Colum McCann Colum McCann is President and Co-Founder of Narrative 4, which he began to help shape in 2004. He is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. Born and  raised in Dublin, Ireland, Colum has been the recipient of many international honours. His most recent novel, Apeirogon, was released in February 2020 and was a New York Times bestseller, and winner of several international prizes. 

The Book of Night Women is in turns, a slave narrative, a story of rebellion, an examination of language, a microscope to the past, a telescope to the future, and a testament, as William Faulkner would have said, to the human heart in conflict with itself.   

It is a book of rip and rhythm. Of flesh and blood. Of love and longing. Of violence and tenderness.  Of the healing glance amid all the hatred.  

"This is why we dark," writes James, "cause in the night we disappear and become spirit."  

This is also why Marlon James writes -- to give voice to the ongoing human spirit that cannot, in the end, disappear. The Book of Night Women does what good books should do: it leaves us wishing that the day -- and the night -- can continue.  

Like the best, and most dangerous, of stories, it seems as if it was just waiting to be told … to all of us.  

Marlon James has been an important member of the Narrative 4 family for almost a decade now, supporting us and guiding us at many turns. It is a pleasure for us to showcase his work to high school teachers and students.   And let’s be fully honest at the same time: The Book of Night Women is a tough book. Some of it comes with a tender warning because a portion of the material does not shy away from the crude realities of life (violence, rape, abuse, language). It’s a teacher’s choice, but for me it’s a book that the best students will take to and remember for their whole lives – and it deals with one of the most important conversations in the world, the shame of slavery and the dignity of the individual in the face of a mercurial reality.  

A student wrote to me after reading this book and said: “Slavery is a tragedy so immense and so unfathomable that it’s difficult to determine the edges of its impact. I worried for Lilith’s survival, grimaced at the blows against her, and wondered how the system of slavery that shackled her remained in place. James imagines a slave’s life on a Jamaican plantation so we can consider all of the real slaves on the real plantations.”  

What The Book of Night Women does so powerfully is that it shakes us out of our ruts of ordinary perception. It is profoundly authentic and yet distinctly contemporary at the same time. It’s a brave text. It’s an enlightening text. It’s a feminist text. It’s a political text. It’s a human text. It uniquely verifies the experience of storytelling.  And in it, the ethical imagination becomes paramount.  

The Book of Night Women is, in short, a great book. It opens up the ribcage and twists our hearts backwards and forwards until it rests, once again, within us, changed.  

Students could explore the following questions:

• What does an un/equal love look like? 
• How does having more power over someone’s well-being than they have over their own limit our capacity to love or even know them? 
• Can we have sympathy for those who mistreat us while holding them accountable? 
• A sentence can tell us the facts of a story, but why do the details of fiction matter? 
• How can spirituality give us power in moments where our actions are limited?
• How do we respond to the violence we observe in art so that we are more than passive witnesses to someone else’s suffering (even if they are fictional someones)? 
• What stories are told by the choice of violence? 
• What happens to us when we decide “to go it alone”? 
• Lilith insists that her “scar only make the skin stronger” – how can we make this true? 
• Marlon James explains, “One of the reasons I think pretty much all but one of my novels have been in the first person is that I really do take inhabiting the space of the character seriously. And if you’re gonna inhabit the space of the character, then you as a writer really do become secondary. And these characters do become people, going in a direction that I wasn’t thinking of or even approve of.” What is the value of finding moments where we can “become secondary”?

Students could investigate the following understandings:

• The history of slavery shows us that while one group can have material dominance over another, to the point of taking life and breaking the spirit of individuals, they cannot break the spirit of a people. All forms of oppression are a lie – an attempt to deny a reality that asserts itself again and again. 
• Cruelty is an infection: it spreads from its first target and damages all who come in contact with it, including and especially those who deal in it. 
• In a hierarchy, many people will choose actions that reinforce the hierarchy and benefit them rather than challenge it. 
• Marlon James explains part of his intention in the book is to show that “prejudice comes in varying shades and intensities.”
• Art can force us to bear witness to realities we hide from. 

Chinua Achebe’s 1959 masterpiece Things Fall Apart provides readers with an insight into Igbo society just before the white missionaries’ invasion of their land. The invasion of the colonizing force threatens to change almost every aspect of Igbo society; from religion, traditional gender roles and relations, family structure to trade.

In some sense, The Book of Night Women is the opposite. Even though it happens far away from Africa, it’s a portrait of West African people post-European intervention. 

If you haven’t read Things Fall Apart (you should!), read the first two chapters here. What are some major differences between the protagonists’ lives before and after European contact—in freedom and in slavery? How was the idea of community altered? Do the Night Women better reflect the old sense of community than the slaves in Montpelier generally? Was there anything that European colonization and slavery did not destroy?