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This One Sky Day: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2022

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London used to speak to me. Miles away and long ago, before finding myself, and my one true love, before planting myself in soil I will only ever mostly understand, London smiled at me, showed me how to see light. It didn’t take much, just a small, kindly act of magic. Most places are like that, if you look carefully enough and with the right eyes. There is always light around us, so long as we have the eyes to see it. On this one sky day, Intiasar has commanded that Xavier cook for Sonteine’s wedding feast. He must cook this meal even though it is not either’s turn to be fed by his hands. In the quest for ingredients Xavier follows Romanza out of the market to the Dead Islands – home of the ostracised ‘indigent’ peoples. They set off across the waters in a boat but to Xavier’s surprise they drop anchor some way from land. Romanza disembarks and appears to walk on water. After some coaxing, he persuades Xavier to follow. Hovering beneath the water’s surface he sees a matrix of coral. Obliging fish form gentle platforms gliding the men from one coral outcrop to another until they reach the shore. I walked with them, utterly enchanted by the ease with which Ross’s politics seeps into the text. This book is bursting at the seams with beauty! Magic! Love! Imagination! It is a burst of colour and flame.’ Romanza Intiasar, the disowned teenage son of the Governor, whose cors is the facility to tell truth from lies, has fled the family home to live among the indigents with his male lover, Pilar. During the course of the day he comes across Xavier Redchoose — the novel’s central character — gifted with the ability to impress flavour into food, with the mere touch of his fingers. This awesome endowment has earned him the title of ‘macaenus,’ which carries with it the obligation to feed every citizen, once, and at an opportune time, in his restaurant — aptly called The Torn Poem. On the day in question, Xavier has been asked by the Governor to prepare the wedding feast for his daughter, Sonteine, and the request, more especially the man who has made it, vexes him greatly.

A group of workers in a brothel joke about the pum-pums being mistaken for raw meat; Lyla says someone might fry it up like pork, Mixie corrects her saying her own pum-pum is nothing less than a lobster dinner. They close the brothel that day, and hang their vulvas on a line to mark their strike. The pum-pums that hang on the line dance. Other pum-pums laugh. I ask Leone about the laughing, and she said that she finds vulvas quite merry. When a lesbian couple accidentally swap pum-pums, their bond is made even more special and their sex is that much more intimate. Leone Ross says much about vulvas, and vaginas – “the entrance to the universe” she writes – but the characters have a range of responses to their flesh falling out from them. While Anise is in the process of investigating her husband’s infidelity, her vulva comes loose and falls from her body. As Xavier becomes more at ease with the water, allowing gracious stingrays to transport him over the rippling waves, he remarks that “to be alive [is] a gamble, a bizarre miracle”. Ross invites us also to suspend our scepticism, to take a risk and wholly immerse ourselves in the wildness and weirdness of Popisho. This is a novel that will reward those who are able to surrender to its capaciousness and eccentricities, to revel in its oddness and delight in each surprise. But This One Sky Day provides us not merely with a welcome opportunity to enjoy a madcap, freewheeling ride through surreal and supernatural territory. It also asserts the importance of interacting with our own unpredictable world with openness, unfettered awe and wide-eyed wonder. Impressively, however, Ross almost always handles the vast range of material and the multi-tonal quality of the text with an adroitness that keeps the reader involved. There is a particularly mesmerising episode in the middle of the novel when Romanza and Xavier take a boat to the mysterious Dead Islands, where the archipelago’s ostracised “Indigent” peoples live. Much to Xavier’s confusion, the anchor is dropped miles from shore. Romanza disembarks and seemingly begins to walk on water, heading for the dry land in the distance. He teaches a nervous Xavier to do the same, leading the way, showing Xavier how to make use of a sprawling platform of coral close to the surface, how to gently rest his soles on fish that will propel him on. Similarly, because of the easy confidence of the narrative voice throughout the novel – by turns raconteurish and gnomic – we too willingly follow as it wends its capricious way.The book primarily follows two characters: Xavier Redchoose, the islands’ macaenus or celebrity master chef, and Anise Latibeaudearre, one of Popisho’s healers. Both characters are haunted by love and loss and are struggling to cope with their own public and private traumas. That novel also did well. But then, says Ross, “I got really frightened. I think in my 20s, I thought that what you do is you write a novel, and then you can be a novelist. And it didn’t quite work out that way. You know, at one point, Oprah had it in her hand, and then … she didn’t have it. And there were a variety of disappointments for this inexperienced, relatively young woman. And I decided that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a novelist.” She stops herself. “No, that’s not true; I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be published, or that I could handle being published.” When we speak, I tell Leone Ross how her work moved me, and she asks a question that almost stumps me. ‘What is it for you?’ she asks, turning the tables. ‘What is going on for you—what does it somehow illuminate?’ And I realise that Popisho is real to me, because it represents the way in which I always see, have always seen, the world. It is a poppy show, yes, because life is just that. And it is kind, and loving, and if not always fair or just, then at least even-handed in its ups and down. One just needs to learn how to look to see it properly.

Most of all, while their cors may be able to help them somewhat, the problems the characters face cannot be solved with magic alone. There is no subtext cors to prevent miscommunication. There is no magic to prevent discrimination, bullying, murder or infidelity. Each person must figure out how to deal with their own problems, and they often have to tap into their communities to do so. On Popisho, a Caribbean nation in which the inhabitants are blessed with unique attributes, ‘a little something-something’ called ‘cors’— for example, the ability to talk with animals, or walk through walls — the ruthless Governor Intiasar controls the local economy with his monopoly of the toy factories, staffed by woefully underpaid workers, through which the island gains its revenue, and its leaders their fortunes. In response to this injustice, among others, a mysterious graffiti artist has daubed the walls of the factories with exhortations in orange paint, notably THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE, while a group of scavenging indigents, reviled and outcast, who inhabit the nearby Islands of the Dead, serve as a collective scapegoat for all the failures and frustrations of the population at large.There are so many other instances where she uses ordinary things to point out inequality and unfairness throughout Popisho, e.g. sex worker exploitation, the emotional and mental traumas of miscarriages, discrimination against same-sex couples, and the sweeping ramifications of governmental corruption. She presents each of these issues with a bit of accompanying magic from either the people of Popisho or from the land itself, showing how far-reaching and destructive these issues can be.

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