On the Sponge Islands - by Julia Martin (Paperback)

About the Book

On the Sponge Islands weaves together natural history and environmental reckoning.

Book Synopsis

When Julia Martin visits the Greek islands of the Dodecanese, beauty and suffering seem inextricable. On the Sponge Islands follows her journey through Rhodes, Symi, Halki, Kalymnos, and Patmos to trace the cultural and ecological legacy of sponge diving. Because of their wonderful porosity, sea sponges have always been perfect for a myriad of human uses, and men from the islands had been diving for them and trading them since antiquity. In the late nineteenth century new deep sea diving suits made it possible to mine the seabed as never before and bring home untold wealth. It was a rich harvest that came at the cost of many lives. And it couldn't last. Everything, one might say, flowed through sponges. Until it didn't.

Over three visits, Martin meets Aphrodite, Lefteris, Manuel, Zinovia, and others whose lives are bound to the sea. Through their stories, she uncovers the rise and fall of the sponge trade and its deep entanglement with environmental devastation. The islands bear the scars of war, both human and ecological. And yet, despite all of this, the Aegean remains a glory of blue. For all of its plunder, the sea is still luminous and alive, and conversations with the islanders keep returning to the heart.

On the Sponge Islands brings together natural history and ecosocial reckoning. Martin's lyrical, searching prose is rich in dialogue, extraordinary characters, and curious tales. While the devastation of the Aegean seabed may mirror the wider ecological catastrophe, the green renewal taking root on some of the islands is an embodiment of hope. This is a story of extinction and resilience, of loss and restoration. It reminds us that it may not be too late--not yet.

Review Quotes

"A fascinating and troubling tale of the human relationship with 'the living mind of the sea, ' superbly researched and told with empathy and insight. I will never look at a sponge, or any other harvested sea being, in the same way again."

-- Kapka Kassabova, author of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

"Sponges famously can regenerate from a few cells, a fragment, when almost all has been lost. With humility, curiosity, and compassion, Martin considers how communities regenerate from the devastation and transformations of war, migration, exile, and technological change; and how our collective and personal histories both sever and bind."

-- Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces

"What does it mean to remember a sea? On the Sponge Islands understands how the death of a marine ecosystem and the fading of a community's memory are the same catastrophe, registered at different depths. This is a book of marvelous lyricism and rigorous thought about what we have taken from the sea and what might yet remain. Julia Martin is a writer of rare precision, and this is her most far-reaching work."

-- Hedley Twidle, author of Show Me the Place

"A work of singular focus, the scholarly memoir On the Sponge Islands includes illuminating bits of natural history alongside its accounts of a tour through the Greek sponge trade."

-- Karen Rigby, Foreword

"The author mixes this story with her own observations of the region's sunkissed charms, as well as its more ominous signs of decrepitude, cruelty, and inner turmoil."
-- Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Julia Martin is a South African writer and literary scholar. She is the author of On the Sponge Islands: Loss and Restoration in the Aegean, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites, and The Blackridge House: A Memoir. She collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places and is the coauthor, with Barry Lopez, of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects. She is also the author of numerous essays on place, literature, and ecology. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape.