Gary Percesepe

In the following interview with poet and philosopher Gary Percesepe, Andrea Lee reflects on the sources and influences of her new novel, Red Island House; the enduring beauty, poverty, and legacy of colonialism in Madagascar; the unique challenges of a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African nation; Jacques Derrida’s notion of survie as linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable; and whether Madagascar has a future. The New York Times ran an excerpt of Red Island House, which Newfound readers can find here. The daughter of a Black pastor who grew up in a prosperous Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, Lee is currently writing a memoir with the working title, Lincoln Went Down to the Nile.

GP: Andrea Lee, welcome to Newfound. Red Island House is so many things at once: an epic novel set in the remote African island of Madagascar; a look at neocolonial ravages in one of the poorest countries on earth; a deconstruction of the idea of “Paradise”; a narrative of a Black American heroine confronting her ancestral continent. What inspired you to write it?

AL: The novel grew out of my experience as a sojourner in Madagascar–that’s to say, someone who has visited the country every year since the late nineties. For a long time I resisted writing it because I felt my knowledge of the country was too shallow. As you know, I live in Italy, where the Indian Ocean is a popular tropical destination, and my family and I came to Madagascar purely as vacationers. Madagascar is one of the most beautiful places in the world, a huge Indian Ocean island with astounding biodiversity and a unique cultural mix, and it was easy to be captivated by the coral beaches, the lemurs, the baobabs, the intricate mixture of indigenous peoples. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that the country, a former French colony, is one of the world’s poorest, and carries the scars of centuries of foreign exploitation. Underneath my enjoyment I felt a queasy guilt at my own privilege.

As always, though, I was looking and listening, gathering up anecdotes from those coastal places where Malagasy and foreigners mingle. One night we ate in a pizzeria called Libertalia, with a pirate painted on the wall, and there I heard a local legend about a shipload of French and English pirates who found the coast so beautiful that they built a crude settlement of the same name: a brawling, “liberty”-minded colony that scandalized the local tribes and was finally eradicated in slaughter and flames.

That 200-year-old tale pushed me to write my novel. For a long time, I’d been intrigued by the trope of tropical paradise: first, that places so described often have a colonial past, and second, that modern foreigners who settle down on palmy beaches often find, not Arcadia, but existences full of misadventure. Behind the hotels and dive centers in Madagascar, I saw the ugly evidence of hyper development, sexual tourism, pillaging of resources.

So my Madagascar observations inspired stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker. And then I joined them together into a larger narrative, a novel with a theme of neocolonialism. I wanted to explore what happens when humans try to exploit paradise: a parable of the Fall of Man. My working title was Paradise Twisted. To unify the novel, I created a single setting: a big villa, the Red House, built by foreigners on an edenic islet in Madagascar. I named the islet “Naratrany.” In Malagasy, the word means “wounded land.”

GP: I was fascinated by the physical description of the Red Island house itself, with floors that look like blood. You described it to me once as “a discount Tower of Babel.” How did these images of the house come to you?

AL: Traveling in the Indian Ocean, I saw the huge Italian villas of Malindi, and other grandiose European vacation houses, and I was struck by their vulgarity. On my first visit to Madagascar, we stayed in a decaying beach villa built in the 1950s, the last decade of French colonization. It was by far the grandest building in a community of fishermen and cane workers, and I immediately equated it with the big house on a plantation. That house had a gloomy, haunted atmosphere; I had horrible dreams there. The floors were painted a deep red common to a lot of old European houses in the region, but to my imagination this color irresistibly suggested bloodshed, an accumulation of old crimes. So, the Red House came into being, an emblem of human greed and colonial depredation. I intended the place to be–like Manderley, or Tara–an almost living presence.

GP: The main character in Red Island House is Shay, who is deeply conflicted on many levels. The “arc” of her character in this novel is fascinating. It is easy for you to relate to her?

AL: Shay is a unique literary character, a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African country. Her interior journey is the thread joining the vignettes that make up Red Island House. It’s easy for me to relate to her; through her I wanted to express an aspect of myself–my reaction to Madagascar, which ranged from a confused feeling of kinship with people who looked like me, to a deep shame at my own entitlement. I envisioned her as perceptive and adventurous, married to an Italian but deeply attached to her Black American heritage; so I made her an expatriate professor of black literature. Still, for all her learning, Shay is thrown off balance by Madagascar, and that conflict drives the narrative.

In her story, I wanted to play with another colonialist literary trope: the swashbuckling adventure yarn, where an explorer battles his way through a savage land. As a child I loved H. Rider Haggard and his genre, and always longed to see a heroine who was more like me. So I decided to subvert the old stereotype of a white man in a pith helmet, and create a Black heroine of the diaspora, who goes deep into the unknown continent of her ancestors. As the years pass, she gains humility and wisdom. The greatest challenge she faces is having to confront her own privilege as part of the developed world, her personal heart of darkness. And Shay does encounter “savages,” but in general their skin is white.

GP: The vivid descriptions of smells, tastes, sounds, and views made me feel as if I had spent a year in Madagascar. Beyond this, the book is a compendium of detail about the culture of the country. What research did you do for the book?

AL: As I said, I hesitated at first. In this period of public discourse about appropriation, the project seemed a bit presumptuous. So, I decided two things. The first was to focus on the in-between world of resident foreigners. The second was to offer respect to the country by researching history and cultural detail, thus avoiding the typical American tendency to see African countries as an undifferentiated mass.

