first meets Sylvia, confesses that the time they have
spent together has led him to “know how Dizzy
must have felt when he heard Bird play the first
time, like, ‘Yeah, this is the sound I’ve been search-
ing for inside myself ’ ” (70–71).
Despite the infinite possibilities Fire and Sylvia
think they might offer each other, their profes-
sional lives, close friends, other sexual relation-
ships and commitments, and philosophies on
love and life affect their lives and relationship. Al-
though they are intermittently able to meet each
other’s needs, physically and emotionally, they are
unable, at first, to commit to each other and so go
separate ways. After a mountain of individual tri-
als and tribulations, however, they find each other
again, pledge their love, and commit to spend a
lifetime together. “Every day won’t be like this, you
know. Happy and sweet,” Fire reminds Sylvia. She
responds, “I know that. But these will be the mo-
ments that we’ll live for.”
Waiting in Vain is more than a mushy novel,
however. Channer’s characters move, like post-
modern nomads, across borders, from Jamaica
to London to Paris to New York, as easily as they
take the A train from uptown to downtown Man-
hattan. They are at home speaking Jamaican pa-
tois and listening to Charlie Parker, Bob Marley,
or Al Green. They are able to enjoy and critique
hip-hop music; drive through Brooklyn’s Prospect
Park, Chinatown, or Soho; or land at New York’s
Kennedy Airport or London’s Heathrow and walk
through the marketplace in Brixton. In doing so
they come to the realization, in the end, that “Ev-
erything in life is a struggle, and the greatest one of
all is holding that commitment to keep struggling
no matter what. Cause when you lose that one, you
can easily lose it all” (323). Waiting in Vain was re-
ceived with rave reviews.
At the end of the 20th century and the begin-
ning of the 21st century, Channer simultaneously
registers, validates, and challenges the true com-
plexity of the many borders that make up the black
literary tradition of the black diaspora. During his
eulogy for his friend, Fire declares,
And I’m not a Rastaman. But that shouldn’t
matter, because we are here today in the nameof love. And love is bigger than religion. For re-
ligion was made by man... and love was made
by God. So let us walk together and make a
joyful noise and sing that song that binds every
one of us who came across the Atlantic in the
belly of the whale—“Amazing Grace.” (320)Fire seems to speak for Channer in his plea: “let us
walk together and make a joyful noise.” Channer,
whose second novel, Satisfy My Soul, was published
in 2000, seems here to be reaching out to all black
writers, maybe even specifically African-American
writers, on the threshold of the 21st century.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Channer, Colin. Waiting in Vain. New York: One
World, 1998.
Wilfred D. SamuelsChant of Saints Michael S. Harper and
Robert B. Stepto, eds. (1979)
Three years in the making, Chant of Saints is ex-
perimental in form and content. The editors’ main
goal was to present the “contributing authors and
artists in a substantial and varied way” (xiv). To
accomplish this goal, Chant includes only a few
essays, created specifically for it, trying to avoid
being a collection of social commentary or scien-
tific documents about the black experience. Fun-
damentally, Chant seeks to capture facets of black
experience by focusing on music, metaphor, im-
ages, and lyric. Chant negotiates between its roles
of documenting black art and culture in the 1970s
and contextualizing writers and artists as being
“mobile in time” (xvi).
Chant’s uniqueness lies in the editors’ experi-
ment with the genre of the anthology by moving
away from the generic categories: fiction, poetry,
and drama. For example, critical essays on a given
writer’s work are complemented by interviews with
the writers. Consequently, interviews with writ-
ers and poets like TONI MORRISON, LEON FORREST,
GAY L JONES, Derek Walcott, and RALPH ELLISON and
essays on their works are included in the collec-
tion. Chant also includes poetry by Jones, ROBERT96 Chant of Saints