Iron
Balloons: Hit Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's
Workshop
Edited
by Colin Channer
Reviewed by Michael Kuelker
Photos by Janet Hill
Iron Balloons:
Hit Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop
Edited by Colin Channer
281 pp. Akashic Books, 2006
ISBN 1-933354-05-4 US$14.95
Reviewed by Michael Kuelker
Iron Balloons, the Calabash-produced book of
short fiction in 2006, has a lot of ignitable space between
its lines, and in it we can hear an echo of Bob Marley's
lyric light like a feather and heavy as lead. And
we whose childhood music is now called classic rock remember
that in the 1960s Keith Moon heard about friends of his
forming a band and quipped they would fly like a lead
zeppelin.
Notice where that career went.
With
something of the same spirit, the title of this beguiling
collection is culled from the lexicon of the Jamaican
music industry and refers to a singer going over "like
an iron balloon." Taking a dismissal and inverting it
into a defiant stance is perfectly in keeping with the
overall verve of these 11 short stories produced by tutors
and understudies in the Calabash Writers Workshop.
When
we peel back the title, something else appears, namely,
the Sisyphean rock that Jamaicans who produce literature
must roll in getting their writing discovered, nurtured,
published, distributed, read and discussed. Take, for
instance, these words about words attributed to the
aged ex-political leader at the center of Marlon James' "The Last Jamaican Lion":
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 people and knew what they wanted, something that
came from having the color of privilege but not wealth
to go along with it.
Iron Balloons is
counter-evidence to the old politico's casual dismissal
of literature, his ghettoization of readers to the leisure
class. Arriving with red, gold and green gift wrap and
hitting like a rootsman's tonic, the stories are mature
and utterly without gonzo, pretense or tourist curry.
It comes as a relief that instead of reading self-consciously
post-colonial prose embedded with foul tasting grad school
theory-pellets, we meet earthy people amid vibrantly drawn
settings. But the settings are not beach, mountain, dancehall
or marketplace, the writers opting to work the interior
realms of psyche. The leaden "iron" and the floating "balloon" of
the title accurately reflects the interplay of light and
dark tones in these well-crafted stories.
Calabash
Writer's Workshop - Photo by Janet Hill
Calabash founders Colin Channer and Kwame Dawes were
raised in Jamaica and teach at universities in the United
States. Both have extensive writing credits, and like
most Jamaican writers, their publishers and most of their
readers are based off island. Channer (Satisy My Soul, Passing
Through) handles the fiction wing of operation Calabash,
Dawes the poetry. (Six poetry chapbooks came out in 2005.)
In establishing a writers workshop they opted for the
model of the producer's yard, specifically the hothouses
of creativity run by Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs and others
in the lustered history of Jamaican music. Coherence in
sound and a bracing level of quality characterize these
and other producers' work. In this sense a yard becomes
much more than a physical space because of its conditioning
functions. "[T]his is how the spirit of the music was
absorbed, how apprentices both learned and caught on," explains
Channer in the introduction.
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.
In this fetching and elastic image, Channer calls attention
to the writer as painter and martial artist, as boxer
and ballet dancer. But he, like the brand name annual
literature festival, always keeps reggae close at hand,
and it is as an album that Iron Balloons comes
packaged, even though music appears as an overt element
only infrequently in the text. The book cover comes bathed
in cool, familiar tones with a blurb touting it as a "narrative
LP of voices," and we, the habitues of record store reggae
racks, will alight with positive pre-cognitive
associations.
Like a reggae anthology, Iron Balloons opens
with the producer's latest hitmaker, Marlon James. A mid-30s-ish
Kingstonian scribe, James sprang out of the greenhouse
with a first novel, John Crow's Devil (2005), which
won wide applause. We expect an excerpt from that book
(also published by Akashic) but are served "The Last Jamaican
Lion," a gripping, stand-alone story of the inner life
of an ex-prime minister. Maxamillian Morrison, a man with
a resemblance to Alexander Bustamante (and not only because
their first names have four syllables and their last have
three and four respectively), is troubled and decrepit
but still intellectually devious. The story unveils the
fears Maxamillian collected in his career as a post-colonial
leader, and like a character out of the 19th century he
is visited by the sins of his political and personal past.
