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Writers often take it upon themselves to understand the world and even explain the world.
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But what does that mean?
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The world is complicated, human beings are complicated, and there are two approaches
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One is that you arrive at a simple narrative that is comforting because it is simple and
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it takes care of the anxiety of complexity.
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You stick to this narrative no matter what happens and view the world through this frame.
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This will also find easy acceptance in the wider world because simple works for everyone.
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Give us a story we understand, give us certainties, give us black and white.
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But this is not the approach good writers take.
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The most attractive thing about complexity is the complexity.
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Nothing is as it seems, the ground is shifting, society is in churn, any generalization you
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make is false, and grappling with this is where the challenge lies, where the joy is.
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My guest today falls in the second category.
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She took many years to write a great book about South Africa, especially the post-apartheid
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years, and I realized while reading it that nothing is as it seems from the outside.
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There are layers and layers and layers of trauma and meaning and intention and no easy
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And actually, every society is like this.
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Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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My guest today is Eve Fairbanks, an American journalist who went to South Africa a decade
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and a half ago and wrote a great book about it called The Inheritors.
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In this book, she zooms into the lives of three ordinary South Africans and reveals
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through their stories both the shape of that society and the human condition itself.
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I met Eve at a conference I attended in Washington DC, found her super interesting, invited her
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on the show, and voila, three cheers for serendipity.
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In this episode, we discuss not just a brilliant book, but also her life, American society,
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journalism in America, modern politics, and the craft of writing and reporting.
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I love this conversation, so will you, but first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If I had to define my life in one word, it would be this, procrastination.
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I have a dozen unwritten books in my head, multiple YouTube shows, even a podcast or
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I have so much problem with discipline.
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Now, let me tell you something, I vouch for these guys.
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Don't wait, you have waited enough.
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Eve, welcome to the scene on the Unseen.
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You just told me moments ago that we are recording just a short distance away, 15 minutes away
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from where you were born and you grew up.
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And in your bio page on your website, you've written about, you know, how much you love
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change and you've written, I love to tell you what intersection or attic music salon
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to go to so you can see how a city is changing, and you also wrote this beautiful long piece
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on District 6 that I'll link from the show notes, where you see another aspect of change,
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that what people remember of a city isn't really what a city is.
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And you know, when people ask me where I live and I say Mumbai, but it's such a complicated
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answer because I think the cities that we live in are just a little, that little sliver
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which we experience through whatever we do, you know, where you sit to work, where you
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go to meet people, but that's kind of it.
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So speaking of DC, you know, what is, what is, how has this city changed in all these
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years and how much of that change is you changing and how much of that change is America changing
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and how much is the city changing?
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Yeah, that's almost an impossible question, isn't it?
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Because we all have different cities, you know, every inhabitant of a city is a different one.
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So I grew up in DC, I was born in 1983.
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My father worked for Reagan in the State Department.
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So we lived first in the city itself and then just outside DC.
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And then I left for college and I came back and I realized, I mean, we, a lot of people
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who worked for the government stay in just one quarter of the city.
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So DC has these four quadrants and they're all kind of have different identities.
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And I, so I worked at a magazine called The New Republic.
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I was a congressional correspondent.
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I was going from the Capitol Hill back to my office in this Northwest quadrant, which
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you were just saying right before we started recording was you throw a stone one direction
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and it's an ambassador.
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You throw a stone in another direction, it's a banker.
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And that's the kind of vision I think a lot of people had of DC.
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I had one other way to interact with it, which was I sang, I'm Jewish, but I love singing.
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And so I sang in churches and every Sunday morning I would sing in a church,
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which was a very historic church that was starting to develop a kind of more black congregation.
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It was in a sort of transition based on the neighborhood that it was in.
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And I took a bus, it was called the H8 bus, right across the city on Sunday mornings.
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And this was an amazing bus because as you would travel, it would be hung over
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people who were recording in a university think tank right now, kind of young people,
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people who had gone out the night before walking the walk of shame.
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And that would be at the beginning of the bus line.
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And then slowly, slowly, as we moved through these neighborhoods,
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it would enter these historic black communities in DC, which I suddenly realized that I had had no,
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you know, I had an intellectual idea of the city.
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You know, I knew, I looked at population figures.
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I knew technically the statistical demographics of the city,
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but that's very different from having a feel for it, from knowing the people,
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from really understanding that makeup.
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And people would start to get on the bus in these most extraordinary outfits.
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Absolutely, you know, the people I knew never got dressed up like that, not even for a wedding,
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you know, with the hats and the kind of monochromatic skirts and fantastical shoes and pinks and blues and beautiful.
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And it was this whole side to the city that I had never understood, which was its historic black,
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which had a very different political life.
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It considered that community, considered DC almost like a southern city and a city
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as apart from its political superstructure, they, you know,
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the World Bank and the embassy row was not there, Washington.
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And I have noticed, though, that now that part of the city has also disappeared over the last 20 years.
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They've gotten priced out and moved to Maryland, moved into the suburbs.
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So you have these sort of layers of changes.
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Washington is changing, I think, faster than any city in the United States other than San Francisco.
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And I don't really see that written about how that affects American politics,
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the sort of wealth that's flooded into the city, the tax sector that's flooded into the city.
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So it's weird to come home.
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I now live in South Africa. We'll talk about that.
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But it's weird to come back and visit my mother.
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She lives 15 minutes from where we're recording
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and see, you know, a city that technically is my home, my home city.
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But I don't feel a connection to it. I don't recognize it.
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It's changed. It's become so much wealthier.
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It's become so much, you know, there's restaurants you go to now, like in LA,
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that are status restaurants where you go to be photographed.
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I mean, that idea, you know, nobody, nobody was dressed to be photographed
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in their terrible white button downs and lanyards from their think tank jobs.
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You know, when I was growing up here, it's become much more of a celebrity city,
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which has really impacted the way that politics works in a
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sense that's barely been captured.
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I think I've done an episode with Max Rodenberg,
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who used to be editor of The Economist in India, and he grew up in Cairo.
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So I asked him, you know, what's his idea of home?
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And like when he thinks of home, what is home?
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And he said, you know, home is Cairo, but it's not the Cairo that's there today.
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It's a Cairo of 40 years ago.
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You know, so is it kind of like that with you as well?
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You know, that the city that you remember and which you consider my city,
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and perhaps that has changed with time.
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It no longer exists in a sense because, you know, everything has moved.
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Or do you still see deepenings of that in some way?
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And it no longer exists at all.
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And maybe that's why, you know, DC, Washington,
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and the United States always had a kind of transient quality.
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So in 1994, when I was, I guess, 11, my public elementary school
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had a number of children in it who were the children of congresspeople.
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Now the city is so much wealthier.
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They go to private schools, I think, a lot, but a lot of them.
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But at that time they were in public school.
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And there was a big election in the country that year that booted out.
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It was the Newt Gingrich's contract with America and the Democrats.
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A lot of these kind of old Southern Democrats were thrown out.
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And I remember these kids in the middle of the year
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because our elections take place in November,
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but the school year goes from September to June.
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So my friends just were gone the next week.
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They had to go back to Oklahoma, back to Alabama.
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So you never had a sense of hometown permanence.
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And I guess on the one hand, you know, when people talk about a kind of grief,
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my mother grew up in Oklahoma, partially.
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But even sort of other people, they say, you know,
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they're kind of grieved by how much, you know,
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let's say the presence of more immigrants or the death of Rust Belt Industries.
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And their cities sort of no longer feel like they think they had felt.
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You know, they assume they had felt for 100 years
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and then suddenly it's feeling differently and you have this sense of loss.
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I in a way, I also don't have that
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because that was just constantly happening in Washington.
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People were getting kicked out with new administrations.
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You know, you had a population of people from India
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or, you know, who are here for four year World Bank tours
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or something like that who then would leave.
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And so it always had a sense of being like a subway station in Washington
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You know, someone was on the platform with you.
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Then they caught their train. They weren't there anymore.
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You had to talk to the other person on the other side.
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So I have found, I feel a little bit alienated sometimes from a certain American feeling
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that, I don't know, something essential, some kind of hometown feeling,
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something you knew growing up as being lost.
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Because for me, that was never the American experience.
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It was always something more coming and going.
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What if you felt about how your parents reacted to the change?
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Because if you look at where their starting point would have been
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to what the country is today, it's completely different.
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You know, right down to demographic makeup and everything.
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You know, so how did they sort of respond to it?
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Because the pace of change was much slower, obviously.
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It happened gradually, but it was getting here and now it's gotten here.
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And there was always, so my parents were conservatives.
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My mother is still a Trump voter.
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And my father is more kind of on the never Trump neoconservative sort of side.
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And I found when I was a teenager in my early 20s, there was a very like millenarian feel
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all throughout America, maybe more on the right.
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I remember my father telling me when I was very young
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that we might be the last generation to read books
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and that we would have to kind of potentially squirrel them away in like a basement.
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And I found this very frightening.
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He, you know, funny, it kind of panned out,
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but in a way that he completely didn't think.
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I mean, he was not foreseeing the rise of social media
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and the loss of sort of attention spans.
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He more meant that we were going to enter like a middle ages,
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like a 800 year period of sort of darkness and war and gloom.
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And there was a real sense of like America in the decline of Rome almost.
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But when I think about that and that America had sort of been a great country
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but was teetering on the edge, you know, that feeling way predates
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Trump and his American carnage.
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And when people sort of date it to that moment, that's very presentist.
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I remember that being pervasive in the 90s,
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this feeling of a kind of end stage, post-constitution, you know, America at its end.
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And I think there was some, an experience that was particular to that,
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my parents' generation, which was twofold.
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First, they were very impacted as children and as teenagers by the nuclear
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You know, people joke about it now, but I find it hard to imagine having to do these drills.
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They did these drills in America where you go under your desk and hide.
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But you would know that hiding under a desk is in no way going to save you from a nuclear bomb.
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It's not really, you know, this is an apocalypse drill.
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But the other thing is that they were growing up in this period
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where there was a totally unusual low level of immigration.
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And America was whiter than it ever had been from about 19...
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I stand to be corrected, but the 1930s through the 1970s.
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So there was a kind of, I don't know, cultural continuity or unity,
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a sense of a singular American culture, even a consensus
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that people now look back on with nostalgia as the real way America was.
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That was in fact an anomaly, right?
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So I think, you know, my father grew up in Georgia.
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Macon, Georgia is about an hour and a half from Atlanta.
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My mother was born in Brooklyn.
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Her parents were communists, card carrying.
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And then, and her father was a science professor and teacher.
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So he moved out to universities, went out to Oklahoma.
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And they just had an experience of America that they imprinted as kind of the real,
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what the country was really like and should be like,
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and kind of a certain type of unity that was in fact very abnormal.
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And I think about that a lot.
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Like, I feel now the country's sort of dominated by a generation
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that's trying to get back to a norm that wasn't the norm, if that makes any sense.
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Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
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You know, when I look at America from the outside,
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at least when it comes to American politics, it seems to me that
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things got into this surreal, what the fuck happened here kind of zone
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just a few years ago when, you know, Trump came to power.
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But before that, everything seemed from the outside pretty normal.
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And every, you know, why would anyone have millenarian visions or,
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you know, think of living in a world without books and all of that?
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And I, I won't ask you the reasons for that,
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but what were the sort of triggers for that?
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Like, why would someone feel that way?
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Why would someone feel that civilization as they knew it was threatened?
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It's surely not just seeing more people of color around you.
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It can't be something like that.
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It's like, were there deeper reasons that one felt that way?
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And is it something, is it some kind of cultural strain that is there in America itself?
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I think it probably is a cultural strain.
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And it drives me personally crazy.
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I'm not saying this is like a, I think it did look from the outside like things were,
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you know, the nineties or this kind of peaceful Clintonian, you know, moment,
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other than the arguing and scandals about his personal life.
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But, but there was this kind of aspect of, of America,
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this other side of it that I grew up in,
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that I think a lot of people who looked at America from the outside
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or were in on the, on the left or center left or Democrat,
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they just didn't experience.
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And it drives me crazy when that I feel, you know, people didn't, didn't have this experience.
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So we, I listened to about a couple hours, I'm going to guess every day,
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growing up to Rush Limbaugh.
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And he completely gave air to ideas that I think a lot of people think were on the fringe,
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but they really weren't on the fringe.
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He had, he was the most popular radio host.
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He had millions of listeners.
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So he, first of all, he had this concept that Clinton,
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Bill Clinton ordered the killing of Vince Foster, if you remember that, his aide,
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Vince Foster, but also other people.
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So there was this idea that Bill Clinton was a person who was ordering
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the killing of his political adversaries, a lot of them, like over 30 of them.
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Then there was this idea that he talked about that is just memory hold,
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that he ordered the shooting down of TWA at hundred.
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So there was this plane that crashed on over Queens in New York,
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and a big plane with 300 people.
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And there was a sort of rumor on it that there were some ex-Clinton bodyguards
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that were on the plane and they were about to come forward and they were silenced.
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You know what my theory is, one of them.
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My father also said something to me once.
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He was a kind of historian of the Soviet Union.
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He worked a lot on the politics of the Soviet Union.
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And he once said to me, but in the context of something different, he said,
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you know, we focus a lot on the losers of a war and how they recover and the
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and the SQLI and the kind of trying to recover your national identity.
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So on Germany after World War II, on Japan after World War II, how did they
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cope with that and kind of come to understand that event in their history and that shame?
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And we don't focus on the trauma that winning a war can inflict on the winner.
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In that, it's a very easy story that then is sort of foisted on the country.
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Oh, it's they came out on top, whatever, you know, we move on when in fact,
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it's a very traumatic experience to go through a kind of a conflict.
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And I think that that America experienced a real loss with the end of the Cold War
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that was never kind of conceptualized.
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And they lost an enemy, they lost a kind of organizing principle,
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they lost a sense of what they were juxtaposed against.
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I mean, you know, for 30 years, the United States had organized its identity and its
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persona and its sense of itself in contrast to the Soviet Union.
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And that was just then gone in the space of a couple of years.
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And so what are you? What do you really stand for?
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You live in a country where you have to live in a country where you have to live in a country
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where you then are faced with a situation where you're forced to look at yourself.
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You can't be looking at the dastardly deeds of your enemy as much.
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You have to look at your own flaws.
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And I think that there was a way in which people who had been kind of cold warriors,
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which was more the Republican Party, they were casting about, you know,
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what now defines us as a party? What defines us as a movement?
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What is our politics? What's our purpose?
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Are we just here to counter abortion?
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For some people, that's a very big issue.
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But for a lot of people on the right, frankly, it's not an organizing principle
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for a political movement or a political philosophy.
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And what they did was they located their enemies within.
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So if you look at a lot of the criticism of the left and the criticism of Clinton
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and the kind of they were seeing something very Soviet in him, this kind of Stalinist,
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you know, you you bring Beria out to the secret courtyard and pump him full of bullets.
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You bring down this plane.
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It was an effort to almost resurrect that enemy, I think.
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But the thing that made it very terrifying was then the enemy is within, which is scarier,
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right? We're being brought down by an internal force.
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So, you know, no, I don't think it's all about race.
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I think there was just a total loss of purpose that was very pervasive
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that happened in the 1990s and 2000s.
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And I think it would have been more obvious if 9-11 hadn't happened,
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which then gave temporarily gave a sense of, oh, now we're organized around this other
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And it kind of put off a sort of sense of it postponed for about 15 years,
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a kind of internal agony and reckoning and falling apart that then happened.
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Does that make any sense?
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This is my like pet theory.
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And I try to sort of voice this on people and they're and they say,
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and I say, maybe you had to have grown up in this,
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you know, so my father, you know, I understood him as a child, as a
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person whose whole life, all his passions, all his emotion, all his almost
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eros and thumos and stuff was almost directed at the Cold War.
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This mission, this mission against to make sure that
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communism didn't spread and overtake the whole world.
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And, and I have this such a vivid memory of the coup that happened in August 1991
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that basically precipitated the pretty sudden collapse of the Soviet Union.
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And no matter what experts will say now, virtually nobody predicted it to happen
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That was not a clear understanding in the West of the weak internal weakness.
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And I think that was very frightening.
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You looked at this great empire that turned out to be rotten from within.
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It was a frightening example in a sense.
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And we were on a beach vacation.
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We were at this beach in South Carolina and I'd been so looking forward to it.
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You know, I want to be on floaties in the beach with my dad and building sand castles.
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And he was glued to the television watching Yeltsin and, you know, these happenings.
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And, and I remember saying to him, please come out and play with me because tomorrow
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communism will also be collapsing.
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But the other thing that I remember realizing at that so young, I expected him
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to be so thrilled to be cracking open the champagne bottles, to be having,
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you know, calling his friends and saying we have won.
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You know, this is ending.
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It's going to be the end of Soviet communism.
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Instead, that moment precipitated for him, for our family, for his group of friends,
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They didn't have something to motivate them to drive against.
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It was a very depressing event in a certain sense, in a complex way.
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I guess it's the question of what happens when the dog catches a car.
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Also, I actually intuitively, I completely agree with you.
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I think that's a great theory for two reasons.
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And one is a political one that, you know, the political theorist Carl Schmitt once said
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that in politics, you always need an other.
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And as you're pointing out, if your other through the Cold War is a Soviet Union,
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and then suddenly that game is over and, oh my God, you won, the dog has got the car.
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Then you look for the other internally.
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And I find echoes of this in our own politics.
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Also in India, I find echoes of this in politics everywhere.
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So I think that's one possible nudge towards this direction.
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And the other, I think, has to do with human nature.
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Like, I think we are hardwired to be tribalistic.
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Those kind of narratives really appeal to us.
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So we are always making this story in our own heads where I am someone and I stand
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for something and there are others, there are other tribes, there are other whatever.
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So I guess maybe I'm thinking aloud that there's also a psychological need to be
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against something and to kind of cavil at that.
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So it's a great theory.
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And, you know, earlier when you were talking about their coming to terms with sort of
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the changing world, I was reminded of this great scene from your book.
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And your book, of course, has many, many great scenes.
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But there's this great scene where you're courting a journalist, I think, who enters
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a taxi and she's sitting in the front with a cab driver who's a black gentleman.
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And she talks about Muhammad Ali.
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And then she realizes that he has no idea who Muhammad Ali is.
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And I think that's very evocative because we often assume that the whole world shares
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our reality and therefore our cultural context and underpinnings and so on and so forth.
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So it is not that what a certain generation thought to be normal was actually normal.
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It is just that that is all that they saw that that was their world.
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Like what you said about Rush Limbaugh not being fringe.
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You know, one of the realizations I had in India is that people I thought were the fringe
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I grew up in this English speaking elite class in India cities.
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And you imagine the world was liberal, secular.
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Everything's great and whatever.
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And, you know, people who are making communal noises outside or people who just seem
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overtly bigoted are a fringe.
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That's literally what we would call them.
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And it's no threat to us and never going to win elections.
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That was a dominant stream.
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And I think many people still haven't kind of come to terms with that changing reality.
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For you, you know, how did the way that you looked at the country change?
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Like if you're growing up in a household like this, you're listening to Rush Limbaugh,
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your dad is working for Reagan.
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I guess your initial view of the world is kind of within that bubble.
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And then you mentioned like you go to church and there are more and more black singers
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and you know, the congregation is changing.
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Like, was it very easy and seamless and you just took in everything by osmosis?
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Or was there, you know, were there moments where a TIL moment where a layer just got,
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you know, taken off and you saw the world in a different way?
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You know, I have read these studies that you've probably encountered,
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which claim that our politics, our political sort of impulses or instincts are some of the most
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heritable, some of the most genetic.
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And I find them very disturbing because
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you know, what does that really mean for democracy, which is in some sense,
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premised on the concept of persuasion, right?
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And, and debate and the idea that people can be brought around to.
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But at the same time, when I read those studies, they, they feel kind of true to me because
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I don't have a great answer for why I grew up in really what was a somewhat narrow
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kind of political universe where there was a lot of pressure to be conservative
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and a lot of contempt, honestly, even in the nineties for, for liberals.
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And I don't know if I should say this, but, you know, we, we met at this liberalism conference
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and I, there were a lot of people there who I would have read in magazines, like the weekly
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standard and stuff in the nineties who, you know, were there sort of celebrating liberalism
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and the, the, the sort of needing to preserve liberalism.
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And for me, it was this weird experience because those were people that I remember
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as like shitting on liberalism, you know, so much when I was, and having such a kind of
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contempt for liberals for the left, you know, the word has come to maybe
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have a different valence now in the US, but, and, and again, you know, I listened to conservative
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talk radio and I went to school, my school was pretty far from my house for odd reasons.
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So it was like a 40 minute drive.
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There was a lot of car time to listen to Rush Limbaugh listening.
#
And I, I just don't remember it ever really
#
making a ton of sense. I mean, not a sense, but I just, just don't,
#
I don't remember having a kind of, you know, encountering a book or a person where that,
#
that made me a little bit more to the left. It just was like, that was always somehow
#
in my nature. It never really settled as an ideology on me properly. So at the same time,
#
though, you know, so I, when I went to college, I went to Yale and it was very kind of, you know,
#
90% of the students would have been to the left, although I knew some great conservatives there
#
who were quite outspoken and, and I think had a good, my thesis advisor was a conservative
#
intellectual, but I was really taken aback by how little they understood about conservatives.
#
So even already then there was a kind of lack of understanding. I sometimes think that larger
#
countries, that there's a downside where people can kind of, larger cities, larger countries are
#
more diverse statistically, but it's easier to get into a mode where, you know, it's very easy to just
#
find a whole lot of people who are very simpatico intellectually and, and
#
the left that I started to encounter, they, there was an assumption that there was an
#
uncomplicated racism, kind of a rump racism that really motivated the right that,
#
you know, wasn't as simple if you'd grown up with it. So that was startling to me. It was
#
startling how much satisfaction people on the left took at kind of degrading Republican voters,
#
which of course continues. I don't know if that's a feature in India, that sort of
#
self-satisfaction. And I hate to use the word both sides, but you do get that on kind of all sides,
#
because there's also a satisfaction, you know, on the right in America at not being as pretentious
#
as the left, not being as, you know, woke or having the woke mind virus, you know, being,
#
being more salt of the earth, very self-satisfied. I wonder if there's a sort of a
#
part dependence to the political cultures that emerge from the design of the system itself.
