James's novel shares the vernacular orality that is characteristic of this formation, its ease and readability not so much. Instead, he offers absurdity. For example, the reader experiences the assassination attempt as seven pages of cocaine-driven free verse stream of consciousness from Bam-Bam's perspective, followed by Demus' description of their escape in a long three-page sentence punctuated only by commas. The end of Bam-Bam's free-verse flows into Demus' prose on the repetition of the word "and": Bam Bam's "[h]e twisted the wheel and slam the gas and, and, and," continues into Demus' "[a]nd the Datsun dash down another road that I don't know" (244-255). At the same time that this section's prose evokes a continuity that foreshadows the similar fate both men meet, it jarringly emphasizes the shift from one form of cognitively altered, almost incoherent narration to another. The way the narrators say what they say, that is in a Jamaican vernacular parlance, is only one facet of both chapters' narrative obfuscation: the lack of punctuation, how the text is formatted on the page, and the represented effects of cocaine are others. In prioritizing such incoherence in what is supposed to be the central moment of the novel, James' writing demonstrates a closer kinship to modernist narratives reliant on narrative devices like stream of consciousness, such as Mrs. Dalloway, than to the Caribbean literary tradition's bastion of scribal orality, The Lonely Londoners.
To dismiss such passages as effusions of unreadable excess that do not follow Selvon's example of coherence within experimentalism is to miss the point of James's cultivated incoherence. A Brief History shirks the well-established ground of vernacular readability in favor of incoherence as a sign that it eschews the political imperatives of earlier generations of writers. If the Victorian novel is the aesthetic model of the relationship between literature and nationalism consciously adopted and revised by first-generation Caribbean writers, the modernist novel's imaginings of postwar Anglo-European ennui provides a model for contemporary writers like James, who want to signal a similar sense of diminishing returns in cultural nationalism. To imagine James's writing only in terms of its regional literary genealogy is thus to miss its critique of this genealogy.
One final way A Brief History challenges the postcolonial literary legacy is by decentering the ideal (male) protagonist whose narrative is more often than not enlisted to homogenously represent the nation and its values. Though not a fictional character, Bob Marley is prototypically the most iconic of Caribbean figures, real and imagined. By not using his name, the novel signals an iconicity that does not rely on the specificity of naming. Today, Marley's name and iconic visage grace numerous branded products that include everything from coconut oil produced in Indonesia to children's books sold on Amazon, in a manner that epitomizes the amalgamation of national culture, corporate branding, and the neoliberal instrumentalization of national identity as intellectual property. James's simultaneous centering and ironic silencing of the singer becomes all the more interesting when one considers the ways in which Marley has posthumously metamorphosed into a neoliberal brand.
This is not to say that A Brief History denies the political potential Marley once represented. But it is committed to showing the ways in which this potential was thwarted. In its scenes set in the mid-seventies the novel positions The Singer as a source of political mobilization for the impoverished largely black lower class citizens with whom he has common origins and a danger to those whose power is threatened by the possibility of such successful mobilization, not only in Jamaica but also in the United States. Through his music, The Singer becomes a popular and ultimately dangerous beacon for political mobilization, because his songs offer listeners rhetoric that resonates with their frustration. Though he dies from cancer abroad, curtailing the political hope invested in him, the novel nonetheless conveys the magnitude of the possibilities for poor black liberation engendered by this hope, presenting it as the rationale behind his CIA sponsored attempted assassination.
But as the novel shows, other forms of political activity were taking place at the time outside of the nationalist model that Marley eventually came to embody. Bam-Bam describes Jamaica as divided between The People's National Party and The Jamaica Labor Party (the two ruling Ps). Both parties, beginning in the sixties, violently gerrymandered support in Kingston's inner cities, often by means of guns supplied to their supporters. As the Cold War and Civil Rights movements inched along in parallel, the US government also began to covertly support this kind of gun distribution to destabilize the communist leanings of the PNP's democratic socialism
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