JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In late spring of 1988, a group of gay men gather in Kingston, Jamaica, to stretch their acting skills and put on a play. At the time, gay men gathering for any reason was risky. Sex between men was outlawed. Homophobia was rampant. And at one rehearsal, a murderous, hateful mob attacks.
MARLON JAMES: This attack in the book was based on an incident which I knew in my gut happened. I just couldn't prove it.
SUMMERS: Award-winning novelist Marlon James was growing up gay in Jamaica during that same time. And in his new book, "The Disappearers," the attack he'd heard about inspires his examination of the choices people make after enduring extreme violence. When we spoke, James told me part of his motivation for writing the book was a fact-finding mission.
JAMES: I always knew the official record is one thing you don't trust. The official record comes in an agenda that was colonial to upper class or whatever. So when I want to know what's going on, I go on the street. I go in the mountains. I go to the alleyways. Or I just grab a group of grandmothers and go, tell me what really happened.
SUMMERS: Does any part of you hope that the attack that might have been gets a more thorough investigation or that people think about it differently as a result of this book?
JAMES: I hope they think about it differently, and it's one of the reasons why I took a very, very difficult decision of going in the minds of the attackers. It was a very hard thing to do, and not surprisingly, it's the shortest section in the book. But I wanted to demystify the idea of a mob as this beast. These are people. You know, it's easy - I wanted to show evil without demonizing it, if that makes any sense. That these people - you know, I tell people, you know, lots of loving mothers and fathers hate Black people. And a lot of the people involved in that attack, you know, go home and kiss their wives and raise their children. They consider themselves good people.
And I wanted to really get, you know - like Grace Paley say - get under the rock of your character's reasoning. What is the logic, the breakdown behind a violent attack? At the same time, I didn't want to dwell too much on it 'cause then I'd throw agency to the people who mean gay people harm, and I certainly wasn't going to do that.
SUMMERS: Yeah. I wonder, do you feel, as a novelist, that you have any obligation when imagining the story of real victims whose stories were never recorded?
JAMES: Absolutely. And I am very careful. You know, one of the postscripts of this book is that I actually finally managed to confirm that the attack happened. And I remember speaking to somebody - it was a person who got political asylum in Canada, and I almost cried. I go, I knew this happened.
SUMMERS: Wow. All right (ph), that had to have been an incredible moment.
JAMES: It was because, you know, I get a lot of flak for violence. And the thing is, I've never told a false violence story in my life. That - you know, we have to come to terms what humans are. You know, recently, I just wrote the new introduction for Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," which I jumped at the chance to do...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JAMES: ...Because the - one of the things that people use to justify liking it is saying the violence isn't gratuitous. And I recount arguing (ph) - this is one of the most gratuitous, violent novels ever written, and that's the point. All violence is gratuitous. If you're saying there's such a thing as too much violence, then you're automatically saying there is such a thing as just enough, you know? What is too much rape? I don't understand. What is just enough rape?
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JAMES: There's no such thing. And if people are disturbed by the violence I write, I'm like, yeah. You're not supposed to go off into the sunset with John Wick. You're supposed to go, damage happened here.
SUMMERS: After this brutal attack, we see this group of men make drastically different choices. Some are clearly in denial. Some try to reinvent themselves. Others really want revenge. I wonder, did you want the novel to resist identifying one morally correct way to survive?
JAMES: Absolutely because there isn't one. There isn't one, and I'm not sure any of them were morally correct or morally incorrect. I, like anybody else, feel the vengeance urge. But the character in the book who chooses vengeance not only loses a sense of mooring, not only loses a sense of self, he loses - he kind of loses his mind. There's a price you pay even if you feel justified. There's a price you pay for trying to go through evil to get to good. You know, I think we're kind of kidding ourselves, but I understand why he chose that.
And I think different people are looking for different things. I think some people want peace. Some people want acceptance. Some people just want to be normal, you know? Some people want to die or vanish. And I really wanted to capture the full range of how people deal with evil that men do.
SUMMERS: When readers come to this book, we bring with it historical knowledge about the devastating nature of the AIDS crisis that the characters in your novel don't have, because it's happening around them in real time. How did you explore that without allowing it to overwhelm the characters' immediate lives?
JAMES: I - it's funny because I didn't intend on exploring it. I, like a lot of people, certainly in my country, thought AIDS was an American thing. So when I went back - I went back to Jamaica to do research, and I just asked people, tell me about AIDS. And I wasn't prepared to get so many stories. I wasn't prepared to meet the nurse who took care of our patient zero.
SUMMERS: Wow.
JAMES: Yeah. I wasn't prepared to run into the people who survived through the '80s. I'm like, how did you do this? And if AIDS itself didn't change the nature of the country, AIDS hysteria certainly did.
SUMMERS: Say more about that. How so?
JAMES: Meaning that the church jumped on it and saying it's God's final punishment against homosexuals. It's one of the reasons why gay clubs in Jamaica went underground - because everybody thought these are the people spreading the plague, especially to decent Christian people who just get a blood transfusion. I remember when AIDS took over from nuclear war as our biggest fear.
SUMMERS: The title of this book - it suggests that disappearing isn't something that's only done to people. It's also something that we sometimes do to ourselves. It can be a mode of survival. What interested you about disappearance? What types of disappearance interested you?
JAMES: Well, I'm also a disappearer, and I was very good at it.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JAMES: And that was how I survived. I realized, for example, if I open my mouth, everybody said I sounded like a sissy. So I just stopped talking. So between 15 and 17, I'm pretty sure I said maybe nine words total. I remember all the homophobic cool kids took the bus to school at 6. So I realized if I take the bus at 6:15, I don't have to deal with any of them. Nobody will see me enter school. Nobody sees me leave.
And there are kids I see now - I'm a teacher. I see - I look at somebody and go, I know you're trying to vanish. I see it. I know when a kid is trying to fade away because - and sometimes it's not something like taking their lives, although there is that, but it's they've realized that the way they're going to make it to tomorrow is just fade, fade into the woodwork, and you figure out how to do it. So the two men in "The Disappearers" aren't the only people who disappear.
SUMMERS: Well, we've been speaking with Marlon James. His new novel is "The Disappearers." Marlon, thank you so much for coming on the show.
JAMES: Thank you so much for having me. So great to be back.
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