Mitchell S. Jackson on ‘Stitching Together Imagined Communities’

Mitchell S. Jackson’sSurvival Math blows past our usual assumptions of how intimate a book can be, positioning its readers as complicit family members, embeds, neighbors, jurors, friends, protestors, imaginative souls. Writers whose work speaks to Jackson’s include U.S. near-contemporaries—Roxane Gay, Valeria Luiselli, Susan Minot, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Rebecca Solnit, Justin Torres, David Foster Wallace among others—but also writers from countries with greater porosity between documentary journalists and fiction writers, such as Cesar Aira, Eduardo Galeano, and Horacio Castellanos Moya. “And for whosoever else engages with what I set down, I wish at least a trace of something worthwhile,” Jackson says: let these margins of ours mark his triumph.

Edie Meidav: Share if you can any particularly vivid verbal snapshots of moments you find important in your trajectory as both writer and family member from your own beginnings through The Residue Years and now Survival Math?

MJ: A few moments stick out to me. The first was when I came home from prison in 1998 and told my then-partner I wanted to become a writer. In hindsight, I had little to no idea what it meant to be a writer, but on the other hand, I claimed the identity and that was important, so crucial. Another moment was deciding to move to New York. I had never lived anywhere else. I moved to attend NYU’s graduate program, but also to establish myself in the writing community, to live the writer’s life. I think it was wise, though it took many years for me to dividends enough for me not to consider it foolish.

The last important moment I’ll mention was around 2011 when I showed my then-mentor Gordon Lish the manuscript of The Residue Years and he told me to throw it out because it wasn’t yet a novel. Well, he actually sent me a postcard that told me to toss it, and then I called him to see if thine eyes were deceiving me. They weren’t. He said the novel didn’t have an “engine” and that I should throw it out and whatever was good in it would still be there. By that time, I’d worked on the manuscript for 12 or 13 years. For a split second, I considered taking his advice. But in the end, I resolved to keep working on it. I couldn’t see myself giving up. I felt about it the same way that James Baldwin described Go Tell it on the Mountain: “ . . . the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.”

In terms of my family, the most significant moment was moving to New York. I had a young daughter at the time, and I can remember the night I left. I picked her up out of her crib and kissed her and promised her I was going to go make something of myself. I meant it, though looking back the move might’ve been as much for me as it was her. Still, I left feeling the weight of making good on my promise. Left thinking that if I failed, I would’ve failed her twice. Looking back, there’s no way for any kind of success to replace my absences, but back then I deluded myself into thinking that was a possibility.

Another family moment instrumental in my writing life was the birth of my son. It doubled the amount of pressure I felt to succeed. I don’t want either of my kids to deem their dad a failure. Between The Residue Years and Survival Math was the self-imposed pressure to best myself, to make something only I could make.   

EM: The plurality of the form you chose suggests something of your own metaphysical stance, both polemic and generous. How did it come to stitch itself together?

And now that the book exists out in the world, do you have any new readings of the shape it took? There is, for instance, a very knowing choice in how you worked as an oral historian: bringing your own aesthetic chops and linguistic glee to the voices of your family members. In the testimony sections, the reader encounters an intimate second-person address while also being swept up by the joy of your language.

Can you speak of or from the aesthetic and sociopolitical consideration that prompted your “you”?

MJ: This question makes me think about Du Bois and Locke arguing about the telos of a black writer, Du Bois insisting art should be in service of justice and Locke arguing that literature shouldn’t serve as propaganda. I fall between them in that I very much want to make sociopolitical statements, and am always challenging myself to do so in a way that’s beautiful. I’m certainly concerned with the beauty of the language, with the sentences, but with this book (and The Residue Years) I was also in pursuit of structural beauty, how I could make the parts fit together so there were resonances, so that there was symmetry, which I think is a kind of beauty. I found myself moving the parts around because of length and not just content.

I had to consider how to present the survivor files, where to present them. I had to decide where to put the centos. I had to figure out whether the ancillary material would be as footnotes or endnotes. They started as footnotes, but they were disrupting the main text, so I moved them to become endnotes. Later in revision, I’m talking after it was a bound manuscript, I took the advice of Nan Graham and made them blind endnotes.

