Of Love and Lies: Bad Sex by Clancy Martin

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We all do it, and we do it all the time. I bet you’ve thought about it very recently, at least. Talking about it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but really it’s nothing worth being ashamed of… most of the time. You do it because it enhances the quality of your life, but if you’re reckless, if you’re immoderate, it’ll ruin you. And here’s the hard dark fact: It’s so prodigiously addictive that it underpins every relationship you have ever had, every single one, especially the romantic kind. It’s always there, in all your interactions with all other people, lurking in the penumbra of every word you speak, whether you like it or not — whether you know it or not.

Lying. This is Clancy Martin’s great subject, our harmless fibs and elaborate fabrications, and what might result from this sort of moral corrosion.

Martin — whose daytime gig is as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri — might be America’s preeminent surveyor of deception, charting all its ecstatic peaks and ethical cliffs. He’s a consistently limpid, agile writer whose philosophical essays throw light on the nature of dissimulation in all its forms, and whose memoirs reveal him to be an expert practitioner of lying himself. But Martin’s confessional nonfiction, while captivating in an insalubrious way, often reads as more self-aggrandizing than self-examining, and his essayistic nonfiction, while thoughtful, loses the vivacity that distinguishes the rest of Martin’s writing, his lurid recounting of flimflammery, dipsomania, and sexual adventures. It is in Martin’s best work — his novels — where he uses the freedom fiction gives to most complicatedly conjoin his metaphysics of lying with his physics of it. His soul-sucker of a debut, How to Sell, was a bleak and funny coming-of-age tale, a semiautobiographical jewelry industry exposé, and one of the sleaziest books you can come across that seriously engages with the work of Kant and Aristotle. It is perceptive, delectably profane, and damn difficult to put down. Bad Sex is his second novel. It’s even better than the first.

At a glance, Bad Sex’s structure looks somewhat simplistic: sixty-six staccato chapters, no more than a couple pages apiece. Martin’s language throughout is straightforward and unaffected, seemingly averse to lyricism, somewhere between In Our Time and Shoplifting from American Apparel. The back cover promises a “loosely autobiographical” novel — i.e., a novel. In fact, it’s very old school at its essence, a classic shopping-and-fucking novel (emphasis on the latter). Adultery tales of this sort have been around just about as long as the novel form itself.

Our narrator, Brett, is a wife nearing middle age, an absent stepmother, a recovering — and relapsing — alcoholic, a procrastinating writer, and, like all of us, a liar. Just as Martin’s terse writing seems like it might owe a debt to Hemingway, his main character’s name recalls another drunken, mannishly-named expatriate, the ravenous Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, now sans Papa’s icky chauvinism. The book is Brett’s account of a yearlong tryst in Central America with her husband’s banker. She narrates mostly in a linear fashion, but dotted throughout are brief moments of temporal liquidity that gesture toward a life larger than just a fling.

Excerpts of Bad Sex have been floating around for a while, here at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, over at Tao Lin’s Muumuu House, and in the pages of a slick edition of The Milan Review. It had been going by the title Travels in Central America, and I first suspected, cynically, that this new name was purely a Tyrant Books marketing hook. They’re known for pushing literature that’s a little darker, a little edgier (and sometimes, as in the case of Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life or Eugene Martin’s Firework, a lot better) than the mainstream. But in fact Bad Sex is a much superior title.

The sex depicted is not bad in the conventional sense of the term. It’s not low quality; rather, it is violent, exhibitionistic, surreptitious, and in one brief, icily frank instance, it is rape. At its best, the sex in Bad Sex is self-destructive. Much of the time it is plainly immoral. This is meaningful, as Martin has said before, in a 2009 interview on KCRW’s bookworm, that he believes the writer is “a moral figure in the public life.” Martin’s no busybody, not a finger-wagger, but he does engage meaningfully with moral questions. Why do we lie? How do we lie?

Martin, with Brett as his vehicle, uses Bad Sex to not merely to dish on a scandal (though there’s no shortage of dishing, the pleasures of which are not to be ignored), but also to reflect on the antinomic nature of romance:

But then I sensed the need, again, for pretense, if I wanted to be attractive to him, if I wanted to be loved in return.

Before Cancun I had told him that everything would be alright with me, again, if I could swim in the ocean with him and see the sun on his skin. When I was sober, this seemed both impossible and true.

I said, “Do you know the most beautiful thing about this flower?”

“You told me but say it again.”

“It has so many petals that it can’t open unless ants chew through the casing.”

The illusions we depended on about love and each other were necessary to keep us going.

Brett emphasizes that lies form the bedrock of relationships. Love is a good thing, but it is fundamentally tainted by deception and self-deception, which are love’s necessary (if not sufficient) conditions.

You cannot love unless you lie.

But it’s the truth — whatever that may be — that Brett longs for. “I drink,” Brett tells us, “I hurt myself and the people around me, and then I write,” and after that you start to see all those little chapters as the frayed bits of what’s left of her life, and you start to suspect that the writing is affectless because she is too emotionally sapped — or too honest, finally — to effect an affect. Her writing, in its unsparing honesty, is Brett’s method of accounting her moral debts.

Then again, Bad Sex is fiction, and it’s significant that we’re clued into the book’s “loosely autobiographical” nature. Autobiography doesn’t tell us the truth in the strictest sense. The author, no matter how fast he runs in the opposite direction of bias’ appearance, the subjectivity of his point-of-view is inescapable. But what autobiography lacks in truth-telling, it makes up for in honesty. Brett’s drunken recollections are honest in their haziness; her self-examination is honest in its self-doubt. “The truth is, I don’t know why I said it, Brett says. But Brett is, significantly, not a real person. She is a facade created by Clancy Martin. Her achievement in honesty is Martin’s achievement in dissemblance. Bad Sex is a book about deception, and, in its proudly “loose” relationship with reality, in how it conceals its philosophical concerns by prioritizing sordid gossip, in its very nature as a work of fiction, Bad Sex is an act of deception itself. Is it the same sort of deception that Martin/Brett talks about throughout the book, the kind that helps facilitate a human connection — this time between Martin and his readers? Or is it smokescreen to conceal the actual events of Martin’s life?

I’m not sure, to be honest. It might be both, but that might be a cheap answer on my part. What I do know is that Bad Sex gives us a familiar story told in commonplace language, presenting itself as nothing more than good, seedy escapism. Yet Martin manages to elegantly imbue his simple little book with complex insights and layers of meaning. That is the novel’s chief pleasure: knowing it should be so bad, but finding it so, so good.

Bad Sex

by Clancy Martin

Powells.com

Crossing The Border: An Interview With David Payne, Author Of Barefoot to Avalon

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David Payne is known for his five novels, Back to Wando Passo, Gravesend Light, Ruin Creek, Early from the Dance and Confessions of a Taoist On Wall Street. He knows his way around fiction. His first book, Confessions of a Taoist On Wall Street, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, whose previous winners include Robert Penn Warren, Phillip Roth and Robert Stone. Several of Payne’s novels deal with attempting to return home after a long absence and to reintegrate into the community.

In his latest book, a memoir, Barefoot to Avalon (Atlantic Monthly Press 2015), Payne makes the journey home to explore his place in his family and to make sense of a history that is rife with alcoholism, suicide and mental illness. He lays bare the secrets, rivalries, and negotiations that make up family life. The story is told through the prism of Payne’s relationship with his brother, George A., who suffered from manic depression.

