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Strange Music by Laura Fish (Vintage, 2010)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Far better known for her poetry while she lived, in recent decades English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) has been embraced by feminists connecting Browning’s struggles with an autocratic father and a family history of slaveholding to oppression against women of all classes and races in patriarchal societies. Many view Browning’s passionate commitment to emancipation as her greatest achievement. Certainly, Browning’s position as a physically frail and frequently agitated woman governed by strong white males fits well within the scheme. Yet as eldest daughter of wealthy Jamaican plantation owner Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, Browning was far from powerless, and she seems to have derived a passive power from illness as well. The many contradictions in Browning’s personality provide an intriguing field of study. For example, she is known to have questioned women’s intellectual equality but studied and translated Greek and Latin classics, and she abhorred the suffering she detected in stories brought back from Jamaica by her brother and cousin but promoted the ideal of the Christian martyr. As an artist, of course, her primary source of power was imagination. Weakened by laudanum and the leeches and “blistering” treatments applied by doting physicians, Browning made most of her acute observations from bed and couch.

Strange Music is Laura Fish’s own imaginative spin on Browning’s life during the nearly three years she spent recovering from a respiratory condition in a rented house in Torquay, beginning in 1838.1 Adopted by Guyanese and Jamaican parents, Fish was raised in England by white foster parents. In her twenties, Fish met her biological father, who was staying in a house in Jamaica once owned by the Barretts. Within the treasure trove of remnants left there by the Barrett family, Fish discovered the subject of her second novel. As a transracial woman separated from her biological mother, Fish shares much with the two dispossessed women whose narratives counterpoint Browning’s letters and journal entries as Strange Music unfolds.2 In the voices of Browning, Creole housekeeper Kaydia and field hand Sheba, Fish relates painful circumstances too heavy to bear; emotional wounds too raw to heal; human losses too great to survive; and disappointments too numerous to overcome. Post-colonial feminists have championed Strange Music and placed it alongside such classics of the genre as Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a fictionalized account of the Creole woman who became the first Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Strange Music links Fish to Browning as well; the pure poetry of the author’s rendering of island dialect and descriptions of Jamaica’s lush landscape reveal Fish a poet and, given the moral implications imbedded in her words, one whom Browning could admire.

Fish’s first novel, Flight of Black Swans (1995), followed a young black British woman of Creole roots, raised by white parents in England, as she travels through Australia’s northwestern territory. The main character’s life changes course after she encounters aboriginal stockmen in the remote Kimberley region and works with them on a cattle ranch. First published in 2008 in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape), Strange Music continues Fish’s exploration of personal and communal loss, oppression and identity as divergent cultures interact.3 To introduce Strange Music, she quotes Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997): “No one is born fully-formed: It is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”4 Keeping Freire’s words in mind as they move through Strange Music, readers will marvel at the inner strength of individuals deprived of human dignity and self-determination.

For centuries, the Barrett family, part Creole, owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. Four years after the 1834 emancipation of the country’s native and African slaves, the lives of freed blacks had not improved. The conditions for workers on the Barrett estate, Cinnamon Hill, were typical; no longer the personal property of their resentful former owners, workers received less pay, were charged for rent and food, and continued to be mistreated. Sheltered in Torquay, Browning feels the effects as they appear in her distant, care-worn father and brother Sam, who has been discharged to Cinnamon Hill to manage the Barrett holdings with their cousin Richard. For the most part, readers will sympathize with Browning’s lengthy list of troubles: Sam’s steep moral decline; Mr. Barrett’s preoccupation with financial ruin; her physicians’ restrictions on reading and writing; the sale of her beloved family home, Hope End, a 500-acre estate in Hertfordshire; fear that favorite brother, “Bro,” would be called away from Torquay; and frustration with her health. Still mourning the sudden loss of her mother a decade earlier, Browning is sad and lonely, and not above using her illness as an excuse to continue her study of Latin and Greek classics and secure ample time for her musings. Daily doses of laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) keep her lethargic and provoke disturbing dreams. When considered against the lives of Kaydia and Sheba, Browning’s unrelenting self-judgment might seem indulgent.

Creole housekeeper Kaydia’s story centers on Sam’s abuse of her daughter. Knowing the ways of white plantation owners with their many illegitimate offspring, Kaydia hopes to divert drunken Sam’s attentions to herself but then becomes pregnant with Sam’s child. Meanwhile, Sheba is suffering the loss of her lover, Isaac, who disappeared after protesting the low wages Sam pays to his laborers. Fish narrates their stories in a distinctive language that demands readers to become immersed in the sound, rather than sense, of the words. For example, as Kaydia watches her dying master, for whom she exists only in the roles he creates, she says: “What’s past don’t go. Don’t grow thin. But I feel small stone of hope snug in my belly. Lightness streams into my head while heart-searing sadness swells in my chest. If joy and fear can live together, they do, now, within me.” And reflecting on the impossibility of removing slavery’s fingerprint by destroying its tangible evidence, a mixed-race child, Sheba says: “Sky turns a deep mango colour, red-purple streaks flare across. A feeling fills my body of holding you at night, Isaac, safe safe safe. But even this leaves me nowhere stranded. Sadness stained.”

Fish found the title for her novel in a letter to Browning from her future husband, poet Robert Browning, from 1845. Eloping with her to Italy, Robert Browning helped his new wife acquire the independence she so coveted while a prisoner of her father, brothers and doctors.5 Although Browning’s poems had many admirers, including author Mary Russell Mitford and poets William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle and Edgar Allan Poe, she esteemed Robert’s approval above all. In turn, in his letter he wrote of the “fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought” in her work. Readers, too, will hear this “fresh strange music” in Fish’s novel. Like the melodies at play in Browning’s poems, Fish’s music derives from the rhythms of her characters’ hearts. Through the act of becoming, the “self-experience” referenced by Freire, these shattered hearts continue to beat. Broken beyond repair, yet they pulse with unquenchable life.

At the request of American abolitionists, Browning wrote “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” while living with her husband in Italy.6 Voiced by an escaping black woman slave in America, the poem, reproduced in the back of Fish’s novel, proves that the physically frail Browning had a goliath’s imaginative power. Similarly, Fish has listened long and well for the voices of Kaydia and Sheba. The rhythms thus captured are chilling.

1 Located on the Devonshire coast, Torquay was named and claimed by notable Victorians (Rudyard Kipling and Charles Kingsley, for example) and is considered to be the “English Riviera.”

2 In an author’s note, Fish explains that Barrett’s narrative in Strange Music includes extracts from the poet’s diaries and correspondence with family and friends, freely edited and adapted to Fish’s purpose. Commentators on Fish’s fiction have described the work as “bio-fiction,” as it moves from a skeleton of fact to a fully fashioned imagining of emotional experience.

3 Strange Music appears on the longlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction, which was created by U.K. mobile communications firm Orange to spotlight the work of women outside the radar of traditional review and mass-market media.

4 Author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese in 1968) and The Politics of Education (1985), Freire left his native Brazil after the 1964 military coup. Subsequently, he taught in Chile and at Harvard and served as a consultant to UNESCO and the World Council of Churches.

5 As there were far too many Brownings (legitimate and otherwise) to claim a stake in the family’s fortunes, Browning’s father insisted that his children not marry. He disinherited her after she wed.

6 First printed in the 1848 edition of the American publication Liberty Bell, the poem was reprinted in 1849 in a Florence newspaper and a book of the same title. Browning revised the poem for an edition of her works published in 1850.