Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings

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James's rejection of a purely nationalist tradition, like that of other authors in his cohort, concretizes his critique of the ways nationalism distracts us from the increased deregulation of global capital and its production of material inequality around the globe. This disruption of privileged tropes in the interest of turning attention onto the transnational forces that structure inequality helps to explain James's use of "a poetics of excess." His experimentation with form functions to rework now familiar paradigms and themes that have been central to the literary imagination of postcolonial realities for a little over half a century.

We can see this in the ways A Brief History troubles the contemporary anthropological, even touristic, purposes that writing about difference serves. For example, Demus, one of the young gang members vested with the task of assassinating The Singer, and one of the men who narrates in a first person vernacular voice the circumstances leading up to the assassination attempt, explains his role in the impending violence as follows: " [t]his is what I want to say before the writer say it for me" (54). Here, Demus preempts the hard luck story of poverty, victimization, violence and limited choices that is usually written about impoverished young black men like him. And these elements do indeed appear in Demus's story.  But what he most wants us to know about—in his words, "where me coming from"—and to tell us before it can be coopted by a writer, is that "people who say they don't have a choice is too coward to choose" (58). His explanation is not one of regret or repentance for his role in an attempt against the life of the "reggae superstar of the world," designed to explain and generate a demeaning sympathy for him and those like him. It is instead a choice he owns and one that to his mind is made consciously and courageously.

This is indeed a departure from narrative depictions of meek and righteous sufferers who are caught without voices and choices within their local disenfranchising circumstances, and who encourage in readers not only sympathy but also, perhaps, charity to help them out of the quandary their inept governments created. In this departure, Demus is critical of how writers skew such agency and intentionality - even as it is exercised by violent men - in the service of telling a particular kind of story about a specific place and its people that consequently bolsters geopolitical divisions between the powerful and the powerless.

James gives us a representative of storytellers who propagate such distinctions in the character Alex Pierce. Alex is a Minnesotan journalist who goes rogue on the story Rolling Stone sent him to cover in Jamaica - whether or not Mick Jagger is cheating on his wife with local black women - in favor of a bigger, more interesting story he imagines is developing around The Singer. Believing The Singer is key to accessing "the real Jamaica" Alex falsely imagines that Jamaican realness can only be found in hyper-local sites like downtown ghettos or dancehalls, ignoring completely the presence and influence of operatives from a government intelligence agency from his own country. James himself describes Alex Pierce as a terrible writer, and shows him creating an exotically hyper-local Jamaica for an audience that is unfamiliar with the place and its people. Pearce writes, "[f]rom this stew of pimento, gunshot blood, running water and sweet Rhythms comes The Singer, a sound in the air but also a living breathing sufferah who is always where he's from no matter where he's at" (82). This is the culminating sentence at the end of a page-long italicized passage of prose that effectively skewers not only those who relish reading such evocative narrative snapshots of the romantically violent and unfamiliar third world places that give birth to crossover icons like The Singer, but also those who compose them.

Pierce himself eventually becomes disgusted with his prose, albeit in masculinist and subtly homophobic terms: "[f]ucking hell. Shit sounds like I'm writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue. Unending vortex of ugly? Holy Sensationalism batman! Who the fuck am I writing for?" (82). Who, indeed? While the generic medium is different, there are echoes here of what Grove Press editor Kent Carroll told Michael Thelwell in the late seventies, when he received the first half of Thelwell's vernacular heavy manuscript of the novelization of the cult classic film The Harder they Come. "According to the industry profile," Carroll said, "the standard American reader of fiction is a middle aged white lady who lives in the suburbs and doesn't like television. Now what the fuck is she, bless her heart, gonna make of this?" (195).1 One can assume that Carroll's imagined (and deeply gendered) audience for Thelwell's novel about a classic Jamaican film isn't too far from Pierce's imagined "ladies who lunch." More importantly, though, the late seventies moment of both examples coincides with a proliferation of transnational writing of all kinds about blackness and difference, which sought in its imagined masculinist toughness to overturn sentimental tropes, and which in fact became vital to the antiracist endeavors whose goal was the achievement of an equitable multicultural world. Both Demus' and Alex's 1976 preoccupation with competing notions of how to tell this story has everything to do with James's latter-day critique of this formation.