Payne and I talked about his evolution from fiction writer to memoirist, the nature of intimacy, and what books should do for readers.

EBM: How did writing novels prepare you for taking on memoir in Barefoot to Avalon?

Over time, I’ve become a little more aware of where the metaphors come from in myself and a little better able to manipulate them toward conscious ends.

DP: My first novel, Confessions of a Taoist On Wall Street, was about a Taoist monk who grows up in a monastery in China practicing esoteric qigong and later comes to New York looking for his American father, a combat aviator who had been in China during WWII. That protagonist’s experiences were so remote from mine that I didn’t see the book as autobiographical in any meaningful way. Now? A character who searches through the world, crossing oceans and wildernesses in search of a father he never really finds, who consoles himself with esoteric practice — think writing — now seems deeply autobiographical, not literally, of course, but in a metaphoric sense. To be honest, I’m not sure fiction is ever fully fictional or that we can ever not write about ourselves, even if we want to. Even Luke Skywalker dueling Darth Vader on the Death Star a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, is and has to be a representation of the conflicts in George Lucas’s unconscious. I think that holds for everything we take as “make believe.” Over time, I’ve become a little more aware of where the metaphors come from in myself and a little better able to manipulate them toward conscious ends. Book by book, I’ve come closer to the border between fiction and non-fiction, and it seems inevitable that I’d eventually cross over.

EBM: You once said about writing fiction that the characters were like having a ventriloquist dummy on your lap and you spoke through them. What prompted you to finally move the dummy off your lap?

DP: The dummy is finally a way of maintaining plausible deniability, of the ventriloquist/comedian — me, that is — speaking the deepest, darkest, hardest truths he knows without being held fully accountable. ‘Hey, the dummy said it, not me.’ I’m not interested in that kind of distancing anymore. I’d rather say, ‘This is what I think, this is what I feel, this is what I believe. Here it is. What do you think?’

EBM: What elements do your fiction and memoir share? How do they differ in terms of their creation?

DP: Both are narrative acts. Both involve storytelling, characterization, description, setting. Novels tend to have plots; memoirs tend not to. Plots make things easier in a way. The gun that appears in Act I implies the firing of the gun in Act II. The engine that drives a memoir isn’t necessarily implied or obvious. Each is unique and must arise organically out of the material itself. That makes it harder and more interesting, or interesting in a different way.

EL: I’d like to discuss your apprenticeship as a writer. What aspect of it — education, teaching, reading, writing groups, mentors — was most instrumental in you finding your voice?

DP: My very first creative writing teacher in my very first creative writing course — this was Robert Kirkpatrick at UNC in 1973 — gave our class an assignment: Write a letter that says the thing you most need to say and could never say to the person you most need to say it to and could never say it to. To this day, it remains the most powerful creative writing exercise I’ve ever done and probably the most important pedagogical experience I had during my education. In Kirkpatrick’s class, we didn’t read the letters aloud. When I assign it to my students now, we do. I read them my letter first, send them off to write their own, and then invite those who wish to share to share. Most do. Invariably the tone of the room changes; it becomes like church. Often, there are tears. When people are honest and go deep, it’s inevitably the areas of hurt and fear and shame they’ve felt most isolated by that resonate most powerfully with others, who have similar stories of their own. It’s a way of getting to the material that I think Kafka means when he says, “we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.” In a way, Barefoot to Avalon is what my letter has turned into after forty years.

EBM: Can you tell me about your choice to tell your life story through the prism of your relationship with your brother George A.?

DP: It wasn’t really a choice. I was sitting in a Hampton Inn in Pawleys Island in 2006, having just finished Back to Wando Passo and not knowing what my next book would be, and a voice inside me said, “It’s time to write about George A.,” my brother. That instant I knew my next book had been assigned. All my books have come to me like lightning flashes in that way. One minute I’m wandering around at loose ends, the next the strike comes and I’m off on the next voyage — three years, five years, in the case of Barefoot to Avalon, eight. Though I didn’t consciously choose the subject matter, the story of my brother and his illness was a door that opened into deep places inside me and our whole family, offering a way into the big questions, Who Am I and Who Were We.

EBM: The book is very candid about your life experiences and includes stories about sexual relationships, abortion, suicide, alcoholism and mental illness. What did you do to stay honest and avoid self-censorship?

My own view is that our private lives, the life of the individual and the family, is still largely terra incognita.

DP: Of course, there’s fear and shame around these subjects and around family secrets in general, but there’s also a kind of guild pride among writers about being brave and candid in confronting them, and a sense of the importance of confronting them. Emerson said, ‘The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent,’ and I think writers — and many readers, too — admire writers who throw their bodies at the mark. I certainly admire them. My own view is that our private lives, the life of the individual and the family, is still largely terra incognita. Much of what matters most in human life occurs there and yet heavy taboos still exist around exposing it. Those taboos no doubt served a purpose once upon a time, but I think they’ve outlived it now, and it’s up to artists to speak up. Murray Bowen, who founded Family Therapy said: “As families move from the compartmentalized, less mature world of secrets and foibles which they assume they are keeping under cover, and into the world of permitting their private lives to be more open and a possible example for others to follow, they grow up a little each day.” I agree with that.

EBM: Your mother was reluctant at first for you to tell this story. What advice do you have for other memoirists about maintaining family relationships while offering an honest accounting of their experience?

The only thing that was under my control was to tell the truth as well as I could understand it and to try to hit myself harder than I hit anybody else.

DP: I think being intimate — whether with someone in your life or as a writer on the page — involves the risk of rejection and loss. When I set out to write this book, my mother said she believed it was exploitative, and for three years we remained at odds. After she read the first draft, she wrote me a beautiful letter that said, “On reflection, I came to understand that no matter what you wrote, you would be kind and fair and compassionate. And you also said ‘it is my life too,’ which made a strong point for your need and right to write what you remember as truth… All of my little secrets are not really that life shaking and on the final take, do not matter that much, so what I feared has simply gone away.” I’m extremely glad and grateful that she came around, but I would have written — was writing — the book anyway, and whether she came around or didn’t was never under my control. The only thing that was under my control was to tell the truth as well as I could understand it and to try to hit myself harder than I hit anybody else.

EBM: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book and how did you overcome it?

DP: There were many, but mission creep was one. The level of scrutiny I turned on myself and my brother I wanted to turn on all areas of my life, including my then marriage and my parenting, to present a kind ethnography of a Self, sort of like what Knausgaard is doing in MY STRUGGLE. In fact, I did that — that’s one reason the book took eight years to complete. At one point, the manuscript was 950 pages and around 350,000 words. My agent, Tina Bennett, and I discussed the possibility of publishing in installments that readers might read the way you watch, say, The Sopranos. Tina, however, always maintained that the brother material had greater depth and emotional density, and I trusted her and listened to her and eventually came to believe she was right. So I gave up the Knausgaard/Sopranos idea and aimed for something more like, say, The Godfather, as short and as perfectly distilled as I could make it.

EBM: You use the iceberg metaphor in the book in reference to emotional depth and darkness that lies below the surface in people and relationships. You also reference a race, both the literal race between you and your brother to the pier in Avalon and the figurative one to succeed. Can you tell me about how metaphor functions, not only in a literary way, but psychologically to help us make sense of the world?

