If I could write this on zinc,I would write it on zinc

It is true that even across the region of the Caribbean what I am now calling “zinc” is in fact called different names in the various dialects spoken from Kingston to Georgetown to Port-of-Spain. Sometimes it is not known as zinc at all but as other metals: corrugated iron, tin roofs, aluminium sheets. Other times it is known by the verb/adjective which describes the process by which these other metals are coated with a layer of zinc — “galvanize”. But in Jamaica it is simply called “zinc”, that material which forms a skirt around building sites all over the world, which glistens under the hot sun of shanty towns in Mumbai and in Soweto, and which has become the rusting roof or fence or wall of a great many of the houses in Kingston or Spanish Town, Jamaica.

Much of my ongoing research is represented and explored in this paper, but it is just as much a personal account of a creative writer considering matters of craft and the materials which give that craft both physical and (perhaps oxymoronically) metaphysical substance.

I wish to start with a generalization: as creative writers (like all artists) we often arrive at our projects via the faintest of roads and the smallest of paths — via whims, small impressions, fleeting ideas. Some of these might be quite banal in and of themselves but when forged together they become the many-laned highways over which heavier things are trucked. This paper is therefore an attempt to bring together some of the whims and impressions, the faint roads and small paths — that have led me to this desire to write a piece of literature on a piece of zinc. The paper is divided into untitled but numbered sections, each describing one of these “small paths” or “whims”. The larger project of writing literary work on zinc is a real one which I am presently embarked on. In 2013 I won the Rex Nettleford Cultural Studies Fellowship to complete said work, but rather than a description of that ongoing project, this paper functions as a kind of map of the thinking that led me towards it.

1

The material evidence of my first sojourn into creative writing is still kept in my father’s chest of drawers. It is a large orange scrap book — standard issue to grade 1 and 2 students in Jamaica. Inside this particular scrap book is a fairy tale that I must have written when I was six or maybe seven. It is complete with illustrations. The story is a simple one: a mouse — apparently a very ugly mouse — happens across a fairy godmother who notes the mouse’s ugliness but also the goodness of his heart. In rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter, the fairy godmother says a chant and grants the mouse his earnest wish to be made handsome.

The story effectively lays bare my own insecurities as a child, so that when I come across it today I feel rather exposed as if had found a diary I was not ever conscious of writing. I also feel sad that the little boy I was, should have felt so inferior in the world, and that in the space of fiction he should have written so many truths.

The penmanship found in this orange scrap book is the big, unsteady letters of a child just learning how to form the letter A, and the letter B, and the letter C, etc. It is the joined up, cursive writing of a Vaz Prep child. And I wonder if when we get that close to writing, if when we form words by the movement of our own hands, by our own personal penmanship, if it isn’t natural that something personal should not come out. This is a question I want to provoke throughout this paper — the link, if any, between what we write about, and the tools that we write with.

I began writing again — and not only writing, but imagining myself as a writer — when my father brought home a computer to Forsythe Drive. It was an Acer laptop and on it was the program Word Perfect. We also had a dot matrix printer — the kind which had to be loaded with sheets of paper with perforated edges with holes on the side. You had to line up the holes to the spaces in the printer, then tear them apart after printing. And it is these two things — the computer and the printer — that I see as much more fundamental to my formation as a writer. The “typed” word, much more than the handwritten word, held a particular power over me. The typed word resembled words found in books, and that I too could type convinced me that I too could create books.

I typed and printed out three or four novellas, and then my first novel between the ages of 14 and 16. The literary merit of these attempts was, as you would expect, dismal and those stories have since been burned. The computer and printer, however, have remained faithful tools in my own craft. The practice and craft of writing (for me) simply does not exist outside of these technologies. My good friend and neighbour, the South African novelist Richard Mason, confessed recently that he has been teaching himself to write by long hand — and says that this has given a new discipline to his novels. For myself, barring that early fairy tale about the mouse, paper and pencil have not been my tools; the computer has.

2

In 2006 I was putting together an anthology of New Caribbean Poetry (Miller, 2007). This act of curating literature, choosing one poet over another, necessarily makes editors and anthologists aware of their own tastes and biases. In the best scenario, the anthologist will reflect on these biases even if he or she doesn’t feel convinced to change them. In the New Caribbean Poetry project I became conscious of, and to some extent worried about, what I began to suspect was my elitism. Of the eight poets in the collection, six either had or were in the process of completing their PhDs; and while they all used a range of linguistic modes and flourishes which could be located in a Caribbean soundscape, I would not say that any of them were using local dialects in an especially flamboyant or challenging way. You must not misunderstand me, for in no way was this sterile poetry. From Christian Campbell to Shara McCallum to Tanya Shirley, these were poets who knew how to surprise with images, how to excite with language, how to engage readers, how to create voices that sang from off the page. Yet, language-wise in this “new Caribbean” that I was championing there were new Lorna Goodisons perhaps, and new Derek Walcotts, but no new Louise Bennetts, no new Linton Kwesi Johnsons, maybe even no new Kamau Brathwaites. While I don’t want to enlist myself into that false project whereby the members of an older generation become categories and we look uselessly for their reincarnation in proceeding generations (art simply doesn’t work like that), I was still struck by what was either the relative linguistic safeness of my generation, or the relative safeness of my choices.

