Patrick Gorham

AfricaWrites is an online cultural resource and reference website. The e-zine provides detailed stories, images and information to the public and serves as a resource for people who might not ordinarily be interested in learning about the unique history and cultures of Africa. The organization also works with the governments of West Africa to provide educational programs and sponsorship for over 182 children in villages throughout Guinea. They also sponsor medical assistance and agricultural programs within Guinea, Liberia, and Rwanda.

Patrick Gorham is a researcher, writer, editor, photographer, explorer and the director of the non-profit African cultural research team, AfricaWrites.com and the Cultural Studies Foreign Liaison (Focal Point) for the University of Kankan (Guinea, West Africa).

Interviewed by Josh Korenblat

/One/: How did you become interested in AfricaWrites?

Patrick Gorham: My interest in African culture began in the 1970’s, during my childhood in the United States. As a child, my mother told me stories of Africa, its great chiefs and pharaohs. My grandparents taught me the lessons of my elders, which were passed along my family through generations of slavery.

Current events informed me too. As I grew, I listened in awe to my uncles Angelo, Enoch, and Calvin, who talked about the greatness of my larger-than-life hero, the boxer Muhammad Ali; a few years earlier in distant Zaire, he had fought to recapture the world heavyweight title against the unstoppable George Foreman. And like most kids, I learned to dance. The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, taught me how to get down with African dances like the Watutsi. Shaped by my childhood experiences, I gained a larger sense of identity, a sense of purpose and a cultural curiosity to see and someday learn more about Africa, my ancestral homeland.

As an adult, this interest grew, and I researched continuously, hoping to learn more about the cultures of Africa. In early 1999, I checked out books about African history at my local library and read about the continent’s people and their traditions. Over time, I realized that much of the public information available lacked an African perspective. Despite the excellent studies, observations, and evaluations of Africa’s cultures conducted by many renowned scholars, I felt that a need existed: a greater emphasis on research in Africa from an African perspective, by Africans.

Life in Africa would be more accurately represented if somehow each unique ethnic group were able to present their distinct histories, stories, and cultures. From this idea, the original concept for AfricaWrites was born. In 2005, I visited Africa to research the rituals and ceremonies of Guinea, where I met Robert Saa Millimono, Mr. Moussa Kourouma, and Mr. Aboubacar Fall. They each shared my vision and passion for research in Africa and became the first members of the AfricaWrites staff. Since then, we’ve worked tirelessly as a Guinean non-governmental organization across the entire continent to record the sights, sounds, rituals and history of each and every African ethnic group.

/One/: Is your work not simply to chronicle present-day incidents and the lives of people today, but to share the histories and the cultures of peoples in Africa with the outside world, which may remain unaware of the diversity and richness of African culture?

PG: By sharing the richness of African cultural heritage through our website and via the African Cultural Studies Center of Kankan University, we hope to elevate the level of dialogue and understanding of African culture beyond many of the misconceptions present in modern, global popular culture and academia today. We chronicle events past and present in the hope of collectively, in conjunction with the respective ethnic groups involved, assemble a more accurate narrative of the peoples and cultures of Africa.

/One/: Why do you consider the work of AfricaWrites to be so urgent at present?

PG: Our work is a constant race against time. With each passing day, we lose an opportunity to learn from aging African elders and with them, opportunities to unlock many complex mysteries of the past. And we risk losing the ability to understand the complexities and historical details that inform Africa’s cultural present.

/One/: Please tell us about some of your cultural findings in South Sudan.

PG: The first cultural expedition of the AfricaWrites team in Sudan was in January of 2009. During that time we conducted studies of the rituals and ceremonies of the Ed Damzin and East Equatoria regions. A year later, during the summer of 2010, we returned to Sudan to study the rituals and ceremonies of West Equatoria and East Equatoria Sudan. Our research, limited in scope due to the rapidly evolving political climate within the country, focused on the Azande, Baka, N’gaams, Mundari, Acholi and Lago ethnic groups.

The findings of the AfricaWrites team, part of which were published on the AfricaWrites website, were presented in narrative form, mirroring the method by which the information was provided by Azande elders and powerful Azande traditional doctors, known as Abinza.

The Abinza gave insight into the rituals of decision-making faced by the kingdom under the rule of mighty King Buduwe and the process of “wasting of the water,” the Vu Ime, to appease powerful spirits and bring peace throughout the land to thwart impending disaster.

/One/: In South Sudan, have the Janjaweed and the forces of the North tried to expunge the languages, art, and culture of the peoples? How have they done this?

PG: In the past, forces allied with northern Sudan have sent militias—such as the Janjaweed-affiliated Ambororo, collaborating with Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)—to kill, maim, rape, and pillage South Sudan, and abduct child soldiers for the LRA army, sewing the seeds of instability and undermining the government of South Sudan. By initiating waves of sporadic and virtually unpredictable brutal killings and abductions, northern Sudan’s government-sponsored insurgents forced thousands to flee from their homes across the regions of Western Equatoria and Bahr Ghazal. Through these acts of ethnic cleansing, many longstanding communities and traditions were displaced, forcing evacuations and resettlement in other regions of South Sudan.

Ethnic cleansing breaks down cultural unity by dispersing ethnicities through violence. Those effected are forced to flee from their traditional, professional, and cultural environments to lesser concentrations of their ethnic groupings within larger and possibly more dominant cultures—without the resources of their prior environments, traditional physical, professional, and spiritual. Today, the government of South Sudan has since taken great measures to keep the public safe, deploying military forces to intercept and halt rebel activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ambororo.

/One/: Are the cultures that you interact with under threat politically, or more often are they simply changing or disappearing due to forces of modernization?

PG: Cultures are usually more complicated than we see them externally and are at  shaped in ways both big and small by their political environments. Although a lifestyle can change and practices can be altered, people generally adapt ancient or traditional ways of life to their continuously evolving surroundings and environments, physical, spiritual or political. Sometimes, if you look closely enough or have the patience to try, you will find that despite modern aesthetic changes, many of the ancient cultures of Africa survive intact beneath the aesthetics of modern dress or habitat. The politics of culture usually depend on the dominant religion and ethnic group of the nation. Established colonial religions have done little to halt the practice of traditional African spirituality.

In Italy, for example, it’s well known that many dialects of the Italian language gradually disappeared following the invention of the television. Television use is widespread and growing in Africa, but not to the same extent that it factors within Europe, the United States, and Asia. That said, as populations grow, shift, decrease or are replaced by a larger dominant culture, within Africa, sometimes language dialects merge or are enveloped by the dominate cultural group.

/One/: When various groups create works of art, how do the people see them and use them? In Western societies for instance, the more useful an object becomes, the less it is viewed as “art.” Instead, often art rests in white-walled museums, far from the concerns of daily life. How central is art to various African cultures?

PG: In Africa today, modern concepts of art coexist with the traditional functions of art. In many African cultures, art and functionality go hand-and-hand. We see this in the multiple forms and distinctive roles the various Nyao mask entities play, representing the Gule, Chitere and Songowe of Zambia. Mask entities revealed during Nyao rituals identify the level of initiation achieved by initiates within the Nyao society. And today, in southwestern Sudan, the finely crafted iron blade of the Mambere is carried by Azande chiefs and dignitaries during ceremonies that signify status within traditional Azande society. In these examples, the function of art is to identify the status and standard of the Kpinga bearer, representing marriage to a certain number of wives.

Art carries meaning in Africa through its ability to convey words and ideas across boundaries, touching all aspects of life and death. Virtually all traditional African art forms serve a particular function.  The Tambaa of the West African Sanana, for instance, is a weapon provided to village ancestors by the ancient Koma spirits of the land. The various decorative animal shapes each represent a particular spirit manifestation that may be summoned for battle or ritual purpose upon the command of its wielder. In this instance, art communicates directly with the ancient Koma and provides a gateway between the physical world and the spiritual world, inhabited by the Koma.

Ritual and dance bridge the boundaries between worlds of the spirit and the physical. In the example of the See Ze Lee, the rite of spiritual cleansing and purification of evil spirits, ritual and dance are used to command spirits for the purpose of healing. In contrast, other dances or rituals, such as the Zere, the dance of the chimpanzees performed by the Mano peoples, celebrate the living and endow participants with the pragmatic attributes of strength, stamina and courage, especially in war. The Zere dance symbolizes the Kan Kie Mia, a chimpanzee family native to the nearby Nimba mountains. Revered as the reincarnated ancestors of the Mano peoples, these creatures animate the most sacred rituals of Mano culture.

