Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. Beauty has infinite range but so does wretchedness and the only way to accurately grasp the full, unending vortex of ugly that is Trench Town is to imagine it. You could describe it in colors, red and dead like old blood, brown like dirt, clay or shit, white like soapy water running loose down a too narrow street. Shiny like new zinc holding up a roof or a fence right beside old zinc, the material itself a living history of when last the politician did the ghetto a favor. Zinc in the Eight Lanes shines like nickel. Zinc in Jungle is riddled with bullet holes and rusted the color of Jamaican rural dirt. To understand the ghetto, to make it real, one should forget seeing it. Ghetto is a smell. Sometimes it’s something sweet: baby powder women wear on their chests. Old Spice, English Leather and Brut cologne. The rawness of recently slaughtered goat, the pepper and pimento in goat’s head soup. Sour chemicals in the de tergent, cocoa butter, carbolic acid, lavender in the soap, fermenting pee and aging shit running down the side of the road. Pimento again in jerk chicken. Cordite from a recently fired gun, poop in baby baggies, the iron in blood congealed from street kill, still there after the body has been removed. Smell carries the memory of sound and there’s that as well. Reggae, smooth and sexy but also brutal and spare like super poor and super pure delta blues. From 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.

Fucking 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? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I’ll just fail like every other journalist before me because, shit, there is no real Singer. That’s the clincher there, that’s the real motherfucker right there, that he is something else now that he’s in the Billboard Top Ten. An allegory kinda, he exists when some girl passes by the hotel window singing that she’s sick and tired of the ism and schism. When boys in the street sing them belly full but them hungry, trailing off before the next line and knowing there’s a greater threat in not singing what everybody knows.

Out the window streetlights glow orange all the way to the harbor like these matches popping off, one, two, three. Then just as you notice them, the yellow of some, the white of others, the lights really do pop off, block by block. I blink and my room goes dark. Kingston shuts itself off for the third time since I’ve been here, but the moon is full and for a while the city is silver and blue and the sky is this sweet indigo, as if the town just turned country. The moon hits buildings on the side and walls of shiny gray rise out of the ground. The only lights come from cars.

There’s a hum from below. I’m on the tenth floor or eleventh, can never remember, and the light comes back on, this time with a buzz. My hotel switches itself on and then the hotel in front of me and then another and the fake light brings back the orange which kills our silver. But downtown is still in darkness. Blackout’s probably going to last all night. I’ve been downtown once, following Lee Scratch Perry when the lights quit. This is what every reporter hears of, the Arma in the Gideon, the point where every single criminal element in the city explodes into lawlessness. And yet it was so quiet that Kingston became a ghost town. For the first time ever I heard the waves hit the harbor.

I don’t know what I want. I’m in over my head. Who wants to be a music writer when rock and roll is dead? Maybe there’s something to the punks or maybe it all just means rock is sick and living in London. Maybe this band the Ramones are onto something, maybe rock and roll has to keep rebirthing itself by going back to Chuck Berry. Fucking hell, Alexander Pierce, the only way to write about music is to talk like a fucking rock critic? Wenner thinks, he hopes, he hopes desperately that any second now Mick and Keef are going to wake up, put down the heroin, deep-six those shits padding the band and make Let It Bleed again, not sludgy shit like Goats Head Soup and good sweet Jesus, no reggae. Instead they’re here doing exactly that, barreling through this song of theirs near nineteen times now in shitty onedrop. I came to this country knowing I would find something. And I think I have, I know I have, but damn if I know what it is.

The lights go off and come back on, minus the hum. No shit. I don’t think anybody was expecting that. I imagine outside the city just got caught off guard. In flagrante delicto. What was Mark Lansing doing before the lights came back on? Who does he know here anyway? The guy who told me about how the ghettos run used to be a rudeboy himself until he went to prison, and came out changed, thanks to books. Autobiography of Malcolm X I expected, and even I have checked out Eldridge Cleaver. But Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy ? They leave him alone because he’s an old-school former rudie who runs a youth group and mediates between the gangs, but also because nobody expects much from a coolie.

Sometimes I envy Vietnam vets because they at least had a belief in themselves to lose. You ever want to leave somewhere so bad that the fact that you don’t have a reason why is all the more reason to go?

In 1971 I couldn’t leave Minnesota fast enough.

Every Jamaican can sing and every Jamaican learned to sing from the same songbook. Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads . Grab the collar of even the most top-ranking rudie and say El Paso, and he’ll follow up in a perfect croon; El Paso citeeee, by the Rio Grandeeeeheeee. It’s the Homo erectus of Jamaican guntalk, where anything you want to know about Kingston’s green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboy-cum-gunman is not in Bob Marley’s lyrics or in Peter Tosh’s but in Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron.”

He’s an outlaw on the loose came the whisper from each lip

And he’s here to do some business

With the big iron on his hip

This is the story of the gunmen of Wild, Wild West Kingston. A western needs a hero for the white hat and a villain for the black, but the truth, ghetto wisdom is close to what Paul McCartney said about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon . It’s all dark. Every sufferah is a cowboy without a house and every street has gun battle written in blood in a song somewhere. Spend one day in West Kingston and it makes perfect sense that a Top Ranking calls himself Josey Wales. It’s not just the lawlessness. It’s the grabbing of a myth and making it theirs, like a reggae singer dropping new lyrics ’pon di old version. And if a western needs an O.K. Corral, an O.K. Corral needs a Dodge City. Kingston, where bodies sometimes drop like flies, fits the description a little too well. Word is that downtown is so lawless that the Prime Minister hasn’t been lower than Crossroads in years and even that intersection is up for grabs. Because come on, once the white and well-spoken Prime Minister says something like Democratic Socialism, within days you’re going to see a sudden influx of American men in suits all called Smith or something. Even I can smell a Cold War and it’s not even a missile crisis. Locals are either catching a flight out or getting killed. Either way everybody is getting the fuck out’a Dodge.