Writer and editor Zeke Caligiuri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, a new collection of essays on class he co-edited along with eleven other incarcerated writers. The volume’s contributors include Eula Biss, Kao Kalia Yang, Lacy M. Johnson, Valeria Luisielli, Kiese Laymon, and many others. Caligiuri, who worked on the book while in Minnesota correctional facilities and is now free, discusses the challenges of creativity and the literary life in prison settings, as well as how the book came to be. He also reflects on the idea that “the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors,” as he writes in a foreword, which he reads from during the episode.

Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I want to rewind a little bit so our listeners can hear about the long road to this book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start as a writer via the Stillwater Writers Collective and later with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop?

Zeke Caligiuri: I really just got my start as an incarcerated reader. A big thing is that my relationship to books and language has always made me want to be able to write the books that impacted my life in the same way. I sort of began writing my own stories and trying to put together my own life, and I ended up running into a cohort of people when I was incarcerated in Stillwater that were also writers or artists. And a big draw that I always tell folks is that when you’re in those sorts of places, the artists tend to find each other. There can be 1000 people, but the artists tend to find each other. And that was really what the case was. Anytime I was anywhere, I always ended up finding other people who were working on things—creatives. As a result, we also realized that there wasn’t going to be support coming from outside of the facilities. We had sort of all gotten together under the idea that we needed each other as a community for whatever that meant, so that it could grow. 

One really good friend of mine, C. Fausto Cabrera, and I always had a real kind of complicated artist relationship. He was phenomenal with all sorts of different mediums like paint and pastels, and he was also a phenomenal writer. I had this project that I wanted to write—I was writing my memoir at the time—and I was really afraid that they would do something to stop it, they would do something to prevent it from getting out there. So we had these sorts of ideas, like, how are we going to build sort of some collective power? There’s really only so much you can do in there, but it was about trying to create a collective of artists and creatives that would be able to somehow help each other. 

Regardless of what it was, we just knew that we didn’t have outside support, and so we built what we call the Stillwater Writers Collective, which was just the collective of us. We ran it. We did everything it took to take care of each other. Fortunately, what ended up inevitably happening was Jen Bowen coming into the facility. Jen had decided she wanted to teach some writing classes, and she did at one of the other facilities. 

When Jen started teaching at Stillwater, bringing other folks, it was sort of a natural relationship that just took over. Essentially, they came to us and said, “What do you guys as a writing community want and need?” And these are all people that had been doing other things in that same realm for many years, just not within carceral institutions. It became kind of this idea of, well, we would love some writing classes, we would love a mentorship program, and we would love to be able to post readings and do things like that. We’ve been able to do those things and they brought all of the right people. That was essentially what a lot of the core was—Jen going out  and finding wonderful people who were also wonderful writers and very talented and understood. 

I guess the landscape of it and what it kind of became was these two communities—one outside of the prison and then the prison communities itself, growing up alongside each other on these two different tracks. And that’s really what brings us to how the project becomes and how… How we have a community in which to be able to create something like this.

WT: You wrote a foreword to this collection, and you talked about the lack of infrastructure for writing or creating art inside these prisons. And you talked about computer labs that have been proposed and set up by members of your community. It made me think, just in a practical sense, what did your writing day look like when you were incarcerated? Where did you work? What did you work on? What hours? Did you have to work? What was your physical environment like?

ZC: That’s a good question. Well, I was locked up for 22 years, so I had a lot of changes. It was really about adaptation. I worked as a higher ed clerk, I worked as an editor of one of the newspapers at one of the facilities, I worked on the yard crew for a long time. Most of my practice would start very early. So I would get up prior to breakfast, prior to counts, prior to any of those early things that you have to get out and switch up. And I spent time with the word. Sometimes that’s really just reading, sometimes it’s writing. So most of my days, and even as a free person—or mostly free person—my practice starts in the morning. If I can start with some blocks of language, I can get something in my mind without any outside interference. You’re not hearing the voices or things that are barking out of a screen. 

If I was fortunate enough, I would get some computer time. I think the last job I worked was in the health service unit at Faribault. That meant you dealt with a lot of people with either long-term health care issues that were not going to leave, or were just recovering from different surgery. So I would spend my day usually reading and writing and then when I could get a chunk of time—an hour to three hours—on a computer, I would go and transcribe as much as I could. In the early days, I took jobs intentionally so that I could go type in a computer lab. You also had to build relationships. Early on, it was really difficult because they didn’t support the prison writing workshop. They didn’t really care that you were in these classes. You had to be in higher ed to be able to use the computer lab. 

WT: You’re writing by hand then and taking it to a computer lab and typing it?

ZC: Or on an actual typewriter. We actually would keep a typewriter, it’s just much more difficult and harder to keep a file.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: For an incarcerated writer to be transferred from one facility to another, what ability to keep files is there? How does a writer keep track of their own work under these circumstances? Is that possible?

ZC: Now it is a little more possible. But you do not get nearly as much computer time as you would like, so that’s the thing. Sometimes you might get a couple hours a week, sometimes you might get more. Each facility has different access. So when I left initially—I had left Stillwater in 2013—I had written my book and had most of this manuscript done. I was working through the process of editing it, and we didn’t have any sort of network file system. They have since changed it. Now if you do leave, your stuff is still saved on your file. So if you go to another facility, it’ll still be there. When I left it, it was not that way yet. 

We went through a really grueling process. I would make edits and send it to a woman who was a close personal friend—shout out to Myrna—and she would transcribe from an actual hard copy, send the digital copy to my editor at U of M Press. They would print that out, do a whole bunch of markups—just like the olden days—and send it to me. And we went through that process. I would circle things, maybe mark small things on the page, but then also maybe have a secondary page. So we had to go through that process several times, just because we couldn’t save the manuscript digitally on my end. So we had to do it through other folks and different channels.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Zeke Caligiuri

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (ed.) • This is Where I Am • Prison Noir (ed. Joyce Carol Oates) • The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (ed. Caits Meissner) • How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison – Electric Literature • “Before I Was Anything” (poem) Literary Hub

Others:

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop • What Incarcerated Writers Want the Literary Community to Understand: Caits Meissner on Why “Prison Writer” Is a Limiting Label (featuring Zeke Caligiuri, Literary Hub, Sept. 11, 2019) • C. Fausto Cabrera • Kiese Laymon • Valeria Luiselli • Steve Almond • Jen Bowen • Kristin Collier  • Sarith Peou • Toni Morrison • Eula Biss

Fiction writer Lesley Nneka Arimah joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how Black horror writing speaks to our current cultural moment. She talks about editor/director Jordan Peele’s new anthology, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, in which her work is included, and how she went from avoiding horror to writing it. Arimah reads from her story “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers,” explains its origins in her own fears, and shares an alternative ending.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Is that the source of the horror in your story? The idea that your own body can become a prison in which you become irrelevant?

Lesley Nneka Arimah: Yes, because my personal oubliette is pregnancy and the idea of motherhood.

WT: When you said aliens were being born… I’m like, “Isn’t that happening? normally?” That’s how a lot of people feel about it.

LNA: I’m at the age where a lot of my friends are having kids or have had kids recently. So I sort of think about pregnancy a lot. And it is one of those things that terrifies me a bit, both in the physical aspect of it—one of my friends developed an autoimmune disorder after pregnancy that just never went away, and she just has this now. Another friend, her feet grew two sizes and never went down. There’s changes in the body. And then there’s also the way that society treats women who are mothers, in the idea that, “Oh, this is all you are now,” right? Like, you’re only allowed to be this mother person, and that is your primary duty. There’s something about that being subsumed by this presence in your body that, both at the physical and the social level, really terrifies me. And so that was my personal oubliette.

Previous to this, I had only ever accidentally written horror; I never did so intentionally. And my accidental horror was also about giving birth to children, and so I was like, “Okay, Lesley, there’s clearly something going on here.” So it just worked out that this was where, when it came to articulate fears in a way that could be outwardly scary, I thought, “Okay, I feel this so viscerally that I think that this is something that I’d be able to depict on the page in a terrifying way.”

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s genuinely terrifying. The first time I read the story, I was reading it aloud with someone else. And we were taking turns shrieking a little bit. In the introduction to the book, Jordan Peele writes, “I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear—but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.” And he describes the anthology as 19 personalized sunken places.

LNA: [Cat meows in background]

VVG: I like how your cat is adding atmosphere to this episode.

WT: Maybe that’s the alien from her story!

VVG: Anyway, I thought that this quote by Jordan Peele was so interesting because it means that representation in horror is—maybe even more than in other genres—a matter of emotional survival. And I was wondering: is that why Black horror has become such a dominant genre right now, or are there other reasons to go along with that?

LNA: You know, I don’t know enough to answer that definitively. But I always think what is really funny is the idea… Black people have had this joke amongst ourselves, and then you’ve seen it play out in some horror movies, where it’s like, the white folks always go toward the noise. And you’re like, “No, I’m not gonna check that out.” It’s almost a meme at this point, right?

WT: Well, that’s the Eddie Murphy routine that the name of the movie Get Out comes from, right? That was a great routine that I used to quote all the time with my friends when we were in college.

LNA: Yes. And that very much articulates a conversation that we’ve had amongst ourselves. I think it’s this idea that life as a Black person is scary enough that if there’s a noise in the dark, you don’t go seeking it out. Because it’s like, “Oh! I’m just gonna avoid that and maintain this calm space I currently have.”

WT: When the voice in the house says “get out,” you get out!

LNA: Get out, exactly! Right! I’m not going to go hunt down the source. The call is coming from inside the house? Well, I’m gonna get out of the house. So how’s that? It’s interesting seeing this renaissance. In the 70s or the 80s or maybe even backdating this more than I should, but you know, the Candyman and oh gosh, what was the other classic horror movie that I’m forgetting now? But this feels very new, a renaissance in a very interesting way. And it’s really interesting how, I’m not sure that Get Out could have happened outside of the particular moment that it became a phenomenon because I feel like the general public was familiar enough with some of the conversations about race for that to be impactful in a very interesting way. Whereas if it had come out maybe 30 years ago, I’m not sure that it would have had the same impact, because we knew our conversations were happening in smaller spaces than they are now and when Get Out first came out.

VVG: There’s also the joke about, if you’re watching a horror movie and there is a Black friend from a certain era, you knew that the Black friend was going to die. Like the people on Star Trek wearing red shirts, those people are goners. Boy, I hope I got that right otherwise all of the Trekkies who listen to our show will write back to me. But anyway, in retrospect that seems so ridiculous because that would’ve been the person with the most common sense who would’ve been like, “Don’t run toward the noise,” actually.

I remember you telling me that in the editorial process for this story, you had to nip off a little bit that went past your actual ending to the story because of length, and we wondered if we might offer our listeners an exclusive glimpse into this?

LNA: Yes, so there’s a pretty strict word limit, and my story was pushing against that word limit. And I had an issue with myself where, do I really want to be the jerk who is like, “Can I have more space?” You know? And so I was like, “No, I don’t.” And so I found what felt like the most natural stop where this ending is a little abrupt, but there’s something cohesive about it. And so I stopped the story earlier than I had intended. My original ending went a bit further, and I was unsure how to wrap this up in a way that is satisfying and meets the word requirements. And so I just lopped it off at an abrupt but natural stopping point. And so there’s a little bit that goes on after the original ending. I told myself that I was going to wait, and if everyone was talking about how clever the ending was, I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, that was intentional. That’s totally what I meant to do all along.”

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.
Photograph of Lesley Nneka Arimah by Emily Baxter. 

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LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH:

What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky • Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (ed. Jordan Peele)

Others:

Jordan Peele • Toni Morrison • Stephen King • “Black horror is having a big moment. So is its pioneer, Tananarive Due” by Paula L. Woods | L.A. Times • N.K. Jemisin • Nnedi Okorafor • Violet Allen • The Nesting by C.J. Cook • The Leech by Hiron Ennes • Rebecca Roanhorse

In the wake of the recent violence in Palestine and Israel, the show returns to an interview taped in June 2021 with scholars Shir Alon and Joseph Farag, who join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how Palestinian and Israeli writers have written about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Farag talks about the evolution of the portrayal of the Palestinian self in literature throughout history, as well as some of the themes and writers discussed in his book, Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story. Alon explains how the unprocessed trauma of the history of massacre and expulsion of Palestinians seems to stage an appearance in Israeli literature every decade. She also talks about Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, and Funeral at Noon by Yeshayahu Koren.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Andrea Tudhope and Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I think in American literary culture, the general impression of prominent Israeli fiction writers like Amos Oz has been that they are critics of the occupation and the Israeli government and military. First of all, is that true? And secondly, who are the other [writers] of Israeli and Palestinian literature that we should be paying attention to as readers?

Shir Alon: To begin, even the American perspective of the Israeli left wing is far more conservative than anything that is actually considered left in Israel. And I would say that writers like Amos Oz — who is usually read together with David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, as this kind of trio of liberal Israeli politics — did represent a mode of critique of the occupation since ’67. But in order to clarify this, we have to do a little bit of history. So Joe [Farag] was talking about the Nakba, the expulsion of 1948. The second term Sugi asked about was the Naksa, which is literally translated to “withdrawal” in Arabic and refers to the 1967 War, which is when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights and basically established this ongoing illegal occupation, a lack of established state borders, and a process of settlement building, which is not recognized by international law. Now, I think this historiography is important for literature as well. We see a difference between the literature of the period between ’48 and ’67, and the literature that comes after that.

WT: What is that difference?

SA: It’s a long answer. Some of it we’ll get to a little bit later. But in the literature leading up to ’67, you really see Hebrew literature writing itself as settler colonial literature. It is asking itself, how do I establish myself in this space? It is seeing the ruins of Palestinian villages around it, and it must articulate a position in relation to them that also explains Jewish sovereignty in relation to the Arab minority and to the Palestinians who are gone, who have been expelled. After ’67, especially in the ’80s and ’90s, and when the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, begins, this political energy turns to the occupation and to protesting this form of control of a huge population that are not citizens, that do not have any sorts of citizenship rights, as a kind of a solution to the anomaly, which is the Israeli state. And questions about the Nakba, about 1948, about the original expulsion, are, to a large extent, overlooked. Now, in the past few years, it is impossible to ignore them again. There’s a lot of complex political dynamics going into it.

WT: That was really great. Now, I’m going to lead you back to Amos Oz. But that was very helpful. Thank you for doing that.

SA: Oh, of course. Amos Oz really represents a generation in Israeli writing that comes out of this settler ethos of ’48 and feels somewhat betrayed after ’67. Because suddenly, the state that they identify with is engaged with these explicit atrocities and illegal occupation, because of demographic changes within Israel that have to do with relationships between Mizrahi Jews — Jews of Middle Eastern origin — and Ashkenazi Jews. And Amos Oz’s writing represents this nostalgic yearning to this period of innocence when the state was small, when the Arabs were obedient, when men were men and women were women. Absolutely he was a very important voice against the occupation of ’67 as a means of reestablishing the righteousness of the Israeli state within its ’48 borders.

Joseph Farag: Which is kind of ahistorical, to go back to what you were saying earlier, given that previous stage of Israeli writing, which was much more forthright about confronting that 1948 to 1967 period and the settler coloniality of that. My favorite work of literature on this is actually Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland, which is published in [1902], and is completely unabashed about the colonial nature of what he calls the new Jewish society in Palestine — he didn’t even refer to it as Israel at the time. But he makes very clear that this will be a wonderful boon to the world’s imperial powers — we will develop cures to malaria here that will allow Europe’s imperial powers to venture into the great African “heart of darkness,” because we will break that final fetter of malaria, preventing greater colonial incursion into Africa. And so, this new Jewish society was seen as a kind of integral part of that settler coloniality, and from my more cursory knowledge of Israeli writing, there was a period where that was pretty frankly addressed.

SA: I do want to say, when we speak about Israel as a settler colonial society, it sounds very radical right now, like a new framework, but this was very explicitly the way the settlers saw themselves. Their model was a colonial movement, they called the settlements colonies. There was nothing that was secretive about it as a model by which the state was imagined. Of course, Zionism is very different as a settler colonial movement because it doesn’t have a metropolis, because it’s a settler colonial movement of refugees. So it has its specificities. But, when we use this language right now we should remember that this is also the language that was used up to the ’50s.

WT: Well I live in Kansas City… this was a settler colonial society around the Santa Fe Trail! Joe, just to finish off this question, Shir gave us some of the very famous Israeli writers—maybe you could talk to us a little bit about who are the great Palestinian writers that from this period should be listened to, right or wrong?

JF: I always fear reifying the canon—if you just name the same authors that everyone’s already talking about, then you contribute to that further entrenchment. But, there are these periodizations in Palestinian literary history that have their particularly notable figures. And so in the 1948 to 1967 period, Palestinian literature — and this is very broad strokes, there are exceptions to this, certainly — conveyed the Palestinian experience of being one of abject exile refugeehood, at the mercy of the “host state” that housed the refugee camps … almost an articulation of victimization primarily. After 1967, it’s impossible to overstate how gargantuan the defeat of the Arab armies was in 1967, where the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria were, within a matter of hours, handily defeated by the Israeli military. So all of the hopes that Palestinians had pegged onto the Arab states and their vaunted armies to liberate them were dashed. And there was this deeply iconoclastic moment that necessitated a Palestinian reinvention of self. And it’s no coincidence then that in 1968, we have the rise of Palestinian armed resistance movements, which had been operating sporadically here and there in the years leading up to it. But from 1968 onwards, you see a sustained armed resistance movement and multiple different armed factions emerging.

And so, literature responds by reconceiving the Palestinian self from one of being an abject victim into one of a heroic resistance fighter. And this plugs in at the same time as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, you have Algerian independence struggles happening, you have this kind of global, “third world,” anti-imperialist foment that’s taking place and Palestinians, during this period, see themselves as part and parcel of that global movement. And so once again, this anti-colonial, anti-imperial ethos reasserts itself. And the iconic figure of the Palestinian goes from being the abject refugee to the kofia-clad resistance fighter with the Kalashnikov. That comes to be reflected in the literature, but also, Palestinian literature doesn’t take the figure of the Palestinian resistance fighter during this period too seriously. There was a lot of skepticism towards the potential of the armed resistance to actually deliver national independence and sovereignty

WT: Who are some of the writers you’re thinking about from that period?

JF: In the earlier period — I include him because he was really the first exponent of this ethos of resistance — you have Ghassan Kanafani, probably the most iconic, the most canonical of Palestinian prose authors. Mahmoud Darwish is the most iconic Palestinian poet. There’s Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. You also have starting in the late 1960s, early 1970s, the emergence of validly and outspokenly feminist Palestinian authors like Sahar Khalifeh and Liana Badr, who were some of the most barbed critics of Palestinian armed resistance. With the Algerian case not far in the background, where Algerian women played a key role in resistance and then were relegated to the domestic sphere and were horribly marginalized generally, there was a concerted effort by Palestinian feminists and feminist authors in particular to not further lionize the very masculinist vision of national independence movements, central to which, of course, was the armed, predominantly male Palestinian resistance fighter. I don’t want to neglect the fact that there were female Palestinian resistance fighters, Laila Khalid being the most iconic example. Women did certainly take a more prominent role in armed resistance beginning in the 1960s, but the response of a lot of feminist authors was to be skeptical about this very patriarchal, macho, nationalist movement.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I feel like it’s predictable that I’m fascinated by this, as someone who writes about Sri Lankan Tamils. When I was reading your work, listening to you talk, Shir, you mentioned Amos Oz as someone nostalgic for the 1948 to 1967 period of “greater innocence,” the smaller state. And then Joe, when I was reading your work, you were talking about a generational Arab critique of people post 1967, critiquing their elders as people who had been, Shir, I think you used the word obedient. So the conversation going on between these literatures is so interesting. When we were talking before this conversation, of course the Nakba is this massive trauma, and I think people think of it as a Palestinian trauma, and of course it is. And then Shir, you said to me that it was also a trauma for Israelis. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and about discovering the Nakba, again and again, in Israeli literature.

