Marlon James / 'Writers of colour pander to the white woman'
Sole rebel? Jamaican novelist Marlon James, whose fictional retelling of the 1976 attempted murder of Bob Marley, A Brief History of Seven Killings, won this year’s Man Booker prize for fiction. Photograph: Felix Clay
Marlon James: 'Writers of colour pander to the white woman'
The 2015 Man Booker winner has blasted the publishing industry for pressuring authors to write ‘astringent prose set in suburbia’ for an ‘archetype of the white woman’
The 2015 Man Booker prize winner Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often “pander to white women” to sell books, and that he could have been published more often if he had written “middle-style prose and private ennui”.
At a sold-out Guardian event on Friday night, James said publishers too often sought fiction that “panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”
Women, particularly white women, make up the vast majority of regular fiction readers, purchasing two thirds of all books sold in the UK. Almost 50% of women classify themselves as avid readers, compared to 26% of men.
James said that because white women readers dominate the market, “the male editors will only accept one type of story. Everyone knows what a New Yorker story will look like. I could have been published 10 times over – I knew that there was a certain kind of prose I could have written; intense scenes that hinted, rather than explored.”
In a recent Facebook post, James wrote a response to a piece titled On Pandering by novelist Claire Vaye Watkins, in which she examined the pressure on female writers to suit male expectations of writing in order to get published.
Calling the essay “potentially game changing”, James wrote: “While she recognizes how much she was pandering to the white man, we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman … astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui, porn for certain publications.”
“If I pandered to a cultural tone set by white women, particularly older white female critics, I would have had 10 stories published by now,” he continued. “Though we’ll never admit it, every writer of colour knows that they stand a higher chance of getting published if they write this kind of story. We just do.”
Marlon James, speaking with the Guardian books editor, Claire Armitstead, on Friday night. Photograph: Anna Gordon for The Guardian
On Friday, James said he wasn’t talking about a particular woman, but “an archetype that exists in the fiction, in the criticism”. He said his comments had the support of other authors, including Roxane Gay and Marie Mutsuki Mockett. “I am not drawing wild conclusions, it is something I have noticed,” he said. “Sometimes we have to stop ourselves and say ‘This is the story I want to write and this is how I am going to tell it, publication be damned.’”
“Marie was rejected because [a publisher] said, ‘Can you make your half-Japanese protagonist more white?’ Even white female writers who write about, say, queer issues, don’t get published because they don’t fit into this suburban, astringent, very crafted kind of story.”
James said this bias towards the archetypal female reader was “probably” a factor in his famous 78 rejections for his first novel, John Crow’s Devil. He blamed the popularity of “cultural ventriloquism” in fiction, where white authors write in a “palatable” way about countries and cultures of which they have no experience.
“It is a literary gold mine, this idea of a white adventurer in a black hell,” James said. “That voice will never go away, because it makes a lot of money. I toyed with it for a while, because I am convinced that as dark a novel as I wrote, I think it would have done a lot better if it was done through that cultural ventriloquism. We don’t have a scene where a well-meaning and emotionally bloodied white dude decides to have a drink with the jokey black dude and they watch the sunset. I was not going to do that and I think that is why a lot of people passed on it.”
James’s Booker-winning epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings, spans four decades and the lives of more than 70 people people in the lead-up to and aftermath of the assassination attempt on reggae singer Bob Marley in 1976.
James, who was six years old when Marley was shot, said he felt he had disappointed a few media outlets for not having emerged from poverty, instead growing up in the comfort of middle-class Jamaica, with a mother who was a police detective. “The first time I heard a gunshot was a Martin McDonagh play,” he joked, likening the story of one of his character’s, Nina, to his own middle-class upbringing: “Reasonably stable, but not much opportunities; lots and lots of boredom. She typifies a Jamaica that never gets written. You want stuff about the Jamaican ghetto or crime, you can find stuff. You never hear about the middle class.”
At the event, James also shared that it took four years to write his Booker-winning novel, which he originally thought would be his shortest book. He also revealed that the first page he wrote was now on page 458, part of an abandoned novel about a Chicago gunman whose mission to kill a Colombian drug lord is interrupted by his boyfriend troubles.
In response to a member of the audience, James said he was still processing his Booker win. “It’s nice being on bestseller lists,” he said. “I think for at least the first five or six months you’re probably still processing it. It’s been really shocking, overwhelming – and also really cool.”
Since he won the prize, James’s book sales have soared – and found him an unlikely admirer in the Duchess of Cornwall. “[At the Booker prize ceremony] I saw she was reading my book so I asked her, ‘Have you been to Jamaica?’ and she said, ‘Oh please, I knew Bob Marley.’ She went up a few degrees in cool for me then.”
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