Jessica Blanton: Outside Reading (February 14, 2010)

This weekend I read a book I haven’t read in a long time: A Place Where the Sea Remembers. The title popped out at me from my bookshelf because it reminds me of what we have been talking about in class; sacred places, and the fact that places are participants in their sacredness. The book isn’t exactly about sacred places; it is a fictional story about a Mexican town and events that happen to the characters in this town, and how they are all connected in some way. According to Lane, a sacred place is a stored place. Sandra Benitez, the author of the book, may have known that when she wrote it, because she describes in the book the power of stories. One character, the mysterious, wise and old Remedios is a supernatural character in the book. She “is weary, a result, in part, of the countless times she has cocked her head in the direction of someone’s story. Remedios knows the town’s stories. Just as the sea, as their witness, knows them, too.” (p. 1)
The book uses the stories of the characters in Santiago, Mexico, to illustrate the fact that people are connected to the universe and the Earth, and those human issues and problems are affected by and affect the places around them. The sea “remembers” the things that happen in Santiago, just as the earth around Santiago, the buildings, the streets, all carry the weight of what people are going through there. The drama and conflict in the town are all experienced by the place. It makes me wonder if Benitez had read Lane’s book “Landscapes of the Sacred” before she wrote her novel. Or perhaps his axioms are more universally known than I originally thought.