Victor LaValle: Hip Hop, the Divine, and Brutal Truths
Interview w/ Victor LaValle
Photo by Teddy Wolff
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle's DESTROYER.
He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.
He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University.
Erin Armstrong: First, I’d like to thank you for taking time to speak with me. I’d also like to ask you to brace yourself, because I think we may be hopping all over the place with this one. As I’ve told you many (possibly too many?) times, I love your work. Something I come back to time and time again in your writing is this inherent brutality in your characters, but there’s a sharp humor there that makes them endearing and honest. How would you explain this juxtaposition of darkness and humor, and the truth of character that results from it?
Victor LaValle: There are never too many times to tell writers you love their work. I tell it to myself once or twice a day just to offset the crushing self-loathing. It’s a damn good tonic actually. I suggest all self-loathing writers try it.
As for brutality I often wonder at this. I must admit I never think of my characters as brutal, but of course brutal people never do. I suppose vain people never realize they’re vain either, instead they just think of themselves as astute. So maybe there is a brutality to my characters and if so I’d like to credit it to growing up in an almost thrillingly honest household. My mother and grandmother raised me and my sister and neither woman understood tact. I don’t mean they yelled at others or were quick to curse, in fact they were both incredibly rule bound and obsessed with decorum. But they almost always told the truth in a way that could feel, well, brutal but also couldn’t help but make you laugh. (Make me laugh, at least.)
My grandmother and mother were from Uganda but my sister and I were raised here in the United States. There were pictures of my grandfather in old photo albums but he never came to Queens and I only met him once, when my mother took me back to Uganda, and I was only one so I sure don’t remember it. I remember asking why my grandmother and grandfather didn’t live with us, why he stayed in Uganda and she came to Queens. My grandfather was an educator. He fought to end British colonial rule in Uganda and once the British left he worked tirelessly to build schools deep in the rural areas of the country because he so believed in education as the means to personal independence. But while out in the bush, as they used to say, he fell victim to certain personal shortcomings and marriage between him and my grandmother became strained to the point of breaking. Finally, when my mother wrote from Queens saying that she needed my grandmother’s help raising me in Queens (my sister came along years later) she made a deal with my grandfather: you get Africa, I get the United States. He agreed only after my grandmother apparently made the seriousness of her bargain quite clear. He never traveled to the US once my grandmother arrived and she never returned to Uganda. My grandmother explained all this to me when I was quite young—maybe seven or eight—and told it all without shame or reservation. Only as a young adult did I realize some might see this kind of story as brutal, or at least too unguarded for a child to hear, but she took it for granted that I should hear the truth. In this way I think she began to train me as a writer.
Because, to be clear, that story is also hilarious. My granddad was rubbing elbows with Malcolm X! I’ve got a photo of the two of them meeting, it hangs proudly in our home. He went toe to toe with the British Empire, which has never been known for being gentle. But for all that granddad never dared to face off with my grandmother. That’s about as complex and interesting as life gets.
EA: I get such a strong sense of place that comes from your writing. I have the feeling that the place is not just a kind of lodestar for your characters, but is an actual character in itself. I think this is most evident in Slapboxing With Jesus. For me, it’s in “Ghost Story” where you write, “in the Bronx you can see the sky, it’s not blotted out. The whole place isn’t standing or on its back, the whole borough lies on its side. And when the wind goes through there, you can’t kid yourself––there are voices.” How much is the city influencing you and your characters, and vice versa, while you’re writing?
VL: I can’t think of any writers I admire who aren’t great writers of place. Shirley Jackson’s small New England towns, Ralph Ellison’s Harlem, V.S. Naipaul’s Port of Spain. I could keep going. A writer without a sense of place is like a tree without roots, it’s simply not grounded enough to grow. Since I grew up in New York City I felt quite comfortable describing the place. I think I got in a little something about all the boroughs except maybe Staten Island. Your locale inevitably affects your perspective, even your personality, so when writing about people it seems essential that you also write about the place, or places, that reared them. Sometimes younger writers avoid specificity about location because they want their stories to appear more universal, but this is wrong-headed. In order to be universal one should write with absolute specificity. If it matters to be precise about language, or character, then it’s just as important to describe your locations with care.
