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A 'Post-Post-Colonial' Take On The Violent Birth Of Modern Jamaica:http://www.npr.org/2014/10/05/353254...storiesfromnpr
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pre-ordered it n was notified that i will have my copy by the 7th -
my copy was in my mailbox wen i got up this a.m………as soon as i finish the last couple pages of the Ken Follett i am on to this one….dying to see how much of the gossip etc made it into the book….heh hehComment
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Book is written using stream of consciousness technique....find miself wondering just how much is fact....fascinating....is true...if a no so, a near so.....
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Excerpt from 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James
Spoken by Demus, a gangster:
“Somebody need to listen to me and it might as well be you. Somewhere, somehow, somebody going judge the quick and the dead. Somebody goin’ write about the judgment of the good and the wicked, because I am a sick man and a wicked man and nobody ever wickeder and sicker than me. Somebody, maybe forty years later when God come for all of we leaving not one. Somebody going write about this, sit down at a table on a Sunday afternoon with wood floor creaking and fridge humming but no ghost around him like they around me all the time and he going write my story. And he won’t know what to write, or how to write it because he didn’t live it, or know what cordite smell like or how blood taste when it stay stubborn in your mouth no matter how much you spit. He never feel it in the one drop. No coolie duppy [ghost] ever go to sleep on him and fool him with a wet dream while she suck out him life through him mouth even though me grinding my teeth shut and when me wake up my whole face cover in thick mouth juice like somebody just stick me in Jell-O and put me in the fridge. John the Baptist saw them coming. Now the wicked running.”
Marlon James, from “A Brief History of Seven Killings”Comment
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this book is not fi di feint of heart….dis is some serious reading in that the technique is challenging…nuff pages n even di I a serious reader had to tek breaks from it…..it was a lot of what has been bandies about re the climate of nuff runnings in Ja at a moment in time……nuff….it had me again, questioning what was what..rumour vs fact ….n Jah know dat wen it come to yaad, the lines r blurred between dose two things…rumour vs fact…..but the style of writing, to me, puts Marlon up there with the great writers of our region….Blessed brethren…u mek u mark indeedComment
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Marlon James’ universe of fictional characters includes the gunmen, their families, and bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that fateful December day in 1976. One of these is Nina Burgess – an unemployed secretary who’s been stalking Bob Marley, and who hopes that he’ll save her from financial ruin. In this excerpt we find her at the gates of his house, recalling her first fling with “him.”
Danny was from Brooklyn. A blond-hair man who came down to do research for his degree in agricultural science. Who knew that the one thing Jamaica created that was the envy of science was a cow? Anyway, we were seeing each other. He would take me around to Mayfair Hotel uptown for a drink and suddenly there would be Caucasians, men, women, old, young, all as if God just waved a wand and poof! White people. I am what they call high brown, but even with my skin colour seeing so many white people was a shock. Somebody must have mistook this for the North Coast for there to be so many tourists. But then 
one would open his mouth and patois would tumble out. Even after going there too often to remember, I would pick my jaw off the ground every time I overheard a white man chat bad. Wait! Ho ho ho, is you that, busha? Ho ho ho, can’t see you these days, man, you get rich and switch? They didn’t even have a tan!
Danny would listen to really weird music, just noise that he would play loud sometimes to piss me off. Just noise, rock and roll, the Eagles and the Rolling Stones and too many black people who should just stop acting white. But at night he would play a song. We broke up almost four years ago, but every time I look outside the window I sing two lines over and over. I do believe. If you don’t like things you leave. Funny, it is because of Danny that I met him. Some party that the record label had all the way up in the hills. Bush people and white people are all that live up here, huh? I remem- ber saying. Danny said he never know black people could be racist. I went to get some punch, poured it slow to kill time then saw Danny talking to the label boss. I was exactly what these workers thought I was, some uppity naigger ****ing the American. Right beside Danny and the label boss was him, somebody whom I never thought I would meet. Even my mother liked his last single, though my father despised him. He was shorter than I ex- pected, and me, him and his manager were the only black people there not asking if we would like our drinks freshened up. Standing there he was like a black lion. How the sexy daughter just come ’pon the man so, he said.
Fifteen years of schooling on how to talk proper and that is still the sweetest thing I ever heard come out of a man’s mouth.
