From the Archives : Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

In this archival episode from 2019, host David Naiman interviews novelist Marlon James about his epic fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

Key takeaways

• Marlon James describes his fantasy upbringing as being shaped by comics and movie novelizations like Star Trek rather than Tolkien or Dune.
• The author explains that Black Leopard, Red Wolf was born from a desire to create his own space for representation rather than fighting for inclusion in European-centric mythologies.

Main topics

• African mythology in fantasy
• Decolonizing literature

Notable quotes

We just get exhausted asking for a seat at the table, so we just build our own tables.

Conclusion

A profound look at how authors can reclaim historical narratives to cr

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Today's episode is brought to you by The Going is Forever, Elizabeth Metzger's third collection of poems. Dubbed oracular, crystalline, and utterly original by Maggie Milner, The Going is Forever traces both holding on and letting go, tracking the nonlinear journeys we take and the daily distances we cross for intimacy, braiding a dissolving marriage, a son's medical crisis, and the death of a father, the speaker reconceives loss as transformation and longing as ongoing love, exploring the multiplicity of the self in proximity to others. Natalie Shapiro writes, these poems will stay with me for a long, long time. The Going is Forever is now available at milkweed.org. Today's archival episode, recorded in person at the studios of KBOO Community Radio in 2019, is with Marlon James, whose latest book, The Disappearers, received surely the most talked about book review of the year from Dwight Garner for the New York Times, who really isn't known to gush. Not only did he say it should be talked alongside Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, and Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Garner called it one of the signal reading experiences of his adult life, a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century so far. The book we discussed seven years ago now was James's move into fantasy and myth, a novel that won the 2020 Locus Award for Best Horror. The science fiction and fantasy author and critic Amal El-Motar was perplexed by all the comparisons of it to George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien and suggested it was more as if Toni Morrison had written Ovid's Metamorphosis, quote, painful and strange, full of bodies shifting from personhood into meat, and somehow always still upsettingly beautiful. This isn't Tolkien's grief-stricken melancholy or Martin's calculating character-forward plot mechanics. It's horror and tragedy by way of fantasy. Nothing discreet, everything... Penetrating everything else, reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf, was like being slowly eaten by a bear. One inviting me to feel every pressure of tooth and claw tearing into me, asking me to contemplate the intimacy of violation, and occasionally cracking a joke. This conversation marked a big moment for the podcast itself as we launched this conversation as part of announcing my partnership with Tin House, a wonderful partnership that lasted seven years and for which I wouldn't be where I am today. For the bonus audio archive, Marlon contributed a reading of his essay, Why I'm Done Talking About Diversity, or why we should try an all-white diversity panel. And as part of celebrating the new Tin House partnership, we also included in the bonus audio archive a craft talk that he gave at the 2015 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop called Nine and a Half Rules of Seduction, where he talks about why writers should consider themselves seducers and looks at the common mistakes writers do at the sentence level. and at the level of story, that can ruin the seduction, and also the best ways to remedy them. This joins a huge array of contributions from past guests, whether China Mieville, N.K. Jemisin, or Daniel José Older, Naomi Klein, Jordi Rosenberg, Viet Thanh Nguyen, or Dion Brand. You can learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio. and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter at patreon.com slash betweenthecovers. And now for today's archival conversation with none other than Marlon James. Speaker 3 (5:17) Good morning and welcome to Between the Covers. I'm David Naiman, your host. Today's guest is the novelist Marlon James, best known for his Man Booker Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which made James the first Jamaican author to take home the UK's most prestigious literary award. A Brief History also won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Minnesota Book Award. as well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Marlon James has a degree in language and literature from the University of the West Indies, an MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University, and teaches writing at Macalester College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's the author of the novel The Book of Night Women, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and John Crowe's Devil, a New York Times Editor's Choice and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. His short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's, GQ, Granta, and the Caribbean Review of Books, and he's here today to talk about his first book since winning the Booker, one of the most anticipated releases of 2019. the first installment in his epic fantasy Dark Star trilogy entitled Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Science fiction magazine and book publisher Tor says this of Black Leopard, Red Wolf. If Charles R. Saunders' Imaro series opened the door to new ways of telling epic fantasy, and N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy leapt over the threshold, then Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf just ripped the whole damn door off its hinges. Louise Erdrich adds, this book begins like a fever dream and merges into world upon world of deadly fairy tales rich with political magic. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fabulous cascade of storytelling. Sink right in. I guarantee you will be swept downstream. And finally, Neil Gaiman says, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. a dangerous, hallucinatory ancient Africa which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter's. It's as deep and crafty as Gene Wolfe, bloodier than Robert E. Howard and all Marlon James. It's something very new that feels old in the best way, and I cannot wait for the next installment. Welcome to Between the Covers, Marlon James. Speaker 1 (7:59) Thanks for having me. Speaker 3 (8:00) So you've said that you believe we should be writing books that we want to read. And that Black Leopard, Red Wolf comes from a desire to see what you weren't seeing in the fantasy world. But you've also described yourself as a fantasy nerd. Right. So maybe we can start not with... what you weren't seeing, but maybe with the ground upon which you stand, like the fantasy touchstones for you that you were immersed in before you started writing Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Speaker 1 (8:29) My fantasy touchstones were all pop touchstones. I didn't read Lord of the Rings until, I mean, pretty much after the movie came out. Speaker 3 (8:38) I Speaker 1 (8:39) didn't read Dune until I was an adult and most of these novels because they just weren't around in Jamaica. Nobody would have had them except rich kids. So, you know, my fantasy upbringing was comics mostly. So we're talking superheroes and sci-fi comics. You know, Heavy Metal Magazine, which somebody may have left somewhere and I'd find. It was whatever I could grab, you know, get my hands on. A lot of my fantasy language actually comes from novelizations of movies. which you could find in any pharmacy, any drugstore, anywhere. So I remember that. I actually read Star Trek, Wrath of Khan. I didn't see it. I read Empire Strikes Back. I read Return of the Jedi. I read Dragon Slayer. These are movies I didn't see until we got cable in the 90s. So that was my fantasy. My fantasy world was, again, very pop and very whatever. Speaker 1 (9:41) I could get my hands on. The sort of masters of fantasy are people I didn't read until way into adulthood. Speaker 3 (9:53) When did you read Ursula K. Le Guin? I know you've mentioned her as an influence before, and since we're in Portland, I thought I'd ask you. When was there an intersection with her work? Speaker 1 (10:04) Probably around my second novel. So again, most of these... you know, books I read, you know, as an adult. Again, because of, you know, being in Jamaica, you read what's available and you read what other people are reading. You also read what they feel like lending you. Yeah, so a lot of that was a pretty adult thing. So my, a lot of my fantasy upbringing to the point where I would want to write fantasy came from the stuff that I read and the stuff that I just, you know. couldn't get my hands on the feel like i wanted to read so Speaker 3 (10:39) you've attributed the original idea of this trilogy to a fight you're having with a friend around the casting of of the lord of the rings or the hobbit the hobbit can you can you talk a little bit about that well Speaker 1 (10:50) you know they announced the cast and it was so it was so lacking in diversity there was almost none if i remember i mean maybe there was but certainly not enough to to to pay attention to And it was just me going, oh, God, where are we? We're going to have this argument again. I argue about representation. My friend will argue about it's a European story, which is exactly what happened. I'm like, why isn't this a more diverse cast? It's 2010. I think it was 2010. And his response was, well, you know, it's a European story. It's a British story. It represents British mythology and blah, blah, blah. And I said, dude, Lord of the Rings isn't real. Right. It's like when Megan Kelly said Santa Claus is white. Santa isn't real, Megan. You can do whatever you want with it. If we've had that attitude, Star Trek would never become what Star Trek became. Speaker 2 (11:50) Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:51) But the argument kept going, and after a while, I just got tired. of arguing for inclusion in somebody's space when I could just create my own space. And I think that's what happens sometimes. We just get exhausted asking for a seat at the table, so we just build our own tables. And at first, when I went off into African mythology, it wasn't to write, it was to read. Because it's one thing to say, you know what, I'm going to focus on African mythology and myths and legend, but it's not like I knew them. Why would I know them, know what they taught them? Well, Speaker 3 (12:28) I was going to ask you that, actually, about whether how much you knew about them or not, because I know that the actor who's playing who played Killmonger is going to adapt to this series. Right. Well, he was either quoted or or misquoted or maybe quoted out of context in Vanity Fair when he said I'm talking about the Black Panther movie. We don't have any mythology, black mythology or folklore. Creating our own mythology is very important because you help people dream. And I'm not that interested in. whether he was quoted correctly or not, or whether he actually believes that, but it made me wonder, like, how available were these mythologies to Speaker 1 (13:03) you? Yeah, he got a lot of flack for that, but I know exactly what he was saying. And one, the sort of responses he got was that, well, he's just ignorant about African mythology and blah, blah, blah, and there's so much around. But I was ignorant of it, too. I mean, there is stuff I know because of my grandfather telling me secrets. But most of the stuff that I wrote in this book, I researched and I did two years of it. It's easy to take for granted the myths. You know, the myths tell us who we are. If you're a European descendant, those myths are always there. Those legends are always there. If you're in the Americas, for a lot of black people who haven't been able. to access these stories, ground zero is slavery. And as somebody who actually wrote a slavery novel, even I am tired of that. So I totally get where he's coming from. It's one thing to say that these stories are wrong, these myths are wrong, but who would have taught him? Speaker 1 (14:07) Which school would have, you know, I learned Greek mythology in school. I didn't learn a single thing African or Arab or Native American in school. So if we're talking about the state of school as it is, there's no way you would have known those things. There's just no way I knew about it either. All of that was from research. I wish it wasn't. And there are certainly people out there who know more than me or knew more than me at the time. But I had to do some