Marlon James Volume 26 Number 2 November 2018
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Vol. 26 / No. 2 / November 2018 Special Issue Marlon James Volume 26 Number 2 November 2018 Published by the Departments of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies CREDITS Original image: Sugar Daddy #2 by Leasho Johnson Nadia Huggins (graphic designer) JWIL is published with the financial support of the Departments of Literatures in English of The University of the West Indies Enquiries should be sent to THE EDITORS Journal of West Indian Literature Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona Kingston 7, JAMAICA, W.I. Tel. (876) 927-2217; Fax (876) 970-4232 e-mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2018 Journal of West Indian Literature ISSN (online): 2414-3030 EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Evelyn O’Callaghan (Editor in Chief) Michael A. Bucknor (Senior Editor) Lisa Outar (Senior Editor) Glyne Griffith Rachel L. Mordecai Kevin Adonis Browne BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Antonia MacDonald EDITORIAL BOARD Edward Baugh Victor Chang Alison Donnell Mark McWatt Maureen Warner-Lewis EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Laurence A. Breiner Rhonda Cobham-Sander Daniel Coleman Anne Collett Raphael Dalleo Denise deCaires Narain Curdella Forbes Aaron Kamugisha Geraldine Skeete Faith Smith Emily Taylor THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE has been published twice-yearly by the Departments of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies since October 1986. JWIL originated at the same time as the first annual conference on West Indian Literature, the brainchild of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris and Mark McWatt. It reflects the continued commitment of those who followed their lead to provide a forum in the region for the dissemination and discussion of our literary culture. Initially featuring contributions from scholars in the West Indies, it has become an internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic journal. The Editors invite the submission of articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, prose, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English-speaking Caribbean. We also welcome comparative assessments of non-Anglophone Caribbean texts provided translations into English of the relevant parts of such texts are incorporated into the submission. JWIL will also publish book reviews. Submission guidelines are available at www.jwilonline.org. Table of Contents Introduction I “Authorial Self-fashioning, Political Denials and Artistic Distinctiveness: The Queer Poetics of Marlon James” Guest Editors: Michael A. Bucknor and Kezia Page, Special Issue on Marlon James Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic 1 Sheri-Marie Harrison Femme Finale: Gender, Violence and Nation in Marlon James’ Novels 18 Lauren Shoemaker “So Many Incredible Gehennas”: Musicality and (the Poetics of) 34 ‘Relation’ in Marlon James’ Novels Emma Crowley Re-evaluating Religion and Superstition: Obeah and Christianity in 50 Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and William Earle Jr.’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack Jhordan Layne Violence, Imperialism and Male Socialization in Cormac McCarthy’s 66 Blood Meridian and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings Michael K. Walonen “Jah Live”: Messianic Time and Post-Traumatic Narrative Disorder in 80 Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings Njelle W. Hamilton Uncomfortable Truths: Lifewriting, Trauma and Survivance in Marlon 96 James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings Caryn Rae Adams Book reviews Barbara Lalla, Grounds for Tenure 111 Evelyn O’Callaghan John Robert Lee, Collected Poems 1975-2015 115 Laurence Breiner Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora and Sexuality in 118 Caribbean Culture Angeletta KM Gourdine 121 Notes on contributors I Introduction “Authorial Self-fashioning, Political Denials and Artistic Distinctiveness: The Queer Poetics of Marlon James” Michael A. Bucknor and Kezia Page Source: Marlon James photograph by Charlie Forgham Bailey. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/marlon-james-i-don-t- believe-in-pg-violence-a6694431.html James’ Caribbean Reckoning In the early summer of 2017, we attended an afternoon workshop on Marlon James at the University of the West Indies. Two academics from the United Kingdom led the conversation, explaining their work and the centrality of James’ Brief History to their projects. They were taking care, as academics do, to understand the many facets of the text. Coming to terms with its reception in Jamaica among Jamaicans was important, and so we II answered their questions and they took notes. We must have looked like a strange class to people walking by. Not one, but two foreign-appearing teachers, a motley gathering of old and young, literary types and those more generally interested in the