Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (tr. Robin Myers)

Reviewed by Phoebe T

‘There are so many islands in one, right? It’s like I was born somewhere else, around other stories,’ Cristina Bendek’s narrator, Victoria, reflects in Salt Crystals. These ‘many islands’, and their ‘other stories’, ripple through this novel of ongoing history, body and landscape, as Victoria returns to her childhood home on the Caribbean island of San Andrés, Colombia – Bendek’s own birthplace. Published in Spanish in 2018, this shimmering novel now appears in English, translated by Robin Myers, and published by Charco Press.

Salt Crystals is, in Myers’ words, an ‘intrinsicially multilingual book’. After drifting through the first weeks of her return, Victoria is grounded to her birthplace by dialogues in Spanish, Creole and English, particularly by her encounter with Josephine, who shifts between languages as she helps Victoria uncover her family’s oppressive history: ‘I know your ruuks, mami, tus raices. And it’s not your fault.’

Victoria’ family history can be traced not only in the languages of the island, but also in the violence streaked across its landscape. Sewage blooms, amid the ‘bare, hook-like brown and grey branches’ of tropical dry forest destroyed to create boutique hotels. Victoria grows from observer to participant in the landscape, acknowledging her own complicity in the state of the island, and joining in activism, ‘thinking rundowns’, water shortage demonstrations and community dances.

As Victoria comes to terms with her ‘shoal of ghosts’, and strengthens friendships with those who are ‘getting decolonised, girl, little by little’, there is no sense of an ending, no ‘seeking safety in the falsely static’. Violence does not stop being enacted on the people or the landscape of the island, and the people don’t stop fighting back. Instead, Bendek has written a story which opens out into ongoingness. Victoria’s story is one among many, in many languages, and many bodies, and these other ‘[h]istories peer out, just as valid as the official one.’

Salt Crystals is published by Charco Press, 27th September 2002