The struggle to be gay in Jamaica, for example

ALISON DONNELL extols a virtuoso literary performance that primes the imagination for justice and transformation to come

Theatre Review / 18 September 2026 Man to Man: a magnificent revival of an East German classic 18 September 2026 PETER MASON applauds the revival, 39 years later with the same team and cast, of Manfred Karge’s version of Brecht’s 100-year-old play, Mann Ist Mann

New releases from Biita Houdei, The Mary Wallopers, and The Tubs

MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds a fearless attempt to bring to the stage the 1984 toxic gas disaster in Bhopal, India

ALEX HALL applauds the account of a dogged, traumatic and punishing campaign for justice that has lasted from 1998 to the present day

NICK WRIGHT laments the political bias of an epic attempt to tell the history of the liberation of France from the Nazis, that excludes both the decisive contribution of the Soviet Red Army, and of the French communist party itself

MARLON JAMES’s 2026 novel, The Disappearers, has already been hailed as the novel of the century by The New York Times, and it is certainly magnificent and explosive in equal measure. Its success lies in the way its artistic execution dovetails with its highly charged subject matter.

The Disappearers pulls the reader into a seemingly knowable time and place — the Jamaica of 1988 to 2005. Yet what James seeks to make known and felt is not to be found in any record or archive. Focusing on the experiences of men who love, desire and have sex with men in a virulently homophobic Jamaican society, this is a novel that explores a silenced history with astonishing depth and detail.

In my own work, I have published literary criticism that argues for the Caribbean as a constitutively queer, as well as a homophobic space, and I found The Disappearers to be a powerful literary reckoning with this hidden past. It strives to bear witness to the harm done to young and old men, with the damage inflicted on masculinity, with the volatile entanglements of vulnerability and exploitation, and with the ferocity and survival of queer intimacy. All of this in a city and a time where dancehall lyrics, Aids, and evangelical sermons created a crucible of loathing that legitimised violent denial.

The action, initially narrated through the diary entries of Eddy Porteous, begins as eight men gather to rehearse John Herbert’s provocative and unsettling 1967 US prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, about homosexuality and sexual power play. As Havelock Titus, the director, declares: “The love that dares not speak its name, shouts all sorts o’ ways in prison. Even in a Jamaican prison.”

To perform homosexuality is undoubtedly an endeavour fraught with risk. However, the rehearsal room is a rare and briefly held space to live it and “to be part of something that tells Jamaica to go f**k herself.”

When a homophobic mob storms a rehearsal intent on killing those gathered there, the assault is narrated episodically in the voices of the perpetrators. The prose thrums with the righteous hatred and exhilaration of abhorrence that accompanies their acts of violence. By the end of the evening, one man is murdered, one blinded, and all carry injuries that can never be healed. Shortly afterwards, two of the men, Matt Chin and Orrin Turner, disappear.

The narrative resumes six years later, and the search for the disappeared follows multiple pathways through many eyes, as the novel makes it clear that gay men in Jamaica disappear way before anyone notices they’ve gone.

The farce of queer denial is captured by one of the eight’s imagined intervention: “A Day Without the Gay, one morning where none of us show up for work… Can you imagine? Battyman and lesbian cleaning their house, cooking their food, teaching their kids, curing their sickness, and literally saving their lives every f**king day. You think they would see us then? … The only way for them to see us is for us to disappear.”

But who wants to be seen when it means being outcast by family, vanished by closeted lovers and clients? And besides, survival often depends on invisibility and passing, “given that a battyman has a sign on his back that says ‘Kill us any which way then move on’.”

This is not new territory for James. His eye for the snarled and performative character of Jamaican hypermasculinity and the co-existence of its homophobic and queer incarnations showed itself in his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. Here we see it through Weeper, the gang enforcer of West Kingston, who still writes letters to the man he loved in prison.

Yet what is a fleeting, if compelling, chronicle in Brief History becomes the substance of The Disappearers. This book unfolds the varied and intimate realities of gay men, their backstories, and afterlives. In their differences in class, ethnicity, social privilege, sexual preference, desire for attachment, emotional intelligence, eloquence, and identity constructions, the novel writes away the enforced flatness of slurs and stereotypes to humanise at scale. It is an everyday act of narrative restitution that has revolutionary significance given the continuing sexual politics of Jamaica.

Nevertheless, and equally significant, there is no comfortable place for the reader in this novel. It does not flinch in expressing the externally tormented, internally combusted lives of its protagonists. The restitution it offers is defiantly not the work of explanation or redemption. And it sets itself at maximum distance from the respectability prized by Jamaican middle-class heterosexuality — possibly epitomised by Jordan forcing his homophobic father, incapacitated by a stroke, to witness him having sex.

In terms of its aesthetics, James’s writerly watermarks are all on show. There are intensely held scenes, polyphony, intertextuality and a soundtrack — he is writing on the edge of extravaganza. But let’s be clear. This is not only a virtuoso literary performance — it is an enraged and personal act of restitution.

When Jordan Brown, a protagonist, praises the efforts of a journalist to record the brutal mob attack, he articulates the necessity of this novel: “Jamaica don’t get to beat us, kill us, then vanish us. And we don’t get to stop paying attention. This is important.” As James has been keen to acknowledge, this news story is one he could have featured in had he not fled to the church that closeted him, and then to the US, which gave him the distance from which to write with the excruciating proximity that defines his art here.

The Disappearers is a resolute, defiant and harrowing refusal to look away. It is, more arrestingly, a literary gesture of solidarity and kinship. In Jordan Brown’s words: “A touch that says ‘There you are, I know you, I see you.’” This is both an essential recognition and one that primes the imagination for justice and transformation to come.

Alison Donnell is professor of modern literatures in English, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from TheConversation.com under a Creative Commons licence.

Book Review / 25 August 2026 Medea in Mexico 25 August 2026 In a season of Greek mythology NIAMH THORNTON looks at an intriguing relocation of Medea to contemporary Mexico

Book Review / 13 August 2026 Being gay when it was illegal 13 August 2026 MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes an engaging and nourishing account of the queer subculture that flourished in London between WWII and partial decriminalisation

Literature / 21 July 2026 A classic of New York fiction 21 July 2026 DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy

Book Review / 10 July 2026 George Michael’s music, artistry and drama 10 July 2026 GLENN FOSBRAEY recommends a biography worth reading for both existing George Michael fans and those yet to be converted