Queer Talk:Black Leopard Red Wolf and the Black Diaspora Amber Jamilla Musser (bio) When Jamaican author Marlon James first started talking about the book series that begins with Black Leopard Red Wolf (2019), his pithy description, "an African 'Game of Thrones,'" circulated widely.1 Although there are differences between George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series and its HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones, both broadly tell the stories [End Page 290] of various royal families trying to gain possession of the Iron Throne, or absolute control of all of the kingdoms. The narratives follow the disparate journeys of members of each faction as they attempt to consolidate power within their own kingdoms and advance toward the Throne through blackmail, sex, and murder. While royal figures appear sporadically in Black Leopard Red Wolf, the central characters are a motley crew wandering through a kingdom in search of a boy. Our guide through this journey is Tracker, who is well known for his keen sense of smell and, later, his wolf's eye. Like Game of Thrones, there are betrayals, power machinations, and sex, but it is in the fabric of their differences where we see what Black diasporic queerness can offer to the genre of the speculative. James offers many layers to thinking about Black queerness. The movements between animals and people and between genders are powerful resignifications of Black fungibility as theorized by Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, and Zaikyyah Iman Jackson.2 In addition to his wolf sensibilities, Tracker explicitly positions himself in a space between man and woman. This announcement comes early, "I did not tell him that the woman was already raging inside me and I desired her desires, but otherwise did not feel like a woman for I wanted to hunt deer and run and sport,"3 but acts as a shadow narrative until near the end of the novel when Tracker realizes there is a space for him to be both without having to choose. Until this moment of acceptance, what we are given of Tracker's interiority is consumed with trying to understand this in-between space even as he unhesitantly beds men, eunuchs, and women (in that order of preference). Sexuality is not a problem within the novel. The angst that Tracker feels has to do with dispossession—his gender anxiety is a signifier of his being without biological kin, which is what marks him most profoundly as queer. Notably, it is this outsider-ness that motivates his quests. Thinking diasporically, Tracker's sense of gender and animal fluidity also reveals itself to be an updated version of the shape-shifting trickster Anansi, who oscillates between man and spider. Anansi stories, which are said to have originated in Ghana, can be found in many places in the African diaspora, including the Caribbean. Anansi is unreliable, but smart. In the stories, passed down orally, Anansi often gets the better of another creature through his cunning and wit. The pleasure of the stories is not moral—Anansi is never in the right—but it is that of admiring intelligence and the power of a joke unveiled. This spinning of tales, however, gives us another way to see how James employs Black queerness to reorient the speculative genre. Tracker loves to gab, aimlessly, copiously, wittily, and constantly. While the plot is done away with immediately—"The child is dead. There is nothing left to know"—the beauty and instability of talking is introduced immediately and continues to unfold. First, "I hear there is a queen in the south who kills the man who brings her bad news. So when I give [End Page 291] word of the boy's death, do I write my own death with it?"; then, "Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth."4 In Tracker's knowledge that the story might bring him harm, we are also given clues to his desire to talk and his understanding that withholding is just as central an element of narrative as what is revealed. After a bit of teasing back and forth with the inquisitor, Tracker finally begins the story: "You have come for a story...
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Jun 24, 2021
Grant Pickett + 2
Open Access
