News
Page 8
Street Roots • July 22-28, 2016
ESCAPE FOR ME WAS WRITING’
Marlon James is the first Jamaican
to win the Man Booker Prize, but
as a gay man he was afraid of how
he’d be received in his native nation
BY RICHARD SMIRKE
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
t’s been nine months since Marlon James
became the first Jamaican writer to win
the Man Booker Prize, the large bags
under his eyes and the mumbled,
monosyllabic greeting are testament to the
relentless cycle of travel, festival appearances,
interviews and store signings that come with
taking home literature’s most prestigious
award.
“I don’t want to come across as one of
those people who whine about success
because they are really annoying, and having
a successful book sure as hell beats not
having a successful book, but it does get
super-exhausting and I have the cranky
attitude to prove it,” said the 45-year-old
author, awkwardly slumped on a sofa in a
corner of a plush hotel, lobby in Manchester,
England.
“Nobody tells you this until you win it, but
every Booker winner that I have run into
since says that by the time you get to
October, you are super happy to hand it over
to the next person. ‘It’s yours. Take it!”’ he
said, gleefully pretending to pass on the title.
Realizing that he is maybe starting to
sound ungrateful, James stresses that his
overnight elevation to the literary A-list is
“incredibly exciting, and I get to meet
wonderful people.” But it is nonetheless
highly repetitive. “Right now, my days are just
traveling, doing readings and sleep. That’s
pretty much it”
By way of illustration, it’s only after 30
minutes of chatting that it suddenly dawns on
him where in the U.K. he is. “My God. I just
realized I’m in Manchester,” said the music
loving writer, who cited the Smiths and
Factory Records’ back catalog as being
“crucial” to his teenage years. “There must
be a New Order museum here, right?”
Upon hearing that a) there is not and b)
the Hacienda nightclub - whose reputation
evidently spread all the way to Jamaica - was
knocked down and turned into apartments
years ago, his excitement nosedived.
“That has got to be the most depressing
thing I’ve heard all day.”
Manchester’s credentials as a cutting-edge
I
music cify took a further battering when the
lobby band started playing a cheesy cover of
“Long Train Running” by the Doobie
Brothers. “Seriously?” questioned the author,
only half-joking. “This is like people coming
to Jamaica and hearing disco. Manchester,
what is going on?”
But the Doobie Brothers provides a period
soundtrack to the book we’re here to discuss:
“A Brief History of Seven Killings,” James’s
epic, gripping and uncompromisingly violent
prize-winning novel.
Inspired by a real-life incident in 1976
when seven gunmen stormed Bob Marley*s
house in Kingston, the book’s sweeping
narrative spans three decades, crosses
several continents and encompasses a cast of
more than 70 characters, including ghosts,
cold-blooded hit men, beauty queens, drug
dealers, politicians, prostitutes, a Rolling
Stone reporter and CIA agents.
The scale, scope and sheer ambition of the
700-page book - James’ third in a late-
blooming literary career - is staggering,
although he said it wasn’t always intended
that way. “It was supposed to be this short
crime novel about a bumbling assassin,” said
the dreadlocked author, who spent four years
working on “A Brief History” and called it
“the riskiest and loosest thing I ever wrote.”
“It’s the furthest I’ve ever gone from my
definition of what a novel should be. I was
fully prepared for everybody going, ‘This
went too far. This is too self-indulgent This is
too long.’ At some point I threw out the rule
book about plot, and I was constantly trying
to surprise myself on every page. The only
thing that I had as a guide was that
everything that’s in my head was going down
on the page regardless of what form it came
down in. A novel should be an adventure for
the writer, too.”
In James’ case, that adventure
started in his childhood,
growing up in Portmore, an
affluent suburb outside
Kingston. Obsessed
with reading from a
young age, he
recalled devouring
every book in his
parent
house
before
Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker
Prize, a prestigious literary award, for his
novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”
PHOTO BY JEFFREY SKEMP
similarly exhausting the school library. Before
long, he was writing his own comics,
superhero science fiction and fantasy stories,
all of which had an escapist theme.
“The one thing that unites nearly every
single suburb on the planet is that for the
most part, suburban living is long stretches of
boredom punctuated by sports and going to
the movies. The best thing about being in
such a - at best stable, at worst dull and
endlessly repetitive - existence, is that you
end up looking for escape, and escape for me
was writing. Even when I’m writing about
really complicated, dark, violent, twisted
stuff, it’s still an escape. My upbringing just
made me hungry for stories that weren’t
mine.”
