Marlon James

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0:17Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative people choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James. Born in Jamaica, he made his name in 2014 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel which interweaves various narratives over several decades, starting with the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Bob Marley in 1976. Having won the Booker Prize and the American Book Award, and becoming an international best-selling author, He moved into the fantasy genre with his next two novels, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King.

1:00A professor of English, Marlon James teaches creative writing at a university in Minnesota, USA, where he lives. Marlon James, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thanks for having me. You were born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. Your mother was a police detective and your father was a lawyer. So a sense of law and order was big in your household growing up, I presume, then, was it? Sort of. I think it was more kind of a sense of comedy. I mean, my mom, you know, my mom put the criminals in and my dad took them back out. Was that the family joke? Yeah, so they kept each other employed, I think. There was a certain kind of ridiculousness to it.

1:44My mom was, you know, she was a detective and she was like the facts and figures. she was sort of the profiler. So she was a person who looks at the figures and go, I think this area is going to be a hotspot next week. And I remember my mom would say things like, don't go to that neighborhood next week. I'm like, what? What do you mean? And of course, next week you hear violence explodes and such and such. So I always thought she was psychic. Turns out no, she was just really good with figuring out trends, particularly criminal trends. But of course, the 1970s was an incredibly violent time. in Jamaica.

2:20How aware were you of gang warfare on the streets or the political conflicts that were exploding? I was very aware of it. I didn't experience any of it because my background couldn't be more suburban. You know, we're part of the sort of emerging middle class. And it seemed like Jamaica is a small island. Something happens in Kingston, I'm going to find out. My mom can't hide us from the news and she wouldn't have thought to do so. So violence and crime and so on was not something, I don't think it was anything I ever experienced until actually I started going to school in Kingston. But it was always hovering.

2:57And the thing about the Bob Marley shooting is that my parents were very good at appearing. Like nothing surprised them, nothing outraged them. It's just another day on the job. And we should just explain the Bob Marley shooting. There was an assassination attempt in 1976. and that is the backdrop or the starting point for your Booker Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings about drugs and the gangs in Jamaica. At six years old, there's a lot I didn't understand, but I understand when my mother was unnerved. That was the first thing I saw that shook her. Did you know Marley had been shot?

3:34Yeah, because it was on the news. It was all over the news. Here now is a special item of news from the JBC newsroom. Entertainer and reggae star Bob Marley, Rita Marley and the manager of the Whalers Don Taylor are now patients in the university hospital after receiving gunshot wounds during a shooting incident which took place at Marley's home at 56 Hope Road tonight. By 76, Marley was already a global superstar. I mean, he was going to become even bigger globally after the Exodus album, after he left Jamaica. How did you regard him at that time? Hey, you know, Marley to me was, he was a series of news reports, honestly.

4:16He wasn't on the radio because Jamaican radio would not play reggae. He was what the older kids and the cooler kids who were rebelling against their parents were playing. It was what the Rastafarians that my parents told us to stay away from, but we didn't, were playing. So Marley was already kind of this spectral presence, even when he was alive. What life is really worth Is an arm that needs her to scold After story had never been told So now you see the light Stand up for your eyes Come on, get up, stand up And he was such an influential figure, not only musically, but politically. We think about that piece, Concert, when he brings together on stage Michael Manley, the leader of the People's National Party, with Edward Siaga, who was leading the Jamaican Labour Party, and there'd been war on the streets of Kingston and beyond, and he brought these two men together and raised their hands together.

5:22Mm-hm. Could we have up here, on stage here, the presence of Mr Michael Manning and Mr Edward Siaga? Oh! I just want to shake hands and show the people that...

5:40I mean, that's an incredibly potent image still, isn't it? It is, but it also came from an incredibly potent gesture. What a lot of people don't know is that the reigning Don Man, the reigning gangster of the JLP, and the reigning, let's call them gangster of the PNP, actually met Marley in secret in London. And they were the ones who basically begged him to come back. They needed Bob to sort of seal it in place. That peace treaty didn't last very long, of course. By 1980, almost every person involved in that peace treaty was killed or accidentally died. And that is reflected in your book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, a book in which there are many more than seven killings.

