In Garfield Ellis’s For Nothing At All, a character petulantly demands to know what kind of gun was used in a shootout described by the narrator, then complains that ‘You don’t have no information inna you story,’ because the narrator can’t remember. The plot unfolds briskly, with transitions between present action and flashbacks deftly executed, though one wonders if the story is a little too economically told, being heavy on description but skimpy on action. This novel takes us through the time at an elegant trot, nimbly negotiating dark corners with its protagonist Mikey Johnson, a browning with a social conscience (‘im always check fi sufferer’), fond of surveying the world through mirrored welding glasses. Paint the Town Red, by Brian Meeks, is an attempt by a card-carrying member of that era - the turbulent 70s - to reconstruct the heady logic of those days and give it literary form. Her book is dedicated to her brother Carlton Tomlinson, gunned down in 1980, and to ‘all other victims of political and gang warfare in Jamaica’, including the 153 elderly victims who perished in the infamous Even Tide Home fire, which took place the same year.ġ980 was a watershed year in Jamaican history, marking the brutal, abrupt termination of the ‘revolutionary’ 70s, and the transition from ‘socialism’ to a more market-oriented, pro-business phase of the nation’s existence. The rawest, most unprocessed narrative is that of Pauline Edwards, who grew up in the ‘dysfunctional community’ of Trench Town. In four texts of varying quality, in various genres, young new Jamaican writers give us their take on the predicament of those who live here. It’s too soon to be a response to the gauntlet thrown down by a writer from the Jamaican diaspora, but finally in the early years of this millennium a handful of local writers have taken aim at the moving target of contemporary Jamaica.
Paint the town red prison series#
And it?’ true that one of the most popular modes of writing Jamaica, especially in the recent past, has been as a series of adventures in folkland, as if the huge reality of Kingston and urban Jamaica could simply be wished away.
Paint the town red prison windows#
It was only the other day that novelist Colin Channer admonished his fellow Jamaican writers for not writing the Jamaica they looked out of their windows and saw every day for not having recorded the traumas that afflicted post-colonial Jamaica in the 1970s, or continue to blemish it today for producing instead waterlogged narratives of exile or yard or church.
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