Writing Between Countries and Across Borders: A Conversation

A conversation between Kwame Anthony Appiah, Marlon James, Jamaica Kincaid, Valeria Luiselli, and Colum McCann, moderated by Eric Banks, from issue 20 of PEN America.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah: In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions, the protagonist says something like, “I’ve been told there’s a difference between expatriates and missionaries, but I can’t remember the explanation.” Where I grew up, expatriates replaced the missionaries at independence. Many of them were perfectly nice people, no doubt, but they weren’t committed to the place. One of the differences in the way that I’ve moved is that I am deeply committed to where I am now. I’m not planning to go back. I visit Ghana, but I don’t think of it as my home anymore. It certainly shaped me—but I don’t think of myself as an expatriate, and I don’t like the word.

Jamaica Kincaid: Expats—the way I became familiar with the word—were these sort of rancid people from England who came and sat around, and we did things for them. They were always supposedly going back to England, though they never did. They formed a community in which they were by themselves, or they were completely dependent on us. It was a group of privileged people who were incredibly lazy.

When I think of myself in America, I think of myself not as an expat. I think that would be very difficult. Even James Baldwin might have had trouble calling himself an expat. A black person is not an expat anywhere. When most people here see me, they don’t think, There’s a black person from the Caribbean. Their first reaction is, She’s black, or African-American. If we were a group of people who went to Eton in England, we would be expats.

Marlon James: When I was living in Jamaica, I worked in advertising. I was surrounded by expats, and my view of them was basically mediocre people from abroad who couldn’t hack it in their own countries, so they’d come to the “third world,” because some locals still go what I call “white crazy” in Jamaica. I actually got in arguments with some of these transplants. I’d say, “You and I both know you could never hack it on Madison Avenue. That’s why you’re here: because we’re idiots every time you open your mouths.”

I’d rather be called a refugee before I’m called an expat. I think of the laziness, and I think of the mediocrity, and I still think of people doing jobs that Jamaicans can do. I became very self-conscious when I came here on a work permit: Every year my school has to advertise my job to pretty much the whole American population, and every year the school has to convince Homeland Security or Immigration that the Jamaican is still the best person, and every year I have to prove that I’m better than hundreds of candidates who applied. So I don’t feel much like an expat. That term implies an ease of being in a place that you do not have to participate in. I participate in the life of this country. I’m involved in things like Black Lives Matter. It never occurred to me that I’d have the luxury of wearing white linen suits or befriending a comandante because I would leave first when revolution happens anyway.

Colum McCann: The term has the tinkle of ice in the glass. It’s Hong Kong and the balcony, and it just doesn’t work for me. Coming from Ireland, we would never term ourselves expats. It seems to me that “to emigrate” means to wound oneself, and to leave one’s country is a form of memory-making. The term “to be an emigrant,” “to be an immigrant,” is very important to the idea of the Irish experience. However, in more recent years, the Irish have become commuters, and we sort of belong in several different places all at once.

I’ll tell you a quick story about talking to John Berger, who had been away from England (he would crucify the term “expat”). We were in Paris, and we were a tiny little bit overserved. We became intimately acquainted with a couple of darkly tinted bottles. I knew John’s work inside out, and I’d been quoting it and saying all these things, and I said to him, late in the evening, “John, John, where are you from?”And he looks at me. “Well, you know, I’m from London.” But then I said, “Where are you from-from?”And he said, “I am a patriot of elsewhere.”I thought that was absolutely extraordinary, and I think it speaks to the experience of people on the panel here today.

Valeria Luiselli: I’ve been called many different things since I came to the U.S. eight years ago. Things that I never knew I was, or I never knew I was. “Alien”is a great term. First “alien nonresident,”then “alien resident for tax purposes but not for immigration purposes,” then “alien resident.” I think now I am an “alien resident” (always an alien).

A few months after I’d arrived, some really bad magazine contacted me to write a column about dating in New York from the point of view of a woman of color. I asked a friend of mine who’s African-American, “What is this ‘woman of color’ thing? What does it mean? I’m not a woman of color.” He laughed at me, and he said, “Of course you’re a woman of color.” It was really shocking and really a process to assume a category that had been placed upon me. Now it’s something that I carry like a badge, but at that moment, it was shocking to be coined, to have to belong to an invented segment of the population.

