Page 31 - Travel Leisure - USA (February 2020)

T + L

OCEANS APART

ISLOMANIA. IT’S NOT A TERM, as of 2020, that has made it into our

diagnostic manuals. But it’s perhaps fair to say that we humans, as a
species, have for millennia had a bad case of the affliction islomania
describes—“an obsessional enthusiasm or partiality for islands.”

From Homer on, islands have industrial-scale plantations flourished.
figured in our literature as sites of For centuries, the brutal force of
desire and of fear. Islands feature that industry powered the Atlantic
in our stories, and in our dreams, slave trade, and the modern global
as both prison and paradise. economy it helped create. The ghosts
We look to them, still, as places of these pasts are never distant. But
where we can be marooned, neither is the determination of the
reborn, or transformed. “Western people who live there today to make
culture not only thinks about all that they can of the beauty and
islands but thinks with them,” the charm of their home. They know it
historian John Gillis has observed. could only have been an island that
One reason why is that islands Shakespeare’s Caliban gazed upon,
are, by definition, worlds unto in The Tempest, to see a place “full of
themselves. But they’re also noises, sounds, and sweet airs that
connected to the rest of our give delight and hurt not.”
world by the sea. This is their Nowadays, many islands are
magic, and their power. menaced by a new threat: climate
This interconnection is also change. But this issue, worrying as it
why islands have often been ruled is, has also underscored the extent to
over, or owned, by people from which these places, so often viewed as
mainland nations. Rarely the seats marginal, are in fact bellwethers, and
of empires themselves, islands as central to our history as they are to
have more often been colonies: our imaginations. Islanders know this.
playthings for continental powers, So do those of us who spend as much
or places to make money. It was time as we can surrounded by the sea.
on the island of New Guinea that There’s nowhere like an island for
sugarcane was first cultivated, learning to see the world, and our
and in the Caribbean where place in it, a little differently.

SORAYA MATOS BY JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO

T R AV E L A N D L E I S U R E . C O M 27