I didn’t see him again until long after Danny went back and I followed my sister Kimmy, who has yet to call her parents after they’ve been robbed and her mother possibly raped, to a party at his house. He didn’t forget me. But wait, you is Kimmy sister? Is where you was hiding? Or you was like Sleeping Beauty, eh, waiting for the man to wake you up? The whole time I’m splitting in two, the part of me that I like to shut off after morning coffee said yes, reason with me my sexy brethren, the other part going what do you think you’re doing with this lice-infested Rasta? Kimmy left after a while, I didn’t see her go. I stayed, even after everybody left. I was watching him, me and the moon when he went out on the verandah naked like some night spirit, with a knife to peel an apple. Locks like a lion and muscles all over and shining in the moon. Only two people know that “Midnight Ravers” is about me.
I hate politics. I hate that I’m supposed to know. Daddy says that nobody is driving him out of his own country but he’s still thinking gunmen are somebody. I wish I was rich, I wish I was working and not laid off and I hope he would at least remember that night on his balcony with the apple. We have family in Miami. The same place Michael Manley told us to go if we want to leave. We have a place to stay but Daddy don’t want to spend any money. Damn it, now the Singer is so big nobody can see him anymore, even a woman that know him better than most women. Actually I don’t know what I’m talking about. This is the dumb **** women always think. That you know a man or that you’ve unlocked some secret just because you let him into your panties. ****, if anything I know even less now. It’s not like he called me after.
I’m across the road, waiting at the bus stop, but so far I’ve let two pass. Then a third. He hasn’t come through the front door. Not once, not for me to run across the road that instant and shout, Remember me? Long time no see. I need your help.Comment
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acalester's Marlon James writes Jamaican epic
Macalester's Marlon James writes Jamaican epic- Article by: ROHAN PRESTON , Star Tribune
- Updated: October 20, 2014 - 8:23 AM
Jamaican writer Marlon James, who lives in Minneapolis and teaches at Macalester, is the toast of fall for his sweeping tale of politics, violence and reggae superstar Bob Marley.
It’s around 3 p.m. on Oct. 1, the biggest day in Marlon James’ career — if not his life. His third novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” hit bookstores today with more buzz than a swarm of bees.
Tonight, James has his first publication reading at Common Good Books in St. Paul, across the street from Macalester College, where he teaches. But right now, as he sits in a car rolling down Lake Street in Minneapolis, he seeks to put out a fire in Jamaica to please some powerful media interests in New York.
James is on his phone with prominent Jamaican blogger Annie Paul, who has just published her interview with him online. The blog post, in which James discusses his epic novel about the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, has upset editors at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, each of which has a story on James coming out soon.
“Can you please take it down?” James asks Paul, no sign of panic or upset in his voice.
She wonders why anyone would care about her little blog in Jamaica.
“It’s just for a little bit,’ ” he says. “It’s an embargo thing.”
Reluctantly, Paul agrees.
“Alright, cool,” he says, signing off. “The Times, I’ve worked with them — they always have to be first.”
The media storm is all about “Seven Killings,” a nearly 700-page novel published by Riverhead, a Penguin imprint. The press is sending James on a multiweek national tour to support a work that blunt New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani called “epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex.”
Novelist Russell Banks has been similarly effusive, saying that “Seven Killings” is “scary and lyrically beautiful — you’ll want to read whole pages aloud to strangers.”
The book is “an indispensable and essential history of Jamaica’s troubled years,” said Publishers Weekly.
Make no mistake: “Seven Killings” is no easy airport read. The novel, which James has been thinking about for decades and which he completed over the past four years, radiates from the Dec. 3, 1976, assassination attempt on Marley, the reggae superstar. Two days after dodging most of the bullets, an injured Marley headlined a peace concert in Kingston, the Jamaican capital, standing between the leaders of the two political parties like, he would later say, Jesus between the two thieves.
James uses the assassination attempt as a touchstone to create an imaginative, Joycean mosaic of social history that pulls in a dizzying cast of characters.
“Seven Killings” begins in 1970s Jamaica, where the CIA, intent on Jamaica not becoming a socialist country, armed rival political gangs that would morph into the posses that ruled parts of New York and Miami in the 1980s and 1990s. There are spies, gang bosses, politicians, musicians, lovers and dreamers.
