Full transcript
0:01- Hello, hello ladies.
0:03So, so many of our audience members are in their 20s,
0:07so we thought we would kind of
0:08bring you back to our 20s.
0:10It's going to be a little easier for Yaa
0:11than it will be for Zadie and I,
0:13who have to look way back.
0:14So, Yaa's debut novel, which you should all read
0:18if you're like the one person who has not read it,
0:21it's called Homegoing.
0:23(applause)
0:24It's an epic, historical fiction.
0:25There are some people in here who have read it.
0:27- Thank you.
0:28- It's gorgeous.
0:29It was published in 2016, and she essentially
0:32won like every award you could possibly win, well-deserved.
0:36She was born in Ghana,
0:37the daughter of a professor of French
0:39at the University of Alabama, and a nurse.
0:42And I love this.
0:43Anybody remember Reading Rainbow?
0:46(cheering)
0:47Yes?
0:48So her first story ever, she submitted to
0:51The Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest,
0:54and won it, which encouraged her to be a writer.
0:57I'm like, thank you, Reading Rainbow.
0:58- I didn't win.
1:00- You didn't win?
1:00- I didn't win.
1:01- I thought you won.
1:02- I got honorable mentions,
1:03so I felt like I won, but I didn't.
1:04- Oh, that's even more inspiring
1:05for the writers in the audience who don't win.
1:08If you get honorable mention, keep writing.
1:11And then she's talked about how
1:13Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon,
1:15which she read in high school,
1:16is really like a click moment for her of like,
1:19I gotta be a writer.
1:20And as a massive fan of Toni's,
1:22I think that's so beautiful.
1:24So Yaa, you talked about that when you were in college,
1:28you went back to Ghana,
1:29and you visited the Cape Coast Castle place
1:31where slaves were confined
1:33before being shipped to the new world,
1:35a place just 50 miles from the town
1:37where your mother grew up, right?
1:39And you returned home, and you said you wrote
1:42a single question at the top of your
1:44blank computer screen, which was,
1:45what does it mean to be black in America?
1:48And that that question unfolded into Homegoing.
1:52Why that question?
1:53Can you unpack that a little bit for us?
1:55- Sure.
1:56I mean, I think for me, the question was
1:58something that had been looming in my mind
2:00for many, many years.
2:02As you mentioned, I was born in Ghana,
2:04but we came to America when I was only two.
2:07And then from there, we moved around quite a bit,
2:10so we lived in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee,
2:12and then Alabama.
2:14And in each place, there were fewer and fewer Ghanaians.
2:18In Columbus, Ohio there was a large Ghanaian community.
2:22I felt, I was going to the African-Christian church,
2:25like I still felt very connected to my ethnicity,
2:27and then by the time we go to Alabama,
2:30there were very few in the part of town that we lived in,
2:33very few black people in the part of town that we lived in.
2:36And so, suddenly I was kind of faced with
2:39this question of how to, I guess,
2:41balance or navigate my race and my ethnicity.
2:44And so for me, going to Ghana,
2:47taking that trip, trying to understand the ways in which
2:51Ghanaian history and American history connected
2:54for me was kind of a way to open up this question
2:57of what it meant to be black in America.
2:59- That's amazing.
3:00I kept thinking when I was reading it,
3:02so, to give you perspective, it's descendants of
3:06this one woman that branch into two families,
3:08and it's linked short stories of
3:11many, many, many generations, from slavery until
3:13contemporary America, and I kept imagining you,
3:17in writing classes, like 20 or whatever years old,
3:20saying, "I'm gonna write this epic novel."
3:23That, like, explaining it to a teacher
3:25and having the professor, whether subtly or
3:27not so subtly be like, oh girl, like you need to pick
3:28a way less complicated first novel.
3:31- Yeah, (laughs) yeah.
3:32- I kept wondering, like, what allowed you to
3:34hold on to that epic vision?
3:36Which also, I was thinking about the
3:38gender and race implications, like,
3:39the epic novels are often written by
3:42young, overly confident white dudes, right?
3:45And you wrote, you successfully achieved
3:48this gorgeous, huge novel as a first novel.
3:51Like, did you have to squash a lot of haters
3:54and like not listen to a lot of professors
3:56that told you not to write something that big
3:59right out of the gates?
4:00- Yeah, absolutely.
4:01I mean, I think part of the task in the beginning
4:04was not just squashing the haters,
4:05but also squashing that voice inside of yourself
4:08that says, this is stupid, this is impossible,
4:10why are you even trying?
4:13(applause)
4:14Because...
4:15Yeah.
