Zee JLF 2019: Pulitzer awardee Colson Whitehead on going beyond racism

Colson Whitehead, one of the stars at this year’s Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, has written six novels (and two books of non-fiction) in the 20 years he’s been a professional writer. And every one of these has won critical acclaim, sold well and bagged honours, the most prominent being the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2017) and National Book Award (2016) for his last, The Underground Railway. The title refers to the mythic secret route taken by African-origin slaves in pre-Civil War America as they made their way from the inhuman work conditions of the cotton plantations in the South to the North, where abolitionist sentiments were popular. It’s a beautiful novel – harsh, brutal, heart-rending, but also life-affirming. Edited excerpts from an interview with the author.

How did the idea for The Underground Railway come to you? Does it have a basis in something real?

In real life, the “underground railroad” was a metaphor, the name of the social network that helped slaves escape to the North. When you are a kid, and first hear these two words, you think it is a real train. I thought, what if I played with that childhood notion – what kind of story could I generate if I made it an actual train beneath the Earth?

Cora seemed to me to be along the lines of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Sethe in Beloved. Did these strong slave women protagonists provide a template in imagining her?

No. I chose a female protagonist because I had a string of male protagonists in a row, and it was time to mix it up and not do the same thing. Harriet Jacob’s memoir (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) about her enslavement, her story, has remained with me since college, and she writes very movingly of the dilemma of the female slave. I thought it was a story worth taking up.

How does race enter your writing? Could you possibly write in a manner that did not bring your identity – a black American writer – into the text?

I write about a lot of things – race, the city, technology, pop culture. I’ve written books that have nothing to do with race.

Have you read any of the new writings by dalits?

I’ve read stories about the caste system, but nothing recent.

All your books are different. How do you decide on what you’ll write about?

I like writing about different things and enjoy different kinds of narratives – dramatic, science fiction, realistic, plotless stories rooted in character. If I keep writing, I get to tell stories in these different modes. If you’ve done one kind of story, why do it again? I get ideas from newspaper stories, articles, a random thought I have while walking down the street. “What if...” If the idea stays with me over time, it is proving its worth.

How did you decide to be a writer? Which writers have been an influence on your life?

I liked to hang around the house when I was a kid, reading. Being a writer and making things up seemed like a good job. I’ve taken inspiration from many places and people: Marvel comics in the ’80s, Walt Whitman, The Twilight Zone, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon...

What is your next book about?

It’s a short novel based on the real-life Dozier School in Florida, a brutal reform school that was rife with abuse and corruption. It follows two boys who are sent there in the 1960s and try to survive.

If you had to name any one book that inspired you, what would it be? Why?

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, with its brand of magic realism, was a helpful in shaping the voice of The Underground Railroad. But I’ve been inspired by so many writers. Sometimes one author is helpful for this project, another author is useful for another project.