July 4, 2018 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Sir walked around a corner and stopped suddenly. A few feet ahead, a bridge crossed a waterway to an island. George Ransom, its rider, had taken this trail a dozen times but had never seen the bridge before. The stallion refused to step onto the island’s connection. Hundreds of large blackbirds living on the island made George curious.
He tugged on the reins to explore territory on the other side of the bridge, but the horse did not budge. The horse had never disobeyed him before.
Battered and bruised, George climbed off the horse when they arrived at his ranch two miles later. He doubled over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath.
Recently retired, George had bought the ranch a couple of months earlier to get away from the bustle of city life. His love for horses and the simplicity of savannah living made him buy the ranch to raise and sell horses.
He had a hundred acres of land in his backyard with the jungle half a mile away from his front yard. He loved hunting and fishing in the tropical Amazon rainforest.
When his breathing settled, George checked Sir’s glistening black coat but found no bruises on the animal. He entered the house and checked an old surveyor’s map of the area.
His stomach churned when he discovered the island, labeled, ‘Soul Island’. He had taken a wrong turn to a place he had never gone before.
He penned the horses and returned to the house to shut all the doors and windows before dark to keep out mosquitoes and other stinging insects that came out at night. With no appetite, George climbed to his bedroom on the second floor and retired for the night.
Screaming caws in the middle of the night scared him awake. He gasped and stared out the open bedroom door which he had closed before going to bed. Blackbirds had invaded his home and flew in and out of his room and all around the house. Stomping hoofs through the front door sent the ominous red-eyed birds darting out of the house through every opening.
The fifty horses whinnied with fear in the oversized barn a few seconds later. The hoofbeats on the wooden floor clomped out of the house and galloped toward the stable.
George sprinted through the open front door to the stalls to protect his horses. He sidestepped their threatening hooves and ducked under Sir to get on the other side to use the horse’s physique as a shield. Sir took on a leadership role and used his body language and soft neighs to calm his fellow horses. The blackbirds had already flown away into the night sky.
An hour later, George returned to the farmhouse, exhausted and thankful for the intervention of Sir. The horse had reacted once again to shield him from getting trampled to death.
George pulled out a large ledger that listed the details of every horse that ever lived on the ranch for the last hundred years. He checked for the name branded on Sir’s rump. He found no entry for Sir. The horse never existed!
At first light, George checked on the horses. Sir had vanished! He mounted a pony to visit the neighboring ranch a mile away.
When he started to relate his experiences to Flying Eagle, owner and village elder, the old man beckoned George into the house and shut the door. He took a seat and asked his wife, Graceful Swan, to prepare breakfast. He lit a fire to some bush in a small clay pot.
While they ate, George continued his traumatic ordeals. Flying Eagle broke a piece of cassava cake and dropped it into the pot before he took a bite each time. Graceful Swan did the same, George followed their strange ritual.
“You took a ride on, ‘Soul-Island-Redeemer’, my boy.” Flying Eagle spoke after George finished his stories. “Your time had not arrived.”
“The Angel-of-Death can make mistakes.” Graceful Swan agreed. “Soul-Island-Redeemer readjusts your time, but the birds have to await official word from their master, the Keeper-of-Souls.”
“Soul-Island-Redeemer had to present you to the Keeper-of-Souls who had the power to overrule the Angel-of-Death and clear your soul.” Flying Eagle showed his missing front teeth with a grin. “Unfortunately, the Keeper-of-Souls’ absence exposed you to the danger of early death.”
“Soul-Island-Redeemer dashed away with you on his back to protect you, knowing that the birds could not travel a considerable distance from the island when their master is away during daylight hours.” Graceful Swan spoke again. “They stay close to keep guard.” However, under cover of night, they can roam freely.”
“Sir stayed with you as your guardian angel throughout the night until the birds got recalled to the island when their master returned and received word of your approach on Sir’s back that day.” Flying Eagle took a deep breath. “in fact, he had arrived two months earlier. He just didn’t know the exact moment of your expiration but had to become your friend for you to trust him.”
“We hope to see you around for a while yet.” Graceful Swan raised her cup of tea. “Cheers to renewed-life.” They each poured a few drops of tea into the pot before swallowing the rest of the tea from their mugs. George did the same.
“What happened to Sir?” George needed closure.
“We invited Sir into our home when we lit the bush medicine that grew on the spot where he had stood before the Great-Beyond took him bodily to become a star.” Flying Eagle grinned. “He had breakfast with us.”
“With the flames now out, he has left once more.” Graceful Swan’s conclusion caused George Ransom to sing praises to his lucky star each night before falling asleep.
Anthony C. Winkler was born on February 25, 1942 in Kingston, Jamaica, the second of eight children to a Lebanese-Jamaican mother and a father with Hungarian ancestry. According to Kim Robinson-Walcott, writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Winkler was raised in Montego Bay as well, where for a brief time the family rose out of its straitened financial circumstances to circulate among the wealthier, upper class, after his father, a tire salesman, was promoted to a managerial position. Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, speaks to the conflicting relationship brought on by Winkler’s birth, telling us, “On his mother’s side, his family was Lebanese – tightwad merchants who detested their adopted home. On his father’s, it was Hungarian, music-lovers who adored Jamaica. So he ranks as a white Jamaican, privileged by ancestry but penurious by birth. Going Home to Teach [one of Winkler’s autobiographical works] …delves into the confusions of his younger self. He felt that he had ‘internalised’ a black identity just as many of his upwardly mobile black peers were ingesting a white one.”
