Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy: Book 1)

"It is. Marlon James basically wanted to explore the rich, cultural mythology of Western and Central African cultures by weaving this grand and epic fantasy set in ancient Africa and dealing with some really contemporary things just stated plainly, like it’s part of the landscape. This book is deeply queer. His main character has a fluid sexuality. The reason why I was drawn to this book is because I’m not sure if you know this, but in Black communities, there’s this idea that queerness is not something that’s inherent or natural to Blackness, that all Black people are “naturally heterosexual,” but some traumatic event like colonialism, or slavery, came in and made us not heterosexual. That’s patently false. It is, I think, an attempt by particular people in Black communities to push back against the idea that they are submissive, that they are weak, and that they are vulnerable; and anything feminine, anything queer, is seen as inherently weak and vulnerable. That is a result of patriarchy, and misogyny and anti-queerness and such. When I was doing the research for The Prophets , I wanted to attack that perspective and so, in parts of The Prophets , there are chapters that go back to ancient Africa to talk about pre-colonial societies and how gender and sexuality worked in these societies. The most interesting oral history came from a woman by the name of Esther Armah, who is an artist and activist of Ghanaian descent. She said that if you ask someone from Ghana, ‘Do you have homosexuals in your culture?’ They’ll say no. She says that Americans misunderstand what that “no” means. Ghanaians just never had a reason to separate homosexuality from heterosexuality: all love was love, all sex was sex. Her metaphor was ‘it was like the land—there were no borders.’ So yes, there were homosexuals in Ghanaian society, but they never had the desire or the need to separate it and make it something distinct or despicable. So, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes that and just runs with it. He’s dealing with these characters who are queer and polyamorous. It’s fabulous. There were definitely no borders around African sexuality in what he put into print. And that is what drew me to this book. He does it in such a rich, complex, and sublime way. It was my own research. In fact, when Marlon’s book came out, I thought, ‘Darn it, he got to it before me.’ But then I figured that at least I wasn’t alone. When my book does get published, I can point to Marlon’s and say, ‘No, I am not the only one saying this. Here is Marlon James who is writing it beautifully.’ Christianity. I have an interesting story about the family spirituality or religion. On my mother’s side, the family is primarily Nation of Islam. On my father’s side of the family, it’s primarily Southern Baptist; dyed-in-the-wool Christians. My mother rejected both. She did not believe in any philosophy where a woman should be secondary, and her bodily autonomy, or her autonomy in general, was not respected. She rejected the Nation of Islam outright. And she rejected the idea of worshiping some grand man in the sky outright. She would not call herself a feminist, but I think my mother is the most feminist person that I have ever encountered. Her ability to know herself, and kick against these patriarchal structures, opened the way for me to do the same. “These books made me feel as though I had a right to exist” I had initially wanted to be part of, particularly, Christianity—because the songs were so beautiful, and the singing was so beautiful, and the dancing was so beautiful and that camaraderie in the church, when everyone is lost in the rapture of it, is so beautiful. But it comes at a price for the Black queer person, and I was not willing to pay that price. It would have taken me much longer to come to that realization, if not for my mother’s complete and outright rejection of it. She is a big reason why I was able to pull away from the indoctrination. I now think of myself more as a spiritual person. I don’t know if ghosts and all those sorts of things exist, but I feel an ancestral energy that I want to pay homage to. I have this basic sense that I want to treat other people with respect, simply because they’re alive, no more reason than that. And I want to leave the world in a better place than which I found it. I’m not sure if that’s religion or spirituality. Whatever it is, it just feels like the right thing to do. Indeed."

"So Marlon thinks that Mordew , my book, is “the future of fantasy”, and I’m loath to disagree with him, so to return the favour… But really, this is an extremely powerful piece of writing. It’s doing a similar thing. It’s the search for a lost boy in this case, and what’s happened to him. And it’s a kind of travelog across a mythical, demon-infested Africa, full of fantastical creatures. It’s another book that has an unusually vivid sexual component to it, kind of disruptive, and – ‘unpleasant’ is probably the right word. It’s a visceral, aggressive denial of everyday life in the service of the spiritual and the sexual, full of quite intense violence, and quite unapologetically strange sexual practices. It’s got that uncomfortable mash-up of children and the adult world, and all of these things combine into this dizzy dream of a trip across Africa looking for someone – except it’s not really Africa, it’s an Africanized secondary world, and it’s very interesting to see what he does with that, which is extremely powerful and full of characters that are uncompromisingly bizarre. It’s a bit like Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel , or Don Quixote … It’s one of those trips where people see a whole bunch of incredibly bizarre things one after another. If you don’t like that kind of thing, you’re not going to like this either, because it’s relatively light on the narrative. The second book is similar, but you get to cross reference the things that happen in the second book with the first, because similar things happen to a different character. So unless you like these travelog books in which a series of bizarre things are depicted to you for seemingly no reason, you won’t like it; but if you do like that kind of thing, it’s fantastically good. I really like books that you can read for pleasure, and then go back to bits of without having to think, “I’ve got to start at the beginning because the story is everything.” That’s one of the problems I have sometimes with fantasy books, that they’re very plot-ish, whereas I prefer more episodic things. Marlon James is incredibly sophisticated at getting under your skin, and having these characters that do and say things that, while you sympathize with them, you’re also appalled by. Not as in, “Oh isn’t that awful?”, but more, “Isn’t the world bizarre?”. I think that’s true, and I think that anybody who says otherwise is mistaken and hasn’t read enough. I think essentially, regardless of what it is that you’re writing, you’re reiterating things that have been done before. I mean, philosophically speaking, there’s no way we would be able to recognize them if you weren’t doing that. And it’s one of the things I have a problem with in ‘literary’ fiction; is it very, very heavily concerned with an originality that the works don’t actually possess. Which I think is just silly. It’s related to the view that fantasy as a genre is not worth reading because it all reiterates the same things over and over and over again. I just don’t think people really understand originality. They’ve discussed that in the visual arts – Rosalind E. Krauss’s The Myth of the Avant Garde , for example, is a very obvious demonstration of the fact that there is no originality, there’s nothing new. But I don’t think that’s a problem, in the same way that I don’t think we all as human beings have to be new, have to be doing things differently. We just have to be , and to work out what that is."