The beginning

The beginning of Each Others’ Islands

Here's my earlier text when I thought about this project in 2016:

We tend not to know each other’s islands. They tend not to appear along the outlines of the maps of the countries we live in. Many islands are simply too small to be seen from a distance. At a distance, then, they become hidden islands, coming into existence only when taking a magnifier, or when a map is big enough to accommodate the details, the nitty-gritty, little nuances of the coastline.

The scales of our maps determine the schemes in our heads, and so we assume coastlines to be solid, not realizing how much is going on around a coastline, the rugged edges, and the shapes they make, sometimes with islands, and sometimes with lakes and lagoons around the line, that coastline. Then there are those countries, where the coastline in itself is an island. The UK is of course on of them, but it doesn’t disappear off the maps that we are familiar with. It’s big enough to count as mainland, with lots of little islands around itself. However, most Caribbean islands, for example, don’t stand out on maps, being rendered invisible by map scales. There are whole nations in the sea that seem to be invisible! Whole countries that appear only when you look closely! What is a nation in a state beyond visibility, a metaphor for marginalisation? What does it feel like to live somewhere which is invisible? To look at a globe and come from a country that appears as nothing but ocean! If we would only use larger maps, so we could only see all the dots of land in the water!

Shapes, Forms

Even with the larger scale maps we use for the European continent, In Europe, lots of islands still go map-missing. Last year, I discovered Caldey Island, off Tenby, Wales, little islands in the Medway river mouth in Kent, and Tabarca, off Alicante in Spain! I first caught sight of the amazing outlines and shapes within the Medway Mouth whilst on a plane. Here where you have a view from the air, you have an overview, and so you can see shapes and arrangement of land and water, which you do not see from a land-perspective. Also on a plane, I saw Tabarca. I was flying to Alicante, and saw this island just before landing. Thinking it is too small and too close to the coast to be Mallorca, I kept wondering what it is I saw. It was Tabarca: off the shore near Alicante, just like Caldey island is off the shore opposite Tenby. For Tabarca island it was the aerial plane-view that made me discover the island, for Caldey Island it was its lighthouse. The blinking light at night I noticed got me enquire where it comes from, until I saw the next day that there is an island behind the coast! So here it was: another island that goes missing off the maps too frequently, not because it is not on the map but because the maps we use are too large-scale, and thus the details go missing!

One could go into yet more detail and find that both Caldey Island an Tabarca are more or less like twin islands: Caldey more and Tabarca less. This is so because Caldey Island has an edge of itself which is, at regular intervals, another island called St Margaret’s Island. In other words: at low tide there are two islands in the sea, and at high tide there is only one island. So island definitions are changeable, and island count depends on the tide. Outlines, hence, rise and fall, and are sometimes more out of line and sometimes more in line. The details depend on what is happening at each moment of looking. Pinning islands down to a particular arrangement, then, goes, ultimately, against the law of the tides. On the other hand though, if a coastline moves without coming back at the next tide, and does so again and again, then there are other factors at work, and the melting of the icecaps, for example, could have found a worrying echo here. So we have to try not to disrupt or pollute nature, in order to keep the (tidal) rhythms and outlines going!

Some islands have funny names, such as Rough Island, in the Solway Firth, and some islands appear to have no name, such an island I cannot mention, except to say that it’s an island that cannot be named! Some islands are just about islands, or rather islet-islands, such as four little ones further outside of Tabarca by Alicante. They are a little group of mini-islands with a group-name (los Farallones), so they have made it into the books and records, being solid enough to be known and seen! Some islands are just rocks or sandbanks, skerries or reefs, or too small to be any of those. Yet other islands are completely submerged under the sea – but these are not islands we are looking at, because we can’t look at them! They don’t count when it comes to island-counting; only land that you can see counts, land above sea-level. So it’s a sea-level too! This level is the limit. And literally, it’s a littoral matter!

Even on sea-and surface level, as we have seen, the shapes that we expect are in reality much more intricate. If you come closer, you get to know more, such as the spaces of land inside what you assume to be just water. Then there are the more stable water-and-land alternations: some coastlines are full to the brim with them in wavy to zigzaggy patterns and all sorts of amazing shapes and islands appearing everywhere around the coast like a dance along the side of the sea. It’s even arbitrary whether to speak about a coastline, because there is not always much of a line there at all, if we think of a line as more or less straight out/line. If we do not, we are closer to reality, for so many of those lines are wavy. It can even be confusing to figure out what is coast and what is island! That is to say, which details of the wavy shapes you can see on a detailed map form part of the coastline, and which of these forms are islands - and then, as a third option, which of them might be peninsulas! Peninsulas are then yet another kind of intermediate shape to look out for! Land and water alternations! There’s another option, and that is the shape of a lake. Some water areas that you see near the coast might not belong to the seaside directly but are lakes instead, showing no connection to the sea but being ‘framed’ by land all around. Lakes and lagoons: I was amazed to find lots of lagoons along the Mediterranean coast of France, so that when you’re on the train along the coastline, you don’t just see water on one side, but on both sides, with the train in the middle rather than on one side! In France, and elsewhere too, e.g.: Poland, Spain, lagoons just off the coastline occur next to a straight line, in other cases, there are no straight lines anywhere.

The whole picture can be so intricate, interesting and confusing, that you might get the impression that the coast, or the islands, are dancing! Or the coast is dancing with its islands and vice versa! Scotland and Norway are obvious coasts full of dancing islands. There’s a presumption of islands there, though some of these, too, go map-missing. Other coastlines keep their islands much more hidden to maps altogether. Such as the German coastline which looks rather straight on most maps, and only reveals islands upon closer inspection. The islands of the Netherlands are still more visible, and by the time, that group of islands reaches Germany, they look to have moved so close to the coast, as if non-existent. But once you get there, more similarities, apart from land-and-water and water-and-land, will arise to you, similarities and transitions – or similarities as evidence that transitions have occurred. Or transition as transmission!

We could spin dialogues around the sea, make a sea-ing and a see-ing forecast around the shipping forecast. We could name our own inner islands, and our sunken lands. We could name our oceans and our drowned elements. We could find that whilst no man and no woman is an island, we are all islands together. We could do all this and more, there is a lot more to be seen and to be said! We may be like privileged refugees, if having the choice to go on an island, and having the choice to return too. By being conscious of our choice, we might help the project of humankind-ness too, to get to know each other, through each other’s islands. Edges and coastlines as meeting points, and more importantly the land-outposts beyond the edges! The edge at the centre, the space between us!