Book Review & Analysis: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

      Reggae music exploded in popularity during the 1970s. At the forefront of this musical movement was Bob Marley. Not necessarily the best reggae musician but certainly a great one and the most famous, he was perfect as a leader when it came to bringing reggae to the world. A lot of his softer pop songs had commercial appeal without being shallow or fake like so much top 40 music of the era. But he also had an angry side that was steeped in politics and the mysticism of the Rastafarian religion that appealed to young people moving on from the hippy movement without abandoning their counter cultural stance. Rastafarians were proponents of marijuana smoking and had a distinctly cool image with their dreadlocks and colorful clothes. As Bob Marley’s fame grew internationally, so did interest in Jamaica as an emerging nation, a country with a vibrant music scene and a tourist oriented economy. Reggae also had a strong influence on the punk, ska, and new wave music scenes that began in the mid to late 70s. A lot of reggae lyrics called for peace and love along with laments about violence and political injustice. Probably most reggae listeners weren’t aware of the events and political climate of Jamaica in the 1970s that served as inspiration for those lyrics. Gangs tied to Jamaica’s two political parties were fighting in the streets and Kingston could possibly be thought of as having a low level civil war at the time. Marlon James portrays the violence between Kingston gangs and their relation to Bob Marley in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Bob Marley is at the center of this novel...kind of. Without being mentioned by name, he is referred to exclusively as The Singer from beginning to end. The novel’s plot lines all relate to an assassination attempt on his life to prevent a free concert, his attempt at ratifying a peace treaty between Jamaica’s gangs, and his death. The Singer’s life is more of a framework for the novel and functions more as the narrative device we call a McGuffin.

This book is all about characters and situations, of which there are many. It is not a plot driven novel. The large number of people introduced to the story shouldn’t bother you. Most of them play peripheral roles and only stay around for a short time after their introduction. But there is a moderate group of central characters that stay around for large parts of the story.

One of the central characters is Papa Lo, the don of the Copenhagen City gang. Copenhagen City is a neighborhood in Kingston with ties to the right wing Jamaican Labor Party or JLP headed by Edward Seaga. They are in constant war over territory with other gangs tied to the People’s Nationalist Party or PLP headed by the democratic socialist and prime minister Michael Manley. While these gangs are politically affiliated, the parties play only a minimal role in the story. Anyways, Papa Lo is reaching middle age and starting to be concerned about surviving. He notices that there are hardly any elderly Jamaicans and he is growing weary of the gang violence even though he tells other people he isn’t. He begins taking interest in the message of the Rastafarians and is in dialogue with The Singer who has hired him to manage security for an upcoming concert. The Singer is affiliated with the left wing PNP in opposition to the Copenhagen City gang, but his intention is to bring peace to the city.

Second in command of the Copenhagen City gang is Josey Wales, named after the outlaw from the Clint Eastwood western movie. Josey Wales recognizes that Papa Lo is aging out of his position. He starts plotting behind Papa Lo’s back to lead a gang of dugged up teenage assassins on a mission to assassinate The Singer. The origins and purpose of this plot are murky, but it is clear that Josey Wales has ties to the CIA who provide him with weapons, drugs, and guidance. Josey Wales’ liaison with the CIA is the freelance asset Doctor Love, a Miami Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran. Doctor Love is an explosives expert who helped to blow up an airplane over Barbados in an anti-communist terrorist attack. Doctor Love also has ties to Colombian drug cartels who he later introduces to Josey Wales. This part of their relationship is of later importance in the chapters that come after The Singer’s death.

The two other characters that carry the most weight are Alex Pierce and Nina Burgess who subsequently changes her name twice before the book concludes. Alex is an American journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, sent to Jamaica to cover The Singer. He is a rogue journalist though and breaks with Rolling Stone to pursue a more lurid story about CIA connections to gun running and gang activity in the Kingston ghettos. As he pursues his story, he ends up being one of only a handful of people who know that Josey Wales is the ringleader of the hit squad that attempts to assassinate The Singer. This has consequences for him later as Josey Wales sends hitmen out to kill anyone who has knowledge of the failed assassination attempt. The danger follows Alex to New York City where he continues working as a journalist covering the Jamaican gangs, called “posses”, that are responsible for the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nina Burgess is a young, middle class Jamaican woman who wants nothing less than a chance to emigrate to America. After being seduced by The Singer at a party, she deludes herself into thinking he loves her and hangs around outside his house, hoping she can convince him to get her a plane ticket and a visa out of Jamaica. She thinks her own country is too backwards and dangerous for her. Nina is all about class mobility.

