M.C. Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha, published in 2020 by Potomac Books. He was recently embedded with
JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war
through The Winchester Star. Armstrong is the winner of a Pushcart Prize
and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri
Review, The Gettysburg Review, Monkeybicycle, Wrath-bearing
Tree, Epiphany, War, Literature, and the Arts, The
Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the guitarist
and lead singer for Viva la Muerte. You can follow him on Twitter
@mcarmystrong.
1 - How did your first book change
your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it
feel different?
The Mysteries of Haditha is both my first book and my ninth.
I wrote eight novels prior to publishing Haditha, many of them focused
on The Global War on Terror. After spending twelve years working on Haditha,
which is a memoir, I would say it changed my life through giving me hope about
the literary marketplace and a bridge back to Iraq. I spent three weeks embedded
with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province during the second
Iraq War in 2008. Meeting so many Iraqis while there changed my life and the
way I saw American foreign policy and my own hometown (which happens to be the
city where the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, received his
education). Writing and publishing The Mysteries of Haditha made me
think deeply about those Iraqis I met and also the ones who might read my book
one day. Through Haditha, I met Noor Ghazi here in Greensboro, the
Iraqi-American peace activist with whom I now collaborate frequently. Through
this book and the relationships that have developed out of it, I feel I have
been given a window into the good side of cosmopolitanism—that conviction—or
maybe just sense—that we are all citizens of the world.
That conviction slash sense slash hunch informs the novel
I just completed, American Delphi. Delphi takes its name from
that place in ancient Greece where one used to travel to hear the truth. The
oracle at Delphi was a woman named Pythia and, generally, her prophecies were
delivered in a trance-like state, perhaps as a function of the psychedelic
response to the vapors rising up from the chasm beneath her perch. In my novel,
Delphi refers to an app that tells the future. Long story short, Zora Box, my
fifteen-year old heroine, discovers that her father, shortly before he died,
developed this app while serving in Iraq, and that it may well be the reason he
was killed. Upon finding the app and harnessing its powers, Zora is confronted
with a difficult question: What are you willing to risk to find the truth?
Gandhi argued that truth is God and God is truth, but what happens when we make
that principle our mission in life? I suppose The Mysteries of Haditha
introduced me to such questions by revealing to me the strange and revealing connections
that tether together America and those ancient lands of Babylon. American
Delphi is my further exploration of those connections and questions, but
just in a new genre.
2 - How did you come to fiction
first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
In spite of The Mysteries of Haditha being my first
book, my first significant publication was “The Seventy-fourth Virgin,” a piece
of fiction about a Muslim Trump from the future that was published in The
Gettysburg Review back in 2011. By that time, I’d been writing fiction for twenty-five
years. It probably all started with Laura Robb, one of those great frenzied
grade school teachers who used to climb up on the desks and shout stories from
on high—or maybe it started with my father who, instead of reading to my
brother and me as children, would often entrance us with improvisational tales
populated with characters who seemed a lot like us and if we ever got snoozy in
the midst of his myths, he would tickle us (put us in what he called “the
mix-master”), which, after awhile, I suppose got us a bit addicted to the
pleasures of confabulation.
3 - How long does it take to start
any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is
it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape,
or does your work come out of copious notes?
The first drafts come quickly, often in a trance that
borders on a rush. A novel I’m working on right now, Support the Troops,
came to me in about six months, back in 2003. But I’m still working on it right
here in 2020. I once had an agent who said that great novels age like wine. You
capture the zeitgeist in that rush and then let time feather in the perspective
that makes the novel that unique bouquet, that mysterious hybrid species of pleasure
and wisdom, philosophy and experience, sense and sensibility.
With Support the Troops, like American Delphi
and The Mysteries of Haditha, I took folders full of notes. Each of
those books required dozens of books worth of reading. “Read before you write,”
the journalist, Seymour Hersh, once said, but I would add to that and say read
while you write and read after you write, too. Never stop reading and never
stop questioning yourself and never stop jotting down those bizarre sensory
impressions from daily life with their metaphorical seeds like “cloppy licks”
(as I listen to Yorick addressing her undercarriage behind me in my office).
Henry James said that “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little
literature.” That’s been my experience. You write ten books and about ten
drafts for each book and how many published works do you have? One. What would
I do without Yorick constantly encouraging me to nurse these delusions of
grandeur?
