I have never read Marlon James, but this is such a lovely interview and it got me SUPER excited for these books to come out. It also made me excited to read A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was tragically not on my radar before this.
“I still wanted a world that, in some ways, doesn’t make any sense, or is just really not quite our plane of existence. Because in a lot of real African storytelling, there is no separation between reality and dream, or reality and fantasy, or the dead and the living. They don’t make those distinctions. It’s one of the reasons why, sometimes, Africans going through things like schizophrenia end up being curious, because their voices are all affirmative. Like, do you really want to cure somebody who has their own private cheerleading squad?“