Rupert Thomson
Knopf ($23)

by Matthew Cheney

The title is not a spoiler, nor is it a tease. Rather, like the title of Rupert Thomson’s previous novel, Divided Kingdom, it declares a matter of fact, behind which storylines sprout, self-delusions fester, and interpretations tangle with ambiguities; the reader is encouraged to think up questions of ethics, politics, identity, and rhetoric in the spaces between. An earlier Thomson novel, The Book of Revelation, has a title that could describe them all, each narrative sprung tight with slow-burn surprises, each book an exquisite leak. Death of a Murderer leaks a little bit predictably, and its surprises are a little quick to burn out—perhaps resulting from the novel’s tight focus. Thomson is a writer of vision and imagination, but he has hobbled himself here, and deliberately so— interesting to watch, but difficult to embrace, producing, as it does, a minor novel by a major novelist.

The eponymous murderer, though carefully unnamed throughout the book, corresponds closely to the real-life Myra Hindley, who died during a life sentence in prison after co-conspiring to kill children. The protagonist of the novel is Billy Tyler, an unambitious cop called to a simple duty: to sit in the morgue and make sure the corpse of the killer remains undisturbed through the night. Her death, in life as in Thomson’s fiction, was big news, and the shot of her mug on front pages and TV screens across the nation inspired nightmares and cries of retribution. In the public mind she was more witch than woman, a monster who had gotten off too easy with three decades in prison, a demon that deserved to be stoned by villagers or burned at the stake, her crimes inconceivable to anyone with even a hint of a soul.

Some writers might use the story of Myra Hindley to weave a fairy tale of good and evil, and others might use it to suggest that, buried in the least civilized corners of our selves, we all have the capacity to commit such crimes. Thomson is up to something similar, but more complex. There is, indeed, the hint that we’ve all got a bit of Myra tucked behind our better days, and some of the characters, in moments of duress and for selfish reasons, even wish for the death of a child. But not in the random way of Myra Hindley, who, with her partner in crime, killed because killing was the fun for the day. Other characters hurt children, but the children live and become adults. (In Thomson’s world, the single precondition of adulthood is familiarity with many kinds of hurt.) As Billy Tyler sits with the body of the murderer—refrigerated and locked out of sight—he thinks back through his life, and we learn that he’s hardly perfect, but he’s no Myra Hindley. He’s been violent and irrational, lost and lonely, susceptible to the wiles of a manipulator, tempted by power, blinded by anger. He’s human, not a monster.

By slowly and methodically peeling back the protective shells around the lives of the people Billy Tyler knows, Thomson reveals his characters as flawed and pained and sometimes reprehensible, but he’s careful never to equate their crimes with those of a woman who helped kill random children. As the night progresses, Billy encounters Myra’s ghost, or his hallucination of her ghost, and she’s no more able to explain herself than anybody else is. Crimes so often remain mysterious even to the people who commit them. That, ultimately, is what Billy and the other people in his life have in common with the most extraordinary and horrifying criminals—they know that, despite whatever stories they tell and whatever causes they strap to effects, something inscrutable remains in every mistake and transgression.

The Neo-classical limit on setting and time in Death of a Murderer should produce tension and drama, but it mostly fails to do so, because Thomson’s novel is more concerned with the slow unraveling of the details of Billy’s life—a life that is surprisingly schematic, seemingly designed to offer points and counterpoints. The narrative reaches out toward everyone who remembers the murderer and her crimes, and now and then Billy wonders a bit what caused the fascination with her abominations, but Thomson’s attempt to be universal—to let his version of Myra Hindley be a nameless stand-in for every banality of evil that ever got groupies—creates an icon more dissipated than haunting. Or maybe the problem is just that the nameless murderer, the freeze-dried corpse, is still more interesting in the shadows she casts than Billy, the patient man of muddled darkness and drab light. It’s a sad fact of fiction, and maybe of life, that evil upstages everything less than itself.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

PEPPER SPRAY
Paul Martínez Pompa
Momotombo Press

THE NIGHT TITO TRINIDAD KO’ED RICARDO MAYORGA
Kevin A. González
Momotombo Press

by Craig Santos Perez

Momotombo Press, which focuses primarily on emerging Latino/a writers, is named after a volcano on the shores of Lago Managua, in Nicaragua. Pepper Spray, by Paul Martínez Pompa, and The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayorga, by Kevin A. González, present Momotombo’s most explosive collections to date.

Pepper Spray captures what it means to be “in skin not safe to be at night.” In “3 Little Pigs,” Pompa describes a violent moment of racial profiling and police brutality:

Me & uncle in a car when a police pulls us over yelling
aiming his gun at uncle’s head when second police comes
........................................................

the first police pulls
uncle out pushes to the street & slugs his head POW!
his back CLUNK! when third police arrives & now 2 police
aiming 1 police spraying & 1 uncle with fire in his eyes
........................................................

when at last a police lowers his gun
says wait that’s not the guy sorry amigo & they leave.

The stripped narrative mediates the dramatized scene, while the cartoonish use of “POW!” and “CLUNK!” animates the poem. Pompa embodies violence not only through the poems’ narrative depth, but also through their formal surfaces. “While Late Capitalism” expresses this weaving:

[Crammd-in-&-bangin-against-each-othr-in-a-dark-aluminm-box-
mostly-women-severl-childrn-&-some-infants-fuss-an-assuring-sound-
in-this-lack-of-oxygen-they-say-drops-em-like-fleas-or-like-th-man-
who-died-standin-6-hrs-into-the-trip-a-woman-drapes-her-limp-babys-
serape-over-th-mans-head-which-nods-back-&-frth-with-each-bump-
in-th-road-thank-god-th-corpses-dont-smell-but-th-hot-piss-stink-is-
making-bodies-vomit-on-bodies-stuffd-next-to-them-must-feel-like-
days-since-th-coyote-lockd-th-trailer-door-&-theres-little-struggle-now-
except-a-woman-trying-to-scratch-a-hole-thru-th-rig-wall-as-she-prays-
some-phrase-or-word-some-idea-that-doesnt-translate-well-in-English]

The brackets concretize the sense of confinement and the hyphens further emphasize the “crammed-in-&-bangin” rhythm. Even the truncated words (e.g. “th” and “frth”) show the crowdedness and aural stumbling of the “aluminm box.” These formal elements powerfully contribute to the haunting image of the woman whose scratching prayer eludes translation.

