Iron Balloons

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.

Introduction
THE KINGSTON 12 OVERTURE
by Colin Channer

I
f 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.