Madagascar has one of the richest literary traditions of any African country–the first literary review in Africa was founded in the nineteenth century by Malagasy writers. I read poetry and prose from authors like Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and Naivo (Patrick Naivoharisoa), as well as translations of the ancient national oral epic, Ibonia, and oral poetry like the Malagasy hainteny. I read foreign missionaries’ records, and the journals of Dutch slavers in the Indian Ocean. I read the eighteenth-century General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which recounts the myth of Libertalia.

And I explored outsiders’ fantasies about Madagascar, such as seen in early letters of Paul Gauguin–did you know that he first planned to live there, instead of Tahiti? And then, there is Hitler’s horrific plan to exile Jews to Madagascar. In Noel Coward’s Private Lives, frivolous socialites dream of escaping to Madagascar, as does Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. William Burroughs’s surrealistic novella Ghost of Chance takes place in Madagascar. Throughout the novel, I include pieces of this information to honor the complexity of a country familiar to most people around the world only through the Dreamworks film franchise.

GP: You grew up as the daughter of a pastor of an historic Black Baptist church in Philadelphia. As a philosopher and pastor of a church myself, I sense a deep, though not obvious, spirituality in this novel, particularly at the end, which I found deeply moving. I want to ask you what part does the sense of the sacred play in it? And do you feel that there is a kind of redemption operative in this novel?

AL: To open the novel, I borrowed a quote from Naivo, one of the foremost young Malagasy writers: “Madagascar is a sacred country, though at the mercy of outside interests.” And certainly, to me at least, there is an intense spirituality diffused through the air of the place. This may connect to the fact that, besides Christianity and Islam, one of the official state religions is Animism, which lends a sense of soul life to the landscape. As someone who grew up in a religious family, I sensed this atmosphere immediately–and I also felt that the damages wrought by human-induced climate change and foreign exploitation were a spiritual violation.

The novel ends with a look at the future and the new life it brings. Although there is loss and destruction, there is also birth. And birth is always a sacred event, bringing with it, however briefly, a primal sense of hope. I wanted to suggest the idea as well that the profound violence of colonialism is always in some ways accompanied by the creation of a new culture–a mixed culture–that springs up inevitably in spite of the bitter facts of conquest, enslavement, destruction, racism, classism, plundering. As Shay is forced to recognize, no culture colonizes another without being subtly colonized itself. So Red Island House does not have a happy ending, but it offers the redemptive sense that humanity survives and evolves.

GP: As you know, I’ve written about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In our correspondence, you mentioned Derrida’s notion of survie, which in Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas is linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable. Shay, of course, is an academic who would be familiar with these broad themes in the Western tradition. I’d love to see literary critics and philosophers pick up on these themes in your work. Is there ever really a post in post-colonial? As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What Ibram X. Kendi calls “racialized capitalism” is ravishing the island, along with the rest of Africa. The continent of Africa today is almost 90% unvaccinated for COVID. Of course, this question, posed from within the Christian tradition, cannot even be asked apart from the notion of hope. Another way of asking this question is, what hope is there for Madagascar today?

AL: To me, Derrida’s survie in general suggests the capability to witness and endure–to accept–paradox. I mean the Tiresian gift for contemplating both sides of the coin at once: past and present, self and other, life and death, male and female, oppressor and victim—and, as you have said, forgiveness and the unforgivable. By the end of Red Island House, Shay is approaching a glimmer of this kind of visionary acceptance.

As for the future of Madagascar, I think that hope is a subjective thing when you are dealing with a largely marginalized country of 30 million people, most of whom struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, an island nation already enduring the ravages of climate change, where thousands in the famine-ridden Southern regions are reduced to eating locusts. As you have suggested, neocolonialism is alive and well, in the form of sex tourism, environmental degradation, and Wild West-style plundering of resources by kleptocratic politicians allied with foreign states. Yet, at the same time, those Malagasy who are surviving have an almost magical resilience and creativity: the country has a high literacy rate and is one of the most digitally advanced of any African nation, while the capital, Antananarivo, is home to an exploding art and music scene. There is an incredible young population–the median age in Madagascar is twenty–that is very future-minded, striving against all odds for a place in the contemporary world.

GP: These are complex themes you address. Was it difficult initially to identify an audience for the book?

AL: I think that in the industry there was an eagerness to pigeonhole it as a very different kind of book: a more conventional novel about love, marriage, and travel, against a flat, exoticized tropical background. In fact, I was advised by an experienced friend that it was best not to mention the word “identity” or “colonialism” in my book discussions, as it might hamper marketing! I found this very frustrating–yet now it seems that the book has reached its proper audience: readers interested in exploring cultural collision and the legacy of history in one of the most beautiful and least-known countries on earth.

GP: Andrea, you are currently writing a memoir. What can you tell us about it?

AL: In a way, I’m addressing the subject of Arcadian fantasies all over again. My memoir is called Lincoln Went Down to the Nile. It describes my childhood in the sixties and seventies in a prosperous Black suburb outside Philadelphia: an aspirational place in which the neat lawns of Lincoln Avenue did indeed run down to the Nile Swim Club–the first Black swim club of America. The doctors, ministers, teachers, and businessmen of the neighborhood were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, but also devoted to achieving the American suburban dream for their families. The result was a feeling of mingled comfort and uneasiness that influenced their children: an extraordinarily creative generation of Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals, who grew up in that idyllic green space. I think the subject is particularly timely as attention has recently been drawn to the strong Black communities of the past, lost to deliberate destruction, or dissipated through increased possibilities offered by integration.

After writing about a place as far away from my American roots as Madagascar, it’s very moving for me to return to home territory. The more that I write about countries where I live as a foreigner, the more fascinating I find the small landscapes of my growing up. Even in the familiar there is always some deep mystery to explore.