The metaphor, in a sense, knew more about me and about my relationship with my brother than I knew about myself or us…

DP: Let me take your second example, the race. As I mentioned before, in 2006 I was at the Hampton Inn in Pawleys Island, SC, when I heard a voice whisper, “It’s time to write about George A.” I knew I had my general subject, but what about George A.? What, specifically? The first thing that came to mind was a memory from the summer of 1975. I’m 20 years old, a sophomore at UNC, George A.’s 17. We’re at our family place on the Outer Banks. George A.’s going back to boarding school and wants to try out for the varsity football team. To make the cut, he has to run a sub-6-minute mile. I’m a distance runner in those days, so George A. asks if he can train with me. Every day we do a four-mile run, two miles down to Avalon Pier in Kitty Hawk and two miles back. Most days, I pace him to the Pier and halfway home, and then I fly, leaving him to finish up alone. But one day, when I kick and start to pull away, he kicks, too. I cut a glance at him. He gives me a strained smile, drops his head and hauls. It’s on. I give it everything I have, and in the final twenty yards, he walks away. When I reach the finish, there he is, panting, hands on knees, trying not to show his glee. Thirty-one years later, when I decide I’m going to write a brother book, this is the first memory that surfaces, the first scene I write. (Now it’s in Chapter 4.) What I find interesting and relevant to your question is that it was at least a year and maybe two or three before I realized this was more than just a specific scene about a specific race we ran one summer; it was a metaphor for our whole lives as brothers, a lifelong race we ran that had love and camaraderie and esprit de corps and mutual assistance in it, together with ferocious competition and the will to win. I didn’t choose the metaphor or craft those meanings into it; it came to me from some place beyond my conscious awareness and intention with the meanings already baked in. The metaphor, in a sense, knew more about me and about my relationship with my brother than I knew about myself or us, and my job as a writer was to pay attention to it until it revealed its hidden truth. By paying attention, I came to a better understanding of my relationship with my brother, got a through-line for my book, and, eventually, a title.

EBM: What can you tell me about the research you did for this book? How did you handle challenges like recalling conversations?

DP: Apart from verifying dates and time lines and speaking to family members to compare their memories to mine, I did very little research. Conversations are as I remember them. I don’t pretend to verbatim recollection — frankly, I distrust anyone who does — and that’s why, in dialogue, I eschewed quotation marks in favor of dashes.

EBM: You grapple with issues of expectation and how we idealize family relationships and end the book with your decision to stay sober and thoughts on the necessity of each generation to bear witness to the realities of family life, however imperfect. A realist’s happy ending?

I don’t claim this book is noble — it may seem ignoble to some — but I do think it was a deed.

DP: When I began this book in 2006, I was an alcoholic whose drinking was off the rails; I was in an unhappy marriage; I was an indifferent father. By the time I ended it in 2014, I was eight years sober; I’d worked hard to save my marriage, failed and ended it; I’d found a new love and become a committed father. Not all of that came out of writing, certainly — much came out of therapy — but the writing and the therapy were two prongs of a sustained act of self-investigation and confrontation that I undertook, not because I was brave but because I was desperate to change and didn’t know how else to go about it. Thoreau said, “Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.” I don’t claim this book is noble — it may seem ignoble to some — but I do think it was a deed. I didn’t know if my deed would lead to change; there were times I feared it might produce insight without change. I also feared that what I wrote might be boring and irrelevant to others, like reading transcripts of another person’s therapy. But I remembered the letter I first wrote in Kirkpatrick’s class, the powerful effect it had on me, I remembered all the letters my students had written and bravely shared over the years, I recalled the sense of being ushered together in a kind of church, and I wrote in the hope that I might bring readers into that space with me.

9 Novels About Social Media Identities

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I wrote Meatspace, a book about the frailties of social media identities when they bleed into real life and the confusion that comes with over-familiarity online and how it breeds contempt for our offline relationships, because I became obsessed with who we really are if we’re spending our entire lives taking the best photos of ourselves, turning our stories into the most tweetable quips and sharing our best selves.

What if this isn’t how things actually are? What is that doing to our brain chemistry? Our relationships?

People asked me afterwards if I worried that a book about social media would date at all. I said that sure, the references might date, but the story—the one of identity, confusion and loneliness—is pretty timeless. People still study Jane Austen. And her books are filled with letters. Dracula is collated diaries, letters, journals, and articles. How outdated are all of these?

Here are ten novels that ooze social media. Because, even if you’re not a heavy Twitter user or Instagrammer, you can’t ignore their prominence in the way we live. And it’s not all bad.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

The Circle by Dave Eggers

On the one hand, this is a terrifying body snatchers-style techno horror about a cult masquerading as a bunch of do-gooders wanting to improve the world. On the other, it’s an allegory for how the very ethos of Silicon Valley, of the constant broadcast, of zero privacy = consummate accountability, may be founded on a field of shit.

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

Another terrifying look into the murky world of being someone else online. Kiss Me First is a well-paced thriller about identity and pretending to be other people.

Taipei by Tao Lin

Taipei by Tao Lin

Tao Lin is perhaps one of the authors best at integrating the act of clicking, swiping, zoning out, absorbing content, typing, reading with disdain, ennui, and the very turgid functional nature of the internet into his terse prose. Few writers are able to do this as seamlessly as him.

Eleven by David Llewellyn

A book that exists as a series of print-outs of emails — funny, and illuminating in that they become the collected narrative of a series of unreliable narrators, which makes you realise what often doesn’t get said in our electronic communications, and how tone and nuance, left at the door, can lead to utter chaos.

NW by Zadie Smith

NW by Zadie Smith

It’s specifically in the section about Keisha Brown that we get to see how easily social media, and the internet, can turn us into active participants. When everything is a click away, it becomes an anonymous thrill to pretend to be other people and live other lives entirely separate to your own.

No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe

The way seeded content arrives before us is all based on intricate algorithms, tracking what we do, say, see, what our friends do, say, see and trying to create a picture of who we are and what we’ll be easily susceptible to. No Harm manages to turn this algorithm culture on its head and show that while the numbers may not lie, they may not be able to compete against humanity.

Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

Even more meta than Meatspace, Joshua Cohen writes of Joshua Cohen who is sent to write about Joshua Cohen, the CEO of a Google-esque search engine called Tetration. What happens next is a meandering exploration of the internet and of immortality.

Friendship by Emily Gould

Friendship is a funny and painfully real dissection of friendship when it’s put to the test by the staples of city-living — rent, ambition, lack of ambition, boozing, and sex. All the good stuff. Gould is excellent at weaving into the text, without it being clunky, interactions between our two main heroes that happen over email, text, social media, and blogs, and it feels real. Now. How our friendships really unfold. Not with a heart-on-the-table pub chat at 1 a.m. But with a carelessly worded hastily sent electronic communication.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

Another Joshua, another bloke (why do we care about social media so much, man?), Ferris writes a bizarre shaggy dog story about the internet and identity, about spirituality, dentistry, and mediocrity. Cutting through all of this is his inventive humor and sideways plot tangents.