/One/: In the West, the individual enjoys privileged status and some believe that one can determine his or her destiny without relying upon help from others. How is the individual viewed in traditional African cultures?

PG: Although the dynamics may sometimes differ based on ethnicity, economic activity, religion and or local politics, there is a great emphasis on the sense of family, village, and community. There is the belief that one’s destiny and the destiny of his or her community are intertwined. Among the cultures that we have observed, the needs of the individual are usually second to those of community.

Photo: Pieter M. Van Hattem

Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and is a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award and the LA Times Book Prize, as well as a longlist finalist for the UK’s Orange Prize. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001; and the bestselling The Keep. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

Interviewed by Joshua Korenblat

/One/: In A Visit from the Goon Squad, I noted the epigraph from In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, which comments on our inevitable attempt to reconcile our current selves with the person we may have been in childhood. Do you believe that we are different people at different times in our lives, depending on our social roles, responsibilities, and relationships—that over the course of our life, we are not one person, but many? How does this insight relate to the characters in your book and your own life and family experience?

Jennifer Egan: I don’t believe that we are different people at different times. A continuity exists even though it may feel like we are different people over the course of time. The passage of time has such a radical effect on all of us—the experience of time passing, the discoveries and tragedies of life. We feel that effect most profoundly when looking back through the chasm, at the version of oneself who didn’t know about all of those things that would come. To some degree, experience is everything: what happens to you ends up being your life. On the other hand, there are things about us that are clear from the beginning. I see that as a parent. And much of life is chance and luck. There is only so much you can do. It’s a paradox.

/One/: Do you have certain needs that are fulfilled more from journalistic writing than through fiction, and vice versa?

JE: Yes, very much so. As endeavors, journalism and fiction writing seem opposite, yet they complement each other with a perfect symmetry. Thematically, links exist between the two, for sure—I take assignments that I’m interested in, and that often means something in the journalism will find its way into the fiction. Journalism is about getting out of the house and forgetting about myself completely. Fiction can be like that too—either way, I’m not thinking about myself—but with journalism, I’m trying to synthesize a huge body of information. Some of that information consists of conversations with people, but overall it’s the phenomena of the outside world that I’m trying to understand in a complete way, and then represent in a concise way relative to how much I know—all for the reader. In fiction, I’m trying to create or suggest a world that I’ve invented. So there’s a sense of discovery and surprise as I’m writing fiction that I don’t have so much with journalism. With journalism, I’m solving a mystery: I’m a detective walking into the middle of a complicated reality: I’m taking notes, looking for clues, finding patterns and keys. But with fiction, I’m just trying to create an alternate reality. It may feel as though I’m discovering an alternate reality, but of course I’m creating it.

/One/: Some novelists begin with conventional forms of narrative in early works, and then gravitate toward complexity as their skills sharpen and wary editors give them more latitude. You seem to revel in novelty. Each book that you write echoes with a different genre; your prior novel, The Keep, has Gothic undertones, even as you break the ordained rules of fiction writing. When you first began to write fiction with an eye toward publishing, did your unconventional, genre-breaking works make it easier or more difficult to pitch your work to editors? Did you ever fear being misunderstood? How did you find sympathetic eyes?

JE: My first novel is totally conventional. There is nothing genre-breaking about it. I did not break any genre conventions until my third book.

/One/: Were you hoping to break the rules sooner?

JE: No, the story I wanted to tell for my first novel didn’t require any genre-breaking to be done effectively. So I didn’t feel moved to do that. And I don’t think I had the skills yet. My mom was an art dealer for a long time. When an artist presented her with beautiful abstractions, she would say, I want to see your drawings. My mom didn’t have much faith in those abstractions until she had seen a mastery of conventional realism. To some degree, I was trying to get my realism straight in those earlier books. The Invisible Circus is certainly ambitious in its ideas, but the structure is not anything you haven’t seen before. There is an LSD trip that I’m pretty proud of—a crazy stream of consciousness—but it’s a coming-of-age story that didn’t require radical storytelling. I was working at the edge of my abilities just to pull that off. I think it would have been out of the question that I could have done something innovative at that point. With Look at Me, I knew very consciously that what I was trying to do was different from what I had done before. I felt nervous about it. That was a book I wrote with much suffering. Some books are that way, and others aren’t. I felt so little confidence as I was working on it—as if somehow I wouldn’t be allowed to do it. I thought, you’re just not the person who does these things, so why are you trying? But I was compelled to do it, so I kept going even while conflicted. Over the years, I felt a kind of agony: the book seemed doomed. I didn’t know what I was doing, and yet I felt really moved to do it. That book was the turning point. Since then, I haven’t felt drawn back to straight conventional fiction. It doesn’t seem exciting to write that way anymore.

/One/: So you like the challenge of a formal structure, or at very least you are drawn to new forms, regardless of whether it’s a challenge?

JE: I want to work on stories that require a more innovative storytelling. Novelty is the fun. Covering territory that I have covered before is not what writing is to me. There are so many things you can do in the world. There are things you can do that would make a huge difference to people. You can help the poor. You can tutor kids or work for a not-for-profit. Why is writing worth one’s time and energy? Why do this? That’s always the question. If all I could do was what I had done before, only in a slightly different way, I wouldn’t have any impetus to do it. That would be a sign that I’m winding down. For now, though, I’m excited about continuing to move forward.

/One/: By engaging in this process of discovery with each new work, are you hoping the reader will experience that process of discovery too, that sense of excitement?

JE: That excitement is implicit—it’s what I write for, selfishly. I don’t think much about the reader as I’m working; I try to feel pleased with my work. I make the presumption that if I’m excited—which sometimes really is a presumption—that’s my best shot at exciting other people. It’s not that I’m in a vacuum. I do have a group of readers that I share work with right from the beginning. If they’re not digging it, I know there’s a problem. It’s not as though I am following my own rudder and not listening to anyone else. I’ve made that mistake once. My first novel was atrocious. I thought it was exciting and everyone else hated it. I don’t want that gap to appear again. So I am very careful to make sure that I’m connecting with others right from the start: to confirm the work has a pulse.

/One/: How much do you judge the first drafts of your work? I read that you handwrite your first drafts on yellow legal pads. Do you do that as a way to keep yourself in a creative flow, in a way that you can’t find on screen?

JE: Yes, that’s exactly why. I don’t want to think and judge. I just try to let something happen. I’m waiting for my unconscious mind to kick-in. Once I have the interesting material, I use my conscious mind to shape it, and try to understand it and make it fulfill whatever vision it seems it could be manifesting. But I can’t come up with the material consciously.

/One/: You like to generate potentially too much material?

JE: I don’t know if it’s too much—it’s often wrong. Much of it is no good; I’m just looking for the part that is good. It doesn’t matter what proportion of it is good, as long as there’s something that’s interesting. The first draft of The Keep was really, really terrible. Not much was good in there. But there were a couple of insights that proved really useful. The critical insight turned out to be that the story was being written by a prisoner in a prison writing class. I never would have discovered that if I hadn’t just written it and seen it on the page. It’s unfortunate that I had to spew out so much dreck to see that, but the insight ended up being very useful to me.

/One/: When these characters arrive on the page, how much do you determine from personal experience? I noticed that in Goon Squad, there probably are characters you’ve compiled from personal experience, and others, like the cruel dictator with a penchant for soft blue hats, who I’m hoping you haven’t met in person.

JE: I haven’t met any of them. I don’t use people I know at all. I’m bad at that. I find it very difficult to do, because it’s hard to know how to jump in with the fiction when you are basing it on something real. I make everybody up. That makes it simple: I don’t know any of them; I have never met any of them before. They are all strangers to me, and therefore it’s liberating to write from their point-of-view. The dictator is no more unfamiliar to me than anyone else.

/One/: Did you seek to subvert the reader’s expectations regarding stock characters—such as the music mogul, the punk rocker, the confused college freshman, the Hollywood starlet?