The post Interviews • Andrea Lee appeared first on Newfound.

It would be unfair, and, well, wrong, to claim that history’s greatest writers had or have leanings towards atheism. There is, however, a solid history of objectively great writers questioning the dogmas of their day, and indeed producing staggering works of literature that simply could not have come about if it were not for their lack of belief.

Some writers that come to mind include Christopher Hitchens, whose charming, hilarious and beautifully compiled book “God Is Not Great” gave him an ironic god-like status in the secular world; Nietzsche, whose genius or views on God hardly need reiterating; Shelley, whose brave and concise “Necessity of Atheism” got him expelled from Oxford University, and Philip Larkin, whose poem “Church Going” is one of the finest in the English language. Along with them there’s De Beauvoir, Mark Twain, Marlowe, Carol Ann Duffy, Neruda, Saramago, Woolf and, though some may find it controversial (but I’m fairly convinced), Shakespeare himself, who have all undoubtedly created moving works while betraying their religious doubts.

I’m not trying to say that these people are talented because they are unreligious, or that religious people can’t produce good literature. That would be an unforgivably stupid claim. What I am saying is that atheism is not often given enough credit for the beauty and meaning that it can incite. Not enough people appreciate the beauty that can come from an acceptance that the world is built on entropy and chaos.

But enough about chaos. Let’s talk about me. I have not believed in gods for as long as I have been able to bathe myself. If we can resist making a joke about me not being able to bathe myself until the age of 24, then we can start to follow the road through my primary school days and puberty to see how a purely material worldview has formed the way I write.

I went to a Church of England school, which, as far as I can tell, is a school that sings hymns, has a chapel service every half semester and occasionally invites the local holy man to come in and tell children why God is so terrific while they sit on a cold assembly floor thinking about Pokémon cards. We were all believers, because at that age a child will take authority’s word for it.

Despite the sermons and prayers and colorful Bible stories that entranced me, I came to realize that I was not someone inclined to belief. I would like to say that I came to that thought through the examination of evidence, or by coming to learn that religion is inherently oppressive and limiting, but that is not the case. I simply found myself not of a mind that could support believing in something for no good reason.

Throughout my childhood, I started to think (without any outside influence but rather natural intuition) that a world without religion was a cold one. I thought that one perhaps could not find enough wonder in a random, chaotic world to create worthwhile art from it.

Art that came from and fell back into the void was depressing. I thought creating art because you thought it was a god-given talent, or to celebrate a designer’s good, work seemed less pointless. But as I came to be more convinced in my views, and less inclined to teenage nihilism, I began to see that the world was even more beautiful precisely because of its transience. My ability to be awestruck grows each time I remember how insignificant a part of it I am.

Now I’m older (wiser?), I find that much of my writing contains religious themes and characters struggling with the question of creators themselves. I find this topic fascinating because humanity has believed for so long that it is the center of a meaningful universe and being told the contrary, that you are ultimately pointless and doomed, seems incomprehensible.

Coming to terms with it is a lifelong, unfailingly interesting effort. Seeing how characters work this question out for themselves allows me to come closer to making peace with it myself. Whether that coming-to-terms involves compiling evidence for or against a deity, or pursuing the physical properties of and reasons for our universe, or simply settling down and having kids, is inconsequential. It is the effort itself that matters and makes good literature, because it makes a reader feel a little less alone in their confusion and despair.

With unbelief often comes a strength of imagination in order to follow Camus’ advice to create your way out of an absurd existence. I am tempted to conclude that believing in a creator means one lacks imagination. It must be said that giving an unprovable divine entity the credit for existence seems a rather easy and unsatisfying way of wrapping things up, and not a habit that makes a good writer. Of course, there is no unbreakable connection between the way people show faith and the way they write, so I might be being unfair. I still can’t help but think that filling in gaps of knowledge with magical beings is not a good lesson in craft.

So I for one am glad that there is no chance that I will be satisfied with any deus ex machina in a story of mine. I’m glad that I do not consider myself servile to a great power, but rather obligated to continue questioning the universe and using my frustration and ignorance to fuel the fire of my godless writing.

There is beauty in this world that can sometimes only be brought out when one has nothing definite to shape their existence around. God from the machine has become beauty from the void. And boy is it beautiful.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, drama and drawing comics.

The post Nihil Est Machina: Finding Literary Beauty in a Godless Universe appeared first on Newfound.

The Red Tent is a fictional (yet thoroughly researched) first-person account of the life of Dinah, the only daughter of Biblical patriarch Jacob (who is more famous for having twelve sons). With Dinah’s help, women’s histories are traced matrilineally; daughters, sisters and mothers are remembered and honored. Through Dinah’s eyes we see women come of age, begin menstruating, fall in love, make love, bear children, bear losses, age and die. It is by turns tender and irreverent. Oh yes, there are love scenes.

I was totally unprepared for this book.

Just to give some context to my reading life up until that point: I was scandalized when I read about Rachel, Jacob’s most beautiful wife, using traditional medicine to help her conceive—specifically a mandrake root, which  “looked so much like an aroused husband.” I was also confused. Mandrakes are used for magical purposes in the world of Harry Potter! I had no idea what “an aroused husband” looked like, and I couldn’t imagine running into one on the Hogwarts campus.

I was a sophomore in Catholic high school and I felt this book’s impacts immediately. Studying the Old Testament in religion class, the injustice of learning of only Biblical patriarchs was made starkly apparent to me. I’d played the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat in seventh grade, so I felt a connection to Jacob’s favorite son. But Dinah’s silence, I realized, wasn’t a temporary injustice of the “Close Every Door” variety. Jacob’s only daughter was never saved or resurrected during my U.S. Catholic education. I had to find her on my own.

