How much do you trade to defeat loneliness?
Strange coincidence during these times of the pandemic, that I am offered the book “Where the Crawdads Sing’ by Delia Owens as a part of my reading list by my daughter.
I call it a coincidence, considering the situation that we are living in and the emotions that all of us go through of fear, loneliness, sadness, and isolation. Aren’t these times of survival and times that we are well aware of the fact that only the fittest will survive the wrath of the COVID. Perspectives differ and there are lessons to learn but strangely there are takeaways that I could derive from the reading of this book.
From being a 6-year-old till the age of 64 almost, the story encircles the life of a young girl Kya until her death, alone and isolated. Kya is abandoned by her parents at the tender age of 6. She is witness to all her siblings leaving her to her fate and destiny in the swamps of North Carolina. She grows up alone, learns to survive by indulging in small trade, aligns with the life of the swamp creatures, and also educates herself with the help of the kind boy Tate. Teenage has her falling in love with both Tate and Chase Andrews, who is the murdered protagonist of the story. Both of them abandon her and add to her distrust of mankind. Eventually, the story has Kya publish books that are successful and also ends with her being a poetess Amanda Hamilton, who lived and died without revealing her true identity. The murder of Chase and the entire town implicating her for the murder and assuming her to be the culprit shows how people and her surroundings lack empathy towards her or her life and the prevalent social prejudice.
At a young age, she learned to fend for herself and also manage her resources and live by herself in the shack. There she creates an environment that is her own, draws her own rules of nature, observes nature and its creatures very closely and keenly, and collects her learning and conclusions that sequentially get published. Knowledge comes to her by self-training and observation. The swamp and the marsh that she is surrounded with and where she lives in isolation teach her a lot in life. That grows to be her lifestyle. Betrayal is something that she finds difficult to reconcile with and this coupled with abandonment rules her life.
Social isolation and loneliness run through the novel as a strong theme and that which human kind is facing today. Life has taught us all about social distancing and living with a mask, just as Kya lives as the ‘marsh girl’ masked and untouched. It is now that we value our independence and the need for the society around us. Well this isolation that we are forced into by the wrath of nature, can also enable us to gain some skills to feed the brain, to keep the mind active, and also probably trade and learn to indulge in business alternately. Understanding patterns of nature, painting, music, collecting art, sketching, reading, and most importantly writing are skills that one can develop and learn.
Kya comes across to the reader as one of the most vulnerable characters in the story only to gradually read about how she evolves to be the most resilient character in the story. She learns to adapt to the swamps and the marshes and knows her habitat well by the time she is a fully grown woman. She is aggressive, is competitive, and manages both worlds with aplomb. She needs no man to protect her, chaperone her or be at her side when she goes out to meet her publishers or travel to the town which she is not familiar with. This quiet girl of Barkley Clove is intelligent but is also sensitive as is seen in her friendship with the seagulls. She is free like the seagulls, connected with nature and her thoughts and creativity can fly like them. While the entire town refers to her as the ‘marsh girl’ which has connotations of being backward and ignorant and probably wild; this girl carves a name for herself in the world of Zoologists. Through the marshes and the swamps, she opens a new life for herself as she enters the world of poetry and the publishing of books.
With the pandemic, our behaviour patterns have also changed. We grow suspicious of people around and prejudice and selfishness seem to have settled in faster than we thought they would. Some of our behaviour patterns as is evident from the story of the trial of Kya have now become acceptable to the world. Abandonment is what we live with, when not allowed to even be there during those last moments of those who we cared for. Yet we defy nature and choose not to isolate, surrender to nature, allow nature to heal, and grow tolerant towards each other. Some decisions seem harsh to us now but are surely the ones that can help us in the future.
The final twist in the story towards the end is what probably alarms us but otherwise, the novel is beautifully worded by Owens as she portrays the life of this young, gentle, naive girl who belongs more to the world of nature than that of humanity. Nature when violated has its own way of punishing humanity and a lesson to learn is that, rather than defying and going contrary on purpose; it is wise to force oneself into isolation, make the most of the isolation time that we have with family and our near and dear ones and allow nature to heal! Thus, the crawdads are a symbol of maintaining a connection with nature rather than a forced acceptance by Nature.