JE: I think so. The minute anything about a person has been established, my immediate question is, how do I undermine it? People are complicated, and often what first seems clear about them ends up being contradicted. That’s how I think about characterization. In Goon Squad, my first inkling that Bennie Salazar existed was when Sasha mentions to her date that her former boss sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee and sprays pesticide in his armpits. I thought, oh, that’s a funny description of a record producer. It’s kind of a cliché. We don’t really know what that means, but it seems like shorthand for decadence. After I finished the chapter, I found myself thinking, yeah, but why does he do those things? The inner logic of it was missing. It’s just a laugh-line, but it intrigued me. I thought, this guy is not behaving this way because he thinks that’s a portrait of a decadent record producer—that’s something you think from the outside. He has an actual reason for doing these things. What is the reason? And that’s why I wrote the next chapter. Let’s put it this way: if I’m writing about someone, and I’m not feeling those contradictions and even an undermining happening, I know that the character is not taking shape as he or she will have to take shape ultimately, to work. You need those contradictions for any real pulse, and that’s what I’m looking for in real life and on the page.

/One/: You seek this contradiction even in a so-called flat character, who provides a function in a scene, like a waiter in a restaurant?

JE: To me, if someone is coming into focus at all, then I’m looking for complexity. Even a peripheral character. In a way, Goon Squad is literally all about the complexity of peripheral characters. That’s the whole logic that moves the book forward. You catch someone out of the corner of your eye, and then you’re plunged into the middle of their inner life. If that’s not a testament to the complexity of peripheral characters, I don’t know what would be. That’s the whole question the book is built around. That’s opposed to a more conventional book, where one of the big questions on the table is usually, what is going to happen? That’s not the question that drives you in this book. It’s much more a question of, what did that used to be like, or what did the world look like to that person, or what was that person thinking at that moment? Those questions guide the reader. If you’re not interested in those kinds of questions, I don’t know if you really want to read this book. The question of what will happen is not really on the table. We’re moving around too much. And I answer that question frequently: I tell people exactly what will happen. I leap into the future sometimes. Again, it’s not really that curiosity that’s compelling the reader along, it’s some other kind of curiosity, it’s a curiosity about the inner-lives of people who may appear clichéd on the surface.

/One/: In Goon Squad, you have many different voices and worlds that you are weaving together.

JE: In a way, it’s sort of a microcosm of what I’ve tried to do from book-to-book already. But in Goon Squad, I just tried to do it chapter-to-chapter, to create a book that is diverse as possible, with a huge range of tone and mood and approach, and yet still have it be one story. There’s always a basic technical challenge to each book. That was the challenge here.

/One/: Were you concerned about maintaining a narrative thread, or did you find it to be relatively easy once you got going, that you were able to take a minor character in one chapter and have that character reemerge later, and trust the reader would be able to stay on board with you during that journey?

JE: I knew that was the big danger of this book. That’s a danger even when you have only two stories intertwining—the reader will prefer one. So I knew that was the big question mark: would the reader be able to rise to the occasion with me, would I make it worth the reader’s while? Even though I don’t stress out about what the reader is thinking, I was on some level thinking about the reader when I made the rule that each chapter would be completely self-sufficient and not require anything around it for context. I’m asking much of the reader to start over every time; the least I could do is provide a big payoff every time, so we’ve had a complete experience every time. I hoped such a payoff would make the reading experience less onerous and more fun, reorienting the reader every time as well.

/One/: Many people have discussed a Facebook sensibility to the narrative structure, and you had mentioned The Sopranos as an inspiration in another interview. At the same time, some of the storytelling techniques seem reminiscent of sprawling Victorian novels, with narrative flights into omniscience, and minor characters who surprisingly reappear in later pages as major characters. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a classic example. Were these literary classics on your mind, or were you just writing to meet the needs of your particular work, and not really thinking about categories and the history of literature?

JE: It’s both: I was writing to meet the needs of this particular work, but I’ve been interested in nineteenth-century fiction for a while. It’s held up to be a bastion of convention, and yet if you really tried to emulate what those people were doing, you’d look like a mad person. Those works were free and flexible and able to do a lot more than most conventional fiction nowadays even tries to do. The other big inspiration for the book was Marcel Proust; he was not of the nineteenth century, but he had a kind of nineteenth-century sensibility, edging into a modernism of his own. He had an interest in the play of consciousness that in some ways is very much like James Joyce—but obviously the outcome is extremely different. I was reading Proust in my forties, and I thought, how would you write a book today about time? Proust does it in all kinds of interesting ways. He uses music both as a subject and as an organizing theme; the book works very musically. He lets the book unfold in a kind of real time; I mean, it’s so long, significant actual time passes as you read it. All of that is interesting to me, but I believed there would be no way to replicate that now. I would have to find a totally different way to write about time. I sensed that music would have to be an important part of this work; time and music are so intertwined. My question was, how could you suggest that great big sprawl of a nineteenth-century novel or early twentieth-century novel like Proust, and yet not have to create all that sprawl? How can you find a way to evoke it, without having to writing it all out? That’s what I wanted to do—suggest enough of the context that we feel its shape.

/One/: In Goon Squad, aging punk rockers rhapsodize and feel sentimental about the past. An art historian imagines himself becoming one with a crumbling Italian building. Such effects of art and music help defy time and its linear nature. You also have a main character in the novel who is a thief. Do you see time as the ultimate thief in the novel, and art and music as ways to defy time?

JE: Time was definitely my ultimate preoccupation, but time is at once an obvious and dull subject: time is passing; things change. I was interested in that as a deep pulse, but there also needs to be surface play to make a book lively, and I focused on that as my main concern.

/One/: Writers shine a light on illuminating truths of the human condition. Yet many of your characters are disingenuous. You have a thief, and many of the characters have criminal records. We already talked about the dictator. Was there thematically something that drew you to thieves, liars, and scoundrels?

JE: I don’t know if they are more thieving and lying and scoundrel-y than your average group of people. I’m not sure it’s so out-of-sync with normal life. As we all know, there’s a dissembling that’s a part of everyday life, and I’m interested in that chasm between the public and the private. In Look at Me, there’s this whole idea of the “shadow self.” One character is always looking at people and trying to find what she calls their “shadow self,” the true self that they’re trying to keep hidden from their more public persona. In my writing, it seems that I’m interested in that divide. Early on when I was working on Goon Squad, I published the first chapter about Sasha in The New Yorker. A friend said to me, if people were interested in what our society’s private life was like at this moment in time, this story would be helpful in answering that question. That really resonated with me. I thought, I’m really interested in that. I’m walking around looking at people, thinking what are they like to themselves, when no one is watching? There is no way to know. Those questions preoccupy me. In deceitful people, the chasm between who they are to themselves and who they are to other people seems even greater.

/One/: You often portray your characters with sympathy and understanding, in spite of their flaws.

JE: As a fiction writer, there’s no point in judging. That’s just so boring and didactic. To me, if you’re going to write about someone, it’s not that you have to make people think he’s perfect, but you have to find a way to reveal the inner logic of what he does. If you can’t, it’s going to be terrible. So that’s always my goal. I don’t say, oh, I’m going to write about a scoundrel—let’s see what the inner logic of his or her action is! It doesn’t happen that way. The inner logic is there well before any judgment exists. I’m looking at it from the inside.

/One/: So you observe, and you do not judge?

JE: Yes, but sometimes readers don’t like that. I’ve had people say to me, these people are weird, they’re bad, do you know people like this? I don’t know what to say to that. I feel like this is how people are—we are all complicated creatures. The reason everyone thinks their family is crazy, for example, is that they know their family very well. That’s a sign that most people are “crazy,” in quotes, if you look closely enough. I’m interested in looking that closely.

/One/: Many of the characters seem sentimental about their past—the punk rockers in Goon Squad have a surprisingly sentimental air to them. Yet you present their stories without sentiment. Do you see a difference between sentiment and sentimentality?

JE: Sentimentality is coercive. As a reader encountering sentimentality, I am manipulated to feel certain ways. I loathe that. I react with coldness. The minute I sense that happening, I just freeze up, and I don’t react the way the writer had expected. Sentiment—I don’t know how I would define that exactly, but to get to your point about characters looking back, I sympathize with their nostalgia, but I am not interested in nostalgia from a literary standpoint. It’s this vision—an earlier golden time, and how sad it is that it has passed. It’s fine for a character to hold that view, but I don’t think it makes sense for a book to hold that view. When I first arrived in New York, I found it worrisome to talk to people who had been in the city for ten or twenty years. Guess what? All of them felt that things had been better ten or twenty years ago, when they were new to New York. There is this tendency to universalize one’s own experience and impose it on the world as a trajectory of the world’s experience, and there you are, welcome to the world of older people saying, the good old days. I don’t buy any of that—even though at 48, I absolutely feel nostalgic for the past and worried about the future. Yet I am conscious of the personal nature of this feeling. My first novel is overtly nostalgic. That’s the point-of-view of the book. It’s about missing the sixties, an aching longing for that time. Lyricism tends to accompany nostalgia in a literary endeavor, and that can be quite lovely. But I was done with that at 31. I hope that I would not return to such subject matter without many other layers of complexity. So yes, the characters are nostalgic, but I am not nostalgic for them. I think that’s the difference between sentimentality and sentiment.