James’ first novel, “John Crow’s Devil,” was published by small, independent Akashic Press. He moved to Riverhead for “The Book of Night Women,” a novel set in the 19th century and told in a woman’s voice. That one has been optioned for a film, but it didn’t approach the rapturous reviews that make “Seven Killings” a breakout book for the 43-year-old author.
The fit professor
James has the physique of the track runner he once was (his specialty was the 200-meter race, although he could not cut it in the land of Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce). To tame his dreadlocks, he sometimes wraps his hair in a bandanna. And he inspires awe in his students at Macalester.
It seems that he has been living for this moment. On his official publication day, as he bounds into his rented loft atop the Midtown Global Market in south Minneapolis, he is greeted by a blast of bright light coming in large windows that give a panoramic view all the way to St. Paul. Framed posters and photographs of primitives and nudes cover the walls, along with framed album covers — Hendrix, the Stones, Grace Jones. It’s the kind of place where Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Bowie would feel right at home.
James sits at a table and flips open his MacBook Air to see what all that fuss is about. He clicks on the article in the Times, hoping aloud that he hasn’t used up his 10 free stories this month. The author photo strikes him first.
“That’s the one they chose?” James says. “I thought I was smiling; I’m not that serious.”
His phone buzzes constantly, and there also are dings coming from his computer indicating social-media updates from friends and followers. He switches to Facebook, and exclaims as he sees who has posted on his page: “Victor Chang!” he says. “He was my first writing teacher at UWI,” the University of the West Indies.
As he reads, he pauses to address a question of language that comes up about this work. The book is told in voices from a wide strata of Jamaican society, from slang and Patwa to the queen’s English. Patwa, he says, is not some dialect of English or, worse, “broken English,” but its own language.
“It has its own rules, grammar, everything that a language needs to function,” James says. “True, it’s not written down, but not every language is written.”
“Seven Killings” is James’ imaginative attempt to make sense of his formative years. He was born in 1970, two years before Michael Manley swept to power, promising a Sweden-style socialist paradise. On the other side was American-born Edward Seaga, often referred to as CIA-ga. More than a thousand people died in political violence that brought Seaga to power in 1980. Manley returned to power from 1989 to 1992.
Junkies, dons and Prince
The book is based on real events and real people, but the names have been changed. For starters, James doesn’t want to be sued. For another, some characters from that era, or their descendants, are still around.
At the reading at Common Good Books, he says that he may not be able to go to Jamaica for two years. Asked if he thinks that the dons or political forces in Jamaica will read his book, he nods. “Or they’ll hear about it,” he says. “It’s a popular parlor game.”
At the bookstore that night, James reads a passage about a Jamaican don named Josey Wales, a trusted distributor of Colombian cocaine to North America. On a trip to New York, Josey goes to a crack house in Brooklyn for the first time to see the effect of his distribution network.
Outside the drug house, the don gets held up by a junkie waving a squirt gun filled with urine. The junkie sprays Josey in the face. Peeved, Josey goes into the house and uses real guns to shoot the zombielike clientele there. The scene is an orgiastic flurry both gory and funny.
Another excerpt involves a man and a woman meeting in an apartment in New York. While they flirt, Prince plays on the stereo.
The man “walks over to the stereo and picks up the album jacket,” James reads, then goes into the characters’ voices.
“Who’s the homely looking dyke on the bike?” The man asks.
“That’s Prince.”
“Prince who?”
“Just Prince. The mustache wasn’t a giveaway?”
“My second thought was, that was the hottest bearded lady ever.”
Son of a judge and a detective
James grew up in Portmore, a suburb of Kingston. His mother was a police detective, and his father, who died in 2012, a judge. His family is the Jamaica diaspora in microcosm. James’ siblings live in Canada, the United Kingdom and Jamaica.
“We were the Cosbys, or saw ourselves as such,” he said. “My childhood was pretty boring.”
He was into comics and music, said Sara James, a graphic designer and Marlon’s younger sister.
“Whenever I think back on my childhood, the soundtrack for all my memories is not reggae, but Prince and Madonna and Men at Work,” she said. “That’s Marlon’s influence. That’s all he was into.”
When he was young, James read everything he could — novels, poetry, comics. He would get magazines at his favorite bookstore in Kingston. “It would be January and we’re just getting the October Rolling Stone, but I didn’t mind,” he said.