In class, I shuddered when a fellow student had to read out loud the list of Jacob’s children and mispronounced Dinah’s name. Dinah introduces herself in the opening passage, “the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah.” But everyone in my classroom said it in the “Mama’s in the kitchen with Dinah” way, and I could only grit my teeth.

This book’s impacts on me deepened with time.

I never stopped wondering about the women of the Bible, and was unsatisfied with the limited ways their actions, intentions and words were recorded. This book gave me a lifelong thirst for women’s voices in my fiction. (And history. And spirituality.)

The Red Tent itself was where women in Dinah’s family went during menstruation. They were secluded from their husbands or sons, but rather than feeling shame in this, they comforted each other and celebrated the power of their bodies. This book made me very comfortable with menstruation. I don’t think I could have been such a supporter of The Vagina Monologues in college if I hadn’t read this as a teenager.

But I am skipping ahead: When I went away to college, I covered my extra-long twin dorm bed in fire-red sheets. When a new friend visited my room, she saw a sheet hanging off my top bunk bed and said my dorm was the Red Tent. I got the reference and started gushing about Diamant’s book, which she had also read. I was amazed by the ways she told me that book had inspired her.

I learned that she’d already picked out her first daughter’s name: Dinah. When I visited her parents’ house, I saw a painting she’d made of how she imagined the character Dinah’s face.

That year we forged a lifelong friendship with ancient tales of mothers, sisters and daughters as its bedrock. This friend is a nurse and midwife, now—fulfilling another dream inspired by The Red Tent.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Journalism. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

The post The Book I Read Before I Was Ready: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant appeared first on Newfound.

What a bunch of babies, all those people crying about Atticus turning out to be racist! I was more shocked by Jean Louise’s uncle punching her in the face and busting her lip to calm her down at the end of the book. And then by how she does calm down, and they proceed to have a drink and a reasonable conversation. The whole thing was very, hey, you know, sometimes you just need to smack a hysterical woman.

But that’s not what this post is about. Or maybe it is, obliquely, in that it’s about irresponsible and socially damaging attitudes that are deeply entrenched within a culture, and at which no one so much as bats an eye.

In short, I liked that Atticus turned out to be a racist. Not because I like racism, but because as a writer and a deeply flawed human being, I appreciate writing that reflects other human beings as human-being-like, which is to say, both deeply flawed and yet capable of good. At our very best, this is all that anyone can hope to be. But my appreciation for the besmirching of Atticus’s character goes further. I think Lee was making a point about racism itself, one that is every bit as valid today as it was in the 1950s.

Her point, I think, is this: Sometimes people who don’t think of themselves as racists, are. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, but it begs the question, If it was true of Atticus Finch, could it also be true of me? Atticus, after all, does not see himself as a racist person. Neither do Jean Louise’s aunt or fiancé. Rather, they see themselves as kindly toward Black people. Their opinions on the habits, culture and limitations of Black people are, they believe, based upon observations and therefore constitute plain facts. The racism at which Lee is striking out, I believe, is different than the overt, blunt-trauma variety of Mockingbird. It’s more insidious, and depending upon your milieu, more socially accepted.

To wit: I grew up in a proudly Southern community. We didn’t have a Confederate flag on our school lawn or anything, but more than once I heard it defended as a symbol of “heritage.” As a child, I also heard the argument that the South’s position in the Civil War wasn’t about slavery per se, it was about state’s rights, and it was economic (never mind that the economy of the South was based upon slave labor). So when Atticus breaks it down to Jean Louise at the end of the book, explaining The Way Things Are, it all felt very familiar to me.

At the same time, none of the adults I knew growing up would have considered themselves racist. It was a Christian community; KKK-style racism wold have been condemned. Nevertheless, racist jokes were told. Mixed-race dating was discouraged. The reason? Differences between “them” and “us” were insurmountable — and then there was the supposed censure of society at large to contend with.

This is the reality: unlike Jean Louise, most of us are not “born color blind.” In our country, people who are not racist have to be ultra-conscious, willing to evaluate every thought they have about “the other” — whatever color their skin may be. They have to learn to recognize racism’s variform manifestations, and to yank it out of themselves by the roots. It’s a lot of work, actually. Sort of like weeding a garden, every day.

The flaws of Watchman are manifold, I can’t argue with that. It’s unfortunate that for whatever reason, Lee wasn’t willing or able to give this novel the same careful attention she gave to Mockingbird, revising and polishing it into a real gem. But even if she had, I think it would still have been reviled. The book is meant to make us uncomfortable — in our own culture, in our own skins. “I’m tired of having my heroes knocked down,” someone recently complained to me, shortly after the book’s release. But if we don’t have heroes on some pedestal being saintly for us, then the work isn’t finished; it remains up to us.

E. D. Watson is Newfound’s Blog Editor. A writer by day and a library clerk by night, her stories have appeared in Bodega, [PANK], Narrative, and THIS., among other publications. She eats cheddar-and-mayonnaise sandwiches when no one is looking.

The post In Defense of ‘A Watchman’ appeared first on Newfound.

When I spoke with Valadez via Skype in May, I could hear birds chirping on his end. At certain points I could hear him pouring tea.