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (September 23rd)

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Looking for some interesting reading to get you through the week? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:

Black Panter, Ta-Nahisis Coates

Acclaimed journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has a new gig: writing Marvel’s Black Panther comics

A celebration of the eternally awesome fabulist writer Italo Calvino

Freeman’s, an “illustrious new literary magazines,” is finally out with work from Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, and David Mitchell

Margaret Atwood annotates her new dystopian novel

Can you be too old for YA fiction? Not according to this writer

A look back at 25 years of amazing Drawn & Quarterly books

How black speculative fiction is protest work

Good news for print lovers: bookstores are increasing while ebook sales take a slide

On the other hand, NPR points out how few books the big literary titles actually sell

The Peripheral Writer: An Interview With Hamid Ismailov, Author Of The Underground

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Hamid Ismailov is the author of dozens of books of poetry, visual poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. An Uzbek writer, Ismailov has been subjected to censorship throughout his career and was exiled from his homeland in 1992. His novel The Underground is released in translation in the U.S. this week by Restless Books, in time for Banned Books Week.

I spoke with Hamid over Skype earlier this year, then visited him at the BBC in London, where he was formerly the Writer-in-Residence and now works as the Editor of the Central Asian division. We talked censorship and creativity, political economy, and life for writers outside of the global centers of literary production.

Melody Nixon: I have your novels The Railway and The Underground on my bookshelf. In each book the plot unwinds through snapshot vignettes, spiritual ponderings, and existential anguishes. How emblematic is your work of a Central Asian storytelling aesthetic?

Hamid Ismailov: I try to be as unique as possible. But in writing these books, I want to represent reality. What I lacked as a reader and writer in the Soviet era, from childhood onwards, was a depiction of the reality that was around me. I was in a melting pot of all kinds of nations, cultures, beliefs, faiths and civilizations, and I didn’t see the richness of these experiences depicted in Soviet literature.

MN: Did you find any of the multicultural richness you sought in books from the west?

So in the mainstream English literature you can’t see any multi-national, or other realities apart from rare exceptions. It was the same in the Soviet Union.

HI: In coming to the west I all of sudden realized it was an even bigger problem for western literature than for Soviet. For example, in British literature, take the most famous books of the last years. Nearly all of them are mono-national, or mono-ethnic. As if people are writing for their titular nation, and that’s it. In Ian McEwan’s famous books you hardly meet any Black people, or Caribbean people, or Chinese. Take wonderful Kazuo Ishiguro, who is himself Japanese by origin. Almost all his books are about English people, and that’s it. So in the mainstream English literature you can’t see any multi-national, or other realities apart from rare exceptions. It was the same in the Soviet Union. I was quite unhappy with this, because the reality was completely different.

MN: I haven’t been to Uzbekistan, but the book really spoke to my experiences of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In Siberia especially you have a converging of different ethnic groups and different cultures — the white Russian culture with the multiplicity of indigenous Russian cultures, the Central Asians with the Northern Chinese who are trading across the border, the Orthodox with the Muslim practitioners — all these groups are in conversation. But the narrative we’re given in the west about the former Soviet Union is that it’s a very homogenous place. (White, Christian, Slavic, Russian, colonialist.) Your work shows us a much more nuanced image.

HI: I think The Railway is the first novel that depicts the reality of Central Asian civilization during the Soviet era. I decided to depict reality as it is, in all its richness. I wouldn’t be creating a masterpiece just for my nation, for Uzbeks, or Russians, but for Koreans, Jews, Gypsies, Chechens, Tartars, all of the people who lived there. I gave voice to everyone. Whoever they were, they had a voice. That was the civilizational and aesthetic task for me.

MN: Did this representation have a political element for you?

Me, as a Muslim who lived in the Soviet Union, I’ve seen 1001 types of Islam. Every strand is completely different…

HI: You could say there is a philosophical element. When we’re talking about the mono-ethnic and mono-focal view of the world — when we are looking at the world with black and white glasses, rather than colored ones — it is problematic in philosophical terms, because it leads to oversimplification. As we discussed, the western perspective was that the Soviet Union was mono-colored. The same is happening now with the western view of the Muslim world. It’s seen as monolithic, one thing, whereas it’s so different and diverse. Me, as a Muslim who lived in the Soviet Union, I’ve seen 1001 types of Islam. Every strand is completely different — Shamanic, Sufi, etc — to an unrecognizable extent.

In The Railway I tried to show the richness, not just of Communism, or of ideologies, but of all kinds of beliefs. These ideologies and beliefs — Communism, Islam, Marxism, Freudianism — are not monoliths. All of them have strands and strands, because human nature is like that: versatile. Even when we’re being dictated to we can’t be monopolized by one strand, whatever it is.

MN: Is there an interaction between where you are and what you’re reading? How does your place, and place of exile, play a role in your literary tastes?

HI: In Uzbekistan and the USSR I was mostly reading only Western literature. Human nature always seeks otherness, something else. You seek unfamiliar familiarities, and familiar unfamiliarities: which appeal to you, but at the same time are different.

I was reading all the twentieth century Western literature, starting from Faulkner through to Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, everyone basically.

I knew the Soviet life well, to the extent that I was fed up with it, so I was reading more and more Western literature. But gradually, moving to the West, I was more and more carried away by my own literature: Soviet literature, historic literature. The further I moved towards the West, the more I liked the old literature of my own country; and when I say my own country that includes Russian literature as well.

MN: You sought that which was different to your present reality.

HI: It’s an interesting interaction. When you are within the culture you are somehow trying to bring into it something of an other nature, of an alternative nature. Western literature played an enormous role in my upbringing while I was in the East; and while I’m in the West I’m more carried away by Eastern literature.

MN: Was it easy to get Western books when you were in Uzbekistan?

HI: The translations, yes, generally. But not everything was translated; Ulysses, for example, was difficult to find. I used to go to Moscow to get the first translation of Ulysses, from 1936. I’ve written several short stories about the experience of getting books. All of my salaries were spent in order to find banned books — for example, Nietzsche. In 1981 I spent one year saving to buy a volume of Nietzsche’s.

MN: Was it worth it?

HI: Every single penny. I used to translate Garcia Lorca. He was not banned like Nietzsche. I tried to buy a small book of his in translation, which cost at that time the same price as really good mountain boots. I bought the book in order to translate him into Uzbek. Normal books were not available or affordable.

MN: Did this scarcity increase your desire to write? Did books begin to seem like precious, magical objects?

HI: Yes, somehow it influenced me. Literature was a kind of magic lantern. It taught me about the effort you have to put in to reach something.

MN: The West is not exactly free of censorship, though in our corporate publishing model censorship operates along subtler lines of political economy and access than perhaps the blunter state instrument of the Soviet Union — though this is of course not true in every state, as demonstrated in our need for a Banned Books Week in America. Can you speak about your experiences with censorship?

People were deprived of their salaries, of their jobs, because of my writing.

HI: I am the victim of censorship myself, because for the last twenty years my books have been banned in Uzbekistan. And even when they were not banned, when they were only going to be banned, I felt very bad because the whole editorial board for a magazine that published some chapters of The Railway was punished. I felt that. People were deprived of their salaries, of their jobs, because of my writing. Therefore, I’m not just a victim of the censorship but I’m a culprit as well, in a way. It’s an abhorrent thing.

MN: How has the experience of censorship shaped you as a writer, and as a person? Did you doubt what you were doing, or did you feel more resolve?

HI: My case was not the worst in Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, my colleagues are incarcerated. One, Mamadali Makhmudov, spent fourteen years behind bars because he is a writer. There are poets, like Dilmurad Sayid, who are still behind bars. Writers have been killed because of their writing. All I suffered was expulsion from Uzbekistan — which is tragic, and painful, but I’ve always thought it might have been worse.

