Paint the Town Red

Brian Meeks

ISBN 10: 1900715740 / ISBN 13: 9781900715744

Published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, GB, 2003

About this Item

Brian Meeks's novel is a moving requiem for the years of an extraordinary ferment in Jamaican society, when reggae and Rastafarian dreams reached from the ghettoes to the University campus, and idealistic young men and women threw themselves into the struggle to free independent Jamaica from its colonial past. In portraying the the temptations towards tribal revenge that corrupted the vision of change, Meeks's sensitively written and well-structured novel speaks powerfully to the present, when even now, Jamaica's political divisions erupt into killings on the streets.As Mikey Johnson takes a minibus through Kingston on his release from eleven years in jail, what he sees and the persons he meets provoke memories of the years when those who sought to destabilize Jamaican society, fearful of the radical socialist direction it was taking, unleash a virtual civil war. His encounters reveal that few have escaped unscathed from those years: there are the dead (in body and in spirit), the wounded, the turncoats, and those like himself who are condemned to carry the burden of those times. Mikey's quest to discover why he survived when his friend Carl and lover, Rosie, were killed in a shootout with the police draws him to look for Caroline, the other woman he was involved with before his imprisonment. From her he discovers a bitter truth about Jamaica's unwritten code of class and its role in his survival.One of the encounters is, we learn in a postscript to the novel, with Rohan, Rosie's brother. Rohan has suffered this loss deeply, but has survived to move forward, while Mikey, with the stigma of his imprisonment, is trapped in the past. It is Rohan who tells Mikey's story, a revelation that casts a reflexive light on the relationship between the actual writer and his subject.Brian Meeks was born in Montreal, Canada of West Indian parents and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. He has taught political science at the University of the West Indies, Mona for many years.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781900715744

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Paint the Town Red
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1900715740
• ISBN 13: 9781900715744
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 159 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Brian Meeks’s novel begins with the release from jail of a young Rastafarian who was involved in the political violence that erupted when forces hostile to the radical socialist currents within the 1972 Manley administration sought to destabilize Jamaican society. As Mikey takes a minibus through Kingston, his story is told as a series of carefully crafted flashbacks. A series of encounters and the memories they provoke reveal that few have escaped unscathed from those years: there are the dead, the imprisoned, the maddened, the turncoats, and those like Mikey who carry the burden of those times. One of the encounters is, we learn in a postscript to the novel, with Rohan who, at the time of Mikey’s imprisonment, is a youth in a family with which Mikey is involved, particularly Rohan’s sister, who is killed in the shootout. Rohan has suffered this loss deeply, but has survived to move forward, while Mikey, with the stigma of his imprisonment, is trapped in the past. It is Rohan, we discover, who is telling Mikey’s story, a revelation that casts a reflexive light not only on the relationship between the actual author and the events he fictionalizes, but the relationship between the novelist who, whatever his origins, writes from a position of relative security in comparison to the lives that form his subject.

About the Author

Brian Meeks is head of the department of government at UWI, Jamaica. His poetry has been anthologized in the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. He is also the author of New Caribbean Thought, Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, The Caribbean, and Caribbean Revolutions.