Iron Balloons Read online

  But Joyce was not just gifted. He was born in a place where being a writer was not merely possible; it was valued. He was born into the kind of world that Jamaican singers and musicians have made for themselves. For Joyce, the possibility of becoming a successful, published writer was concrete. So the meaningful comparison isn’t between Vic Reid and James Joyce. If you want a meaningful comparison, you’d need to sit in at a whiskey bar in Ireland then come and visit a Jamaican ghetto “corner” when a yout’ with a name like Deebo or Drop Kick is about to “give a drama” … or simply drop by an East Kingston rum shop.

  We established the Calabash Writer’s Workshop for a single reason: to help more Jamaican writers get published—by more presses, in more countries, more often. We also wanted them to be published in more forms and genres, from more points of view. We still do.

  As such, to get into our workshops you must compete. You must send in a manuscript. It’s the only thing that counts. If your writing gets you in, you pay nothing. If it doesn’t get you in, we’re sorry—you can’t just buy your way.

  The teachers lead the workshops for the love of it. None of us get paid. This point is even more remarkable when you consider that all but one of us come from overseas. When we come to Jamaica for our three-day intensives, we don’t stay in hotels. Calabash can’t afford it. We stay with family and friends and put the savings to good use. What would go to accommodation goes to things like putting out a daily spread in case we have some students with a lot of talent but not enough to eat. It’s a form of dignity insurance. Having food for everyone allows those in need to benefit in a selfrespecting way.

  But another rationale is simple joy—the joy of working with the knowledge that a mango slice or melon wedge is just a step or two away, along with hot Blue Mountain coffee, frosty orange juice, and sticky almond buns; the joy of knowing that the cooler has a Red Stripe and a Heineken that bear your middle name.

  We don’t have a lot of money. We don’t even have a proper office. But as an organization we believe in certain things. Although all our offerings are free and open to the public, we believe in affirming the personal dignity of everybody we serve. Although we operate in a Third World country, we believe in reaching for the highest global standards. We believe in truth and beauty, in having fun, in breaking rules, in taking chances … doing things with style.

  The work in Iron Balloons and the art direction of the book itself are illustrations of the things that we believe. They also illustrate our commitment to going beyond developing more Jamaican writing talent, to actually getting more Jamaican writers into print.

  Iron Balloons is not the debut publication of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust. In 2005, with the support of the Reed Foundation, we inaugurated the Calabash Chapbook Series, six volumes by student poets: Mbala, Nikki Johnson, Andrew Stone, Saffron, Ishion Hutchinson, and Blakka Ellis. The series editor was Kwame Dawes.

  In 2005, we also worked with Peepal Tree Press to copublish a special Calabash fiftieth-anniversary edition of John Hearne’s novel, Voices under the Window. And in 2004, we worked with Macmillan Publishing to bring out a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Roger Mais’s Brotherman. Like Voices, Brotherman is one of the most important novels in the Jamaican (and wider Caribbean) literary canon, and had fallen out of print. Yet even though Iron Balloons is not our first publication, it still holds a special place for us, for many reasons; but the one I’d like to talk about is our collective admiration for its publisher, Akashic Books.

  Our emotional involvement with Akashic began in 2002, when I read an article on Cuban writer Daniel Chavarría in the New York Times. He sounded really interesting—and believe me, he is. But what really got me hooked was that his publisher was based in Brooklyn.

  I’d never heard of Chavarría’s publisher although I’d lived in Brooklyn for ten years. So I googled it—Akashic—found it online, tried to call the office just to talk, but there was no phone number on its website.

  To me the name Akashic sounded slightly cultish, conjured mental images of Satanists who liked to dress up like Hasidic Jews and publish clever books encoded with demonic messages that only showed themselves beneath a special purple light.

  So time passed, a year. I forgot about Chavarría and Akashic and went on tour to promote my second novel, Satisfy My Soul. Then, in 2003, I met the man I’d thought of as the King of Brooklyn Satanists at Medgar Evers College on a balmy Brooklyn afternoon.

