Left: Hazel Carby. Right: Saidiya Hartman.

On a rainy winter morning, Hazel Carby arrived at my office in Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall to discuss her new book, Imperial Intimacies, which is a history of empire, slavery, colonialism, and migration written in the form of a memoir. This eloquent and moving account of the entanglements of empire is narrated from the perspective of a young black girl of Welsh and Jamaican descent trying to survive in postwar Britain, a world that would prefer for her not to exist at all and that never for a moment fails to see her as an outsider, an eternal alien. “Where are you from?” is the question that each day challenges her right to belong, that routinely marks her as a foreigner in the country where she was born. The narrative advances on dual tracks and the story oscillates between “the girl” and the “I” of the adult narrator, a scholar and researcher, in search of the pieces of her past and reckoning with what it means to be black and British.

Imperial Intimacies sets out to challenge “the binary thinking that opposed colonial center and colonized margin” and the conviction that British identity is predicated on the non-belonging of black and brown people, whether citizens, migrants, or refugees. The book does so by traversing the “geographies of pain” that emerge in the wake of empire; connecting the rural hamlets of Wales and Jamaica; linking the factory, workhouse, and plantation; following the dense web of connections between the lives of peasants and workers, soldiers and the enslaved; and tracing “the perverse lines of descent” created by racial slavery.

 The movement of conscripts and migrants and young working women and errant daughters reveal the forms of violence and domination, exploitation and precariousness that connect the imperial metropole to the colony. Imperial Intimacies is an assemblage comprised of the recollections of a precocious and lonely young girl in postwar Britain and the arduous research of a scholar “pitting memory, history and poetics against each other” to produce a story comfortable with the unresolvable contradictions and mysteries of the past.   

Stories shared in the kitchen and recollected from the sick bed compete with the archive regarding the truth of what happened when. The scholar’s research discloses the rifts and failures that no one can bear to admit—a stint in the work house and the lines of kinship ruptured by the categories of human and slave, master and object of property, free black and chattel. Imperial Intimacies explores and intensifies the conflict between familial stories, national histories, imperial accounts, and archival documents. Carby writes across these registers to trouble and unsettle national and imperial projects. Hers is an account of Britain articulated in the relation between two islands and in the explication of personal and public inventories, which range from the political arithmetic of imperial governance and the double-entry bookkeeping of the slave ledger to the brutal and terrifying acts staged in a kitchen—a mother’s lessons in duty and sacrifice and a suicidal father lying unconscious on the linoleum floor. At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking.

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I first met Garth Greenwell when we were both undergraduates. At that time, Garth had studied music and wrote very beautiful poetry. His native talent with the English language was evident to anyone who met him or saw him speak. His commitment to writing was inspirational; even as a young student, he lived in a room with two cats and many, many hundreds of books. He could talk about poetry for hours, and everything he said was formulated in eloquent, unpredictable sentences. Twenty years have passed since then, as have many poems, three books of prose, and thousands of miles between us. Garth and I have since crossed paths in Michigan, Washington, DC, New York City, Iowa, Texas, and several times in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he lived for a number of years and where all of his books are set. He still speaks in more beautiful sentences than anyone else I know. There is simply no one like him, no one so able to give musical shape to ideas both on a page and in person. His books, the prize-winning novella Mitko, the much-acclaimed novel What Belongs To You, and now the new work, Cleanness, all vibrate with intelligence and passion, and with exquisite control of language.

Garth Greenwell has received the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, What Belongs To You was selected as a best book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City. When we conducted this conversation, Garth was in Iowa and I was in Atlanta, so the following took place over email. 

INTERVIEWER

As I was reading Cleanness, I couldn’t help but think of lines from Louise Gluck. “I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved.” I thought also of Catullus’s famous line: “I hate and love.” Your work captures this tension with enviable clarity and precision. Can you speak a little bit about this?

GREENWELL

The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality.

INTERVIEWER

Between is the word reviewers of your work mention most often. Your work is described as mapping the territory between vulnerability and sustainability, between love and alienation, between desire and shame, between passion and confusion. Where do you locate this “between”?

GREENWELL

The “Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds,” Stevens calls for at the end of “Idea of Order at Key West” have always seemed to me like a goal of art. I’m drawn to art that expands and multiplies complexity, art that seeks ever finer gradations of feeling and thought. When do we ever feel a single feeling, or for long? When are we ever wholehearted? How long can we stay in a single place, or stay there happily? Between-ness is the human condition, it seems to me. Certainly itinerancy has characterized my life. Between-ness is also the condition of art. We love to draw lines and borders. Desire and art-making are border-crossing impulses. Promiscuity—an eagerness for mixture, excitement at the new things arrived at through unexpected encounters—is one of the virtues I most admire in thinking, in art-making, in life.

