Jamaican Literature.Com

Title: A Personal Agenda
Author: Winsome Packer
Publisher: Self-published 2010, 286 pages.
Reviewed by: M. Hanna in the Jamaica Observer newspaper

A thoroughly entertaining first novel by Winsome Packer follows the format of the blockbuster detective novel by starting out with startlingly violent and brutal murders and ending open-endedly with many questions unresolved. This book is a wonderful read but also is full of signs that the author intends to follow up with volume two. The opening scenes introduce the core conflict: the intolerance of black Americans for black immigrants and vice-versa. It is an immigrant’s story, full of detail and angst, and always the simmering intra-racial tensions among native black Americans and black immigrants in the United States.

The murder of disgraced black ex-Congressman Richard Darby and his family in Washington DC, brings the Capitol Police Department to conclude that the dead congressman’s criminal associates perpetrate the murders. But soon there is another savage murder of a black congressman and his family in Nebraska. The law enforcement officials put Carmen Jones on the case. She is the lone black officer in the Nebraska investigation. Carmen is convinced that some personal motive lies at the heart of the murders. She follows her instincts and soon is caught up in an unexpected romance with Detective Brian McKenzie, who leads the investigation on Capitol Hill. She follows the intriguing Jasmine Armstrong, a beautiful black immigrant on the White House staff, until Jasmine confesses in a long segment of the text that details her experience in America where she has come to live for the previous 10 years from her home in Panama. The focus of the novel shifts from Carmen to Jasmine for the last third of the text. Beyond Jasmines confession lies a surprise ending that definitely points the way to a sequel.

Jasmine’s immigrant’s tale focuses the two areas of conflict in Packer’s novel: the refusal to help in the capitol city to anyone who is not able to satisfy the personal agenda of the other person, and the hatred of the two groups of blacks for each other. Jasmine says:

I pulled the door to the phone booth open as a rage toward black Americans began to burn my inside my belly. Why couldn’t these people leave me alone? During the ten years that I have lived in the United States, they had created the greatest barriers in all that I have strove for. I had on numerous occasions wondered by it seemed that they did so little to help or uplift other blacks but were so quick to tear them down.

I had found black American women to be particularly vicious towards immigrants like me, and very rarely found one that would lend me a helping hand.

My experience with black American men was equally disenchanting. They were interested in seducing me or were threatened by my looks and confidence.

These sentiments are explored and illustrated throughout the text with a great deal of enthusiasm, Packer warms to her subject in fine style, working the elements of Jasmine’s immigrant experience for all they are worth. The novel reads well and is highly entertaining. Carmen’s disappearance from the text is another of the signals that a sequel will be forthcoming.

The imbalance in the book that is caused by this divergence into Jasmine’s experience of the United States is not necessarily a bad thing as this novella makes for good and interesting reading. The central issue – the fierce competiveness between the difference groups of blacks in the United States – is an interesting and unusual one. Packer writes with clarity, forging an intricate and convincing detective story out of the serial murders and the sad tale of the immigrant’s woes. Her ‘detective’ voice is sometimes unintentionally humorous, as for example, when Carmen goes to kiss Brian for the first time and is caught up in the nervousness of being intimate with a white man:

Oh God, she thought, I am about to kiss a white man. She breathed. It’s just a kiss and he is just a man…

The kiss was as sweet as tiramisu, and she caught her breathe at the sheer pleasure that his touch evoked. He pulled her closer and kissed her again, more firmly this time, marvelling at the excitement that the touch of her lips awakened in him.

I found this prose fun to read, and funny.

Packer’s narrative moves along smoothly for the most part. It offers an insider’s view of the workings of the job as staff member in a Congressman’s office on Capitol Hill as well as some insight into the life of a female detective. But the real interest lies with the analysis of black against black that is interrogated at each step of the way. Here is an interaction between women and co-workers (Jasmine’s voice):

The three women looked at each other as though they were transmitting some hidden message among themselves. Henrietta turned back to me.

This meetn’ for black folk, honey, she said, shooting the look to her friends again. You one of us?

I drew in my breathe in shock at the blatant affront. The woman was asking me if I was black even though she was half shade lighter than me. I was familiar with the resentment that black Americans frequently directed at immigrants like me. A few weeks after I had arrived on the Hill, one of them had asked another within my earshot, ‘Why don’t they all get back on their banana boats and stop stealing our jobs?’

Packer, a native of Jamaica, writes these interactions with intimacy; she has first-hand knowledge of them and also of the workings of Capitol Hill. Inspired by her own experiences, Packer uses A Personal Agenda to recall the alienation, hostility and impropriety she experienced as a newcomer to Washington. ‘In working on Capitol Hill, I felt that my civil rights had been encroached upon and given that the perpetrators have been others who had fought for their own rights, I found it to be sobering,’ she says.

She currently serves as the representative of the US Commission for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), or the Helsinki Commission within the US Mission to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna. She has served in a number of political and other policy-related positions including border and aviation security advisor to US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, and has worked to advance democracy and good governance in Africa. Packer holds a Masters of Public Administration from George State University and a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from Florida State University.

Winsome Packer’s novel is full of interest and panache, with careful attention to the challenges that face beautiful women in patriarchal settings. Packer has been ambitious in this offering and A Personal Agenda is an entertaining read, but one that requires more to bring about a satisfying conclusion.

A Personal Agenda is available online @ Amazon