Gay Jamaican writer wins Man Booker Prize

bingostring · Oct 13, 2015

Marlon James has won the Man Booker Prize

Man Booker Prize 2015: Marlon James wins for A Brief History of Seven Killings - BBC News

wisefolly · Oct 13, 2015

Here's an essay Marlon James wrote about having to leave his country in order to safely be himself.

From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself:
I knew I had to leave my home country — whether in a coffin or on a plane.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/from-jamaica-to-minnesota-to-myself.html

A longish quote:

At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know. The silence left a mark, threw my whole body into a slouch, with a concave chest, as if trying to absorb impact. I’d spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn’t fit in. I bought myself protection by cursing, locking my lisp behind gritted teeth, folding away my limp wrist and drawing 36-double-D girls for art class. I took a copy of Penthouse to school to score cool points, but the other boys called me “batty boy” anyway — every day, five days a week. To save my older, cooler brother, I pretended we weren’t related. At home, I lost myself in Dickens’s London, Huck Finn’s Mississippi River or Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. One day after school, instead of going home, I walked for miles, all the way down to Kingston Harbor. I stopped right at the edge of the dock, thinking next time I would just keep walking.
Click to expand...

Gay Jamaican writer wins Man Booker Prize

bingostring
Full Member

wisefolly Guest

Gay Jamaican writer wins Man Booker Prize

Thread Tools

bingostring Full Member

wisefolly Guest

bingostring
Full Member