Where the Crayfish Sing is Delia Owens' first novel. Born in 1949 in Georgia in the United States, Delia Owens is a biologist and zoologist before being a writer. For more than twenty years, she lived in Africa and devoted three books to her love for fauna and flora. Upon its publication in 2019, Where Crayfish Sing was a great success, appearing on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than a year. Published in France in 2020, the novel is currently being adapted into a film by director Reese Witherspoon.
Summary
"For years, the wildest rumors have been circulating about 'The Swamp Girl' from Barkley Cove, a small town in North Carolina. Yet Kya is not the wild and illiterate girl that everyone imagines and fears.
At the age of ten, abandoned by her family, she must learn to survive alone in the swamp, which has become for her a natural refuge and protection. His meeting with Tate, a gentle and cultured young man who taught her to read and write, introduced her to science and poetry, and transformed the girl forever. But Tate, called by his studies, abandons him in his turn.
The loneliness becomes so heavy that Kya is not suspicious enough of the one who will soon cross her path and promise her another life. When the irreparable happens, she can only rely on herself… »
After abandonment, comes loneliness
Immersing us in the heart of North Carolina, in 1952, Where the Crayfish Sing is a novel with abandonment as a common thread. That of Kya Clark, a ten-year-old girl. First the abandonment of her mother who runs away from home to escape the blow of an abusive and alcoholic husband when Kya was only six years old. Then after the abandonment of his mother, comes the abandonment of his brothers and sisters who left for a better life. It is lost in the swamp, in a shed with spartan comfort that she finds herself alone with her father who gradually disappears from the landscape to abandon him definitively in turn.
Escaping the social worker and police officers, she learns to survive with ingenuity in an environment that is a priori hostile. Left to itself, it feeds on oatmeal and catches shrimp and other crustaceans. Driving the boat brilliantly, she knows the tide schedules thanks to her sense of observation. Without money but resourceful, she exchanges what she collects in the swamp, between mussels and fish for fuel to feed her boat and kerosene lamp.
Until 1970, Kya lived cut off from the world, with solitude as her only companion. But it is in the swamp that she learns, stumbles many times, to then develop an incredible moment of survival and forge an impetuous and free character.
Where the crayfish sing: an ode to nature
From the title, we know that Where the Crayfish Sing will be an ode to nature. And the first pages confirm it: nature is omnipresent. Indeed, it is in the heart of the marshes located in the famous Outer Bank – islands with natural and wild landscapes – that Kya lives. If in our minds, swamps reflect a pejorative image, this is not the case for it. Thus, she grows in harmony within this nature becoming in her eyes the school of life.
The Marais then appears as a paradoxical, wild but benevolent place that reigns " both life and death, an organic mixture of promises and decomposition ". A true refuge, nature also appears as a foster mother for Kya, replacing her biological family. In this sense, in this landscape of holly and sycamores, oaks and white walnut trees, gulls, snow geese, herons and marsh snipe become his family.
Over time, she will come to know all the secrets of the Marais. The Swamp will then become a character in his own right in the novel, perhaps the most important. The zoologist depicts with extreme precision every corner of this strange, mysterious and poetic place. We discover its beauty under the passionate gaze of the little girl who collects rare bird feathers and shells. The vegetation appears lush, sometimes calm and welcoming, sometimes wild and dangerous, sometimes hostile and saving, but always cathartic.
Nature becomes for "the daughter of the swamps" her greatest strength. "She knew more than anyone else about tides, snow geese, eagles and stars, and she didn't know how to count to thirty."
A novel about difference
Where the crayfish sing highlights the difference of others carried at first by the character of Kya Clark. Indeed, the people of Barkley Cove have a lot of prejudice towards him. They consider her a savage and an idiot, she who has spent only one day at school. Prejudices, her family history and her place of life will always chase her. Thus, nicknamed "the swamp girl" and "Miss Neanderthal", she will evolve excluded from society, she who nurtured the desire to be like everyone else and to integrate. In vain.
Through the character of Kya, the novel denounces a two-speed justice. When "Chase Andrews' body was found in the swamp, which, unsurprisingly, would have swallowed him in silence", she, the outlander, will be designated as the ideal culprit. In the course of this police investigation, interspersed with childhood memories of Kya, we discover the United States of the 70s, between arbitrary justice and racial segregation, embodied by the characters of Jumping and Mabel, because of their skin color. And it is with these characters least integrated among the inhabitants that the girl manages to create deep and sincere bonds.
To conclude, Where Crayfish Sing is both a learning novel, a thriller but also a sociological study. In this ode to wilderness, mysterious and pure, Delia Owens highlights the importance of environmental protection, tolerance, difference and open-mindedness.
