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| Edited By: Suhit Kelkar |Source: DNA |Updated: Jan 25, 2015, 05:20 AM IST
Q Tell us a little about your background.
A: I hail from Richmond, Virginia, from the east coast of the USA.
Q; How did you develop an interest in reading?
A: My mother passed on a love of reading to me. I read poetry, history, fiction.
Q: How did you take up soldiering?
A: It was an economic decision. I knew I wanted to pursue an education but couldn't afford it. I knew if I would serve with the army (for some years), they would pay for my college education. That is how my father, too, and his father before him, had served in the army—it was not a career decision.
Q) Did you ever imagine you would see active service?
A: No. It was in 1998 that I joined up. The world was a different place. I didn't predict that the US would be at war for 15 years.
Q: Did you support the Iraq war?
A: I was always skeptical of the narrative of WMDs. But I felt an obligation to the soldiers with the unit. I felt I had to go with my friends. Immediately after arriving in Iraq, I began to oppose the war. It was strange to fight in a war I did not believe in, but for me it was a matter of survival. That feeling of being conflicted appears in my novel and my poems.
Q: After the war, you went to college. What did you study? Any writers who have stayed with you and who you studied in college?
A: English literature. There are many writers: I loved the novel Great Gatsby. Poets like James Wright. It was incredible to go from stressful situations that occupied my thoughts to where I could be immersed in literature. Some writers, like Lorca, I discovered in translation.
Q: When did you begin writing 'The Yellow Birds'?
A: I began writing it two years after I returned (he returned in 2006). I was then a customer service representative with a credit card company. It was a way of writing about my conflict. Sharing it with readers.
Q: What is the novel about?
A: It's about two soldiers sent to Iraq, and one of them has promised the mother of the other soldier that he will protect him. But the other soldier dies. It's a novel about the war, but also about the narrator, who must live with his failure.
Q: To what extent is this novel autobiographical?
A: The incidents are fictionalised, but the underlying feeling is all mine.
Q: When did you take to writing poetry?
A. I have been writing poems since I was a teenager, obviously not the kinds that appear in the anthology. It took me a year (after my return) to get enough distance as a soldier to look at it at a level of remove, to turn my experience into art. I was trying to give people who had questions about America's involvement in Iraq and the Middle East access to that experience they might not have. With poetry it is more visceral. Energetic. There is immediate response. A novel is more immersive. For me, my writing was about being a responsible citizen and the role art can play with that.
Q: Your war poems are unconventional in that their tone of voice is conversational, casual.
A: I wanted to strike an emotional note of detachment. Repressed emotion. I wanted the language to have a certain amount of subtlety and hope that I could communicate the depth of emotion under the surface.
Q: To what extent is a poem given to you?
A: I start with an image that I don't know the significance of, or a line with music to it. I figure out what is the context, and whether it needs a context. For me, drafting is finding the language to communicate the experience the way I have felt it. Sometimes I feel like a carpenter taking things out.
Q: How has writing about your traumatic experiences changed you?
A: Writing gives you a degree of control over your experiences. You choose the words. You control what happens. You get to shape your own reality. If a memory inspires a poem, it can be transfigured, transmuted. One has the ability through writing to alter those events. There is a therapeutic element to it.
