Sipped Ink vol 7 issue 4
Hello fellow readers, how did you get on with A Brief History of Seven Killings this week? I turned on the radio this very morning to be greeted with Bob Marley’s ‘Could You Be Loved’, which I’m taking as a good sign for us.
Once again, most of my time spent with the novel was via the audiobook version, for one reason and another. Whilst I’ve enjoyed my time with it, I do admit that it’s having an impact on the quantity and quality of notes that I take, and thus the sort of analysis I’m able to provide. It’s not so much that I feel like I’m interfacing less directly with the text, but I’m certainly less likely to pause the audio and consider what I’ve just heard than I am to re-read sections and make notes. As such, I’ll be making an effort to switch back to the paperback next week (as circumstances allow), and we’ll see what effect it has on the newsletter. For now, however, here’s what I have for you this week.
I haven’t done the exact maths on this, but my feeling was that the opening chapter of section three was the longest of the novel to that point. One of the reasons for this is to allow Marlon James room to reveal a ‘new’ narrator — Kim Clarke — piece by piece. At first, we question her motivations for staying in a relationship she doesn’t seem to enjoy, before it becomes clear that she sees Chuck as a means to an end: a path out of Jamaica if she can suppress her distaste for his calling her ‘miss Kim’ (p279) and his ‘sexy little slut’ (p280). The only positives she seems to feel in the relationship are mere possibilities: that other Jamaican women may be jealous of her; that she may experience a white Christmas in America. In an attempt to realise these things, she engages in a similar ploy to that which we have seen Josey Wales use: to leverage racist assumptions about her intelligence. Kim’s actions often seem counter to her own conception of herself, whether it’s acting as though she actually likes Chuck, or — on the other hand — stealing from him, we struggle to parse the truth of her character.
This tangle is by James’s design, of course, as the reader becomes increasingly suspicious that Kim is not a new narrator but actually Nina Burgess under an assumed name1. We observe her still engaged in the gambit of trading sex for the possibility of life outside of Jamaica, and we also observe her continued ambivalence about it. Her pervasive desperation, as evident in her willingness (even desire) to have a child with a man she dislikes so as to increase the likelihood of her escaping the country, is sad to observe years after we first encountered her.
We see the mirror of Kim’s real attitude towards Chuck when he unceremoniously ends their relationship. In particular, his comments about finding her ‘sexually conservative’ (p299) reveal that she has meant as little to him as he has to her. Both have engaged in the act of creating a false life outside of their home country: Kim’s is in her mind as a potentiality, whilst Chuck has lived his lie to the extent of moving in with Kim, and taking her out to celebrate a relationship milestone. Both have been using the other, but the power dynamics of the status quo ante are such that Chuck is free to walk away, whilst Kim / Nina remains stuck. Her attempt to start over once again requires more dramatic action: the setting alight of first the symbolic newspaper and then the house, along with the declaration that ‘[Nina] is a dead name of a dead woman in a dead city’ (p313).
The picture that Marlon James continues to paint through his depiction of both Barry Diflorio and Bill Adler is that of an American foreign policy both dysfunctional and reckless. The agency’s actions are unknown to the country’s ambassadors, and Barry first professes to have fallen for Jamaica before eventually exclaiming ‘Fuck this country’ (p326). What is unclear is the extent to which, as he observes the landscape of international disquiet (Yugoslavia, Argentina, South Africa) and ponders a pending resurgence of chaos in Jamaica, Barry understands the CIA’s place in it. Similar to Chuck leaving Kim / Nina, the CIA is free to walk away from Jamaica untroubled by the mess they have helped create.
In the subsequent chapter, James further complicates the picture of power in Jamaica. In contrast to Barry’s prognostications of imminent chaos, we learn of the truce between Papa-Lo and Shotta Sherrif. Notably, this is something that has come about following their imprisonment and subsequent acknowledgement of their mutual enemy:
When puss and dog kill one another the only one who win is Babylon. (p335)
We later learn that the true nature of the ‘peace treaty’ between the two rival gangs is not intended as a cessation of hostilities, so much as a redirection of those hostilities as a unified front against the police and government.
The version of Papa-Lo we encounter after a remove of some years is notably less powerful than was once the case, and engaged in acts of vigilantism. As is common with the violence in the novel, it is unclear whether he is accomplishing anything. His actions seem largely motivated by his own power struggle (such as it is) with Josey Wales, whom it becomes clear Papa-Lo wants the Singer to identify as the would-be assassin who missed his target.
Papa-Lo’s own death is foreshadowed by a sense of increasing disorientation, as explained by Sir Arthur George Jennings in the chapter closing the novel’s second section. Subsequently, the reader may begin to fear for Alex Pierce’s life in the following chapter as he too seems disoriented, and appears to be visited by an unexplained presence. Perhaps even more shockingly, it is Alex who is eventually compelled into an act of desperate violence, and who takes a life rather than losing his own.
Indeed, the changes in Alex Pierce are perhaps even more pronounced than those in Papa-Lo. He is seemingly newly competent, even having managed finally to interview the Singer. In his meeting with Josey, the latter still paints Alex as the perpetual clueless outsider — biased, and clueless as to the true nature of Jamaica:
People like you don’t see much. Always putting down little note in your little book. Before you even step off the plane you already write the story. (p385)
But in fact we find that Alex has been making good on his wider journalistic endeavour, not imposing his own story on Jamaica but speaking at length to those directly involved. Perhaps he might yet refute Demus’s earlier warning about outsiders telling the story of Jamaica.
That’s it this time out. It’s a slightly longer reading week in terms of page count, and I will see you back here next Sunday to discuss the novel up to p502.
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Interestingly, in the audiobook version, the Kim Clarke chapter is read by the same voice performer as Nina’s chapters, but with a noticeably weaker accent. ↩︎