Alongside Pompa’s serious tone, he establishes an ironic self-consciousness in regards to “ethnic” poetry. In “Commercial Break,” he takes on the voice of an organization called “Pretty White Poetry”:

Strategically placed, a Mexican
will fire up your drab, white
poems

.............................

Need an authentic-
indigenous tone? Try our mud-

brown, Indian Mexican.
Your audience will taste
the lust in Montezuma’s loins
as they devour your work.

Want some spice
but not too much pepper?
A Spanish concentrated
Mexican is the perfect touch.

As a title, “Pepper Spray” suggests an arm of police authority, the “peppering” of the U.S. with immigrants from “down there,” and the effects of racialized representations. Pompa’s work renders his own experience as a “Meck-suh-kin” from Chicago in contrast to the struggles and untranslatable prayers of a larger, anonymous community of Mexican immigrants. Pepper Spray haunts the senses with its honesty and intensity.

According to Pompa, pretty white poets have “imported salsa-smooth Puerto Rican / vernacular to make your diction dance and your syntax sway.” They don’t worry about mixing Puerto Rican and Mexican imagery because “most readers won’t / know the difference!” Ironically, the diction and syntax of Puerto Rican poet Kevin A. González, in The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayorga, actually do “dance and sway” through “well paced rhythmic lines.” Although Gonzáles and Pompa explore similar themes of personal passage, migration, cultural authenticity, and institutionalized violence, their voices are so different that not even a pretty white reader would mix them up.

González’s title refers to the non-title fight between Puerto Rican boxer Felix ‘Tito’ Trinidad and Nicaraguan boxer Ricardo ‘El Matador’ Mayorga in 2004. Mayorga knocked down Trinidad in the third round, but Trinidad came back with a vengeance and knocked down Mayorga three times in the eighth round. Although heralded as a victory for Puerto Rican pride, González perceived the event quite differently, and uses it as an opportunity to question Puerto Rico’s political status. His metaphor for culture suggests that the neo-colonial status of Puerto Rico has transformed culture into capitalist desire:

Our culture is a pair of Adidas
dangling from telephone lines

& a small child reaching up,
fists gripping air,

arms brief & contained
like the two o’s of colony.

Like Pompa, González frames political discussion through personal experience. In “Julio, El Barbero,” he writes about his childhood barber:

He fled Cuba in the Sixties to neighbor isle
Puerto Rico & became an estadista.

You can’t blame him, argued my father,
a Statehooder himself, against my claim:

He should shut up, support the cause
or leave. La estadidad is not an option.

The cause meant independence. I was fifteen,
disciplined by my heart’s blind politics.

As this poem continues, it moves away from the political discussion into a poignant narrative about Julio’s life. In another poem, “Cultural Strumpet,” González articulates the political in a completely unexpected way: “You wore T-shirts / with portraits of patriots on the front / & told girls how Ché Guevara, baby, / was buried beneath the Fountain of Youth.” González’s “cultural meditations” range from humorous to ironic, nostalgic to angry, creating a truly unique narrative voice.

Pepper Spray and The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayordo, both present writers of extraordinary achievement and promise. Pompa and González navigate their marginalized experiences through poetry that peppers and KO’s our imaginations with a range of prosodic accents. In Gonzalez’s “Flat American Waltz,” he writes:

Let’s talk about accents, tongues

curling up as they hit the base of the pot.
The black smoke of the bus assimilates

into the black air. Let’s all believe in the place
these hard plastic seats are taking us.

From Chicago to Puerto Rico, from the violence of boxing to the violence of police authority, from immigration to political issues, Pompa and González guide us across turbulent borders, their curling tongues stamping the “melting pot.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry
ECW Press ($15.95)

by Holly Dupej

Designed by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry, Apostrophe offers an absorbing, almost hypnotic, expanse of found sentences from the Internet, all of which begin with “you are.” The sentences were selected and assembled by an automated computer program created by the authors for this purpose. The program starts with an original poem written by Kennedy, in which every line is an apostrophe (an utterance directly addressing a person or figure, either present or absent). Each line of the poem is entered into a commercial search engine; the search results are then mined for sentences beginning with the phrase “you are,” which are retrieved and placed side by side in the text. The result has all the elements of classic catalogue poem, but with distinctly contemporary echoes of the jumbled and often recognizable voices on the Net.

Because of its haphazard assembly, the text greatly varies in its effects. The voice ranges from the shallow chatter of adolescents to the deep emotional confessions of bloggers. Some sections read like a second person narrative while others are more lyrical (and may in fact be song lyrics). Disconnects between ideas frequently offer a surprising sense of humor: “you are stealing the content, making you a thief · you are ‘breaking your contract with the network’ · you are ringing up my Slurpee.”

Other recurring impressions include the uncanny feeling that you’ve read this somewhere before (“you are a redneck if…”); the outrage upon suspecting the computer has intentionally insulted you (“you have the ugliest dork I’ve ever laid eyes upon”); and the eerie moments of self-recognition when the text unknowingly speaks to your current situation (“you are probably wondering what exactly is going on”).