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Anna Weiner (Photo: Russell Perkins)

As a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Anna Wiener files dispatches from San Francisco that home in on the Silicon Valley’s human stories with a subtlety elided by consumer data sets and algorithmic models. Contextualized by her own professional experience at a succession of Bay Area internet platforms, she’s plumbed LinkedIn-friendly headlines about earnings reports and funding rounds in order to interrogate the culture: the restrictive gatekeeping of seed accelerators and venture capital, the unlikely marriage of California bohemianism with corporate libertarianism, and the lonely homogeneity of modern, online cities. By analyzing the structures behind the tech industry’s most valuable and ubiquitous products, she conveys these phenomena as natural, if not inevitable, byproducts.

Wiener’s memoir Uncanny Valley maps her own coming-of-age during the Valley’s 2010s rush, as well as the industry’s simultaneous loss of innocence. Frustrated at her dead-end assistant job with a New York literary agency, she jumps at the opportunity to join a short-lived ebook start-up, then sets west to work at a series of big-data SaaS (Software as a Service) companies that promise excitement and equity in exchange for cultish devotion. As a support specialist, she inadvertently finds herself witness to Gamergate, Pizzagate, data breaches, and the ad-tech surveillance boom that fed the 2016 election. The Bay Area, and soon the nation, are seized by palpably unsustainable wells of funding, and the visible indicators of gaping income inequality in the city itself are viewed as markers of progress. Eschewing the caffeinated, self-referential keenness that defined the decade’s online writing, Wiener is cerebral and diagnostic in her observance of escalating corporate surveillance.

I first emailed Anna in early 2016 to express my appreciation of her n+1 story on start-up burnout; at the time I’d been pulling eighty-hour weeks at a doomed Flatiron District data start-up, and her portrayal of infantilizing conformity, circular marketing speak, and opaque executive boys’ clubs seemed remarkably true to my own experience. In December 2019, we met at a bar in her native Brooklyn neighborhood, which, like San Francisco, has been transformed by coworking spaces, fluorescent fast-casual chains, and a shiny new arena that houses a professional basketball team owned by a consortium of local tech czars.

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in the idea of a professional meritocracy. You write about, on the one hand, being conditioned by traditional liberal arts values, and then landing in Silicon Valley where the “meritocracy” is almost flipped. It’s less about degrees and accomplishments than hustle, ambition, and the ability to sell oneself. Looking back, which of those, if either, do you find more empowering?

WIENER

I wouldn’t call either one empowering. I think they just have their own rules, their own networks. In practice, the two value systems aren’t that different—it seems to come down to marketing. Publishing has a ton of problems. Gatekeeping, tiny networks, compensation low enough that, when combined with the emphasis on cultural capital, is prohibitive and exclusive. I’m a beneficiary of this—I went on five networking coffee dates, a chain of referrals, before being sent the job listing for the assistant position I took in publishing.

Both industries are pretty homogeneous. In tech, meritocracy seems to be used as a cover story for social inequities. Not everyone has the opportunity to prove themselves in the same way. My sense is that underrepresented minorities in tech don’t get a pass so easily—I think you’ll tend to find that those groups are heavily credentialed. At the first start-up I worked for in San Francisco, the job listing for customer support representatives came to read, “Relevant work experience or a degree from a good college.” The CEO, it’s worth mentioning, had left college to found the company at age nineteen or twenty. It’s like the difference between someone who went to Yale and someone who dropped out of Stanford. I think both of these industries inherit the problems of a larger social landscape.

Something that’s really valuable in publishing is the idea of taste. The concept of taste is riddled with sexist, racist, classist assumptions. But for a lot of people, it comes down to an individual feeling, an individual orientation toward a form of cultural production. It’s not measurable. Like you said, in tech it’s more about your capacity for hustling, less about who you are than what you say you can do, what you generate or say you’ll generate. Both strike me as forms of storytelling, in the branding sense.

