Once I’ve written about ‘The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina’, concluding that copying the Marquez/Allende-like style in a magical realism novel isn’t enough to make it good. Now I’m going to write about a 2010 novel by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller, ‘The Last Warner Woman’. If someone asked me how to do magical realism, I’d point to this book. It plays with narration, fiction, and memory. It has its own style without any need to copy anyone. It focuses on people marginalized because of their race and health in a way which is by no means shallow. And it’s so readable that I completed it in two hours without skipping pages or missing any point.
Spanning a period from the early forties to the seventies in its main narration, it tells a story of Adamine Bustamante, born in a leper colony in Spanish Town, the last warner woman of Jamaica, a kind of the clairvoyant warning others of catastrophes. When she leaves for England, she is soon misunderstood and placed in a mental hospital. Many years later, her son born in the hospital tries to put the eerie fragments of her life together. What was true, actually? What happened, and what did not? The novel is open to different interpretations, which I like a lot.
We don’t have to know everything. We don’t have to know if Adamine was born in a leper colony or a hospital. We don’t have to know who her father was. We don’t have to know her son’s name to understand him and root for him. Because we can reflect upon what is fiction and what is truth, whether it is more blurred than we’ve been taught. This novel asks questions without shoving answers into us.
Still, it doesn’t mean that everything is indefinite and vague in ‘The Last Warner Woman’. There are question the author is clear about, and he is clear about them when it is needed. Such themes as ableism, racism, colonialism, colorism, domestic violence, and medicalization of women are important in ‘The Last Warner Woman’. Yes, it is a story about loss, religion, and memory too, but who says that more ‘social’ questions are less universal than these ones? There is a lot of space to speculate and ask, but it doesn’t mean that violence in a community or an institution is summed up as ‘well, it happens’ here. I like this aspect, just as I like that the book is written with compassion and understanding when it should be. For example, people with leprosy aren’t demonized or ignored as a backdrop, but they are Adamine’s friends among who she grows up. They have their stories and personalities. There is a story of a teacher who at first thought that her disease was eczema, or of a man who was abused and exploited by his aunt. And neither Adamine’s mother is in the novel just to bear her child and die. We learn what she liked and how she moved into the hospital to sew bandages for the patients. We know how lively and friendly she was, and in the end, we regret that we’ve lost her, just as we’ve lost Adamine – but to another kind of death.
I have to admit that I had different expectations about the UK part of the story, but now I think that Miller’s way, focusing only on certain aspects of immigration and institutional violence, makes sense. After all, Adamine’s life becomes confined, and it cannot be a broader story the way, let’s say, ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy is. There are Jamaicans who think that Adamine should assimilate. There are white Britons who think they are tolerant, but they are very biased, actually. And there are people who use the indifference of institutions. It’s sad and terrifying, but, as I’ve said, it’s something we need in this novel.
Because magical realism shouldn’t be about the supernatural for the sake of supernatural, about the simplest archetypes thrown into the given setting. It should be about human experience and emotions meeting the unexplainable. Certainly, ‘The Last Warner Woman’ is this kind of book.
Left Hand of Fiction 