MN: Are you able to go back?

HI: No. I could go visit as a British citizen, but if something happens, I’m aware that I would face the consequences alone.

MN: Do you see yourself as an Uzbek writer, even though you’re in exile?

HI: Yes, very much so. Because you know, I wrote my last three novels in Uzbek. So I’m not writing for international readers; initially, I’m writing for Uzbek or sometimes Russian readers.

MN: When you look at your writing now, what do you see as the biggest challenges?

HI: I’ll tell you, the biggest issue with me and many writers like me: if I were born Chinese or Indian I would’ve had a platform. I would have been much more appreciated by now. You have to belong to a huge community. People like me who belong to small nations, whatever their talent is, whatever their capacity is, they’re doomed to not be seen. There must be a huge population behind you. I think, were I an English writer I would have become more known.

This is about the hegemony of World Literatures — by which I mean, the two or three literatures that run the world. English, French, and maybe partly Spanish literature.

MN: The colonial powers.

HI: Yes. I know writers who are extremely powerful that we as human kind should be proud of. But nobody knows them because they belong to small nations: Georgians, Armenians, Tajiks, and so forth. Ion Druţze the Moldavian writer. Otar Chiladze from Georgia. Meša Selimović the Bosniak writer. They are world-class writers.

MN: One could say the same about you. Let’s discuss your work in more depth. There’s a powerfully idiosyncratic style and feel to your books, and each is so different to the last. What compels you to continually experiment?

HI: In everything I write I set myself up for a new style and a new tone. When I started writing The Underground in 2006, I wrote fifty or sixty pages frantically, and I felt it was beautiful text. But the only problem was that the tone was repeating an earlier work of mine. I was so unhappy I decided to stop immediately. I tore apart the sixty pages and rewrote them in a completely different manner, which became The Underground.

If you compare any book of mine by tone or stylistics they are completely different from one another. I don’t like repeating what I have discovered already.

MN: Why is that?

HI: Creativity should be an “ultimate creativity.” It should be dictated by the particular thing you are writing. Every particular thing should not be repeating a previous version.

Unfortunately, many writers exploit the things they found once, and they become slaves to their own ways of writing. For me, creativity should come with every new piece.

MN: What do you think of the idea perpetuated in the west, particularly in writing programs in the US, that you “find your voice?” Once you discover your voice — or two or maximum three voices — you’ve “arrived” somewhere final, which will carry you through for the rest of your career.

HI: That is a point of view dictated by consumerism, and the literature of consumerism. If you are J. K. Rowling, until the end of your life you should stamp out Harry Potters and nothing else. I’m utterly against it. Because unfortunately this consumerist literature has already done harm to world literature.

MN: How so?

We’ve created a class of readers who want to swallow a pill and understand everything.

HI: We’ve created a class of readers who want to swallow a pill and understand everything. “One voice” literature is creating these type of readers. I worry, and I’m afraid, that if today Kafka or Joyce wrote their books, no one would dare to publish them. No one would dare to publish Finnegan’s Wake. Because no one would read it, because it’s too difficult to understand in one go.

MN: So the “literature of consumerism,” as you call it, is reducing creativity in writer and reader? Is this because creativity becomes seen as something conquerable, and static?

HI: I don’t believe in “discovered” creativity. If it is “discovered” and it is used, it is no longer creative. It’s already taken root. Creativity is shown in potential, and challenge. Every creative act is against the previous one; it’s breaking the rules of the previous one. Unfortunately, what the modern Western school is implanting is the “created creativity.”

For example, if we study Haruki Murakami’s way of using plot structure, we can choose to follow it or to say, “No, I won’t use it — because he himself has already used it. I’ll break his rules” — and that is a creative act. But this attitude is so difficult in the modern world, because you’re endangering your readership if you take these risks. It’s much easier to become a brand, with your own voice as your brand. Everyone is buying book after book because they know exactly what these books are about.

My trade is a bit different: Creativity in everything I am doing. And creativity afresh when I am creating.

MN: Do you think your openness to, and desire for, fresh creativity is what drives you as a writer?

You reconstruct and deconstruct reality, by breaking myths, lies, clichés, and propaganda. That’s why dictators are afraid of writers.

HI: One thing, yes, is creativity, but this is not the objective in and of itself. Generally the first impulse comes from curiosity: when you want to know something about yourself, or about the way life is appearing in front of you or exposing itself to you, or the logic of character development. You ask: why is this appearing in this particular manner, and not in another manner? Then you start to investigate and understand it. You see the logic you couldn’t see at first. Then you start to unravel everything. You reconstruct and deconstruct reality, by breaking myths, lies, clichés, and propaganda. That’s why dictators are afraid of writers.

The Total Strangeness That Is Life: An Interview With Paul Lynch, Author Of The Black Snow

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by Will Chancellor

black snow

Paul Lynch’s second novel, The Black Snow (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), deserves every writer’s attention for its masterful use of language. Lynch’s prose aligns perfectly with the minds of the protagonists, Barnabas and Eskra Kane: swirling in ever more eccentric loops like Yeats’s lost falcon when we follow the husband; initially ticking and determined then streaming out like an angered hive of bees when we follow the wife.

Nature, and the language which describes it, is elemental in The Black Snow. The craggy lyricism reminds me most of Ted Hughes, where a tree can be “A priest from a different land,” who “Fulminated / Against heather, black stones, blown water. // Excommunicated the clouds / Damned the wind / Cast the bog pools into outer darkness / Smote the horizons / With the jawbones of emptiness // Till he ran out of breath — ”

Here’s the opening incident of Lynch’s novel, when a farmhand first sees then rushes into a fire.

“A thin cat’s tail curling grey into the sky, some kind of smoke that mingled easy with the cloud’s pewter. Evening was pressing down gentle and in the way the light fell he could have missed it, a yellowing that shook upon the fading day…Barnabas bent and grabbed a rock shaped like the tooth of some old animal that had fallen there to die under the wheel of an ancient sun…the dull sound of Matthew Peoples’ boots thudding up the field…the way he moved with his limbs all thickly, like he was set to stumble…his hands balled like stones…Fire…A skim of starlings in the sky above Carnavan seemed to mirror the rising wreathe of drift smoke. The murmuration swung in unison like minds entwined, weaved the sky with giant breathing until the dusk pulsed like a lung. The group inverted and swirled, caught the light and bent it, swung again into a strip of infinite looping, nature’s way of mocking perhaps what was playing out below…”

Lynch’s prose is so vital and so rich, capturing the ineffable meaning of the fire in a way that bare syntax could not. It makes more sense to me to juxtapose his writing with lyric poems than it does to compare it to grit lit or Irish noir.

Critic Alan Cheuse was an outspoken advocate of Paul Lynch. Of The Black Snow he wrote, “As Lynch presents the story, it becomes an out of the ordinary creation, a novel in which sentence after sentence comes so beautifully alive in all the fullness of its diction and meaning that most other contemporary Irish fiction looks sheepish by comparison.”

In 2013, I was fortunate enough to meet Paul Lynch on the red carpeted floors of the Long Hall pub in Dublin. We’ve remained friends since.

Will Chancellor: To date, and I don’t imagine this ever really changing, you’ve written novels with a slow literary speed limit — readers should proceed at maybe twenty pages an hour? This strikes me as a little insane in our scan-centric culture, not dissimilar to a cyclist on the side of a freeway. Do you fear for your life?