4 - Where does a work of prose
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
My short works, these days, like “The Spotlight Trial” and
“Do You Know Ted Cruz?”, tend to be ways of staying limber in between bigger
projects. I have a million of what some might call “obsessions” and that’s the
origin of most of my prose, long and short. I’d like to say there’s a hard and
fast rule here and that the deeper obsessions win the larger projects and the
shallower hungers become short stories, but that’s not always the case. “The
Spotlight Trial” is the only piece of fiction or non-fiction that I’ve
published about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but I’ve been investigating that
story since my mother took me to see Oliver Stone’s JFK back when I was
fourteen. I suppose a work of prose generally begins for me when I hear the
character and start mumbling in his or her voice. Once that speech starts to
bramble around my brain, I’m helpless and it’s wonderful.
5 - Are public readings part of or
counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing
readings?
I’m a performer. Unlike Sartre, I do not believe that hell
is other people. I love people. For fifteen years, I’ve been in a rock n’ roll
band called Viva la Muerte. If I didn’t like to perform in public—if it made me
sick like it did Barbara Streisand—I wouldn’t keep doing it. I adore it. And I
like to give readings, especially when people show up ready for a good
conversation. Other than a wild jam with an adventurous musician (that
sublingual back and forth), I find nothing more nourishing than good
exploratory talk with total strangers and curious friends. Readings are one of
those rare intimate spaces where such connections can take place. You turn off
your phone. You meditate on the writer’s words for a half hour, maybe longer.
You listen. You tune your ear to his, her, or their music. And if your muse
awakens, you find yourself inspired to ask a question and, thereby, tickle the
fragile of the ego of the lonely writer. Whether as fan or author, I think
readings are wonderful antidotes to the social media environment where
everyone’s talking and no one is listening.
6 - Do you have any theoretical
concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer
with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
In many ways, my questions are the questions of my
characters, particularly Zora: What happens if I stop salivating on cue to the
public relations people at home, at work, and all around me and decide to dedicate
myself to truth? What if mission number one is keeping faith with the truth?
How bizarre, right, for a fiction writer to dedicate himself to truth. But, to
paraphrase Picasso, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” What’s the
difference between truth with a capital “T” and the lower-case variety we
encounter every day with tickers of stats and facts? The big T, in my
experience, refers to intuition, that sense of the truth and what is
hidden. The big T is not found in polling data or “naming names,” and it is not
found in the geographical cure. The big T, I find, has something to do with
unnaming and defamiliarization, that Poe idea that everything beautiful possesses
some property of the strange. The best books I’ve read show me science,
insanity, the South, the war, my backyard, my bedroom—or simply a cup of
coffee—in a fresh and strange light. The question I’m always trying to answer
in my work is what is the question my people are dodging? Write what’s
missing—that’s my bumper sticker. When you go to the bookstore and you see the
world divided up by genre and class and race and religion and everyone shopping
within their own market tribe, ask yourself: What story might bring the tribes
together for a roisterous powow? What would happen if I started speaking to a
young adult like an adult? What would happen if I allowed my sci-fi characters
to have a fully developed or totally dysfunctional sex life like we see in
Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles? That basic modernist principle
of defamiliarization—make it new—when applied to the genre as well as the
sentence, can be so much fun, and can help to tear down some of these walls we
see the political economy and our contemporary “common sense” erecting between
us.
7 – What do you see the current role
of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you
think the role of the writer should be?
My vision for myself as a writer is probably quite
different than that of my three best writer-friends, Andria Williams, Paul Crenshaw and James Tate Hill. But I do see a tradition that yokes most of the
writers I know and admire together: The writer speaks for those who cannot. The
writer provides a vision of the invisible. The writer speaks up for the
voiceless, the censored, and the forgotten. If the writer does have a role in
the larger culture, I think it is as an amanuensis for that dirty muted figure
in the basement of Ursula LeGuin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
If the writer’s role in the culture has been diminished, and I think it has
been, it probably has something to do with many of us picking at the low-hanging
fruit and speaking up for ourselves rather than others. Do we really need more
backyard and round the house glimpses from the quiet desperations of the blanched
burbs? Do we really need another granular vision of alienation from the new
Brooklyn? So much of the dominant culture seems concerned with New York, LA,
Washington, DC, and the elites who can afford to live in those cities. What if
our literature, film, television, and politics ceased yielding so much mental
real estate to those places? One of my favorite TV shows, Ozark, is
successful, I think, because it leaves the elite coasts and travels to a
forgotten region. One of my favorite novels from a few years ago, Stephen Florida, achieves the same effect by traveling to North Dakota and
exploring the forgotten sport of wrestling in hilarious and mythical fashion.
