Browse content similar to 17/01/2017. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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said it left him feeling he belonged to the universe. It is time now for | :00:00. | :00:00. | |
HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk, I am Steven | :00:00. | :00:15. | |
Sako. The more things change, the more things stay the same. | :00:16. | :00:16. | |
An adage that seems tailor-made for race relations in America. | :00:17. | :00:19. | |
After eight years of a black President, amid a swirl | :00:20. | :00:22. | |
of demographic and social change, black Americans still feel the bite | :00:23. | :00:25. | |
My guest today is Paul Beatty, whose prize-winning novel Sellout | :00:26. | :00:30. | |
is a devised satire to unpick the black American experience. | :00:31. | :00:51. | |
It is funny and provocative but is it also fundamentally bleak? | :00:52. | :01:11. | |
It seems to be optimism has always been seen as the default mood | :01:12. | :01:18. | |
Reading the book, the Sellout which has caused a storm | :01:19. | :01:31. | |
and won the Booker Prize, some would read it and think, | :01:32. | :01:34. | |
gosh, this man has a very bleak world view. | :01:35. | :01:36. | |
I don't think it is that bleak really, in a weird way. | :01:37. | :01:40. | |
I think hopefully within the energy, there is a kind of something that | :01:41. | :01:43. | |
The energy contained vicious humour and it is very | :01:44. | :01:53. | |
funny but fundamentally, you have a book that is pretty much | :01:54. | :01:56. | |
about race relations and the experience of being black | :01:57. | :01:58. | |
in America today and it is not that different from the way it has ever | :01:59. | :02:02. | |
been, including the era of outright slavery and segregation | :02:03. | :02:05. | |
I can't say that, I am 54, I am not 254. | :02:06. | :02:15. | |
So I cannot speak for how it is different. | :02:16. | :02:17. | |
My life is different within 54 years. | :02:18. | :02:24. | |
Barack Obama, when he talks as the head of the nation | :02:25. | :02:36. | |
about race issues, he says, change has come and things | :02:37. | :02:38. | |
are different and we are making progress. | :02:39. | :02:44. | |
Good for him, he is the President and he should say that. | :02:45. | :02:48. | |
He wouldn't say that if it wasn't true. | :02:49. | :02:51. | |
We went through huge wars over stuff that wasn't true. | :02:52. | :02:57. | |
I only speak for myself, not for everybody else. | :02:58. | :03:04. | |
I just speak for myself, or I try to. | :03:05. | :03:17. | |
So "we" is a word I don't use very often. | :03:18. | :03:20. | |
Just from my perspective, I am not trying to send this message | :03:21. | :03:23. | |
from the body politic black, it is just my perspective, | :03:24. | :03:26. | |
It is Obama's job in a weird way and someone said earlier... | :03:27. | :03:34. | |
The book is kind of about what is progress and what it feels | :03:35. | :03:37. | |
You were talking about American optimism. | :03:38. | :03:42. | |
It is kind of an optimism that is sort of spreading to world politics. | :03:43. | :03:50. | |
Everyone is doing things the way Americans do. | :03:51. | :03:53. | |
You have to be optimistic, I don't know if that is new. | :03:54. | :03:58. | |
There has been all of these police shootings in the news in the States. | :03:59. | :04:05. | |
I can't remember a time when there were not police shootings. | :04:06. | :04:12. | |
You are someone who grew up in Southern California | :04:13. | :04:16. | |
and I guess a defining moment for you was probably the Rodney King | :04:17. | :04:22. | |
I don't know if it was a defining moment, these things happen | :04:23. | :04:27. | |
and it was one of those things where it was... | :04:28. | :04:30. | |
That was when the match finely ignites, it was that last straw. | :04:31. | :04:33. | |
