10
George Grella and Charles J. Rzepka
In a 2009 interview, Elmore Leonard spoke about Djibouti, the novel he was then working on. “I think, God, if I ever had a great idea, you know, for a plot, it's this one, Djibouti” (Rzepka 2009, para. 104). The novel in fact reflects Leonard's great idea, mingling his remarkable feel for characters and his knowledge of cinema with, indeed, a most challenging plot. Though it appears very late in his long and productive career, as his penultimate work in fact, the book demonstrates that one of the acknowledged masters of crime fiction, no longer young, was still operating at the height of his powers. Like several other late works, such as Get Shorty (1990) and Be Cool (2005), the book is a metafiction, in which the author makes the challenges facing creative artists and the hard choices posed by the creative process a central focus for reflecting on his own work as a writer.
Appropriately, given its place so late his career, Djibouti brings together a number of Elmore Leonard's typical stylistic features – vivid and idiosyncratic characters, violence and threats of violence, colloquial dialogue and free indirect discourse – and sets them to work in one of the author's most exotic locales, a place much more foreign to most of his readers than the Cuba of Cuba Libre, the Italy of Pronto, or even the Rwanda of Pagan Babies: a commercially and strategically important country on the strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean beyond. The book's core storyline concerns piracy – young men, many of them former fishermen, hijacking cargo ships passing through the strait and holding them for ransom – and ends up focusing on the threat of a terrorist attack on a tanker full of highly explosive liquefied natural gas, “LNG.” The resulting explosion would be “fifty‐five times more powerful than the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima” (Leonard 2010, p. 236), according to Billy Wynn, a private but very wealthy US citizen with an intelligence network to rival the CIA's. Wynn plans to foil the terrorists by blowing up the ship while it's at sea, before it can reach port.
Wrapped around this storyline is a framing narrative that features the young, prizewinning documentary filmmaker Dara Barr and her six‐foot‐six African American cameraman/grip/gofer Xavier LeBo, a hale and hearty septuagenarian. The two of them have traveled to Djibouti from New Orleans (Leonard's birthplace) to make a film about the pirates, but eventually find themselves tagging along on Billy Wynn's attempt to preempt the terrorist attack: he plans to ignite the LNG tanker with an elephant gun and armor‐piercing ammo. Leonard's plot turns on the interplay between what the pirates and terrorists do and Dara's and Xavier's attempts to make a film out of it. Eventually, the filmmaker and her assistant decide to call their movie Djibouti, letting us know in no uncertain terms that Leonard's book is meant to be a metafictional reflection on its own composition, in the mode of filmmaking.
As most of his fans recognize, and as George Grella has traced in detail (Grella 1998), Leonard's written work is saturated with references to cinema. Surely no one but Elmore Leonard would lock two of his characters, a recently escaped convict and a female US marshal, in a car trunk, literally cheek by jowl, and then set them on a discussion of movies. Out of Sight (1995), the novel in which this comical encounter occurs, prolongs that discussion in meetings between the two, one fleeing the law, the other pursuing him. Their relationship evolves in part out of their mutual interest in certain films and certain actors, and like a number of Leonard's people, they identify with particular cinematic scenes. They both like Three Days of the Condor, for example, noting that it resembles the situation they are in: a man on the run and a reluctant companion.
Set in Hollywood, Get Shorty (1990) exploits its characters' connections to the film industry: just about every one of them, good guys or bad guys or something in between, for one reason or another dreams of making a movie. The protagonist, “shylock” Chili Palmer, who travels to Hollywood to collect a debt from a producer of grade B horror flicks named Harry Zimm, encounters a scream queen, a major male star, and a couple of crooked would‐be investors, all of them working at cross purposes on their plans for a movie. In La Brava (1983) the novel perhaps closest in technique to Djibouti, Joe La Brava, the retired Secret Service agent turned photographer, finds himself becoming a real‐life character in just the sort of film he was addicted to as an adolescent, while being manipulated by Jean Shaw, the actress on whom he had a crush. The book's plot, a kind of film noir of its own, copies the movies that La Brava, and his creator, enjoyed in their youth, enabling La Brava to figure out the course of events that will result in theft, betrayal, and murder. He even concludes the action by self‐consciously copying the reactions of actors in those same films. As Chip Rhodes points out, La Brava looks so intently into the fun‐house mirror of life and its reflection in popular culture as to be “clearly antirealist”: “What is ‘real’ doesn't precede representation; it is a product of … the culture industry” (Rhodes 2008, p. 147).
Leonard embarks on a much more complicated examination of the ambiguities of reality and representation in Djibouti, a novel so tightly constructed around film that it virtually becomes its own movie.
