Why Marlon James Decided to Write an African “Game of Thrones”
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
A long read so I'm not going to post the whole article, great read though!!!
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
A long read so I'm not going to post the whole article, great read though!!!
Last fall, I met James, who was about to publish his fourth novel, at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. He is forty-eight now, and teaches creative writing at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He splits his time between Minneapolis and New York, where he rented an apartment, in Williamsburg, last winter. His third novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a cacophonous epic with dozens of story lines spiralling around the 1976 assassination attempt on the life of Bob Marley, won the Man Booker Prize, in 2015, and became a best-seller in paperback. It was optioned, first, by HBO, and later picked up by Amazon; Melina Matsoukas, best known for her work with Beyoncé and on the TV shows “Insecure” and “Master of None,” was attached to direct. After winning the Booker, James told an interviewer that he was going to “geek the fukk out” and write an “African Game of Thrones.” The first installment of what he calls the Dark Star trilogy, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” comes out in February.
James, who is six feet two and muscular, has a scar between his eyebrows, a scruffy beard, and shoulder-length dreads that he often ties back in a low ponytail. He carries himself with a swagger that he dates to his first visits to New York, in 2004. Kaylie Jones had sent the manuscript of “John Crow’s Devil” to Johnny Temple, the co-founder of the indie press Akashic Books. Like all of James’s fiction, the novel is messy and incantatory, narrated with the distinctive ring of fevered speech. “Make we tell you bout the Rum Preacher,” Part One of the novel begins. James had wanted to write a “noirish, magical-realist fable” about Jamaican rural life, he told me—a story that wouldn’t idealize its pastoral setting. (No “stern grandma getting crawfish from the river,” he said.) In the book, a new preacher attempts to purge the village of sin and ends up unleashing disorder. A girl remembers a man’s “jerky balls” slapping against her naked mother; a man called the Contraptionist is struck by lightning while mounted in a machine he built to “fukk cows of any size.” The church congregation flits from religious ecstasy to near-demonic possession.
Temple loved it. “It reminded me of Faulkner, of Steinbeck, of Toni Morrison—the Old Testament strength of the imagery, this deep, rumbling, roiling heart and soul,” he told me. But one thing worried Temple, James said: the novel’s depiction of homosexuality. It’s framed as a product of abuse and a source of shame. While Temple was editing the book, he asked James for his views on the subject. James flinched at the question, assuming that Temple was asking if he was gay. “But he said, ‘I just have the worry that you’ve written a homophobic novel,’ ” James recalled. “I told him that I was writing about a homophobic society. He said, ‘Well, there’s a fine line,’ and he was right. We cut a lot of that shyt out of the novel, thanks to him.” (Temple’s recollection of the exchange is fuzzy; he said that the manuscript had “maybe some homophobic elements” but that he’d always intended to publish it.)
For a writer who once lamented that no one would ever read his books, James’s timing is auspicious: among the sort of people who pay attention to the Booker Prize, snobbery about wizards and dragons and aliens is increasingly passé. The kind of realism that tends to predominate in literary fiction is “as fantastical as sword and sorcery,” James told me. “The world of a lot of these novels is super white, super middle-class, women only appear in a certain way. That isn’t real life! There are black people on Nantucket! We’ve given social realism this pride of place as the thing with the most verisimilitude, but there’s more verisimilitude in Aesop’s fables. Literary writers don’t get to talk down to sci-fi about invented worlds.”
A blatant preference for Caucasus Masculinus is no longer particularly fashionable, either. Sci-fi was shaped in its early years by writers, such as H. P. Lovecraft, who were obsessed with the monstrosity of the inhuman other; classic fantasy tales are full of pale European heroes on horseback striving to preserve the virgin landscape from evil forces and animalistic invaders. But there is a long counter-tradition of speculative fiction by black writers, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 apocalypse story “The Comet” through such major figures of the genre as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. In the nineteen-seventies, the writer Charles R. Saunders began publishing the stories that became “Imaro,” a fantasy novel set on an Africa-like continent called Nyumbani. “We have to bring some to get some in outer space and otherspace, as we have done here on Earth,” Saunders wrote, in an essay published in 2000. Fantasy and sci-fi construct imaginative versions of where we have come from and where we might be going; for Saunders and others, writing such stories with black characters is a matter of recognizing that black people have shaped the past and will play a vital part in the future.
