Review: Marlon James’ the Book of Night Women
Was this book written for white people? Does it matter?
No. I don’t think it was written for white people. And, yes it matters.
This essay is for the August 2022 Readers and Writers Book Club. To join the book club all you have to do is read the book and either write an essay or respond to an essay. Then you are in. Remember to tag your essay #RaWBC. For September 2022 we are reading Grievers by adrienne maree brown. Publish September essays on or after September 22, 2022.
Thank you for reading, and thank you to Laura M. Quainoo for joining me in starting this book club.
Marlon James’ the Book of Night Women was a hard read for me. Why? Probably because it was full of truth I didn’t want to see. As a white man whose ancestors enslaved people and who continues to live in a nation where the legacy of slavery has not been reckoned with, Night Women disturbs me and disrupts my ignorance. The book challenges me and other white people to be more aware of and to challenge injustice in the present.
Setting his book in the first years of the 1800s, Marlon James describes the details of the brutality of slavery through the experiences of Lilith, a young enslaved woman in Jamaica. The narrator and all of the Black characters speak in a distinct language that transports the reader into their lives. This was an unfamiliar perspective for me, a white midwestern USer, but it is vital for me to read books like this. If we are to shift the conversation around race in this country we need to collectively step outside of our comfort zones and inhabit the perspectives of others, both past and present.
Who did Marlon James write this book for and why did he write it?
I guess we would have to ask James that question.
From my perspective, it seems like he wrote the book for himself and people who share his background. This book is a love letter and a testament to his ancestors. It says “I see you and appreciate you.” It says “I won’t let people forget you and I won’t sugarcoat your story.” It says “Yes. It was that bad. And yet our people fought back and survived.”
As a white man reading, I feel like an outsider. I think this is intentional. By centering the perspective of a young Black enslaved woman, he chooses to de-center whiteness and maleness.
James also asks the reader to consider the possibility that “all white people” might have been made crazy from participation in this harmful system, especially white men. It is disorienting to me to be lumped together with all white people, but I think this is intentional. I think is it possible that James wants for Black people to feel seen and for white people to feel disoriented and challenged.
As to why he wrote the book, I can only guess that James thinks this story has something to teach us about present-day modern life. White people like me tend to think of the horror of slavery as something that happened a long time ago and maybe wasn’t that bad. We are wrong about two things. First, we have no attention for how horrible slavery was. And second, we think that all of the injustice is safely in the past.
I think authors and creators walk a line when they portray racialized trauma. They risk creating “trauma porn” which potentially re-traumatizes Black people and titillates white people. A book like Night Women is not for everyone. You need to be ready for violence, but it strikes me that it makes a difference who wrote it. In the hands of James, every decision advances the narrative and the perspective. This is not Blaxploitation.
I am reminded of two recent works by Black creators: Steve McQueen and John Ridley’s Twelve Years a Slave and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country. By pulling our faces to look directly at both the horror and the humanity of their characters’ lives, Black creators keep fighting against our collective desire to look away from pain, dehumanization, and injustice. And by pointing at injustice in the past, these creators challenge us to recognize horror and injustice in the present. Perhaps this is why Jordan Peele has struck a resonant note in the horror genre with movies like Get Out.
We will not be able to imagine healing the harms of the past if we are not able to look at how bad it was. And if we can’t see the past and heal from the past, then we also can’t see the present in its full context. We need the truth about the past to make sense of the present. We can handle the truth, and James gives it to us.
This book is brutal
It is hard for me to comprehend the scale of the violence of slavery in the colonial Caribbean. Colonial powers brought millions more people to Caribbean islands than to North America, and Jamaica was the biggest of the British-controlled islands. Sugar was the most important crop of the colonial Caribbean, and the production of sugar involved back-breaking forced labor in unimaginable conditions. Sugar plantation life was so brutal that the death rate exceeded the birth rate throughout the Caribbean, and plantation owners, instead of improving conditions, would just buy and enslave more people. They treated enslaved people as disposable humans.
