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Commentary on “The Devil Is Beating His Wife”

Sarah Archer

Moving to a country you’ve never before visited is a surreal experience. In 2015, I watched Sint Maarten come into view through a plane window, knowing that this island, then completely unknown to me, was to be my home for the next two years. My husband and I lived there while he was in school, and in that time I fell in love with SXM: its riotous colors, fabulous French markets, and singularities. In how many places can you straddle two countries in one island? I even look back now with grudging fondness on some of the inconveniences of living in a place where the pace of life is decidedly un-American.

I was surprised by the diversity of the island. There were Caribbean natives, from SXM and other islands. French and Dutch nationals coming to rest in these balmier French and Dutch territories. Tourists aplenty, particularly from the US. But also immigrants from seemingly every part of the globe. I came to observe that most people moved in one of these spheres: Caribbean native, immigrant, or tourist. (I was in a smaller, less visible fourth class as a transient resident: not quite immigrant, not quite tourist.) And the interactions between these groups, under the island’s sun-soaked, happy-go-lucky surface, were complex and fraught. Hurricane Irma, which devastated the island in 2017, unleashed some of those tensions.

Having spent most of my life in America, I’m well-versed in the class, racial, and gender politics of this country, so it was eye-opening to be in a place where the divisions are subtly different. In “The Devil Is Beating His Wife,” I let some of my observations from my time in SXM inform the characters, though, of course, three fictional characters cannot hope to represent an entire culture. I aimed for these characters to be people, not ideologies. I was also inspired by some of my favorite short stories from Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, in which games take shocking or sinister turns.

Lastly, I wrote this story to challenge myself to write in third-person omniscient. It’s harder than it looks!

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Sarah Archer’s debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam and optioned for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central, and been recognized by the Black List, the Tracking Board, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Austin Film Festival. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast.

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