It begins with Dara arriving in Djibouti, where she intends to film the pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden. Xavier, who has booked a hotel suite and a boat with supplies, is waiting for her at the airport. The plot proceeds in the familiar Leonard fashion, with the kind of architecture one often sees in a Robert Altman movie – characters cross paths, overlap, collide, meet each other through coincidence, accident, or design, until a complicated series of events involves them all. By chance Dara meets the half‐British half‐Saudi Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, better known as “Harry,” on her flight from London to Djibouti; he happens to work for an organization called the International Maritime Organization, “investigating … piracy in the Gulf of Aden” (Leonard 2010, p. 3), the very subject of Dara's planned documentary. The two, of course, hit it off immediately. In reality, Harry is a gunrunner for the pirates and, like others whom Dara and Xavier encounter in their plan to make their film, he grows from an accidental acquaintance to a major player in the novel's plot.
Initially, Xavier serves as a kind of cicerone, describing Djibouti to Dara, renting the Buster – the boat they will need while shooting footage of the pirates at sea – and introducing her to other important people through his casual, wised‐up patois. He also functions as the main person to tie all the threads and all the other characters together. He tells Dara about Billy Wynn, the laid‐back Texas oil millionaire with a more than casual interest in terrorists and large‐caliber weapons, who is sailing around the world with his latest girlfriend, Helene, a runway model he met in Paris. When Dara, Xavier, Billy, and Helene visit a nightclub, Xavier induces a genuine pirate, Idris Mohammed, to join them, so that Dara can pursue research into her subject. This meeting eventually sets the second, intersecting terrorist plot in motion, when Idris and his friend, Harry, invite the captain of the LNG tanker and several members of his crew, including two Al‐Qaeda terrorists, to a party at Idris's house in the town of Eyl. There, Idris and Harry kidnap the two terrorists with the idea of turning them in to the US Embassy for a reward. Despite their disparate aims and motivations, all these characters serve important functions, both thematically and in advancing the plot. In addition, they nearly all show up to assist in one way or another with the climax and denouement of the novel.
Leonard frequently earns the praise of critics for his stripped down, colloquial idiom and his consciously stated antiliterary philosophy, which abjures anything in the least decorative, fancy, or ostensibly avant garde. The first of these practices is continued in Djibouti without much alteration. The second, an outgrowth of Leonard's animus against the “sound” of writing – “If it sounds like writing, I re‐write it,” he once announced (Leonard 2001) – determines his decision to stick with the old fashioned device of the omniscient but unobtrusive narrator. The latter works well, however, with Leonard's metafictional jump cuts from time to time, place to place, and person to person, which impart a kind of kaleidoscopic urgency to the action.
The structure and pace of Djibouti constantly vary in a way more common in film than in fiction. In chapter 4, for example, the narration backtracks to Dara's decision, made in New Orleans several weeks before the novel's opening scene at the airport, to travel to Djibouti for her next film. Leonard lists her filmography and awards, and some subjects she contemplated and discarded – a documentary on nuns, one on prostitutes, one on Alcoholics Anonymous (particularly relevant considering the author's history with that organization). Having made films about the rapes and massacres in Bosnia and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and apparently feeling drawn to difficult and violent situations, Dara casts about for a new subject and happens upon several reports of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. The incidents capture her interest and lead ultimately to the making of the movie as well as the bifurcated narrative that starts at the very beginning of chapter 5, where Leonard compresses into nine words – “Dara was out on the Buster twenty‐seven days” (Leonard 2010, p. 35) – the many crucial events transpiring in the Gulf of Aden during the nearly four weeks Dara and Xavier shoot their raw footage of the pirates at work. Instead of reading about those events directly, we watch them unfold in the first edited rough cut that Dara puts together in a three‐day span after her return from sea, while waiting for Xavier to join her. As we watch, Dara and Xavier watch, too, and we get to overhear their comments and speculations on what happened in those 27 days and their plans for the film they want to make of it.
Interspersed among the events that we watch in our imaginations as we listen to the filmmakers talking about them are several scenes that Leonard narrates from a third‐person objective point of view because they took place off camera. The result is an extremely complex layering of narrative time frames that allows Leonard to comment and reflect on the art of his own fiction by way of Xavier's and Dara's discussions and decisions regarding their movie, which has evolved over the course of their sojourn at sea from a documentary about Djibouti pirates to a film about terrorists infiltrating an LNG tanker with the intention of blowing it up when it reaches its US destination.
As we might expect, much of the discussion here and later in Leonard's novel concerns the relationship between art and reality, fact and fiction, and ultimately artistic integrity: should Dara and Xavier complete their documentary about the pirates by including the terrorist plot against the LNG tanker, the Aphrodite, despite lacking footage of scenes crucial to that plot? Or should they turn the film into a hot Hollywood property about pirates and terrorism, a feature film with studio scenes and on‐location shots starring name actors, which will blend fact with fiction (and bend the former to fit the latter) in order to cash in on current public interest in both topics? About halfway through Djibouti, at the beginning of chapter 21, the story of the pirates and the LNG tanker that we've been watching over the shoulders, as it were, of Dara and Xavier, catches up to the narrative “now” of the viewing and commentary that's been framing it. Dara and Xavier emerge from their hotel room in response to a phone call from Idris and we wait, anxiously, for the outcome of Leonard's book, which will ultimately determine not only the outcome of Dara's movie, but also the kind of movie it will be, not to mention her fate and Xavier's.