  I’d just finished listening to a panel discussion at the National Black Writers Conference and was walking down a crowded passage when I saw a table full of books that had the most compelling titles and designs I’d ever seen. I stopped to look and saw copies of Chavarría’s Adios Muchachos and The Eye of Cybele. I began talking to the guy selling the books and the story in the New York Times came up. I mentioned the freaky business about the website with no phone number, and during a casual conversation it came out somehow that the guy was not who I’d suspected—a clerk or intern sent to babysit the books—but Father Akashic Himself.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Oh. Johnny.”

  He had one leg crossed over the other and he was smiling, both to me and to himself.

  “Johnny what?”

  “Johnny Temple.”

  My first thoughts, in order, were:

  1. That’s the coolest effing name I’ve heard in a very long time.

  2. Why is this white man selling books by mostly non-black writers at the National Black Writers Conference? Doesn’t he believe in profits?

  3. If what I see here on this table is any indication of what this guy thinks about and champions and values, then the soul of Island Records lives on in Akashic Books.

  So we got to talking. He lived in Brooklyn, and I lived in Brooklyn too. He lived in Fort Greene, and I lived in Fort Greene too. He lived on South Oxford Street, and I lived on South Oxford too. Between Atlantic and Hanson Place … and I did too.

  Oh yes, he lived across the street from me. I know a good thing when I see it, so I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “I run this little literary festival in Jamaica by the name of Calabash. Little thing. I think you and Akashic should come next year. Here’s what I want you to do. Choose four authors—you don’t have to do it now—and tell me who they are and which airport they’d fly out of, and Calabash will pay the bill … airfare, accommodation, transfers, a little per diem for expenses.”

  He said, “You’re kidding me.”

  I said, “No. It’s like how we do it in the recording studios down in Jamaica. When you ask a guitarist that you have a feel fo’ to come in and give you some licks, what the man does is his t’ing. But that’s why you ask him. You want his t’ing.”

  With animation now, we began to bat ideas back and forth, and somehow it came out that he was into music. Well, more than that. He was a musician in the rock band Girls Against Boys. What instrument? Bass.

  “Oh, I play bass too.”

  Akashic made its first appearance on our program in 2004, with not four, but five authors—Nina Revoyr, Sean Keith Henry, Kaylie Jones, Arnaldo Correa, and Yongsoo Park. Akashic has had a presence on our program every year since.

  Like many Calabash-Akashic ventures, Iron Balloons began as a telephone call. It happened in the weeks after the festival in 2005. The poets from the workshop had already been published in the Chapbook Series, but we hadn’t found a way to get the fiction writers into print. They were disappointed. So was I.

  I kept assuring them that something big was going to happen, although I wasn’t sure what. I did know that I wasn’t going to get them into print in any “mom & pop” way. I also knew that I wouldn’t bring them certain opportunities until I was confident that they were really ready fo’ bus’.

  The decision to get the poets into print before the fiction writers had come after weeks of long discussions by phone with Kwame, who lives in Columbia, South Carolina. It was a conscious decision to b
us’ the poets first. There were several factors, but in the end it came down to this: They had come into the workshop at a higher level than the fiction writers for reasons that would take too long to explain … Okay, I’ll explain one of them. An unskilled writer can learn the rudiments of poetry from listening to music. Poems are also, generally speaking, short. As such, more people attempt to write poetry than fiction anywhere you go. In Jamaica, the near complete absence of mechanisms to produce fiction writers further skewed what is a naturally occurring imbalance. It’s a numbers game. It’s easier to find twenty good poets out of 2,000 than to find ten good fiction writers out of twenty. I’m not saying these are the actual numbers. But I’m sure you get the point.

  After working with the fiction writers on developing their stories, I called Johnny Temple when the time was right.

  “Hey, Johnny T.,” I said, “I have this great idea.”