/One/: You live and work in New York. Many writers need a specific setting and community in which to flourish, and they even write about that place as if it were another character. How important is your community to your writing, both for the process of your writing and within your actual text?

JE: I have a multifaceted answer to that. I adore New York. Brooklyn is just one sliver of New York—it works well to be here with children. I don’t know if it’s made it easy for me to thrive as a writer, but it’s helped me a lot. Interestingly, what I love about New York is not necessarily community; it is, in part, anonymity. It’s bursting with so many worlds that are rich and complicated and don’t give a damn about the literary world. I really love that. I love the fact that it’s crowded. I get scared in the country. I don’t like the feeling that everyone is asleep; I like to know that someone very near me is wide awake—even though I need to go to bed! Of course, I used to partake of more of the action than I do now with kids—I certainly stayed out late and drank too many margaritas. Even as I committed excesses or sometimes couldn’t work as well as I wanted or had a hangover, I knew exactly what I was trying to do, and I was always thinking of what needed to get done. In my twenties, I was pretty serious. You might think being surrounded by other writers would be sustaining, but I don’t think that has mattered much. I do have some friends who are writers, and I adore them, and I definitely have relied heavily on my writing group, whose personnel has changed over the years, but the basic spirit of it has remained steady and a couple of the people have, too. It’s hard to imagine functioning without them. Yet I’m also not sure I couldn’t have replicated that somewhere else—you know, there are people all over the place—although maybe not, I don’t want to take it for granted.

New York is so inexhaustible, and that’s what has been so invaluable to me. There’s just so much here, any direction that you look. There’s a Vivian Gornick essay that I adore—I think it’s called, “Nobody Watches, Everybody Performs.” It’s about the sheer performance inherent in street life in New York. I’ve never owned a car. I love to walk. I love the subway; I’m thrust up against, often physically, people that I would never have occasion to talk to in normal life or meet. That’s gold. There is no way that I could replicate that experience elsewhere. New York has been critical not so much because there are a bunch of writers around, but rather because there are so many other kinds of people around.

/One/: Even though you write about punk rockers in Goon Squad, I found an appropriate quote for this novel about music from another musician, the composer Aaron Copland—like you, he mixed pop and serious culture in his work; for instance, he adapted cowboy tunes for ballet scores about Billy the Kid. Copland writes about polyphonic music, or music with many voices, “Even supposing that you do not hear all of the voices equally well, there is every likelihood that when you return to it again, there will be something for you to listen to. You can always hear it from a different angle.” Do you hope that when readers return to your book, which has so many voices in it, that they will find new passages and understandings?

JE: It’s funny, when you were reading the Copland quote, I thought, that’s how I feel about living in New York! I’m always ecstatic when people say they have been moved to read my work more than once, yet I never engaged in the fantasy of a person going back and reading Goon Squad repeatedly. I was focused on how the reader would navigate the book and have a real experience in a single reading.

/One/: As Keats says, “Unheard melodies are sweeter.” Is there some poignancy to the fact that the characters’ lives spin around music, but as the reader, we cannot hear the tunes? We can hear the lyrics sometimes, but through the writing, we can’t actually hear the music.

JE: I didn’t think of that as poignant, but it is a funny tension whenever you are writing about music. In Goon Squad, I wrote a chapter in Powerpoint, where the character, Lincoln, discusses how musicians use pauses in their work. One funny thing about working in Powerpoint: I could represent pauses visually, which obviously I couldn’t do only in text, where all I could say was, “There was a pause.” Which of course was not actually a pause. Creating those pauses visually in Powerpoint was really exciting. Even though I feel worried about the future of the book and all of this wacky digital media, the idea of adding new dimensions to a novel is exciting. Powerpoint allowed me to do that. I cannot take that away from it—hard as it was to use it to write fiction. I ended up creating a color version of the Powerpoint presentation, which I worked unbelievably hard to create. It’s on my website. You can watch it as a slideshow, and you will hear all the songs that have pauses, which Lincoln discusses: ten seconds of music with the pause inserted. In a funny way, that was my chance to provide a soundtrack. When I look at the printed book chapter, that doesn’t even look like the real Powerpoint to me anymore. Now that I know what it looks like in color, I just feel, ach, how can I even look at it in black-and-white? It lacks that vibrancy. So, for me there is a soundtrack. And many of the music groups that I reference really did exist—anyone who has a memory of that time in music will be able to conjure a sense of the sound. Proust writes a lot about a composer called Vinteuil. In Proust’s text, this composer wrote a particular melody that comes up again and again, and of course, we can’t hear the melody. I don’t think that’s a problem. I feel like I can conjure the music; I can create it myself. I don’t need to hear audio. If fiction is doing its job, we can conjure the sound for ourselves.

Ken Chen

Ken Chen is the 2009 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. His debut poetry collection Juvenilia, which will come out in April 2010, was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Chen abandoned a promising career at a Wall Street law firm to become the Executive Director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (aaww.org), the most prominent literary arts nonprofit in support of Asian American literature. Most recently, he curated PAGE TURNER, a two-day Brooklyn literary festival that featured more than forty writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, and David Henry Hwang.

While an attorney, Mr. Chen successfully represented the asylum claim of a Guinean teenager who had been detained by the Department of Homeland Security. The case was named one of the top ten most significant pro bono cases of 2007 by American Lawyer and profiled by The New York Post, Essence, and The New York Times.

His work has been published in Best American Essays 2006 and was recently recognized in Best American Essays 2007. His work is published or forthcoming in The Boston Review of Books, The Yale Anthology of American Poetry, Fence, Jubilat, Film International, C-Theory, Radical Society, and Art Asia Pacific.

Mr. Chen started Satellite: The Berkeley Magazine of News + Culture and also helped found Arts & Letters Daily, a cultural website described by The New York Times as “required reading for the global intelligentsia” and called the “best website in the world” by the Guardian. Mr. Chen has been featured in World Journal, the most prominent international Chinese language newspaper, and China Crosstalk TV. His work on Asia and Asian American affairs has been published in The Boston Review of Books, Manoa, The Kyoto Journal and nationally syndicated Asian American PBS show Pacific Time.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

/One/: It seems like you started out with creative writing and moved to practicing law and then back to creative writing. Can you talk about these transitions?

Ken Chen: That’s right. When I was in college, I took a lot of creative writing courses, with Ishmael Reed and Bob Hass and other writers, so I think as a young writer I had this sensation of being able to walk around and constantly think about poetry and ideas. A lot of times when you have a creative project, that’s sort of like following a scent around a corner; it’s not necessarily an intellectual process. You can kind of smell an idea and you can just keep that smell, that scent, in your life. Most writing, I think, happens when you’re walking around. It’s not when you’re sitting around. But I think being a lawyer was a really weird experience– I think this is a good thing, but when I say it people say it’s a bad thing—because it kind of crushed my spirit. The reason why that’s a good thing is because I think that a lot of times when you’re a writer, writing can make you a smaller person. You can often feel neurotic or have a constant sense of guilt that you’re not writing. There was a time when I was a lawyer where I was working seven days. I could have that thought riding through my head or that scent that was around the corner and not feel guilty about not writing. It really changed my relationship to writing.

I basically stopped being a writer. And even now, I am really not sure I am a writer. In some ways it’s a lot harder to be the director of an arts non-profit than to be a lawyer. I have no resources. When I was a lawyer, I had like six to nine paralegals that could do whatever I wanted. At the workshop I’m often the one picking up the trash, or painting the floor or whatever, so in a way my job has made me much more type A and I’m often just trying to get things done. I think when you’re doing creative work you have to have more of a blasé mind, like a mental luxury where you’re not trying to shoot directly towards a goal.

/One/: So in a way being a lawyer made it easier.

