{"id":499,"date":"2017-10-09T20:30:02","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/marlon-james-seven-killings\/"},"modified":"2024-08-19T17:07:15","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T17:07:15","slug":"marlon-james-seven-killings","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/october-2014\/marlon-james-seven-killings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Words, October 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marlon James\u2019 A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em> <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Zoya Haroon \u201815<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Kingston, Jamaica, on December 3, 1976, days before the influential Smile Jamaica Concert, unknown gunmen burst into Bob Marley\u2019s home with machine guns and shot at Marley, his wife, and his manager. Marley suffered only minor injuries, and went on to perform at the Smile Jamaica Concert on December 5 as scheduled. However, Marley left Jamaica the following day, going into self-imposed exile for the next two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Marlon James\u2019 third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em>, deals with the legacy of violence spawned by that day in 1976. Over seven hundred pages long, the novel spans three decades and includes a cast of over eighty-nine named characters. Equal parts detective novel, political thriller, and oral biography, James\u2019 novel is set to be released on October 2 and is already hailed as \u201crequired reading\u201d by Publishers Weekly<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Kingston, Jamaica and an award-winning author of two acclaimed novels, James teaches creative writing here at Mac. He\u2019s very stylish and somewhat intimidating, but I recently cornered him in the English department and managed to ask him a few questions about the process of writing A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel, which took four years to write, was inspired by a feature in a 1991 issue of Spin Magazine<\/em>. Timothy White, who wrote Bob Marley\u2019s biography Catch a Fire<\/em>, included a postscript in the issue that detailed the fate of Marley\u2019s would-be assassins. The article intrigued Professor James. He saved the issue of Spin<\/em> and kept the postscript in the back of his mind even as he published his first two novels, Jim Crow\u2019s Devil<\/em>, in 2005, and The Book of Night Women<\/em>, in 2012. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

James\u2019 considers A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em> a departure from his last two novels; it is far less structured, often written in stream of consciousness, with dead ends and disappearing characters. The novel is both hectic and relaxed; it doesn\u2019t have an ending – it just stops. James describes his new book as being lighter than his previous work, less concerned with its own intellectual legacy. According to James, \u201cyou just sort of cut that crap and just write.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em> is also a massive, ambitious undertaking. The novel is huge and densely populated by different voices. After writing each page, James asked himself, \u201cIs this better than what I\u2019ve written before?\u201d Writing the novel was not a linear, solitary process. James began writing from what is now page four hundred forty-seven in the published text, and a team of five Macalester students (now alumni) helped him conduct research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What began as an attempt to chronicle the lives of Marley\u2019s almost-assassins expanded and grew until the novel included a diverse host of narrators and dialects, including journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts. James takes the reader from the 1970s through to the drug wars of the \u201980s and into the early \u201990s. In doing so, the reader experiences the turbulence that shook Jamaica throughout the propaganda of the Cold War and the huge role US foreign politics played in shaping day to day contemporary Jamaican life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, with so much packed into one novel, I had to ask Professor James: what story does the novel really tell? Is the novel even trying to tell a story? In the end, A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/em> tells the story of the consequences of violence. As Professor James points out, \u201cNothing is ever really over.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marlon James\u2019 A Brief History of Seven Killings  By Zoya Haroon \u201815 In Kingston, Jamaica, on December 3, 1976, days before the influential Smile Jamaica Concert, unknown gunmen burst into Bob Marley\u2019s home with machine guns and shot at Marley, his wife, and his manager. Marley suffered only minor injuries, and went on to perform […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":498,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-499","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8797,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/499\/revisions\/8797"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}