I’ve never been called “expat” before. It’s not a term that I like. It’s also very Anglo-Saxon. There isn’t a term in Spanish that’s quite like expat, so it isn’t a term that I’ve ever used to define my own being and not-being. It presupposes a fatherland, the patria, and it presupposes, also, a very strong bond with the center that one has exited from; I don’t have that relationship with any country. I’ve never lived in any country for more than a few years.

Eric Banks: You once said, “I decided New York was the place I wanted to live because it was the place where I felt exactly the right equilibrium between being foreign and being at home,” which I think is wonderfully put.

VL: So many people here are somehow foreign to the city and always in the process of coming to terms with it, or becoming involved with it in different ways. Something that I’ve always struggled with is being a Mexican in New York. There’s a big Mexican population here, and most of this population is invisible. In a physical sense, most Mexicans in New York work underground, either in the kitchens or the bodegas or in the delis that we walk through. My daughter once asked me, “Who’s down there?” when we were walking on the metal flaps in the sidewalk. She used to think it was a scary space, that there might be witches or something. I said, “No, it’s a lot of Mexicans,” so she really loves peeking in now and saying, “¡Hola!” But it’s an invisible population that’s rarely mapped. To find my own space within that Mexican population has been a challenge. Finding a sense of belonging and distance at the same time is something that I work on every day.

EB: Colum, is this an experience that you would identify with?

CM: I don’t feel foreign here at all, and a lot of the people that I know, especially writers, don’t feel foreign here at all. One of the things that I think is brave and tough and muscular about the American literary establishment is you are allowed to come here and to retain your foreignness. If you’re Sasha Hemon, you can still be Bosnian and American at the same time. There are so many writers—Junot Díaz, myself, Yiyun Li—who are allowed to come here, and they don’t strip away the citizenship of where you came from. That’s a very brave, American idea, and it wouldn’t necessarily happen in other parts of the world. It would be very difficult to go to Ireland and to be a person of two countries, so we should applaud some of the democratic and radical experience that goes on here, that sort of radical welcoming where you can come here and be someone new directly on the next day. I applaud that notion, that I’m allowed to hold on to my country, because I couldn’t come here if I had to say goodbye to my country. I couldn’t come here if I had to be labeled an expat. That would just wound me too deeply.

JK: I certainly would like to ask Junot Díaz about that—but mainly, you really ought to think about what you say, because I think it’s very easy for you. You’re a white man. You have a huge, distinguished history of coming from Ireland. There are a lot of Irish people who came to America and disenfranchised a lot of other people in the process of becoming “white.” It sounds wonderful, and it’s a nice thing for you to say about America. Americans would really like that, a lot of them, but in contrast to you, I didn’t feel I was just stepping into this grand literature and welcomed. I still don’t feel like that at all, so I would not universalize that so much. Just say, “I, a white guy from Ireland, had this experience.” I’m really glad that you had it. I don’t wish to be a white guy, but I’m glad that white guys enjoy themselves so much.

MJ: There’s a difference between New York or California and America. For example, my second novel was published by Riverhead, but everybody else rejected it. My first one was rejected by 80 people. It’s one of the reasons why a bunch of writers of color have declared that we will never be on a panel on diversity ever again. You’ve heard me say it publicly. Because I think there is this lip service to diversity: I’m allowed to be Jamaican, but a certain kind of Jamaican, a certain kind of antiseptic Jamaican. I agree with Kincaid on this.

There’s a problem when a Nigerian writer goes, “There is my Nigerian voice, and there is my Nigerian-for-America voice.” I’m not talking about right-wing people; I’m talking about people who speak about diversity and the neoliberal and so on. I think we are allowed to hold on to our identity, but to me even the “allowed” part may be problematic. I’m not asking for permission.

KAA: I came here in my late twenties, and two things do strike me as welcoming about this country. One is that though I came here a long time ago and I still talk like this, when I say I’m an American, people don’t fall about laughing. Whereas I think in many other countries you could go to, if you didn’t talk like the regular people, they would. Here, I think, citizenship, which I have, is kind of it. We have a long history of exclusion, but citizenship is open now, in principle, to anybody who can get in. It can be hard to get in. It’s easier to get in if you have a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, but once you’re in, you’re in. I like that.

