The small community hugs the shores of the Bay of Fundy, near the mouth of the Kennebecasis River on the coast of New Brunswick, Canada. Survivors of a half-remembered catastrophe, theirs is a world of ritual and memory, of trauma passed down through generations as carefully as an heirloom, and of a tremulous intimacy, freighted with respect and dread, with the ocean on their doorstep. Kaya and her lover Harbour have come of age and are preparing for the all-important “Rites,” which will mark them as full members of their community and allow the elders to teach them “all the arcane histories that weren’t spoken of with children, except in whispers or subtle implications.” Alas, while Harbour’s candidacy is accepted, Kaya’s is rejected, sending the latter on a quest for self-discovery that culminates in an encounter with a strange being that knows more about her than she wishes to admit—bringing deadly consequences in its wake.

Winner of the 2022 Quebec Writer’s Federation First Book Prize, Trynne Delaney’s The Half-Drowned is an unsettling and atmospheric seapunk novella steeped in Black Canadian history, portraying a resilient, post-apocalyptic seaside community shaped as much by its ancestry, and memories of grief and suffering, as by the toxic waters it lies astride. A work of speculative fiction tinged with horror, it is presented as a series of interlinked reflections told from multiple perspectives. The plot is not straightforward, but disjointed, with insights cleverly revealed through allusion for the discerning reader to pick up. While the beautiful prose can be unclear at times, it is nevertheless a promising debut effort that can be read and appreciated in a day or two.

Blighted by the after-effects of an unnamed catastrophe “just two short generations ago,” the once picturesque Bay of Fundy has been reduced to a picture of death and decay, suffused with the stench of “rotting meat.” Garbage-filled waters are “iridescent” with the “skim of oil” and spit up “rainbows of trash.” “Mountains of detritus” define the beach, which is covered in “silken mud” that can easily drown the incautious as they wend their way across “the shallowing crush of plastics”:

It’s also said that anyone foolish enough to venture out past the plastic walls that define shore from sea should be treated as a ghost until proven otherwise.

Occasionally, freak floods and hurricanes churn up “the buried treasures” lying on the “bed of plastics and seaweed” and “among the usual Barbies and corpses,” to deposit more than “seal carcasses and plastic vomited onto shore.” Kaya recalls a childhood memory of “half a man … trailing like seaweed back towards the water in pinks and reds”, leaving a “trail of ripped guts, punctured faces, toothy disintegration of the body as a whole.”

These oceans stopped rising with water but keep rising with plastics and memories. A plastic water bottle tells me about a family eaten away from cancer before their taps would spit anything but scum and fire. Bagsandbagsandbagsandbags drift, flat fishes in the water, where plant life was, where other bags were, where more bags and bags and bags will be and bags and bags and bags are swimming in schools stuck together by bags and forks and knives and straws and rope in long dragons of bags that surface only to scare people into believing the oldest stories.

With the waters of the lake poisoned, the broader water cycle of the region has transformed into an atmospheric cycle of mortality. Toxic rain that makes rocks “dissolve to thick mud” also gives rise to “poisoned soil,” and unsafe water supplies that spread “common sickness” (which claims Kaya’s friends Ocean and Kit), and perpetual ailments such as “skin pocked with rash.” “The air is thick, but not with smog,” and “toxic fogs” cause deaths reminiscent of First World War gas attacks—including the sound of “rattling breaths as [the sufferers] pass”—requiring everyone to wear an “air filter scarf” as they traverse the landscape during “dying season.”

“The sun didn’t burn so much backintheday,” explains Kaya’s mother, recalling “a world where even the lightest skinned could sit out on nice days, let the rays catch the angles of their bodies that were often left in the shadow.” Presumably the new environment selects for those with dark and protective skin pigmentation, making images of white skin glimpsed in the spolia and detritus of earlier society puzzling to those born with no memories of pre-cataclysmic life.

Completing this picture of a predatory natural environment are references to other dangers that stalk the landscape, including evenings of “a heady dark spiked with a crescendo of lightning strikes” that can strike anyone and anything, as well as communicable water-borne parasites and “competitive scavengers” from other tribes.

It is against this backdrop of a world of clear and persistent danger that the drama around Kaya’s murky origins plays out in the foreground. “Found between intestine and hair and bladderwrack … red-faced and wailing, cradled in a mussel shell” on the lakeshore, “arriving from the ocean on the doorstep of a flood,” Kaya is “never quite claimed as the town’s own.” As stories of her (Aphrodite-like) origins abound, she finds “a trace of myth follows her still,” making her seem “ethereal and otherly” and driving her “itch to get outside these borders she’s accidentally grown up between.” Rejected by the “Ritegivers” on the basis of her birth, and following a bad breakup with Harbour, she leaves the community to find her own place in the world:

Harbour will be wedded to this place. Kaya relegated to singing its anthems without tasting belonging. Belonging’s been dead for a while now, she was just lapping up the leftovers.