It occurs to me that 10 p.m. on a Friday night for me (in New Jersey) is 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning for him. He thanked me for staying up late—and it was late for me. We both wondered what happened to our resolve for all-nighters, in those bygone College Days. No more staying up till 5 a.m. and pounding back coffees throughout the following day, for either of us. Even though, Valadez told me, there is a Starbucks in his neighborhood in the urban area of Chengdu, China.

Eppinger: If I walked into the closest Starbucks near you right now—

Valadez: Oh, it would look like a Starbucks.

Eppinger: And do people camp out there, like with their laptops and their homework, or “working from home”? Or, is there a different vibe?

Valadez: You know, that is not as much of a thing here—the hanging out in coffee shops.  People will socialize, or play on their phones. But you don’t see a lot of people sitting down at a Starbucks to work. You see people who are hanging out with friends, or—it’s that thing I don’t really get about the U.S. either, where people will go somewhere and then just be on their phone. Why did you leave the house for that?

Chengdu is a fairly modern, highly developed city. Where I was before, in Neijiang, there was no Starbucks. What’s a little more common is what they call a milk tea shop. Milk tea is essentially the frappe version of tea. It’s like 10% tea and 90% cream. It’s really good! But the word “tea” is kind of misleading.

In the smaller places (like Neijiang), a lot of young people—especially on college campuses—go there to hang out. If they stick around, they’ll play cards, play on their phones, smoke cigarettes, and drink a milk tea.

Eppinger: Sounds pretty good!

Valadez: You know, it’s college life. But those students you’ll see doing that (this is not my judgement, this is taking into context the social dynamics), are like the “bad kids.” Like, “Oh, they’re hanging out in the milk tea shop when they should be studying.”

Eppinger: What do “good kids” do instead?

Valadez: Education here, from middle school through high school is just like: Study All The Damn Time.

Eppinger: Hmm.

Valadez: Twelve, thirteen-hour days—if you’re not in class you’re in a study hall. A lot of high school students go to bed at 1:00, wake up at 6:00, they have class for ten hours, and then after class they’re in a study hall for three more hours, then they go back to their rooms and do some more studying! So college, by comparison, gives them a lot more freedom. But it’s still really regimented, and their time is very scheduled for them.

Eppinger: I think some of the most poignant things you’ve written about in updates since you’ve been there is the concept of Leisure Time for university-level students. Also, things like: time for creative expression, and time for creative writing. So if I went to the Starbucks near you right now I wouldn’t see people with their laptops idly writing, or scribbling in a notebook. So, where could I find that? Or, could I find it?

Valadez: You could find it. It would be in a very specialized area.

There’s a book shop in Chengdu called The Bookworm, which is a pretty exceptional place. It has that traditional Western feel of a café where they have open mic nights. The space is really set up for people to hang out and chill. They have writing groups there. Of course, China has a long tradition of arts and literature. That influence combines with the modern café art scene feel more common in the US. It makes for a really unique atmosphere.

Eppinger: Right. I guess that challenges my American/Western assumptions of what it means to be in a “college town.”

Valadez: Oh absolutely. The way things are organized in China, there’s the tradition—in Chinese, Dan Wei (单位), which means “work unit.” In the old tradition, if you got a job somewhere, the job took care of you: housing, meals. Some of that tradition still maintains.

A lot of teachers live on the campuses where they teach. Sometimes there’s housing provided by the university. Every campus is like a small universe. These college campuses are communities of people. Teachers don’t live there alone, they bring their families, and you have the tradition of taking care of your parents when they get older, so grandparents are living with them. You go outside at night, and you’re likely to run into more grandparents and little kids than students.

Eppinger: A multi-generational university. That’s interesting.

Valadez: It makes it so that it’s not party time, you know?

It’s kind of nice, it gives you that warm communal feeling. Of course, things are much more regulated for locals. The dormitories don’t have RAs. They have what they call ayi (阿姨) or shushu (叔叔), aunts or uncles, older people who live in those buildings and make sure you’re not fucking off!

Eppinger: Do you interact with, or meet, working writers in China—who are either Chinese or from abroad? Is that part of your daily life right now?

Valadez: Other foreign writers, I have met. There’s a community out here of artists, especially who live in Chengdu. I have met, and even did a reading once, with Chinese poets. Unfortunately, those opportunities have been few and far between. I think there’s a lot of mutual respect there, but it’s hard. The language barrier makes it difficult to have a dialogue.

Eppinger: How do you fit writing and a literary life into your working life in China?

Valadez: My volunteer life afforded me a lot of extra time that I didn’t have back home, so I was able to create some routines, create some structures in my life to promote my writing practice. I continue that, though at this point it’s a lot more difficult. My working life, in particular, is a lot busier. So for me, the way to fit writing in with my life here is to be really concerned with: Tonight is writing night. This is writing time, right now.

Eppinger: Good for you! One burning question I have right now—it involves a lot of speculation. If a university student in Chengdu, where you are right now, went home and said, “Mom and Dad, I’ve changed my mind, I want to be a poet,” or, “I’m going to write novels.” What do you think the reaction would be? Would it be supportive? Or would it be something more like what we’d hear Stateside, “Oh, you’re gonna starve! That’s a terrible idea”?

Valadez: Things here are so rigidly structured, I couldn’t even imagine a student saying that at all. In my experience, it’s hard enough to get students to even admit those things to themselves, or to their friend.

In Neijiang where I was teaching, odds are a lot of those students were the first in their families to go to school, and it’s a really big deal. Because most of my students were girls, that means: You go to school, become a teacher, get a stable job, and then within two or three years get married, have a kid. And, at the same time, help their parents in retirement.

Eppinger: Do the students around you have the time or the inclination to read for pleasure?

