Winkler
Avia Ustanny, Freelance Writer
SOMETIMES IT just takes a while before your genius is recognised. Or sometimes, as it happens, life does not serve up what you labour so hard to convince it that you deserve. Sometimes.
By the time this article is published, author Anthony Winkler will have celebrated his 61st birthday (February 25). Anticipating it, he has had cause to reflect on the results of his writing. Winkler has been producing novels since the 70s. His latest works, including the movies The Lunatic and The Annihilation of Fish, were based on stories written in that time period.
As he faces this move past his 60th year, it is apparent that the jury is still out on whether or not his work will make his fortune.
Winkler, a born Jamaican, is the writer of the novels The Painted Canoe, The Lunatic, Going Home to Teach, The Great Yacht Race and The Duppy.
In this his 61st year, will fame come his way? The omens of fortune are good. This writer spent a good portion of Christmas day past cracking up while reading Winkler's The Lunatic. The book, if you do not know, is even better than the movie.
Story of the mad man
This is the story of the mad man Aloysius and his white German lover Inga. The effects of Winklers humour could not have been worse than if one were being physically tickled.
Aloysius, the village madman, lives in the Jamaican bushes and has long conversations with the trees and plants. Watch out when love comes in the form of German tourist Inga. We know that it is the dream of many black, Jamaican men to end up with a "browning", or better yet, a soft-haired white women. Oh, the exquisite irony of it! Interracial relationships, a theme which you will see recur in other Winkler works, is a fact of island life.
Winkler's robust humour, and unrepentant championship of the cause of the insane always delivering to him good luck (even if it comes with a dash of bitter lemon, it's still luck) where in real life he often gets nothing at all is sweeter than a Westmoreland guava.
In the author's latest work coming to Jamaican theatres soon another mad man will take centre stage. This could be another "laugh 'till you cry" work, of the tongue in cheek variety.
The play is called The Burglar.
In this four-act play, Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks, a middle-aged Jamaican couple, have finally returned home after spending 35 years abroad. On their first night home, a determined burglar tries to break in. He is a demented fellow who lives in a cave nearby and who bitterly resents the splendid home being erected so close to his squalid digs. He declares to the Hendrickses that he has come to take everything they possess after a lifetime of labour (every Jamaican's secret nightmare). We do not see him until the last act, but they engage him in dialogue that comically sums up some perennial themes of Jamaican society: Who is responsible for the vast differences between people all around us? What do we owe our brother?
"By the end of the third act, a simple burglary has become a philosophical match of skills and wills between the Hendrickses and the burglar. In a comical reversal, the Hendrickses trap and lock the burglar inside their fortress, where after mistakenly drinking sleeping drops intended for Mrs. Hendricks, he is confronted by the couple in a dramatic finale that is both hysterical and moving," we read in the promotional literature.
What is the fascination that Winkler, a very staid, former college lecturer who gets his income from writing English and literature text books have with mad men?
In The Annihilation of Fish another Jamaican mad man enjoys another inter-racial relationship until his lover kills his imaginary demon and takes away his will to live.
Winkler confesses to Outlook that madness runs in his family. "I had a cousin who died in Belleview." The redemption he offers to the insane, might therefore be connected to this simple fact.
But, more to the point, we find out, is the perversity of life. You work hard, do all the sane things you are supposed to do, and then you discover that that juicy looking yellow thing you have found in the wilderness, when you are so hungry, is a lemon, not a guava. It is enough to make you hiss your teeth. But Winkler says you should laugh, instead. Life is a joke.
Take the fate of The Annihilation of Fish, which was produced two years ago for US$2 million (after the producer took 10 years to make it).
The distributorship for the Winkler-written work went all awry when the company which bid on it reportedly went broke immediately after winning the bid to distributorship.
"They played it every day at midday in one Los Angeles theatre" Winkler reports. "Who goes to the movies in the middle of the day?"
It was only recently that the makers of the movie got back the film.
Life is like that.
Jamaican vernacular
Part of the difficulty with his works has been Winkler's insistence on writing significantly in Jamaican vernacular. "If you write in the vernacular, you lose your foreign audiences. If you write in English, you lose your sense of self," he explains.
Winkler has tried to serve both audiences by switching back and forth between the two languages, as indeed Jamaicans do in everyday life.
In the new play, the mad man insists on being spoken to in the Queen's English. Hysterical. As is life.
Life may not be set up to make your dreams come true, but its absurdity can certainly make you laugh. A good joke is the only thing that is guaranteed.
Laughter and much food for thought is what we are assured of in works from Winkler. It may be that the author, who already has a cult following for the movie version of The Lunatic, will before long find himself satisfyingly popular.
