In 2015, the author Marlon James was in London, where he had just won Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Holed away in a hotel room after the ceremony before he flew home to Minneapolis, the characters for a TV show began to take shape.
“I’ve always looked at novel writing and storytelling as a kind of detective work,” he said in a recent video interview. “Characters show up in my head and I wonder why. They’re a mystery to be solved.”
In the resulting HBO limited series, “Get Millie Black,” there are several other mysteries to be solved. The five episodes tell the story of an obsessive detective, Millie (Tamara Lawrance), who returns to Jamaica from London to reconnect with her sister and join the local police force. While investigating the case of a missing teenage girl, she comes close to breaking point.
With all the requisite twists and turns of the detective genre, “Get Millie Black” is a confronting look at Jamaica’s criminal underworld, set against the misty backdrop of a colonial past that is never far away. “In this country, nothing haunts like history,” Millie says in Episode 1: “Pick something ugly, bigoted hateful, shameful, violent and you see a shadow reaching back 400 years.”
This long shadow has fallen across much of James’s writing, stalking him since he was growing up in Portmore, a town just outside Jamaica’s capital, Kingston.
While he has described his upbringing as both “boring” and “frustratingly middle class,” growing up with parents working in the police force meant James was exposed to the violence and danger that now shape his work.
His mother, Shirley Dillon-James, became a detective in the 1950s, when it was rare to see a woman in that role. She was a “brain box,” he said, who could anticipate a crime before it happened; he based the character of Millie on her.
“Like my mom, Millie finds the invisible,” James said: “As somebody in the diaspora, as a queer person, as a Black person in America or the U.K., our disappearances don’t count for much.”
In the United States, the families of missing people from marginalized backgrounds have complained that the police put their cases on the back burner. James said this was also true in Jamaica, where at least 1,000 people go missing each year.
In the show, Millie’s mother, Miriam, is violent and neglectful toward her children. Lawrance, the actress who plays Millie, said that an authoritarian style of parenting, including corporal punishment, was a legacy of slavery and colonialism in Jamaica.
As a child, Millie is separated from her sister and sent to England — leaving her with a “sort of survivor’s guilt,” Lawrance said. Millie’s sister, a trans woman who later becomes known as Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), is left to bear the brunt of their mother’s wrath and eventually runs away. Over the phone, Millie’s mother tells her that her sister has died. They are only reunited when Miriam herself dies, and Millie learns the truth: that Hibiscus is still alive.
Like many L.G.B.T. people in Jamaica, Hibiscus, a trans woman, lives a precarious life. She forges a home for herself as a “Gully Queen,” part of a real-life community of mainly gay and trans youth who live in a storm drain, known as the Gully, in Kingston. Both McQueen, who grew up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and her character are “survivors of transphobia and homophobia,” the actress said, adding that Hibiscus “blooms throughout the show.”
Lawrance, who came out as queer to her British-Jamaican family when she was 22, was “blown away” by the L.G.B.T. community she found while filming Jamaica. “Having Hibiscus, the trans community and her sisters around her as central to the story, I think, shows that queerness exists, transness exists in Jamaica,” she said.
Even though she recognized that there’s “so much violence, too much violence,” especially toward trans people, Lawrance said she was frustrated with the perception that Jamaica is “wholly homophobic,” especially given the island’s sodomy laws date back to British rule.
Lawrance and James both said that they hope “Get Millie Black” offers a more nuanced portrayal of Jamaica than is often seen onscreen. We see inside fancy “uptown” houses where white Jamaicans luxuriate, and glance into strip clubs and peaceful back alleyways populated by cute children.
The show features a predominantly Jamaican cast, and James said he also saw making it as part of a process of self-examination. He’s lived in the United States now for 17 years, but Jamaica still pulls him back, he said.
As much as “Get Millie Black” is about how the past haunts Jamaica, it is also about James’s experience of being a transplant, and the anxieties of returning to a place he once called home.
“My problem is that my eyes are in the back of my head,” he said. “Every time I open my eyes, I’m seeing behind me.”
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