(Poet, Amatoritsero Ede in conversation with novelist, Esi Edugyan)<\/i><\/p>\n
Amatoritsero Ede<\/b>: Esi, we are excited to have you on MTLS. First, what was the inspiration for Half-Blood Blues<\/i>, your most recent novel.<\/p>\n
Esi Edugyan<\/b>: In 2005, I went to live in Germany on a fellowship, in Stuttgart, a city in the South. As a black woman in Germany, I began to wonder about the history of black people in Germany, and I came across the story of the so-called Rhineland Bastards, children born to German women and French black colonial soldiers at the close of the First World War. I wondered what had happened to those children during the Third Reich.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: A historically bigoted pre-war Germany is important as setting to Half Blood Blues. Is it a coincidence that a writing residency in today\u2019s Germany also started you on this novel? In other words, how much has contemporary Germany left its racial sentiments and social divides behind from your experience of the place?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: What surprised me most about my time in Germany was my own slow realization that one of the cradles of humanism and enlightenment values was undergoing such a challenge from contemporary political and racial divides. Germany as a nation and the Germans as a people have carried the scars of the 20th century more than most. It was, of course, quite literally a divided place, and still is today in many ways. Being a visible foreigner in such a place at such a time meant that I was lucky enough to experience both the most generous and the least generous of impulses. Inevitably, the complexity of those experiences fed into the novel.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: Yes. Germany is indeed ironic. However the Enlightenment necessarily assumed that there were Others who were not enlightened! So one could say that the Enlightenment was shadowed by race or racism; it was steeped in a humanism that de-humanised others. That is the irony. Most of those \u2018humanist\u2019 philosophers who theorized the enlightenment were racists \u2013 from Emmanuel Kant to Rene Descartes. Therein lies the roots of twentieth century Nazism and the current racial divides in Germany. I lived there for 8 years as a student. It can be a hot, hot kitchen if you are black or coloured. But I must insist that we have a humane Left too there and that the German Right-Wing does not enjoy popular support.<\/p>\n
Hieronymus Falk is the \u2018soul\u2019 of Half Blood Blues – musically and otherwise. He is as important, if not more important, than Sid, the narrator, who is also the former\u2019s antagonist. Yet \u2018Hiero,\u2019 is always in the background, silent, brooding, unheard and tragic. He is the shy enigmatic musical genius. I, as a reader, wanted to hear and feel more from him. In the end when we do, he is blind and broken, even if unbowed. Would there have been any other way of characterizing him other than this?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: I\u2019m so pleased you engaged so deeply with the novel. I\u2019m sure there would have been many ways of conceiving these characters and this story, but that would have been a different novel.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: Agreed!; a different novel but with the same characters. A sequel to Half-Blood Blues<\/i> that resurrects the unforgettable Hieronymus Falk would be very interesting indeed. I think he is going to be an undying fictional character. Is there any chance of a sequel?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: Thank you. There are always so many more stories to tell, aren\u2019t there? I can\u2019t imagine revisiting this world and these characters, but it\u2019s an interesting idea.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>.: Yes, when I asked that question I was actually thinking of that rich tradition of sequels – for example in James Joyce through The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man<\/i> and Ulysses<\/i>. In both works, the fictional Stephen Dedalus is a major character. Each novel therefore reflects upon the other, enriches the reading experience and the study of Joyce as a writer in his impact on the modern English novel.<\/p>\n
The writing life brings its challenges and its fulfilment. What has been the most tasking challenge you have had to overcome as a writer, and as an African-Canadian writer?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: Interestingly, given the delicacy and generosity in your question: questions such as this one. That is, being regarded as a hyphenated writer, an Afro-Canadian etc, as if there were some special topic or subject required, and some special audience expected, rather than simply being seen as a writer telling stories about the world. Please don\u2019t misunderstand me \u2013 it isn\u2019t a ghettosization, here in Canada, at this time in history. Far from it. There has been so much interest in the past twenty years in stories that haven\u2019t been heard, in minority voices, that sometimes one feels lucky to be able to speak from such a background. Sometimes. As a writer, the challenge is always time, confidence, energy, encouragement. Rejection is hard. Half-Blood Blues<\/i>, in particular, couldn\u2019t find a publisher until Jane Warren, then at Key Porter, picked it up. And when that press folded, suddenly, in the fall of 2010, editors across the country again saw the manuscript, and again rejected it. That was a heartbreaking time.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>.: I asked about the African-Canadian experience precisely because identity does matter from culture to culture to varying degrees and historically. It is part of the stories and realities in the world. You experienced it first-hand in Germany. It might be felt differently in Canada. And identity has shaped the modern world as we see in the example of the story of the Enlightenment \u2013 where, based on race, some become automatic barbarians and non-persons.<\/p>\n
Dreaming of Elsewhere<\/i> is your creative nonfiction mediation on home and belonging or un-belonging. It begins with the anecdote of Anthony Wilhelm Rudolph Amo, the Ghanaian child taken away to Germany as slave in the early 1700s and raised as the ward of a German aristocrat. This is symbolic of the mass movement of black people from Africa to a new world Diaspora. Can one say that black people have really found a home in their travels beginning with forced migration (slavery) initiated during European contact in 1400s Africa?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: An interesting idea. I wouldn\u2019t wish to speak on behalf of all black people. I can say, for myself, that my search for belonging has been a personal one, rather than a collective, racial one. I do believe, as you suggest, that home is not so much a place as a way of belonging in the world.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: Of course, no one can speak for a whole race or group of people. But as public intellectuals those demands and responsibilities gets silently passed on to us based on \u2018pigmentation\u2019 and historical experiences.<\/p>\n
In all its senses, where is home for you \u2013 Canada, Ghana or elsewhere?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: I don\u2019t know that it is a question of place.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: Since 2005, a small circle of immigrant black writers describes themselves with the new-fangled term, \u2018afropolitan,\u2019 rather than the usual cosmopolitan. They are second- generation immigrants, have African roots and connections but may be ambivalent towards the continent. As a writer of African descent, what do you think about the idea of Afropolitanism?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: I think how we see ourselves is often what we become. Africa is a vast place \u2013 as varied and complex as Europe, or Asia. Sometimes we forget this in North America, and imagine it to be more akin to the US or Canada \u2013 a continental nation, multiple, but sharing a dominant culture. It is not; it does not. What I might say in answer to your question is this: that being descended from elsewhere has, in my experience, contributed to a feeling of otherness. For some writers, such a feeling would naturally lead them to seek out others with a similar experience, and form groups or cliques. For me, it has always led me to distrust the collective path, and to lurk on the sidelines.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>.: I cannot stand cliques myself because it is limiting. But I do have sympathies. And again, depending on a particular culture, you find yourself pushed into cliques. Germany did and does do that from my experience of the place.<\/p>\n
Half-Blood Blues<\/i> is a breathtaking and quietly stormy book \u2013 in its characterization, plotting and, especially, speech. What gets to me is the originality of its vernacular voice and its jazzy cadence. How did you manage to capture pre-world war black speech or rather the language of the streets and of Jazz with such familiarity and authenticity? It seems like this work is hundreds of years older than its author.<\/p>\n
\nE.E.<\/b>: What a generous description \u2013 thank you! How is anything caught in fiction? It\u2019s something mysterious, even to its author. I do recall writing an early passage of the novel, with the language far more ordinary, and showing it to my husband, who is a poet. His response: Tighten the voice, make it crunchier. So I let the voices speak with a little more passion.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>.: You had to put aside the manuscript of another work, your actual second novel after The Second Life of Samuel Tyne,<\/i> to concentrate on Half blood Blues. What is the title of that work and are you going to try bringing it out now; I am sure your readers are curious?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: I\u2019m sure every writer\u2019s desk is filled with half-finished manuscripts, untitled drafts, stories that might one day be completed. Mine is no different. Yes \u2013 it was a novel that could not find its equilibrium, and kept tipping under its own weight. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll go back to it some day. Perhaps.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: On a lighter note, a Ghanaian friend of mine tells me that your name would be pronounced [edujan] and not [edugyan], though it is spelled that way. Is this correct? And what is the significance of your name. African names usually have a story, a meaning behind them. What is the story behind your name?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: Yes, your friend is correct. The name is actually not my original family name. My father\u2019s surname was originally Anderson; for reasons known only to himself he changed it in adulthood to Edugyan, which is a name taken from somewhere within his extended family.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: Anderson sounds like a European name though; perhaps this was why he changed it \u2013 due to questions, again, of identity and roots.
\nAnd do you speak any Ghanaian language \u2013 Akan, Ewe or Ga for example \u2013 or would you learn one?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: I grew up in a household in which Twi and Fante were spoken, as well as English and French. I understand Twi and Fante far better than I speak them. Would I ever wish to learn a Ghanaian language? Yes \u2013 as well as so many others. If I had a second lifetime.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>: As is common to African cultures, Ghana has a rich story telling tradition, especially in the folktales genre. Was there any experience of that kind of influence in your literary background?<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: Not folktales, no, although I\u2019m an admirer of several West African writers \u2013 Achebe, of course, but also Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, to name a few. But I was raised in Calgary, studied in Victoria and Baltimore, and my literary sensibility was formed by reading writers such as Ondaatje, Atwood, Richler, Toni Morrison, George Eliot, etc etc.<\/p>\n
A.E.<\/b>.: Finally, all of us at MTLS express our gratitude that you took time off your busy schedule to talk to us and we look forward to your next book.<\/p>\n
E.E.<\/b>: Thank you. It\u2019s been a pleasure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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