Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)

by Marlon James

Bi oju ri enu a pamo. Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

winds went rough past me, like fat men in a hurry.

Mark this: The journey to his kingdom was much longer than the journey to his dead lands.

back then I still thought there was a self to lose, not knowing that one never owns the self.

The ground was right now not the ground, and the sky was not the sky, and lie was truth and truth was a shifting, slithering thing. Truth was making me sick.

What does the bearer do with the thing he can’t bear, throw it off? Let it crush him underneath?

Here is my belief. The first man was jealous of the first woman. Her lightning was too powerful, her screams and moans loud enough to wake up the dead. That man could never accept that the gods would gift the weaker woman with such riches, so before every girl becomes a woman, man sets up to steal it, cut it away, and throw it in the bush. But the gods put it there, hid it deep so that no man would have business going to find it. Man will pay for this.

Say this about a child. In you they will always find a use. Say this as well. They cannot imagine a world where you do not love them, for what else should one do but love them?

A night fat with heat.

Of all the terrible features of your form, shame is the worst.”

“Because, Tracker, all men under the sky, men who love to think they are different from each other, perhaps to make sense of when they war, are all the same. They think whatever troubles them here”—he pointed to his head—“they can fuck it out into me. This is foreign thinking, that I did not expect from a man from these lands. Maybe you wander too much. You’ll be praying to only one god next.”

Time is flat to all animals; they measure it in when to eat, when to sleep, when to breed, so missed time to him feels a board with a huge hole punched out.

Look at us, we speak of melancholy, and melancholy no matter the tongue is always the same word.

The Sangoma once told me that the dream jungle is where you find things that are hidden in the waking world. And that hidden thing might be a lust. The knowledge is in leaves, and dirt, and mist, and heat thick like a ghost, and it is a jungle because the jungle is the only place where anything can wait behind the cover of a large leaf. The jungle finds you, you cannot seek it, which is why everyone in the jungle seeks why they are there. But looking for meaning will drive you mad, the Sangoma also said.

Word is divine wish, they say. Word is invisible to all but the gods. So when woman or man write words, they dare to look at the divine. Oh, what power.”

What is love for child, if not mania? I look at the magic of my smallest boy and cry, and I look at the muscle and might of the oldest, and grin with a pride that we are warned should be only of the gods. And for them and the four in between, I have a love that scares me. I look at them and I know it, I know it, I know it. I would kill the one who comes to harm my sons. I would kill that one with no mercy and no thought. I would search for that one’s heart and rip the thing out and shove it in their mouth, even if that one is their own mother.

Truth is truth, and I do not own it. It should make no difference to me who hears it, since him hearing the truth does not change it.

“Never?” “A little, sometimes never.

“I miss you, sister,” he say. “I miss me too,” she say. Always too clever but not clever enough to know when to blow out that wick so she don’t shine too bright around a man, even if the man be her brother.

No, not belief, for she say, belief will get people around her killed. I say to her, No, my mistress, only belief in love do that. Accept it, return it, cherish it, but never believe love can do anything other than love.

After this man betrayed me to the pack of hyenas, I couldn’t find him. After that I went roaming, and roaming, full and brimming with hate but with nowhere to let all this malcontent out.

A time surely comes when grief is nothing but a sickness, and I had grown sick of sickness.

Wanting to kill, wanting to die, in your head they are the same colour, and the door to one leads to the other.

“If a wolf refuses to howl, people will give it another name.”

Maybe this was how all stories end, the ones with true women and men, true bodies falling into wounding and death, and with real blood spilled. And maybe this is why the great stories we told are so different. Because we tell stories to live, and that sort of story needs a purpose, so that sort of story must be a lie. Because at the end of a true story, there is nothing but waste.