That craving for things global opened his world. It also helped form his rangy aesthetic.
“He’s a singular talent who’s been dedicated to reading and to writing for a long time,” said Jamaican-American novelist Colin Channer, founding artistic director of the Calabash Literary Festival, through which James and many other writers honed their crafts and got their breaks.
“He’s of a generation of writers who inherited the boldness and the freedom of earlier writers. … But his freedom also comes from reggae. He has a central place in the global modern.”
For Channer, the hallucinogenic stream of consciousness that animates parts of “Seven Killings” is not just the influence of Faulkner and Morrison, but also of reggae, specifically dub music.
“Marlon is doing in literature what Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry did in music,” Channer said. “He’s channeling a reggae aesthetic that’s being overdubbed on literary styles.”
At Calabash 10 years ago, James got his big break. He used to go to all the readings and workshops.
“I remember this round face bredda with picky head in the front row,” Channer said.
At one workshop, he met writer, editor and Prof. Kaylie Jones. She had heard about his work and was excited to meet him. The only problem was that he had thrown out the manuscript of his first book, “John Crow’s Devil.” James had to contact friends in London to retrieve a copy.
“When I read it, I was spellbound,” Jones said. “I can’t believe that it had been rejected by most of the publishers in New York. They must not have read it.”
Jones suggested James to Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books in Brooklyn. He, too, was smitten.
“Marlon’s writing hits me on a visceral level while completely capturing my imagination, my intellect,” said Temple, who used his earnings from his rock band (Girls Against Boys) to found a press.
“His writing has gristle, this raw coarseness that I’m attracted to in music and literature. When you lose yourself in it, it’s such a pleasure because you’re in the hands of a master.”
In his classes on campus and in his readings, James often is surrounded by former students. They talk about him in near-reverential terms. Jeff Bennett, who sometimes works out with James, said that his former professor’s influence changed the course of his life.
For starters, when he sent James a story, Bennett was not even an English major. He changed majors, graduated and has been sending out fiction. Recently, he gave notice at his job so he could spend more time writing.
Jones, the editor and writer, heard James talking recently. She said it sounded familiar.
“He was saying some of the stuff I teach my students,” she laughed. “I told him, ‘I taught you that.’ ”
“He said, ‘Oh, that’s where I got it.’ I have to remind him.
“When I first met him, 10 years ago, I told him he was going to be the voice of a generation. He was going to do great things. And here we are, and he’s just getting started.”
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/279500062.htmlComment
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NYT's book review of ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings,’ by Marlon James
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
‘A Brief History of Seven Killings,’ by Marlon James
By ZACHARY LAZAROCT. 23, 2014
“Well, at some point you gotta expand on a story,” a character observes late in Marlon James’s new novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” “You can’t just give it focus, you gotta give it scope.”
An American journalist named Alex Pierce is explaining himself to a group of Jamaican drug lords, members of the Storm Posse, who have tracked him down in Brooklyn and are threatening to kill him if he doesn’t rewrite his next article according to their specifications.
It’s 1991, and Alex knows both too little and too much about the gang violence that has bedeviled Jamaica since its independence in 1962. Like all writers, he is a clueless person looking for a clue. Novelists, in particular, are plagued by this urgent sense of unknowing. James, Pierce’s creator, is so inquisitive that he goes beyond what can be established as historical fact and invents what lies beneath, those thoughts and emotions that can never be known for certain.
“A Brief History of Seven Killings” is based in part on the real-life story of the Shower Posse, who began their rise in *early-'60s Kingston and spread to America, where, by the 1980s, they controlled much of the crack trade in New York and Miami — in the book, they form an alliance with Griselda Blanco of the Medellín *cartel.
The partnership echoed another one, when Jamaica’s prime minister Edward Seaga and his Jamaica Labour Party used the gang as enforcers in the slums of Tivoli Gardens (called Copenhagen City in James’s novel), which became that party’s fief. Both the J.L.P. and their rival party, the P.N.P. (People’s National Party), had armed gangs in their service, for whoever controlled the slums controlled Kingston, and whoever won the Kingston vote won the nation’s elections.
