"So Many Incredible Gehennas": Musicality and (the Poetics of) 'Relation' in the Novels of Marlon James

As in John Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women, A Brief History of Seven Killings exudes a musicality in its structure and tonality that embraces an intermedial comprehension of the complexities of coloniality and the post-postcolonial in an articulation that is both linguistically and sonically legible. Taken together, these novels excavate the harmonies and discordancies of Jamaican subjectivities along the familiar lines of the slave narrative, Christian revival, and the detective genre, seeking out the awkward, or what Sheri Marie Harrison terms the 'difficult subjects' that elide the conventions and paradigmatic characterizations of the Caribbean literary landscape (Harrison, 2014). Their musicality, I argue, supports a socio-historical critique of the exclusionary legacies of revolt and emancipation that have shaped the Jamaican imaginary, questioning the liberatory function of music and ritual and their strained formal and ideological mapping onto individual consciousness