Iron Balloons
IRON BALLOONS
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2006 Colin Channer/Calabash International Literary Festival
eISBN-13: 978-1-617750-92-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-05-7
ISBN-10: 1-933354-05-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934824
All rights reserved
First printing
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Peepal Tree Press for permission to reprint “Marley’s Ghost” by Kwame Dawes, which first appeared in A Place to Hide by Kwame Dawes (Peepal Tree Press, 2002); “Sugar” by Sharon Leach originally appeared in Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Jennifer Sparrow (Seal Press, 2006).
Photograph of Colin Channer by Joan Chan.
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
Akashic7@aol.com
www.akashicbooks.com
To youuuuuuuu … dis one dedicated to youuuuuuuu…
Editor’s Acknowledgments
One day, when I’m really rich, I’ll give each of the following people a 60GB iPod fully programmed with their favorite music: Kwame Dawes, Justine Henzell, Roger Brown, Mervyn Morris, Geoffrey Philp, Kaylie Jones, Johnny Temple, the forty writing fellows who entered the first Calabash Writer’s Workshop in 2003, Russell Banks, David Winn, Chris Abani, Marie Brown, Junot Díaz, Dr. Edison O. Jackson—President of Medgar Evers College, Dr. Elizabeth Nunez—Chairperson of the college’s English Department, and Professors Gregory Pardlo, Linda Jackson, Nellie Rosario, and Tom Bradshaw—the creative writing team.
Addis and Makonnen, my American children, oonoo yardie faada love oonoo. Eternal Father bless our land.
Thanks be to Jah.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction by Colin Channer
MARLON JAMES
The Last Jamaican Lion
ALWIN BULLY
Parting
A-DZIKO SIMBA
Someone to Tell
RUDOLPH WALLACE
Siblings
COLIN CHANNER
How to Beat a Child the Right and Proper Way
ELIZABETH NUNEZ
All Ah We Is One
KAYLIE JONES
The Anger Meridian
GEOFFREY PHILP
I Want to Disturb My Neighbor
KONRAD KIRLEW
A Little Embarassment for the Sake of Our Lord
SHARON LEACH
Sugar
KWAME DAWES
Marley’s Ghost
About the Contributors
Introduction
THE KINGSTON 12 OVERTURE
by Colin Channer
If I wanted to be safe, dear reader, I’d begin by sharing lovely and interesting facts about the stories in this book. After that, I’d become quite grave and academic when I talked about the book itself—about what gap it fills, what discourse it furthers, what development it traces, call it a radical … something, and hang it on a branch of a thematic tree.
In short, dear reader, I’d try to justify why you should be holding this book so closely, close enough to read. Iron Balloons is an anthology. Compared to novels and memoirs and collections of verse, anthologies are the ugly sisters of the literary world.
But I won’t speak for Iron Balloons. It’s a collection of outstanding fiction, and good fiction speaks for itself. The writing in this book knows how to grab and hold attention, how to keep it going once your interest has been lit. In short, it knows how to seduce, so it doesn’t need an editor to play the spinster aunt, to speak on its behalf and set it up.
It has charisma, depth, and character. A voice that keeps you listening. An intellect that shines. A shape that you can sense beneath its clothes.
Set mostly on the island of Jamaica, but narrated in a continental range of moods and tones, the stories in Iron Balloons are unified by setting, but also by their connection to the Calabash Writer’s Workshop, where many of them were born. Some were born to students; some were born to tutors; and some, through close editing, were born to both.
The name “Calabash Writer’s Workshop” has a fancy ring, which might give you the impression that we spent our days in alternating modes of lounging and carousing at a nicely renovated farmhouse with its own organic garden and a pond—what some city people in America think of when you say “upstate.” I say some because the word also refers to jail.
The truth is, we had our workshops in a house without a roof in Kingston; not the one beside the Hudson River in New York, but the oddly scary and alluring one that keeps on spreading in defiance of its geographic borders—tall green mountains in the back, and in front a big polluted harbor, the water macho gray in blunt refusal to assume the sissy turquoise of the tourist traps that dot the Caribbean Sea. The one where I (and I) was born.
However, things were not as bad as I just made them seem. We held the workshops in what today is quite a spiffy mansion right behind Vale Royal, the Prime Minister’s official home, a gabled eighteenth-century house. When we first saw the place that would become our home, we were struck by its landscape of wise old trees that seemed to stand in judgment, the gracious dip of its sunken lawn the size and shape of an Olympic pool, and the practical potential of its side cottage with two bathrooms, a full kitchen, and a tiled veranda decorated with potted plants and rough-hewn chairs from Mexico with puffy leather seats.
But the cottage also had a tenant. On top of this, the mansion was undergoing tedious renovation. It was a husk. A shell with no windows, roof, nor doors. But it was big and beautiful, and was easy for all forty students and four teachers to reach. And if we played our cards correctly, we knew, it would be free. In the end, it was. And for this we’re grateful to its owner, Roger Brown, who instructed his workers to make sure that we’d have at least a temporary floor.
