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(upbeat music) (bell rings) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland.

I'm Dan Moulthrop Chief Executive here and a proud member.

Today is November 16th we're here with two impressive authors as part of our Lucille D and Robert Hayes Greys Forum on the cultural arts.

It's also the annual forum in which we partner with Cleveland's wonderful, Anisfield-Wolf Awards.

Today's forum is also sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation's African-American Philanthropy Committee.

We're joined now by Karen Long she's manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards at the Cleveland Foundation and she'll introduce our speakers.

- Thank you, Dan and good afternoon.

On behalf of the Cleveland Foundation, we are proud partners to the City Club in hosting this virtual forum, the worldwide reverberations of Jamaicans 18th century slave revolts.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are 87 years old.

They exist thanks to Cleveland poet and philanthropist, Edith Anisfield-Wolf to enhance our grasp of the rich diversity of human cultures and to blunt racism.

The list of winners includes seven writers who went on to become Nobel laureates, artists who have set the table for some of the world's most important conversations.

The Cleveland Foundation has administered the awards since Edith died in 1963.

One of her legacies is the city called partnership with the foundation to provide a forum for a winner every year.

In fact, our moderator today, the novelist Marlon James stood at the City Club lectern six years ago in that tradition, he is in conversation today with this year's Anisfield-Wolf Award recipient for nonfiction.

Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren professor of American history and professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard University.

His book Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War tracks that coordinated uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1760 and 1761, their actions influence our notions of war and race to this day.

Marlon James who won his AW award for his profoundly Jamaican story, a Brief History of Seven Killings grew up in it's Capitol Kingston.

His second novel, The Book of Night Women centers on over billion of people enslaved on a Jamaican sugar plantation around 1801.

It was the first Marlon James book that Vincent Brown read turns out these two have been reading each other for years, guests, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Marlon James and Vincent Brown.

- 'Cause everyday I get to say hello, Cleveland.

Okay that went everybody, but (laughs) - Hello, hello, Marlon from Cambridge.

And thank you so much, Karen for that wonderful introduction.

Nice to be with you.

- Thanks again, Karen.

And it's so great to be here you Vincent.

You know I tried to think of all sorts of ways to jump into this.

And the first thing I thought of, you know, not beyond us being a Jamaican I remember growing up on hearing songs about Tacky's Revolt, and I can't remember what a folk song was, Bobi always heard about it, and it's something we grew up knowing about, but it's the thing that struck me even from just from just reading the, you know, the prologue and it certainly in a way of reading the prologue and then circling back to the end of it and this almost sounds like a weird thing to say, but there's a certain kind of let's use the word dignity and the word war.

That's not in say uprising or revolt or insurrection and it like in a lot of ways, the word like uprising in a strange way, it kind of reduces what was happening whereas war brings it up to a different level.

- Yeah.

- Is it important on how we see that?

- I think it's kind of vital.

I mean, the first thing you have to understand is I grew up in San Diego, California in the late Cold War period, right?

When the United States was essentially always at war and San Diego, which is a big military Garrison, a lot of friends who joined the Marines or the Navy.

And so they were kind of actively involved in this.

So just being in a state of war is something that I grew up with, but, you know, to go directly to your point, you know, we tend to think of war as a more dignified and endeavor with a larger scope than something like a rebellion or an insurrection or an uprising, or even a riot, which is often the way, you know, black uprisings are characterizing.

And so I do think that I was trying to attach what happened in Jamaica in 1760 and 61 but even before that, and after that, the uprisings that we see there with I think the more kind of dignified approach to warfare, the more respectful approach that we take when we think about warfare.

Now, I recognize that one of the things I'm doing there is taking a kind of genre of analysis and applying it to something that it's not usually applied to.

And so that encourages us to ask all kinds of questions that we don't ask.

We just talk about slavery volts.

So questions about tactical aims and strategies and territory, and the scope of the conflict are questions that are immediately relevant when you think of these as wars, and they're not often asked in the same way where you just think of these as uprisings.

I guess in some ways, you know I'm trying to do something that you did as well with the book of Night Women.

If I can characterize it properly, there's something about the book of Night Women.

That's like a Victorian romance, but not with the kinds of characters you usually see in Victorian romances.

And so once we kind of, you know, appropriate the genre of the Victorian Romance or appropriate the genre of the war story for the kinds of characters and the kinds of activities that are not normally seen within those genres, I think, you know, the story form looks different.

And that's one of the things I was trying to do we can reopen the question of what war is by examining a slave revival using this.

- But it's interesting you say that because I thought that when I actually, that when I was writing Night Woman, I also wanna read your book that by sort of by appropriating this word you ended up seeing the situation correctly.

- You see things that you, that you wouldn't otherwise see.

