From Movie to Murder Confession??
By Leslie Urena ('24)
Set to come out July 15th, 2022, the film Where the Crawdads Sing will follow the story of the Marsh Girl of Barkley Cove, raised on her own in the marshes of the North Carolina in the 60’s, and her trial for the murder of a local football player. The movie is a film adaptation of the book of the same title by Delia Owens, published in 2018. The film is directed by Olivia Newman, produced by Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine Productions, and stars Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. But behind the fictional murder mystery is a haunting story of its own.
Film production began in April of 2021 and the trailer came out in March of 2022, featuring the song “Carolina” written by Taylor Swift for the movie. Being a faithful adaptation, it will follow the same basic story as the book. Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) grows up on her own after being abandoned by her family. She makes a living selling mussels for a character named Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jr.) and his wife provides her with clothing. She is ostracized by her town, yet she still manages to make connections with a few of them, including Tate Walker (Taylor John Smith). When Tate goes off to college, Kya becomes involved with Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson). Shortly after, Chase is found dead next to an abandoned fire tower in the swamp, and Kya becomes the main suspect after fibers on his coat match that of a red wool hat given to Kya by Tate.
The book currently has a rating of 4.5/5 stars on Goodreads with over 1 million reviews, is part of Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, and is a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Author Delia Owens had published other books before Crawdads alongside her husband, Mark Owens, with such titles as Secrets of the Savannah, Cry of the Kalahari, and The Eye of the Elephant. Unlike Crawdads, these books are memoirs of the Owens's experiences and observations among the wildlife of Africa.
Both Delia Owens and her protagonist, Kya, share a history of growing up in the South and publishing books on their observations of nature; they also share the similarity of being tied to a murder. As a result, many people believe the story to be as much a biography or, in a way, a confession disguised as a piece of fiction. In an eerily similar way to the novel, Owens and her husband are tied to the shooting of an alleged poacher in Africa in 1995.
Jeffrey Goldberg published a longform article in The New Yorker about the murder in March 2010. Titled “The Hunted,” the article asks “Did American conservationists go too far in Africa?” Goldberg describes what led Mark and Delia to Africa, what happened while they were there, and what happened when they came back.
They first settled in Botswana in the early 1970s, in a place called Deception Valley within the Kalahari Desert, with the intent to live somewhere untouched by human life. Despite their awful living conditions, they managed to successfully conduct their research and observations with the trust of the wildlife around them.
Scene from "Where the Crawdads Sing".
Photo courtesy of RadioTimes.
Delia and Mark Owens in Zambia, 1990.
Photo courtesy of Slate.
The first problem arose when Mark Owens witnessed a mass slaughtering of wildebeest at the hands of poachers, which led him and Delia to urge for government intervention. As he wrote in Cry of the Kalahari “Since no one within the country would listen to our recommendations, we decided to try to publicize the issue worldwide, to enlist the support of prominent people outside the country who perhaps could encourage the Botswana government to review the problem.” Eventually, they were expelled from the country for campaigning against Botswana’s major source of income, which is beef exportation to Europe. After their expulsion, they resettled in the North Luangwa Valley in Zambia.
It wasn’t long until the problem that expelled them from Botswana caught up to them in Zambia. They ran into elephant skeletons while trekking the Luangwa River Basin and quickly recognized it as the work of poachers. As Owens wrote in The Eye of the Elephant , “There will be no ignoring them, running from them, pretending they do not exist. If we stay here to work, we will have to do something about them.”
The couple campaigned for an end to poaching and with the help of supporters, and were successfully able to decrease the rate of poaching in Luangwa. This led to poachers targeting them in a failed assassination attempt. The conflict had become more violent from then on, which resulted in Mark ordering park rangers to shoot any poachers they saw carrying firearms. According to Distractify, Mark and Delia are now wanted for questioning for the murder of an unidentified victim.
As an avid reader myself, I find that sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you separate a problematic author from a novel in order to enjoy it (J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, for one). I feel that Crawdads is exactly that; a reader must be unaware of the author and her past in order to fully enjoy the story. However, in instances where a work is directly inspired by an author’s personal experiences, you can’t necessarily separate the art from the artist.
For example, Counting Down With You tells the story of a Bangladeshi-American teenager growing up with strict South Asian parents, and her budding romance with a classmate. While the book is about the main character and her personal struggles, author Tashie Bhuiyan specifies that the book is, in its own way, a retelling of her own coming of age.“
Counting Down With You is the story of my heart, and it was written as a love letter to young brown girls…The main character of this novel, Karina Ahemed, represents one experience–my experience–but it does not represent all.” (12).
Bhuiyan’s personal experiences are one with Counting Down With You because it’s directly inspired by her life. I believe that Delia Owens does the same thing in Crawdads. That is why I still find it hard to believe that the movie was green-lit when the author’s problematic past is not at all a secret and is, arguably, what inspired the novel. But I cannot lie, the movie looks incredibly well done, the story is certainly captivating, there are thousands of fans rallying behind it, and Taylor Swift contributed to the soundtrack. I don’t expect Owens’s past to affect box office at all.
So while it may be a stretch that Crawdads is Owens's confession to a decades-old murder, it is still alarming to learn of her past after reading the book and knowing how ends. The situation also brings up whether or not it was the Owenses' place to intervene with the poaching issue in Africa as foreigners. However, despite all of the discourse surrounding Delia Owens, you can still expect the story of the Marsh girl to be on your screens this summer, telling the story of how every creature does what it must to survive.
Cover photo courtesy of She Explores Life.