TO BURY OUR FATHERS
A Novel of Nicaragua

Sergio Ramírez
translated by Nick Caistor

by Steve Moncada Street

This 1977 novel by the former Sandinista Vice President of Nicaragua evokes a world formed, if not deformed, by the same kind of global economic disparities and culture/ideology clashes we still debate. In its original Spanish, the title is a line from a nursery rhyme about a mother's slaughtering a pig: "Were you scared of the blood?" Maybe British translator Nick Caistor considered such a question too much for an English-speaking readership to absorb all at once (after all, ours is the language of colonizers, not of the colonized). But even in translation this novel, despite its scenes of torture, murder, military massacre, prostitution, destitution, and assorted chaos, is a celebration—by turns fond and funny, boisterous and sad—of this volcanic Central American country and its beleaguered people.

Ramírez’s many-faceted depiction takes place during the years when what’s been called the worst dictatorship in all Latin America was being established. Order and authority have been deeply suspect for so long that even a character who would supplant el hombre (the first of the Somoza dynasty that fell, eighteen years after the scope of this book, to the Sandinistas), has moments of doubt: in one of the book’s central events, the kidnapping of a National Guard colonel, one kidnapper drinks too much and asks his co-conspirator, “What will it get us?” The colonel has his own storyline, and provides the only first-person narration in the book—the very structure of which is an indication of the creative freedom Ramírez included among the freedoms his revolution aimed to foster. The six narrative threads are identified by lithograph vignettes (e.g., a man in a cage, another with a guitar, a coffin on a cart); events span generations from 1930 to 1961, according to a Chronology at the end that can be helpful to consult throughout.

The story begins around the time Indio Larios worked for U.S. Marines stationed in Managua (as they’ve been in fact, on and off, ever since a 1913 invasion to defend a presidency that supported U.S. natural-resource interests). Concurrently, a character who becomes Lario’s companion in rebellion witnesses a street protest against a rigged presidential election and, simply for happening upon it, is punished by his father, whose motto is “Always follow the one who’s in command.” In an illustration of the way Ramírez always grounds the political in individual human experience, the boy is made to kneel on dried corn kernels scattered on a floor.

Other instigating events include the colonel’s ambush in a cinema by a rebel named Altamirando (“high-looking”) and, five years later, a John-the-Baptist-style revenge. An early Miss Nicaragua contest is rigged, won by the colonel’s adopted daughter (actually won first in a raffle, we learn in another narrative thread). A failed rebellion within the National Guard, the perpetrators’ flight toward Costa Rica, and other characters’ exiles in Honduras and Guatemala constitute more interconnected plot lines.

Interconnectedness itself—of Latin American affairs and cultures, even of North and South—is one of the book’s recurring themes. It’s seen in a rendition of the Honduran Army’s 1959 attack on Nicaraguan guerrillas near the border at El Chaparral (of which Ramírez himself is a survivor); in a reference to the fall of Cuba’s Batista; in names from Tegucigalpa to the Dominican Republic; in cameos by or references to Argentinian tango singer Carlos Gardel, El Salvador’s flying Yolanda, and Mexican singer/songwriter Agustin Lara; and in the names Indo Larios gives his children: Bardo Ruben Darío and Heroína Rafaela Herrera (the great Nicaraguan poet and the 19th-century patriot, respectively) as well as Simon Bolívar. U.S. references are often ominous or resentful, like the “green slime obscuring the US Marine uniform” on a skeleton hanging from a jungle branch, or the ubiquitous “Yankees.” But one character’s scheme to sell monkeys from the Mosquito Coast to laboratories in New Orleans, which reputedly use the testicles to manufacture a kind of pre-Viagra, and details like papers stashed in a Quaker Oats box and what’s playing at the Orion theater (The Bridge Over the River Kwai), are more complex. In an early attempt to please his employers, Indio Larios organizes a dance for officers’ daughters that, in its funny and poignant preparations and eventual disaster, becomes a humiliation that contributes to his political change: again, ideologies are rooted in individual experience in this wise book.

Wise too because, while the high spirits of such episodes are at the forefront of the reading experience, everything has at least two sides, often opposite ones. The kidnappers hold Col. Catalino Lopez in a Guatemalan brothel order to exact a paradoxical revenge, getting him drunk and sending him off to fail at sex; suicide threats by a young woman working there take on, in her own tearful account, the fuller perspective of her mother’s reaction: “she takes the blunt knife she has been chopping onions with . . . as though she’s offering me a sweet . . . shouting at me that it’s a good idea, I ought to go ahead and kill myself.” And the personal motives behind the overtly political events, like the kidnapping itself, remind us that politics is at its core about people, or should be.

Of course it’s local, too, and Ramírez’s evocation of place is joyous. Nicaragua is rendered with the familiarity of a local giving directions: San Juan del Norte, Puerto Cabezas, Quinta Niña, Campo Bruce, Malacatoya, Xlolotlán. The names of native trees alone make a happy scat: quelite, jalacate, tiguilote, guanacaste. Characters debate the legacies of songwriter/trumpeter Gaston Perez, José de la Cruz Mena, and baseball players like Chino Melendez, Stanley Cayasso, and others. Some names are dropped in conversation between kidnappers and kidnappee, some from characters through whose talk over bottle-cap checkers in a Managua tavern (Pepsi for black, Spur for white) we get many of the book’s central events, in narratives within narratives that sometimes read the way a Robert Altman film sounds.

But counterpoint between scene and flashback, fact and fiction makes this wild world more familiar as we read, and Ramirez’s balanced characters make it real. Indio Larios and Col. Lopez are forever at odds, but since an episode when Indio’s wily acumen saved Lopez’s honor and military career, they’re forever emotionally interdependent as well. Ramírez seems to favor neither over the other. Indio’s revolutionary feats make him so famous that when Simon Bolívar sends a telegram requesting permission to re-enter Nicaragua with his father’s body for burial, the operator, reading the name, says, “So he’s back at last.” But when the son, who never knew his father and has suffered under his pompous first name all his life, leafs through the papers his father’s left him, what he sees is "grandly headed writing paper" from "exiles' committees which constantly changed their names," and he scatters them to the wind.

That gives us a glimpse not of the author’s cynicism (Ramírez wrote this novel when his own revolutionary idealism must have been at its most hopeful peak, four years before the last Somoza fell) but of his clear-eyed respect for the nuances of truth, as well for as its extremes. The violence here is brutal and spectacular, often to a lyrical degree: rifle butts in mouths, trails of blood, torture by near-drowning, and a father carrying a bowl with “the huge flower” of his bull-gored son’s “bluish-pink intestines,” which, before he gets where he’s going, are “no longer pulsing in the water . . .” It might not all be good, but Ramírez reminds us that it’s all part of life.

Not surprisingly, the extremes of his world are resolved most pleasantly in the mind. “That’s the way it goes,” one character says in the book’s final lines. “At least they left you memories.” But like any good literature, this thirty-year-old novel is a monument to more than the past. Its real subject—exemplified by Indio Larios, who lives out his final days with all his hopes, sins, errors, triumphs, and disappointments boiled down to a capacity for endurance—is the full range of the human spirit, no matter our language, country of origin, or politics.

 

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

With the advent of electronic maps, accuracy of scale and orientation have become secondary to one primary issue: data layers. Throughout history, maps have been altered (via scale, labels, details included and omitted) to maximize the ease of use for specific users or purposes. Electronic maps are more easily adapted for a broad spectrum of users, primarily through the use of multiple data layers—though the map is ostensibly of the same region, each layer of an electronic map focuses on different attributes. The image of a single document with several different layers of information is equally apt when describing many postmodern writers’ narrative techniques. Depending on a reader’s perspective, taste, and observation skill, different layers of the narrative may become obvious: plot, theme, perspective, language, pacing, etc.

In a 2005 interview, Cris Mazza describes herself as “a literary fiction writer who writes layered narratives, often about a person’s interior world impacting their ‘real world.’” She contrasts this work with the “literary fiction” that most large commercial presses put out:

so many of them are of a simple structure: starts here, goes forward, ends here, with some flashbacks . . . the structure [is] uncomplicated. Most of these commercial literary novels are easy (or easier) to follow . . . They aren’t layered, either with different passages in time or different portions of the character’s brain at work presenting different language, forms and voices. And 80 to 90 percent of them are in first person.

Two of her most recent novels—Disability (FC2, 2005) and Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press, 2007)—are prime examples of Mazza’s narrative layering, though her layering art operates in very different ways in each book. Both effectively use multiple layers, and yet the technical or structural differences in the layering make for wildly different reading experiences. Disability employs more obvious structural layers, such as contrasting narrative voices and alternating chapters, while Waterbaby employs a range of narrative formats within the larger narrative.

Waterbaby follows an epileptic woman named Tam as she heads to Maine to research her family’s history for her sister Martha, whose genealogical project traces the lighthouse-keeping branch of their family. In many ways, the narrative seems much like the standard “literary fiction” structure Mazza outlined in the interview: it centers around one main character, it moves forward with a smattering of flashbacks to earlier times, and it builds in a linear fashion to its ending. It is told in third-person rather than first, but superficially, at least, the overall structure matches the fiction she criticizes.

Beneath the surface, however, layering is present within the narrative in a few different ways. While the main story is relayed in the fairly conventional format outlined above, Mazza interrupts and buttresses this arc with a plethora of other sources and formats: the family website (which sees a variety of edits and multi-media additions over the course of the novel), excerpts from web pages Tam finds, newspaper clippings, descriptions of TV broadcasts written like stage directions, genealogical lists, and a catalogue of emails. The number of narrative formats and techniques here makes the novel a kind of microcosm of media in today’s info-drenched world, mimicking the possible layers of an electronic map. Yet it is the purpose of each form—its purpose within the story itself, its intended audience, and the diction and style it employs—that creates a sense of map-styled narrative layering. One can read each form as a more technical structural map, like a subway map, or as a more nuanced, content-derived map, like a neighborhood map with colorful commentary.

The emails are an ideal example of the multi-faceted nature of this effect. First, there’s the variety factor: they include more personal family updates, Martha’s emails containing her written text of their family’s history (with added editorial comments and asides in parentheses), Tam’s semi-fictional narratives of her own interpretation of her family’s history, and quite a few deeply personal emails written by Tam that remain unsent. Their purpose within the story shifts depending on the writer—Tam’s range from reports on her progress to painful self-reflection; Martha’s either relay research and tips on genealogical work or flit across fairly superficial details from her life.

This contrast in function and style helps create a function exterior to the plot itself: each email helps to show some element of the writer’s (and the audience’s) personality. Martha’s emails have the sort of rambling, non sequitur jumps we expect from everyday communications:

How horrible for you that your roommate would treat you so badly. Can’t you get a lawyer or something to make her give you your things? Don’t worry about sounding like whining, writing about it is good therapy. Why not start a journal? Gary’s writing a new book—it’s about Mom! He’s calling it WaterWings, or Wings of Water. He says he hasn’t decided which. He’s shown me some of it, and it’s helping me do Mom’s portion of my family history, which G calls my book, but that’s not what it is. After all the hunting and investigation, you have to put it down on paper, in regular writing, but it’s just for the family, not a book like G’s.