SA: So, when I say the Nakba is a Jewish Israeli trauma as well, I’m speaking about trauma as a structure. We usually associate trauma with victims, with victimhood, but the fact is, trauma is a threatening experience that the self does not want to process, and it remains unprocessed, it remains repressed. And then, as Freud writes, what happens is this repressed content inevitably returns. The principle of return is this obsessive repetition and obsessive chewing over these materials that you’d rather not deal with, you’d rather shove down. And we see something very similar in Hebrew literature and culture, particularly in this early period of the 50s up to the 70s.

In 1948, the expulsion of the Palestinian was a known fact, and we see it very clearly and explicitly in literature. The poet Nathan Alterman wrote poems about this, journalistic poems where he’s very clearly chronicling the massacre of Palestinians in Lydda [Lod], where there were a lot of riots and violence just a few weeks ago. There is a very famous novella called Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, who was a fighter in the ’48 war, he later became a politician. It’s a magnificent text that narrates the expulsion of the Palestinian village from the point of view of a soldier. And there is nothing that is secret there, it’s all very clear, he looks at the village and he says, we are creating a Holocaust. He looks at them, he sees the Jewish refugees from Europe from just a few years earlier. This novella was a bestseller. Nobody thought this was something that was hidden. But in years afterwards, the story of the expulsion was denied, both passively, people didn’t talk about it, but also very actively. There were hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian villages where their citizens were expelled, or they ran away and were not allowed to come back.

In the ’50s, Israel starts a campaign to destroy these villages, to not leave them there as monuments to the destruction. Very famously, in a lot of places, forests were built over these ruins. Maps are changed, names are changed. And there is a very big campaign to change all the names of towns or geographical markers or historical markers to their Hebrew names that completely erase the Palestinian layer of this geography. And what happens is that, in 1967, you have a story like Facing the Forests by A. B. Yehoshua, a very famous novella as well, in which you have a grad student who needs to finish his dissertation — this might be familiar to a lot of us. He takes himself to some writing retreat in the woods, and it turns out that under the woods, there are the ruins of a Palestinian village. And he’s not aware of that, and the woods have to be burned down in order for this village to be revealed. So something that was common knowledge — the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, the expulsion — is staged in this literature as a story that is hidden and has to come to light. In another book that I’m writing on now, which is not as well-known, but I wish it was, called Funeral at Noon by a writer called Yeshayahu Koren. It was written in ’66, published in ’74. This is a settler colonial text, because it’s so obsessed with marking the land and marking the geography, and it takes place in a small Israeli colony by the border. And right next to it there are ruins of a Palestinian village, and it’s called in the very first line “the abandoned Arab village.” I heard an interview with the writer Yeshayahu Koren once, and he said, ‘nowadays everybody’s making a big deal that this is happening in a Palestinian village, but I didn’t even think about that the village was just, you know, part of nature. The history is unseen.’ And, you know, you listen to him, and you say, what do you mean it doesn’t mean anything? Of course this is about the Palestinian village. The novel is about this dissatisfied housewife that keeps returning again and again to this destroyed village, and she doesn’t really know why, but that’s where she goes in this obsessive return to this moment of constitutive violence of the state. But when Yeshayahu Koren wrote it, the Palestinian village was not associated at all with this history, even though it’s right there in the middle of the text. So it has this capacity to disappear.

We see the cycle happening again and again. Literature, every few years, stages the discovery of the Nakba. The repressed comes up, and then it’s just acting out. There is no working through, there is no actual work of decolonization, of, ‘okay, what does it mean that our lives are built on ruins? What does it mean that our homes were somebody else’s homes?’ It is just shoved under the carpet again to reemerge 10 to 15 years later.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Andrea Tudhope. 

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SHIR ALON:

Static: Labor, Temporality, and Literary Form in Middle Eastern Modernisms (forthcoming book) • “The Ongoing Nakba and the Grammar of History,” LA Review of Books • “No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba” •  “Gendering the Arab-Jew: Feminism and Jewish Studies After Ella Shohat”

JOSEPH FARAG:

Palestinian Literature in Exile Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story • Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: ‘Palestinian Literature and Film’

OTHERS:

An Open Letter in Support of Adania Shibli From More Than 350 Writers, Editors, and Publishers, Literary Hub •“Tension Over the Israel-Hamas War Casts a Pall Over Frankfurt Book Fair,” by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times • The LiBeraturpreis 2023 (press release by Litprom) • “We want to make Jewish and Israeli voices especially visible at the book fair” | Frankfurter Buchmesse • “Palestinian voices ‘shut down’ at Frankfurt Book Fair, say authors,” The Guardian • Amos Oz • David Grossman • Facing the Forests by A. B. Yehoshua • Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar • The Old New Land (Altneuland) by Theodor Herzl • Men in the Sun, Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, and All That’s Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani •”A Lover from Palestine,” “ID Card,” and many others by Mahmoud Darwish • The Ship by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra • Wild Thorns and Passage to the Plaza by Sahar • Eye of the Mirror and A Balcony Over the Fakihani by Liana Badr • Nathan Alterman • Funeral at Noon by Yeshayahu Koren • Minor Detail by Adania Shibli • Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom • The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon • Waltz with Bashir (film) by Ari Folman • The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi • Divine Intervention, The Time that Remains, and It Must Be Heaven (films) by Elia Suleiman

Novelist Jonathan Lethem joins host Whitney Terrell live at the Cider Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas. Lethem discusses his new book, Brooklyn Crime Novel, which is set in the neighborhood where he grew up—and where he also set his 2003 novel Fortress of Solitude. They discuss terms like blockbusting and redlining, and the ways that Lethem’s writing explores the ramifications of real estate manipulation on residents of these cities and others around the nation. Lethem reads from Brooklyn Crime Novel and talks about the book’s inventive approach to time.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: You have an entire section in the book that goes through and examines all the language of gentrification, which I liked and enjoyed—terms like blockbuster, redliner, real estate broker, displace your pioneer settlers, and questions about that language and thoughts about that language. Lawrence is not immune to gentrification, by the way. There’s quite a bit happening in the neighborhood where I live. How much has the language of gentrification—the conception of what it means—changed since the ’70s?

Jonathan Lethem: I’m going to do a pretzel maneuver on your question. The word gentrification itself is so taken for granted. It’s not that old. This common use of it where we all just say it like everyone knows what that is. It had to be invented and then become familiar. It began as an academic term in England. I started researching it, and this certainty that we have that attaches to the familiarity of that word, is recent. People didn’t know what was going on, and they had different words for it. Of course, early on, when the process was being given names, it was being given positive names.

WT: It’s not a term that I remember being used in Kansas City at all, until people became aware of the fact that… You can make a lot of money in Brooklyn, people actually learned that in the 90s, like in Kansas City. And then artists and younger people who were not from Kansas City started realizing they might be able to pull that off here. And that’s sort of happening in a place called the Crossroads.

JL: I watched the adults—the parents in my neighborhood—discover that they were doing something, sometimes very intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, and sometimes with mixed purposes, or confusion about what role they were playing. And they had to find that name, before they could even begin arguing about whether it was a good or bad result. It was a fresh word at that time. It’s amazing how many metaphors from what we would now call colonial or settler history of the United States that, you know, this was not Conestoga wagons in Brooklyn, right. But this idea of settlers or pioneers was very, very strong. And more than that, you had very strange other words that were imposed.

There was a project by the Brooklyn Union Gas, our utility company, to help people renovate the buildings. It was called the Cinderella Project, which is really uneasy if you think about Cinderella. Does that mean the other buildings are the ugly stepsisters, or that it’s all going to go back the way it was at midnight? Or there needs to be a prince? And then there was the Brown Stoners newspaper called the Phoenix, which is like a thing coming back to life. Well, very awkward given that there were actually a lot of buildings on fire there all the time. But this inadvertent yearning to put it in some kind of metaphorical framework—

WT: Or to find language for what was happening, to name things, in a way, for the first time.

JL: And there was an obsession with Victorianism, with restoring the buildings to a previous legacy/past that would explain why it was okay that now they were being taken over by a white community. Because they were Victorian houses, right? Oh, then you exaggerate this kind of image of gas-fitted fixtures in the chandelier or the marble fireplaces, and people would actually even dress up in Victorian outfits and be photographed in their restored parlors. As if to say, “We’re just bringing it back.”

WT: This is weird because the quote I wrote down cuts out part of what you’re talking about. Let me put it this way, I grew up very near this neighborhood, but I lived in a Black neighborhood in Kansas City for about 10 years when I came back from New York—a beautiful neighborhood—and I still own that house, and my neighbors are still my friends, and they never talked about gentrification. My neighbor, Helen Thomas, would be like, “When is my property value going to go up?” Because all the houses, just a few blocks away, in white neighborhoods… like my parents’ house, has gone up 100 times in value since they bought the house in ’67. Whereas Helen’s house is the same price as what she bought it for 30 years ago, right? In a way, there are people who own property in Black neighborhoods who would like to see this. You know, it seems fair. The store value of real estate going up in value and for them, at least for Helen, and for other friends that I had there, that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. I think it’s a complicated issue. It’s not as simple as, “Oh, this will be terrible for everyone.”

JL: It’s very complicated. And now, I want to push it one stage further and say that the word gentrification covers so many different kinds of dynamic and process and experience when people refer to it, that it’s actually concealing as much as it successfully names. And one of the things I started to intuit was that the action for me—in terms of my political desires, my sense of justice, or my idealization of a world that would make sense to me—would reflect my values. I started to look at this kind of carving off of one area, like eight city blocks, or even 20 city blocks, and saying the argument is whether or not it should change and in what way, is itself a blind.

That larger structural issues about capitalism, equity and our society were what we really needed to address, and just being in favor or not in favor of pretty buildings or property values or really good restaurants or whatever, was not going to actually be the argument that mattered. Of course, many people experienced the early part of what we call the gentrification of my neighborhood as like, “Wow, it’s coming back to life,” or, “Wow, now the cops will come and take this criminal activity out of our viewfinder.” Like, “We won’t come out of our houses at night and see something going on or be mugged.” “The schools got better.” But that’s not the story that I started to think was the one that had to be understood. The story that had to be understood is how larger forces, developers, the city itself, the society itself, were leaving enormous kinds of tragic inequity.

WT: So is that the crime in Brooklyn Crime Novel?

JL: I’m not going to tell you what the crime is—

WT: I feel like the story of Kansas City is the story of the Nichols company that used racial covenants to divide the city, and so Helen Thomas’s property was worth less because a company had spent a century teaching people that separate white space was more valuable than the space multi-ethnic people lived in. And real estate is all about imaginary value. It’s more because you say it’s more or because someone will pay for it. It’s not like anything that’s real.

JL: You mentioned blockbusting. And this is a term that people haven’t heard as much anymore, but it was a sensation and a scandal in the 1950s. The way neighborhoods were exploited was a reverse maneuver of scaring the white people out, specifically by telling them the neighborhood had gotten so Black that their property values were about to plummet, and chasing them into the suburbs, and then flipping the houses to make a fully non-white community. And it was a double monstrosity, because once you’ve done that, you controlled the property values in it.

We all feel like we want to treat the people in front of us humanely, and many of the people I grew up with were participants in the Civil Rights era. They’d gone on freedom rides, and they taught in impoverished neighborhoods where there was a segregated school. And then there had been busing, and the teachers had left or been fired. I mean, all kinds of desires to live in a society that reflected the values that the Civil Rights era helped create. And these bitter ironies helped to create the desire to live in Brooklyn—to come back from the suburbs and live in the cities. And you mentioned artists—it’s so often driven by people looking for affordable places to live and make art and people who can’t afford and want to be in a community where there’s that kind of possibility. It is even often driven by people who feel that they are in some way, radicals, sexual exiles, or not welcome in other places. Gentrification starts with an inordinate number of different kinds of desires, many of them really idealistic.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Jonathan Lethem 

Brooklyn Crime Novel • Motherless Brooklyn • The Arrest • The Fortress of Solitude

Others:

James Alan McPherson • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith • Black Spring by Henry Miller • Another Country by James Baldwin • James Joyce • Patricia Highsmith • Iris Murdoch • Henry James • Mark Twain • Benito Cereno by Herman Melville • Ralph Ellison

Poet, editor, and writer John Freeman and novelist Omar El Akkad join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the final issue of Freeman’s, a literary magazine founded in 2015. El Akkad, a contributor to the volume, describes founding editor Freeman’s intense and uniquely broad interest in literature, as well as his unusual ability to curate collections of pieces that are in conversation with one another. Freeman explains the work and support that made the magazine possible, and reflects on the moment when he decided to pursue it, as well as how he decided to conclude it. They discuss the publication as a project that created a valuable network of literary connections and gave many writers a new context and outlet for their work. El Akkad reads from “Pillory,” his story which appears in the final edition of Freeman’s, and talks about how he came to write it.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran.

EMBED FROM MEGAPHONE

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I’m teaching a creative nonfiction class right now. And I tell students: think of when you’re doing a polemic, you have to define terms like… Tom Frank in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas defines this term called the “great backlash” as a way of explaining what conservatives were doing in the late ’80s. And what I love about that piece is how easily you can quickly define these terms that don’t exist in our language, but we understand how they work, and they fit really easily into the flow. But the piece wouldn’t work without you creating a terminology for what’s happening.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of my time trying to think about the price of admission, because a lot of my stories end up in a place where there is a price of admission. I wrote a story a while back called “Government Slots” about this world in which there’s something like a post office and everybody gets a little box. And whatever you put in that box is believed to follow you into the afterlife. It disappears the moment you die. And so the whole story, which has almost no plot to speak of, is about what kind of things people would take with them, if they thought it would follow them into the next life or whatever comes after. And so, some of these boxes are full of Bibles, resumes, condoms; people have very different ideas of what’s coming next.

But that was another story where we had to think about the price of admission, like, here’s what you need to know about this setup. Because once I give it to you, I’m not interested in that anymore. We’re going on the emotional aftershocks of that. But it’s something I have to think about a lot. And I do it to varying degrees of success.

WT: I mean, it’s very hard to do world-building concisely, right? I think that story does a great job—it’s not a very long story, and it creates an entire world very quickly. Can you talk to us a little bit about, as a writer, you mentioned a little bit earlier that you were aware of Freeman’s and were reading it? When did you start reading it? In your mind is there such a thing as a “Freeman story”? Are there particular things that you value about the journal? We’re trying to start… find somebody to do a long book about this later, criticizing John for somehow doing something wrong, and the people that he’s brought into the novel like they do with Iowa.

OA: I make fun of them a lot. And then immediately send them an email saying, “Please don’t drop me. I beg you.” If I’m being perfectly honest, my ignorance knows no bounds. And the first time I came across Freeman’s was when I was researching John, so, the backstory, for whatever it’s worth, is that in the middle of working on the edits to my second novel, this book called What Strange Paradise, my editor Sonny Mehta passed away. And in fact, the last trip I did before everything went to hell because of the pandemic was to his memorial service in New York. And I was in a really bad place. I sort of won the lottery, with respect to my first agent, my first publisher. You’re a first time novelist, and you have no idea what the hell you’re doing and suddenly, you’re put into this position where you’re working with people who are among the best who have ever done it.

I didn’t want to do anything else with writing as a commercial endeavor. And John comes into Knopf, and I have no idea whether he asked for me to be working with him on another novel that still doesn’t exist, that I’m still working on. I have no idea what the backstory is. And I start looking up this guy, and I’m like, “Oh, he has a magazine named after him. That’s something. I guess I better read this thing.”

I think Arrivals was the first one that I picked up. And I just became obsessed with it. It was a great introduction to the kind of person John is, which is the sort of person that you can sit with and say, “Tell me your five favorite Nepalese poets,” and he’d be like, “Just five?” And you’ll have to come up with another container, or sub-container, to put it in, because the extent to which he really cares about literature as an individual effort, but also literature into how the stories speak to one another, I think is unlike almost anyone I’ve ever worked with. And so that’s how I became acquainted with the entire endeavor.

It was weird reading somebody’s work and reading the thing they’ve created before, I think, we ever had a discussion in person. Or no, we did have a discussion in person at the Vancouver festival, when I had no idea why you wanted to talk to me at all, because I had no idea what was going on, on the other side of this. But it was part of my introduction to who John is, as a literary mind. And that is a facet that continues to astound me.

John Freeman: Vancouver is a great place. I go to these festivals, in part in order to meet people like Omar. And for the last 10 years, Vancouver Writers Fest has been generous enough to schlep me out and in exchange for me moderating an event or two, I get to mooch around and listen to people whom I don’t know read, and it’s been a wonderful education, not just in Canadian lit but in literature from around the world. And Omar’s frequently roped in to moderate events as well as be in them. And so I had seen Omar both on the end of questions and on the questioning end. And it’s very unusual to see a novelist be able to do both. You two are particularly quite odd in that regard. Because most novelists are world builders, but they’re not necessarily journalists and interrogators, and both of you have worked in some capacities as nonfiction writers yourselves.

And Omar, of course, has spent a lot of time as an overseas reporter, sometimes in conflict zones. And it’s exciting when you see someone’s mind framing stories by the questions they ask. And then you can see them do that but in the fiction way, which is to create sort of invisible structures of enchantment, which are asking questions, but are not necessarily visible.

So, you know, with American War, what would happen if everything that ever happened around the world as a result of America’s imperial flex happened within American borders? What would that feel like? And you know, similarly, in What Strange Paradise, what would happen if you reset the story of Peter Pan but on the island of Lesbos, or in the middle of the Mediterranean, with two children trying to walk to safety? But I think that there are some people who have worked as journalists and are novelists – Colson Whitehead is another – where you can see that the skills are related and enhancing each other.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: John, you’re talking a little bit about questions. And you wrote about that in your introduction to the issue and you also write at some length about the late Barry Lopez. And you write about how keenly attuned he was to living and the intensity with which he paid attention to everything. And the issue includes, incredibly, a never before published story by him, and also includes a never before published poem by the late Denis Johnson. Can you talk a little bit about including those pieces in Conclusions?

JF: Yeah, there’s also a poem by an 11th century Chinese poet translated by Wendy Chen, who came to me as a submission at Knopf, and I was just completely bowled over by these poems. Li Qingzhao, who’s sort of regarded as highly as Li Po, but has a kind of Sappho-like quality to her poems. They’re poems of longing and love. The voice feels so immediate. And those poems have been known and been around and Wendy has just done a new translation.