When I say we, I mean the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust, a not-for-profit organization founded in Jamaica in 2001 “to transform the literary arts in the Caribbean by being the region’s best-managed producer of workshops, seminars, and performances.”
Our producer, Justine Henzell, was the person who got the house and supervised the team of volunteers who set up rented tables and chairs. The twenty fiction writers worked inside the house. An equal complement of poets worked outside in pools of lignum vitae shade. The tenant? Justine spoke to him as well, and he was kind enough to go away for weekends whenever we were there.
If you somehow got through Mr. Brown’s big gate, especially if you did so at lunchtime, and, more importantly, if you were someone who had no idea how writing workshops operate or, on the contrary, someone with a tightly fixed idea of how they should, you might have gotten the impression that you’d stumbled on a group of idle people who were simply hanging out—and you would have been half right.
Half right, because we were hanging out, yes, but in productive ways.
First off, we were the right mix of people hanging out, students with the desire to learn, and teachers with the understanding that only a part of what it takes to be a fiction writer can be transmitted through instruction—mainly the mechanics; the other part, what one could call the feel, or instinct, is learned by catching on.
Hanging out creates the context and the opportunity for catching on. The best writers are unbelted martial artists who’ve served a long apprenticeship in verbal jabbing, sly exaggeration, and the scrappy but effective sparring known as “
talking shit,” all of which are well-established storytelling forms with native modes of dialogue, narrative voice, character, characterization, plot, and point of view. Although their value may be hard for outsiders to discern, these styles of mental capoeira develop and in turn depend on high levels of agility, strength, and grace in a range of vital skills, including pacing, rhythm, pitch, description, and painting with symbolic language. When you combine these skills with magic, good luck, and in-born gifts, you get stories that people want to experience over and over again. You get hits—hits like Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil (Akashic Books, 2005).
Marlon was admitted to our basic fiction writing workshop in 2003. Two years later he would publish a debut novel that went on to be a finalist for both a Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Caribbean Region). Does it get much better than that?
The Jamaican music industry was built on hits. It was also built on hanging out. We knew this. So can you imagine our pride when a musician friend of ours came to visit and remarked that the workshop had “the magic vibe of Studio One, Joe Gibbs, or Federal,” the Jamaican equals of Motown, Stax, and Mussel Shoals?
The workshop had the feeling of an old Jamaican studio by accident as much as by design. Like me, festival programmer Kwame Dawes, who taught poetry to the senior group, knows and respects Jamaican music and the folks who’ve worked to make it a global success. Among Kwame’s many published works are Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic (Peepal Tree Press, 1999), which makes a compelling case for reggae as a literary model, and spotlights my first novel Waiting in Vain (One World/Ballantine Books, 1998) as a refined example; and Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius(Sanctuary Books, 2002), the first major critical study of the songwriter’s work.
But on top of this, we had a lot of common sense. As such, we didn’t feel the need to be obedient to conventional models when we conceptualized a workshop for our literary trust. There was very little searching, really, or long debates. The choices were instinctive. They were also pragmatic. In Jamaica, the music model has worked—has managed to develop from fragile beginnings to become a biosphere with a continuous cycle that allows new talent in the hundreds to sprout up each year and grow—and the literary model has failed.
The Jamaican literary establishment—despite the fact that its members have traditionally come from the educated middle class, and despite the fact that it has produced some solid writers, including John Hearne, Roger Mais, Vic Reid, Erna Brodber, Velma Pollard, Andrew Salkey, Louise Bennett, Olive Senior, and Neville Dawes—has never been able to truly establish itself with relevance outside the academic world, guarantee its survival by creating either a devoted local readership or a mechanism to nurture new talent and future growth, or create an industry in anything more than name.
The very fact that one can now speak of a Jamaican music establishment speaks to the success of its membership, whose origins are almost exclusively poor and working class. What makes its success all the more stunning is that a musical establishment—in the sense of an identifiable set of working artists with the economic power and social influence to shape what people think about, read about, and imitate—did not exist before the mid 1970s.
From the beginning of the local industry in the 1950s till then, the standard of living of the most skilled and highly paid Jamaican singers and musicians barely measured up to that of a civil servant, teacher, or nurse.
A great leap in earnings would be triggered in the early 1970s, when Chris Blackwell’s London-based Island Records re-entered the Jamaican market, where it had been founded in 1959.
There are many interesting facts about the label’s reentry, but what is most fascinating to me in the moment of this writing is how much the industry had changed in the intervening years, how much it had developed with almost no investment from overseas in barely more than ten years. Jamaican businesspeople, many of them owners of bars and liquor stores, had invested their own time and money to build retail outlets, wholesale distributors, pressing plants, mastering labs, and recording studios (often in the very same location); but almost none of this investment would have come—it would not have been justified—if the talent pool to produce a vast amount of good music wasn’t there.
