PHILIP ALLEN

Defying putative extinction, this 80,000-word coelacanth conveys the resurrection of a student protest movement in a fictitious island (AuxIndes) off the coast of Africa. Insular activists joined by a pair of young Black Americans bearing their own legacies of bondage work through business and professional channels to manage a vulnerable republic, despite its isolation, poverty, and corruption. Prevailing insular dynamics force the principal characters to readjust their connections with one-another.Surrounding them, the ocean environment exemplifies the conduct of elusive communications, to assure survival, and to recombine resourcefully. To The Indies turns on the sensibility of Cynthia Van Zan, product of a once-enslaved Louisiana family and a father descended from West African royalty. A graphic artist with special "gifts," Van Zan enlivens the narrative through innate affinity with creatures of the ocean. Her colleague, Denis Guyane, born in New York of Haitian immigrants, pursues a more terrestrial career as trouble-shooter for their AuxIndien employer, the Fisherman and sometime President Roger Masson. After a period of enforced isolation, interrelated crises bring the principals together on both predictable and eccentric pathways. These include prospects for a professional reunion of Van Zan and Guyane in Manhattan as the Covid emergency is about to burst.