And from that living legend, we delve into some ancient myths with our next guest, Marlon James, the award winning Jamaican author who brings us a powerful saga in his new book, Black Leopard Read Wolf, the first of his Dark Star trilogy, best known for his man Booker winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings he told our Alicia Menendez about his new fantasy epic.

Marlon, thank you so much for being with us today.

For having me.

This is a complex book, a complex world.

How do you describe it?

You know, the best way to describe it is to just start at the beginning.

This black in the black of red wolf, a slave trader hires a bunch of mercenaries and heroes for hire to find a child who's been missing for three years.

That's all they know.

This story then jumps to the end.

They found the child.

Terrible things happen.

People want answers.

There are only three witnesses, and each witness is not going to tell the reader what they saw.

What does that then tell you about the nature of truth if there can be three different versions of one story?

Well, for one, the reader is going to read it as a lot of work to do, and every day is going to have to decide because I'm not going to tell them who to believe.

It's pretty much you are your judge and jury, as you know, assuming that.

Yeah, because the whole idea of of of truth, of authentic version of the director's cut, they all these things, every Western in a lot of African storytelling, you know, from the get go, that it's a trickster that's telling it a story.

It's always you always know you're dealing with an unreliable narrator And that fascinates me.

I still I still am fascinated by eyewitness accounts and people who look at the same thing and come to completely different perceptions You know, if you see some somebody can look at a guy gorging on a bag of chips and think, oh, he's starving.

Another person think, oh, he's gluttonous.

But seeing the same thing.

You have described this trilogy as an African Game of Thrones.

I would love for you to read us a passage from the book.

Absolutely.

This is from the beginning, actually says the child is dead.

There is nothing left to know.

I hear there is a queen in the South that kills a man who brings her bad news So when I give word of the boy's death the way I write my own death with it, truth, each lay just as a crocodile eats the moon.

And yet my witness is the same today as it will be tomorrow.

No, I did not kill him, though I may have wanted him dead.

Crave for it the way a glutton craves goat flesh or to draw blood and fire through his black heart and watch it explode black blood.

And to watch his eyes when it stops blinking when it looks but stop seeing.

And to listen for his voice croaking and hearing his chest.

He even a death rattle saying, Look, my wretched spirit leaves this and was wretched of bodies and the smell of such tidings and dance at such a loss.

Yes, I got out the conceit of it, but no, I did not kill him because you re and you are Palmo.

Not everything that I see is should be spoken by the moat Should I give you a story?

I am just a man who some have called a wolf.

The child is dead.

I know.

The old woman brings you different news.

Call him murderer.

She says, even though my only sorrow is that I didn't kill her, the redheaded one said the child's head was infested with devils.

If you believe in devils, I I believe in bad blood.

I will give you a story.

How did you know that?

That was how the book had to start.

I didn't man beginning sometimes come after I've finished a novel.

I'll have a this is why, you know, when I'm teaching students, they have so much pressure how to begin and you can take them forever.

I am usually just begin to.

The first word you read is rarely the first read a reader is going to read.

And some of this has survived all the drafts.

But I didn't read and know how it began until, you know, until I got to the the end of it.

When you have a book that is as successful as a Brief History of Seven Killings, which critical acclaim won the Man Booker Prize, how does that change the way you approach the work that follows I don't think it changes it much because if I was really concerned about it, I think I'd have written a more careful book.

I think I'd have written I'd have made a less risky turn, although to me doesn't seem to make a jump.

Even in brief history, a large part of the novel is told by a ghost.

So and if you grew up in the Caribbean and you grew up with with the not just, you know, not just fairy tales and so on, but the African and African traditions and myths and legends and, you know, the Native American myths and legends and so on, real and surreal doesn't have the boundary that people it seems to have for other people.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez always said that the great thing about the Caribbean is that truth is, you know, fixed truth is stranger than the word is fiction.

And he's actually he's absolutely right.

It's so it didn't feel so much like a leap for me in terms of the work.

It definitely wasn't.

But then how strange is it to you that the vast majority of epic fantasy ends up happening in Western Europe?

Oh, that's not strange for me.

Oh, and that's the thing to come to terms with as a fan of epic fantasy, that most of it is European or most of what I've read was European.

Most of it was based on European history, European myths.

I mean, I love I love Vikings.

