A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school.

I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can’t even afford shame and I wait.

Madness is walking up a good street downtown and seeing a woman dress up in the latest fashion and wanting to go straight up to her and grab her bag, knowing that it’s not the bag or the money that we want so much, but the scream, when she see that you jump right into her pretty-up face and you could slap the happy right out of her mouth and punch the joy right out of her eye and kill her right there and rape her before or after you kill her because that is what rudeboys like we do to decent women like her.

I go back home and walk the street and notice something for the first time. Not a single old man in the ghetto.

He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness.

The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you.

You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch.

On January 12, the Wall Street Journal called Michael Manley’s PNP the most inept of all Western governments.

Liguanea Club at the very least had dark-skinned people and quite a few Arabs doing the let’s-pretend-we’re-white thing which just never gets old.

I have to go somewhere, somewhere people never talk about, somewhere like Hanover, who the r’asscloth know what going on in Hanover?

Hold on, him wasn’t me grandfather, no man in the ghetto have grandfather.

Is a passage beneath ghetto that rain water supposed to pass through to prevent flood, but since Babylon don’t send garbage truck to the ghetto, everybody throw garbage in the gully so when rain fall the same ghetto people get flood with water, rubbish and shit.

Copenhagen City and the Eight Lanes playing domino and hugging and kissing and lovey-doving like I didn’t kill your brother, father and grandfather three years ago.

Either way, in prison you always carrying something in your asshole, and all the battyholes behind bars add up to one trade route.

What kind of man pick Trench Town as him favourite spot? You lucky you white, eh? Make me ask you something, you think Trench Town is a favourite spot for anybody living in Trench Town? You think any of them sitting on a stoop saying, Now this is the life? Tourist funny, boy.