57 pages • 1 hour read
Alexis SchaitkinSaint X
Alexis SchaitkinFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Geographical Context: The Caribbean Islands
Saint X is a fictional Caribbean island based on Schaitkin’s research on existing Caribbean islands. The Caribbean includes any islands within the Caribbean Sea, and as such, includes 13 different sovereign island nations, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and the Cayman Islands. Cuba, off the coast of Florida, is the largest island in the Caribbean and the closest to the continental US, and the Caribbean archipelago stretches east and then curves southward from there. The characters who live on Saint X often talk about dreams of moving to either New York City or London, both of which are thousands of miles from where Saint X is said to be.
In the opening of the first chapter, Saint X is situated among real islands that make up the archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, such as Saint Kitts and Saint Vincent. Saint X is in the middle of this archipelago and is 40 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide. The native vegetation and terrain matches that of the surrounding islands: arid soil, salt ponds, a volcano, and tropical vegetation.
Once Clive Richardson moves from Saint X to New York City, he references the “islandness” of each place, expressing his longing for his home. As both the Caribbean archipelago and New York City are made up of islands, these locations provide a stark contrast to one another: Clive visits Manhattan Beach but finds it difficult to believe he’s surrounded by an ocean; he smells the food that he grew up with in his Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, but it smells wrong on cold air. Both New York City and Saint X have a complex history of immigration, slavery, and socioeconomic diversity, which come into play in both locations in the novel.
Socioeconomic and Historic Context: Race, Colonialism, and Tourism in the Caribbean
Race and class come up as sources of tension for the characters on Saint X, and the history and socioeconomic circumstances of the island play a large role in this dynamic. Though this is a fictional island, Alexis Schaitkin paints a picture of an island that has been transformed by tourism by 1995, the year in which the inciting incident of the book takes place. This accurately reflects the economies of many countries in the Caribbean, which now rely heavily on tourism. In the 1980s and early 1990s, tourism replaced agriculture as the main economic activity, representing 7-90% of countries’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employing directly and indirectly over 30% of the total population (Acevedo, Sebastian, et al. “Caribbean Tourism in the Global Marketplace: Trends, Drivers, and Challenges.” Unleashing Growth and Strengthening Resilience in the Caribbean, International Monetary Fund, 2017, pp. 378).
Portions of the book take place during Clive Richardson’s childhood, and within these passages, Schaitkin portrays the island before its tourism boom. Clive remembers that only one family in his community had a generator and a television, and while it’s unclear whether this reflects poverty within his community or a lack of access to electricity on the greater island, this may gesture toward the tumultuous history of many Caribbean islands. Christopher Columbus claimed the region for Spain in 1492, and particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, European colonialism dominated the Caribbean and relied heavily on African and Afro-Caribbean slave labor. Though Spain was the main colonizing power, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France also claimed a number of territories. Caribbean plantations mainly produced sugarcane, but tobacco, coffee, and bananas were also popular exports. Indigenous islanders were gradually replaced by a large number of African-born laborers, whom the Europeans enslaved.
Emancipation of enslaved populations and sovereignty of island nations did not begin until the 19th century. Since the substantial wealth generated by the plantations all went back to the European countries, the islands were left impoverished after emancipation, relying on agriculture and local industries until the tourism industry boomed in the 1980s. The islands’ populations are majority Black, but socioeconomic inequalities remain between the white and Black populations who live on the islands. The novel takes place at the height of Caribbean tourism in 1995, before the industry started to decline in the 2000s.
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