Until then, in that span of 17 intervening chapters, the novel turns into what might be called a movie of itself in the making. But this transformation has already begun to take shape from the opening chapter, when Dara arrives in Djibouti and is driven by Xavier from the airport to her hotel. She starts shooting street scenes with a camcorder, capturing some local color, which begins the process of shooting the film that will literally frame, as a work‐in‐progress, the first half of the novel and, considered as raw material for completing that work‐in‐progress, will imaginatively shape the second. As she shoots while Xavier drives her through the city, Dara gives a kind of voiceover, explaining and interpreting the subjects she captures – the mosque, the Central Market, the meat in the butcher's stall crawling with flies, and the sellers of khat (the local drug of choice). Xavier also serves as a clever, colloquial substitute for the traditional third‐person narrator, introducing Dara and the reader not only to the location and atmosphere but also to characters like Billy and Helene, both of whom become significant players in the movie and in the book.
Of central importance to Leonard's metafictional reflections on his own art of storytelling is the question of storytelling's responsibility to reality and whether the very concept of “reality” makes any sense when it's framed by words or the lens of a camera. Is reality most accurately conveyed in direct proportion to the amount of raw footage a documentary filmmaker like Dara decides to include, a matter of simply recording what happens, from moment to moment? Dara's editing process during the three days before Xavier's arrival back in Djibouti refutes that idea, entailing extensive cuts and numerous chronological shifts in order to make an interesting narrative. We watch and listen to Dara as she assembles and edits the footage she has shot, reviewing and reacting to the events she's filmed in Leonard's typical modes of indirect and free indirect discourse – “Aren't you clever? Lose the poetic fucking around” – along with omniscient narration – “She cut much of the shipping footage,” “She kept most of the navy ships and helicopters,” “She worked at a dining table” (Leonard 2010, pp. 35–36). The prose flows rapidly through a series of independent clauses and fragments, capturing the jumpy movement of Dara's thoughts and of the film she watches: “She had Idris at the tiller of a Yamaha‐powered skiff trailing a high wake; Idris in sunglasses, a yellow scarf around his head; Idris and his Coast Guard boys going out to hijack a ship” (Leonard 2010, p. 35).
Dara's internal running commentary illuminates her methods of editing, altering, cutting, and interpreting her work as she sketches out in her mind just what she should include and how she should shape the work she envisions.
She liked the rhythm of the edit: pirate skiffs getting a beat going with quick cuts to faces she thought of as rimshots coming in a flow of action and gone.… There were clips that had too much lead she'd trim to get in and get out. An excess of scenery to cut.
(Leonard 2010, pp. 35–36)
Dara's editing preferences and diction – “get a beat going,” “rimshot” – mimic those of her creator, who was known to liken his own compositional methods to jazz improvisation (Grobel 2001, p. 281; Rzepka 2013, pp. 22–23). “An excess of scenery to cut” reminds us of Leonard's ninth “rule of writing”: “Don't go into great detail describing places and things” (Leonard 2001).
When Xavier joins Dara in her hotel suite and contributes his own commentary, other moments and other characters turn up on the screen, some entering the plot for the first time in what deserves to be called the first draft of the novel but is, in the novel itself, the rough cut of the film. At this point, the book's narrative largely turns from omniscient description and free indirect discourse to the easy dialogue that Xavier and Dara enjoy as professionals and friends. He and Dara take on the authorial voice and assume the author's role, telling in their own style the story they have shot and in part witnessed, with a privilege not usually granted to the characters in a novel. They prepare us, through their speculations, for some of the action that will later occur in what might be called the novel's time rather than the time they are watching on screen, which is the temporality that Dara has created while editing her film over the previous three days. They even introduce people the reader has not seen, like Jama Raisuli (James Russell), a major character with his own story, and wonder about the fates and present whereabouts of others who have already entered the plot, like Idris Mohammed, the pirate they met at the nightclub. They consider who will “star,” who will turn out to be the hero of the work. Some of their suggestions and predictions are realized in the later chapters of Leonard's book, taking on a fictional life beyond the discussions that originate them. Others disappear. Once again, in making the movie, the characters write the novel, at least until chapter 21. From that point on, however, Leonard's book begins to “write” their movie, because up to its very last chapter Dara cannot decide what kind of movie she wants to make, and that decision depends, in turn, on how the terrorist plot in the book plays out in a series of events beyond her control.
The question of what kind of movie Dara will eventually make surfaces as early as chapter 16, after she has learned that the Aphrodite is a terrorist target and that Idris and Harry have captured the two terrorists on board so as to collect the bounty the U.S. has placed on their heads. She and Xavier are still hard at work, late on the day they started, viewing and trying to figure out the final edit of the film. “I've got two hours of Somali pirates in the can,” she tells Xavier, “and it's no longer about them.” “The picture takes a turn here to bigger stuff,” he replies, referring to the plot to blow up the Aphrodite. But Dara recognizes the problem: “We don't have a transition … We don't see Harry and Idris forcing the two al Qaedas into the SUVs.” Xavier's solution is to finesse the missing footage with one of Idris's men telling the camera what happened and then crosscutting to “some black Toyotas ready to go.” “I'm not going to fake shots,” says Dara. (Leonard 2010, p. 112). As an award‐winning documentarian, Dara is committed to the truth, and that means, in her mind, using only real‐life footage, however cut, pasted, and vocally massaged it has to be for story purposes.
But Xavier is already thinking of a big‐budget feature.
“It's turnin into a Hollywood movie,” Xavier said, and saw Dara, tired of it, shaking her head. “Or the treatment of a picture,” Xavier said, “you could sell to a studio for a pile of money, since you don't want to shoot it with movie stars. …”
“Hollywood's way ahead of us,” Dara said. “Pirate movies are already in preproduction, Samuel Jackson doing one.”
(Leonard 2010, p. 113)
Dara begins to give way, however, as the terrorist plot takes an unexpected and dangerous new turn. Jama Raisuli, a psychopath and for that reason the more dangerous of the two terrorists, escapes from Harry and Idris's custody, murdering four guards and his fellow Islamist fanatic, Qasim, in doing so. Jama is now on the loose. The terrorist plot is alive and well, and getting more exciting. Dara here makes a deliberate and morally dubious decision not to tell the police that she knows the identity of the murderer. “You messin with police business now.” Xavier tells her. “Maybe somebody else shot them,” she replies, disingenuously.
“If I know,” Xavier said, “you know. … You want to see if you can turn [Jama] up. Hopin it keeps goin. It does, you got material for a feature. I told you that before.”
“I see myself sitting in a studio exec's office,” Dara said. “He's got my screenplay in front of him. Or it might be a treatment.”
(Leonard 2010, p. 169)
It's at this point that Dara gives her imaginary screenplay the title of Leonard's book: Djibouti. “They'll want to change it to something else,” she adds, “tell you foreign words don't sell as features.” “Like Casablanca,” Xavier replies sarcastically. But although she's now willing to consider the idea of going Hollywood, Dara is still hesitant. She imagines the studio exec asking her, “But where are the backstories to show motivations?” “He'll say something like ‘It lacks verisimilitude’” (Leonard 2010, p. 169). Dara decides she has to get in touch with Jama and learn his “backstory” if she's going to commit herself to the feature film option. It's a very long shot, she realizes, since “[n]ow he's free he's gonna hide out or change his looks” (p. 171). “All we need to know,” Xavier replies, “is what happens next” (p. 171). Dara does catch up with Jama and learns a great deal of his personal history, including a piece of information that puts her life in jeopardy, but she remains uncommitted to the Hollywood option up to the very end of the book, when Jama catches up with her. Even though her final choice is strongly hinted at, however, we never learn definitively what she decides to do with her film.
Dara's willingness to toy with the Hollywood option is puzzling because it would appear to compromise her integrity as a documentary filmmaker. Not only would she have to abandon her leading principle of fidelity to fact (manipulated as it may be by editing and voiceovers), but she would also have to turn her back on the people in the film she regards as the real victims of the ship hijackings: the pirates. Dara's reputation has been built on her ability to shine a spotlight on the ugly moral truths of major catastrophes and quotidian events. Woman of Bosnia won an award at Cannes for telling the story of the rape victims of the Bosnian War; Whites Only, on the boy‐next‐door racism of American neo‐Nazis and Klansmen, won Best Documentary at Sundance; and Katrina, a close‐up, eyewitness account of the hurricane's devastation of her hometown, won Dara an Oscar. “Dara's camera stayed on people who couldn't leave, homeless now, waiting for help that never came” (Leonard 2010, p. 27).
Going Hollywood would mean rejecting what gets Dara's juices going as a documentary filmmaker and what has thus far won her awards and acclaim: speaking up for the oppressed. Dara sees the pirates this way, and their war against international shipping as a defensive reaction justified by the threat that the First World's international fishing fleets pose to their livelihoods as fishermen. “They've made thirty million hijacking ships,” she tells Xavier, “but lost out on a three‐hundred‐million‐dollar market when they had to stop fishing. Toxic waste dumped in their seas, while foreign fishing companies have come from as far away as Japan” (Leonard 2010, p. 47). To Dara, the pirates are “Somali rights activists” (p. 45), “freedom fighters” (p. 46). She's indignant that seven who were captured by the US Navy are being held in the cargo hold of the Lewis and Clark, a navy supply ship, in the same place “where we used to chain slaves” (p. 46).