What Gabe Habash accomplishes in that book through his wonderfully repellant
and utterly unreliable narrator is introduce you to a person and a place you
didn’t even know you were ignoring, an unknown unknown. That’s what so much
good writing does, over and over. Write what’s missing.
8 - Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In The Mysteries of Haditha, I begin every chapter
with an example of graffiti the Iraq war and labeled those epigraphs “graffiti
from the war.” Each of those quotes, like “The enemy is in the White House, not
over here” or “Why write? Draw naked chicks”—came from the latrines of Iraq and
Kuwait. But one of my editors suggested that I say “graffito from the war,”
rather than “graffiti.” I had never heard of the word “graffito.” I did not
know graffiti had a singular. Is one piece of zucchini now zucchino? At first I
thought the editor’s suggestion preposterous. Then I thought it brilliant for
its defamiliarization. I found myself pondering this question of “graffiti” or
“graffito” late at night and on long walks. I asked Andria Williams about it and
she brought up the issue of zucchini. I loved the debate, the defamiliarization
of language in my own head and imagining how that veiling might unveil things
for my readers. Would I seem pretentious for using “graffito”? Would
pretentious people embrace “graffito”? What would “graffito” do for the reader
as the first impression of my first book? I went with “graffiti,” but I adored
agonizing over the process—the story—with that editor.
9 - What is the best piece of advice
you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Terrance Hayes, in his gorgeous poem, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy,” writes, “Not what you see, but what you perceive: that’s
poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement of derangements.” That
piece of wisdom from Mister Lighthead slash Hayes is right up there with what
my mentor at UVA, George Garrett said to me. Hayes is speaking on the level of
the line. Garrett, when I asked him the question of “How do you make it as a
writer?” responded with one simple word: “Last.” Garrett’s talking about the
big picture. He told me that the young writer is always surrounded by more
talented people, bright young men and women left and right. But the ones who
make it are the ones who last, which raises the question of what sustains those
who do not yield to the temptation of law school, marketing, and suicide? That
question takes us back to Lighthead’s answer. If you practice
perception—vision, metaphor, and empathy—every morning when you write, writing
will become a healthy intoxicant, a nourishing addiction, a form of yoga and
prayer. And you will last.
10 - How easy has it been for you to
move between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
There are so many genres and each one brings its own
challenges. For example, I don’t think it’s easy to write Young Adult after
you’ve been doing longform journalism or “serious literary fiction.” When I
started on American Delphi, I thought to myself that this will be a
piece of cake and maybe even a nice break after Shenandoah, an
historical novel about the War of 1812 I recently completed. After all, how
hard can it be to perform the mind of a fifteen-year old girl? Well, quite
hard, it turns out. I sent the first few chapters of the first draft to my seventeen-year
old niece, Hannah, who read me the riot act for the number of “whatevers” I’d thoughtlessly
plunked into the voice of Zora Box. Hannah and my friend, Rachel, gave me a
good primer on what young American women say and don’t say when it comes to
their bodies and their country. I do not think every writer simply contains
multitudes from the outset. The multitudes are out there and in order to feel
them and emote them you have to talk with them through reading or conversation
or research and observation. At least I do. Which is to say, it’s easy to jump
from genre to genre, but it’s hard to do it well.
11 - What kind of writing routine do
you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you)
begin?
I write in the morning and I read at night. The shorter
the bridge between dream and page, the better. I like to wake up, tune my mind
with whatever book or song my intuition tells me is my tuner, and then turn to
my guitar or my computer. If I can keep my cellphone off throughout the
morning—if I can sustain a monastic silence through coffee, windowlight, and
unmediated concentration—I might just be able to conjure a few good pages. This
is the routine, for the most part, but when it becomes too routine and starts
to feel mechanical, I’ll go to the woods or into journalism and longhand
scrawl. I’ll do a sweat lodge or a Dead show. I’ll write scholarship. I’ll
write nothing but night poetry until I feel like the muse is wild and satisfied
with my commitment to her mysteries and commands. And then I’ll return to the
computer in the morning and that cardinal that always stares at me when I’m on
the path.
