How Islander Consciousness Can Save Us from the Island Delusion
A Story from the Outer Hebrides for America's "No Kings" Weekend
No man is an island.
You know that line. You might even remember it’s the start of a John Donne poem.1
After all these centuries, those words feel like cliché rather than masterpiece. This idea that “no man is an island, entire of itself” is truer than true, but many of us want to defy such conventional wisdom just to prove some dead white guy wrong.
And yet, it just might be worth revisiting that idea…
This Country Is Not an Island Either
This weekend, with the No Kings protests cropping up in all fifty states, we are literally going to challenge a fool who wants to imagine he lounges upon a throne, ruling his own private island nation. (And yes, there’s the cruel irony that he sits behind a desk and bans people from small island nations and other places he and his cronies have labeled undesirable.)
By gathering together - those who are well-seasoned marchers, those who mobilize for “the big ones,” and those who are going to find the courage and take to the streets for the very first time - we dismantle our own illusions that we might be safe or in any way separate from the fascism that’s taking hold in these United States.
I envision our individual island-selves, otherwise sequestered in our private lives, all coming together to form a great continent of resistance.
And then, maybe, in the weeks and months that follow, we’ll find a way to resist the urge to return back to our own cozy, helpless isolation. What if we really do keep building community and creating a renewed sense of culture built on care and justice rather than mere capitalism and a selective understanding of the American dream?
The Paradox of Island Life
I grew up with a soul-deep reverence for islands. As a child of Cape Cod, a peninsula cut from the mainland by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1916, we were not-quite-islanders. Even for us, the thought of actually growing up on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket seemed strange and close to the impossible.
But that didn’t stop me from romanticizing those places that rose from the waves. Prince Edward Island was the haven of my childhood imagination. The first time I set foot on Aran, the largest of the three islands just beyond Galway Bay, I found myself coming home to a place I never knew I was longing for.
I longed for the solitude and the familiarity that seemed woven into island life. Let me walk the tideline alone for miles, and then welcome me in to share a dram in the pub or a beer on the porch, please.
I haven’t yet been able to take up the challenge of living on an island any smaller than the nation of Ireland, but someday, I would like to try.
We mainlanders tend to see islands as lonely places, but I think we’re the ones who are versed in aloneness.
On an island, isolation can engender the greatest degree of interconnection. It’s on the far flung archipelagos that culture tends to survive the longest. Island living actually makes for the most profound sense of community.
On an island, we might imagine that the people know the difference between the sacred singularity of the land and the necessary collective energy of its inhabitants.
How could a man be an island when the island is the island, after all?
A Story Born of Island Consciousness
In the late 90s,
(creator of the Substack A Year & A Day) traveled Scotland collecting stories for what would become the Hebridean Folklore Project.On the Isle of Harris, she received the story of the Cailleach Squire from an islander named Norman MacLeod.
As you’ll hear, this tale introduces us to unjust king, a sovereign maiden, and the sacred hag of Celtic lore, the Cailleach. The narrative is anchored into its own island, but it spans many landscapes from Lochlann (Norway) to Éire (Ireland). Island consciousness is anything but provincial in this sacred tale.
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I admit, I did not remember the source of “no man is an island.” Now, I can almost see the page in the literature anthology that guided that first survey class for new English majors. John Donne’s poem is worth reading again, even if the “man talk,” the Eurocentrism, and the casual mention of a friend’s manor all push your buttons.