Ideas for stories come to me constantly, but sometimes they feel urgent and important, as though not getting the words down may be doing someone a disservice. Like the girl whose photograph inspired my short-short story “Strangled by Sapphires.” Here’s the backstory.
As part of a fact-finding, eye-witness expedition to Madagascar in 2017, my colleagues from Conservation International and I flew in an eight-passenger Cessna Caravan over one of the last remaining tropical rainforests in the southeast, where we had had a base of operations since the early 1990s. The rainforest was nicknamed “CAZ,” or the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor (read more about Conservation International Madagascar here). After departing the airfield in the capital Antananarivo, the pilot flew over a nickel mine operated by a large multinational corporation. The site was what you would expect to see – a deep hole with terraced rings around an industrial worksite and excavators and dump trucks moving in and out of the five-story pit. A few minutes later we circled over another mine, this one radically different – a ramshackle collection of hundreds of blue tin-roof shacks surrounded by potholes full of opaque puss-brown liquid. Piles of cut trees looked like toothpicks from the skies, forests cleared to make room for more depressions oozing ancient groundwater from the Earth. An illegal sapphire mining operation.
Later that day, in a government conference room in the Ambatondrazaka, about 165 miles northeast of Antananarivo, the capital city of Madagascar, we listened to community members and government officials discussing economic and environmental issues in the nearby forests. The discussion, lively and difficult to follow given Malagasy, English, and French were all being spoken to share information with everyone in the meeting, took a sudden turn. A man shook a color photograph of a family member, raising it higher, his voice rising in volume and pitch, and though I did not speak his language, I thought I understood one thing – his pride in this person in the picture. The photo circulated around the room and as it came closer to me I saw it was a young girl dressed in a pretty violet t-shirt. I imagined she was in school that day, perhaps learning about the forest or long division in mathematics.
Upon closer inspection I saw the girl’s lips were white and her eyelids closed. A colleague translated for me – she had been raped, strangled, and then killed by a sapphire miner under the influence of drugs. She was a girl no more than 11 years of age, a girl whose life would not go on, a girl who would play no more games, eat no more red rice, never run into the fields surrounded by felled logs. The man waving the photo was not proud, he was devastated and angry. Angry at the government, the armed forces, the foreign nonprofits and the foreign companies making money off the communities and their forests.
I snapped a quick photograph of the photo so as not to forget this girl and how she died. Her story stuck with me for years. I felt haunted by it and wanted to understand the connection between the illegal gemstone mines, the blue-roofed huts, the holes full of muddy water, and this girl brutalized alongside the rainforest and all its inhabitants.
The girl killed by sapphires became a sort of benign ghost in my mind. But then she became resentful that I held on to her so tightly, she questioned what right I had to prevent her from taking the final steps in her journey. She wanted to be at peace. I imagined a conversation between us and the result is the flash fiction “Strangled by Sapphires,” which was published this summer in Indiana State University’s Plane Tree Journal, the fourth issue of which features works about nature in crisis.
Flash fiction is so short you can read it on your phone while standing in line at the grocery store. It’s usually less than three pages, or somewhere around 1,000 words. It packs a lot into a tiny space. I remember one of the first flash fiction pieces I ever read was by Italo Calvino; the entire story took place on the head of a pin. Flash fiction, according to author Charles Baxter, is about “sudden stress,” where a character must react more than act. Flash fiction lives between “poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, and the personal and the crowd,” Baxter writes. He adds that there are no grand decisions or time to build up a character’s psychology as in 19th century novels, as “time and space have both run out simultaneously.”
Plane Tree Editor and Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University Brendan Corcoran writes that:
“Plane Tree: Nature in Crisis is the journal’s fourth issue and the first published as a special thematic issue bringing together works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Here, nine writers from every corner of the US to Australia explore the human relationship with Nature defined by crisis, loss, mourning—and hope. This issue starts with the premise that ongoing climate and ecological crises define our moment in the Anthropocene, affecting every human community and biological niche on planet Earth. With human civilization singularly responsible for the losses we witness and endure, this decisive decade is poised on a razor’s edge between assurance of future chaos defined by mass suffering and the prospect of survival with profound healing. The following works speak to the challenge and possibility of artful writing engaging with the reality of Nature in crisis.”
If you are interested in learning more about the social and environmental impacts of illegal gemstone mining in Madagascar, here are a few articles I found helpful at the time of drafting my story:
- National Geographic – “How illegal mining is threatening imperiled lemurs,” by Paul Tullis, with photographs and video by Adriane Ohanesian
- Mongabay – “What happens after a mining rush? Photographs from Madagascar,” by Arnaud de Grave.
- The Guardian – “Sapphire rush’ threatens rainforests of Madagascar,” Associated Press in Antananarivo.
And here is a story from earlier this month that reveals not much has changed:
- Equal Times – “Madagascar: for better or for sapphire,” by Lola Fourmy and Martin Huré.
It is so important to observe, witness, and imagine ways we will use our humanity to problem-solve as we face so many global challenges in every part of the world. As the ghost says to the American, a story is not a gun or a gendarme’s badge. The American replies that the story about the ghost’s life and her death is more powerful than a weapon. I hope you agree.