An Interview with Amina Gautier
Bret Meier, a senior in the English literature and modern languages programs at the University of Central Missouri and an editorial intern for Pleiades: Literature in Context, interviews Amina Gautier, whose stories “Flight to Canada” and “Elevator” appear as part of our Summer 2019 fiction folio of the Afro-Caribbean and its diaspora.
Amina Lolita Gautier, Ph.D., is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. At-Risk was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Award. Now We Will Be Happy was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and the International Latino Book Award. The Loss of All Lost Things was awarded the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, the International Latino Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award, and the Chicago Public Library’s 21stCentury Award. More than one hundred of her stories have been published, appearing in Agni, Best African American Fiction, Blackbird, Glimmer Train, Latino Book Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and Southern Review among other places. For her body of work she has received the PEN/MALAMUD award.
BM: The spontaneous, post-election move to Canada is portrayed as reckless if not irresponsible in “Flight to Canada” (featured in the Summer 2019 issue of Pleiades). The characters seem to be focused on trivial cultural details, such as maple syrup and mayonnaise on burgers. Why did you choose to have your characters ignore the reality of their proclamation?
AG: First, because I write in the tradition of realism and that scenario is entirely realistic. Many Americans are culturally ignorant about other countries and much of what we do know is superficial—we know a country’s food, but not its political history. I know plenty of fellow Americans who don’t know much more about Canada than the superficial details my story mentions. I’ve actually met people who think Canada is in Europe and I’ve definitely seen people demonstrate that belief while going through Customs in the airport. Second, knee-jerk reactions are seldom thought through. When something happens that we don’t like and we respond in an impulsive and rash manner, very little objective thinking is occurring.
BM: The past becomes a reminder to the couple that racism is not a problem limited in scope of the United States. Do you believe that the people who choose to promote human rights abroad must also confront inequality at home?
AG: Absolutely. I think it’s a very human thing to project and compare. It’s equally common to form one-up and one-down comparisons and to believe that another nation is more polite/friendly/civilized etc. than yours when the truth is that people are people and nations are made of people. When we remove the topsoil of cultural and national mythology (the story a nation tells about itself), and begin to dig through the layers of history, we tend to find that the same country that we might laud for being more civilized and polite has had a history of oppressing certain groups. It’s strange, because we tend to acknowledge and accept our own nation’s complexity and contradictions—for example, we believe ourselves to be the Land of the Free, while we know very well about our country’s history of slavery—while imbibing the stories other nations tell about themselves without questioning and challenging those myths.
BM: As someone who has lived in several areas of the United States and undoubtedly experienced racism in varying degrees, does writing become an effective tool in enduring and confronting racism?
AG: Writing has been my most effective tool in not only confronting racism but recording and documenting it. Back in 1851, when deciding to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe said, “There is no arguing with pictures, and everybody is impressed with them whether they mean to be or not.” That’s how I feel about fiction. There’s no arguing with it. People change our history books, erasing narratives, recasting slaves as ‘indentured’ servants etc. and, in essence, rewrite history, but even when you change the historical record, the literature of the day is still there, recording and documenting the mores of the culture and the time. Just like liars don’t like to be called liars (even when caught in the act of lying), racists never like to be called racist even when their actions and words are clearly racist. I no longer bother to waste my breath on one racist or racist act when I can publish a story that can capture that moment for a much broader audience and yield a much larger response.
BM: In an article in the Riverfront Times, you said that although At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy have won many awards, people are paying more attention to your most recent collection, The Loss of All Lost Things. You stated that, “I wonder if one of the reasons they like it more is that it’s not so overt that the characters are black.” In “Flight to Canada,” we do not know that the characters are black until close to the end. Is concealing or overtly revealing the race of your characters a conscious choice when you are writing a piece?
AG: Rarely do white writers announce that a character is white and if white writers are not asked to specify a character’s race, then writers of color should not be asked to either. There should not be two different sets of rules for equally talented writers and there is absolutely no reason to assume that a character is white unless told otherwise. I actually don’t consider this particular story to have concealed or revealed race. The story features two black characters alone in their home, so there isn’t any reason for either of them to bring up the fact that they are black; they are looking right at one another and can see that. Stating their race only becomes important when the story takes a turn towards the somber and another racial group is mentioned. Mentioning race at that point highlights that two different racial groups had very different experiences in the same country. This is important to note because in our current cultural climate there has been a shift towards the privileging of personal experience. An example of what I mean by that is when Person A tells Person B that Person C is a liar and provides numerous documented examples of Person C’s lies, but Person B says, “Well, Person C never lied to me, so I don’t believe it.” This is where we are right now. Someone will say, “So and So never sexually harassed me, therefore So and So must not really be a harasser.” To bring this back to the tenets of the story, this becomes important because it asks whose experiences get privileged and whose get ignored and overlooked.
BM: The last line of your work [in the story published in Pleiades] , “Had they been handed seeds upon arrival and told to plant them, only to see them crop up and bloom in a field of blood?” is reverbant and tonally contrasting with the light-heartedness of the rest of the story. You regularly end your stories with a knockout sentence like the one above that conspicuously speaks to the underlying message of the piece. How does the way that you conclude your stories speak to your style as a writer?
AG: I am an artist, which means that the work needs to be beautiful. It must be artistic at the sentence level—it can’t just be excellent in terms of the story’s content, but the mastery has to carry over into the craftsmanship and the execution of the story as well, which means I have to knock it out of the park. That doesn’t mean tying up everything with a big bow so much as it means not allowing the story to peter out at the end but to end like you mean it (which, coincidentally, is also how you should begin—deliberately). Whenever I near the ending of a story I envision an ice-skater or a gymnast’s performance and how they always stick their landings. They finish their routines and then they fling their arms up smile brightly and the audience knows that’s its cue to cheer.
BM: I think many of our readers would like to know your “method” for putting together such successful and powerful works of fiction. What are some of your influences in the literary world and what kind of process do you undergo to start working on a story?
AG: My process is to not force it. Stories take time; they have to simmer. So I let them. And one of the ways I let them simmer is by simultaneously working on multiple pieces. When I am in drafting mode, it is not uncommon for me to work on three to five different stories in one day—adding a scene here, a paragraph to another one, setting there etc. which is all a lot of fun. It keeps me from getting bored. When drafting is over and the story’s been left alone for a few months and I return to it with the attention to revise, then I focus and concentrate on that one story and that one story only, taking it through as many drafts and revisions as necessary to make it beautiful. Early drafts are for content and scene construction. Later drafts are for sentence level revision and artistry. Once I’ve figured out the story that’s being told, I then determine the best way to tell it. This involves trying different POVs on for size and as well as making decisions about language, sound, and rhythm. I’ve written over one hundred stories and each one must be distinct and uniquely crafted.
Bret Meier is a senior in the English literature and modern languages programs at the University of Central Missouri and an editorial intern for Pleiades: Literature in Context.
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