All along, I considered whether I had too much. In the end though, I decided on what one reviewer called “exuberant maximalism.” In terms of the sentences, I want there to be music everywhere, to have particular cadences; in some cases, I want there to be unusual diction. I also was very conscious of making sure I was rendering, or maybe filtering is a more apt word, the more researched passages in my voice. I didn’t ever want to present something in the voice of the academy. It was important to me that the reader realize at every turn that whatever they encountered was being filtered through me.

EM: If we think of the imagined communities this book might stitch together, did you imagine particular readers as magnets for distinct sections of the book?

MJ: I love the idea of the book stitching together imagined communities. At the risk of sounding self-involved, I imagined the perfect reader as myself or someone like me. Someone who has intimate knowledge of communities in which survival math is a necessity, but also someone who has experiences in the academy and is intellectually curious. I kept asking myself how can the things I’ve been reading and teaching speak to my past experiences? What does The Pedagogy of the Oppressed have to do with my Uncle Henry’s hustling? What does my mother’s past practice of donating blood have to do with the topic of nationalism or who belongs to this country, with nationhood? That said, I do think certain essays speak more directly to my past self—the old twenty-something knucklehead: “Survival Math,” “The Scale,” “Fast Ten, Slow Twenty,” “The Pose.” Those are all essays where I’m trying to reach back to my young patnas and say look, say consider this, say let’s take a broader vantage. On the other hand, “American Blood” and“Apples” and “Exodus” are written more toward the community of those who believe in whiteness, who believe they own this country if not the world, who believe they deserve dominion over America.

EM: If we take as temporary truth this idea that a literary work succeeds to the extent that it is strange, how much it wrestles with its aesthetic and sociopolitical ancestors in some Oedipal struggle that then produces a wondrous misreading that becomes wholly new, Survival Math is both strange and great: you make a pointed choice in offering a work so documentary, confessional without being self-exculpatory, an homage filled with invective and reverence while letting no one off the hook. All the brave choices here make me feel the book will become a classic of the form, and not just for courage alone. Are there any literary or social forebears who come to mind, playful mash-up artists, brave strange maximalists who nonetheless curate the exuberance?

MJ: I agree with the idea of work succeeding in terms of its ability to engage what came before it—the Oedipal struggle to overcome one’s forebears—and produce something new and strange and great. That very much echoes what Harold Bloom argued in The Anxiety of Influence. What also comes to mind is whether that is a temporary truth or an eternal truth of the definition of “successful art.” I wonder about how the success reconciles with what’s considered avant-garde, if there is a point at which art becomes so strange that others can’t interpret it, that it forsakes aesthetics for effect, that it is perceived as art for art’s sake.

Which brings me back to question of audience, to those readers who may not own deep literary or artistic references from which to inform their reading of a work. I want to push those readers, but I also want my work to have meaning for them. But back to the heart of the question, in terms of forebears for the book, I don’t think there could be a Survival Math without books like Manchild in the Promiseland and Down These Mean Streets and Soul on Ice and Brothers and Keepers and Makes Me Wanna Holler.  I am indebted to Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker. Without those literary relatives and others, Survival Math is something else.

That said, while drafting and revising, I certainly was thinking about Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time and Coates’ letter to his son in Between the World and Me. My response was to write the letter to Marcus but also to write a letter my daughter, which was a swerve away from what they’d done. The imagery in Rankine’s Citizen influenced my decision to incorporate photography in the book, and my swerve was to shoot it myself rather than use stock images, and also make the portraits uniform.  

In terms of the endnotes, I loved the footnotes in Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the energy of the voice, how they flouted conventions. My swerve there was to pushed them even further in terms of content and length, in terms of what they were doing rhetorically. There is an endnote in Survival Math that functions as a letter; there are many that operate as long lists. In terms of voice, I love Toni Cade Bambara’s voice in Gorilla My Love, how it exalts the experience of home and how home shapes the way one speaks.

