The translations of Latin American writers tend to fall into two categories, both of which reflect the economics of the publishing industry rather than any natural division of their own. American publishers are willing to print works that already have a track record. The books and the authors that have already done well with a Spanish (or French, or Portuguese) audience are the ones worth the gamble. (This may be true of translations generally.) Anyway, it's a conservative approach which, like all conservative philosophies, puts great weight on the tried and tested, the known, the past. Consequently there's usually a considerable time lag between the original writing and an American readership. When we read most of the Latin writing, it's as if we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of drawing the world closer the lens puts us at a greater distance from the immediate scene. Of course there are exceptions in the 'major' authors, like García Márquez or Vargas Llosa. Their works get translated very quickly. But the result isn't always healthy. In this process inevitably these writers come to represent for us the new or the present. And why shouldn't they? They are all we have seen of the contemporary.

To partially rectify this distortion, American publishers will assemble anthologies of new writing. This second category of translations is usually quite a hodgepodge, subsumed by an equally mixed set of motives. Sensing new trends in this country, the publishers will press forward with collections of children's stories from Latin America that might sell in a new market for multicultural classrooms or you'll see scores of anthologies of women writers, and so on. I think there is even an anthology of gay writing by Latin Americans. Wading through these books is fraught with other sorts of distortions. For example, reading an anthology of black writers in South America lends itself to an exaggerated understanding of the voice they command within their national boundaries.

Writers who hail from remnants of the British empire and write in the English language by-pass some of the obstacles arising from these conditions. Instead of the single novel, or the fragments of an evolving career that might be collected in the anthologies, we can get access to a broader body of work, as well as a deeper sense of the writer and the contemporary worlds they describe. Here then are noted some books I've been reading, written by the contemporary Jamaicans, all of whom happen to be women and black.

The catalogues our minds keep! Such a wealth of detail, like fossils embedded in the layers of sediment, just waiting for another couple of thousand years to show up on the eroding surface.

I discovered one of these specimens when reading The Roads Are Down (1993) by Virginia Spence. It's a very short book, her first and only to date. In many ways the novel is rough and incomplete. You can see she struggled with the form and got in a little over her head. Even so it's an interesting book written by a young author full of life. The casual way in which her two narrators reel off strings of misfortunes, snafus, entanglements, and imbroglios is the sort of worldliness you'd expect of these two independent-minded women. One is a real estate agent and the other an architectural engineer. Although the welter of events often lead down dead ends, there is an abundance of day-to-day existence that's lively and familiar. From the novel I got the feeling of contemporary life in Jamaica, or at least this slice of the middle class. And when she mentioned the Blue Mountain brand of Jamaican coffee... I remembered something.

The Wedding Present

I doubt if you knew Olin. He was one of a group of students that I occasionally ran into in Durham. Midway through college he got married and moved to a lonely apartment miles from school. I was quite surprised by his marriage to this dour girl. It seemed like such a dismal match. Nor did he himself appear very thrilled. When he came back from his honeymoon he did his best to suppress an air of defeat about the whole thing. Olin was this boisterous, wily, Armenian who had grown up in rural southeastern New Hampshire, gambled at cards with a passion, took drugs indiscriminately and now he had married this wallflower who scowled at everyone. What was this?

Not that long ago I talked with him on the telephone--for the first time in twenty years. As might have been predicted that first marriage was long behind him. He was living in North Carolina and playing golf with retirees who insisted on calling him "young man." Which boggled his mind. Nearly forty, he hadn't felt young for a long time. In fact he couldn't remember the last time anybody had referred to him as a kid. He couldn't get over it. Where had all the years gone?

"I don't know about you," Olin said. "But I fucked anything with a skirt."

He wearily acknowledged he was married again. I gathered she lived back in New Hampshire, in the other house they owned, but he skipped over the details of this arrangement as if they were unimportant.

Maybe it was old news. Because I remember seeing Olin in his miserable apartment the night he blew back from the Jamaican honeymoon. She had even put up curtains. Here were his chums, come to say hello, and there was his smoldering wife, quite unhappy about our intrusion on their post-nuptial glow. Ah well, things wind down.

Jamaica, man! How was it?

"Good, good," Olin answered. "You guys will like this" He held up a one pound coffee tin that he retrieved from his suitcase.

In bold arching letters over a majestic landscape we read: "Blue Mountain Coffee." What an exotic item those Jamaicans had prepared for him. What ingenuity!

"Jesus, you brought this back through customs?" I asked him in amazement.

"Sure," Olin responded, obviously pleased that this brazen act smuggling dope had made the impression he had hoped. "Who's going to suspect a sealed coffee can?"

Needless to say we had a good time smoking his wedding present. Everyone except his wife, who got paranoid about the neighbors smelling the clouds of smoke that roiled out of the huge conical spliffs he rolled from newspapers. Before disappearing into their bedroom she made a point of telling Olin to be sure to lock the door when everyone left.

The fact that both of Patricia Powell's novels are written entirely in dialect is some indication of how things have changed. Although there have been other examples of this choice, it is striking to think that a woman who has been tutored under the wings of well-known authors at Brown University would find that climate amenable to her work. Writing in dialect is hardly new, but it's a different matter when that dialect is extended beyond the dialogue of the characters to the voice of the narrator. Limiting the use of "broken English" to the characters gives the reader the impression that the narrator is "above" this jumbled speech, more educated and knowledgeable, separated from the creation, omniscient. But Powell's invisible narrator speaks in the same manner as the rest of the poor people she depicts.

Me Dying Trial (1993) follows that portion of Gwennie's life that begins with the conception of her illegitimate daughter Peppy. As she drifts away from an abusive husband, Gwennie is forced to seek the education she needs to obtain a teaching certification. When Peppy grows older her story gradually gains an equal importance.

One of the strangest effects of this immersion in Jamaican dialect occurs when Gwennie emigrates to Hartford, Connecticut. You have the internal sense, the psychological feeling, of what it's like to be a foreigner in this country. The Americans--speaking in their everyday manner--seem to be the ones using a bastard tongue.

I've not read Powell's second book, A Small Gathering of Bones (1994) but I did check to confirm that she continues to use dialect to lay out her narrative. I don't think I would recommend her work. Beyond the startling novelty of the language, I had a hard time keeping interested. On the other hand, this writer is all of 31 today (and was but 26 when Me Dying Trial was written), so there's no telling what she might be capable of in the future, "promise" being the lasting lure in the publishing equation for contemporary fiction.

The most recent work I've seen by a Jamaican author is a short-story collection by Olive Senior, awkwardly titled Discerner of Hearts (1995). Even though she lives in Toronto, Senior's stories are all set in Jamaica. The tales are accomplished, which is to say they're crafted and highly polished. The kind of thing you might expect from somebody with as much experience in journalism as she has apparently had. If I've read her thumbnail biography correctly, in the past decade she's published three collections of stories, two volumes of poetry and a nonfictional work about Caribbean women. Senior's accumulated "professionalism" shows, but professionalism has a drawback: she often elevates technique over raw sensation, substitutes sociological analysis for individual characterization, or distributes blame instead of succumbing to wonder. This is not to say that any of these tendencies is necessarily bad. This author has a great deal to say about modern Jamaica and by implication, the Caribbean once dominated by the British. There are insightful understandings about the maintenance of the English class system even after independence, the strivings of women, the shifting roles of the men who have lost power, the uneasy relationship between the Ras Tafarians and an older Protestant tradition, the corrosive influence of drugs. But these analytical gifts can come at a cost.

-July 7, 1997

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf