By Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Winkler
WESTERN BUREAU:
WHEN ANTHONY Winkler finished reading the short story Absentee Ownership of Cows on the second day of the Calabash International Literary Festival 2004, there was a standing ovation.
Colin Channer intercepted Winkler as he was leaving the stage, leading him back to the podium. "Anthony, in Jamaica they call that a forward. You have to give them one more," he said.
"Dem bigger dan me. Cyaan argue wid dem," Winkler said.
Winkler followed Tessa McWatt and Chine Mieville on Saturday's opening 'MacMillan Presents' session.
He started a tale of a Mr. Hutchins in the US receiving a letter from a cow he left behind in Jamaica, a cow which complains about the skimpy outfits of 'dancehall sisters'.
TALKS TO DEAD WIFE
Mr. Hutchins keeps a conversation with his dead wife, Thelma, makes a pass at the widow of an American soldier and is slapped for his troubles.
The tale is a knee slapper up to when he decides to go home to address the cow personally. Then it became a story of loss, as he returns home to a half-finished house and is ruminating on the lost years. "The cow was right. Jamaica gave us life, and what have we given to Jamaica? Our old bones."
There was silence under the tent as the audience listened to how the old man was found dead the next morning and was buried a week later, the postmistress never telling his children about the letter he wrote to an 'A. Cow'.
His second story was The Dog, the story of the Leylands and their misfortune of good fortune, being wealthy (US$20 million net worth), but as migrants from Jamaica they are aware that life is an old dog that can't wait to chew a piece out of the happy people.
Tessa McWatt set a scene of shopping in a market a picture of tranquillity that is shattered by an explosion, which leaves the central character with shrapnel in her knee but many other persons much worse.
Questioned by the police, she notes that she had seen two men in leather jackets "who looked like they had things on their mind" for a long time.
"People will always react to feeling wronged," she tells the police.
China Mieville went down the science fiction route, setting the scene with an explanation of the racist New Quill Party, the Xeneons who they despise, and the Folly Beggars club, where all savoury and unsavoury characters meet to be entertained.
But the fare is different this evening. A set of puppeteers retell the familiar tale of Jack Half-A-Prayer, a captured 'bandit' who had been publicly displayed by the government of the day after he had been captured. In the previous tales, a man had killed Jack when the police had been distracted.
In this version, though, the puppet killer frees Jack Half-A-Prayer and gives him a pistol. The censor steps up to stop the production and the New Quillers and Xeneons clash and there is a riot, the theme of resistance being couched in science fiction.
