Short Story - The White Gyal With The Camera by Kei Miller
Kei Miller’s story collection is transcendental— in both form and intent. Published by Akashic as an installment in its Noir series (from Brooklyn to Moscow, Haiti and more), explores Kingston’s dynamics pertaining to “the way its boundaries of color, class, race, gender, ideology, and sexual privilege crisscross like storm-tangled power lines,” through 11 original stories. Colin Channer, editor and Kingston native, lays out his perception of his hometown’s culture, which he likens to that of New Orleans as “liquor-loving, music-maddened, seafood-smitten, class-addicted," and that image comes through loud and clear in these thoroughly well-written stories. Of them all, Kei Miller's powerful "The White Gyal with the Camera," about a white photographer's sojourn in one of the city's grittiest neighborhoods, August Town, is most likely to linger in readers' memories.
It is not so much that the city’s streets are baffling, exactly—at least not to those who live there. But episodes erupt all the time that render Kingston a baroque and startling place. Several of the stories in Kingston Noir succeed brilliantly in reproducing the simultaneously estranging and horrifying effects of urban violence in Jamaica. And there is something appropriately unsettling about the differences between the stories, collected and edited by Colin Channer, such that the sense of being dislodged somewhere puzzlingly dissimilar from the place one began sometimes mimics the feeling of moving through Kingston.
Not much has been written about this collection, or the story “The White Gyal With The Camera” but for starters, Kei Miller pays homage to the tradition of Jamaican crime writers. There is something unaccountable about Kingston’s most macabre and absurd occurrences. “The White Gyal with the Camera” is beautifully turned, also restrained. The most violent thing that happens in that story is the moment when silence is broken by a camera’s shattering on the ground. This moment is amplified by a violation that came before—a woman is seen in her nakedness, nothing too grim, as these things can go. But that’s the point. Miller’s piece succeeds because in a context of over-stimulation, he returns us to the more basic and fundamental forms of violence to which people are everyday subject. The catastrophe of that broken camera is the disaster of imagination foreclosed, the material effects of which are everywhere in the very scenario the story’s eponymous white girl captures and temporarily transforms through her camera lens.
Essay - Fail Better by Zadie Smith
In a nutshell, Zadie Smith says that writing is the loss of what you want to say. Though it’s possible to come close to the ideal, what’s impossible is to capture it entirely; what’s left is an approximation, a best shot, an also-ran. Nobody else is the wiser, of course, because how can they know the perfect thing that was in your mind before you ruined it by trying to write it down? Over time, it’s okay to like your work, to forget the ideal that you were striving for in the first place, to see honesty where you once only saw falsehood. This is probably a necessary step; without it, it’d be impossible to keep writing at all.
Smith’s essay touches on what it takes to make a writer great, and argues that beyond the skill at craftsmanship that good writing takes, it also requires the personal element of the writer’s own truth to give it that necessary X-Factor needed to push something above the fray. Truth, this thing that colors the writer’s work, has become so watered down by our postmodern inability to believe in any absolutes, and therefore makes us all unimpeachable authorities on our personal experience.
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