6:23There weren't seven killings. And it's certainly not a brief history either because it runs to 600 pages. But it was that assassination attempt which was the spark for the book for you. Yeah, because I do think it was one of our losses of innocence. Because Marley was considered untouchable. The rule in Jamaica is nobody touches a tough gang. And turns out he wasn't untouchable. I look at the ground, but the bass about to push me down so that the people can trample me. And the guitar coming through the crowd like a spear straight from my heart. I did think it was one day since we shoot you But when I take a stop, it's two days And I don't know if I did sleep in the Garbage Lands Or Duke Street Or the park And when evening turned to morning And then evening again for two days And where I did gone for a whole day that I can't remember But I can't think nothing right now How you just attacked me And everywhere I look to run The people just blocked me And maybe they should block me because Josie Wales must be here too, and Papa Lowe.

7:29I must say that this is what you plan all along. What was school like when you were growing up? Just any day in the British school, and that's my school. Turns out British colonial school is a lot like British school. I went to an all-boys school. So it was an old-fashioned education. Very old-fashioned, very colonial. It was a very big deal when we did Huckleberry Finn. Not just because it was an American book, but because it was a book in dialect. And we were raised to think, to assume that was improper English. It was broken English as if it needed to be fixed. It was a big deal. So my generation, I think we were sort of midway between old and young.

8:08I still go back on whether we were the first of the new or the last of the old. Because we, you know, we were raised to be gentlemen. I couldn't get into a fight on the street because somebody would go, aren't you a Woolmers boy? A what boy? The name of the school is the Woolmers Boys School. Yeah. And I go, aren't you a Woolmer's boy? I'm like, oh, right. Because I have on the epaulette sort of tie, and you wear your jacket and tie when you leave the school campus. So it was very sort of public school. Old-fashioned, but a good education, are you saying? It was a good education. It was. My literary sensibility came from that.

8:43It's interesting, the dubbed poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was on this program, and he told me how when he arrived in England at a young age, he was so ahead of his new London classmates that he was put up a couple of grades because of that colonial education, particularly the teaching of English. So what sort of books were you studying? I mean, by the time I was 15, we had already gone through D.H. Lawrence, certainly James Joyce, quite a few of Dickens. My teacher to this day shows off that I got a perfect score for Shakespeare in the GCEs. Actually, I also show off that perfect score. So tons of Shakespeare, most of the tragedies.

9:23Were you learning the plays? Would you be able to recite? Oh, yeah, I could recite Hamlet. My plays are Hamlet, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, which is still my favorite. And my father was also a big Shakespearean, so we'd have these Shakespeare duels. Like rap battles? Kind of. Clearly the most uncool rap battles ever. What, trading lines? Yeah, easy stuff like to be or not to be. And he would recite Mark Anthony's monologue at Julius Caesar because we're all noble men and so on. The thing about Shakespeare for me is that I heard it as much as I read it, which is probably why, you know, Shakespeare is such a huge influence and why it lives on.

10:02And why I, to this day, I write to be read aloud. Also thematically, you mentioned Dickens a moment ago. It just brings to mind, again, brief history of seven killings. It's told from multiple perspectives, including from those at the very bottom of the social scale. Was there a Dickensian influence on? There's always been a Dickensian influence. On a very technical level, Dickens taught me how to write flat characters. Flat? Yeah, a character who is probably known by just one trait. You know, Mrs. Macauver is known solely by I'll never desert Mr. Macauver. And that's really all you need to know about her.