12 - When your writing gets stalled,
where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
As I mentioned above, I’ve always found inspiration in the
wilderness and live Dead. But, day to day, when the Rockies aren’t right
outside my backdoor (as they were one summer) and the Dead aren’t on tour, it’s
the exorcisms of exercise, yoga, and playing live music with my friends that
returns me most reliably to the source. I’m a gym rat. I like getting lost in
the reps and the sweat and doing laps in the pool. I also have a couple wonderful
yoga instructors who resist the American impulse to make yoga just another form
of cardio. They organize their practice around poetry and vision and the people
who attend their classes tend to have unorthodox spiritualities. Those
meditations and the silences and conversations that flow out of them decalcify
my mind weekly, although not as frequently during this pandemic. But more than
anything, it’s music—listening and playing. I don’t know where I’d be without
Viva la Muerte. So many writers treat music like an outsider or a child or an
inferior form of storytelling, but I view great songwriting as literature and
always try to remember that when poets used to invoke the muse, they would ask
her to sing. Music is the source.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of
home?
I grew up in Winchester, Virginia, a city that used to be
the apple capital of the country—orchards everywhere. My friends and I camped
in those orchards and drove old beaters down the lanes between those scraggly
trees on summer nights when we were teenagers, often throwing each other from
the backs of trucks or the roofs of old station-wagons. Sometimes, I would see
the Haitian migrant workers picking apples for the Byrd family orchards (same
folks who ran the newspaper) and I wouldn’t think twice about race or class.
White people owned the orchards and black people were shipped in from poor
foreign countries to pick the fruit. That’s just the way it is, right? Of
course, those apple trees are all gone now. In Winchester, our grocery stores,
like most American grocery stores, carry Chinese apples. Our McMansion
neighborhoods are now like tombs for the orchards—streets and complexes named
after the apples. But I can still smell that sweet cidery air.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that
books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,
whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I have a friend named Chris Porter who is an incredible
collagist. Whenever I dive into his work on Instagram, I’m reminded of what
William S. Burroughs taught me back when I was first getting turned on to
literature in high school: Good art cuts up the linear mind. Good art cuts up
that mechanical mode of thinking that politicizes and tribalizes, dropping
everyone into binary boxes. As Wendell Berry says, “Every day, do something
that won’t compute.” I love collage for those reasons, and also because it’s
fun, especially if you’re building one with someone else. It returns you to the
mind of a child—the way it compels you to use your fingers and answer images
with images and put fun sticky words on top of mean or boring words.
Jennifer Orth-Veillon has a fascinating blog about World War I. She asked me to contribute to it last year, and what I wrote about was
the cut-up method that most people credit Burroughs with discovering. Although
it’s true that Burroughs did popularize literary collage in books like the Nova
trilogy and Naked Lunch, there was this World War I era writer named John Dos Passos who was practicing cut-up slash collage twenty years before Burroughs in
this trilogy called USA. For those interested in biographical criticism,
one thing I discovered while doing research, is that the inspiration for Dos
Passos’ ad man character, J. Ward Moorehouse, was Ivy Lee, the uncle of
Burroughs. Lee was an actual factual historical advertising agent who got lured
into developing propaganda for the American government and the character of
Moorehouse is one of the first literary studies in what happens when the wall
between state and entertainment breaks down. Before Burroughs developed his
avant-garde technique, he was a young man in a family who witnessed,
first-hand, what propaganda can do to a man’s mind. Yes, everything is
personal. Burroughs cared about propaganda because it was part of his lived
experience. Advertising, broadly, and propaganda, specifically, tries to cut
into our consciousness in the name of profit and nationalism, anxieties
relievable by purchase, fear assuaged by cash. It riddles the minds of aunts
and uncles and struggling teenagers. Collage like you see with Porter and
Burroughs, on the other hand, cuts into that riddling and helps you reclaim
your courage and intuition, that sense of play that’s so essential to good
writing and being a brave and fun human being.