And so one of the things that has kind of been excluded from the study of slave revolts is how a lot of these people involved in slavery volts were involved in military campaigns all over the Atlantic world, including military campaigns in Africa.

And so many of the soldiers who fought in Tacky's Revolt in Jamaican 1760 and 61 had fought in African campaigns before that.

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that, you know, one of the ways the slave trade operated was through the sale of European firearms, African political kingdoms, polities, and the increase in the scale and the fallacy of African wars, which helped to produce more captives for sale to the Europeans.

And they came out to start the plantations, which facilitated the wealth of the Caribbean and the like war so very much part of the political economy of that.

- Well, one thing you mentioned in the middle of the book is, and it's so in a way we don't them knowing that this slave trade in a way, it kind of funnel slave revolt because all of these war leaders, all these tacticians are being taken away and shipped to the Caribbean and they bring, and they bring with it.

You know, it's funny, your book made me realize even I'm pretty proud of how much I had to learn my Jamaican history and I'm like, are you Americans don't know where you are, but at the same time, it never occurred to me that what was happening was kind of a skill kind of military tactic, as opposed to just see as holiday European said, these skirmishes that it has can stamp out.

- Yeah I mean, I think that's partly again, when we think of revolt or insurrection or uprising, really thinking of a reaction, not really thinking of the initiative that black people to act on their own accord, all the different reasons they might have had for engaging in military conflicts, right.

That weren't just a reaction to the Europeans.

Although there was certainly that, but also drawing upon previous historical experience and skills and desires that pre-existed the slave trade preexisted that their enslavement in a place like Jamaica, or in a place like South Carolina or in a place like New York.

- Yeah so what kind of California do you get interested in Tacky's Revolt in the first place?

- Well, I mean, in part of the same way, I got interested in the history of slavery in the first place, which is, you know, they didn't really teach a lot about the history of slavery or black history at all in my schools, or even in my high schools growing up in Southern California.

So before there was a kind of freak out over critical race theory, ignored the subject altogether, right?

And so I began learning a lot of the history that I care about now from like reggae musicians, right?

So people like Bob Marley and Burning Spear and Steel Pulse, the English Reggae Group, I've learned a lot about, you know, the history of slavery in the African diaspora, about black politics from music and so in that way, my entry into the history of slavery was also an entry into Jamaican culture through Jamaican music.

And so my interest in Jamaica, I think started there.

- Yeah that Burning Spear although must have been big.

- I saw Burning Spear like, three, four or five times.

- Yeah you know the thing that it did the same thing for me but is also, for me, and it deliberately effected Night Woman, it also made me fall in love with the language, because the thing about reggae when I was listening you know, is that reggae was talking about very, very serious things in a language of someone that wasn't my own mouth.

- Yeah.

- And it's honestly, you know, in 1975, 76, when Burning Spears go ahead and do your remember the days of slavery and everybody said no (both laugh) Yeah but it was also the way, the thing that was struck me about that is that and ties to a sort of black storytelling was that he used present tense.

- Yeah.

- You know so that the legacies of Tacky's Revolt of the Maroons are still all our own us.

- Yeah.

You know, there's a fantastic literary scholar named Nadia Ellis, who is at Berkeley I believe who's written a chapter on Burning Spear talk and Fena Mackey as well.

But talking about how Spear, you know, invoked spirit possession, and in fact kind of drew upon the spirits of ancestors in slavery and brought them forward into the present.

But there's something about his music that brought the past into the present in a very, kind of very visceral way that the sounds that he made, which are often guttural, which were often kind of molds and shrieks and not just words themselves were part of these invocations that kind of helped, I think, animate the music.

I find that analysis very rich and in something that kind of brings history alive for people to say like, no, I don't have a conscious memory of any of that, but can I commune through this music with some feeling, some spirit of the past?

I think that's one of the things that Spear spirit for a lot of people.

- Yeah an emergency already.

You said rebels stories must be learned by their enemies.

What challenge was that on the historian?

- Yeah.

Well, in many ways it goes back to what you were saying about language, right?

So, you know, I have a distance, like not having grown up in Jamaica, not speaking Jamaican Patois, like, you know, I don't speak in the language of Jamaica.

So I'm kind of speaking an American English writing in an American English from outside.

In the same way that as I approached this story as a historian, I'm approaching through the sources of the rebels enemies, right?

So I've got plantation records, I've got diaries, like the notorious diary of Thomas Thistlewood that he was in Westmorland.

Yeah.

It's a hard read.

He's a brutal, brutal, brutal character.

And he's not unique.

Military records, government records, et cetera, the records of traders and planters.

But I don't have really anything that was written down by the enslaved.

If you have any oral histories there are many many generations removed and passed down, but you can't hear, you know, people, you know, their voices or inscriptions that they made at the time of the revolt.

