The Space between
Postcolonial and Epic Fantasy
After
the success of A Brief History of Seven
Killings (2014), acclaimed writer Marlon James declared his next novel
would be an “African Game of Thrones”
(VanderMeer). In 2019, Black Leopard, Red
Wolf hit the shelves, though speculative fiction reviewers immediately
distanced the book from Game of Thrones.
Instead, Victor LaValle suggested James was taking on J. R. R. Tolkien’s
cementation of the mythic European quest tale but that James “is here to kill
that noise” (LaValle). The novel feels more in conversation with Tolkien than George
R. R. Martin, particularly in the focus of a quest, but also in the frame.
Technically, The Lord of the Rings is
written as a continuation of Bilbo’s There
and Back Again, which is published as The
Hobbit. James also incorporates a frame (or frame upon frames) in telling
Tracker’s quest. Jeff VanderMeer’s review reminds readers that James represents
a generation of writers killing the noise around Tolkien and white-centered
fantasy: “It’s just plain lazy to compare this novel with, say, works from the
last decade by Nnedi Okorafor or David Anthony Durham or [N. K.] Jemisin or
Minister Faust or Nisi Shawl or Kai Ashante Wilson” (VanderMeer). A cohort of
authors have helped make Marlon James’ book possible, but his book remains so
unlike these novels that grouping them together feels inept, as VanderMeer
writes. Indeed, this novel would not be grouped with Okorafor or Durham on the
bookshelf, even though it very much requires a knowledge of speculative fiction
to successfully read. While these authors engage with postcolonial themes, I
argue that James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf
subverts the postcolonial tradition through epic fantasy but by relying on oral
storytelling, the novel joins texts like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies. This epic fantasy can be read as
post-post-colonial, as James once labeled himself, while still being
illuminated by postcolonial theory (Mayer).
The
repeated orality in signature postcolonial texts suggests a reclamation of the
oral that expands beyond the novel. First, the novel form is not ideal for oral
stories. While many writers have used an oral framework to great
acclaim—Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! for
example—the novel undermines these frameworks by its very form of print or when
the orality calls attention to the form of the novel, thus dispelling the
illusion. The amount of oral frameworks in postcolonial novels suggests a
revolutionary tendency, that telling stories
holds power over the oppressor. As Helen Young writes: “Colonisation and
imperialism silence the voices of the colonised, rendering them spoken for and
about, to such an extent that one of the foundational questions of postcolonial
theory was ‘can the subaltern speak?’” (116). Oral frameworks reclaim the
silenced voice, but the orality also creates a truth for the reader as a
witness, thus accessing the genre of the testimonio.
The
testimonio connects to the reader through an empathetic narrator telling the
atrocity. While linked to Latina/o/x literature, John Beverly’s description of
the testimonio encompasses literature
beyond place: “By testimonio I mean a novel or novella-length narrative in book
or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first
person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events
he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a
significant life experience” (31). This description adequately contains a novel
like Alvarez’s In the Time of the
Butterflies, which fictionalizes the lives of the Mirabal sisters under the
Dominican dictator Trujillo, but what happens when magical realism injects the
text, such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children?
Technically, Marlon James’ Black Leopard,
Red Wolf functions as a testimonio, but it is not a testimony of history.
As more postcolonial writers use speculative elements to engage with their
stories, the use of oral frames to create a fantasy suggests a unique
intersection of speculative, postcolonial, and narratology studies. Black Leopard, Red Wolf represents this
intersection by reaching past the colonial to classical oral epics.
The
postcolonial epic fantasy novel may not search for a national literature of a
certain place but rather to create a space on the page, and the community
around the page, where the traditional fantasy reader—often imagined as a
white, cisgender, heterosexual, man—is not the ideal audience. In the article
“Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the
Postcolonial African Novel,” Wole Ogundele recognizes this shift in the goals
of earlier postcolonial texts and the current engagement with African myth:
This new genre has not only been
explained in terms of cultural hybridity, but has also been traced back to
African oral-mythic narratives. These causal explanations are fine, but they do
not fully relate the novels to the primary concerns of the main genre(s) of
postcolonial African novels that were produced, roughly, between 1958 and the
early 1980s. The concerns may be summarized simply as culture and nationhood.
The one implies myth, folklore, etc.; the other, history and politics. (125)
While
focused on African literature, Ogundele captures the opposite ends of the spectrum
between speculative postcolonial and literary postcolonial—respectively, a
focus on imagining alternate pasts or new futures versus recording or
fictionalizing history. For example, David Anthony Durham’s Acacia Trilogy creates a fantastical
world where the colonizers become the colonized, allowing space for a detailed
exploration of power structures and systems of oppression. Black Leopard, Red Wolf sidesteps even this exploration of
colonization as James creates a fantasy world filled with the universal rather
than the historically specific.
In
conversation with the testimonio, James’ novel could be read as allegorical for
the historical atrocities of imperialism on the African continent (much as Tolkien’s
work can be read as allegorically anti-fascist), but through the orality of the novel and layered storytelling, each layered story contains its own believability, the novel becomes
pure epic fantasy, as described by Tolkien: “The gems all turn into flowers or
flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and
potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they
were you” (147). This freedom aligns with the anti-imperialist aims of
postcolonial literature, but if postcolonial literature often emphasizes the
political and the historical, as Ogundele says of African literature, then is
there space for epic fantasy in the postcolonial mode? Akshya Saxena
defines postcolonial studies in 2018 as “one of surfacing histories and forms
of empire in the globalization of capital” (317). This definition troubles the
idea of a postcolonial epic fantasy as it either forces the epic fantasy to be
read as an allegory or risks dehumanizing the survivors of atrocity through the
lens of sword & sorcery. A third option appears if one views a postcolonial
epic fantasy as undermining the empire of traditional fantasy.
