Bookends
Continued…
But I don’t know if it’s surprise … you’re sort of taken off-guard because, you know, writing is a pretty solitary thing. I don’t write thinking of what the reviews are gonna be, because you just don’t have time. It’s more sort of a jolt even when the reviews are good because you go, oh, it’s a public thing now, it’s out there. You spend 10 years writing, or even if you spend two months writing a short story, one of those months, the story only existed as something in your head. And then it becomes something on your laptop, your writing pad or so on, it’s still something that’s barely, at the most, five feet away from you. So when that just gets thrown out into the world, you’re kinda still outside with your pants down and people going: that’s really nice underwear. But your pants are still down.
AM: Let’s talk a little bit about gender, because there’s a lot of discussion about this in the literary world. I consider (a famous Jamaican author who paved the way for many) to be one of the best writers from the Caribbean. Do you think she would be more acclaimed internationally if she had been male?
MJ: I don’t think so… Certainly when I was trying to sell my first book, I realised that a lot of publishers, major publishers, just didn’t think the Caribbean was something to look at. Even when I was shopping around my first novel, one person actually said “the Caribbean isn’t in this year”.
AM: Really?
MJ: So I think some of it is the mainstream press not paying enough attention. I don’t think she would have succeeded more if she were male. If that were the case, then Earl Lovelace would be on to his fifth bestseller by now. I think it’s the industry. I think the industry has a very narrow idea about books. But also, the industry sometimes can’t get past its old practices. The only time they’ll get behind, for example, a collection of short fiction, even if it’s absolutely brilliant, is if they feel a novel is coming soon. One exception to the rule is Jhumpa Lahiri, who came out of nowhere, with Interpreter of Maladies. But she’s really easily marketable. She lives in Brooklyn, she is beautiful, there are lots of non-literary things that the American star machinery can latch onto. So it can also be that as a writer, she doesn’t fit their star machinery. We Jamaicans sometimes … I think the fact that some of us grew up with pretty stable lives – I mean even now, I can still hear the disappointment when people realise I didn’t come from the ghetto. It’s not sexy. I did an interview with an Italian journalist when Dudus was caught, and he started, without even asking me: “As someone who wrote himself out of the ghetto, who saved himself by the power of the pen, as opposed to the power of the gun …”
AM: Oh my goodness.
MJ: You know, I grew up in Portmore, and in Portmore the thing you worry most about is if water was going to lock off. I was watching Sesame Street the whole time, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t come from that culture.
AM: Well, Marlon, I’m really disappointed … The only reason I’m interviewing you is … no, I’m joking.
MJ: (Laughter). No, but even now, somebody will call me – a publicist – and when I tell them, they go “oh oka-ay. Oh”. I say: people, get out of this.
AM: It’s funny you should say that, though, because on the other hand I get this thing of being a “middle-class writer”, from people who don’t have a clue about my background, and I could tell them some stories that would maybe surprise them. But people just assume things.
MJ: Yeah. Yes. Jamaica is small, and you know everything. At one time, both of my parents were police. But it doesn’t matter what class you came from, if you were growing up in Jamaica in the Seventies, you didn’t escape. There was nowhere to escape, so those things are still real. I remember when Bob Marley got shot, I remember when the PNP member of parliament Roy McCann got shot. I remember what it meant. It meant that now it was open season. It wasn’t just people in West Kingston killing each other. They were moving uptown. I know the fear. I remember when people were talking about Home Guard, and Home Guard must have meant the police couldn’t do the job. So you didn’t escape it, no matter what strata of society you were in. But I still think the publishing industry has these narratives that they like. And (some writers) don’t fit into that easy narrative … But they still look at this thing as marketing to just what they were looking for. I mean my first book was rejected 78 times … It’s really tricky figuring it out. Sometimes I think publishers have an idea, and a lot of times they’re wrong, about what is a book with international potential. And who writes in a way, that even if you’re writing about a hut in Clarendon, it’s written in a way that somebody in Russia can relate and identify … I think sometimes publishers don’t think about some of these works from countries tap into these sorts of universal things that we can relate to. That, of course, is highly subjective. And nine times out of 10, they’re wrong.
A.M.: Well, the self-publishing industry is proving some people wrong. Thanks for this.
MJ: Great talking to you.