Marlon James does not pull any punches when describing the violence of life on a sugar plantation. It is as if he wants readers to feel the awful truths in our bones. It is a time and place that we would collectively sooner forget, but there is much that not forgetting that time and place can tell us about this time and place where we find ourselves today.
We are in the midst of an empathy crisis in the United States. When we can’t or won’t see and feel life from another person’s perspective, we end up making choices that hurt people. Because we live in an interconnected world, harm has a way of coming around full circle. The antidote is to deliberately put ourselves into situations where we take in uncomfortable truths from other points of view. It could prevent shit from coming back around and biting us in the butt.
James keeps coming back to the metaphor of a circle throughout the book. It is as if he wants the reader to recognize that generations of people lived and died thinking that the brutal life he describes was the only way to live. Despite living in a world of circles of repetitive trauma, James’ protagonist Lilith consistently defies expectations and makes different decisions. She is her own person and struggles in her own ways to not be pulled into the circle.
I think James is asking the readers to consider the circles that we travel in. He wants us to question those circles and step outside of them.
Who are the heroes?
It would be a mistake to only focus on the brutality of this book. It would be like saying that white people should watch Twelve Years a Slave in order to feel bad about what was done by white people to Black people. That analysis misses the strength of the Black characters. In Night Women, James gives us a glimpse into the power, courage, and strength of these women. Our protagonist, Lilith, finds herself brought by the women of the plantation into a region-wide plot to overthrow the white landowners. We witness the resistance, defiance, uniqueness, and humanity of each of the women.
We know that it was rebellions like this one that led the British government to abolish slavery in the islands in 1833. In a real way, Marlon James sets these women in roles similar to the Founding Fathers in the United States.
This is a story of resistance against tyranny.
I don’t know if it was James’ intention, but I saw many parallels between the rebellious plotting of the women on the Montpelier plantation and the spirit of liberty in the face of oppression embodied by the foundational stories I learned about the American Revolution. When the “redcoats” are summoned to impose martial law in the book, I instantly recognized them as enforcers of empire, just as they were at Lexington and Concord. The British are the bad guys in this story, too.
Not all white people?
James does not leave white readers without someone to identify with. He knows that violence just leads to more violence, and while he includes retributive violence, he does not turn the book into a simple revenge fantasy. He brings in a complex white character in the form of the overseer, an Irish man named Robert Quinn. Quinn and Lilith develop a relationship where each of them comes to see the humanity within the other. It is an impossible bridge, given the inhumanity of the situation they both live under, but it gives the reader a chance to see both Black and white characters outside of the roles cast for them by the system.
One of the central questions of the book is whether all white people in that time period in Jamaica were bad. The embodiment of the “not all white people” question comes in the form of Quinn. However, James shows the reader over and over how difficult it is to attempt to resist dehumanization within a system that continually casts people into race-based roles.
In a telling sequence, first, a white female character confesses to Lilith how her role as a woman in the strict patriarchy feels like slavery to her, and then Robert Quinn compares the way Irish people are treated by the English to slavery. This sequence reveals both how the oppressive system functions by hurting all people within it and also how blind women and Irish people might have been to the true brutality of slavery because they could not see beyond their own struggles.
In the book, white characters are often shown to be mentally and physically ill, and the narrator proposes that it is having to play the role of oppressor that drives white people crazy or makes them sick or addicted. It is an open question in the book whether this happens to all white people in the system.
By presenting such a clear system of oppression and how it affects the people put into the oppressor role, James asks us to consider our present-day systems of systemic oppression and wonder if it might make white people act outside of the rational.
As readers, we are asked to assess the impossible question of whether white children in that time and place deserved to be killed because they would have grown up to be cruel and harmful to Black people. There are some Black characters who believe that all white people deserve death, while others, including Lilith, struggle with this question. James does not let white people off the hook. Even his complex and sympathetic characters participate in the system.
Are people inherently violent?