KC: I basically stopped writing when I was a lawyer, but there are ways where being a lawyer influenced my writing. Before I had been a lot more committed to a kind of lyricism. But I really like writing sometimes that’s not very interesting, or that’s trash, or writing where the language is not interesting but the ideas are interesting. You probably read poetry in translation, or writing in translation, and often times there is a translation style where there is no body of language, it’s just all content. In that sense, sometimes I really like that kind of writing. I think maybe parts of my book are like that – but not all of it.

/One/: How’d the transitions affect the book?

KC: The book is strange because some of it was from when I was an undergraduate, some of it from when I was a law student, some of it I wrote when I was a lawyer and some was just from last summer. But I rewrote the book several times before it was published.

/One/: Do you do a lot of rewriting of your work?

KC: I don’t generally. But I was really lucky to work with Louise Glück on this project. Working with her helped me look at rewriting as a form of creativity that’s reactionary in a good way. I think it is very hard to just spontaneously generate something. Often the difficulty is finding a topic, not in actually doing the writing. But if you just try something on a page, then you can recreate it in a reacting instant. There’s this one piece called “Type A novel” and it’s not something that existed before I worked with Louise. It’s a combination of four different poems but it’s one I actually really like. I feel like I can’t really see the joints. I feel like it’s a real piece.

/One/: How did you get to work with her?

KC: She’s been judging the prize [The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition] for a long time. She has shown a lot of generosity and willingness to help edit the book. She’s sort of like the ideal reader, so for many of the writers who have won the prize she’s shaped the manuscript in a way that, I think, brings out more of the essence of the writer, as opposed to controlling it. But I think what that does is make it so she can pick writers who are more weird because they will often have a kind of a vitality or strangeness but surrounded by things that don’t quite work. As a result she can pick that and help shape it, as opposed to picking something that is sort of less risky. So actually the way to think about it is, it’s like a venture capitalist fund: she can make high-risk, high-return decisions, whereas most poetry things are kind of low risk.

/One/: It is interesting to me, because you write essay and you write fiction, and you’re working on a novel, or were working on a novel, but your book is poetry. I am curious to know what you consider yourself: poet, writer, essayist, or novelist?

KC: It’s funny, I noticed in running the AAWW [Asian-American Writers Workshop], the word “writer” is very policed. When I came in I was like, “Let’s bring in anthropologists, let’s bring in journalists, let’s bring in screenwriters.” But they’d come in and be like, “Well, I am not really a writer. I just write like five books a year about anthropology.” It was like they were ashamed to be called a writer. And I think poetry is a shady word. Everybody is embarrassed to be called a poet, but at the same time it has kind of like, kitsch. You’re basically saying you’re a poor snob when you say you’re a poet.

Before this book, I did not have much success with poetry. My greatest successes actually came through essays. I was in Best American Essays and I’d been working on a novel for a decade. But I see them all as a very similar enterprise. I sometimes spend a lot more time on the essay—for example I would rewrite the whole thing—than I would on a poem. I don’t think the genre divisions are really comfortable. I think what’s interesting for me is that I kind of feel like the book has kind of a lot of, it looks like from the outside that there’s a lot of formal variety because some forms are like essays, some like stories, but I think they’re just all attempts to find a vehicle that’s appropriate for the way of thinking at that particular moment.

At the end of the day I am probably a poet but I am not really that interested in a lot of things that poets are interested in, like beauty. I think poetry for most people is about delegating certain emotions that have to do with perceiving beauty.

If you clock in my hours, most of my writing has been fiction but I have generally not published any fiction and don’t think anyone will ever view me as a fiction writer. I am in a secret writing group, with well-known poets who are secretly writing prose. And when I am in the group, I would notice that that I am always thinking about how to make things more dynamic. For example, a typical mainstream poem could be going on about the world but the result is you can’t have any kind of dynamism in the narrative because the person is not reacting against another person, for example. I feel like a lot of my stuff is set up, there’s a dynamic. People are talking to each other.

/One/: Did you grow up reading poetry?

KC: No. I remember like in second grade I read this poem about a caveman and I thought it was really cool. That was all the poetry exposure I had until I was maybe seventeen. But I think even then I kind of really never got the point of poetry. I think if you read the Western Canon or something, a lot of it is people talking about how beautiful flowers are. I think there’s a weird disconnect because it’s presented in this academic context, right? It’s all about intellectualism. Somebody is talking about how pretty a nightingale is; it’s not a disembodied mental experience. So you’re a little bit like, “Oh, how do I process this?”

/One/: Have you formally studied poetry? There are poets that learn the theory behind it all and ones who are just born with something.

KC: Well I think I am a bad student and a good autodidact, and so I have read a lot of stuff on my own. I was an English major so I took all the Milton kind of stuff. I guess I would say that I’m both more traditional and more experimental than you would think. There are a lot of great books about meter I think a lot of poets my age don’t really read. I like a lot of obscure English poets like Emma Webster. But at the same time most of what I read these days, aside from work, is experimental poetry.

/One/: Who are some of your favorite poets?

KC: That is a hard question because you don’t want to turn your dreams into a reading list. But I can say, I used to really like writers who were writing at the top of consciousness, like Eliot’s essays, because you can feel him thinking at you. It’s this weird experience because you’re inside his mind, but lately the writers I’ve liked are writers who are writing at the bottom of consciousness, where it’s almost before language. It’s not so much about the rational mind. I just read “Veronica” by Mary Gaitskill and it’s totally incredible. It’s as though the body wrote the novel instead of the narrator. It’s sort of about being, what it means to be. But it’s all tawdry and about sex and prostitutes and such. And I really like Henry Greene. He kind of invented this sort of caveman dialect. It’s actually based partly on Arabic syntax and he takes out all these modifiers and words like “the” so it’s sort of like looking at walls written by a caveman or something. And this Irish poet Maeve Binchy who sort of writes weird dreamy things I can’t figure out. These poets are almost like prose writers who are writing the form, the body.

/One/: I know you were born here, I think your parents were immigrants. Did you grow up learning another language or were you always speaking English?

KC: Chinese is actually my first language but I’ve forgotten it all.

/One/: I was wondering how it might influence your writing in English. It probably still influences you.

KC: Well, it’s a weird thing to have a relationship to something you’ve forgotten.

/One/: But something’s there I think – something must be there – in there. It’s a weird thing – but I guess for you it’s not a conscious thing even if it’s there.

KC: Well when I did the reading at Triptych, the co-curator Kaveh [Bassiri] commented on Louise Glück’s intro where she says that the book is a little bit about immigration. He said something like – it’s not really about being an immigrant, it’s about being the children of immigrants. And he said, he, as an immigrant, could never take the liberties of language that Ken does because Ken deliberately uses bad English such as using the language of a Christian Russian immigrant or fake Chinese. I thought that was very moving because Kaveh was saying that as an immigrant, he feels like he’s constantly forced to show that he can speak proper English and you know he’s policing himself, disciplining his own language.

I think it’s very hard to figure out what parts of you come from where. But then I feel a little bit weirded out when I read reviews of the book and they say, “Oh, you know, he does this sort of thing because that’s sort of what classical Chinese poetry is like, etc…” It’s this weird kind of overly determinative placing of me because I am not really a Chinese poet, you know. I’m writing out of the Western tradition.

/One/: Did you do this purposely or do you think people read too much into the work?

KC: Well I mean I think I’m unfair because I quote all these Chinese poets so it’s not as though I’m presenting myself as George Herbert or something. But on the other hand, I don’t read classical Chinese poetry so its not as though that’s my métier. And even if I were to make a list of Chinese writings, I think Chinese poetry would be lower than certain other Chinese writings. So it’s just weird to have someone else contextualize you for you.

/One/: Hmm, that’s what  reviewers do. Do you think that the gig at the Asian-American  Writer’s Workshop  and the contact with all these writers and creatives is helping you?

KC: I think the problem is that workshop ends up becoming creative acts.  Like the creativity I would put into a poem or a story goes into the programming of the workshop. So we do a lot of things that are really creative, for example we just had a book party for Monique Truong’s second novel. She was on the cover of Poets & Writers and we had a feature film actress read the parts for the book. We also gave out miracle berries—berries that rewire your taste buds so everything tastes sweet. Vinegar tastes like Riesling and hot sauce tastes like Moet.  So, we try to do a lot of things that change the idea of what a literary event can be.

The programming, curating, becomes its own art form. But I need to create my own space because I can’t think and the writing I do right now is less thoughtful.