EA: Something that has shown up multiple times in your characters is mental illness, or the looming threat of it, and how dismissive people can be towards them. Mos Def named his 2009 album after your book, The Ecstatic. He said of the title, “The term was used in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe people who were either mad or divinely inspired and consequently dismissed as kooks.” You’ve been pretty open about your own battle with mental illness in the past–– did you ever feel dismissed because of it? With that, how much of these characters are yourself as you could have been or were, and how much of them are people you have known? How important still is it for you to give a voice to those who would be otherwise written off as “kooks”?
VL: Mental illness has absolutely been one of the fundamental concerns of my early work, or really all my work up until the novel I’m writing now. Only five books in before I finally decided to give it a bit of a rest! It’s an essential concern for me because of my own struggles, but even more so because I’ve got a few generations of family members who’ve dealt with clinical issues of mental illness and so, inevitably, it’s become a part of my world view. In truth I didn’t even understand it was a somewhat unique way to experience life until my best friend in grad school, Mat Johnson, gave me the reality check. Really he was trying to help me see the uniqueness of my perspective. Once I realized this I ran with it and people my stories, and novels, with the kinds of people I actually knew and, maybe more importantly, actually loved. I think my family, and my upbringing in Queens, allowed me to get to know all of the kinds of people who are generally overlooked, written off. The mentally ill, immigrants, blacks and Latinos, Asians and working class whites, and much more. It’s important to me that all those kinds of people get the chance to be vivid, vital, villainous, and memorable.
EA: Going off that same question, your characters are the marginalized: youths, the poor, the mentally ill, addicts, people with weight issues, etc. This is something that seems to be closely connected with hip-hop and metal, genres you referred to once as “working class male power fantasies.” The two genres have grown in popularity since the 80’s and mid-90’s, sometimes referred to as the “golden age” of hip-hop. How do you see the changes both have gone through as connectors with these people now?
VL: Well, I’d say that hip-hop has managed a much better, or more long-lasting, life than heavy metal. I do think about why this is the case sometimes. Hip-hop became a global phenomenon, a commercial behemoth that easily took its places along pop music and dance music. Rock and roll hasn’t even fared as well. Meanwhile heavy metal has largely shrunk into a series of specialized circles. The last metal group to really turn into some kind of popular scene was probably Slipknot and even that was a decade ago. Maybe hip-hop was, in the end, more mutable than heavy metal. While many claim that hip-hop is dead or dying it just doesn’t seem to get the news. Of course the music has changed and it would only be right for a person of my generation to say that it was better “back then.” But of course it wasn’t better, I was just younger.
EA: You said in a 2003 Essence article, “I found that when I was fattest, women trusted me most.” I noticed that the men in your books have this obsession with the meaning and sense of the word ugly. Rather in a sexual context or equating it to trustworthiness, as in Big Machine, the men have a fascination with it. What is it about ugly that these men are so attracted to and simultaneously repulsed by?
VL: Ugliness is more interesting than beauty, for me, because I spent so many years of my life convinced of my own ugliness, what I took to be my essentially unlovable nature. This had nothing to do with my body, but once you’re convinced you’re ugly you will find ample proof. Over time my obsessive inspection of my own body, my myriad faults, turned outward. I used to wonder if everyone felt as ugly as me. In my childish vanity I assumed no one could. (If only I’d known quite a few other people thought they were the one and only.) That level of personal inspection made me quite aware of other people’s bodies, too. I compared and contrasted with other boys and, as I grew older, other men. I surveyed women just as closely once I turned about twelve or thirteen and became a being of free floating lust. What I found—in both the men and the women—was that the most interesting things about nearly every body around me were the things we often generally call faults. Underbites and lisps, limps and “weird” thumbs, eyes set too far apart or too close together, long feet or short toes, big noses or small ears. I began to feel that people hid their humanity in their flaws and this only made them beautiful to me. I’m not going to pretend there wasn’t repulsion, judgment, dismissal a lot of the time (if I was doing it to myself why wouldn’t I do it to others?) but it wasn’t only that. My editor has pointed out to me that few current fiction writers pay as much attention to bodies as I do and I think he’s right. But so much of a person’s character is written on their body, a language much more honest than almost anything he or she might say. I’m in love with that.