So you're always having to kind of read through these sources to what might have been beyond.

There's a lot of really heavy interpretive work.

And the way I think about that is you have to think about what the shaping forces on these work.

You just read them as, you know, transparent windows onto what happened 'cause they're too invested in describing their view of what happened, right?

The planters, they hate the rebels, but you have to kind of imagine why they wrote the way they did.

And then think about what it was that was compelling them to write.

And that is the slave rebellion itself.

So the imaginative work happens kind of between the source and the thing that you can't see, the things you can't know, but you know, they're more likely ways that a source elders grab something and less likely ways.

And that's where we work as this.

- Yeah it made me think as a reader and a writer it's almost, it's how do you pass the truth from an unreliable narrator kind of thing?

That was the one thing.

And I mean, I remember going through, you know, grappling with Thomas Thistlewood diaries as well.

This way I literally have a character point him in the face, in my novel as somebody is certainly a bitch but the thing that appalled me in horror fan was also the thing that drew me to the source.

That in a way his sort of none solance almost makes it trustworthy.

- Yeah.

I didn't know.

He felt was, you know, he was not being critical of himself.

He was not writing for an audience who might judge him.

He was just like casually noting his own brutality, the rapes that he committed, punishments, the tortures that he administered, you know, he wasn't ashamed of them at all.

He wasn't justify himself at all.

And so you're right I mean, I think you can read those as facts on the ground in that way.

- Yeah it's just like I was saying, you know, I said somebody else, you know, I actually trust the testimony of a psychopath Because if nothing invested in that too, it's interesting, you know, when I was reading this and I think once I reviewed it, commented on it and it made me think about it like, again, one of the things that this book had me doing is rethinking certain things that in a way Tacky's Revolt and what happened before and after constitute almost the very first forever war.

- Yeah.

So that's definitely, I mean, look, like I said, you know, coming from the United States in the late 20th and early 21st century, you know, I was born in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War.

And, you know, in my 50 plus years of living, I can't name you a five-year period where the US military hasn't been abroad in the world somewhere, you know, engaged in conflict with somebody.

So I consider that, you know, more than a half century of continuous warfare.

So in fact, you know, I'm trying to see that of thing.

Lemme go and you look at 18th century Jamaica or the 18th Century Atlantic War more generally, and you see these European wars, which are constant, the wars between Britain and France and Spain and Britain and the Netherlands and all of these European powers.

And then you see the wars between the African politics that I mentioned that are producing these and slave capital for sale and then you see these slave revolts, it all looks connected.

It all looks like a kind of continuous state of endemic warfare, which doesn't have clean beginnings and endings.

And therefore it looks much more like the kind of warfare that we're growing accustomed to where you don't just have like a four year period marked off with a proper name, right?

Which bleeds out, and doesn't have clean battle lines.

And doesn't have, you know, distinctions between civilians and non-combatants can start in one place and in another place on the other side of the world, that's the kind of warfare I think these slave wars represent and it turns out it's the kind of warfare that I think we've become, you know, we've grown more accustomed to.

- Yeah It's a kind of warfare has always been there.

I mean, if the US had lost the revolutionary war, then you know what I've said it was a series of guerrilla attacks.

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And it just would have been kind of a pre-cut continuous sequence between the other wars between Britain and France would have folded into the middle point between the seven years war in the Napoleonic wars and a much neater way we've come to seam a clean brick point if it hadn't resulted in the creation of a new nation state.

- Yeah you know, this book was surprising me from page one.

And I thought I knew my stuff, But I'm very curious because I keep thinking I must have heard of Apongo I must have heard of this guy and I'd never heard of him.

How did he vanish?

- He's like a Thistlewood, he's like a Thistlewood.

- And I read the Thistlewood and I'm like, it makes me wonder that the thing about this that I love is it's sorta excavated people who we met.

None I've heard of were actually pretty crucial.

- Yeah.

- And it made me wonder what is there, I mean, I'm sure there are tons, but aspects of this in the research stage that surprised you?

- Yeah I mean, that story surprised me in part, because, you know, we know about Tacky as a named leader of the revolt and we call it Tacky's Revolt ever since Edward Long's kind of first narrative description of Tacky's Revolt and his 1774 history in Jamaica, but there were so many other important principle leaders, perhaps even more important than Tacky that come forward, that emerge when you go back into the event and you read the sources closely.

So I guess the big surprise for me that, you know, maybe Tacky's Revolt should be put in scare quotes, it may not have been Tacky's Revolt at all because some of these other people who led the revolt who led I think much more intensive dimensions of the campaign really are, have gone unacknowledged because they weren't acknowledged by Edward Long.

- I remember Edward Long's sister that was reading that.