  “Oh cool,” he said. “What is it?” I told him. He mused, “Oh yeah. I think that could work.”

  But I didn’t understand how much work I’d have to do. I’d never edited an anthology before. They’re much more complicated and involved than one would ever think, which is why I have to thank my friend and guide and close collaborator, Kwame “The Godfather” Dawes, who gave me crash courses by phone and e-mail according to my need.

  Despite Kwame’s guidance, I still lost control of the project at some point because of my obsessive streak. I wasted months just weighing options, slowly chewing every choice until it turned to mush … criteria for selection … gender balance … organizing principle. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

  Johnny began to worry. But even when he was worried he was always patient, always understanding, always nice.

  When my breakthrough came, it happened the way many of them have come over the last ten years—from something Kwame said. He was talking about a reading he’d done and how well some of his reggae poems had gone over, and he said, “Boy, Channer, you cyaah lose if you trust the reggae every time.”

  And so I asked myself, what would a great producer do? How would Duke Reid or Coxsone Dodd choose material for a great LP? What would King Tubby, Lee Perry, Mikie Bennett, or Prince Jammy do? Jack Ruby? Steelie and Clevie? Niney the Observer? Digital B? This is it.

  They’d select the best combination of known and new voices from their stable, consider each work in terms of pace, subject, style, and mood, then put them in the sequence that would have the best effect.

  They’d ask some trusted people for their points of view, but they’d leave the ultimate decisions to themselves. They’d trust their own experience, their knowledge, their instincts, and their taste. They’d imagine how they want the person who experiences the material to be moved, then sleep on it … and wake up with a little doubt, but doubt illuminated by something else—an awareness that on some level, all they’d really done was make an educated guess, that they’d done all they could and that now the work would have to go into the world and speak for itself … grab and hold attention … spark interest … keep it going … seduce.

  In short, they’d trust the reggae, and this, dear reader, is what I’ve done. I hope that all is well with you. One world. One love.

  Smiling as I write this,

  Colin Channer

  Founder & Artistic Director

  The Calabash International Literary Festival Trust

  March 7, 2006 (10:59 p.m.)

  Brooklyn, New York

  (A dub version of “Answer,” mixed by Scientist at King Tubby’s studio, throbbing through iTunes)

  THE LAST JAMAICAN LION

  by Marlon James

  Ché Guevara, fat, dead, and shirtless, appeared on the front page of the evening paper. Surrounding him were several other men, all in uniform, none dead and none really men, just boys with automatic rifles that they clutched like phalluses. No boy in the photo could prove he had fired the fatal bullet, but all claimed to. Some of the claimers weren’t in the photo, or the barracks, or even the region, but claimed it nonetheless. With his trousers on and his boots off, with his dazed eyes open and his mouth in the crooked tilt of a half laugh, Ché looked not dead but aroused from sweet sleep. Beside that story was another: Boy Last Seen on Aloysius Dawkins Street Has Not Been Seen Since.

  “Blackheart man did catch him, you know, Mr. Minister, Blackheart man did catch him.”

  Morrison had left public office almost seven years before, but his maid Clemencia still called him Mr. Minister. It took him years to relieve the suspicion of mockery in her voice and accept that she was being genuinely obsequious. He even married her for it, though she continued to act as maid and call him Mr. Minister. He called her Mrs. Minister, partly in affection, partly in mockery, but affection and mockery were two things lost on his wife. A perfect wife for the likes of Morrison.

  He studied Clemencia from the ridge of his nose. She waved her feather duster all over the veranda, stirring up more dust than she was getting rid of. The veranda was sealed off with a wall of louver windows, through which a chilly wind shook him. Mosquitoes sometimes. She would have closed them had he not raised a fuss, something about meeting the evening, the only visitor who always kept her word. Behind him was a gray wall, cut in the middle by a dark hallway that led to the kitchen. This country prefers windows to mirrors, he heard a voice say, but shook it out.