It was on tape and there was this thing... | :04:34. | :04:35. | |
Obama was in the new Smithsonian Museum of African-American History, | :04:36. | :04:44. | |
He is flanked in the background by all this iconic stuff | :04:45. | :04:55. | |
of the civil rights movement, photos. | :04:56. | :05:03. | |
There is a black woman Robin Roberts asking him, | :05:04. | :05:06. | |
she has a weird passion in her voice, wanted him to respond | :05:07. | :05:09. | |
She asked him about a specific shooting where a guy has his hands | :05:10. | :05:13. | |
up and it is all on tape and the police officer just shoots | :05:14. | :05:17. | |
Obama equivocates, that's what he does. | :05:18. | :05:24. | |
I think it is that equivocation that doesn't read as optimism. | :05:25. | :05:27. | |
There is a sense of people wanting to hear an opinion, a passion, | :05:28. | :05:33. | |
something beyond diplomacy in these things. | :05:34. | :05:42. | |
They want to hear, hey, what do you think? | :05:43. | :05:45. | |
They want to know what you really think and it is hard to read | :05:46. | :05:49. | |
and it is one of those things where I remember when I saw it, | :05:50. | :05:52. | |
I was not angry with him or anything but I was just like, | :05:53. | :05:56. | |
yeah, that is the true power of the position. | :05:57. | :05:58. | |
He is the Commander-in-chief, not the police chief. | :05:59. | :06:01. | |
It's a weird thing about what this means. | :06:02. | :06:03. | |
On HARDtalk a while ago, we interviewed Professor Cornell West, | :06:04. | :06:07. | |
one of the great intellectual thinkers of black America today. | :06:08. | :06:10. | |
Hopefully, he is just a great thinker. | :06:11. | :06:12. | |
When he thinks about race and Obama, I am not sure he has ever used | :06:13. | :06:18. | |
the specific word sell-out that you titled your book with, | :06:19. | :06:20. | |
he basically says Barack Obama has sold out black Americans. | :06:21. | :06:25. | |
It is weird, it is not an impulse behind that book but I wish... | :06:26. | :06:35. | |
I don't think there was an author in this book, it was a funny book, | :06:36. | :06:39. | |
like a phone directory of Uncle Tom's sell-outs | :06:40. | :06:41. | |
You go through that book and it is every black American | :06:42. | :06:48. | |
Some people will call Cornell West a sell-out for their own reasons. | :06:49. | :06:57. | |
It is not like I am a huge fan of Obama, I think he has his faults. | :06:58. | :07:06. | |
It is a hard thing to say because somebody is of a certain | :07:07. | :07:13. | |
race or gender or something that, they owe that demographic | :07:14. | :07:16. | |
It is that notion of, people should know better. | :07:17. | :07:25. | |
It is the people who should know better, who sometimes are the most | :07:26. | :07:30. | |
I am not calling Obama ruthless... I think if I | :07:31. | :07:40. | |
was suffering drones, I would think he was ruthless | :07:41. | :07:42. | |
but I am not saying I think he is an insensitive person. | :07:43. | :07:46. | |
You picked me up when I described Cornell West as a leading black | :07:47. | :07:49. | |
thinker and you said, look, he is a thinker, | :07:50. | :07:52. | |
I think a lot of your writing is about identity and when it comes | :07:53. | :07:57. | |
to being a black American, the degree to which your blackness | :07:58. | :08:00. | |
The identity is shifting, it changes. | :08:01. | :08:14. | |
I have a slight background and one of the identity things | :08:15. | :08:17. | |
that was always interesting was, there was this kind of self | :08:18. | :08:20. | |
actualisation when you reach this nirvana of consciousness and some | :08:21. | :08:24. | |
of the book is based on a guy, a psychologist called William Cross | :08:25. | :08:28. | |
I think it was from Negro to black consciousness. | :08:29. | :08:32. | |
There was this ideal kind of black identity. | :08:33. | :08:35. | |
It was fascinating and done with such care. | :08:36. | :08:47. | |
