“I like rewriting, so I have created a process where I do a great deal of it.”

I’ve been looking more lately at how writers deal with problems of focus and concentration. When I talked to Karen Joy Fowler about Booth, I also asked her about her writing strategies.

I was interested to see in a recent interview that you don’t write steadily and consistently. “I have never managed to string more than three days of writing together,” you said.

I write very much in fits and starts. And you know, that seemed like a problem to me—it probably is a problem—but I’m too old to fix it now, so I just don’t worry about it anymore. I am who I am. I write the way I write. There’s nothing to be done about any of it.

How do you keep going? Asking for a friend.

I’ve tried different strategies at different points in my life. They’ve all been successful to a point and ultimately unsuccessful: they work for a while and then they don’t work anymore. I have tried more journaling in the hopes that something will spring from that easier kind of writing process.

I usually find that if I’m going to get inspiration, it’s going to come from somebody else’s book, so mostly I do a lot of reading and hope that someone else’s genius will reach out of the page into my brain and start me thinking about something new.

And when that happens, what then?

Then I start to write. I move very slowly forward. I try to get a paragraph, and then I rewrite that paragraph, and I rewrite that paragraph again, and then I wrote another paragraph, and I rewrite both those paragraphs. I like rewriting, so I have created a process where I do a great deal of it. I do some rewriting every day, and I try to force myself forward some small amount every day as well. The worst part is when I’m at the absolute beginning, cause I’ve got nothing to rewrite. Once I’ve got some words up, then I can proceed in a much happier way.

But “just sit down and write and something will happen” doesn’t necessarily work for you?

Not necessarily. I find that if I say, “I’m going to write 500 words today,” I can do that. I can do that quite easily. They won’t be 500 words that I like, or that I want to keep, or that lead to the next 500 words. It’s an assignment I can tick off, but it’s not a helpful assignment, so no.

The idea has to be there from the beginning—

The idea has to be there. Some idea has to be there. Any idea. It doesn’t have to be a full idea for a full book. It might be an idea for a scene, or a paragraph, or a sentence, but something more solid has to be there.

Interview with Karen Joy Fowler, July 2022

Karen Joy Fowler: “Chaos Is the Stuff of Plot”

Karen Joy Fowler (Indiana, 1950) made up her mind to become a writer on her 30^th birthday, “a kind of insane decision that I had no real knowledge of the implications of.” Her first novel was published a decade later, and in 2004 she published her first bestseller, The Jane Austen Book Club. This engaging, drily funny tale of life in a small provincial city as observed by the book club’s members became her first bestseller.

Her next, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), is a magnificent novel about an experiment in primate behavior that, when it fails, exposes the ethical and emotional complications of human-animal relations. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In her latest novel, Booth, she enters into the longings and delusions of an American household amid the tension and escalating violence of the US before and during the Civil War (1861-65). Set in a divided country, Booth offers an intimate portrait of a theater dynasty as troubled as it was famous. Like all Fowler’s books it’s told in a compelling narrative voice, sparkling with dry humor and full of acute observations on human shortcomings.

From the living room of her house in the California seaside town of Santa Cruz—home to a literary community of which Jonathan Franzen is the best-known member—Fowler talks about what drew her to the Booth family. Their letters and memoirs brought them to life for her: the charismatic, unpredictable Junius Brutus Booth, whose acting career was marred by his alcoholism, and his son Edwin, who, despite or because of his conflicts with his father, became the most renowned Shakespearean actor in America. The most famous, or notorious, member of the Booth family was its most beloved son, John Wilkes, who chose the side of the South and slavery and became President Lincoln’s assassin.

How did you go from a contemporary book about animal rights to a historical novel about the Booth family?

It began as a response to the ubiquitous and constant mass shootings we have in this country. I started thinking about the families of the shooters, and how you would go on with your life after something like that. I’m hardly the first writer to have had this thought, but that is were I started.

But in the middle, Trump was elected, and this was just a great shock to me. I will never get over the shock of it. I put the book down for a long time, just to try to deal with life in a country I no longer recognized. And when I picked it up again, my focus had shifted. I was thinking more about how the issues of the Civil War have just never been resolved, and that what we were seeing was a clear, straight through-line from the Civil War to what is happening now.