Valadez: Oh yeah. There’s still ever-present the traditional Chinese lauding of education. A lot of them will go the library and read for fun at their schools. Read stuff that they are just interested in. Also, they believe that’s a way to improve yourself, it’s a way to broaden your horizons, to read more books.

The post Bad Kids at the Milk Tea Shop: Leisure Time, Reading and Writing in Chengdu and Neijiang, China appeared first on Newfound.

In a recent interview with SG Magazine, Malaysian writer and resident of Singapore, Tash Aw, criticized Singapore’s lack of literary culture. Calling out the country’s educational system, Aw says, “the whole thing about writing requires you to question stuff in general. Not necessarily political things, but from a personal point of view. It needs you to question stuff that’s going on inside yourself. Very basic things, like family. That’s not something the Singaporean educational system encourages.” Aw goes on to point out the Singaporean peoples’ general disregard for literature and self-history, their emphasis on work and social standing, as well as other cultural ideas.

In defense of his country, though, Aw offers this: “I think Singapore is very creative, with great film-makers and visual artists. Literature is the one thing that’s lagging behind. The Great Singapore Novel isn’t going to happen for a long time, because to have any novel, let alone a great one, you need to be able to draw upon reserves of experience. If you’re going to rely on that post-’65 narrative, then Singapore is a young country. Somewhere like Britain has had hundreds of years.”

Singapore’s literary culture is however, budding. Cyril Wong, Simon Tay, Su-Chen Christine Lim, Alvin Pang, and Grace Chia, among others, are at the forefront of Singaporean literature in English, pushing against cultural friction since independence in 1965. Small presses such as Math Paper Press and Ethos Books are iconic in the Singaporean literary landscape. Tiong Bahru, Jalan Besar, Alexandra, and Keong Saik are emerging neighborhoods—with independent bookstores—attracting young artists.

At the foundation of this emerging literary scene is Singapore’s library system. Twenty-six libraries and national archives dot the island. All libraries include collections in all four national languages—English, Tamil, Chinese and Malay. The flagship of the system is the National Library, a sixteen-story tower in the central business district, between the bustling markets of Bugis and the quiet museums of Bras Basah.

The National Library was established in 1844 to educate the local populace. The present-day building was founded in 1960 and expanded outward and upward. It is, in fact, two libraries in one: the Central Public Library beginning in the basement with general reading stacks, and the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library from the seventh to the thirteenth floors.

Other libraries in Singapore’s system of libraries have a similar environment to libraries in the United States. The National Library, however, stands out. The place embodies what defines a public space, integrating the natural and built environment with vaulted ceilings in reading rooms and cozy crannies in courtyards. Patrons sit in the bamboo garden, flipping pages of The Straits Times. They take naps on the sofas in the Central Library. They chitchat in the plaza in front of the library. They study in the expansive ends of the reference library on the seventh through ninth floors, trying to not be distracted by skyline adorned in pastels made alive by the blue sky. They sit on the floor next to elevator doors, creating their own private space. They walk through, around and about installations made by various local artists, attempting to decipher meaning.

The National Library also includes a theater, in which local playwrights showcase their work, and exhibitions examining national history (on one floor, a central space was devoted to the history of literature in Singapore). All in all, the library itself is a cultural and social hub for all Singaporeans.

Singapore thrives in its rigidity—45-hour work weeks, projects finished ahead of schedule—its people are a work-centric people. The country’s first—and arguably most influential—Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, once said, “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.” The National Library is an oasis as a free-flowing space that bends the rules of purpose and definition. It is the cultural backbone that can lead to the creation of “the Great Singapore Novel” in due time.

Ravi Venkataraman is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chengdu, China and serves on the editorial board of MaLa: The China Bookworm Literary Journal. When he isn’t teaching, playing ultimate frisbee or binge-watching TV shows, he writes fiction and poetry. His work was previously featured in That Lit Site and Papercuts, and is forthcoming in Journal of Microliterature.

The post Singapore’s Literary Culture and the Power of a National Library appeared first on Newfound.

And yet, access to books and the written word is limited for many South Africans, due to the past law of apartheid and its remnants in daily life. Books are a rare commodity and fiercely guarded in South Africa. I still haven’t worked through what my reading life in Cape Town has meant.

I spent a year as a grad student at the University of Cape Town in 2011, and I adored the main library’s Recreational Reading Room. It was a cozy wood-floored room filled with loveseats and novels by African and British writers, whose books never made it to American circulation desks.

Another gem of UCT was the library at Hiddingh Campus—an enclave of just a few Dutch colonial buildings in Cape Town proper. Hiddingh Campus was the Art School. The art and philosophy library (next to the campus art supply store) was my heaven amidst the madness of Cape Town. Walking there meant being aggressively (and I mean physically) pan-handled by strung-out child beggars.

However, anyone who set foot in either of these libraries without an active university ID would be denied entry by the dogmatic (and armed!) university security guards. The guards might take people to a clandestine location to interrogate them. If you tried to get into one of these libraries and couldn’t produce university ID, you were “renditioned” for a day.

(Do I need to state that this never happened to me, a white American student? But that for a time I was dating a South African student, a Coloured student, an absent-minded student, who once forgot his ID and tried to get into the library and ended up cuffed to a chair in the basement instead? I checked out books for him for the rest of the semester. But that’s not justice, is it?)