The volume's other bookend, a novella by Kwame Dawes,
similarly tells a story from the inner folds of a decaying
mind and demonstrates the presentness of the past. A poet,
dramatist, critic and professor, Dawes officially crossed
over to fiction in 2003 with the publication of A Place
to Hide and Other Stories. (His debut novel, She's
Gone, has just been published.) The 60-page "Marley's
Ghost," which first appeared in A Place to Hide,
is a finely calibrated balance of naturalistic mindflow
and poetic precision. The parallel universe in which a
Bob Marley-like figure faces the last days of life closely
resembles our own, and while Dawes hews closely to some
of the established facts of the Marley narrative, he is
engaged in the Great Jamaican Act of versioning. Just
as one may distinguish between blues and blues music,
the reader finds Dawes expressing reggae ideas rather
fulfilling expectations about a Last Testament of Bob
Marley. For the bass-heavy chinka-chinka reggae fiction
to which the back cover gives hint ("in the proudly odd
tradition of Jamaican music...") it is Geoffrey Philp
who delivers.
Philp
memorably explores culture clash in "I Want to
Disturb My Neighbor," setting the story in the late seventies.
By this time Michael Manley's brand of millennial socialism
had been accompanied by the rise and internationalization
of Rastafari-inspired roots reggae, but it would take
years before reggae would become a normalized part of
Jamaican culture. The Rasta-reggae axis of this time was
still deemed subversive and alien. Because of its power
to transmit messages of values and identity and because
it was going everywhere, even into the Jamaican middle
class, reggae became an object of discourse, a thing to
receive censure, praise, echo or outright ban. Philps
depicts a youth named Courtneigh meeting his coming of
age next door, and everything in this story about being
caught between the rivaling authorities of establishment
Christianity and Rasta ideology pulses with piquant life.
At
one end of the juxtaposition is Michael, a once-"decent
boy" known now by his Rasta identity, Jah Mick. Conscientized
to Africa, orthodox in uniting precept with action, Jah
Mick, editor of a zine called Rootsman Kulcha,
is all-Rasta/all the time. At the other end is Courneigh's
perturbed mother; the loud reggae music next door, she
says, interferes with her Friday night Bible study. Betwixt,
the narrator observes:
[H]e'd come back with a new name and a new flex,
a beard, long dreads -- a 'boogooyagga.' You don't
need no translation. So it mean is so it sound. Say it,
'Boo-goo-yagga. Boo-goo-yagga.' It sound bad, eh?
Yes,
and the narrator is soon to get in touch with his own
bad self. The Rastaman, who presents a little of the
familiar to Courtneigh (he was once his older brother's
best friend) and a lot of the strange to the community,
is ideally suited as his guide. Jah Mick's house becomes
a place for Courtneigh to put a complicated cultural force
into deeply personal terms, a place to confront Third
World revolution, the idealization of Africa and ganja.
It is a heady package, wrapped in reggae basslines thick
enough to paint with, and would be perfectly irie were
it not for his mother's equally serious and personal admonition
to see the blasted music turned down. The narrator, who
has been lured to this space (for books that he "borrowed
and read in secret ... Garvey, Kenyatta, Fanon ...") and
then forbidden from traversing there, is now pushed by
his mother to that same place. There he must examine the
self, must decide and act.
How was I going to tell Jah Mick he had to turn down
his music or my mother was going to call the beasts?
It was about the threat as much as the lie. The man
wasn't doing anything, really, yet she thought it was
okay to terrorize him with the name of the police
like she was casting out a demon in the name of Jesus. In
the name of Jesus, come out!!!!
Although
his consciousness of the adult world is in a state of
early bloom, Courtneigh is a wonderfully observant youth.
He informs Jah Mick, "She is an old lady. She can't
change. Certain kinda music goi' burn her," and points
out some of the relevant fine print in their social contract: "And
when it burn her, is me she take it out 'pon. Is not you.
You is a big man. You live by yourself. Me still live
with my mother and she taking your fat and fry me." Philp
makes his story deeply relational. Instead of leaving
readers with a valedictory reminiscence of the golden
age of roots reggae, he has us make contact with ideas
that remain combustible. The story reminds us that at
times like these, when compromise appears impossible,
the superlatives people use are rarely abstract to them. "After
that," Courtneigh confesses at the disquieting conclusion, "I
did not pray for a very long time."
Although there's usually much made in anthologies like
this about the representations of standard English and
patois in Jamaican literature, only one of the stories
in Iron Balloons (Rudolph Wallace's "Siblings")
is written entirely in patois, a feature of the book going
without comment in the 17-page introduction about the
history, theory and practice of Calabash. For selection
criteria, Channer says that, prompted by counsel from
Dawes, he found himself "trust[ing] the reggae."
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 sequence
that would have the best effect.
