Marlon James & Language

A Brief History of Seven Killings is as much a book about identity and history as it is about language.  Marlon James has known Jamaica his whole life, and the novel functions not only as an ethnography of sorts but also as a fictional, global narrative grounded within transatlantic history–the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica before the Smile Jamaica Concert for peace.  The concert was organized to unite the warring gangs and their supported political parties (the Jamaica Labor Party and the People’s National Party).  The book looks forward and backward–ending finally in the early 1990’s in the Bronx.  Beyond Jamaica and New York, the novel invokes history of the CIA, the School of the Americas, the American crack cocaine epidemic, the Medellín cartel, and the Cold War.

I spent the weekend trying to figure out what direction I wanted to take this post in.  I knew I wanted to talk about the history and the novel’s implications and lessons (both politically and socially), but I keep coming back to language.  Told from varying perspectives inside and outside of Jamaica, the novel invokes Jamaican Patois in a number of its narratives–a dialect I knew of but knew nothing about before reading.  Jamaican Patois is a dialect derived from both British/American English (via colonialism) but also the languages of West African (from the African diaspora).  It also uses both phonetics and direct translation in deriving the meaning of words or phrases.  Some of the slang required Google searching, but a lot of the speaking dialect in the book can be understood through phonetics.

One voice in particular, Nina Burgess, is a young woman from Kingston who, after sleeping with Bob Marley (who, I should mention, is exclusively referred to as “The Singer” in the book) one night, eventually shows up at his house again in hopes that he will romantically take her away from Jamaica and the violence that persists.  She witnesses the assassination attempt on Marley and there encounters another of the novel’s most prominent figures, Josey Wales–a gangster from Copenhagen City also involved with the Medellín cartel.  This encounter intrinsically guides the novel, as Nina Burgess takes on 3 additional identities (who all also narrate at one point or another in the novel) over the next fifteen years in hopes of escaping that encounter and Josey Wales.

Nina experiences, at various points in her life while embodying different identities, other Jamaicans (and Americans as well) critiquing the degree to which she avoids using Jamaican Patois.  Her escape from Jamaica and her past brings her to a hospital in the Bronx, where she eventually learns of Josey Wales’ death and confronts her past when she meets the wife of a victim of Wales’ violence while working as a nurse.  For Nina, language is tethered to identity, and she wants nothing to do with Jamaica or her past.  Professional progress and integration within American society motivate Nina, as each subsequent alias draws her further from the original, Kingston-born Nina Burgess.

As a whole, A Brief History of Seven Killings manages an exceptionally fresh take on the global novel.  I’m still not quite sure how I feel about Nina Burgess (and her aliases) being the only prominent female voice in the narrative, but I think the nature of the novel’s subject matter lends itself to a prevalence of male voices (not to suggest that this is a good thing).  Nina’s narrative trajectory and end result is important, though, so I find some solace in that.

 

 

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

I listened to a podcast segment about this text last year when the 2015 Man Booker shortlist was announced, but I delayed picking it up until a few weeks ago.  After seeing it appear across various social media platforms in the past month or so, I impulsively opened it and began.  What many consider some of the book’s main faults: a lack of authenticity associated with the characters’ backstories, weak execution of foreshadowing, and the male-centric cast all underscore why Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (which I have embarrassingly still not read) captured the coveted Man Booker last year over this and the others on the shortlist.

A Little Life situates readers–somewhat–within the consciousnesses of four college friends as they navigate adulthood in New York City and beyond.  One of the four, Jude St. Francis, proves the main subject of the friendship and the novel as well.  Jude’s turbulent yet still monetarily successful life keeps the other three–Malcolm, JB, and Willem–tethered together as they all pursue vastly different careers.  While early on, the story follows the four of them, the later sections focus mainly on the relationship between best friends Jude and Willem and the queer male relationship that unfurls between the two.

Despite the adequate criticisms, I want to highlight one profound aspect of the text that truly encapsulates what I feel to be the essence of ‘the contemporary’.  Yanagihara sets up this idea of contemporaneity with what is portrayed but also, and more importantly perhaps, what is omitted.  The readers observes the obvious characteristics of contemporary social culture: communal living, the breakdown of nation boundaries through what seems like ceaseless wanderlust, a present–yet still underrepresented in some sense–emphasis on racial consciousness and identity.  However, what readers do not see much of over the course of the text proves one of if not the most singular symptom of contemporary culture: technology.  Text messaging and email are both referenced, but Yanagihara goes no further.  We do not see the reliance on smart phone applications and social media that one may expect to observe in a text so inherently tied to contemporary identity.  Perhaps this is partly due to the success all four men begin achieving as their lives unfold, or perhaps there is something deeper, something more metaphysical going on here.