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“Why are you so drawn to terrible people?” the author Jaquira Díaz was once asked. “How come all the people you write about are in prison?” Fortunately for readers, Díaz was never discouraged by such notions of literary propriety. “Terrible people” in the eyes of some—runaways, addicts, criminals, child killers—are not merely the people she’s drawn to, they’re the subjects of her remarkable, heartrending debut memoir, Ordinary Girls. As she portrays her life growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, Díaz introduces us to a range of unruly women—her mother; her “reckless and unafraid” schoolgirl friends, Chanty, Boogie, and China; and her younger self, a bright girl who learns and loves to “fight dirty,” who moves uneasily through juvenile detention centers, the military, and, ultimately, academia. Though she explores her own coming-of-age, Díaz is, above all, interested in the girls, not the girl. She avoids the often unbearable solipsism of memoir by turning her fierce and compassionate gaze on the lives of her friends, tracing the tropical fervor of their adolescence, the moments they break free, the moments they offer each other loyalty and joy. The memoir is rife with a rare energy; it’s never staid or sorrowful or sordid. Díaz excels at capturing the pulse and beat of life. Even in the bleaker moments of the book—Díaz’s suicide attempts and drug binges, the mystery surrounding a neighborhood mother accused of killing her three-year-old son—Díaz’s voice is steadfast, unflinching, yet mournful and lyrical. At one point, she recalls the bravado of herself at sixteen, “like a rabid animal … Macho Camacho in the right … Joe Fucking Frazier at Madison Square Garden” in the “fight of the century.”  Swift and startling, Díaz compells us to watch the fighters, to know the elation and risk of survival. After speaking with Díaz on a “Mean Girls” panel at the Center for Fiction this summer, I wanted to continue our conversation about violence, young girls, and new literary forms. I caught up with her over email while she was back in Miami on her book tour.

INTERVIEWER

In Ordinary Girls, your depiction of coming-of-age in Miami is so vivid and rich. The book is full of specific details—dancing to “Pop that Pussy,” drinking orange sodas at Miami Subs, wearing oversize T-shirts over bikinis, listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. How did you excavate that? Was it from memory? Or did you draw on journals and other sources from the time?

DIAZ

I’m still friends with all the girls in the book, the ones who survived, and we often talked about these things. I was part of a group of girls that took lots of pictures. My friend Flaca took photography in high school, and worked in a photo lab, so she always had a camera, and later a camcorder. So much of our adolescence was recorded because of her. But we were all kind of obsessed with documenting our lives. We all had diaries, slam books, scrapbooks. We had a huge shared diary we passed to each other where we wrote entries, and we’d keep it for a few days, then pass it on. I also wrote so many letters to my friends. I was always writing, taking notes. I already believed myself a writer, and was always sketching out ideas. I thought I would write about my life, even though I didn’t even know what memoir was.

INTERVIEWER

Why did it feel important to you to portray the music and style of your friends? Why was it important for you to include details of youth culture, of style and music that are so often absent from “literary” work?

DIAZ

Ordinary Girls is in some ways about navigating a certain kind of black and brown girlhood. So many of the details that were present during our girlhood are erased or disparaged in our literary culture. The details of my life are the details of a working-class life, of growing up in poverty in Miami Beach and in the Puerto Rican housing projects. The music I reference, the music that was the soundtrack to my life, was music of the streets. Hood culture is not considered high art, but what is hip-hop if not poetry? 2Pac was a poet. So was Nas. The old salsa I grew up on was made up of storytelling and myth and poetry. Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Lucecita Benítez were storytellers and poets as well as singers. Music taught me to write sentences. I learned more about writing from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill than I ever learned from Hemingway.

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Jennifer Hasegawa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the highest compliments in my lexicon of praise is the term lebenskuntsler, German for “an artist of life”—and high in my pantheon of the lebenskuntslers I’ve known is the musician/composer/conductor David Amram. Still flourishing at age eighty-nine, Amram has an impressive resume. As the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence, for which he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein, he has created funky jazz numbers as well as classical symphonies and concertos. Then there is the rich music Amram has written for Arthur Miller’s plays, including After The Fall; for Joe Papp’s earliest Shakespeare in the Park productions; and for legendary films such as Elia Kazan’s Splendor In The Park and John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate.

But Amram does far more than write scores (or “figure out which correct notes to choose and then write them down on each day’s new empty page,” as he puts it). He’s often on the road, teaching students of all ages, leading orchestras, “sitting in” with any musician who asks him to, and performing his own public concerts. These “Amram Jams” can last up to five hours, and feature Amram scat-singing improvised songs along with a diverse array of guest artists. Amram has jammed with local musicians from all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, becoming, according to the New York Times, “multicultural before multiculturalism existed.”

True to the title of his seminal 1971 double album No More Walls, he has played Latin music to audiences in China, played Kenyan music in Latvia, and worked frequently with Native American artists. This last connection led, in 1977, to The Trail of Beauty, a piece for mezzo-soprano, oboe, and orchestra whose libretto featured traditional indigenous texts.

