Foreword

SOMEBODY ELSE'S TROUBLES shows us an America (circa 1980s- 90s) that is not working—where the solutions are often worse than the problems, where people have lost faith— with their mates, their jobs, their God or gods, and each other—where drinking vodka all day seems to be an attractive option. It’s a society that needs change but keeps getting short-changed.

The novel also shows us an alternative society, a new Eden, in the form of a small Caribbean island named Mabouhey—undeveloped, unknown, and hence undiscovered, a small paradise that is lush in its greenery and alluring in its charms.

The rich but fantastic story of this novel brings its main characters to converge on this island—by choice, chance, and need. Most are escaping from unhappy and unfulfilled lives in the spiritually-deprived, morally gridlocked United States—but they are also escaping to a fresh start at more meaningful life on the island.

This rambling, rumbling beast of a book is also an old-fashioned love story showing love wearing many of its garments—forbidden passions, heartbreaking violence, graphic hetero- and homo-sexual couplings, and selfless service to others. It focuses most, however, on the kind of active love that helps people overcome their cynicism, ennui, and hardened passivity so they dare to reach out to the world despite its imperfections. It’s a kind of love that proves the axiom of one of its characters, a priest: namely, that “our failure to love is always the failure to act.” It is therefore an invitation to all of us not to leap before we look, but to leap while we look, with our eyes wide open.

EVERYBODY ELSE'S TROUBLES is nothing if it is not a story, a rich old-fashioned story, fiction stranger than the truths it reveals, a wondrous dream, you might say. It is not a documentary, nor a slice of life. If anything it is a big fat juicy, somewhat messy sandwich, sauces and cheese dripping with each bite. And there’s a big pot of gumbo next to it—seafood, chicken and spicy sausage in each bite. No, this novel is no ordinary meal, no mere slice of life—it’s a banquet filled with tastes both familiar and exotic. It can thrill you and it can bite back.

The adventure is a rollicking odyssey through the perilously rocky moral terrain of late Twentieth Century America that touches intimately on the excesses, the warped appetites, and the headlined controversies and conflicts of these “Me Decades.” It includes predatory child-molesting priests and their young victims confused and ultimately alone in their sexual wonderings, it reveals the ruinous and corrupt excesses that is the War on Drugs, it recounts the greed of politicians who pay only lip service to ideals while pocketing federal dollars, and it accentuates the chronic need to save small industries in the rust belt of mainstream America. This novel not only reveals these problems— sometimes comically and sometimes tragically—but inveighs against them, exploring the day’s headlines about the crises and shortcomings of the major institutions of our American lives—including government monopolized urban education, inner city crime, deadening bureaucracies, and the charlatan false prophets and demagogues who offer phony self-promoting solutions.

SOMEBODY ELSE'S TROUBLES reveals a world of violent Chicago streets, and of spiritless small-town Ohio canasta games, of exotic, pristine tropical islands, of scheming politicians and avaricious police and priests who prey on those they are obligated to serve. It’s a novel where you visit a priest’s parish parlor one moment and a sleazy Ohio “adult bookstore” the next. The novel’s more complicated characters—those who end up on the island—include a vodka-swilling academic and scholar, a “burnt out” case that could have stumbled in from a Graham Greene novel; an Ohio factory owner and operator who seems to have lost his will to do anything but unhappily follow the insatiable ambitions of his materialistic and uncaring wife; a Chicago priest who takes his spiritual duties so seriously that he is exiled by his superiors to Mabouhey to get him out of their way; a grubby but loveable insurance investigator, food stains dribbled all over his shirts and corpulent torso, with uncommonly good instincts for both his job and fellow human beings. And there is Marguerite, the lovely darkerskinned Eve of this adventure who was born on the island and whose life and love—her Adam—were destroyed on a tragic sojourn to Chicago.

The story is told in the voices and dialects—and in one case, a diary—of these characters and a variety of minor characters—including less educated, illiterate or preliterate folks who are often wiser than their better educated colleagues. Clever phrases and insights abound: “mi causa es su causa,” one character remarks; a stale marriage is described as “a match made in limbo”; a priest tells a young recruit: “The only sure things in this world, my son, are death and taxes. The Catholic Church tries to avoid both and has been mighty successful for going on two thousand years!” And when our heroine, the lovely island native is assaulted on her trip to Chicago and is told, “It’s a jungle out there,” she simply replies, “No, it is not a jungle.”

This is the first novel of a man who has survived the disappointments and joys of the worlds he writes about. Joe English is as busy, as lively, and as wide-ranging in his interests, his commitments and his passions as his novel. The son of a factory manager, English lived in New Jersey, Virginia, Colorado, and Mexico. He won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for his work at Colorado College and earned a Master’s degree in English at Rice University. He studied briefly for the priesthood, but left to work outside the clergy. He was an English professor at Triton College in River Grove, Illinois, for many years. Since 1970 he has lived in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, where he has fought against institutional disinvestment and residential resegregation for 47 years. He was instrumental in preserving the historic homes in Austin’s Austin Village area, which serves as a model for people of all ethnicities and backgrounds learning to live together as neighbors. He spends much of the winter months in his Caribbean home in Sosua, Dominican Republic.*

-Hank De Zutter is a Chicago based journalist who wrote a weekly public affairs column for the Chicago Reader. He was the education editor for the Chicago Daily News and English professor at Malcolm X College in Chicago as well as co-founder of the Community Media Workshop.

*Sosua deserves mention. What today is a thriving international community of 70,000, Sosua consisted of abandoned banana plantations until the advent of World War Two, when it was founded by Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s tyranny. In July 1938, at the initiative of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32 nations and 24 voluntary organizations sent delegations to a conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, to discuss the refugee crisis of that time: Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Golda Meir, future Prime Minister of Israel, was permitted to attend the conference as a representative of British Mandate Palestine, but she was not allowed to speak or participate in the proceedings. At the conclusion of the conference, which, with one exception, provided little but lip service to the plight of the Jewish refugees, Meir told the press: “There is only one thing I hope to see before I die and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.” Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann said, “The world seemed to be divided into two parts: those where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.” At the Evian Conference, only one country stepped forward to open its doors to the persecuted people—the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic guaranteed the emigrants freedom to practice their religion and it guaranteed their right to own property. It donated 26,000 acres of land and, in addition, provided a low-interest loan; Sosua was founded. As the Jewish refugees disembarked at the nearby port of Puerto Plata, Dominicans greeted them with loaves of bread and bottles of wine. To this day Sosua maintains a strong Jewish presence. “I now spend my time in two soulful places,” English says. “Austin and Sosua. I am doubly blessed."