The over 280 pages of successive “you are” sentences are by no means a passive reading experience, and require the right mindset (and time) to appreciate this celebration of excess. The work does not go unrewarded, however, as the text slowly unveils the inescapable urge to see continuity, humor, and sensitive human insight connecting these sentences, where in fact there is only random chance.

A “live” version of the program is also available online (www.apostropheengine.ca). At the site, each line of the original text is embedded with a hyperlink that generates a new “you are” poem using current search results. Each line in the resulting poem leads to another poem as well, and so on. Begging to be read non-linearly, the Apostrophe Engine mimics the meanderings of Web surfing inside a constantly shifting digital information flow.

Blurring the lines between author and machine, page and screen, and writing and coding, Apostrophe successfully embodies the topical transformations of writing in the digital age. As technology increasingly infuses into our daily routines, it seems appropriate that we turn to it to expound the psyche of our culture. Apostrophe suggests we may begin to ask the machines we build to tell us who “we are.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

Attila József
translated by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics
Green Integer ($12.95)

by John Bradley

“Whoever is born to a mother is betrayed in the end,” writes Attila József, the legendary Hungarian poet, in his poem “Late Lamenting.” József had much to lament. His father died when he was three, his mother when he was fourteen. In 1924, the Hungarian government accused him of “blasphemy” for his poem “Rebellious Christ”; he narrowly avoided a prison sentence. Later a professor kept József from teaching his poem “With a Pure Heart.” Suffering from severe depression, he stumbled, or more likely threw himself, under a train on December 3, 1937; he was 32.

József published seven books of poetry in his short and troubled lifetime, and after his death seventeen collections came out in Hungary, notes Michael Castro in his informative introduction to A Transparent Lion, the last translation of József’s work to appear in the U.S. While considered Hungary’s greatest 20th century poet, József’s reputation extends far beyond his homeland and his time. Despite József’s frequent use of rhyme, which Castro and Gyukics preserve, his poetry feels quite contemporary.

Take these lines from a self-portrait entitled “Attila József,” with their mix of matter-of-fact acidity and playfulness:

He liked to eat, he resembled God in some things.
He got a coat from a Jewish doctor,
and here’s how relatives referred to him:
Don’t-want-to-see-him-again.

No doubt his intensity and his mercurial moods, not to mention his constant requests for money from family and friends, would have made József difficult to deal with. However annoying he may have been, though, his genius can be clearly seen. Look at how he ends this self-portrait: “His decay was nation-wide; // but, well, do not be sad.” He can shift from the personal to the political with ease.

It’s this expansiveness that evokes the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Though Vallejo dissected language while József did not, both poets address the unfairness of life, both demonstrate self-pity and self-mockery, and both poets write as if death perches on their shoulders. The following lines of József’s could easily be mistaken for Vallejo’s: “It’s ridiculous, I haven’t wronged them / more than they’ve jerked me around” (“Thus I Have Found My Homeland...”); “it isn’t me who shouts, it’s the world that rumbles” (“It Isn’t Me Who Shouts”); “the suffering of the conquered makes me suffer” (“By the Danube”).

The two poets also share a political stance toward the have-nots. This stanza from József’s “In a Light, White Shirt” captures this paradoxical class consciousness:

The wealthy don’t like who I am
Unless I live oh so squalidly.
And the poor, for me, don’t give a damn.
Their comfort diminishes me as a man
where to love is ignominy.

The poor have learned to accept their status, which angers József, just as it does Vallejo. Yet both writers identify with the poor, even while knowing this further isolates them. That “for me” implies that the poor don’t particularly care about the woes of this young poet; their own worries keep them busy. No wonder both poets turn to dark humor for comfort. In “For My Birthday,” József mocks his talent with relish: “Thirty-two I have turned today— / this poem by surprise came my way / titty /ditty.” While Vallejo would not employ the rhyme, he’d share the sentiment.

As can be seen in the lines above, Castro and Gyukics have given us a lean and informal translation. József in all his complexity comes across loud and clear; the voice is intimate, though paradoxical. The cover photo of the young poet with creased brow furthers a sense of contemporaneity; you feel you might meet this guy at a coffeehouse or bar. My only complaint with A Transparent Lion is that it isn’t larger. We need a translation of all the poetry of this enigmatic and fascinating poet.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

Interview by Wipanan Chaichanta

Born in England and educated at Warwick University, John Burdett practiced law in England and Hong Kong before deciding on a career in writing. After honing his narrative chops with the intriguing thrillers A Personal History of Thirst and The Last Six Million Seconds, he went on to write three arresting novels featuring the unforgettable detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep: Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, and most recently, Bangkok Haunts (Knopf, $24.95). Sonchai, the son of a Thai prostitute and an American father he has never seen, is perhaps the only moral cop in the Bangkok police force, though he still helps his mother run her brothel. Besides the increasingly complex character of Sonchai, Bangkok Haunts revolves around the fascinating figure of Damrong, a prostitute who has been killed in a snuff film, yet whose presence permeates the novel in the form of video, dreams, and ghosts.

Burdett, who now lives in Bangkok himself, offers a novelist’s perspective about Thailand and its unique culture in the following interview.

Wipanan Chaichanta: Your main character is half-Thai and half-American, the son of a Thai whore and a devout Buddhist. How did you develop a character whose ethnic and moral background offers polarizing views of Thailand and the West?

John Burdett: Sonchai evolved very slowly. I took more than a year before I bit the bullet and wrote in the first person as a Bangkok cop. I knew negative voices would cry “Arrogant Farang!” or words to that effect, but narratively it was the only way to go. It was only after I had taken this step that the other elements fell into place—his Buddhism, his mother’s profession, his perfect English and imperfect French, his rich education in both Asia and the West.