The central character in your book seems to reflect a bit | :08:48. | :08:50. | |
The central character goes on to do absurd things | :08:51. | :08:57. | |
like acquiring a slave, he is a black man and he gets his | :08:58. | :09:00. | |
own slave and launches an initiative to segregate the local school | :09:01. | :09:03. | |
In many ways, a very likeable character. | :09:04. | :09:10. | |
In his own relationship with his father, he was used | :09:11. | :09:13. | |
His father was trying to condition him to become the right | :09:14. | :09:26. | |
My mother is beautiful, a super genius, I ask her everything | :09:27. | :09:35. | |
Did she discuss with you how to live as a black person? | :09:36. | :09:40. | |
Me and my sisters are all left-handed. | :09:41. | :09:46. | |
No one in my family is left-handed other than us. | :09:47. | :09:52. | |
We asked our mother about it and she said, I tied your right hand | :09:53. | :09:56. | |
behind your back and so whatever left-handed is supposed | :09:57. | :09:59. | |
It was that weird kind of experiment and she also raised us Japanese | :10:00. | :10:06. | |
You don't want to get into this, believe me! | :10:07. | :10:10. | |
My mum's a huge Asiaphobe is what I would call it. | :10:11. | :10:29. | |
I might be misinterpreting this but the message | :10:30. | :10:32. | |
of the book seems to be, you lacerate many of the tropes | :10:33. | :10:35. | |
and stereotypes of black culture and black thinking and in a really | :10:36. | :10:38. | |
In a way that frankly only probably a black person could. | :10:39. | :10:42. | |
I don't think so, I don't think that is true. | :10:43. | :10:45. | |
Hopefully it is the only way that I can. | :10:46. | :10:48. | |
Let's talk about language, you spray cuss words through the book | :10:49. | :10:53. | |
That is not street talk, I cannot let you get away with that! | :10:54. | :10:58. | |
I don't know if you read it or not but it is not street talk, for me, | :10:59. | :11:09. | |
the language is the whole thing for me. | :11:10. | :11:11. | |
The book is about everything and we are talking about blackness | :11:12. | :11:14. | |
and I am always thinking about what that is for myself | :11:15. | :11:17. | |
For me, you know, my blackness is all cultural appropriation, | :11:18. | :11:22. | |
you know, from where I grew up, from my Latino American friends, | :11:23. | :11:25. | |
my Filipino American friends, you know. | :11:26. | :11:27. | |
The degrees to whatever blackness is, it is all me, | :11:28. | :11:31. | |
I just happen to be black, thank goodness, and I am not | :11:32. | :11:34. | |
It is not just about the skin or things that are going to be | :11:35. | :11:40. | |
on the black shelf in the library, it is everything. | :11:41. | :11:45. | |
For me, it is everything and so the language is how | :11:46. | :11:49. | |
I try to render that and so for me, the language is what you quote | :11:50. | :11:53. | |
as street talk is the way I might talk to my friends which is not | :11:54. | :11:57. | |
necessarily street talk but it is how we talk to each other | :11:58. | :12:01. | |
because we have known each other our whole lives. | :12:02. | :12:03. | |
I have an academic background, so it is some of that. | :12:04. | :12:06. | |
What about, if I may, I am picking a specific | :12:07. | :12:09. | |
because it is so emotive to so many different audiences | :12:10. | :12:12. | |
in the United States and around the world, | :12:13. | :12:14. | |
For me, it is a difficult proposition because we do not use it | :12:15. | :12:19. | |
But everyone watching this will know what word I am talking about. | :12:20. | :12:28. | |
The point is, when I said there are certain ways | :12:29. | :12:32. | |
in which you write in which ways a white person couldn't write, | :12:33. | :12:35. | |
This is HARDtalk, but you can't talk so hard, I guess! | :12:36. | :12:41. | |
It is about offence as much as anything else, some | :12:42. | :12:44. | |
Absolutely, there is no reason that they shouldn't. | :12:45. | :12:49. | |
The word comes up in that book because Mark Twain uses it 200 | :12:50. | :12:54. | |
So it's not like only some people can use it. | :12:55. | :13:06. | |
Mark Twain was writing in a different period. | :13:07. | :13:09. | |
If white people use it today, they get hammered. | :13:10. | :13:12. | |
But it is redolent of - well, you know - slavery, | :13:13. | :13:20. | |
disrespect, total discrimination and prejudice. | :13:21. | :13:21. | |
Just this point, for example, I read in the New York Times, | :13:22. | :13:30. | |
the praise for the book was consistent and | :13:31. | :13:32. | |
I read about a reading you did in New York City where the writer | :13:33. | :13:41. | |
who was present said it was interesting because | :13:42. | :13:43. | |
the audience was predominantly white and the author said it seemed | :13:44. | :13:48. | |
to them that some of the audience didn't know whether to laugh or not. | :13:49. | :13:52. | |
They were a little unsure of this territory. | :13:53. | :13:54. | |
I don't think that necessarily has to do with race, | :13:55. | :13:57. | |
I have read for black audiences, some laugh and some don't. | :13:58. | :14:02. | |
I have won the Man Booker Prize, a huge honour. | :14:03. | :14:08. | |
I did a thing at the Man Group in the States and a woman | :14:09. | :14:20. | |
who was interviewing me was, like, "As a white person I wasn't sure how | :14:21. | :14:24. | |
A colleague told me, well, why don't you start with maybe | :14:25. | :14:30. | |
the book is funny, and that opened up some stuff." | :14:31. | :14:35. | |
And I said, "Well, the person who told you that is also white." | :14:36. | :14:39. | |
So everybody's bringing their own things and in securities | :14:40. | :14:41. | |
I think I agree with you on some level. | :14:42. | :14:50. | |
I think we have a hard time talking about grey areas. | :14:51. | :14:53. | |
You know, we're really good with pontification, | :14:54. | :14:55. | |
prognostication, but it's that grey stuff that for me is the most | :14:56. | :14:59. | |
interesting stuff, the stuff where I'm lost and don't necessarily | :15:00. | :15:01. | |
It's a book, it's not a memoir, it's fiction and some of the stuff | :15:02. | :15:10. | |
I believe some of the time and some of the stuff I don't believe, | :15:11. | :15:14. | |
In one way, just in terms of plot, it's a story that doesn't | :15:15. | :15:20. | |
have the ending you might wish to have. | :15:21. | :15:22. | |
There's this wonderful premise that the main character in the book | :15:23. | :15:25. | |
is actually being taken to the Supreme Court | :15:26. | :15:27. | |
You want to know at the end whether he's going to be found | :15:28. | :15:32. | |
Is that because you don't believe in resolution in your books? | :15:33. | :15:42. | |
I'll get my doctorate in psychology at some point, | :15:43. | :15:48. | |
so there's a huge undertone in the book. | :15:49. | :15:51. | |
So the book ends with a discussion of what closure is. | :15:52. | :15:54. | |
I've been talking for a while about the book in person, | :15:55. | :15:57. | |
"Do you ever see it getting better," I don't know what that is, | :15:58. | :16:00. | |
I don't know what people want from closure because people want | :16:01. | :16:03. | |
different things and I don't know if I believe in the construct. | :16:04. | :16:08. | |
We were talking about President Obama earlier, | :16:09. | :16:11. | |
and when he won the first go-round, I had a friend of mine who I've | :16:12. | :16:15. | |
known for a long time and he had an American flag in his car, | :16:16. | :16:19. | |
and I was, like, "Dude, what's up with the flag? | :16:20. | :16:22. | |
"I'm not knowing you as a flag waver." | :16:23. | :16:24. | |
He was, like, "Yeah, I kinda feel like America's | :16:25. | :16:26. | |