The book opens in the “golden childhood’ of the Booth siblings, when they lived on a farm in slave state Maryland. Junius chose the remote location so he could raise his children according to his own moral principles—he disapproved of cruelty to animals, eating meat, and, to a lesser extent, slavery—and also, as it turns out, because he was in hiding from his first wife.

Their happiness didn’t last, Fowler says: “The Booth family was coming apart more and more at the seams, as the nation did the same.”

You’ve said that one of the themes of your work is of a lost Eden, this idea of people who had better lives, have lost them in one way or another, and are trying to return. Did you experience Trump’s election as a lost Eden?

Not necessarily a lost Eden so much as a lost future. I had really believed that the election of Barack Obama meant something about where we had come in terms of race relations. It was a sense of progress, a sense of the creation of a multicultural democracy that seemed to me to be, with fits and starts, proceeding. That’s what I lost.

You don’t say a lot about race in the novel. I wonder what decisions you made about how to talk about race, how to talk about slavery.

It was something I just tried to do very, very carefully. For my characters, I feel there’s a real generational shift. The grandfather and the parents, who grew up in England, were shocked by slavery in a way that their children, who grew up with slavery all around them, were not. With the exception of John Wilkes Booth, they all opposed slavery, but the younger generation certainly didn’t talk about it very much, and possibly didn’t think about it very much, which is the way you are with your own family. Everything that you grow up with seems perfectly ordinary until you see somebody else’s family and you realize, no, this was crazy, this was always crazy.

A thing that I’m missing in the book, that I just would have liked some help with from these historical figures with, is that realization. Yes, they’re opposed to slavery. When did that happen? When did they notice it? But they left no record of any such thing, and I did not feel up to imagining it.

You seem fascinated with the theatricality of this theater family.

I think I can make a case that growing up surrounded by Shakespeare’s language and plots and characters had an impact [on the Booth children], and not a good one. John Wilkes, at least, saw his life as a big story, a grand story, in which he was destined to play an outsized role: he had a sense of his own importance and his destiny from very early in his life. If you look at the assassination itself, it looks like a piece of theater. He had lines and timing planned, and it seems like he was doing a scene.

The father appears to be acting his father role, in a way that’s typical of narcissistic parents.

Yes. I wouldn’t disagree with that. He had a role to play, and it could be an extremely benevolent, entertaining, lovely role as long as he was not brooked in any way. As long as he was allowed to play that role unimpeded by any sort of complaint or pushback or hesitation, he could be quite a good father. But he could also be quite a dreadful father as well.

I seem to be very attracted to alcoholic fathers in my literature, which is perhaps because I had one.

Attracted in what sense?

Well, they’re great catalysts for action. They create chaos all around them, and chaos is the stuff of plot.

One of the questions the father’s life seems to ask is about the relationship between having moral principles and being a good person.

That’s a really interesting question, yes. [Ironic tone] The one does not lead as clearly to the other as you would hope.

One of my favorite characters in all of literature is Lancelot in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. This is a person who, with the exception of falling in love with Guinevere, behaves in a morally impeccable way because he thinks of himself as such a damaged and ugly person. Because of his deep self-loathing, he lands in a place where he tries to behave with grace and generosity and courage at all times.

And it’s the people who see themselves as good who cause the trouble? The road to hell is paved with good intentions?

[Sweetly] I’m sure many people who see themselves as good are very good.

Were there things that were constraining, or liberating, for you in writing about real people?

I felt very anxious about it. It was in many ways easy, because there was so much material that I had to work with, so many things I did not have to make up, that were just there in their own letters and their own experiences. But I always felt this trepidation that I was doing something that would not hold up to close scrutiny.

Are there political divisions in your own family?

No, there really aren’t. I’m very lucky that way.

Do you have any advice for people with that problem?