Before I got here, I had read James Baldwin and Richard Wright. I knew about Martin Luther King. I knew America was a racist country where you risked being shot. I knew all the basic facts, but I had no real sense of the African-American experience, meaning the experience of the descendants of America’s slaves, and yet every black family in this country that I met welcomed me in as if I was a brother, even though I talked weird and I didn’t really have any connection with them. Now I do; I’ve been a professor of African-American studies. But I didn’t grow up with it. Sometimes when I think about that, I’m moved almost to tears by the welcome that I experienced, by people like Skip’s family, whom I got to know when I first got here. They didn’t know anything about my life, and I didn’t know anything about theirs, but they let me in immediately in a kind of mad way, and it was very moving to me. So I do feel I’ve been welcomed in a bunch of ways that I don’t think would happen in a lot of other places.

In a way, we got a bit stuck with the “expatriate” word. The thought behind this was how the experience of moving around affects your relationship to things like language. I grew up speaking two languages, and one of them was English. I grew up, as many people in the world did, listening to American television as a child. The sound of American voices—black voices, white voices, Southern voices, Northern voices—was in my ear long before I got here. It wasn’t my language, but it didn’t seem strange to me when I got here. An awful lot of people in the world live in countries where English is the government language, and in those countries, Dallas was playing in the ’70s, and you got to hear it. So America didn’t seem so strange in that sense. And as I said, we were brought up in a house, a Pan-Africanist household, to read Baldwin and Wright. Actually, Wright talks about part of my family in one of his books, so we knew some of these people. I feel that it’s not like the Anglophone expatriate experience where you come from England to this strange place, and everybody talks in a language you don’t know except when they’re talking to you and so on. It’s not like that at all. It’s a very different kind of move in relation to language.

VL: To add something to the theme of welcome and not welcome that we sort of left hanging: I also don’t feel quite welcome as a Mexican here when there are stadiums full of people shouting, “Let’s build a wall!” There are many levels of belonging, and in many of those levels of belonging, I don’t feel welcome, either. But I do think that the literary world here is larger than the one in Mexico and more diverse—more international, but also more diverse racially. Most Mexican writers are white, and there’s very little recognition of writers who don’t write in Spanish in Mexico.

I learned English when I was five years old while living in South Korea in an American military school. The community was founded by soldiers who had decided to live in Korea and had Korean-American kids there. Because my parents were fiercely nationalist as Mexicans, they wouldn’t allow me to watch TV, because the American base only played American TV. When I arrived here, I spoke weird English—I also spent time as a child in South Africa, so my English was more South African, and I had no knowledge of American idiomatic expressions. That has been a really difficult thing, to relearn English, although it’s the language I learned to write and read in before Spanish.

JK: Well, I didn’t see television until I was 19 years of age. I’m older than everybody here, I think, so I don’t have the familiarity that you talk about as formative. I grew up in what was—well, Britain wasn’t a colonial power anymore, but we didn’t know that. No one told us. So I don’t have an ease with American culture, though I did always want to look like an African-American woman in Ebony magazine. I loved Ebony magazine, and I loved African-American culture in the way I saw it through that lens. But the thing you’re talking about, familiarity with American culture giving you ease, I still don’t have it.

In relation to language, I am still very much a person of colonial Britain. My relationship to literature begins with Chaucer. My writing is not at all informed by American culture, and I do see the problem my works present to an American, who might always be wondering why the sentences are so long, why the repetition. My influences are the Oxford English Dictionary, the King James version of the Bible, Milton, and no one understands why that would be. When I sit down to write, I sit down to think about the world, it has nothing to do with American anything. The American love of a story that has a beginning and an end, and the absolutely hateful thing called closure: I have no interest in it at all.

That’s very productive for me, but I think unsatisfying to an American readership. We are on a powerful continent, and this powerful continent produces so much disturbance that the citizens of the continent would like, when they sit down to read a book, for that book to offer some solace about the human condition. I insist on offering none.

EB: That raises the interesting question of audience. How much is this something you think about, Marlon?

MJ: I didn’t realize this until somebody pointed it out to me, but the American section of my book reads totally differently than the Jamaican section. It’s not just that the subject matter changed; she said she could tell I had changed. That complements something Colum said. I know I could never write that novel in Jamaica. I think there is a sort of a freedom to be exactly the type of writer that’s in my head, and to have everything that is up here come down exactly that way on the page (I don’t mean without editing). Being uprooted can actually become a safe space where I can create. Especially when I’m writing very political stuff, like A Brief History of Seven Killings. Being in my home country would have resulted in a different kind of novel. I actually think it would have resulted in a failure of nerve. I’m only talking about myself—there are lots of people who are perfectly capable of writing really explosive stuff in their home countries; look at the great South African literature that came out during apartheid. But I think I needed that kind of suspended space.

EB: When you talk about that “suspended space,” is it something very specific about the place you ended up, or is it more the experience of being somewhere else?

MJ: I think it’s the experience of being somewhere else. I’ve written the bulk of two novels on the road. I wrote my second novel when I was on tour for the first one. I just got used to writing in shifting space.

I have a desk. I have an office. I have never been there. Even when I’m home, I have an office, I have a computer, I have everything, and I’ll crouch down on the floor in the living room and write, or go downstairs or something. I don’t know at what point it happened, but instead of waiting for this state of flux to be over so I could create, I decided to create in flux.

CM: I’d agree with Marlon. I was just struck with this image, for whatever reason . . . Truck drivers, to keep themselves awake, have two tricks: They cut their fingers, sort of wound themselves, to keep themselves awake as they’re driving down the road—and they also inhale sulfur. They light matches, and then they flick them out, and they inhale the sulfur.

MJ: How do you know these things?

CM: I was on the road for a long time. When I came to the States, I took a bicycle across the country for a year and a half. I ended up doing about 8,000 miles on the road, and I met all sorts of crazy people. It seems to me that writers who come to this place do the same kind of thing. We’re looking for that moment of struck-ness. We’re looking for that moment of pain, in order to remember or to keep ourselves awake.

VL: The matches trick always does it for me.

CM: Sulfur jags your brain. It gets your brain to go whoosh.

VL: Absolutely. Immediately.

CM: Immigration is a form of sulfurizing.

EB: Valeria, The Story of My Teeth was a collaboration from a distance: You were working with people in Mexico City in the creation of the novel. Can you say something about that?

VL: I was trying to write my second novel, and I was trying to write it in English. I’ve been writing in both languages for a long time, but my three published books were originally written in Spanish. I was commissioned by a big art gallery called the Jumex Collection. It’s one of the most important contemporary art collections in the world, but their money comes from a juice factory that holds a monopoly. It’s called Jumex (jugos mexicanos) and their revenues buy contemporary art. I thought that relationship was disquieting, so when they commissioned me to write a fictional piece for the gallery, I said I would be more interested to write for the factory.They said no, so I said I wouldn’t do it. We negotiated a bit, and finally we found a way to make it possible. I sent an installment, printed like a chapbook, to the factory, and they handed it over to different workers to see who might be interested in reading it.

Twelve people were interested. They formed a reading group and got together once a week to read the installments, and they criticized it and suggested changes, or just tried to interpret it. That helped me a lot, because I never know what I’m doing when I’m writing. I would listen to those sessions and then write the next installment—with no previous plan, of course, because I had to hear what the workers said first. It’s very 19th-century, actually.

EB: It’s a serial novel.

VL: It’s a Dickensian kind of thing, just with email.

It brought me back to Spanish as well. Real Spanish, the Spanish of a group of workers in discussion. During that period, I called my uncle a lot (the main character is partly based on him). My uncle was a salesman in a big market. He’s a big storyteller; he always tells stories about the things that he sells, so I heard his voice. It was a way of connecting back to real Spanish, not extraterritorial Spanish, which is what I mostly hear and speak now.

CM: I love that idea of real Spanish and accessing the old language. I’ve written a book about the homeless people who live in the subway tunnels of New York; a book about a gay Muslim ballet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev; a book about Romani people in Slovakia; and a book called Let the Great World Spin, which takes place in New York. The whole time, over the course of nine books, I always think that I’m still writing an Irish novel, and that’s really important to me. Even if this accent gets in under my accent, as far as I’m concerned, I’m still always writing about the place that I came from. Is that old-fashioned? Is that silly? I don’t know, but I cling to the notion that no matter what, I’m still writing an Irish novel.

Audience Question: How do you know when you belong, if you live in many places and you keep traveling?

CM: Michael Ondaatje, one of my favorite writers, talks about the international mongrels of the world. He’s born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, goes to Canada, and writes his first book about a turn-of-the-century jazz musician down in New Orleans. I think he belongs in that sort of elsewhere. But that, for a writer, brings up several issues of cultural arrogance, economic arrogance, gender arrogance, and so on. You know: What do you have a right to talk about?

MJ: I think belonging is a really expansive and really reductive thing at the same time. I feel I belong wherever I flip open my laptop and start writing, in a way. That’s important to me. Going back to Jamaica, I realized how much home was important to me, and also how little I belong there. A certain lack of belonging is important for a writer.

