![]() He told friends to delete the copies that he’d e-mailed to them, and ceremonially burned the manuscript on the balcony of his apartment. He titled the novel “John Crow’s Devil” and mailed it to agents and to publishers. ![]() They are driven by sexual secrets, and Gibbeah is obscurely cursed: dead cows with upside-down heads wash up in the river, and the sky drips with black feathers and blood. Then he began writing a novel about two mysterious preachers battling for control of a fictitious Jamaican village, Gibbeah, in the nineteen-fifties. He wrote a scrap of an African fantasy story, set in a world ruled by eight evil spirits. One of them, Salman Rushdie’s “Shame,” an extravagant tall tale set in “not quite Pakistan” and laced with first-person authorial intrusions, rearranged his ideas about what writing could be. He began sneaking novels inside a leather Bible case to read during worship. It was the same list, wasn’t it? Relieved, James decided that he was straight he just had a hero-worship problem.īut he felt restless, and frustrated by the church’s anti-intellectualism. He sent away for guidance about what the church discreetly termed his “struggles.” A pamphlet came in the mail, titled “Are You Gay? No Way!” It advised him to think of all the men he wanted to sleep with, and then to think of all the men he wanted to be. He did graphic-design work for the church in his spare time. James attended worship on Sundays, went to Bible study on Mondays and Wednesdays, planned church events on Thursdays, helped out with a youth group on Fridays. He joined a charismatic evangelical church in Kingston, with a mostly upscale congregation, where people spoke in tongues and services lasted for hours. They said a prayer of invitation together and James considered himself born again. He started going to church again after another close friend, a pastor, suggested that the answer he was looking for could be found in Jesus. He and Ingrid made regular trips to Miami to go clubbing, and on one of those trips he went to an adult video store and bought a VHS tape called “Dreams Bi-Night.” He returned to the store on subsequent Miami visits, buying gay porn magazines and poring over them for hours, then leaving them in a hotel trash can before he flew home. After graduating, he got a job as a copywriter for a Kingston ad agency. Where do we go now? he thought, and kept thinking it for years.Īt the University of the West Indies, James fell in with an arty crowd who liked college rock and hip-hop as much as he did and didn’t ask why he never dated. One night, on a battery-powered radio, he heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” by Guns N’ Roses, for the first time. Shortly before James’s eighteenth birthday, Hurricane Gilbert flattened Jamaica, leaving the island without power for months. James began locking himself in his bedroom and tape-recording his efforts to sound masculine, repeating words like “bredren” and “boss.” Sex between men is illegal in Jamaica-the law is unenforced now but remains widely supported. They talked about the new-wave and American pop records they heard on FAME FM, and together they made a sardonic and punchy zine called Rum. He became friends with a girl named Ingrid, who attended Wolmer’s Trust High School for Girls, and who, like him, believed that Jamaica was too small. After reading “Tom Jones,” at age twelve or thirteen, he filled a notebook that belonged to his father with diary entries in the style of Henry Fielding.Īt Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys, classmates called him Mary, and he kept a distance from his more popular older brother, to spare him embarrassment. He wrote plays-one was a Jamaican revision of “Cinderella”-and he drew comics, with shape-shifting monkey men and telepathic heroes. After reading “Little House in the Big Woods,” he decided that he wanted to write. He liked Greek mythology because everyone in it seemed to be naked. When James was five, other kids started calling him a sissy, and he retreated into comics and books. ![]() Both were readers: his father favored Shakespeare, and his mother loved O. Henry. His mother, a sweet and stubborn woman, rose to the rank of inspector his father, a brash but melancholy man, left the force and became a lawyer. He had attended Sunday school as a child, with his brothers, in the nearby town of Portmore, where his family lived in a neighborhood populated by doctors and civil servants. ![]() He was in his early thirties, living in Kingston, Jamaica, working as a graphic designer and occasionally producing photo shoots for music magazines. Fifteen years ago, when Marlon James was working on his first novel, he requested an exorcism. ![]()
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