I don’t know. My politics are very central to who I am. My value system is expressed in them. And my value system is one of tolerance, inclusion, the idea that everybody’s voice is as important as everybody else’s voice, the idea that everybody should be safe inside their house and outside their house. People who don’t agree with such baseline humanity…I just don’t know what to say.

I expect everybody thinks they have that same baseline that I do, but it seems to me that [drily] their policies often do not express that baseline.

The book opens with a quote from before the Civil War, from the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” What does that mean to you?

That there is a way of looking at American history that is not honest, but serves certain people’s purposes and can become the dominant narrative. We’re in a current time where there’s much protest, removing Confederate monuments from public spaces, and also taking a look at the sort of sainted forefathers in America and noticing how many of them enslaved people, and trying to be more precise about who they were, what they said, what they did, trying to put together a more honest portrait.

But one of the things that has done is remove symbols of unity from the country. If your goal is to put the country back together again, taking a figure like Thomas Jefferson and removing him from the reverential position that he has held is something that a number of people are gong to push back against.

Our history, which ideally should be something that unifies us, if looked at honestly is not. It seems to me that we have always chosen a sort of threadbare unity over an honest look at the past, and I think that’s what Douglass was talking about.

But isn’t that threadbare unity still necessary and valuable?

I guess. It depends on who has to be sacrificed in order to create the sense of unity. Clearly, in the attempt to put the country back together after the Civil War, the black people in the South were sacrificed in order to assure the South that the structures of white supremacy would not be overturned by the abolition of slavery, that things could go on much as they had before. It was a great betrayal of the freed peoples in the service of trying to coax the white rebels back into the country.

And I think one of the things we’re facing now is whether Trump will be held accountable for treason, and we’re facing what we always face,…a sense that the country will be very disunified if anyone is ever actually held accountable, and that it’s better just to paper over it and move forward, which is the choice we always make. So I’m very curious as to how the current situation is going to play out.

Originally published in Dutch in Trouw, September 4, 2022.

I talked with the great Jesmyn Ward about Mississippi, Black Lives Matter, and her memoir Men We Reaped, recently published in Dutch as De mannen die we oogstten. Read it at trouw.nl/cultuur-media/jesmyn-ward-schrijven-was-iets-waar-ik-voor-wegliep-totdat-mijn-broer-stierf~be2204bf/.

“’Girl, Woman, Other’ came out of a feminist impulse, which was to create these multiple narratives from women’s perspectives. But I also wanted to see my black, British generation acknowledged, because I know that if we don’t write about it, nobody else will.”

My conversation with Bernardine Evaristo in Trouw, December 6, 2020.

While I’m talking with the poet and novelist Paul Beatty in his Amsterdam hotel, we spot another Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel, sailing through the lobby. Both have novels newly out in Dutch translation, and both did interviews the day before for a books program on Dutch TV. Beatty envies her interview skills, he tells me. “She has her thing all ready. She knows what she’s going to say when she goes in there.”

Beatty, on the other hand, doesn’t always know what he thinks, or he thinks… Read more on Literary Hub

A.S. Byatt: I Have Not Yet Written Enough

To interview the American writer Chris Kraus I don’t step into the lobby of a comfortable hotel. Instead I climb two narrow, scuffed flights of stairs to the little Amsterdam apartment her Dutch publisher has rented for her via Airbnb. Nor does the 61-year-old woman who opens the door and makes us coffee project the usual distant tolerance of a literary star on a book tour. She has a soft, sweet voice and the uncombed hair of a punk kid, and she talks the way she writes: with the high-octane brain of a culture critic combined with the best kind of geeky enthusiasm.

She’s here to talk about her first book, ‘I Love Dick,’ a groundbreaking mix of feminist analysis, art criticism, personal essay, and epistolary novel. Published in 1997, it was later embraced by a new feminist generation and has just been translated into Dutch. Kraus was born in the United States, grew up in New Zealand, and moved to New York in the 1970s to study acting. She became an experimental filmmaker, paid the rent by working as a topless dancer, then turned to writing when her films failed to find an audience.