It appears Winkler’s early life was unsettled and mobile, living in Kingston until he was eight years old, then moving to Montego Bay when he was nine; however, a year later he was back in Kingston, where he lived with his grandparents. He attended three different secondary schools: Excelsior College in Kingston, and Mt Alvernia Academy, followed by Cornwall College in Montego Bay; it was at Cornwall where Winkler pushed against the establishment, refusing to be caned by the school’s headmaster, which led to his expulsion. After high school, he moved once more to Kingston, where working as an accounting clerk – “a terrible dry goods clerk”, as he later told Tonkin.
Robinson-Walcott tells us one of Winkler’s “few positive school experiences had been his success with English compositions, and by his early teens… had decided that he wanted to become a writer”. And so, with a desire to write at 20 years old, “a reluctant Winkler was despatched to America by his mother, who was determined that her son should make something of his life”. Arriving in the US in 1962, he spent 13 years in California, “a place which he disliked”. However, despite his antipathy, Winkler’s love for study saw him acquiring three degrees in English – an AA degree from Citrus College, Glendora, and a BA (1967) and MA (1968) from California State University at Los Angeles.
Following his graduation, Winkler taught briefly at Pasadena City College; later, he began collaboration with JoRay McCuen-Metherell, a department head at Glendale Community College in California, whom he met while selling textbooks. Working together, Winkler and McCuen-Metherell began writing textbooks, in what turned out to be a 40-plus year relationship. Wikipedia reports Winkler had worked as a textbook salesman in California, and had come to realise he could improve the product he was selling. It turned out to be an income-earning realisation – after writing and submitting two chapters for a text, Winkler received (US) $1,000 as a first book advance. The initiative would lead to a successful career as a writer of tertiary textbooks of grammar and composition.
With this career underway, in 1975 Winkler returned to Jamaica to teach at the teacher-training college in Moneague. However, this did not work out, and he returned to the US in 1976, moving to Atlanta. Even as he built a successful career writing English textbooks, Winkler was also writing fiction. As the Observer in Jamaica noted on September 21, 2015, “…life as a writer was not an easy vocation, as his first novel and enduring favourite, The Painted Canoe, took him several years to write and more than 10 years to get published. It was the Mike Henry-owned Kingston Publishers that eventually put out the book in 1984”. His next book, The Lunatic (1987), appeared a year after The Painted Canoe, and was such a success it was adapted into a movie in 1991. He also published a collection of short stories, The Annihilation of Fish and Other Stories (2004), from which the story ‘The Annihilation of Fish’ was made into a movie starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder. Winkler was also a playwright, with two plays, The Burglar (2003), which had a Canadian premier in Toronto in 2005, and The Hippopotamus Card (2004). He also wrote God Carlos (2012), with his last novel being The Family Mansion (2013).
In her speech delivered at the Presentation of the Anthony Winkler Archives to the National Library of Jamaica on April 6, 2017, Robinson-Walcott tells us: “Winkler stands alongside other Jamaican fiction/prose writers whose works have formed the Jamaican literary canon: Roger Mais, John Hearne, Neville Dawes, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Kei Miller, Marlon James. The Lunatic is already on its way to becoming a classic in Jamaican fiction… Winkler is unique because in his work he is able to combine outrageous farcical humour with insightful social commentary and incisive analysis of his fellow Jamaicans. Winkler’s books transcend the boundaries between popular and serious fiction …of Winkler’s oeuvre, there is a sobriety underlying the farcical humour and a richness underlying seeming superficialities which are often underestimated; there is an artistry in the seamlessness with which these levels coexist…”
Tonkin tells us of Winkler’s writing: “All his work fizzes with an exuberant delight in the speech, manners and customs of the island underclass. And the books tangle frankly – and uproariously – with the taboos of race, colour and class among a people branded to the heart by slavery and colonialism – ‘mixed and hybridised in every conceivable way’… Much of the edgy comedy in Winkler's work stems from the ways in which race and rank interact, and contradict. Language itself becomes a minefield strewn with colonial-era bomblets, all waiting to detonate.” As the National Library of Jamaica tells us, “To quote… author Marlon James: ‘Every country (if she’s lucky) gets the Mark Twain she deserves, and Winkler is ours, bristling with savage Jamaican wit and heart-stopping compassion.’ To describe him as a ‘comic genius’ is to limit the scope and reach of his work as well as its overall impact on the Jamaican literary landscape. [He] has sought to examine, explain and ultimately ridicule traditional societal norms. His writing is, in fact, an act of resistance against, according to him ‘the dead weight of an imposed culture’.”
Winkler’s novel God Carlos, won the Townsend Prize for Fiction in 2012. In 2014 he was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for his contribution to literature. He passed away in Dunwoody, Georgia at 73 on September 18, 2015.
Sources for this exploration: Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition; National Library of Jamaica; The Independent; National Library of Jamaica; andWikipedia.