But after contracting food poisoning from eating a seventy-year-old can of food that she finds at an abandoned store, untouched for decades, the enormity of her situation dawns on her.  Worse is an encounter with an unwelcome companion:

The bear has two heads. Each one hangs low as they turn to face the base of a skeleton tree. She suffocates something between a scream and gasp of wonder. Its fur is blue-black and in patches it has lost pigment. The patches of gold shimmer against the filtered sun. Its species is black bear. Ursa americanus. Her species was homo sapiens sapiens. Now, both are simple survivors. She looks into their four eyes. They are soft. Why aren’t your eyes soft? All this earth opens to you, and you look at it all hard? they seem to ask.

There is a harsh and visceral beauty to this world, despite its horrors. The shimmering wildlife, the lakeshore covered in at least one “pink and blue trash dune” suggest a post-apocalyptic future harkening back to a primeval past, albeit with human-made elements now incorporated into it. This is a world suffused in the imagery of death, but also witness to life, struggling to assert itself against the odds. Horrific yet beautiful, the new balance achieved by Nature absorbs and incorporates the man-made pollution into itself, creating a composite that includes everything to achieve a new synthesis and a higher equilibrium—which in turn serves as a model for the human societies emerging within it. There is a natural harmony to be found here, albeit a harmony of the graveyard, making the humans and other lifeforms here charnel-dwellers in an oceanic “grave that teems with survival.”

Peppered throughout the novel are references to “angels” for whom “death didn’t exist anymore,” barring “falling from the sky and breaking across the ocean’s crust.” Their corpses can be spotted in the waters of the Bay, “so mangled that they could no longer mimic our forms,” and to children, resembling “mermaids.”  The angels are believed to have “left for the skies,” leaving behind advanced technology that occasionally crashes into the ocean (possibly scavenged by the community); it is later revealed that the angels’ goals were “appropriation not extermination,” suggesting that these are alien creatures who sought to colonize and make a home on Earth, only to find its environmental conditions inhospitable for their kind. This view is strengthened when Kaya finally encounters a creature that she interprets as her “mother”—a kind of research and terraforming entity “made outside and separate from the natural history of this planet,” left behind to “observe and communicate,” and “do what’s necessary to adapt the rest of this place back to habitation”; it appears to have created her out of recycled alien materials and human matter, possibly as a prototype, before inserting her into the local human community for espionage purposes by depositing her on the beach (as a baby, to maximize her odds of adoption).

Whatever held her, whatever took her, that alien thing lifted from the water, that took her ill, malfunctioning shape and held her as a mother. Was her mother. Remade her and made itself into her reflection. When done with her, its mirage wavered away taking on Kaya’s rhythm and motion. Holding onto her image until dissolution. Something beautiful reaching for proximity to humanity. In it she sees herself.

Events quickly escalate. Taking Kaya’s form, the alien infiltrates the town to seek out Harbour’s brother, LaVon, with whom it has been cultivating a telepathic, possibly even a romantic, relationship—and which, unfortunately, does not end well for him. When the real Kaya returns to the town, she finds the alien has reconciled her relationship with Harbour, who reciprocates romantically.

While “not many believe aliens have the concepts of joy embedded in their semi-robotic codes,” it’s quite possible that the alien—a syntheto-organic construct—is capable of evolving new “logics,” suggesting the haunting possibility that the destruction of Earth and the countless deaths endured by both “angels” and humans might have been avoided had the former approached the latter with more empathy: “Your trust makes it want to like LaVon,” Kaya is told, “even if like shouldn’t be in its code. You, it, I, we change.”

Despite the clarity of its thoughts when in mental conversation with LaVon, the creature’s motivations aren’t made entirely clear. It’s quite possible, though, that it was attempting to perform a ritual common amongst the “angel” species, adapted to suit the local environment and genetic composition of LaVon’s human form—and underestimating the danger to LaVon (and itself) in the process. The lack of clarity behind its actions make it a fine alien, since an encounter with a truly alien species is likely to be fraught with misunderstanding and opacity. Indeed, it may even serve as a metaphor for the spectre of slavery—a prominent component of the community’s self-narrative—that also devours bodies, memories, and identities to sustain and perpetuate itself.

All of history compressed. We were over there on the opposite shore and hemisphere. We were over water sardined foot to head to foot to head. Piglet fetuses. We were on blocks getting ourselves chopped into pieces. We were south and north and east and west. We were cargo. And we were free in never being free … You tell me that I am history in history. I am a preacher. Griot [a traditional bard in West African cultures]. Storyteller. Historian … You tell me I am history. Only when history is done.

