The Shell Collector

Most of the story’s major events take place on an unnamed island said to be part of the Lamu Archipelago of Kenya. This archipelago is located in the Indian Ocean, closest to the northern coast of Kenya. The characters in this story often travel to or refer to the town of Lamu, the largest town within this archipelago. The relative remoteness of the setting supports the story’s exploration of Isolation From Humanity, while the coastal environment is integral to the story’s plot and symbolism. The cone snails that variously cure or kill the story’s characters are marine species, and the shell collector has a deep affinity for the ocean and its residents.

Kenya is a predominantly Christian country, but Muslims make up 11% of the population, and this community is more concentrated in the northeastern and coastal regions where “The Shell Collector” takes place. Religion appears in several contexts in the story, not least when the protagonist explains to the visiting American journalists that it is the month of Ramadan, a holy time in the Muslim faith: “Far off, he heard the high, amplified voice of the muezzin in Lamu calling prayer. ‘It’s Ramadan,’ he told the Jims” (10). The narrator here uses the Arabic muezzin to describe the person who proclaims the call to prayer, while later it is the mwadhini who visits the shell collector—mwadhini being the Swahili translation of muezzin. Mwadhini would likely be the term used locally since Swahili is one of the principal languages of Kenya.

The mwadhini plays a small but significant role in “The Shell Collector.” As he remains unnamed, readers know him only by his religious position. Like the broader faith he represents, the mwadhini provides one perspective on Fate Versus Happenstance, urging the shell collector to see divine purpose at work in the story’s events. The idea of fate reaches its fullest iteration when the shell collector encounters a teenager who says, “It is Taraweeh. […] Tonight Allah determines the course of the world for the next year” (32). Taraweeh, derived from the Arabic word meaning “to rest and relax,” is a special kind of prayer that takes place each night of Ramadan. The teenager ascribes an additional significance to this prayer that may better describe Laylat Al Qadr, one of the last nights of Ramadan known as the night of destiny.