This turf war led to spiraling poverty and savage violence. It was the kind of trauma described and transmuted into song by the great Bob Marley (referred to in the novel as the Singer), who in 1976, amid unprecedented bloodshed, announced a free concert to promote peace in Kingston. (Marley was himself caught between the J.L.P. and P.N.P., along with their criminal gangs.) At the same time, outside forces including the C.I.A., anti-Castro Cubans and the Colombian drug cartels were converging on Jamaica with money and guns.
If all this sounds confusing, it’s because it’s true. On Dec. 3, before he could give the peace concert, Marley was ambushed at his house by a band of gunmen, shot twice, and almost murdered. After that, organized crime in Jamaica went international.
There is always too much history to keep track of — the daily news is itself an impossible barrage — and so a certain kind of novel has evolved to shape narratives out of such chaos, not to find answers, but to capture the way history feels, how it maims, bewilders, enmeshes us. If, like James, you’re from Jamaica, then recent history might suggest a gangster chronicle, and the central plot and metaphor of his novel is an intricate set of connections between the attempted assassination of the Singer and the rise and fall of a J.L.P.-connected crime boss called Josey Wales. The man who comes to kill the Singer, icon of peace, is a gangster whose export business is not reggae but cocaine. It doesn’t matter whether this hypothesis is factually verifiable. It isn’t. What matters is whether the story is persuasive and suggestive.
It helps that James, as in his “John Crow’s Devil” (2005) and “The Book of Night Women” (2009), is a virtuoso at depicting violence, particularly at the beginning of this book, where we witness scene after scene of astonishing sadism, as young men and boys are impelled by savagery toward savagery of their own. This, again, is how history feels to those on the wrong side of it, and the novel’s great strength is the way it conveys the degradation of Kingston’s slums. Even through the sometimes preposterous voice of his journalist character, James renders it vividly: “Zinc in the Eight Lanes shines like nickel. Zinc in Jungle is riddled bullet holes and rusted the color of Jamaican rural dirt. . . . Ghetto is a smell. . . . Old Spice, English Leather and Brut cologne. The rawness of recently slaughtered goat, the pepper and pimento in goat’s head soup.” Such passages reveal what this novel fundamentally is: an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America’s participation in that history. In the end, the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it’s more than that.
Indeed, the further I read, the more the book’s increasing sense of absurdity, its pop culture references, its compulsive ventriloquism and its range of tones — comic, surreal, nightmarish, parodic — began to remind me uncannily of David Foster Wallace’s all-or-nothing “Infinite Jest.” (I even began to wonder if the book’s title, obviously ironic given its length, was a homage to Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.”) This eclecticism sometimes had the odd effect of distracting me from the courage of James’s book, which is after all an exploration of real-life acts of violence. One central character, for example, is a woman named Nina Burgess, who flees the gang wars of Kingston to start a new life in New York, as a caregiver to an elderly rich white man. When they engage in mild flirtation, Nina thinks: “I know this part, I’ve watched ‘Dynasty.’ I should ask him if he’d like a drink. . . . Which isn’t going to happen though he really does look like Lyle Waggoner and I heard Lyle posed for Playgirl.”
Perhaps out of a desire to make Nina more than just a victim or a stereotype, James gives her these sardonic thoughts, though they tend to obscure her loneliness and terror (she is literally running for her life). The virtue of irony is that it creates discomfort, and although I struggled at times with James’s irony, it allowed him to write beautifully without writing too beautifully, which would have been a different kind of problem.
“Some people have this thing ‘bout themselves, maybe is a ghetto thing where even if another man don’t destroy you, you going destroy yourself,” James writes later, more powerfully, in the voice of one of Kingston’s lost souls. “Every man in the ghetto born with it, but somehow the Singer cure it. You look ‘pon the two of we in a picture, both of we smarter than the ghetto, but only one really get out.”
The speaker is imprisoned at Rikers Island. The Singer is now dead, never to be replaced, but the succession of gangsters goes endlessly on. Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” eventually takes on a mesmerizing power. It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley’s, but like the tumult he couldn’t stop.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS
By Marlon James
688 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/bo...es-review.html
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over 1300 views n not one other person has read the book n can comment…not even Jkid who started the post….dang….nothing controversial bout dis so y no comments on the book or people just live vicariously tru oddas like moi's reading n sharing….:sigh:Comment
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everybody coming looking for updates to see if the book worth reading.Originally posted by evanovitch View Post
how it go?When its hot in the jungle of peace I go swimming in the ocean of love.....Comment
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