This is the opening paragraph of Marlon James' Book of Night Women, which tells the story of Lilith, a slave girl growing up on a Jamaican slave plantation in the late 18th or early 19th century.

"People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a b**** to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, or spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the black jack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red." (Chapter 1)

We're seeing Lilith's birth here. A slave master rapes her mother, and that's how Lilith is conceived. Her mother dies giving birth. Lilith is born into slavery. This is violent, brutal stuff. Why? Because slavery was violent, brutal stuff.

The violence of this birth scene, and of slavery in general, is in the language. Marlon James is doing some crazy things with English here. His sentences are ungrammatical. He is writing in a language that echoes not standard English, but Jamaican pidgin English.

Marlon James is appropriating English here. You know that nice Queen's English? "Good afternoon, Ma'am, may I trouble you for a cup of tea?" Well, it's like Marlon James is saying that that kind of English has no ability to express the violence of the slave experience. So he makes English violent. He makes it improper, ungrammatical, and crazy in order to express the violence and craziness of slavery. Just look at how much blood there is in that first paragraph.