WC: How did you transition from law to writing?

JB: I always wanted to write, but I graduated from Warwick University when the U.K. was in cultural and economic gridlock. I read law in order to get a job. Quite soon after qualifying, I responded to a request for English lawyers to work for the Hong Kong government. I applied and was accepted and my life changed.

WC: What were your impressions and experiences when you first visited Thailand? Is it any different now that you live there?

JB: I first stayed at the Oriental, which was all about orchids and nostalgia and full-blown Asian luxury. Sure, the rest of Bangkok is not like that, there is a lot of poverty, pollution, corruption and inefficiency. But the Thai character is very welcoming and, once you know the city, you can have a good time almost anywhere.

WC: Your novels partially revolve around prostitution; you stated at a recent reading that you think prostitutes are “kind of heroic.” What do you mean by this?

JB: We have always to distinguish between different “markets.” I don’t like to use this word, but in a capitalist society it seems the most appropriate. There is a very great deal of prostitution in Thailand, and more than ninety percent is Thai to Thai. Only about five percent involves the farang or Western market. It is this last which I have focused on. In this limited market, I have talked to hundreds of girls, almost all of whom tell a similar story. There was no direct pressure for them to sell their bodies and they do not work for pimps. They decided on their careers for a number of reasons. The first is poverty, but there is also the degrading and depressing factor of very poorly paid manual work, which is the only alternative available to them. Some working girls enjoy the “game,” others dislike it, most are pretty indifferent, but everyone agrees it’s better than a factory or a building site. I find the girls heroic because they do this work cheerfully, usually manage to get some fun out of it, and share a huge percentage of their earnings with their family. Often such girls are the only protection families have against financial disaster. “Family” here includes extended family, so often a girl will be paying the medical and educational expenses of a number of nephews and nieces.

WC: At one point in Bangkok Haunts, you have a character exclaim: “Cultural conflict? You mean between a Western man with his pathetic need for a safe womb to crawl into and a Thai whore looking for a gold mine to exploit?” What is the essential cultural conflict between Thais and farangs? What are the greatest misconceptions of Thailand and her people?

JB: We Westerners have no folk memory of extreme poverty. Generally, we don’t know anything about how it molds peoples’ minds. From the luxury of a high standard of living, we evolve all kinds of romantic notions, often to disguise the fragmentation in our society. In rural Thailand, where the majority of the girls come from, love has little to do with romance or even sex; it has to do with supporting someone and her family unselfishly for life. Sure, there is a lot of cultural conflict between a romantic fifty-something farang and his young Isaan bride. Generally, though, the farang will get everything he dreams of in terms of love, respect, influence, so long as he takes care of her and her dependants. Often, however, the farang will see this attitude as evidence of a mercenary and therefore “impure” love.

WC: The central character, other than Sonchai, is essentially the prostitute Damrong, who is killed at the beginning of the novel in a snuff film—her character subsumes the novel, not as a living person, but on film, in dreams, and as a ghost.

JB: There are many ways to feature a character in narrative. In Macbeth, Banquo influences the action long after his death. A similar technique is used in the case of Hamlet’s father and stepfather. In using the ghost technique, I was able to bring Damrong’s full nature into the story without having too many flashbacks.

WC: You stated during your reading that ghosts are a big part of Thai culture. Can you explain for the uninformed Westerner both the superstition and power that ghosts exert over the minds of Southeast Asians?

JB: Once again, we must be careful not to fall into a patronizing attitude here. Sure, many Thais seem to believe in ghosts, but it’s not without irony. Girls in particular are given to using “ghosts” as a slightly flippant excuse of universal application, for example to be used to avoid work, or visiting an inconvenient location, or to express menstrual tension. But I would say Asians in general live closer to the human subconscious. They are more willing to express themselves by reference to the folklore, which includes ghosts. They also tend to interpret what we Westerners might call psychological events as supernatural ones. This enables them to seek support from various shamanic personalities, including clairvoyant monks and seers, where in the West we might seek a chemical solution. On the other hand, we must not discount the continuing tradition of ancestor worship, especially amongst the Chinese and Indonesians. In this tradition, the ancestors—i.e., the ghosts—have great power and influence over the present and need to be treated with respect and gratitude. There is some of this influence at work even amongst urban Thais, but with regard to “up country” people and in particular the hill tribes, we find very often that the ancestors form the core of the community identity.

WC: There is a scene after Damrong’s death in the snuff film where Sonchai “sees” Damrong (or is it her ghost?) in a supermarket—it haunts the reader into thinking that Damrong might still be alive.

JB: It is in the nature of real ghosts, as opposed to the comic opera type, that they manifest as perfectly ordinary people. When I practiced law in South London, I found this to be a fairly common theme amongst the urban poor, including some Anglo-Saxon tribes.

WC: The novel also features a great conversation in which Sonchai’s boss, the corrupt Colonel Vikorn, “interrogates” the criminal Tanakan using an extended hypothetical analogy. Why do both men speak euphemistically about Tanakan’s culpability in Damrong’s death?

JB: Vikorn is doing his job as he sees it. Certainly, he is blackmailing Tanakan, but that is because Tanakan, as he knows himself, has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. To Vikorn, this is no different than a traffic cop taking a bribe from a motorist whom he has caught speeding. Tanakan is thus fair game, but remains, as Vikorn well understands, a pillar of the system. He must therefore be treated with great respect, and Vikorn must at all times be careful not to step over the line of “opportunity” which Tanakan’s transgression has created. Vikorn therefore talks in symbolic terms in order to avoid the crassly literal. At the end of the day, if Vikorn does not play the feudal game in accordance with the rules, Tanakan will snuff him.

WC: Describe the differences between the legal systems in Thailand and the United States.