In the case of Barry and Denis Johnson, those pieces were found recently. I’m friends with Barry’s widow, the writer Debra Gwartney. And when I went to Barry’s memorial up in Oregon, in his study there was a poem open on a kind of pedestal facing the woods, which had been recently scorched from one of the big Oregon fires. And it was a kind of poem that was about stewardship. And I had no idea Barry had written a poem and it was dated 1980-something in Port Townsend. And I asked Debra, I said, “What is this?” And she said, “I think he wrote this as a broadside in benefit for Copper Canyon.” So I asked if, at a later date, we could publish that. And she said, “Absolutely.” Because it’s a beautiful summary of all the ways in which maybe we underestimate our footprint on the world, but also, how much more improved our lives would be if we saw stewardship as not an “also” but just as a primary function of our reason to live.

And in the course of laying that out, she wrote back to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been looking through Barry’s papers, and I found this essay, do you want to look at it?” And she gave it to me on my birthday last year in Seattle when we were having an event for Freeman’s. She has a harrowing, beautiful piece about driving out of the fire that eventually claimed a big part of their house. They survived, but that was probably the beginning of the end of Barry’s life. They lived on a salmon river, and the river was really damaged, and the salmon suffered as a result of it. And in the course of this event, she just handed me a printout of this piece. And it’s a gorgeous piece of writing of walking home along this river. And for whatever reason, maybe someone commissioned it, and he never liked it or decided not to turn it in, or maybe the magazine folded, all those things can be very likely. But it’s a perfect piece of writing and a perfectly observed walk home. And it’s at the end of the day. So it felt like the most obvious place to begin the issue.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.

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JOHN FREEMAN

Freeman’s • Wind, Trees • Maps • How to Read a Novelist • Dictionary of the Undoing

OMAR EL AKKAD

“Pillory” • American War • What Strange Paradise

OTHERS:

Freeman’s Conclusions | Vancouver Writers Fest • Freeman’s Conclusions – The Nest – Vancouver – Oct 20, 2023 · Showpass • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 22: “The Unpopular Tale of Populism: Thomas Frank on the Real History of an American Mass Movement” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 17: “Poetry, Prose, and the Climate Crisis: John Freeman and Tahmima Anam on Public Space and Global Inequality” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1, Episode 5: “Is College Education a Right or a Privilege?” featuring John Freeman and Sarah Smarsh • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 17: “Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad Tell a Different Kind of Climate Change Story” • Denis Johnson • Barry Lopez • Wendy Chen • Li Qingzhao • Li Po • Debra Gwartney • Michael Salu • Colson Whitehead • Jon Gray

Novelist Rebecca Makkai joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about new accusations of sex crimes or sexual misconduct, this time leveled against comedian Russell Brand, actor Danny Masterson, and Spanish Soccer Federation president Luis Rubiales. Makkai observes that since the start of the  #MeToo movement, more people are willing to take such accusations seriously, but also describes the repetitive nature of the abuse as discouraging. She reads from her recent novel, I Have Some Questions for You, which, in part, asks readers to reconsider the way they think of sex, class, and race.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Each of the cases that we cited in the intro have, for me, specific echoes of cases that began the #MeToo movement. And also with the plot of your most recent novel, I have some questions for you. For instance, Danny Masterson was convicted of rape, he’s going to prison. How does that compare to Harvey Weinstein, who was also convicted of rape and is in prison now, as his case was the original impetus behind this whole movement? I mean, are these cases parallel, can we learn anything from their repetition?

Rebecca Makkai: I don’t think it’s a shock to anyone that this is repetitive. It was certainly that repetition and that repetitiveness that was really on my mind as I wrote this novel, but also in the years in which I wrote the novel. So I started thinking about this book in 2018. And that was when this initial wave of stuff was happening. They’re not all going to be exactly the same. And that’s where we have to be careful about saying, “Well, this one’s not as bad” or “this one is different.” We have to have room to make those distinctions. But that doesn’t mean we are using those distinctions to diminish. Which is a tricky balance.

WT: One of the things that I was thinking about the parallels between Masterson and Weinstein is that Weinstein was protected by the old boy network of Hollywood, right? He had power. He was a producer. And so people were afraid to say things about the assaults that he made on them, the women.

And the similar thing with Masterson, although in his case, it was the Church of Scientology, because he’s a member there and the teachings of the church are that you shouldn’t report these kinds of things to the police or report anything outside of the church. And so the women who were involved in eventually making these allegations said that they had all felt discouraged directly by the church or implicitly by the church from reporting what Masterson was doing, and it seemed like that happened also in the Weinstein case.

RM: Yes. But what’s interesting is that, what has happened in both cases, is that people have eventually talked. That doesn’t mean people are always going to feel free to, they’re not always going to be listened to. But this is what’s shifted in the past six years, five years, right? There were two things that really surprised me a lot. Well, there were many things. But the two main things that really surprised me about #MeToo: one was that it lasted. Because I really thought it was going to be like, two days of this internet hashtag. And then we were going to go back to not caring about this stuff, and not listening and not believing stuff. So that was number one.

Number two was the way that people were digging down. It wasn’t just famous people. And it wasn’t just the big capital T traumas. It was more nuanced. Maybe not necessarily prosecutable things, but people talking about, “Hey, this stuff happened in high school, this stuff happened in college, and it really upset me.”

And I guess three, tying those all together, is that people were listening. It was not just about people expressing themselves. It was also about people listening – and certainly not everyone’s listening. Certainly not everyone feels free to speak. Certainly we’re not getting this all out there. But the understanding that I think we’re starting to have in these cases – and maybe social media is part of this, you can reach a bigger audience faster when you have a problem – but we’re starting to have this understanding that people might at least listen. That’s new. That’s huge.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: And I feel like one sign of this… RIP Twitter. We’ve already talked about this, but I do feel like I log on to X, and –

WT: Sugi, have you arranged for us to pay for Twitter now? We don’t have a lot of funds. We’re gonna have to sell real estate, the podcast real estate.

VVG: No. We’re not…no.

VVG: The things that are trending, by the way – which is one of the reasons for “RIP Twitter” – only like 50 percent of them, or maybe less, are even pertinent. But Russell Brand was trending recently. And he started as a comic who often talked about his drug and sex addictions, and he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008. And then as one does, he set up a YouTube channel in 2013. I do not [have a YouTube channel], but anyway, Russell Brand does, and he became a hero –

WT: You do too have a YouTube channel, Sugi! We were just talking about this.

VVG: We have a YouTube channel. Anyway, he became a hero of the left in Britain. And then as one does, he shifted and became a vaccine denier and conservative nut job. And then in September, four alleged victims accused him of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse during a five-year period from 2006 to 2013. Is there an earlier #MeToo figure who reminds you of that narrative arc?

RM: Yeah, no, definitely. You look at someone like Bill Cosby before #MeToo–

WT: That’s who I thought of…

RM: Right. And we had years before #MeToo, and there was this pile up of all these women. I remember, there was a cover of some magazine. I can’t remember which one – I don’t know if it was their pictures or their names…

VVG: It was New York Magazine.

RM: Lord knows how they felt about that. That was probably a problem in and of itself. But one of the effects… it’s all these women. All these women are saying the same thing. We were not – when I say “we” I don’t mean “me,” but, this aside – we weren’t ready to go, “Oh, my God, this is clearly real.” There was still that, “Well, but they’re all in it for the same thing,” which is fame and glory, or whatever it was that people thought. Fast track to wealth and success. But maybe there’s been a shift. I don’t want to sound pollyannaish, believe me, but maybe there’s been a shift to more of us sooner, more publicly believing when these stories come public.

VVG: I think that I was actually thinking of a different magazine story, which actually illustrates the shift that you’re talking about. I think it was the New York Magazine that had a bunch of accusers on the cover, kind of supporting that case, which was more recent. And so this makes me want to dig up the earlier story that you’re talking about. But even just the notion that similar imagery would be portrayed for almost opposite reasons. Like, in the first instance, some sort of subtext of “name and shame,” like the nerve of these women saying this thing?

RM: I don’t think that’s what New York Magazine was doing. That was not my impression. I think they were saying, “Look at all these accusers.” I think it was like “Look at all these women saying the same thing.” Standing with them.

VVG: So we are talking about the same story.

RM: I think we are talking about the same story. I mean, it’s one thing to come forward. It’s another thing when your name or image is put on the front of New York Magazine. Like, you wonder how they felt about that. Because of course, they are not in it for the fame and glory, quite the opposite. No one wants their name known in this regard. So it’s more just like, “God, I wonder what the underbelly of that was,” and the effect for those women.

But, no, this is the story where they were like, “Look at this army of women all saying the same thing,” and that had a profound effect. At that point, I certainly didn’t need to be convinced, but I was like, “What is wrong with us societally that when this many people come forward – which should also be the case even if one person comes forward – but this many people come forward all saying the same thing, and we’re still not believing them. What is wrong with us?” Although I was probably one of the last people who needed convincing, that still hit me really hard when that appeared.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Rebecca Makkai by Brett Simison.

