What more could I have done? "The Children" by Andrea Lee

"The Children" by Andrea Lee takes what is normally a rhetorical question meant to suggest there was nothing more anyone could have done--"what more could I have done?"--and interrogates that question seriously, treating it like an earnest question rather than a rhetorical one. There may not be an answer that emerges by the story's end, but it's clear that the theme of the story is to make the question much more uncomfortable than it normally is, less a soothing balm and more of an accusation.

The story focuses on the actions of Shay and Giustina, two women spending part of the year in Madagascar, women who enjoy varying levels of privilege not available to those around them. In Giustina's case, hers is ancestral privilege. Her "noble family has ancient roots in Tuscany," and she is "one of those rare aristocrats who are still safely contained within their insular history," someone who navigates within the "tight circles of old Italian nobility."

Shay, on the other hand, seems to have married into her privilege. It's not clear where her husband Senna gets his wealth from, but he clearly has it, because he and Shay own the hotel where her friend Giustina is staying. 

Shay is a person of color, and although her skin is described as brown, which made me think she was Indian, like many of the rich visitors to Madagascar, she is also described as African-American. Whatever she looks like, she feels her skin color gives her some kind of familiarity with the natives of Madagascar, an assumption the narrator tells us is false: "...her brown skin and her American expansiveness lend her a false sense of familiarity with the people of color around her: people of the island, whose language she doesn't speak, and whose values and motives she will never fully understand." 

Shay and Giustina may have come by their privilege in different ways, but they both now possess it, meaning they both now have a similar responsibility to use their privilege to seek justice for those lacking privilege. However much Shay and Giustina might indulge intellectually in post-colonial artistic movements, they both are claiming a place of privilege in Madagascar that dates back to colonialism. They are the owners of capital while the locals work for them.

As a story that implies we are all complicit in the injustices in the world, "The Children" is a little bit heavier than other Madagascar-based fiction of the 21st century. 

The immediate candidate for justice that appears to Shay and Giustina is Harena, the child of a local woman and a reprobate, old-nobility Italian who happens to be part of Giustina's social circle. Giusitina insists on meeting the girl in order to know more of her story, then promises to try to find the girl's father. What she hopes will happen when she brings the fact of the girl's existence up to him isn't clear, but she is struck by the injustice of Harena living in relative squalor while her father lives off ancestral wealth in Italy, so she decides she will at least try to do something.

Giustina goes back to Italy, Shay having kept several facts hidden from her, like the fact there was a serial murderer on the loose or that locals thought thirty-something Giustina was Harena's grandmother come to claim her. Shay feels that Giustina is too gentle a soul for some facts. Shay also finds out there is another child of the Italian reprobate, a half-brother to Harena, living far to the south in Madagascar. 

Using "the way the world is" as an excuse

Throughout the story, there are phrases that seem to operate to emphasize the inevitability of injustice. These have the effect of distancing Giustina and Shay from responsibility. Examples of these distancing phrases include:

• "...you go tracking down all the white men who leave children behind, that too will never end."
• "You're trying....what more can you do?"
• "...and soon afterward died there of malaria, as so many do in that harsh line of work."
• "And so bureaucracy performs its traditional task of transmogrifying action into inaction, and the two women lose themselves in their own busy lives."
• "placidly seem to accept..."

On the one hand, Shay is right. "Man hands on misery to man," as Larkin put it, and the misery goes back so deep, there are limited things anyone can do about the injustice now rampant in the world. If you aren't going to become a zealot who devotes her whole life to stamping out the injustice, to the extent you deny yourself your own happiness, you have to either accept your limits or go insane. Shay isn't wrong.

Yet Shay also senses that retreating into a "what's to be done?" sort of philosophy is the surest way to make certain nothing ever changes. Telling herself she did "the best she could" is no truer than a "lullaby or nursery rhyme." Because honestly, the best anyone can do is quite a lot, and few of us ever really reach this level. Shay realizes this when she has her own children and understands the "crushing force of incomparable love" that comes with it. She realizes she has not worked for Harena's interests with the same level of care she would have for her own children. 

Ultimately, we all are living in the wreckage of colonialism. Those who caused the initial harm are now, like the Italian family of the father, only a shadow of their former selves, so they cannot fix their own mistakes alone. Which means that righting injustices means taking an active interest in something you yourself didn't actually cause. It means having a different meaning of "doing what you can," one that is extremely demanding on the person doing the introspection.

This seems unfair, but it's better than pretending not to see what the world is like. To do that, to fail to do more than our fair share to fix a world others have broken, is to invite the scorn of those who come after us. As Shay thinks, "it is all too easy to lose" the respect of her children when they think of the consoling lies we told ourselves. That's true of all the children of the world who will come after us. 

Other takes:

Karen Carlson in A Just Recompense, who does a great job running down little clues in the text I was too lazy to chase down.