E-mail a friendColson Whitehead
airdate June 12, 2009
Esquire named Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist the best first novel of 2000. Whitehead has also received a coveted MacArthur Fellowship and won the Whiting Award for young writers with exceptional promise. In between books, the New York native writes reviews, essays and fiction that have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times. After graduating from Harvard, Whitehead worked at The Village Voice and also began drafting his first novel. His latest is the coming-of-age story told in Sag Harbor.
Award-winning writer talks about reviewers calling his work the first post-racial Obama era novel to come out. (2:51)
Full interview. (12:37)
Colson Whitehead
Tavis: Colson Whitehead is an acclaimed author whose previous books include Apex Hides the Hurt and The Intuitionist. His latest is one of the most talked about novels of this year, Sag Harbor, which takes place in the mid-1980s in the famed Long Island beach community. Colson Whitehead, nice to have you on the program.
Colson Whitehead: Hey, thanks for having me.
Tavis: It's good to see you. First of all, congrats on all the rave reviews about this thing.
Whitehead: Yeah. You never know how it's gonna turn out, so you feel good (laughter).
Tavis: Yeah. What do you make of that? You write three novels previously, book number four comes out - not that the other ones didn't do well, but the hype on this one is just off the charts.
Whitehead: Well, it sort of, you know, creeps along. So you do a reading and people really responding in a new sort of way or a different way and then you get, you know, more and more good news and you sort of like just have to accept it and enjoy it (laughter) and put away the usual pessimism.
Tavis: What have people been responding to with regard to the novel? What's getting their interest?
Whitehead: Well, it takes place in '85 in the Black community of Azurest in Sag Harbor. So it's very specific, but people are, you know, responding to it if they're from Wisconsin or, you know, it's pretty applicable to any sort of summer experience.
So first kiss, first crappy job, trying to buy beer and your older friend has the car and trying to sneak into clubs when you're underage. So even though it's very tied to '85 in Benji Cooper's life, people are seeing themselves in the story, so I'm really enjoying that.
Tavis: This is, by your own admission - my phrase, not yours - semi-autobiographical. Fair enough?
Whitehead: Yes. I mean, you know, the first book is generally autobiographical, the novel, as a cliché. I was so self-conscious when I started that I knew I did not want to do that. So it took me a while to, I guess, mature as a writer and, you know, 20 years to get away from my teenage years to actually want to go back to that terrible (laughter) teenage time.
You know, I am drawing more directly on my experience more than I have before, but frankly, I'm not that interesting, so I do have to make up a lot of stuff, you know, to make it work.
My friends that I grew up with, I wanted to put them in the book, but they weren't that interesting. I think, in the same way, they wouldn't do what they had to do for the book, so in the same way that in life people don't always do what you want them to.
Tavis: I hope your friends ain't watching right about now (laughter).
Whitehead: I haven't seen them in a long time. You know, we're gonna catch up. We're gonna catch up this summer.
Tavis: You dissed a bunch of them, I think (laughter). Not that interesting. That said, for those who don't know - this is central to the story. For those who don't know what Sag Harbor is like, what it's all about, describe it for me particularly through the lens of an African American.
Whitehead: You know, the Hamptons, East Hampton, South Hampton, monied whites. But in the '20s, '30s and '40s, there was this new re-emergent Black middle class in New Jersey, New York. Bankers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and they wanted a place to go. So Sag Harbor, which is a very sleepy town on the interior of Long Island, just had a lot of land that hadn't been claimed, so it was open.
It spread by word of mouth, so you come out, you have a friend out, next year they start coming out and so on and so on. In the '40s, they started subdividing the land and threw up a lot of houses. So my grandfather had some funeral homes in Orange, New Jersey and he started going out, so my mom was going out there when she was a kid.
I went out there every summer until I went to college. Whereupon, you know, you get militant and it's too bourgie and you don't want to hang out in the Hamptons.
Tavis: You got past that, obviously.
Whitehead: Well, yeah (laughter). You got a little older and it's like a nice place to go, so I'm still going out there again with my wife and my daughter. She's on the same beach that I used to play on and my mother used to play on, so it's a nice continuity. My mom moved out there full-time about 20 years ago, so I'm going out there for the holidays. You know, I've seen the changes in the place.
Tavis: Your mom still living there full-time?
Whitehead: Yeah, yeah.
Tavis: How do African Americans who are not affluent connect to the story line, who don't get a chance to go to a nice private school in Manhattan and go out to Sag Harbor in the summers? How do everyday people connect to the story?
Whitehead: Well, it's about, you know, how to live, how to be a teenager and to figure out your way in the world. You know, I'm trying to use pop culture in a way that opens up the story. So I picked '85 because Benji and his friends are boys, you know, about to become men and in '85, you know, hip-hop was leaving this really sort of corny early '80s moment where bands like UTFO wore like leather jumpsuits and had characters like The Village People and Run DMC was rapping about staying in school, which seems very halcyon and innocent.
