English 015 - Americans Abroad
Life and Death Under The Sheltering Sky
Life and Death Under The Sheltering Sky
Category: 3E: Bowles | Diana Heald
Death is an ever-present factor in Kit and Port’s lives, sometimes a small, dark pinpoint in the distance, at other times overwhelmingly great and foreboding. The signs of death are everywhere: in the sickly children crawling on mounds of garbage, in the rotting, spoiled food served at every meal, in the darkness behind the sheltering sky, and in Port’s gradually worsening health. Yet both Kit and Port continue to ignore death’s presence until it is too late: Port dies of malaria while Kit’s neuroses and irrational behavior get the best of her. As they journey further into Africa, Kit and Port also journey further into their own innermost darkness—their mortality, the existence of which becomes more clearly unavoidable. Perhaps the only person who understands the true character of Kit and Port’s journey is Mirhnia, the Arab dancer who warns Port with a story of travelers pursuing a frivolous illusion out in the wilds of the Sahara, only to find that it is the inevitability of death that awaits them. Kit and Port spend their lives at the same time searching for and running away from death, and the tension between their fate and their aspiration is pervasive throughout the novel.
While the Arab dancer’s tale initially sounds far-fetched to Port, eventually it has many implications for his wife and him. Mirhnia tells Port about three Arab girls whose goal in life is to drink tea in the Sahara. She differentiates them from other girls like them, who travel to coastal cities to make their fortunes. In contrast, these travelers are impractical: they set their sights on an unattainable illusion. Their surroundings are depressing: “the men are all ugly. The girls dance in the cafes… but they are always sad” (p. 37). They set out for the Sahara without thinking about it practically, their sights set only on something silly and superficial, in the hopes of finding a society better than their own but with no reason to think they will. It is no coincidence that they arrive in the Sahara as the sun sets: darkness is a metaphor for death throughout the book. The girls die in the desert; “all three of the glasses… were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara” (p. 39). They have accomplished what they set out to do, yet the outcome is not what they had imagined. While the story seems irrelevant when Port hears it, its implications are pervasive throughout the novel—the girls’ tea represents what the travelers are unwittingly looking for: death behind the sheltering sky.
Kit and Port arrive in Africa with the intention of distancing themselves from European society and “the whole horrible thing that happens after every war, everywhere” (p. 15). Ironically, while they run away from death and the aftermath of World War II, the travelers get closer and closer to their own deaths as their journey progresses. As Kit and Port move deeper into the Sahara, under the illusion that leaving European society behind will somehow allow them to leave death behind as well, death’s presence is still within them. Port notices that “[t]he landscape was there, and more than ever he felt that he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him” (p. 168). Although the terrain becomes increasingly exotic, the persistence of infections and dark, uneasy feelings prevents Kit and Port from feeling at ease, because like the Arab girls in “Tea in the Sahara,” all the desert has to offer them is death and disappointment.
While the desert landscape is ominous in and of itself, for Port and Kit, the sky above it is a constant reminder of their fate. Port tells Kit that behind the sky lies “[n]othing… [j]ust darkness. Absolute night,” which prevents either of them from being able “to get all the way into life” because gnawing pinpoints of the darkness behind the sky seem always to afflict the travelers (p. 101). Port is especially aware of it as his illness grows more serious. In the delirium that takes hold of him in his last minutes, he imagines he possesses two centers. One of these is “gigantic, painful, raw and false,” like his life on earth, while the other, “the true one, the tiny burning black point… [is] unmoving and impossibly sharp, hard and distant” (p. 222). This pinpoint of darkness is death, and for Port to reach it he must “[r]each out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” (p. 235). Kit responds to the pinpoint in a different way: “her mind… strengthen[s] the thin partition, the danger spot of her being” (p. 267). While Port embraces darkness and reaches out to it, Kit must build a cocoon around herself to keep it from bothering her. Unfortunately, in doing so she becomes completely numb, to the point where she separates herself mentally from all other human beings. When Kit returns to civilization and hears French being spoken, she worries that “the words were coming back, and inside… there would be thoughts lying there… [that] must be kept inside in the dark” (p. 302). By keeping language out of her life, Kit avoids thinking of ideas, so she cannot be afraid of death, yet neither can she enjoy it. Although Port, unlike his wife, ultimately finds peace by piercing the sky and reaching out to death beyond it, the tension between Kit and Port’s fear of darkness and their dire need to accept it permeate the novel.
Bowles depicts many scenes of sleeping and waking, another aspect of Kit and Port’s ambivalence between light and dark, life and death. In waking, Port becomes aware of “an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness,” from which he can seek repose only in sleep (p. 11). Similarly, when Kit wakes she often is able to “feel doom hanging over her head like a low rain cloud,” and worries about the omens that give rise to her neuroses (p. 43). While the pinpoint of darkness gnaws away at Kit, after Port dies she realizes that if “the dark dream [is] shattered… the light of terror would be constant… the pain would be unendurable and endless” (p. 308). The act of waking is always painful, yet neither Kit nor Port is able to sleep deeply and peacefully. Kit, in her agitated state, wishes “she could give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope,” yet she continues to let darkness bother her, rather than accepting it (p. 207). Kit and Port’s insomnia and discomfort in sleeping and waking reflect the restless tension between eternal repose and the pain that characterizes their everyday existence.
If darkness represents tranquility, no one is more at peace with darkness than the blind, which explains why Kit and Port are both so drawn to blind people. One of the most peaceful images in the novel is that of a “venerable Arab, his legs tucked under him, his eyes shut… he made no sign of being aware of [Kit and Port’s] presence… he was praying” (p. 100). This man is particularly compelling in that, in contrast to Kit and Port, he seems at ease in his surroundings because he has accepted darkness, and therefore death. Port is wildly attracted to a blind dancer with a “supremely impersonal disdain in [her] unseeing eyes and placid lips” (p. 137). Seeing her hits Port “like an electric shock; he [feels] his heart leap ahead and his head grow[s] suddenly hot” (p. 138). Both Kit and Port are drawn to people who, unlike themselves, are able to make peace with their own mortality. While Port is unable to find this darkness for himself during his lifetime, Kit, even in her numbness, has moments of blindness and of tranquility. As she is being brought back to European society, she is vaguely aware of “the constant references to her closed eyes,” and knows that in opening them she will be made “defenseless before the awful image of herself, and the pain would begin” (p. 310). While Kit is at peace in the few moments in which she can close her eyes, those around her try to force her eyes open, preventing her from truly accepting darkness and instead allowing her to remain dazed and numb.
Bowles, in his exploration of death and how it affects his characters, makes a compelling point about travelers. Kit and Port flee Western civilization because the war has made them terrified of death, yet ultimately they find that death follows them everywhere, regardless of how fast they travel or how far they distance themselves from European influences. Death is often a pinpoint somewhere at the core of their beings, yet for Kit and Port there is always the fear that “at any moment the rip [in the sky] can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed” (p. 312). For Bowles’s characters, travel may delay the realization of their own mortality, but it cannot prevent it: if death is present and all-consuming in the remotest corners of the Sahara, it truly cannot be avoided.
Posted by on November 25, 2003 at 12:56 PM