*

REBECCA MAKKAI:

I Have Some Questions for You • The Great Believers • The Hundred-Year House • The Borrower • Music for Wartime

OTHERS:

Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 1, Episode 2: “Jia Tolentino and Claire Vaye Watkins Talk Abuse, Harassment, and Harvey Weinstein” • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 1, Episode 22: “Alice Bolin and Kristen Martin on the Problem With Dead Girl Stories” • “Russell Brand’s Timeline of Scandal and Controversy,” by Alex Marshall, New York Times • “Danny Masterson sentenced to 30 years to life in prison in rape case,” by Alli Rosenbloom, CNN • “Luis Rubiales resigns as Spanish soccer president following unwanted kiss with World Cup winner Jennifer Hermoso,” by Issy Ronald, Homero De la Fuente, Patrick Sung and Zoe Sottile, CNN • StoryStudio Chicago

Writer, programmer, and tech consultant Alex Reisner joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his recent Atlantic articles on Books3, a massive data set that includes hundreds of thousands of pirated e-books, and that Meta and other companies have used to train generative AI. Reisner explains how he extracted book names and titles from long strings of text in Books3 to create a searchable database, and why not finding yourself in the database doesn’t mean your work is safe. He also reflects on the dangers of metaphorical language in discussing AI, what he’s heard from legal experts, what publishers are and aren’t doing, and how piracy has shifted from benefiting individuals to helping corporations profit. Reisner reads from his groundbreaking Atlantic coverage.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So, Alex, I wanted to go back to something you were talking about earlier—“substantial similarity.” I remember reading in one of your pieces that some of the lawyers were arguing that AI is creating works not substantially similar to our works. So then, that means—to Whitney’s point about hypocrisy—that there’s this two-faced thing going on where they’re saying to the court, “When we ask our AI to write a book in the style of Alice Munro, it’s not actually doing that.” But then the use is being marketed as, “We can get this AI to create a text that is Alice Munro-like, in a way that you won’t be able to tell the difference.” Am I understanding that correctly? What do you think about this “substantial similarity” argument?

Alex Reisner: Yeah, I think these systems can—to some degree—spit out their training text. The companies have gone to great lengths to prevent that from happening. [The systems] also can’t do that 100 percent of the time. In some cases they can, but companies are preventing that from happening.

VVG: How can they say to some people, “We can do a perfect imitation of Sugi,” and then say to these other people, “This definitely does not sound like Sugi. It’s legally defensible.”

AR: I’m not really sure how to answer that. I think it’s really getting into this gray area, because nothing like this has been in the courts before. There’s an undergraduate writing exercise where you try to imitate the voice of a writer you like, but no one goes out and tries to sell that in the way that—very soon—could be happening here. Going back to the “substantial similarity” thing again, I think the legal meaning of that is very technical, and I’m not sure exactly what it means. To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t know if the actual words need to be similar, or if capturing an author’s voice is similar enough? I’m just not totally sure how the judges are going to see that.

VVG: Yeah, and I’m sure there’s going to be all sorts of variability in the same way that like—are they going to be mapping syntactical patterns or vocabulary? All of which can probably be mathematically represented, as you were talking about earlier. So to ask the question that all of our listeners would probably like us to ask—if you had written a book that was in one of these data sets, what would you be doing right now to protect your own work?

The Authors Guild put out this piece and gave us some advice. Some of that advice is obvious, like send letters to the company, donate money to the Guild to support the lawsuit. Then some is less obvious, like setting up Google alerts for your book, sending takedown notices when you find unauthorized copies, including their “no AI” training statement that they suggest you put on your copyright page. Or… learn how to edit a robots.txt file so you can restrict open AI’s crawler, GPTBot. I just barely understood the last sentence I said. What do you think about this advice? Should I be learning how to edit a robots.txt file? 

AR: Robots.txt is actually important and may become a key part of this. It’s pretty technical. But the quick explanation is it’s a file that sits at the root of every website and describes what robots can and can’t view on your site, and to some extent, how they can use what they view. So a lot of people are now using robots.txt to block GPTBot, which is the robot that ChatGPT uses when it scrapes a lot of content from the web for training. So you can do that, but again, that’s not going to help with books, that’s only with stuff that you put on your own website, because that’s the only website where you can control robots.txt. Even suggestions that seem like they should work—like a “no AI” training clause in your copyright notice in the front of your book”—my understanding is that it’s not really going to work.

As an author, you have a very limited ability to specify how your work can be used, for example, you could put in a copyright notice that you can’t read this book on the Sabbath. But in court, a judge is gonna say you can’t enforce that. People who buy your book can read it whenever they want. In the same way, if a judge decides that training AI on copyrighted material is fair use, they’re going to say that no author can specify that a company can’t do that. So it’s really tricky on an individual author level.

I think what seems really important to me right now is staying on top of what the publishers are doing. As I said, they’re there, they seem to be embracing generative AI. They’re staying awfully quiet as all these authors are filing lawsuits. And I don’t know if the Authors Guild is planning some kind of interaction with them.

The Writers Guild of America just achieved something with the studios in Hollywood that could be helpful. The Authors Guild is a very different kind of organization. The whole labor situation is very different. But I don’t have any great advice other than to try to keep an eye on the publishers and maybe encourage them to keep AI out of the book acquisition and editing process.

Whitney Terrell: The Screenwriters Guild is much more powerful and has a much longer history of striking and negotiating with the studios. Authors like us, we’re more like professional golfers. We’re independent contractors. I don’t think people think of themselves as being in a union or guild in that way. So it may be the time for authors like us to learn how to do that because it’s going to take collective action to protect some of this stuff.

VVG: Alex, you were referring earlier to the guy who made Books3, Shawn Presser, who told you that he did it, in part, to have a data set available to people other than rich corporations who are developing AI. In other words, to level the playing field by making OpenAI-grade training data widely available. And as you wrote, piracy used to primarily benefit individuals. I have been thinking about this recently because I learned that my work appears in libraries like Z-Library. I was talking to someone else about it and they were like, “This is incredibly important for accessibility in the Global South. You’re writing about Sri Lanka and people there who want to be able to access your work might be accessing it this way.”

My initial reaction was to be like, “There are unauthorized copies out there, I feel violated.” And then she was talking about the grief that people experience when Z-Library gets taken down, pops back up again, gets taken down, pops back up again. The sadness people experience when they lose access to some of these things. I was moved by that story and thought about my friends who are copyleft activists, and have talked about this kind of accessibility. But now, this kind of piracy is benefiting corporations. So is there a way to thread that needle to stop corporations while adopting anything close to a copyleft perspective?

AR: Yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s pretty complicated. You’re talking basically about how we manage access to this stuff for different people. This situation is—as I see it—a consequence of just digitizing everything, which we’ve been doing for the past 25 years. There’s a sense in which digitization cheapens books. It cheapens writing. It just turns it into data and becomes kind of ephemeral. It spreads really easily across the internet. Since the advent of social media, we’ve seen how companies can scan and mine texts for demographic information, like our habits, our brand preferences, and our writing style, which they can mimic. Things being digital is extremely convenient, but this is part of the cost of it.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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ALEX REISNER

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic • “What I Found in a Database Meta Uses to Train Generative AI” • “These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech” • “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI”

OTHERS

Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders (The Authors Guild) • Practical Tips for Authors to Protect Their Works from AI Use (The Authors Guild) • “Some writers are furious that AI consumed their books. Others? Less so,” by Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 17: “Chatbot vs. Writer: Vauhini Vara on the Perils and Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence” • “My Books Were Used to Train AI,” by Stephen King, The Atlantic • “Murdered by My Replica?” by Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic • “My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic • Alice Munro • Rebecca Solnit • Meghan O’Rourke • George Saunders • Ta-Nehisi Coates • Martin Amis • “Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement,” by Wes Davis, The Verge

In anticipation of Banned Books Week, Brooklyn Public Library’s collections manager Leigh Hurwitz joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the recent, dramatic rise in book bans disproportionately affects young people, and why BPL has chosen to offer access to its half a million eBooks and audiobooks to every person in the U.S. between the ages of 13 to 21. Hurwitz, one of the librarians behind the groundbreaking digital library card program launched in April 2022, talks about how in its first eighteen months, Books Unbanned has helped more than 7,000 users in all 50 states to access the books they need. Hurwitz unpacks the range of reasons teens cite for needing the cards, including privacy, lack of transportation, and—in some places—the requirement to get a parental signature or use a deadname to acquire a physical card at the local library. They also explain the positive responses from Books Unbanned readers who are able to see marginalized aspects of their identities portrayed on the page for the first time. Hurwitz reads from their Vice article about the program.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Are there challenges to the Books Unbanned program? Have you had any issues? What are you going to do if you do? What happens when this gets on Fox News… if Fox News decides to run a story about this terrible program that you have?

Leigh Hurwitz: We honestly—this is such a boring answer—we really have not had any pushback. A few annoyed emails at the beginning, maybe. But we’ve really only heard from the people that are supportive of this program.

WT: That’s good. Only a few annoyed emails is pretty good for anything a library does.

LH: I know. Yeah, we definitely have patrons who were more annoyed about other things that were happening at the library. But no, we have a wonderful community here of our patrons.

WT: Everyone’s perfect. 

LH: We’re here for them, we wouldn’t exist without them. I can tell you one very small personal thing, which I just sort of laughed at, was when I did a Reddit AMA a few months ago. And one person, I guess who attended that, tweeted at BPL with my full name saying, “BPL, do you have any response to this?: Leigh Hurwitz wants to give copies of Hustler to all preschool children in the country.” Just this stock statement, and BPL was incredibly supportive and asked me how I wanted them to handle it. We just ignored it.

WT: Or, Leigh, is that why they put you in the printing room for this interview?

LH: I’m in the printing room! They’re just trying to bury me! I know that this institution is so incredibly supportive of all its staff and pretty unwavering in its commitment to access and intellectual freedom. So I think we have enough goodwill locally and nationally that we would be able to withstand any negative attention from Fox News. Something that’s been happening across the country is that public libraries have seen an increase in bomb threats being called in.

A lot of times it’s because of things like drag story hour. This did happen to us recently as well but it wasn’t directly connected to Books Unbanned. There are other things that are part of this whole boiling cauldron but that aren’t directly related to Books Unbanned.