  “Stop chatting donkey shit in me ears, you old bat,” he scowled.

  She continued dusting with no change in speed or countenance. He wondered if it was not all an act; if she knew full well that he often degraded her and was planning something slow, sweet, and vengeful, like a pinch of arsenic in every cup of evening tea. He concluded that this was mere paranoia, a consequence of old age as regrettable as it was inevitable. He was seventy-five years old and had no children.

  Morrison became the first Prime Minister of the country in 1965. He was an impossibly tall man, lanky and white, with wild sideburns that seemed to have sprouted from the century previous. His thin hair went white from thirty and it would have given him dignity were it not for his notoriously foul mouth. Born white in one of the northern parishes, he grew up poor. But within a few years after his fifteenth birthday, he became an expert horseman and owner of his own filly.

  Morrison had a way of making something out of nothing that mystified people. Sly and smart, he used his inferior birth to his advantage, manipulating his richer cousins who felt sorry for him. He would beat well-bred gentlemen at poker and horse races, worm his way into richer white society, and fuck the wayward girls of the gentry, the ones who tired of white flesh but could never stomach black. His wealthy uncle in the city took him in at seventeen to teach him manners and broughtupsy, but that succeeded only in teaching Morrison the difference between women who wouldn’t and women who would.

  Being tall and white, people looked up to him in mind and manner. Moreover, he loved people genuinely, Negroes in particular. Negro women, to be specific. He prevented three scandals with his own concoction, passed down, he would say, from an Obeah woman on the northwest coast, and guaranteed to “finally solute the problem.” The simple thing, chunks of green papaya laced with pepper, force-fed to the Negro girls who had other plans, could abort even the most stubborn fetus. Thinking about those days caused a twitch in his crotch, a feeling he welcomed but never trusted, something like the phantom itch of an amputated leg, the lost leg he remembered his mother asking him to scratch. His own legs were useless. Morrison could stand, but diabetes and sin had caught up with him and he could never walk very far. In that way, he was finally like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  In just three days there was to be a huge ceremony. So important he was that his enemies were putting on the most important, grand, expensive ceremony of the year. In three days, Maximilian Morrison was to be given the nation’s highest order. He was to be declared The Most Honorable, Right Excellent, National Hero.

  But the newspaper made no mention of it. 1967. They always hated him, the press. They ha
ted his bluntness and brusqueness and his failure to get a degree. They hated that he never read Silas Marner, never climbed up through the civil service, never went to Munro Boy’s School. They hated how he made the Queen laugh in a most unqueenly fashion during her last visit. They hated that he always seemed to have red dirt under his fingernails. “A rascal, that Prime Minister,” the Queen was heard to have said as she covered her smile.

  Many men, upon realizing that they will never win love, choose to wreak fear. Maximilian rose to the top of his party by sheer dint of bad will. Sometimes, usually before an election, a dead rumor would awaken like the stirring of old dust. Rumors of how his two rivals came to meet their untimely deaths within five years: one by fire, with his corpse so gruesomely burned that proper identification was impossible, the other by a sleepwalking leap from a balcony, despite no history of sleepwalking.

  Maximilian would hear an invading whisper. He would listen for the tinkle of chimes behind him, the hurried wind through louver windows, or the loose strand of a wandering conversation from the house next door, and think that they have come back to warn him, a Jacob Marley to his Scrooge, that reckoning was upon him. It wouldn’t be the first time. They had told him only three nights ago to expect a return on Wednesday. Today.

  Maximilian Morrison looked at himself. His hands and feet were covered in red spots like tiny islands. Now is the winter of our discontent, said a voice he did not recognize, from a book he had never read. Reading was for a specific Jamaican, the type that gathered with other specific Jamaicans on manicured lawns to argue about what was wrong with the country. Maximilian never trusted talkers. He was a doer. He solved problems, sorted out people and knew what they wanted, something that came from having the color of privilege but no wealth to go along with it.