GUEST INTERVIEW - CHRIS ABANI

We're awfully pleased to offer this exclusive, thoughtful guest interview with Chris Abani.

INTERVIEW BY KATE DURBIN

Chris Abani's prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007) GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985) and the novellas, Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006) and Song For Night (Akashic, 2007). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize.

The Virgin of Flames is Abani’s most recent work, and the New York Times calls it: “Ambitious and original…Abani’s Los Angeles is at turns desolate and luminous…a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure.”

Abani agreed to answer some questions via email about his new mind-trip of a novel, which features one of the most inventive and affecting casts of characters I have come across in recent fiction. There’s Black, the protagonist, a sexually bewildered 36-year-old muralist whose Igbo father left him as a child, and whose Salvadoran mother tried to beat the love (or the guilt) of Christ into him. Then there’s Sweet Girl, the transsexual stripper from Mexico City who he is at turns in love with and wants to become, and the angel Gabriel, who follows Black around in the form of a pigeon.

There’s no way to summarize the book without doing it a great injustice, but I do think it’s safe to say that it’s a hilarious and harrowing exploration of identity as well as a poetic love and blues song to that vast, magical, terrifying place known as the city of Angels.

1) Where was The Virgin of Flames written? If it was written in Los Angeles, what part of Los Angeles? What kind of exploration of the city did you do as research for the novel and in doing so did you find anything that surprised you enough to cause any changes or shifts in the texture of the novel?

The novel was written mostly in Los Angeles, with the exception of a one-month residency in Marfa, Texas courtesy of the Lannan Foundation. I wrote most of it when I lived in Boyle Heights in East LA. I did explore in the literal sense – drive and walk around as much of East LA as I could, taking pictures where I could and in some cases film, but mostly it came from just living there. In terms of myself, I had to examine a lot of my ideas and preconceived notions of LA and of sexuality and gender and race. So yes, in every sense, there was exploration. I did a lot of research about LA history and social movements. I am not sure if any of that caused any particular shifts, but everything went into the novel in a way giving it a unique texture.

2) Ritual is an important aspect in this novel. Black, who is a muralist, has many rituals he enacts before painting--from his cup of tea to his unusual and humorous physical exercises. It's significant to note, I think, that he creates all these rituals himself, unlike the frightening and painful rituals that his mother forced upon him in childhood. Were there any particular rituals you enacted when writing this novel? Can you talk a little bit about the significance of ritual (religious or individually constructed) in this book, for Black and for you?

I have no rituals for writing. A busy travel schedule denies me any such luxury, so no particular rituals were engaged in while writing this novel. When I was young I was invested in the idea of ritual in making art, you know, the Remington typewriter, the lone cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, Miles Davis on the stereo, the whole works. But that only lasted until I was about 18. I realized at that time that I was confusing ritual with process. I do however try to live my life with the reverence, and irreverence, that ritual demands. Smile.

Religion though is another matter. It has always fascinated me. I went to seminary very young to be a priest and was asked to leave over matters of dogma. I then dabbled in everything from Islam to Hinduism through to Buddhism. I am however drawn to the idea of religion as a language essential to us as human beings. I think that somewhere along the line, institutions have hijacked this language, but the idea for me is that religion is the attempt to give faith a voice. And what is faith if it is not the tenuous idea that we somehow matter in the scheme of things. The exploration of this language be it in cities, in the underbelly of things, in sexuality, in race and racism, is tied to the idea of becoming and that is sort of core to my work.

3) The instability of identity and the longing for a personal identity one can call his or her own is a major theme in all your books. It seems to me that the longing for some place to call home, for a self to truly own, is the essential theme of this novel, even underlying questions of sexual and racial identity (but obviously inseperably connected). Can you talk a little bit about that longing Black feels for a self to own?

