Marlon James on His New Book “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”

AMANPOUR: And from that living legend, we delve into some ancient myths with our next guest Marlon James, the award-winning Jamaican author who brings us a powerful saga in his new book, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”, the first of his Dark Star Trilogy. Best known for his Man Booker-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, he told our Alicia Menendez about his new fantasy epic.

ALICIA MENENDEZ, CONTRIBUTOR: Marlon, thank you so much for being with us today.

MARLON JAMES, AUTHOR: Thanks for having me.

MENENDEZ: This is a complex book, a complex world. How do you describe it?

JAMES: You know the best way to describe it is to just start at the beginning. This book — in the Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a slave trader hires a bunch of mercenaries and heroes for hire to find a child who’s been missing for three years. That’s all they know. This story then jumps to the end. They found the child, terrible things happened, people want answers. There are only three witnesses. And each witness is now going to tell the reader what they saw.

MENENDEZ: Right. What does that then tell you about the nature of truth if there can be three different versions of one story?

JAMES: Well, for one, the reader is going to — the reader has a lot of work to do. The reader is going to have to decide because I’m not going to tell them who to believe. It’s pretty much your judge and jury as a reader.

MENENDEZ: I like that.

JAMES: Yes. Because the whole idea of truth, of authentic version of the director’s cut, all these things, ever are Western. In a lot of African storytelling, you know from the get-go that it’s a trickster that’s telling you the story. It’s always — you always know that you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. And that fascinates me. I still am fascinated by eyewitness accounts and people who look at the same thing and come to completely different perceptions. You know if you see some — somebody can look at a guy gorging down a bag of chips and think “Oh, he’s starving”, another person thinks, “Oh, he’s gluttonous” but were seeing the same thing.

MENENDEZ: You have described this trilogy as an African Game of Thrones. I would love for you to read us a passage from the book.

JAMES: Absolutely. This is from the beginning actually. It says, “The child is dead. There’s nothing left to know. I hear there is a queen in the South that kills a man who brings her bad news. So when I give word of the boy’s death, do I write my own death with it? Truth eats lie just as a crocodile eats the moon, and yet my witness is the same today as it will be tomorrow. No, I did not kill him. Though I may have wanted him dead. Craved for it the way a glutton craves goat flesh. Oh, to draw a bow and fire through his black heart and watch it explode black blood, and to watch his eyes when it starts blinking when it looks but stop seeing, and to listen for his voice croaking and hearing his chest heaving in a death rattle saying, look, my wretched spirit leaves this most wretched of bodies, and to smile at such tidings and dance at such a loss. Yes, I glut at the conceit of it. But no, I did not kill him. Bi oju ri enu a pam o. Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth. Should I give you a story? I am just a man who some have called a wolf. The child is dead. I know the old woman brings you different news. Call him murderer, she says. Even though my only sorrow is that I did not kill her. The redheaded one said the child’s head was infested with devils. If you believe in devils. I believe in bad blood. I will give you a story.”

MENENDEZ: How did you know that that was how the book had to start?

JAMES: I didn’t. My beginning sometimes comes after I finished a novel. I’ll have — this is why when I’m teaching students, they have so much pressure on how to begin and it’s going to take them forever. I usually just begin. To the first word you read is rarely the first word the reader is going to read. And some of these have survived all the drafts. But I didn’t really know how it began until I got to the end of it.

MENENDEZ: When you have a book that is as successful as A Brief History of Seven Killings which critical acclaim, won the Man Booker Prize, how does that change the way you approach the work that follows?

JAMES: I don’t think it changed as much because if I was really concerned about it, I think I’d have written a more careful book. I think that I’ve written — that I’ve made a less risky turn. Although to me, this does seem like a jump even. Even in Brief History, a large part of the novel is told by a ghost. So — and if you grew up in the Caribbean, you grew up with the — not just fairytales and so on but the African traditions and myths and legends and the Native American myths and legends and so on, real and surreal doesn’t have the boundary that people — it seems to have for other people. Gabriel Garcia Marquez always said that the great thing about the Caribbean is that truth is fixed, choosing a stranger in a way that is fiction. And he’s actually — he’s absolutely right. It didn’t feel so much like a leap for me. In terms of the work, it definitely was a leap.

MENENDEZ: But then how strange is it to you that the vast majority of epic fantasy ends up happening in Western Europe?