Xavier, Leonard's voice of reason, pushes back: “You makin the Lewis and Clark a slave ship?” “You know what I mean,” Dara replies. “In the hold, guarded by marines.” “I know how you makin it sound,” says Xavier (Leonard 2010, p. 46). He sees that Dara wants to portray the US Navy as “the bad guy” (p. 45) and the pirates as “good guys” (p.47).
“Girl, they don't care about fishin. They stumble onto piracy,” Xavier said, “and can't believe it. They havin fun and gettin rich. They flyin out to take a ship, one of 'em stands up to piss over the side, bottle of Heineken in his hand, drunk as he wants to be—it's part of bein a pirate … This what you want to film, what these guys are doin? They enjoyin every minute of it.”
(Leonard 2010, p. 47)
“I want to show why the Somalis became pirates,” Dara replies. “To get rich,” Xavier tells her. “Where the people this is about, the poor Somalis havin to hijack ships[?] The only one I've seen was drivin a tricked‐out Mercedes” (pp. 45–46).
Dara's sympathy for the pirates begins to change when she hears of the attempted hijacking of the American container ship, the Maersk Alabama, an event that actually happened in April 2009, during or just before the time Leonard was writing his book. The pirates failed to secure the ship, but four of them managed to take Captain Richard Phillips hostage in one of the ship's lifeboats. Adhering to its well‐publicized policy, the United States refused to pay ransom. After four days of failed negotiations and the surrender of one pirate, the remaining three were killed by Navy SEAL snipers and the captain was rescued. Discussing the incident with Xavier, Dara reflects on the fact that the Alabama was bringing 4000 tons of food to malnourished refugees in Somalia and 320 tons of vegetable oil for refugees in Rwanda. “You have reasons now,” Xavier says, “not to feel sorry for the pirates”:
“After the three in the lifeboat were killed,” Dara said, “bloggers all over the Internet were saying, ‘Don't fuck with Americans.’”
“How'd that leave you?”
“It made sense. We have a problem, we don't pay our way out, we go after it.”
(Leonard 2010, p. 74)
Dara's resurgent patriotism should come as no surprise to anyone who knows that Leonard served with the US Navy Seabees in the South Pacific during World War II. “I reacted like everybody else,” Dara adds (Leonard 2010, p. 74).
In the end, Dara's feelings about the pirates or her country are beside the point. Dara doesn't need a Hollywood blockbuster to achieve name recognition, and in light of Leonard's disappointing track record with the studios (with a few outstanding exceptions, none of them understood what made his writing so popular, or so funny), she's likely to get as much grief as gain out of any such arrangement. Moreover, she's already earning a comfortable living and has no family to support. In short, she's not greedy for fame or money. It's just that the documentary she set out to make is turning into something else under her hands, as often happened to Leonard in the course of writing a novel, and like any great artist, despite never having done it before, she's flexible enough, and talented enough, and self‐confident enough to give some thought to the direction it's apparently headed in – Xavier's direction.
Enter Jama Raisuli, aka “Jama al Amriki” to his Al‐Qaeda associates.
Born James Russell – which he insists on pronouncing “Russell” – Jama Raisuli is an African American small‐change drug dealer who converted to Islam while serving time in jail, mainly in order to defend himself from white inmates and their skinhead gangs. He has no real interest in Islam. When Tariq, his prison mentor, asks, “What is it you hope to become in your life?” Raisuli answers, “Famous. … I been looking at ways.” “Dedicate yourself to jihad?” “That's a way to go, yeah” (Leonard 2010, p. 129). Jama's lack of commitment to his adopted religion, as well as his susceptibility to American mass culture, is indicated by his choice of an “Arab” name upon his prison conversion: “Raisuli” is the name Sean Connery adopted for his role as a desert chieftain in The Wind and the Lion. What Jama does have going for him are a photographic memory and a talent for mimicry. Both allow him to become fluent in Arabic, without a trace of an accent, in only three months. He also takes great pleasure in killing, which impresses his Al‐Qaeda handlers, although their calculations boomerang when he shoots and kills his fellow terrorist, Qasim, without remorse or even a second thought, and for no other reason than that Qasim knows his name is James Russell. He's especially interested in killing people who know his real name.
Leonard's fame was built on two broad supports: his ear for colloquial speech, which Jama shares, and his uniquely compelling characters. One reason they had to be compelling was that Leonard entrusted them to “move the story,” as he put it, while “I keep my nose out of it”:
I begin with characters …. Add a few more characters … and see what happens. I don't know myself what's going to happen until I'm well into the story and I see how the characters interact.