4:16Because if you're not willing to fail at something epically,
4:20then you will never be able to write
4:22something epic, you know?
4:24And so I think having that reminder for myself
4:27was really helpful, and then sticking to the research,
4:31and understanding that I was kind of
4:33attempting to tell the stories of
4:37these people who had really existed.
4:39Obviously, the novel is fiction, but every time I read
4:42an account of what somebody had gone through
4:45in these time periods that I was writing about,
4:47I felt as though I had to,
4:49I would do them a disservice if I didn't try, at least,
4:52to get this book right.
4:53- Wow, that's awesome.
4:55I'm so glad you didn't listen those voices.
4:58Zadie, you had success at a very early age also.
5:01I, like, couldn't believe this when I read it.
5:04You wrote White Teeth at 23 years old, is that right?
5:08- [Zadie] Yeah, it was published when I was 23, yeah.
5:09So a little bit earlier--
5:11- So you really wrote it when you were 22?
5:12- [Zadie] Yeah, yeah.
5:12- How can that be?
5:13I mean, that's amazing.
5:15So, like, since then, let's just put in perspective
5:17for Zadie's career.
5:19She's published seven books, five novels,
5:21two essay collections, also won every imaginable award.
5:24Maybe not the one from
5:26LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow, I'm sorry.
5:28(Zadie and Yaa laughing)
5:29But every other award that you can win,
5:30become an icon of sorts.
5:33When you look back at that book, White Teeth,
5:36and at this 22-year-old writing,
5:39did you have, like, a driving questions
5:41at the top of your computer screen,
5:43metaphorically speaking, like Yaa?
5:45- Yes, I absolutely identified with Yaa's question.
5:50I think actually, it's sometimes underplayed
5:54the sense that when you're writing,
5:56you're not, for me anyway, it wasn't about
5:58describing myself or my identity.
6:01It was genuinely a question.
6:02I guess the question in my house was,
6:04how did these people come to be married?
6:08Which is a question perhaps everybody
6:10asks of their parents.
6:11But in my case, it was a very long question.
6:13(audience laughing)
6:14- [Interviewer] Yes.
6:15- Why does a woman from Jamaica,
6:18from the diaspora, how did she meet this
6:20working class white man from an equally long ancestry
6:25in a different place?
6:27And then that question expanded to, you know,
6:30why are there Bengalis next door?
6:32Why are there Pols?
6:34Why the Irish?
6:35Why this Jewish family?
6:36I grew up in this incredibly mixed environment
6:38and this mixed school, so everything was
6:40questions and also, deep voyeurism, you know?
6:44I really wanted to know what was going on
6:47in all the houses next door, all the flats next door.
6:50I was really fascinated by other lives, you know.
6:55- But why did that fascination
6:57manifest in fiction form?
6:59I mean, did you think about investigating it
7:01in other ways, or were you always drawn to fiction?
7:05- It's such a strange form,
7:07because it really is lying to tell the truth,
7:10if you see what I mean.
7:12There is no way, when I read Yaa's book,
7:14first of all I felt, I wish I'd had that book
7:16when I was 15, was one of my strongest
7:18feelings about that book.
7:19It was a book that I had wanted to read my whole life.
7:23But the rightness of it is not
7:25the rightness of history or, you know what I mean?
7:28It's not, it's the rightness that you feel in your gut,
7:30which is very hard to quantify.
7:33Why, when I read one book about
7:36the history of diaspora do I feel this is right,
7:37and another book might feel false, or...
7:40There's no guarantee in that sense,
7:42and it's full of risk.
7:43No matter how much research you do,
7:45you can't do research into humans, not really.
7:49So when I writing about all these people,
7:52the risk is always, well,
7:54what do you know about the Bangladeshi family next door,
7:57and what do you know, in fact, about your own mother?
7:59What do you even know about yourself?
8:00It's not rocket science.
8:03It's this emotional content.
8:06And all you can do is feel your way through it, you know.
8:11Research helps for sure, right?
8:13You have facts, you have historical details.
8:16But the rightness or wrongness of a page
8:18is always a massive risk.
8:21Every page is a risk,
8:22because at any point the reader is free to say no.
8:25I don't agree, I don't feel this.
8:27This isn't my life, it doesn't represent me.
8:29So that risk is what I'm addicted to, in fact.
8:33The possibility of bring wrong so many ways all the time,
8:36for some reason, is a great thrill to me.
8:38- (laughs) You're a thrill-seeker.
8:40So did you have the equivalent of a
8:43Song of Solomon, like something you read early on that--
8:45- Well actually, to be boring,
8:46it was also The Song of Solomon.
8:48(Interviewer laughing)
8:49But maybe a bit strong for me was Alice Walker
8:54and The Color Purple, just because, I don't know why,
8:58it had a stronger impression on me,
9:00and I was younger when I read it, probably.
9:03And then of course, all the other writers.
9:04I was brought up in England,
9:07so I was reading Dickens, Roald Dahl, Shakespeare.
9:11It's a massive canvas of reading, you know.
9:14Some of it which was close to me,
9:16and some of it couldn't be further away,
9:18but meant as much.
9:19- Yeah.
9:20So yeah, I'm sure that's a beautiful thing to hear,
9:25that your book had an influence on Zadie.
9:27- [Yaa] Yeah.
9:28Did you have an audience in mind when you were writing,
9:30or did you have to sort of banish the notion of
9:32anyone's actually going to read this
9:34in order to take that leap of faith to get it done?
9:38- I mean, what Zadie said about
9:39wishing that she had had this book when she was 15,
9:42I think that's always my target audience, you know,
9:45is myself at 15, the book that I would have
9:47wanted to read, the book that I wish that I had been
9:50able to see myself in.
9:52I'm gonna butcher the Toni Morrison quote,
9:54but she says something like,
9:56"If you are looking on your bookshelf for a book
9:59"and you can't find it, you have to write it."
10:01And I really took that mandate to heart, you know.
10:04I had never seen myself in fiction,
10:07and I read so voraciously as a child
10:10that the fact that I was able to, you know,
10:14find commonalities with these characters
10:17who were completely different from me
10:18was all so exciting, and it means that I think
10:20that fiction does its work,
10:22that it allows us to feel empathy
10:25for lots of different people, and yet still,
10:27I craved a story that I myself, as a middle-schooler,
10:33as a high-schooler would have wanted to see.
10:36- And have you been surprised by
10:37who has responded to the novel?
10:40Have there been any interesting reactions
10:42that you were like, well,
10:43that's not who I wrote it for, but great.
10:45You know?
10:46- I mean, I think any time anybody
10:48has told me that they've read the book, I feel that,
10:51because writing a novel, I think of it as,
10:55you're kind of working in the dark for so many years,
10:59uncertain of whether or not your book
11:01will ever come to light.
11:03And so the fact that this book has come to light
11:06and that the light has been so bright,
11:08and that so many wonderful people have read it,
11:11and gotten something out of it.
11:13I'm astonished every time.
11:15- That's beautiful.
11:17- Zadie, in your most recent book of essays,
11:19you write, "My hope is for a reader who,
11:21"like the author, wonders how free she really is."
11:26Which I love.
11:27What do you mean by that?
11:29- What I'm wondering when I'm writing is
11:31whether it's possible to create a citizen
11:35or a civilian, a non-writer, who thinks as a writer does
11:42about identity, I guess that's what interests me.
11:45When I was a reader, like Yaa,
11:49I was reading all kinds of books, by necessity,
11:51with people in them who were
11:52supposedly nothing like me.
11:54Yet when I read Madame Bovary,
11:55I thought, I too am Madame Bovary.
11:57When I read Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich,
12:00I thought I too am Ivan Ilyich.
12:02And that's the experience of minority readers all the time,
12:04this identification across supposed boundaries.
12:07What I'm trying to do is encourage people
12:11in the other direction.
12:12So if somebody's reading Swing Time
12:14and they're reading about a little black girl in London,
12:17I don't want that identification to be at a distance,
12:19like look at this interesting exotic story of this person.
12:23I want them to identify the way I did,
12:25wholly, body and soul, no matter what they
12:27happen to look like, no matter what
12:28their particular background.
12:29That's the exercise, that you place yourself
12:32in this person's life, not as a minority interest,
12:35not as an, oh, I wonder how they live.
12:37This is your life for the duration of this book.
12:40This is your life.
12:41You live in it, the way I lived in your books,
12:43and that kind of exchange is important to me.
12:47And also, I guess, as person who feels
12:51that identity is real and also constructed,
12:58I'm interested in coalition across difference, you know?
13:03That's the story of my life,
13:06the story of my family and partially
13:08the story of my country.
13:10So I'm trying to make people step into
13:14this girl's life as if it were their life.
13:17That matters to me.
13:19- That takes a real generosity
13:22of a reader, too, right, to believe that they will
13:24go the full way as opposed to this
13:27more sort of objectifying reception or read.
13:31And one of the things I've been thinking about
13:33with both of your work is that
13:36novels allow for this multiplicity of characterization,
13:39like this nuance, and that's very present
13:41in both of your work.
13:43And as someone who's trained as a journalist,
13:46one of our huge failures at this moment
13:48has been creating so much dualistic narration
13:51about who people are and who represents a country, etc.
13:56Whereas you all are able to encompass so much nuance
13:59in the characters that you're portraying.
14:01Do you feel like, is, for like the regular people
14:05in the audience, like, do we actually have
14:08that failure of imagination about other people,
14:09or is that a representation of journalism?
14:12Do you know what I mean?
14:13It's like, people read your novels and love them
14:15and then we go out and have all of these, like,
14:18incredibly reductive ideas about each other.
14:21Is that a failure of human nature,
14:22a failure of journalism?
14:24Like, I'm just trying to unpack
14:25why we see so bad at nuance in this moment, in particular.
14:30- I think fiction's wonderful, obviously,
14:33but it's hard to find a substitute for experience, you know?
14:37And in my experience, we were talking backstage
14:41about the kind of housing estate,
14:44or project, as you call it, that I grew up on,
14:47was class-wise united, but race-wise completely mixed.
14:52So when you live in this kind of coalition space
14:55of black people, Indian people, Pakistani people,
14:58Irish people, it's not that your lives are
15:01point-for-point exactly the same,
15:03but there are points of connection
15:04that you can communicate across,
15:06as you get used to the idea that perfect alignment
15:08doesn't have to exist in order for
15:10communication to happen.
15:11- Right.
15:12- And that's my assumption, what's happening at the moment,
15:15I think, is that unless the alignment is perfect,
15:17it's considered as if no conversation can happen.
15:20But it can happen.
15:21It might be clumsy, it might be awkward,
15:22it might be embarrassing.
15:23It might make you angry sometimes.
15:25It's still possible.
15:27- Right.
15:27- And there are things that you have in common structurally,
15:29in my case, in our housing estate,
15:30the fact that we were all poor.
15:32That is a coalition in itself.
15:36So I think in fiction that becomes much easier to do.
15:39In life, we bristle a little bit, no?
15:42If your story is not my story,
15:44how can we speak?
15:46- Right, do you feel that way, Yaa?
15:47- Yeah, I think was fiction does in part, too,
15:50is that it takes away this wall,
15:53so that you're not, as Zadie was mentioning,
15:55you're not becoming this kind of voyeur,
15:58looking at this other person.
15:59If the fiction is done well,
16:01you feel as thought you are actually
16:03living the experiences of these characters.
16:05You get to kind of follow their thoughts and feelings.
16:09And so in a way, they become your thoughts and feelings
16:11just for that moment that you're reading the book.
16:14And I think that that exercise of walking
16:17in other people's shoes, rather than kind of
16:21seeing them, watching them, but feeling as though
16:24you have become them, is the thing that when I read,
16:27that's what I'm looking for.
16:29- Right.
16:30Well and especially in the case of Homegoing,
16:31you have such a macro and a micro thing going on,
16:34because you're getting these generations
16:36and these sweeps of history, of context,
16:38but then you're getting these tiny details.
16:40I mean, I can bring to mind different characters
16:44in these, like, tiny moments that made me
16:46empathize with them more,
16:47whereas a lot of the media we're consuming
16:50is so flat and so fast, and doesn't contain
16:53that kind of macro and micro, right?
16:55So I think part of it is a time thing,
16:58does that make sense?
17:00- Sure, and what you said about fast and flat,
17:03fiction takes forever, you know?
17:05It can take, Homegoing took me seven years.
17:08And so I was able to kind of imbue
17:10that sense of macro and micro because
17:13I was thinking about it so deeply for so long.
17:15And I think if you're writing and reading things
17:19very quickly, off the cuff,
17:21you don't always get that second layer,
17:23that third layer, that fourth layer.
17:25- Yeah.
17:26Last year at this summit, I got to interview
17:28this amazing woman, Adrienne Maree Brown,
17:30who's an organizer and a writer.
17:31And she said that basically all community organizing
17:33is speculative fiction, because you have to imagine--
17:36- [Zadie] Such a great woman.
17:37- The worlds that you're trying to build into,
17:39and I thought of her when I was reading your work
17:42and preparing for this, and I just wondered
17:44if you'd talk about what you see as the role of the novelist
17:47at this really contentious moment
17:50where a lot of us are feeling very heartbroken
17:52and kind of turning to media, turning to different
17:55activist endeavors, but sort of trying to
17:58find ourselves in all of this.
18:01- I think for me, the mode I write in
18:04is the idea that, I know this is in some ways opposite
18:07to a lot of what we heard while we're here,
18:09is that my own stories, in some ways,
18:11for me, the one I'm least engaged with,
18:14I don't know how to put it.
18:16Like when I'm writing my novels,
18:17I know that sometimes there are characters
18:19who seem physically like me or structurally in
18:22the same position as me, but the problem with yourself
18:25is that you're so subjective about yourself.
18:28- Right.
18:29- And sometimes I'm the person I see least, you know.
18:32Whereas when I wrote White Teeth,
18:34the people I really engaged with was everybody else.
18:37- [Interviewer] Right.
18:38- A kind of fascination, a love, and a curiosity,
18:41and I think in terms of community organizing,
18:43that seems to me so essential that,
18:46of course yourself is important in your identity,
18:48but what you're there for are these others,
18:50is trying to understand, ask questions,
18:52what's your life like, how does it feel,
18:54what are you doing?
18:55That extension away from yourself
18:57into other people is what maybe
19:00fiction could model as a kind of citizenship behavior.
19:05- [Interviewer] Right.
19:06- The idea that yourself is great,
19:08but it's just the start of a much broader story.
19:11- So the practice of curiosity and--
19:13- The practice of curiosity and being
19:15radically involved in other people's lives
19:16and caring about them.
19:17- Yeah.
19:18(applause and cheering)
19:23Yaa, do you have thoughts about the novelist's role?
19:26Because it's interesting, you said it takes you seven years.
19:29Like, that's a lot of years of being, you know,
19:31sitting in front of a computer,
19:33and I'm sure there are moments of thinking,
19:34like, is this relevant, is this, you know,
19:37in these fast moving times,
19:38how do you think about your work
19:40in context of everything that's going on?
19:43- Well, I was really grateful for
19:45the slowness of writing Homegoing,
19:47because that meant that I was able to kind of,
19:49the world was changing around me,
19:51but I was able to kind of understand
19:53why the questions that were important to me
19:57were questions that do always matter to the wider world.
20:00So I was thinking about, I was thinking
20:03about Ghanaian history, I was thinking about
20:05American history, I was thinking about identity.
20:07And some of the things that came up in the book
20:10at the time that I was writing it
20:13didn't feel particularly relevant to the world
20:16at that moment, and yet when the book came out,
20:18it seemed extremely relevant.
20:20And so that understanding that
20:22our curiosities are important,
20:26I think that's something that novelists can be aware of
20:31and can kind of help us see.
20:34- I love that.
20:36I also feel like both of you, I mean,
20:38curiosity to its most granular form of questions, right?
20:42Learn how to ask really good questions.
20:44Stop talking so much, right,
20:46could be a good lesson for all of us right now.
20:48And you talked about that your
20:51novel came from a question.
20:53I know you're just working on your second novel.
20:55Is there a new question at the top
20:57of the blank screen these days
20:59that's driving you that you can share?
21:01- Not as direct as with Homegoing,
21:04but it is still driven by questions.
21:08I think what I'm always attempting to do in my work
21:12is to feel as though I'm being deeply interrogative.
21:15And so if, I can't name a specific question
21:19for the next book, but that desire to
21:22continue kind of interrogating my own thoughts in my mind
21:27is hopefully something that will be apparent on the page.
21:30- I can't wait to read it.
21:31Zadie, do you have a question
21:33at the top of your metaphorical screen these days,
21:36or a few of them?
21:37- It's weird, I just finished a book,
21:39and it actually has an epigraph which is a question,
21:41so that's strange that you...
21:43- [Interviewer] Yeah, there you go.
21:44- It's Frank O'Hora, how can a person fail to be?
21:48I thought that was a really interesting question.
21:50In what ways can you generally fail to be human, you know?
21:57To act like a human, to consider other humans.
21:59I wouldn't have thought that was possible a while ago,
22:02but now I realize it is.
22:04Like being human isn't just a thing you're born with.
22:07You kind of have to earn it, you know?
22:09It's actually a big deal.
22:11And there's loads of ways you can fail
22:14to be a full person.
22:17So I was putting that question to myself.
22:19In what ways do I fail every day
22:23to honor this thing of the human,
22:25which to me is kind of a big deal.
22:27- Wow, that's so beautiful.
22:29Is that non-fiction or fiction?
22:31- It's stories, short stories.
22:32- Short stories, wow.
22:33All right, well I can't wait to keep reading both of you.
22:36I feel so grateful for your work
22:38and the way that you move through the world,
22:39and let's all keep attempting to earn to be human
22:42here in our time together.
22:44Thank you both so much.
22:45(applause and cheering)
22:48(uplifting instrumental music)