JAMES: Oh, that’s not strange for me at all. And that’s the thing I had to come to terms with as a fan of epic fantasy, that most of it is European or most of what I read was European. Most of it was based on European history, European myths. I mean I love Vikings. I love Lord of the Rings. I love The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I love Philip Pullman.

MENENDEZ: Yes. Do you have strong opinions on Hobbits?

JAMES: You know I have strong opinions on people’s opinion. But reading these stories when I was growing up, it’s not like I’m clamoring for representation. But, of course, if I’m a 10-year-old kid and seeing people doing dashing and daring events, I want to know somebody who looks like me every now and then. And I think somebody from Celtic or Scandinavian descent can take for granted stuff like Thor, could have a Thor. For people in the West, for black people in the West who have been sort of cut off from all these epic traditions, it’s new era, it’s new discovery.

MENENDEZ: Why did you know you had to write this book?

JAMES: That’s a good question. Because there are other books I could have written. I think there are a few things. One, I am always gravitating to the book I think I would want to read. And if it’s out there, then I don’t have to write it. But if it isn’t, then I mean that’s a book I’m going to gravitate towards. I also — because I’m kind of a glutton for punishment, I always go after the most impossible kind of book. Almost every book I start writing, it starts from the position of me going there is no way I can write this. I don’t know how to get into this story. It’s going to get — this is the book that’s going to kill me. And that happened with this as well. It’s —

MENENDEZ: Because it was a trilogy or because it was epic fantasy?

JAMES: Because it was epic fantasy and because I didn’t know who was telling the story. And I didn’t know how to tell it. And that’s when the whole idea of the trilogy came up actually that it wouldn’t be me trying to create this one long narrative. It would me — it would be me writing stories that sort of confound each other and cancel each other out. The hero’s story, it may very well be the victim of story B or the villain of story B.

MENENDEZ: How does writing in the realm of fantasy change the way you grapple with what many consider social constructions like gender, race?

JAMES: No. That’s a good question because a lot of that didn’t happen for me until I did the research. So in the book, there is queerness. There is gender fluidity. There is, you know, people — there is people with plural personalities. There are different genders. There are different attitudes towards sexuality and homosexuality and so on. And all of that might seem like me trying to hit some intersectional point in a novel but all that was from the research. It turns out that’s the oldest element in the book, that there are tribes with 14 genders, that there are ways in which African societies had accepted queerness and homosexuality and strangeness and even trendiness from way back thousands and thousands of years. That is not until, you know, a bunch of American T.V. preachers told them this is evil, that a lot of viewers start to reconsider it. But that to me was the most mind-blowing aspect of the research just how old all of that was.

MENENDEZ: Much like Game of Thrones, the book is replete with sexual references. And I wonder how often when you’re writing about sex in this book are you really writing about power.

JAMES: Quite a bit, actually. One because people spend a lot of time trying to demonstrate sexual power over other people. That’s one aspect of human nature that hasn’t changed. But there is also a certain kind of sensuality and frankness that’s part of the African storytelling tradition that I think we with more puritanical minds can really appreciate or think it’s something that should be shunted away. You know, it’s — that’s one of the reasons why Blues was so sexually frank. And in other ways, that’s the African coming out in Blues music because the — and to latch on to that, to write in that sort of supersensible world with a really high erotic energy was exciting and it was also kind of scary because at the backend of that is also a danger, at the backend of that is abuse and so on. And the aim then though is how do you capture that without that becoming the viewpoint of the book because that’s always a risk we run when we play with things like that. Did you have a racist character? Did you write a racist book? Do you have a sexist character? Did you write a sexist book? And that’s the way I think I hit a mix with between not believe — not flinching and not blinking in the sight of all this. But I also point out that this world knows enough about what’s going on, that this is not normal. This is not tolerated, that this is all people exercising power as  opposed people exercising what they think is right.

MENENDEZ: I think that a lot of us, especially in those teen years, who feel that we’re growing up on the margins. I very much identify with everything you’ve ever said about being a nerd and retreating into books.

JAMES: Yes.

MENENDEZ: And so then I wonder, is epic fantasy a means of escape or a means of belonging?

JAMES: It’s both though. Just as though — X-Men Comic. I remember when I was reading X-Men, the thing about being an X-Men fan or reading X-Men is a lot like being an X-Men. Because you’re like —

MENENDEZ: Sell me on it.