I love Lord of the Rings.

I love language in the Wardrobe.

I love Philip Pullman, yeah.

You have strong opinions on hobbits.

You know, I have strong opinions on people's opinions, and it's yeah, but reading these stories when I was growing up, it's not like I'm clamoring for representation.

But of course, if I'm if I'm a ten year old kid and seen people doing dashing and daring events, I want to somebody who looks like me every now and then and I think somebody from from Celtic or Scandinavian descent can take for granted stuff like Thor.

Could they have a Thor you know, it's 44 for people in the West, for black people in the West who have been sort of cut off from all these epic traditions.

Then it's, you know, it's, it's it's new eras, new discovery.

Why did you know you had to write this book?

That's a good question.

Because there were other books I could have written.

I, I think there are a few things.

One, I am always gravitating to the book I think I would want to read.

And if it's out there and I don't have to write it, but if it isn't, then, I mean, that's a book I'm going to gravitate towards.

I also, because I'm kind of a glutton for punishment, always go after the most impossible kind of book.

And almost every book I start writing, it starts from the position of me going, There's no way I can write this.

I don't know how to get into this story.

It's going to this is the book that's going to kill and that happened with this as well.

It's because it was a trilogy or because it was epic fantasy.

Because it was epic fantasy and because I didn't know who was telling the story and I didn't know how to tell it.

And that's when the whole idea of the trilogy came up, actually, that it wouldn't be me trying to create this one long narrative.

It would me it would be me writing stories that sort of confound each other and cancel each other out.

You know, the hero story, Amy Very would be the victim of story B or the villain of Story B.

How does writing in the realm of fantasy change the way you grapple with what many consider social constructions like gender and race?

No, that's a good question because a lot of that didn't happen for me until I did the research.

So in the book, there is queerness, there is gender fluidity, there is, you know, people there's plural people had plural personalities.

There, different genders and different attitudes toward sexuality and homosexuality and so on.

And all of that might seem like me trying to hit some intersectional point in a novel.

But all of that was from the research.

It turns out that's the oldest element in the book, that there are tribes and 14 genders, that there are ways in which African societies had accepted queerness and homosexuality and strangers and even transness from way back thousands and thousands of years that is not until, you know, a bunch of American TV preachers told them This is evil, that that I love you.

Was that to reconsider it?

But that that to me was the Mind-Blowing aspect of the research does how old all of that was.

Much like Game of Thrones, the book is replete with sexual references.

And I wonder how often when you're writing about sex in this book, are you really writing about power?

Quite a bit, actually.

One, because people spend a lot of time trying to demonstrate sexual power over other people.

That's one aspect of human nature that hasn't changed but there is also but there's also a certain kind of sensuality and frankness that's part of the African storytelling tradition.

That I think we, as more puritanical minds can't really appreciate or think it's something that should be shunted away.

You know, it's there.

That's one that's one of the reasons why blues was so sexually frank.

And in a lot of ways, that's African coming out in blues music.

Because the the and to to latch on to that, to write in that sort of super sensual world with a really high erotic energy was exciting and was also, you know, kind of scary because at the back end of that is also danger.

At the back end of that is abuse and and so on.

And the aim then, though, is how do you capture that with that becoming a viewpoint of the book?

Because that's always a risk we run when we when we play with things like that.

Did you have a recent character as the director?

Is this book you have a sexist character?

Do you read a sexist book?

And that's where I think I hit a mix between not being not flinching and blinking in the sight of all of this, but also point out that this world knows enough about what's going on, that this is not normal, this is not tolerated, that this is all people exercising power as opposed to people exercise and what they think is right.

I think there are a lot of us, especially in those teen years, who feel that we're growing up on the margins.

I very much identified with everything you've ever said about being a nerd and retreating into books.

Yeah.

And so then I wonder, is epic fantasy a means of escape or a means of belonging?

It's both, though, just so simple.

And this is an X-Men comic.

I remember when I was reading the X-Men.

The thing about being an X-Men fan or reading X-Men is a lot like being an X-Men but because you're like, so me on it.

I think certainly for me, the idea that by opening a book I can live another life was what drew me to it.

So you're being drawn to these huge worlds, but the sense of belonging from, Oh, I can belong in here There are other people like me here.

