Vanishing Point

The island is a fascinating trope. On the one hand, it’s fraught with dark colonial histories – think Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest violently subjugating Caliban on his native isle; a microcosm that applies, of course, to our own ‘island home’. It’s also a site of wilderness, where Freud’s concept of the id flourishes, liberating the primal urges that are repressed in ‘civilised’ society. ‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood’ chant the shipwrecked little boys in Lord of the Flies as they succumb to their primitive under-selves. This is a far cry from European representations of fictionalised Pacific paradises and the phenomenon of ‘islomania’, which imagines an Edenic escape from the woes of life.