And so, books for South Africans who aren’t university students can be hard to come by.  Cape Town had some nice book shops, but the price of new books was prohibitively expensive. $30 USD for a new paperback is steep to me, even by current US standards. But in that world where wages and general standard of living were lower, $30 translated back into South African Rands was a pile of money. I couldn’t see how anyone could afford to read new books. When I last lived in Cape Town, the country also had no broadband infrastructure—so Internet access was prohibitively expensive, too. A world of words is online, but proved too expensive to dive into.

And then, the public library went missing. No, this isn’t a magic realism tale. I lost the Cape Town Public Library.

The Main Collection was at one point located in the City Hall building in Cape Town proper. (On Darling Street. By the taxi rank.) But the last time I lived in Kaapstad, in 2011, no one could tell me where the public library stacks were. THE MAIN COLLECTION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY WAS MISSING! I was convinced I’d stumbled into a Borges short story, because no one ever cleared this up for me. To this day I have not learned where the main library’s books have been moved.

I read a lot in Cape Town, and I tried to read things that I could only get in South Africa. But the fact that I could do this was a mark of my privilege—as a white person, as a US citizen. The written word isn’t the resource that most Westerners think of exploiting when they think of South Africa. I didn’t want diamonds and I didn’t want gold, I wanted to get to know the works of Alex La Guma, Steve Biko, and Nadine Gordimer.

I still have some ambivalence regarding South Africa, the intractable racism and classism there, and my own compliance with unjust systems. But that isn’t to suggest that there aren’t excellent organizations there, working to make education and access to literature more equitable, or to make South Africa a reading nation.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Journalism. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

The post Literary Treasure Hunting in Cape Town appeared first on Newfound.

I was captivated.

When I decided to reread it nine years later, all I could remember was that it was indulgent. In the opening pages, eighty-year-old Chris Minaar sets up the premise: He’ll recount every woman with whom he’s slept over the course of his long, debauched life as a white South African novelist.

Things get interesting when we meet a lover named Daphne. It’s the 1970s; apartheid is at its height in South Africa. Minaar is twenty-something and Daphne is a willowy, blonde dancer. During a private dance, she reveals that she always wears a tight rope belt around her midriff. She is bruised, in constant pain, and abstains from sex. The reason she gives for torturing herself: “It’s this country. Don’t you see?”

A little background: This encounter takes place after the Soweto uprising of 1976, in which tens of thousands of Black African student protesters demonstrated against the designation of Afrikaans as the official language of national education. These peaceful protests were met with violent government retaliation. Many Afrikaans-speaking whites felt helpless and frustrated by the government’s injustice.

As I reread the book, I wondered about Daphne, and found myself wishing Brink had given her more of a voice. Daphne’s belt reminded me of Simone Weil’s hunger strike, and I was intrigued by the way she adopted her country’s agonies into her own body. Given more than one line of dialogue, would Daphne have expressed something similar to Weil? At twenty, I was the consummate student. I sought more words to consume, more information. I wanted authors to speak to me and I wanted to hang on every word.

Nine years of studying and reading and critiquing later, I am comfortable taking a book to task. This time around, it was Minaar’s character that stood out to me as most lacking.

Minaar likens himself to Scheherazade, claiming he retells the stories of his loves to amuse others and make sense of his life. This promises the reader exaggeration and magic, which Minaar delivers.

Nevertheless, Minaar differs from Scheherazade in a crucial way: Scheherazade is fighting for her life, against terrible odds. Minaar, on the other hand, is the portrait of privilege: white, straight, male, professionally successful. He’s more like King Shahryar, who beds and kills a new wife every night. Upon this reading, I felt that the novel fails because readers cannot draw convincing parallels between Minaar and Scheherezade.

Most of Minaar’s lovers have been white South Africans or Europeans, with a few exceptions. When we catch up to the modern day, Minaar is nostalgic over a Black South African woman he employed as a “Girl Friday.”

The nudge-nudge language suggests readers should be charmed by such a naughty tryst. But on my recent read, my antennae raised: this woman is much younger, from a historically disadvantaged ethnic group and social class, and Minaar’s employee. Can a relationship with such an unequal power dynamic have started with consent at all? We cannot know—we’re never told how it began, only that it ends, “ Like so many others. Married…what a waste.”

In fact, every woman of color with whom Minaar sleeps is his employee. While a pretty accurate portrayal of racial separateness in the New South Africa, the issue is never taken head-on by the narrator, nor discussed by any other character. The narrator’s blindness to these inequalities is his biggest shortcoming; the book’s is its reticence to comment on such matters.

I am also critical now of how convenient so many of the fantastical parts are. Minaar’s lovers are impossibly good-looking and insatiable; of course they could only be satisfied by a weedy novelist. Taken with an ironic avoidance of the realities of race and class in the New South Africa and some murky issues with consent, there were times I could not believe I used to love this novel.

Rereading the book was like holding up a mirror and seeing a past self. The past reader loved any words that were strung together, and wanted others to tell her how the world worked. Reading again, I wanted to demand that she demand more of what she read.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

The post Remembering “Before I Forget” by Andre Brink appeared first on Newfound.

The last few days of November were excruciating. I woke up on November 30^th with my inner voice screaming, “You failed! You are a failure! A fail-y, fail-y FAILURE!” Like I’ve said before, my inner voice is a jerk.

However, something sort of miraculous did happen, something my jerk-wad inner voice has only recently, begrudgingly acknowledged: I wrote a good-sized chunk of a novel. 30,000 words, give or take. And I’m still writing it. NaNo wasn’t a failure, not really. (That’s right: the title of this post is misleading; our culture is more interested in people’s failures than their triumphs, and I wanted you to read this post. Sue me.)