10:38To sort of get to the essence of a character without turning them into caricatures, although I do think he fell into that sometimes, particularly if they were Jewish. but for the most part he was really good at creating this sort of universe of people who all sort of work their way into your skin to this day i am still terrified of bill sykes usually if i speak about him long enough you will start to see the goose pimples start to pop over my skin he terrifies the crap out of me well there are several characters in in a brief history who are similarly terrifying there is also a vast cast of those characters who i would now probably regard as flat characters, the ones who are sort of the walk-on parts, the supporting, kind of supporting actors to the main stage, aren't they?

11:22You teach literature at a university in Minneapolis. Do you teach in a similar way to the way that you were taught at school and at college, do you think? Yeah, because literature in America went through a sort of a crisis in the 60s where it turned into literary studies. I have lots of issues with literary studies, including that it's not really about literature. And I think I have students who can write 15 page papers on Derrida's theory on Dickens, but they can't tell me anything about Little Derrick. So to go back to a class where the only text we're going to read here is this book, maybe some essays on the book.

12:04I have nothing but respect for literary theory, but I wasn't teaching that. And I also believe that they were supposed to experience a book. The one thing I wouldn't tolerate in that class is the discussion of whether you like or hate the book. I'm like, I truly don't care. We want to know what is the book saying and how did it get there? And what is this book saying about how we live now and how we live then? That in itself can carry a good half of the semester. I also, you know, because I can't escape being a post-colonial writer, sometimes we look at books and books that are responses to them.

12:41It's always great to teach Why Sargasso C and Jane Eyre. It's pretty obvious, but people always leave with a different view of birth, though. And the funny thing is you really don't need Why Sargasso C to suspect things are not all that great with Rochester. The book that's set in the Caribbean. Yeah, you read Jane Eyre, you know, you already see there are some issues with Rochester. I was going to write a sequel to Jane Eyre where Jane Eyre has driven mad herself. Because he totally is going to drive her mad. You've thought about that. Oh, yeah. I've thought a lot about this. Marlon, you're the writer.

13:14You're the novelist. You can do whatever you want. Go ahead. If I start writing about the afterlives of every book that I've read. It's one thing to be taught about literature and to be led to certain books as a child. another thing to start discovering books that you love yourself. Were you a big reader as a child? I was a huge reader as a child. I read everything. I thought books were keeping secrets from me, and I just wanted to know what they were. It was a big thing for me, for example, I was going to say steal, let's call it borrow, the book Adults Are Hiding. It's not always dirty books, even though there were those, but it was also books like Shogun by James Clavail.

13:56But, you know, this is the same thing. So it's the era of the big commercial book. You know, tons of like Leon Uris. Exodus. Yeah, Exodus and the Hajj, which I remember. Lots of Norman Mailer. Yeah, I think I was, what, maybe way too young to be reading The French Lieutenant's Woman. I forget, I'm in England. The French Lieutenant's Woman. I always felt like a closed book was keeping something from me. When did you start writing your own stories? Probably when I was around eight. In a notebook and creating? In a notebook. I mean, we call it fan fiction now, but that's what I'd write. Because we just spoke about it, so I'm interested in the afterlife of Jane Eyre.

14:36I was interested in the afterlife of these books and these TV shows I would see. And especially if I didn't like them, I'd just rewrite them. like I was always disturbed that in this this show that was an incredible Hulk it was just so almost morbidly sad and I never understand why he was always so sad so I rewrote the ending where Hulk finally found a woman who was woman Hulk so I take credit for inventing She-Hulk I want my royalties on this cultural life Marlon James I asked my guest to choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And your first choice is Rhythm Ravings, a work by Jean Binter Breeze, who was the first woman to write and perform dub poetry, I think, really.

15:26So when did you first read or when did you first hear Jean Binter Breeze? I heard her on the radio. I'm trying to remember how old I was. The first time them came to Bellevue was for the doctor and the landlord the upper rate to take the radio out of my head. At first I thought it was, I was overhearing a conversation until I realized it was actually the radio. I thought it was just a mistake because there was nothing like it. For instance, it's not like dub poetry that's appearing on the radio every minute. It's not as if this form was already something most of us knew about. Most of Jamaica didn't know about it yet.

