Thomas Glave: Words for Our Now

Thomas Glave, author of Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent. Photo by Sylvia Plachy.

Talk about the genesis of Words to Our Now.

I didn’t realize that this collection would be a book until a few years ago. Since the mid 1990s I’d written a few essays here and there, but it was only in more recent years – not long after the publication of my short story collection, Whose Song?, in 2000 – that I began to think seriously about publishing a book of essays. This desire was fueled partly by the wish to continue experimenting with prose in forms other than fiction (but simultaneously in fiction), partly by a sense of urgency about political matters that had developed in part out of my activist work in Jamaica and elsewhere – matters about which I really wanted to write -- and partly because I honestly wasn’t sure if I really could write what people called “nonfiction”; I wanted to see if I could write it, and what that writing process would feel like – how would it differ from fiction? And then, as you know, a couple of the essays in the collection originated as keynote addresses. Writing an address for a specific event in a specific time and place was another exercise altogether, from which I think I really learned an enormous amount. All of the work involved – the actual processes of craft and crafting -- was, I felt and still feel, often very difficult, in ways very different from, yet sometimes similar to, what I’d encountered in fiction writing.

Talk briefly about your vision for a homophobia-free Jamaica and how you think this can be accomplished.

I don’t envision a homophobia-free Jamaica any more than I envision a racism-free world; in the world in which we live, that is, one of human beings, I just don’t think the complete eradication of these prejudices is possible. I also believe that homophobia must exist as the partner of, and in the presence of, sexism and misogyny, which means that until we eliminate those, homophobia will continue – and I do not think that, at least in my lifetime or yours, we, whoever “we” are, will eliminate any of these. But I do think that, in Jamaica, we can aim for a less violent society: one in which people might continue to view homosexuality with disgust and loathing, but will not feel compelled to chop someone up with a machete because of those feelings. That’s really what I would like to see – a far less violent world. But I must be realistic and concede that the lessening of that violence has to begin with me. And I’m aware that, while I’m here, I will do so much and no more. I have managed to make a kind of peace with that. The important thing is that we all try to do something – not sit back and wait for someone else to do it.

Can you tell us about what led you to write about Steen Fenrich, a 19-year old black gay male who was killed by his stepfather in Queens, New York six years ago?

I wanted to remember him and to ensure that others knew about him and remembered him. His case and life were only among the many, many, many cases and lives like his forgotten and tossed aside – sensationalized for one second in the increasingly tawdry media, then discarded. I also wanted to draw attention to the inequality of remembrance: how so many people remember the tragic death of someone like Matthew Shepard, whose death was indeed a horror – but how few even knew who Steen Fenrich was. Steen was black and Matthew was white; Steen was not socially privileged and Matthew was. Race and class certainly have something to do with who is remembered, and how well. Even if only for myself, but hopefully for so many other people as well, I wanted to do my part to re-member – put back together in memory – Steen. This essay was, is, a kind of testament to what I could put together of his life and death. It is, I guess, a kind of altar to him. Young black men, black men, black women, need more of these altars. We do. And there are still so many more people to remember – more, I think, than most of us can possibly deal with.

Besides James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill and a handful of anthologies that feature essay writing, very few LGBT people of African descent write nonfiction, let alone publishing an entire book of essays. Many of the issues you explore in your fiction are present in your non-fiction, as well. How does the essay form allow how you address homophobia, Jamaica, injustice, etc., differently than in your fiction and poetry?

In the essays, I as the writer – and, to be sure, the thinker – have to take a stand that I wouldn’t necessarily have to take, or even wish to, in writing fiction. With fiction, I prefer to let the characters tell the story, their story, and not use them as props for my own political explorations; their humanity and complexities are what I would always prefer to keep in the foreground. I think that there is room for a particular kind of ambivalence, a yes-and-no-ness, in fiction that I, at least, haven’t yet worked out equally in nonfiction, at least not in the essays I produced in this book. Also, in the essays, I found that I really had to say – at least some of the time – “I think this” or “I believe that,” in a frankly declarative way that I would never have done in fiction. Doing this forced me to think very clearly, actually often unflinchingly, about just about all of my moral and ethical beliefs. I didn’t always enjoy that process, for sometimes it required me to confront some of my own hyprocrisies and inconsistencies – but I think the process was finally an extremely powerful, if deeply unsettling, one to experience.

Working this way – stating my own beliefs and taking stands on what I believe in -- also ultimately made me feel rather exposed – there is no character to hide behind, quite, in nonfiction; it’s you and the world out there with which you’re having a conversation.

I also found that my language changed a bit, in that I sometimes had to use words like “homophobia,” “racism,” “colonialism,” “gender,” etc., in order to shape and provide a landscape for the discussion the essay was advancing. These were words I would have used in fiction only if the characters had chosen to use them. I think that, in fiction, one runs a particular risk, if one uses words like those, of sounding more like a pamphleteer than a fiction writer. In fiction, I wouldn’t necessarily find those words that interesting – imagine a short story that starts off “The racist man walks to the store and contemplates his homophobia” – how interesting would that be? – but I did discover their resonances in an entirely different way in nonfiction. Still, I tried my best to keep the language in the essays as fresh as possible, free of the platitudes and ideologically deadened language that many activists use so relentlessly over and over again.

Your essay using the Clinton-Lewinsky affair to talk about race, sexuality and gender was thought-provoking and a little frightening. Based on a discussion you had with your students, did you know then this issue and your take on it would provide good fodder for an essay? Clearly you could have written a fictional piece. What was your motivation to recount it as non-fiction?

No, I honestly didn’t know, when I asked the question that led to the essay, that an essay would come out of that question and the class in which I asked it. And, in fact, the truth is that I never saw anything about this essay as potentially fictional, as in “This might be a great short story!” I was motivated to write an essay because I wanted to understand something I didn’t understand; that is, I realized soon after asking the question (Would the world have experienced the Starr Report’s blaring reporting on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair had Lewinsky been a black gay male?) that there was a lot of secret, or coded, or “taboo” information that I didn’t know or hadn’t thought deeply enough about – things like sexual/power dynamics between black and white men, for example – that I needed to understand in an utterly precise, configuring way in order to better understand why my students had been so shocked when I’d asked the initial question. Although the experience of each essay in Words to Our Now felt completely different from the other, this essay was particularly challenging and strange – I felt as if I were piecing together the pieces of a puzzle in order to make sense out of the pieces that nobody was supposed to see or acknowlege. It was odd!

Creatively how has your writing developed over the last two decades?

I’m not quite sure. I would like to think that I have a stronger sense of technique now – a stronger command of language and sense of architecture and rhythm – than I did when I began writing the material that went into my first book. But you’re always learning, eh? Every day something different comes along that you didn’t know the day before.

Can you let us in on your writing process?

Not really! I’m not certain that I fully understand it myself. I just see it first and foremost as a discipline: clothes must be washed, floors must be swept, classes have to be taught, and prose has to be written.

Talk about your connection to Essex Hemphill and to Assotto Saint.

I never actually knew Essex Hemphill, though I admired his work from the moment I encountered it – and I was fortunate to encounter it while he was still among us, alive. When I first saw him perform in “Tongues Untied” in 1989 I hadn’t yet read his work, but within months of seeing the film, I had found Conditions, an earlier book of his; and then, some time later, Earth Life, his first chapbook. And I really did drink in, if that is the phrase, those books. I’d never seen anything like his work before. That was, I think, a truly exciting time for black gay men in particular and writing by black gay men.

Assotto I met in New York City around the same time; he soon became my spiritual big brother, in some ways nearly like my father and guardian; I somehow always felt very protected in his presence. (Although I’m not sure even Assotto, a very grand, tall queen, would have liked to have been called my “mother.”) He believed strongly in my early work and gave me much encouragement. I felt a kind of special kinship with him, I think, though we never talked about it, because of his Haitian background – he was a fellow Caribbean man; in his case, one who had directly experienced the ugliness of the Duvaliers. Assotto published some of the work I was writing at that time, and, as I’ve said elsewhere in other interviews, actually provided the inspiration for the short story “The Final Inning,” in Whose Song?, that finally won an O. Henry award. He didn’t live to see that, or to see Whose Song? published, but he was present there in the book – I know that.

I helped him during the time of his partner’s decline from AIDS – that was a really hard year for Assotto – and then helped take care of him after his partner died. All the life seemed to go out of Assotto after that. He became a kind of shell, and got sicker and sicker until he finally died in June of 1994, about a year before Essex died. I think that Marlon Riggs died that same year.

I recall being very much in awe of all those people, but I learned something vital from them all, and from Audre Lorde – certainly from Assotto, whom I can still hear telling me: we now have to do the work that they began to do. I see that work connected to the work of many, many other writers, including those who might be of African descent and not LGBT. The conversations are getting closer, often, even if the words are often different.

The moment you knew you were a writer.

I’m not sure. I think when I was very young, around 14 or 15 – but I didn’t use the word “writer.” I just knew, as I had already known for years, that this, this work, this thing, this closeness to books and to words, was what I wanted in my life, always. I didn’t want to, couldn’t, imagine life without all that.

What does Words to Our Now mean to you at this juncture in your career?

Oh. . .I really have no idea. I’ve barely had time to think about it, since I’ve been touring with the book and also teaching at the same time, and trying to write more, and read. It’s a book that will show me in some time where I was at this time and where I was going. It’s a bit of my testimony about what I feel about the world right now and how very much I want things to be better. I want Iraqis to be safe, not bombed to death; and I want all empires to lay down their arms and join the rest of humanity in this thing called “humanity.” Even if those things don’t happen now, I feel better knowing, with this book, that I at least expressed my joy about the lovely things and my dissent, outrage, about the terrible things.

What can readers expect from reading Words to Our Now?

Hopefully a great many things – and, I hope, most of them unexpected.

An excerpt of this interview appeared at Vibe.com.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006 @ 12:46 PM