Of course NaNo was a failure in the sense that I didn’t complete my novel. I still don’t know how it will end, not even close. I’m now about 60,000 words in, and figure I’m only about halfway. I’m not Tolstoy; this isn’t going to be War and Peace. I know that a lot of those words will have to be mercilessly razed in the revision process. I’m trying not to think about that. Yet.

What I learned from NaNo is that I can write more in one day than I thought I could. A lot more. NaNo participants are supposed to produce approximately 1600-1700 words per day; most days I managed to get close.  Some days I actually exceeded my goal. But other days I didn’t write at all. Nevertheless, I impressed myself. Now, I’ve established a more moderate goal of 1000-1200 words per day. I still don’t get there every time, but it’s easier to consistently achieve.

When you’re writing that much, you don’t really have time to be critical. Most days, my jerk-wad inner voice can hardly get a word in edgewise because I’m too busy writing. Of course that means I’m generating a lot of literary doo-doo: sentences that will make me cringe when I go back to revise. But it’s eerily nice having my headspace silent, save for the whirring of my brain cells—which if you’re wondering, sound sort of like an electric fan.

Since the NaNo experiment, I’ve had several people ask what my “plans” for the novel are—meaning, how I want to publish it. I can’t think that far in advance. That’s like asking a pregnant lady which university she thinks her fetus will attend—or if she thinks it will go to college at all. For now, I’m just trying to maintain my momentum, applying ass to chair, as they say. My cello playing has suffered; I’ve been stuck on the same song for six weeks. If only there were a National Cello-Playing Month to give me a kick in the pants!

E. D. Watson is Newfound’s Blog Editor. A writer by day and a library clerk by night, her stories have appeared in [PANK], Narrative, Real South and Gulf Stream, among other publications. She eats cheddar-and-mayonnaise sandwiches when no one is looking.

The post NaNo FAIL; Or, How Cello Lessons Had No Impact on My Ability to Write a Novel appeared first on Newfound.

However well-intended and meticulously researched, the journalistic approach of this type of article lacks the essence of the discipline they are discussing. Literature and the arts are not about facts and figures, they are about what it means to be human, hence the label: the Humanities. Literature seeks to expose the truths of human existence, the shared experience, the feeling of being alive. So, in my first post for Newfound, I find myself looking for my place in all this cognitive shifting sand.

Doomsayers typically predict the downfall of the humanities by college enrollments and declared majors. There are more people studying business, medicine, and accounting, they may say. English departments are downsizing due to decreased interest. There are several problems with this argument, but let’s examine the most glaring fallacies. First, people study the subjects they think will get them jobs, e.g., business and medicine. Yet, in a bad economy, there are fewer jobs for everyone regardless of one’s area of expertise. The fact that one studies humanities does not decrease employment opportunities; the economy does that. Second, people don’t necessarily need a university education to succeed in fields such as literature, art and music. Using college majors to determine success seems unfair when you are comparing brain surgeons to painters; it’s apples and oranges.

Those bemoaning the downfall of literature often state that people are reading less—at least for fun. I would counter that people are reading more. When people spend more time staring at their phones than actually talking to people in real life, they are in fact reading. And although a tweet isn’t the same as a novel, perhaps their Twitter feed will read like one. By scrolling through someone’s Facebook, you can read the story of a person’s life, or at least the parts they share. Perhaps it isn’t highbrow literature, but you have to admit it is raw humanity. And it’s fun.

But if everyone is online, then should we study communication or marketing? Often this is the suggestion from these articles. However, these fields teach people to spin, how to be perceived, to control what is admitted. They hide the truth behind created fictions. Writing for corporate communication, marketing and advertising are very different than humanities writing. Literature seeks to reveal the truth through  fiction, to show more than what one usually perceives. There is a reach to provide the reader with an experience, not just an opinion.

Articles concerned with the decline in recreational reading generally mention benefits of reading, such as increased focus and imagination. They will discuss how reading can improve attention spans and promote empathy. This seems to be a turn, but often is no more than a pause to tease the literary reader that what they do might be worthwhile. If only the articles stopped there.

Instead, they usually conclude with more saddening news, such as this statement by Sarah Schwister in Quail Bell Magazine: “Americans are still turning away from serious fiction, and sadly the literary novel may wind up mostly forgotten, like poetry.” Statements such as this one make me furious, and cause me to wonder at the writer’s intent. In my outrage, I find my place, the solid ground on which I stand.

Poetry is not forgotten, not even somewhat forgotten. Not only is poetry still alive in its own right, but poetry is at the heart of every well-turned phrase, every novel surely, but also the clever meme or funny anecdote. The disturbing thing here is that people in the field, the writers who pen such articles,  have already given up on poetry as a form of expression. They have bought into the idea of an America that is turning away from words.

Society does not determine whether the humanities live or die. We do, we that live in the world of the humanities. Some of us work hard every day to promote reading and arts, cultural values and societal change. What is true and always has been is that the hearts and minds of a society’s poets and artists determine its direction, functioning as its moral center. Sure, we are finding new forms of expression, but that does not mean we have to kill off the existing ones. Perhaps multimedia is the future for the humanities, but that does not preclude the writing of books, or even poetry.

It is the artist who makes the difference. Let us not look at the world and have it tell us what will and will not be. Instead, let us look and tell the world what might be. And let that expression take any form. The future is as bright as we paint it. Let us not give up on ourselves just yet.
 

Reggie Carlisle finished his BA in Creative Writing at Weber State University in 2014. His first published story was in the Fall 2013 Mixitini Matrix. He currently resides in Utah with his wife and five daughters.

The post Who Decides the Humanities’ Future? appeared first on Newfound.