Though this is something less than the encryption code
for Getting Published by Calabash, it clues us to the
personality of the book, if not the effect of its best
stories, the moments that are full with plenipotential.
Even
in the lone selection set at a resort, folks aren't
getting their groove back, at least not for long. Sharon
Leach's "Sugar" moves from the title character's fantasy
revenge to her newly earned recognition of the power of
dreams. A young lady with many unrealized yearnings, she
works as a hotel maid at a place where the "rich owners
[who] play hug-up with the government are the ones who
reap most of the benefits." One afternoon finds Sugar
and her sister enjoying a brief inversion experience in
one of the hotel's beachfront rooms.
We
stripped down to our underwear and laid on the bed,
eating insipid leftovers from a plate we had stolen
off a tray left outside one of the occupied rooms
-- watching TV and letting the air conditioner blast us
until our skins were ashy. We stared at each other
and burst out laughing. We were soon sobbing with
laughter. 'This is it?' Celine gasped finally, wiping
her eyes. 'Air conditioning and TV? Rich people really
fool-fool!'
The
scene is a Carnival-for-two, a sanctuary of the mind
governed by an alternative code and flow of time. Carnival
season, as critic Karen McCarthy Brown writes, is
the
time when all the rules can be broken, when sexual license
is permitted and people do things they would
not ordinarily do. It is a time when the poor can
be arrogant and make fun of the powerful as well as a
time when the rich can go slumming.
Entering
this extra-ordinary time, Sugar is able to counter the
ordered work she must normally perform (in a cotton
candy-pink uniform) with a little fun (in her underwear),
and the laughter at the end comes overlaid with a feeling
of moral superiority. In this we recognize a universal
urge, that of appeasing the latent resentment we have
of other people, especially those who loom large, who
are proximate to us, but whom we do not know. (For the
same reason we can expect the American tabloids to keep
full with the follies of celebrity; we are to be aware
not just of the rehab or untimely deaths of the Beautiful
and Famous but alerted to their weight gain and public
nose picking.) Leach's story offers more than a passing
glance, though, at what inner lives are like. We soon
find Sugar repeatedly gazing at a hotel guest, a black
American woman about her own age who is staying alone.
The guest strikes the hotel maid as elegant in every
way. Fixated on everything from the diamond stud in
the guest's ear to her long braids to the lubricated
and the confident way the woman maneuvers among fawners,
Sugar embraces the image ("I imagine the girl is me")
as an ideal self. Meanwhile, she cleans rooms for international
visitors on holiday. They spend grand sums of money and
leave expensive electronics lying about their rooms. The
convergence Sugar yearns to have with the life of the
imagined Other promises to assuage the complications of
her family life -- a mother with a flair for the domineering,
brothers and sisters with immediate needs, and an absent,
distant boyfriend.
Possessed
of a desire to "do anything for [the rich American
woman's] life," and only momentarily obtaining relief,
like laughing at the banality of decadence, our title
character is ripe for a Moment. Enter the horny Americans,
a married couple named Peter and Denise. They have dreams,
too, including a particularly vivid interracial menage
a trois, and nearing the end of their trip, Peter offers
to pay handsomely for one with Sugar. "I know I don't
have to tell you how much Uncle Sam means around here." In
between this crass observation from Peter and a wet kiss
on the neck from Denise -- Iron Balloons is a book
about bodies, about the viscera: "I feel goose flesh rising
on my arms and I feel sick, as if I am going to puke" --
Sugar is ensnared and yet strangely removed. She adheres
with sufficient force to her detachment to notice what
in the old days of poetry was called mutability.
Now
Peter is suddenly in front of Denise and me. He is mostly
lean, although he has the beginning of a beer
belly. He is tan with limp, thinning hair the color
of wet sand, which he keeps always in a ponytail beneath
his cowboy hats. Today, he is bareheaded and his wet
hair, splayed about his shoulders like octopus tentacles,
reveals a balding pink spot.
What
a forlorn moment this is, a picture of the sad pathos
of intimacy at midlife. But it gets eclipsed by another,
more lacerating dismissal when Sugar delivers breakfast
one morning to the woman she has epitomized. With a chance
at last to have one on one communion, Sugar says to her
doppelganger, "I've seen you there [at the hotel bar]
before -- you always take Absolut and cranberry juice." The
woman tells Sugar that her English is good. Let Sugar
take it from here:
I
stood waiting for her to remember. And what, maybe ask
me to sit with her? Already I can imagine us being
friends -- she will tell me her name and I will tell
her that she is the person I would most love to be in
the world.
But
she immediately seems to forget that I am there and
starts to eat. I feel dismissed, useless. like a
comma almost.