Yet underneath this seemingly innocent report of everyday life, we get a taste of the difference in the siblings’ personalities: Martha’s steady family-centered focus, Tam’s introspection that would best fit a journal, and Gary’s show-off tendencies. The kinds of writing mentioned implicitly outline a hierarchy of sibling competitiveness: Gary’s writing is a book, Martha’s is “regular writing” but “just for the family,” while Tam’s writing is considered merely therapeutic. Each subsequent form serves different functions and engages with an altogether different kind of audience and expectation, providing a sense of how the family views each member, one of the foundations of the complex family dynamics seen throughout the novel. Tam revels in solitude and seeks no external audience; Martha is reasonably social but confines herself to immediate friends and family; and Gary is outgoing and well-traveled, seeking publication and the unfamiliar audience it provides. We get the sense that, like their implied audiences, the siblings exist on separate layers of the same map: each might cover the same ground but would label different features and focus on different users.

Tam’s own emails do have a sense of the reflection and introspection we’d expect from a journal, while still carrying some of the haphazard leaps in thought we see in Martha’s. Though the leaps are similar to her sister’s, they are generally more radically sudden, both in subject and in the level of intimacy with the audience. Even if journal-like, the emails she actually sends do have an awareness of audience beyond mere journaling:

I’m still on the train writing this. We have to be getting close to Portland. It seems I’ve been on this train for days and days.
Remember how we used to talk in the dark (and get in trouble) when we were supposed to go to sleep. Then there was a time when you were still too young, or I thought so, and I didn’t talk to you much. I wonder, did we ever get over that?
Anyway, I’ll rent a car in Portland and continue on to Southport. I’ll go straight out there. I’ll let Southport be my *first* impression of Maine. I barely remember it.

These emails blend reports back to Martha, meanderings down memory lane, and logic-based explorations of the family’s past ripe with if-then scenarios. However, the ultimate lesson in contrasts comes not from the comparison between Tam and Martha, but from Tam’s actual emails with her host of unsent emails, in which she is far more vulnerable, explorative, and even poetic:

Do you still think best in water? I wish I’d jumped in, one of those days you were thinking. I think I almost did. It might’ve changed everything . . . You never saw me foam at the mouth that night, then you never saw me again. But you’re still with me, in the grand mal aura stage—either it induces memories of you, or else stray memories of you jarred loose by accident (or incident) cause the aura . . . So far I’ve staved off the next big one. But, over the years when I’ve dreamed of you, who’s to say I haven’t gone through the rigid stage and woken with just a slight headache, just a little confused.

This contrast between the “real” sent emails and the interior “unsent” emails falls easily into line with Mazza’s characterization of work as “layered narratives, often about a person’s interior world impacting their ‘real world.’” While we can see the introspection of a journal-keeper, there’s also the sense of a conversation (implied by the addressee), of interaction with an other. The fact that these emails remain unsent—and, in most cases, are deleted—indicates the facets of Tam’s personality her family doesn’t see. They are something beyond “whining,” beyond the closed circuit of a journal. The desire for resolution and interaction—whether realized or unsent—is an integral part of Tam’s life that her family cannot see. Over the course of the novel, the family research she engages in helps work this disconnection inevitably to the forefront.

These contrasts don’t only show the differences in the characters’ personalities or actions; they also strike at the core of the process of storytelling itself: editing, selecting, censoring, jumping wildly into untested waters, etc. Like Tam’s investigations, seemingly disparate strands of information get woven together into a single tight version of reality that, after careful assemblage, is nearly impossible to separate out into different components. In essence, the technical layering helps manifest the more subtle content-based layering that occurs: the struggle of family dynamics within a family that is somewhat emotionally out of touch; the unsteady overlap between fantasy and reality; the things we hide from ourselves or willfully ignore; how we narrate our own lives to ourselves; and so on.

The varying degrees of interplay between the content-based and technical layering create a third, more elusive form of layering: the relationship between the reader and the text. Though this is not a layer that fits easily with the map metaphor, as it exists entirely outside the plane of the text itself, the novel demands that the reader engage with different layers in different ways. In essence, the technical and content-based layers require that the map-reader engage in a range of uses at one time rather than the single-use of a simpler narrative or a subway map. Most texts require readers to be observers; some encourage or require a variety of other characteristics: detective-like participants, students, judgment-makers or -acceptors, perhaps even character-like participants. With his all-too-human protagonists and multitude of narrative styles, James Joyce would be an extreme example of the text that requires participation; but think also of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, requiring readers to recognize patterns and relationships, or Jeanette Winterson’s participatory second-person narration in Written on the Body. Waterbaby requires that readers act as distant observers (reading the straightforward past-tense main narrative, as well as most of the emails between family members), participants (reading and sifting through evidence and histories alongside Tam), and privileged confidantes (seeing the unsent emails and—in one case—an unsent letter).

These different roles for the reader are evident in the fantasies that Tam constructs around the female figures in her family history. These fantasies tease out connections between Tam and her ancestors. Early on, she wades into the details of their lives, drawing the occasional strong detail and extrapolating it into a more nuanced narrative:

The big stone was erected in its place beside the plot where Jaruel and Catherine would someday rest. The deep, solemn letters, the little boy’s name, his exact age (4 years, 2 months, 10 days), forever making his life eternal, unforgettable . . . This would have been the extent of Catherine’s outward display of sorrow. The large stone would have been it, would have manifested her anguish. . . . Perhaps she visited the big stone often at first, visiting also the unseen stone in her gut, and perhaps relived over and over how she might’ve saved her child, carried him from their frozen outpost to a doctor in Bath, some heroic traversing of unpassable roads in unlivable conditions.

Fantasies such as this incorporate elements of Tam’s life but have a clear distinction between their main character and Tam. We see Tam identify at least mildly with the main character—in this case, Tam’s own mourning of the loss of competitive swimming, the ability to bear children, and the anguish of losing people she cared deeply about have little “outward display,” but central to the text is her inability to let go of her past, “the unseen stone in her gut.” Yet these early fantasies focus more on the character and simply use Tam’s language and the details she’s observed to round them out further.

As the text continues, Tam increasingly dominates these fantasies, making herself more or less the main character. This shift mimics the shift in the roles required of the reader, moving from observer to active participant. The fantasies occasionally and ever more frequently overtake reality, so that the reader—like Tam—begins to lose the ability (or the need) to distinguish between the two. As their near-symmetrical names indicate, the relationship between Tam and Nat (her long-lost, fairly distantly related cousin) is this fuzziness made flesh. The ontological confusion begins when Nat comes upon Tam in the old family lighthouse, mistakes her for the family ghost, and has sex with her.

The bizarre attraction between Tam and Nat adds another level to the fantasy and the reader’s relationship to the text. The two staunchly avoid talking too much about their actual realities and insist on concocting scenarios and scenes from the ghost’s legend and history. At one point, Tam goes so far as to dress as the ghost at Nat’s request. This incursion of fantasy into reality demands more of readers in part because there is a certain level of taboo in it: the two quickly discover they are distant cousins, yet continue the affair. But they both know that reality will not allow the relationship to continue, and the fantasy is so compelling and erotic that they willingly sacrifice reality to prolong it.

This exploration of sexual psychology generates another layer to this map, requiring the reader to play two roles: as observer, the reader is wrapped up in the fantasies. Simultaneously, the reader is external enough to the situations to act as judgment-maker. The reader’s complicity with the affair (as well as many other events and actions in the novel) is both repulsive and enticing. Indeed, readers may find themselves swinging sharply between feelings of sympathy with and dislike for Tam, particularly when bits and pieces of the family’s history come out. Though a technique by no means uniquely Mazza’s, the see-sawing of the reader’s reactions to the main characters does make this a more nuanced novel.

Equally nuanced but significantly shorter and less technically complex, Disability, published two years before Waterbaby, has a vaguely similar structure, proceeding in a mostly linear fashion through a narrative interspersed with occasional flashbacks. Yet most of the similarities end there. Disability follows two main characters—Teri and Cleo—as they work in a state home for severely handicapped children. The novel opens with a change in administration at the home; the bulk of the narrative follows the resulting changes in work duties and the two women’s friendship. The chapters alternate third-person narrative focus, creating an even back-and-forth between Teri and Cleo’s perspectives, like two map layers showing roads and waterways, respectively, in one area. The technical layering in Waterbaby is derived from the variety of narrative structures and media as well as their sometimes tense interplay. Disability’s layers are tucked deeper within the predictable tennis match-like structure of its narration.

The two women’s chapters employ obvious, wildly different narrative techniques and diction, harking back to Mazza’s much earlier “Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?” (1991). Teri’s chapters are written in a kind of shorthand style with no commas, a plethora of run-ons, and a variety of abbreviations (&, w/, etc.):

The funk is always penetrated & acknowledged 1st. Hot dogs & mashed potatoes & wet carpet & industrial disinfectant & plastic toys & usually pee & sometimes poop.

These are the novel’s opening lines. While they have the easy task of introducing the tone and feel of the home itself, they also quickly show us the strengths within Teri’s narrative style: it is immediate. Very little of Teri’s narrative is filtered in any way—we have none of the “she thought,” “she felt,” and so forth that would distance us from her in a traditional novel. Instead, immediate sensory experience combines with a stream-of-consciousness style that is unself-conscious. Although this is technically functional, keeping the reader moving fairly swiftly through the text, it has the added duty of reflecting Teri’s life and personality: she works two jobs and has little time (and little desire) for extensive self-reflection. Throughout most of the text, Teri is a woman of action: she acts and she reacts. The closest to self-analysis we get are a few mentions of Teri’s daughter: conceived by rape, she has changed her name and chosen to live with her biological father. Teri is efficient and straightforward most of the time, but she is haunted by her inability to remember all the details of the rape and how her daughter came to despise her so much, by her fears that she was a bad mother, and in some ways by the process of analysis itself.

Her narrative reflects this odd paradox: it is both stark and poetic, lending itself well to gorgeous description and detail (as in the list-like fragment quoted above), as well as crisp step-by-step actions. Cleo’s chapters are written with longer, more technically correct sentences with bigger words, more complex structures, and a minimum of abbreviations. Her first chapter begins:

There isn’t any question in Cleo’s mind that she’ll be part of a united front standing on the realityside of the therapy question. They make the lowest possible wage, working routinely up to their elbows in the most basic functions of life—food in one end, waste out the other—but they aren’tstupid, after all.

