Iron Balloons (3 page)

“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 bus’ 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

C
hé 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 hated 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.

“I said if you want something to eat?” she shouted from the hollow corridor.

“Is you goin cook it?” Maximilian replied.

“Then who else, Mr. Minister?”

“Me no know. I was considering starvation, with all the tripe you giving me lately.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

She did it again. Spoiling for a fight, he had not realized her masterstroke until too late. She had left him hanging on the cusp of cussing, shot him with apathy while he stood waiting for a fuse so that his mouth could explode. He had to swallow his own malice back down. Maybe she was getting smarter in her old age, a sort of sage foolishness that was better than sense. He had underestimated her again.

Maximilian was bored. His neighbors, men missing hair and mind, and women who now wore stockings rolled up to the knee, all seemed to be at peace, with boredom being the last rung before heaven. Not Maximilian. He felt cursed for having an alert mind but a lost body.

On the table were beetles and butterflies, all dead, but whose wings sparkled with a luminescence. He thought to collect them; he had the pins ready, but never really started.

Evening was threatening to come. The two men had said three days hence. Maximilian told himself he was ready for the visit. And should they come to take him to hell, they would just have to fucking wait. Not even the devil was going to have him before he became a National Hero. This was what balanced his life’s great imbalance, something that made a life of no children worth something. Not that he ever wanted children. But the two men in a dream, or a vision, warned him of a visit today. Maybe not a warning, he thought, but a promise.

Maximilian did not tell his wife of the dream. Sleep was always a shifty thing, even when he was younger. In dreams he would travel to new lands and dark women, but would hear the bark of a dog in the next yard, or the hum of distant trucks, or the hushed call of a woman asking if he was awake.

So when Aloysius Dawkins and Teddy James told him to expect a visit, he couldn’t remember if he was asleep or awake. There was a blur of words and he was lost as to whether he had heard or felt them, but there was also his wife’s snore right beside him, though he did not look at her to make sure. Maximilian remembered the men’s shapes but could not recall seeing their faces in the dark. Nor could he remember who spoke first or what he sounded like. They had been dead so long that he had forgotten their voices, what their breaths smelled like after four beers.
Coming back on Wednesday
, one or both said. Today.