Moon Witch, Spider King

“[Art is the] effort to create for oneself a different order of reality from that which is given to one; an aspiration to provide oneself with a second handle on existence through the imagination.” ~Chinua Achebe

“…in its function as a second handle on reality, fiction appears to allow a disabled tradition, a broken time, to appear at another level of consciousness as intense, if suspended, history.” ~Emmanuel Eze

What do I hear when I read Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King? I hear Blackness transmitted across space and time, continent and ocean, island and mainland. I hear West African vampires and dead Englishman and 1970s funk songs. I hear the sampling track of inner-city griots reverberating from traditional drum to drum tracks. I hear…

Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy’s classic, immense Blood Meridian starts with:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

And Moon Witch, Spider King:

One night I was in the dream jungle. It was not a dream, but a memory that jump up in my sleep to usurp it. And in the dream memory is a girl. See the girl. The girl who live in the old termite hill. Her brothers three, who live in a big hut, say that the hill look like the rotting heart of a giant turn upside down, but she don’t know what any of that mean. The girl, she is pressing her lips tight in the hill’s hollow belly, the walls a red mud and rough to the touch.

See the child, see the girl as they traverse the hellscapes they were born into. With unrelenting styles, McCarthy and James create psychologically taxing worlds. That is the whole of Blood Meridian but a mere aspect of Moon Witch, Spider King. Sogolon, the Moon Witch, lives a seemingly unending life of trial and tribulation, but her childhood (comprising about a third of the book) is particularly onerous. Eventually, she is banished to Mantha, a nunnery in a remote mountainside, a trip that brings to mind the judge and the boy traversing the creosote and dried, lava rocks of the American West.

Sogolon escapes from Mantha and quite literally starts over. And for a while she even experiences something like joy (an emotion completely and utterly nonexistent in Blood Meridian) even if something is always gnawing at her. That something moves her towards night fights at the donga before pushing her towards her destiny as the protector and avenging angel of battered women, executing with relish and glee the men who prey on their or someone else’s sisters, daughters, mothers, or wives. But this turns out to be only one of Sogolon’s destinies; Moon Witch, Spider King, like Sogolon herself, contains lifetimes.

Maggot Brain

Dirt stuck in the back of her throat make her cough, and terror make her shudder. Sogolon is crying when she pull herself out of the dirt, but the weak sun open her hazy eyes, and what she see stop it.

Yakub

Even in the bush I hear of white scientists. Men (all of them is man) working forbidden magic, making nasty sacrifice, mixing their knowledge with abominations, and brewing hard potions with sulfur for so long that they burn all the brown off their skin. Now the skin whitening is the initiation to join their number. And even after that is another thirty years before one can call himself a scientist.

Shakespeare

When Sogolon talks to the man who will eventually become the closest thing to a husband she’ll ever want or have:

“When they call me cursed they bring pity with the scorn. The village burn the last woman somebody call a witch.”

“Fuck the gods, and the witches, and the belief in witches. A motherless child and a brotherless sister. Instead of one life, you already live three. Do you think on these things?”

“Why? Living is living, and that alone take so much to do. Who have time to do anything else?”

He stop the horse to look at her.

“I will not soon forget you, Sogolon the motherless.”

And again, later, as the women of the royal court, their minds having been poisoned by the demigod Aesi, ridicule disgraced Commander Olu:

“Leave him alone, he never trouble anybody.”

“Viper don’t trouble nobody until you step on him.”

“Then leave a man’s snake for once.” More laughter.

“Indeed, he already married to the air, or ghost, or demon maybe. I hear he moan for her at night, even though he can’t name her in the morning,” say another.

African time and rhythm

The most successful and least nihilistic of the writers… are those who…tried to maintain the continuity of cultural traditions by writing in the time of African languages … these experiments are scattered testaments that Africa – like other cultural regions of the world before or along with it – articulated some stories of their experiments in modernity as stories of fragile traditions broken and, however imperfectly, reinvented. ~Emmanuel Eze

But most of all this is what I hear. I hear Marlon James (along with many others) uncovering traditions lost to the past. Yes, he is doing this by creating an African mythological landscape populated by creatures from every corner of the continent, but he is also doing it in the way he bends and breaks the language. This is not the English of a time before or after, but an English of possibility, an English of an alternative time, space, and reality, an English that, to the best of its abilities, carries in it the implicit experience of what it is to be an African of the blood if not one of the soil. James does with words on a page what only the finest hip-hop artists and spoken word poets can accomplish. He makes the words sing, lest we forget what they mean:

“And song is how you talk,” I say.

“Way of song long gone, Sogolon. Singer man don’t sing songs no more.”

“Just because you not writing down deeds don’t mean you stop singing. How you keep to memory what the world tell you to forget?”

This is how it is done.