And Apongo let me think of something else you mentioned in the book, these sort of situations where there's sometimes it happened without us knowing where a person of uncommon sort of a noble or prince or somebody of really decorated soldier or sort of war figure gets kidnapped, or is every one I think once or twice somebody to recognize that I'm going to get me to bring back my son or else.

Well, what was interesting about why don't we, I wondered why upon go was sort of erase is appointed, brought up elsewhere that if it became known that noble princes are fighting this thing, then it becomes, it actually becomes a kind of a war.

It becomes a more dignified struggle and they couldn't have that.

- Yeah, that's right.

I mean, so one of the things about enslavement is the suppression of the dignity of enslaved people, right?

And so there's a constant, you know, attempt and need to basically defame anybody that the British are fighting if they're enslaved.

So they don't have to recognize them as legitimate combats.

Right so they don't have to recognize their struggles as actual wars.

So they can just be uprisings or reactions to what they think of is duly constituted authority.

Denigration is constant and so you constantly see you know, when they do recognize even Tacky there's an attempt to diminish his sexuality, right?

This happens all the time, right?

Where anybody that seems to hold some kind of power, right?

The first thing they want to say about them as well, thereafter white women, it's kind of automatic that that is how an African would see their aspirations.

That's what they would reduce them to.

- Yeah great within this essay and Michelle and Cellos and he says the American myth of the black sex machine gone berserk.

- I didn't even see it and you know, you mentioned Edward Long, right?

He writes these crazy things all about black sexuality.

You know, you think they have no place just to kind of, you know, a mature characterization of a conflict between masters and slaves, but they're fundamental to the way Edward Long seeks to push these people down.

- Yeah, somebody asked me, give me an edit for a surprise birthday presents.

They go read Edwards Long history through for me, it gets a riot and so because it's her riot by his own standards, he actually, that was pretty thorough.

He was just kind of dangerous.

- He's a good historian, right?

He reads the sources carefully.

He weighs his evidence.

You know, he kind of brings things forward.

He makes clear arguments.

So as 18th century historians go, just comparing him to his peers and as they did, he was a well-respected intellectual, right?

- But it's interesting how his hatred of black people ultimate and it made his history pretty much, you know, irredeemably flawed really.

- Yeah I mean, irredeemably flawed.

If you wanna find out what black people are doing, and if your purpose is to actually describe black politics and black history absolutely flawed, and it's indispensable because no black politics is reacting to that campaign against their dignity that Edward Long is very much a part of.

- Yeah.

I always lump it with Eugene's journal.

You know, which I read 'cause somebody has to the sort of the whole, how all it really is.

- But also, but also, I mean, one of the things about that that I think is so fascinating about these stories and it's something that you get in your writing is that people's fears and fantasies are very much a part of the history.

So I'm not trying to distinguish that from, you know, the kind of hard material history you wanna write when it's a fundamental part of what's going on.

And so you can't really write the history, honestly, unless you're writing about all these crazy distortions that are often psychosexual.

- It is, it's like reading you know, writing these sorta African fantasy novels that I've been writing.

And one of the things that I ended up doing is going back and read all histories of African continent, mostly for entertainment value, because (laughs) - Its like watching constant movies away.

- I know it's absolutely so ridiculous.

But it's ridiculous but it's almost book after book it does this sort of parade off people's fears and desires that they then act on as opposed to actually observing anything.

- Yeah yeah.

It's a fundamental part of the story, which is why kind of, when you get back to observing these sources and trying to watch how things unfold over time at the time, by stacking these sources up, you see a lot of surprising things, other things that, you know, may not surprise you, but surprise me was that we have this list of the first 25 people captured in Tacky's Revolt on the north side of the island and the parish was St. Mary.

There were 25 people that were captured of the uprising and put a board of ship.

And anytime somebody comes on board of Royal Navy worship, the god they gotta put them on the mustard.

And so you get these 25 names and 10 of those names are identifiably women's names.

So 40% of these first rebels captured are women.

That's about their percentage of population in the parish of St. Mary right?

So, you know, women are represented in this revolt, proportionate to their numbers in the population and historians of warfare and the stories of slave revolt aside from a few, like the bullying of Glymph and usually French have not really considered women's participation in slavery revolts as carefully as they should, when, you know, certainly here they are right at the very beginning of this campaign.

- Yeah.

Why do you think that that eraser upon erasion happened?

- I mean, I think it's because people see through the categories that they already have, right?

So they have these kind of, you know, frameworks, and it's hard to see things that fall outside the framework you select, right.

You're selective in your, even in your vision.

And if you think of something as a war, you already think that that's gendered in a certain way.

That's a masculine activity.

And so the women must be doing something else.

And so you just fail to see them.

- Yeah there Florence, 19 gaining up the place.

- Yeah right?

