Politics or Opera, Revolution or Art? The Triumph of Felicity Alexander’s Decision
The World So Wide, Zilla Jones. Cormorant Books, 2025.
Zilla Jones’s The World So Wide, as the title suggests, is a novel of breathtaking scope. Set in two divided but interlocking worlds — Grenada and Winnipeg — the story traces the first thirty-six years in the life of Felicity Alexander, the child of a Black Grenadian mother and a White Ukrainian father. Felicity acquires international acclaim as a talented, impassioned, seductive, sensitive, and lyrical opera singer. She chooses music — unfailing devotion to her art — over political commitment to Grenada’s revolution in the 1980s, a decision that deprives her of meaningful rootedness in her mother’s country, a recognizable West Indian identity, and acceptance from her Grenadian friends during this tumultuous era. Above all, her exhilarating quest to sing worldwide — the only “life she wants” — separates her from Claude Buckingham, the man whom she loves with “overwhelming joy,” whose own self-sacrificing work for the Revolutionary Government of the People of Grenada (the Black Pearls of Freedom) has no room for opera.
In its nearly four hundred pages, the book portrays the tension between artistic and political pursuits: both demand a determined steadfastness of the whole soul, but the two parallel roads cannot intersect in lasting, meaningful human relationships. As a young woman growing up in Winnipeg, Felicity quickly discovers her “gift of song.” After receiving a scholarship to study at the prestigious Guildhall School in London, England, she enchants opera company directors internationally, who want her to perform in Lucerne, New York, Vancouver, Tokyo, Sydney, Amsterdam, Chicago, Glasgow, Los Angeles, and every major cultural centre — yes, in a world so wide — as she “sparkles” on stage as a “beautiful Black woman.”
Felicity knows that there is “no other world for her.”
Still, her life, though rooted in music, which “sings in her veins” and is never “silent,” is marked by suffering, including the setbacks that come with being Black — that is, a “lighter shade of brown,” as Felicity specifies — in the White milieu of opera. This musical half of the plot is the most engaging, I feel, with its mixture of joy and pain. Intensity, competitiveness, exhaustion, and excitement ripple through every event, including the offstage scenes: in auditions, rehearsal halls, dressing rooms, meetings with lighting, hair, costume, wig, and makeup artists, episodes of sickness in washrooms before a performance, and frightening preparations in the wings to step onstage. While glamourous, Felicity’s life is also emotionally problematic. She traverses the world so wide without a family: her two daughters, left in Winnipeg, come from different fathers, neither of whom is her husband; her father is, apparently, dead; her relationship with her mother is strained; and Felicity fails to sustain partnerships with anyone, as she engages sexually — fleetingly — and unfaithfully with one man after another, from city to city, for temporary affection and comfort. In effect, Felicity is terribly lonely and often unhappy, her fragility evident in frequent episodes of uncontrollable tears and desperate sobbing. Her name, Felicity, is ironic, yet her joy is also rich and resilient when performing.
The other principal setting in this wide world is Grenada, a place into which Felicity doesn’t easily fit. Here, she lacks the “freedom to sing,” and she isn’t dazzling with exhilaration while “all eyes” fall on her. As an ordinary person, she is somewhat lost, lacking a role for herself, only partially understanding the demands — and dangers — of the political climate, as leaders shift, people revolt, strikes occur, and coups and invasions unfold. Her involvement in the Grenadian political community begins in London, in 1965, through the West Indian Students Association, where she meets Claude, who studies law. Immediately, their mutual love ignites, but his return to Grenada to fight for his people — to die, if necessary — leaves her floundering at the periphery of a former circle of friends. “You don’t belong here,” Claude says. Later, when she visits Grenada, in search of her former lover, she is mistrusted as a Canadian foreigner and a privileged opera singer, who acts recklessly in the nuanced arena of political activism. What does her music “have to do with us. Our struggle,” people want to know. “What are you doing for our movement? For the revolution?” they ask. While she can’t stop loving Claude, Felicity, in Grenada, isn’t happy, though her sensory perceptions throughout these segments bring her — and the reader — surprising delights: scents from the ocean, exotic heat, fragrant spices and foods, intricate methods of cooking, lush vegetation, and the charm of the “pink, orange, and yellow houses, sandwiched between the blue of the sky and the sea.”
As the novel wrestles with divisive dualities in politics and art, the chronology of the plot also fragments, with reversals and progressions, backward and forward. Readers reconstruct Felicity’s life in increments, as more and more people and places enter her sprawling — but focused — existence. Each chapter title identifies dates and locations: we begin in Grenada, in 1983, only to be thrust back to Winnipeg, to Felicity’s childhood, in the 1950s, while the decades in between are tangled together, in random order, at a hectic pace, as Felicity traverses a wide world.
In 1983, as the story ends where it began, we wonder: will Felicity be truly happy, at this point? The novel, I think, leaves that outcome unspoken.
Ultimately, she witnesses an event of extraordinary violence, which plummets her sensitive soul into a period of emotional trauma and mourning; though now, perhaps, she is finally content to abandon Grenada, to find refuge solely in music: yes, “the only life she wanted.” In this world, her tears will arise (as she was taught to permit) from the emotional power of an opera, a fictional world that dissolves when the curtain comes down.
Even the words from her most beloved aria, “O luce di quest’anima,” which was, until then, “her song for Claude,” will now be sung for life itself: she is still young, and she isn’t dead, as those whom she knew most intimately, in Grenada, certainly are.
In effect, Felicity rebounds, as she has before. Quickly, she prepares for her coveted performance of Traviata “at the Met.” With insight, she also envisions her life as having “the three acts of the operatic tragedy,” yet her story, I feel, isn’t tragic: she lives and she sings with a deeper, richer emotional maturity. Zilla Jones’s novel concludes with this hopeful finale.
— Suzanne Stewart is the author of The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons. She writes from Antigonish.
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