Microsoft Word, however, did not find my choices as safe as all that. At the very end of the project, the computer program seemed to have finally had enough and was no longer willing or able to contain these two hundred plus pages of Caribbean Poetry. The gentle sprinkles of dialect had managed to cause a “ruption” and I received a haughty and affronted error message the likes of which I had never seen before, nor since:

There are too many spelling or grammatical errors

in your document! Spellchecker is shutting down!

It is probably since then that I’ve had this whimsical idea of a kind of Caribbean writing that sits uncomfortably in the spaces that have tried to contain it — on Microsoft Word, or even on the pages of an anthology — a kind of writing in search of another, more appropriate medium — Caribbean writing in need of what Bolter and Gruisin have theorized as “remediation” — a theory we will return to soon.

3

The Jamaican novelist, Michelle Cliff, feels an anxiety that rises almost to the pitch of hysteria (purposefully and artfully so) when she looks back and considers her place as a brown woman in the wider world but as a white woman in Jamaica. She occupies a complicated space. Cliff reflects on her island childhood and is able to recognize her family’s relative poverty when placed in a global context, but their privilege, largely uninterrogated, when placed in the local context. For on the one hand her grandmother’s house has no running water or electricity; her chimmy pot is collected each morning by the same grandmother who empties it. On the other hand, this grandmother is the “redwoman” of the district who owns six acres of land, devoting some of it to the growth of sugar cane. There is even a sugar mill on the property and so the unmistakable echo of slavery and plantation life, plantation politics and plantation hierarchies resound through Cliff’s growing up. Michelle Cliff’s childhood friend is the dark-skinned Zoe, but she never visits Zoe’s house; Zoe always shows up at hers. They go to very different kinds of schools in Kingston. When they play cowboys and Indians, Zoe is always her “girl”. Importantly, Cliff has the ability and means to come and go from the island, though this freedom of movement also becomes its own sort of disinheritance. This is to say, Cliff is disinherited from Marcus Garvey who she is told, “is not our people”; she is disinherited from patois, which is not the proper way to talk; she is disinherited from Blackness.

In London, studying and researching, Cliff is visited by a cousin — darker in complexion than her and more obviously accented. They go to a restaurant and are not served. This is a first for Cliff who before that was able to “pass” as white but now with the presence of her cousin is marked as “brown”. Cliff exclaims that she hates the “fucking English” (Cliff, 2008: 22). Her cousin — perhaps unable to understand his sudden darkness in the world (for in Jamaica he too would be seen as almost-white) is insistently forgiving — “No, man, the girl is just busy” (2008: 22). They move on to another restaurant in the theatre district where the cousin now meets up with his white friends. At some point in the night the cousin and friends begin to laugh hysterically and mock the effeminate gestures of the waiters: “‘Why you want to bring us to a battyman den, lady?’” (2008: 22) he asks Cliff, who is silent, struck by how easily one can turn from victim to victimizer, and also hurt by a cousin who doesn’t yet know that she is a lesbian.

Things get even more complicated at the end of the night when the drunken cousin insists on sleeping with Cliff, and she has to find a way to shake him off.

When Cliff brings together this personal history, along with anecdotes about the abuse of Jamaican house-mistresses over their housemaids, she begins to feel and to channel a certain kind of rage. She suddenly wants to write a new kind of narrative to contain the things she has to say to the world at large, and to Jamaica specifically. However, the tools of her craft suddenly feel insufficient to the task.

The now seminal essay which contains these reflections has, of course, been typed, word-processed, aligned, type-set, fed through printers, copied, bound, committed in its final form to ink and to paper — and yet its very title speaks to the insufficiency of that material, and the desire writers occasionally have to find other containers for their messages. Cliff’s title, which the present essay riffs off is: “If I Could Write This In Fire, I Would Write This In Fire”.

4

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s helpful theory of remediation is usually mobilized in our increasingly digitized age to understand the movement of a variety of genre practices into or onto new technological or technologized spaces. A play which becomes a TV show has been “remediated”. The phone conversation transformed into a Skype interaction is, similarly, an act of remediation, as is the handwritten letter transformed into the email, or the flip chart which eventually evolves into a PowerPoint presentation.