I also love Barry Hannah’s prose—one of my favorite stories of his is “Water Liars”—and the way it’s religiously referential. I came up in a religious family and want my language to reflect that fact, not just in my allusions, but in diction and syntax, in the way I use the rule of threes, anaphora, and all the rest. Often when I have to quote or create some dialogue, I think of drama: I recall an exchange in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or how Wilson rendered voices of his characters in Fences. I never once questioned whether any of Wilson’s characters would sound like that in the real world and I treat that accuracy of representation as a challenge. I also very much had the maximalism of Tom Wolfe in my head while writing. I love his use of onomatopoeia, repetition, unusual punctuation, hyperbaton. There’s a kind of abandon in his prose. He always seems to be having a grand old time writing. I’ve gone on for a long while, but the short answer is there wasn’t a single work or author that served as a template for the book, but I was certainly conscious of the work of those I’ve mentioned (and more that I didn’t) and how I could mash up their examples in pursuit of making something new.

EM: So many people who speak from any cusp—whether James Baldwin, Maggie Nelson, Philip Roth—have these bedfellows ever been married before?—deal with the chatter of those who would rush to consider them traitors to the group. To speak of one’s experience, of matters which never should leap outside the group, can more than twiddle one’s identity. Any of your experience or wisdom you wish to share with anyone who might wish to write or speak from a similar cusp? How did you at different stages of the writing of Survival Math handle this question of betrayal? Anyone you particularly admire from the past who blew open the world with some masterful grace?

MJ: One has to ask themselves if they are ready for the fallout of revealing insider secrets. Because that’s essentially what happens. Those secrets could be about family, friends, community, or even to some degree about a larger group. If there’s still that ambivalence about enduring the consequences of revelation, then maybe the writer should wait. I’ve felt the fallout acutely. I’ve said elsewhere that my dad and I stopped communicating when my novel came out. That’s six years ago. Though I’d love for us to be on better terms, I also can live with our distance because what I put in the novel (and documentary) felt essential. And also because I wrote from a place of compassion. But I have also written critically (and I hope empathetically) about others who are dear to me, my mother and grandfather among them, and I couldn’t stand that kind of silence between us. In writing about dear ones, I had to ask myself again and again was I betraying them, had to ask if what I included was for the sake of titillating a reader or because it was necessary to examining or revealing an important truth, had to ask if the risk was worth the reward of elucidation. So I guess my best advice would be for a writer be to ask those same questions. I think Jean Toomer’s Cane is an example of challenging the expectations (and limitations) of genre and also artfully writing about race, whose work, “blew open the world with some masterful grace.”

EM: Anything that has surprised you so far in how people read the book? Pleasure or blowback?

MJ: I’ve been surprised by how many people cite “Composite Pops” as one of their favorite essays. I’ve been surprised with how few people mention “Apples” at all. I think my most discerning and generous readers have been women of color, which surprised me because I think they also have the right to be the most critical of the content. In terms of blowback, there was one reviewer who seemed triggered by the content of “Composite Pops,” and “The Scale,” and who seemed to let her response color the rest of her reading. I have been disappointed in how few people discuss the centos and how they frame the sections of the book.  I am critical of readers who’ve said they wanted less history and philosophy and more survivor files or all survivor files, which are by and large narratives of trauma. I hear that request as their wanting to hear what happened, but not why or how certain circumstances came to be, which I extrapolate as another way of their saying they’re okay with it all happening again. To just tell the story is in some sense to maintain the status quo.

EM: Terrible question for any writer, but here goes: one passage which nearly sums up your motive in writing the book? I’m going to put my own here or at the top of this interview after you answer the question!

MJ: No one has ever asked me that before. But here’s a shot at an answer: “… there’s the history of ours that’s hit the books, what evermore should live in its ledgers, but we must, I must, keep alive the record of where we lived and how we lived and what we lived and died for—lest it slip into the ether.” This, I hope, emphasizes the importance of recording our experiences, of historicizing them, of not letting others be the most essential recorders of those experiences and that goes for the personal and the collective.