15 - What other writers or writings
are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Recently, as I’ve been finishing my dissertation on
post-9/11 soldier-writers, I’ve been thinking a lot about Don DeLillo and the
growing community of Iraqi authors who have focused on describing America’s Global
War on Terror from a point of view other than that of our soldiers. What
DeLillo woke me up to twenty years ago is the same thing I see in Iraqi authors
like Ahmed Saadawi (author of Frankenstein in Baghdad) right now in more
granular ways: the American idea isn’t the only one out there. DeLillo’s work
is decisively and intricately cosmopolitan, even to the point that one sees him
questioning some of the problems of the cosmopolitan point of view (like its
tendency toward elitism) in novels like Underworld and Cosmopolis.
To subscribe to some species of cosmopolitanism, the idea that one has a
special responsibility to those beyond the vaporous borders of one’s nation,
seems increasingly remedial as we build this globalized world and see America
export its systemic racism abroad, but to see one’s self as a citizen of the
world means more than just knowing a few facts about China and Russia.
Strangely, when you dig into the literature of some of these countries where
America has more than just a carbon footprint—like Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
the Congo, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, and Vietnam—you start to learn more about
those countries and their customs, sure, but you also begin to learn more about
America and some of these complex problems we’re facing, like the war on
terror, automation, and climate change. But more to the literary point, in
Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, what I think readers will discover is
that even the Iraqi idea of evil is now a composite of ideas repurposed from an
English novel and an American movie, a beast that is itself a composite of body
parts reflecting this collage notion of war and the world.
16 - What would you like to do that
you haven't yet done?
At the end of his life, Ken Kesey obsessed over making a
movie about his time on the magic bus, Furthur. He made the argument, in an
interview, that if Shakespeare were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing
literature or drama. He would be telling the people’s stories and the people’s
stories are movies. That’s changing. Now, it seems, longform television—that
hybrid of TV, movie, and literature’s more in-depth concerns with character—is
the people’s choice. So, I’d like to go there and adapt my most recent novel, American
Delphi, as a longform sequence. The Delphi saga is poised to be a
trilogy, but there’s also an open-ended quality to it that will lend the story
to creative input from others who may wish to grow the tale beyond its literary
borders. As we speak, I’m working with Naima Said, a Palestinian writer and director with a great Horror film podcast, on building that script. Incidentally,
I’d also like Viva la Muerte to one day play Red Rocks, that great natural
amphitheater out in Colorado.
17 - If you could pick any other
occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you
would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
When I was eight and bored in a third grade English class,
I took to memorizing the names of the American presidents I could see on a
poster that perimetered the room. Upon accomplishing this feat and having my
parents show it off as a kind of parlor trick at parties and family reunions, I
got it in my head that, instead of being a professional baseball player or a
fireman, maybe I’ll one day be one of those men like James Garfield or John F.
Kennedy. The delusion of grandeur implicit in such a dream job is obvious to me
now and scares me. I canvassed for Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Even now,
in 2020, I still sometimes get so excited about what America can do that I
still entertain the thought of jumping in. But then I look back at Obama and
reflect on how powerless he felt, so unable to accomplish his basic goals like
closing Guantanamo Bay. I think about how depressed I used to get as I listened
to one of my students at North Carolina A&T, an historically black college,
agonize over Obama using drones to assassinate people of color all over Africa
and the Middle East because, as Obama confessed in his memoir, the “machinery”
of war commanded him to do so.
Sometimes, I think back to a summer when I was twenty and
working for a blind lawyer. I was studying the LSATs and was ready to launch a
career as a trial attorney and genuinely believed that arc would one day take
me to the White House. But cobbling together those documents for that old man
and witnessing the zero-sum game of American law—always the winners and the
losers—gave me a sinking feeling, a claustrophobia. As the summer went on and I
tried to drink that feeling away, I felt like I was being asked to live someone
else’s life. There was one day, in particular, when I was speaking with one of
our clients who wanted a divorce from her husband. Long story short, she told
me about the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her husband. She gave me the
details, as they say—the particulars of his sadism. When I reported back to
Joe, the attorney, what she’d told me, I could tell that Joe found my interest
in her pain touching but irrelevant. “Immaterial to the case,” were his words.
Well, those details—the sensory details of a human life—were not immaterial to
me. I wanted to organize my life around them.