serious. in-depth research to come to that. Speaker 3 (14:38) And how difficult was it to get beyond or around a sort of a European gaze when you're looking at some of the material in your research around Africa? It's Speaker 1 (14:47) extremely difficult. For one, that means any history book written beyond the past 30 years is useless. And most books in Africa are trash. There are one or two European scholars I could trust. But even then, you know, I teach English. I teach writing. So half of what I do is just deciphering the coding and all in the stuff that people write. So at one point, the research was just a kind of a comedy. It's let's see how quickly we can see the bigotry in this line and so on. And so there's a lot of that. There's reading judiciously. There is catching up on all the latest research. Still going through some of the bashes. Here's a pretty recent example. We still call the Great Zimbabwe as if it's one. And everybody says the Great Zimbabwe. There were dozens of Zimbabwe's. The ruins are all right there. But as recently as 2010, there were still documentaries acting like it was an African Stonehenge. Like there was one. No, there was a whole valley of fortresses, a whole valley of Zimbabwe's. But we still... tie into the sort of African Stonehenge, was it built by aliens, you know, kind of thing. So they have to go beyond that, have to decipher that. And sometimes it means going to the folktales, some of which are only recently translated. It means me going through the boring stuff. I have no problem reading what that scientist read. When I grab a research book, whatever it is, the first place I check is the bibliography because I want to read what they read. And if you're going to do something like that, you have to go to the original sources, the boring documents, the logs, the stuff that's not sexy. Speaker 3 (16:40) Well, talking about sort of deciphering coding, to me, it seems like a smart move that you sort of said the hell with The Hobbit because in a way, like, it's not just. like your friend says, European mythologies, at least in the books, but it feels like it's sort of a defense of different iterations of European values. Yeah. And like when you have like the Scandinavian like elves and the Welsh or Scottish like hobbits, but the evil creatures, I don't think coincidentally or, and perhaps suspiciously, they don't come from a non-specific elsewhere. They come from the South and they come from the East and they ride creatures called Oliphants. So there is, It feels to me like there is a racial coding and that maybe there would be an entering of a – like if you put other characters in it who are not white, maybe they would just be non-white characters in a white space. They'll be orcs? Well, Speaker 1 (17:32) they are. You know, I am far – I'm actually hugely influenced by Tolkien right up to the point where I had to spell check. I had to make sure I didn't have too many Tolkienisms. But I also think Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and these guys are products of their time. And even the whole idea of the dark continent or the whole idea of all these things that we associate with darkness, whether it's the witching or even something as simple as the word blackmail, is stuff that they're products of their time. I find I'm nowhere as – I'm not offended by Tolkien at all as I am, say, by H.P. Lovecraft. Right. Who's just a straight up racist. But there is this sort of, and it's a very, it's not even a sci-fi thing or even necessarily a racist thing as it is a British thing of this distrust of the other. And the other always comes from the south. And the other always comes from darkness. And the other always, it's anything, it's always coming from outside. It's funny. The whole notion of public health, for example, is a British concept. But it came out of the idea that disease, if it's coming, is always coming from the outside. It's always coming from the dark continent. It's coming from the locals. The idea that there's always something about to infiltrate. And that's something as simple as public health. Well, I think the Speaker 3 (19:08) vampire myth around the influx of Jews into England has partially influenced the vampire myth. Yeah, Speaker 1 (19:15) there's always this idea that somebody outside is coming for you. And it's interesting how that is one of the myths that has endured. Look at any murder mystery. Even, you know, the really, really smart detective fiction writers know that the enemy was always within. But the characters are saying he's outside. It's always stranger comes to town, this sort of outside thing, which reflects a kind of xenophobia that's still in Britain. Look at Brexit. Speaker 3 (19:48) Yeah. Well, the one way in which I feel like you have a strong connection to Tolkien is the sense that you've sort of created an African Middle Earth. It's not Africa, and it's not a specific time. It's a... Speaker 3 (20:04) It's abstracted from time and place, but you also make a nod to a specific time period and to Africa in a more general sense. So I was hoping you could talk about why the 9th and 10th century appealed to you as sort of some of the reference points on the way in which you would create this world. Speaker 1 (20:25) Well, one of the things that really appealed to me is there are parts of Africa that went from Stone Age straight to iron without going through bronze. I think that's remarkable. And it's one of the many cases of accelerated society that happens below the Sahara. And I think, and the book happens, the bulk of the book is below the Sahara. It could have been easier for me to set it above the Sahara and go, whoopee, pyramids. And then go, whoo, build that hill ends. But there is still this idea, and certainly by people like... people like me, ignorant people like me in the diaspora believe that civilization was above there. The backward people were below the Sahara. I mean, one of the reasons why we don't have these kingdoms anymore is that the British burned them down. You know, Benin City had streetlights. You know, almost all those cities had a very functioning grid. They were trading with the Indians and South Asians for centuries. Speaker 1 (21:25) Granted, sometimes that was slaves. I like those centuries because society was still being formed. And even then it's pretty loose. That's why I say it's closer to Conan the Barbarian or Star Wars or, yeah, Middle Earth. Yes, Middle Earth is clearly drawing from Dark Ages, and it's drawing from Dark Ages in a way