Cleo’s penchant for analysis and self-awareness is immediately obvious. In the first sentence, we immediately have a filter: “in Cleo’s mind.” In Cleo’s narration, we are almost constantly reminded of narration as an act of sifting and filtering the world—she analyzes, she agonizes, she turns over problems. This sets her up to be a more reliable narrator for scenes with other characters, and frequently Mazza has Cleo handle scenes with a lot of the staff or other external-tension-based scenes. Rather than the driving randomness of Teri, we have a more aware, slightly slower-paced narrator here.

Ironic, then, that given her focus on analysis, Cleo seems more willing to glide over the truly painful topics for self-reflection. While Teri fumbles her way through, dredging up her past, Cleo generally avoids confronting the level of unhealthy codependence in her sexual relationship with Windy, who uses her for sex and little else. But she spends lots of time thinking about the new therapy programs, the growing distance in her friendship with Teri, and the incompetence of the day-shift workers. In contrast to Teri’s streamlined efficiency, Cleo’s narration is soft, almost indulgent. She plays ideas out rather than jerking between action and idea, almost overthinking others’ actions and words.

These differences in diction and viewpoint are fairly obvious layers executed on a basic technical level—one could say they’re implemented more to help us differentiate the two characters from each other than for any singularly layering purpose. The basic structure of the narrative voices is similar: each chapter slides between external events and exposing the woman’s thoughts. Yet there is some interesting interplay occurring within these larger techniques. Specifically, there is a slight disparity between each woman’s narrative voice and the voice she uses in dialogue with others. Teri’s choppy shorthand yields to soft, calm vocalizations that are almost always complete sentences: “We’ll have to do some bodybuilding down here, the braces can’t be the only things holding you up. . . . Maybe that’s best until you’re finished with your irrational attacks . . .” Cleo’s more eloquent narration is offset by crude, belligerent dialogue punctuated by profanity: “Bullshit—he doesn’t have opposing thumbs, he can’t even open his hands by himself. Who wrote this fucked program?”

This raises some interesting points about the nature of storytelling, but in far different ways thanWaterbaby does. Here, the focus seems not so much on assembling a coherent whole out of disparate parts or on exploring the differences between fantasy and reality, but more on the differences between the somewhat tidier world of narrative and the messier world of actual interaction and reactive thought. In essence, it seems more about the disparity itself rather than forming a coherent whole from disparity.

The subject matter lends itself well to the topic of alienation and miscommunication at the novel’s core: the kids that Teri and Cleo take care of are severely limited in their abilities to move, speak, eat, care for themselves, etc. At one point, Teri and Cleo are discussing Angela, a child with cerebral palsy who cannot move her body beyond turning her head and arching her back. Teri asks Cleo, “What if Angela is normal inside? What if she understands everything? What if she’s got normal intelligence but can’t do anything about it?” Cleo’s answer: “God.” Complete self-awareness horrifies them, for Angela but also for themselves. They both preserve a certain amount of alienation in their own lives by refusing to actively change their situations. The turning point comes in a moment of crisis, and while Teri is the first to act, ultimately Cleo is the one who changes.

This would seem to indicate that Mazza leans toward introspection and analysis as a means for personal change. Tam spends a large proportion of Waterbaby dredging up and minutely analyzing events from her past, and the changes she undergoes over the course of the text are monumental. Teri, whose introspection is limited to one major event in her life, has her employment circumstances fluctuate but otherwise is more or less unchanged. Cleo, capable of self-analysis up to a point, sees some major changes in her personal and professional life but otherwise seems fairly consistent.

Content and life lessons aside, Disability demands far less of its readers than Waterbaby does. Given the slightly awkward narrative voice of Teri’s sections, this may seem surprising, but in Disability, Mazza lays the ground rules out much more clearly and succinctly. The narrative tennis match makes each chapter’s focus highly predictable and, ultimately, it lacks the interplay between various techniques that makes Waterbaby so interactive. Disability is driven more by external events—a new administration, problems at work—than Waterbaby, which seems to subsume itself in the many layers of Tam’s consciousness. And Disability does not invite participation and multiple readerly roles the way thatWaterbaby does.

Maps are useful for their abilities to convey information, and the balance of information is key. Too little and the map is useless; too much and the user is overwhelmed, making the map just as useless. Like mapmakers, novelists—particularly those like Mazza who layer narratives—must strike a balance between too much (bordering on the encyclopedic) and too little (plot only). In Disability and Waterbaby, Mazza demonstrates her ability to do so. Like a good subway map, Disability is tight, efficient, and perfectly designed for what it does. But for a work that truly explores “a person’s interior world impacting their ‘real world’,” Waterbaby is a cartographic achievement.

Click here to purchase Waterbaby at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Disability at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Film director Guy Maddin came to international recognition in 1988 with Tales from the Gimli Hospital. Six feature films and over twenty-five shorts later, his latest, My Winnipeg, is a docudrama of his hometown. Coach House Books recently published a book of the same title as a companion to the film: the book includes an annotated script, a conversation between Maddin and Michael Ondaatje, collages, photographs from the production, notebook excerpts, and other ephemera. Maddin’s first book, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (which includes journals, journalism, and film treatments) was also published by Coach House in 2003.

Maddin’s films, often in black and white, sometimes silent, tremble with a libidinal enmity for technical sophistication. Their imagery abrades the etiquette of photographic realism: grainy nocturnal terrors dissolve into the texture of the screen as if overcome with hallucinatory fever, sinking below the surface with the dignity of the Titanic orchestra. Melodramatic confessions, desirous for their own telling, mock the grotesque posturing of repressive morality. Although aesthetically enamored of the past, Maddin’s films are specifically contemporary, saturated in a mischievousness that answers social and technological progress as they once again up the corporeal ante.

I interviewed Guy Maddin via telephone while he was at his summer cabin in Gimli, Manitoba.

Jacob Eichert: Your book My Winnipeg is in large part an annotated script of your film of the same title, and reads like an illuminated manuscript with marginalia. Did the commentary tradition or history of Romantic marginalia influence your annotations?

Guy Maddin: It’s not like I’ve read a lot of famous marginalia. I’ve read my John Ruskin and my David Foster Wallace. I guess Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire might have been the first book I read that had a lot of marginalia. I remember once seeing Anthony Burgess’s annotated Finnegan’s Wake, and it sure seemed like a headache. I can’t remember who said it, but some famous author compared acknowledging the existence of a footnote to running downstairs to answer the doorbell while on your honeymoon. But these are more than just annotations; they are wild digressions and in some cases a mere piling on of stuff I meant to include in the movie. I really wanted to give Winnipeg the marginalia it deserves. It’s already got the marginalized status it deserves. I also wanted to give the world the Winnipeg marginalia it deserves. When I was approached about doing this book, I said yes, even though I really didn’t have the time, because I had accumulated so many anecdotes I was really broken-hearted had not gotten into the picture. It’s also a chance to vivisect the movie in a way.

JE: Reading your annotations and digressions felt like browsing through Wikipedia late at night stumbling upon entries that haven’t been edited by their sanctioned editors, tagged with “citation needed.”

GM: Well, like the movie, it’s all spiritually true. There might even be members of my family that would disagree with what I’ve written; that doesn’t mean they’re right, but they’re allowed to protest. I found myself mythologizing less with the book than I did with the movie. For some reason, I thought the book was a chance to get more facts down. A lot of people came forth with anecdotes after I finished the movie. In addition to the stuff in my notebook, I got a chance to include a few of those. I made very brief mention of the E Gang: these guys I used to hang around a bit in the eighties who stole the letter E from signage. The CBC did a spot on them complete with concealed identities. Apparently they struck a deal with the police; I only found this out after my book was published. In exchange for returning most of the Es, the police agreed to drop charges against them. The history of Winnipeg is continuing to write itself. At least it’s alive now. It seemed to have no pulse for the longest time. The history of so many cities, so many hometowns, seemed to be dwarfed by other mythologies. It feels really good to get our history out there.

JE: Both the film and annotated script, are “at heart . . . walking reveries.” The book reminds me even more of a walk, with its layout on the page, its boulevards leading to asides.

GM: Yeah, you can cross the street for a while and come back or slip down a back lane for one block, but you are still on track. The main thoroughfare of the narration is keeping you pointed in the right direction.

JE: You’ve mentioned W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as inspiration.

GM: I just love its tones. It’s a literary masterpiece. Somehow he seemed to be walking with every word he laid on the page. There’s just something relaxed and loose about it, even though he is a very disciplined writer. He seemed to be able to keep adding. The anecdotal freedom of it gave me the courage to proceed like a stroller allowing my memory to meander. I still don’t know how history will judge the pile of stuff I’ve made. I like to daydream every now and then, and it still seems possible that someone will remember it very fondly or confuse it for something really good or even great someday.

JE: Did you read any additional walking literature in preparation?

GM: No, not in preparation. But I really enjoyed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which has a long stroll in it as a recollection. I’ve also read, with great pleasure, the stories of Robert Walser. Walking, besides writing and cracking up, was his favorite thing to do. One of his great short stories is called "The Walk." That too had unbelievably interesting digressions but still had a directionless direction it was determined to go in. It felt like about the right distance and amount of ground covered when it was all over. I felt thoroughly satisfied and spent. That was the kind of feeling I was hoping to create with My Winnipeg.

JE: Are you familiar with Charles Baudelaire on the flâneur or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project?

GM: I have read those too. A lot of people have said that I should just use the word flâneur, but I always think of it as more urban. Mine are really night walks. Even though I wrote almost everything in the movie while walking around the city, there is just something about the minus-forty degree temperatures I was strolling around in that didn’t remind me of Benjamin or Baudelaire. I guess I was thinking of Walser, because he died in the snow while on a walk. But all that stuff is wonderful.

JE: Have you read any of Guy Debord’s writings on psychogeography or the dérive?

GM: No. What I did read specifically for the movie was Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach. It is a 19th-century decadent novel about a guy wondering around this haunted ghost town in Belgium: Bruges. It’s a Vertigo kind of story. He walks around and sees his dead girlfriend and stuff like that. While walking you’re more inclined to tip your thoughts in the melancholy side of things than if you’re driving, when you can get to a place in a hurry. Your thoughts get a little more time obsessed for some reason. Ghosts inevitably start popping up and strolling along your side. I was also thinking of Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, that great Mexican novel. It’s takes place in a ghost town in which every character is a ghost, I think even the protagonist.

JE: The middle section of your book is an interview conducted by Michael Ondaatje. How did you come to be interviewed by him?

GM: I took a train from Windsor, Ontario after only ten minutes sleep. I had an extreme hangover, or maybe I was still drunk. I was cursing my stupidity because I knew it was an important interview. We had been keeping in touch a bit, and I was making sure he got tickets to my movies over the last few years. He was very kind to say some nice things about my pictures. Coach House Books asked him if he would be interested in interviewing me. He really did his homework, and he came up with some really nice questions. It seemed to go okay in spite of the fact that I was holding my splitting head together with my cupped hands during the interview.

JE: Which of his texts have interested you?

