55 pages • 1 hour read
Marlon JamesBlack Leopard, Red Wolf
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “Here is One Oriki”
Part 5, Chapter 22 Summary
Tracker addresses the Inquisitor, refusing to talk about his time in Mitu with Mossi after giving the boy back to Lissisolo. A griot enters the interrogation room and begins to sing about Tracker’s time being in love and helping raise children. Tracker still wants to get circumcised, so he visits the Gangatom chief and asks for help.
After Tracker takes part in the male coming-of-age ceremony (drinking cow’s blood and riding bulls), the cutter comes with the knife. However, Tracker refuses, recognizing his misogyny: “The sum of my days / is all about cutting the woman out [...] when it is I who leave my mother / and I who would now cut away my own self” (530).
The song continues with Mossi encouraging Tracker to visit his mother, who is housing the mingi, and he wails for her. When the griot mentions Leopard, Tracker stops the verse and agrees to tell the Inquisitor “everything” (532).
Part 5, Chapter 22 Analysis
Chapter 22 includes interplay between the framing narrative (the interrogation), the main narrative (Tracker’s testimony in this interrogation), and a sung narrative that italicized and lineated (pieces of Tracker’s story that he omitted). It is in this offset text that Tracker comes to accept women, his own feminine side, and his sexuality. The griot sings:
And one was the woman, and one was the man,
and both was the woman, and both was the man,
and neither was neither (526)
This describes Mossi and Tracker’s partnership—their sex life as well as their marital roles, where both can act as “wife” (525). Rejecting circumcision, which Tracker had wanted for most of the book, is key to releasing his hatred of women and himself.
James’s use of male-male love and gender fluidity sets this novel apart from contemporary mainstream fantasy as well as historical Arthurian romance. Within the roots of the fantasy genre, like Sidney’s renaissance story Arcadia, male-male relationships are a stabilizing feature for courtiers ruled by a kingless queen. However, James does not offer Lissisolo as a third part of the renaissance attraction triangle. Tracker learns to tolerate, but not mindlessly venerate, women by the end of the novel.
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By Marlon James