Several years ago, after a frustrating argument with a friend about the all-white cast of “The Hobbit,” James had an impulse “to reclaim all the stuff I like—court intrigue, monsters, magic,” he told me. “I wanted black pageantry. I wanted just one novel where someone like me is in it, and I don’t have to look like I just walked out of H. P. Lovecraft, with a bone in my hair, and my lips are bigger than my eyes, and I’m saying some shyt like ‘Oonga boonga boonga.’ Or else I’m some fukker named Gagool and I’m thwarting you as you get the diamonds.” Though James is well versed in the recent flourishing of speculative fiction from the African diaspora, he still sometimes talks about the Dark Star trilogy as though there were nothing comparable in the world—partly because when he first dreamed up the project, several years ago, it felt truly oppositional, and partly, perhaps, because he still has a tendency to see himself as an embattled rebel, even as the world has begun to celebrate him. He wanted to write a black fantasy novel that would succeed with a literary audience, too, the way that Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” had, in 2004, winning a Hugo and getting longlisted for the Booker. “So I did as Toni Morrison said, and I decided I would write the novel I wanted to read,” he told me.
For two years, he researched African history and mythology, constructing the foundation for a fantastical vision of the continent that would invert the monolithic “Africa” invented by the West. He drew on oral epics, like the Epic of Sundiata, which some people believe was the basis for “The Lion King,” though the filmmakers have called it an “original story,” while admitting some parallels with Shakespeare. (“I felt like these stories had been stolen from me,” James said at Comic Con. “People say that ‘The Lion King’ is based on ‘Hamlet.’ Please.”) He read legendary monster tales, like those about the Inkanyamba, a South African serpent with a horse’s head, who causes summer storms. He made notes on the grammar of African languages, to inflect the book’s prose. He briefly considered doing a historical series, an “Ethiopian ‘Wolf Hall,’ ” but then reverted to his dream of writing fantasy that honored the African diaspora. He wanted to build a “vast playground of myth and history and legend that other people can draw from, a pool that’s as rich as Viking or Celtic lore,” he said.
He sketched his new world’s geography. (The maps that appear in the book are his work.) He made a list of characters that kept getting longer. There would be a quest to find a boy, he decided, and a motley group of seekers: a Moon Witch, a mournful giant, a perceptive buffalo. He wondered if the Aesi—a man with “skin like tar, hair red, when you see him you hear the flutter of black wings”—ought to narrate the story. Then he started thinking about a character called Tracker, a hunter with a nose that can suss out the details of a man’s life in an instant—the spices in his kitchen, the last time he washed—and track a woman to another city with just a whiff of her shirt. Tracker would be sullen and resentful, reserving his gentleness for a group of deformed children, called mingi, whom he meets through an “anti-witch” called the Sangoma.
James took a yearlong sabbatical from Macalester to work on the book. But when the sabbatical was nearing its end, in the summer of 2016, he had ten Moleskines of notes and no story structure. One day he was talking with Melina Matsoukas, and she mentioned the Showtime series “The Affair,” which shifts perspectives, “Rashomon” style, allowing its characters’ versions of events to diverge. The school year was about to start, but James knew that this was the solution. Before the fall semester had ended, he’d written the first hundred pages.
James began teaching at Macalester in 2007. After “John Crow’s Devil” was published, he attended a low-residency M.F.A. program at Wilkes University, in Pennsylvania, at the suggestion of Kaylie Jones. He knew that a degree could open the door to a teaching job in the United States. “If you are a writer in Jamaica, maybe even in the Caribbean, there comes a point when you just have to go,” he wrote on his blog, a month after moving to Minnesota. He added, “I love my country but I’ve never missed it, perhaps because I have never forgotten the reasons I left.”