18 - What made you write, as opposed
to doing something else?
How does one begin to answer that question? Maybe
everything depended on my father’s improvised bedtime stories and my mother’s
belief that Kennedy was killed by his government and my sister asking me what
SHE wanted out of life and this one winter day when I fell through the ice of a
lake and my brother reached down and pulled me up. I often go back to those
four family contexts. My father showed me the fun in riffing and jamming,
making what’s right in front of you part of the story. My mother showed me that
the story in the news wasn’t always the real story. My sister would often,
half-playfully and half-seriously, ask me when we were children, “What do I
want?” She knew that my brother wanted to be a doctor and that I, apparently,
wanted to be a lawyer, but as I got closer to law school, her question became
my own. There she was, the babe of the family, sitting in her highchair,
watching all of us at dinner all those years, talking about all the things we
thought we knew and knew we wanted, but she wasn’t sure. She didn’t know. There
was a great destabilizing honesty in that, and I think about it all the time.
Where do so many stories start? With my sister, Katee, and the confession
that’s implied in her question: I DON’T KNOW.
And then there was that day on Lake Holiday. I was four
and carried a Captain America matchbox car in my pocket. I carried that car
everywhere. My father took my brother and me with him to retrieve a red canoe
from the lake and we were told to go sit on the marina while he tied the canoe
to the roof of our old gray Oldsmobile with its arcade carpet in the back. We
did as we were told and sat above the ice of that lake, playing with our
matchbox cars. We positioned them on the ice and raced them and crashed them
and made the sounds of motors. But then I let mine go, maybe just to see how
far it might travel on that perfect surface. Well, I suppose it went further
than I expected. I couldn’t reach it so, without thinking, I stood up and
walked out on the ice and I fell through. I remember trying to come up and
hitting my head on the underside and feeling a panic unlike anything I’d ever
felt before, a claustrophobia and breathlessness that still resonates right
now. Miraculously, my brother found me and grabbed my hand. Then that night, as
my father was washing my body with warm water in the garage sink and my mother
was putting my clothes in the dryer, she found that Captain America car in my
pocket and handed it to me. One thing I realized that day was that I’d nearly
died and that my brother had saved my life. That brush with death woke me up to
something I’m not going to try to name here, but it has a great deal to do with
who I am and why I write.
19 - What was the last great book you
read? What was the last great film?
Right now, I’m reading Winter Counts by David Heska
Wanbli Weiden, and if the first fifty pages are any indication, this is going
to go down as a great book, so fingers crossed for Virgil Wounded Horse, the
narrator. I hope he can guide me through like his namesake from antiquity.
Before that I’d say Phil Klay’s new novel, Missionaries. Klay’s one of
the authors I’m studying for Camp No, my dissertation, and I loved his
first collection, Redeployment, so I had high hopes for Missionaries.
But there were moments where my faith wavered, and after I finished it, I
remember thinking that those slow uncertain intervals—where the book ceased being
a rocket ship and instead created space for the characters to breathe and doubt
and ponder things like mercy as a species of injustice—those were the moments
that, for me, made the book great. When you take that risk and allow your
characters to be human and depart from the linear expectations of the
page-turner, you can lose your story, but if you’re sensitive you can go down
those rabbit holes and return and your reader will follow you. Would I have
followed Klay all the way through if he were not the National Book Award
winning author of Redeployment? Did he earn that slack? Would his
editors have permitted him those wide berths that gave such shape and dimension
to his characters and allowed him to tie together Pennsylvania, Afghanistan,
and Colombia? Those extra-textual questions are fascinating to me and get at
the root of some of the thornier aesthetic issues of our time: Who is allowed
to tell certain stories? How does biography shape destiny in the literary
marketplace and in the intimate psyche of the reader and writer?
As far as film, I’ll go with first thought best thought: Mank.
James Tate Hill and I watched that the other night and, although I suspect we
both liked it for different reasons, I think, broadly speaking, we both were
impressed by how original it was. I had never heard of Herman Mankiewicz. I had
no idea that he was the man behind the curtain—the author—of Citizen Kane.