And he said, "To us, to black Americans. | :16:27. | :16:31. | |
I was, like, "Man, that's a huge debt!" | :16:32. | :16:34. | |
I'm not trying to put everything on equal footing but there's | :16:35. | :16:38. | |
Native Americans, there's the environment, there's | :16:39. | :16:40. | |
But it's interesting when someone feels like that debt has been paid | :16:41. | :16:48. | |
I want to come back to that big canvas. | :16:49. | :16:57. | |
It's not just about race, there's so much going on in today's | :16:58. | :17:00. | |
America and I want to know what you're thinking | :17:01. | :17:02. | |
about and writing next but before that, there's one other thing | :17:03. | :17:05. | |
about your writing that fascinates me. | :17:06. | :17:07. | |
People have called you a satirist, I think you prefer the word | :17:08. | :17:10. | |
Whatever the right word is, you find ways to make really | :17:11. | :17:16. | |
Is there anything that for you is off-limits, | :17:17. | :17:23. | |
in terms of getting entertainment, a laugh, comedic value? | :17:24. | :17:29. | |
I don't think about it being off-limits. | :17:30. | :17:31. | |
I think, "What's this narrative I'm trying to tell." | :17:32. | :17:34. | |
Language is so important, and I think there are things that | :17:35. | :17:37. | |
can be read on the surface as, like, I've violated some sacred trust, | :17:38. | :17:40. | |
Everybody has the right to use whatever language they want to use. | :17:41. | :17:48. | |
If somebody feels like they don't have that, that's on them, | :17:49. | :17:52. | |
I'm not trying to say it's equal and a level playing field, | :17:53. | :17:55. | |
So, yeah, why do it if something's off-limits? | :17:56. | :18:03. | |
For you, the Civil Rights movement isn't off-limits, | :18:04. | :18:07. | |
some of the great heroes of black freedom movements. | :18:08. | :18:10. | |
Could you imagine writing a funny novel about, | :18:11. | :18:15. | |
So, yeah, my first book is about that. | :18:16. | :18:26. | |
So, yeah, I don't think about that stuff very much. | :18:27. | :18:31. | |
It's not like I'm that sensitive that other people might think | :18:32. | :18:35. | |
about that but as much as I can I try to be considerate | :18:36. | :18:38. | |
about what I'm talking about and how I'm saying it, | :18:39. | :18:41. | |
I'm sort of mocking them, but these are things I care very | :18:42. | :18:48. | |
deeply about and are things that I respect. | :18:49. | :18:51. | |
I think in the same sentence, in the same joke, I think that | :18:52. | :18:58. | |
And I start by ridiculing myself, whether it's apparent or not, | :18:59. | :19:02. | |
that's the person I'm picking on because I'm really trying to test | :19:03. | :19:05. | |
myself and where are my boundaries and stuff like that. | :19:06. | :19:08. | |
Bringing it back to the United States today, | :19:09. | :19:13. | |
Obama's leaving office, the next president is going to be | :19:14. | :19:16. | |
You didn't know that when you wrote the book. | :19:17. | :19:23. | |
It's a fascinating take on modern America but America's sort of had | :19:24. | :19:26. | |
another shift and another lurch since you wrote it. | :19:27. | :19:29. | |
How are you feeling about the United States of today? | :19:30. | :19:33. | |
Some people are pleased as punch, I'm not one of those people. | :19:34. | :19:38. | |
I feel in a weird way similar to how I always feel, | :19:39. | :19:42. | |
which is very cautious and very pessimistic. | :19:43. | :19:43. | |
your perception of the world isn't all about race, | :19:44. | :19:54. | |
but nonetheless in the switch from Obama to Trump, | :19:55. | :19:57. | |
there are some people in the Civil Rights movement | :19:58. | :19:59. | |
and politics saying this is a disaster for minorities. | :20:00. | :20:02. | |
This is a guy who ran a whole identity-based campaign. | :20:03. | :20:11. | |
There's a thing for me, there's kind of a white self-hatred | :20:12. | :20:14. | |