By the time Island Records signed the Wailers in 1972, the Jamaican industry had produced the likes of Bob Andy, The Heptones, Delroy Wilson, Ken Boothe, and The Paragons, and it kept on producing acts of international note, some of whom joined Island Records as well. These include Third World, Inner Circle, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Gregory Isaacs. In the early ’80s, Herb Alpert’s A&M Records signed perhaps the most influential reggae singer to date, Dennis Brown. The momentum has continued to the present day, as evidenced by the careers of home-based performers with international careers, such as Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Junior Gong, Morgan Heritage, Elephant Man, and Sean Paul.
In contrast, there is almost no book publishing industry to speak of in Jamaica today, outside the specialized areas of education and law. Today, I cannot think of ten established, active, home-based novelists, memoirists, or poets below the age of sixty-five. Those who I can identify are the remnants of a small group that came of age before independence in 1962—more than forty years ago—yet Jamaican music is increasing its local and global relevance every single day. Dancehall reggae is hiphop’s only bona fide competition for the hearts and minds of urban youth around the world, and its global march seems to have increased its local pull.
What explains the difference in fates? There are several obvious reasons, most significantly the island’s history of illiteracy and poverty. This has limited the amount of people who can actually read, the popularity of reading for leisure, and the habit of reading beyond the world of the essentials (like newspapers).
But one of the key reasons for the differing fortunes of the two industries is fundamentally related to the architectural structures and related social models that defined the mode of development that each one pursued. Jamaican literature followed the structural model of the university, the salon, and the club, which worked very well in Britain—and is continuing to work for Jamaican writers living in the U.K., Canada, and the United States—while Jamaican music developed along the lines of the tenement yard. The more inclusive model won.
Most of the great Jamaican recording studios were based in converted houses with concrete or dirt yards where the lawns used to be, and although their gates were guarded by what are now legendary roughneck men, their owners understood that there was something to be gained by having lots of people with a love of music hanging out and milling round—that a vital energy could be created from the chemistry of a well-selected crowd.
The Jamaican industry exploded in the 1960s in part because the early studios allowed a lot of people with extraordinary talent to serve apprenticeships with established artists. Most of this apprenticeship took place out in the yard.
The yard was the garden where the talent grew. In one corner, you’d see some talent learning how to sing in three-part harmony. In another, some were learning how to play guitar. Underneath a guinep tree, dance moves were being rehearsed. Inside, another set were watching a session going down, wondering when they’d get their turn. But everyday, while all of this was going on, there’d be some lyming (hanging out)—and this is how the spirit of the music was absorbed, how apprentices both learned and caught on.
At Studio One, the most famous of them all, you never got a chance to cut a tune until a veteran said to owner and producer Clement Dodd, “Ah t’ink ’im ready, y’ know.”
When a veteran at Studio One declared that you were ready, it meant that you were in possession of a song worth singing, that you’d found and polished your voice, that enough people in the yard had heard you singing and thought you were good, and that people where you lived and in the yard had begun to greet you with the title “Singer” instead of your regular name. All of this together meant that you were ready to break out, or, as Jamaicans sa
y, ready “fo’ bus’.” And things are pretty much the same today.
So, the last thing you want to be as a Jamaican singer is an iron balloon. Why? Because “iron balloon cyaah [can’t] bus’.”
If you’ve been going to the studio for a very long time without earning the chance fo’ bus’, or if you’ve gotten chance after chance but you just can’t bus’, then you’re a certified iron balloon.
The student writers in this book have all been working hard in relative isolation for a number of years without getting the chance fo’ bus’. But see—dem bus’ now. They’ve been published by one of planet’s most well-regarded independent publishers, and, on top of this, in the company of prize-winning authors like Elizabeth Nunez, Kwame Dawes, and Kaylie Jones.
I can’t prevent myself from wondering how the students’ lives would have been different if Jamaica were a different place, one where writing talent had the chance to prosper in a vital world of opportunity, like the one inherited by singers and musicians from their industrious, forward-thinking peers.
If this had happened, the world of literature would be a different place. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the island of Jamaica produces the most records per capita in the world, a fact that isn’t contradicted by anything I’ve ever heard or seen.
This is fantastic. It says a lot about the lyrical ingenuity, entrepreneurial drive, and technical know-how of the island’s people. But it’s also tragic. For it means that hundreds, even thousands of Jamaican novels, plays, and poems have been kidnapped in the mind over the last forty-something years and pressed into service as three-minute songs.
It’s especially tragic when you consider that Jamaicans are the most gifted storytellers in the world.
Sure, people talk about the literary genius of the Irish. Their legacy is great. I’ll give them that. But I don’t think the Irish are as naturally gifted as Jamaicans. What the Irish have in addition to their talent is a longer history—specifically, a longer history of literacy, access to publishing, and freedom to express themselves with the printed word. So frankly speaking, if you’re going to judge both countries on achievement, the Irish win hands down. Joyce alone could take our crew with Ulysses alone. Just one lick—boof—and we all fall down.