Well, it's not so much that identity is unstable, as it is a process and not a destination, if I can paraphrase Homi Bhaba. If that is the case, and I feel that for me it is, then we are always becoming something. If we are able to acquire enough stuff around us we appear more stable, more static than others. These things, kids, families, wealth, reflect ourselves to us and we tend to think of the image as the self. When people find themselves without mirrors, there is nothing to reflect off of, and they begin to unravel. It's like in the old vampire movies, where the vampires have no reflection. This is their biggest sadness and their greatest desire. This is what Black is struggling with. Home is the self, not so much a physical place, but a sense of arrival, or like you say, to feel like we own ourselves. But the thing is the desire is what is important because it is never sated, no matter what it arrives at. This in a sense is part of the human condition, that we are always carrying an existential melancholy with us. We are all the fallen angels. What a thing of beauty that is.

4) Iggy tells Black that origins aren’t important, that what is important is dedicating ones self to the life you've made and have ahead of you (I’m paraphrasing). Black, however, is obsessed with his origins, haunted by them. I'm curious as to how you see this tension between Iggy's perspective and Black's perspective as tying into the California dream and the history of the city of Los Angeles? In particular I mean THIS Los Angeles, in your book, a city filled with many people of various origins, all who are trying to eke out a living and move forward while still holding onto their various histories?

The thing is, in the end, there is no LOS ANGELES. There is only the city we carry inside of us. There is a tendency to believe in authenticities, in the idea of a pure place. Everyone thinks his or her Los Angeles is the real true one, and of course the problem with this is that it is closely linked to a politics of ownership that denies the reality before us. Every city is shaped by the people who live there and in a way we can even argue that cities are the manifestations of our unconscious; a place that resists classification, where everything and everyone can and often do co-exist. Chief Parker tried to section off this city in the early part of the last century, to forcibly segregate it by race, with all the city ordinances and zoning laws that kept certain races out of certain neighborhoods, all that, and what now? The city, and time, resists all that, and returns to its fecund uncontrolled and uncontrollable malleability. Christopher Isherwood in California The Tragic Country was more poetic about the dream of this place than I could ever be. If there is any truth to this city, or any city, it is somewhere between our desires for and of it and the city's resistance to that. There is no authentic LA, that's kind of what my book argues. There are only multiple cities within it, each as valid as the next.

5) Objects, shrines, talismans—physical things are all important in your novel. They serve to conjure ghosts and memories, to provide protection (ex. Iggy’s wedding dress that Black wears) and to facilitate revelation. There are so many interesting and eclectic objects in this book. "Kitsch with conviction," as Iggy says. Can you talk a little bit about how you see these various objects working in the text, both for the reader as well for the characters? Where, for you, does their true magic lie?

On one level, because the language of the novel is so poetic, and because it is a character driven novel not a plot driven novel, the objects serve to anchor the reader to an object world that they can trust in a novel that is by nature of its subject and structure often ambiguous. But it is also play on the way that we build iconic representation and the ways in which we imbue objects with more meaning than they can possibly own. The question remains though, what happens to meaning when these objects are placed in the unusual yet remain within a culture that is used to reading them a certain way. Can that shift alone cause a shift in seeing, in questioning, even in becoming? We fill our lives with talismans – talking Homer Simpson bottle opener’s, bobble head toys, etc. – and we make meaning with them and often use them to anchor our identity and our morality. I try to move them out of context or order or place into the public dimension, the fluidity of such objects to see what new worship we will come up with. This is their true magic - that they not only reveal our deepest unspoken and often unspeakable selves, but they aid in every transformation in our lives.

As for Kitsch without conviction, this is pretty much what LA is – certain burger joints, certain cinemas, certain streets, the clash of cultures, the desperate attempt to collect history in the most ephemeral objects and knowing the futility of this in an ever changing landscape to approach with the half-hearted humor of kitsch, but a self aware kitsch (California car culture is one, as are farmers markets).

6) The LA River serves many symbolic purposes in your novel. Can yout talk about why you chose the river as an emblem of the city?

Well, every great city in the world has usually been situated on the banks of a river. I mean it is the water that draws people to settle there in the first place for obvious reasons – drinking, crop irrigation, transport, etc. Usually the river builds a symbiotic relationship with the city and its inhabitants that is beyond merely the practical, it becomes mythological. We can’t think of Paris without the Seine for instance. There is something about water that does this, its flow, its ability to absorb history, the dead, and the desire of a people. Water is also closely associated with birth and femininity and most rivers and other large bodies of water are linked to goddesses – Yemenya, Oshun, Mami-Wata and so forth. In many ways, you can almost think of the river and stories around it as vital to the city – there is really no London (Londonus) without the Thames, no Shakespeare even. This is the case with LA. It once had an amazing river that has been despoiled, used up and now, to protect against floods, covered in a concrete channel. No one thinks about it, but there it is nonetheless, flowing through the dreams of everyone. I found out in researching the city that the reasons LA streets flood every time it rains is because they are meant to – the serve as flood drain channels for the river, but also you could argue that mythologically they serves as arterial channels of the river and therefore the dream of the city. When you even think of places like Venice that was riddled with canals now filled in to be streets it makes you smile. Water is everywhere in LA and yet it is a desert that only exists because we pump consumable usable water from the Colorado River in Colorado; we stole the water in the days of the Mulhollands. Now we have more pristine lawns per square mile than any city in the world – we use water as though we aren’t in a desert. So in many ways, LA wouldn’t even exist except for a force of will closely tied to water and how we steal it. On another level, water is the oldest symbol for change, for transformation and transubstantiation even, from baptism to erosion. Since the book in many ways is looking for words for this experience, for this transformation that cities offer, this religion of cities, to quote the first line of the novel, how could the LA River not be the perfect emblem for this city of ephemera? And as the novel asserts (and I won’t say where in the novel), “there can never be no more river.”

7) You are now seen as a quintessential L.A. writer--an immigrant with a complicated past, a world traveler, a man about town, a bizzare and beautiful hybrid of a writer. What are your current thoughts about the work that is coming out of L.A. and how are you involved with discovering and helping other L.A. writers?

“A bizarre and beautiful hybrid of a writer!” I should have you writing blurbs for my books! Very kind in its own bizarre kind of way. I love LA writing, always have and always will, from the tinsel town stuff to amazing sci-fi by writers like Steve Erickson, Shessu Foster, to the early noir of Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler, to the work of Chester Himes and of course onto Walter Mosley, the history and socially aware books of Mike Davis, David Ulin and Steve Isoardi, all the movies of Charles Kaufman and so forth – and expand that to include California (Joan Didion, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann, Steinbeck) – it is a rich, rich world. I like this town because writing literary and interesting fiction is not its industry. In New York writing smart books is its industry and writers get caught up in that as much as Hollywood people here get caught in that industry. But writers, well, we just hang out and grow in weird and individual ways. It’s great. That said, there is a huge poetry scene here too and without great presses like Red Hen, most of it would remain in bar readings in Chinatown, coffee shops in Manhattan Beach and so forth. That is the literature that I am interested in championing. Work by women and other minority poets that can be unexpected, content or stylistically challenging – I want to help promote this. That’s why I came up with the Black Goat Poetry Series, an imprint that I had with Red Hen Press and which has now moved to Akashic books in New York. We have two books out to date – Percival Everett’s first book of poetry and Kimberley Burwick’s book. Three more follow this fall – a book by Karen Harryman, Kwame Dawes and Uche Nduka. In many ways, Los Angeles has more to offer the world of American Literature than it is given credit for, and all the small presses and journals out here are building that reputation slowly. I am only one of a large group of people engaged in this.

Kate Durbin is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her work has been published in Boxcar Poetry Review and Moondance. Currently she is at work on a collection of poetry and a novel.

Comments

[Ethan]

There used to be a time when LA was just a city.

-Ethan
Backpacking on Little Money

[Rebecca K. O'Connor]

The is no place in the world that was ever JUST a city. --at least not to any artist.

[Phil]

Excellent interview!

[Anna Clark]

Wonderful interview--a lot of power in relatively few email questions. Thank you!

[Imani]

Just amazing--thank you very much for posting this.

[Stephen Brooks]

Did you ever work out of Dalston in London England many years ago?

[Chioma Ugboma]

I need Abani's email address pls

Chioma Ugboma (eyiucheugboma@yahoo.com)

[Chioma Ugboma]

I send this from Nigeria ad i need to speak or write directly to Chris Abani via his e-mail.