55 pages • 1 hour read
Marlon JamesBlack Leopard, Red Wolf
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Storytelling and Truth
Many of the stories told in the novel, including Tracker’s, are lies. The strongest example of this appears in the different versions of the boy’s story that circulate and recirculate. The reception of these stories—acceptance or rejection—also varies. At one point, Leopard “feed[s] on [Bunshi’s] story like someone starving, or like someone glutting” (165); this story was not the complete truth, but what he wanted to hear.
James’s frame narrative—the interrogation—explicitly mentions the relationship between stories and truth: Tracker says, “What you wanted was testimony, but what you really wanted was a story, is it not true? [...] Truth is just another story” (523). The Inquisitor is comparing his story with other testimonies; at the end of the novel, Tracker asks about “another story,” Sogolon’s story. Discovering the truth is choosing which story to believe.
In addition to the Inquisitor requesting stories, some monsters require stories, but evaluate them based on how entertaining or moving they are. Kamikwayo will only release Tracker from his spiderweb if he tells a story. Tracker interrupts the story of Lissisolo’s son (the most recirculated story in the novel) with the phrase, “But that is not the story” (588), multiple times. The story with the most pathos, the one the monster desires, is not about royal politics, but about the murder of loved ones.
An important character in African folklore, Anansi, is similar to the white scientist who transformed himself into a spider-like creature. Tracker asks if the scientist is this particular “trickster and storyteller. Are you not one of the Nan Si?” (583). Rather than the mystical role of the Anansi, Kamikwayo is born from Frankenstein-esque experimentation, an amoral science. Yet, the importance of trickster storytelling from the Anansi tales is a major theme in James’s novel.
Written Texts in Dialogue with Oral Traditions
Throughout Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the reader engages with written and spoken texts. For instance, Bibi’s war stories are different from historical texts: “leaves of paper bound in leather-skin” (211). While Bibi’s stories are part of the main narrative, James usually italicizes written texts. This includes testimonies and writs that make the novel intertextual. Furthermore, the library master elevates the written word: “Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine” (316). Basu’s writs—his wishes—outlive him, highlighting the power of the immortal written word.
When discussing the King’s slaughter of griots (due to his fear that they are truth-tellers), the old griot says,
For the age of the voice is over and we in the age of the written word. The word on stone, the word on parchment, the word on cloth, the word that is even greater than the glyph for the word provoke a sound in the mouth [...] they may kill the griot but can never kill the word (384).
Political dissention, like Basu’s, can live on after individuals die. Written texts can even find use as transmitted texts that were once previously only oral tales.
Verbal Sparring and Wordplay
James underscores ingenious orality in dialogue. There are countless witty exchanges between characters; “somebody [is always] throwing wit” (296). Lewd insults recall the tradition of one-upping that is similar to both African-American toasts (see Bruce Jackson’s collection entitled Get Your Ass In The Water And Swim Like Me) and Shakespearean stichomythia. One example of verbal sparring is between Tracker and Aesi. The monster opens with: “Fuck the gods, you say. I have heard you. And yes fuck them, this is the age of kings. You don’t believe in belief. I butcher belief. We are the same”; Tracker replies: “I will tell my mother she has one more son. She will laugh”; and Aesi follows up with: “Not with your grandfather’s cock in her mouth she will not” (513). Aesi is the winner of this bout.
In addition to verbal sparring (and actual battle scenes), James emphasizes multiplicity of meanings, or levels of meaning, in dialogue. Tracker notes the lack of “double tongue” (106) among the Kalindar, as well as how Sogolon uses “witch double-speak” but he understands “the word inside the word” (246). Implied or connotative meaning gets embedded within the explicit, or denotative, meaning of a word. Another way dual or multiple meanings build is through puns—how characters can interpret one word in a variety of ways.
Slave Rebellion and Abolition
While James flips the racial dynamic of Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the conventional fantasy novels of Tolkien and other white authors, dark-skinned characters breed, buy, and sell slaves. This recalls the novel The Known World by Jones which features a black slave owner. Hidden slave labor powers Dolingo; as Tracker enters the city, he wonders what “number of slaves did it take to pull” (410) the platforms that carry them up and down the tree, and eventually frees the boy trapped in the walls of his room who controls the doors, windows, etc.
Tracker and Mossi releasing this slave triggers an uprising against the Queen; “The slaves are rebelling” (454). They also resist slavery by repeatedly making love in the slave ship that carries them to Kongor. Right before the men become lovers, Tracker mentions the ship’s crew’s fear of “slave ghosts, furious about dying on the ship for they were still chained to it and could not enter the underworld” but he would offer the ghosts “ears to hear of their injustice” (473-74). Gay male sex overwrites the ghost stories; they resist heteronormativity as well as slavery in that ship’s first deck.
Furthermore, one of Basu’s writs against the King calls for the abolishment of slavery as an institution: people should “be never enslaved, or enslaved again [...] and this freedom shall also be for their children and their children’s children” (322). This dream outlives Basu; it later reappears on paper by Tracker in the library. Tracker shares this dream; he frequently declares his hatred of slavers and slavery throughout the book.
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By Marlon James