I thought Oldman’s performance was brilliant. Here’s this “court jester”—Mank—serving
up the truth to William Randolph Hearst and corporate Hollywood during the
Great Depression. Mank is a truth-teller, but as the Depression approaches and
belts tighten, you can see that Hollywood has increasingly short patience with
the fool’s wisdom, his critiques of the system. Mank decides to back the
socialist author, Upton Sinclair, for governor of California in 1934, and it
nearly gets him canceled like so many folks in the American media who dared
back Bernie Sanders. Like Oldman’s Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, Mankiewicz
is a man whose story will forever be attached to a more famous man—Orson Welles—the
one outsider in Hollywood who dared support the peek behind the Hearstian curtain.
The film is shot in black and white, which initially
suggests another time, another Hollywood. But, of course, very little has
changed. There continues to be very porous borders between state, finance, and
entertainment—DC, New York, and Hollywood. But any number of think pieces or
podcasts could touch on that hairy subject. The thing that makes Mank so
original and powerful is the way it flips everything via the black and white
skins of nostalgia. You go back in time to the good old days of the great white
men—Hearst and Welles—but Fincher hardly gives any lines at all to the
bloviations of the leading man and the mogul. No, Fincher has hidden in the
future in the costume of the past. He is a writer’s writer. His main character
is the author and it’s nothing short of magic the way he and Oldman convert
this talking head for the working class—this mind—into a compelling embodiment
of the elephant in America’s room: our blind appetite for propaganda.
20 - What are you currently working
on?
I’m working on the second installment of American
Delphi and an essay called “Teaching Conspiracy Theories at a Historically
Black College.” I’m almost done with the essay, but I’m not entirely sure I
want to go out with it because it touches on extremely sensitive material. Over
the past twenty years I’ve watched Republicans and Democrats weaponize conspiracy
theories as a way of destroying each other. Whether it’s Republicans convincing
folks the pandemic is a hoax or Democrats destroying a woman of color like
Tulsi Gabbard by suggesting she’s a Russian agent, it’s the same old story from
Mank: American propaganda. Meanwhile, our mainstream media continually
takes the simpleton’s stance by paternalistically cautioning its readers, i.e.
our citizens, away from conspiracy theories. The contemporary “hot take” on
conspiracy theories is that they are purely the domain of incels and toothless
and illiterate inbreds from the far right.
Of course, this is not the whole story.
Back when I was teaching at North Carolina A&T, the
historically black college that educated the mastermind of 9/11, I saw another
side. Many of my African-American students would urge me to watch conspiracy
theory documentaries and to teach them—to use them to inspire critical
thinking. Conditioned as I was by white corporate media, I was initially
reluctant to respect my students’ wishes and tastes. However, I felt torn after
awhile. I didn’t want to be one of those crusty white teachers who only taught
his specialty or simply built a syllabus around the greatest hits from the
great white canon. So, after doing a dive into the literature on how a teacher
might do this—use conspiracy theories in the classroom—I decided to take my
students’ advice and meet them where they lived. And it was transformative.
Rather than view the conspiracy theory from the POV of the privileged white kid
with an obsession over the assassination of the privileged white Kennedy
brothers, I found myself looking at the conversation from the POV of a people
who had, historically, experienced actual criminal conspiracy after actual criminal
conspiracy, often under the guise of science and criminal justice. Using viral
underground documentaries like Zeitgeist in the introductory rhetoric
and composition classroom, I came to see the conspiracy theory in a new light.
It was not always a place for offering simple answers in the face of complex
history. In many ways, it was a place for raising questions, and in a country
so riddled by propaganda, good questions, increasingly, can seem more
nourishing than answers. But this grows so dicey in the contemporary pandemic
moment where we just witnessed Sandra Lindsay, an African-American nurse, as
the first person to take the Covid-19 vaccine. Does understanding the murder of
Fred Hampton and Malcom X or the framing of the Central Park Five help us
understand our country’s growing resistance to official narratives? Yes, of
course. But what about MK-Ultra and Tuskegee and the systemic use of poor
people and people of color as government guinea pigs? When so many blacks have
indeed been unwittingly used as test subjects for government science, how do we
begin the urgent and healing conversation that will give national and
international science—global health—the credibility it requires to be effective
in the coming decades? These are the kinds of issues the essay wrangles with.
Like with most of my work, I’m trying to navigate that strange pastoral zone
where history and mystery meet and swap costumes. But I’m not sure about this
one. What do you think? Should I go out with it?
12or 20 (second series) questions;
