Saluting the life of Mr Anthony Winkler
THE passing last Friday of Mr Anthony C Winkler, one of Jamaica’s best-loved writers, has left a void in the artistic community that will not be easily filled.
Indeed, Mr Winkler was one of those writers who had the ability to give readers profoundly insightful and humourous depictions on the idiosyncrasies of Jamaican culture and the peculiarities of the Jamaican personality.
His novels were widely read, starting with The Painted Canoe published in 1984, followed by The Duppy, Dog Wars, Crocodile, The Great Yacht Race, The Family Mansion and God Carlos.
Two of his most popular novels have been made into movies — The Annihilation of Fish, starring American Mr James Earl Jones and British actress Ms Lynn Redgrave, and his most famous work, a satirical novel titled The Lunatic, the centrepiece of which was a cricket match on the village green, starring Jamaicans Messrs Reggie Carter, Paul Campbell, Carl Bradshaw, Winston Stona, and Tony Hendriks, Mrs Linda Gambrill, and Ms Rosemary Murray.
Although Mr Winkler left the island to live abroad when he was 21 years old, after attending Excelsior in Kingston and Cornwall College in Montego Bay, he was a patriotic Jamaican as was evident from the fact that his subject matter was Jamaican life. In addition, he served as president of the Atlanta Jamaican Association for two terms, during which he co-ordinated Hurricane Gilbert relief efforts, scholarship programmes, and staged Jamaican cultural events, including theatrical productions.
His life as a writer was not an easy vocation, as his first novel and enduring favourite, The Painted Canoe, took him several years to write and more than 10 years to get published. It was the Mike Henry-owned Kingston Publishers that eventually put out the book in 1984.
His experience is chronicled in Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer. And, while he has been most prolific in the writing of books — fiction and non-fiction — plays (The Burglar and The Hippopotamus Card), and films, he made his living from the sales of his textbooks on English. They include Grammar Talk, Writing Talk, A Brief Introduction to Speech, Readings for Writers, Writing the Research Paper, and Reading, Writing and the Humanities.
Ironically, for someone who wrote so many novels, Mr Winkler may well be more remembered for his non-fiction works, among them Bob Marley: My son, written with Mrs Cedella Marley Booker, mother to the legendary reggae icon Mr Robert Nesta Marley.
In Going Home to Teach, Mr Winkler, who held bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, gave an autobiographical account of his experiences during the 1970s at a school in Moneague, St Ann. That, we believe, is one of his most important books.
Against all that background, it was no surprise that the quality of his work was recognised in Jamaica with silver and gold Musgrave Medals in 2004 and 2014, respectively. In addition, his being awarded the Townsend Prize, a biennial literary award recognising the achievement of Georgia fiction writers, in 2014, was most deserving.
We salute the life of Mr Anthony Winkler, a life well lived and which brought joy and cerebral stimulation to many. May his soul rest in peace.