We later find her working as a prostitute in Montego Bay under the name Kim Clarke where she hooks up with an American businessman named Charles who works for a bauxite mining company. She moves in with him. The two of them use each other. Charles uses Kim for sex and as an unpaid domestic servant. Kim doesn’t love him but pins all her hopes on his promises to marry her and take her to live in America. When the Jamaican government raises taxes on bauxite exports, the American company closes down its Jamaican operations, Charles leaves and doesn’t take Kim with him. Nina/Kim later shows up in New York under the assumed named of Dorcas Palmer.

Then there is Weeper, a character of lesser importance in the beginning, but one that becomes more significant in the later New York City chapters. Weeper is an educated man, an atheist and reader of Bertrand Russell, and he is also gay. He tries to follow the honest path of education upwards out of the Copenhagen City ghetto, but gets arrested and tortured in prison by the police. After getting out, he becomes Josey Wales’ closest associate and later moves to New York to oversee the crack dealing operations there.

Otherwise there is a large cast of peripheral characters. Most of them are gangsters or gang affiliated. Despite the large numbers, there isn’t a wide range of characters though. One of them is, however, the duppy, or ghost in Jamaican English, of a man who died in the West Kingston Wars of the 1960s. Unseen by the other characters, he gives surreal narratives of murder scenes, telling us what happens before the killing and what happens to souls on the other side.

The plot, as explained above, is simple. The subplots are a bit more complex, but not by much. The complexity is in how interwoven they all are. But this novel is less about plot and more about character. More specifically, it is about Jamaica as seen through different subjective points of view. And the subtext of the novel is about thwarted ambitions for class mobility. The Singer, for instance, seemingly at the top of Jamaica as a type of prophet or king, is thwarted in his ambition to bring peace to Jamaica. First assassins try to rub him out and then gangsters use violence to make his peace treaty fall apart. After that he dies and the text carries a heavy suggestion that the CIA had a hand in his demise.

Papa Lo’s desire to retire and live to old age in peace is thwarted when he gets killed in a police ambush, probably orchestrated by Josey Wales who takes over as don in the Copenhagen City gang. Both Josey Wales and Weeper initially tried to move up in life through channels of vocational work training and education, but were beaten down by the police and found no other outlet for their desire to grow other than in criminal gangs. Josey Wales does succeed in expanding his operations by working with Colombian drug cartels to traffic cocaine to America, but meets his match when he crosses a competitor in New York. Weeper also gets killed. In New York, he finds liberation because he is able to live with minimum hassle as a gay man, unlike in the oppressively homophobic society of Jamaica. But he dies in a gang hit there too.

The desire for class mobility is further emphasized in Josey Wales when examining his motivations. As mentioned before, he tries to advance himself by learning a skilled trade, but then gets shot five times during the wars of the 1960s. As he rises to the position of don, we learn small details like how he wants a flush toilet in his house, something given to him as a payoff from the JLP, and how he refuses to talk about the business of killing and drug trafficking before finishing his morning tea. At the end of his life, his son attends a prestigious private school. His aspiration is for a middle class existence like the family that Nina/Kim comes from. And she wants to escape her middle class life by fleeing to America to escape from the crime that plagues Jamaica, making it unsafe for middle class people.

After The Singer dies, the last two sections of the novel mostly take place in America, sometimes in Miami but mostly in New York. Jamaican posses that deal crack are the central part of these back end sections.

Nina/Kim, however, does achieve her dream when she takes on another fake name, this time Dorcas, and emigrates to New York. She finds herself, in a way, by working as a caretaker for a man with amnesia. The significance is that every day, he forgets who she is and she wants nothing more than to forget her past and become someone else. This becomes another thwarted ambition since people recognize her Jamaican accent no matter how hard she tries to lose it. She later becomes an emergency room nurse and realizes something big is happening because Jamaican posse members keep showing up with bullet wounds. In the end this shows how her Jamaican-ness is a permanent part of her no matter how hard she tries to hide or eliminate it.

It is in New York City that the white journalist Alex Pierce shows up again too. While continuing to work as a journalist and author of a biography about The Singer, he meets with an inmate of Rikers Island prison. Tristan Phillips is a member of the Ranking Dons, the coke dealing posse that rivals the Storm Posse which is the American arm of the Copenhagen City gang led by Josey Wales. Tristan is a fallen Rastafarian who is a signatory to the peace treaty The Singer tries to uphold back in Kingston. Alex uses his journalist credentials to get in touch with Tristan, but he has a hidden motive. Alex fears for his life because he is one of only a couple people who knows that Josey Wales is the man who orchestrated the assassination attempt on The Singer. He also lives in fear because he killed the man who they sent to murder him in a bid to eliminate everyone who knows Josey Wales’ secret. Alex looks to Tristan for inside advice on his safety. It is through Tristan that the novel takes on a meta-narrative quality since he insists on Alex writing a book about the Kingston gangs and how they tried to assassinate The Singer. Alex, the white journalist, thereby becomes a literary persona representing Marlon James, the Jamaican author of this novel. The novel’s title is also a reference to an article written by Alex Pierce.

After Tristan assures him he is safe, Alex returns home to find a gang of Jamaican thugs waiting for him. Alex has been writing a serialized work of investigative journalism about a massacre in a Brooklyn crack house. The articles are revealing too much about the posses in involved. After a brutally violent confrontation, Alex learns that he will be allowed to live only if he continues writing articles that are approved of by the Storm Posse. This may be good news, but his wings are clipped so that his ambition to be a truth-telling journalist is thwarted. To a certain extent, all the major characters in this book get only a fraction of what they want. That fraction doesn’t go far for any of them. The theme of thwarted ambitions reminds me a bit of the poem “Dream Deferred” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

The most amazing part of this novel is how it is written. Every chapter is told in the first person by a different narrator. That way we get a subjective, kaleidoscopic view of everything that is happening. The story lines and subplots are interwoven into a web of multi-dimensional perspectives so that we see each character from both their own subjective point of view and the subjective point of view of others. It’s an amazing accomplishment that this writing, in all its subtlety, is so easy to follow.

It’s also amazing how effectively this works in character building. Each of the main characters are so distinctly written that it is easy to tell them apart. They really come to life as individuals through their narratives. You might notice in the beginning that each chapter heading is the name of the character speaking. By the end of the book, these chapter headings are absent and yet it is still obvious which character is speaking. This is even more interesting in how Nina/Kim/Dorcas takes on three different names in three different locations, yet it is clear that she is all three people without the author ever explaining this. He never explicitly says, “and then Nina changed her name to Kim.” He just shows us how she is as she is and allows for us to make the connection of our own.

And the stand out narrative for me is when Tristan is talking to Alex in prison. The only speech in these passages is that of Tristan; the speech of Alex isn’t written into the text. It is like sitting next to Tristan in a prison visitor’s booth where he is separated from Alex by a plexiglass window as they communicate over a telephone. These passages are especially good because of the change Tristan goes through during the conversation. At first he is hostile towards Alex, but after learning about Alex’s secrets, Tristan becomes relaxed, interested, and friendly. This is done by showing us only Tristan’s side of the conversation and his change in mood is delieverd so effectively because of the actual language used. Again the author shows us this change without explaining it.

One other great thing about this novel is the crafting of the language. It is mostly written using Jamaican English or Patwa as it is sometimes called. Marlon James, being a Jamaican author, has a natural understanding of the language and he writes it so well that he captures its rhythms and nuances in pronunciation and vocabulary. In fact, the shifting narratives give it the feel of reggae music. When listening to reggae you will notice the instruments don’t all play at once. Pauses and empty spaces in the rhythms create a depth that can’t be achieved in other ways. You might notice the call and response patterns in reggae rhtyhms too; the horns play a line of notes then stop to allow the bass and keyboards to run for a measure then stop to allow the horns space to play again, so on and so forth. The structure of shifting and alternating first person narratives operates with a similar logic. You will also learn some new vocabulary too if you read this. Words like “raascloth”, “battyboy”, “pussyhole”, and “fuckery” are repeatedly used throught the text. If you finish this and “fuckery” hasn’t been permanently etched into your brain, you probably weren’t paying much attention to what you were reading.

Finally, this book is not about the CIA’s involvement in Jamaica, but that element is a root cause of the problems being portrayed in the story. The novel starts fourteen years after Jamaica gained post-colonial independence from Great Britain. Within less than a decade, the CIA began a destabilization program in this small West Indian nation that was struggling to get on its feet and stay there. When the democratic socialist PNP party came to power in a landslide election, the CIA armed JLP affiliated gangs with heavy ammunition and the result was disastrous in two ways: the brutal violence of a rapidly escalating crime rate and a growing narcotics trade. Both of these problems spilled over into America and may have permanently damaged Jamaica as a nation. To paraphrase Josey Wales, America creates monsters and then acts surprised when they act monstrous. All this is in the name of fighting communism although I’m convinced the American government doesn’t actually care about fighting communism. They scapegoat communism for the purpose of imperialism and hegemony. If this is the case, maybe we deserve some of the crime that drug cartels have brought to our shores. Our meddling in other countries’ affairs is only perpetuating the problems we claim to be fighting against.

A Brief History of Seven Killings fills a gap in people’s knowledge of Jamaican history and culture. If you search around for books covering this subject in the decades of the 1970s to the 1990s, almost nothing can be found. Yet people worldwide are familiar with Jamaica through its music, most especially the monumental work of Bob Marley. Although this novel is fiction, most, if not all, the events in it really happened. This can be corroborated by checking a wide variety of legitimate academic sources. Marlon James crafts all that information into a novel and makes it accessible to the general reader. The Jamaican Patwa and the descriptions of extremely brutal violence might make it difficult for some people to read, but it is possibly the most important book about Jamaica that has been written so far.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Jamaica White by Harold Underhill

Jamaica White

by Harold Underhill

      According to Jamaican folklore, the plantation mansion of Rose Hall in Montego Bay is haunted by the ghost of Annie Palmer, also known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. As the story goes, Annie Palmer murdered three of her husbands, practiced occult rituals in secret chambers under the mansion, and was finally executed during a slave rebellion in the 19^th century. Now her ghost, hungry for revenge, is said to wander around the plantation grounds.

Rose Hall, in more recent times, was bought by an American businessman who renovated the mansion and turned it into a museum. Night time tours, for those willing to fork over enough cash, are given. These excursion come complete with Scooby Doo style explorations of secret passageways splashed with blood, underground tunnels, and seances. These tours would not be complete without scary stories about Annie Palmer. So some people in the Jamaican tourist industry have a vested interest in keeping the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall alive.

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for gothic horror. I don’t literally believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but when gothic horror is at its best, such things function as metaphors anyhow. So when I found Harold Underhill’s historic novel Jamaica White, purported to be the story of Annie Palmer and her life at Rose Hall, I thought I was in for an interesting creepshow. This novel did turn out to be creepy, but not for the reasons I expected.

James Arthur is the novel’s protagonist. He arrives on the docks of Montego Bay after a voyage from Manchester, England where he grew up in poverty. In a desire for power, wealth, and a ticket out of the working class slums, Arthur takes on a job as a “buckra”, an overseer, on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation named Rose Hall.

Arthur meets up with Broderick at the wharf. Broderick was once an Irish murderer, living on death row in an English prison. The jailers struck a deal with him. If he agreed to work as a colonial plantation boss, they would spare his life on the condition that he never return to England. After arriving at Rose Hall, Broderick’s self-discipline, sadism, and sociopathy made him rise in the ranks to become the head buckra of Rose Hall.

Arthur is taken to his bungalow where he meets two other characters of lesser importance in the plot. One is Mary Lou, a slave woman who cooks, cleans, and does sexual favors for him. The other is Wilson, a rum-drinking alcoholic who used to be a school teacher. He got fired for protesting the use of corporal punishment in the classroom and so got sent to work in Jamaica to get rid of him. Wilson acts as a voice of conscience in the story. He doesn’t like slavery, but he depends on it for work. Convinced that it will eventually end, he holds educational classes for slaves who want to learn how to read.

So far so good. The characters are distinctly drawn and effectively introduced. The world building is of high quality with vivid descriptions of the plantation and surrounding jungle. The narration goes step by step to draw the reader into this world and the story with all the elements building on each other to create a fantastical literary space. Despite being a place of slavery, the plantation and its surroundings are described as enticing, sensual, and elysian. Underhill has a definite talent for using language to create mood, atmosphere, character development, and plot. But at a certain point in the novel, I begin to feel his talent is wasted.