16:03It was still an underground form. I remember thinking, who let this mad woman loose on the radio? and if the rain just fall, me get coconut run down for eating with to see him play cider where the country bus then pull out and sometimes me actually board the bus and the conductor boy him and said, dirty girl, come off at the bus I true, him not hear the rhythm in my head same like at the cassette where the DJ play and me hear me DJ say, eh, eh, no feel no way Town is a place that I really care It almost sort of creeped up by accident noticing that there was some form going on here, that things were rhyming.

16:44And if they didn't rhyme, there was rhythm. And that was before even the music kicked in. And she didn't need the music because of the chorus, she ended up singing it. And I remember thinking, this must be what genius sounds like. Because it was thoroughly strange. To me, it must have been like when people here first heard Bowie. It was just so strange and yet sounded so essential at the same time, it was liberating in the sense that one of the downsides to my education is that you do sort of grow up with this idea that literary perfection is the Victorians and that anything else is a kind of a bastardization of it.

17:25It's one thing to use Jamaican patois to be slapstick, to be a sort of a Jamaican Benny Hill with it. It's another thing to actually talk about serious things. And Jean Benderbreeze was writing in dialect. She was writing in dialect. She was borrowing liberally from reggae. She was borrowing liberally from classic poetry. The thing about a lot of Jamaican dialect poems is that you listen long enough, you will hear Coleridge. Because we all learn rhyme with the ancient mariner. I listened to Louise Bain and I go, yep, Coleridge. I can hear it. And I can tell who read Wordsworth. Because that's what we grew up listening to.

18:04So there's that. You're hearing dub reggae. You're hearing something that something Lee Scratch Perry would do. You heard somebody who sort of cut their teeth on both Burning Spear and clearly Coleridge. And it just sounded like it was almost making itself up as it was going along. And it's one of those things. I was talking to David Mitchell about this a couple of days ago. We're both on a panel at a book festival. And we're talking about the artwork or the book or the poem that gave you permission to do what you do. And usually the first response to that thing is always a sort of outrage. Like, how dare you do this?

18:40Can you do this? Oh, my God, we can do this. And did Jean Bintabreeze do that for you? Did she sort of liberate you as a writer? And as you say, she's writing in the vernacular. I keep coming back to brief history. But, you know, it is a book in which you do inhabit the speech patterns, very different speech patterns of different characters. You're writing very often in Jamaican patois, but each voice is sometimes subtly different. Yeah. Well, because, you know, I mean, for example, I grew up pretty middle class. Most of my language came from television. So even now I have a very American inflected patois.

19:20I mean, you know, we can't chat bad, but I say stuff like water, which annoys me to a great deal. I have no idea. What, the Americanization? The Americanization, it horrifies me every time it comes out of my mouth. But yeah, there are differences depending on your education level or where you grew up. So like if you are very rich and upper class Jamaican, you probably say things like theater. And I always go, where is the theater? You mean theater? And it was actually very important for me to capture the different sort of versions of Jamaican. The other thing that Binta Breeze did for me, and a lot of other writers did, is through them why I have still recognized voice as paramount.

20:05I think that's one of the reasons why I think all but one of the books I've written is in first person. How old were you when you first came across Gene Binta Breeze? I couldn't have been more than, say, 13, maybe 14. Certainly a young teenager. But you then already had ambitions to write. I did, but I never thought it was something like a career in writing. And more than a Jamaican actor thinks you're going to have a career in acting. Because, you know, again, I'm still raised sort of British colonial. It's are you going to be a lawyer, doctor or civil servant? And I was training to be a lawyer, which was funny.

20:44I did all the courses. My dad was a lawyer. I ignored him saying the one thing you should never become is a lawyer. because I think my dad became a lawyer because it was just considered, that's what you did. Why would he not want you to do that? Because I don't think he ever got over not doing what he enjoyed, but instead doing what he felt he had to. And you wrote your first novel, John Crowe's Devil, after leaving university. And whilst you were working in an advertising agency in Jamaica, what did you learn from being a copywriter? I learned brevity, which is such a ridiculous thing for a guy who writes 600-page novels to say.

21:23Like Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, who both also worked as ad men and both also write huge novels. I know. Maybe we're just being reactionary because we've had to reduce something down to a line. But that's not brevity, economy, clarity. When you're in advertising, you're never far away from music because music underscores everything. So weirdly enough, advertising reminds you that language can be lyrical. And that's something that I hopefully have never sort of excised from my prose. But I also think, and I'm sure this was the same for DeLillo or Salman or whoever came out of these industries.

22:01At some point, you have to ask yourself, are you a copywriter or a writer doing copy? You know, are you a graphic artist or an artist doing graphics? And what were you? I think I'd like to think I was a writer doing copy. Did you know that at the time? I didn't until I realized that I was, I started to create these fake ads because I just wanted to be pushed artistically. I started writing prose or going back to prose, not necessarily to become an author to publish it, but to do something creative that was mine. And the thing about advertising, and it was great while I was in it, but you're also creating through compromise and you're creating by committee.

22:39You certainly can't write books that way. You can't write novels that way. Sometimes you can do TV shows that way, but not the good ones. It was an attempt for me to recapture some creativity because I do think, and I still do, that if you're any form of artist and you spend most of your life in compromise, I'm not sure you'll be able to make art after that.

23:07your next choice for this cultural life marlon james is the 1991 nirvana song smells like teen spirit so why have you chosen this like a lot of nerds kirk kabin is a patron saint of mine and you're a nerd absolutely those of us who like nirvana this song we tend to have certain things in common we're outcasts at school we all had a major smith's period in in jamaica oh yeah these are not bands you'd associate with sort of jamaican taste not really um it's one of the reasons why we always run after them but you know this is the 80s so we have mtv and and you have one rich friend with a satellite dish and somebody got a copy of melody maker from 10 weeks ago and I'm reading the tattered bits of it, wondering who the hell is the wonder stuff and so on.

23:57So the Smiths were really, really big. Smells Like Teen Spirit was like a Smith song that you could sort of bash your head to.

24:15This came out in 1991. So you were 21? Yeah, 20 when it came out. 2021 and still in jamaica at the time still in jamaica i mean a 21 year old is still a teenager um and it was a song that more than anything else made you identify your tribe that meaning that this was 91 there are people who like guns and roses because that proved you're cool and you're straight and you're a jock and even in jamaica those dynamics still apply but you saw kirk Cobain as giving voice to a different kind of identity then. Yeah. And even if that identity was unformed or not fully formed yet like mine, that that was cool too.

24:58Did you know you were gay at the time? Not really. Yes and no. But you hadn't come out? No. I don't know if this makes sense. It's like I knew I was queer from when I was eight. I don't know if I knew I was gay until I was like a late teenager. Because queer is not necessarily a sexual thing. And if I didn't think I was queer, you know, my schoolmates certainly made me feel queer. In what way? In a way, I was strange. I didn't belong. Or I was a sissy. I was a nerd. Were you bullied? The weird thing about boys' schools is that you don't get a lot of physical bullying at a boys' school. You get a lot of verbal bullying and a lot of disassociation and exclusion.

25:36But we're very gentlemanly about it. Also, I could fight. You were a tough kid. Yeah, this sissy could fight. So it was never physical. You know, it's only in hindsight I realized something about Jamaican homophobia, which you don't have to spend a lot of time on. But one of the reasons why it's so acute and so violent and so famously violent is that it's not a crisis in homosexuality that's going on in Jamaica. It's a crisis in masculinity. And part of it is that we have no models as to what masculinity should be. So it's always up for grabs. Did it make you feel like you would have to leave Jamaica then?