Title: Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing

Author: Kim Robinson-Walcott.

Publishers: Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 2006. 208 pages.

Reviewer: Mary Hanna

A smart and crackling engagement with West Indian whiteness, Out of Order! delivers what the title promises: humour, knowledge, and an irreverent sense of the (literary) art of how things should go. Kim Robinson-Walcott is a lively writer and a fine scholar, and in this text, the two traits combine deliciously to forefront the work of iconoclast Anthony Winkler, white writer par excellence since, as Robinson-Walcott contends, he writes from the margins of his group and through a voice that could be mistaken for black.

What does that mean? Robinson-Walcott sets out to define exactly what it means in her wonderful, rollicking grapple with the slippery concepts of West Indian whiteness and her exposition of the novels that have set the trail for white writing in the Anglophone Caribbean. Her opening chapters deal expertly with both issues and we come away anxious for more information, more page turning. It may be strange to think of an originally academic text (this book started life as Robinson-Walcott's Ph.D. thesis) as gripping and amusing, but it is so. Out of Order! is perfectly designed to unfold as a serious critique of Winkler's work - one that does not shirk the language of the maitre (famous for pum pum and a discourse on God as peeny wally). Robinson-Walcott writes of Winkler from a cool distance that allows a narrative of aplomb and is a joy to read.

locate Winkler

The first half of the text seeks to locate Winkler and his works in a narrative of West Indian whiteness, while the second half presents close readings of three of Winkler's most popular books: The Lunatic, The Duppy, and Coming Home to Teach. After the opening chapters, which define West Indian whiteness as clearly as it is possible to do and then discusses the texts of whiteness, Robinson-Walcott seeks to locate Winkler in the stream of texts that are written by white or near-white West Indian writers. She presents two superb chapters, 'Transcending the Planter Legacy' and 'Claiming an Identity We Thought They Despised' - the latter bounces off Michelle Cliff's title in her famous text The Land of Look Behind and has appeared as an article in the journal Small Axe. Robinson-Walcott compares Winkler's work and attitudes to those of H.G. de Lisser, Tom Redcam, Michelle Cliff, and Pauline Melville among others, and finds that he stands apart in his literary and personal embrace of the poor black Jamaican people. Winkler is genuinely able to discourse in the language of the people and to show the goodness and the ironic attitudes that underpin their thinking. He makes protagonists of the poor black man, something that is unique in the writing of West Indian whites and follows the trail blazed by Roger Mais, for example. Winkler writes blackness with the language and the attitudes of the black man, which no other white writer has attempted, although there are several attempts (as with the Antoni brothers) to write black women as protagonists. Robinson-Walcott teases out the similarities and differences between the white writers and finds Winkler set apart. His work can easily be taken for that of a black writer, she contends.

In the second part of the text, Robinson-Walcott examines the three selected texts under the heading 'Reading Anthony Winkler'. She discusses the iconoclastic The Duppy under the heading 'Writing the Black Protagonist', and - quite in order - she places The Lunatic under a Bakhtinian header 'Carnival Meets Dancehall'. In this chapter, Robinson-Walcott takes a scholarly approach to Winkler's hilarious and raunchy work of art, the narrative of the lunatic Aloysius who gets himself involved with the power-crazed German tourist Inga and proceeds to try and steal from the Busha. In the course of the story it becomes clear that Aloysius is in fact less mad than the people and the country that surround him - he is the upside of carnival, while the country (and Inga) is playing dancehall. Aloysius's compassion saves him and he ends his story under the wing of a widow woman who takes him in to service her sexual needs while she looks after him. This popular novel was published after The Painted Canoe which had a good critical response but nothing like the reception that greeted the rollicking The Lunatic.

Winkler's growing-up

The final chapter in Out of Order! is 'Searching for the Centre', a thoughtful and provocative engagement with the text of Winkler's autobiographical Coming Home to Teach. Robinson-Walcott draws heavily on her excellent interviews with the author to construct the narrative of Winkler's growing-up in a family that is Lebanese on his mother's side and that was located in Montego Bay for part of its journey. Winkler left for the States at the age of 20, so his experiences as a boy in Jamaica are deep and embedded in the local culture because he was not economically privileged. As Robinson-Walcott argues, his "Jamaican reality, then, coincided with that of the black and poor". Or, to put it another way, in Going Home 'one of the tutors at the college suggests that for a white man he is 'certainly peculiar', and the others jump to his defence: 'There isn't a white bone in Tony's body'; 'him only look white. But him definitely not white''.

Winkler was expelled at 14 but made up for his educational lacks when he went to America, working his way to an MA; he has made his living from writing textbooks. He currently lives in Atlanta which he enjoys sufficiently to have relaxed his dislike of American culture, but his heart is in Jamaica: Jamaica is home. Winkler's teaching post in Jamaica occurred from 1975-76. He left mainly because his American wife Cathy was unhappy here. Winkler went back to a life of writing that would not have been possible in the island. He has two new books that will soon be published, Dog War and The Crocodile.

Robinson-Walcott has written an engaging and thoughtful critique of Winkler's works (except for his short stories) and presented it with élan and style.

- Mary Hanna