When Broderick first shows Arthur around the plantation, the new buckra gets a first taste of what is to come. One of the slaves gets a severe whipping for stepping out of line. Arthur is initially shocked by this, but gets over it quickly. After dark, Broderick brings Arthur to a dungeon where the house servant named Venus is chained to the wall. Broderick gives Arthur a whip and commands him to flog her as part of the training. Arthur obeys and again feels disgusted before silencing his conscience and continues learning how to be cruel.

There are multiple scenes of tirture throughout the story. They are vivid in their detail and go on for longer than they need to in order to get the point across. Broderick is also sexually promiscuous with the slave women and even indulges in pedophilia. On one hand you can say that this descriptive writing needs to be so detailed to show how inhumane slavery truly is. It also serves the purpose of building Broderick’s character as a psychopathic sadist. One the other hand, the descriptions of torture are so indulgent that they read like passages from the Marquis de Sade. What I mean to say is that Underhill writes about slavery as though it is a fetish. He writes as though he takes delight in all the fine details of the torture. I’ll come back to this later.

All of this builds up to Arthur’s meeting with Annie Palmer, the owner of the Rose Hall sugarcane estate. Up until that point, Arthur only hears about her through other characters. Her reputation precedes her as stories circulate about her frequently having sex with Broderick and the strongest of the male slaves. It is also said that she murdered her husband to inherit control over the plantation. But before they meet, Broderick commands Arthur to kill a slave who tries to sabotage the machinery in the sugar mill. After the killing, Arthur goes through the same cycle of disgust and suppression of his conscience. Then he gets incapacitated by an illness.

Annie Palmer demands that he be brought up to her mansion so she can nurse him back to health. In the process of Arthur’s recovery, they get emotionally close and begin a sexual relationship. Arthur falls madly in love with her, but of course she is only playing with him. He is too naive to see that. After he becomes healthy again, Annie takes him to a waterfall in the jungle where they have sex. The eroticism in this novel is just as graphic and indulgent as the passages where slaves are tortured. At this point the writing becomes outright fantasy and it is easy to forget the story has anything to do with slavery. In fact it reads like a description of paradise. As the narrative goes on, it becomes more apparent that the practice of slavery is a deliberate part of that paradise.

At this point, I can reiterate that the writing in this novel is great. The sequential progression leading up to the meeting between James Arthur and Annie Palmer is effectively handled even if it isn’t entirely original. The description and character building are consistently strong. Annie Palmer is an especially well-drawn character combining elements of sensual beauty, intelligence, and social charm all wrapped up in a woman with a strong and commanding personality. If you ignore her darker side, her role as slave owner and her ability to be cruel without mercy, you could be forgiven for finding her attractive. In fact, if you like strong, commanding women it would be surprising if you didn’t.

In the course of Arthur getting to know Annie Palmer, he appears to be building up to a moral awakening. He feels disgusted by the violence used to control the slaves. He agrees with the alcoholic Wilson, the man who tries teaching the slaves to read, that slavery is morally wrong and must end sometime in the future. But as he continues working as buckra on the plantation, he gets closer to Annie as their sexual trysts become more common. Annie Palmer, as it turns out, thinks of herself as a visionary. She acknowledges that slavery is terrible, but she justifies the practice by saying that great empires can only be built through cruelty. Her long range dream is to turn Jamaica into another Roman Empire. This could well be a delusion of grandeur, but Arthur swallows it whole. This is the point where the novel loses my sympathy. Any moral awakening that Arthur may have been on the verge of having is crushed as he becomes more fanatical about his love for Annie Palmer.

As Arthur becomes increasingly more devoted and less concerned with the welfare of the slaves, she loses interest in him, begins to humiliate him, and eventually shuns him. Meanwhile, a slave rebellion is brewing up with Venus, the house servant, playing a major role in it. The entire plantation, including the mansion, is set on fire and all the white people are killed except for James Arthur who is saved by his sexual servant Mary Lou. The rebellion is arbitrary. It functions more as a means of climaxing a plot rather than delivering poetic justice. It is an explosion to distract the reader from the mundane plot in which the relationship between Arthur and Annie Palmer fizzles out. The key to understanding this is in the final passage when James Arthur is returning to England on a ship. As he lies face down on his bunk, he is crying because he lost Annie Palmer, the woman he was madly in love with and the one he pinned his fantasies of future wealth and power on. He has no gratitude, or even any thoughts for Mary Lou, the slave woman who saved his life. James Arthur’s story ends without any moral redemption.

