The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 13

In 1996 I picked up the first volume of a fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire”. If I recall correctly one of the very first scene featured a young lord’s son thrown off a roof because he found visceral evidence that the king’s son and daughter were having an incestuous relationship. This wasn’t Chronicles of Narnia. It was bloody, tragic, epic. And told from the first person perspective of well over two or three dozen characters.

When I heard it’d been optioned as an HBO Show, I thought there was no way they could pull this off.

Hell, the author himself couldn’t pull it off. I stopped reading the series at Book 4 because there was such a gap between books that I had to damn near go back and reread them every time a new one came out. And Martin still hasn’t finished the series. Game of Thrones’ final season comes out in a few months, and we’re probably still at least a year or two away from the 6th book, much less the final one.

(I’m not tripping, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know if he did this on purpose, but I’m pretty sure Martin chose the hardest method of crafting a fantasy series possible. On the one hand, using the first person enables him to delve into the tragic aspect of the series—characters make a range of costly mistakes because they didn’t have full information, as you the reader screams No No No!—but the more first person narratives he has to juggle over time the more unwieldy the series becomes. By the sixth volume, Martin (who was 42 when he started the series is now 70) needs something like an old school 26 volume encyclopedia to remember where everyone is and what they conceivably know.)

My plan is to wait until the 8th season is over, and then binge watch the whole thing. And maybe reread the series if it ever gets finished.

(Well. It’ll get finished. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time—which based on the success of Game of Thrones has been picked up by Amazon—was finished by Jordan’s research assistant after he passed away, I’m certain we’ll have something like that here.)

Anyway.

I write all that to write that Marlon James’ Black Leopard Red Wolf just came out.

I’ve written before that I don’t believe that people need to necessarily see themselves on screen, depending on the power dynamics. I think that with exceptions majorities need to see minorities more than the reverse. Minority imaginations tend to be far more capacious than we give them credit for, while majority imaginations on average tend to be limited. Even when they’re not.

Martin, for example, based what became Game of Thrones in part on battles between various factions for the throne of England (the War of the Roses). His influences?

The only woman on this list is Andre Norton, who (and I didn’t know until I wrote this sentence) legally changed her name from Alice Norton to Andre Alice Norton because she knew boys were the primary market for fantasy in the thirties. And I don’t think she ever wrote a single novel featuring a woman protagonist, much less a non-white one. The rest of the list is guilty of the same charge—in fact Lovecraft was an unrepentant racist. The fantasy series I grew up reading—Howard’s Conan, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Moorcock’s Elric of Melniborné, Jordan’s Wheel of Time (which I also didn’t finish by the way) all featured straight male protagonists, all set in what was basically a fantastic version of Europe.

Black kids like me knew this, loved them anyway. But knew that there were a whole set of stories to be told if someone just recognized Earth contained more than one continent (which, technically if you look at a map isn’t a continent).

In fact, my plan was to start a second career as a fiction writer after retirement, and my first crack would be a high fantasy set in a mythical version of Africa.

All of this brings me to Marlon James.

I thought I’d written about him here before, but it turns out that all I did in 2017 was note that his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings made my fb network’s “best of 2017” list. I could’ve dedicated a newsletter to that book alone. Told in the same first person style as A Song of Ice and Fire, James’ book has got to be one of the best novels I’ve ever read, using a failed assassination attempt on Bob Marley to talk about post-colonialism, sexuality, crack (the seven killings intimated in the title happens near the end of the book in a New York City crack house), crime, black nationalism, immigration, the CIA, and pop culture (among others). If you didn’t grow up in the Caribbean or live near a Caribbean neighborhood growing up it might take a bit of time, but it’s worth it.

In one of the interviews about A Brief History (which was the first book written by a non-Brit to win the Man Booker prize), James noted that he wanted to write an African Game of Thrones next. That he, like me, was tired of reading yet another fantasy series set in what could only be Western Europe.

Black Leopard Red Wolf loaded itself on my Kindle last night.

Will let you know how it is.

…..

This issue was done on Sunday. But I didn’t send it out for reasons.

In the interim…Virginia.

A picture of the governor in blackface was found—and it isn’t as if the picture is sixty years old, as it was taken when he was a young adult in 1984. The Lt. Gov was accused of sexual assault. And the state’s attorney general also revealed he appeared in blackface.

I’m going to take the first and third together. Blackface has a long and troubled history in American history. To get a sense of how normal it was at one point in time, check out this clip of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Someone like a Megyn Kelly couldn’t and probably can’t quite understand what the big deal was/is about blackface is because it was American as apple pie. American popular culture begins with blackface. For the governor and attorney general, this is just what people did. And it’s important to state this. However, although from what I understand, activists on the ground are connecting the governor’s past willingness to don blackface and connecting it to problematic contemporary public policy, people outside of Virginia aren’t really getting that story. And this is tragic, because without connecting the dots what we’re basically left with is a cancellation project, where the governor isn’t asked to step-down because of his policies, but rather because he triggered a significant portion of his voting base. I’m not sure this gets us closer to the politics we want.

As far as the charges against the lieutenant governor?

I do not believe that we should reflexively believe accusers. I do, though, believe we should take accusations seriously. And in this case I know Vanessa Tyson. She is my friend. One of my closest friends in the discipline. She does not have an axe to grind. She is not part of a nefarious plot to keep an African American from public office. Before I became aware that people were attempting to connect the governor’s blackface history to policies, I would have supported him stepping down, but I wasn’t calling for it. But in this instance I’m pretty clear about what should happen—a full investigation should occur, and if he is found guilty he should step down. We have to be better.

We have to be better.