GM: I just read Divisadero with great pleasure and of course Anil's Ghost, which was really beautiful.Coming Through Slaughter is one I read long before I met him, so I revisited that recently. It really held up nicely. He is so versatile, doing New Orleans jazz and stuff like that among all the other things he does.

JE: I thought it was a good interview pairing since many of his books are solidly place based. For instance, In the Skin of a Lion is set in Toronto.

GM: And also he had a really nice conversation with Walter Murch, the film editor, in a published book [The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film]. That is a real fun book for anyone who likes to read or watch movies. Murch was the editor of The English Patient, so they got to know each other on that project.

JE: Before making films, you wanted to be a writer. . .

GM: Well, I was realistic about it. I came late to reading, the same way I learned how to skate when I was eighteen. No one read in our house. I had dyslexia as a kid, and I didn’t like reading at school. I was really good at math and all those left brained things, so I just stayed away from all the courses that required essays. When I was about twenty-four I fell in with a bunch of English, film, and theater people, and I discovered I’d been using the wrong hemisphere all these years. I also tried writing but realized I was starting too late. No matter how effective it might be someday, it would always be a bit strange just like my skating style. I’m one of the fastest skaters I’ve encountered playing hockey, but I still have a really weird come-to-the-ice-too-late style. I stood too erect and was always vulnerable to the big hit. I just had too many holes in my game. I figured that as a writer I probably had way too many holes in my game as well. The more I thought of it the more I discovered I liked primitive painters and musicians. Then I discovered primitive filmmakers that were really exciting to me, like Luis Buñuel and Kenneth Anger. I thought, maybe I’ll try my luck in another art form because I don’t really like primitive writers. They’re just boring to me, but there is something about the primitive in other art forms that is really exciting.

JE: You said that, “quickly [you] became a good enough reader to know that [you] could never be a good enough writer.” Do you recall any details of when you become a “good enough reader” to know this? Was it while reading a specific book, author, or genre?

GM: I started reading Nabokov right away. The first book I read was Bend Sinister, a book I just found in the cottage and decided that I better start reading. Then, I read Lolita, Pale Fire and worked my way through all the rest, then through Franz Kafka. Like so many people who encounter Nabokov, I tried imitating him. It’s not as easy as it seems. I realized that great writing is a bit of a miracle. In 2000 I was broke. I used my C celebrity status as a filmmaker to get a job as a film reviewer at The Village Voiceand at Film Comment. I started dabbling a bit in writing, and I really kind of enjoyed it. Plus, I had been keeping a diary. I really admired the diaries of John Cheever. As cruel as they might have been to his children, he left them an unbelievably honest portrait of himself. I started writing something for my daughter in the late Nineties. Then after I had been writing a bit, Jason McBride, an editor at the time at Coach House, asked me if I had anything that I would consider writing. I said, “no, I could never be a writer, but I have these diaries.” So he published them [as From the Atelier Tovar, 2003]. Since then I’ve learned that I can write, now and then, in short stretches. I’m no aphorist, but I can summon the inspiration for a short breathless sprint. That’s what this book is. Besides, I’m writing about myself; I’m not really creating fiction, so it’s a little bit different. It’s just a matter of getting enough style down to engage and then just letting my taste, whatever that is, dictate what the reader is exposed to.

JE: What does being a “good enough writer” entail?

GM: When I first said that, I probably thought you had to write like Nabokov. I’ve since discovered that there are a million-and-one other kinds of writers. Sometimes even a species of journalism can be great or collage writing, if it is combined in the right way. I haven’t read enough William Burroughs or Brian Gysin to pass judgment on that, but I do a lot of art collage. I’ve listened to enough musical collage, soundscapes and things like that to know that the oddest juxtaposition sometimes can work wonders. But collage writing has to be read in really small dosages. Since I said that many years ago, I would have to change my opinion now. It’s not that I’m any better at writing than I was then, but I just know more about what writing can be. In other words, I guess I am good enough to put something out; at least I’ve done it anyway, whether I am or not.

JE: You’ve often said that George Toles, your friend and collaborator, taught you how to read. What did you mean by that comment? Were you referencing something more than him providing you with a reading list?

GM: My high school teachers, god bless them—they were probably burnt out by rotten students—really didn’t make reading a very enjoyable experience for me. They were always asking me to decode symbols. I remember George saying that you shouldn’t have to decode symbols. If you decode a symbol it’s like solving a crossword puzzle, you know you’re not ever going to redo a crossword puzzle. A great book should be a mystery at all times; it should be entertaining and get better each time you read it. He just reassured me that I wasn’t missing as much as I thought I was, or if I was, things could be read anyway. And since then I’ve become friends with John Ashbery. His way of approaching a poem is to read it quickly without stopping the first time through, without worrying about whether he assimilates anything, just to see how it feels and not to be so intimidated. If they teach you anything in high school it’s that you’re dumb, and writers are smarter than you. So there’s not much to be enjoyed. George gave me the courage to find things I liked. And he did make suggestions. After I told him I liked Nabokov he suggested Flannery O’Connor and things like that. I also got a great list from Michael Silverblatt, the host of NPR’s Bookworm, whom I happened to meet in 1980. He gave me a list with At Swim-Two-Birdsby Flann O’Brien, the novels of Beckett, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais. These were books of tremendous fun, books that I didn’t realize the likes of which could possibly exist, like Beckett’s Molloy with the pebble sucking scene that lasts pages and pages. George would read things out loud all the time, something no one had ever done for me, especially as an adult in adult company. It was fun discovering the love of words without him being a pretentious shit about it. There was nothing tweedy or stuffy about him, he just loved the books. I’m at the point where I’ve seen him bump into just about everything you could bump into on the sidewalk while reading; he’ll go to the ballet and take a book and read it. He just loves reading. I hear his voice reading out loud whenever I’m reading, and I guess I always will.

JE: I have that same experience with poets. After I’ve heard them, it’s impossible not to hear their reading voice.

GM: Once George and I were really mad at each other for about a year. It was destroying reading for me because I could only hear his voice, this guy I was pissed off at. Thank god we buried the hatchet.

JE: What books are you currently reading?

GM: I am reading Gyula Krudy's novel Sunflower. It’s a very nice Hungarian book written in the early 20th century. And then Ostinato by Louis Rene Des Forets: it’s an autobiographical book of childhood remembrances. I’m also reading Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel—I read about six books at the same time—The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and Paul Morand’s Fancy Goods, a French author from the 1920s translated by Ezra Pound, beautiful stuff. And the last book I am reading right now, I’m almost finished, is Safe Conduct by Boris Pasternak, also a childhood autobiography; it’s really poetic.

JE: My Winnipeg, both the film and book, seem to be indebted to the literary works of magic realism more than any other of your works: it incorporates the phantasmagoric with descriptive reportage and looks to the fantasy world within our own rather than creating a fictional setting.

GM: It’s strange. I really didn’t have to make up the magic realism part. It’s just a way of looking at the world. A lot of people say, “Geez, a lot of strange things happened to you.” Then, they’ll tell me about their lives, and a bunch of strange things have happened to them, but they just don’t see them that way; they don’t see the magic in them or an interconnectedness among the various components that seem to be telling a story, other than their own dull life story.

Michael Silverblatt was telling me the other day that he had always been one of those guys that went to petting zoos and the animals always ignored him, the cute little goats and bunnies always went to other people. He’s since developed Type 2 Diabetes, which means he not only urinates more sugar than the average person, but he also sweats it. Now, thinking of Magic Realism, he’s had a few instances recently walking down the street in L.A. where a million butterflies, I guess smelling the sugar coming out of his pores, have completely encrusted him in fluttering wings. It’s one of those true-life moments as described by Gabriel García Márquez, or something like that. I guess he literally is just a sweeter person now than he was before. But one of those odd coincidences is that he is now beleaguered by gorgeous butterflies wherever he goes. These kinds of things just happen in Winnipeg, and they all just sort of line up because, I don’t know, I live here, and because I’m looking at them and thinking about them.

JE: Another literary affinity that I have never heard you mention, although you did mention Burroughs a few moments ago, is Beat literature, with its confessional autobiography and Romantic mysticism.

GM: I like the idea of the Beats. When rap started getting popular, like thirty years ago, I thought maybe these guys will be the new Beats: they sing autobiographical stuff and they’re living on the edge. But they’ve turned out to be something different altogether. I wish I knew more Burroughs. I have Interzone on my night table ready to go soon. There are a few places I’m told are Interzone-like places here in Winnipeg, little underground places of unreal depravity. But my favorite Beat writer is Neal Cassady. I like Jack Kerouac, but Cassady’s The First Third is an amazing book. The part he wrote about his prehistory, the stuff about his family before he was born, is really beautiful. You can tell he was well read.

JE: Your latest film project is a collaboration with John Ashbery. In what capacity is the collaboration taking place?

GM: If I don’t hurry up John will never speak to me again. I want to make a feature film that’s kind of a choose-your-own-adventure internet movie labyrinth, but I also want to have a lot of satellite short movies that are orbiting around this main feature, moons of the main story. I’ve collected the plot summaries of a bunch of lost silent films and unrealized projects by the great canonical directors. If you read their biographies there are usually big appendices featuring the unrealized projects. I started making the unrealized projects of other filmmakers myself. My short film Heart of the World is actually my own version of Abel Gance’s Fin du Monde. I thought I would just assign a bunch of these to John and he could add his own embellishments, completely rip them to shreds, or reconfigure them as much or as little as he wanted to; then, I would shoot them. But I’ve been really fucking up, and I haven’t gotten them to him yet. The success of My Winnipeg derailed me for about a year and made me travel extensively. I haven’t had a chance to work on these things as much as I want, but I’m really close now. If I can just apologize enough to John for taking so long. Last time I talked to him he still wanted to do it, but that was a few months ago.

JE: He was one of the live narrators for your film Brand Upon the Brain; is that how you met him?

GM: Yeah, he did a Mother’s Day special in New York. He did a wonderful job. He was wondering how to narrate it because he likes to read his own poetry with little affect. He had just finished watching an Ed Wood movie earlier in the day and decided to channel The Amazing Criswell, Ed Wood’s narrator. I’m really glad he did. It’s not just an impersonation of Criswell, but there is something of Criswell in it. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Plus, just having John’s DNA all over the project was pretty thrilling.

JE: Your film Careful begins with a Rudyard Kipling poem, and you’ve mentioned Rainer Maria Rilke as an author “that really got through to you.” Do you read much poetry?

GM: I wish I read more. The latest thing I’ve read is Crabwise to the Hounds by Jeramy Dodds, a book that I think just won the Griffin in Canada. I really enjoyed that. Ashbery speaks to me more readily than almost anyone else. I also like Anne Carson, the Canadian poet who translates Euripides and things like that. Of course, I have read Homer and Fernando Pessoa. My list isn’t going to be very outré. I haven’t had a special tour guide into poetry. John Ashbery translated Pierre Reverdy’s Haunted House, and I really enjoyed that.

JE: Actually, my connection to Winnipeg is a great poet who recently moved back there.