/One/: Do you have any thoughts on challenges that poets face today and do you think that digital media has changed the form of poetry?

KC: I think the main challenges that most writers face are financial. It’s very hard to write and have a job at the same time. I think the problem with poetry is that there’s a surplus of poetry and there’s a lack of demand. One of the most depressing literary experiences I ever had was walking into the small press distribution warehouse in San Francisco, or is it Berkeley, and just seeing rows and rows of poetry books that no one will ever read.

The other thing that strikes me is that when I talk with students who are out of MFA programs, I feel this sort of weird careerism about poetry. It’s sort of like there’s a different level going on where poets I see are almost like technocrats of poetry. I feel like I go to a lot of poetry readings and people don’t even talk about the work; it’s like a social scene. I mean I feel like the poetry scene is kind of nepotistic. I guess these are kind of like structural, economic, social problems that I think effect the kind of work that’s being produced.

/One/: Do you think that’s any different than 50 years ago? Financial problems and all that?

KC: It’s notable that a lot of the writers we remember from the past are the people who were wealthy. A lot of language poets actually, I think, come from money. I think 50 years ago there wasn’t this way where poetry could be a full-time job. And the field was much smaller. Poetry wasn’t a vocation, you know? I feel like MFAs are like a bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble.

I used to be really interested in new media. I grew up in Silicon Valley. One of the first pieces of writing I published was actually a journal article about how computers can change the way we tell stories. I helped do this weird narrative computer game art project that was at one of the first digital art conferences. But I’m a little bit skeptical about how technology will change poetry. I think that the ways technology will influence poetry are often different than what you think it will be. I just joined a group blog called Montevideo and I was obsessed with blogs five years ago. I used to read blogs all the time and there are a lot of poetry people who write blogs. I think I’ve realized… I think the blog is not a new form. It’s people wanting to make a magazine online on their own and I think that in 50 years people will be like “What were these weird blogging things?” and people will be like “Oh that’s where people discovered these other ways of conveying information online. It was this obsolete form because they didn’t know what the internet was yet so they wrote essays and threw them online.” But blogs really shouldn’t be like essays. I only wanted blogs that were like essays but that was just my dinosaur nature. Tumblr even Twitter, I don’t really like these forms, but I feel like they’re much more new. There’s a different type of engagement.

I mean if you think about it, we had a new issue of Entertainment Weekly or Us Magazine and it has words being put on pictures, juxtaposed, on every single page, and you know if a poet did that, it would be considered daring. It’s not as though technological capabilities change the way we imagine. You would think that the Internet effecting poetry would be like through hypertext writing, but that kind of started more than a decade ago and it didn’t really take off. A writer who really got a lot out of the internet is Tao Lin. He kind of used his blog as kind of like an incredible self-promotion tool.

/One/: What would be your dream masterpiece project, if you were to have one? Would you want it to be the great American Novel or would you want it to be a beautiful book of essays?

KC: That’s a very good question. My problem is I have a bunch of projects in my head but I just don’t have the time to do them. I’ve been working on this novel for like a billion years so I’ll probably never finish it. I have four different book projects in my head. I guess people reading this on the internet won’t plagiarize any of these projects [laughs] but for one, I want to write a massive globalization novel that will take place in a law firm, and it’ll be all about class. I want to write a pan-Asian novel where every character is a different ethnicity.

Another project I want to do is some kind of essay collection, idiosyncratic essays like Geoff Dyer and Sebald who write unconventional essays. I think I’m really an essayist at the end of the day and I think there’s some kind of project I’m meant to do that is a series of books that are just sort of weird essays. That’s actually what I tried to do the other day at that blog Montevideo. I also want to do a collection of reviews on kind of cool things, and I want to do a book of introductions at the Workshop because they end up being kind of like mini-essays. It could be like a guide to contemporary Asian-American literature. And I want to do a book about comic books.

/One/: You’d better get going–you’ve got a lot of work! If you were to pick one, one that you absolutely had to do, which would it be?

KC: Well I think hopefully I’ll have a body of work when I die, and if I do, the majority of it will be weird essays that are not expository writing, not about a topic. They’re just sort of like this other form. I don’t know how to name it because there aren’t a lot of people who do it.

/One/: Is there anything else you want to ask yourself?

KC: “Who are you?” [laughs] I guess not.

/One/: OK, we’ll stop then.

Ulrich Boser

Ulrich Boser is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. He analyzes a variety of social policy topics and is particularly interested in education and criminal justice issues.

Prior to the Center, Boser was a contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report, special projects director for The Washington Post Express, and research director for Education Week. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and Smithsonian. He is also the founding editor of The Open Case, an online criminal justice magazine and currently serves as the research director of Leaders and Laggards, a project that evaluates state systems of education.

In February 2009, HarperCollins published his book The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft, and it received glowing reviews in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, and the Associated Press, among others. The book spent more than a month on the Boston Globe bestseller list and became a national bestseller.

Boser’s writing and research has received a variety of awards and citations, and Washingtonian magazine recently described him as “a writer to watch.” He has also served as a commentator for CNN, National Public Radio, and The New York Times.

Interviewed by Josh Korenblat

/One/: What piqued your original interest in investigating the theft of the paintings at the Gardner Museum?

Ulrich Boser: In December 2004, I began working on a story for US News & World Report about Harold Smith, one of the world’s most successful art detectives. He had recovered lost Renoirs, exposed forged Da Vincis, and cracked the country’s largest gold robbery. Smith worked the Gardner heist for years. But within weeks of our meeting, Smith died of skin cancer, and after his death, I decided to pick up where he left off and search for the lost paintings.

/One/: What are some of the themes of your book? You bring to vivid, trenchant life the theft of the paintings, down to the slice of the knife to wrest the Rembrandt canvas from its frame. There seems to be a tension between beauty and vulgarity in this theft; the love of art and the love of money; the timelessness of the museum and the fleeting nature of both life and theft. Can you articulate your thoughts regarding these polarities and how they might compel various forces in your book?

UB: I don’t know if I can identify the themes that run through the book. I think that’s for readers to decide. That said, I think the history of Boston, the history of the museum, the history of art theft, all have an upstairs/downstairs, high-society/low-society tension, and I wanted to highlight that—I think it’s a key part of the story. I also think that the Hollywoodization of museum crime prevents recoveries. People often glamorize art theft. They think that art thieves are sly and skillful, Pierce Brosnan types with a passion for Impressionist paintings. But the reality is far from it, and the people who steal art are largely run-of-the-mill crooks—aging drug dealers, out-of-work bank robbers, ex-cons looking to pay the rent. They want the cash. They steal art because it’s easy.

/One/: Did you see these themes at play in the art and artists themselves? You briefly mentioned Rembrandt’s moral failings despite the overwhelming moral pulse most can feel in his art, and Vermeer’s financial problems have been well documented—he died at age 40, destitute and reportedly a mere shadow of himself. Is the contrast between the impoverished, suffering artist and the timelessness of art part of the final painting’s appeal, both in your imagination and in the popular imagination?

UB: Yes and no. I think the tension is there. No doubt. You cited some good reasons. But I also think that these works stand on their own. They are masterpieces regardless of whether their creators were poor or rich or criminals or saints.

/One/: The twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin once feared the potential lost “aura” of original art in an age of mechanical reproduction. In the case of the Gardner paintings, which are truly lost and available only in mechanical reproduction, what do you think this aura means to art lovers? What is lost by getting to see only reproductions and not having access to the originals?

UB: Great question. And so, yeah, I think people often forget how important these paintings are. I mean, there are so many reproductions out there—it’s so easy to become numb to the magnitude of the heist. But these works are masterpieces because of the details, and the details are lost when you steal the original.

Here is what Gardner director Anne Hawley once told a reporter—and I think it’s a good summary of the magnitude of the loss: “For us, it’s like a death in the family,” she said. “Think of what it would mean to civilization if you could never hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony again. Think if you lost access to a crucial piece of literature like Plato’s Republic. Removing these works by Rembrandt and Vermeer is ripping something from the very fabric of civilization.”

/One/: In the book, you are clearly motivated to find the paintings in part because there is a hefty $5 million dollar reward for their return. And yet near the end of your book, you concede that your growing obsession with the case might have less to do with tangible results—that the mystery itself has lured you in with a pull that many artists must experience while creating their works, and that many can attest to while viewing a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. Can you explain this emotion that you felt and that you witnessed in others who were searching for the lost paintings?

