Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of four novels: John Crow’s Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf(2019).
Currently living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College‘s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
Marlon James Biography
Nationality, Family & Age
He is Jamaican native-born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police. His mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective.
His father, then (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) became a lawyer. As of 2019, James is 48 years old.
Education
He attends Kingston’s prestigious Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys in the 1980s. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature.
He leaves Jamaica to flee homophobic violence and economic conditions that he feels would mean career stagnation, later explaining: “Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.” He then receives a master’s degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006).
Marlon James Career
Marlon James Works(Books)
- John Crow’s Devil (2005)
- The Book of Night Women (2009)
-
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
Marlon James
Beginning of Career
2005
James premier novel, John Crow’s Devil (2005)was then rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication. The book tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957.
2006
His second novel, The Book of Night Women (2009), is about a slave woman’s uprising in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century.
2007
James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, since 2007. He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College‘s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
2014
The third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores some decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the views of many narrators. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted.
He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971. James’s most recent work, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), is the first in a planned fantasy series.
2019
In February, James gave the seventh annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford.
Theme
Themes in James’s work span religion and the supernatural, sexuality, violence, and colonialism. Often, his novels display the struggle to find an identity, whether it be as a slave or a postcolonial native of Jamaica.
John Crow’s Devil (2005)
In John Crow’s Devil, his first novel, James explores postcolonial Jamaica through a religiously-charged, archetypal battle of good and evil. His characters in this novel represent, through their archetypal portrayals, many facets of humanity including hope. Despite the particular setting, the novel “conveys archetypal situations that reside in the collective unconsciousness.” Additionally, this piece of Caribbean gothic reveals the power of guilt and hypocrisy both in a person and in a community, and generally reveals truths of human nature. The ghosts of colonialism are more subtle, but the instability and struggle for identity are clear to the reader.
The Book of Night Women (2009)
James confronts the traditional slave narrative by presenting a protagonist (Lilith) who approaches her enslavement with complex duality, despite the constant description of antagonism between slaves and masters on a plantation in Jamaica. Lilith hates the masters, but much of the novel deals with how she “aspires to obtain a privileged stature within plantation society by submitting to the sexual subjugation of a white overseer, Robert Quinn”.
This is additionally confronted by Lilith and Robert’s “love”, leading the reader to question the limits of love and relationships. James intends to have readers root for Robert and Lilith, but then catch themselves, as Robert Quinn has a reputation as a brutal, violent overseer—even ordering Lilith to be severely whipped. The situation for the reader is further complicated because Quinn is Irish, another population that was looked down upon during the time period. While this at times brings him sympathy, his whiteness overshadows his Irishness.
The Book of Night Women (2009)
In The Book of Night Women, James challenges the traditional slave narrative by presenting a protagonist (Lilith) who approaches her enslavement with complex duality, despite the constant description of antagonism between slaves and masters on a plantation in Jamaica. Lilith hates the masters, but much of the novel deals with how she “aspires to obtain a privileged stature within plantation society by submitting to the sexual subjugation of a white overseer, Robert Quinn”.
This is additionally challenged by Lilith and Robert’s “love”, leading the reader to question the limits of love and relationships. James intends to have readers root for Robert and Lilith, but then catch themselves, as Robert Quinn has a reputation as a brutal, violent overseer—even ordering Lilith to be severely whipped. The situation for the reader is further complicated because Quinn is Irish, another population that was looked down upon during the time period. While this at times brings him sympathy, his whiteness overshadows his Irishness.
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
James’s 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, portrays an “often angry account of a postcolonial society struggling to balance identity and a burgeoning criminal element.”The novel has 12 narrators, contributing to the “excess” that Sheri-Marie Harrison explores in her article “Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings.” She explains: “James’s rejection of a purely nationalist tradition, like that of other authors in his cohort, concretizes his critique of the ways nationalism distracts us from the increased deregulation of global capital and its production of material inequality around the globe.
This disruption of privileged tropes in the interest of turning attention onto the transnational forces that structure inequality helps to explain James’s use of ‘a poetics of excess.’ His experimentation with form functions to rework now familiar paradigms and themes that have been central to the literary imagination of postcolonial realities for a little over half a century.”
The New Book
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019)
His most modern book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) described as “an African Game of Thrones is the first installment of a planned trilogy. It has been described by NPR journalist Ari Shapiro as “an epic fantasy quest, full of monsters, sex, and violence, set in a mythic version of ancient Africa.”
According to TIME magazine, the novel “joins the ranks of those by authors like Tomi Adeyemi and N.K. Jemisin, whose works push back against institutions about the types of figures who ‘should’ appear in fantasy fiction.
Upcoming book
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases(2020)
Marlon James teams up with authors like Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie.
Marlon James Quotes
“Killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”
―
“If it no go so, it go near so. —Jamaican proverb”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“—The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“One of the things I fucking hate about my fellow Americans: whenever they fly to a foreign country, first thing they do, they try to find as much of America as they can get their hands on, even if it’s food in the shitty cafeteria.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“You know, most of this feminism business was nothing more than white American women telling non-white women what to do and how to do it, with this patronizing if-you-become-just-like-me-you’ll-be-free bullshit,”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.”