JB: In Thailand, the system can be bent by anyone with money or influence. In the U.S., you need both!

WC: Are there really “invisible men” like Tanakan, wealthy psychos who have no moral values? Can anything be done to limit the exploitation of Thais, Cambodians, and Vietnamese?

JB: Certainly, there are plenty of characters of this kind, not only in Thailand but all over the world. Wealth does not make people moral, and very often it has the opposite effect: people think God has made them rich because they deserve it and have a right to indulge themselves. It is a tradition that goes back to Nero. However, in this instance, I have made use of urban myths rather than restrict myself to any known cases. There is a school of thought to the effect that snuff movies do not really exist, but that does not matter in the realm of fiction, where myth is often more powerful than fact.

I do not want to put myself forward as someone who has a solution to any of these problems, but it does seem to me that a good start would be to abolish agricultural subsidies in the West so that subsistence farmers in the Third World have some kind of level playing field to work from. At the moment, a great many depend on their children participating in the drug and sex trades in order to make ends meet.

WC: You describe Damrong being sold into prostitution at age fourteen by her parents. The contract was for one year in Malaysia, sixteen hours a day, servicing a minimum of twenty men each day. Damong returned to Bangkok as “Totally efficient. Totally cold.” No wonder she was responsible for her father’s death and demanding gatdanyu (a type of obligation or blood debt) from her brother Gamon. In some ways her character seems comparable to Richard III or Milton’s Satan.

JB: Those are grand comparisons! I practiced criminal law for a short time in the U.K. and was involved with a few criminal cases in Hong Kong. The fact is that the environment for a child is one of the prime factors that determine if she or he will grow up into a monster or a responsible human being. Damrong has all the natural gifts and needs of a young woman, but her background has twisted her so that she can only express herself in an apocalyptic—and indeed criminal—manner. This is not at all unusual amongst poor young people. I think the debate is blurred at the moment by Islamic fundamentalism, which makes us believe that something in radical Islam produces a destructive and suicidal mentality. Actually, this is a universal reflex to poverty and defeat which we have seen all over the world, from the ghost dances of Native Americans a hundred years ago to the extreme violence of many African communities today. Indeed, I learned from the History Channel a few nights ago that the Anglo-Saxons formed themselves into apocalyptic suicide squads at one time in order to fight the Romans, who could not be otherwise defeated because of their superior technology. And, of course, we have the example of kamikazi from Japan in WWII. Damrong is simply an apocalyptic character within the limits of her background. She is courageous, larger than life, skillful, smart, and loves destruction for its own sake. I would say that fits with quite a lot of criminals I have met in my work.

WC: Damrong exerts her revenge from beyond the grave against those who wronged her. Not only is there an element of sorcery, but there is a strange transition in which Gamon looks like “Damrong in every movement”; you even refer to Gamon as “she.” Can you comment on how this passage coalesced in your mind?

JB: I was stuck for an ending. I was lying on my bed, wracking my brains. Then Damrong appeared before me and explained exactly how the ending had to be. I simply followed instructions, like a secretary, on condition she never haunt me again.

WC: What can we expect in your fourth Bangkok novel, and is there the possibility of a movie based on one of your novels?

JB: Movie option is more or less tied up for Bangkok 8. If they actually make the thing, and it works, I guess they’ll want to do more of the Sonchai books. I’m halfway through the fourth one, which is provisionally entitled The Godfather of Siam.

Click here to purchase Bangkok Haunts at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007

Interview by Leonard Schwartz

Michael Hardt, with Antonio Negri, is the author of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), which Fredrick Jameson has called “both a critique of a wide variety of contemporary theory and a prophetic call for energies to come,” and Multitude (Penguin Press, 2004), which moved the earlier theoretical discourse into a more ordinary language mode and began to talk about the political power of love. Together, the books have had a palpable impact on the way in which we think about the relationship between language and power. While Negri is an important Italian thinker (although many American readers weren’t aware of him until this collaboration), Hardt too has come into his own as a political philosopher of the first rank. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, and has translated several works of philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. He is currently a Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University.

In our conversation below—originally broadcast on Cross-Cultural Poetics, the radio show I host in Olympia, Washington, and transcribed by Holly Melgard—Hardt discusses the process by which his collaborative books with Negri were written and the nature of power as it functions in a complicated form of social oppression.

Leonard Schwartz: Your books Empire and Multitude have provided a rich humus for all kinds of other projects that have been created in their wake. Can you say a bit about the nature of your collaboration with the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri? The whole notion of a theoretical work of philosophy that is written by two people is intriguing.

Michael Hardt: I love the collaborative process. It is really quite liberating and obviously productive too. I’ve often thought that when people write together, in any collaboration like this, one almost ventriloquizes in the voice of the other—I sort of write in Toni’s voice, and Toni tries to write in my voice—and we end up writing in this third voice, which is neither his nor mine. And that’s one of the things that is freeing about it, this third voice that neither belongs to one nor the other person.

LS: Tell us more about Antonio Negri—obviously you have collaborated with him on these two books, but you began actually as his translator. Is that accurate?

MH: Well, I suppose so. I translated one of his books in order to meet him. He’s someone with the kind of life story that ought to be a Hollywood script: he was a professor of political science in Italy in the ’60s and ’70s, but was also involved with workers and student movements, and was arrested and imprisoned for his political activity in the late ’70s. He left prison in the mid ’80s and then spent fourteen years in Paris. It was during that period that I went to Paris to meet him. And I thought I really couldn’t just present myself as some, you know, graduate student from Seattle (laughs), and so presented myself as a translator. We got along quite well and so I moved to Paris. Eventually one thing led to another and we started writing together.

LS: What a great story. What’s the title of that book?

MH: That was his book on Spinoza called The Savage Anomaly. It was published in the U.S. by University of Minnesota Press.