arts, graduate students and the hoary headed. All in all, we were all from a class leisurely enough to be gathered at 1:00pm on a Monday afternoon to talk about a novel. After the session, between the shadows of the ficus trees and the administrative offices of the faculty of arts, with Marcus Garvey looking on, we talked about a regional reckoning with James’s work and his fame. This issue of the JWIL is, in a kind of way, the special fruit our conversation bore. It is not a simple thing to reckon with Marlon James from a Caribbean/Jamaican perspective. Not to say that he too hadn’t come of age under the ficus as a student of UWI in the 1980s and therefore belongs to the University just as much as either of us. He took a creative writing course with the established Jamaican writer John Hearne and he describes the University of the West Indies as “a door: wide open” to Source: Ficus Tree at the the Faculty of Humanities, UWI. Photo by Justine-Marie Williams him (James, “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself ”) - wide open as different from the closed mouth approach James took in high school against the taunts of “Mary” and “batty boy” (James, “From Jamaica”). It was at UWI that he fell into an artsy crowd, a comforting world of “cheap liquor, potato chips, ironic quips and mix tapes” (James, “From Jamaica”). James was also one of the young writers mentored through the Calabash Festival workshops; his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was saved from the obscurity of the trash because of James’ participation in the workshop and his association with the editor Kaylie Jones. That James “credits the workshop for getting his career started” (Smith, “Emboldened by Reggae Jamaican Writers Bust Out”) is no slight nod. Indeed, it is a major acknowledgment of an international festival held in a sleepy, rural village in Jamaica. Although Calabash is grounded in Jamaica, it has always kept in play both a national and international flavor, quite a suitable beginning for James who, for many reasons, says he never felt at home in himself in Jamaica. James, like writers from previous generations stretching back all the way to the Windrush Generation of the 1940s, navigates that now well-known discomfort with being from a society that is considered incapable of being a literary home. On top of that, James, like Andrew Salkey’s Johnnie Sobert in Escape to an Autumn Pavement, sought a more complete escape from the imposing hyper- heterosexuality of Jamaica and the violence it wields against those who do not conform. For James, the impact of this violence on the spirit led him to church, the exorcist’s chamber, and a desperate embrace of his exile; “whether in a plane or a coffin” he had to leave Jamaica (James, “From Jamaica” and Tolentino, “Why Marlon James Decided to Write an African Game of Thrones”). Our claiming of James must be with the understanding that we claim him for a place that he feels rejects and denies him himself. From as early as his high school days, Jamaica marginalizes and silences him despite his attempt to fit in. James occupies an interesting in-between position, neither insider nor outsider, perhaps a peculiar brand of exile. III Queering James We do not necessarily find James’ inability to live in Jamaica adequately captured by the word “exile” though; the pressures that caused him to leave did not set him adrift, a rootless wanderer in search of another home. Instead the notion of insider/outsider has efficacy as a description of James’ relationship with the nation even if it is not adequate to talk about the complexity of his identity as a gay Afro-Jamaican writer. In James’ coming out essay in The New York Times Magazine, we understand the limits of diaspora for him. After he dons his “New York skin” –his freedom–he must change back into his “normal” costume before he returns to his half-brother’s home in the Bronx (James, “From Jamaica”). Jamaican communities in Miami and New York are extensions of the cultural space of the island, outside of the geography of Jamaica, but still too close for members of the queer community to be out and feel safe. The term Afropolitan may come closest to capturing James’ grounding in the local and his transpolitan connectedness (Hassan). Afropolitan, according to Taiye Selasi who coined the term, describes how some African identities can move through space (continents) and inhabit multiple identities without compromising any one (“Bye-Bye Babar”). To our mind, Afropolitanism, even as it responds to narrow conceptions of Africa and Africans by exposing the lives and experiences of privileged Africans, speaks to a certain kind of belonging that a writer like James holds if even in smaller (less continental) contexts. James finds some measure of freedom as a Kingstoncosmo,1 a world of ‘pree’ and privilege, with weekend trips to Miami and a buoyant gay scene. In many ways, this Jamaica is so underground or so above the plains that it might as well not be Jamaica at all and, spatially, it is small, very small.