Daily Recco, July 5: The Four Winds of hardship, courage, resilience and dreams
Set in the era of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds brings out the courage and sacrifice of an entire generation through the eyes of one indomitable woman.
As the world is plagued with soaring income inequalities, we have somehow brushed the desperation of the past under the carpet of oblivion. What seems to matter to our generation is our myopic views of job losses, economic downturns and inflation. Add to that, climate change and the consequent agriculture crisis, we have enough on our plate to make us more morose about what our world is going through.
We seem to have forgotten that less than a century ago, the world suffered the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialised world — The Great Depression — that rendered millions jobless and led to an era of camaraderie that arose from a shared tragic present. It was a time when desperate workers came together to fight for their incomes, honour and for their very existence.
Set in such times is The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. It is an emotional tale of a woman who is going through a personal battle, fighting for her freedom and dignity, in the larger paradigm of the efforts to organise migrant workers in America during the Great Depression (eerily mirroring the treatment of immigrants today).
The novel opens in north-western Texas, where a 20-something-year-old Elsa Wolcott has been kept cloistered at home by her parents, who spare no opportunity to remind her of her lack of social skills (perpetrated by her confinement) and her supposed “unattractiveness”. Elsa is desperate to get out, for if she doesn’t do something drastic and doesn't do it soon enough, her future risks looking like a morbid extension of her present. She would be confined to this house all her life, and that is not something she can take.
Elsa finds her one great escape to explore a night of adventures. The aftermath is none too pleasant. Come 1934. Initially, she is basking in the life she yearned for, and finally found — a husband, a family, a home and a livelihood on a farm. And then strikes the sinister brew of bad weather and bad agriculture, leading Rafe Martinelli, her husband to abandon her and her children.
Texas is unforgiving and California is all too inviting. The alluring pull of America and the American Dream. But in California lies a life fraught with xenophobia where she will remain an outsider. She battles the drought outside and the drought within as she crosses deserts to beat the starvation, for herself and more for her children.
The Four Winds is grim and shakes your very core, as you get a glimpse into life during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era, through the eyes of the indomitable Elsa Martinelli (née Wolcott). An era that came to define the courage and sacrifice of an entire generation. And in that, we find the succour to ride through our lives as our generation sees the worst of its times amidst the raging pandemic and the economic downturns.