WT: Well, we’ll see if we can fix that by publishing this podcast.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I know this is gonna surprise you. There’s not a ton of overlap between our listeners and Fox News watchers, so you may not be at huge risk being with us, but I’m curious just because – for people who maybe don’t know – or just if things have changed since the days when my mother would drop me off at the library and leave me there for hours. If you go to a public library, and you’re 13 years old, and your parents want to see the list of books you checked out, can they? Because it seems like one of the important things here is privacy, right? And that’s one of the things that digital collections allow too, if you’re reading something on your Kindle, it’s less visible than if you’re reading a book with its regular dust jacket. I mean, it sounds like you haven’t had parents writing in to say, “What is my kid reading? And why are you making that possible?” When you’re a minor—which, most of these Books Unbanned readers must be—what privacy rights do you have with what you’re reading?

LH: This is different in every public library system, they all have different requirements about what ID you need to be eligible for a card and things like that. But for anyone who’s 13 years old and up, you do not need a parent or guardian to sign the application or get permission for you to have a library card. For children who are 12 years old and under… I mean, you can have your own library card pretty much as soon as you’re born. For now, we do require anyone who’s 12 years old and under to have a parent or guardian sign the application so that they can have a library card.

But I will say that something we’ve uncovered as a result of Books Unbanned is finding out that there are a lot of public libraries in this country that require you to have a parent or guardian approve your library card application up until 18 years old, which is shocking. And a colleague of mine actually is putting together a survey to see what sorts of policies like this are in place and to say, “Okay, are you doing this because this is just the way you’ve always done it and no one’s evaluated it in a long time, or is there something else at play in this requirement?”

VVG: That’s just wild. You can go get your driver’s license at 16. Why would you be able to get a driver’s license but not a library card?

LH: I know. We take the privacy of all of our patrons extremely seriously. We don’t share data, and we also don’t keep track of what people have borrowed once they return it. So we don’t even keep track of that information. We consider our national teen eCard holders our patrons, too, and we take their privacy just as seriously. And that’s also why one of the reasons for Books Unbanned is to find out what is happening in this country and hear directly from teens themselves. We’ve collected a lot of stories, and we take their privacy and their vulnerability and their sharing of these stories with us really seriously. And so we are figuring out a way that we can get consent from some of them to share their stories, even if it’s in an anonymized way. But I think that that is an example of how we treat our patrons in Brooklyn as well.

VVG: So you’ve been talking about this program’s various successes. And I’m curious about what’s ahead. You mentioned you thought it would be temporary and now it seems like it might be a longer-term fixture and that Seattle Public Library is now on board. I’ve been reading about all of these other things like the Banned Book Club app, where it will sort out what books are banned in your area based on your geolocation and then help you check them out. I was like, “Yes, finally! The geolocation thing doesn’t freak me out anymore!” Anyway, I’m curious about what you have in the works. I understand you may have a new podcast in the wings.

LH: Yes! I’ll mention that first since you brought it up. We have an extension of our Borrowed podcast called Borrowed and Banned, which is seven episodes long and really takes you into the history of censorship in this country, especially as it relates to books and libraries, and takes a macro and micro look at all of this, focusing on individual stories, but also the broader history. I know I keep saying that word ‘history’ but that’s what it is. And just why and how books are being banned and what people can do about it. I think that’s a really important piece of this, too: “Okay, what are we going to do about it now?” It debuts on September 28.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Leigh Hurwitz by Gregg Richards.

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Leigh Hurwitz:

“I Helped Thousands of Teens Impacted By Book Bans. Here’s What They Had To Say” | Vice • Blog posts by Leigh Hurwitz | Brooklyn Public Library

Others:

Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor | PEN America • Books Unbanned | Brooklyn Public Library • “Brooklyn Library’s ‘Books Unbanned’ Team Wins Accolades,” by James Barron, New York Times • How the Brooklyn Library Helped Fight Book Bans in Oklahoma by James Barron, New York Times, Sept. 12, 2022 • Introducing: Borrowed and Banned | Brooklyn Public Library • PEN America & BPL Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute • BookMatch and BookMatch Teen • Reddit AMA with Freedom Forum • Libraries for the People • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 45: Celeste Ng on the GOP’s War on Children • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 5, Episode 12: Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 13: Censoring the American Canon: Farah Jasmine Griffin on Book Bans Targeting Black Writers • “Readers Can Now Access Books Banned in Their Area for Free With New App,” by Christopher Parker, Smithsonian Magazine

Eighteen months into the invasion of Ukraine, Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko, hosts of the podcast Explaining Ukraine, return to talk to co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan about how the war has affected Ukrainian artists and how they’re responding. They talk about the actions of deeply engaged writers and intellectuals they know, like Yaryna Chornohuz, a young poet who’s an activist and has joined the army as a paramedic. They also give an update on what’s happening at the front and the possibility of the formation of an international war tribunal to investigate crimes of the Russian Federation.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We’re going to get to the way that Ukrainian writers and artists have been responding to the war in just a minute, but I wondered if you could first update us on what’s been happening. There’s been a lot of reporting here in the U.S. about the Ukrainian counter offensive. Is it happening? Is it going too slowly? And now, most recently, there seems to have been some important progress by Ukrainian forces along the frontline near the city of Zaporizhzia. So where do things stand as of mid-September?

Tetyana Ogarkova: Well, in fact, the situation is quite difficult on the frontline. The counter attack on the Ukrainian troops has been underway for a couple of months already. But there are a lot of problems with this because a lot of territories are really mined by Russian troops. That’s precisely why Ukrainian troops had to change their strategy to advance without destroying their own troops. That explains why the advances are slow—quite slow on the ground. They’re careful. But the most important issue they have is to continue moving forward. Even if they’re not moving hundreds of kilometers, they’re sometimes moving about hundreds of meters per day or kilometers per week, still advancing in the South.

In the East, the situation is even more difficult because in some places like Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region—northeastern Ukraine—Russians are trying to attack once again. There are a lot of troops in this direction trying to get what they lost one year ago. Let me remind you that last September, this brilliant military operation of Ukrainian troops for the Kharkiv operation took place, and they managed to liberate huge amounts of Ukrainian territories, but now, Russia is still trying to attack in this region. So the situation is really very tense. And Ukrainian society understands now that it will take a lot of time to liberate Ukrainian territories.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: That may also be because we had—both in Ukraine and in the outside world—exaggerated expectations. And it was like in a football match or a computer game where you are looking at some soldiers that are trying to liberate certain territories. Of course, in real life, it’s a little bit more complicated because Russians have been preparing for this counter offensive in the South, and they built three lines of defense. They astonish the mind with a lot of things.

We are talking about hundreds of kilometers of very dense minefields. But despite all that, the Ukrainian army succeeded in breaking these lines. And now, near the city of Zaporizhzhia and more to the south near the town of Robotyne, Ukrainians are really breaking through the first line of defense, which is very tense and complicated. We gradually see their little advance, which actually—if Ukrainians break through this corridor, the first line of defense, second line of defense, and the third line of defense, it is quite probable that they will build the actual corridor in the South and Russians will be in a very difficult situation because Ukrainians will be able to reach Crimea, for example, with strikes.

So I think we need to understand that obviously, the war will be longer than some expected, and we Ukrainians were saying this from the very beginning to not have the illusion that this will be just a series of brilliant blitzkriegs, and we should be prepared for a longer fight. Here, the question of technologies is very important and the question of drones in the air is very important. Who will actually conquer the air? This is very important. But also, we should not have the impression that this is an endless war. Russians are weakening, and they are actually exhausting their resources. They’re not helped by big supplies from the outside world. Instead, the solidarity with Ukraine is huge, we really appreciate it, and it’s important that it lasts.

Whitney Terrell: Well, that breakthrough that you’re talking about with these lines of defense seems very important—I read in the German news service, DW, that Russia has committed 60 percent of its available resources to that first line of defense, right? So the reason that the break in the first line, around Zaporizhzhia and another place that you mentioned, is important is because according to DW, they’ve only put 20 percent of their available resources to the second and third lines of defense. So I’m wondering, now that this first line has been broken in a couple of places, does that mean there’s a chance for Ukraine to make faster advances?

VY: I do think that there is a chance, but we should be very careful and understand that it’s also a battle of resources. And Russians are also learning, so it’s wrong to believe that this is a stupid army. Of course, they made a lot of mistakes, and Ukrainians are smarter, I think. But at the same time, we need to understand that this is a war that is increasingly going into the air and increasingly dependent on technologies. We should understand that many things are really done by infantry—by individual soldiers who are very carefully going through these really dense mines and losing their lives. And of course, we have this inhumane dimension of the war where we’re losing many, many soldiers. And the only way to decrease the suffering is to supply the Ukrainian army with better technologies that will help to better demine, target Russian artillery, and fight against the Russian drones, etc, etc. So we really need to understand that Ukrainians are paying a huge price for these but at the same time, we do need more weapons, technologists, and more smart technologies.

TO: I would also like to add an important comment about time and evaluation. So the evaluation was about 60 percent effort for the first line and 20 percent for the second line. It might be true. It’s only an evaluation and time plays against Ukrainians once again. During the time Ukrainian troops were busy with the first line, Russians had some time to prepare. The second line or the third line happened last year when Ukrainian troops were preparing their counter offensive in the South. Russians never lost a single minute of preparation time.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief for the Ukrainian army, was asking for weapons to use for the long months of autumn 2022 and spring 2022 to prepare the defense lines. So what military experts say is that if you enter a territory it is really heavily mined now. If you compare what is happening now to what was happening during the Second World War in the Soviet Union—because Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union—you can compare the level of mining. They have five to ten times more mines today than during the Second World War. So imagine the effort it took to have Ukrainian troops advance and also the effort it will take to demine all these territories for after, because this is a war, not a game of football. It’s not about who wins or who loses, it’s about having a place to live. And to get life back into these territories, you need to demine them. So it will take time and a lot of effort and a lot of resources from both the Ukraine and hopefully from our international partners.

VVG: So I think you’re both giving us some useful metrics to think about what exactly progress in this war looks like. And I’d like to keep talking about that. I also feel like podcasts aren’t a visual medium, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the geography and about the map of the war as it stands. We’ve been talking about Zaporizhzhia. Can you explain why progress there is particularly important, and if Ukrainians are about to advance further, where will they go next?

TO: Well, Zaporizhzhia is a key direction now for a simple reason. If you start from Zaporizhzhia and advance to the south, you may hopefully arrive in Melitopol. Melitopol is situated close to Azov. And the main plan of the Ukrainian army is to divide the Russian troops that are now occupying eastern Ukraine, southern Ukraine and Crimea. If they succeed, going to Melitopol and then later to Donetsk, they will reach the Sea of Azov. And when the Ukrainian troops reach the Sea of Azov, it would mean that Russian troops are divided in two parts. And given that Ukrainian troops are already partly able, they will be even more ready later to control the so-called Crimea bridge—the bridge which Russia constructed after the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula back in 2014.
So they will be cutting off the logistics of the Russian army from the territory of the Russian Federation, and they will encircle all of these Russian troops in the part of Crimea, and in this tiny part of southern Ukraine. It will facilitate things for the Ukrainian army to fight further, to liberate, and to make Russians leave Crimea, and from this part of southern Ukraine. It will also facilitate things in eastern Ukraine. But in eastern Ukraine, it will be, in a way, more difficult to get Russians out because they still have a broader borderline with Ukraine. I mean—Donetsk region, Lugansk region, all these territories are close to Russia, so they will still be able to have these logistic chains, for weapons, for infantry, for artillery, for everything. This is why the southern direction is a key direction now. And a huge amount of Ukrainian efforts are concentrated in this area.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko:

Explaining Ukraine (podcast) • Ukraine in Histories and Stories

Others:

Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 2: “How Dostoevsky’s Classic Has Shaped Russia’s War in Ukraine, with Explaining Ukraine’s Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko” • Yaryna Chornohuz • “Being a poet and a woman on the frontline – with Yaryna Chornohuz” (Explaining Ukraine) • Timothy Snyder • “Timothy Snyder: Freedom as a Value and a Task – a Talk in Kyiv” (Explaining Ukraine) • Joseph Heller • Thomas Pynchon • All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque • “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso • “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” by Wilfred Owen • “Remembering Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, killed by a Russian missile,” by Joanna Kikissis • Kateryna Kalytko

Novelist Leila Aboulela joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan on their 200th episode to talk about the fighting between rival military factions in her native Sudan, which has displaced millions of civilians. She compares the situation of Sudan, which underwent a coup in 2019, with the six other African countries that have experienced coups since 2020. Aboulela explains the historical precedents and particularities and reflects on how, when a country’s military is its mightiest institution, a coup can be the only way to change leadership. She also reads from her new novel River Spirit, which covers the period of time leading up to the British occupation of Sudan.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: This year, conflict between rival factions of Sudan’s military government has led to fighting that has prompted, unfortunately, millions of people to leave their homes. You spent most of your childhood in Khartoum. This must be hard to watch. How are your friends and family there faring? And what is the situation like on the ground for civilians from the reports you’ve been hearing?

Leila Aboulela: I spent more than my childhood in Khartoum—I actually left in my mid-20s. And I had already graduated from university and got married and had a baby. So I did a lot of life there. My friends and my cousins, most of them, by day 11 of this conflict, had left the country. The first instinct of people was just to get away from this sudden, unprecedented bombing of their homes. And after they left for Egypt and other neighboring countries, things are very bad now for civilians, because this war has indiscriminately targeted hospitals, it’s bombed the airport, it’s bombed schools, water facilities, electrical supplies. So day to day life is just unbearable at the moment, and that’s why people have fled.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So they went to Egypt. Sudan borders, I think, seven other countries. I know there’s a lot of people who are internally displaced, and also people going into other countries. So your friends and family went to Egypt. Are there places within the country that are turning into refuges as well?

LA: Most people went outside the capital, they went to the provinces, which had less fighting. And they felt safer there. It just happened that my family and the people I know went to Egypt. I guess because we originally have ancestors from Egypt. So there’s always been a connection with Egypt. So the instinct was to go there as a place of safety. But people have gone to Ethiopia, Chad, South Sudan, depending on where they have links, where they have family members, but most of the displacement is happening within the country itself.

VVG: At the top of the show, we were talking a little bit about how I know someone in Egypt who has been working with people displaced from Sudan. And I was also reading a story in the Times about people who had gone from South Sudan, to Sudan, and were now returning, so doubly displaced. And I think that history of multiple displacements seems to be part of the larger story of the politics of this area. So Sudan became independent in 1955. And I was reading that since then, there have been 15 coup attempts in Sudan, five of which have been successful. Can you talk a little bit about how General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan came to power in 2019 and why he is now at odds with Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, who is the leader of the paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces?

LA: Yeah, he came into power as a result of a civilian revolution against the old general, the old military dictator. So Sudan, almost from independence, with very few and short exceptions, has been ruled by one military dictator after the other, so really the army is the most powerful institution in the country. It’s got the biggest share of the budget. It’s the richest institution, it’s the most powerful institution in the country. So basically, just changing whoever’s ruling comes then with a coup, one coup after the other.

And so this General Burhan took over with a coup, but he was supported by this paramilitary, the Dagalo, that you mentioned. But then they fell out because this paramilitary was meant to be incorporated into the main army. But they negotiated the terms into which they would be incorporated in the country’s army, but they weren’t happy with the negotiations. And so they went to war in the capital, disregarding the people who were present. So that is what happened, unfortunately. And unfortunately, the paramilitary were encouraged and in the hope that they would lessen the power of the military. But it just backfired. It was just not a good idea. In theory, maybe it was a good idea. But in practice, it was just a disaster.

WT: Seems a little bit like the issues that Russia has been having with General Prigozhin, who runs a paramilitary organization there, as we all know, and he’s now dead. The Wagner group that became powerful then turned on the military itself. And there’s this infighting in that way. And both of these generals that we were speaking of played a role in an earlier conflict in Darfur. I wondered if you could talk about that and how that contributes to their history.

LA: Yeah, so this Hamdam Dagalo was a warlord in Darfur, and all these atrocities that were taking place in the capital [now] took place in Darfur. And he’s a warlord and he owns a lot of mines and gold and you know, he’s quite a powerful person in the west part of the country. And actually, people in Darfur are saying now to the people in Khartoum, well, you’re just tasting what we had before, the war has come to you in the capital. You used to be safe in your bubble. But now, the war has reached you as well.

WT: Sudan was a British colony. Earlier in the episode Sugi mentioned six African countries where there have been coups. Guinea, Niger, Chad, Gabon, Burkina Faso and Mali. These are all former French colonies. Of course, they all have their own specific political context. But what role does colonialism play in what’s happening here?

LA: Well, colonialism laid down the boundaries—the maps of all these countries—in ways which the colonialists thought was logical, but it might not have been logical for the people, and the way they were affiliated with their tribes and how they felt that they were loyal. But then colonialism decided to mark “this is Sudan, this is Chad, this is Guinea.” So that is one thing you’ve got, you’ve got a boundary, which is European-created. That is one thing.

And then the other thing is the way the colonialists did the divide and rule and how they kind of would set one group against the other and play one group against the other. And so this created these kinds of divisions and the separate development in certain areas of the countries and how perhaps one tribe would be elevated and be favorites amongst the British and be given land and be given help, whereas others won’t, because they’re deemed to be a threat. So these kinds of divisions and all of that, this is what the legacy is of colonialism, I would say. But I know at the end of the day, we’ve been independent for all these years, we can’t blame colonialism for every fault. We have to, as Sudanese, shoulder the good part of the blame.

WT: To what extent—this is just a thought experiment, you can tell me if this is completely nuts, but—you know, sometimes there are patterns. For instance, in the United States there’ll be clusters of mass shootings, right. If something bad happens, you give someone else an idea to do the same thing. And I wonder if—is it possible that because one state has a coup and then some other group thinks, “oh, we could do that in our country,” could that be contributing to the reasons why this number of coups are happening at this particular time, or are they all individually oriented and there’s no connection between them?

LA: It could also be to do with the flow of the firepower, you know, the guns, the weapons, the defense. The defense industry is very secretive, we never hear about unemployment in the defense sector, or how much sectors are earning. We’re not privy to all of these details, they’re all top secret. So we don’t know what is going on. And I’ve noticed, for example, in Sudan, you get a very poor country, and then suddenly a military truck is driving down the road, and it’s so sophisticated, and it’s so pristine, and the soldier is dressed really very nicely.

So a lot of money is being poured into this. And if there’s guns and bullets, why wouldn’t they use them? They’re gonna use them because they’re there. And how come they are affording all of these things in a place where they can’t afford vaccines, and they can’t afford schools and all that? But suddenly, there’s no problem, they never run out of arms, they never run out of bullets, and yet they run out of food, and they run out of all these other things. So the weapons are a big part of it.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Leila Aboulela by Rania Rustom.

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LEILA ABOULELA

River Spirit • Bird Summons • Elsewhere, Home • The Kindness of Enemies • Lyrics Alley • Minaret • Coloured Lights • The Translator • Articles in The Guardian

Others:

“What’s behind the wave of coups in Africa,” Al Jazeera • “Chaos in Sudan: Who Is Battling for Power, and Why It Hasn’t Stopped,” by Declan Walsh and Abdi Latif Dahir • “How To Write About Africa,” Granta, by Binyavanga Wainaina, 2005 •  “Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan Writer And LGBTQ Activist, Dies At 48,” by Colin Dwyer, NPR, May 22, 2019 • Sudan, a coup laboratory – ISS Africa • Khartoum (1966 film)