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Salt Crystals is a first person, present-tense narrative, written as a series of journal entries. Set on the small Caribbean Island of San Andrés, it is an exploration of the aftermath of colonialism and how history informs and impacts the present day. It’s an immersive, sometimes challenging, book, worthy of more than one read to be fully appreciated.
Victoria, the twenty-nine year old narrator, has returned to San Andres, her birthplace, after a fourteen-year hiatus. “Life here is a continual conversation between lethargy and longing,” Victoria observes on the opening page. The book evokes this atmosphere beautifully throughout and it’s a mood that suits Victoria well. Her life in Mexico City has reached an impasse: her parents are dead; her lover has cheated and her health is compromised as she has late onset Type 1 diabetes which requires constant attention to avoid hypoglycaemia.
Victoria is Raizal (of island heritage, with a certificate to prove it) but is “used to being taken for a tourist” and is treated as an outsider because she is so pale. As a child “it was so lonely, never seeing my own features reflected in anyone else’s face.” On San Andrés, the past matters, indeed “it’s a constant reference in everyday life” but Victoria doesn’t know much about her heritage. Her grandmother always said there was no black blood in their family (no slave blood she means, as San Andres’ early British and Dutch colonists imported slaves from Jamacia), but Victoria’s hair implies otherwise. In this, as in so many other things, Victoria feels helplessly uninformed. “I don’t know myself well enough. How do I work? How does the world work? I don’t know anything,” she says. Once Victoria finds a photograph of her great-grandmother, the rest of the book is devoted to answering these questions.
Language plays an important role throughout the work. Spanish, English and Creole are the island’s three official languages, but despite growing up there and going to school with locals, Victoria can’t initially speak Creole which is used most in everyday conversation. Her immersion in island life soon rectifies this though, and as she becomes more fluent her confidence and sense of belonging grows.
Victoria meets a variety of characters as she travels the island. There’s Juleen, an old school friend and island native; Maa Josephine, a quasi-prophetic woman who turns out to be a distant relative; Jaime a professor who is a Cachaco (mainland Colombian) and potential love interest, and Rudy, a young lawyer and activist. Each offers fragments of personal and island history or political perspectives about the current island situation but Victoria feels bombarded. “I feel worn out by all the details I can’t seem to recall or repeat to myself” she writes, recalling their words. The reader too by this point feels somewhat numbed by all the names and dates. It’s a bold stylistic decision to replicate Victoria’s initial confusion in the form of the novel but, on balance, it pays off. Victoria eventually visits a library where everything becomes a lot clearer and the present-day story moves on without any similar information overload.
Victoria’s complex genealogy (related to both slave-owner and slave) helps her to understand her place in San Andrés. Once she has clarity about who she is, she begins to connect meaningfully with other people. She stops categorising them by skin colour or according to where they were born because “once you understand the past, you must move past it too.” It’s only by coming together and moving past cultural identity, Victoria posits, that progress can be made. “We’re like the salt that makes the seas, simmering in the heat of history, as acidic as wound-healing vinegar … we’re like salt crystals; refractory, luminous, mirrors for each other.” She is able to look forward, to engage in the present, and becomes politically active, attending demonstrations for clean water for locals.
From the very start of the book Bendek’s vivid depiction of San Andreas is a highlight. On the one hand it is a magical, transcendent place: “My ears are full of the sea already; I can hear as if my head’s been rewired. All around me the sun paints luminous shafts streaked with pink and lilac. A startled fish darts away … I could cry right now. This is how I must have felt in utero,” Victoria writes, the first time she swims on arriving back home. San Andrés is “…still an idyllic sight, more beautiful than the photos in those magazines, better than postcards … my island’s crystalline water is spectacular in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else.” Yet every moment of “outlandish beauty” is undercut by the reality of human detritus, “I can see that the seaweed has morphed into a morass of plastic lids, straws, shreds of packaging, cigarette butts, stuff and more stuff …white clouds hide behind squat hotels that have clearly seen better days …”
The longer Victoria stays on the island, the clearer her thought processes become until finally, she’s able to see a way forward: “This country is in a mess,” she writes. “We’re in a delicate situation and the only way for this land to prevail … is by changing profoundly.” The needs of the island and its seas offer a unifying cause, beyond political and cultural factions.
One of the things I admire most about Bendek’s writing is that she refuses to take the easy option. She continually challenges us to consider alternative perspectives. By the end of the novel Victoria has developed a plan for the future and it would have been a neat enough – if predictable – way to finish. Instead, the last chapter (Victoria’s last journal entry) is written as Hurricane Otto threatens to obliterate San Andrés. Nature will ultimately prevail regardless of human intentions. Victoria chooses to stay. “I want to witness the moment when an invisible finger hits reset,” she writes. It’s a measure of her new self-awareness that she adds, wryly: “It’s a good time to shoulder my reality; the airport’s been closed for a week.”Salt Crystals works best when Bendek shows us scenes from island life, or Victoria’s life in Mexico City. When the information about the past is presented as exposition, or as part of a long conversation whose primary purpose is to provide information, as it often is, it becomes hard to digest. On balance, however, I enjoyed reading Victoria’s journal and even if (as for Victoria) some of the details were hard to retain, I will remember San Andrés and its people for a very long time.
by Cristina Bendek
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Charco Press, 216 pages
Jackie Morris
Jackie Morris has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from the Open University, 2021. She writes short form fiction and came third in the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition 2022. Work is published in the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day anthology, the Sydney Hammond Memorial completion anthology 2022 and online at Free Flash Fiction and Retreat West.
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