Hooves on the Turf

Colin Channer

The Park Slope Barnes & Noble reading of Akashic authors Colin Channer and K. E. Silva proceeded with perhaps 10 people in attendance. The corner tucked beside the religious texts in the lower level is a reading area for about 8 customers when it’s not rearranged with rows of chairs for author events. It’s not a space that intends to command a turnout like Upstairs at Union Square does, especially when the streets outside are glistening under a Friday night shower, but it offers the intimacy and informality fitting for readings.

Colin Channer is the kind of author you’d want to meet in such an informal setting. How much of his bubbling personality a carefully taken promotional photo can mask was immediately apparent. While waiting for the reading to begin slightly late, he said, “I’m Ja-faken,” in response to someone’s casual inquiry into the heritage of his parents, continuing to pull out one startling statement after the other. He said that he’d like to open a book store for the illiterate, but, wait a minute, wasn’t that called a video store? He couldn’t understand why people came to readings though he hoped God would bless them, and said that he wrote books because he’d need one if he was going to read one to an audience. “I’m not one of those writers who has to absolutely write,” he declared, and bursted out later, “Then why I am I still going to the super market?” when the topic of discussion was Fresh Direct, which delivers everything a super market sells, including ice cream.

All of this unfolded while the demure and soft-spoken K.E. Silva smiled and moved about in hushes. She had come east from California to promote her novel A Simple Distance and had read with Channer at one occasion few days earlier. In her hands was a copy of her book that had received an “undergrad treatment”—yellow chunks of highlight here and other bright colors elsewhere, little stickies peaking out from everywhere. Sitting in the front row, looking about and whispering, she hoped Channer would read first.

Channer had not brought along his copy of Iron Balloons, an anthology of short stories he edited from the work produced at his Jamaica’s Calabash Writer’s Workshop. He held one up from the display and explained that it was $550 for a round trip to Jamaica, but the island could be experienced for $14.95 on paperback. Though there were many great writers in the collection, he continued, it was necessary to remind your students they don’t write as well as you do, for which purpose he had included a story of his own, “How to Beat a Child the Right and Proper Way.” The story is told in the voice of an old Jamaican woman who had meant to speak on the subject of “How to Make a Budget and Stick to It,” but a revolting exchange between what might’ve been an Italian mother and daughter at Duane Reade had inspired the new topic. It was evident from the way Channer transformed himself into the woman, holding up his palm when necessary and gliding through the rhythm of Patois, that it was reading he loved, therefore he wrote.

Excerpt:

My speech this evening is called “How to Beat a Child the Right and Proper Way,” and the reason I decide to speak on this topic is based on the fact of something I saw today that remind me of something that took place on a Tuesday night in Jamaica thirty-four years ago, in 1972. Some of you never even born yet.

Anyway, today when I was in a Duane Reade on Broadway, over by Wall Street, buying some panty hose and some chocolate for my grandchildren, I saw this child of about seventeen back-answering her mother. Everything the mother say, the child back-answer. You know how these children nowadays can go on. Just rude. When the mother talking to her, you know what she was doing? Popping her bubble gum and rolling her eye. She fold her arms and shaking her leg, and sometimes when the mother say something serious to her, she look on her mother and laugh. The child just rude and out of order. Anything the mother say, she contradict her. If the mother say, “A,” she say, “B.”

Silva’s novel is set in a fictional West Indian island Baobique, miniscule in comparison to Jamaica like the one her family is from and to which her mother returned once Silva enrolled in law school. Sliding behind the desk, she warned that she wasn’t quite sure how to follow that up (referring to Channer’s performance). She had not the cadence of Patois or the outrage of an outspoken Jamaican woman, but she held the audience still with an evocative passage she read in the same soft voice.

Excerpt:

I was born with quick-growing roots that bore between my parents and split my family into pieces. As a child I often crept to the top of the staircase that ended just outside my mother’s bedroom. I would curl up against its stained, picket railing on the last step before our second floor landing with a blanket and my copy of The Little Prince, so I could both read and watch her door.

K.E. Silva

The book is loosely based on her experience of being gay in a second home where homosexuality is hated with fervor. Channer later jokingly described the residents of the islands as “Talibans of homophobia.” But, he said, Rasta was the previous equivalent of homosexuality.

Publisher Johnny Temple of Akashic Books noted the similar themes of diaspora and generational gaps in the works of the two Caribbean writers and wondered if there was anything specific about the Caribbean that allowed it. An organic discussion followed in which Channer pointed out that the Caribbean people have historically been migratory people, harvesting and reaping here when the seasons allowed, and moving to places like Cuba and Canada when they didn’t. The islands themselves were designed to be labor camps, and later expected to function as a political, economic entity. Silva added that because of the lack of opportunities for higher education where her mother is from, young students continuously go abroad, not always with the intention to return. She felt that when a family is split into two places, one cannot feel complete without encompassing both in one’s life.

Someone of Filipino origin asked the writers about their experience of going back home for the first time, especially when parents take it for granted that you are to do so at some point. Channer said that the experience of going back for people of Caribbean origin was singular because of proximity. For a smaller island where there may not be an international airport, however, Silva said that the trips are longer and more expensive. Another asked if Silva planned to read her book in the island, and saying that her mother has not read the book and that life would be difficult for someone like her mother who is dependent on her family there if she were to do such a thing, she said she had no plans. Channer exclaimed, “If she is a West Indian mother, she has read it! And one day she will suddenly throw you a non-sequiter, like… why use initials?”

Oct 27, 2006.
7:30 pm