Song of freedom

When Colin Channer came into the office for an interview, I didn’t even reach for the recorder. He walked through the reception area, greeted me like an old friend, and we hunkered down in one of those sterile office conference rooms and turned it into a living room. An hour later, after an intense and often uproarious discussion about teaching, small-press publishing and the craft of writing, we got down to business.

I make note of this because, after reading Channer’s 2007 novella, The Girl With the Golden Shoes (Akashic, $13.95) and then meeting Channer, it’s impossible to separate his writing from his huge personality. Both Channer and the book exude a certain friendly confidence, an inviting self-awareness of where they are and what they are doing. Born in Jamaica in 1963, Channer moved to New York for college when he was 18. He stayed in the States, and now teaches at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, though he’s at Columbia College for the spring as a visiting writer. But he’s also maintained his connection to the Caribbean, running the annual Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica.

The Girl With the Golden Shoes has similarly struck out on its own. The book was originally published as part of Channer’s Passing Through (Ballantine, 2004), a story collection that spanned 100 years on the fictional island of San Carlos. But Channer wanted Girl to stand as a complete work, and after Akashic Books published Iron Balloons, a collection of writing from the Calabash Writer’s Workshop, Channer worked with publisher Johnny Temple—whom Channer calls his “editor and bredrin” in the book’s acknowledgments—to make it happen.

“It was the best work in Passing Through, and I felt like it deserved its own life and own space,” he says. “If I were to die today, this is the book that I would want to last, to be my legacy.”

Part moral fable, part coming-of-age journey, the story concerns Estrella Thompson, a fiery 14-year-old girl growing up in a small fishing village on San Carlos. Estrella’s mother died during childbirth, and her grandmother took her in. At the novel’s outset, a British scuba diver surfaces on the coast of the village, scattering the children who, like their parents, have never seen a man in a wet suit before. But Estrella sticks around to talk to the mysterious man. Soon the story becomes legend, and the elders have an easier time believing Estrella talked to a mermaid than a man who could breathe underwater. When the weather shifts and the fish stop biting, the elders of the village believe it’s Estrella’s bad blood—quite literally—fending off the fish. Forced to leave her village, she embarks on a long sojourn to the capital city without shoes on her feet. Estrella occupies a strange limbo, where she’s not old enough to handle herself, but old enough to think she can.

“It’s a story about a time and a place when there was no adolescence,” Channer says. “You’re a child, and then you reach sexual maturity and you’re an adult.”

Along the road to Seville, Estrella comes face-to-face with the various direct and side effects of colonization: class divides, sexual subjugation and a guilt that pervades both oppressor and oppressee. Channer uses language to manifest all of these themes: Estrella transitions among speaking English, Spanish and her native Sancochie, depending on the status of the person she addresses. The shifting of language also creates a symphonic effect. True to his gregarious nature, Channer uses the music of his birth island as the backbone and backbeat for his writing.

“Reggae, for me, served as a literary model in many ways,” he says. “Its ability to bring together—without conflict—the political, the philosophical, the comedic, the erotic, the tragic, is amazing. No other form of music does that while also being entertaining. I play music. And my music can go around the world and touch many people, but I play music with a particular sound, and that sound is reggae.”

Channer reads as part of Story Week Thursday 17.