This scene will no doubt remain a hashmark in the narrator's
timeline of death by a thousand cuts. Sugar's selfhood
has been suddenly effaced, put in limbo, made almost into
a punctuation mark (one of the the lesser liked and oft-misapplied
ones at that). Nevertheless, she will, out of the stifling
demands and crassness in her life, climb to a place of
newness that she can accept. She will work out a rationale
as strong as her mother's faith in a moment Leach captures
with glistening clarity.
Iron Balloons contains
a steaming lot of what happens when characters don't
recognize the mystery into which they have inadvertently
dropped. They need an intervening episode, character
or insight. One story that provides this remarkably
well is Elizabth Nunez' "All a We is One." It
is a tale of tensions over skin hue, cultural difference
and economic class, about a family of three black Americans
who walk into a racial incident at a Jamaican swimming
pool. We find in the public discussions on talk radio
how people discuss and not-discuss blackness in the same
breath. And yet the story never wavers as a compelling
narrative. In Kaylie Jones' "The Anger Meridian," we find
a story of how well, and yet how little, we know the other.
With readerly transportation moving with a swift gallop,
by the end of the tale, winded, we have seen a death,
a betrayal, hidden money and a flush of women's liberation
a la Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." We simply must
have more, and we will. The only story in Iron Balloons not
self-contained, "The Anger Meridian" is excerpted from
a novel in progress.
In
Colin Channer's "How to Beat a Child in the Right
and Proper Way," the setting shifts from Jamaica to the
diaspora. A middleaged Jamaican woman, Ciselyn, who attends
college in New York City, gives an assigned five-minute
speech to her class about her rudegal daughter. And goes
overtime. Turning over a large hunk of her life in this
address, Ciseylyn more than delivers on the how-to of
the story's title, going outrageously beyond prescribed
time with buckshot detail, producing a thought pattern
so contoured and absolute that it becomes like seeing
the whole of a body in a single cell. Channer makes it
hard to pick out individual lines demonstrating this,
the story being all about voice and cumulative effect.
It is like reading survivor testimony, unsentimental and
defining life-episodes by a voice of authority, meaning
the story cannot be told in other ways. Whether describing
her job, her daughter or the reason she's had to change
from her original topic (How to Make Budget and Stick
to It), Ciselyn has almost nothing to say by way of commentary.
This is a woman of sinewy, forward-thrusting narrative.
Finally, when she offers an overarching lesson about parental
guidance --
[L]ove your children, but don't let them use
that love to rule you. Harden your heart when you
have to, and put it on. They strong, you know. You ever
see them on the playground yet? Jumping and rolling
and all o' dat?
--
she does so by calling attention to bodies. Bodies symbolically
armored like this hardened heart, "put on" as
deliberately as a spiritual garment. Bodies on the move
and under the lash, "Whappa-pappa-pappa-pappa-PIE!" We,
her readers/classmates, cringe (don't we?) at the delight
Ciselyn exudes in beating the idea of reform in her daughter
(the "child" is 17, naked in the shower). In the end Channer
makes us admire this woman and her capacity to fashion
a self-determining life without a big head start or much
outside help.
Iron Balloons is
rooted in the "reggae aesthetic" of
Kwame Dawes' 1999 critical study Natural Mysticism.
The "aesthetic" part of the term refers to the ways and
means of the music, the coherence in its culturally expressive
Caribbean-ness. As Dawes amply demonstrates, reggae offers
myriad rich inventions of language, and though reggae
songs are generally brief (the studio recordings, at any
rate), the range of stances and personas that a singer
can adopt is wide. Don Drummond, Lee Perry, Burning Spear
and Bob Marley are focal points, but Dawes' larger concern
is in showing the cohering force of reggae upon art and
conversation in the Caribbean.
The
impact of reggae on imaginative writing has been both
a necessary and an increasingly fruitful one,
particularly since there was, I argue, a period of uncertainty
in Caribbean literature after the achievement of independence
in the 1960s. Without the anti-colonial animus that
gave voice and purpose to much of the earlier nationalist
writing, it became increasingly difficult to find any
major thematic concerns shaping and driving the work of
Caribbean writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And so we ferry from the thesis of Natural Mysticism to
Dawes' reggae poems (if you're new, start with Shook
Foil), which read Bob Marley and other cultural artists
across Jamaican space, and arrive now to the conclusion
of Iron Balloons, "Marley's Ghost." It is indeed
The End, where a man beset with cancer named Joseph lives
in a squalid room in Spanish Town. He listens to a tape
of Exodus over and over. Joseph's woman has left
him, and he is "trying to think of whether he should go
and find her, or whether he should stay in this room and
let his dreams consume him." Dawes leaves lasting impressions.