It always feels like it's 1913 to me. | :20:15. | :20:30. | |
I know a lot of people are trying to compare it to feeling | :20:31. | :20:34. | |
like the late 1920s and '30s with all the nationalism, | :20:35. | :20:37. | |
but I'm going earlier somehow, that weird... | :20:38. | :20:39. | |
Archduke Ferdinand match hasn't been struck that's going to send | :20:40. | :20:41. | |
the world into a weird kind of chaos. | :20:42. | :20:44. | |
This guy was chosen for a reason, people feel a certain way. | :20:45. | :20:51. | |
You know, there's an image that they want to project, | :20:52. | :20:54. | |
there's something in how they see themselves and how the country sees | :20:55. | :20:57. | |
them, they want him to be that figure and that face of something | :20:58. | :21:00. | |
Yeah, preaching this retroactive, out-and-out antipathy | :21:01. | :21:14. | |
Scary, does it make you feel alienated from your own country? | :21:15. | :21:24. | |
I'm not a person who's ever felt like this is my place, | :21:25. | :21:30. | |
I live there, it's my home, but I'm not a person, like... | :21:31. | :21:33. | |
I kind of know that it's not this place that was designed for me. | :21:34. | :21:37. | |
But it's my home so I have to make it work. | :21:38. | :21:43. | |
Its job supposedly is to make it also work for me, | :21:44. | :21:46. | |
so these things are happening in concert. | :21:47. | :21:48. | |
On the show we've had different, sort of, voices from the black | :21:49. | :21:54. | |
We've had Al Sharpton on not so long ago and representatives | :21:55. | :22:01. | |
from Black Lives Matter, there are approaches to protest. | :22:02. | :22:03. | |
What's your take on how best to achieve change | :22:04. | :22:09. | |
I don't have a take on it, it's something I always am imagining | :22:10. | :22:14. | |
in these books but for me my take is just to write, that's what I do, | :22:15. | :22:18. | |
I get nervous when people tell me how to think, | :22:19. | :22:23. | |
it's one of the things about this election that's made me nervous. | :22:24. | :22:27. | |
People are so comfortable being told how to think because in a weird way | :22:28. | :22:30. | |
These things make me nervous, I'm always nervous. | :22:31. | :22:38. | |
I've learned that I write from a point of being uncomfortable, | :22:39. | :22:41. | |
from being apprehensive but sometimes when I write | :22:42. | :22:43. | |
there is a sense that I'm unfettered and much more bold on the page | :22:44. | :22:47. | |
That's interesting you say that because on the page you're fizzing | :22:48. | :22:57. | |
with energy and you go to places a lot of people wouldn't go, | :22:58. | :23:00. | |
I'm a kind of boring, inert person here. | :23:01. | :23:04. | |
I'm intrigued to know where you're going to take the spirit that's | :23:05. | :23:07. | |
I have stories that come to me over over time, | :23:08. | :23:12. | |
I have a couple of ideas, I don't know exactly | :23:13. | :23:15. | |
Are they going to be about contemporary America? | :23:16. | :23:18. | |
One of them actually is and the other one might not be. | :23:19. | :23:21. | |
You opened up with this thing of the more things change the more | :23:22. | :23:29. | |
One of the nice things is, you know, my first novel's 20 years | :23:30. | :23:34. | |
old and some guy recently wrote a review of that first novel | :23:35. | :23:37. | |
I think good art does that hopefully. | :23:38. | :23:43. | |
A final thing, and I can relate to this, you once said that writing | :23:44. | :23:47. | |
is hard, in a way you hate writing, but you can't stop doing it. | :23:48. | :23:51. | |
There's nothing that gives me the kind of satisfaction of writing. | :23:52. | :23:56. | |
so I don't want to throw it away just yet. | :23:57. | :23:59. | |
Paul Beatty, thanks so much for being on HARDtalk. | :24:00. | :24:32. | |
We got some topsy-turvy weather conditions across | :24:33. | :24:35. |