(Lyczak 1983, p. 236)
Often, a relatively minor character to begin with would “on his own, elbow[ ] his way into the plot” (Skinner 1987, p. 42) and achieve something like independent agency. This was the point at which, typically, Leonard gave the character a name, an authorial act of christening that meant, “Remember this guy” (Rzepka 2009, para. 126). Once the takeover began, Leonard could sit back and watch to “see what happens.”
Which is what Xavier advises Dara to do as she ponders whether or not to leave Djibouti with a documentary or stay and gather material for a feature film: “All we need to know … is what happens next” (Leonard 2010, p. 171). Jama Raisuli/James Russell is the character who makes “what happens next” happen. “You want to find the boy playin he's more African than American, huh? Wouldn't mind runnin into him,” Xavier asks Dara. “I'll bet we could,” Dara replies (Leonard 2010, p. 170). This being an Elmore Leonard novel, that turns out to be a good bet.
It's a good bet because, however autonomous they may seem, Leonard's characters never lead him by the nose. What happens next often requires the author to intervene here and there to make parallel or diverging lines of the plot intersect, or to fiddle with his earlier narrative choices in order to make his characters' decisions consistent, plausible, and thematically or psychologically coherent. “That's how you make the plot work,” he once said.
You take a little from here or you take from back here and put it up in the front so that you've got a setup now. … I never worry about the book. When I'm writing the book, I know I'll think of an ending. I'll have a choice of endings the way I finally get into page 300, approaching the end, and then I may have to go back just a little bit to set something up and so on. But I know it's going to work. I'm confident, always, that my book's going to work.
(Rzepka 2009, para. 114)
Although he appears as early as chapter 13, when Harry identifies him as “Jama Raisuli,” Jama (as Leonard calls him for the rest of the book) isn't identified by his birth name until five chapters later. From its opening sentence, chapter 18 seems to announce that James Russell is going to “elbow his way” into the center of the plot and dominate the action to the very end, as he does: “Before he was Jama Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russell” (Leonard 2010, p. 128). It's not until this point, when Jama Raisuli gets his “real name,” that we are told, over the course of chapter 18, about his life as a criminal and a terrorist, from his first incarceration through his conversion to Islam to his recruitment by Al‐Qaeda and his first terrorist attack. It's as though Leonard were saying, “Remember this guy.”
Chapter 18 lays out the “backstory” that Dara needs to turn her documentary into a Hollywood blockbuster. After Jama's escape in chapter 22, Leonard's book focuses on his flight and the mayhem he causes on his way to detonating the Aphrodite with his cell phone. In the process, it turns into its own kind of Hollywood blockbuster, with something for everyone: a crazy renegade terrorist named after a character of color played by Sean Connery in a movie about a cross‐racial kidnapping that, like the Somali pirates' hijackings, provokes an international incident; an equally crazy vigilante patriot explicitly modeled on Sterling Hayden's portrayal of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove (of whom Helene, his fiancée, repeatedly says Billy Wynn reminds her); Helene herself, nicknamed “Muff,” a knockout fashion model as eye candy; the crazy vigilante patriot's hired hit man, an ex‐SEAL named Roland Burk Bethards modeled on every cool action‐hero ever filmed; the US Navy and US Embassy personnel in Djibouti collecting intel on Jama and Billy, if you want to attract the flag‐wavers; an LNG tanker ready to explode at the touch of a button; and, last but not least, the explosion itself. (Here take your pick of off‐the‐shelf disaster flicks.)
Most significantly for a book so highly invested in metafictional reflection, the framing narrative of Djibouti and the narrative it frames soon mesh into a single narrative stream after the “elbowing” to prominence of Jama Raisuli in chapter 18. In chapter 21, Dara and Xavier leave Dara's room to get their first, brief look at Jama and Qasim at Idris's home in the African quarter, where the two terrorists are under armed guard. In the next chapter, Jama escapes and becomes, from that point on, the master cylinder moving things forward and taking all the other characters with him. Tagging along are Elmore Leonard and his fictional alter‐ego, Dara Barr, as they wait to see “what happens next” on their way to figuring out how to end the story that each of them, one in writing and the other on screen, is working to complete. This zippering together of frame and framed into a single laminated narrative is the tour de force that places Djibouti in the same metafictional cohort – in kind, if not degree – as Robbe‐Grillet's The Erasers or Jorge Luis Borges' “Death and the Compass.”
It's easy, however, to lose sight of this accomplishment if we let ourselves be distracted by the glitter of Leonard's Tinseltown gewgaws. These are, in nearly every case, undercut or compromised by the author's knowing, and often telegraphed, ironies. Jama's naming himself after a Sean Connery character is perhaps the most blatant example, but there are others. The ex‐SEAL, who should by rights end up the hero of the film, is shot and killed by the terrorist using an improbable stunt borrowed from John Goodman's character, Walter Sobchak, in The Big Lebowski.1 We might also mention Leonard's occasionally violating, with tongue in cheek, his own “10 Rules of Writing,” such as number 6: “Never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose’” (Leonard 2001). “‘And all hell broke loose,’” Xavier said. “You ever use that expression?” (Leonard 2010, p. 97).