Paul Lynch: I do think you must always write for the ideal reader. But it would be folly to worry too much about who exactly that is. Nor do I worry much about the reading speed of a sentence. I think instead about what the sentence is asking for, its texture and feel, the inevitability within it that pulls the reader on.

I ask myself if I have got close enough to what I am writing about. Often, I find the closer you get, the more texture you are going to end up with. That for sure will slow a reader down. And great if it does. Literature is about contemplation not speed-reading for plot or fact. I try to give the reader what I call the startling moment — to take them down to the heartbeat of a character. To open the moment out in all its richness.

There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives.

I certainly do not fear for the life of literature. There will always be people born wired for books. Every age has its contemplatives. But for the writer now, as much as the reader, the internet is the great challenge, isn’t it? Sooner or later, every serious writer will face the question of how much they need to disengage from the noise and unwire their brain from distraction. I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket after I’m finished writing but I might as well be attached to a dopamine drip. The internet generates a constant fear of missing out. It is the tyranny of the new. But what the writer seeks is human truth and that is as old as the ages.

WC: Were you ever serious about photography? Have you ever had a creative impulse that you thought needed a medium other than that of prose?

PL: That is interesting because my writing imagination is intensely visual. A book often begins with a vision, something half-seen that needs to be explored. But it took me some time to figure out my imagination needs to be written. There was a period in my twenties when I thought I might be a photographer. I pored over masters such as Cartier-Bresson and took to the streets. I have an OK eye but I know I don’t have what it takes to be a visual artist. Though I did learn from it. How to see a face. The internal geometry of a scene. How to capture feeling in a place. Whatever it was that I unconsciously sought from photography unlocked when I began to write.

WC: Cartier-Bresson believed in, and tried to capture, that one decisive moment in any scene — not dissimilar to Flaubert’s search for le mot juste. Can you describe the process of finding the decisive moment, which I imagine happens in your head rather than an actual street, and then expanding that moment into a broader scene?

PL: I don’t believe there is any decisive moment as such for the fictional writer — writing is rewriting and though there are many passages in my books that are essentially a first take, everything else can take many, many attempts before it finds the ideal shape. And what makes it ideal? I know it when I read it.

But I do identify with how Cartier-Bresson likened the decisive moment to zen archery, that one must be egoless, alert and present fully in the moment. Meditation forms a part of my daily life and it guides my mind into the necessary space for writing. It seems that I enter some kind of alertful trance when I work. I become the moment in which I am writing. And yet I am there, the author, standing in the river and meddling with the flow.

Being open always to what is given to you is so important. The Black Snow was born entirely from a dream and the moment I woke I began taking notes. I saw the opening of the book as if seen from the sky, watching below as a byre stood burning and cattle ran flaming into the night. I did not know what it was other than that I had been gifted something that resonated deeply.

WC: My favorite scene in Black Snow is when Barnabas breaks the taboo of leaving historical ruins undisturbed and, instead, starts removing the stones of a famine cottage, one wagon load at a time, to build something new for his family. I read this as the work of the writer — particularly the Irish writer: to hell with the solemnity of the past if I need those stones to build out the vision in my head.

PL: King Lear and Job stood in the shadows while I was writing this novel — two men pushed hard by the fates. Barnabas gets pushed hard too and I admire how he rails against what is thrown at him. He is the kind of man who will do whatever it takes to survive, to rebuild his byre and regain a livelihood for his family. Ultimately, he crosses the line and starts to destroy a famine cottage for its stonework. And, of course, this is laden with symbolism. But I’ll leave that for the reader to unpack.

At a glance it might seem that The Black Snow is that certain type of Irish novel — a pastoral story set on a farm. But it seems to me this book is very different, that the writing became an act of creative destruction. That it dismantles the idea of the farm, the dream of the pastoral, the dream of Ireland, slowly, inevitably, piece by piece, until nothing of it is left.

WC: The Black Snow reads like a ghost story without ghosts — the environment and the characters seem like they’re made of smoke. How do you view the supernatural in this book?

PL: I am very intrigued by this question because this book is haunted — but not by ghosts. It seems to me what hides in plain sight is the inexplicable. It is an absence that is always present. It is the fourth main character in the book. How do you write about what can’t be written about? I try to bend language until it can suggest the ineffable, the great gap between what we think we know, and what we don’t know. The felt but not expressed. The intuited but not understood, what Wordsworth called “recognitions, dim and faint.” I wanted for the language to come up against the void. A difficult thing, really, and one has to force language into the strangest of places to accommodate this.

I’m interested in how blame rushes to fill an absence…What moves in that gap between knowing and unknowing I think of as ghosts.

Daniel Kahneman has a line: “our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.” How do we respond when tragedy strikes and there is no answer for what caused it? In the book, Barnabas, Billy and Eskra each follow their own private convictions about how the fire started. There are no answers in The Black Snow and yet everybody believes they know who is to blame and thus act upon it, pulling the strings of the book’s ending together. I’m interested in how blame rushes to fill an absence. I wanted to explore how we live our lives in certainty, only to discover that we really know nothing, that the truth is we are philosophically blind. And yet the human mind cannot help but tell itself narratives to explain the world. What moves in that gap between knowing and unknowing I think of as ghosts.

WC: And yet the process of writing is one of intuitive flashes, things that lack causes.

PL: Writing is following the sky of your mind. Who knows from where the winds blow. Or perhaps we are diviners. You cannot see the spring beneath but suddenly there is a twitch in the stick. What do you think?

WC: Diviners? There is something of the medieval serf in a writer — miserable or too dense to be miserable, toothless, holding up a chicken bone from the mud and swearing that it’s a fossil, indisputable proof in the existence of elves.

How far removed are the Kanes from the miseries of medieval peasantry? You’ve set both of your novels to date in a rural world governed by the most universal needs: food, shelter, safety. It’s the world familiar to the speaker’s father in “Digging,” by Heaney:

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Can you talk about the decision to strip away everything — electricity, politics, global interdependence — and focus on primal and immediate concerns?

PL: What I’m interested in discovering is human truth. What does it mean to be alive within the dream of life? It seems to me there are essential human truths that have never changed throughout the ages, and that what we think of as unique to our own time is, in fact, the general. I am convinced, as a writer, that we must be able to witness ourselves as we have been moved and shaped by such universal forces. And so the writing must be shaped a certain way to meet this challenge. Being mythic certainly helps as it implies distance in order to see things better.

WC: Are these questions that have real, discoverable answers? Do you think you will find them in writing and say, whew, that was tough. Now on to my sci-fi book?

Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life.

PL: I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible. And as the writer grows, so changes their perception of the world and with it more things to write about. And so I can’t ever imagine getting tired.

Online

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by Joanna Walsh

My husband met some women online and I found out.

His women were young, witty, and charming, and they had good jobs — at least I ignored the women he had met online who were not young, witty, and charming, and who did not have good jobs — and so I fell more in love with my husband, reflected as he was, in the words of these universally young, witty, and charming women.

I had neglected my husband.

Now I wanted him back.

So I tried to be as witty and charming as the women my husband had met online.

I tried to take an interest.

At breakfast, I said to him, “How is your breakfast?”

He said to me, “Fine, thanks.”

I said to him, “What do you like for breakfast?”