GM: Who’s that?

JE: Colin Smith.

GM: Yeah, I’ve heard of him, but I don’t know him. I know a couple poets as well, and I stuck a few little things of theirs into the book. This guy Michael Lista wrote the poem Louis Slotin You Will Not Turn Forty, which I think is coming out from University of Toronto press this year. I’ve read the manuscript and it’s really great.

JE: The My Winnipeg script is full of poetic repetition. In the interview, Ondaatje compares it to the exaggerated gestures of silent film.

GM: Yeah it really is. But that wasn’t a conscious attempt. I guess the verbal gestures just didn’t feel grand enough. I felt ready to impart my drama to the proceedings once I’d repeated things enough.

JE: Did that come out of the rhythm of the walking at all?

GM: That’s interesting. It probably did. Quite often I’d go walking with a video camera, so the footsteps are right there. And I had the images in my head when I was in the recording studio improvising the narration. I never did write it. I promised myself I would never stop talking to really think through a sentence. That resulted in me bluffing a lot and repeating. Sometimes I would repeat a sentence five or six times till I got it right, but I never stopped talking. So it ended up with a somnolent energy and a repetitive drone. I don’t know whether the material out of which each sentence was fashioned was lyrical or not, but the mere repetition of that material seemed to puff it up into an ersatz lyricism. So it probably did come from those snow-squeaky footsteps that started it all.

JE: You already said that you didn’t like primitive writers, but I was curious if you could articulate what it is about film or music that literature doesn’t have, which makes for exciting primitivism.

GM: For some reason I love rock bands that can barely play their instruments, that just get some feeling out. There’s something charming and horny about the youth of it all. It reminds me of people not really knowing what they’re doing sexually, just grouping away, and it really excites everybody. There’s accesses to emotion, and a species of honesty, that really depends on not having technical mastery over anything. Not knowing how to write but writing anyway makes for a more tiresome read, whereas, I could listen to The Ramones forever. Thank god they were smart enough never to learn how to play their instruments. I just prefer writers who actually can write. I like primitive and sophisticated music but I prefer primitive. If it’s sophisticatedly composed and performed, I like it to be primitively recorded. I like my old 78 records. There’s just some sort of magic in it. The closest I’ve come is primitively printed or stored books. Mildewy books are more fun to read than new paperbacks, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I like my John Ruskin, but no one would accuse him of being a primitive. The Ruskin books I read have so much mildew in them that it makes me sneeze constantly. I don’t like reading the modern Penguin reprints of Ruskin when I have these original octavos.

JE: Speaking of groping sexuality, Henry Darger comes to mind as a kind of a garage author.

GM: You know I’ve never read the book, or even excerpts from it, but I do love the collages and tracings he did. He’s a hero of mine. Is his book even available?

JE: There’s an abridged version.

GM: Is it pretty tough slogging? It must be.

JE: I’ve only read excerpts, but yeah, it is.

GM: His drawings are incredible. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe him as a crazy person. I’ve had some friends with mental illness and the first thing to go was the sense of humor, especially with medication; it’s really sad. The writers I read can be a little crazy, but I want the sense of humor or at least some really romantic sense of doom. When Walser got too crazy he couldn’t write anymore. Believe me, if someone said, “I’ve discovered this primitive writer you’ve got to check out; he’ll make you feel like you’re listening to The Ramones,” I’d be all over it. Maybe there are plenty of them out there and I just haven’t found any yet.

JE: The images and sound in your films are, for the most part, murky, or rather distorted. How does the distortion play into this idea of primitive excitement?

GM: There’s a sense of discovery that’s evoked in me by the sounds of audio palimpsests. When I was really young, I inherited my dead brother’s short wave radio. I would listen to these remote American stations at night when stations would trade places with each other on the dial, swap frequency strengths, and exchange dominance over each other. It became kind of enchanting. And then there would be a neighboring station where just the percussion was pushing through into the broadcast. So percussion from one city would be scoring the broadcast from another. It constructed an acoustical portrait of America for me. And then I discovered, when I was much older, a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes my dead brother had made where he’d recorded these radio broadcasts exactly like the kind I’d listened to, things intentionally off-dial. He’d been deeply mystified by these things evidently. Now you encounter lots of ambient music artists who use the same strategies in creating soundscapes. It’s all been legitimized, but these things were tremendous adventures for me as a kid. And I’m not claiming I was an artist, anything but, I was very passive. The most I would do was turn the dial if things were boring me a bit too much until I found just the right rich textures. I have this car, and the left speaker wires have been detached, plus the left channel is missing. I can drive around listening to FM radio and sometimes two stations overlap. I can get these one-of-a-kind mash-ups of fragment of songs. I’m just driving in and out of nodes and wave frequencies that are strong and then weak and then absent. It just seems to be a big primeval bog of sounds rolling away and producing beautiful art at all times. I’ve had some really trippy drives out to the lake listening to this stuff, and I just don’t want the car ride to end. And it’s almost unbearably heartbreaking that no one else is noticing it. I’ve always been intrigued by that, and when I’m making my own soundtracks I just feel better when I’m making something reminiscent of that.

JE: Some characterize the distortion in your films as decadent. But, in addition to being boring, isn’t clarity the contrivance, duping us into thinking that that is how we really see and hear?

GM: Yeah, it’s very misleading in its narrow mindedness and its earth bound thinking. Besides, decadent always suggests the very end of something, sort of bonking your head up against the end of the cul-de-sac with mauve bruises on your forehead. To me all that stuff just seems to be the beginning of something exciting right now. Although, the word decadence has so many great connotations that you sort of want your stuff to be smeared with decadence, with opium resins and things like that.

JE: I also want to talk about the relationship of technology to primitivist filmmaking. You filmed your short Nude Caboose with cell phone cameras. But doesn’t this effortless technology fail to impose the kinds of hindrances that you said, “often produce nifty inventions?”

GM: Well, I guess I just like how crummy new technologies are when they first come out, especially compared to how excited everyone is about them. The cell phone camera I used was a few years old, and they’ve improved a lot since then. These things are just like 4mm film cameras. Nude Caboose didn’t really deserve more than 1mm gauge film. The plot seemed a bit thin for 4mm even. I’m scared of video, and yet I shot so much of My Winnipeg in video hoping that this would be the movie that would drag me over into the video sphere. But I chickened out at the last second when I realized the script wasn’t a video script, it was still a film script. So I transferred almost all of it over to film by projecting it onto my fridge and re-shooting it. One thing I’ve noticed is that film and my writing aesthetic seem to really line up. If you’re not careful you can make so many mistakes with the film camera, nothing is automatic, you have to focus it and you have to take a light meter reading. I’m always screwing up, but my strength is that I know when to keep the accidents. But with video, everything is set on automatic. Every time I shoot something it looks exactly like everyone else’s videos, it looks like something off of America’s Funniest Home Videos. I guess I could just simply put the aperture and focus on automatic and just wait for the accidents to happen, but there’s just something about video accidents that don’t seem as charming as film ones, not yet anyway. They haven’t got a social context, nor will they ever probably, whereas there is so much social context for overexposed and blurry film. It seems to take on a meaning that no one can quite fathom. I haven’t quite caught up with the technology in that I haven’t figured out how to be inept at it yet. Well, I am inept in that I’m a banal videographer. I just have to learn how to make better mistakes.

JE: In a previous interview you said, “after 2000 I just unlearned how to play all my instruments and I became a garage band again . . .” How did you set about to unlearn your skills as a filmmaker?

GM: I threw away the tripod and I started moving around, and I refused to storyboard anymore. I used to plan all my shots and then place the tripod. It really reduced the chances of unexpected things happening. With Cowards Bend the Knee in 2002 I had so much to film I didn’t know how to schedule it, so I just told all the actors to show up every day in costume and be ready. I’d put them on the appropriate set, then, with my Super 8 camera, which is about the size of a Dustbuster, I would start vacuuming up all the imagery the way you start vacuuming up a room full of pine needles or something. Sometime I went vertically, sometimes horizontally. I would switch pan from one character’s face to another, then back down to the first character’s hands, then over to the second character’s hands, then back up to the second character’s face, and then push in. I would be going in and out of focus, and sometimes the lights would flare up or be overexposed or underexposed. There was a heterogeneous quality to all the images, and it created a great sloppy array of cut-rate imagistic scraps, like in a big bargain bin sitting there. When it came time to edit them it had a primitive energy I liked, and it was unlike anything I’d ever done before. I got kinda hooked on that. Perhaps I’ve ridden that strategy of shooting as far as it can go. But it really helped me understand the relationship between my subject matter and my shooting style a lot better, and it actually encouraged me to open up and make some wilder stories that fit this shooting style with a kind of carelessness quotient.

JE: How did you unlearn without loosing confidence in yourself as a filmmaker? When your confidence is shattered, how do you prevent yourself from leaning on your skills as a substitute for confidence?

GM: If I had a strength it was that I was aware of all my weaknesses, so if I was leaning on anything I was leaning on that. I just wanted to flirt with my weaknesses at all times. I have been skating in that very narrow margin between my strengths and my weaknesses, being careful not to go too far into either territory. That’s where all the fun lies for me.

JE: You also said that you “want to unlearn how to watch movies . . .” How do you watch movies, and what is it you want to unlearn?

GM: I may just have been being glib. I don’t know where I said that, but I vaguely recall saying it and thinking it was pretty clever. I probably have learned to watch movies a little bit more each year, and I have broadened my taste a lot. Movies are made for a million different reasons and I’ve learned to recognize more and more of those reasons each time. I probably haven’t unlearned how to watch movies, but I don’t think I have even vestiges of the kind of attitude that regular viewers have towards continuity and plot plausibility. Plots have to be psychologically plausible not superficially plausible. I couldn’t care less about whether James Bond’s cuts and bruises heal over from one scene to another.

JE: Well, those are all the questions I have in me.

GM: That was a nice conversation. Thank you. Where are you, what city?

JE: Oakland, California.

GM: Lovely Oakland. I was there about a year and a half ago. So say hello to Oakland for me.

JE: Will do.

GM: Have a nice night.

JE: You too.

GM: Bye, bye.

JE: Bye.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

David Swanson’s first book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, $19.95), traces the growth and concentration of power in the executive branch of government during the Bush administration—a radical change that has altered, and now threatens, the very fabric of the republic. Yet Daybreak also suggests that electing a new president and Congress is not the solution to this constitutional jeopardy, for until the American people reclaim their representative government, changing parties and executives at the highest levels won’t change anything. Swanson served as press secretary for congressman Dennis Kucinich’s two presidential runs and is a cofounder of the website AfterDowningStreet.net. His book tour brought him to the Kansas City area for two days, where I met with him on Constitution Day, fittingly enough—September 17, 2009. We discussed his new book and his work as a political activist.

Bob Sommer: Let’s start by talking about your background. You hold a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia, worked for congressman Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaigns, cofounded AfterDowningStreet.net, and now have written Daybreak. How did you get from there to here?