#
For example, over here, you have a first pass or post system, you have your presidential system,
#
and the way the design is that it is almost inevitable that you'll have these two dominant
#
parties. And when you have these two dominant parties, you'll have a package of beliefs that
#
are not necessarily coherent together, but they'll become, you know, associated with one party. So,
#
you know, if you're a Democrat, you're, you know, you'll be pro-choice, you'll be
#
for gun control, et cetera, et cetera. There's another package of beliefs that just go together
#
with the Republicans. And then, you know, you either subscribe to the package or not,
#
it becomes tribalistic, your narratives become simplistic. It's very easy to then, you know,
#
paint the other side as just, you know, in an equally simplistic and false way. And I'm just
#
thinking that some of it is perhaps a tragic accident of the system that you end up with. Like,
#
I love the American system for many other reasons, especially, you know, your first amendment, which
#
protects free speech or the focus on individual freedom. I think those are awesome. I'm really
#
jealous of those. But at the same time, I wonder if there is also this kind of part dependence, which
#
then creates this particular kind of tribalism. Like, I guess tribalism is inescapable,
#
but in a different system where, for example, if government is much more local and you don't
#
have first pass or post, if you have a different kind of proportional system, then you have multiple
#
parties, they have to work together. It gets less polarized. What are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
I really like the phrase tragic accident, because I think in America, we don't think anything is an
#
accident, sort of. But I think you're right. I mean, I sort of think tribalism as a principal
#
feature of human nature is overrated. It's overstudied. It's overconceptualized at the
#
moment. That's my personal view. You know, I live in South Africa. I have for 15 years since 2009.
#
And that is a country that's supposed to be very tribal. And people almost are perpetually trying
#
to impose a tribal analysis on its politics. This is the rise of Zulu nationalism. And partly,
#
that's because people like the word tribal, you know, you associate it with an African country,
#
right? There's a simple nature to that analysis. And it's not, you know, people really,
#
80% of the country, at least, doesn't vote according to a kind of tribal mentality.
#
It's not that tribe. People are not acting out a kind of tribalism there.
#
I sometimes think tribalism has occurred here in America because the packages, like you say,
#
the packages of beliefs now that are associated with each party are so arbitrary.
#
I remember, I love this poem named Wendell Berry. Have you heard it?
#
And he has this odd politics. He's very pro-life. And he's very kind of
#
communite. He's very labor. He's very anti-corporate, very kind of anti-capitalist.
#
And the way that he articulates this political view is very coherent. You can totally see
#
how those two beliefs can go together very naturally and how someone could just have that.
#
But he has no home at all. Like, you have to now be kind of pushed into one of these two lines where
#
maybe you're more socially conservative, a little bit more traditional, a little bit,
#
you know, you might, I have friends who I think have a kind of Brad Wilcox,
#
if you know that guy. He's a very interesting scholar who talks about the importance of marriage,
#
sort of pro-marriage. He just wrote a book called Get Married. And he kind of gets branded,
#
you know, he takes it maybe a little far, but he's, and they may be, these are people who
#
have left-wing economic views, but they have a real feeling for the importance of the marital
#
compact and, I don't know, the historical nature of that, whatever it is. And they have to just
#
suppress, they have to decide, is culture or economics more important to them? And it's a very
#
unnatural choice in order to, and so they become more tribal because these tribes now are so
#
irrational. You know, they're clumps of views. The right wing is having a great struggle in the U.S.
#
to move in a more kind of left populist direction economically, but it's still confined by its
#
donors and its old kind of Reaganite. And nothing you're going to vote for in the U.S.
#
really makes a lot of sense. You're lucky. It's also an accident if your political views
#
actually align with one party or the other. So that, I think, promotes tribalism because
#
then it's just like almost a sports team color type of thing. It's more, you know,
#
you take out a saying that's more- No, I totally get what you're saying. Like, I think,
#
on the one hand, I agree with you that you can overemphasize the importance of tribalism because
#
we contain multitudes and we have many other knobs which can be, you know, tweaked in various
#
directions. But at the same time, I think over the last decade especially, you know, the tribalism
#
is something, whether it's been amplified by social media and technology is another whole
#
discussion. But I just, I just, that tribalism is much more visible to me in a really tragic way
#
because both in India and in the U.S., I used to think that there are certain people who stand for
#
certain principles and they will stick by those. And they abandoned those principles completely
#
for the sake of tribalism because I've chosen a tribe. I mean, when you, your dad worked for
#
Reagan and now he's an ever Trump-er. And that makes complete sense because everything Trump
#
stands for is actually against Reaganite republicanism and the three stools of the
#
Republican Party. Then they've completely turned their back on that, you know, whether it's on
#
free trade or, you know, just every aspect of that. And that has been so bizarre to me over the last
#
10 years to find that, you know, you may, I might not agree with your principles, but you said you
#
stand for certain principles and I believe you and I respect that. But then when I find that you
#
don't really care about them at all, you're just part of the tribe and you're going in whatever
#
direction that in a sense is dispiriting. Like when you speak of Wendell Barrie having a
#
particular, you know, being an iconoclast in that sense, I think people like that are outliers
#
who are thinking about issues on their own. I think what happens more is we'll reflexively
#
fall into a particular, you know, into a particular package and we'll believe we believe that. I mean,
#
I think we're fooling ourselves also a lot of the time, but, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's
#
orthogonal. No, I mean, I think that's, yeah, you know, I think of, um, but
#
so in the United States, I'll reveal my parochialism here because I don't know,
#
and you can weigh in, but on the, how that this manifests in India, but for instance, my, my
#
father, I think had never voted on the presidential level for a Democrat in his entire life.
#
He was born in 1944 until 2020. So in 2016, he didn't like Trump, but he voted for Evan McMullin.
#
If you remember, there was this kind of third party anti-Trump Reaganite Republican candidate,
#
and then my father felt that he'd wasted his vote in a way, and he should have, you know,
#
it's Trump won. And so in 2020, he voted for Biden. I've had people who know him ask me,
#
so they'll say, so your dad is not a Democrat. And I'll say, well, no, he's not a Democrat. He
#
really still believes in most of what he believed in, which was a pro, you know, support of the
#
press support of, of free speech, but also the health of the, the press that Trump regularly
#
attacked, you know, Reaganite type of economics. And, and they'll say, well, if he didn't vote for
#
Trump, then he's a Democrat. And so there's this thinking that you have to, if you're not one,
#
you're the other. And, and he's not a Democrat. I don't think he would ever say he's a Democrat,
#
but he just, it's very hard to be homeless in part because you don't feel like you have any
#
power. I mean, I see something that I don't find frustrating is that being a free thinker
#
in the United States being heterodox is now becoming its own identity. There's now
#
heterodox institutions. There's a heterodox university, which I find kind of counter to
#
the idea of, you know, there's heterodox donors, there's heterodox institutions. I don't know that
#
it's something that you institutionalize by nature. And, and yet I think partly it's that
#
if you don't have that in America, you feel like you have no clout, you have no way to lobby,
#
you have no power at all. So, you know, Wendell Berry is a poet who lives in, I can't remember
#
where he lives, Kentucky or Tennessee or something. So he maybe doesn't care, but someone who's really
#
interested in politics, who wants to be a political actor, you do get streamlined
#
one way or the other. Is that, I mean, does that have any counterpart in India?
#
I actually wonder about it. I think about it. I think in India, it's relatively,
#
it's possible to be sort of deracinated from the politics, but it's getting a little harder. And
#
that is going to be my next question that from the outside, from a distance, the discourse here
#
seems incredibly polarized. And therefore, if you entered a discourse, but you're on
#
neither one side nor the other, then you're just going to get canceled by everyone.
#
But is there a social cost to being an independent thinker? Because as an independent thinker,
#
you never actually find a tribe. Like I remember this great letter someone wrote to the economists,
#
economist had described atheism as a belief system. And this person wrote in arguing quite
#
correctly that atheism is no more a belief system than not collecting stamps as a hobby,
#
right? You don't have, so there's no organization for people who don't collect stamps.
#
You will not find non-conformist finding a committee together, right? It just doesn't
#
make sense. So is there an incentive to conform to one tribe or the other over here? Is there a
#
social cost to just being saying a pox on all your camps? I think there's a huge incentive.
#
And I think it's subtler than some of the kind of cancel culture. It's still rare that someone
#
would have the platform that they would be actually fired from a job for saying the wrong thing,
#
or these cases that are put out in the media, or that they can't perform comedy anymore,
#
whatever it is. But I do think you don't want to seem... I just read this wonderful book by
#
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, where he talks in one chapter about friendship. And he describes
#
friendship. I'm going to butcher it so people must just read this very short little chapter.
#
It's a beautiful chapter on the essence of friendship and the kind of underrating
#
of friendship. And he talks about friendship is basically when you encounter someone
#
and there's this feeling of, I never knew someone else thought the same way.
#
I never knew that someone had the same structure of mind. I never knew that someone had the same
#
acts. And when so much is politicized, when you have such a sort of complex
#
political thing where we're supposed to have... Even an ordinary person is supposed to have
#
views on free trade and abortion and all these things that you might frankly not feel that
#
strongly about or really understand, or what marginal tax rate should be applied to corporations.
#
And it's going to be extremely difficult to find other people who have just the same
#
so you stay quiet about most things.
#
Yeah, I don't know. I think I don't really know why...
#
I read a lot of old newspapers and old kind of advice columns. I love reading advice columns
#
from the 19th century and seeing what they sort of... So it was more like a social life, social...
#
And in a way, maybe it's a feature of there being less obvious class.
#
I think that people in the United States were much more stratified by class
#
in the 19th century. You just wouldn't really have a friend or have any overlap or have any
#
tribe, tribal kind of affiliations with someone who wasn't in your class realistically. And now
#
you might, and that's a good thing in a way, but people are now looking more for kind of a political
#
allegiance. I must read that essay on friendship. Common interest isn't like when I find someone
#
who likes, say, Mark Strand and Tom Waits, straight away I know, okay, we can be friends.
#
Because that stands for something also, and it stands for a certain type of emotional resonance.
#
And is there something like that for you?
#
I think that no, I mean, I think that I've tried to find friends
#
with whom I share fewer common interests for whatever reason, you know, in order to,
#
but maybe, but I've started to realize, so I turned 40 and that I maybe had a, especially
#
when I was reading this idea of friendship, I thought, oh, you know, because I think maybe
#
I had too anthropological an idea of friendship that there was always a bit of a distance,
#
you know, that there is something that you're learning from a friend, you're being sort of
#
challenged by them. But in the end, there is an ease with a friend who just, what would it be?
#
John Donne and, you know, even like Jonathan Franzen, if it's a woman who loves Jonathan Franzen,
#
that's kind of rare. So, you know, you're, you kind of know that someone is seeing through similar
#
lenses, I think. Let's talk about your childhood. You know, take me back to your childhood. What,
#
I mean, what kind of home did you grow up in? What was it like? What was the relationship with
#
your mom and your dad? Like you've got a really complicated mother daughter relationship in your
#
book. So what was it like for you? How did that play out? It's interesting that you
#
identify that. So the book I wrote was on South Africa. I'm quite present in it as sort of an
#
observer. And, but there's not a ton, there's an introduction that's about me. And then, then it's
#
kind of what I've, what I'm witnessing in South Africa. But there are, and so I didn't think I'd
#
written that much about my mother, but then my mother read the book and thought and said that
#
that was not true. No, what I meant was not about your mother, but Malaika and her mother.
#
Yeah, I think so there's a relationship in the book between a mother who grew up in one political
#
regime, really grew up in one country and gave birth to a daughter at the cusp of the birth of
#
another country. So her daughter would grow up in another country, even though it was the same
#
country, territorially, it was a totally different nation. And I think I, I felt so much for their
#
dynamic and their, their deep love and their tensions for one another. It was a, she later
#
had a son, this woman, but it was her only daughter. And they had a very deep relationship that I think
#
had some overlap with, with my, my family. So I was an only child. My parents had me quite late,
#
39, 40. And you get two things as an only child. On the one hand, you get
#
an extraordinary concentration of love and input and attention and kind of
#
of intensity of, of parenting. And then there's the downside of that, which is
#
a huge amount of kind of expectations. And, you know, you're the one person who's going to
#
carry this whole family forward. And I think it was an unusual upbringing. I mean, my parents also
#
did not have a great relationship with each other. And they sought, and I don't mean this
#
in a weird way at all, but they sought types of interactions with me that were very adult,
#
that they weren't able to have with each other. And that was also maybe like a blessing
#
in some respects, because I remember my father having very intellectual or very sort of,
#
I don't know, adult types of discussions with me when I was so young, six, seven, eight, nine,
#
you know, about books that he was reading and books that, you know, he liked. He was someone
#
who never fit in academia, because he could never focus. But he had an unbelievably wide
#
range of interests from kind of the Bible to poetry to even, I remember him taking my science
#
textbooks and saying, God, it's so interesting, photosynthesis, you know, the Krebs cycle and,
#
and everything was really alive for him. Learning was really almost sensual for him.
#
He also, he didn't really have, he wasn't like a dad for better and for worse. I never saw
#
a father who like flopped in front of the TV and watched sports. He never seemed to need to
#
decompress. His hobby was reading Plato in the ancient Greek and trying to kind of get through
#
it being, you know, in his rocking chair, I remember. But it made for me, there was no real
#
divide between his work life and his other life. There was no divide. There was no such thing for
#
him as a career. He just saw it all as he was a person in the world who was trying to understand
#
the world and then interact with it and push it a little bit in the direction that he thought
#
was more free and more ethical and more whatever, beautiful. And so
#
there was no distinction between what one did for work and play and, and that for me was,
#
I don't know, it was the norm. And then when, when I realized that people
#
my age were thinking about their work life and their work life balance and that life was something,
#
your work wasn't life. It was something that you, I, it was for me very strange. You know,
#
you would spend most of your waking hours, eight to, if you're very ambitious starting out in
#
finance or something, eight to 12 hours, 14 hours, 16 hours a day, text or in something that wasn't
#
your life. I just didn't understand that. And I suppose that writing, I never sort of had a dream
#
to be a writer. I never, I had a boyfriend in my twenties who was, had like, he watched this
#
musical called Newsies, which had these kind of journalists, you know, at typewriters, a bit
#
retro, but at typewriters wearing the newsboy caps and the suspenders with the pipes. And like,
#
he had the whole identity that he wanted to step into that. I never had that, that sense, but I,
#
I also, maybe you encountered in this book I wrote on South Africa, where I write a lot about people
#
that I encountered at parties. I write about my friends. I write, you know, often I'll anonymize
#
them. I write about like romantic interactions that I had. Everything is sort of contiguous with,
#
there's not like an interview that you're doing and then you go home and it's not part of
#
what you're seeing. So it turned out to be a line of work, I guess, and a way to spend one's time
#
that seemed natural if one just doesn't think of having a job, I guess.
#
I love that description of your dad because it speaks to me at two levels. And one level is that
#
too many academics I encounter and honestly too many people in every field, they get stuck in a
#
particular groove and then they're going on that groove all their lives. And that is their thing.
#
And the rest of the time they are decompressing. So if you're teaching political science somewhere,
#
that's your whole gig. It's what you do for work. You may not even enjoy it. And then you're watching
#
baseball or soccer or whatever it is you watch here. Not to dig at sports. My partner is English
#
and he's dragooned me into watching the Premier League. You've written a great piece about how
#
you watched the World Cup game together, France versus Argentina. There's something in it. It's
#
enjoyable. I also watch a lot of sports. I'm not dissing that. But we decompress now by watching
#
the endless TikTok reels. I had a friend the other day because I was saying,
#
I don't really get TikTok. The videos are so short. It just seems like a lot of them are ads. Even
#
if they're not ads, the person's trying to become an influencer by getting on the radar of a company
#
that will then pay them to review their clothing or whatever. And she said, no, you're going to
#
love my TikTok reel. Let me show you. And then she showed me. I don't want to sound pretentious,
#
but it was such a reprieve from anything that would be understood as life. It was so
#
random. I don't know. It's not to dig that I even go home and watch cat videos now,
#
but what is it about the way we're living for much of our day that requires us to lie on the bed for
#
an hour and watch cat videos when we don't even have a cat? So I'll digress further here and go
#
down this little TikTok journey. So TikTok first came to India a few years ago at around the same
#
time that cheap broadband became almost ubiquitous across the country. And what that did was that
#
there were a ton of people in villages and small towns and et cetera, et cetera, who now got access
#
to the internet at the time TikTok happened, who did not otherwise have that kind of access.
#
And our mainstream entertainment I always felt was fueled by elites in either Bombay, if it's
#
Bollywood or Chennai, if it's a Tollywood or whatever, who were at a far removed from most
#
of the people. Right. So it was like a top-down vision of entertainment. It was pretty narrow.
#
And in all of these villages and towns, you had these kids looking at TikTok and number one,
#
seeing people just like themselves. Like if you're of an alternate sexuality in a little village,
#
you could be the only person like that. You think you're a freak show. That's, you know,
#
it can be pretty messed up, but then you see people just like you on TikTok. So, you know,
#
they're like you, then you see them creating content. And then that magic moment comes where
#
you realize that you can turn the camera around and you can also create something and express
#
yourself. And I think for a few months, it was such an outpouring of really interesting kinds
#
of creativity, you know, starting with just a reproduction of memes, you're lip syncing to
#
something. That's where you start, but then all kinds of really interesting art. And I used that
#
word advisedly, just kind of coming out of that. And then something terrible happened, which is
#
that China did an incursion across our border and our prime minister wanted to show his strength,
#
but there was nothing to do apart from banning TikTok. So TikTok got banned. And I thought it
#
was a terrible tragic moment, but that's a digression. I'll sort of come back to it later.
#
But the question I was sort of getting at about your dad is that one, I love the fact that he's
#
not tied himself down to one thing, that he's multidisciplinary. He's, you know, looking at
#
plant biology, the Quran and the Merovingian era of French history, as you've written somewhere,
#
that he's interested in everything. And I kind of love that. And the second aspect of
#
what I also love is that he's constantly alive. He's doing stuff, which is very much a sense that,
#
you know, what you mentioned in your book, that every once in a while you'll come into the
#
narrative and you can talk about something that happened back home, or you'll be saying,
#
oh, this friend told me this, or, oh, my roommate doesn't shampoo or whatever.
#
And it all melds in beautifully. And is that sort of, do you think that that kind of aliveness,
#
as it were, is it something natural to a person that that's just who you were?
#
Or do you feel that that is something that we need to show intentionality towards and inculcate?
#
Because, and I say this because at a personal level, I've often found that I'm just getting
#
into a groove. I'm doing the same fricking thing. I'm not discovering new things. I'm not
#
learning new things. I'm not meeting new people. And it almost becomes like an act of intention,
#
that bloody hell, I need to do more of that. What was it like for you? Like, do you think you just,
#
A, got it from your dad just by osmosis, that way of looking at the world? Or B,
#
that that is just who you were, his personality? Or C, did you think about it and work at it?
#
I think I got it partly from my dad. And not to digress totally. I mean, he, you know,
#
I think he was a very unusual person. I mean, I remember, so I had like boyfriends in high school
#
who would come over and they would find him so sort of strange. He wants a person come over,
#
a friend come over, who had like a huge water bottle, really weirdly oversized. And he said,
#
it was the Merovingian, he said, that it looks like a Merovingian pot, that these Merovingian
#
rulers, which was an early French, they used to stuff messengers who had a message that they
#
didn't like into these giant pots. And for me, that was the kind of thing that he just sort of
#
said all the time. He had this kind of vast repository of things that he remembered. And
#
I remember some friends of mine, you know, in high school were like, what the heck was that?
#
You know, what a weird thing to say. And I think that he, pre-TikTok, he sort of found himself,
#
he found like that comforting reflection of himself in older literature. So in Pascal,
#
who, you know, wrote about religion, but also politics and, you know, had the sort of wider
#
Montesquieu, who wrote, or Montegna, who wrote about politics, but who also wrote these strange
#
essays about whether his cat had consciousness and, you know, kind of contemplating his cat's
#
inner life. And, and- Did his cat have consciousness?
#
Yes, I think. No, the question that I think he realized is impossible to know. And that's
#
a fascinating mystery. And I think it's interesting to ask, you know, why,
#
whether that kind of old literature no longer, whether it's not adequate as a reflection,
#
you know, for people to really find themselves in it, find themselves in a character in Shakespeare,
#
or whether we have too narrow an interpretation of it now in some sense. But in terms of, you know,
#
I think I got that from my dad, but I also had a birth defect when I was born,
#
and was told when I was young by principally my dad, and I don't really know, it wasn't stressed
#
over and over, but he used to say the operation, so this birth defect now has a very high
#
survival rate. It's very fixable. But that wasn't the case before the 70s. The operation was invented
#
in the 50s. It wasn't really that successful, then they got it going. So he used to always say
#
to me, you know, that nobody is alive, older than, you know, 40 or 50 or whatever it was,
#
who ever lived, you know, who had your own experience in the world, in human history.
#
I think he was trying to make me feel like I had this interesting,
#
I don't know, experience or something. And, and also, you know, that without modern medicine,
#
you know, you just, I don't know if he would have said you just would be dead, but like,
#
there was that. And it was a weird thing to hear, I think, as a kid, you know,
#
you. But it also gave the feeling of like, it's a gift, man, like you don't necessarily have the
#
right. It's not an obvious thing that you just would have life. And so you, in some sense,
#
really wake up every morning and think like, wow, awesome, like, I get to see something
#
interesting today, you know, the world has again woken up for me, and I'm in it. And, and, and
#
something, you know, is, is, there's something out there that's shifting and weird and unexpected. And
#
so maybe that was a kind of thing. I think so. But I also, I don't know, I mean,
#
I in terms of the getting in the groove, unfortunately, the other thing is
#
if one has any wish to participate in in sort of intellectual life, or
#
participate in kind of anything, there's a very big pressure to be a brand, I feel that.
#
So I was, for instance, encouraged, told by publishers, don't, don't write about South
#
Africa unless you want to be an Africanist, because you're going to need in order to sell
#
a book about South Africa, you're going to need to talk about it endlessly for the rest of your
#
life, like, and kind of become an expert. And that'll be your niche. And that'll be what you
#
are known for. And you can then be booked onto talk shows and go to conferences and
#
get, you know, monetary opportunities and more than that, like, opportunities to have a role
#
in the world. And the world now is so integrated and big, and everyone's jostling for,
#
you know, a position in such a huge universe, TikTok, the universe of TikTok, the universe
#
of Twitter, how are you going to distinguish yourself, you have to have a kind of and I see
#
a lot of people that I know are very kind of have wide ranging interests and
#
even views that will change and they, they get on a track, they get kind of branded for a certain
#
type of idea or commentary or even column format or podcast format or documentary format or
#
cinematic style or whatever it is. And then you feel you have to keep going with that. Like
#
Andy Warhol, you're just reproducing yourself, reproducing yourself so there can be, you know,
#
hundreds of yourself out there, I guess, I think. And I don't know, you know, it's,
#
it feels almost impossible to resist. I don't know that I resist it as much as I should, because
#
resisting it means can mean obscurity. If you're, if you're constantly kind of looking at something
#
new, you're known for writing on a certain topic, and then you say, really, I want to,
#
I want to write about, you know, the science of love or something. It's like you're starting
#
again. You're having to build that LinkedIn resume from scratch. Your followers may not
#
follow you. I think it's hard. I feel, you know, I just recoil so strongly at that
#
view that you have to do one thing and be a brand. I feel like it's a narrow marketing view. I think,
#
you know, there are many things that shape us, but something like this, the anxiety for how we are
#
perceived by others or how successful we are in the world should absolutely sort of not be one of
#
them. And I guess it wasn't for you, because that's not why you went into this book in the
#
first place. But just coming back to childhood again, and the shaping of you, you know, what
#
were your curiosities like? Like you mentioned elsewhere that you were, you know, intrigued by
#
the Civil War, and you'd go and visit all the Civil War sites and all of that. But what were
#
your curiosities like? What really switched you on, you know, that made you excited?
#
I'm a big believer in copying. I'm a big believer in mimicry. Like when we're young, if we want to
#
write or something, I think you should start out trying to mimic the people you really like. I
#
think that can be very, it can actually be freeing and finding yourself. So I think I copied my dad
#
a lot. He was kind of a hero for me in terms of the hugely wide ranging interests. And so I had
#
this like little kiddy obsession with caves. I tried to create a cave. I learned that caves
#
are created through acid, basically the acid in water, and the kind of acidic elements,
#
cutting through alkaline. That's why lime environments have a lot of beautiful caves.
#
But I didn't have as a kid a concept of time, really. So I thought if I put lemon juice,
#
dripped lemon juice for days, or maybe weeks on like this piece of limestone that I had,
#
I would make a cave. I didn't really get that, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. I don't know
#
how you'd have a concept of that. So I love that. I love certain poets, certain composers. I played
#
the violin. I really fell in love with Bach. I couldn't really play him. It's very, very difficult
#
to really get the structure of it. But I did develop this kind of interest in the Civil War.
#
I don't totally know where I came from. It might have been accidental. So we moved out,
#
my family moved out at a certain point of Washington, mainly to get out of an apartment
#
into a little bit of a larger house. And that was where they could afford. They moved into the
#
suburbs. And in Virginia, it had a very different feel. I feel the land in the state of Virginia
#
is kind of like soaked in blood, soaked in history, soaked in it kind of exhales
#
this very, very complicated history because it had so much warfare on it. And you
#
you drive on these roads at the time, they've renamed some of them, but that were named for
#
Confederate generals. Lee Highway is right around the corner from where we are now. A friend of
#
mine went to Jeb Stuart High School, who was a cavalry man in the Confederacy. So you feel
#
you're surrounded by this, but it was also sort of unspoken. You know, Antenna Battlefield,
#
Manassas Battlefield were 20 minutes from my house. And yet we had a very careful
#
very abstracted way of learning about the history in school. It was kind of meant to,
#
I think, not trigger. We didn't have that word so much then, but not not kind of
#
exhuming any dead bodies, dig up any passions that were, it was very bloodless, the way we learned
#
about it. And I loved going to visit those battlefields. I think
#
there was something about American politics when I was growing up that
#
was very kind of principle bound. We talked about these principles of
#
even like free speech or the principle of human life, preservation of human life,
#
and what life do we give kind of precedent to? The life of a mother?
#
You know, even thinking about what is property? These were the same issues that they were talking
#
about. So is a fetus a mother's property? And yet there was a frustration. I think a lot of
#
Americans wanted our politics to be more European. They perceived of European politics, which of
#
course was very new to Europe, but as very sort of wonky and policy. Europeans were instead talking
#
about the price, should the surcharge price on milk be this or that? Should the farmers be given
#
this amount of subsidy? It was very kind of more technocratic. And there was a wish that a lot of
#
people had to have this type of technocratic politics. And yet America resisted this wish.
#
It always, it would come back to this principled. And in a way the civil war was a way for me to kind
#
of experience an era where people were just more, I mean, it was about, could a human being ever be
#
considered the property of another? Was the freedom of a community to decide what it wanted
#
the greater than the freedom of an individual? Because you have to remember that the South,
#
the American South prior to the civil war, they thought that theirs was a fight for freedom.
#
Absolutely. They characterized it that way. They thought they stood for freedom.
#
Now it seems strange to us, but it didn't to them. Why didn't it to them? I was very fascinated by,
#
I was always, I had this argument with my mother. I said, she said, if I was living in Germany in
#
the 1930s, I know that I would have resisted Hitler. And I said, man, how can you know that?
#
How can you think that you would have been different? Mustn't we consider that we would
#
have been one of them? Because they were them and they were human beings. And I'm sure some of them
#
were nice people to their families and they loved their children. And we have to ask ourselves,
#
how could, and I would ask myself, well, now we just think it's impossible to believe that
#
one would have thought that they were fighting for the cause of democracy and freedom
#
and be a slave owner. But what would that have been like? How can I imagine myself into that mode?
#
So I guess my curiosity really kind of like, at for a time, it sort of settled in the civil war,
#
the American civil war, which I think is why I became interested in a certain point on South
#
Africa because South Africa was dealing with similar questions of, you know, the white community
#
there thought they had a right to run the country the way that they wanted. They perceived it as
#
almost an issue of their freedom and they were headed toward a civil war and that they then
#
averted. It was a different type of an outcome. Someone once described to me, and I think it's
#
interesting to think in one's own context, I don't know if there's a case like this for India, but
#
he said, you know, I think of South Africa and the United States, and this was not an American.
#
Americans often assume that all other countries have similar politics to theirs, but he said,
#
you know, it was the same equation, different variables, South Africa and the United States,
#
which I think is a really instructive or illuminating way to think about it. They had
#
a similar discourse and similar ideologies playing out with regard to race there
#
and racial justice and racial conflict, but the different variable were the demographics
#
and the size of the country and other things like that.
#
You know, the question that you just asked, you know, you asked your mom about, you know,
#
whether she would have opposed Hitler. The Princeton professor, Robert George, wrote a
#
piece about how he asked a similar question to his students that if at the time of the civil war,
#
would you have opposed slavery? And all of them were, of course, yeah, we would have,
#
but, you know, as Abraham Lincoln once himself said, if I was born in the South, I might have,
#
I might have taken the other view. And you've got a beautiful piece on Stonewall Jackson,
#
where you write about what a remarkable man he was and everything about him was something
#
you would admire except for one thing, which was a position he took on that crucial issue.
#
And this realization for human complexity, was it always there for you early on? Because
#
it becomes an easy tendency to just judge others as good or bad. And especially, I mean,
#
social media exacerbates that in modern times. And the act of judging someone is very appealing
#
to the ego, because the moment I judge you, I am saying I'm more virtuous than you or I'm
#
more knowledgeable than you and so on. So it's tempting. It's a human sort of temptation that
#
there is. But, you know, and I wonder how we grow to a recognition of human complexity. It's
#
obviously there in all of your work. But did you arrive at it over time? Or was it sort of
#
inherent early on from your study of history, from reading about men like Jackson and so on?
#
I think I arrived at it early on, in part because I felt like
#
sort of an outsider in my family, just characterologically. You know, there are kids
#
who I think feel, I see this in my partner's sister's family, there will be a kid who just
#
feels out of place somehow. And even like, you know, you wonder if you're adopted or something,
#
you feel like you came from somewhere else. And that's maybe partly genetics or something,
#
some quirk. But maybe it's a bit weirder when you're an only child, because
#
the more kids there are, the more you see that everyone's just different and they're born
#
different. But if you're the only one, it's a bit more alienating. So maybe if you're growing up as
#
an only child with parents who in some ways just don't remind you of yourself at all, in terms of
#
personality, in terms of the way they're reacting to certain things, this is less on the intellectual
#
level than almost, I don't know, how my parents reacted to emergencies, how they related to each
#
other, how they sought out their friends or how social they were or weren't, you know, those basic
#
kind of personality traits. And it was very, you know, I found them quite weird. And I think they
#
found me somewhat weird. And yet you have absolutely no choice but to try to get along,
#
but also to try to understand these people. I feel, you know, I see now there's a thing of like
#
no content, you know, to estrange yourself from parents who are not,
#
quote, serving you or who are very difficult. I don't know if that is a thing in India,
#
certainly in the African countries I've lived in, because I've also lived in Kenya, it's much
#
less accepted to cut off your parents. But it's kind of coming as an idea. And that can run the
#
gamut of you have abusive parents, in which case it's completely, you must. But it can also run
#
all the way down to, you know, my parents voted for Trump. My parents, you know, are annoying.
#
My parents have a different parenting philosophy. My parents. Yeah, and I think that's a loss for
#
the child. I guess I, to me, it was a big benefit to be in such close contact and almost constant
#
kind of intercourse with people who were very different. My mother once said to me, you know,
#
I wouldn't have been surprised if I had if I had a child who this says something about American
#
politics. If I had a child who'd grown up as a and converted to Christianity, I would have thought,
#
well, you know, what, you know, I guess, that's the majority, really, it's the way you go.
#
But I never thought I would give birth to a liberal. I just never imagined it. And I think
#
it's been a powerful experience for her actually to has a child who just makes choices that baffle
#
her that she never would make, you know, and this is actually one of the more superficial choices
#
that I mean. But she said, I just never, never would have imagined I would have had a child who
#
would have moved to South Africa, moved to Africa. It just was like, I knew nothing about that.
#
But she, she now has developed a real love for that, the country she's come and visited,
#
spent a lot of time there. And it's kind of decanted a hidden side to herself. I find it
#
interesting. So in the American context, my mother, I think feels as I probably feel,
#
I'm probably in the US context, like a more standard lefty, or center leftist, then. But,
#
and my mother, she will kind of go along with certain racialized ways of understanding crime,
#
a certain view on immigration that, you know, she's quite positive about East Asian immigration.
#
And the browner a person gets, the less positive, which is very common, I think,
#
in the Republican Party in the US. And I think, but I think she's picked that up from her
#
environment. And she used to say things in the US context, like racism doesn't exist anymore
#
in America. It's only reverse racism. It's now, you know, white people are just managed.
#
And it never really was such a thing. And, and getting out of America and going to South
#
Africa, I was singing there, I joined a choir in South Africa, she came. It was a classical music
#
choir, we were singing a Handel opera, and in Cape Town. And she she came, she was visiting. So she
#
came in the audience, she came with a friend of mine who was in a who is in an ethnic group
#
that's so called colored, which is a South African term for mixed race. And it's not offensive. It's
#
very complex. Some people like it, some people don't, but they're a very proud colored
#
community. And so Arthur was colored quite dark skinned guy. And he was the only person of color
#
visibly in the audience, because I don't know that type of classical concert, somehow it's very
#
South Africa is still very socially segregated. And so he and my mother sat together. And she was so
#
outraged afterwards, she said, you know, Arthur, once or twice, he checked his phone, but I think
#
he was trying to take a picture, it wasn't. And he and the person next to him was just sniffing at
#
him and like looking at him and looking at him like he should leave. And I think it was racism.
#
And I said, Yeah, probably. You know, it's got a profound history of racism that, you know,
#
South Africa, it wouldn't be surprising if that still existed. And her kind of almost compassion
#
for or even identification with Black South Africans, she's much more interested in their
#
history, their struggle. It's like that different country can uncover a suppressed
#
other side of your personality. She's a different person there. And so just come back to your
#
question, probably moving to South Africa, living in another place, I think can usually almost always
#
makes, it just uncovers another part of you. It frees other parts of your, your personality,
#
you and you're just interacting with a different thing that can then cause the back side of you
#
to become visible to yourself, if that makes sense. There's a fascinating sort of thing I
#
started thinking about when I did an episode with this Indian writer called Natasha Badwar.
#
And she was speaking about how she and her husband met. And when they started going around,
#
they introduced each other to each other's parents. And she found that his parents were
#
completely different from what he had described. And he found that her parents were completely
#
different from what she had described, because each of them in their own minds, they had painted
#
a picture of, Oh, my mother is like this. And that you're just thinking of them like that.
#
You never look at them as real people who are constantly changing and all that. And did too
#
and there is a thought I sometimes have that most people know their friends much better than
#
they know their parents, you know, acquaintances much better than they know their parents,
#
because they're stuck to that sort of fixed image. So was there a moment where that shift
#
happened where you started, you know, relating to your parents, not as parents for whom you
#
might feel affection or exasperation or resentment or whatever, but as actual human beings who've
#
got love lives and foibles and, you know, as interesting to you as say, Deepu or Amalaika
#
or a crystal might be that, you know, there are so many layers to uncover. Did that happen? How was
#
it like, I'm guessing you guys are all friends by now, but we're not all friends. I mean,
#
my parents are separated. So I think, you know, my, my father, my parents' marriage ended when I was
#
23 and they met when they were 14 and they had, so it was an extremely long relationship for the
#
two of them. And, and I think I was maybe able to see my father more as his own person, as opposed
#
to the kind of, certainly we had what was almost a narrativized dynamic as a family growing up,
#
where like my mom was the villain and my dad was the, the hero, you know, which wasn't true.
#
But it was hard for me to see, I sort of saw them that way. And I think,
#
I think I was only able to really
#
like have full or kind of full-hearted or something or kind of three-dimensional relationships with
#
my partners, with men, once I saw, once I sort of released my dad from like the godlike position
#
that he had kind of been in. And so, but I also don't know that I've fully done that. I
#
had a conversation with my partner who I've been with for nine years where I said, you know,
#
it's strange to me that because the way he talks about himself is very different from how I perceive
#
him, like his sense of, I don't know, even his career failures or the opportunities he didn't take
#
or the, that he's been too shy or that it's not the way that I perceive him at all. And I realize
#
he has an image of himself. He has like a self-living inside himself that's different
#
from the one that I'm, that I love in a way. And then it occurred to me that if that's true
#
in one direction, it has to be true the other way. And I thought, you know, I have no idea who this
#
person loves actually. You know, you hope in a relationship, and I think it's true that the
#
person like loves you for who you are. That's what you want to feel. And yet on some level,
#
I said to him, you know, you're in a relationship with a person I'll never know.
#
I don't know who you love. I don't like, I will never know because my sense of myself,
#
and it's a very weird, you know, the one I had, it's a bit maybe alienating, but at the same time,
#
I think that mystery, I find my mother in particular, she, maybe because I kind of had
#
low expectations for her. I mean, we had a difficult relationship. And one in which I felt
#
she was smothering or anxious about me in ways that just didn't, that she didn't understand me
#
at all. And also just her worries would kind of take over or, you know, it was just a lot to me.
#
And I've been surprised by her a lot as an adult, the things that she finds exciting,
#
her sort of capabilities, traveling. We travel together every 18 months or so. We just were in
#
Finland. We choose these kind of arbitrary destinations. We're hoping to go to India.
#
She's 80, but she's very, I never really knew what a genius she is with languages.
#
And in a way, I think, you know, we can sometimes box in America conservatives as like
#
disinterested in other cultures or closed minded. And I just have realized, I mean,
#
her capacity to sit on the plane with a book, teach yourself Greek, and then have like a
#
legitimate three minute conversation, which is long in this, you know, it's really amazing. So
#
I guess that's one argument for relationships that are not by choice. You know, I don't know that
#
I would have chosen the parents that I did, right? But had I been able to pick them out from a lineup,
#
you know, if, but over time, the ability of a person to surprise you is one of the loveliest
#
things. And, you know, I feel that way about my partner too. Well, sometimes, I don't know,
#
he'll just have a reaction or, and I'll think, God, I really had no idea you were gonna have
#
that view or say that. And, and that's so, it's such a pleasure. You never know someone fully.
#
So I mentioned Mark Strand earlier, I will read out one of my favorite poems by Mark Strand now,
#
which speaks exactly to this. I love Mark Strand. I want to know what poem you picked here.
#
So it's called Harmony in the Boudoir. Harmony in the Boudoir by Mark Strand.
#
After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife that she will never
#
know him, that for everything he says, there is more that he does not say, that behind each word
#
he utters, there is another word and hundreds more behind that one. All those unsaid words,
#
he said, contain his true self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her.
#
So you see, he says, kicking off his slippers, I am more than what I have led you to believe I am.
#
Oh, you silly man, says his wife. Of course you are. I find that just thinking of you having so
#
many selves receding into nothingness is very exciting. That you barely exist as you are couldn't
#
please me more. Wow. I love that. This is from his last collection of poems called Almost Invisible.
#
It's prose poems and they're just masterpieces. I'm not sure I've encountered that poem before.
#
I'm going to look that up. Yeah. So let's sort of talk about your journey into writing. Like,
#
is that something that you always wanted to do or was it just a part of plunging yourself into life?
#
So you're reading a lot and you're finding out stuff and then you're getting excited by stories
#
and that leads you to writing. How did it all come about? Like, did you see yourself as a writer when
#
you were a kid growing up? You know what's funny? Talking about whether we know others and whether
#
we know ourselves. I always had this line that I never was that interested in being a writer.
#
I studied political science and I did an internship with the US State Department at an embassy
#
and then I got a job out of college at the New Republic magazine.
#
My memory is and my conception is that I wanted to be an editor,
#
but that the magazine started to assign me. So anyway, I started writing and then
#
sort of almost backed into that accidentally. I was going through some boxes of old
#
material from my schooling, diaries, and I discovered this little journal. Well, it was
#
a thing that I had to get. It was like letters that I had to write to a teacher. I think a teacher
#
said, you know, had a little assignment when I was eight in third grade that we had to
#
write letters. I don't know about how our weekend had gone and how we liked our parents and our
#
relationship with our siblings and our hobbies, whatever it was, just to get us writing, practice
#
our handwriting. And one of them obviously was, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I
#
wrote, I want to be a writer, which I think not only did I forget it, I suppressed it because
#
I grew up in an environment in the United States where there was a lot of pressure to achieve.
#
When people did things, they often did competitions. So I studied music and I would be then
#
enrolled in like music competitions where you would get first place, second place, third place.
#
I was given my first standardized test when I was six, a test of my abilities that ranked me
#
by contrast to every other American child. Like it put me in a percentile saying, here's
#
you know, all American children, you are 86 or, you know, 45th or so you're constantly being ranked
#
in that way, tested. Everything is kind of, yeah, about a sort of achievement. And I got very kind
#
of panicky with that. I often didn't do as well as I would hope at those music competitions and
#
feel very disappointed if I got third place instead of first. And I mean, that's, you know,
#
little achiever child, but it's a certain kind of environment that frankly, probably a lot of the
#
people that you talk to in the United States will have grown up in if they ended up at an Ivy League
#
or something like that. And for a while that feeling kind of ruined music for me. It took
#
the pleasure away. It made it about performance, about being watched, about success, about judgment.
#
And I think that there was maybe some intuitive part of me that wanted to
#
hide writing somewhere else, away from that. It's like a theory that I have
#
that some people, and then within some people, some desires are a thing I call shade plans.
#
So they can't get too much sun too early. And I've had that theory with some people
#
in dating is like, if it seems too serious too early, they'll kind of freak themselves out and
#
sabotage it or bail or, you know, that it can't be too hot too soon. It can't be. And I think
#
about that sometimes with the kind of like, thing now where we're supposed to wake up in the morning,
#
look at ourselves in the mirror and state our goals out loud or like, you know, put our goals
#
online for accountability from others. And I'm sure sometimes that can help, but sometimes I think
#
we have to hide parts of ourselves from ourselves. So I think I wanted very early on, I was very
#
interested in writing. I also think writing is sort of interesting because the other thing I did was
#
music. And there is this phenomenon in music of prodigies where really a seven-year-old can play
#
with the New York Philharmonic potentially, and can kind of seem at least sensitive and quite have
#
a mature style. You can bud so early. I don't know that I've ever read, and maybe someone will
#
challenge me, but something written by someone who turned out to be a wonderful writer before age
#
16 or 17 that was not total crap. Like somehow kids can't write, actually. There's a woman who
#
was in my elementary school, as it happens, who named Sandra Beasley, who's become a wonderful
#
poet. And I found also in this old stuff, this poetry book like our class had to put together
#
of little poems by we were 11. And I found Sandra Beasley's poem and my poem, and she's like a real
#
wonderful poet. And her poem was so bad. I mean, there was no promise, there was no potential, there
#
was nothing. And I think I like that about writing, that somehow it's an adult enterprise, that it's
#
something you have to have a little experience behind. It cannot fall totally victim
#
to kind of the efforts to make children prodigious and, I don't think. I mean, there are these kids
#
who write like novels, but come on, I don't know. Nothing is any good. No poems ever make it into
#
collected works that were written any younger than, I think, 17. No, I absolutely agree with
#
you because I think you need two elements to be able to write well. And one is life experience,
#
what the hell do you write about? And the second is craft, and it's bloody hard work. It takes a
#
lot of time to get your craft to the level, you know, where it can combine with your self-reflection
#
and then you come out with something good. But that's it. Even with music, you know, people
#
think of Mozart as a child prodigy at 17, but he was practicing since he was five, you know, so that
#
like years of work went into the craft because of, you know, the expectations of his dad or
#
whatever his particular toxic circumstance might have been. But I completely buy that. There are
#
things that you just have to grow into. You can't quite force it. But you studied political
#
philosophy in Yale, so how did that come about? Were you interested in it? Did you want to be
#
like your dad? Or did you want to be a political philosopher? Or were you just, you know, going
#
through the motions and that just happens to be what happened? Take me through that.
#
My mom says I just wanted to be like my dad because she always said, you know, I was the police,
#
I was the bad cop, and your dad was the good cop, and you always wanted to just copy him.
#
I don't know, I certainly didn't want to be an academic. And maybe I, you know, sometimes like
#
in our 40s and 50s, we only then, God, life is so short, we only suddenly realize, you know, that
#
we were in lifelong flight from something that gave us a fright in our childhood and
#
and maybe we shouldn't have been. So, you know, but I thought some of the academics that I saw
#
around my father, it seemed oddly a very political life, these petty politics like Kissinger says
#
about. And so I initially studied English. That was my major. And I, at least the story that I've
#
developed about why I changed that is that I also didn't, I wanted to, I realized that all the books
#
that I was reading in that course of study were books that I was, would read anyway. Now, you know,
#
I was maybe having more interesting discussions and stuff in my courses, but it was something,
#
it was material that I would do anyway outside of schooling. I had taken a class my freshman year in
#
kind of political thought and read and kind of trudged through Machiavelli and struggled with
#
Rousseau. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, those books were actually quite difficult for me,
#
and I wouldn't, I wouldn't just pick them up, frankly, on the, you know, read them on a commute
#
to, if I'm being honest with myself and really understand, feel like I understood something.
#
And I thought, God, you know, this is the time when I should be forced, you know,
#
yeah, just put forcing myself to encounter things that I won't otherwise do
#
for fun. So I changed my major, which you can do probably in the US system more easily than others.
#
But I remember I, I didn't have enough courses, so I had to go to the head of the department
#
of political science and to convince him that a class I'd taken on Shakespeare was actually
#
political philosophy because we'd read Coriolanus and we'd read The Tempest. And I don't think I was
#
wrong, but I remember standing there and thinking to myself, this sounds a little bullshitty or
#
something, you know, I obviously like, and then a history class that I'd taken on Thucydides, I said,
#
that's, that was a political science class, please add it to my total. And, but I also,
#
I really wanted to write, like a longer piece of writing, a sort of thesis on Lincoln.
#
And the English department would not let me do it despite him being such a titanically great
#
writer, such a powerful essayist, really, and rhetorician. And so I, I was sort of in this
#
bullheaded, I was like, well, that's what I want to do my last year of college, and this is the
#
material I want to study and try to write about. And so I have to then get a major that will allow
#
me to do this. So that was, that was why I did that. But I think, you know, I wish that I had done
#
that course of study earlier, because the other thing that I wish that I'd studied that I didn't
#
was religion, because the way that Americans think about politics, the epic, existential,
#
apocalyptic, millenarian stakes, the vision of a redemptive moment, the vision of unity,
#
the vision of an America that somehow could crest an epic conflict and land in a place,
#
in a sort of Edenic moment is so Christian. The political vision for America is totally,
#
totally shaped by Christianity. I sometimes tell friends of mine, you know, you have a
#
very Christian way of thinking and a Christian political ideology, and they'll say, what are you
#
talking about? I'm an atheist, you know, and I haven't been in church ever, you know, once
#
for a wedding. And I say, no, that doesn't matter, because it got stripped of the Jesus content. But
#
Trump is absolutely a Jesus figure, his martyrdom, his, you know, I think a lot, sometimes
#
when my mom will go about what she likes about Trump, I'll start singing or just reciting the
#
parts of Handel's Messiah, despised, afflicted, hated by men, you know, and the hate directed at
#
him is what shows him to be a surpassing figure of actual, you know, and so I wish that I had
#
read more Christian. I only encountered that when I was singing at churches, kind of accidentally,
#
you know, I got, had to sing the liturgy and all of these hymns that, that embed that.
#
Christopher Booker has this book called The Seven Basic Plots, where he says there are seven plots
#
that basically run through everything. And I think what you just described is like these are
#
standard storytelling tropes that Trump is kind of feeding into, like this is one particular kind
#
of story. And it can find its location in religion and a source there. But there's something primal
#
within us that I think these kind of stories appeal to, which is why religion shaped itself
#
around these stories, perhaps that's one way of thinking about it. Maybe when I think about,
#
I don't actually necessarily know enough about,
#
I don't know, certain sort of
#
titanic political figures. I don't want to only equate Trump with
#
dictators or something, you know, because I actually don't know that a fascist.
#
But that strongman appeal.
#
Or, you know, someone like Napoleon, I don't know that as much of their appeal.
#
And I don't know about, let's say a figure like Modi, that as much of their initial appeal,
#
quite as much, you know, there is a thing of coming from, like the lower classes or, you know,
#
sort of coming out of nowhere, coming from the bootstraps. I think that can be very,
#
a very powerful background for a leader, not only because it appeals to the masses,
#
but also because if you are trying to make your way into an elite from not being in there,
#
you have to have the most incredible powers of observation. You have to really know how
#
these people start, you know, work in order to, you have to be an incredible, incredibly sensitive,
#
actually, in a sense, an incredible observer. But I don't get the sense, like with the histories
#
I read of Napoleon, that it was so appealing to people that he had been hated or had been
#
persecuted. There's something in the American, contemporary American context that's a big appeal
#
that I guess I, it somehow is very Christian to me.
#
I think, you know, you mentioned Modi, I think a lot of the authoritarian leaders around the
#
world today, you know, feed into that, again, that instinctive attraction towards a tribal leader.
#
I mean, we evolved in small tribes, you want your leader to be the biggest badass there is,
#
it doesn't matter what his character is, he's going into war with the other tribe, they're
#
coming at you, and you want the biggest badass there is. But that's only part of it. All of
#
these people are also tapping into various local and different arrangements of their times,
#
you know, whether it's Modi or Orban or Putin or Trump, and I guess that plays a part.
#
Tell me about your time in journalism, like one thing I was very surprised by when I was
#
reading your work, I came across this lovely piece you wrote called The Flirting Game,
#
and it's in a different context. But over there, at one point, you mentioned that
#
some women, because you know, doing something in a manly arena would almost make them,
#
make the male gaze turn on them in a different kind of way, would actually stick to subjects
#
that women were supposed to write about. And I think this was true of Indian journalism,
#
up to maybe 10 years ago, that if you're a woman, you're supposed to do the softer stories,
#
the feature stories, the lifestyle stories. You know, I read an episode with this great
#
political reporter Sujata Anandan, who sadly died recently, died this year. And when she started in
#
the 1980s, she was a complete outlier, because she said, fuck you, I will cover politics, this is
#
what I will do. And went on that supposedly, you know, a beat otherwise reserved for men and just
#
did incredible work there. So give me a sense of what journalism was like when you got into it.
#
Like, I imagine one gets into a field with an idealistic view of it, that this is what we will
#
do, this is what reporters do, this is what a newsroom looks like. So what was the journey from that
#
to whatever it actually was like? I don't think I had that idealistic feeling at all, because
#
my father had such contempt for reporters. Like, he hated the idea of objectivity in the press,
#
and the sort of self-righteousness that can surround it, that we are just reporting the
#
objective facts. And he was a very sort of early critic of that idea and of the times. And so
#
I didn't have, I don't think I had the total starry eyes. But in a way that made me,
#
when I started at the New Republic, it was a very intimate, almost like family-like
#
magazine environment, where people socialized a lot. And, you know, we had two writers who were
#
senior writers, but they were maybe, when I was there, like 30, so I would have been 22.
#
And one ritual was that they would be wrapped in bubble wrap, and then they would like samurai
#
wrestle in the hallways. So it also had this dude vibe. And there were a lot of conflicting
#
expectations for women, I would say. I think that in certain respects, I've wondered whether
#
I advanced a little faster, I was pushed forward a little bit, because
#
there was already beginning to be a feeling that there should be more women in harder political
#
reporting. So I think, you know, I got added to the New Republic's team covering the presidential
#
campaigns as one of three reporters when I was very young, I would have been 24. And I think it's
#
possible that they wanted, you know, two dudes, two white guys and a woman that was good, nice
#
for them. But you wanted to do it anyway. I wanted to do it anyway, absolutely. And
#
obviously, the downside I could see with other people sometimes, you may be worried,
#
is my work really quality? Or have I been added, you know, for this reason? But,
#
you know, the thing that I did talk about in that piece that you mentioned was
#
having had some experiences that were all along a spectrum from what would count as a real me to,
#
you know, kind of like assault that probably could have had a criminal charge if I had
#
done that, all the way down to, you know, someone where you'll be at like a conference or you'll be
#
at a journalist happy hour and someone you start having a really great conversation with somebody.
#
And they'll seem to be finding what you're saying really interesting, you know, you just feel,
#
oh gosh, that feeling of simpatico minds, you know, oh, we're really vibing, like we're really
#
having an interesting conversation. I have a new idea for an essay and, you know, this, I'm really,
#
it's just so interesting. And then the person will say, why don't we follow this up? Why don't
#
we get a coffee? Why don't we have a, you know, drink? And then the next time you meet or the
#
time after that or the time after that, it'll slowly start to kind of dawn on you that the
#
person wants to pick you up. I think this happened to some other people more, even more than it
#
happened to me, but, and it's such a subtle, because it wouldn't necessarily culminate in
#
some kind of Harvey Weinstein hotel room flasher thing, but it's, for its very subtlety, be really
#
dispiriting because you would wonder, was, was I ever interesting? Was I, was that ever
#
like a really, you know, thing where somebody really wanted to get you on the team and
#
get you writing for this magazine or was it a cover for some other motive? And I think
#
Me Too has done a lot in the United States, almost it's underrated, I think, for
#
the not total degree, but the degree to which it's made that type of dynamic more, people more aware
#
of it. It's made men more anxious, which is good. I don't think, you know, sometimes, you know,
#
you'll get these pieces where it's, or men or women writers saying, men are now anxious in the
#
workplace, so they should be. You should worry about whether you're really trying to give this
#
young woman writer an opportunity or frankly, whether you want to sleep with them, you should
#
be anxious about whether that's what your real motive is. So I don't think that that's a bad
#
thing. So it's, it's changed enormously. The Washington press corps has shifted. I just see
#
women now as political commentators on TV. I see them as the lead reporters for, you know,
#
on the White House beat for the Post, for the Times. There's been a total change. What has not
#
changed in Washington, and maybe this is true in India, is the class from which reporters are drawn.
#
In fact, I would say you're getting a greater concentration of reporters than you would have
#
if you were a woman writer. This was probably always true for like essayists, that they came
#
from upper-class families, but reporters, they used to be able to start at local newspapers
#
and make a living wage. Not great, but like a really living wage, starting at the Richmond Times
#
dispatch or the Cincinnati Inquirer, and then move their way up and coming from, you know,
#
some town in Ohio. Now, you know, the famous thing is you used to get one dollar a word for
#
a magazine piece in 1978 in America. Now you get at best one dollar a word, but not with inflation,
#
just this one dollar still. So that's now however much less it is. And really very few people are
#
able to survive in journalism in their 20s now without family help or spousal help. I remember
#
being on a WhatsApp group for women freelance writers. This WhatsApp group was created after
#
me too. And these were women writers who were working to play stories, really deeply reported
#
stories, great work, amazing work in magazines and, you know, on a freelance basis. And there were,
#
I think, eight of us. And we started then talking not about sexual harassment, but about a wider
#
range of things. And at one point I said, let's have a discussion about income and just how you
#
manage, like, how are you guys setting, you know, a financial goal at the beginning of the year,
#
and then at what point do you take stock and say, God, you know, I'm going to have to do some,
#
edit some Amazon quarterly reports or some crap, you know, to make it. And how do you balance
#
different types of assignments? And it was like crickets. And then people started weighing in and
#
said, you know, I don't worry about my income at all because either my spouse is a very highly
#
paid lawyer or I have a family. And I realized that I had the privilege, in a sense, I lived
#
in South Africa by that point where my dollar goes a million miles. But it's just not talked
#
about enough that so few people who now write about the crises of poverty, the crises of not
#
being able to pay for health care, the crises, and they do so with extremely good intent,
#
but they will never experience the reality. I mean, even me, you know, I don't come from
#
a truly impoverished upbringing or anything like that. And there's just nobody now who's
#
a writer in America who does. It's a really rich man's game. Almost every woman I've called on the
#
show and every woman who's come on the show has, you know, shown signs of that imposter syndrome.
#
You know, am I good enough to do this? Why are you calling me on your show? And spoken about that
#
early years struggling through it. How was it for you? Because on the one hand, you kind of expressed
#
your worry that when you were one of the three reporters that are you filling some quota,
#
because you're a woman equally, I guess from that magnificent essay I'll link from the show notes.
#
So listeners, please go and read it right now. Also the worry that why are people talking to me?
#
Am I really interesting? Is this really a great piece? You know, self-doubt is just so common.
#
And I guess self-doubt is even more crippling for women because you're just trying to navigate this
#
really weird space where you're beginning to realize that there is this extra layer of
#
awareness you have to have that people's intentions are not always as transparent
#
as yours might be when you're in an interaction. So were there moments of that self-doubt in your
#
writing, in your reporting? How did you kind of get past it? Because, you know, it's a survivor
#
effect. We see the people who make it past. We don't see the people who don't make it past.
#
Let it get them done. That's so, I mean, that's such a
#
truth there. I had less of that as from the fact that I was a woman. And I
#
credit my dad to that. He just never, I don't know, there was never any sense that I,
#
I don't know how to put this so it doesn't sound, that I had to do girl things, that
#
he completely like engaged with my interest in military history. And he also just
#
encouraged me to debate with him from a really young age, to disagree with him, to
#
have an argument about the meaning of a text that we'd read. And somehow I remember getting to
#
college and my mother wanted me to go to an all girls private high school, which I really was
#
opposed to for, probably I wanted to be with cute boys. You know, but, and one of the rationales
#
for those schools was that girls learn better when they don't feel anxious about looking,
#
competing with boys or worrying about raising their hand. And I remember, I think I was just
#
from an, it was not, I remember just thinking, why would you ever worry about that? Why would,
#
and then I got to seminars in college and I, and I thought to myself, my God, it's true that I'm
#
the only woman raising my hand. Like, and where does this come from actually? So I will say that
#
I don't feel at least consciously aware other than the feeling that there was a certain game
#
in Washington that one had to play with one's sexuality early on. And I don't know that I was
#
always entirely innocent. I mean, I sort of felt, okay, I am seeing women who are made up a certain
#
way, getting certain types of opportunities, especially on TV. And so I guess I need to try
#
that. I found it more difficult and something that I wasn't, that I didn't see, I haven't seen
#
talked about as much, maybe, but like once I, my work started getting attention or praise,
#
I found that anxiety producing. And I've noticed that there can be writers sometimes
#
who write like a first book when they're very young and it is like heaped with praise as like
#
a breakout talent gets the now deceased guardian first book prize, but there used to be that
#
thing. And, and sometimes those writers really struggle then with a second, you know, they just,
#
I think that people can feel entrapped by having to outdo themselves or even live up to this,
#
because what you like about your own work will never be the same as what's celebrated.
#
But then you see like what's celebrated about it and you think, oh man, I have to now feed that
#
mouth, that beast, or I have, yeah, I have to, you see that this is much more talked about in music.
#
Sorry to keep coming back to music, but it's like the other world that I know is, and it's really
#
talked about is like people who win the Van Cliburn prize in piano, huge prize at, and it often is
#
won by very young artists, 19, 22, 24. Van Cliburn himself, after whom the prize was named, was
#
sort of prodigy who then became an alcoholic. And just, he never, there was almost this other
#
public self that then he could never live up to. He was always terrified of having to live up to
#
that person. So that's like the thing that I've found more difficult as time goes on. And as one
#
keeps going, you can start to be trapped by your own work in a way that I don't see a lot of
#
discussion that might help me or kind of frankness about that. When I sometimes encounter these
#
writers who, I guess it seems to me that it's pretty clear that they're struggling to follow
#
up on, make a sophomore effort. And then I'll ask them, what's going on with you? Or like,
#
I'd love to see more of your writing. Or they'll have something of like,
#
it's really hard for people to admit or say, well, this new thing I'm working on is just taking a
#
very long time and my editor is annoying and it got overtaken by events and then I have to rewrite
#
it. And it's very, it's a kind of hidden thing. I think anyway, that's my feeling.
#
So when you're writing, like, I wonder that, you know, when you want to do journalism,
#
there are different aspects to it. And like, I can just thinking aloud, I can think of like
#
three aspects to why you would want to do a story. One aspect is that very shallow one that you see
#
yourself as a journalist who is doing journalism and there is the glamour to it or there is whatever
#
you perceive that role to be and then you get into it. A second aspect is a purer one of the
#
story itself that you find subject X is interesting and let me delve into that and ask questions and
#
I'll come up with, you know, the story and it's going to be a great story and I'll feel happy when
#
I do the story. And the third aspect is a process itself that you can just be in love with the
#
process of getting a story, meeting people, asking questions, following curiosity,
#
sitting down, writing draft after draft, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, which of these was most
#
attractive to you, you know, in terms of, I think that a mistake people can make is get drawn in by
#
the shallow notion of what they could be as a journalist or a novelist or a writer or whatever,
#
or the not so shallow notion of what the final work could be. But the real great work really
#
happens where you also start loving the process, enjoying the process. So what was it like for you?
#
Like I've been a journalist for about a decade and I was more of an editor and I found the reportage
#
really hard to do because I'm such an introvert to go out there and talk to people and
#
all of that, which is really hard for me. It just didn't come naturally. I had to, you know,
#
it took intentionality. So what was it like for you in terms of, you know, many people will say,
#
I hate the writing, but I love it when it's done. Right. So what was it like for you? Did that
#
process also mean something invaluable to you? I've never liked that line. I think it's Joan
#
Didion. Like I hate writing, but I like having written. And I think, I don't find that true.
#
I like writing in a way. I like it. There's a little masochistic. I mean, it's not like,
#
I like it. Like, I like going to the ice cream store and, you know,
#
there are very venal motivations to venal. I don't know if that's the right word, but, you know,
#
I think a lot of journalists, they do want a form of recognition. They want
#
to persuade. I think competition is an underrated motivation, which is why I think it's very
#
important to kind of nurture like environments within publications, within magazines, where
#
there are multiple people who are like on the same beat or who are working the same, you know,
#
who have a similar level of talent or ambition or so you have competitors. I have a very close
#
friend who's I think a brilliant writer in a smaller African country. One of the things that
#
he struggled with is not really having a competitor in his environment. And it can be very
#
motivating to have a nemesis. One of my favorite pieces that I wrote was largely kind of like an
#
fu to another writer who I just felt had written such awful stuff. And I couldn't take it anymore.
#
And I thought this person has to be opposed and trying to almost like crush that person, you know.
#
You sound like a man now.
#
I do. Do I? Oh, God. I mean.
#
Didn't mean it as a compliment.
#
Yeah. Look, I think sometimes there's a halo of idealism. You know, when I hear at journalism
#
schools, you know, people's motivation for trying for your teachers say why you should go into
#
journalism, it can often sound so altruistic and so and it I don't know that it's always so great to
#
give people such a purist view because then you get a very warped sense of what it is you're
#
actually doing in show business. You're there to move people and to entertain people, but you're
#
also there to be a star and get some applause and have a light on you. And, you know, the honesty
#
about that, I think, can be useful. That said, I've seen people want to be writers who don't
#
do much writing like other than, you know, that it's more about wanting that identity
#
and that some people can have a tremendous discipline and just decide they want to be
#
a published author, start sitting down every morning before the kids wake up or whatever
#
it is or they go to their job and bashing out a novel and read a lot of books on plotting and
#
stuff and do it. But I think if you're not writing already, by which I mean trying to compose
#
funny and interesting long text messages, I don't mean writing, you know, you have to be
#
sitting and working on a secret epic poem, right, but that you have a real day-to-day pleasure with
#
the, you know, doing it. I sometimes feel like I think I can have the feeling when I write something
#
that I really enjoy writing that it isn't even written by me. I don't know if you ever experienced
#
that, but that it's almost coming through you. That somehow it came together and you think,
#
holy, you know, wow, I really felt that with the book that I wrote when I was reaching the end
#
chapter, I thought this whole thing had a superstructure that I was obviously subconsciously
#
doing, but I was also not even consciously aware of that there were things that I was
#
able to come back to and land on and arrive back at at the end that I hadn't even necessarily
#
plotted out or anticipated. This is why I'm not the biggest fan of the outline. The outline is
#
very trapping. It traps you in your conscious understanding of what your work is going to be,
#
but for me it was more like I was kind of awed by the work itself had its own life that almost
#
felt like it had come again through me. And so my goal is to make myself a smooth vessel.
#
You're trying to avoid disruptions. You're trying to be a smooth vessel for something that's coming
#
from artistically from somewhere else. Reporting, I always, I mean, that was maybe the thing that I
#
like talking. I mean, I sometimes listen to my interviews and I think to myself,
#
God, I wish I hadn't talked so much, but maybe sometimes it can put people at ease.
#
I talk a little about my own relationship to the subject that they're talking about, but
#
I really enjoy new people, unusual places, people's strange stories.
#
I love listening to those and remembering them. So that was the more natural
#
thing for me. I think the hope was to achieve, I don't know, a story and literature
#
above reporting, but using that as a foundation. And that's harder. That's somehow,
#
but again, when you get it, it kind of, I mean, the last thing I'll say that I find about writing
#
is it runs so counter to a lot of contemporary views about how you achieve, how you meet goals,
#
which is like scheduling by an app and like making sure that your Apple Watch goes off
#
and you do your 20 minutes at 6 p.m. One of the favorite parts of, in fact, the prologue to this
#
book that I wrote, which I loved, I just enjoyed, but I wrote it on a vomit bag in a plane.
#
I was just sitting on this plane. I didn't have even, my phone had died, so I couldn't write it
#
out. I didn't have a notebook with me. And suddenly it was just there, unbidden. I've obviously been
#
working on, I suddenly thought, oh my God, that's the way to start this. And the paragraphs were
#
just kind of like downloading from somewhere into my head. And I thought, I have to write this down
#
or I'm going to lose it. What resembles paper? Can I borrow a pen from my neighbor? Oh, there's
#
this vomit bag that's actually paper. But it really comes, I think, in a sort of inspiration
#
and ideas, they come at times that are very unpredictable. When I land on a method,
#
a method to write, as soon as I figure it out, it no longer works. I have to come up with some new
#
method. So you always feel like a kind of hapless beginner, but I think that's part of the fun of
#
it. It's hard to get into a mode. Some people do. This is just my experience, but it's hard to get
#
into a kind of mode where it feels like, hopefully, a surgeon might feel, oh, I've done this a million
#
times. It's always the same. An appendix is an appendix. It's rote now. I can be listening to
#
Journey or a podcast while I'm doing it. It's always much more disorienting. And yet,
#
it's kind of fun for that reason. I often think about the role of form, the forms that we choose
#
to write in, what they do to us. I've been a columnist where I've had to turn in 800 word
#
pieces. I've been a columnist where I've been able to write 2,500 word essays. I've written
#
one bad book. So I've done a lot of blogging where I used to do like eight posts a day was
#
my average through a certain five-year period. Five posts a day where I did some 8,000 posts
#
in five years, and many of them would be really short. And I think about the relationship of
#
form to the work you do, because if it's like, say, an 800 word piece, you've got to be kind of
#
crisp. You can't digress. You can't go too deep. You've got to figure out the essence of it. And
#
it's got its own requirements. You can really branch out with an essay. With a book,
#
you can go in a different direction, just in terms of podcasting, the kind of conversation
#
we are having. If this was a half an hour conversation, I had to get over and you had to
#
leave. It would be really different. Totally different. It would be damn good because I'd
#
manage it and you're great, but it would be totally different. And I think that that shapes
#
not only the work, it also shapes a person because the kind of thinking that I give myself
#
permission to do when I know I can write 10,000 words about this is really different from the
#
kind of thinking I would do when I know I have only 400 words, I have to give it by deadline.
#
What was that experience for you working through forms? Because I guess when you first came into
#
reporting for the New Republic, what was the sort of lens that you worked with and how did that work?
#
And you've mentioned somewhere else that when you got to this book because you were talking
#
to these people for smaller stories, and then you said that, no, this doesn't fit. I got to do more
#
of these. I got to go in deeper and all of that. So what's your relationship with form as a writer
#
being and how do you think it shaped you? Yeah. Well, I had to start pretty short. So I had a page
#
in an actual physical magazine. So I would be frantically looking to cut three words because
#
they were running over, you know, like it was that. And I sometimes think we don't think enough
#
about how writing has changed with the internet where there's not that like constraint. And a
#
useful constraint is both good and bad. Yeah. I also did then some blog posts, which I found
#
very fun because and that was maybe more about the time. Like you had to, you know, I would be at a
#
hearing. I mean, they weren't very fun events. I will say it was like a hearing on like fisheries.
#
There's nothing, you know, and then I had to go write it up as a blog post, but you just had to
#
like, it was your first thought. You weren't really agonizing over it. You know, I was reading this
#
book, an Indian American writer, Priya Parker, who writes about parties, basically, how to host
#
like a good party or gathering or conference, basically gathering the artists called The Art
#
of Gathering. It's a great book. And she was writing that basically people who really, there's
#
this kind of industry secret. If you're a person who sets up conferences or a wedding planner,
#
where there's specific numbers of people that for odd reasons just work. And those numbers are six
#
for dinner party, 15, 30, and 150. And then like just a sea of humanity. And when I read that,
#
I thought, man, that's so fascinating because I've thrown so many dud 10 person dinner parties.
#
And maybe it was just that I didn't have six and I didn't have 15. And she had sort of then reasoning
#
as to why that, but I have theories around word length. So I think around a thousand words is a
#
natural word length around 2,500 to 3,000, 25 to 3,500. So that's like a short magazine article,
#
a really long op-ed. You know, there's this fetishization of long form. I don't know if
#
that's the case in India. Maybe Caravan would publish stuff like that. But here there's this,
#
there was this fetishization of the 8,000 words, seven to 8,000 word big magazine piece. That is
#
a horrible length. It's just, it's somehow, it's not short. It's not long. It's so painful. I read
#
many pieces that length. I've written them where I think this really should be a book.
#
And it's just like a dumb summary of a book, or it should be a 2,500 word piece that's just
#
blathering on for way too long. I think 13 to 1,500, 3,500 to 40,000, 35,000 to 40,000.
#
And then like big book length, 150,000. And the odd thing is our kind of just tragic accident,
#
arbitrary kind of lengths of stuff don't really, I've had many book ideas that would be 40,000,
#
like a short, like a novella. But in nonfiction, there's not really, and it used to be, you know,
#
if you, again, if you read Montagnier, Rousseau, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, you know, they wrote
#
at that length. That's a natural length for a nonfiction kind of statement, argument.
#
Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is 13, 14,000 words.
#
Oh, interesting. Right, right. So you do get a few of that, but
#
you get a lot of books where the person has basically been pressured to write 100,000 words.
#
The one other thing I'll say about form, you know, artists think a lot about the medium.
#
And when I go to an art show, it's just at a gallery with a buddy in New York,
#
and we were being given a tour by a curator, and he was very focused on the medium.
#
Was it this kind of paint? Was it this kind of liquid pigment? You know, were they using
#
these found objects that they like smeared on the canvas as you do now, you know? And
#
I think that's an element of writing that we don't really consider. So I sometimes write
#
as text messages. So about 80% of the book that you wrote, that you read of mine was written on
#
WhatsApp. Wow. Oh my God. On your phone?
#
On my phone. I wrote it on my phone because I felt that writing on, first of all, people will now
#
read on their phones and they read at a different pace than they read on a page. I started to get
#
this idea when I tried to read Moby Dick and I was trying to read it on my phone and then on a
#
Kindle. And I was totally, I was like, what the hell is this book? This book stinks. I'm just,
#
I'm so, it's terrible. I'm bored. I can't really get into it. And then, and I thought it was my
#
own failing. And then I picked up a paper copy at a used bookstore and I just loved the book.
#
And I thought, and conversely, I read a Frank Fukuyama book, The Origins of Political Order,
#
on my phone, like on the Kindle. That's a big book.
#
I loved it. I blazed through it. And then I saw it in a bookstore and I thought, holy cow,
#
I don't think I would have finished this book. It's like a doorstop. I would have been intimidated.
#
Had I known that I was only on page 78 of like 1100 pages, I think I would have become
#
dispirited, but I didn't know. I just was going, you know? And so I also think it's useful for
#
writers, I find, to mix up. If you're stuck, I will sometimes tell people,
#
this is something I do. I've composed essays in a Twitter, like window or a Facebook status update
#
window and not post it. And then, and I've had a, I had one nightmare where Facebook like reloaded
#
and it erased my entire thing. Cause I hadn't like, but I will then just copy and paste it.
#
I won't post it. But what that does for me is it gives me a more intimate sense that I'm actually
#
talking to people, which can be hard to kind of access. You know, Homer, he used to just deliver
#
his works. Shakespeare, the works were almost immediately delivered before a crowd. Then he
#
would adjust them. You get the intimacy of communicating with people. When we sit with
#
our computer in a Word document, there can be a lack of that. So oddly, I find it just tricks
#
my brain. Like even if I don't post it, if I'm like on Facebook, you know, I'm aware, I'm seeing
#
little thing reels pop up from, I'm like, oh, that's the people who are going to be potentially
#
encountering this work. So I think there's a lot with medium that matters with writing,
#
whether we write, you know, we don't, unlike with those art shows, we don't know
#
when we read something, whether the person has written it by hand, whether they've dictated it,
#
which with some older writers can still be the case, whether they've written it on a laptop,
#
whether they've written it on their phone, which now for columnists, you know, often be the case.
#
And, but that does impact the writing. Long, long ago, I did write a column on a phone and
#
I did an episode. Now my memory is so bad, I've forgotten with whom, but he told me about this
#
favorite writer of his who came out with a book that was slightly different from the previous
#
book. So he got in touch with him and he said, what happened? You know, your voice was a little
#
different and he wrote the whole thing on a treadmill disc. So he was walking while he was
#
writing and that kind of affected what happened there. And that's so interesting. And so I used
#
to have this hack where, you know, similar to what you're saying, if I would get stuck, which when
#
I was younger, I'd be consumed by the anxiety of what people are going to think of this important
#
piece and I'd get stuck. And what I would do is I'd just go to my Gmail, I'd hit compose. I'd put
#
my own email ID in the tool list, but I'd pretend I was writing a letter to a friend about it.
#
And then it would just flow much more better because there's nothing at stake. You're writing
#
a mail to a friend and it would just be fine, you know, so little hacks to kind of get past
#
yourself. So tell me about how you took that step by 2005, you start with the New Republic,
#
2009 you're in South Africa. What happened, you know, that that took you in that direction?
#
Was it a happy accident? Was it something that built over time?
#
I think it was a little bit of an accident, but I never expected to come back to DC.
#
There was this whole kind of thing. I don't know, growing up in the suburbs of DC,
#
it was like a place people wanted to get out of. It felt stuffy, stuck up, not as cool as New York
#
or San Francisco. I don't know how it is with New Delhi, but there's places where there's
#
capital cities like Brasilia or like even Pretoria in South Africa, where it's not the coolest city.
#
By a long shot in the country in South Africa, they call Pretoria Snore City,
#
because snore in Afrikaans, the language there also means mustache. So it also has this meaning
#
of like stuffy bureaucrats. So Washington, now it's cooler after Obama, I think, but it had that
#
reputation. So I think when I came back, you know, I wanted the job, I wanted to be working
#
at this magazine, but I didn't want to get sort of stuck in DC. And then I had this experience
#
starting to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.
#
So there is a real statistic, and it's no longer totally up to date, but it would have only gotten
#
more extreme, which is that in the last 20 years or something like that, America has lost about
#
a third of its newsroom jobs worldwide, countrywide. So at publications like the
#
Chicago Tribune or the LA Times or San Francisco Chronicle and smaller ones. And
#
meanwhile, the newsroom jobs in Washington have doubled or tripled. So there's an
#
increasing concentration as national politics has become kind of a soap opera in the United States.
#
There's more reporters concentrated here. And I remember on that 2008 campaign, I went to Iowa,
#
where they do the first primary. I was like the third string. I was the junior reporter
#
in this team of three. So the other two are covering the rise of Obama. And I was sent to
#
like Mike Huckabee. I don't know if you remember him. These kind of forgotten names, you know,
#
these second string candidates to cover their events. But still, I remember going to a number
#
of events. I had to stalk Mike Huckabee at a barbershop. And there were more, he was like
#
giving a talk while getting his hair cut. It's a weird American thing. And there were more
#
reporters there than people. And you got that a lot. And I remember thinking I, no matter how
#
good I think I thought I was, there is no way that I'm really adding value here. Everyone is
#
writing the same story. Plus, you get an ultimately dangerous two pronged game, whereby tiny things,
#
you know, Biden coughed. That's part of a bigger story. But like some, you know, Biden's press
#
secretary is getting divorced or like these tiny things become big scoops because there's not enough
#
food to go around. There's not enough of the like actual news at the buffet table for all of the
#
hungry people. So, you know, you get this amplification of tiny dramas that shouldn't
#
really be and it becomes a problematic element of politics. And you get an access game whereby,
#
and you still see that this a lot with coverage of Trump and Biden and whereby
#
reporters are now coming out and saying, I saw Biden in physical decline six months ago. It was
#
so obvious. There was a big New York Magazine article about this, where the reporter was just
#
saying all the reporters understood this is really going downhill really fast. Why couldn't we say
#
that? Because we didn't want to piss the campaign off and the White House off because we're desperate
#
to keep in the good graces. So we get that one little scooplet. The whole competition,
#
press competition in DC, I think is very, it wasn't something that I felt I was doing well at.
#
And it wasn't something that I felt was really healthy. I don't know which motivation was
#
stronger or weaker, to be honest. But so I was like, I want to go somewhere else. I want to go
#
somewhere else. I want to go to a different country that maybe has some parallels to the
#
United States in a minority of respects, but is just completely different. I initially planned
#
to move to India, but then I applied for a report, a writing grant, two-year writing grant,
#
that they only give it to one person every year and you propose what country you want to go to
#
and you make a whole proposal about what you're going to write about. And two years earlier,
#
they'd given it to someone to go to India. So I thought strategically,
#
no, I'm not going to get it. This is so horrible. So you could have been in India
#
instead and written a book about us. I could have, but you know, and so I thought, and so
#
completely tactically, I thought that's just, I don't think I'm going to land this grant,
#
which I need to fund myself. And I wanted a longer, you know, there's smaller reporting
#
grants go for a month, but I wanted a long thing, very few of those. And this was a fantastic
#
opportunity. So I landed instead on South Africa with very little knowledge, relatively speaking,
#
about the country. You know, I was 11 in 1994. My parents were really focused on the former
#
Soviet Union. And even in American schooling, I don't remember there being, I'm sure we learned
#
about Mandela, but not a lot. So I got to South Africa. You know, I had read books and tried to
#
prepare, but I bought a one-way ticket there with this grant, which was basically living expenses.
#
But the interesting thing about this particular grant was you were prohibited from publishing
#
anything about the country for your first year. It was a very weird old school grant where they
#
wanted to avoid the foreign correspondent thing where somebody lands. And after two and a half
#
weeks, they had their big essay on the future of India, right? Indian forest correspondents
#
talked to the taxi driver on the way from the airport and they filed that. And I was so worried,
#
you know, we think we have such a short time horizon for ourselves sometimes in our 20s and
#
people are so nervous about bylines. And I thought, you know, I have to be, have a byline every two
#
weeks. You know, I'm just going to be, I'm going to vanish. And so I was not happy about this,
#
but I also understood it. And it turned out that it was really amazing because what I did have to
#
do was I had to write a letter every month to the director of this weird organization that existed
#
in a basement in like a weird part of Washington. It was just this old small foundation that has
#
this one writing grant. And, but the letter would not be published. It was private, but this
#
particular, the head of the organization was very demanding and very, he would like edit them. And
#
I don't know, he really wanted them to be nice pieces of writing and interesting pieces of
#
reporting. But the great thing about it was that I was able to write about friends to him. I was
#
able to gossip. I was able to write about people that I'd interviewed, but in a way that was more
#
frank than I would maybe write, than I would immediately publish if I wanted to maintain the
#
relationship with them. And so I think if there is a frankness to the final book that I ended up
#
publishing, that probably was born of that method and that particular quirk and eccentricity of this
#
grant. Let's take a quick break. And on the other side of the break, we'll dive into South Africa.
#
All right. Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea for
#
me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend, the
#
brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it, everything is everything. Every week we'll speak for about
#
an hour on things we care about, from the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
#
We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
the world. Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube
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channel at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. The show is called,
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everything is everything. Please do check it out.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm sitting here with Eve Fairbanks, who spent many
#
years writing a book so you can spend many hours talking to me. And tell me about what that early
#
experience in South Africa was like, because you've mentioned that you were working on smaller
#
pieces. You didn't expect this to be a book or it to be this book when you started out.
#
So take me through the process of discovering the story and figuring out that it was a book
#
you wanted to do. You know, to be totally honest with you, I think I wanted to do a book from the
#
start, but not for good reasons. I hope sometimes we get into things for bad reasons and then we
#
can fix it later. So I think, you know, there was a phenomenon with kind of my generation of writers,
#
American writers, which is you go to another country for two years, write a book, and then
#
come back and present it to the United States. So I sort of unthinkingly assumed that I had to do
#
that. So I was always thinking about it, but I knew almost immediately when I got to South Africa
#
that it was going to be a much longer task than an American unthinkingly assumes when one,
#
you know, goes overseas. It's such a complex society with such a kind of thorny history.
#
And more than that, it has a storyline, which it's known for. I don't know how many other
#
countries are kind of have a, like that they almost constitute a parable on the world stage.
#
There's this kind of story that they're known for. And almost nobody's personal story and
#
personal experience of the country really fits perfectly into that. So there were a lot of things
#
that people don't feel comfortable saying immediately, kind of disappointments on the
#
one hand. And I found very often things that had gone right for them or things that they were
#
happy about that also didn't fit into a kind of emerging 30 years after the end of apartheid.
#
South Africa has been a disappointment, is very violent, is, you know, turning into a harder place
#
for white people to live, hasn't achieved its goals for black people that people actually found
#
it hard to complicate that negative story. So it took many, many conversations and even years of
#
knowing people to kind of drill down into their secret opinions and hidden layers of what they
#
really thought about the country that they were living in. So I immediately, you know, I got a
#
book contract pretty quickly, actually. I got, I moved there in 2009. I sent a contract in 2012.
#
And then I began a process of continually not delivering said book until I think that they
#
lost hope that I was ever going to write it. And then it was a pleasant surprise when I sent them
#
a book. But as I mentioned to you, and we just chatted before this, I wrote a version of the book
#
in 2015 that I then scrapped. And over the course of the time, you know, I initially was in South
#
Africa on a writing grant. It was a two-year grant for journalists and academics to kind of,
#
it was a foundation. So there was a toilet magnate, a man who got rich in the 1910s and 1920s,
#
producing industrial toilets. Crane, if you sometimes see on a toilet, even overseas,
#
I'll say crane on it anyway, Charles Crane. On his deathbed realized I think he didn't want to
#
be known for toilets. And so he endowed a writing grant right at the time when
#
it seems like a distant memory. But the feeling was that America did not sufficiently meddle in
#
other countries' affairs, that it was too isolationist and, you know, didn't know enough.
#
And so he endowed this writing grant to send, I don't know, even people who were ultimately
#
going to go work in government initially, only men until the 1980s, to go to distant lands and
#
write about on a camel. But this grant still exists, this endowment still exists. And so
#
they still send people overseas, about one every year. So I initially had this writing grant.
#
Then, though, I knew I wanted to stay on. And my task then was to make a living
#
writing. So I was doing magazine pieces and longer reported pieces, essays, shorter op-eds
#
throughout the process of gathering string for this book.
#
Did the time factor sort of, you know, was it like a sort of an internal deadline that was a red shit?
#
I have two years. And, you know, I think what would happen to me is that I would just panic
#
in month one, that I would think, oh, this is the time I have. And what am I going to do? Let me
#
start gathering stuff. Or, oh, my God, six months have gone. Or, oh, my God, one week is left. And
#
it's, you know, was that a source of pressure on you? Or were you just able to sit back and
#
decide at some point that I'll be here as long as it takes, but I have to get it done?
#
Oh, God, it was a source of terrible pressure. I mean, speaking of being a woman writer,
#
I was told by one or two people involved in book publication in the United States that it was
#
important that I published my book before I turned 30. Like, that I be a woman writer in her 20s.
#
They could say I'm still in my 20s. So there was initially like a, and I never really thought,
#
I knew I wasn't going to make it, I think, but I thought, God, you know, are you kidding? Like,
#
that part of your advertising material is going to be this is a 20-something
#
woman. So I needed to get it out like in May, you know, before my 30th birthday. That didn't happen.
#
Oh, I just had, I had so much panic about it actually. And I think, I think that book publishers
#
do a disservice. They, they often produce very short contracts. So my initial contract had me,
#
I'd been in South Africa for two years and they said, oh, you know a lot about it.
#
So you can write the book in nine months. I've seen other people and myself, if you agree to do
#
a book in a year or nine months, you end up taking much longer than if you'd set out to do
#
three years from the start. So if your goal had been three years, I think, you know, one maybe
#
could have done it, but then you end up in this panic state where you're, every morning you wake
#
up and you think I've, I'm behind, I've blown my deadline and it kind of becomes this headwind.
#
So at the same time, what I didn't experience was, I actually had a health experience we can
#
talk about. I had a sickness, which I think made me ultimately write a better book that I was
#
grateful for in the long run in my round, year six of working on this. But I, people kept flinging
#
the Churchill quote at me, which is like, first you, a book is like a mistress. I'm going to
#
misstate it, but first you are entranced by it. Then you're starting to grow tired of it. Then
#
you hate it. And then you just have to throw it arbitrarily out of the house at some point.
#
In other words, because I would say, I don't think I, I'm fin, I don't think I have enough
#
material. I don't think I have met the, even the right, found the right characters.
#
And people would say, well, you're going to always feel that way. So at a certain point,
#
you just have to draw the line under it and say it's done and it's over.
#
My personal experience was that I knew when it was done. Unfortunately, that took a long time,
#
but I was not fully satisfied with it, but I felt it. I, I felt it was done when I was
#
finished with it finally. So Robert Carrow took a decade when he was given a year to write the
#
power broker. And he's taken some 30 plus years since then to finish his Lyndon Johnson series.
#
So please don't take so much time over your next book. We can't wait. I really don't want to. Yeah.
#
Yeah. No, you know, this stuff that you've set up with these little nuggets of publisher wisdom,
#
just make me so mad that the brand matters and you have to be out with a book before you're 30.
#
And this is just terrible stuff. And I just think that it's all wrong and shallow thinking.
#
It doesn't have to be this way, but you know, do you feel that these sort of
#
this conventional thinking represents how fucked up the world is? Or do you think the world is fine?
#
The wisdom is fucked up. I think the world is less fucked up than the wisdom.
#
And I think that publishers underestimate readers. You know, there are raining,
#
I find the way people speak and publishing is very cynical. I would hear over and over,
#
people don't read anymore. People don't buy books. And I would be like, why the fuck are we in this
#
business then, man? Like, why don't you go, you know, open a restaurant or do a tech startup or
#
what? Like, why are you occupying this chair at this, you know, fancy building in New York,
#
at this august publishing house? It's a very, and somehow it's supposed to, I think,
#
impress other people. You sound kind of- World-weary.
#
Yeah. Yeah. Wised up. But it's very, it burrows its way deeper into you the more you say that
#
than I think people even expect. So people assume, there's an assumption in publishing that
#
if one book sells very well, you must, all authors must now do repeats of that.
#
But in fact, people want something fresh and different, you know, and I don't know,
#
the world is really not well served by the current publishing. It's very, it feels like a kind of-
#
Okay. So in downtown Johannesburg, there are these buildings. Well, there's a whole infrastructure
#
that was set up for a society and an economy where black people were in kind of labor camps
#
outside the city serving white people. So there's no real good public transit between
#
new emerging neighborhoods. It's all kind of a relic and people are having to kind of
#
live awkwardly in the old infrastructure of this thing that no longer, but that people don't really
#
want to change or rebuild. I remember a very vivid experience I had in downtown Johannesburg. There
#
was a building called the Medical Arts Building, which was an old doctor's building in this downtown
#
with all of these like operating rooms or like, you know, gurneys and like examination tables
#
and cubby holes for the medical receptionist. And now this building has a preschool that has some
#
charismatic black churches. It's a black businesses that are in this building, but they were, I
#
remember seeing a whole lot of fruit laid out on an examination table, like an old OBGYN with the
#
stirrups, you know, for the OBGYN examination. And, you know, on the one hand, I was, I found it
#
striking because I thought, wow, they really make, people are really making do with what was here.
#
On the other hand, it's having to live in this infrastructure that for a whole bunch of reasons
#
can't be rebuilt. And I feel that way about publishing. You know, they, publishers now,
#
they take 85% of authors' profits. They are in, you know, buildings in Midtown that even
#
financial companies can't afford the rent, but they're just still there. So a whole, you know,
#
all of that profit from books has to go to their rent. Then they have to, you know, publish the
#
keto diet and these kind of trash stuff to, it's all, it doesn't work anymore for writers. A lot
#
of agents, I had a realization that agents' clients are publishers, not authors, because agents, they
#
need to maintain more of a relationship. They interact more with any given publisher than they
#
do with any given author. So they are ultimately, they're serving publishers more than the authors.
#
So it's a very weird and hard universe, at least in the United States.
#
That's actually a great metaphor. And it's not just true of publishing. It's really true
#
of so many industries, including the media, where, you know, the, like, I look at all these
#
structures that are artifacts designed for a previous age and an earlier world and the
#
world has changed, but the artifacts remain. So you see it in publishing, you see it in media,
#
you see it arguably in nation states and the way they do what they do. And it's really bizarre that
#
there is this lag that the old institutions are no longer valid, but new ones haven't yet come up
#
to take its place. And meanwhile, we are kind of floundering and making do with what is there.
#
One of my dear friends, Sonia Follero, has written a few non-fiction books. The first of them,
#
I remember she was in Bombay in those days, was called Beautiful Girl. It was about the
#
bar dancers of Bombay. And she took years to write it. And she did, I think, four drafts of it.
#
And I read all of them and they were all completely different. Like in each one,
#
she just started from scratch with different characters at the center of it. And they inhabited
#
the same universe, but they could just have been four books. And I remember just marveling to myself
#
at both. And even the first draft was really good. I remember marveling to myself at the patience and
#
the rigor of this woman who was just managing to throw away something beautiful she has constructed
#
and just start again in a bloody minded way. And recently she wrote this great book called
#
The Good Girls. And I have an episode with her where she talks about that, where she finished
#
the book. And then her agent in London said, it's great, but start again. And she started again
#
and spent another year and a half doing another draft. And that works beautifully. What was it
#
like for you? Because I'm imagining that when you are writing, it must be so tempting either to give
#
it up because of the frustration that is not going quite where I want it to, or to rationalize what
#
you have already done and convince yourself that, hey, this is fine. I just need to tweak. But what
#
you did was each time you started the damn thing again with different characters at the heart of
#
it, right? So just tell me a little bit about that process. What was it all it took on you? What was
#
it like? Well, writing, I so suffused with unbelievable doubt. I mean, you asked me about
#
the doubt I've experienced as a woman. Maybe it's that it pales in comparison to the
#
more tremendous doubt, because it is true. I've noticed that there are pieces that I've written
#
where I finish it and I think, wow, this is a real piece of crap. It's just not reading well.
#
And then an editor will get it and say, it's perfect. I love it. And people will really
#
appreciate it. I've also had a couple of pieces. I have a white whale that's a 12,000 word piece
#
that I just think I love it and no one will publish it. And it's this piece that I just
#
have not managed to get published. And I remember I showed it to kind of an editor that I admire a
#
lot. And she said the horrible words. We met at a coffee shop and she printed it out and put it
#
down on the table and then said, what is this? And I was like, oh man, that's really bad. So,
#
you know, you don't know whether you can trust your own judgment and your own instincts.
#
Start a subtract newsletter, put it up and just start thinking aloud on your subtract.
#
Really? Come on. Now I'm dying to read it. What I did with this book. So I knew that I wanted to,
#
I found that particularly with fiction, but even with non-fiction, a lot of books about South
#
Africa were principally about the white experience or the black experience. And the other characters
#
would be totally marginal. You find in J.M. Katsia's work, which aspects of which I like,
#
but I don't love in part because the black characters are like plot devices. They don't
#
they don't really have any reality. Frankly, they exist to haunt the way characters. Yeah.
#
And you can get books where the reverse is true. And so I wanted to somehow, and I really found
#
it was true that different people that I met and what is, it wasn't always bound by race, but
#
had just a completely different, they were like, it was like they were living in a different
#
country. They saw it through different eyes. They saw when they were driving through,
#
let's say downtown Johannesburg, they would see something. They would see something optimistic
#
or they would see something completely dispiriting and devastating. Just a totally different vision
#
of the same set of facts on the ground. And, but I somehow wanted to get that all,
#
get that into one book. And initially I had the idea of writing. And so my, you know,
#
the thing I wanted to do was to portray the country and then people in the country who had
#
experienced this head-turning, dramatic change of a country that was white run, minority run,
#
run by a minority elite class really, to a black run country. And it was a kind of transition that
#
I certainly think many people either hope for or fear in the United States, maybe even in Europe,
#
there's a fear of cultural loss and change and transformation. But in South Africa,
#
it was almost like this had happened. You just woke up really one day in 1994 and a person who
#
a year earlier had been referred to in the press as a terrorist, Nelson Mandela, was president.
#
You don't get, you didn't get that anywhere else. So just remarkable kind of
#
situation that people were having to live through. And so I wanted to, to tell what it was like for
#
a set of people from different kinds of backgrounds. Very early, I met a man named Christo, who had had
#
both a very dramatic and unique experience of this transition, but also something, it was almost
#
like it had become literal in his life, what was figurative for a lot of people. So he was
#
in the last class or the last cohort or year of white men, white Afrikaner men, to be drafted
#
into the apartheid military, to fight for effectively a country that went out of business
#
like three years later, right? And to fight under terms, as were described to him, is
#
the elites in the country, by which I mean the government, the military, high super-circum,
#
they realized that white rule was going to end much earlier than they transmitted this knowledge
#
to the grunts, the soldiers on the ground. So he was still being told as late as 1992 that his task
#
was to uphold the white state, to save his parents, his sisters, his community from
#
certain destruction, certain annihilation and massacre by black terrorists. And then he found
#
himself, and so, and he had the experience where he basically shot somebody in, under the auspices
#
of a military operation within South Africa. He was patrolling a protest movement within a
#
black neighborhood and somebody was killed. It was a kind of mistake. He shot somebody that
#
he wasn't supposed to shoot, but he would have been protected even a month earlier, but the
#
white government under F.W. de Klerk had suddenly decided, ah, we're going to try to
#
improve our, you know, so that we can join a new black government. As a partner, coalition partner,
#
we're going to try to suddenly clean up our reputation overseas and look like we're
#
taking human rights much more seriously. So he was then put on trial as a civilian for murder,
#
despite having been given a military order. And so he suddenly had the experience where he had
#
thought he was doing something heroic, something pro-social, something to support the state.
#
And suddenly his society around him was saying, no, actually you're a criminal, which was a
#
transition that a lot of white South Africans went through in terms of their identity and
#
having to understand their role in their world and their society. So he very early, I met him
#
in 2010, a year after I moved to South Africa, and I knew I wanted to write about him and
#
tell his story. And the other characters in the book I met much later. I wrote a version of the
#
book in 2015 that I also tore up, as I was saying to you, because I initially took a journalistic
#
approach where I thought, okay, you have like a white right-winger, you're having like a person,
#
younger person who's trying to get really hip with the new society, you know, you have a
#
black freedom fighter, you have a black political leader. I need a farmer because land is a very
#
salient kind of site of dispute in South Africa. So I was looking for kind of all these types of
#
people to write about, and they just weren't kind of coming alive, I think. They were more,
#
and I found myself having to omit parts of their stories and parts of their personalities that were
#
too complicating, and it kind of went against what I was trying to show
#
in terms of their political movement. They had to be avatars of a certain
#
ideology or strain of thought, and it just wasn't really satisfying to me. So I ended up
#
throwing that version of the book away and trying to think about myself less as a writer
#
and less as a journalist in particular, and more as a human being, and thinking, okay,
#
when I'm just with my friends, when I'm out on a date, when I'm talking to my mother,
#
who do I talk about? Not trying to set up a, not with the craft, but who do I,
#
who can't I stop thinking about? Whose story just seems the most paradoxical and, you know,
#
where I just say, God, you know, I met this person and you won't believe what happened to them, and
#
this is what they told me they were thinking, and it's so,
#
it's so human and so revealing, and that was how I ended up with the three main figures in the book,
#
which is Christo, and then a woman who lived in one of the areas that he patrolled, who was born
#
virtually in the same month he was born, in 1970, which means they came of age,
#
they were coming of age as apartheid was falling, which was a generation that really interested me
#
because, you know, you asked me a lot about my childhood, they, all of their perceptions of
#
their world, their parents, the things that they were told they could do and should do when they
#
grew up, the way they understood what they were aiming for, that all just was like blown apart
#
suddenly, basically at age 21, at the cusp of adulthood, and they had to reconsider even their
#
pasts. You know, one thing I found intriguing about South Africa was that people had to re-
#
understand and almost, not only re- contemplate what their future was going to be, but
#
what their past had been, you know, who they had been, whether they had done enough,
#
whether they had behaved in the right way, whether they had been good or bad people,
#
and then, so, and this woman had led protests against apartheid, quite violent ones actually,
#
which she talks openly about, and then really had to grapple with whether the country that she had
#
led into being was a good one, and she had to grapple with that through her daughter,
#
to whom she gave birth effectively as apartheid was falling. So those were the three people that
#
I settled on. How did you manage the process of, you know, getting close enough to them to get
#
their stories out? Like initially the danger is you're on the outside looking in, plus you're
#
American and there is a stereotype of the, you know, the arrogant American looking in from outside,
#
the condescending American. How do you get them to the point where they are comfortable with you,
#
where they are talking about their life, where they're, you know, they remove their filters
#
and, you know, begin to trust you and open up, and, you know, so what was it like? Like what did
#
you have to learn to get there? Were there any techniques? Like one of the things that,
#
you know, struck me through the book were the rich details that you had gathered, like Christo's mom
#
Trudy, you know, when she's young and she's first going out, you speak about how she wanted, quote,
#
a tight white mini dress that ended where her fingertips did when she held her arms straight
#
along her thighs, stop, quote. At another point, her husband, Johannes, you know, when Christo goes
#
off for the camp, you speak about how sad he spelt and he just wept and the only thing that
#
broke the spell was working on cars, he says. Someone bought a gearbox for me and I felt the
#
heaviness lift, stop, quote. At another point, Dipu says that, you know, when foreigners and their
#
money came into South Africa, you know, she bought herself a fridge and a long table, just like the
#
one she remembered seeing in white people's houses. Another great detail where Eliasis talks about,
#
you know, back in the homeland, he bought cattle for $40 each, right? How are these details coming?
#
Like there is tremendous trust, you're really opening up to give these details to a stranger.
#
So how are they coming? And as a matter of craft, are you looking for these details?
#
Are you asking these details? Like when Elias says that I started buying cattle,
#
did you then ask him for how much? Because you know that that will add just that right concrete
#
touch of color. You know, do you ask Dipu, what did you buy? You bought a long table. Why? You know,
#
so take me through sort of that process, because I think that here I'm only seeing the end result of
#
it. But to get here, there is some kind of magic happening between you and these people. So tell me
#
about that. I would ask for a lot of detail. And I would ask for people to paint me a picture,
#
which is always deceptive. And there is a little bit of that in the book,
#
you see people's memories clashing. Because oftentimes, the more vividly we remember something,
#
the less true it is. Because the more vivid a memory is, the more times we've revisited it,
#
and we adjust it a little bit every time. I had this experience, a woman, a friend of Dipuos,
#
this freedom fighter is how they were described. But she, I was having her describe to me,
#
the first time she saw Mandela after his 27 year imprisonment. He was released in 1990,
#
February 1990. And he then flew almost immediately to back to Johannesburg,
#
he'd been in prison in Cape Town and went to a stadium and everyone was waiting to see him.
#
But the apartheid government had censored both his voice and his image. So there had been no,
#
nobody knew what he looked like, because he was going to be like 30 years older than he would
#
have been. And the shock that she experienced, having treasured this image of a young boxer,
#
a young lawyer and a young boxer. And actually, the only idea she had was Time magazine had
#
attempted to put on their cover an age progressed, you know, like those milk curtains with lost
#
people. They had tried to age progress Mandela and it was of course absurd, like it didn't work.
#
And so her sudden shock when he, this old man, which she of course had partially prepared her
#
for, but she couldn't have prepared herself for it enough, kind of came out on stage with this
#
halo of white hair. But then when I was, I was trying to write a little bit about the
#
context of this speech, and I'd realized that she had mixed that speech up with a different one,
#
she'd kind of combined two memories. And because it was almost so important to her, that memory,
#
it had become wrong, actually, but it also had come to represent something important about her
#
own hopes and her own desires. So I would ask people, you know, for sometimes tedious detail,
#
you know, I remember asking Christo's mother for to describe the christening dress. It's like a
#
little dress that you put even a boy baby in, because it gets handed down and they get baptized
#
in that, in that, in this Dutch Christian Afrikaner white South African community. And
#
I said, you know, did it have lace? Did it have lace along the bottom? Can you remember,
#
you know, where are the folds? And people could sometimes find this, but then they would remember
#
and they would enjoy getting into that kind of texture. The other thing, two things that I did,
#
well, three things were, I tried to read, I tried to learn some of people's mother tongues,
#
their native language. So I learned fluent Afrikaans is very easy language as an English
#
speaker. It's probably the language that's most similar to English, Dutch and Afrikaans. So I
#
learned to speak that and that, it really opens a pathway with people, especially as an American,
#
I think people, and especially as a native English speaker, people aren't always expecting you
#
to have made an effort. Trudy, I interviewed in Afrikaans. I didn't speak English with her.
#
I did, I also learned some Sosutu, which was the native language of Dipuo. I did not become as
#
good a speaker as Afrikaans because it's a Bantu language. It's like totally different,
#
wasn't Indo-European. It was harder for me, but I tried. I also would take people, instead of doing
#
like an interview like we're doing, partly because I didn't have to make a nice recording, I would
#
take them to the places that we were going to be talking. I would take them, so if you and I had
#
been talking about our childhood, we would go to the house where I grew up. I would fly,
#
I would fly people. I'd pay for people to fly. I paid for Malaika, Dipuo's daughter, to fly back
#
up to Joburg and take me to the places where she had gone to a restaurant where she had gotten
#
her favorite thing to eat as a young child was a boiled sheep head, which is a huge delicacy.
#
It's this awesome thing that were sold in secret homes because Black people weren't allowed to own
#
businesses as late as the 1980s in South Africa. It was illegal, so you had these unmarked homes
#
that sold sheep head. And once people get into those environments, they get very textural. They
#
see things that they, you know, gosh, like this rug looks the same or, oh, they've changed the
#
blinds. And we used to have, I had a whole detail about the blinds that women used to pull to prevent
#
the police from seeing them meeting late at night while they were having these anti-apartheid
#
meetings. And that came partly from somebody saying, oh God, you know, we went into one of
#
the houses where these meetings are, you've changed the blinds, you know. And they used to be like this
#
and this is exactly how they pulled. And the final thing is I, you know, Dipuo and Malaika
#
in particular, they stayed in my house because Malaika didn't live in Johannesburg. So when she
#
came up to do this process with me, she had to have a place to stay. She was a student. She didn't
#
have disposable income. So I went and stayed with my relatively new boyfriend at the time and she
#
stayed in my cottage that I was renting. And that broke a little bit of a fourth wall, I think that
#
she kind of made fun of my clothes. She was like making coffee and she was eating, you know,
#
using stuff out of my fridge. She saw a little bit of that other side to how I was living.
#
And we then would get into a discussion. There's a brief discussion in the book where she said, you
#
know, as a black woman, I don't feel like I have permission to live in a way that's as bohemian as
#
you do. Like to drink, I had these mustard jars that I had washed and they were my drinking cups
#
and it was kind of like a funky, you know. And she said, you know, I would just look poor
#
if I did that. It would just be a, I'm always striving for the nicest stuff.
#
There's another thing in South Africa where people, white South Africans often look down
#
on poor black South Africans for buying fancy sneakers, buying a fancy car. But she said,
#
you know, it just feels like I have to show that I at least have this possibility.
#
Whereas you can almost have this thing that's a little bit dumpier, but it's kind of like funky.
#
And, you know, she wouldn't have known that if she hadn't been
#
parked in my house. So, and that led to a kind of complex conversation about the way that both of
#
us moved in the world then. Yeah. So I did that kind of stuff. I was always trying to get Kristo
#
to come up to Joburg, but he didn't like to leave his familiar environments, which I talk about
#
that white South Africans still have so much more money on average than black South Africans. But
#
there's a kind of freedom in the world and a freedom in their environment and a freedom to
#
walk around and a sense of ownership over the general space that they don't feel anymore. And
#
it's a sadness. I'm not saying that they're victims due to that, but it was something that I noticed
#
with him very much. You mentioned before the episode started that you heard my episode on
#
Delhi, which of course was with Swapna Little and a great book, The Broken Script. And when I was
#
reading your book, I thought of that at one point and I thought of that because the most interesting
#
and poignant part of that book for me was that there was a generation of people who grew up
#
when the official language of the country was Persian. So they thought everything is in Persian.
#
They learned Persian. That was aspirational. The kids studied Persian and this was the world.
#
And suddenly in a couple of decades, Persian had vanished and it was English and they,
#
you know, mentally they prepared for one world, but they were in a completely different world.
#
And it's so discombobulating. And what do you describe in South Africa is a little bit like
#
that, that, you know, a year ago he's a terrorist and now he's a president and everything has
#
changed and all your equations are different. And how do you even cope? And I was also struck
#
with sort of your, you know, drawing the analogy that, you know, this is happening everywhere in
#
the world. It's happening in America, except that here it happens really fast. It just happens
#
within 30 years. You know, America still, it's playing out from the civil war. It's a couple of
#
centuries, but South Africa, everything happens in 30 years in a really sort of fast kind of pace.
#
And do you think, and, you know, we'll talk in detail about sort of the, how the black people
#
responded to it, how white people responded to it, but it almost seems that it's just this weird
#
sense of displacement to where nobody is really able to adjust to this, to cope with this.
#
Like you said, it's not just about reconstructing what you want from the future,
#
but also perhaps reshaping your memories, recontextualizing everything.
#
What did, you know, studying that period really teach you in general, both about human nature
#
and how societies deal with change? Like does that fast pace itself lead to different outcomes
#
than would otherwise have if the process plays out over 150 years? Because a lot of it is
#
like shock treatment. It's a shock to the system. I think just in terms of
#
growing up in one world and being thrust into another, we're very aware with money
#
that when people lose an investment, it's shattering. You know, I think with Bernie
#
Madoff, when a whole bunch of people were basically told they thought that they had been
#
growing this investment and it was actually totally worthless and it never existed.
#
It was just a world shattering nightmare. But people also make investments in their
#
identities. They make investments in the persona that they're going to be. They make
#
almost investments in their morality, by the way that they treat others over time,
#
the choices that they make. Am I a vegetarian? Am I going to have an arranged marriage or love
#
marriage or whatever? And then sometimes those investments, it feels like increasingly as things,
#
you know, history seems to move faster and faster, those investments suddenly become worthless.
#
They become unvalued by the rest of the world. It's not really a valuable thing to have done
#
anymore. It's not a valuable persona. It's not honorable to have fought in this military campaign.
#
It's not honorable to have backed this political movement. And I don't know that we have as much
#
compassion for people who have a loss of that kind of investment, but it can be equally
#
shattering. I think, you know, one thing that struck me about South Africa was it had a kind of
#
the particular era that it went through in the 1970s, 1980s, the fight against apartheid,
#
the effort to preserve it by the government and some, you know, the white minority. And
#
that was so, it had such a plot. It was so consuming. It had a sort of narrative. And I
#
think that's true about the Civil War. I don't know what era in Indian history might be equivalent
#
to that, but it had a kind of narrative thrust. And to be ejected out of that into an era in which
#
the main story has kind of ended, but you also feel like you're still kind of in it. But
#
now it's not even fully clear what the country's central problem is. It has multiple ones at once.
#
If you solve a problem for one community, you're creating one for another. This is very stark in
#
South Africa. One of South Africa's current issues is that some people act as if South Africa is such
#
a disappointment and it would be so easy to kind of fix it. But you have an economy there, which
#
really, if you redistribute enough wealth, if you kind of make it fair enough for enough poor people,
#
there's no way that the wealthier people will not have a change to their lives that they don't
#
want. They want for the country to stay, to become entirely fair for all the kind of...
#
They really do want that. They think they want that for all people. And yet for them to be able to
#
also wake up and see the world as they remember it and have the opportunities for their kids that
#
they knew they could have. And you cannot square all those circles at once. And it's very difficult
#
to know how to fix that, especially if you don't have a kind of utterly clear moral
#
issue that is being pursued, that's kind of dominating. People will ask me sometimes still,
#
so how did it all turn out? How does the story end in South Africa? And I'll say,
#
well, it doesn't end because it's not a story. It's a country. It's not actually a limited series.
#
It's not an eight part thing like the TV show succession or a movie that has a conclusion.
#
It's just a place that people have to keep living in somehow that will continue to have
#
whatever events it will continue to have. And yet people there, I think, feel very
#
disoriented because they don't know what story they're in. A lot of people almost find comfort.
#
I found this particularly true in the white community, but also in the Black South African
#
one. But paradoxically, they find it quite comforting in a way to feel that Black South
#
Africans are going to someday kill them, like it was always said, someday drive them out of the
#
country, someday take revenge. It almost feels like that is what should happen based on our
#
understanding of biblical stories and justice, and they're waiting for this. And it's very
#
disorienting that it's not arriving. It's very disturbing to be forgiven. You don't know what to
#
do. It's somehow more mentally easy to prepare for, you know, the ending. It hasn't arrived yet,
#
but it will, right? I sometimes think there is this, and this is true across all societies,
#
that there is a feedback loop between a formal structure of society in this state and culture
#
itself, and individual psychology, in the sense that you might have a particular structure like
#
apartheid, but that then plays into culture. It plays into the way people think about themselves.
#
And even if you take that formal structure away, what do you do about the rest of it? What do you
#
do about the psychological scaffolding which both Black people and white people have built
#
and which are sort of ingrained in them? Like, you know, you quote Steve Biko talking about,
#
you know, the psychological feeling of inferiority that, you know, Black people felt. And there are
#
many moving examples of this, like about a family where a certain strain of the family is whiter
#
than the others, because at some point, you know, one of their ancestors was raped by a white man.
#
And you say about how no one speaks of this, but there is almost some sort of an unstated,
#
you know, pride in the thing that there is some white blood there, right? And it's so complex and
#
disturbing. At another place, you know, there is an internal racism where when Dipua is born,
#
you speak about how her father isn't acknowledging her because she is blacker than the rest of them,
#
you know, blacker than the Black as it were. And you also speak of how their enemies can be their
#
role models in the sense, you know, the white policeman is an enemy, but they also, in a sense,
#
admire the machismo, the uniform, the rituals and all of that, that while they might have
#
contempt for traitors within their own side, they actually admire the Black people who work
#
for the South African establishment. And many of the police carrying out apartheid were actually
#
Black. So it's this complex sort of relationship. And I see this even in India, like even after
#
colonialism ended and the British have left, there was still the sense that English was looked upon
#
as a, you know, a marker of sophistication and where you stood in society, you know, a man in
#
a suit would be more respected than a man in perhaps more ethnic dress, unless you are at
#
some funky rich man's wedding. So, you know, and it's a psychological baggage which really
#
intrigues me because then if you just look at a country and say that, oh, we have solved the
#
geopolitical problem, there's no more apartheid, we've got a Black president, everything's going
#
to be fine. But it's not like that. It's so deep. And, you know, so how did you find Dipua and
#
Malaika and all the other characters you've mentioned? And it's an ongoing struggle. So
#
I'm not saying there's a denouement to it. Like you said, the season doesn't end. This is life.
#
It goes on. How hard was that to get past? Like, is it something that requires generational change
#
that maybe Malaika's kids will be fine? Well, I'll ask you. I mean, so, you know, India's
#
further out from British rule. Do you still experience ripples? I'll tell two quick stories
#
and, you know, I don't know if they have analogues, but I have a friend in South Africa who is a kind
#
of mid to high level government employee, Black South African. And I was telling him about this
#
experience that I'd had where I had used a translator who was a neighbor of mine.
#
And I loved her and she did fantastic work. And then she asked me to borrow money,
#
quite a lot of money, like a thousand dollars. And then there became this whole thing where
#
slowly over the course of months, I realized that she never had any intent to pay me back. And
#
it turned into this thing. And then I had to sue her like an American. And it was, you know,
#
basically I'd effectively been conned. And he said, you know, I have to tell you, it's just
#
very African what they did. They saw, you know, in this sense of kind of buttering you up, but
#
ultimately seeing you as a mark and our Black communities think this way. And I'm sorry this
#
happened to you. But this is just so quintessentially, you know, it doesn't surprise
#
me, I'm afraid. And this is a type of kind of behavior that's taught in Black communities.
#
And it's a problem we have. And I then said to him, you know, this woman was white.
#
And he said, I don't believe it because it's Black people who steal. And I said, well, I don't know
#
what to tell you, it's a white woman. And he was just so kind of mind blown as an
#
intelligent, intellectual leader, Black leader, you know, who had worked to
#
upend the white political, you know, the minority white system, who still had such a deep assumption
#
that thieves are Black, without even having a totally negative valence around it. I mean,
#
if you have no opportunity to have a legal business, you're going to have a lot of people who
#
are extraordinary entrepreneurs and criminal, quote unquote, you know, enterprises. But
#
it was just such a deep assumption for him that the face of a criminal would be a Black one,
#
as a Black man, right? And that, the political end to white minority rule did nothing,
#
really, nothing to undo that. It's slowly being undone over time. But, you know, I guess the
#
question is, could we do anything more intentionally to undo that? It also, you know, you mentioned the
#
admiration of white power figures under apartheid. There was a guy that I wrote about, who I knew,
#
who grew up in a rural area. Something that is not talked about a lot in South Africa is that
#
the majority of policemen under white rule were Black. This is something that I thought about a
#
little bit when I watched that movie RRR. It was a lot of Rs. I can't remember how many Rs. Yeah,
#
it was three Rs. Okay. And there is this figure who's kind of Indian, initially kind of a stooge
#
for the Colonials, right? But you absolutely had those figures under apartheid. And he
#
talked about the victimization of his father by this Black policeman, that this Black policeman
#
just, well, the Black policeman had gotten orders, but he had to arrest his father in
#
quite a brutal way. And he said, you know, even after that, forever, for years, for decades,
#
we always felt blessed as a family when we were invited to like a barbecue or a meal at that
#
policeman's house, because the fact of his proximity to power, power is power,
#
power, just made him seem higher than us. You know, and in a way, in an abstract way,
#
we were fighting against the white police, quote unquote. Absolutely. We're sort of anti-apartheid
#
family. But when it was personalized, when we saw that guy in the uniform and we thought,
#
oh, you know, he's getting paid a lot and he has, you know, dinner with white bros and stuff like,
#
we found that impressive and remarkable. He's gotten, he must have really impressed them.
#
You know, so it was that kind of complexity that I found that still really lingers.
#
People talk a lot about how the current South African government is corrupt, which it
#
is, has a bad problem with that. What is less talked about is the way that that is a mimicry
#
of the apartheid government, which was very corrupt. That corruption was almost less
#
obvious because white people, well, in the eighties, I think the white percentage of the white
#
population was 15% around that. So if you were just enriching your cronies, it kind of looked
#
like you were enriching your community in more of a broader way. Now, if you're enriching 10% of the
#
population, it's much more obvious that you're just enriching the, you know, the communities
#
that you're from. It appears more corrupt, but it really was the same behavior. And Black South
#
African leaders really, they want to live up to the image of power and the image of power.
#
Very often in the post-apartheid era, which was something that many Black South Africans didn't
#
expect, the police chief is very brutal and will okay and kind of sign off on brutalities,
#
that people will then say, how is it possible that a Black police chief is committing the
#
same kind of brutalities against our people that the white police chief did? Well, it's because
#
he inherited a vision of what it looks like to exercise power.
#
I think it's actually, I'll be cynical and say that the current government being corrupt
#
is not as much a mimicry of the previous government as in the nature of governments,
#
because power always corrupts. You know, and there's an analog of what you just described
#
in India itself, where what we essentially did in 1947 is we took over the colonial state apparatus
#
of the British and we replaced white-skinned rulers with brown-skinned rulers. And that didn't
#
change. It remained oppressive and we remained subjects and not citizens. And it's a fight that
#
still needs to be fought. To answer your question, I'll say, you know, what Joan Robinson once said
#
of India, whatever you say of India, the opposite is true. And that's very much the case in the
#
sense that while I'm speaking in English now, I own it. This is an Indian language, you know,
#
we've kind of adopted it completely. And so for a certain class of people, the baggage isn't there.
#
For a different class of people, the baggage is very much there. You know, if you have white
#
skin, you're both likely to be treated much better when you come to India and you're also
#
more likely to be cheated. You know, so both of those kind of, you know, hold true. And it's just
#
a long process that takes decades and decades. And we've seen it here. We've seen it in India.
#
I'm sure that's the case in America as well, that these things don't overnight change. I was struck
#
by, you know, something that at one point Dipo says in your book, I think Dipo and Malaika are
#
talking about these white people who try to fit in and they'll wear dreadlocks and they'll do all
#
of these things. And at one point, you know, Dipo says, there is no white person in the world,
#
not a single one who will ever legitimately be a part of us, stop quote. And that really made me
#
stop and think that I can imagine that in that particular generation for people who've lived
#
through apartheid that you can say something like that, because your lived experiences as black
#
people and white people are so incredibly different. And of course, you know, you can
#
never truly be off the other side. But that's sort of essentializing. Like, do you think there's
#
something to that? Like, how did that make you feel when you heard that? Because it just filled me
#
with despair, because a part of me is saying that, hey, no, we're all human beings, we're the same,
#
like, screw it. And the other part is saying that you idealistic fool in the real world,
#
these differences exist and how do you even get past them?
#
Hmm. It didn't make me feel bad, because one interesting dynamic, a thing that's hard. So,
#
you know, the United States has the Peace Corps, where they send young Americans to all
#
different kinds of countries to do and build schools and blah, blah, blah. And an interesting
#
thing that used to be true, I don't know if it still is, but around 2011, I had a friend,
#
or even a bit later, I had a friend who was in the Peace Corps, the American Peace Corps in South
#
Africa. And he was saying that statistically, they had realized that their highest attrition rate,
#
in other words, the largest number of people who dropped out and went home and just couldn't handle
#
it, were people who were sent to South Africa. And they, at that time, had a cohort in Niger,
#
which they have since pulled due to political instability. But, you know, they had people in
#
countries that were much less, like you can't find a shopping mall, you can't drink the water,
#
it's like harder physically, and you would think it would be more stressful. And I said,
#
what is that about? Like, why is South Africa? Because in many ways, South Africa is the most
#
developed country in Africa. Again, almost everywhere you can go to a shopping mall,
#
which is sort of, you'll hear American music and you'll find like, you know, a Cinnabon or something.
#
And he said, you know, I think it's because, this was his view,
#
as soon as you come here, you get incorporated into the drama. Like, you are a white person.
#
Or Black South Africans had a lot of difficulty in South Africa, because they would suddenly become
#
like Black, like a Black South African. And they would try to say, no, I don't have this history,
#
I'm a foreigner. But they would become incorporated. I had an experience, I lived for a period of time
#
in a rural area, well, in a town called Bloemfontein. And I used to walk to the university
#
where I was taking a class, I was trying to learn Afrikaans, so I was taking an Afrikaans class.
#
And it was like an hour walk. And more than once, a car would pull up, and with a white family in it,
#
and they would say, Ty, do you need help? Has your car broken down? And I would say, no, no,
#
just walking. And they would hear my accent, and to have a brief chat, and I'd say, you know,
#
I'm American here, but I'm taking a class at the university, and I'm taking, I'm walking.
#
And they would say, oh, you know, but we don't walk, as in white people. And I would say,
#
there's no we, I'm not white South African, I'm an American. And they would say, no, no, no, no,
#
there is a we, you're a we now. And so that's an odd thing about report, very challenging thing
#
about being a reporter there. In a sense, on the other hand, you get incorporated more quickly,
#
you know, you aren't necessarily Americanized so much. So I wasn't really offended. There was an
#
experience that my partner had, my partner is white South African, he was kind of an
#
anti apartheid activist, he was a sort of good white, I don't know, like he was, he was, you know,
#
young photographer who was photographing some of the movement and apartheid. And he now runs
#
a photographic studio. And he said, so that there used to be this handshake, a different
#
handshake that black South Africans used with each other. And then he started trying to use it
#
to be like, we're cool, you know. And then he he said, sadly, I think now there's a different
#
handshake. Like, that every time I try to become a part of this community, they change the secret
#
handshake. Yeah. And I said, you know, are you sure? And I realized that he might never know
#
that part of that was a sense in himself, that he could never join a fear that he
#
didn't actually know these people that, you know, guilt that he had never learned a black language,
#
a, you know, I said, Are you really sure that they have a new secret handshake? Maybe they don't,
#
you know, and, and I, but then he said, Well, the nature of it is, I, I probably wouldn't ever know,
#
you know, I think generationally in South Africa, that is changing, I really think it is, I see now,
#
many more interracial relationships, friendship groups at restaurants than I ever saw even 15
#
years ago when I was there. So when I first arrived here. But do you know the secret handshake?
#
I don't know. How would I know? I would never know. I was also struck by some of the different
#
responses from white people, including white liberals. Now, one interesting kind of response
#
was going overboard, the extreme posturing, I discovered this lovely term, get creep.
#
Am I pronouncing it right? Hot crime. Hot crime. Oh, okay. It's a yes. I was just going with the,
#
I'm terrible at pronunciation. Hot crime. Yeah, I'm terrible with the, which basically means
#
to crawl up someone's asshole. And this is something that Christo used for a guy called
#
Francois who was just posturing constantly. And, you know, you've given various examples
#
of this, like, you know, this, how Malaika once wrote an essay lambasting a South African lit fest
#
and saying, oh, you know, it's, it's racially prejudiced and so on. And then the organizer
#
wrote to her and she goes there and they're just happy to take a beating because they are
#
self congratulating that look, we are so liberal and we can hear all this about ourselves and all
#
of that, which was one very interesting sort of response from the white community. And then you
#
also have another kind of response where people who were earlier anti-apartheid people who were
#
progressives and liberal white people suddenly turning their back and saying, you know, in
#
various different ways and not being able to deal with it now that blacks are finally running the
#
country. And part of it, of course, as you said, was that some of them thought that we'll be
#
partners in this. And they realize they've been cut off completely. Like Thabo Mbeki stopped
#
returning one guy's calls when, when he came to power. And again, forgive me listeners for
#
my pronunciations. I can't even pronounce the English words properly. So I must be forgiven
#
for this. So give me a sense of what's happening there, because this is not the typical kind of
#
mental breakdown. You would expect that the people who are in power have lost power and therefore
#
they are, you know, it's not that it's even people who were anti-apartheid are kind of
#
losing it in different ways. You speak of one guy, Chris Lowe actually committing suicide,
#
but making it look like a murder is sort of, I mean, it's just so deeply complicated, you know,
#
so what was your way of dealing with that? Because as a white person yourself at one level,
#
you would have like, were you ever worried that I should not seem too sympathetic to these guys?
#
You know, and, and how do you, you know, there's a lot of posturing going on, but how do you
#
distinguish the posturing from the actual grief that people feel and the actual guilt that people
#
feel? So yeah, there was a paradox that I encountered very early on in South Africa,
#
which was that some of the happiest white South Africans who now constitute about 10% of the
#
population that I met were the most pessimistic and racist, which is not what I expected because
#
I thought if you don't think black South Africans are fit to run the country, you would be very
#
horrified that they now do and, you know, very alarmed at the, at the diminution of white influence
#
on politics and affirmative action and all that stuff. And yet they were some of the people who
#
were the most determined to stay in South Africa for their kids to stay. They seemed kind of merry.
#
And then I realized one psychological kind of upside for them was whenever anything bad happened,
#
it was like that sort of met their expectations. They didn't have, they never had a hope that
#
things would go super well. They never felt let down. They were just, okay, well, yes, of course,
#
you know, there was the third president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. It was a very corrupt figure
#
who ultimately got ejected by really the elites in his party and the electorate and a popular
#
movement in a great, you know, good moment for the country. But he said, for instance, that he
#
thought he had protected himself from HIV when he slept with a friend's daughter extramaritally by
#
taking a shower afterward. I mean, this stuff. And people, you know, if you'd hoped for a very
#
sophisticated cosmopolitan multiracial, you know, that was very depressing. If you thought this
#
place is going to turn into a banana republic, you were like, whatever. That's what I anticipated.
#
No, you know, I'm not. Don't feel disappointed. There was another phenomenon whereby, yes,
#
a number of very prominent white liberal thinkers who were, who really went out on a limb and
#
suffered under apartheid for being iconoclastic, for believing in Black liberation, for believing
#
in democracy. You know, they were announced by their families. They had to become exiles
#
from the country. They, you know, were pursued by the secret police. They really had put a
#
lot on the line. I noticed when I got to the country that some of them had turned in a very
#
right-wing direction, which one poet in particular wrote a prominent essay saying basically that we
#
have to revive apartheid, saying that the Cape area, Cape Town, is going to maybe have to become
#
a breakaway state dominated again by white people. And this shocked me because I thought
#
you put so much on the line. You know, you were such an anti-apartheid. This was a poet who spent
#
three years in jail, at least three years, six years, I forget, but he was jailed by the white
#
regime for assisting the anti-apartheid movement. How could he go back on it like that? And
#
one thing I thought had happened after I spent a lot of time with these people and really
#
tried to understand what was going on for them was part of the experience that had made it
#
bearable to be, you know, it's a terrible thing to be disowned, you know, to have all this,
#
to be going against the popular wisdom. It's very difficult to be a bad, yeah,
#
they were called Ferayers in Afrikaans means traders, traders to your race.
#
Really contempt was heaped on them. One of the things that made that really bearable was to feel
#
that you were at the vanguard, that you were, and that, you know, when the day came, eventually,
#
when there was freedom, when there was democracy, you were going to be vindicated. In a sense,
#
you were going to be able to take part and lead finally and not be in the shadowy margins and on
#
the run and in hiding and, you know, that you were going to be able to. And so there was this
#
figure that you mentioned, a political, a kind of politician who was just condemned by the white
#
elites under apartheid, who was a very, who developed a very close partnership with
#
Thabo Mbeki, who was the second president of the country and a huge figure in the transition.
#
And he later told a very close friend of his that he had understood, he had felt those,
#
he was best friends with Thabo Mbeki. And he and Thabo Mbeki, they were going to be like bros,
#
you know, in a bro comedy after the, after the final, you know, end of this shitty
#
white regime. And they were going to figure it out together. And he said, after
#
black liberation, he sent all these policy papers to Thabo Mbeki, expecting Thabo Mbeki
#
to be on the phone with him. Let's figure it out together. Help me decide what to do. And
#
Thabo Mbeki just didn't have any use for him anymore. It was a black world now. You know,
#
there were so many actually qualified black people, overqualified to enter these positions that he,
#
he was forgotten. He was marginalized. He, there was no space for him on the op-ed pages anymore.
#
And he drank himself to death, basically. He, there are multiple figures in my book who
#
commit suicide because they are,
#
they did not anticipate that what they had fought for would lead to their own personal
#
marginalization. And that to me was just so illuminating because I see that in the U.S.
#
I don't think it's the only thing sending figures like Andrew Sullivan or
#
Barry Weiss or, you know, some of these sort of people who had been left-wing are now turning
#
to the right. But I think there's an element of, they just didn't see, they didn't anticipate,
#
they didn't think forward to the fact that they would not, people wouldn't be as interested in
#
their point of view. They wouldn't be leaders anymore once the world that they had tried to birth
#
was born. Sullivan was always conservative, no? He didn't, I think, in the early 90s.
#
That's not a good example.
#
Famous essay or conservative case for gay marriage.
#
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, he's very sort of touchy and has a kind of bitter tone,
#
but maybe he just always had that. But it's like the intellectual dark web kind of
#
Jordan Peterson type figure. I guess you can argue, were these people ever liberals? But
#
they've had a very public renunciation of basically saying, oh my God, you know,
#
this thing that I thought would be good is actually not good. This kind of more diverse
#
reality. And I think they are seeing effects that they didn't anticipate that are real and
#
really political. But I think it's partly also about their positionality.
#
I mean, the intellectual dark web I always felt was a weird grouping. By the way, the guy who
#
coined that name, Eric Weinstein, has been on my show once. But I always found it a weird grouping
#
because they weren't all for the same thing. They were just against the same thing, which was
#
quote unquote wokeness. But there was no commonality in terms of what they're for. They were all over
#
the place. But coming back to South Africa, I love this story where in your book you speak of
#
the Dakar safaris, which is where, you know, the white government of the clerk was, you know,
#
negotiating with Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. And you have this great story of how at one of those
#
meetings Mbeki is pouring scotch for these guys. And he's saying, here we are, the terrorists. And
#
for all you know, fucking communists too. And then everybody laughs. And the thing is,
#
they weren't terrorists. They weren't communists. They were just people who succumbed to power.
#
When you get power, you behave in certain ways. And that's, you know, tragically sort of the
#
nature of the beast. And the other thing that is disillusioning, and it goes back to
#
what we were talking about at the start of our conversation, where I was lamenting that too many
#
people, you think they care about principles, but they're tribal. And here I'm not talking
#
about tribalism, but that principles point comes up because you realize that when the guy who was
#
supporting the ANC and going against, you know, his fellow white people, you would imagine that
#
he was doing it because he was principled. And then once change happened, he could, you know,
#
he was happy, but he wasn't happy. There was some other deeper reason for because of which
#
he was doing it. And, you know, so they were saying this is what they wanted the end of apartheid,
#
but there was something more. Maybe they wanted to be celebrated. Maybe they wanted to be lionized.
#
Maybe they just wanted a cause behind which they could rally to prove their self-worth to themselves.
#
And I mean, the human mind is so weird. Sometimes, occasionally people have said
#
that I have too psychological an interpretation of politics that-
#
But how can you not? I think it's underrated as political motivation, but
#
I do think there's an upside to a lack of principles. And I'll give an example here,
#
so, you know, there was an extent to which the anti-apartheid, the imposition of apartheid
#
and its perpetuation and then the anti-apartheid struggle became a Cold War proxy conflict.
#
And that was by necessity. You know, the African National Congress, which was the
#
main freedom fighting movement, they did seek help from Moscow. They needed help. They needed
#
funding. They needed something because the state was quite powerful in South Africa. And
#
at a certain point, the white regime was at great pains to keep itself going because all the other
#
colonial regimes in Africa had collapsed and they were really struggling to have some justification
#
for maintaining minority rule. And they sought that justification and found it in a temporary
#
way with by saying that the Black liberation movement was really communist and that they were,
#
and they did get a lot of help from the United States kind of behind the scenes
#
as a kind of anti-communist. And so there was a big, but, you know, there were also a lot of Black
#
South African leaders that really found something very attractive in communism, in Marxism. They
#
felt they were real Marxists. And so that was kind of how Black and white South Africans saw each
#
other in the seventies, in the early eighties as anti-communists and communists. And then
#
capital, big corporations played a huge role in tearing apartheid down. And I mean white run
#
corporations because they started to see these sanctions and even being such a closed economy
#
and not being able to really sell to Black South Africans because Black South Africans weren't
#
allowed to progress economically. They couldn't become markets. They couldn't become middle-class
#
consumers for these companies. It just wasn't a healthy economy. So they ran these things called
#
the Dakar safaris where they set up these meetings in Senegal between Black exiles,
#
South African political Black political leaders who they had thought were like flaming Marxists
#
and these kind of capital, you know, these big corporate bankers and stuff. And they talked
#
about just having scotch together in the hotel bar and suddenly seeing we're all kind of human
#
beings. But the other thing that happened was once Black South Africans entered power,
#
they changed. Their ideology changed. Their practical sense of what they needed to do to
#
not kind of have the country collapse economically suddenly. They changed. Their sense of what they
#
were stewarding changed. And I think about this all the time with the current with,
#
with I've written some and I've reported some like 10 years ago, but from Israel.
#
And I find often in that conflict, one element of a very multifaceted and terribly difficult
#
conflict is I think the sense that Israelis have that if Palestinians got a functioning state,
#
got a real state, they would still have the exact same mentality, the exact same goals,
#
the exact same kind of ferocious rhetoric, the exact same ideology, just like a lot more funds
#
and weaponry. So it would be a lot worse, you know, for Israel. There's not an understanding that
#
once people achieve a certain political goal, that itself changes them.
#
They, you know, there's a character in my book who talked very frankly about wanting to kill
#
any white. She didn't have the opportunity to see white South Africans growing up because
#
she was stuck in this segregated kind of reserve where white South Africans didn't go and she
#
couldn't really get out easily. But she had the thought if I saw a white South African,
#
I would kill them. You heard a lot of that rhetoric. And so there was some justification for
#
the fear that families like Christo's family, an ordinary family, a farming family had that if
#
Black South Africans got power, they'll just import that attitude into the structure of power
#
and then they'll own the planes and the tanks and there'll be a massacre. But in fact, there was
#
such a swift change once they achieved that goal of gaining freedom. They weren't the same people
#
and that, you know, we don't apply that idea to this other conflict at all.
#
You know, Dylan, I think it was Dylan who once said if you ain't got nothing,
#
you got nothing to lose. So the moment, you know, you give a state to the Palestinians,
#
the moment Black South Africans come to power, the incentives change, everything changes.
#
They want to behave differently. So yeah, that kind of makes complete sense.
#
Another aspect that I want to talk about and that struck me at various points while
#
reading the book is about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about each other.
#
Like you write in your book about how 1976 was seminal in the sense that the white government
#
allowed television and television gave a window to the Black population of how the white saw
#
themselves. Like so far they were just looking at whites in a very superficial way, you know,
#
from a distance. But you could now see the stories that white people tell themselves and
#
that made a difference and might have increased their resistance and anger and whatever.
#
And when you fast forward from there, I think of this anecdote you gave from the current time
#
where one of your white liberal friends had his car stolen and he said, they stole my car. And
#
you were like, who is they? And he is like, they stole my car. And you're like, you know,
#
when does them end? I think you ask. And how are those stories changing? Like I can imagine
#
what a story is in 1980, where it is adversarial on both sides and there is fear on both sides.
#
How did that change? Because I guess, you know, 94 happened so suddenly that there must be a moment
#
of kind of grappling and figure out what's happening. But we are now in 2024. So what's
#
the story now? Or is it just too complex? I mean, is my question ridiculously simplistic? Because
#
across generations, across classes, there will be many different stories. Like what do you see?
#
I think those stories are very sticky. I mean, that was a thing that I was just so struck by.
#
And they're sticky because we often think about the stories in terms of stories that people tell
#
about the other. But the story that you tell about the other also incorporates you in contrast to
#
them. So you are also in the story. So to change your story about the other, you might have to
#
change your story about yourself. That's the harder thing, I think. So for instance, you know,
#
in Washington, if you don't have a story about how Black citizens, you know, Black communities
#
basically just are broken due to their own lack of ability not to be broken and, you know,
#
perpetuate single father family, single parent mother families and glorification of violence
#
and prison. And if you start to see them more as, you know, some of these communities really can't
#
advance, then you have to ask yourself, what is preventing them from advancing? Is it possible it's
#
you, right? And the way that you are living and your own fear and your own unwillingness to shop
#
in those neighborhoods. And that is much harder than just in a vacuum changing your story about
#
the other. And so I think, you know, the more that white South Africans
#
change their story, so the story that allowed apartheid to go on for so much longer than other
#
colonial regimes, among other, you know, unique factors to South Africa was that Black South
#
Africans didn't, couldn't run a country, that the country was going to fall apart.
#
South Africa has in fact not fallen apart. Its crime rate is half of what it was in 1992.
#
Somebody, a criminologist, white South African criminologist once said,
#
in any other context, this would be just a cause for enormous celebration that we've reduced crime
#
so much. And yet the story is that South African crime has risen in that it's terribly criminal and
#
it's, you know, overrun by gangs. And, you know, why does this story persist? And the problem is
#
that if you, at least with the current generation, remember apartheid only ended in 1994, we were
#
alive. We were sentient. I was still a child, but even people my age would have gone to segregated
#
schools and, you know, not stood up in the middle of school like that famous picture,
#
you know, I resist, like, you know, we were complicit in some ways or they, you know, if you
#
were our age. And the more you tell, you tell yourself, no, this country is actually given
#
its history and given all the kind of impossibility, you know, economically that it's trying to kind of
#
put square pegs in round holes. It's functioning. It's survived. It's being led
#
in some ways competently. The more you have to revise your story about yourself and say,
#
wow, we were just totally wrong that these people, you know, I think more liberal
#
white South Africans, you know, there were racist South Africans who just said
#
black people are inferior. They have lesser brains. Their skulls are smaller, whatever it is,
#
you know, terrible stuff. They'll never. But then there was a thing of like,
#
my father told me that he remembered being part of the Reagan administration and thinking that
#
apartheid was a crime, you know, real human, you know, against human rights and a terrible tragedy,
#
but that the, the black community was not yet mature enough to have political power. They
#
weren't, you know, that was another line that you could have. And if you just, if you say,
#
wow, that story was wrong, then you're like, we were just, we were just oppressing these people
#
for absolutely no reason. Absolutely. You know, it was just totally criminal what was going on.
#
And I think that's part of the reason that some of these stories about,
#
in particular, crime and not the crime is a huge problem in South Africa, but it is less of a
#
problem than it was. And there's this tremendous persistence of a story that it must be worse now
#
that blacks, black people are in power. It almost can't, it's like, it can't,
#
I mean, even the HIV epidemic was, you know, painted in that light that look what happened.
#
Yeah. And that was such a kind of accident of history. Like that was just, you know,
#
virus emerged. It had to happen. Like, I mean, there's no causation at all, but
#
none at all. But no, it was absolutely presented as, you know, degenerate. Yeah.
#
And I do find that in personal, you know, I sometimes feel when people are talking about
#
the country abstractly, even South Africans within the country, when they're talking about
#
the trajectory of their country, these stories are so still so persistent in their personal relations.
#
They live outside of the story. So that for me is interesting. It's helpful.
#
It's somehow hard to write about, but it's, you know, you will find, for instance, Christo
#
is the main white character in my book. And if you were to ask him about the country and you
#
were to ask him about black South Africans writ large, he would certainly say he's more on the
#
conservative side and becoming more conservative. I think politically he would say it's been a mess.
#
It's, you know, been a disappointment. This government is corrupt. It's
#
crime. And, you know, he would probably say, I don't want to put words in his mouth right now
#
because I finished my book three years ago. But he had, at a certain point, he acquired a
#
black law partner. And this is an interesting case because South Africa has much more affirmative
#
action than the United States. He acquired that partner in order to get contracts
#
with the government. So it is not true. Sometimes people will say, oh, you have to give your business
#
over to black people. There's a whole like way that South Africa exists in the white
#
conservative American mind that isn't what the country really is. So it's not true
#
that you have to give up your business. If you want to contract with the government,
#
a certain type of contract with the government, you do need to show that you have a level of
#
black ownership. You're free to pursue non-government contracts, but he wanted those. So he got this
#
black law partner who initially, I think he put in, he would tell you if you know him and he's
#
being honest, you know, just as a kind of token dude. The guy was a real lawyer. And he has
#
developed a real partnership with that man and a real, you know, a real serious respect for him.
#
And yeah, a partnership of equals now with that man. And his children now see him working alongside
#
as an equal, a black man, which is something he never would have seen. I mean, his father was
#
a farmer who was not racist for his time, but the only black people who would have been around him
#
would have been his servants, really his employees, you know, but so much lesser. So,
#
you know, he has these relationships that now exist outside of that story,
#
which I find interesting. You see that all over that are starting to kind of escape the
#
confines of the storyline. Even if he has a black partner now, you did mention that he might be
#
getting more conservative with age. And I have a general question that in your experience,
#
do people become more conservative with age? And if you've observed that, I wonder why? Is it that
#
everyone has a reflexive bigotry, which as you grow older, it gets more and more tiring,
#
or perhaps unnecessary to hide? I think there's maybe I don't know, I wouldn't say that.
#
I mean, I actually was thinking aloud. I said it too harshly.
#
No, I mean, I think you start to feel left behind by changes, you start to feel disoriented by them,
#
you start to feel, you know, I'm in a generation, maybe just at the tail end, where we still were
#
like aspiring to marriage, and like monogamous partnerships, and a certain type of wedding,
#
and a certain kind of in America. And now the big thing is like polyamory and
#
totally that's like, considered more the kind of liberated and kind of advanced.
#
And so now you have to ask yourself, am I a lame wad? Like, was I just like pursuing this
#
totally worthless, I have a friend who's 10 years younger, who's like has this very strident to me,
#
kind of rhetoric about how basically, a certain vision of like a certain type of marital
#
relationship was just like a sham, foisted on people by capitalism. And like, it's one thing
#
to kind of discuss that in the abstract, but then you have to ask yourself, was I a sucker?
#
Was I just like suckered by Hallmark into like living my whole life in a certain manner?
#
Was I, could I just not see through? And that's a difficult thing with generational change,
#
because it makes older people, you know, its critiques can make kind of, can render older people
#
like sheep and losers who like couldn't see how they were being exploited and kind of,
#
and even if the rhetoric is, and she will say to me, no, it's not your fault, like,
#
you know, it was just like what you were being sold, but you still don't want to think that you
#
were dumb enough to kind of drink some Kool-Aid or like, you know, get, you know, so.
#
So it's either I'm stupid or these kids are evil. These are your options.
#
I think that kind of can become the option, right? I don't know. And
#
that's a difficult position to be in. Again, it's something that interests me in particular is
#
how well we're able to, what we do when we're faced with the challenge of revising
#
our past and reconsidering even small kind of actions, like, I mean, small and,
#
or even ones that don't seem political, like the kind of wedding you had or something, you know,
#
like at some point you may be called on to revise whether that was a kind of moronic thing.
#
I feel it can be very courageous for parents who get faced, who encounter at a certain point that
#
their child says, I had a childhood full of torment because I was playing a gender role
#
that didn't fit me. And you then are being called upon in a sense to accept that your parenting was
#
bad, you know, that you didn't see it. Or I had an experience with depression in my mid-30s,
#
which was pretty like a big thing to go through. And it was also very interesting. And I kind of
#
I'm glad that that had happened, but it was quite, it was a very big event of shift. I mean,
#
I was really kind of, but my mother, my mother joined a support group for parents of children,
#
adult children experiencing like mental health woes and a big
#
aspect, you know, something that the children would sometimes say is like,
#
I have all this trauma from my childhood. You ruined my life. Like it was terrible. Like,
#
and sometimes people are very depressed. They're very angry. They're very,
#
you, you can't take it totally personally. And I will say, my mother did a great job of
#
saying like, okay, you know, let that be your experience. But she said she encountered a lot
#
of parents of children that were totally unable to consider that they had done anything, even
#
unwittingly, even with good intent, but that had been harmful, painful for their child. They just,
#
it was too painful for them to, to just kind of integrate that idea. And so she even encountered
#
parents who had just lost touch with their, you know, just almost abandoned the relationship
#
with a child rather than have to go back and rethink who they had been as the parent of a child.
#
So I think it's, I don't know, I think it's such a huge human challenge. And so maybe we do become
#
kind of bitter and resentful as we're, our past is being put into a different light by,
#
by younger people. That's a possibility. As Philip Larkin once said, man hands on
#
misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any
#
kids yourself. So, you know, we've got like another 20 minutes to wrap this up. So, and I could talk
#
about your book for hours, honestly, it's just so rich and so rewarding and so complex. So I'll just
#
ask all my listeners to go out and buy it and read it and write to you if they feel like. To move
#
back to a sort of a general question, and I can make it a penultimate question is that you are
#
from America. Your early childhood interest was also in the civil war. You know, this is a canvas
#
where the same sort of painting is playing itself out, but in a much slower way. And it's not so
#
overt perhaps, but some of these tensions are there. Some of these adjustments get made. Some
#
of these complexities, some of these foibles of human nature come into play. Do you feel that
#
there's something about America you understand better now that you've written this book and
#
you've, you've seen, you know, you've, you've gone through that arc of change and what it can do?
#
Well, I was told by many of my friends, and I don't even, it wasn't something I'd even
#
felt so triumphant about, but that they remembered that I was the one who said
#
Trump may well win. And I, I thought that because of what I'd seen in South Africa,
#
and specifically how poorly people take to the notion that
#
they might've been wrong, that they might've been bigoted, that they might've been
#
bad people, how hard it can be, you know, with this particular character who had this stark
#
experience of it. But to go from being told that he was a patriot
#
and a hero for kind of holding certain views and then acting on them, to being told that he was
#
kind of a shithead and a loser and a murderer, it just didn't really,
#
he, he became, he had a period, which he then left in a sense, but there was a real period
#
of like, fuck you. You know, I, my experience of Trump leading up to 2016 was that
#
through kind of family connections as some of the conservatives that I knew
#
who were contemplating to vote for him, they didn't like him. They didn't really respect him.
#
They actually thought he was a crappy, you know, all I thought the, the left's kind of line against
#
him as especially like that he's unfit to be president, that he's just a salesman, that he's
#
a reality TV show, that he's a, it wasn't really going to work because that was what they,
#
they liked about him in this way. Imagine you have a neighbor that you really have a feud with
#
and it, it's maybe their fault, you know, and, but you're really feuding with this neighbor. And then
#
again, a guy escapes from a psychiatric ward and runs naked through the neighborhood and pee and
#
pees all over this guy, your neighbor's lawn. You might find that pretty funny. You might find it
#
pretty satisfying. You might not say so, but you might privately, you know, in your house think
#
like, yeah, you know, sir, is that guy right? That was how these people viewed Trump. No one
#
described Trump like this before. A guy running naked through a town peeing in someone's yard,
#
but well done. Yeah. If you don't like the guy who's already peeing in, you're going to be like,
#
ha ha, you know? And so I think I saw that because I'd seen it more overtly, partly because that
#
change happened so quickly and in South Africa. Another thing that I feel that I wonder about,
#
I mean, a very huge theme in my book, which was difficult to write about and had a lot of
#
conversations where I even am sort of present and being challenged on how I see this, but
#
with Dupont and Malaika, but they talk about it as internalized racism. So the other situation
#
in South Africa where suddenly Black people had a lot of influence, a lot of power, a lot of,
#
and it was suddenly revealed the extent to which they distrusted their own Black
#
counterparts. You know, this Black
#
friend I had who subconsciously assumed that the thief would be a fellow Black
#
person. And I wonder, you know, I don't know that we're at the point in the United States yet where
#
we can really, it's like the presence of racism coming from White people is still so sort of
#
prominent that there's not the kind of space to see. But I've wondered, I don't know enough
#
and I haven't investigated enough and I haven't talked to people, but you know, I've listened to
#
interesting podcasts and read things about Black appreciation of Trump. I just wonder how that
#
will manifest because I'm certain from South Africa that it's inescapable, that it's in you
#
too when you are marginalized. I mean, many people who work in corporate environments as women
#
can find that some of the most misogynist people they work with are other women.
#
It gets in there very deep. You don't, you know, it's pervasive culturally. So
#
I don't know that we've reached a stage in the United States where that
#
can be kind of understood or witnessed or seen or analyzed. I'm curious about it.
#
I'm also curious about it, which is why I hope you keep writing books for the next 40, 50 years and
#
allay some of this curiosity as things change. My final question for you, for me and my listeners,
#
recommend for us books, films, music, which you love so much, which fill you with joy,
#
that you want to share them with the whole world.
#
Oh, gosh, you know, I'm sometimes criticized. I had a roommate in Kenya. I lived in Kenya for two
#
years who once said to me, for someone who is kind of well-educated and red and, you know, just in
#
York, you have the worst taste in music that I've ever, because I grew up loving country music.
#
There's no such thing as bad taste. What is this shit? Taste is taste. You like what you like.
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm loving a singer right now named William Prince. He's a Canadian singer,
#
a country singer, but he has an interesting background. He's an Indigenous Canadian,
#
and I think it influences music in very subtle ways. It's not so overt,
#
but he just sings beautiful, beautiful love songs. I'm very interested, my interest at the moment,
#
I'm very interested in the way we talk about love, friendship and love in the, I don't know,
#
American society and in South Africa. And one of the most amazing books I've read recently is
#
called Love, a History by Simon May. He's a writer in the United Kingdom who writes a kind of almost,
#
yeah, history of views on love. And it's not only Western, actually, understanding of what romantic,
#
what passionate love actually is and how to write about such a thing and think about such a thing,
#
especially in the West in an age when one of his theses is that love has replaced religion
#
for some people. So what people used to desire from a relationship with a God
#
or a kind of religious sentiment they now look for in love. So that's one that I would,
#
I would recommend. Let me try to think of a final. And finally, so South Africa was a more closed
#
society. It's interesting. A lot of people, I think, got a lot of information about South Africa.
#
Some people will have read books on it or followed the anti-apartheid struggle and kind of have an
#
impression of it who are outsiders, but the information flow didn't go the other way.
#
My partner, as I mentioned, is a photographer and he grew up, he was born also in 1970s, it happens,
#
and grew up. So he was a teenager under apartheid, Greek heritage, white South African.
#
It was a schooling that was extremely censored. He left the country in 1988 so as not to be drafted.
#
He would have been drafted into the military, the same as Christo, who I wrote about.
#
And he said 30%, it was due to an opposition to apartheid. But to be honest, 70% was I didn't
#
want to go to boot camp and be in the fucking army. So he left for a week-long vacation,
#
quote unquote, to visit his grandmother in England and didn't go back for two years or three. Yeah.
#
And he bartended to make money and he wandered around Europe and he found himself in Berlin in
#
late 1989 with his camera. And he said, I started taking photographs, things seemed quite chaotic.
#
And then people were tearing some buildings down and I thought, oh, they're demolishing some
#
stuff in the city center. And then I thought, wow, people seem really
#
fired up about tearing this stuff down. And suddenly I realized I was watching
#
the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the movement to tear down the Berlin Wall was the news wasn't
#
allowed to enter South Africa. It was censored because the government became hopelessly torn.
#
On the one hand, they wanted to present themselves as anti-communist. But then
#
when those anti-communist popular rebellions became really big, they didn't want to bring
#
in the news of a popular rebellion that was being really successful in tearing down a government.
#
So South African music was really very influenced by American music, very influenced by American
#
jazz, very American in a lot of ways. It didn't have a lot of overlap with West African
#
Chora playing this very, very atmospheric, these incredible African music traditions.
#
It was really cut off from that. But just now there's a musical movement called Ama Piano,
#
Ama Piano, which means the piano nation. Ama is nation in Zulu. It's incredible.
#
It's kind of electronic. It's a little like house music, but not like doof, doof, doof.
#
It's beautiful kind of mixing of South African music traditions and African musical instruments,
#
even some Arab influences from North Africa. Any specific artists or songs or albums?
#
There's an artist called Kwesi, who's a singer who collaborates with a lot of Kwesi, K-H-W-E-Z-I.
#
But if people Google Ama Piano on YouTube, Ama Piano Hits, Ama Piano Playlist, it's a smallish
#
movement, but it's the big thing in South African music right now, which has incredible
#
musical tradition. It's also an interesting environment. Again, slightly outside of the
#
political, there's a lot of dislike of foreigners in South Africa for complex reasons that I go into
#
in the book. You'll read it. Yeah. Very, very complicated and psychological. South Africa has
#
its own immigration from the rest of Africa. It's very developed. But in this musical realm,
#
they're integrating Congolese singers, kind of elevating them, collaborating with Zimbabwean
#
singers. That's been a long tradition, but Congolese, Kenyan, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon.
#
It's really a beautiful genre that's being kind of birthed. The New Yorker had a decent, it was
#
okay. It had an article kind of introducing it so people can look that up too. I'm going to listen
#
to Ama Piano and I'm going to check out everything else you mentioned. Eve, thank you so much. It's
#
been wonderful. Thank you. This has been great. Yeah.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