In drawing Joseph's life full of the rubics cubes of woman
problems, sickness unto death and memories turning up
and over with weirdly autonomous force, he weaves a modern
myth. Whether it's Gilgamesh's Enkidu, Homer's Herocles
or Dawes' Joseph, literature provides no model of the
power of words greater than those of the fatally wounded
warrior.
[W]hile he did not know of the cancer multiplying
itself from his toe to his bones, to his blood, to
his brain, even as he lay there staring at the sky, he knew
the weightlessness of being weary of the world -- the
hollowness of having spoken all that was burning inside
his belly. He felt dry, spent. When prophets grow
silent it means they have served their purpose.
The man believes he has inherited the soul of Bob Marley.
But the story is more than simply about possession or
channeling, and its imprimatur of story-truth has more
to do with how a self can incarnate another than on knowing
extra-textual things about Bob Marley. (That, for instance,
Marley's name in the Twelve Tribes of Israel was Joseph,
and that the Rastaman Vibration album quotes from
Biblical text attesting to "the Blessing of Joseph.")
The finer points of Dawes' Joseph and the historical Bob
are swept along by a rarefied air. "He keeps returning
to his dream that is no longer a dream but a narrative
with sequence and meaning. He has to return to it because
it gives him a sense of grounding." Reading "Marley's
Ghost" is like plunging into the underworld of Greek epic
to visit one of the shades. Dawes is Hermes, the reader
meeting a fragile body, a mind ignited and bedeviled by
unfinished work, a self whose surreal voice we don't want
to see diminished.
There is multiple possession at work here: Joseph by
the spirit of Bob Marley, Dawes by the capacity of reggae
to signify Caribbean-ness, and we by the storyteller's
capacity to have us see mystery made manifest. (There
is also the Iron Balloon-ish pluck of an author
hereby commanding Google to pop up the title of his short
story in keyword searches that hitherto made mention only
of Scrooge's erstwhile business partner.) We live in the
world of connectedness. Russell the cook serves Joseph "mounds
of mashed yams islanded in thick callaloo and okra stew,
spiced with various herbs and coconut oil," and out of
this comes a groundation moment. Joseph, who is by this
point in the story is very ill, has found himself unable
to recalls the words to a song that he has picked out
on his acoustic guitar. It throws him into a quiet stunned
panic. And it elicits from the writer a prose with more
than just a good noun-pronoun rhythm in it.
Russell
sat in a chair behind him. He realized what had happened
to Joseph and quickly began to recite Psalm
139. As the words came out of Russell's mouth, Joseph
began to sing with him. His fingers worked their way around the
fret board and he found melodies to carry the psalm. The
two continued like this, a song breaking out in the
room, the sweet taste of holiness. Russell's face
had the wooden toughness of a sun-hardened sea jetty.
His locks were virtually red and clumped in disarray
around his head, just like the heads of his fellow
bredren who fished the waters of Bull Bay on the rugged south
coast of the island. His face was a lumped mass of muscle
and overgrown pimples. Few recognizable expressions
passed through that face. but sitting there, looking
at the back of Joseph's head, his face softened into strange
liquid textures.
No, Jamaica is not easy. "In Jamaica we say that
puss and dog don't have the same luck. I can't tell you
what will work for you," reports Channer's Ciseylyn on
the dipdown of her long speech. The messages elsewhere
in the volume are equally full with mystery. Bob Marley
died in 1981 and only stories can bring him back. Sugar
needs money and gets laid. Young adults with complicated
lives are pushed into places without compromise. And a
good short story works a lot like a haunting.
Works Cited
Brown, Karen McCarthy. Tracing the Spririt: Ethnographic
Essays on Haitian Art. Davenport, IA: Davenport
Museum of Art, 1995.
Dawes, Kwame. Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae
Aesthetic. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 1999.
Michael Kuelker is the editor of Book of Memory:
A Rastafari Testimony (CaribSound 2005), the spiritual
autobiography of Jamaican Rastafari elder Prince Williams.
For more information, see www.CaribSound.com or www.jahworks.org/travel/travel_story/book_of_memory.htm [interview with the editor]. Book of Memory will
go into its second printing in early 2008.
###
Calabash
Writer's Workshop Photos by Janet Hill:
Ibo Cooper, Wayne Armond, Stevie Golding, Sereste Small
and unidentified person