- Well I read your book 'cause I read a book from, it was one of my pandemic books (laughs) but I also, you know, I also read it our own the same time I was reading Julia Scott, the book Common Wind.

- Oh yeah he was one of my teachers.

- Oh yeah.

Oh my God.

The first time I read, Common Wind I think I read it as a printout.

- Hey, so that was one of the most famous dissertations written in the field of African diaspora studies or Atlantic slavery studies.

Literally that was a dissertation from 1986, only a few copies of it around.

And we used to pass it around like an underground mix tape.

Just like you read this thing, you've got to listen.

You got to read it.

- I can't remember how I got it.

But I was reading, Common Wind when I was reading a Fistful of Shells, Toby Green's book.

And the thing I've thought about with these books is, is not to lump them together.

But the thing I did notice is an approach to history that is actually expanding it in a way, including your book, that I just, I couldn't get over how it was just this sense of even the physical sense, reading it of my world, being expended.

He shouldn't be an expanded.

And I think because and even words like war and so on that even as coming from a country where we learned to celebrate Tacky's Revolt, we celebrated, but we reduce it as opposed to seeing it as part of a continuum as seen it as part of a form of a war.

As seen it as these are skilled tacticians launching, a kind of warfare.

That's actually how we fight war.

- Look, Marlon I think going back to this question and the frameworks in which we are prepared to see things as part of the long history of the diminishment of black people, frankly, which is that, you know, we can imagine like the revolting against the planter, but just against the whites or just on a plantation, just in a colony.

But to imagine them with a geopolitical frame of reference has been very hard to do, to imagine them as having kind of political aims and desires that aren't simply reducible to reflection or reaction to what white people are aiming to do.

That's been hard to do you have to first ask that question?

So using words like war, thinking of people's activities as stretching across continents and an Atlantic canvas already as a way of allowing us to see things that were clearly happening, right?

And it's hard when you start with, okay, here is a slave they're socially dead, kind of in a lot of, and a lot of theory.

And therefore kind of all we can understand is the things that limit their world.

We can't understand the world that they would want to create or even the worlds that they have come from.

- And that everything you're doing is reaction as opposed to actions or strategies we are planning.

- Politics seriously, right?

It's not always gonna be a story of great virtue, but it's gonna be a story you have to take seriously as a story of initiatives and reaction as I've been saying.

- I knew this was gonna happen, that I was gonna forget that with the ask questions.

So, if you have questions for either of us, you can text 3305415794 that's 3305415794.

You can also tweet them at City Club at the City Club, @The City Club and we will to try to work them in.

- So I have a question for you while we're waiting to gather, which is, you know, when you read history, I know you sometimes read it for entertainment, especially those old histories, but like, where do you see as the limits of what historians can do that really kind of provides you an opportunity to do something else and do something more imaginative than we have access to because of our genre rules or limitations as has professional historians.

- I mean, to me, it's not even so much limited as where's the jump off point.

I think, you know, for me, it's how do some of the things that knew what had happened in history affect people on a day-to-day level?

Yeah I'm like, you know, on a yeah, I know how does this thing affect her Wednesday?

Are how they view women, like one of my favorite things to write in book of white man was actually when the white woman Isabel says, have you heard what Edward Long has written about us?

- Yeah.

That must've happened, right?

- Yeah.

It must have happened, it's awesome because Mansfield couldn't exist without that, or send it on, can exist without that somebody has sent out this thing about the knit, the cruel white woman is a wild beast who may be slightly tinted.

And I think for me as a fiction writer, I mean, in some ways I'm not that different from Austin.

And I take that on, run with it.

And I think that's it.

I'm very curious about how that played out on a domestic level, which is why I really grudgingly here did how much I got from Thomas Thistlewood.

- Yeah, right.

- Because ultimately this boy, just so flipping basic.

- Yeah.

- But it's sort of the dynamics between slave and slave and slave owner where sometimes he can be going off on a hunt with some of his, you know, strongest slaves.

I'm not worried for a second that they're gonna try anything and I'm very, you know, it's there in all the historical tax, but it's there just, how these systems of oppression and control and brutality work on an ordinary level, you know?

And then I'm also sort of reading books that also deal with that, like beloved, you know, and, you know, and how, yeah how holy that plays out on domestic level.

I think some of that, somebody that just had to imagine some of that, I mean, the sources are there that I didn't get to.

I mean, God bless the Elsa Gomez on those years and those guys you know, it's funny, I still visit more history departments and English departments.

- Is that right?

- Yeah.

So it's very important.

I mean, if I can ever consider myself a historical novelist, but that's how those things came about.

Yeah we got a question.

This one says in both of your books, enslaved drivers seem like key characters, but they're portrayed in very different ways in Tacky's Revolt for example, before Apongo was a rebel leader, he was a driver, in Night Woman that drivers read into the woman who were built as enemies, as defenders of the plantation regime, who stood in the way of our successful rebellion.

Could you both speak a bit about the role of enslave drivers in Jamaican slave society?

- Yeah, I'll start.

But I think that the answer is that they're both right?

So are there as representatives of, of planter authority, helping to keep the plantation working, they are privileged in that regard over and above other slaves.

And some of those privileges, you know, include access to women, unfettered access to women.

So they wouldn't be seen, I think as enemies of a lot of women on plantations.

At the same time, you know, that afforded, they wield gives them a certain capacity as organizers.

And so you do find a cross, you know, plantation slavery in various countries, drivers often being involved in organizing slavery revolts because they are used to wielding coercive authority.

They have connections, right?

And so they can lead rebellions for that reason.

It's both and the question is like, under what circumstances does a driver go from being merely representation, a representative of plantation authority to being a rebel is why the predicament of the enslaved becomes so key to look at moment by moment, what's happening that shaping their vision of what their own possibilities are.

- Yeah I think for me also for Night Woman, I think it is complicated even though in a lot of ways, the overseers are the flattish characters in my book and kind of deliberately.

So because of just how I grew up on heritable, overseer and so on, but, you know, but also we grew up here in stuff about the house Negro, and it was very important for me that this was a book about house slaves, because we also have this idea of house slaves being complicit.

- Yeah we have Malcolm X as well.

How stable was his field Negro.

- Yeah but you know, in these houses, if the soup was too salty, somebody got whipped, you know, it's in bullet in what you know, the thing that they have in common, the way I was treating house slaves, and we write a number on an overseer, is that even the idea of their one thing is still reductive, and it's a snapshot.

It's just not like that.

So there's a third question and it says, oh, when I said for, when you said forever war, I thought of the continuing struggle against police murder and white supremacy.

Maybe I was only thinking narrowly about struggle as opposed to real military uprisings.

Maybe you could comment on that.

- Yeah well, I think one of the things I'm trying to do is confuse the easy distinction between the kind of violence that you're talking about and the kind of violence we associated with large-scale geopolitical wars.

But when you look at the slave revolt, right, it's policed by individual planters, by one militia that's composed of individual planters.

And then by the British Army and the Royal Navy and the Marines and the allies that the government has made of the Maroons after the treaties of this site.

So I can't draw for you a clear distinction between a military campaign and police violence, or individual racial violence in this current situation.

Because I don't think that that kind of distinction really helps us understand what's going on frankly, it helps us to see the kind of connections that I think are really important.

So I actually end the book with someone who is kind of walking along a muddy road.

- Like Montezuma.

- Montezuma wise by them, they splashed with mud it's 1792.

The Haitian Revolution is raging nearby and people know it.

And he says, you know, he does, he's not having it.

And he says, you know, you may drive Negro out of the path now, but pretty soon you will turn you out of the path.

And so of course, they freak out and they organize a kind of hasty interrogation, essentially, a trial.

They find out that there's not really, there's not really a conspiracy to be discovered the distinction between just this refusal to be of the sleight of his dignity and the planters, understanding that this could be part of a revolutionary war.

There's not a distinction.

Right and they're in their imagination, it's the same thing.

And I suggest that in Montezuma's it might be true.

So I think there's a reason for refusing those distinctions.

- Yeah my problem with a distinctions were looking at police brutality and so on, in that way, is that the thing about war and the term war is that in its own way, it kind of puts people on equal footing and white supremacy, you know, wiser Burmese oppression, it's atrocities, you know, you get mad equally in war, you're coming here.

You're basically going, could be in that crime.

Yeah, but it's-- - So I think that's an important caveat and I take the point and I think it's an important one, but, you know, I think, again, we're more used to asymmetrical warfare then warfare is not always between equals that there's kind of warfare against populations and populations try to strike back in ways that they can, without presuming that there are, you know, that there's any kind of equality between combatants.

- I want to go to another question.

One thing that struck me, because talking about more modern parallels, a modern parallel, I was drawing when I read the book is the whole idea of a Garrison country, because I'm not man.

That was the 70s.

Yeah it's what do you think, do you think there is a sort of last thing let's call it damage or damage legacies that those things do in countries like Jamaica?

- I really do and I mean, I hear, I think you know, the fact that we're probably about the same age and we're both kind of children of the late Cold War period where, you know, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had lots of Garrison countries, right?

All these proxy wars, like the one fought in Jamaica in the 1970s, like the one fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s, you know, these were fought all over the world and they did have, you know, extremely consequential and deleterious effects on the societies, violence, endemic, and habitual.

They flooded these places with firearms and those things don't just go away when the main theater of the war moves on.