UB: The Gardner case does have a lot of strange angles. I ended up chasing down all sorts of curious tips and angles. I interviewed all kinds of people. I hired private investigators. I visited prisons. I once flew to Ireland to see if Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger might have the art. It has been nearly 20 years—and the masterpieces are still missing. And I think that’s the rub. The case is a mystery, an unknown, and that means that almost anyone could be a suspect, from a retired guard to an ex-curator to a guy who lived near the museum for a few months in 1990 and seemed to come into some money a few years later. I think that’s what attracts so many people to the case. That and—of course—the $5 million reward.

/One/: Did the work become more meaningful to you by its absence? There is a long tradition in art of exploring this theme. Consider this poem by Emily Dickinson, which asks if yearning is better than having: “It might be easier/To fail with land in sight/That gain my blue peninsula/To perish of delight.” Did art itself become more meaningful to you during the course of your research for this book?

UB: Absolutely. I often had a John Steinbeck quote rattling around in my mind. I think it goes something like this: “Wanted loses value on being had.” That said, I want to see those paintings back at the museum. In this case, at least, yearning is not better than having.

/One/: How did you change over the course of the book?

UB: Hard question, as that is essentially the story of the book. I mean that’s the narrative arc.

/One/: Many art museums exhibit work taken during World War II, and of course famous pieces like the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Pantheon, are highly controversial in terms of their provenance, having been lifted in imperial times from the original locales. Do museums take into account the provenance of their works and how they are attained with more acuity these days?

UB: Yes, museums and galleries are working a lot on these issues. Yet, the art underworld remains huge—and the Art Loss Register’s database of stolen art has swelled over the years to include 609 Picassos, 181 Rembrandts, and Caravaggio’s priceless masterpiece Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. According to experts, the stolen art trade is one of the world’s largest black markets, a $4 to $6 billion illegal business.

Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Chai Vasarhelyi is a director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese, and Brazilian roots. She grew up between New York City and Rio de Janiero and graduated from Princeton University in 2000 with a B.A. in comparative literature. She made her film debut with A Normal Life, which she co-directed and cowrote with Hugo Berkeley – and this hour-long documentary about young Kosovars who came of age during the recent war won the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival’s Best Documentary award. Chai has received grants from several foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the William and Mary Greve Foundation. Chai has worked with Emmy Award-winning teams documenting the 2007 Paris-Dakar Rally, girls’ soccer in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and a New Orleans high school basketball team that emerged from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to win the 2005 All-State Championship. She has received an Achievement Award from the Creative Visions Foundation. I Bring What I Love marks Chai’s first feature-length documentary film.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

/One/: How did you first learn of Youssou N’Dour?

Chai Vasarhelyi: I grew up with world music but it was mostly Brazilian; my father’s Hungarian and grew up in Brazil. I was interested in making an uplifting film in Africa, and a film called Amandla! had come out which looked at the events in South Africa through music.

Also, someone had given me a mix tape with a West African artist on it, so it made me like West African music. At the same time I had this premise of looking at Africa through music. Youssou is the most celebrated living contemporary musician today in Africa, and the first time I heard him perform at Carnegie Hall was kind of a life-affirming experience. I didn’t understand a word of what he was singing about, I didn’t understand the context, but there was something so emotionally honest about him and it really touched me. So I wanted to meet him and see if this was the right story.

/One/: Did you just approach him?

CV: Yes, how the film came to be has a lot to do with how I approached him. The first time was through a Senegalese friend of a friend who owned a bar in New York; he introduced me to Youssou briefly after that concert. I mentioned that I wanted to make a film, so we met the next day on the street for about 10 minutes, and then I met with his management and his record label, and at the end I heard that there is this other album, that it’s something very special. Youssou is very hard to pin down. I knew he was playing in Europe and I was working in London, so I went to Spain and literally snuck backstage at a concert. He looked at me like, “What are you doing here?” and invited me to eat with them. That’s when he gave me a burned copy of the Egypt album.

/One/: Was the album already out?

CV: He recorded it in 1999 and was going to release it in 2001, and then 9/11 happened. So he held the release. When I met him in late 2003/early 2004, he was thinking about finally releasing it. He burned me a few tracks from a laptop, and I followed the band in my car as they drove to Grenada for the next show. I’ll never forget driving into this city that symbolizes everything—the east and west and the religious persecution and the call of the Moors—and listening to Egypt. I just knew that I had to make this film, because I was flustered with the situation with America and here was someone actually standing up for something he believed in and presenting a tolerant face of Islam, which is not what we saw in the media.

/One/: How many years did it take to make the film?

CV: I filmed for two-and-a-half years and edited for about two years. Later in the editing I had to go back and do a few more things, so it was on and off for four years, and then a year to release.

/One/: This movie is a departure from your previous documentary.

CV: The team is consistent: I have the same editor and I would say the films are very close to each other although very different in subjects. My first film is called The Normal Life, and it’s about six friends after the war in Kosovo. We were all the same age when I began making my film. It’s a very sincere film, and part of my heart still lies in the ground in Pristina. Both films are very similar in terms of the heart that’s in them and both are stories that you would not necessarily have heard but that do pertain to our lives. They’re similar filmmaking style. The gaze is similar.

/One/: How do you find your subjects? Chance, or are you always looking?

CV: I think you know when you find them and as you get older, you tend to become more discerning. I really wasn’t sure about Youssou as a subject. I was very tentative and it was the Egypt album that just turned me. I knew at that moment this was the film I had to make. It’s a very idealistic way of looking at it, but it was that important to me. Similarly, with my first film, I knew there was a story there in Kosovo; I couldn’t understand how it was possible there was a war and ethnic repression going on in 1999. I thought we’d resolved this stuff and here it was happening in the middle of Europe. It was very idealistic to get on that plane. I was in college and I was like, “Let’s go to Kosovo.” I met the subjects of that film—all translators for places like The New York Times and Washington Post, who were exactly like me except where they were born. These individuals are extraordinary and grew up waiting for war. The understanding that so little, yet so much, separated us blew my mind. I didn’t know it would take four years to make the film and I didn’t know how hard it was. I’d never gone to film school. I’d directed plays, but that was very different.

/One/: Why film? You’re in college and you want to tell this story—why decide on film as a medium as opposed to, say, writing about it?

CV: Film relays the most amount of information in the least amount of time. Also, it brings to life emotions in a way that will allow people to identify with the subject.

/One/: Did you have a prior knowledge of the Griot tradition before meeting Youssou?

CV: I actually did. When I was growing up I’d learned about the Griot tradition from a book we had to read in a French class about West Africa. I wasn’t intimately acquainted with it, but I had since eighth grade discovered what Griot was. The Griot tradition is fascinating and relates to the idea of the epic tradition, and that was another connection between the Kosovar Albanians and the Senegalese. Albania is one of those places that the idea of epic poetry is still alive and that people recite their poems. There was something I found very compelling about that type of storytelling.

/One/: How does Youssou manage to keep true to the tradition and yet be so popular?

CV: I don’t think that popularity and the Griot tradition are in conflict with one another. The Griots were popular musicians; the Griot was for the people. As a pop musician it’s a different issue.

How does he stay true to it? I think it’s in his blood. It’s all he knows. What he actually sings in In Your Eyes is “If you want to educate your people, build a school.” His art has always been his activism. His activism has always been his art. He has devotionals and he does have some love songs. But even the songs that are about women are things such as “respect your aunt.” There’s a social message to everything he does but it doesn’t feel like medicine because of the Griot tradition. It is the role that he plays and there’s a place in that society for that type of music.

/One/: Youssou has been referred to as the Bono of Africa. Other than the activism apparent in his music, what other type of humanitarian work has he been involved in?

CV: Youssou has been a tireless humanitarian. He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1987. His first time going international was part of Amnesty International “Human Rights Now!” tour alongside Peter Gabriel. He’s very much into the rights of children, including education and health. Malaria is also something that’s very close to his heart. He’s even testified before Congress about the disease. What’s fascinated me is that he’s really asked to speak on behalf of a continent, and that’s a very strange thing. I mean, who are we to ask one guy because he happens to be from Africa to speak on behalf of a continent?

Youssou insists on living in Dakar. He says there’s an airport, and that he can fly anywhere. He insists on bringing a lot of these things that he sees abroad in his development at home and I think it’s got to do with his roots, it’s got to do with the Griot tradition and staying close to the issues that pertain to the lives of everyday Africans.

