Paul Beatty isn’t a writer who is comfortable speaking about his work. His motto? “Writers write.” He jogs his legs restlessly while he deflects questions like flies. He speaks with a strange combination of deliberateness and recklessness. “I have to be diplomatic,” he’ll say, on one hand. But then he’ll go on a rampage if something bothers him — “I’m not very aware of my surroundings.”
He resists labels and lineages, and loves to solve puzzles. Ask him about griot, oral storytellers, magic realism, satire, and he says, “People can put me in any lineage they want. I don’t necessarily see myself in that.” He often begins writing a novel at the end, and always has an idea of the pit stops he wants to make. He acknowledges that there are a ton of writers that are deeply important to him but very few that are important to his writing. In prior incarnations he has been a poet and a doctoral student of psychology.
What happened to poetry?
There were a lot of things. One is simply, my poems started getting longer and longer, the other is I started writing towards an ear, towards an audience. As a poet you have to be kind of public, you have to do a lot of readings. It just became really uncomfortable for me. People saw me as the type of poet I wasn’t. Once I wrote this line, and in my head I was like, Oh yeah, they’ll like that. I’d never thought like that about anything I’d written before and it just sparked me. I started to figure out how I wanted to write my first novel, which I’d been thinking about for a long long time and I never looked back. I still read a lot of poetry, but am just not moved to write poetry anymore.
You said that people saw you as the type of poet you weren’t. What was that?
As a poet in New York I’d read at the Academy, I’d read at St Mark’s. I’d read all over, but I couldn’t stand that whole performative aspect of it. I just had a hard time being associated with something I didn’t see myself as part of.
So are there things you’ve taken from poetry as you’ve moved towards fiction?
Absolutely. What did poetry teach me? A ton of things. Poetry is where I sort of figured out how I was going to weave all these various languages in my head, or whether I could do it. I also learned that people could see through what you’re writing. So whatever I write, it’s easily the spine of my language, and every now and then I address it directly, because it’s so important to me. It’s the other stuff — my self-perception as a poet was a problem.
When you begin reading The Sellout, you immediately realise this very strong voice…
Thank you so much.
Was there a recognition when you found that voice, that you had found it and was going to run with it?
It’s interesting I don’t think about voice much. I’ve thought about it more as a poet because I heard the term bandied about so much, but now the words on the page connote a voice. I mean there is something in my head — there’s a temperament, there’s a tone, there’s a vernacular that’s going to be there. You can easily say what I’m talking about as voice, but I don’t see it as voice, you know? It’s a match on the page of... God, I’m going to say voice in my head, but I don’t want to say voice because it sounds like a speaker. You know when you speak into something like a sonogram, when you have those oscillating waves, what’s it called?
These ones? (I show him the voice memo recorder on the iPhone with sound waves)
Exactly. How do you make those legible on the page? How do you make that match? That frequency, that altitude? That’s what it is. Because you look at this (points to the phone), and that’s a manifestation of voice, but you don’t necessarily hear what’s being said, and in a weird way that’s what I’m getting at.
Do you feel like a bit of a prophet with the publication of this book? I mean it feels very timely with the current U.S. President…
This book has taken me five years. It’s not like I knew this was going to happen. I’m writing about something very timeless. For me it’s always that time, and I think it always has been and it always will be. You know, it’s like these problems of interpretations, these problems of language, so that for me is the stuff that’s there. I guess once I’m done, someone’s going to publish this book. But I’m not necessarily trying to finish before Obama is doing this or that. I’m completely aware of what the cultural zeitgeist is, and so that’s not the content, that’s some other stuff.
Okay, but why has race remained the predominant theme in America?
I don’t think it’s the predominant theme. I think it’s huge, I mean, it completely shapes how things are perceived, but it’s not necessarily a deterministic kind of thing. For me, America never holds itself accountable for anything that it does. Very rarely. And so race is one of many things that there’s never been any kind of reconciliation about. People talk about it, they discuss it, they write about it — it’s a genesis of a lot of things, but there’s never acknowledgement or culpability or apology in these kinds of things. Part of it is also habit. I think the race thing for me — I am who I am, and I see the world the way I see it, the world sees me the way I think it sees me — is going to be in whatever I write about. And so, in many ways, you can substitute race with a bunch of other things, and I’m not answering your question because I agree it’s a huge thing. Prejudice is one of those things, you know? It just doesn’t go anywhere.
Somebody asked you a question about collective consciousness after one of your talks here, generational memories…
Yeah, I knew what he was getting at but I don’t believe in that — that historical socialisation can start to feel like a collective consciousness on both ends, however you want to label those polarities. I don’t know. Why? I mean that’s a hard question to answer. I mean, how do misogynists get married? Why do people marry misogynists? These are complex things. But these are long patterns of how people treat each other and for me it’s interesting to see.
I remember reading an article about Japanese hip-hop a long time ago and it was interesting — these young Japanese rappers — what translated from hip-hop for them into their lives. When they broke it down it’s about what so much literature is about, what art is about — whether we acknowledge it or not — it’s all about identity. About what identities you see and what identities you don’t. And a thing that I’ve come to realise is that books that aren’t about women or aren’t about blacks or aren’t about Native Americans, are about them in absentia…. I’m going to tell you a weird story and this is not necessarily American as such. But I did a reading once at Rutgers, and I get asked who my influences are. I said there’s a lot of Russian literature, but also a big influence was Japanese literature. So I went into this whole long list about how these writers have affected me, and the head of the English Department said, “Oh that’s bizarre, I see Japanese and black cultures as being opposite,” and I just made a face similar to what you just made, and I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t sure why I was so pissed in the moment, and later I went, what does it mean that cultures are opposite? That word is laden with hierarchy, you know? And so, it’s that language about how we talk about each other —all that helps perpetuate it. I don’t know how or I don’t think it’s even possible. I think it’s just how we operate as people. Maybe not everyone, but you know, we all do at some level or at some time.
How important is memory to you?
It’s all of it, it really is. It’s all fictive, but it’s based on some memory.
But how does it work?
I don’t think about that, and if I knew I don’t think I would say. There’s a book that I hadn’t read before — Christopher Isherwood writing about LA, A Single Man . It’s so good. He has a section where the guy who’s a writer, a professor — he’s lonely, his lover has died, and he goes into this thing where he’s talking about teaching in his head, he does this riff on the here and now, which sounds like it’s not about memory, but it’s about how memory shapes everything. It’s so beautiful. I tried to point out to the students — he’s teaching you to do exactly what you asked me — turn your memory into fiction. So the here and now is a phrase that really resonates for me because I studied psychology for a long time, and these things are as important to how I write and think as to anything else — about listening to yourself listen. So you’re in the here and now being active and passive at the same time…
It’s a way how you encompass in a single sense — a thought, a paragraph, so many levels of emotion, of actual behaviour. So, memory is key to that, there’s something in there that’s the trigger to what’s happening.
What do you think fiction can do that maybe other art forms can’t?
Oh man, it just lets you conjure. It just lets you conjure. The categories, the jargon — you know, none of that stuff, I don’t care about it. It’s the shit that makes you conjure. Fiction can do that.
Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.
