April 1, 2009 issue
Arts & Entertainment
Any sign of a kink in one’s hair and one could be accused of having a “touch of the tar brush” (used derogatorily). Kinky hair, frizzy hair, mat down hair, dreadlocks, Afro, crimpy hair, and negro knots were considered indications of African roots.
Then there is lotan hair (wavy), hard hair, press hair (straightened), plait hair, brush hair, wire hair, mat down hair, guinea row hair, and flat row hair. Now if you really want to get down and dirty you tell somebody that they have crab louse hair (the school nurse took a special interest in that hair), and mangy hair.
If you had straight hair, that was considered “good” hair. Brylcreem hair, lotan (silky hair), and hair slicked down with police oil (pipe water), could “improve” your appearance.
Albinos who people called white negroes had whitish, yellowish kinky hair which was distinctive. Later Afro and dreadlocks became fashionable as did braided hair.
Greasy hair was not that great, while blonde hair, especially in females was considered most desirable. Curly hair was suspicious in terms of ethnic origins. Red hair was associated with having a hot, “turkey” temper and being belligerent.
Hair styles came and went. Do you remember the “calabash” cut executed in a backyard or bottom house by a parent, with the calabash used as a template on the head. Everyone in school knew if you had a calabash cut and your ears would be ringing from the slaps to the back of your head. More distressing was the fact that everyone also knew that you came from the poorest of the poor.
Then there was the respectable “square back”, and the tapered back of the Jackson, with or without sideburns. Also brush cut or crew cut of the military and the duck tail or duck’s arse of a movie star.
Salt and pepper hair was an indication of your vintage, like the rings around your neck. When the hair started to thin out and recede, you had more “face” to clean. Over a decade ago when I had a head full of black hair, I thought I was starting to lose my hair. I bought a bottle of Rogaine from the pharmacy which was quite expensive and I thought would bring instant, thick hair.
While I was opening the bottle, a few drops fell accidentally on my fingers. I rushed to wash it off immediately but still ended up having a sleepless night thinking that hair would be sprouting from my fingers by morning! In any case, I chickened out and tried to take the bottle back to the pharmacist but he was having none of it.
There is the Mohawk cut, the skin head cut, and the reverse Mohawk which is the natural state of balding seniors. When I lived in Trinidad, a neighbour suggested that if you went to a farmer’s field and stood around at the fence for a while, you might entice a cow to come over and lick your balding scalp. This would cause the hair to grow back. I never tried it.
I am now left with thin hair, grey hair, balding hair, falling hair and dry hair – ah, the pleasures of aging. However, I don’t believe for one minute that bald men are not sexy and that you have to be covered with hair from head to toe to be attractive to the ladies. I don’t have the hair of Samson but I can hold my own.
In any case, for most of us it’s hair today and gone tomorrow. Enough of this foolishness. Ah gone. If the creeks don’t rise and sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.
Anthony C. Winkler, Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer, Oxford, Macmillan 2008.
A review by Frank Birbalsingh
Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer is the autobiography of Anthony Winkler, author of seven works of fiction and a travelogue Going Home to Teach ; he is also co-author of more than 15 textbooks written for US colleges and universities.
Born in Jamaica in 1942, Winkler has lived in the US since 1962, and has written scripts for films of two of his stories – The Lunatic, and The Annihilation of Fish which features such Hollywood actors as James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder. But Trust the Darkness is not mere autobiography: it is also history, sociology, memoir, travelogue and writer’s manual, for it tells us as much about the trajectory of the author’s own life, activities and beliefs as about Jamaican history, society and education, or American society and education, in addition to practical problems facing a contemporary writer.
Like his Caribbean background, or indeed his writing, Winkler’s ancestry is mixed – Hungarian on his father’s side, and Lebanese or Syrian on his mother’s. His paternal great-grandfather founded a flourishing music store in Kingston, Jamaica as far back as 1884, but his son – Winkler’s grandfather – lost the business to a devious clerk whose successful intrigue meant that Winkler did not enjoy the full benefits of a child in a typical white family in British colonial Jamaica. Still, he grew up in an inherited family home in the capital city of Kingston, and even if they did struggle to make ends meet, his parents had good social connections and employed black servants, not to mention the fact that his mother had relatives who were rich Syrian merchants.
This is probably the most interesting feature of Winkler’s autobiographical volume: that because of his European and Middle Eastern origins, he writes from a minority position within the dominant - typically British-descended - white group in British Caribbean colonial society. His father thus emerges as an energetic, hard-working, if dangerously impulsive man who struggles to support a large family of eight, but is given to drunken rages during which he can be quite cruel, and often beats his wife. Not only that: after they move to Montego Bay, he regularly embezzles money from the company for which he works, and gets involved in an incident that aptly illustrates the brutality and injustice of British Caribbean colonial society.
Although Winkler’s father intends to pay back the stolen money, he is suddenly faced with a visit from company auditors who would discover his fraud. As luck would have it, however, on the night before this visit, he catches a thief red-handed stealing a single tyre from the company’s garage; and later, in court, brazenly testifies that the thief, along with unnamed accomplices, stole: “a long list of tyres, batteries and radios... adding up to more than the amount of his embezzlement - while the poor thief sat gaping with disbelief.”
On the strength of his testimony, the hapless thief is sentenced to: “the maximum penalty allowed by law,” since the court is unlikely to take the word of a poor black man against that of a respectable white businessman. When he reports this incident earlier, in Going Home to Teach, Winkler does not only identify his father as the businessman, but waxes eloquent about the inherent racial and social injustice of the incident, whereas, in Trust the Darkness, where he identifies his father’s role, he simply says that a missionary who attended the trial reported that it was: “like watching Satan testify.”
This is not to suggest that Winkler gives an unsympathetic portrait of Jamaica. On the contrary, he may protest too much by advertising his Jamaican birthright several times in his book. His passion for Jamaica is indisputable. To him Jamaica is: “an unfairly stratified society” and he is shocked, for instance, by the deprived circumstances of his family’s maid Edith whose: “grimness of mind was a way of arming herself against the blows of ignorance, poverty and want.” Even more shocking are his revelations about the sexual services offered by these maids, both to their employers and their children: “the maid often broke in young masters sexually.”
But Jamaica is the subject only of the first half of Trust the Darkness whose second half describes the author’s struggles as an immigrant in the US, first to get a university education and then establish his career as a writer.
If the Jamaican half of his book is more compelling than the other it is because of the author’s passion for his native land and the peculiar conviction of his (minority white) insights into Jamaican culture and society. In comparison the account of his academic and literary success in the US, or of his adventures and explorations there, are interesting largely as another story of immigrant success. This includes the later arrival of his mother and other family members: one brother died of a heart attack while another died as an heroin addict, and his sisters went through multiple relationships or marriages.
Winkler’s title, by the way, “Trust the Darkness” is taken from a sentence: “Above all I learned to trust the narrative darkness” which he explains as follows: “behind every work of the imagination was an autopilot that knew the flight plan. I merely needed to trust it.” This is followed by much similar reflection about writing and life generally. Winkler has much to say, for example, about his first novel The Painted Canoe which was revised over many years and rejected by several American publishers until his mother took it to Jamaica where it was finally accepted. His own contented marriage, his eventual illness with Parkinson’s disease and his troubled family background may influence one final reflection: “I do not know whether or not there is a God. But I do believe in the survival of the spirit after death... I believe what we do here counts for something.”