The most thematically important of these devices, conventions, references, and self‐references is the novel's climactic “Hollywood” disaster moment, when Billy Wynn takes aim at the LNG tanker at sea with his elephant gun, trying to preempt its coming closer to shore and being used to blow up the entire city of Djibouti. Dara is filming the action and “Muff,” after telling Dara that she's afraid Billy is too drunk to shoot straight, suggests they try a dry run first. Just as Billy lowers the gun to eject its armor‐piercing cartridge, Helene steps forward and grabs the gun, throwing Dara off balance. She stops filming just as Helene raises the gun and fires. In the next moment the tanker goes up in an enormous fireball, which Leonard describes with flagrant disregard for his 11th rule. This sounds “like writing”:
The fire rising in a fury to sweep over the tanks to the stack of decks in the stern, fire clinging to cover the bridge. Now gas was oozing out of the hull's broken plates to form vapor pools that ignited and burst into fireballs, exploding in the clouds hanging low over the Aphrodite, the ship consumed by its cargo, burning to death.
(Leonard 2010, p. 256)
Here is the over‐the‐top written equivalent of our blockbuster payoff, complete with an up‐to‐date feminist statement: the girls can do everything the boys can, and do it better.
But it turns out that Helene, fearing that they will all be arrested for murdering everyone on board the Aphrodite if they aren't incinerated in the ensuing explosion, deliberately tried to miss the ship in a bid to preempt Billy's preemption. She is astonished at the explosion that Billy congratulates her for igniting. “Aimin at the sky when she fired,” Xavier tells Dara, who saw the same thing. “They somebody else settin off explosions” (Leonard 2010, p. 257). He and Dara both know that “somebody else” was Jama. The entire crazy‐vigilante plotline is now not only moot for Leonard's purposes, but useless for Dara's as well: she missed filming both the explosion and Helen's crucial shot, which turned out not to be the crucial shot anyway, and no one would believe that the coincidental timing of the miss and the explosion could be so perfect. “If I use the scene in a feature, does it seem too much of a coincidence,” she says, “[Jama] blows it up as Muff fires?” “You want to change what happened?” Xavier asks. “No,” says Dara, “but I have to make it believable.” To which Xavier offers a reply for which Dara has no rejoinder: “We don't see him do it” (Leonard 2010, p. 257). Xavier's implied conclusion is unassailable: if this were a Hollywood movie, Helene's igniting the LNG tanker with an elephant gun would make perfect sense. Or, alternatively, we'd show a scene with Jama blowing up the ship. Either way, Xavier implies, we'd make it “believable.”
The humor in this scene is many layered, but only dedicated readers of Leonard's fiction might know where to look for it. The farcical undercutting of conventional, rugged‐individualistic heroism, the teasing of artistic integrity – despite her increasing inclination to make a feature film, Dara can't ignore her documentarian commitment to “what happened” – has been part and parcel of Leonard's work almost from the start. The very idea of setting off an LNG tanker explosion with an elephant gun, even filled with “Nitro Express” cartridges, is ludicrous, if undeniably fascinating as long as we don't stop to think about whether or not it's “believable.”
Just as ludicrous, though far more fatal in its real consequences, is Jama Raisuli's need to kill anyone who knows his real name. Ostensibly, he's just trying to prevent that information from reaching the US Embassy because then he will become not only a terrorist but also a traitor, which means he will be facing execution, not just Guantanamo. But Jama's obsession goes far beyond any practical necessity. He kills a prostitute of his acquaintance on the mere suspicion that she knows he's really James Russell, realizing only afterwards that he must have been wrong. In the final chapter of the book, Jama returns to New Orleans, his hometown as well as Dara's, Xavier's, and Elmore Leonard's (the book is thus something of a “homecoming” for all four), and threatens to kill both filmmakers because they know he's really James Russell. By this time, however, the cat is out of the bag. “Everybody knows his name,” Xavier says to Dara, referring to Jama in the third person. “He's got to think up a new reason to shoot people” (Leonard 2010, p. 278). But the occasion for doing so never arrives. Xavier gets the drop on Jama with the help of Dara, using the same distraction technique Jama used on Burk Bethards, and in the struggle for his gun, Jama is shot and dies.