I was reminded consistently while reading A Little Life of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the notion of the contemporary.  He postulates, ‘Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism’ (41).  This is exactly the distinction Yanagihara arranges in the narrative.  Readers see the characters fretting over exorbitant rent prices in Manhattan and using phones and computers to communicate, but social media and the internet more broadly are scarcely mentioned if at all.  In this way, we have a ‘relationship’ with contemporary culture that proves ‘a disjunction and an anachronism’ while still exhibiting clear signs that associate it with a world we recognise.

I was both frustrated with parts of the novel while also appreciative of the authorial risks Yanagihara takes in arranging it.  I wished for more moments of interiority from Malcolm and JB.  The first two hundred pages or so really excited me for what may come, but overall, as a reader, i felt slighted by the way in which the narrative offers certain insight without ultimately following through consistently.  We get the entirety of Jude’s abusive childhood that proves central to the overall narrative, but we only get snapshots of, for instance, the relationship between Malcolm and his parents and JB’s struggles with artistic fame and addiction.  Why is the reader offered these plotlines without the necessary closure?

Overall though, the novel proves exceptionally well-researched and the final section and ending are executed quite well.  The gripes it receives are not minor by any means, but Yanagihara still presents a narrative that focuses on the fundamental nature friendship in a contemporary, interconnected space that demonstrates the intrinsic importance of causality and chance.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride

Lexical prowess and experimental narration may often deter even the avid reader from engaging wholly with a text.  Ulysses, for all its groundbreaking contributions to modern literature, still lays untouched on bookshelves around the world because of the amount of active participation the text requires from its reader.  It would come as no surprise then that a text so engrained within the Irish tradition as Eimear McBride’s debut novel from 2013, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, may, on first glance, discourage readers with its fragmented and stream-of-consciousness narrative style as well as its use of slang.  However, readers may ultimately find solace in the way McBride crafts a story that demands close reading.  That is not to say that the book is easily read by any means, but the emphasis on sentence-level detail consistently draws the reader inward.  As Sinead Gleeson’s 2013 review for The Irish Times outlines, ‘[the novel] doesn’t keep the reader at a distance. We are expected to pay attention, certainly, to immerse ourselves in its shifting voices and stop-start rhythms, but it hugely rewards that dedication’.

This, in Gleeson’s terms, collection of ‘shifting voices and stop-start rhythms’ that forms the crux of the text provides valuable insight into McBride’s unnamed narrator.  Growing up in a conservative Catholic household without a father, McBride’s narrator expresses the struggles associated with maturation and the visceral familial rifts that result.  The text is narrated in the first person and addressed to her brother, her elder by two or three years, who suffers from a brain tumor while they are both young children.  This sibling relationship develops alongside the narrator’s own individual growth, as the reader learns of how her budding sexual identity outwardly affects her relationships both with her dogmatic mother and socially ostracised brother.  The text relies on the coalescence of external dialogue and internal musings in order to provide well-developed portraits of the narrator’s progression from early childhood, into adolescence and through young adulthood.

After an unconventional sexual awakening in her early teenage years, McBride’s narrator juxtaposes her own maturity with that of her older brother’s.  She notes, ‘We were moving off now.  From each other.  As cannot be.  Helped.  I didn’t help it from that time on.  Young know.  All that…Who are you?  You and me were never this.  This boy and girl that do not speak.  But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on’ (61).  McBride underscores not only the complex nature of sibling rivalry but also the way in which her narrator feels she’s responsible because she ‘left [her brother] behind’.  Readers experience this relationship shifting as the siblings growing from teens to young adults and social forces begin drawing them apart further.

By the novel’s conclusion, we still find the narrator feeling responsible for her brother and the way in which her family and society wrongly identifies him.  She additionally reflects on how her own choices have ultimately affected her brother’s life.  In this way, the narrator’s sexuality–while primarily driving the narrative and contextualising her own struggles –grows somehow entwined with her brother’s ability to effectively grow up. The narrative is foremost a lesson in the importance of interpretation and perspective.  Socio-sexual discovery for the narrator manifests itself differently for each of the other family members.

I could not have chosen a more thought-provoking text as my first post-MA coursework read.  Beyond the numerous prizes this texts has accrued, McBride creates a story that both haunts and liberates the reader with narrative interiority that is reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce.  It is no surprise that the text has since found its way onto literature course syllabi worldwide.