There is a scene in the book where one of the Black characters is looking at the behavior of the white men in Jamaica. She speculates that the white man in England must be enslaved to English civilization and that in Jamaica he is free from the constraints. In her eyes, the first part of him to become free must be his penis because in Jamaica white men are constantly raping enslaved women.
It is a theme in the book that the colonies bring out an animal nature in the white men, causing them to engage in debauchery and violence that they would not have done in England. I think the book proposes the idea that this animal nature is just beneath the surface for all of us, waiting for the moment when we are in a position to express it.
But I also think that a central idea of the book is to reject that notion.
It is not clear to me that James believes that debauchery and violence is the inherent underlying state of humans and that true “freedom” would mean some sort of Hobbesian nightmare. I think James actually thinks that all humans are potentially good, but the situations they find themselves in can cause them harm, which can lead them to hurt people.
You made me do it!
In the book, there is a juxtaposition of the violent rage of the landowner, which he is unable to control, and the actions of Lilith, who also responds to violence with more violence. Both characters are portrayed as having a darkness that can overtake them. Both are people who James paints in a sympathetic light at other times. In both cases, the violence is a response to accumulated and acute hurt, both real and imagined.
While the landowner and Lilith’s rage might seem similar, James lets the reader know that they are very different in two respects. First, there is the obvious power imbalance, and second is in the ability to assign blame and punish.
These two differences are on display in one key scene, where during a big event on the plantation, Lilith, who is serving food, drops hot soup on a white guest. The landowner flies into a rage and beats her in front of his guests. After the landowner is pulled off of her, Quinn tells her to go hide because he knows that the landowner will blame her for his own inability to control his violence in front of the respectable guests. The landowner’s response will be to blame her: “you made me do it.” And then he will punish her for bringing out his awful side.
I think of the white backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement. They say George Floyd made officer Chauvin kneel on his neck. “Look what you made me do!” And then punish the protestors.
The spilled soup scene is key to understanding the way race worked then and still works. Both characters might have violent responses to situations, but only one of them gets to blame the violence on the other and then punish them for bringing it out of them.
If this book has anything to say to me about the present moment, it is that I am reminded of the violence done by police in the United States against Black people who are deemed criminals (or just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). It is a classic abuser scenario. You made me hurt you because of X Y Z! Now I am mad at you because I wouldn’t normally be this violent except for you. Now I will punish you for making me into the bad guy.
How can we get to a point where we see each other as individuals?
One of the demands of whiteness is to assimilate to the dominant culture. This demand is made of white people first and then demanded of others. James makes an effort to show white children and women being beaten and oppressed within the system. In order for people to take on an oppressor role within a system, they must first be oppressed. People must feel like they have no other choice but to take on their role.
But Night Women suggests time and time again that we do have another choice. Assimilation means that we must accept a monoclonal notion of who we can be, and James resists that idea at every turn. James presents key characters who fight assimilation and come to see each other as individuals, beyond race and gender.
Trauma sets us up to make patterned repetitive responses. We get locked into a certain way to respond and it becomes a reflex. In James’ world, Lilith consistently fights her patterned responses to make her own choices in the moment. We each, white and Black, get to fight the roles we are cast into by the various traumas we experience in our lives. We get to reach for the humanity in the other people around us. We get to fight the impossible fights against brutal systems, and we get to do it together.
Thank you for reading.
Part of a book club is that we respond to each other’s takes on the book. Please respond below in the comments. Am I full of shit? Tell me, I can take it. Did you like my essay? Which part?
I want to thank Laura M. Quainoo for suggesting this book for our first Readers and Writers Book Club book. Please find other takes on Night Women by following the tag #RaWBC.
It is not too late for you to read and respond to Night Women. Just write your essay and tag it #RaWBC and maybe tag Laura or myself.
For September, we are reading Grievers by adrienne maree brown. Get it at Black Garnet books through Bookshop. Please post your essay on or after September 22nd with the tag #RaWBC.
© Andrew Gaertner, 2022