References to ancestral memories of slavery in this novel are occasional and vague, but appear to shape the community’s identity as a survivor of history and trauma, and compel its members—each of whom has their own story of trauma—to turn their continued collective survival into an ongoing triumph over history and hardship, as well as a measure of their success when other cultures around them have seemingly disappeared. At the same time, the infrequency of these references to an African origin perhaps reflects how the community’s history is lost but half-remembered, relevant but not dominant, and influencing but not dictating its identity and communal narrative—which in turn is as shaped by the immediate physical environment as by cultural memory. Perhaps it also suggests how those memories are beginning to fade as the community derives an identity more from its environment than from its past, now that it has been shorn of the organizing host-entity that is Canada (with its historical and social arrangements); but the occasional stabs of anger and resentment that come through in the minds of certain characters emphasize that these memories cannot be entirely suppressed, merely processed and understood.

But it’s the theme of evolution and adaptation that is truly overarching, connecting all the characters—human or otherwise—to the land, and to each other. Just as the angels are alluded to have taken human form to better infiltrate human society, and the alien creature—a learning machine—is constantly absorbing and analyzing new influences in its quest to terraform the planet for its creators, likewise the human community of Fundy displays an arc of cultural evolution that is noteworthy.

In this grimy and trash-filled future, cleanliness takes on a sacred and ritual dimension, and so it is apropos that the local cathedral has been repurposed as a bathhouse, “used to worship differently.” (“Bathing and swimming aren’t the same. One is for getting clean.”) On the other hand, libraries appear to have retained their purpose as centres for learning and community, suggesting that this community has very purposefully selected from the spolia of earlier civilizations to craft an identity for itself. Perhaps a statement is being made about repudiating the sort of organized religion that was used to justify the enslavement of their ancestors in the United States and elsewhere. For this community of survivors in “a promised land … full of rocks and disease,” clean water, bathing and cleanliness are the new gods, and learning to scavenge resourcefully—from harnessing frequent lightning strikes to generate “lightning reserve powered light,” to braving the dangerous mud on the beach in-between flash floods to fish for valuable metals—is a lifestyle of necessity.

While it’s unclear how the human community is organized economically, it is clear that there is some social hierarchy governing it, with a body of “elders” providing administrative or moral guidance, or serving as a kind of collective conscience for the community as it makes its way in this brave new world. The elders serve as gatekeepers to communal acceptance, organizing the “Rites” in which the young can apply to participate on their eighteenth birthdays in order to prove themselves, presumably for a pathway to leadership in the community. The specific nature of the Rites is left unexplained, but there are indications that it can be traumatic, with LaVon’s mind suggested to have been damaged irreparably as a result:

She needs to know what her brother saw that melted his brain into some other someone.

… people who exited the community centre post-Rites changed. How they changed wasn’t always obvious. Sometimes people came out with superiority complexes. Other times they came out quieter, more thoughtful, or broken, like her brother.

It is suggested that during the Rites, the elders share mythologized stories of the origins of the Black community (“That is how my ancestors on my mother’s side got here, underground on the train, in the night”), as well as a history of its struggles to achieve civic and racial justice—a legacy that can be painful for those with no knowledge of the past beyond their immediate present. Preparation for the Rites is gruelling, involving scavenging for gold on the unstable beaches—a misadventure that exposed LaVon to “rotten water” with “poison that began to eat away at his skin”—while braving floods and other scavengers. But successful participants emerge from their Rites with shaven heads, gold teeth, grills and pearls embedded in their mouths, ready to enjoy a new-found status in their community.

Suffice to say, The Half-Drowned is a story of love, belonging, and identity that doubles as a thoughtful exploration into the nature of imagined communities, and the role of the environment and cultural memories in shaping identity and purpose. Portraying a community with open borders that doesn’t seem militaristic and rigid (despite the harshness of its environment), it is a thoughtful and atmospheric, if incomplete, vision of an oceanic future in which a scrappy and simple (though not simplistic) culture clings to life against the odds, shorn of grandiosity while maintaining a basic dignity. It invites us to ponder what constitutes the basis for a successful “civilization” beyond wealth, power, and sophisticated architecture, as well as the inextricability of the environment from our fortunes.

Whereas in other settings the sea can be a source of life and sustenance, openness, new ideas, and cosmopolitan influences, here it is a source of death and decay, surfacing junk and dangers that this society sifts through for treasures. This is an aquatic world, not filled with the heady scent of sea spray and freshness, but with the stench of putridity, and a picture of a society perpetually on the edge of disappearing, of being half-drowned. The novella celebrates its precarity and ability to survive, which while uplifting, also serves to remind us of how our environment can hold us hostage if we continue to punish it with our lack of empathy and compassion.