Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
A BOOK'S cover is essentially its clothes, its uniform. As such, despite the adage, one cannot help but judge - or at least assume - things about a book by using its cover. After all, that is why those graphic artists and photographers were paid - to give the reader an idea of what lies waiting between the book's covers, to provide an anchor for our impressions.
It is no different with Colin Channer's latest work of fiction, Passing Through. Passing Through's cover evokes the 'island' (that mythical imagined place where tourists come to play and only really friendly people live) feel. More importantly, it promises something sexy within.
Passing Through's cover features a lone woman. She stands with one hip thrusting out to highlight her figure. Her finely arched back is turned and she is wearing a parrot printed bathing suit and matching sarong which offsets her beautiful, flawless chocolate skin. Additionally, the fact that her face cannot be seen adds a hint of mystery, the perfect ingredient for a vacation isle. All that is needed is a well placed 'come to the islands mon' to finish an advertisement for a holiday filled with barely hinted at pleasures.
SEXY INVITATION
Along with the sexy invitation she represents, as a tourist she is clearly just passing through. However, the first and last lines of the text (and if you get that far you should have picked it up long before then) suggest that Passing Through is about more than tourists having a sexual romp on 'paradise'. The book ends with the words, "we're not here forever. We're all just passing through."
It almost seems then that the book and its cover are at odds. How does the sex collide with the rest of the book? Is it simply the hook with which to snag hapless readers intent upon salacious treasure?
Passing Through virtually drips with sex and not all of it is very sexy. It is therefore not surprising that the name also evokes the tourist trade and thus the transience of life in the Caribbean. The Caribbean has been linked to ideas of sex for as much as it has been linked to the search for gold, the love of rum and the growing of sugar, whether it is the place where younger brothers came to find rich heiresses or bored housewives come to get their groove back.
Passing Through is filled with descriptions which lovingly attempt to trace every curve or plane of the female body. Channer maps them as minutely as any explorer would virgin territory. An example of this is the description of Estrella which, interestingly, is given while she is bathing.
"Her waist was tightly tapered and her breasts were little banks of mud with twig nipples. She had no cleavage and standing up her bosom looked the same as when she was lying down but her hips were matriarchal and her buttocks had deep clefts, and when she sank into the stream to rinse, emerging from the slick suds to walk toward the bank, she was the vision of a goddess coming through the clouds."
The scene could have easily been ripped from a soft-porn flick.
Indeed, Channer treats even the geography of the mythical island he creates with a sexual glance. As such, descriptions such as "(t)he harbour was the crater of an old volcano that had shot its load and crashed" and "miles of naked beaches bathing in the sun, thighs of whitest sand just lounging by the sea" are contained in the text. Of course, sex is the language of the explorer who comes to deflower virgin territory of its mysteries and, as such, it is quite appropriate for the text.
SEX AND NEAR SEX
The sex quotient of Passing Through goes even higher when the numerous sex and near sex scenes are added to the list. From beginning to end Passing Through serves up sex. Interestingly, the high level of sex is related to the post-colonial project in the text. In describing the nature of the Atlantic in The Repeating Island Antonio Benitez-Rojo says "The Atlantic is today the Atlantic because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps, between the encomienda of Indians and the slaveholding plantations, between the servitude of the coolie and the discrimination of the criollo-"
Though not quite as intensely, this is the process that Passing Through describes the process through which today's Caribbean writer, if not the Caribbean itself, was birthed. A red 'stories' on the cover gives the suggestion that Passing Through is a collection of short stories. However, the fact that the characters interbreed and feed off each other gives it the feeling of a novel. Though independent of each other, the tales come together to paint a larger picture.
Though the stories take place on the mythical island of San Carlos, there are echoes of the author's native Jamaica. These echoes also fit neatly in with the unimaginative, incestuous naming rituals of Europe's colonising forces, who insisted on populating the region with repetitions of the same place names. As such, the text makes references to places called Mt. Pleasant and schools such as Holy Childhood and St. George's.
GREAT CARIBBEAN ICONS
In creating an evolving Caribbean world, the stories make mention of many great Caribbean icons who passed through in reality. There is mention of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Marcus Garvey, while Bob Marley makes something of a cameo.
The sex and sexuality of the characters allow Channer to explore racial, sexual and social politics in the Caribbean. Even so, several of the females play into the sexual stereotype about the sexual appetite and loose morals of the Caribbean woman. Issues of race, love and loving arrive from the first story in the text, 'The High Priest of Love'. When race and sex collide the issues get complicated, as a black woman may have dreams of a 'brown-skinned child', though a brown-skinned man may well find that he is not white enough for respectability without anything else to prop up his place in society.
As such, though most of the stories take place well before racial equality was an accepted matter, Channer has his characters fornicating up and down the racial lines. The results are hardly ever good, regardless of the beauty of any children produced.
Should one sift through the pages of Passing Through, several of the issues which populate post-colonial texts are disrobed. The stories contain a dash of various issues such as nationhood, race, identity and much more. But the issue that boils to the surface most consistently is sex.
It is a thread that ties these stories together.