EA: I want to talk about young writers, and the atmosphere–– for lack of a better word I can think of–– they’re writing in now. With numerous lit journals and new MFA programs springing up all the time, do you think this is a good thing, or is it watering down the experience? What was the scene like for you in your 20’s?
VL: I entered my MFA program having made a total mess of my undergrad years. I barely passed many a class and in my junior year I got expelled. The dean who expelled me told me he would personally see to it that I never returned to Cornell for as long as he was around. I felt like John Belushi in Animal House. (Though really, at that time, I was more like Flounder.) I left school and lived in town with friends and worked temp jobs as a mover for half a year. Then that dean went on sabbatical. I had been keeping a close eye on him. And as soon as he was gone I begged another dean, who had no animosity toward me, to let me back in so I could graduate. She did so and I managed to get through.
I tell that story to say that I may have a somewhat warped view of what the MFA scene was like because I arrived feeling utterly desperate to finally prove myself worth a damn. I showed up to my first day of my first workshop with twenty copies of my first story in my bag for God’s sake! That’s how keyed up I was. And that gave me a kind of tunnel vision about the program. I didn’t fuck around as much as I could have (and should have) with my fellow students. I went to class, I went to work, I read, I wrote. That’s all I did for two years. As a result I produced a fantastic amount of writing (and a small percentage of it actually approached being fantastic). So for me the two kinds of MFA experiences I know of are the ones where the students are almost pathological about writing and succeeding (which really just means writing and writing and writing) and there are the folks who seem to be in the program to dabble with writing, to try it on for a while. I don’t state that as criticism. Some people want to write and others realize they’d rather do something else. They might become agents or editors or publishers or publicists, all of which are grand and noble professions that always desperately need smart, driven human beings. Or they might have lives that interrupt their writing time and don’t return to the lessons they learned until they’re forty, sixty, eighty years old. I met my best friend in the program, a writer named Mat Johnson, and we bonded because we were both just desperate to be writers right now. You’ll find those people in every class of writers and writing programs. That can’t ever be watered down. That particular quality is insoluble.
EA: All writers, I think, go through these egoistic moments where we know we’ve done something worth something and feel like we should be recognized for it. On the flip side, while still self-absorbed, we go through times where we feel like we aren’t good enough and don’t belong. What was the best advice you have ever received about dealing with “fraud syndrome”?
VL: I’m guessing that most intelligent writers, or just most intelligent human beings, feel like frauds now and again. This is simply a natural part of being intelligent enough to understand you aren’t divine. This can’t be avoided. And, in fact, I don’t think it should be. That feeling of fallibility is what helps a writer to improve. It can help to remember that just about every writer you’ve ever admired has experienced the same thing and still continued to write. Take some consolation in that when you can. I know I do.
But then there are other times when I need to light a fire underneath that fraudulent feeling, need to see it turned to ashes just so I get myself ready to write. In those instances I like to repeat a phrase of some kind to myself. Call it a mantra or a prayer or a chant. I change it every few years, after the magic has gone out of the words. The one I used for the longest time was a line from a song by Tricky. He was somewhat big in the nineties, a British trip-hop artist (though I think he hated the term). There was one song off an album called Pre-Millennium Tension. My Evil is Strong. That was the title. I just loved that phrase as a kind of reminder to myself. I liked it so much I’d print it out in 48 point font and tape it to the wall above my computer. If I sat down feeling a little shaky, a little unsure, I’d look up at the wall and see it:
MY EVIL IS STRONG
Fuck yes, I’d think. It sure is. Then get back to work.
EA: My final question, at the request of my best friend: what is Sean’s next move at the end of “Raw Daddy”?
VL: Do you know I had to go use Google Books to read the end of that story and remind myself how it ended? I couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere in our place. Anyway, in keeping with the theme running through that story, Sean is about to go upstairs and, for a short time, convince both himself and Lianne that they are both divine.
Erin Armstrong Ramírez is the Managing Editor and Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Editor at GASHER Journal. Her works have appeared in or are upcoming in Haunted Waters Press, SmokeLong Quarterly, A-Minor, New World Writing, Banango Street, and The Fem. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder in Creative Writing.
Issue 5