Much
of the novel surpasses Eurocentric epic fantasy, but readers unaccustomed to
such literature have two terms to latch onto: the Tracker and the Inquisitor,
both common tropes. Jeff VanderMeer relates the idea of Tracker to the sword
& sorcery genre, the less literary offshoot of epic fantasy: “[Sword &
sorcery] features some down-and-out adventurer who takes on some task with
little enthusiasm and maximum cynicism about the outcome and who may be little
changed by the experience, which becomes murky to the point of not even being
sure who employed you” (VanderMeer). This description matches Tracker’s
attitude, particularly as he engages with the Inquisitor, who ultimately
controls Tracker’s story. As one level of reality, the Inquisitor remains thin.
His character is largely revealed from Tracker’s responses to unrecorded
questions. In the opening of part two, the Inquisitor gains a voice as Tracker
reads an account of their talks. When Tracker says the torture the Inquisitor
used was not accurately recorded, the Inquisitor’s frame becomes a power
structure (100). The Inquisitor controls the narrative to some degree, even
through the questions asked to prompt Tracker’s storytelling. He also controls
Tracker physically, determining when the story will end. While Tracker’s layer contains the most traditional narrative structure, the Inquisitor’s is marked
by absence and when present, becomes epistolary and scriptlike:
A
lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break [Tracker’s] untruth by asking him to tell a different
part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of
the four years in between.
INQUEST:
Tell me of the year of our King’s death.
TRACKER:
Your mad King. (98)
The
format separates the levels of narrative, but also the sense of authority.
While Tracker asserts his voice in the narrative, the Inquisitor controls the
presentation and how the story is received, particularly by those in power.
Indeed, this frame represents the most direct relationship to postcolonial
literature by focusing on who controls the story and what stories are told or
suppressed. While plenty of speculative fiction explores ideas of colonialism,
James’ novel remains a traditional epic fantasy in its lack of engagement with
“forms of empire,” as Saxena writes. Speculative postcolonial often focuses on,
as Grace L. Dillion describes, “the destabilizing effects of internal
colonization on cultures that for good or ill welcome advanced technologies and
first-world hypercommodification while overlooking tricontinental economic
interests” (220). Again, this is not the story Tracker tells.
Like
the griots invoked throughout the novel, Tracker becomes a story-carrier. Unlike
the narrators of other postcolonial texts with oral frameworks, Tracker’s
stories do not unite a nation or uncover a forgotten history but turn the
relationship between a shape-shifting man and a tracker into a violent epic.
While not all postcolonial literature engages with nation-building or
fictionalized history, Tracker’s story seems uniquely post- such concerns. The
impact of postcolonial literature can best be seen through the power imbalance
between Tracker and the Inquisitor, particularly due to who controls the story.
James has described Black Leopard, Red
Wolf as the first part in the Dark
Star trilogy, with each novel retelling the same quest for the boy but from
different viewpoints (Preston). Thus, more layers of oral complexity, and
levels of reality, can be expected. For now, Black Leopard, Red Wolf remains an epic fantasy first and foremost
but can be illuminated by postcolonial theory.
Works Cited
Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. U
of Minnesota P, 2004.
Dillon, Grace L.
“‘Miindiwag’ and Indigenous Diaspora: Eden Robinson’s and Celu Amberstone’s
Forays into ‘Postcolonial’ Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Extrapolation, vol. 48, no. 2, 2007, pp. 219–243. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.3828/extr.2007.48.2.3.
James, Marlon. Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Riverhead
Books, 2019.
Joshi, Priya. In another Country: Colonialism, Culture,
and the English Novel in India. Columbia UP, New York, 2002,
doi:10.7312/josh12584.
LaValle, Victor.
“Gods and Monsters.” Bookforum, 2019,
https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_05/20622.
Accessed March 9, 2019.
Mayer, Petra. “Marlon
James Wins Man Booker Prize.” NPR,
2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/13/448397179/marlon-james-wins-man-booker-prize.
Accessed on March 9, 2019.
Ogundele, Wole.
“Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the
Postcolonial African Novel.” Research in
African Literatures, vol. 33, no. 3, Fall 2002, p. 125-139. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.2979/RAL.2002.33.3.125.
Preston, Alex.
“Marlon James: ‘You have to risk going too far.’” The Guardian, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/17/marlon-james-interview-black-leopard-red-wolf. Accessed March
9, 2019.
Saxena, Akshya.
“A Worldly Anglophony: Empire and Englishes.” Interventions: The
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, May 2018,
pp. 317–324. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2018.1443830.
Tolkien, J. R.
R. “On Fairy-stories.” The Monsters and
the Critics: And Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien, HarperCollins,
2006, pp. 109-161.
VanderMeer,
Jeff. “Marlon James’ ‘Black Leopard, Red Wolf’ unleashes an immersive African
myth-inspired fantasy world.” LA Times,
2019, https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-black-leopard-red-wolf-marlon-james-review-20190103-story.html. Accessed March 9,
2019.
Phoebe Wagner can be found studying in Nevada. Follow her on Twitter @pheebs_w.
