Sipped Ink vol 7 issue 5

Hello friends and fellow readers. I hope that the oppressive heat has not drained your energies this week; perhaps you’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings out in the open air somewhere, laying on a tartan blanket next to a wicker basket full of triangular sandwiches. Please note: that is an invented scenario, and not something that I’ve been doing. I did read the novel this week however, with my eyes, rather than taking it in through my ears. I’ll admit to having missed the way the language flows when narrated by a native speaker, but I did enjoy having the text in front of me again.

This week, in a change from the usual beat-by-beat kind of analysis, I thought we’d take a closer look at one of the novel’s central themes: masculinity. It’s a thread that is near omnipresent in the text, and yet it feels to me as though some of the chapters we’ve encountered this week afford us particular insight into how it operates in the novel.

It is perhaps too obvious to need stating, but the most prominent strain of masculinity in the novel emphasises strength and aggression over everything else. In the Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings, particularly (but not exclusively) amongst those characters involved in gang violence, the expectation for male characters is that they display nothing but strength at all times. Not only is any form of weakness to be hidden or denied, but the categories of actions, words, and attitudes that are considered to connote weakness are voluminous.

We have already done some exploration of how this dynamic affects the society’s women (see issue 2 of this newsletter). The novel’s men, however, are equally trapped within it, and forced to conform. Everything about their speech and actions is in accordance with this principle, with the penalty for transgression the threat of extreme violence or death. At a basic level we see it colour the language used, with the most frequent slurs revolving around accusations of weakness via homosexuality (‘battyman’), or effeminate weakness (‘pussyhole’).

We have seen that a hint of weakness in action is not even permissible under extreme duress: when Bam-Bam screams in fear following the shooting at the Singer’s house, Weeper’s response is to threaten to kill him. At the same time that the society’s women are marginalised, disempowered, and afraid, so too its men live in fear, forced to suppress anything other than strength, and to conform to a societal expectation of hyper-masculine insensitivity, violence, and promiscuity.

By virtue of his position of power, Josey Wales is one of the only characters who experiences some respite from these constraints. Whilst other characters do consider it strange that his relationship is monogamous (with the expectation being that he should demonstrate his authority through sexual promiscuity), his position of power provides him some shield against accusations of weakness.

We do, however, see the beginnings of tension and suspicion introduced by these dynamics, even between father and son. Early this week, we witnessed Josey observing:

It’s the first time he doing it, he know and I know, the son trying to stare down the father. But boy is a boy and not a man. (p420)

Later, Josey is drawn to recognise that this frisson has grown into the beginnings of a potential threat:

I smile with the boy so that he don’t feel like I threatening him too much, but he is sixteen now, and I still remember sixteen, so I know hunger growing in him. All this talking back is moving from a little cute to a little threat. (p470)

Another aspect of this theme with which the novel is very much concerned is how the expectations of distorted masculinity interact with homosexuality. James introduces two prominent gay characters to the narrative, and allows their differences (John-John K: a caucasian American; Weeper: a Black Jamaican) to play out in their attitudes.

In the section we have read this week, Weeper is seen being increasingly defensive about ‘seeming’ gay, indicating that he has internalised his homosexuality as a form of weakness. He cannot help but read everything, down to the physical mechanics of his lovemaking, in terms of a power dynamic he feels as though he is not living up to. Tellingly, in one moment, he explicitly frames this in terms of gender:

you can’t howl and bawl because to howl and bawl is to give it up and you can’t give it up, not to another man, not a white man, not any man, ever. As long as you don’t bawl out you not the girl. You not born for it. (p447)

Just as he has subconsciously accepted homosexuality as a weakness, he has also accepted a model that casts women as inherently weak and subjugable.

It is impossible to read this thread of the novel without reflecting on the experiences of its author. In a 2015 piece for the New York Times, Marlon James writes candidly about growing up gay in Jamaica. Afraid of the negative consequences of appearing gay / camp, he instead chose a kind of self-ostracisation:

I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know

As a youth, he had accepted a model of society that marked his feelings as abnormal:

frightened by school, praying to God every night, please let me wake up in another body. One that walked and talked right.

And, whilst such feelings are certainly not peculiar to the country of his birth and upbringing, James explicitly conceives of his tortured, closeted state — and relief from it — in terms of geography and culture:

Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.

Tellingly, when reminiscing about the change that his first years in America brought about, he chooses to frame it in terms of having previously acted inauthentically to meet societal expectations:

I didn’t even realize when it happened, when I stopped playing roles.

Weeper, by contrast, seems yet unable to relinquish the shame inculcated into him by his life in Jamaica.

This is, admittedly, a scratch of the surface of how this complex novel deals with masculinity; it is inextricably interwoven with all the various dynamics of power we have seen: politics, street violence, abusive relationships. In closing, I’d like to add two other pertinent passages that I highlighted, from two quite different narrators. Taken together, I think they offer some insight into how Marlon James attempts to show the evils of a society distorted by entrenched ideas of strength, weakness, power, and gender.

Tristan Phillips:

Some people just have this thing ’bout themselves, maybe is a ghetto thing where even if another man don’t destroy you, you going destroy yourself. Every man in the ghetto born with it… (p472)

Kim Clarke:

Two years since the election. Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same. You can’t change the country, but maybe you can change yourself. (p282)

The next newsletter, which will arrive with you on Sun 25 Jul, will cover up to p601 of the novel. It’s the penultimate issue this summer, and the last ‘full’ week of reading. The final issue, the following week, will certainly look at the final 85 pages, but is intended to be more of a summary of our time with the novel as a whole. Enjoy the week’s reading, and I’ll see you here in seven days’ time.