‘I Love Dick’ is often read as a comedy about romantic obsession. Its main character is Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful filmmaker in her late thirties. One night she goes out to dinner with her husband, a well-known culture critic, and his hipster colleague Dick. Dick spends the whole evening flirting with Chris, but as soon as she falls for him he loses interest. She copes with her growing crush on Dick by writing him letters, some of them together with her husband. Gradually the letters become the essays that form the heart of the book.

‘I Love Dick’ deals with marriage and unrequited love, but also with the question of women’s authority: Who gets the right to speak? Can female experience can ever claim to be “universal”? Men who write about their own experience are respected, Chris tells Dick, but women who do the same are dismissed as “bitches, libelers, pornographers, and amateurs.” By investigating her “failures” Kraus lays bare the power structures that keep women from succeeding in art and love, while asking us to reappraise our own definitions of success.

So why all this attention for the book? Why now?

I think maybe the appeal of the book now is that people are reading it as a comedy: it’s light and funny and it brings people together. It was a very polarizing book in ’97 when it came out. And it turns out 20 years later to be a very unifying book.

What’s being unified?

Well, I do these events, and a lot of people come to them, and there’s always a great discussion, and people laugh and laugh and it feels as though the book has become some kind of bonding thing in a really disparate, multigenerational audience.

You’ve called ‘I Love Dick’ “an attempt to analyze the social conditions surrounding my personal failure.”

Yes. I tried very hard for a number of years: I’d made eight or nine short films and then a feature film, and they had utterly failed to catch on. Powerful people said very disparaging things about them. And yet I felt I wasn’t stupid; my work was not without merit; and so I decided I wasn’t going to make another film until I understood the failure of my films. And to do that I had to look not just to myself and the films, but to the atmosphere in which they were circulating, and the power dynamics of the culture industry and the art world in which they were received.

And the closer I looked at that, the more interesting it became, and the further it took me away from my own problems and failures and into the lives of others. I became very interested in whatever became of the second-wave feminists, who at that point [in the 1990s] would have been in their fifties and sixties and, you would think, in very visible leadership positions, given the tremendous contributions they made earlier in their lives. But no. They’ve mostly disappeared. A whole group of women just seemed to have been obliterated. And that became one of the essays/slash/letters in the book, trying to understand the quote-unquote failure of those women, not as a personal failure, but as something that the culture did to them.

People in their twenties are often under a lot of pressure to succeed in work and relationships. You admit that that’s an uncomfortable position. Is that part of your appeal?

Your twenties are such a difficult time. You have no idea what your life is going to be, and the decisions you make really do influence the turns your life is going to take. And in the postmodern situation, where everyone’s on their own to figure out their life, there’s nothing much to guide us except each other and things we pick up in the air and in the culture. It’s very hard.

It seems like the unattached life that used to be reserved for a few bohemians is now the one everyone has to live, whether they want to or not.

Exactly. That’s the cruelty of neoliberalism, that the person who picks up the garbage has to live as precarious a life as the person who wants to be an art star. Not everyone is born to be an independent contractor or self-promoter, and why one should have to be in that role just to do a perfectly ordinary, routine job that used to be valued in a way that it’s not valued now—it’s just one of the tragedies.

I’ve written monographs where I get interested in the depopulation of everything between the two coasts in the United States. [Outside of urban areas] you go five or ten miles off the Interstate and there are ghost towns. And the neoliberal idea is these people whose families have lived in these towns for generations should just get a moving van. That’s the answer to their problems: go to the megapolis; the work is there. As if there’s no integrity and no value to the history and lives of these towns and communities.

That’s happening here in the Netherlands, too.

It helps explain the rise of Trump, that the lives of white working-class Americans are as devalued as third-world labor.

Why has no one been addressing this?

People are addressing it, but not in a massive way. Identity politics gains a lot of traction and lends itself to a lot of mass media coverage, because it’s very tabloid and everybody really wants to read about themselves and think about themselves, but how to find a more popular way of bringing the conversation outwards? There’s a great feminist group started by Melissa Gordon, an artist in London, called We Not I, a feminism that’s more about “We” than “I,” and that can address these larger problems, and not just the problem of the body and the individual, and self empowerment and self-assertion.