JAMES: I think, certainly for me, the idea that by opening a book, I can live another life was what drew me to it. So you’re being drawn to these huge worlds but your sense of belonging from, oh, I can belong in here. There are other people like me here. There are other people like me reading this at this moment. I mean we didn’t have the Internet so we didn’t have chat rooms or we didn’t have forums. You just have to assume there must be somebody else out there who is reading X-Men, who’s reading Watership Down and who’s having the same moment that I am having. And then when I get older and I read of writers like Michael Chabon or even Tenacy Kowitz (ph) and they talk about what comics and fantasy did for them, I realize I wasn’t alone [13:50:00] after all.

MENENDEZ: How much of the marginality though was about that nerd identity and how much of it was about being gay?

JAMES: I don’t know if those are separate.

MENENDEZ: Right. So where did they —

JAMES: I think you know that — back then, I thought of it as — I went through all sorts of stages with that, the whole it must be a phase or God is going to fix it sometime. And actually, that way of thinking took me all the way into my 30s. It’s — it adds to it. I think it adds to the sort of — I mean everybody around me are nerds, that I have one more degree of remove where I can’t reveal to even you guys. You end up locking yourself off quite a bit. I remember 1987, I had caught known talking to such an extent that I remember I went to visit my family in Chicago and my cousin sent a note back to my brother. The first thing it says, “First, your brother, he doesn’t talk.” Because I was so convinced as soon as I open my mouth, people go, “Oh, there goes the gay. There goes the such and such.” So I just decided you know I’ll just stop talking. So I certainly ended up in this huge can of just voluntary mental and social close down. Close down to the point where one of my next door neighbors thought I went to America for high school. I was like no, I was right here.

MENENDEZ: But was the danger to you based on your nerd identity or on your gay identity?

JAMES: For me, it was both. Jamaicans reputation for its homophobia, of course. And growing up — when I was growing up, I felt in a very acute way. I mean I was never gay bashed or anything like that but I didn’t have to be. I think internalizing that fear was traumatic enough. And also, it’s part of our culture. It’s part of our music and so on. Back then, I don’t want to put Jamaica in the identity it’s always had because it’s funny. I talked to Jamaican writers who are eight years younger and they read my essay in “New York Times” and they’re like, “I didn’t recognize that Jamaica you lived in.” And I realized how things have changed in some ways. But for me, it was — the fear was so immense, I could internalize it despite nothing happened — happening to me. It didn’t have to. It’s — the fear, it doesn’t need something to happen for it to happen. And I realized for me, I had to leave. I had to get out. Not necessarily because I was afraid of attack but I was afraid of if I keep reducing myself more and more and more away, what am I going to be left within three years? And I just — I don’t think I could have lived with such a constant diminishing sense of self so I had to go.

MENENDEZ: Yes. I mean it’s interesting to think of you living that dual life and then being able to write these characters that are looking at the same events from dueling perspectives.

JAMES: Yes.

MENENDEZ: Because you yourself were able to do that constantly.

JAMES: Yes, absolutely. And I’m not just sort of code-switching but behavior changing and the slipping into different identities all the time. I was like yes, I was Clark Kent and Khalil. I used to have this ritual where I was staying with family in the Bronx. Of course, I was like super closet in the Bronx and dress very hip hop and got my baggy pants and all of that. And I’d take the train on to Union Square’s Barnes and Noble. And I go into the Barnes and Noble bathroom and put on my skin tight jeans and my queer outfit. It’s like Superman, super queer. And then I would sort of gallivant all over downtown in the village and so on. And I was like Cinderella. I had to get back to Barnes and Noble by 9:30 because it closes at 10. So I had to like dash back to go back in the bathroom, change back into my normal clothes, and then take the fact back to the Bronx. And that was life for a really long time.

MENENDEZ: Until when?

JAMES: Until maybe 2007 actually.

MENENDEZ: What changed then?

JAMES: Moving here permanently, moving to Minnesota. I think one thing about moving to Minnesota is I thought well, I would never have the eyes of Jamaicans or the eyes of my family on me. And I could completely reinvent myself the way I want to reinvent myself. I didn’t have to be — have all these versions of myself running around. And the writing more and learning to be bolder and learning to accept myself more, that those versions of me just started evaporating until there was only one but it took a while. It took years.

MENENDEZ: You must look back on that and feel like there’s a lot of lost time?

JAMES: Oh, God, yes. I have to believe that things happen when they’re supposed to happen, I think. And maybe I just wouldn’t have had the emotional maturity to deal with all of that in my 20s or even in my 30s because I mean I’m having one hell of a 40s.

MENENDEZ: Marlon, thank you so much.

JAMES: Thank you so much for having me.