― The Book of Night Women
“People who say they don’t have a choice just too coward to choose.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.”
― The Book of Night Women
“Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“She not black, she mulatto. Mulatto, mulatto, mulatto. Maybe she be family to both and to hurt white man just as bad as hurting black man…..Maybe if she start to think that she not black or white, then she won’t have to care about neither man’s affairs. Maybe if she don’t care what other people think she be and start think about what she think she be, maybe she can rise over backra and nigger business, since neither ever mean her any good. Since the blood that run through her both black and white, maybe she be her own thing. But what thing she be?”
― The Book of Night Women
“My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it’s some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time. It’s the way I’ve discovered to not do a damn thing. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours, then half hours, then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time to bite size. It’s like dealing with losing a man. If you can bear it for one minute, then you can swallow two, then five, then another five and on and on. If I don’t want to think about my life, I don’t have to think about life at all, just hold for one minute, then two, then five, then another five, before you know it, a month can pass and you don’t even notice because you’ve only been counting minutes.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings“Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“When building monsters don’t be surprised when they become monstrous.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Bi oju ri enu a pamo.
Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“People think blood red, but blood don’t got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don’t reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse ‘pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o’-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin’ call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.”
― The Book of Night Women
“Nobody in the game uses their feet, but it’s football. I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it’s not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet that takes forever.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you.” ~Homer, The Book of Night Women”
― The Book of Night Women
“…Love isn’t saying, I love you but calling to say, did you eat”
―
“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
―
“Those who think he had lucky breaks are not only unaware of the real story but also fall prey to that sin of the mediocre: bitchiness about others’ success”
―
“The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
―
“The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far in it.”
―
“People stupid. The dream didn’t leave, people just don’t know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Nobody ever owns a gun. You don’t know that until you own one.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“—Do you know what we mean by Cold War?
—War don’t have no temperature.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“Is true, you do feel better about things the further you run from it”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He’s the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Gorgon say that Callisto was a woman who laugh all her life but never smile once.”
― The Book of Night Women
“Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day.”
― John Crow’s Devil
“She not no fool, Lilith tell herself. She not a sleeping princess and Robert Quinn is not no king or prince. He just a man with broad shoulders and black hair who call her lovey and she like that more than her own name. She don’t want the man to deliver her, she just want to climb in the bed and feel he wrap himself around her.”
― The Book of Night Women
“Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about.”
―
“When kings fall they fall on top of us.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“I hate when a man feels I’m obligated to disclose my marital status to somebody I don’t even know. Even this bullshit about status itself as if married and spinster are the only two choices for defining myself. Or because I’m a woman I’m supposed to have a status at all.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“I tell myself that I tolerate Kimmy because she could never survive me even once talking to her the way she talks to me. I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“I might be a snob, but at least I’m not a hypocrite, still coasting around because I have nothing to do now that my life’s dream to fuck and breed for Che Guevara blew up in my face. Nor am I hanging out with rich people in West Kings House who now don’t wash their hair and calling themselves I-man to upset their parents, when everybody knows in two years they’re going right back to their father’s shipping company to take it over, and marry whichever Syrian bitch just win Miss Jamaica.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“You sure you can handle big woman chat, pickney? You sure you ready for that journey? You think good before you answer. Because some people about to forget that me be the head bloodcloth nigger in here. Now, go peel two potato and don’t draw me tongue out in this place.”
― The Book of Night Women
“Life is love and I have no love left. Love has drained itself from me, and run to a river like this one.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Never think about the past, that shit will fuck you up and you cant fuck it back”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“You ever see a man who doesn’t know he’s unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman’s face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.”
― Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“Fucking hell. Shit sounds like I’m writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue. Unending vortex of ugly? Holy sensationalism, Batman! Who the fuck am I writing for? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I’ll just fail like every other journalist”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“If a man call himself Rasta today, by next week that is him speaking prophecy. He don’t have to be too smart either, just know one or two hellfire and brimstone verse from the Bible. Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don’t lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don’t eat crab?”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Then coffin, black with silver handles with the dead boy in a black velvet suit. If you’re never gonna sweat why not go out in winter style?”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
“—Lilith. Named you meself. Did you know Adam had a first wife before Eve? Called her Lilith, but the bitch was too headstrong so got rid of her, he did. Headstrong, another word for uppity.”
― The Book of Night Women
“I also know that too many people talk too much, especially the American, who never shut up, just switch to a laugh every time he talk ’bout you, and it sound strange how he put your name beside people we never hear ’bout, Allende Lumumba, a name that sound like a country that Kunta Kinte come from. The American, most of the time hide him eye with sunglasses like he is a preacher from America come to talk to black people. Him and the Cuban come sometimes together, sometimes on they own, and when one talk the other always quiet. The Cuban don’t fuck with guns because guns always need to be needed, him say.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
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