Wallace Collins – författare

Jamaican Migrant (1965) is the honest and moving recollection of a Jamaican cabinet-maker who emigrated to a new life in Britain. This is the book of a man who has been through the whole story in his own life – childhood in a large and humble Jamaican family, apprenticeship there, the journey to Britain as a stowaway, years in London as a Jamaican immigrant. The author takes us from Jamaica’s coast, the drug-idlers and orators on the beach, the hurricanes, his father’s wartime jazz band, to the problems and sophistication of girls and jobs and solitude in a London winter.

Jamaican Migrant (1965) is the honest and moving recollection of a Jamaican cabinet-maker who emigrated to a new life in Britain. This is the book of a man who has been through the whole story in his own life – childhood in a large and humble Jamaican family, apprenticeship there, the journey to Britain as a stowaway, years in London as a Jamaican immigrant. The author takes us from Jamaica’s coast, the drug-idlers and orators on the beach, the hurricanes, his father’s wartime jazz band, to the problems and sophistication of girls and jobs and solitude in a London winter.

THE EXIT INTERVIEW is a story about the competitiveness between two business, oriented buddies whose friendship became marred by jealousy and envy, ended in tragic circumstances, or at best, melodramatically.

In LOVE IS A DRUM, Pops is a senior citizen who shares the spotlight with Malcolm, a young romantic who projects himself years ahead of his time to emphasize with the old man.

THE EMPTY STAGE is a story that indulges in the often beguiling concept of reality. It speaks to a reality that Billy, a television cameraman, and Walter, a character actor, both finds it difficult to identify actuality.

BLOOD AND WINE is a story that shows the need for our compassion in understanding the vagrant and try to ease if not remedy his eerie, and dismal world of existence.

My endeavor here is to validate and document In Winters Eye what causes me to reflect, and try to recapture, in retrospect, my experiences--events propelled then by my pervasive apprehension of frost. This symbolic cold weather chills me to the bone In Winters Eye, which has now resurfaced in this brooding, but stark and detail reality. Yet, though the metaphorical winter weather doesnt bother me that much anymore, but when I accidentally get onto that slippery patch of racial black ice that camouflages the asphalt Thrue-way as passable, then, it would hit on my wheels and send me careening into a chaotic irrational verbal spin. My meeting with that icy patch on lifes roadway to somewhere, or nowhere for that matter, freewheels my sense of direction as it throws me off my intended course of normal human progress; after which I would struggle to maintain control of myself and the vehicle of my life I am driving down the road, if not to somewhere in the future, but to obliterate the past, where my wheels would swerve and skid helter skelter, luckily, into the shoulder of the Thrue-way for my ultimate survival.

It became a necessity for me then, after meeting head-on the pronounced differences intoned by the assonant and dissonant sounds that racial preference plays out with acrimony, compared with the personal autonomy of my parent culture and the restrictions based on race in anothers. My endeavor to be accepted by my peers saw me struggle to adapt and to assimilate the new culture I enter, of which I wrote about In Winters Eye," or simply to remain, not just as an entity, but preferably that of a functional individual, as in the following.

It is in such an ethnic arena that one jazz-dance to the subtle tempo from the racial nuances afoot, as one tries to keep time to that unique racial beat, sufficient to make one assess ones common experiences with others, keeping in mind, meanwhile, how it was in the countries, I lived and traveled over the years.

In the fall of 1967, it was not a dream I had awakened from, and found myself living a life, akin to that of a spectator perched on a ledge in the balcony, gawking at the happenings taking place below in the arena. My consciousness held sway as I ogled at the vibrant milieu of racial politics happening then in my New York. I was not dreaming either when I found myself living in an apartment in Corona, Queens, as it was my natural evolvement within the trajectory of my migratory, path to the Big Apple. Neither was I having an-out-of-body experience that spirited me from Jamaica to London, then whisked me off to Toronto on a tidal wave, and finally being carried aloft by a big silver bird that landed me in the New York, slab-dab in the middle of the Civil Rights struggle. It was a vast struggle then, and remains so today, though on a higher level as still a living, breathing, a phenomenon that, in the 1960''s, had elicited a mad rush of water to ooze from fire hoses manned by assiduous, if not sadistic, law and order protagonists that swept their fellow American brethren off their feet, and tossed them several yards from the offending fray.

Stanley Dawson is a young Jamaican who volunteers for military service in the Royal Air Force then goes off to Great Britain to fight in World War II. After his arrival in England he becomes a casualty, not from action in combat, but from injuries he sustains during a training exercise. His experience in his weeks of hospitalization, left him determined to overcome the debilitating effects of frost bite he suffered. He recovers enough to justify to himself and his Commanding Officer that he was in Britain to fight in World War II as a Royal Air Force man.

The long term effect of his injury catches up with him, however, soon after his return to Jamaica four years later, where he struggles to maintain himself as the old campaigner of organized combatthe war veteranagainst casual, but a sharp-edged lifestyle of his boyhood friends. It is a way of life that makes him search for a clue to his apparent, irreparable existence. He senses that he is, not only partially incapacitated but spiritually dazed. His illness is made worse by the confusing political trend and the rising tide of emerging differing political opinions and the immediacy of social consciousness then sweeping the island.

In a Quiet Voice is a collection of essays, free verse and stories the writer presents retrospectively as writings he recorded over time. His essays are historical with short stories buttressed and heightened by free verse. The writer dedicates this Word Imagery to the reader as narrative that flows through the book like red wine into the readers