Laura Tanna

One of my favourite couples lives in London, and yes, he is a writer and she a former actress, though if you can catch her in a good mood she still does diabolically accurate and funny impersonations. I'm referring to Jamaican-born Evan Jones and his wife Joanna. He's probably best known in Jamaica for his poem 'Song of the Banana Man' and the script he wrote for the BBC television series, The Fight Against Slavery. Because of that series, vastly superior in my opinion to the more cliché-driven Roots which was so popular in the United States, I'd interviewed Jones for an article in the Jamaica Journal in 1985 and we've remained in touch ever since.

In Europe, he's best known for the movie scripts he's written and having worked with director Joseph Losey who had to move to London to work after he was blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. Jones has written scripts for films with actor Michael Caine, Elizabeth Taylor and the French actress Jeanne Moreau, among others. Anyway, we were celebrating the publication by Macmillan Caribbean of his new novel set in Jamaica, Alonso and the Drug Baron.

Salient nuggets of truth

What Evan didn't know is that I was bringing them a copy of Kim Robinson-Walcott's new book, Out of Order!, recently launched by UWI Press and based on her dissertation about Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing, encompassing 'near-white' as well. A former editor of Winkler's and the person responsible for getting The Painted Canoe and then The Lunatic first published, Robinson-Walcott succinctly draws on the most salient nuggets of truth in Winkler's six books, including his autobiographical Going Home to Teach and shares her own insights with us, so that someone who has never read any of Winkler's books could come away with an intimate understanding of his body of work, though without any experience of laughing aloud at his funniest scenes.

A white Jamaican, in his novels Winkler writes from the point of view of his poor black protagonists. In examining this, and by bringing in observations from various sociologists and writers, Robinson-Walcott forces readers to acknowledge that sometimes racism and prejudice exist towards white West Indians, as well as brown and black, a topic that UWI's intelligentsia usually prefers to ignore in favour of dealing with the more obvious aspects of slavery's impact on West Indian social history.

One leading author told me he didn't realise that white West Indian writers had acceptance issues - a topic that could be explored more fully in the future. Winkler's own first reaction to the book was something along the lines of choosing not to read it as he would rather be Anthony Winkler than read about him. Rather a sensible reaction in point of fact.

A chapter in Out of Order! deals with Evan Jones' first novel, Stone Haven, based loosely on his family in Jamaica and the interview of him in Jamaica Journal, but his second novel, in which his protagonist Alonso is a black Jamaican, had not come out at the time of Robinson-Walcott's study, unfortunate in that it would have been interesting to see her reaction to it in relation to her study. Nonetheless I was able to discuss Robinson-Walcott's chapter on Jones with him on a second meeting. Remember, this is a man who upon graduation from Haverford went to Palestine and worked with the Quakers for the United Nations in 1949 after the first Arab/Israeli War and at the age of 21 found himself in charge of a refugee camp of 30,000, so he has seen extreme suffering on an international level, just to give you a little background. Jones' reaction to Out of Order! was this:

Jones' reaction

"I joined a West Indian group of writers when I first came to London (from 1956) but then decided I didn't want my nationality to become the reason I was published or not published. I'm a writer. I've written some 15 screenplays and Alonso and the Drug Baron was written for me, to please myself, because usually I've been commissioned to write.

"I reached into my childhood in Jamaica to write Alonso. I see him as Anansi - that and I'd sailed recently in that part of the Jamaican coast so the scenes were vivid in my mind. I've written characters who are German, English, Inuit (Eskimo), Jamaican but I never set out only to write from the point of view of colour. I would never have written Stone Haven if I'd thought it would be looked at purely from a racial point of view. Race is part of it, and part of life, but life and art are about the human condition as a whole."

Please note: In the article 'Trekking through Ireland' published in The Gleaner of Wednesday, August 16, there were some errors which are corrected as follows: Kenmare is in County Kerry; an editorial cut eliminated a paragraph on Galway City, which is the place to which we would not return, not Ashford Castle which is lovely, though expensive; the Republic of Ireland is peaceful NOW, though its history is not.