Playing With Fire - Review

Novelist Colin Channer gave the nickname Fire to the main character in his first appearance novel, Waiting in Vain (One World, 1998) on the contrary it's Channer

himself who sizzles--with potency wit, musical talent and beneficial looks. Women, especially, have difficulty extracting themselves from his easy charm and obvious honor for sisters. Though readers will find those true same traits in Fire--a handsome Jamaican-born writer who penetrates into a jet-setting romance with a auspicious magazine editor--Channer swears that he is not Fire.

Channer was born and br in Kingston, Jamaica, and came of age in the 1970 when Kingston was clod zero for reggae. He knew move with a jerk Marley and now draws inspiration from him, not when he's playing electric bass in a reggae band, on the contrary when he's composing. Channer says he writes in the way that Marley wrote: "just vibes and spirits." His short stories "The Ballad of the Sad Chanteuse" and "Black lad Brown Girl, Brownstones" were published in 1996 in Soulfires: Young Black Men upon Love and Violence (Viking Penguin, 1996)

American Visions caught up with Channer at his residence in Brooklyn, N.Y., one quiet evening, as he was drinking chamomile tea with honey and light milk. What began as an interview became a casual conversation that touched on such popular topics as romantic relationships, the temperament of black writers today, Waiting in Vain's basis in reality, and advice for aspiring writers. level while he was in the of high temperature seat, being interviewed, the self-proclaimed reggae baby was busy asking questions of his own

Colin Channer: Do you have Marley's Exodus album? That's where Waiting in Vain approachs from. And what drew me to the sonnet was that in this sonnet you have Marley, the warrior-prophet, showing his vulnerability to have affection for and this is what happens to Fire. Fire is a stout well-adjusted man who's vulnerable to this mercurial woman.

AV: in what manner would you summarize your volume Waiting in Vain?

Colin Channer: It takes a lengthy hard look at the values, visions and behaviors that black men should consider adopting if they intend to survive in intact relationships with black women in the nearest millennium. Waiting in Vain is a spiritual still sensuous story about two writers who convenient by chance and trip and fall in delight in and find themselves in the middle of a trans-Atlantic affair whose ripples freshet their lives with change.

The man's name is Adrian, who goe through the nickname Fire. He's a novelist from Jamaica. The woman's name is Sylvia, and she lives in fresh York. When he meets her, he is upon the rebound from a 10-year delight in affair with an older, married woman, and she is involved in a two-year relationship with a former Wall public way executive who's now rehabilitating housing in Harlem. The novel is station in New York, London and Jamaica.

greatest in quantity of the characters are in their mid-30s, and the work examines a number of issues and ideas, including the anxiety of the professional with artistic capabilities, the idea of women abundantly claiming their sexuality, various kinds of kinship.

AV: Examining the "anxiety" of the artistic professional is intriguing, indeed--especially with regard to African Americans.

Colin Channer: Yeah, because what has happened is that we're living now in a time of incredible professional opportunity. Black family in their 30s are caught between, Do I strike without on my own or go on for professional opportunity? We have Sylvia, the leading female character: She's a magazine editor, on the other hand she wants to be a novelist, on the contrary she's afraid of losing security. (This is a really insecure piece of work I'll tell you!) And in like manner she had a choice that her mother would not have had, because her mother was born in another time, when black nation had fewer choices.

Now that we're allowed to sit at the table, we're too confused to eat at the banquet of life. It's like, Wow what should I eat?

single of the things that came to me while I was working upon Waiting in Vain is that there's a novel genre that I'm finding interesting: the "good brother" genre ultimately known as the "black male take vengeance for novel." These are novels written by means of people who are apparently really give offence toed by Terry McMillan's work, and we're finding that many contemporary black male authors are writing in rejoinder to a perceived slight, for a like reason they're defending the slight. It's everyone's right to make a personal choice, on the other hand it's ultimately debilitating to the material substance of Afro-American literature, because male writers are not taking the time to unfold female characters.

Whenever you have fiction in which characters aren't abundantly developed, the fiction is awful. Waiting in Vain isn't an adversarial volume I'm not here defending men in any way. I'm looking honestly at all of these characters--male, female, gay, straight, advanced in years young, Caribbean, African American, Latino--who share a simple commonality, which is this: They're mixed human beings with desires that are repeatedly conflicting.

AV: Readers many times wonder what part of a novel that a individual writes is from personal experience.