Word: islanders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like last year's winner, Doris Lessing, Le Clézio has strong ties to Africa - he was born in Nice in 1940, but his family history on both sides leads back to Mauritius, an island about 500 miles east of Madagascar that has been best known in the West, at least until now, as the home of the famously extinct dodo. The son of a doctor, Le Clézio grew up in France and Nigeria speaking French and English. He began writing at the age of 8 - one of his childhood efforts, composed on a long voyage...
...amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island - lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences hung with soggy towels, shattered windows, and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books, all water-laden, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew, and hung about with...
Francis fled the island and the home where she had lived for "40 odd years" with her husband, a sea captain for Texaco, taking only a few photographs and the bank books for the Galveston Grandmothers Club. It was the first time she had left during a storm. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a category three storm, had blown hard but with no surge. This time, Hollywood Heights, her West End island neighborhood just two blocks off the beach was quickly put under water by Ike. A moldy black water line high on the yellow siding shows where the water...
There is order emerging from the chaos. Randalls supermarket and its in-house Starbucks is open, but with the island water and sewer system still not functioning, portable toilets have been lined up outside. Dozens of moldy, battered refrigerators ripped out of the low-rise seaside condos are corralled on street corners. Stacks of new drywall stand outside. Just two blocks from the beach, a tall wire fence has been erected around the gas pumps and doorway of Luke's Supermarket and Deli, a 50-year island institution where West Enders could sit out front and munch on barbecue...
...more than 6,000 island residents perished in a hurricane. Many of the dead were taken out to sea for burial but even though their bodies were weighted down the tides brought them back. For over a month there were mass funeral pyres around the city. There will be no burning on the island this time. Fires are forbidden. There is a dusk-to-dawn curfew and residents are warned to get shots for tetanus and hepatitis before returning. Downtown, with its brick and ironwork Victorian-era buildings - once dubbed the "Wall Street of the Southwest" - is a ghost town...