There are other people like me reading this at this, you know, at this moment, I mean, we didn't have the Internet, so we didn't have a chat room, so we didn't have forums You just have to assume there must be somebody else out there who is reading X-Men, who's reading Watership Down and who's, you know, having the same moment that I am having.

And then when I get older and, you know, I read of writers like Michael Chabon or even Ta-Nehisi Coates, and they talk about what comics and fantasy did for them.

I realized, Oh, I wasn't alone after all.

How much of the Marginality, though, was about that nerd identity and how much of it was about being gay?

Um, I don't know if those are separate.

Right.

So where they.

I think it's, you know, that back then I was, I thought of it as I went through all sorts of stages with that.

The whole it must be a phase or you you know, God is going to fix it at some time.

And actually that way of thinking took me all the way into my thirties It's, it's, it adds to it.

I think it adds to the sort of, I mean, everybody around me are nerds, but I have one more degree of remove where I can't reveal to even you guys.

You end up locking yourself off quite a bit.

I remember back in 1987, I had cut down talking to such an extent that I remember I went to visit my family in Chicago and my cousin sent a note back to my brother that the first season's first year brother, he doesn't talk because I was so convinced.

As soon as I open my mouth people go, Oh, there goes the gay.

There was a certain stage that I just, I said, I'll just stop talking.

So you, I certainly ended up in this huge kind of just voluntary mental and social closed on clause on to the point where one of my next door neighbors thought I went to America for a high school.

As I know I was.

I was I was right here.

But was the danger to you based on your nerd identity or on your gay identity?

For me, it was both.

You know, Jamaica Jamaica has a reputation for not for for its homophobia, of course.

And growing up when I was growing up, I felt it in a very acute, very cute way.

I mean, I was never gay bashed or anything like that, but I didn't have to be, I think, internalizing that fear.

Was it traumatic enough?

And and also, you know, it's part of our culture.

It's part of our music.

It's so on back then.

You know, I don't want to, you know, you know, put Jamaica in the identity's always had because it's funny, I talked to Jamaican writers who are eight years younger than me, and they read my essay in New York Times and they were like, I didn't recognize that Jamaica you lived in.

I didn't realize how things had changed in some ways.

But for me, it was the fear was so immense I could internalize it.

This meant nothing happened happening to me.

It didn't have to.

It's the fear doesn't need something to happen.

You know, for it to happen.

And I realize for me, I had to I had to leave.

I had to get out.

Not necessarily because I was afraid of attack but I was afraid of if I keep reducing myself more and more and more, what am I going to be left with in three years?

And and I just I don't think I could have lived with such a constant the diminishing sense of self.

So I had I had to go.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting to think of you living that dual life and then being able to write these characters that are looking at the same events from dueling perspectives.

Yeah.

Because you yourself were able to do that.

Yes, absolutely.

And, you know, and not just sort of code switching, but behavior changing and and, and, and slipping into different identities, you know, all the time I was like, yeah, it was Clark Kent and Carlyle.

I used to have this ritual where where I was staying with family in the Bronx.

So of course, I was like super closeted in the Bronx and dressed very hip hop and, you know, got my baggy pants and all of that.

And I take the train to Union Square, Barnes and Noble, and I go into the Barnes and Noble bathroom and put on my skin tight jeans.

And my, my queer outfit is like, is like Superman.

That was super queer.

And then I would, you know, sort of gallivant all over downtown in a village and so on.

And it was like Cinderella.

I had to get back to Martins and normal by nine 30 because they close at ten Saturday, dash back to go back in the bathroom, change back into my normal clothes and then take the five back to the Bronx.

And that was that was life for a really long time until then, until maybe 2007 that what changed then I'm moving here permanently moving to Minnesota.

I think one thing about moving to Minnesota is I thought, well, I would never have the eyes of Jamaicans or the eyes of my family.

On me and I could completely reinvent myself the way I want to reinvent myself.

I didn't have to be have all these versions of myself running their own and writing more and learning to be bolder and learning to accept myself more, that those versions of me just started to evaporate until there was, you know, there was only one, but it took a while.

It's like years.

You must look back on that and feel like there's a lot of lost time.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

I have to believe that things happen when they're supposed to happen.

I think.

And maybe I just wouldn't have had the emotional maturity to deal with all of that in my twenties or even even in my thirties.

Because, I mean, I'm having one hell of a four days.

Marlin, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.