Fish, Laura

English

Iowa Research Online

University of Iowa 
International Writing Program Archive of Residents' Work 
9-10-2010 
Fish Out of Water 
Laura Fish 
Panel: Sense of Place 
Rights 
Copyright © 2010 Laura Fish 
Recommended Citation 
Fish, Laura, "Fish Out of Water" (2010). International Writing Program Archive of Residents' Work. 803. 
https://ir.uiowa.edu/iwp_archive/803 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online. For more information please contact: lib-ir@uiowa.edu. 
  Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 10, 2010: 
Ian Rosales Casocot (Philippines), Laura Fish (United Kingdom), 
Albana Shala (Netherlands) and Ismail Bala (Nigeria) 
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 
Laura Fish  
Fish Out of Water 
 
 As a child growing up in the late 60s and early 70s in the south of 
England, I could make little sense out of where I was and why I was haunted 
by feelings of not belonging. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I dis-
covered where my birth parents were from - Guyana and Jamaica. Because of 
this the themes of dispossession, difference, dislocation and place are 
strongly embedded in my writing. 
 It is of great importance to most people to have a sense of place. Of 
belonging. This sense of belonging to a place can be strengthened when one 
moves, by one’s own will or by force, to a new and different location.  
 I spent almost one year abroad when I was twenty-one. I travelled 
through Egypt, Sudan, India and Nepal. Maintaining a relationship with such 
huge areas of the planet was an emotionally exhausting way to live, but be-
ing so far away from home helped me to put the past into some kind of per-
spective, as well as the place which I had considered to be “home”. 
 Whether or not my first impressions of the new places were accurate, 
there was often a sharpness to them. An edge to everything. A vividness. A 
purity. Being an outsider, a stranger, can provide insights that local inhabi-
tants do not have, because of the ability to compare.  
 Likewise, I found that I viewed “home,” or the place from which I had 
set out, under a new light because I was seeing it from a distance – from a 
different perspective. Then after time, my original home, which I had not 
really thought of as a home, but rather as a place where I lived, I came to 
view though rose-tinted spectacles. It appeared more homely. 
 Similarly, with the passing of time, events can come into sharper focus. 
Past events, the confused maze of a childhood, can become clearer, sharper, 
more beautiful or uglier, too.  
 Our first impressions of a new place are often coloured by a desire to 
find greener pastures than those from which we set out. This is succinctly 
put in The Promised Land, a short story by the Senegalese writer, Sembene 
Ouseman, that I read just the other night. The main protagonist, Diouana, 
has arrived in France from Dakar for the first time: 
 
Her eyes took everything in and she gazed in wonder 
and admiration. Her mind became filled with these first 
impressions. How beautiful it was! Africa now seemed no 
more than a sordid slum. 
 
But after a while in France, Diouana felt very different, and homesick. She be-
came: 
 
 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 10, 2010: 
Ian Rosales Casocot (Philippines), Laura Fish (United Kingdom), 
Albana Shala (Netherlands) and Ismail Bala (Nigeria) 
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 
… immersed in memories. She compared her native 
bush to this dead brushwood around her. What a differ-
ence between these trees and her Casamance forest, so 
far away! Her memory of the village and the communal 
life there made her feel more cut off than ever. She bit 
her lip and deeply regretted having come. A thousand 
and one details flashed through her mind as she looked 
back at the past. 
She became aware again of the present, of the reality of 
her life in France, where she was doubly a foreigner, and 
her mind hardened.  
 
The desire to conjure up and capture the mood and essence of one’s original 
“home”, or starting place, often becomes stronger the longer we are away 
from it, and finally the grass can become greener back home. And yet, when 
one returns, home is no longer home because over the course of time it has 
changed. For me now, there is no “place” that I consider home. Instead, home 
is something I carry with me.  
 How do I approach creating a sense of place in my own writing? My 
second novel was born not only out of historical research but also out of a 
visit to a country I had not been to before, and my first encounter with a par-
ticular house. The house is Greenwood Great House, a former home of Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning’s family in Jamaica, where my father now lives.  
 Walking into Greenwood Great House was like traveling back in time. I 
knew I wanted to write about the place. The way in which the property had 
been restored to its full grandeur evoked an atmosphere of the past, and 
memories of first seeing those spacious rooms are still very sharp and clear. 
 Can one obtain an authentic sense of place through visual materials, 
internet research, films, photographs and/or slides or portraits? Yes, but 
nothing beats the experience of actually being there with the people, experi-
encing the way light falls, seeing the depth of misery, or the anger and sad-
ness, and freedom in their eyes. Traveling to new places, physically “being 
there” and interacting with the people, can take one through the looking 
glass into something approaching the experience of the local people, and to 
finally make common cause with them. Few visual materials can truly convey 
the irritation of being pestered by mosquitoes, the smell of jacaranda blos-
soms, or can sustain the sense of walking in someone else’s shoes.  
 Flannery O’Connor says in 'Mystery and Manners,' “Fiction operates 
through the senses, one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories 
is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince 
through the senses…”The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is 
that it deals with what can be seen, heard smelled and touched. 
  Places are shaped by, cared for, or abused, carved and sculptured by 
their inhabitants. The essence of the inhabitants is rooted in the land and on 
  Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 10, 2010: 
Ian Rosales Casocot (Philippines), Laura Fish (United Kingdom), 
Albana Shala (Netherlands) and Ismail Bala (Nigeria) 
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 
the ground on which they tread and survive. I strive to create characters and 
focus on bringing them to life by trying to evoke moods and feelings through 
the senses - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch - to create a sense of place. But 
as David Lodge says in The Art of Fiction: “Effects in fiction are plural and in-
terconnected, each drawing on and contributing to all the others ... descrip-
tion in a good novel is never just description.” 
 
 
 


Fish Out of Water

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Fish Out of Water

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