LS: Let’s talk about your book Empire. Many readers leap directly to the propositional nature of the statements in the book, but I wonder if for you is the compositional process as important as what actually gets said?

MH: I suppose so. The experience of writing these books has been one of confronting a new global situation that we don’t really understand, and the writing process is really one of trying to grasp the situation. It’s not like we start a book and we really know what we’re after; we get it in the process of writing.

LS: Speak in order to discover what to say, and write in order to figure it out.

MH: Exactly! And that’s one of the reasons why Empire is so difficult. I think we’ve made a big effort with Multitude to write in a way that a non-academic audience could appreciate. But one of the things I discovered in trying to write for a more general audience is that certain difficulties of these kinds of projects that are just inherent in them. And it goes something like this: If we were just writing something we already knew, then we could write it in the most straightforward way. But if the writing process itself is part of the discovery, and we’re trying to gesture toward and find figurations for something that we don’t yet understand, then of course it’s going to be difficult. Partly because the reader is involved in the same process of trying to grasp something that hasn’t yet been fully digested. I don’t know exactly how to say it.

LS: I know what you mean. . . If it were easy to say, it wouldn’t be especially worth saying. In Empire, you do talk about the difference between “empire” and “imperialism,” and you talk about the three modalities of control that Empire exerts, one of them being Language. So, in a sense, that problem is posed when you speak about the compositional strategy. How do you reach or write for many people without it becoming immediately commodifiable?

MH: I realize that I was probably wrong when I said before that what we’re writing is something that we don’t understand. I think it’s really that sometimes recognizing different or more precise terminology, or trying to invent different languages, allows us to see more clearly, gives us a different perspective or a different vision on things. I wouldn’t exactly put it that language has become commodified, at least in the old sense. There’s a long modernist tradition of talking about the commodification of language, that advertisers ruin things and we need to break through that with a kind of modernist difficulty. I’m thinking of high-modernism, of the great novelists and poets—it’s not quite the same as that, it seems to me. It is grasping the new, but it’s trying to find a way of expressing or having us see, newly, the changes that have taken place in the world. In my experience, I have to break through with a different language. And that allows us to see things differently.

LS: In a way what you say also mirrors your stance toward empire in the book. You don’t moralize against empire or globalism per se; rather, you seem to see a certain aspect of it which is inevitable and necessary, and potentially even revolutionary. Could you say a little bit, especially for readers who haven’t yet read Empire, about the general theoretical stance you take concerning the differences between imperialism and empire?

MH: It’s partly again to try to see power structures newly; the point of departure for the book is that imperialism, as we knew it, is no longer the ruling form of power. Now of course, after September 11, 2001, and especially after 2003, many people would say, “No, what’s going on is exactly U.S. imperialism.” The U.S. has taken up the mantle of the old British empire and they are attempting to control foreign territory and potentially the whole globe. That’s the way I would define imperialism: the power of a nation state to impose its sovereignty over foreign territory (as the British did, as the French did, as other imperialist powers did). And so, in some ways, we would see it through the same lens, but I think that’s a misrecognition of how power functions today. In fact, I would even argue that Bush and his cronies were also mistaken. They really thought that the U.S. could be an imperialist power; they really thought that unilaterally the U.S. could dictate, remake the Middle East, rule over the world, etc. And they were wrong, they were completely wrong. . . and now we see the disaster from it. We see the failure from it. In any case, we don’t need to be taken in by the same mistakes. The only way that global power can function today, the only way that the rich can stay rich and keep the poor poor, is by constructing a much more networked form of power, a network of control. . . a network that of course includes the United States, but also includes the other dominant nation states, the capitalist corporations, various multinational institutions, plus a variety of non-governmental organizations. It’s this that we’re trying to call Empire; it’s a new logic of global control or domination. You might say this: in a way we’re trying to guard against fighting against old enemies and recognize the new enemy.

LS: Along those lines, you reject the term “military industrial complex” as a piece of language that has outlived its utility, or is not descriptive of the enemy. Can you say what, in the description of “Empire” you just offered, differs from the older notion of a “military industrial complex”?

MH: It used to be much easier to recognize a single locus of power—if there was a Winter Palace that we could invade, if it was really all coming out of the White House—if we could locate power in that way, it would make political practice, at least at a conceptual level, very easy. You know who the enemy is. You know where it is. On the other hand, if in fact power, global power, is tending toward this kind of network that we’re describing, it makes it much less clear where to attack or where to stand. It really poses a new challenge for politics. Philosophers like Toni and I, and of course larger social movements and political movements, have been trying for the last ten years to grasp this new de-centered power structure and find ways to challenge it.

LS: In Empire you suggest “Imperial control operates through three global and absolute means: the bomb, money, and ether.” Now we know what the bomb is, and we know what money is, but it’s your third term ‘ether’ that it seems to me is the most important, at least from the point of view of a poetics. You say about this third term:

Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial control. The management of communication, the structuring of the educational system, and the regulation of culture appear today more than ever as sovereign prerogatives. All of this, however, dissolves in the ether. The contemporary systems of communication are not subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communication—or actually, sovereignty is articulated through communication systems. In the field of communication, the paradoxes that bring about the dissolution of territorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever.

Can you talk about the way in which you chose to foreground communication as the battleground?

