Once on This Island

Dominican Mission Trip: “Once On This Island”

                                                                      Beaver Island

When my daughter Caitlin was attending the University of Western Michigan she played the lead role in a musical production called “Once On This Island.” It was a challenging role, not the least because she is white and her character, Timoun, was conceived as a Black West Indian with the requisite accent. It is a measure of her ability as an actress that she was entirely convincing in the role, starting with the accent.

In the play Timoun falls in love with a white boy who washes up on the beach half dead. She nurses him back to health, and they enjoy an interlude of ecstatic romance as he recovers. When he returns to his French colonial family, however, they persuade him that he must cut all connection to her. Timoun is convinced that, once he sees her, he will remember their love and return to her. She stations herself at the entrance to the family’s grand residence, and stays there so long the gods take pity upon her and turn her into a beautiful flowering tree, where in future years her lover’s children come to find shade and pick the fruit from her branches.

I find this story of undying and unrequited love to be almost unbearably heartbreaking. The image of Timoun at the door of the mansion, convinced unto death of the authenticity of her great love, evokes every tragic and tender feeling of which I am capable. The cold hearted shallowness of the aristocratic white people appalls and infuriates me. The image of a generous and beautiful tree, sheltering the children, is a metaphor for my experience of Christ and the nurturing communities that derive their identities from him, and have sustained me throughout my life. I am often oblivious to the passionate love and suffering that is their source, and our experience among the Episcopalians of the Dominican Republic has brought it all to the forefront of my awareness.

The love and kindness bestowed on us by our Dominican hosts reminds me of Timoun, and her unconditional hospitality lavished upon the shipwrecked stranger washed up upon the shores of her island. I am sorry to admit that I feel something like Timoun’s  white lover, who returns to his privileged home and soon forgets all about his experience with her.

Our experience in the Dominican Republic was more sweat equity  than romance, and had many comic moments  and none that could be described as tragic. Our Dominican friends are not consumed with grief at our leaving, nor are we guilt-ridden at having left them. This is tgrue, partly because we are all preoccupied with events of daily life, but also because of the grace of the flowering tree. We have returned to our privileged North American lives and have been forgiven for it, both by our Dominican colleagues and by God, who shelters us all under the boughs of that “faithful cross, above all other, one and only noble tree; none in foliage, none in blossom, none in fruit thy peer may be.”    

Ti Moun

Those gods must have been crazy,

Thinking they could

Preserve her life,

Inspire her dance,

Observe her love,

Then watch her fling herself against the Wall

        That separates the hotel from the common street,

        That separates grandhommes from peasants,

        Ti Moun from him.

       

Those Caribbean gods must have been crazy,

Thinking they could just continue on,

       Their indolent eons spent

       Watching sleepy islands for any sign of agitation,

       Swatting, as if at flies, at any trace of innovation.

Did they think they could go back to their old habits,

Tinkering with islands

And our hearts?

Those island gods must have been crazy,

And so was I,

Thinking our hearts would not melt when she cried,

“He must be wondering where I am!” and

“Don’t you remember when I danced?”