This One Sky Day: How to See Light

by: Houman Sadri , June 14, 2021

London used to speak to me. Miles away and long ago, before finding myself, and my one true love, before planting myself in soil I will only ever mostly understand, London smiled at me, showed me how to see light. It didn’t take much, just a small, kindly act of magic. Most places are like that, if you look carefully enough and with the right eyes. There is always light around us, so long as we have the eyes to see it.

A coughing metropolis like my old home would not, at first glance, seem to have an awful lot in common with Popisho, the colour-saturated, perhaps-Caribbean archipelago at the heart of Leone Ross’ novel This One Sky Day (Popisho in American markets). On these islands, the magic is overt, and every inhabitant is born with a ‘cors,’ a specific magical ability. Anise has healing hands; Xavier can flavour food with a touch; lies cause Romanza physical pain. Butterflies and Moths are plucked from the sky and eaten—the former bring on an alcohol-like buzz, while the latter, deep-cured and aged, lead to darker highs and an addiction that ‘killed you over time, like revenge’ (33). Those in the know can learn to walk across the water between the islands, the soles of their feet feeling for a rotation of undersea flora and fauna to bear their weight. But as fantastical as it is, Popisho is as real as any street I have ever walked, and just like the behemoth in which I grew up it understands itself better than even the most attuned among its denizens. Lucky enough to have the opportunity to discuss the novel with the author herself, I put this to her, and she does not disagree: ‘Popisho is somewhere,’ she tells me. 

The road to this archipelago has been long and circuitous. By her own reckoning, This One Sky Day has taken fifteen years to write, the author amassing around 450,000 words of material before editing it down, sometimes with the help of the characters themselves. ‘I just wrote … you know, all over the place, and I have a tendency to[wards] narrative, to beginnings, middles and ends, and to scenes and so on. And so of course, eventually it starts being scenes. And then you have hundreds of scenes of things. And then, of course, Xavier is talking to me.’

This is Xavier Redchoose, whose cors allows him to flavour food with his hands and who consequently holds the title of macaenus. This is a gods-appointed position that obliges him to provide one perfect, tailored meal for each resident of Popisho, on one occasion only during their lifetimes. Xavier is both haunted and not haunted: his wife, Nya, has been dead for a year, and in Popisho the newly dead will wander, heading for those they loved most in life if they do not receive proper burial rites in time. That Nya has not appeared to him speaks volumes about the life they have lived and the love they never really shared, while the macaenus is also in the thrall of stark temptations from the past. 

In fact all of the novel’s protagonists are somewhat mired in darkness as the eponymous day begins. Anise, the healer, is unable to bring a child to term, which on Popisho means that her four stillbirths manifest themselves as ‘eyeballs … so big and luminous, sitting disembodied in a pool of liquid, sinking into the wooden floor … they leak out of her and across the bedroom, and sink into the same plank, until the wood buckles’ (27). As a result, and out of what Ross sees as a combination of patriarchal pride and a misplaced sense of his own heroism (‘My woman gets sad when she gets pregnant and loses babies. So we won’t have sex. And he actually sees that as heroic!’ she says in describing the situation), her husband Tan-Tan is unfaithful, the discovery of which is the threshold she must cross to begin her hero’s journey. Romanza, son of the archipelago’s corrupt governor is tormented by the need to come to terms with his fundamental love for a father who rejects him for being gay, and worse still, whose dishonesty is laid bare by Romanza’s cors. His sister Sonteine, meanwhile, appears to have no cors, something that marks her as an anomaly on these islands, which adds to the stress of her forthcoming wedding feast. This, though, is a novel about love, redemption and hope. Without darkness we could not understand light, and the profound loneliness and sadness the characters go through give the myriad ultimate joys they experience even deeper resonance. And these triumphs are brought about, directly or indirectly by perhaps the novel’s most important protagonist: Popisho herself.