(Having lived with him for a number of years, I already know what my husband likes for breakfast, and this is where the women online have the advantage of me: they do not yet know what my husband likes for breakfast and so they can ask him what he likes for breakfast and, in that way, begin a conversation.)

He did not answer my question.

So I tried to take an interest in what my husband was doing. I asked him, “What are you going to do today?”

He said, “I will strip old paint from the shed.”

(I already knew he planned to do this. But, again, that is where the women online have the advantage.)

I said, “That’s nice. Have a good strip.”

He did not respond to my jokey sexual innuendo.

Instead, my husband went outside to strip paint from the shed.

When he had gone I thought:

His women are the sum of all their qualities, not several but complete, massive, many-breasted, many-legged, multifaceted, and I participate in these women. Some of his women have been chosen because they are a bit like me, some because they are unlike. He likes them. And he likes me. He likes me for being both unlike but like them. He likes them for being both like and unlike me. If I met them, I know I would like them, most of them, as we are all a little alike. Or at least I would not dislike them for being like, but unlike, me, and for him liking them not better but — although, and because, they are different — exactly the same amount as he likes me. We are all trapped behind the same glass. He can make us spin for his amusement and turn us to view any side. He is greater than the sum of our parts, though each part of them competes with me: their qualifications, and their legs, and their hairdos, and their cup sizes. And I compete with them, and some of my parts even outshine some of theirs, which are occasionally mediocre. But I cannot outshine them when they are added together.

After some time I went outside into the garden where my husband was stripping paint from the shed, and said,

“Why didn’t you tell me about the women online?” And he said, “I did, when you asked me,” and I said, “Why did you lie about how long you’d been talking to them?” and he said, “I didn’t.” And I said, “I saw your emails and it’s been going on for months. And I don’t care what you’ve done,” I said, “I just don’t want you to lie to me about it,” and he said, “I can’t take this from you again. You have to let it go. You fucked someone. All I did was send a few messages. You have to let it go.”

And I said, “I didn’t lie about that. You lied about it. Just tell me you lied about it and I’ll let it go.”

And he said,

“No.”

In the evenings, my husband listens to old vinyl. My husband says to his women, “I like old vinyl,” and so they listen to some old vinyl for him.

“You remind me of Debbie Harry,” he tells one of his women, “and you look like Belinda Carlisle. You make me think of Debbi Peterson (from The Bangles), and you look like Dale Bozzio.” My husband has a line and he follows it.

The line is flat. It is a line of enclosed screaming women. They are stretched into an eternity of dental floss you could wrap round the world a thousand times. It’s not their breasts I can’t cope with, nor their qualifications. It’s not their Debbie Harry legs, their Dale Bozzio voices, it’s the way they multiply, each by each other, exponentially: it’s the digits.

My husband is a god, many headed.

Because he has multiple women, he may have multiple aspects.

I want the same thing.

So I have practiced myself by writing to him, although we live together.

I have somehow assembled some words that, when seen through a glass screen, might look something like it could begin to be somebody. Now that I can read over what I might be, I think I know which parts are me and which belong to my husband’s other women. I have become, perhaps, almost one complete person who could, perhaps, have a conversation.

And if I were to use these words to write to my husband while he, simultaneously, communicated with his other women, or while I communicated with other men, would the words we said to each other lose meaning, or would this render what he says to them just more of what he says to me, and what I say to them just more of what I say to him?

Are there only two sides of the glass to be on? And if I were able to skip over to the other side, would the view back look like old vinyl, his women, their voices trapped on a flat plane, damaged, heard underwater?

I think all this while standing in the doorway of our house, looking out into the garden at my husband stripping paint from the shed.

I say to him, “Are you having a good strip?”

And he ignores my lame joke, so I say,

“How’s it going?”

And he says, “Fine.”

And I say, “Can I get you a coffee?”

And he says, “Yes.

Thanks.”

For more, read Electric Literature’s interview with Joanna Walsh.

Ta-Nehisi Coates to Write for Marvel’s Black Panther Comics

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award Nominee and a national correspondent for The Atlantic, will be writing a new Black Panther series. Coates’ love for comic books is well documented, in April he talked to Vulture about the resurgence in superhero comics and adaptations this past decade, saying: “There were a lot of great stories being told during the ’80s, and those people who were reading them are of an age now where they can make this vision.” Coates also explained why he thinks superheros and comics go so well together, and why he prefers reading comics to watching movies: “Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much. I always feel like when I see movies, I’m a little let down by the [digital] animation. I want to hear the voice in my head, you know?”

The Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four issue 52, in 1966, a few months before the founding of the Black Panther Party. The character is the king of the fictional African country Wakanda, a highly technologically advanced nation. Black Panther mostly relies on his intellect and very high end weaponry, but also has some mystical powers.

Coates’ yearlong storyline will be drawn by Brian Stelfreeze and is titled “The Nation Under Our Feet.” It is inspired by the 2003 book by Steven Hanh. In Coates’ story, a superhuman terrorist group called the People attack Wakanda, and the story follows the Black Panther dealing with the uprising caused by the People’s efforts. According to Comic Book Resources, Coates cites Jonathan Hickman’s “Secret Wars” as an inspiration for his story.

You could say Black Panther is having a moment these days, making its big screen debut on May 6, 2016 in “Captain America, Civil War” and getting a standalone pic in 2018. Axel Alonso, the editor in chief of Marvel explains how the company values and promotes diversity in their super heroes and says of “The Nation Under Our Feet”: “It’s going to be a story that repositions Black Panther in the minds of readers. It really moves him forward.”

Jonathan Franzen Is Coming to a Burrito Bag Near You

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Jonathan Safran Foer once had a dream to expand the literary palate of fast food enthusiasts and ever since authors have been lining up to do this allegedly well-paid gig.

This fall, Foer and Chipotle recruited Jonathan Franzen to write one of their illustrated essays that will be adorning their paper bags and cups. Franzen explains why he decided to sign on: “Honestly, Chipotle store credit was a decisive factor. Chipotle is my go-to fast food restaurant. I also admire its wish to be a good corporate citizen.” Now we know where to track him down with our questions about the symbolism in Purity.

Franzen’s featured “Two Minute Driving Lesson” has illustrations by Adam Hayes and takes a more or less obvious stab at restaurants and costumers who, unlike Chipotle, choose non-recyclable cups and packaging. Our world is based on short sight, Franzen claims, as he goes on to suggest that this is why Americans throw away sixty thousand paper cups every two minutes, simultaneously making the present easy and the future dark and complicated.

Other titles in this batch of essays include M.T. Anderson’s “Two-Minute Romance” and Laura Hillenbrand’s “Two-Minute Ode to Chocolate.” The other writers contributing this time around are Mary Roach, Laura Esquivel, Lois Lowry, Tom Perrotta, Sue Monk Kidd, Anthony Doerr and Stephen J. Dubner. All of the stories are available online here.

Queerness, Womanity and Hope: A Conversation with Chinelo Okparanta, Author of Under the Udala Trees

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Under The Udala Tree

Battles, personal and political, fill the pages of Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel, Under the Udala Trees (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015). In the late 1960s during the Biafra War in Nigeria, Ijeoma, a young Igbo girl falls in love with an ethnic Hausa orphan, Amina. Okparanta, whose accolades include a 2014 O. Henry Prize, offers a vivid portrait of blossoming queer love and all its attendant beauty and wretchedness, alongside the country’s coming of age as a nation. The novel reaches to the present and into the complications and hopes of contemporary queer life in Nigeria.