And so, you know, in my book, I think I'm trying to suggest that if you take my premise, that slavery itself is a kind of state of war.

It helps to explain why the post slave societies of the Americas are so violent across the board, right.

And in the United States to think of police violence, mostly as a kind of like, you know, white on black racial violence.

Now this is the main already even here, because our police killed maybe like 1000 people a year, disproportionately black and brown, but not all of them, right.

So, you know, 500 of those people may be poor white people killed by the police.

It's just more acceptable to kill people here, but that's also true in Jamaica, right?

- Yeah.

- Where the police there predominantly black?

It's also true in Brazil like most of these post slave societies are violent societies.

And I think that that is a carry over right.

Something that's established in the era of slavery and all of these things.

- Yeah and they all also have a history of the police being the tool off enforcing oppression, Jamaica, certainly, you know, from the 1860s, the 1930s, 1938s and all of that.

And so there are those part of your question, and this is a question for this new mode of history that you discuss is emerging as a nation experiences, backlash, whitelash I guess, history and culture on hold, they're taught in K-12 education.

How should communities deal with this?

- And so I'm not a K through 12 educators.

So I don't have that kind of good answers.

There's gonna be a bit of a dodge, but I do think, you know, you want honesty.

And the most important thing is to honestly engage our history.

Like if we don't observe that history clearly learn from it so that we can orient ourselves in the present in relationship to our past, I don't think we can, you know, make good decisions about how we're going to act on our common values for the future.

And that's why I think history is vitally important.

So the idea that we would just say, okay, if history is uncomfortable for people, if it unsettles the myths of our own virtue and goodness, you know, it's gonna make it that much harder for us to act in virtuous ways in the present and the future.

I'll leave it at that level of generality.

- Yeah my response to that is that I think Americans need to realize that, you know, the culture war is also a forever war, you know, it's on the main places these are being fought now is like school and the library it's in there and I said you know, if a librarian gets fired in an obscure county in Texas, you probably won't really not hear about it.

You know, and you know, the critical race theory, which far as I know, no high school has ever thought.

- The example they use is let's get Toni Morrison's books out of staff.

- Yeah.

But I think, I do think people may be uncertain after that question is a lot of it goes back to parents and students and so on that the culture war never ended and that they they have to be as vigilant as the people trying to take the books away.

- Yeah.

Oh, we are we better off that I didn't learn anything about slavery in school.

And I instead learn it from music.

I doubt it I mean, I think that that schools abdicating their responsibility to teach actual American history.

- Somebody said, if you're teaching people to take pride in things that weren't a part of it you're gonna have to teach them that take shame and things that weren't a part of too.

- Fair enough, right.

Yeah I mean, as long as we're gonna talk about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, let's talk about the slaves too.

You know, I'm cool with continuing to talk about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

I just wanna acknowledge that there were slave holders.

- P. Djeli Clark the scifi fantasy author has this stunning short story about the previous previous lives of George Washington's false teeth.

I mean, it is an incredible story.

Another question is a lot of world history taught in America is larger tool than centered around European poet.

In for instance, successes, your book flips that this on its head, do you think there'll ever be a time when by BOC contributions to the creation of the world, as we see today will truly be incorporated?

- I can't predict the future, but Hey, we have to write it.

I mean, that's what we're doing here, right?

Where we're basically not re we're refusing the reduction of black history to the history of racism.

And in my case, I wanna write the history of the enslave, not just the history of slavery here again.

I mean, I think I learned from novelists, historical novelists and others, for whom like the predicament of the individual is where they start the character and the characters desires.

And if you start again with the initiative of these people, it's not, you're not just writing about their condition and reacting against you're writing about them.

And I think that's what we have to go with black history too.

And we'd build out from there, not just a contribution, but like the way that black people make worlds, that to me is fundamental, but you gotta, you just gotta put in the work.

- Do you see that as a moving away with history?

Because a lot of times, you know, if people could reduce history as a story of famous people.

- Yeah that sort of tracking, don't like a Montezuma.

How important is that as we continue to tell these stories?

- It's always been important to me in part, because look, if part of what we're trying to figure out, what history is a process that's unfolding, it's still unfolding that process wasn't driven only, or mostly by those important or famous people or by those states, right?

Those people in those states are reacting to forces.

We could say from below that are just as important as their initiatives.

And so I wanna understand kind of what those forces are coming from below.

And that means looking at the common people and their aspirations of what they're trying to do and how they're in some ways compelling and Edward Long to write the way that he writes.

- Yeah for me for fiction you know, I just follow up with Tony Morrison said, write the books, the books you want to read, you know, write the stories that you wanna be told.

A lot of times aren't told because you haven't written them yet.

- That's great yeah.

- It kind of have to do this.

Somebody says it's custom made me for me or both of us.