VL: I don’t know if you have kids or not, Marlon, but I think that when you do have kids, that sense of belonging begins in PTA meetings, and it’s horrible to belong.

JK: Yeah, but that’s a different thing. A parent is a parent, and a writer is a writer.

VL: But we are both things, come on.

JK: No, I take exception to the PTA as belonging. I think the PTA is belonging to the parent, but a writer is not—

VL: I just cannot disassociate myself as parent and writer.

JK: I haven’t read your writing, so I can’t say that makes you not a good writer.

VL: Well, maybe tonight you will.

JK: That’s just not acceptable. A writer is a writer, and a parent is—

VL: I don’t agree.

CM: I would love to say that I can be a writer and a parent both at the same time. Sometimes I become the son of my son, for instance, in that I am fascinated by what he is fascinated by, and he leads me in all sorts of different directions. I think you can embrace both at once. You can helix these things together.

Audience Question: Do you think about writing intentionally or strategically as people of color or people who are not from the “first world”? Marlon, you were talking about just writing for yourself in your head—but you also know that white people are listening, Americans are listening. How do you play with that?

MJ: There’s a danger if you think about that too much. The novel, the poem, or even the painting that is in your head is the one that should come down on the page. Otherwise you start to write by committee (and the committee hasn’t even formed yet!) or you start to second-guess your audience. Is there a price to pay for that? Yeah. It’s been a long road for writers like me to get published, but I have to trust that the writing will find its audience, whether it takes five years or ten years.

There are certain things I don’t do. I don’t pander to an audience. I don’t drop the Jamaican part off. Somebody once said to me, “I couldn’t make it through your book.” I said, “I don’t give refunds,” because I’m at the point where I don’t care. I teach creative writing, and one of the hardest things to get students to stop doing is pre-compromising. Nobody’s told you you’re difficult yet, and you’re already pre-compromising with your story? I had to un-teach myself that, because I came out of advertising, and advertising is all about compromise. Audience is a matter of craft, not art. Is this as clear as it could have been? Is this a place for a colon or a semicolon or a comma? That’s what I think about audience.

Audience Question: Do you intentionally play with structure or form when you’re writing about place?

MJ: I try to reflect a place but also subvert it, twist it, even violate it. Some of the stuff I’ve written is based on true events, but I didn’t write nonfiction because I wanted to reserve the novelist’s right to invent.

JK: When I’m writing, I am only true to the thing I’m writing. I find the contemporary obsession with the consideration of others in writing really disturbing, and I almost can’t respect a readership that would expect me to please them.

Audience Question: I would like to know what you make of the notion of selective or elective affinities. Because nobody here came here by force.

MJ: I don’t know to what I extent I made a choice to come here. I came here because I ran out of choices. I came here because as a writer in a territory where writers wouldn’t go very far, as a gay man in a country that’s not very keen on that stuff, part of it was running out of options.

Baldwin chose to go to France, but he also had to. He had to. I’m not going to make conclusions for everybody here, but I think it’s more than a caprice. There is an urgency when we leave where we are. That’s why the term “expat”is kind of tricky, if not outright bad. Last night, I was talking about how terrible the word “immigrant” is. Certain people get to be “immigrants,”and some people get to be “migrants,”and some people get to be “expats,” and some people get to be “refugees.” But yeah, for me at least, there was some choice. I could afford my plane ticket. But there was a sense of running out of options and a sense of needing to leave. Not necessarily fleeing, but certainly leaving as an act of saving oneself.

CM: My affinity would be to story and to storytelling and the ability to nuance the debate, and to complicate the notions of place by bringing in new stories and sort of mashing them all together. The place that I belong is in the process of stories and storytelling.

VL: I began my life as a reader perhaps a little bit late, when I was 15 or 16. I was in high school in India, and I had a very good literature teacher who read to us and gave us Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, and I began reading about Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance in that context. I had grown up in South Africa, but I couldn’t live there beyond when I was 15 because my parents left. The place I knew I had to eventually get to was Harlem, and I’ve been living in Harlem since I came here. I guess it is through story that you sort of fall in love with a place. There’s a beautiful line by Langston Hughes, who says that he was already in love with Harlem before he arrived there, and I think that I was already in love with Harlem when I arrived, because of him and other people. So yeah, that constellation of writers—there was also a group of Mexican writers living in Harlem during the Renaissance, most of them unknown, widely unread, that I eventually started reading. They became part of the cohort of ghosts that made me feel at home.

Feature photos via PEN America.

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Issue 20 of PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers, is available now.