If you go a few years into the future, hip-hop is becoming commercialized, gangsterized and becoming more mature in the same way these kids are growing up. You know, the pop culture of the time, I think, opens up the story to anybody who was sort of semi-awake in the '80s.
Tavis: I understand clearly from a writer's perspective what writing about this period gives you to work with. Tell me, though, why this period - you're not old, obviously - but tell me why that particular period of your life as a writer was more fertile ground, more fertile territory, for you to put this book out as opposed to some other period in your life. Does that make sense?
Whitehead: Yeah. I think I just had to really sort of get some distance and get the technical skill to do first-person narrator. In the past, whenever I had a first-person voice, it always became someone very like me and it took the four books to actually have the distance to shape these personal experiences into something that's more artful than just confession and autobiography.
You know, hopefully you write books and you get better and you don't relapse too much, but you keep getting better and better from book to book. It just took me four books to figure out how to do it.
Tavis: That's not very long. You got a lot more in you, I'm sure. You and I were talking before we started this on-air conversation about the fact that there was a review. I should be honest with you. It wasn't just a review. This is high cotton, as my grandmother would say. It wasn't just a review. Your book was the cover of the New York Times Sunday book review a few weeks ago.
I was on a plane coming back to Los Angeles and I had a chance to read the entire thing. There were two things about that review that bothered me honestly, concerned me, and I want to get your take on it. You're not responsible for reviews, but I want to get your take on it as the author of the two things that concerned me, in no particular order.
Number one, the person who wrote the review seemed to have a reductionist view of some seminal Black books in the past. Maya Angelou's book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, comes to mind. Richard Wright's book. I thought reductionist about some books in the past, making the comparison to yours. Number one, that troubled me.
But the second thing that troubled me was that he seemed - the reviewer, that is - to celebrate this book as the first major novel in the post-racial Obama era and I wanted to get your thoughts on those two issues that at least jumped out for me in that review.
Whitehead: Well, it's coming out in January, so it is post-Obama (laughter). But besides that, you know -
Tavis: - post-racial. Not just post-Obama, but post-racial.
Whitehead: His formulation of post-Black, his definition, something seems to be in the air. For me, the way he describes it is being yourself. You can have white influences, Latino influences, African American influences, and draw upon them to make your art.
But for me, that seems like the first thing you do as an artist. You take everything you can and figure out how to make a voice, how to make a way of making art out of everything you find or come across as you're finding yourself. Post-Blackness is really just sort of doing your own thing, being your own person, being an individual.
I could definitely drive down certain parts of America and find out how post-Black I really am. You know, the sheriff is like "Don't let the sun set on you" and I'd be like, "Don't you read the New York Times review? I'm post-Black."
Tavis: Exactly (laughter).
Whitehead: "I was on the cover, my face. Didn't you see that?" Yeah, I think we're in a great, beautiful moment, but we proceed by baby steps. And in terms of the other books that he compared Sag Harbor to, you know, those are all very distinctive works and, as a critic, you have to find a language and references, you know, to open up the discussion.
I think, for me, I would mostly align the book with the movie Cooley High from like the '70s, you know, after the American kids find their way and the shifting world of teenage codes. How do you become a man? How do you become a person and individual? As someone who watches a lot of TV, you know, my references generally come from stuff I saw in the afternoon movies (laughter).
Tavis: In this Obama era, how do you think your kids and other kids growing up in Sag Harbor in the summers are going to be different from you and your generation?
Whitehead: Well, yeah. I mean, part of what I deal with in the book is the shifting generations and how they see themselves. My grandparents had a different idea of what it is to have this place in the Hamptons. My parents who went to college in the '50s and '60s and were part of the civil rights movement have a different idea of what it means.
We and the kids in my generation took it for granted like, you know, we sort of understand what is going on in the struggles. So my daughter is four and a half and I've no idea how she's gonna see the world. I don't really wear ties that often. I was at a function two months ago and I wore a tie. She said, "Daddy, you look just like the president."
I'm like, wow, she's growing up in this world where, if you wear a tie, you look like the president. You know, a Black man in a tie looks like the president. So her complete frame of reference is gonna be totally different. I can't predict it and I don't want to predict it because I'm in some ways carrying this sort of older baggage of, you know, a life before this moment.
Tavis: The new book from Colson Whitehead, his fourth novel and the one that everybody's talking about, Sag Harbor. Colson, nice to have you here.
Whitehead: Thanks a lot, man.
Tavis: Enjoyed the conversation and you can take your tie off now (laughter).
Whitehead: (Laughter) Sounds good.
Tavis: I know how uncomfortable that must be for you, but your daughter got the chance to see you on TV again looking like the president.
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