My choice of feminine pronoun is deliberate. As Ross puts it to me, ‘as far as an Island can be gendered, the Island is definitely gendered’, and Popisho is female at heart. The central conflict at the heart of Popisho society is between the forces of a colonial, corporate and patriarchal central government represented by the governor and, to a point, Christianity, and the magic at the heart of the island, represented by the Obeah women, spiritual leaders who worship a vast pantheon of gods. The gender of these leaders is important. As Ross points out, Obeah priests are traditionally men, and are also often seen, in a Jamaican context, as malign. ‘I remember getting to Jamaica [1] and hearing about the Obeah man … somewhere in the Hills. They were away over there doing that evil thing, but I thought they sounded great. So, I deliberately just made them women … even if you’re a 20 year old Obeah woman in Popisho, you’re ancient, you know: they have a timelessness about them.’ Popisho’s iteration of Obeah is matriarchal, and in tune as it is with the islands and the multiplicity of Gods stitched into their fabric, it is clear that the paternalistic forces of the capitalist powers-that-be are due to face their nemesis in the archipelago itself. Because Popisho is rebelling, and it is doing so on feminist terms.

While Anise is in the process of investigating her husband’s infidelity, her vulva comes loose and falls from her body.

Her entire pum-pum had come loose: like a heavy battery falling out when the tiny locking device is retracted. Compact, self-contained. No blood, no mess. Just a chunk of her, lying there, rocking slowly. Anise screamed. Then when nothing happened, she stopped screaming. … The vulva stared up at her, like a meaty bit of cake. Yes, that was it: someone had sliced into her pelvis and scooped out the whole thing. She might cup it all in a handful. There were freckles. She hadn’t known that about herself. (178)

She is not alone in this: every woman on Popisho experiences the same phenomenon, and it is the archipelago itself that causes it. Popisho, we are told, has rebelled before, and with Governor Bertie Intiasar increasingly trying to industrialise the archipelago in order to sell the magical toys they produce to foreign countries, lining his own pockets while the ‘indigent’ underclass are stigmatised and victimised, she is doing so again. Her opening salvo represents a Lysistrata-like wake-up call to the female population: a bloodless, and easily healed [2] way of obliging them to contemplate their own sexuality and power in the face of sexism, patriarchy and male entitlement. As Ross puts it to me, ‘the earth is displeased … and Popisho, as many people say throughout the novel, is being even more Popisho today, which in my mind is the Earth [saying] no seriously, not accepting this burgeoning capitalism, things are about to go wrong. Popisho … will not have it. And so it’s causing a kind of saturation of magic. And it seemed to me it made sense that … of course it would lend itself to the women. And then as an individual, as a series of individuals, but also as a group of women, what do you do when faced with your vulva? How do you react? And then of course, that becomes this wonderful opportunity to talk about sexuality, to talk about pain … about what will you do if that happens to you? Who are you without it? Do you want to take it back? Do you want to [still] have it?’

As the day turns to dusk and Intiasar’s patriarchal machinations become more pronounced and malign, the island’s reaction becomes increasingly apocalyptic. But apocalypse, as we know, can be a positive, a bringing down of old or worn out paradigms. Popisho’s rejection of colonial and patriarchal encroachment brings with it the petrichor scent of new understandings and love rekindled and redefined. And in the end, this quiet/seismic revolution within the text pinpoints what is revolutionary about it: in these dour days especially, we need art that believes in good, in love and, above all, in magic.

When we speak, I tell Leone Ross how her work moved me, and she asks a question that almost stumps me. ‘What is it for you?’ she asks, turning the tables. ‘What is going on for you—what does it somehow illuminate?’ And I realise that Popisho is real to me, because it represents the way in which I always see, have always seen, the world. It is a poppy show, yes, because life is just that. And it is kind, and loving, and if not always fair or just, then at least even-handed in its ups and down. One just needs to learn how to look to see it properly.

Book info: Ross, Leone (2021), This One Sky Day,  London: Faber (480 pages).

Notes:

[1] Ross and her mother moved from London to Jamaica when she was six years old, returning to the UK when she was 21.

[2] We are later told that reattaching the multitude of vulvas presented very few problems, ‘[o]ne hundred and twenty-four … to be exact’ (372), and the reader is made privy to the solution (or otherwise) to each of these.