The death of Jama Raisuli at the moment Xavier confirms that he and Dara know his real name is significant at a level beyond that of the diegetic narrative in which he appears. For the name “James Russell” is the name that ensures his autonomy in the mind of Elmore Leonard, who first breathed life into him as a free agent within that narrative. It's his birth name, but also the name by which he was “born” into Leonard's story as more than the terrorist extra he'd appeared to be up to that point. Until chapter 18, he is either nameless or goes by an alias, “Jama Raisuli.” Once he is given his “real name” in the first sentence of that chapter, however, Jama becomes free to make choices that will show his creator “what happens next” in the story Leonard is trying to complete. That degree of autonomy is granted to no other character in Djibouti. (Considered extra‐diegetically, of course, as a product of Leonard's unrestrained, open‐ended imagination, James Russell's autonomy, like that of the pointer on a Ouija board, is only apparent.) Jama's death under the name “James Russell” thus marks a passing of the baton from Leonard, who conceived the character's real name, to Leonard's fictive counterparts, who acknowledge possession of it just as the written narrative in which they appear, along with the diegetic reality it supports, comes to an end. James Russell will now, presumably, achieve a similar autonomy not as a person but as a character determining “what happens next” within the film narrative that Dara and Xavier were busy trying to complete when he so rudely interrupted them.
The final chapter of Djibouti is devoted to that effort at completion. It opens with Xavier and Dara back in Dara's apartment in the Crescent City and Dara taking a “webcam” call on her computer from “Muff” and Billy. “He wants me to write a feature motion picture and make up stuff we don't have,” she tells Xavier. “I still want to do the real thing, a documentary” (Leonard 2010, p. 271). After she signs off, a conversation ensues, with Dara clinging to the idea of doing a documentary and Xavier pushing the Hollywood route. “You know what holds me back, don't you?” Dara asks him. “Making up an ending,” a lack soon supplied by Jama's appearance at their door.
Between this moment and that, Dara finds herself being persuaded by Xavier's idea as it becomes elaborated into a story, not about pirates or terrorists, but about the courageous young filmmaker who wants to film them, her trusty, aging black sidekick, and an African American terrorist. However, before we can get too excited about still another round in the specular play between life and mimesis, we learn that the script Xavier has in mind bears only a superficial resemblance to what happened in Leonard's book: Jama falls in love with Dara and tells her “everything [she] wants to know about him and al Qaeda” (p. 275), the pirates drop by the wayside, and Jama invites Dara to be with him when he blows up the Aphrodite with a cell phone call. (Thus, viewers would get to see him detonate the explosion after all, as Dara wanted, but not in documentary mode.) In short, the feature film Xavier has in mind corresponds only superficially to the book we've just read. And just as Dara starts getting into it, imagining along with Xavier whom to cast for what role, Jama appears at the door.
Once the dust has settled and Jama is breathing his last, Dara asks Xavier, “Is this how it ends?” “What, your movie?” “Djibouti,” she replies, to which he adds the last line of the book: “We must be close to it.”
Xavier's concluding statement, it bears saying, doubles down on the metafictionally doubled plot of book and film that we've been enjoying since chapter 18. Dara's “this” refers to both her movie and Leonard's book. But Xavier's rejoinder, while bringing Leonard's book to a close, does not allow it to achieve closure regarding how the story of Dara and Xavier's film‐making adventure will end: will it lead to a “doc‐cu‐men‐tary,” as Xavier mockingly calls it (p. 275), recording what “really” happened in Leonard's novel, or to the feature film Xavier favors, twisting, and turning those “facts” to please the studios? Complicating matters considerably, of course, is the fictional status of Leonard's “factual” narrative, which combines real historical facts such as the attempted hijacking of the Maersk Alabama with an entirely fictional cast of characters. Like all good metafictions, then, Leonard's leaves us wandering in a hall of mirrors facing and reflecting each other to infinity. Its conclusion is inconclusive, its ending open‐ended. It stops without finishing. We are left knowing only this: the death of Jama marks the death of Leonard's Djibouti, but the birth of Dara Barr's.
References
1. Grella, G. (1998). Film in fiction: the real and the reel in Elmore Leonard. In: The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television (eds. J.H. Delameter and R. Prigozy), 35–44. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
2. Grobel, L. (2001). Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
3. Leonard, E. (2001). Easy on the adverbs, exclamation points and especially hooptedoodle. New York Times (16 July) http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts (accessed 26 June 2019).
4. Leonard, E. (2010). Djibouti. New York: Harper Collins.
5. Lyczak, J.M. (1983). An interview with Elmore Leonard. Armchair Detective 16 (3): 235–240.
6. Rhodes, C. (2008). Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
7. Rzepka, C. (2009). “The Elmore Leonard interviews, Part 2.” Crime Culture. https://www.crimeculture.com/?page_id=279 (accessed 26 June 2019).
8. Rzepka, C. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
9. Skinner, R. (1987). To write realistically: An interview with Elmore Leonard. Xavier Review 7 (2): 37–46.
Note
1 Confronted by “skinheads” in the parking lot of a bowling alley, Sobchak flings his bowling bag at the “cowards,” as he calls them, and charges. There is a gun inside his bag, but he never draws it.