/One/: You are quoted as saying you are a “change the world” kind of person. What is your definition of “change the world,” and what do you think is the responsibility of individuals in communities to try to achieve that?

CV: I think Youssou is a really good example of what you can achieve. I don’t know if what I can do will have any effect on other people’s lives. For me, I saw a story I thought was very inspiring and maybe a film showed that story to more people and touched their lives. We all have a responsibility to stand up for what we believe. My mother is Chinese and fled oppression in China. My first film was set in Kosovo, where people didn’t have basic human rights. It’s very easy to say, Everyone stand up for what you believe in, but at the same time you also want to live to see the next day. It’s nuanced. At the time I made the film—after 9/11, war going on in Iraq—I felt helpless: Here I am going to Kosovo making movies, and does it mean anything?

/One/: Why did the Egypt album grab you so much?

CV: Here was an artist standing up and essentially celebrating a tolerant face of Islam, which was not at all the story we saw in the mainstream media, and I thought that was brave. Islam is a very diverse religion—why are we only hearing one version? Youssou’s Egypt project brings that to life: He was a black West African reaching out to North African Egyptians. They didn’t speak the same language but were celebrating a common tradition in a very old Arabic musical style about the Senegalese Sufi brotherhood. It just raises questions, and that’s what I was interested in. It wasn’t dogmatic, he wasn’t on a soapbox, he wasn’t preaching to anyone—he was truly just celebrating and telling the stories.

/One/: Were you and Youssou surprised at the negative reactions to Egypt given the fact that he was so popular?

CV: I think Youssou definitely pushed the envelope when he released an album during Ramadan. I think that no matter where you are that was definitely new.

/One/: Why did he do that?

CV: Essentially because he was implying that this is spiritual music, why can’t you listen to it during Ramadan? What happened was that it was misunderstood for many different reasons and the reaction was so extreme, so fast that there were debates on the radio, people were calling in raising objections, and the TV station pulled the ads off the air without letting them know. Overnight 20,000 cassettes were returned by street vendors.

/One/: If he had released it in another month, not Ramadan, do you think the reaction would have been as negative? Was that the reason for the negative reaction or was it him singing sacred verses?

CV: I think it was definitely a combination. I think in releasing it during Ramadan he was introducing it into the sacred space and that brought it to a head. Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection and Youssou was introducing this music as a way of spiritual reflection, and so it just illustrated his point in a particularly clear, black-and-white way. I think no matter when he released it, it would have raised eyebrows and been a topic of discussion, but doing it this way was very intentional.

/One/: Has his popularity been restored?

CV: It was such an extraordinary thing that happened around the album: the Grammy and the endorsement from religious singer Mustapha M’baye. What you see in the film when they go into that studio to sing about the Prophet Mohammad, it’s the first time that a religious singer was in a recording studio. You had music in the spiritual realm but it wasn’t recorded and it certainly wasn’t released. It was recorded in a tape recorder and when you walk the street you hear it but Mustapha, by crossing that line, lent his support to Youssou, which was a very big deal because he’s one of the most celebrated religious leaders in Senegal. And the Grammy was like winning a gold medal—that’s the only way to think about it. No one knew what a Grammy was. Kabou Gueye, the assistant composer turned to me once it happened and asked, “What’s a Grammy?” I said, “It’s a big international award.” It was the first time a Senegalese had ever won it. I think Senegal was such a tolerant society that allowed that reconciliation, when do you see the media admitting they’re wrong? No one does that. In Senegal they said, maybe we were wrong. Now, there’s a whole genre of sacred recorded music. There’s a woman who was one of Youssou’s backup singers that is now a famous Sufi recorded artist.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She studied Linguistics at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing (the “African Booker”) in 2006 and for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Award in 2009. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside.

Interviewed by Sara Goudarzi

Laila Lalami: I grew up speaking both Moroccan Arabic and French, but my earliest exposure to books came through French because I received a semi-colonial education that emphasized French more than Arabic. Nearly all of the children’s literature that I was exposed to as a child was in French, so when I started writing fiction, it was in that language. While I could read and write Arabic competently enough, I found it very hard to write fictional narrative in Arabic. My use of French in fiction isn’t at all that unusual for a Moroccan writer of my generation (witness, for instance, the work of Fouad Laroui, or Abdellah Taia, or Nadia Chafik, or Driss Ksikes).

However, once I left Morocco to study abroad, I started to question the bilingualism with which I had grown up. In my country, French and Arabic did not always have a harmonious relationship; rather, they were often in competition in the public sphere. I started to feel really uncomfortable with the idea of writing fiction using the colonial tongue. At the same time, I had been working on my dissertation at USC, and I had to use English daily. That’s how the idea of writing fiction in English came about. Ideally, I would have written in my native language, but since I could not, it seemed that English was my only other option. And between writing in English and not writing at all, I made the choice of writing.

/One/: How does it benefit or detriment your readers, if at all?

LL: I would hope that good fiction, by which I mean fiction that tells us a truth about the human heart, is of great benefit to readers, no matter what language it is told in.

/One/: In many ways, you are acting as a translator before you even put words on the page—meaning you’re translating ideas in your native Moroccan culture into something we can understand. How important do you think this is in our understanding of other people/cultures?

LL: I don’t know if the role of the novelist is to translate a particular culture. It is enough that the novelist try to tell the most specific, the most complex, the most truthful story she can tell. And it is that specificity, that complexity, and that truth which eludes us so much in our perceptions of other people.

/One/: Do you consider yourself particularly inventive with your usage of English? How is it different from the typical translation where the original text, written in a native language, is translated by someone else?

LL: I do play with language in my work, but in ways that may be invisible to some readers because this playfulness is characterized by absences. For instance, I try to excise from my text any American idiomatic expressions because they are often culturally specific and my characters wouldn’t be using them. I also add in words from Moroccan Arabic that are hard to translate in simple ways. For example, it is easier to use “tagine” than to say “a stew of meat and vegetables cooked in a clay pot.” I don’t know whether my process is similar to or different than one involving a translation because I haven’t had experience with translation myself.

/One/: One’s nationality can certainly differ from how one identifies culturally. How do you identify—Moroccan, Moroccan-American, African, other?—and how does that affect your relationships and the communities in which you work and live in?

LL: I identify as all those things—and others besides: woman, Arab, Muslim, progressive, and so on. I think one’s identity is fluid, and different sides of it can be reinforced depending on the social, political, or cultural situation.

/One/: When you first started thinking about your new novel, Secret Son, were you intentionally trying to tell the story of the tension between classes in Morocco, or did you start with a character and the story took off from there?

LL: I remember clearly the moment, six years ago, when I started writing Secret Son. I had this image in my mind of a young man, walking back home in the rain to the shack he shares with his mother, having just watched a movie at a nearby theater. I followed that image for years, trying to figure out who this man was by putting him in increasingly intense dramatic conflicts with people around him. It turned out that the story was about Youssef, a young man from a slum near Casablanca. He has grown up all his life thinking he was the son of a respectable schoolteacher who died in a car accident, but at the beginning of the novel, he finds out that he is in fact the son of a wealthy businessman, so he decides to go find him. It’s this journey that frames the entire novel.

/One/: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you identify with the protagonist, Youssef El Mekki, a young man born into poverty, yet your own background isn’t similar to his. Whose story are you telling and why was it important to you to tell it?

LL: I am telling the story of my characters. Whether I have something in common with them is beside the point—the point is for the writer to use her imaginative empathy to create the most complex, most fully realized character she can.

/One/: In your opinion, does literature play an important role in promoting tolerance and awareness?

LL: Literature is the only art that allows us direct access to the minds, thoughts, and feelings of other people. So in that sense, yes.

/One/: Who were some of your influences? Can you recommend Moroccan writers or artists who have influenced you to /One/ readers? Who are some current writers that you admire?

LL: I think that perhaps it might be more appropriate for readers and critics to tell which influences are apparent in my work. All I can tell you is that everything I live, read, hear, and experience influences my work. I can of course recommend several Moroccan writers I admire: Driss Chraibi, Leila Abouzeid, Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Fatema Mernissi, and Abdellatif Laabi. Other contemporary writers I admire include J. M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Ahdaf Soueif, Margaret Atwood, and the late Tayeb Salih.