Left: Staceyann Chin reads from her memoirs at the 2009 Calabash International Literary Festival, Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, on Saturday morning. Right: Anthony Winkler reads part of his life story at the 2009 Calabash International Literary Festival, Jake's, Treasure Beach. - Mel Cooke photo
When Calabash International Literary Festival programming director Kwame Dawes asked the large audience at Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, on Saturday morning "Are you ready for a big reading?", there was a resounding 'yes'. And they got, in memoirs of their Jamaican lives by Staceyann Chin, former Prime Minister Edward Seaga and Anthony Winkler, in a reading that put together a lesbian, a 'one don' and a social analyst renowned for his humour.
Interestingly, though, none of the trio fits into the niches carved out by stereotyping of their more public personae. So Chin, her delivery notably free of histrionics, spoke to abandonment in The Other Side of Paradise, alone save for her Bible-thumping aunt when she started menstruating and later denied by her father to her face.
Seaga's reading concluded with his entry into representational politics, but the excerpt from the first of his two-part autobiography, centred largely around his experiences living with the poor in Buxon Town, St Catherine, and Salt Lane, downtown Kingston.
And although Winkler's short story, Greasy Leg, was a ribald riot into a lady tricking some Cornwall boys as she gave them supple leg for their money, his autobiographical excerpt was about sheer pain. Winkler was whipped by housemaster Monkey Mac at Cornwall College repeatedly and mercilessly, Winkler attributing this to his white skin colour and the teacher's sense of social inferiority.
A range of emotions
The audience under the tent was carried through a range of emotions and laughter, silence and many ranges of reactions in between. So, at 10 years old, Chin looked at an egg-shaped blob in her panties and "I know what is happening. I am having the period." Her overly holy aunt, with whom she lived, was reading from her large black Bible when Chin hesitantly approached her and promptly told her she would pay for the napkins now "because it come on you sudden", but not every month.
There were gasps of shared pain when Chin described putting on the napkin the wrong way, so the adhesive stuck to her vagina, and then had to rip it off when it became unbearable. The excerpt ended in a confrontation with the raging aunt, who somehow connected Chin having her period and pregnancy ("make sure you stop talking to the boys over the fence"). When her aunt raised her hand to strike Chin, "I duck and raise the brown pad to defend myself" and as the aunt retreated, a 10-year-old Chin laughed, as did the audience at Jake's on Saturday.
Emotionally devastating
Chin's second autobiographical excerpt was emotionally devastating, being denied to her face by her father Junior Chin at his store after she had worked up the courage to call him ("This is Staceyann Chin and I want to know if you are my father"). Despite their physical similarities, many people saying Staceyann was the 'dead stamp' of his acknowledged daughter, he said, "I never really had sex with your mother." On her way out, devastated, his brother Desmond stopped her and said he is her Uncle Desmond and she can come around anytime. Although Desmond is kind, it is her father Junior who she wants. And Chin concluded, "I want to kill my father, who is not my father. I want to be dead." Chin closed by expressing her love for Jamaica and wish to see the day when lesbians are not abused and have to run away, when "people can say 'she is a lesbian, so wha, a no nutten'".
Revealing the unrevealed
Seaga said, "I came here to reveal the unrevealed about someone whose life is a mystery", noting that he is the only survivor of the (high-ranking) Jamaican political scene from 1950. Members of the audience sang him 'Happy Birthday' when Seaga said his birthday would be the following week. Seaga said a minister once told him, people believed he came off a boat in a white suit and a Panama hat, and disabused all of that notion with the story of his family, starting with his father pursuing his mother to the US and marrying her. In beginning to correct those misconceptions he read from 'Edward Seaga, Shaping History, Volume 1: Clash of Ideologies, 1930-1980', a Macmillan publication.
Seaga looked at his early life mainly through education, from Blake Prep School to Wolmer's (where in an interview to become prefect, the headmaster told him "never warn twice", which Seaga applied throughout his life "although I exercised discretion." Initially, Seaga was interested more in sports, but when he was laid up with athlete's foot, he studied chemistry and that was the foundation for him excelling academically. He went to Harvard University initially to study nuclear physics, but got more interested in the social sciences which allowed him to think, his lack of bedside manner precluding a place at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Seaga actually started to study medicine at the University College of the West Indies, but switched to the social sciences and lived in Buxon Town, St Catherine, and Salt Lane downtown Kingston, a lot of the reading devoted to that period where he studied rural life, Zion and pocomania, among other religious practices.
Comedy wins
In Kingston, Seaga formed a bond with Malachi 'Kappo' Reynolds and wrote a public letter defending him when he was harassed by the police. "I detested injustice and would have many confrontations with the police in later years," Seaga said. The reading ended with Bustamante appointing Seaga to the Legislative Council, marking his entry into representational politics.
When Dawes read the authors' bios at the start of the reading, the biggest cheers had been for Winkler's and Dawes remarked, "comedy always wins out". And Winkler's Greasy Leg did fit into the comedy category.
But his recounting of early life at Cornwall College, Montego Bay, was filled with pain, hated by the older students as he refused to be ragged, confused by schoolwork ("it was like an impenetrable fog had descended over my eyes") and terrorised by housemaster 'Monkey Mac', who caned him mercilessly once a week, with sometimes a double thrown in.
Nothing Winkler tried to appease him worked, and he concluded that it was because he was white, going into discussions of class that centred around the difference between Cornwall Beach, where 'Monkey Mac' swam and Doctor's Cave Beach, where Winkler and his family went to in MoBay. "Though we swam in the same sea, we walked on different beaches," Winkler said, concluding that he was whipped for a panoply of privileges accidentally inherited by birth. And with his wife steadying his papers against the wind, Winkler gave the audience at Jake's a touch more of humour on Saturday morning at Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth.