Colson Whitehead: The USA is still very racist
05. November 2018 11:36
Our editor Natálie Bartlová was talking to Colson Whitehead, author and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, at the 28th Prague Writers' Festival. The interview was conducted on Oct. 6, 2018.
What is your creative process? How do you write? Do you have a routine?
Well, I usually work from 10:30 to 15:30, that’s a good day. It is perfect for writing one to three pages. If I can do eight pages per week, I am pretty happy. You know, it takes a long time to write a novel. If I keep to 8 pages a week, that’s 30 pages a month, and then after a year, you have a novel. And I don’t write every day. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing, so I don’t. So, I write on Monday and Tuesday and then Thursday and Friday or Thursday through Sunday. As long as I can get those pages, I am satisfied. And then I do a lot of outlining before I start. At the beginning and the end. The middle can be a bit fuzzy or unknown, but as long as I know what I am writing toward… seems to work better. So, I do a lot of structure stuff before I start writing.
I play a lot of music. I have a playlist of circa 2 000 songs, and it goes from the Clash to the Daft Punk to Edith Piaf to Prince. And it keeps me company, these songs I have been playing for like my whole life. And New York is very noisy – there is always a car going by, or an ambulance, so music helps me.
You studied a lot of material, mostly the oral history archives when doing research for The Underground Railroad, the book whose main theme is slavery. The lead character of the novel, Cora – is she inspired by some of the stories you have read? Is she motivated by someone real, or even by your daughters?
No, she is made up. You know, sometimes I have characters who are drawn from my personality or people I know, but she is mostly made up. And she has the least amount of me in her, which is probably why people like it more than my other books.
Was it hard to write a female teenage character for you?
It is always hard. I mean whether the character is very much like you or not, if it is going easy, you are probably not putting in the work. So yeah, it was hard, but it is always hard. But it wasn’t harder than any character before.
I am also interested in another character from The Underground Railroad. As I read the book, I had the impression that almost every white character that was there usually turned out to be a bad person. And the only person who seemed to stay good throughout was Sam. Is that so?
Well, no. The person who takes them from Georgia, Fletcher, he hides them in his house. I would say he is good. I would say Lumbly, a person who lets them in his basement in the beginning, he seems to be good. And Martin, even though he doesn’t wanna get involved in illegal activity, seems to help her. So, I would say no.
But yeah, there are virtuous, good white characters and there are evil black characters, like in real life.
Why do you think that The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize?
*smirks* It’s good.
Sure it is, but do you think that there was a particular thing that got the board.
No, I don’t really have any big theories about it. I am very proud of it, and I am glad it’s been received so well in the USA and around the world.
You never know – I think all my books are good. So I can’t say why this one takes off and this one doesn’t.
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What inspired you to write about this part of history? Is it because slavery is still not debated enough?
No, I mean… you know when you are a kid and you first hear about the underground railroad, you think it is a train - and obviously, it is a human network. So really I was just sitting around, thinking “Oh, what if it actually were a train? What kind of story could I get out of it?”
So, before there is Cora, before there is a history of slavery and railroad, there was just a sort of “What if it was real and what kind of story could I get out of it”. I was not trying to correct some historical wrong or teach what it actually was. I was just trying to find an interesting story that would appeal to me.
I think a lot of people outside the USA actually believed that the underground railroad was a real train when reading your book... We usually are not taught U.S. history in depth, so it is easy to get confused.
You know, Americans also think it’s a local, real train. That’s how poorly taught it is. In Europe and other continents there is an excuse not to know, but in America, there is no excuse – but a lot of people still don’t know.
This is a question I also asked last year Wesley Lowery, the investigative journalist, and I got an interesting answer, so I’m gonna ask you the same one: I read this statement on a social website Tumblr: “All white people are inherently racist”. Do you agree with that or not?
Oh, Tumblr *laughs*... I certainly do not agree.
When it comes to Martin Luther King, what do you think about his ideas nowadays? For example, I have read that one of his suggestions of how to improve the situation of black people in the USA would be that white people would financially aid black people in sort of “reparations”, so African Americans could build up their society up to the level it deserves. Do you think it would work?
It seems to be more complicated… as a freelance writer, I never expect to get paid on time, so that’s how I’d approach this.
So how is the situation with racism in the USA right now?
Well, it was racist 200 years ago, it was racist 150 years ago during slavery, and it is very racist now. We’ve just elected a white supremacist president… it gets better by small degrees. If you look at the setting example of Barack Obama, who was elected by 51% pop of country, 49% did not vote for him, and those 49% went after getting Trump elected. It is not like they disappeared overnight because we had a black president. There are people who were racist on November 4th, 2008 and they are racist on November 5th 2008, so…
Are you Democrat or Republican?
Um… you couldn’t really write this book and be a Republican.
You have written a lot of books in different genres. I am kinda amazed by that because many authors are specialized just in a specific area. You seem to be just fine when it comes to switching and mixing the genres. How did that happen?
Well, I like science fiction, realism, contemporary literature and I like writing non-fiction, so if I keep writing books, I get to address these different interests of mine. It is hard to figure out what I like about, say, this zombie story, what I wanna throw out, what I wanna keep… it’s hard to learn how to write a long form, a longer non-fiction piece, like my book about the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, the novel The Noble Hustle. But yeah, the difficulty is what makes it interesting and fun. The challenge is what makes the book vital.
Are you working on something new right now?
Oh yeah, I just finished one book – two months ago, it’s coming out the next summer. It’s called The Nickel Boys, and it’s about jail for juvenile delinquents, it’s a reform school. And it is based on a Dozier school, which was in Florida, operated for 100 years and there was a lot of abuse - physical, sexual, students were killed by guards… and it closed down in 2011, and people started investigating… so it’s about two kids who are at this very repressive reform school in the 1960s, and one gets out, and one doesn’t.
And I am taking notes for a new book now. Takes place in Harlem in the 1960s, it’s a crime novel.