Can you talk about sister writers Anna Bard and Velma Pollard and your literary significance in Jamaica?

- I leave that to you (Marlon laughs) - Yeah I think that the significance of both of those writers is, and this is I can't say this, you know, I can't say this enough the way in which they paved the way for language subject matter as well, both ratable, you know, center issues on woman and the cycles of strength and violence and so on that they have to live through and so on but even more than that, they both also liberate language, something that Reggae musicians also did.

The idea that the voice coming onto your own tongue can speak serious things and talk about serious and complicated and things that were, you know, deeply ambivalent how much did the sort of the fiction and the full folklore and the songs, and just all these auto sources help you in writing a story, something about Jamaica?

- Well it shapes my intuition, right?

And compel certain kinds of questions that may not otherwise be asked.

And I think I was going to go back to, you know, what fiction does for me as well, which is when I read, you know, your work, it raises questions for me that then I can go back to the sources with, and it helps me again with the framing to see things that I might've looked past before.

Right and so in that way, it kind of works of imagination kind of really helped me to see things that are there and then I can, you know, I can document, right.

The answers to questions that are raised by my fiction writers, that are raised by musicians that are raised by folk artists and things like that.

So one sees that, you know, the shaping of what we think is important and the kinds of the kinds of inquiries we make, the kinds of questions we ask the way we might wanna talk about something that happens in this other realm.

It's not just about, you know, what I see from the sources.

Like I said, the sources don't tell me transparently what was happening.

I got to post questions of the sources, those questions come from my life, my experience, the other kinds of cultural media that I ingest.

And that way, there's always this kind of feedback loop between, you know, the imaginative culture of literature and the more documentary writing of history.

- Was that an evolution for you as a historian?

- I think so, but as I said, when I came to this history through another media, I came to history through music, and, you know, again, one of the other kind of major influences on me in terms of the history of slavery was the television show roots.

So already I was bringing questions that I brought from popular culture and media to the analysis of history.

And as it turns out, as I said, you see different things in the sources when you ask different questions.

- We have requested what are the histories that need to be written, the ones you want to read?

- Ooh so I'll tell you, my younger daughter, who's 14 now.

She said, "Why don't you write a happy story next?"

(both laugh) And I don't know that I could do that.

I've got it in me, but I do really appreciate stories of unlikely fellowship and solidarity people coming together, who wouldn't necessarily be thought to come together, people working together for common goals and in really difficult and extreme circumstances.

Those kind of stories really appeal to me.

Those are my favorite parts of movies, right?

When we should be enemies, wind up becoming friends for some reason.

And I'm now working on a book on the African diaspora, through the era of slavery, all about how people come together to create new expressive forms in dance and music and in literature and art.

And through that, they make common cause struggled to maintain their dignity, even in slave societies and create actually peoplehood out of that.

So those stories of fellowship and solidarity, I think those are the stories that I want to read that I'm hoping to write next.

- Ah, it's really the way he said that I did think about, you know, growing up that beer was a certain kind of dignity that we used to get through knowing these folk songs.

- Right.

- And, sometimes not knowing how far back they went, but you know, we're learning something special here because my grandmother probably used to sing it.

- Yeah yeah.

I mean, what, so when Marlon sings, you know, I remember we used to sit in a government yard in Trenchtown 'cause they have been the hypocrites one could think of a government yard in Trenchtown and nearly described the slum, right?

Or you can think about the fellowship, that's invoked there, the vision, the critical vision by sitting in that government yard and looking out on the world and having a critique that's you know, that's powerful and it's beautiful, even though one could see it as like, oh, wow look at the desperation of these people, look at their conditions, look at the misery they look in and Marlon was telling us now look at our critical perspective on the world.

- Yeah and also though we part that is we're talking about fellowship, and so on but it's, again, it's doing two things, which, you know, it's empowering voice, but it's also empowering voice to talk about the world right in front of you.

- Yeah, right.

- Which is something I know as a writer, it was something, I, you know, the first stuff I used to write, I was still trying to read about England.

So I'm still trying to, you know, I have two kids Los and Harriet trying to buy a Paddington.

- Where there's that framing issue.

Right and so it's been a good writer.

You got to write about England, otherwise you're not writing.

- Right and so the whole thing about, you know, that the world outside your window is where writing about.

- Marlon James and Vincent Brown that was absolutely fantastic.

I thank you so much.

It was really just enlightening, but more than anything, just joyful, really just really enjoyable to listen to you, both reframe and reconsider the language we use the history that we know that the stories that we tell each other and that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Thank you.

It's been wonderful.

- Thank you, Dan and thanks so much, Marlon fantastic conversation.

I look forward to the next one.

- Yeah thanks for having me.

- Thanks so much for joining us today.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

This forum is now adjourned.

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