MH: One thing we’re trying to do is argue beyond a notion that all the means of communication are manipulated in some instrumental way by some sovereign or localizable power that stands behind them. In other words: it’s not just that the media, or other forms of communication, are instrumentally used to dupe people, or to maintain profits of corporations, or to make the population passive. I think that those are sometimes good approximations; I remember a wonderful science fiction movie from the ‘80s in which the characters would put on a certain kind of glasses, and when they’d look at the newspaper, instead of the regular headline, it would say things like “Obey Authority”—that’s what the real message was! Those kinds of conspiracy notions about the media have a certain utility, but I think it’s more difficult than that. There isn’t a censor that tells the newspapers exactly what to think, and there isn’t even, usually, the head of a corporation who calls up a newspaper and who tells them what to print and what not to print. It’s a much more amorphous aspect. It’s de-centered and has a network form. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to grasp.

LS: I’m thinking about your strategies as a writer—your command of a certain kind of theoretical language, but also the way in which you draw a literary background: in Empire there are passages from Melville that come in, for example, but also a series, interestingly, of Christian rhetorical figures. What do you see as the writing strategies at this moment that best intervene in a communication system that is loaded in the direction of empire, but not inevitably destined to express the interests of power as opposed to the subversion of that power? Is it, for you, theoretical language that remains the best bet? Or is it the mixing and the cutting back and forth between direct speech, theoretical language, and a kind of literary parlance?

MH: I think it is that mixture that seems most effective, but I was thinking as you were speaking about the political power of language itself and how much weight one can put on that. I’m against the notion that philosophers and writers can write a certain way and that’s going to tell people what to do—I’m definitely against that, but I sort of react too hard in that direction, and therefore discount the power of language and think the real power is in practice, is in the movements. . . but then I think that’s not really right either. I think there is, and there is necessarily, a properly political power in the invention of language. But that doesn’t reside necessarily in the authors; we just grasp, sometimes, this linguistic convention that can have political effects.

What it reminds me of is this passage from Spinoza’s book called The Theological Political Treatise, a book that got him in a whole lot of trouble. The whole book takes on religion, bringing it down to materiality; Spinoza says that prophets are just people with great imaginations, that sort of thing. But he also says that what a prophet does is call a people into being—and that seems to me like an amazing expression of the properly political power of language. When you say that a manifesto, or a prophet, can call a people into being, what it means is that it can organize the passions—you know, the striving for liberty, the organizing for democracy, etc.—and construct out of them a political reality.

LS: An extraordinary way of putting it. And I think that is the project of your book Multitude too—to replace terms like “masses” with the possibility of some other form of collectivity that you call “multitude” and are attempting to talk into being. To go back toward the philosophical structure of your thinking, can I mention a philosopher or two and ask you about their influence on your work?

MH: Sure.

LS: How about Giorgio Agamben, the great Italian philosopher whose work is cited and referenced throughout your book?

MH: He’s definitely a very close fellow traveler. He’s a personal friend of mine and Toni’s and he’s also thinking through many of the same problems. But then we come to great differences. The shorthand way of saying it (for people imbued with the history of philosophy) is that Agamben comes out of thinking through Heidegger and Hegel, and Toni and I come out of thinking through Spinoza and Marx. But I think the difference really has to do with the fact that in Agamben’s work there’s never a pointing toward the subjectivities that can create the new; he’s much more focused on recognizing the forms of power that determine and limit us, and less focused on the ways within contemporary reality that something else emerges.

LS: Gilles Deleuze?

MH: He’s definitely the writer that I came to philosophy through; I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation about his work, and so on. Toni’s relationship to Deleuze is quite different, because Toni comes through a heretical sort of Marxism of the ’60s, and only comes to Deleuze’s work, say, in the early 1980s. That relationship between Marxism and this newer French thought—call it post-structuralism—was a kind of shift for Toni, whereas for me it was my first. . . my baptism.

LS: As you’re talking about your books, it’s wonderful to hear the way you always think about what Negri would say as well. It reminds me of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom language is a form of responsibility. But there’s another passage in Empire I was hoping I could get your response to; it’s in your chapter on “Virtualities.” You write:

Through circulation the common human species is composed, a multicolored Orpheus of infinite power; through circulation the human community is constituted. Outside every Enlightenment cloud or Kantian reverie, the desire of the multitude is not a cosmopolitical state but a common species. As in a secular Pentecost, the bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a common tongue.

Again, if you could take us through a few of the figures, images, and concepts there… it is a rich and startling passage.

MH: I think we did a certain number of these things subconsciously, like this relationship between the theological and the political. . . Someone once said, “Why do you have to use religious imagery, when you’re not talking about something religious in that sense?” I think that often, theological language allows us to grasp that creativity that we have to recognize—the actual construction of the new. It’s one way of approach that helps us get out of our daily understandings that don’t seem to be able to grasp that possibility of creating a future; so, the mixing of that theological imagery with this worldly political project is a way of trying to grasp what you might call divine, or the divinity of the creative instance: that’s a long-standing trope in poetic language, but here we’re trying to recognize it in the creativity of the political process.

The notion of mixture and flows is clear throughout our books. We’re trying to talk about subjectivities that are not really identities, that are not essences, but are based on a primacy of mixture, a primacy of miscegenation, a crossing of these boundaries that ought to be a way of addressing and undermining racial hierarchies, gender hierarchies, other hierarchies based on identities. In any case, the method, in a way, of “mixture” and “movement” is already implicit there in what you’re pointing toward.

LS: Could you say a little bit about your emphasis on the term “immanence” in your writing?

MH: Well, the simplest level (which always appeals to me) is immanence as the insistence on horizontal political structures and horizontal social organization—“horizontal” meaning on the same level as each other, as opposed to a transcendent instant that stands above us. I’m describing things that are supposed to be commonplace among social movements and political organizations today, the organization of anti-war or anti-capitalist protest movements—it’s always done in that form. Or at least that’s the ideal, the spirit in which things are attempted. The more difficult problem is when we try to understand the forms of power that we need to oppose today as also residing on the plane of immanence. If we were to think of power as simply transcendent, that would be like having a man behind the curtain. You know, something like in The Wizard of Oz, where you have this guy behind the whole thing. Then power is transcendent and we can recognize where it is and we can attack it, blah, blah, blah. . . but if power really functions immanently, if it’s really spread out and not centered in any one place, it becomes much more difficult to identify and analyze and attack.