While “[t]he goal of remediation” they write “is to refashion or rehabilitate older media” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 56), the older medium is never quite forgotten. They explain:

[T]he new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. (1999: 47)

Emails, then, which hang on to the language of “CC: carbon copies”, and “BCC: blind carbon copies” imagine or remember processes that have nothing to do with the present technology. The book on an iPad with its animated pages is also an act of remembering. And that on our computers we have “documents” and “files” contained inside “folders” is yet another way in which technology constantly remembers and is dependent on practices that precede it.

Bolter and Gruisin almost always imagine remediation as a sort of improvement, the incorporation of newer technologies, but I would like to extend their theory and imagine remediation more neutrally — as simply the movement of a genre practice across media or materials — not necessarily an “improvement” but merely a travelling. For if the print book turned ebook has been remediated, the ebook which is turned into the print book has not been un-mediated or de-mediated, or even un-remediated.

I want to further suggest then that certain practices can be remediated onto spaces which are not necessarily technological spaces. Contemporary writing can indeed be remediated onto something as old and rusty as a sheet of zinc.

But writing on a sheet of zinc calls a kind of attention to itself. The medium does not in any way shrink from our gaze and thus challenges a core aspect of remediation theory. For Bolter and Grusin correctly point out that new media are almost desperate to disappear. New media try to perform the lie that the experiences they provide are not at all mediated, but, rather, that they are IMMEDIATE. New media try to give an experience of what we might call “there-ness”. The good novel grips us, as if we were there; we put on 3D glasses to be right there in the film, etc. Remediation theory helps us to remember the fact of media and materiality; through its lens, things which try to remain invisible, suddenly reappear. But even putting theory aside, the very act of remediation brings with it a necessary consciousness of media. The novel, for instance, which had too long been synonymous with the technology that housed it (the book) has more recently been reminded of its materiality. Readers are now as aware as they ever have been of the platforms on which they can read the content of a novel — physical pages, Kindles, Nooks, etc. For a longer time consumers of music have also been aware of the various platforms through which they can engage with a musical album — vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, iTunes.

I suggest, then, that remediation should be seen in this frame as well — not just the movement from an older format to a newer format, or from one format to another format, but also the reminder of format. That which pretended to be unmediated is now remediated.

For creative writers and artists, times of remediation offer new and exciting possibilities as they exploit the specific potential in the materials they choose to work with or on. Essayists who have taken to writing blogs now use hyperlinked narratives that can only be contained on the internet; Jonathan Safron Foer’s The Tree of Codes (2010) with its literal holes in the text prevent it from easily being digitized. It is a book of this century, from a major writer, that cannot be downloaded on Kindle, but rather insists on its tactile experience. Alan Trotter’s project of tweeting in real time, over the course of a year, the torture logs of a prisoner from Guantanamo Bay gave followers an experience that would have been impossible in traditional book format, or even on any other internet platform; at unpredictable but specific times, followers were suddenly alerted to what would be happening NOW, and NOW, and NOW. You might say it gave them a profound experience of “there-ness”.

Writing today is increasingly remediated, that is to say, reminded of its medium — its digital or its physical substance. This is good news for writers who can choose and exploit the precise number of dimensions they wish to work in. In this time of profound remediation, I suspect that ambitious creative writers all around the world will go earnestly in search of other materials, other containers, as it were, for their craft. They might not all be impressed by and drawn like sheep to the bells and whistles of digital spaces (though many will use them incredibly); others, who have suddenly been reminded of the importance of media, will look for spaces that might offer different and newer possibilities.

5

I have come round to the opinion that as a writer what I must concern myself with — what I must go out and seek — is not just material to write about, but material to write upon; that sometimes I should not look for depth, but for surface, and that the surface itself can change the writing; that so much of how we understand genres and how genres work and move and affect the world has to do with the cultural significance and capital (or lack thereof) of the material on which they are written.

So what then — if not after the paper, at least other than the paper? What then, other than fibre optics? What then other than the tiny phone screens on which a younger generation is perfectly comfortable reading the essays of Henry James?

Put like that, it must be immediately apparent that there is no limit to what we can imagine, to what in fact has already been imagined, to what has been used over the years: writing on bodies, on trees, in hedges, on train tracks, on sky, in sand, on dirty windshields, on walls and yes, on zinc fences.

If I may, a poem I wrote and published a couple years ago:

“This Zinc Roof”

This rectangle of sea; this portion

Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat;

This that the cat steps delicately on;

This that the poor of the world look up to

On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled

Heaven they could be lifted into.

God’s mansion is made of many-coloured zinc,

Like a balmyard I once went to, Peace

And Love written across its breadth.

This clanging of feet and boots,

Men running from Babylon whose guns

Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives; this galvanised sheet; this

Corrugated iron. The road to hell is fenced

On each side with zinc —

Just see Dawn Scott’s installation,

A Cultural Object, its circles of zinc

Like the flight path of johncrows.

