RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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who refuse to wear the uniform. If s(he) rejects the service economy, s(he) faces the
scorn of taxi drivers and waiters, and the simplifying gaze of first-world eyes, for living
the old ways.
Achille‘s frustration at being what seems like ―the only fisherman left in the
world,‖ combines with strange weather to convince him that his life prospects would
improve ―someplace‖ else, ―some cove he could settle like another Aeneas, / founding
not Rome but home‖ (301). Two arguable signs of global warming, surprising rains
during the dry season and the rising levels of ―bursting seas,‖ convince Achille that
―somewhere people interfering / with the course of nature‖ (299). Seven Seas tells him
that like the Arawak, the egrets, and the parrots, ―man was an endangered / species now‖
(300). Although he and Seven Seas know that the marlins, albacore, shrimp and human
beings are endangered, the two islanders‘ limited spheres of influence can do nothing to
halt the commercial trawlers‘ over-fishing, ―the discos, the transports, the greed, [and] the
noise‖ (301). Achille learns exactly how tenuous and endangered his lifestyle and habitat
are by remaining committed to his work and his island. He finds this knowledge
sufficiently ―enraging‖ (300) to enlist healed Philoctete for a journey to somewhere, any
place else. They load up the canoe and go south, ―searching‖ for a neocolonial anti-isle, 36
an innocent beach where Achille could revert back to the simplicity of his childhood.
They find no virgin bay in which to harbor their canoe and start life over. They keep
going south, however, towards the Grenadines, like Jonah towards Tarshish, until they
witness a surfacing whale—―Baleine,‘ said Achille‖ (303)—whose disturbance of the
water swamps In God We Troust. Shaken by the awesome display of the leviathan,
36 DeLoughrey reads the ―Antilles‖ of European exploration in the Atlantic and Pacific as
―utopian counter-lands‖ (6).