Visiting the Islands

The images from St. Thomas were so striking, so colorful and rich, and yet as time passes I find myself depending on the photographs to supplement my faulty memory. (Ah memory--shifting, shifty, shadowy, and misshapen--but that is for another post at another time.)

One thing I wasn't prepared for (probably because it's a U.S. territory) was that the island seemed more run-down than I expected. One taxi driver said (without our asking--so he could have told us anything, or nothing) that the island is much better off than the islands that do not receive U.S. funds. And I imagine part of the run-down quality is the very nature of any island; it is isolated, with limited natural resources, and it's expensive to get goods in and out.

Still, one image that came to mind was Eric Fischl's "A Visit To/A Visit From The Island." Certainly, Fischl's painting is the extreme, a diptych with the purpose of exposing issues of class and race. The visitors around us were not indolent (nor nude) and the islanders were not refugees washed up on the beach. So I must ask myself why my mind made an association with the painting. I suppose because there was a sense of two separate worlds, one of the vacationers visiting and having a good time, one of the islanders working and going about daily life. Doesn't this sense permeate any location that's a vacation destination, where tourists flit in and out on holiday, the natives' livelihood? I think what troubled me was I could not see what the vacationers' money funded. It's not cheap to visit St. Thomas (partly that island thing again--hard to get items in and out), but I would have felt better if it looked like the working class was benefiting from the money spent on its island.

More and more I see the issue of class (more than gender or race or any other) as the one we need to address most.