The American penny is made from zinc,

Coated with copper, but still enough zinc

That a man who swallowed 425 coins died.

This that poisons us; this that holds

Its nails like a crucified Christ, but only

For a little while. It rises with the hurricane,

Sails in the wind, a flying guillotine.

This, a plate for our severed heads;

This that sprinkles rust

Over our sleep like obeah;

This that covers us; this that chokes us;

This, the only roof we could afford. (Miller, 2010: 12)

I present the poem as a catalogue of impressions that have indented themselves on my own mind — my own musings on the material and the potential in a sheet of zinc. I must acknowledge my subjectivity in this, for the present essay does not wish to insist on the importance of corrugated iron to Caribbean communities — a material which is hardly unique to that landscape but is found in the wider Commonwealth and indeed the wider world. Yet, it would be just as silly to deny the way that zinc does seem to mark and define much of the territory, especially the urban interiors, almost as much as coconut trees and beaches seem to define the coast.

Zinc has even become a common surface for painters, a canvas for visual artists — as in Dawn Scott’s installation “A Cultural Object” or more recent work by Matthew McCarthy in Jamaica. However, it has not become a surface for authors. Even if we were to acknowledge the ways in which zinc walls have provided surfaces for producers of text, such textual artists are never elevated to the position of “author”. Here I am of course recalling Foucault’s idea of the author function — his insistence that certain acts of writing are not considered as having a proper “author”:

[W]e could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author function” while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer — it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor — it does not have an author. (Foucault, 1991: 107–8)

We might add to that list: placards have protestors, they do not have authors; tombstones have engravers or etchers or elegists, they do not have authors; walls have graffitists, they do not have authors.

6

If walls have graffitists, not authors, there is one great exception in the Caribbean. The Guyanese poet, Martin Carter, is known for his political poetry, and yet many sympathetic critics have been uneasy with this label — not because it is unfair or because Carter would not have approved of it himself — but because it seems to locate Carter, or rather to relegate him, to a place outside of craft. Stewart Brown writing in the introduction of a critical compendium on Carter asserts:

It was too easy for a casual critic or anthologist to settle for a version of Carter as the anti-colonial radical who swore to use his shirt “as a banner for the revolution” and who consequently wrote “plain bad verse” — as one commentator asserted — putting his cause before the necessary craft of making poetry. Such a view of Carter could not have been sustained by anyone even halfway seriously examining his work. (Brown, 2004: 7)

But Carter was indeed a socialist and a revolutionary and towards the end of his life — or so the story goes — he lived under strict surveillance. In fact, it is because of this surveillance that we have access to some of his later writings. As the government snapped photos of Martin Carter and his house they were in fact snapping pictures of his zinc fence — the surface on which he had begun to write. Photographer, then, as unwitting anthologist and publisher.

As an established author, one of the first Caribbean writers to be published by an internationally reputable press, Carter lends his authority to the surface of the wall. In other words, its writing suddenly becomes not graffitied, but authored. Earlier I spoke of writing and writers in search of tangible material, but now I’m suggesting that there are local writing practices that are in search of authors and authority — in search of capable practitioners who are willing to consider and expand the potential in things such as walls and in zinc.

It seems to me that we spend quite a lot of time thinking about the short story, for instance, as a marginalized genre when it should be obvious that there are a great many practices of writing that have been ignored in even more profound ways — and not just by critics, but by authors as well. Of course, critics and authors should feel no obligation towards the kind of practices I am describing, though I suspect that certain kinds of writers, those of us lumped into this strange category of “world writers”, might find it useful, even exciting to occasionally turn our attention to very local practices.

It is almost certainly a risk, for the kind of writing I am now championing is so culturally specific, so locally placed, that it almost never imagines itself travelling — something that we see as a definitive marker of world literature. You cannot, however, pop a sheet of zinc or a portion of wall into a facsimile machine and have it spit out copies to be dispatched to bookstores around the world or purchased on Amazon. The kind of writing I am describing is profoundly located within its specific society and speaks profoundly to those who can physically engage with it.

It is worth nodding to the obvious, that writings such as Martin Carter’s imagine themselves as belonging to a biblical genealogy, the writing on the wall as at the feast of Belshazzar — the hand which Rembrandt and John Martin capture so well in their apocalyptic paintings — the hand that wrote to the decadent banquet “Mene mene tekel”: For you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

How interesting it would be, if in a creative writing programme a brave student would choose the wall as her medium, and say that she was not exactly interested in the aesthetics of fiction or non-fiction or poetry per se, but something closer to prophecy. Such risk-taking could usefully disturb and reinvent genre. As we think about writers around the world attending to the matter of “craft” perhaps we should allow ourselves to think beyond the novel, or the short story, or poetry, or any of the usual suspects — to think also about very different kinds of surfaces onto which authors might begin carefully to craft text.