This Other Eden

In Parts 3 and 4 of This Other Eden, the forced eviction occurs, and the community of Apple Island is divided. Ethan does not return home after being evicted from the Hale estate, although Bridget comes in search of him. The islanders are forced to confront their futures adrift and reflect on their families’ pasts on Apple Island, highlighting the theme of Family Legacy Across Generations. The community traces its new-world roots to Apple Island, so their eviction is a violent severance from their family origins, legacies, and traditions. As the book concludes, the thoroughness of the eviction is revealed, with the dead removed from Apple Island, their remains mixed together indifferently, and a plan to bury them somewhere on the mainland. This lack of regard for Apple Island’s dead emphasizes the deliberate erasure of its people, highlighting the theme of Government Interference in Marginalized Communities. The largely white government is all-powerful, and the introduction of eugenics to mainstream dialogue has set their eyes on the nearest target, Apple Island. With a plan to turn the island into a tourist attraction, the narrative speaks to a capitalist greed that disregards human life, especially that of marginalized or othered communities.

Throughout the novel, the plan to evict the islanders develops primarily in the background, through excerpts, state visits, and news gleaned through Matthew Diamond. In Part 3, however, the eviction arrives in force. The reactions to it vary, with some resigned to their fate while others rage. Despite the insistence that the eviction is for health and humanity, Zachary asserts that there are other motivations behind it: “You lousy, low-life, Johnny-come-lately stinkers! You always got some fancy talk that proves we’re no good, but it’s always the same old recycled happy horseshit! Hounding folks till you kill them right down dead!” (193). Both Zachary and Esther recognize that Government Interference in Marginalized Communities is not about helping the marginalized communities, but rather, protecting societal standards defined by people outside of their community. The people on the island live in peace, harming no one, and yet as soon as the government turns its eye toward them, they condemn the island, its living conditions, and inhabitants, insisting that they violate societal standards and must be divided and erased. The government not only wants to erase a racially diverse community but also take the land, and therefore insists that there are reasons for doing so. As the hundredth anniversary exhibit excerpts demonstrate, history tells a different story of the community through found objects. The artifacts of life on Apple Island were “nearly identical to that of any other nearby community at the time,” thus proving that there was nothing abnormal, let alone immoral, about the islanders’ existence (199). The prejudice toward them, however, was spurred from a disapproval of racially diverse communities that were seen as inferior, different, and dangerous to mainstream life. This racial diversity is the motivation behind the eviction, and, historically, such discrimination has resulted in the death and displacement of other marginalized communities.

As the islanders reckon with their eviction, the homes and lives they built on the island come into focus. Eha struggles with the notion of leaving and disassembles his family’s house, piece by piece, in order to transport it with them. He remembers building the cabin with Zachary and recalls the moment each piece was put in its rightful place. It is in many ways his life’s work, and he must now take it apart. Zachary also reflects on his life’s work, which he takes great pride in, but as the community around him crumbles, he takes a more critical view of his artwork. Zachary uses Art as Personal Expression and finds solace in his carvings, seeing them as a manifestation of himself. In crisis, as he looks at them before he leaves, he realizes that much of what he saw in his carvings were reflections of his mind, known to him alone. Now, gazing at them from a different angle, he sees that their meaning stemmed from himself, and an outside observer would not see his personal touch or understand the intricacies of the thoughts he imbued the carvings with. Though this does not render them meaningless, it allows Zachary to part with his tree, burning it down before the mainlanders can.

Eha and Esther struggle most with the eviction and what it means for their family, highlighting the theme of Family Legacy Across Generations. Their family began on the island, and their stories are passed down entirely from the island. When life begins in a place, it is difficult to separate the people from the place, but Eha and Esther are forced to reimagine themselves as displaced peoples. Indeed, with the loss of their home, they begin to reflect on their lives, and most especially on Eha’s father. Eha’s father is Esther’s father as well, and after his birth, Esther murdered her father. Esther is haunted by her father, most effectively in the form of her son: “Her father haunted her. He appeared every day, in Eha’s face, flaring, only for an instant but clearly, brooding, glowering, foul, so much at first that she’d have rather nursed a snake than her child” (208). Family Legacy Across Generations manifests in the inheritance of physical qualities, demonstrating that legacy is not always an easy or painless thing, and Eha’s resemblance to the father she murdered makes it impossible for Esther to live in peace. For Esther, the past lives on in the present through Eha. Eha, who never knew a father, reflects on his life and the role that Zachary plays in it. Zachary helps him learn carpentry, acting as a father to Eha, passing on family legacy and knowledge by teaching Eha with the tools that Benjamin Honey used. Traditionally, these skills would be passed from father to son, but with Eha’s father dead, Zachary happily fills the role, and the legacy of the Honeys thrives, as it now lives on in Eha. He uses his carpentry skills, which can be traced all the way back to Benjamin Honey, to provide shelter for his family, no matter where they find themselves after the eviction. Indeed, even in his dismantling of their cabin, Eha demonstrates that he will rebuild a life for them and, in a sense, they are carrying their home with them. Though the island itself has always been home, the Honeys were sheltered by the cabin built by Eha and Zachary, and they pack this up with them. Further, in the long pause on the water, Esther feels peace, suggesting that parting with the island also marks a goodbye to the pain of her past. Esther is the elder of the island, and in imagining a woman sinking into the island, she sows a piece of herself there in a final tribute to the island even as she and her loved ones leave. Further, while This Other Eden is far from a happy story with a happy ending, there are glimmers of hope in the possibility of Esther healing, and as Zachary raises Patience Honey’s flag above his head while venturing deeper into the channel, the text suggests that while people can be unjustly removed, their legacies remain. This theme of Family Legacy Across Generations is furthered by the text’s leaps into the future, which often depict the life of the islanders through Ethan’s paintings, which are now respected relics of Apple Island. While many of these paintings are held by the Hales, a cruel irony given Ethan’s own eviction from the Hale estate, they represent family legacy outliving a family itself. Through Art as Personal Expression, Zachary has ensured that the Honey family, and indeed all of the former inhabitants of Apple Island, will live on. While they were offered no vindication in life, 100 years later, they are remembered as simple, common people who did no harm and yet were harmed themselves for merely existing in a world that viewed difference as liability.