Amram frequently plays the piano, the penny whistle, the French horn and the Spanish guitar, but he can also coax melodies from the shanai and the dumbeg and other instruments that few Americans have heard of, much less heard. During his daily life he even wears some of these instruments around his neck, along with amulets and other gifts he’s received.

Over the decades, Amram has preserved his artistic adventures in three memoirs: Vibrations (1968), Offbeat: Collaborations with Kerouac (2002), and Upbeat: Seven Lives of a Musical Cat (2008). He’s currently working on the fourth, to be entitled “David Amram: The Next Eighty Years.” Born in Philadelphia in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family, Amram was raised on a dairy farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where, he says, his father was a major ethical influence and where he loved hearing “the old hog callers, who excelled in this special style of performing art,” he writes. “Whether or not they impressed any hogs, these farmers made me see that you can find music and beauty anywhere if you pay attention. They also made me see that you can transform anything into a form of expression all your own.”

After studying history at George Washington University, serving as a soldier with the Seventh Army in Europe, and working as a busboy, a soda jerk, a janitor, a gym teacher, a moving man, and an amateur boxer, Amram wound up in postwar Paris, where he spent time in cafes with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen as they created The Paris Review. Back in New York, he joined Charles Mingus’s band. Around 1959, Amram acted alongside the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as the painter Larry Rivers, in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s groundbreaking short film Pull My Daisy (for which Amram also composed the soundtrack). This “promising young composer,” as he now waggishly describes himself, has made music with Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Johnny Depp, Willie Nelson, Thelonius Monk, John Prine, Frank McCourt, Dizzy Gillespie, Paddy Chayefsky, and Patti Smith.

Apart from kunst, Amram is equally impressive with the leben part of the lebenskuntsler equation. He’s been an indefatigable social activist, a prodigious raconteur, and, as the critic Nat Hentoff aptly phrased it, “a ubiquitous deliverer of good cheer.” Recently I visited Amram at his home in Beacon, New York, which overflows with books, CDs, framed photos, DVDs, instruments and awards. We had a long and lively conversation, presented here in condensed and edited form. —Gary Lippman

INTERVIEWER

Are you surprised to find yourself nearing the age of ninety?

AMRAM

You bet! I never thought I’d make it to thirty. We came up in the “live fast, die young” era. But contrary to the old saw, turning eighty-nine didn’t happen quickly. Anyway, I don’t have time for old age to catch up with me. The title of Charlie Parker’s great 1945 anthem “Now’s The Time” remains my mantra. People are already planning celebrations for my ninetieth birthday in different cities around the world. So I am eating extra vitamins and trying to get at least one good night of sleep a week to be ready.

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The Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three collections of short stories, and more than a dozen children’s books. She studied French literature at the University of Athens, worked for many years as a columnist for Kathimerini, and now teaches creative writing at various Greek institutions. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; the first of her two novels to appear in English, I’d Like, won the National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Prize in 2008, and the second, Why I Killed My Best Friend, was short-listed for the 2015 National Translation Award. (Both books were translated by Karen Emmerich.) Her new novel God’s Wife, translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Michalopoulou spent this fall in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, where I had the good luck to continue a conversation with her begun long ago in Athens. But it was only after she departed for Greece that we embarked on this interview via email.

INTERVIEWER

The premise of God’s Wife is at once audacious and unsettling. Can you talk about the origin of your novel and the kinds of research you undertook to tell such an unlikely story?

MICHALOPOULOU

Certain books start with a disturbing question. My question here was, What if God had a wife? How would she be, what would she expect from him, and what would he expect from her in return? The Bible is full of submissive women who wished to have many children and either followed their husbands or became prostitutes. I read somewhere that these women speak 1.1% of the words in the Bible. In this patriarchal view, God’s wife would be an introverted human being, an acolyte. But what if she didn’t comply with this model of thought because of her education? I played around with this idea for some time and in 2012 I started reading philosophical and theological texts in a more focused way. What would a girl married to God have access to? What would she want to read, especially if her husband was mysterious and reserved? I wanted to write a bildungsroman about a female protagonist who changed her views on life and love because of the books she read. This is my romantic view about education.

INTERVIEWER

On the first page of God’s Wife, an epistolary novel written to an unnamed reader, the narrator declares, “Having lived for so long by the side of Him who created All from Nothing, I am finally creating something of my own. I am creating you.” How do you imagine your reader(s)?

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