David Swanson: Well, I grew up in northern Virginia and didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do when I finished high school. Eventually I attended architecture school but dropped out and never became an architect. Then I did a master’s in philosophy, and what do you do with that? So I became a reporter. I started as a part-time sports reporter, covering high school basketball, and worked my way up to political reporter and editor, and ended up as a political reporter in Washington, D.C., covering the labor movement. But I still was getting censored and told what to do, and I’ve never been someone who could be told what to do, so I became a PR person for a group called ACORN, which recently could use some better PR. Then I quit that to work for congressman Dennis Kucinich because at ACORN we were winning all these local victories, and sometimes state victories, but it was one step forward and two steps back. We would pass city laws and they would knock them out in the state legislature or at the national level. I worked for Dennis and we lost, so I went and worked for the labor movement in their media branch, and I ended up working as an activist and blogger. I now work mostly for a group called Democrats.com, but also for other activist groups, writing articles and blogs and doing speaking events. I have the ideal job because I work from home in a beautiful town some distance from Washington, D.C., so I can get there if I need to, but I don’t have to live there. I’m at home with my three-year-old boy and my wife and I do full-time activism.

BS: You mention congressman Dennis Kucinich a number of times in Daybreak. How has he influenced you personally and politically?

DS: Oh, tremendously. To begin with, he creates a strange anomaly in our system because if you look at the forces of corruption that I analyze in the book—the corruption of money, of media, of party discipline, of gerrymandering, of unverifiable elections and so forth—and you look at most districts across the country, you can pick out where some of these corrupting forces have determined bad representation, representatives who don’t represent their constituents. And then you look at Congressman Kucinich. I was just in his district on the book tour and spoke with some activists there, and there’s nothing radically different about the citizens of that part of Cleveland compared to the other districts across the rust belt and across the country, and yet they have a congressman who represents them and the rest of us dramatically better, and it comes down to him and his decision not to be corrupted. He demonstrates that you can resist the forces of corruption and still represent the people and get reelected.

BS: Your website, Let’s Try Democracy, mentions that you live in Charlottesville “and can see Thomas Jefferson's house Monticello from [your] window.” You also mention James Madison, whose house is close enough for you “to feel it when he rolls in his grave.” Jefferson and Madison and James Monroe—presidents three, four, and five; and all Virginians—figure prominently in the political philosophy described in Daybreak. How have their writings and proximity influenced you?

DS: You can look out my front window and see Monticello up on a hill, especially in the winter when the leaves are gone. Madison’s house is just down the road in Orange, Virginia, and James Monroe’s is a mile or two from Monticello, so everybody in that area talks about them and reads them and has wildly different interpretations of who they were and what they would have wanted. And you might include the fear they had of establishing a monarchy. I mean, these are people who had risked their lives to get rid of a monarchy, had fought a war, which was perhaps not necessary—I am someone who advocates against wars—but they had gone to great lengths to get rid of a monarchy and had set up a government in which the first branch, the primary seat of power, was to be a legislature, and a relatively impotent executive would execute the will of that legislature. Jefferson thought they were just going to have a House of Representatives. He didn’t know about the Senate. He went to Europe and came back and was told about the Senate, which would be this antidemocratic force to restrain majority will, because there was a lot of that in the thinking of these guys, even while they were thinking of moving democracy forward, at least for wealthy white male people who owned slaves. And they put into the House of Representatives, the body that would be closest to the people, the power of impeachment. They thought we would use it all the time, and that it would be frequently needed for presidents and judges. They also built into the Constitution ways to amend it, which they thought we would do constantly. They didn’t want it to become some sort of sacred book. Jefferson famously shredded our sacred Bible and picked out the parts that he thought were good and threw out the rest and made his own Bible. He didn’t want the Constitution treated any differently.

James Madison and George Mason and other Virginians put a lot of thought into how to avoid what Jefferson called “elected despots”—how to not have brief monarchies of four-year periods but to really maintain the power of the people through representatives in the legislature. And they clearly understood that the greatest danger would come from war, so we were not to have a standing army. If we were going to have an army for a war, it would be up to Congress to oversee and fund and get rid of it after the war. Congress was to decide whether we were to have a war or not because wars would allow presidents to seize power. All of this is largely undisputed, and yet you see people with exactly contrary points of view today.

BS: In your discussion of presidential power, you ask rhetorically, “Why did James Madison hate his country and love the terrorists?” The context of that question is a statement from Madison that begins, “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded.” Describe what you meant.

DS: Well, I can’t say exactly what James Madison meant, but clearly he was right if he thought that during times of war, civil liberties would be stripped away and people would be more likely to permit it under the guise that it was needed for war. During the past eight years, because we’ve had this declaration of war by the president, of eternal vague war against terrorism, we have seen our rights and liberties stripped away. Habeas corpus is now gone. I mean, you didn’t even need the Bill of Rights—this was in the Constitution. But Alberto Gonzales can come before the Congress and say, “Well, the Constitution says you can’t have habeas corpus taken away from you, but that doesn’t mean you ever had it.” Which suggests that we don’t have any rights that are in the Constitution. So because there was a war against these evil, evil terrorists, we lose habeas corpus. And then a new administration from the opposite party—because we have a government now divided into two parties rather than three branches—comes in and formalizes the system put in place by the previous administration, a system of pseudo-due-process for people stripped of habeas corpus.

You go down the line through the Bill of Rights and subsequent rights in the amendments, and they’re all gone. Not that they were perfect nine years ago, but they were radically damaged during the past eight years, except perhaps for the Third Amendment, which they don’t need to touch anymore because we’ve built homes for soldiers and we don’t have to put them in our homes. You come to news like today’s news—that the senators of the great state of Kansas, where we sit right now, have managed to keep the evildoers out of Leavenworth (which apparently is a place you can just wander out of if you feel like it)—and they’ve done that by holding up nominations that they’re now going to let go forward, using an antidemocratic abuse of power to fight off this mythical threat of evildoers, who have been used to justify the removal of our rights. And because these monsters, these dark-skinned Muslim foreigners, can’t be treated as humans, we aren’t going to have rights any more, and in most cases we aren’t going to have those rights for Americans of any color, race, religion, or description either. So we’re going to lock people up without charging them; we’re going to detain them without due process; we’re going to spy on them without warrants; we’re going to remove all the rights going back to the Magna Carta because of these evil monsters that scared the senators from Kansas, and as a result everybody’s going to lose their rights.

BS: While many would consider you politically on the far left, Daybreak, especially the first half of the book, espouses relatively conservative attitudes toward the Constitution and the Republic. You describe how far we have “strayed from adherence to the Constitution” and rather ominously state “we are in unprecedented territory, far closer than ever before to losing our republic, and losing it in much the way that Rome lost hers.” Conservatives, in particular George W. Bush, have campaigned on the principle of strictly interpreting the Constitution. How do you reconcile that?

DS: Well, I would need to see the evidence that many would consider me on the far left—I think what that would probably mean is that people have seen on television that advocacy for peace and justice and workers’ rights and healthcare constitute far left positions. It would mean that people have not looked at the opinion polls done by those same media outlets, which show that most positions I advocate for are strong majority positions in the United States. Most of us falsely believe we are in a fringe left minority because our televisions tell us that over and over again. But I think we have to constantly keep correcting that wrong understanding. Single-payer healthcare is seen as a crazy, commie, lefty, pinko position, except that a strong majority of Americans has favored it for decades—and down the line through most of the issues I talk about and care about.

I do think that it is properly called a conservative position to say with John Adams that we should have a nation of laws and not a nation of men, and that laws should be enforced for all and that no one should be above the law. You look at Glenn Beck’s Nine Points for America—who I would not call a conservative, but a racist fanatic—and I think it’s number five that no one should be above the rule of law. Well, you know, we can all agree on that in principle, but are we going to actually apply it to people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and so forth? There are those who would apply it to a president if he’s a Democrat and those who would apply it to a president if he’s a Republican. I would apply it to any president and to any public official, above all to the highest of officials. So I would not begin the prosecutions with the lowest ranking torturers who strayed from the illegal torture policies, but start at the top and work your way down. When they’re going on television and confessing, you don’t get the lower-down to squeal on the higher-up and work your way up. You can start, as we did at Nuremberg, at the top. I think that’s perhaps properly called a conservative position, although it’s probably also a liberal idea that’s been fighting for real traction for a couple of centuries.

BS: The phrase “unitary executive” gained wide use during the Bush administration. What is meant by that phrase, and what’s wrong with it?

DS: It got some traction during the Reagan years. In some measure it is based on one of the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, which ironically seems to suggest that we should have one executive rather than two or three or a council in order to have one guy we can hold accountable for everything that is executed, meaning that we can impeach that person; we can expel that person from office. Which is just about the opposite of what Dick Cheney and his lawyer and chief of staff, David Addington, had in mind, which is that the executive has all power; that powers to make laws, to make wars, to make treaties, to make appointments, and to act outside of any rule of law belong to the president and the president alone, and the president is given this unitary power of executive in the Constitution, meaning, in Dick Cheney’s interpretation, that he can decide what’s law and execute it. The meaning of the Constitution as understood by most people for over two hundred years, and seems clear to me, is that the president is required to faithfully execute the laws as passed by Congress, which means that you don’t get to change them with signing statements, you don’t get to create them with executive orders, and you don’t get to create them with secret memos written by your lawyer. You have to actually execute the laws as written by Congress, whether you agree with them or not, or in the case of new laws, veto them. Sign them or veto them. Those are your choices. The Constitution provides no third path on that.

BS: President Barack Obama came to office with an agenda of “looking forward.” Yet you are a strong advocate for impeaching Bush and Cheney and investigating the alleged crimes of their administration. Wouldn’t that just mire the country in a divisive political struggle that would make the brouhaha over South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson’s shrill insult to the president when he addressed a joint session of Congress look like small change?

DS: Yes and no. When people on Capitol Hill argue with each other, it is treated as a catastrophe by the media in Washington. I mean this is the biggest concern: that everybody in Washington gets along harmoniously with each other. At least, when Democrats get elected to power, the primary demand of the people they’re supposedly representing is for bipartisanship and harmony; whereas, when you elect Republicans, all you hear is mandate for right-wing change. People I’ve talked to across the country seem to care relatively little about how well people in Washington get along with each other at dinner parties and much more about whether we have peace and justice and jobs and prosperity and human rights. As my friend John Nichols, who wrote the forward to my book, has said, you’re confusing the illness with the cure. The sickness is the destruction of our government, of our checks and balances, of our representative republic. The cure is impeachment, or enforcement of laws and prosecution. You know, aspirin is not a headache; it is a cure for headaches. Impeachment and prosecution are aspirin, not the headache. We’re getting things upside down. We’re told that the impeachment of Clinton was traumatic and destroyed the country. It actually was much briefer and much less of a big deal than we’re told to remember it was, but it was also an impeachment for a silly offense, and a majority of the public opposed it. But a majority of the public wanted Bush and Cheney impeached without the Congress even acting. If you look back through the history of the country, where impeachments have progressed, they have been incredibly popular with the public. The last time the Democrats did anything to stand up for checks and balances, when Richard Nixon was president, they subsequently won the biggest victories anyone could remember, and they lost after letting Reagan off the hook so as to avoid the trauma and disagreement on Capitol Hill.

