| Journey to a Better Future |
January 29, 2010
I just re-read Colin Channer's The Girl with the Golden Shoes. I found the story of Estrella more beautiful and more moving than ever. Channer's writing is fluid and hypnotic, and his characters and their landscape are so perfectly rendered and so genuine that I felt as if I were there along with Estrella on her journey to Seville, the capital town of her island. The theme of the novel is universal to humankind -- the struggle for identity and self-determination -- and yet is also very specific to the nature and circumstances of the Caribbean islands with their history of colonial and post-colonial challenges.
What moved me to tears in this reading was how the fate of Estrella mirrors the fate of Haiti. For many of us, an island setting of tropical lands surrounded by blue sea evokes paradise and ease. But for Estrella and for many Haitians, especially following the devastation of the January 12th earthquake, the island that is their home is a prison of poverty, marked by a failure of governments in the past and by constrained possibilities for the future. Estrella wants to escape the fate mandated by the circumstances of her birth and struggles to overcome the obstacles placed by others on the path towards her self-defined destiny. Haitians also struggle today against terrible odds to create new lives out of the wrecked buildings and bodies left behind by the earthquake. From what I have seen and read, the minds, hearts, and souls of the Haitian people remain steady; like Estrella, they may be turned aside by circumstances but they will not be turned away from what they hold true and right.
What Estrella holds true is that she was born for more than the small, isolated community in which she lives. When her grandmother warns her that she will find only death if she goes looking for something beyond what she was born to, Estrella answers, "If I stay here and don't do nothing with myself then that would kill me worse." Having taught herself to read, she yearns to learn more about the world beyond her cove. When an American appears on the beach one day and tells her she can be whatever she wants to be, she knows she wants to be far more than just a fishing girl. The American scuba diver plants the dream and then disappears, leaving her to fend for herself amidst the prejudices of her community and then amidst the harsh outside world into which she is banished. The parallel with Haiti can again be made: the United States policy has been to offer dreams and money, and short-term intervention in times of crisis, but the long-term support needed for education, infrastructure, and industrial and environmental planning has not been given, not by the U.S. nor by any other country. For years NGOs working in Haiti have been working with Haitians to build and provide the necessary educational and environmental frameworks for a better future but more help is needed, and now more than ever. Save the Children, for example, has long-standing programs providing shelter for children, improved schools, health care, and nutritional support and education. They are currently working to provide medical care, safe drinking water, and other relief following the earthquake
The action in The Girl with the Golden Shoes occurs over just a small period of time but within that time, much happens. When Estrella begins her journey to Seville she is young, inexperienced, and trusting. By the end of the book, she has lost the innocence of her youth. Her determination to fulfill her destiny of a better life, however, is stronger than ever, bolstered by her conviction that she alone -- no one else -- can define her own destiny. She wants a better future not as a gift to be offered by someone else but as her right to determine and achieve. I wish the same for the people of Haiti, that they have a future of open and unfettered possibilities, a future determined by their own hopes and dreams, and not limited by the constraints of poverty, environmental disaster, or governmental failure.
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March 11, 2009
Colin Channer's novel, Waiting in Vain, is a great book. It meets every one of my requirements for great book designation: genuine characters, richly drawn; good plot requiring movement and struggle by the characters; change in the characters (growth or diminishment), and absolute fearlessness and honesty on the part of the author in bringing all this about. Channer gives us compelling characters placed within evocative interior (what these people are thinking) and exterior landscapes (he paints wonderful portraits of New York, London, and Jamaica). He gives us a marvelous plot revolving around two artists from Jamaica, one tortured by his past and one fully grounded in his, who have to make profound choices about love and friendship amidst competing pressures of artistic, ethnic, and economic identity. And Channer also gives us great sex (and some bad sex), good food, and enticing play lists of music and books -- and lots and lots of ideas on life and how to live it.
Waiting in Vain starts out innocently enough as an intelligent man's Romance Novel: good, sharp, illuminating prose brings us a beautiful man who meets a beautiful woman but there are obstacles placed in the path of true love, and impediments to the fulfillment of lustful longings. But then that good prose gets the bit in its teeth and takes off, and the novel becomes much, much more than a love story. It charges full steam ahead to deal with the big issues, like how much or how little we allow ourselves to be defined by others in terms of ethnic background, class, gender, sexual preference, and financial status; the roles that fate and destiny and free will play in our lives; and our responsibility to self and to family, as well as to friends and to lovers. Yes, like I said, the big issues. A novel about love and sex becomes a novel about every important question you have ever asked yourself -- and if you haven't, you should.
This is a novel to read more than one time. The prose is too good for just one read, it has to be read carefully and fully, the issues are too many and too important. Channer takes the ideas of his novel and probes and examines them, places them out in the harsh but vivid light provided by the very rich and dense plot. The plot is played out by intense and contradictory (REAL) characters, and deepened through their long and engaging introspections on what is the purpose of everything that we do, the work, the love, the sex, the family, the friends: what ties everything together? This is a big question, the meaning of life really, and there is no simple answer. As in real life, there are too many characters, with too many issues and backgrounds, secrets and burdens, for there to be one answer (although there is the Romance Novel answer: I liked this book so much that I accepted love as an answer but I want a sequel to see how the romance works out, if it becomes a life, a marriage with children, a bonding of time and body and matter and dreams). This novel is never simplistic (although sometimes the romantic language is a bit too simple -- especially between our two main love bugs, which is why I want a sequel to see if the trilling words of love continue through the years). Channer never demands that we see it all from his point of view -- that we accept his answer to the big question -- but only that we see all the possibilities, and make up our own minds.
That is what good books do: put it all out there, honestly and vividly, and then trust us, the readers, to reach our conclusions. A good book does not tell you what to think, or what to see, or what to listen to or taste or touch (although this book gives some great recommendations as well as instructions). A great book shows you the way but you have to follow the path with your own mind, and a really great book, like Waiting in Vain, takes your heart and soul along for the ride too.
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