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.
Symbols & Motifs
Witches and Witchcraft
Tracker’s obsession with witches crops up throughout the novel. Bibi says, “Not everything comes from the womb of witches, Tracker” (211), and Bunshi says, “Is every woman a witch to you, Wolf Eye? [...] All you ever did was watch woman suffer and blame her for it” (310). These are just a couple of examples of a prevalent motif. Witchcraft and witches are slurs used by Tracker before he confronts his misogyny.
Considering he is under the protection of a powerful magic user, the Sangoma, Tracker’s insults are hypocritical. A woman involved in selling a baby replies to his witch-related insults with: “What plenty you know about witch and witchmen. You must be the real witch” (539). She, along with other witches and non-witches, are morally repugnant. The “secret witches market” (152, 536) is where people barter babies for parts, but the body part merchant that appears there is a male white scientist. The Mawana witches that appear in Chapter 16 are more monstrous than human—even Tracker wouldn’t classify them with human women.
Sogolon, the Moon Witch, lies to and betrays the other members of the fellowship. The “divine sisterhood” (374) in Mantha where she meets Lissisolo is reminiscent of Avalon of Arthurian legend; Morgan le Fay interferes in royal dynastic politics through the duplicitous conception of Mordred, while Lissisolo sneaks a prince disguised as a eunuch into the sisterhood to conceive.
Weapons
Phallic objects proliferate in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. One example of this is Mossi’s foreign swords; when they meet, Tracker notes that Mossi’s “sword is not Kongori,” and Mossi explains it “belonged to a slaver from the land of the eastern light” (290). The eastern sword also comes from Arthuriana; for instance, in the Roman de Silence, the cross-dressed titular character wields a Moorish sword. Mossi’s sword is an example of the many puns used in the novel when Tracker thinks about how he “really wanted to see his sword” (292), and when the Queen of Dolingo examines his “sword [...] from a strange land” (414). Mossi’s sword is an object of desire as well as an object of violence. Tracker compares Mossi’s beautiful swordplay with “swinging light” (395), and even Sadogo notes Mossi is “master of some art” (399).
Other characters carry swords: A mercenary has a “shiny red sheath for a scimitar” (248), and their host in Kongor has a “thick straight blade right down to halfway, where it curved to a crescent like a bitten-out moon” (251) mounted on his wall. However, Tracker prefers axes. He steals and receives many sets of axes throughout the novel. For instance, buffalo helps him get “new axes” (272) by ramming a homophobe until he drops his, and Leopard gives Tracker axes—and gives Mossi swords—in Chapter 20. Sadogo has a special “iron glove” (516), which is the last thing Tracker sees at the moment of Sadogo’s death; the glove becomes a metonym for the not-giant.
Amalgamation of Languages
James includes short proverbs in a fictional language, but one derived from African languages including Yoruba and Swahili, throughout Black Leopard, Red Wolf. There are spelling variations within his text, which is reflective of variations within written representations of African dialects. The mixtures of languages James uses is reflective of how the peculiar institution of slavery mixed folks from different African tribes together and caused linguistic (as well as mystical) mixing. Proverbs appear at the beginning of each section; some translated within the chapters. For example, the epigraph at the beginning of Part 6, Death Wolf, is: “Mun be kini wuyi a lo bwa” (532). Later in Chapter 23, the epigraph appears translated as, “I brought weeping to the house of death” (545).
There are also different languages within the text that are untranslatable, or only translatable by certain characters. Mossi can read “coastal glyphs” (326) in Basu’s papers that Tracker cannot. Basu himself wrote, “there are the words I will write in a message I will never send, or in a tongue they will never read” (319). Rather than a unifying mix of oral languages, written words cause division and get used for divisive proclamations. Tracker says, “Glyphs are supposed to be the language of the gods” (326); this connects to the theme of elevating written texts over oral texts because of their longevity. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, intertextuality appears with italicization of passages that are not in English, as well as passages found in written texts.
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By Marlon James