J.R. Ramakrishnan: In the first pages of Under the Udala Trees, you plunge us into the Biafran War — and a life-altering moment for Ijeoma, the novel’s protagonist. I think I am correct in believing that you are a generation removed from the conflict and am interested in the choice of historical setting. How has the war’s shadow shaped you as a writer, and more generally, what are its effect on your generation? Did you consider a contemporary setting for the book at all?

Many people seem intent on erasing the not-so-glamorous aspects of our history. But there are many of us Nigerians still living with the memories of the war.

Chinelo Okparanta: When the novel (in its present reincarnation) was born in my mind, this war period was its natural beginning. At its inception this was the story of a young girl, sent away during the war, after having lost her father. This aspect of the character having lost her father in the war was inspired by my mother’s life. In addition to hearing about the death of her father, I grew up hearing stories of the young men she knew who went to fight for Biafra and never returned. I heard about the food scarcity, about the way people ran and hid inside the bunkers during the bombing raids. I heard about the kwashiorkor children and about the corpses littering the roads. Nigerians don’t like so much to talk about the war, especially not these days, with the “Africa Rising” narrative. Many people seem intent on erasing the not-so-glamorous aspects of our history. But there are many of us Nigerians still living with the memories of the war. I’d like to think that as more time passes, and as the wounds become less raw and gaping, more stories will be told.

JRR: While the war rages around her, Ijeoma has to grapple with the dangers of her emerging sexuality and love for Amina. I was especially struck by how you invoke both Christian scriptures and Igbo folk tales to weave together the complexities of Ijeoma’s predicament. Would you talk a little bit about these currents and their impact on the shaping of the novel?

CO: I grew up on Igbo folktales. And, like many Nigerians, I grew up in a very religious atmosphere: I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, which meant that I attended Bible studies three to four times a week. Those two aspects of my life came together naturally when writing the novel. There’s a proverb by Chinua Achebe that goes, “Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” I would say that these days, for many Nigerians, Bible verses have replaced our traditional proverbs. These days, Bible verses are often the palm-oil with which words are eaten. But for Ijeoma, I think the Bible stories and verses were in some ways an extension of the folktales. For her, it was a sort of juggling act: using elements of the folktale (and storytelling elements, in general) to try to understand the Bible.

JRR: I really appreciate your Chinua Achebe tribute, particularly the lines: “His name was something like water, something like air — an ongoing and essential part of my existence, though often taken for granted.” Achebe is just one of the very many enchanting storytellers that Nigeria has given the world. Do you feel that you are writing as part of this established canon? What effect, if any, do you feel this has when you approach the page?

I don’t feel that I am writing as part of an established Nigerian canon. I’m simply writing…

CO: It is true that, like Achebe, I am the product of the Igbo oral storytelling tradition; this tradition has perhaps had the strongest influence on my work. It is also true that I write a lot about Nigerians. But no, I don’t feel that I am writing as part of an established Nigerian canon. I’m simply writing: Writing from a place of emotional truth. Writing about things that move me. I think it would be a mistake for any writer to write with the intention of entering a particular canon, or with the intention of being part of any trend. By the time the work is done, the trend might have moved on; the canon might have been redefined and re-set. Canons often change. That being said, if, in my lifetime, I were to accidentally find myself in any canon of great writers, I would be super excited. I would gather my mother and siblings and all my BFFs, and we would do the dance of joy around the kitchen table!

JRR: In Under the Udala, Ugochi, Ijeoma’s roommate says, “Everyone knows the story of Okonkwo.” This seems to be true — Things Fall Apart is so very much a cherished part of many lit syllabi. Okonkwo’s story is deeply centered on masculinity, and his show of it to his community. It seems too that much of Udala (and the stories of your debut Happiness, Like Water) are about the feminine, and its workings, values, and value within the characters’ prevailing societies. Would you discuss this? Perhaps in the context of the book’s evocative title?

CO: That’s a nice thought — the idea that Under the Udala Trees might be in some ways the feminine counterpart to Things Fall Apart. It would make for an interesting study! Where the title is concerned, the udala fruit was one of my favorite fruits growing up, so it made its way naturally into my writing. The fruit itself is thought to symbolize female fertility, so, in that way, it was also relevant to the themes of my novel, as the novel seeks to interrogate prescriptive notions of femininity.

Men tell women how to be. Women tell other women how to be.

Udala fruit aside, it seems to me that in too many societies, people are obsessed with telling women how to be women. Men tell women how to be. Women tell other women how to be. Womanity is often being defined in relation to men or in relation to other women or in relation to children. I wanted to write this novel about a woman who goes on a personal journey at the end of which she comes to terms with herself and with her own personal beliefs; a novel about a woman who succeeds in defining herself outside of those restrictive societal constructs.

JRR: Without giving away too much, I’ll say I was relieved by Ijeoma’s eventual fate. I imagine you must get a lot of emails about your work from the global Nigerian LGBTQ community. Are you hopeful for a more peaceful and open life for queer communities in Nigeria?

I do hope that there comes a time when Nigerians finally accept that homosexuality is in fact a natural part of our society just as it is with all other societies.

CO: Actually, there are parts of Nigeria (Hausaland) in which members of the queer community exist relatively conspicuously and fairly peacefully. This is not the norm for all of Nigeria, but nevertheless, these ‘yan daudu (i.e. men who “present” as women, or in the least, as a cross between masculinity and femininity) enjoy relative freedom. Even so, they still fall victim to homophobia. And, they are still looked upon as aberrations. The general attitude of Nigerians toward the ‘yan daudu is one of reluctant tolerance — the notion that they are not a naturally existing part of Nigerian culture. These ‘yan daudu are expected to marry women and have children, contrary to what they might really want. So, in the end, theirs is a false sort of freedom. I do hope that there comes a time when Nigerians finally accept that homosexuality is in fact a natural part of our society just as it is with all other societies.

JRR: You don’t shy away from the difficult in your fiction. How has your work been received by your family and community in Nigeria?

CO: I have received some interesting messages via social media. Messages that seemed half-joking, but also half-serious, along the lines of: “If you do that Gloria and Nnenna thing in Nigeria, we will kill you.” I was upset at the time, but nowadays I just think to myself, “Well, they haven’t killed you yet!” Anyway, my mom and siblings and friends have all read my work. I have the support of the people who count.

JRR: I read and contemplated the last line of your acknowledgement quite a bit: “Last but not least, God and the Universe, for conspiring together to make this book the assured expectation of things hoped for, and the evident demonstration of realities, though not beheld.” Would you meditate further on this?

CO: The novel was a difficult book to write. On the surface, it seems a rather simple book, but it’s astonishing how much effort goes into chiseling down words and ensuring they are unpretentious, unaffected, honest, and true to themselves. I’m naturally a “simple” writer. But even for me, this was work.

Also, the novel came at a difficult time in my life. Between the weird, threatening messages from random people who thought I should not be writing about homosexuality, and general difficulties in figuring out this whole writing business, it’s a surprise to me that I was even able to write the book. Basically, that aspect of the acknowledgment is simply a sigh of relief. Relief that I had set out to write a meaningful novel, and I had succeeded in doing just that. Relief that I set out to create a fictional storyline that would embody some sort of hope for those who found themselves in the same situation as my protagonist. I hope I have succeeded in doing that.