At this point we can and should impeach Bush and Cheney and strip them of their privileges, but we would first have to explain to an uneducated public that we can even do that. It would be easier to simply impeach people who are in office now, like Jay Bybee, chief torture-memo writer and appeals court judge. We just impeached a judge from Texas for groping employees. You know, impeachments do not have to involve sex. Here’s a guy who wrote memos not just legalizing torture, but legalizing aggressive war, legalizing warrantless wiretapping, and he’s sitting there as a judge with a lifetime appointment, waiting to go to the Supreme Court, and they will tell you in Washington that we shouldn’t impeach him because the media will accuse us of going after a conservative judge. Well, do conservative judges now get immunity even when they legalized torture in secret memos? Where can you go beyond that? If you can’t impeach him, whom can you impeach? And if you will never impeach, if you will never use subpoenas and enforce them, what is Congress other than a bunch of court jesters? If we will not prosecute statutory crimes against the people who make those crimes happen, and only against the underlings, then we’re going to have two classes of citizens, those under the law and those above the law. What did we have a revolution for?

BS: One theme that runs through Daybreak is the prominence you believe the House of Representatives should have in our governmental structure. Why is that?

DS: It is the closest thing to representing us. It represents by population. It’s expanded now to the point where each member has to represent 700,000 people. That’s absolutely impossible. It hasn’t been enlarged in a long time and should be. These are the members of our government who we are most able to influence. We can call them; we can email them; we can fax them. We can go to their offices and meetings and go to their homes. We can find out where they are and talk to them face-to-face. They don’t have security guards; they don’t have secret service. It takes less money for them to run for office than it does for senators and presidents. They’re less the focus of the corporate media and that corrupting influence because there are more of them. They’re accountable every two years in elections, at least they would be if we didn’t have such a corrupt system and all the gerrymandering and all that, but we need to clean up the system. We need to make them truly representative of us. We have a long ways to go, but it’s our best shot at having anyone represent us in Washington.

BS: Anyone who knows your work as a blogger and political activist won’t be surprised to find in Daybreak a strong indictment of the Bush administration, but many Democrats come in for sharp criticism as well, including congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, senator Chris Dodd, and president Barack Obama. My original question was, “Why do you hate your country and love the terrorists?” but I’ll settle for asking how and why they’ve disappointed you.

DS: [Laughs] Well, they haven’t disappointed me in the way they’ve disappointed a lot of people who put way too much hope in elections and way too much emphasis on a president, and expected the world to change because we elected Barack Obama. I voted for him. It was the better choice of the two lousy choices we had. I was thrilled that for the first time in history my state of Virginia voted for the less racist of the two candidates and it was a black guy. I mean, that’s helpful. But I don’t expect anything to change in Washington because we elected a different guy president. I expect things to change in Washington if people get active and engaged and force change in between elections. If you look at the Democrats that you name—and most Democrats—they are funded by corporations and they are subject to the demands of their party, which is now led by President Obama. You know, at any given moment half of Congress is following the lead of the president because he is the leader of their party, and their loyalty is not to a branch of government but to a party. In my district in Virginia we threw out perhaps the worst, most offensive Republican there was in Virgil Goode and put in a Democrat named Tom Perriello, who answers to the Democratic leadership. It’s much more difficult for a man like him, who was given $1 million by the Democratic Party in the last week for TV ads and who won by a fraction of a point, to ignore them than it is to ignore us, the people who live in his district. And so he comes in and he’s thrilled to vote for wars, but when they put in the IMF [International Monetary Fund] funding for the Eastern European banks, he’s dead set against it until they threaten and cajole and promise, and they’re now running radio ads for him. The threats and the promises they use to control these people are intense. When a Congress member won’t vote the way his party demands, he or she is often threatened with a loss of money and even with a primary challenge. This is their career on the line, and it’s very difficult for constituents to make it harder for that member to ignore us than to ignore the party or the media or the money. But that’s what we have to do until we clean up the system, and we can do it, and there are cases of us doing it. So I’m not so much disappointed in individuals as I am dismayed by the whole system. But it shouldn’t surprise us, and it shouldn’t depress us. It should energize us to get to work and save this republic before it gets even harder to save.

BS: The second half of Daybreak describes a variety of ideas for a “new and improved U.S. Constitution.” This seems like a departure from the conservative interpretation of the Constitution you described earlier in the book, while tampering with it also seems quite risky. What are you suggesting?

DS: Well, the Constitution has always had a lot wrong with it that should be fixed. It’s also had many things wrong with it that have been fixed, right? When it was written, only white, wealthy males were allowed to vote. I’m glad that’s changed. But I think it could get silly, too, like amending the Constitution to ban alcohol and then amending it to put it back. With the handful of times that we’ve tweaked this thing over more than two centuries, that those are two of the amendments on the books is crazy. But this is a document that was cutting-edge a long, long time ago and isn’t any more. You look at constitutions around the world that are way out ahead of us, and you look at international treaties that are way out ahead of us, and you look at this document that we were supposed to update with the times, that Jefferson asked us not to treat as a sacred document but to fix as we advanced, and it long since needs to be updated. There are many, many reforms we can make legislatively simply by changing rules. For example, the filibuster, the worst blockage of majority opinion in our government, is not in the Constitution, contrary to what you might hear on Fox News. It’s just a rule. Fifty-one men and women in the Senate could just change it tomorrow, but to get rid of the Senate itself, which I advocate for—as it’s also an antidemocratic block on the will of the people—would require amending the Constitution.

We’ve reached a point now where crazy things, like giving rights to corporations as if they are human beings, like declaring that money is speech, require either a Supreme Court decision or an amendment to the Constitution to reverse. If you want to get rid of the Electoral College, this remnant of antidemocratic control over our elections, you have to amend the Constitution. There’s no reason that you couldn’t go into a convention and amend the Constitution with a comprehensive package of reforms that updated our system of government and gave us rights that other people have developed around the world. We’ve amended the thing so that we can’t discriminate in voting against certain classes of people, but we don’t have the right to vote in the Constitution! Had we the right to vote in the Constitution we could quite easily get automatic registration so that when you’re eighteen, you have a Social Security number and you also have voter registration. Instead we have this busywork that we think of as activism, where we go out and register people to vote. We could have a national system of verifiable voting—on paper, publicly counted before all variety of witnesses, locally, at the polling places, and those totals would be added up regionally, and the whole thing transparent, so that we knew we were electing the people we chose to elect. A lot of reforms would be easier, and some can only be done by amending the Constitution. And yes, it’s risky, because we could amend it to make it even worse, but not doing it is just as risky.

BS: Daybreak is not only a description of how power came to be concentrated in the executive branch, but a proscription for reclaiming that power. You describe “aggressive progressives” toward the end of the book. What do you mean by that phrase?

DS: Well, I got that slogan from Democrats.com, a group that I work for. You know, progressives almost always tend to be on the defense, and those on the right in this country tend to be on the offense. I mean we’ll sit down and ask ourselves, do we really think that we can pass single-payer healthcare this year? If not, what we ought to do is go out there and just make our initial demand for what we think we’re going to get, this weak little public option thing, and that’ll leave us no room to negotiate and therefore it’ll have to be that or nothing, but we’ll seem very reasonable and pragmatic and strategic. Whereas those on the right just demand that we stop legislation that will kill grandma and enforce abortions and impose socialism and so forth. They never ask is it realistic that this year we’re going to strip all rights from gay people or deport all immigrants or defund the school system. They just go out and demand it, and they push the debate in that direction, and then the debate in the corporate media becomes this two-sided thing between absolute crazy extreme right-wing positions and something sort of halfway to the right wing that gives them 80 percent of what they wanted but not quite. So that tells you where the middle ground is.

It is the role of Congress members to compromise and negotiate agreements and pass bills, but that’s not our role. And our role is not necessarily to exaggerate what we want in the direction of some crazy extreme that doesn’t make any sense, but our role is to demand our ideal, exactly what we want, without some censorship, and nothing less, and if a compromise is reached by our representatives in the form of a bill and we want to support that bill, we support that bill, but without self-censorship, without pretending that now our ideal is the public option and forbidding our neighbors from saying the words single payer at our rallies because it would distract from our new ideal. That’s not strategic or wise; that’s corrupt and we could learn something from those on the right. Not as much as we think if we forget that they control the media. We have to stop beating ourselves up for not being as witty as these ignorant illiterate morons. They’re not witty and pithy and disciplined in their messaging. They own the media. Nonetheless, they’re willing to go out there and speak their minds, and we self-censor and pre-compromise before we open our mouths. That’s a problem.

BS: In your acknowledgements you describe writing a draft of this book in about a month and then submitting it to a large revision following suggestions from your editor. Can you describe that process, beginning with how your prior work enabled you to compose the draft so rapidly?

DS: Well it didn’t seem rapidly to me. The first part of this book was largely things that I had been working on and didn’t need much research. The second half needed some research, and the books I have in mind for when I get off this crazy tour are going to involve a lot more research. But I sort of took a month off activism to just stop and think, what’s working, what’s not working, and what can we do to fix it. I turned off the telephone. I turned off the email and the Twitter and Facebook and everything and didn’t answer the door, and wrote a draft. Then I sent it to several publishers. A couple of them got back and said they wanted to do it, and I chose to go with Seven Stories Press, which has done a great job in my limited experience of publishers. I’ve loved what they’ve done, although they wouldn’t publish it for a year. They have sort of their fall line and their spring line. You know, book fashion shows, and so during the course of that year we spent maybe a second month fixing it up. My editor, Crystal Yakacki, sent me a proposal for how I could revise and rearrange and turn everything around in the book, and it was very much a reorganizing of everything and a rewriting of major sections. I did that and got it back to her. Then she liked it, and then it was small tweaks and fixes, and then it was footnoting. For God’s sake, please read the footnotes after I spent all that time on them. And then as the months went by and the world continued to spin, I revised several chapters to update, so the book looks not just at eight years of Bush-Cheney and what went before, but at the first months of Obama and the new Congress. At some point I had to stop updating and put the thing out the door, and we worked out the cover and blurbs and promotions. Seven Stories was incredibly helpful. John Nichols wrote a forward at the last minute that was wonderful and over-the-top. It was a good experience for me.

BS: Your book tour for Daybreak has included a lot of events hosted by activist groups like PeaceWorks here in Kansas City. What have you learned touring the country as an author and political activist yourself?

