Wake Rasta and Other Stories contains seven stories which are varied in approach, style and point of view. This is Ellis’ second collection, published in 2001, and represent a surer more confident Ellis without any loss of the sympathy for his characters and their environment which marked his earlier collection.
By the time the collection emerged some of the stories had already had their own individual successes. Spert was published by Callallo; Hartel had been published in the Caribbean Writer and had won the Canute A. Brodhurst prize. The Rapscallion and the Sea had also been published.
Two of the stories are straight out of the seafaring phase of Ellis’ life; others are out of Central Village where he grew up.
STORIES
Hartel
A young man tries to come to grips with the uncertainties he experiences from a father who is not sure he is his.
Wake Rasta
A Rasta man is needed for the very soul of a society whose children threaten his very existence. Is it possible for the values of a society to survive the next generation’s demands?
Mississippi Morning
A young marine officer is reluctantly drawn into a drug smuggling operation.
The Rapscallion and The Sea
An old ship, a stubborn old sailor, and a half-crazy captain are caught in a mighty storm in the gulf of Mexico.
Shirley’s Temple
A young bank supervisor is caught between her poverty, her morals and her financial and material needs.
Spert
A bright young woman must choose between love, security and driving ambition
The Outlaw
Time and love threatens the independence of a drifter in the Florida Keys
Posted by The Sunday Herald on 28th Feb 2012
uninitiated readers may pick up this volume expecting some sort of treatise on Rastafari. They will be disappointed on that score, but rest assured the feeling is just temporary.
Prize winning author Garfield Ellis (His Flaming Hearts won the Una Marson National Literary award.) is less interested in theology or ideology than in psychology – Jamaican style. The seven stories contained in this collection are essentially brief character studies, inspired and informed by the established but always evolving idiosyncrasies of the Jamaican people.
But rather than indulge in literary caricatures Ellis invests his characters with their own distinct yet credible personas. Think of it as an Atlas of personal conflicts with Jamaica as the principal backdrop.
The title story is indicative of this. A young but hardened gunman his “delinquent-on- the-riser”. Accomplice, an impressionable pr-adolescent boy, his chronically ill grandmother and a local shopkeeper (the ‘rasta’ of the title) populate this ultimately tragic tale of greed and divided loyalties.
The diverse socio-political strands that Ellis weaves together in this story, set at the height of the political tensions that intensified in 1980 are alone worth the read. “Politics” he writes, “thundered down the Spanish Town Highway . . . and split the village in two. Socialist on one side and laborites on the other.”
Juxtaposed in the middle of the book are two stories that speak to the compromises that men of means enforce upon our women folk. “Spert” tells of a young Jamaican woman forced to choose between her rags to riches financial security and the desire for independence. While “Shirley’s Temple” shows a more materialistic ‘heroine’ her ambition. Spert in Particular, is a deceptively simple but powerful examination of the collision between traditional roles , material desires and the need for individual accomplishment that are rearranging contemporary Jamaican life.
Ellis’ chief narrative mode is the confessional, that is, the protagonist themselves tell the story in their own voices. It is the author’s voice however, that shines through.
In one passage, from the abovementioned, “Shirley’s Temple” He outlines the unfolding of a silk negligee thus;
“White laced silk, light as baby’s breath, fell against her hand, she pulled and it unfolded , like silver drifting smoke.
The book is replete with such compact descriptive gems, whether Ellis is addressing intimate moments , the crush of peek hour traffic on a busy Kingston street or the uneasy existence of both the bucolic and the urban in a small town.,
Wake Rasta and other Stories confirms Ellis as Jamaican writer of prodigious talent.
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