In early November, I flew out to Minnesota. The landscape on the drive from the airport to campus was colorless and frozen. It spooked James when he first arrived. He had a hundred dollars in his pocket, and he knew almost no one; he spent almost a month living off pita chips and hummus. Finally, he called Ingrid, who now works as a digital-media consultant and is still his best friend. (“I always knew he was a writer,” she told me recently. “And I always knew he was gay.”) He asked her to Western Union him some cash from Kingston.
In his first semester, James taught a fiction workshop and a class on the literature of 9/11: Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children,” which he loves; John Updike’s “Terrorist,” which he thinks is awful; Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Twilight of the Superheroes,” which he regards as the best work of fiction about the attacks. When I visited, he was teaching a nonfiction workshop. On a Thursday afternoon, his classroom was dim; late-fall sunlight cast slanting shadows. James, in patchwork jeans and a denim oxford, commanded the room with a generous attention that took a variety of forms, depending on the student who was receiving it: gentleness, prodding, bemused sarcasm. “Don’t assume that everyone knows what a hotep is,” he told a student who had written about an encounter at a barbershop with an exemplar of the type, a man whose Afrocentrism was mixed with regressive sanctimony. “Hoteps are pro-black but anti-progress,” James explained to the class. “They’re stunningly sexist. Your favorite rapper is probably a hotep. He also might be gay. When I used to work in the industry, I got monthly updates on who’s gay. But I’m not gonna tell you!”
As if accepting a challenge, he set his second novel entirely in the world of the feminine unthinkable. “The Book of Night Women” tells the story of six enslaved half sisters living on a sugarcane plantation in the late eighteenth century who plot a rebellion against the overseer who fathered them. James had wanted to write about the impossibly brutal and volatile period in Jamaica when enslaved Africans outnumbered their white owners by more than ten to one. “The Book of Night Women” is full of rage, and a terrible beauty; in the Times, the scholar Kaiama L. Glover compared it to the work of Morrison and Walker. She also noted that much of the book is, “understandably, very difficult to read.” It is written entirely in eighteenth-century patois, and teems with intimate agony, from an attempted rape and subsequent murder early on to a series of mass executions at the novel’s end. “I think violence should be violent,” James told one interviewer. There is nothing “tasteful or beautifully written or wonderfully wrought” about violence in real life. Sure, he admitted, explicit violence and sex can quickly turn pornographic. “So what?” he said. “Risk pornography. Risk it.”
In his office at Macalester, beneath a poster of David Bowie, James told me that he’d actually considered “The Book of Night Women” a commercial work. It had a mesmerizing protagonist—the violent, green-eyed Lilith—and, with the ticking clock of the rebellion, a tight, cinematic hook of a plot. He’d written the first draft in the third person, through the eyes of a British magistrate. “I really tried to get my Jane Austen on!” he said.
I remembered a story he’d told me—one of his favorite grudges—about his attempts to get the book published. An editor at Viking UK had suggested that he rewrite the book in Standard English. “You hated that suggestion,” I said. “But Standard English was actually the first thing you tried.”
“Of course!” he said. “People gotta eat! I’ve been trying to sell out for years!”
He pulled up a file on his computer and showed me the old draft. The writing was classical and polished. It also felt tedious and stilted. As James worked on the book, Lilith’s dialogue gradually took over; he trashed the draft and began again, starting the book with her. The result might still be his best novel. As with the rest of his work, the strength of the book lies in the knowledge of power that is exclusive to the powerless, and in the unexpected, even unclassifiable ways in which his protagonists navigate the systems they’ve been forced to live within. Lilith, proud and selfish, distances herself from her half sisters, and thrills to private visions of revenge and divine apocalypse, imagining that “true womanness was to be free to be as terrible as you wish.”
These could be threads in themselves
