Sipped Ink vol 7 issue 1

Hello, and congratulations on completing week one of this summer’s read-along.

Having cruised past that daunting front matter listing dozens of characters occupying various places and time periods, the opening section was not what I had expected. And, looking back 98 pages later, that prologue (of sorts) from Sir Arthur George Jennings is different to the rest of the text in both tone and construction. It reminded me of nothing more closely than George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which would win the Booker Prize two years after James’s novel. It’s a strange thing for the reader to begin a novel being addressed by the dead, but Jennings seems to be trying his utmost to provide some kind of context for what is to follow. Rather than do this explicitly, both his presence and his words imply that this will be a story of death and tragedy. My instinct is that this introduction will be worth returning to once we have finished the novel, but it is worth noting on this first pass the sly warning from Jennings regarding the Singer:

That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device. (p3)

It’s quite a statement for a ghost to make, particularly when he’s in the process of giving the prologue to a novel.

What follows is certainly a potent mix right from the beginning: politics, music, religion, masculinity, violence, drugs. It’s a lot, and it warrants the provision of a little context, some of which the novel is happy to provide, but there is much of which it presumes foreknowledge. A potted framework then, for the events of the novel thus far:

Jamaica achieved independence from Britain in 1962 (roughly a decade before the beginning of the novel). Its political circumstances in the period of the novel are such that it retains ties with Britain and the United States, but in 1970 had become a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, a collective of states essentially declaring non-partisanship in the Cold War. (We are at this point a decade on from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in the midst of the protracted war in Vietnam.) The election of Michael Manley to the office of Jamaica’s Prime Minister in 1972 was a cause for concern for the USA because he was a self-declared socialist. As such, CIA activity in Jamaica in this period was aimed at preventing what was increasingly seen as the country’s slide toward communism, and allyship with the Soviet Union. The early 70s is also the period in which Bob Marley converted to Rastafarianism, and in which his recognition worldwide exploded with the release of Catch a Fire (1973). Michael Manley’s organising of the free ‘Smile Jamaica’ concert in 1976 sought to utilise Marley’s wide appeal to calm roiling gang tensions in Kingston, but was also seen as a naked political move.

There’s plenty missing from that distillation, but hopefully it gives us something to build upon. For additional context, I will add this brief note from The Guardian’s review of the novel, regarding James’s rendering of Copenhagen City:

Though the ghetto’s name is an invention, it is reminiscent of actual places within the urban sprawl of Kingston, places such as Tel Aviv, Spain, Gaza and Angola — areas that exist within Jamaica but also refer to a wider world of conflict in which it participates. The names of some ghettoes, such as Tivoli Gardens, seem especially ironic, with the inspiration of the original being so far removed from the killing field the place has become.

The novel’s construction — told in multiple voices, and from different angles — certainly owes something to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). It is also one of the touchstones for the novel’s oft-noted cinematic style, and particularly comparisons with the work of Quentin Tarantino. This technique grants the writer a great deal of latitude in telling an expansive story, particularly in James’s iteration, which blends real figures with fictionalised archetypes, and is inclusive of both living and dead voices.

I don’t wish to dive too deeply into any one of these perspectives this week; we have had at most a couple of chapters in each voice, and it feels very much as though we are only beginning to know them as characters. Let’s save that kind of analysis for later on, and instead spend a little time thinking about a couple of the themes being introduced at this early stage of the book.

Power is the first that suggests itself to me, though admittedly it is present in the novel in various forms and as such is perhaps better read as an umbrella category under which the novel is developing multiple sub-themes. There is the power of the politicians, yes, and also that of the ‘top ranking’ gang leaders. There is the corrupt and corrupting power of the police, and then there is whether and how these three strains of power intermingle. There is also the more direct, blunter power of those wielding the guns; and we must consider the power of the outsiders supplying the guns, and what they want from those whose fingers are on the triggers. This complex web is something that James has only begun to weave for us at this point in the text, but already we begin to feel the tautness of its strings and the way the vibrations reverberate when one is pulled or plucked.

Consider for instance the similar way in which macro and micro power are spoken of here:

If you don’t live politics, politics will live you. (p31)

When a gun come to live in the house it’s the gun, not even the person who keep it, that have the last word. (p72)

There is a sense in both cases that power operates upon the person despite any effort they might make to deny it: that power has its own gravity. It is perhaps what Bam-Bam means when he says of the Singer: ‘He flee before you turn into something like we’ (p79). There is a sense that circumstances are destiny, despite one’s attempts to counter them. We find this too in Josey Wales’s gentle mockery of Weeper:

Weeper think it an even match, they with the power, he with being right. (p66)

Related, we also find frequent references to the theme of needs and desires in the text. Early on, Demus frames his ambition in terms not of freedom from discomfort, but of freedom from want:

Me want enough money to stop want money. To bathe outside ’cause me want to fucking bathe outside. (p55)

Bam-Bam speaks of the Singer’s detachment from what life is actually like for regular Jamaicans in similar terms:

he keep giving people what they need and young people don’t need nothing, they just want everything (p79)

Indeed, it is through Bam-Bam that we experience the starkest rendering of desire in the text. During the novel’s most extended passage of bravura writing to this point, we ride the arc of a cocaine high with Bam-Bam as he experiences wants that take on the properties of needs (to ‘fuck-fuck-fuck’ and ‘kill-kill-kill’). The whole passage can be read as an expression of his own dictum from the novel’s opening pages:

Reason is for rich people. We have madness. (p9)

And it is in this space, where one has very little, and wants (or needs) more, that needs become entangled with power. Josey Wales outlines his theory that ‘every Jamaican man is a man searching for father’ (p42). Specifically, he offers this is an explanation for gang members’ fealty to the likes of Papa-Lo. We might also consider it as a comment upon Jamaica’s place in the world during this period, and the global actors seeking to leverage power in the interest of their own needs and desires.

Even as few as 98 pages in, A Brief History of Seven Killings is proving to be as dense and complex a novel as some of the reviews and cover quotes promised. As such, I’m likely going to approach the text in different ways from issue to issue of this newsletter. I will certainly try to keep note of the themes I’ve highlighted here, and those that come to the forefront over each week of reading. However, it could be that by this time next week we have a better understanding of some of our narrators, and I think that kind of closer textual analysis could be fruitful too.

Some small notes by way of closing this issue out:

Firstly, I have heard from a couple of readers who have found it difficult to parse the dialect several of the narrators use. All I can offer (as a veteran of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and a whole bushel of Irvine Welsh novels around the turn of the century) is to read for the spirit of the text, even where some detail might escape you. There is a captivating rhythm and music to much of the language, though finding it requires the reader to accept the innate misogyny, homophobia, and curious gyno- and phallocentricity of much of the slang for what it is.

Secondly, here’s a picture from SS & CS whose choice to bring not one but two copies of the novel into their home is to be applauded:

And finally, here’s a link to a playlist on Apple Music that I’ve started. It features some of the songs mentioned in the text; I haven’t gone crazy trying to capture every track referenced, but I’ll keep adding a few as they pop up throughout the novel.¹

I wish you all the best for the week of reading ahead, and I will see you back here next Sunday to discuss everything up to and including p196.

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1. this playlist has subsequently been deleted  ↩︎