Let me just give you a little example of that which I think all of the anti-globalization movements were struggling with, before our new age of war and terror. What these movements were trying to do was to think about how to recognize the new forms of power, how to recognize that they were multiple. In other words: if you think back to the late ’90s and early 2000s, the various different globalization protest movements weren’t just against the White House. They didn’t analyze it as though global power were all just dictated by the U.S. Government. Otherwise, they should have just been at the White House every weekend. But rather, they were experimenting with new enemies; they were trying to recognize how the WTO is actually a kind of power, how the IMF and the World Bank are sites of power, how NAFTA is a locus of power, and how they were all constructing this kind of network of powers that function together. And so they were trying to analyze what is the power that controls the world today, that dictates globalization, and also how to attack it. I wouldn’t call all of this a success—it’s not a finished process—but I will say that it was and has been an open experiment to try to recognize these things. How to recognize a form of power that functions immanently, and then how to address it, attack it, challenge it, overthrow it—these are the kinds of questions that we’re trying to confront, and that a large group of other people are trying to confront too.

LS: I appreciate what you said earlier: you’re not interested in your books in offering dictates or precepts or taking on any kind of moral high ground—this is because of the nature of immanent power, right? What is a solution in one situation isn’t going to work in another. It’s not relativism per se, it’s just a recognition of the fluidity of the object of critique.

MH: Right, and its plurality.

LS: Michael, it’s a little bit off subject but I think it maybe brings us back to language and communication—I’m just wondering what poets you might be interested in? Do you read or find the work of those kinds of language workers useful for your own?

MH: In school, high modernism was the angle of American poetry I really worked in, and in recent years, it was Pier Paolo Pasolini—he’s well known for his films and somewhat for his novels, but it’s really the poetry that interested me most. It’s one of those things, I have to say, that I’ve set aside because of other things seeming more pressing or urgent. But I think contemporary poets have addressed these same problems and are in a way part of, let’s say, the experimentation to create sorts of new responses. I’m convinced that that’s true and I think that I’m not up to the level of being able to recognize it.

LS: There are parallel kinds of concerns and investigations going on within a certain kind of poetic discourse—one of the reasons Empire and Multitude seem to constitute a really important horizon for so many poets. But let’s go back to the nature of your collaborative writing process with Antonio Negri, who as you said earlier was in prison for an extended period of time on charges pertaining to his political activism. Could you say just a little bit about that legal entanglement?

MH: It is complicated. The short version of it is that he was very involved with the non-terrorist stream of Italian worker and student movements of the ’70s, and so, when he was arrested in ’79, he was at first accused of all sorts of things: being the mastermind of all terrorism in Europe. But what he was actually then charged with and convicted of was that his writings made him essentially a leader of these non-terrorist but radical left movements. The law in Italy was that he could be held responsible as leader for any act committed by members of the group, so he was convicted on those sorts of things—things that happened at demonstrations, mostly. He spent four and a half years in prison, then managed through a very peculiar Italian phenomenon to leave the country and spend fourteen years in exile in Paris, and then came back and did four more years in prison plus two house arrests, and that completed the sentence.

LS: That is extraordinary. And when you first began writing with him, he was at what stage of that odyssey?

MH: He was in Paris; that was in the mid-’80s, and so he had been a few years in exile.

LS: Then part of the writing process must have taken place during his second period of incarceration.

MH: A little bit, yeah. It wasn’t very productive, I have to admit. I think that often when someone’s in prison, they have a lot of other things on their mind.

LS: Well, there’s Antonio Gramsci, and a whole tradition of prison writing. . . but not in this case, it seems. I want to read you one last passage from Multitude: “How can we discover and direct the performative lines of linguistic sets and communicative networks that create the fabric of life and production? Knowledge has to become linguistic action, and philosophy has to become a realreappropriation of knowledge production. In other words, knowledge and communication have to constitute life through struggle.” Can you comment on that passage and what’s behind it?

MH: It’s interesting hearing you read these passages; I haven’t read them in a while.

LS: I think it helps to hear one’s writing in someone else’s voice sometimes.

MH: You’re right—in someone else’s voice, and then after a certain amount of time too. The basic sense behind this, of course, is that we have to organize politically, and that has to become central to productive life. When we’re talking about—knowledge, language, communication—these have to become central to economic production. In a previous era, the industrial production of material goods—automobiles, refrigerators etc.—organized all the rest of production in the world under their image: agriculture, service work, etc. were organized under that pinnacle of the factory. Our argument today is that the pinnacle of production that organizes the rest of the economy under its image is in fact what we call immaterial forms of production: the production of knowledge, the production of ideas, the production of effects. These are now economic activities, production values that are transforming all the others. So when in this passage we’re talking about knowledge and the organization of philosophical thought as a political need, it’s partly with that in mind—that these are now sites of extraordinary power.

LS: It puts extraordinary responsibility on the cultural worker. What are you working on, post-Multitude?

MH: Toni and I are of course writing, and we do think of it as a third in this series with Empire and Multitude. . . what it will actually turn out to be is very hard to say yet. Have you ever felt that when you ask a writer what she or he is working on, often the response sounds secretive? But I think in fact you can’t really tell until it’s done, so it seems false to try to dream up something, say it’s about X or Y.

LS: It also could hex the whole book too if you start to tell—while you’re talking about it you might kill it. I respect that demurral. Are you in the middle of it?

MH: Yeah, we’re in the writing of it, which feels like the middle because the whole first half is thinking and talking.

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