THOROUGHLY MODERN MARLON

NOVELEST MARLON JAMES WRITES HISTORICAL FICTION, BUT JOINS HIS STUDENTS ON THE POST-MODERN PLAYGROUND.

BY | AMY GOETZMAN '93

Th ere ar e writers who bemoan the Internet, and the ways it has
transformed books and reading. And then there are writers who embrace
it, distractions and all. “I am an Internet junkie, that’s my problem,”
says creative writing professor Marlon James, who maintains
the literary blog “Among Other Things,” fights a tenacious Facebook
addiction, and can be found on YouTube promoting his latest novel,
The Book of the Night Women.
“The Web is one-third blessing, two-thirds curse for the writer
who doesn’t want to write,” he says. “I don’t know where I stand as a
writer, but I am the finest procrastinator of my generation.” In other
words, he knows exactly what his students are doing when they
should be doing their homework. “But rest assured there will be three
Armageddons before I hook up with Twitter.”
At 38, the Jamaican novelist is one generation older than his students,
and it’s a critical divide; he was raised in a pre-online time and
place, loving books. His students can’t imagine a world that isn’t at
their fingertips, and that world is a veritable playground of amusements
that keep them from writing. But it also can be a powerful tool:
James says he researched most of Night Women, which takes place
in slavery-era Jamaica, online. “I would never have attempted that
novel without it. If I’d had to use conventional methods of research, it
would have taken years,” he says.
James came to writing—and teaching, for that matter—in a
roundabout way, after first spending six years in advertising and film
production. “Yeah, it was fun,” he admits. “But it did nothing for me
as a writer. I wasted those years. I believe that if you are a creative
person and you spend too much time in a compromised career, eventually
it’s going to affect you. You will lose that talent.”
He got out in time. One day, while reading Salman Rushdie’s
Shame, James looked up and thought, “I should write.” He enrolled
in the low-residency master’s of creative writing program at Wilkes
University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, living in New York half the
year and Jamaica the rest of the year. (He has a bachelor’s degree in
literature from the University of the West Indies.) He wrote his first book, John Crow’s Devil, and watched 70 publishers
reject it before he destroyed it—or so
he thought. When the manuscript resurfaced
months later, he found a publisher. (Discouraged
writers, let that be a lesson.)
N ow he pushes his own students to use
their time wisely. The dreadlocked, supremely
easygoing James guides his classes past the
pitfalls that befall many young writers. “The
margins of my notebooks from his classes are
filled with the words from his ‘banned words’
list. We aren’t allowed to use these words in
our writing ... words like ‘wafting’ and just
about every adverb,” says Anna Rockne ’10,
who signed up for James’s “Crafts of Writing”
class after taking his creative writing class,
because she knew “I would be getting a lot of
blunt feedback and suggestions for improvement,
and laughing a lot.”
Says James, “The one thing that separates
brilliant people from everyone else is that inexhaustible
capacity for hard work. I’ll say,
‘This is very good. Now rewrite.’ If you feel
confident in your talent, then the work is not
ready. Every time you start a new story you’re
supposed to feel anxious, you’re supposed to
feel nervous, you’re supposed to think, This is
the one that is going to destroy me. I am going to
fail. When my students tell me that, then I say,
‘Good! Now you’re ready.’ ”
James came to Macalester in 2007, first as
a visiting professor. Now on the tenure track,
he’s found a nurturing community in Mac’s
English Department. “I lean on all of them,” he
says. “The creative writers here are really cool—
Peter Bognanni, Wang Ping; it’s cool having
people I can talk to on multiple levels, as a professor,
as a writer. The level of discussion here,
even on trivial matters, is pretty high.”
M eanwhile, he’s back online, researching
a new novel to be set in 1920s Europe. The
Kingston native has quickly become one of
the young lions of post-colonial literature, in
the company of Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, and
Sherman Alexie, although his penchant for
the past has earned him comparisons to Toni
Walker and Gabriel García Márquez. His inimitable
island patois in Night Women makes vivid
the unspeakably cruel lives endured by the millions
of slaves who worked Jamaica’s sugar and
coffee plantations under British rule. “There’s
nothing you can do about history. But grab
a pen and suddenly, you have power. There’s
a reason why the oppressors burn the books
first,” says James, adding that the horrors he
encountered in his research nearly caused him
to shut down.
Perhaps the ghosts of the past spur James
to join his students in the distractions of the
modern world. Online, the self-described nerd
writes passionately and cantankerously about
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rock music, politics,
and race. As an outspoken black writer, he is a
lifeline to Mac’s students of color. “While our
department is incredibly diverse, especially
for a very white-dominated field—permanent
faculty include Chinese, Turkish, Indian, and
Latino women, and our current chair, Daylanne
English, specializes in African-American
literature—having Marlon here has been very
important to our African American English
majors,” says department coordinator Anna
Brailovsky.
James sees the Internet as a staging place
for the next wave of African literature, a place
where kindred voices can gather. “I wished I
had a community of writers back when I started
writing, somebody to tell me I wasn’t crazy
for trying to do this,” says James—who only
now knows that he wasn’t.