"Reverse-Gentrification Of The Literary World"

About seven years ago, Dawn invited me to a concert she was giving at Indigo Café, a small Black-owned café/bookstore in Ft. Greene that has since gone out of business (they still exist online though, and they carry my book, so you should buy it from them if you don’t already have it).

Upon arrival, I learned two things:

1) It was actually a concert-slash-reading with said reading to be provided by a local Jamaican ex-pat author by the name of Colin Channer; and

2) I was mad early. Dawn wasn’t even there yet.

Sociable as I am, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting at the next table, who turned out to be a writing student of Channer’s. We had what I recall as a great conversation, although I suppose any conversation is going to seem vibrant and bohemian when you’re listening to jazz in a café/bookstore in Ft. Greene.

Anyway, after we had been talking for about an hour, Channer entered the café, strode over to us and affectionately rubbed my new friend’s (i.e. his student’s) head. Suddenly, he realized he had interrupted our conversation, looked slightly embarrassed, took a moment to ponder how to rectify the situation, and then, without uttering a word, reached out and rubbed my head as well. A complete stranger. It was a bold and hilarious gesture, particularly considering that – while I am in fact the world’s nicest guy – you wouldn’t necessarily know that to look at me.

So ever since then, I’ve always checked for his work, which turns out to be really good. In fact, from what I can tell, Channer has subsequently become one of Jamaica’s leading literary figures, founding the Calabash International Literary Festival and Writers’ Workshop, and publishing four novels, a book of short stories and an edited anthology.*

Anyway, I mention all of that because he’s hosting a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Brooklyn-based, Caribbean-friendly, independent publisher Akashic Books at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library tomorrow (Thursday). I mean, come on, their motto is "Reverse-Gentrification Of The Literary World":

10 Years of Akashic Press

October 18, 2007 7:00 PM

Brooklyn Public Library, Central Branch

Novelist Colin Channer hosts an evening of readings by Akashic authors: Amiri Baraka [!], Arthur Nersesian, Preston Allen, T.Cooper, Felicia Luna Lemus, and Tim McLoughlin.

*This is kind of a side issue, but Channer was the first writer I’ve read to portray conversations that switch back and forth between Jamaican Patois (a/k/a Patwa) and Standard English, a phenomenon that has fascinated me since I moved to Brooklyn. Virtually everyone who speaks Patois also speaks Standard English, so when two West Indian people are talking to each other, they often switch back and forth for emphasis or to make various kinds of rhetorical points. Now if the people have Jamaican accents anyway, you almost wouldn’t notice that they were switching – it’s mainly a matter of grammar. But Brooklyn is home to many, many folks who speak Patois with a West Indian accent but Standard English with an American accent (usually because they were raised in New York and their parents came from the islands). The point is, if you didn’t understand that Patois was a separate language, it sounds like they’re just switching back and forth between an American accent and a Jamaican accent for no reason.

I hear people do this every day now, but when I first encountered it, I was amazed. Especially because of the way it actually works in conversation – one of the people will switch, then the other one will follow. Then one of them will switch back and the other will follow. And on and on. So their relationship to each other - and their perception of which aspects of the other person's identity are most important at that moment - is overtly encoded in the way they talk. So once I became familiar with the dynamic, I began to really appreciate the way Channer uses that dynamic to provide subtle clues about his characters' frame of mind.