“You Know You're West Indian if . . .”: Codes of Authenticity in Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain

The moment that makes Colin Channer's Waiting in Vain possible is marked by the anxieties of a global Caribbean community, located in Brooklyn, Bridgetown, Brixton and other spaces. ¹ These anxieties are about the power of a single nation-space to define itself in relation to other spaces. Specifically, in Waiting in Vain, if the United States interpellates all black ethnicities as "African American," what makes Afro-Caribbean constituencies resident in the United States distinctive? There are other anxieties. If the late 1960s and the 1970s marked a period of perceived ideological authenticity in the Caribbean context--the Non-Aligned Movement, kareba suits and caftans, the I-Threes--what defines the present? A different kind of politics? No politics at all? Does economic success for twenty-, thirty- and forty-something professionals, in particular, intensify nostalgia for a Luddite world of dreadlocksed fishermen and no e-mail, a utopia of pristine beaches and hand-crafted bookshelves? Finally, where erotic pleasure is deemed as important as ideological integrity, if not more so, and where the acknowledgement of homoeroticism questions older nationalistic narratives, do sexual identities need to be rethought? Colin Channer's novel responds to these anxieties in interesting ways.

Certainly, his readers seem to think so, judging by their comments on Amazon.com: "I felt truly honored as a West Indian to find a novel that for once shows that we are a fiercely artistic, intelligent, well-travelled and multi-faceted people. . . . I went out and bought John Updike's Brazil and Rita Dove's Through the Ivory Gates," writes one reader. "We" are complex and cosmopolitan, not Hollywood's hokey go-cart-turned-bob-sled champions, nor Seinfeld's country bumpkins. Waiting in Vain not only reveals "us," but shows us how to be even more like us--sophisticated readers of the American writers Updike and Dove. Another reader, noting that he left Jamaica twenty years ago, states that only another Jamaican could allow him "to experience the feelings of what it's like to be raised amongst the upper-class, and [Fire's] rebellion about his times spent in the ghetto and appreciating that way of life and his association with his Rastafarian uncle." And another: "Fire, despite how he looks and what he lacks materially, is a man with compassion and sensitivity." That Fire, the novel's hero, can be read as "lacking materially" and as "upper-class" is indicative of an audience that has varying degrees of familiarity with (or willingness to acknowledge) Jamaica's class system. The comments of two reviewers from the front cover of the paperback edition similarly push the novel in different interpretive directions. The line "Caribbean in origin but global in vision," suggests a cosmopolitanism rooted in the Caribbean, and "Representing a figure all too rare in contemporary romance, African American A. J. 'Fire' Heath, a sensitive, sophisticated man with a good career" suggests the novel's hero as redeeming negative representations of African American males.

That readers blur class and national lines or draw them in different ways in a novel that, I suggest, goes to great pains to make these distinctions important, suggests the overlapping of multiple constituencies. Caribbean nationals who are resident, diasporic, or sometimes both at the same time; African Americans who have Caribbean roots; African Americans who don't; and Canadians, Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans: these constituencies are often rendered indistinguishable by the logic of US or multinational advertising strategies, college application rituals, and police brutality. The constituencies come together or fall apart around any number of fault lines, defining themselves variously as "black," "Asian," "Latino," "people of color." Jazz festivals and a succession of parades in Toronto, Miami, Port of Spain and London, bring these constituencies face to face occasionally. But the anonymity of Internet sites and cable networks offers consumers a chance to imagine themselves as...