That’s the whole problem with this novel: it just doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t make a statement. It doesn’t take any definite moral stance. The message is vague and weak. Sure there is something to the slave rebellion, but the slaves aren’t fully humanized in any way. They are mostly in the background or else used as objects for labor, torture, or sex. Venus does have her own monologue at the end, but it does little more than explain the plans for the rebellion. Her subjectivity is only suggested. Mary Lou is entirely objectified too. She appears to like Arthur but it’s never made clear why. And the only white people who have any pity for the slaves are pathetic losers who don’t have enough will to do anything aside from continuing to work as buckras, sustaining the practice they claim to hate.

It’s possible the author is attempting to examine the nature of power and domination in the character of Annie Palmer. If so, it’s not clear what he is trying to say. Her flippant attitude that slavery is a necessary evil when doing great things is sickening, but she isn’t written as a villain. In fact she’s written as desirable and seductive. In fact, she bears some resemblance to Wanda von Dunajew, the dominatrix in Sacher- Masoch’s Venus in Furs. And James Arthur isn’t far from Severin in the way he worships her. Actually Annie Palmer reminds me a bit of Elon Musk and his belief that empathy is a weakness that prevents great men from doing great things. Arthur is like the kind of shlubs that admire Musk for his ruthlessness and power even though Musk has made it clear that he despises the entire human race. That is an all inclusive hatred and the shlub fans are a portion of the humanity he despises. But if this is the point of the book, it is weakly stated and too vague to be of any value. In any case, if empathy is nothing more than an obstacle to great achievements, I’d say that great achievements are not important. I’d choose empathy over greatness any day.

Again, I will restate my opinion that this novel is excellently written on a technical level. But the content is such crap that the form gets overshadowed. The over-indulgence in sex and violence is a big part of that. It’s not that I’m, squeamish. I’ve read and sometimes enjoyed my share of transgressive writing. I’d even say there is a time and place for detailed descriptions of the cruelties of slavery. You could argue that such excessive description is necessary to show how cruel it actually is. When written into the proper context that is true. But there is a problem of proportion in this story. The passages about torture and sex are longer and given far more attention than any other elements in the narrative. The author seems to take great delight in his scenes of sadism and then takes just as much delight in pairing them with long and detailed passages of erticism. After seeing what Annie Palmer is responsible for on the Rose Hall plantation, you’d have to be a really sick person to want to fuck her over and over again, let alone fall madly in love with her and worship the ground she walks on. I think Harold Underhill’s intentions are to indulge in a sick, racist fantasy while throwing in some insincere details about moral conflicts so that readers don’t outright dismiss him as a complete piece of human shit. If he has some other intention, I’ve missed it because he didn’t articulate it clearly enough.

If you want a Caribbean twist on the gothic horror genre, Jamaica White isn’t a good choice. It does have a castle, but there isn’t any witchcraft and there aren’t any ghosts. The only thing scary about it is the passe attitude the author has towards the brutality of slavery. It’s nothing but an eroticized fantasy of white supremacy, power, domination, and violence. It might appeal to people who are indifferent to racism. It might appeal even more to Nazi pigs who sexually fetishize racism.

Jamaica White doesn’t even incorporate any of the Jamaican folklore surrounding the White Witch of Rose Hall. Academic folklorists have traced the legend’s origin back to an early 19^th century novel about a slave rebellion set in Cuba. Over the years, details about a female plantation owner were added; they derived from a real woman, who didn’t live at Rose Hall, but had three successive husbands. They all died of natural causes and she never killed any of them. It is true that Rose Hall once had a slave rebellion, but Annie Palmer never existed except as a fictional character in ghost stories told around campfires by Jamaican storytellers late at in the night. The current owners of Rose Hall have a vested interest in keeping the legend alive since their profit margins depend on it. I didn’t like this novel, but if I ever get to listen to the the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall being told by a Jamaican person in the flickering lights of a campfire, I’d be fascinated.

 

Book Review & Critical Analysis; Explosion In a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion In a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier

       “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.

Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.

The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.

The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.

They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.

The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.

The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.

A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.

In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.

Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.

Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.

Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.

Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.

When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.

From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.

The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.

The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20^th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.

In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.

The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.

Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted.