TheDefendersOnline.com - Interview with Elizabeth Nunez

‘Our Need to Belong’: Elizabeth Nunez and Anna In-Between
Posted By The Editors | October 29th, 2009 |

By Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Anna In-Between, the seventh book from acclaimed author Elizabeth Nunez, is one of the finest novels published this year. Nunez has made each word choice with the economy of a poet. The result is elegant prose: substantive, meaningful, but never wordy or clunky, just beautifully satisfying and thought-provoking.
Elizabeth Nunez copy

Elizabeth Nunez

Nunez, Provost and Senior Vice President at Medgar Evers College in New York City, has written several acclaimed books, including Bruised Hibiscus, which won the American Book Award in 2001, and her latest work, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Anna In-Between.

In addition to authoring several novels and co-editing the anthologies, Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the Nineties; and Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Woman Writers at Home and Abroad, Nunez is co-founder and former Director of The National Black Writers Conference, and former chair of the PEN American Center Open Book Committee.

In Anna In-Between, the title character, a 40-year-old divorced, childless woman who runs the fictional Equiano Books in New York, has returned to the nameless Caribbean island of her birth. While struggling to edit a manuscript, Anna also struggles with her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, who has breast cancer, and her own yearning for respect from her mother and her boss at the publishing company.

In this interview for TheDefendersOnline, Nunez discusses the state of black books, the “authentic self,” and the powerful narrative she has crafted—one that honors our finest literary traditions and most controversial topics.

Q: Anna In-Between is your seventh novel, the one Ishmael Reed has called your best. What was your inspiration for this narrative?

A: Anna In-Between grew out of an overwhelming feeling of loss that I experienced in the last few years. I had accomplished what I had set out to do—what most immigrants set out to do. I had achieved the means to live a financially independent life: I had the university degrees, a good job, and enough money to educate my son, purchase a house, car, and all the material things that would ensure I would have a comfortable life.

Yet something was missing. I wanted to be connected to my roots, but where were my roots? So I began this novel about a woman who had immigrated to the US when she was 19. Now, close to 40, she returns to her Caribbean island homeland and discovers that her assumptions about the people and place are all wrong; even the landscape seems to work against her. Then where does she belong?

All human beings have a need to belong, to a country, a community, a family, a significant other. This is a novel about our need to belong. I chose to explore the life of an upper-middle class West Indian woman because this is the type of woman I know best. I come from a similar background. Anna’s career in NY publishing gives me a chance to express my dismay about the direction the publishing of books by black writers seems to be going.

Q: In many ways your protagonist and her family and friends on the nameless island where the novel is set defy the many stereotypes Americans have of Caribbean life. How important were these issues to you during the writing process?

A: Well, I did not set out with a plan to set the record straight on the realities of West Indian life as much as to tell a story about a woman whose background I…could write about with a degree of authority and confidence. But it is true that most Americans are comfortable with pigeonholing West Indians as people in need of help, who are happy to serve them either here in the US as domestics and laborers, or on the islands as wait staff in hotels and sandy beaches. Many Americans seem to have a hard time imagining a Caribbean island society that is quite complex, ranging from working class to upper class, including a very strong and self-sufficient middle class with professionals, merchants, intellectuals and owners of big business.

Q: Your title character, Anna Sinclair, hovers in the spaces between the United States and the Caribbean, between confidence and vulnerability, between community and isolation. She also exists somewhere in the muddy middle of the color line. Why did you choose to examine the multiplicity of identities and complex racial narratives of most black people living in the West?

A: I resent the tendency of the West to define the identity of people based on categories that are comfortable for Westerners, categories based simply on skin color. The reality is more complex, especially on the Caribbean islands, where inter racial couplings have been common for a very long time. I think of my twin first cousins; the male is blue-eyed and blond, the female dark olive-skinned with black hair, both of the same parentage. In South Africa, under apartheid, my male cousin was identified as white, his sister as colored.

But even in sub-Sahara Africa, where he worked as a missionary, black Africans insisted on indentifying my male cousin as white. Yet who determines which of the twins is white and which is black?

In the novel, Anna quotes T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin/ To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”

Q: The dislocated self, caught in the space in between, is a persistent theme in the work of writers of African descent, and generally references the Middle Passage as a space of transition, where the authentic self is often lost, and sometimes recovered. But your work makes few direct references to the Middle Passage. Has the voluntary migration from the Caribbean to the United States become more dominant in the soul of the West Indian immigrant? Is this the primary space where we often become lost, or trapped in-between?

A. Who is to determine “the authentic self”? We are part of the human race, the human family, and have a right to the human cultural heritage wherever that heritage is located. Mozart and Shakespeare belong to me, as well as Achebe and the rituals of African spiritualism.

Our journey on this earth is to achieve our human potential. We are born human beings, but it is quite another thing to be human, to become human. Dislocation from the African past is only one of the dislocations that Caribbean people experience; there are many others.

In this novel, I focus on dislocation from the very landscape of one’s homeland, dislocation from one’s family and friends, dislocation from the nuances of one’s cultural beginnings. But from my very first novel, I was determined to find a place for a reminder of the brutality of the Middle Passage in all my novels. In seven novels I have done just that, including this one where Anna, her father and her mother have a spirited discussion on the effects of slavery.

Q: Your novel also presents a discourse on achievement and failure. In part, you explore what John Sinclair calls “the psychology of immigration.” What point were you trying to make with that running debate within the Sinclair family?

A: I am a bit tired of the tensions and animosities that exist between African Americans and Caribbean immigrants, fanned by people who find it useful to keep resentments burning as if to justify stereotypes ascribed to African Americans.

Yes, as a group, Caribbean immigrants have been successful. I believe I saw a report that indicated that in Queens, New York, Caribbean immigrants surpass Asians and Jews in income and education.

But it isn’t skin color or country of origin that explains this phenomenon. The truth is that all immigrants, of any skin color or from any country, are a special group of highly motivated people, who left their homelands for one reason alone: to improve their circumstances in life. Of course, they will be more ambitious; of course they will be more willing to make major sacrifices for success. They already made the hugest sacrifice of all when they left home, country and family.

Q: The natural world appears in many forms in this novel. Did you intend to offer a lament on over-development and the gaudy excess that followed an oil boom on the island?

A: That is an astute observation. Many times readers find in a novel things the writer was not conscious of intending, but which are still there in the work, perhaps unconsciously put there by the writer. So I agree with your analysis, though I was thinking more about the theme you mentioned earlier regarding dislocation. Not only is Anna dislocated from the Caribbean landscape, the natural world of her homeland, but it seems that her father is also required to do the same. It seems that one of the requirements for achieving middle-class status is eschewing connections to one’s earthy roots.

Q: With the references to oil and steel drums, the nameless island seems to be your own homeland, Trinidad. Why did you choose not to name the place where the book is set?

A: The challenge for the novelist is to create a world that is plausible, and characters who are believable. I wanted to avoid the distraction that is possible for readers who sometimes are critical of a work that does not correspond to certain facts. But though the novelist uses fact in fiction, he or she is creating a work of art that is driven by the narrative and the characters. Certain facts ground a work of fiction and can be distracting if they are inaccurate, but the writer must be free to use these facts in the service of his imaginative world.

Q: I have concerns for my own ancestral island home, Bermuda, that you explore in Anna In-Between, including over-development, Americanization of local culture, and increasing violence due to the drug trade. Do you think that these issues are on the minds of many people of Caribbean descent?

A: Yes, I worry that the media—print and electronic, the internet and TV—have become the new imperialists, the new colonists, shaping a world that serves the needs and pleasures of the Big Countries. I worry when I see so many examples in the Caribbean of people giving up their cultural expressions to imitate those of the developed world.

Q: Beatrice’s refusal to go to New York for the life-saving surgery she needs is stunning. As her reason for remaining in the Caribbean becomes clear, she and Anna begin to debate over Beatrice’s treatment and African-American life. It is clear Beatrice will die if she does not go to New York, but in one brilliant scene Anna loses the argument, and helps make the case for Beatrice’s decision. You’ve opened the door for readers to think about many topics related to the American health care system and black wellness. What motivated this aspect of your narrative?

A: I can’t say that I wrote this scene because in the US we are currently in the throes of a huge debate on reforming the health care system. Sometimes fiction mysteriously seems to reflect topical concerns. I was mostly interested in exploring our values, whether material comforts are more important, more satisfying than the peace and happiness possible when we are in sync with the values of our cultural heritage. Of course, in this novel, what is at stake is life itself.

I also had a chance to explore the consequences of the negative news about African-American life beamed through the TV in homes across the world. But it is not only African Americans who get judged by these narrow representations of their lifestyles; white Americans also get painted as racists and oppressors.

Q: How do you find the time and space to write such well-crafted prose, especially as you juggle your art with your duties as provost and senior vice president at Medgar Evers College?

A: I worked hard in this novel to marry the “what,” the subject matter, with the “how,” the language and style. I wanted to drill down to the diamond, to find the minimum number of words, the minimum descriptions that would convey the scenes and characters that were in my imagination.

I am no longer provost, so now I have more time to write. But I have never allowed teaching or administration to prevent me from writing. I need to write for my sanity and for my own understanding of myself and my world. I find time to write. It is at the top of my list of things to do every day. Writing helps me make sense of our chaotic world. It brings order to my life, and comfort to me.

Q: There is much debate among writers, editors, booksellers, and others in the book publishing industry about the rise of urban literature. In your novel, Anna is an editor attempting to publish the work of a more literary author and must confront her superior, who is giddy over the sales of urban lit. What compelled you to dramatize this debate in your book? How do we reconcile the aesthetic tradition of our literary fore-parents with the industry’s need for profit?

A: Your readers will find the answers to the questions you ask here in Anna’s ruminations on the state of publishing, especially publishing of writers of color. Sure, I understand that publishing is a business that, like all businesses, depends on financial profit. But publishing is also in a position of affecting culture and values. Publishers claim that they do not determine culture and values; they simply reflect the dominant values of a society.

However, by determining which books will be published, which books will be marketed aggressively, publishers exercise a sort of censorship that can seriously affect the decisions we make. The truth is that every major movement in the world was affected by a book. One can begin with the Bible, the works of Darwin, Marx, Sartre, Freud, De Beauvoir, Baldwin, Wright, Hurston, CLR James, Morrison etc, etc.

I am deeply distressed by the paucity of serious literary fiction by black writers that is being published today. I know it is not because black writers are not writing this work; I know it is because the publishing industry has determined that it is not profitable to publish this sort of work. Once upon a time, publishers were satisfied with single-digit profits; now they want to be like every other business and make double or triple digit profits.

But publishing is not like every other business; publishing is in the business of exploring the human condition, helping us to understand ourselves and inspiring us to improve ourselves and our world. True, books, like other art forms, should entertain us. I have no objections to the books that readers seek simply for entertainment. But books should also, and can also, challenge us intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally, politically and in other, deeper ways. A good book continues to cause the reader to think long after the reader has put it aside.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and a co-founder of RingShout: A Place for Black Literature. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com