Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
I FELT like chanting Bogle-like "See de key deh" close to the end of A-dZiko Simba's 'Someone To Tell', the third of 11 short stories in Iron Balloons.
For while there is a great explanation for the strange name of the fiction collection in editor, Colin Channer's extensive introduction, Simba's child character captures the essence of the frustrated storyteller and the feeling of release when the story finally gets out.
In Jamaican music parlance, as Channer points out, 'iron balloon' is a term given to a wanna be artiste who has been trying for a long time to be successful, to 'bus', but cannot. He notes that many of the 11 authors in the collection, published by New York-based Akashic Books, had been working hard for many years before enrolling in the Calabash Writer's Workshop in 2003, "without getting the chance fi' bus'. But see dem bus' now".
No more 'iron balloons' then, are Simba, Marlon James ('The Last Jamaican Lion'), Alwin Bully ('Parting'), Rudolph Wallace ('Siblings'), Konrad Kirlew ('A Little Embarassment for the Sake of Our Lord') and Sharon Leach ('Sugar').
The students join their workshop teachers and certainly no 'iron balloons' - Channer ('How To Beat a Child The Right and Proper Way'), Elizabeth Nunez ('All Ah We Is One'), Kaylie Jones ('The Anger Meridian'), Geoffrey Philip ('I Want To Disturb My Neighbour') and Kwame Dawes ('Marley's Ghost').
Simba's 'bus' is different, as the child who could not find someone to listen to the story gets the chance to tell as he lies in a hospital bed, leg in traction after untold story on out-of-control bicycle meets macca bush and hard ground. "And the story bubble is big, big, big now, and it is so full of wanting-to-tell that it is ready to bus', and it does," Simba writes.
FLOATING WITH INSIGHT
And if there is any doubt about the importance of the stories being told, Dawes makes the matter clear in ending the collection. His central character in Ensom City, St. Catherine, hearing 'sounds of a city determined to pursue its Third World rituals of laughter, dubwise, gunshot, car crash, screwing, hallelujahs, praise and the telling of stories'.
The stories in Iron Balloons are well past 'bussing' stage. They float with insight 'There was an anxious moment there in which the pastor had to choose between looked at as a man who loved children or a father who knew how to control a child," Kirlew writes, while Bully observes 'lightning looks for water. Men are drawn to women's tears', are filled with that often elusive happy gas of excellent lines. Marlon James writes, 'She 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' and are taut with emotion. Leach's 'Sugar' longs for bonding with another woman 'but she immediately seems to forget I am there and starts to eat. I feel useless, dismissed, like a comma almost'.
And they have the capacity to seriously disturb. I heard Rudolph Wallace read his incestuous and so engaging tale 'Siblings', the only one written totally in patois, two years ago and it is as moving now in print as it was then in speech.
Channer and Dawes make by far the longest contributions to the collection, the latter going for the headspace, while Channer writes a moving (emotionally as well as in the setting), humorous, but deadly serious tale of a Jamaican single mother who had applied the extension cord of correction ('I size up all the juicy parts and then I start to beat') at a critical juncture in her teenage daughter's life.
And it is from this story that actor Delroy Lindo ('Sahara', 'Romeo Must Die') will read to open the 2006 Calabash International Literary Festival on Friday night in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