DS: Well, I’m going to forty-seven cities, and I think I may be around number ten so far, so most of the tour is still in front of me. I’ve taken on way more than I should have, but I’m meeting lots of people and learning lots of things—incredibly inspiring stories from people who can talk a blue streak, and eloquently, but never put pen to paper. I went around Ohio and did five or six cities and met people who are struggling with an economic depression but who are still working on national issues like healthcare and international issues like Iraq. I met one woman who went to Iraq a couple of months before the bombs hit with a bunch of academics and met with the leaders of the government there, who presented the letter they’d sent to Congress saying, “We have no weapons. Why won’t you listen to us? This is as crazy as the babies in the incubators”—the lies that started the war the last time—“Can we please talk?” She brought this letter home thinking it would change everything only to find that nobody cared and the bombs were going to hit. But now she has a son adopted from Iraq. People are doing everything they can at whatever level, working night and day, with no recognition and certainly no interest from the corporate media. I come a day early to a place like Kansas City and find myself out protesting a weapons factory and nuclear weapons and learning about the lawsuits and actions that are being filed to try to block the factory from being expanded. I was out there protesting with a bunch of guys who do hip-hop poetry and then come back to this house and put down this lengthy poem about war and peace that was just amazing. I got it on my tape recorder, so I leave every town with recordings and photos and stories and things that I wouldn’t know, on top of getting a better feel for what I’m writing about that people agree with, disagree with, don’t understand, already knew. It’s very, very helpful.

BS: What’s next for you, now that Daybreak is in print?

DS: I would much rather be writing another book than anything else, although it is probably useful for me, for the reasons we just discussed, to do a book tour aside from the little bit that it does help in promoting the book. You know, I would love to actually make most of my living writing books, which may be a very distant dream. I’m going to keep working with Democrats.com and Progressive Democrats of America and peace groups and United for Peace and Justice and Code Pink and the human rights groups that are working for prosecutions now and the ACLU and everything that I’ve been doing because, you know, we have a long way to go and most people are just now, after eight months, waking up to the idea that we have to be active citizens, even though there’s a new Congress and a new president. So there’s a lot ahead of us.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

John Trudell, a Santee Sioux who first came into the public eye as the spokesperson for the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, was a key player in the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1971 and the reclamation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Tragically, he paid the ultimate price for speaking out when his wife, children, and mother-in-law perished in a house fire that many believe was retribution for his antigovernment activities. Trudell handled his pain by devoting his energies to poetry and songwriting. His recorded work combines his lyrics and poems with “traditional Native music” as well as rock and roll. Lines from a Mined Mind (Fulcrum, 2008) collects the poetry he has written and recorded since his first album, 1983’s Tribal Voice, to 2007’s Madness & The Moremes. Trudell has recently leant his voice to give love give life (site discontinued), an organization seeking to provide universal health care to women and children. We spoke via telephone earlier this year.

Christopher Luna: Was there a particular time period or album when you began to feel confident about how you were combining poetry and music?

John Trudell: I felt it with the very first album, Tribal Voice. I liked it. I didn’t set myself up for criticism, and I didn’t try to compete against myself. Then I got the opportunity to do electric music with Jesse Ed Davis, and we made Graffiti Man. In my mind I was thinking, this may not be a perfect album, but hey, I’m gonna learn as I go along. I’ve never not been pleased with one of my albums. I figure because it’s spoken word, there will be people who relate to it, and people who don’t, so I don’t worry about any of that. I've been doing it for over twenty years. I’ve always written because it was something I had to do, never for the glory.

CL: Which songwriters or poets do you look to for inspiration?

JT: I haven’t really thought of it in terms of inspiration—I was inspired by desperation. That’s why I started writing. But I was influenced by people who wrote lyrics that I could relate to: Bob Dylan and the Beatles (John Lennon, specifically), Jackson Browne, Buffy Saint-Marie, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Leonard Cohen.

CL: How important is the time of day or setting in which you write? Is there a time or place in which the words flow most easily for you?

JT: None of that’s a factor. I write when the lines come, so I can be in the middle of a crowd. I can be driving down the road, at home out somewhere in the public, and the lines come. That’s what I do. It isn’t like I have to create a special space and place to find my lines. Some of them find me, and then I’ve gotta hunt for the other ones, but I can do that in basically any environment.

CL: Were you happy with how Lines from a Mined Mind turned out? How involved were you in the process of putting the book together?

JT: I’m very pleased with how it turned out, from the shape and the size of the book to the way it was all laid out. I didn’t have a whole lot to do with it, other than having to track down and find all those lyrics and retype them. That was a real challenge. My lyrics are scattered all over. But basically, I pretty much left it in their hands.

CL: Many of the poems in the book are either about politics or love. Is there a particular part of the country where you feel most comfortable, or where those things might stir up for you a bit more?

JT: A lot of what I write about is my observations, and the part of this country that I feel most comfortable in is the part that’s in my head. But a lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I’ve seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large. It’s like there’s all this energy going on in this country—a chaotic, frustrated energy. So when I write my lines it’s basically got to do with my observations of that energy.

CL: When I saw you recently in Portland, you spoke about the difference between thought and belief, an idea that you also address in a piece called “Reason to This.” Could you say a few words about your take on the difference between thought and belief?

JT: Everything’s about energy. As human beings, we’re given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently. We use our intelligence, our creative intelligence, because we create with intelligence. I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we’re programmed to believe what we’re told. We’re programmed to believe them. We’re programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe. And believing isn’t thinking, but we’ve been programmed to believe that believing is thinking. To use our intelligence to think means we’re keeping the energy active, we’re thinking, we’re really using the power of our intelligence in a thinking way. But when we’ve been programmed to believe, we’re no longer thinking, because energy flows. So when you’re thinking, that energy’s flowing out into the universe and there’s something happening. But when we’re believing, we’re not really thinking, because the belief has walls: “This is what I believe.” So what I believe is like a box, and we’re taking the energy of our thinking and putting it into a box of beliefs, pretending that we’re thinking. But we’re really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we’re blocking our spirit, so to speak.

CL: Can you give us an example of how you’ve used this in your own life?

JT: I’ve gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don’t know, or I think. My whole attempt has been to think my way through this reality rather than believe it. That’s the only concrete example I can give you.

CL: I am a great admirer of your activism, and I was wondering if you think that a poet or a songwriter has a responsibility to do this, or whether you have just incorporated those things into the path that you had already embarked upon.

JT: I started out as a political activist, so to speak, but I think it’s the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person ... it’s the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can. And if we use the power of our intelligence, if every individual did this, took responsibility, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

I don’t look at it as activism. There’s a sense that we’re human beings and there’s a way that human beings should live. And we’re not living like that. So I think that it’s everybody’s responsibility to head in that direction. Those who will take the identity of poet or activist or any of that are no more responsible to do that than everyone else.

CL: I wanted to ask you about a poem called “My Fire.” I was wondering whether there was a particular incident that inspired the attitude that you describe in the piece.

JT: “You don’t like my smoke, stay away from my fire”? Nothing in particular. I liked the line. It’s been my attitude for a long time. I was at a music festival up in Laytonville, I think, in Southern California, and that line came into my head: “If you don’t like my smoke, then stay away from my fire.” A lot of these things, they’re not based upon a particular incident. That line came into my head, and immediately I found a couple more lines to go along with it, then over a period of time I hunted the lines to go with that line. I write one line at a time, so I’m never really sure what it is that I’m gonna end up saying when I’m done.

CL: What is the concept behind the new CD, Madness & the Moremes?

JT: We had released Bone Days in 2001, and I wanted to make the next album but we didn’t have any money—I have to raise the money to make my own CDs. So I thought, I don’t have enough money to make one album, I think I’ll make two! It doesn’t make any difference, right? So that was madness there, on its own. The concept behind it is that the dimensional reality we’re in, it truly is madness. We may accept it as normal, but I’m telling you, as human beings we’re living in a reality of industrial madness. And I think that the way that we deal with it is through what I call the Moremes. We deal with these different defense mechanisms within ourselves.

CL: What made you decide to do a new version of “Baby Boom Che”?

JT: It’s the very same version that was originally released on the eight-track cassette, back in ’85. Then it was re-released again, through Rykodisc, in 1991. But it’s the same set of lyrics. It’s the same musical version. The music for “Baby Boom Che” and “God Help and Breed You All” were both written by Jesse Ed Davis, so I included them because Jesse Ed Davis plays guitar on the album.

CL: I like “Restless Situations” from Heart Jump Bouquet very much. Could you tell us what you’ve learned from the women in your life?

JT: Overall, they looked out for me a whole lot better than I looked out for them. That’s what I learned about the women in my life. We’re all human beings, we’re just different genders, male and female. But we’re all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don’t really understand love anymore, it’s only half of a concept now. As males and females, we do a lot of things against each other and to each other in the name of love that really doesn’t make any sense. And on that particular song . . . I tried to write it as a human being, but from the gender of a woman.

CL: I think that politics and love are two of the hardest subjects to write about. We all have these feelings, and so often as a writer it’s easy to believe that there is nothing new to be said. I really like the way you’ve put it into words for us.

JT: I appreciate what you’re saying, but you know, whether it’s love or politics or spirituality or any other thing, it has all been said. So the real deal is to not get hung up on that, you know? You can basically write about the same things over and over again—love, hate, religion, politics, class, environment—there’s about a half-dozen things that we write about in this reality. The understanding I came to was that when we write and express, we’re learning how to see. And through this process, we evolve. If what we’re seeing is coherent and makes sense, then that’s what it accomplishes.

When I first started doing this, especially with the music, I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never worked with a band. I’m not a musician. But one of the things I realized in the beginning was that I was just gonna allow myself to evolve with this, and learn as I go along. So I never worried about whether my stuff was perfect. I wanted things to be a certain way, but I wasn’t looking for recognition of perfection from other people. I said it however I could find a way to say it, and I think that’s really what it’s all about.

CL: “Happy Fell Down” describes an experience that is universal. I’ve thought a lot about how a writer can get to the universal through the specific, and that’s something that you do very well. Obviously these are stories that come out of particular experiences in your own life, yet they’re situations that just about anyone can relate to.

JT: That’s why I just say this stuff the way I say it. I put it out there, and for people who can relate to it, that’s who it’s for. “Happy Fell Down” was my observation of a couple whose relationship was deteriorating. I remembered how happy they were. They were some people I knew, and they were going through this thing, and that’s what put that in my head.

CL: Everyone has had that experience of going along and everything is fine, and then suddenly it’s not.

JT: Most everyone’s had it more than once!

CL: Tell us about the work you’re doing to secure health insurance for women and children.

JT: Give Love Give Life is an attitude. There should be universal health care, and in the long-term that’s what we want. Until we can get there, we want to prioritize health care for the women and children of America, because of respect. We have a website, GiveLoveGiveLife.net [site discontinued], and there’s a Myspace page, and we would like people to check that out and participate however they can to promote this idea. We think that maybe it should be said more often in this country.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009