Queen of the Whale Cay

[nundinae]

Title: The Queen of Whale Cay
Author: Kate Summerscale
Number of Pages: 256
Genre: biography
Book Number/Goal: 2/50

Rating: 0 for an attitude dismissive of racism, among other things

Review: The thing is, I really really wanted to like this book. I read Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and I thought it was a great book, and that writing about history by showing the interaction of real events with their media coverage with the fictional accounts that were inspired by the real events and/or their media coverage was ingenious and helped you understand things better. What I got was disappointment increasing proportionally to and exponentially with my expectations.

 

 

The Queen of the Whale cay was called Marion Barbara Carstairs and was a fascinating (if racist) person. She was a volunteer woman ambulance driver during WWI, a notorious figure in the lesbian so-called demi-monde, had affairs with Dolly Wilde and Marlene Dietrich, possibly met Djuna Barnes, possibly identified as male, raced boats in the UK and US, possibly was in love with her doll, called Lord Tod Wadley (often photographed with his owner and alone; it was actually rather disturbing), and finally purchased an island in 1934, where she imported 500 Bahamian settlers, as the blurb disingenuously states.

 

This is, obviously, where the not-fun part starts. The thing is, Marion Barbara Carstairs was definitely racist, in the cringe-inducing, patronising colonial way, and an absolutely hypocritical tyrant. She was a little despotic monster, regulating her settlers' private lives, using corporal punishments, which was incidentally against the law, but there was nobody who could stop her on Whale Cay. In the end the British authorities would decide that she, as the owner, was the ultimate authority on her island. She would disapprove of “adultery” and would have people guilty of it expelled from the Whale Cay, or, at least in one instance, horse-whipped(!); at the same time, she engaged in countless affairs with dozens of women. She would issue notices to the general population of the island such as this:

 

'I eat brown rice in preference to white. Therefore, if brown rice is good for me and my household, it's good enough or even too good for the people.'

 

In 1939 she started the, as she called it, Coloured League of Youth, which was supposed to “rejuvenate the whole race”, and its manifesto said:

 

'The Coloured People do not prosper in the way they should. They do not seem to care, or want to get on. THIS MUST BE CHANGED.'

 

Yay, good thing you have your great patronising white person to help you with that, yay! (NO).

 

While Kate Summerscale acknowledges what this sort of thing means ('The Coloured League of Youth was correspondingly paternalistic, run principally by whites and predicated on weakness in the black race', page 178), she only does it after three pages' worth of anecdotal evidence of Carstairs' not-racist behaviour and enumeration of her non-white girlfriends¹, and writing this on page 168:

 

'Those who lived on the Whale Cay remembered Joe Carstairs (she wanted to be called Joe – nundinae) with respect and affection. They were like her own children, they said. Joe sacked white managers who worked the blacks too hard (BOOHOOOO how noble of her, but the managers were STILL WHITE, you racist cretin, how can you not see that??? - nundinae). She insisted that the islanders go to church every Sunday and that they contribute to a health-care fund, which insured them against hospital treatment. To prevent the spread of disease Joe at one point forbade travel between islands. In Nassau she donated a substantial sum to the Bahamas General Hospital, with which it established the Carstairs ward for children, and she helped found a grammar school. (...) And, as long as they behaved, Joe allowed her islanders some fun. At Christmas she provided fifty-five-gallon drums of wine (...).'

 

Oh, how noble of her! (NO).

 

Also, all the children on the Whale Cay would be brought to her for naming D:

 

I know virtually nothing about racism, apart from fact that it is wrong wrong wrong. I don't know the nomenclature, I'm absolutely unfamiliar with categorising racist behaviours, so I might have explained it poorly², but the bottom line is, this book made me very uncomfortable. I would turn every page with trepidation, awaiting the fail fail fail of every new paragraph. What is particularly grating is that the issue could have been resolved easily, it would have cost the author nothing to just say something like “well, yes, this was all totally racist and wrong wrong wrong, and nowadays completely unacceptable, and even back then absolutely deplorable”, but she didn't. It must have taken much more effort doing the weird racism apologetics dance that Summerscale engaged in, but nonetheless, it seems that she just couldn't help herself. WHY???

 

I don't even want to imagine how any possible descendants of the people Carstairs mistreated might feel while reading this book.

 

There were also other issues, such as blurring the line between homosexuality and paedophilia, but my blood tension has had enough for today. I will do my best to repress it all now.

 

 

1Yes, the “I have black frieeeeends” fallacy used by a professional author in a real book. SO MUCH FAIL.

2If so, please read the citations again. And again. And again. And again...