His first novel, “John Crow’s Devil,” about
a religious cult that destroys a Jamaican
village, was turned down 78 times before
eventually being published in 2005. He
can laugh about it now, but at the time,
the large pile of rejection letters made
him seriously question his future as a
writer.
“I was done. I just gave up on the
idea,” said James, who described
unsuccessfully trying to track down
and destroy every copy of the
unpublished manuscript after one
particularly painful rejection.
“Some of the people who turned
down that book were seriously
smart people, and for me to hold
onto the idea that 78 people were
just wrong and I’m right was
ludicrous. As it turns
out, I was right.”
Following its
publication,
James
quit his successful but unfulfilling career in
advertising and took up a teaching post at
a small arts college in Minnesota, where
he,still lives. The distance and separation
from his home country, where
homosexuality is still criminalized, enabled
him to come to terms with both his own
sexuality and some of the unspoken, less
savory aspects of Jamaica’s history.
“Either I saved myself in Minnesota or
Minnesota saved me,” he once said.
1111»
Page 9
News
Street Roots • July 22-28, 2016
H'Ä
James’ second
novel, “The Book
of Night Women,”
about a slave
revolt on an
18th-century
Jamaican sugar
plantation, told
through the eyes
of a woman born into
slavery, came out in 2009 and won
international acclaim for its evocative and
uncensored prose. “For me, novels aren’t
just where plot happens. They are also
where the things that I want to get off my
chest end up being said and characters
become the mouthpiece for that without
becoming didactic.”
He said he wrote “The Book of
Night Women” to dispel the myth,
“even among black people, of the
house negro who had it so good
that they sat with the house
master.”
The fact that all three of
his books to date, as well
as the novel he is
currently writing, a
“Game of Thrones ”-
style fantasy story
set in Africa during
the Middle Ages,
are based in the
past stems
from a
desire to redress the colonial
f history he was taught at
school, James said.
“Until I hit college, history
was reading about people who
p don’t look like me, don’t talk
I like me and have nothing to do
, with my life. From Columbus
t down to Queen Victoria, it was
all dead Europeans.”
The history of the world, he
said, is typically the story of rich and
powerful people. “The people who have to
suffer from what they do don’t get
histories. I don’t necessarily think I write
the past to rectify it, but I do write it to
highlight issues that history books aren’t
telling us.”
“A Brief History of Seven Killings” and
its sprawling cast of lowly gangsters, sex
workers and corrupt politicians, rooted in
first-hand sources and historical fact,
brings his home country’s recent and
violent past to life in vivid and damning
style. The book’s global success has made
the author internationally famous and led
to a deal with HBO to write a TV
adaptation. But for a long time after the
book was published, he resisted traveling
home for fear of how he would be received.
When he did finally return earlier this year,
he was pleasantly surprised.
“By and large, Jamaicans are happy for
the success of the book and think it can be
a turning point for the discussions we are
having in Jamaica. That’s not to say
everything is peachy. The first thing I went
back for was a Bob Marley lecture, and
people set up websites where all the
homophobic bigotry came pouring out -
‘Can’t believe that some batty boy is
talking about Marley,’ and so forth. So I’m
not kidding myself that that isn’t there.
But for the most part, people were very
happy to see me. I’ve been there twice
now, and there is so much about both trips
that was so refreshing and positive.”
He described meeting members of a gay
students association and thinking that he
had to give them an uplifting, inspirational
speech about how life can and does get
better.
“They just wanted to talk about
Beyonce,” recalled James, grinning at the
memory. “That really made my night. It
still doesn’t mean that I’m going to walk
down the street holding some guy’s hand,
but I do think that the situation is slowly
changing for the better.”
Courtesy of Big Issue North / INSP.ngo.
I
"At some point
X threw out the
rule booh about
plot, and X was
constantly trying
to surprise myself
on every page.
The only thing
that X had as a
guide was that
everything that's
in my head was
going down on
the page regard
less of what form
it came down in.
A novel should be
an adventure for
the writer, too."
MARLON JAMBS,
AUTHOR OF "A BRIEF
HISTORY OF SEVEN
KILLINGS''