“The Children,” by Andrea Lee, begins on Anjavavy Island, a popular tourist destination in Madagascar, where hotel owner Shay is visited by her elegant Italian friend Giustinia at the same time a serial killer who beheads his victims is running amok. Shay shelters her friend from this information. Later, when the women are going food shopping, Harena greets Shay with a wave. Giustinia is instantly entranced by Harena’s stunning looks and asks who she is; Harena is half Italian, her father being the aristocratic Leandro, a heroin addict who was exiled to Madagascar by his family in Italy. After Leandro’s father died, he returned to Italy to inherit his estate, but not before spreading his “seed.” Giustinia reveals that she, in fact, knows Leandro, and would like to meet Harena. Shay, mistakenly seeing no harm in this, introduces the two. When Giustinia tells the young woman that she knows her Italian father, she begins to act like she was promised a gift. Harena tells them that when her ex-boyfriend Hans took her to Italy, the gatekeeper of her father’s estate would not let her see him; she only got to leave a letter stuck in the gate that hopefully her father would receive. Shay questions the validity of this story as Giustinia remarks that she should probably contact the girl’s family, feeling somewhat obligated after seeing Harena’s hope. Giustinia emails her husband to no reply, as Harena still looks upon her with an expectant gaze. Rumors spread about Giustinia being Harena’s wealthy Italian grandmother, though Shay keeps this hidden from her friend. As it turns out, Harena is not “a nice girl”; often drinking and getting into fights, as warned by Shay’s neighbor. With still no information of Harena’s family, Giustinia returns to Italy. After her departure, Shay comes across Didier, another beautiful, abandoned son of Leandro, searching for his grandmother after hearing the rumors about Giustinia. Shay tells the teenager that his grandmother never came to Madagascar, and feeling pity for the boy, gives him enough money for his return home. Shay becomes paranoid of more of Leandro’s children showing up at her doorstep. Giustinia reconnects with Shay, saying that she made contact with Leandro’s sister, and that Leandro is dead. When Giustinia told the sister about her niece and nephew in Madagascar, she laughed, stating that Leandro has children all over the Carribean as well. Giustinia tells Shay that Leandro’s aristocratic family has nothing but empty titles for the children. The two women feel guilty in their role of giving Harena and Didier false hope. Harena marries a Chinese musician, and despite always being beautiful and well dressed, drinks and does more hard drugs than ever. She denies her father’s death and speaks of him as if he is going to fetch her, after her violent breakdown upon receiving the news. The serial killer turns out to be a dock worker who had the idea of killing people who chose to work for the Europeans who were poisoning the land and offending the ancestors. On his way to the courthouse, he is lynched by islanders. Since both the criminal and his victims were of low class, the killings are promptly forgotten about. Shay associates the murders with Harena and Didier. Over the years, half European children become a more common sight on the island, with Shay herself having two. The stories about Harena and Didier fade into obscurity.
“The Children” by Andrea Lee is a striking tale of class structure and allegorical colonialism; taking place on Anjavavy Island of Madagascar, the setting is used to its full potential as a tool to establish the conflict.
The adventure of the lost heirs begins when Shay and her friend Giustinia run into Harena at the Fleur des Îles café. This happens in the early two-thousands, at the same time that a criminal at large on Anjavavy Island is cutting off people’s heads.
Right off the bat, two related conflicts are introduced to us readers. We view this story through the perspective of Shay, who connects the killings of workers who helped Europeans to the plight of Harena and Didier. Both of which are later disregarded by the Islanders, who’s interest seems to only lie in everything that is high class.
Later, Shay wonders why she saw no harm in this. It has to do, she thinks, with the general trifling nature of her behavior in Madagascar, where 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.
This excerpt is a reference to Shay’s “white savior” sort of complex. Though she too is a person of color, she is disconnected from the values and motives of the people who surround her.
“What more could we do?”
“We did what we could.”
“What did they need?”
“They needed to be found. Of course.”
“Was that our job?”
“Who knows if it was?”
“We could have tried harder.”
“We did what we could.”
This internal argument of Shay’s is further exploring her need to be a savior to Harena and Didier, feeling as if it was her job to help them reunite with their Italian family, which in the end, seemed to do more harm than good. This may be a reference to colonialism; European’s used the excuse of people of color “needing” their help as a means to colonize and enforce their own beliefs. In fact, it seems to be implied that the children themselves are colonies; abandoned, abused, left with false hope that they’ll be whisked away to a fantasy life in Europe.
Shay herself cannot help associating the unspeakable murders with the plight of Harena and Didier. But is it a plight? Wrong was certainly done. By miserable Leandro, and by his stony-hearted family. But also by Giustinia and Shay, with their frivolous intervention—they were like magpies who settle on cattle and peck open wounds.
Shay is told that, when some visiting Italian finally gave Harena the news of her father’s death, she flung bottles, clawed her own face, and screamed that it wasn’t true; that even now she talks about Leandro as if he were coming to fetch her. Her husband is patient with—maybe even proud of—what he calls her European behavior, but people on Anjavavy say that she is possessed. Nothing good, they say, will come of her.
In this story, there are multiple instances of putting European traits on a pedestal; a form of “European excellence.” Harena and Didier are considered beautiful by Shay and Giustinia seemingly because of their Eurocentric features.
Discussion questions:
Do you think that the head hunter was a necessary aspect of the story?
Was the setting’s class structure well incorporated into the conflict?
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