And in Amsterdam this fantastic woman, Jessica Gysel, has started one of the most important feminist magazines in the world, called Girls Like Us. It’s such a paradigm for the possibilities of feminism. It includes all professions, it’s not just people in the culture industry. It’s actresses, it’s engineers, it’s teachers it’s social workers. It [shows] a whole bandwidth of women who are doing work that they believe in, all cultures, races, ethnicities, generations. It’s advancing a feminism that’s not merely about individual self-empowerment, but all kinds of women who are engaged in influential and meaningful ways with the larger world.

In a later book, ‘Torpor’, you write about deciding not to have a child —

That was not the character’s decision. She wanted to have a child, but there was absolutely no support for her to do that. When she got pregnant her husband wanted her to have an abortion. And then she wanted to adopt a child, but he wasn’t serious about that either. She was told by her family, “We’ll never help you if you get pregnant.”

If you’re an artist in the US, unless you have independent means and family support, it’s virtually impossible to have a child. I know Dutch artists in their twenties who have children, and it’s a courageous decision here, but it’s not an impossible decision. It’s not [career] suicide, which it pretty much would be for women living in American cities who are trying to pursue careers in art or culture without other support. Because there’s no social support, there’s no safety net.

I don’t think that you can’t be a serious artist or writer and a parent; obviously that’s not true. There are plenty of women who have children who’ve created great and permanently meaningful work. But I don’t think you can do it now unless you have other means of support outside the arts.

A lot of young women seem to think that if they’re not successful on these terms, that makes them a bad feminist.

That’s so fucked up, isn’t it?

I ask Kraus about the election in the US: Hillary or Bernie? “Bernie!” she says. Then she looks at me as though she can’t believe I had to ask.

Yes?

Obviously. I mean, it’s the first time in decades that people have had a chance to vote for a candidate who’s not the lesser of two evils, who’s a person of real integrity, who has been successful and meaningful and altruistic and generous. [His campaign] is the legacy of Occupy taken more mainstream. I’ve volunteered, I’ve donated money…

Real change, Kraus continues, has been achieved in social issues like gay marriage. Now she hopes class issues can gain more traction. “I think class is the big barrier in the US. No one wants to talk about it, no one wants to admit to it, and very few people want to advocate for it.”

Why is it so hard?

Because it’s the loser thing. To be of the lower class is to be a loser, and everybody wants to be a winner. The persistent lie of American capitalism is that everyone can be a winner.

Which brings us back to your book: so if you admit that you’re a loser…?

So that’s a very political act, to admit that I’m a loser, because then maybe you can admit it too. And then maybe we can all together look at why we’re losers and how the system is rigged against us.

Published in different form in Trouw, June 25, 2016.

I talked to Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah about books, bologna sandwiches, the Harare Public Library, ‘Animal Farm’ in translation, living in more than one culture, and her new novel, ‘The Book of Memory.’ The interview ran in Dutch in Trouw on Feb. 16 and in English on LitHub.

http://lithub.com/petina-gappah-on-zimbabwe-language-and-afropolitans/

On September 4 I moderated a reading with one of the writers I admire and love most, Margaret Atwood, for the John Adams Institute in De Duif in Amsterdam. There’s no recording of our conversation, but she read one of my favorite parts of MaddAddam, the story of Zeb and the bear, and you can see her reading here:

http://lezentv.nl/articles/985/Margaret_Atwood__Maddaddam

For someone who can be so fierce in her fiction, Toni Morrison is remarkably easy to talk to. A conversation on the phone with her, at the house on the Hudson River where she’s lived for years, is warm, fun even—if you’re allowed to say that about a Nobel Prize-winning author. She tells stories. She heaps praise on her collaborators, theater director Peter Sellars and singer Rokia Traoré. And when you apologize for asking about a play that premiered two years ago, she tells you she never gets tired of talking about “Desdemona.”

“It’s one of the few things I’ve done for the stage that I regard as really powerful,” she continues. It’s easy to see why she feels so strongly. In some ways, the musical theater piece is for her a risky departure: an experiment with music theater; a collaborative work; a rare encounter with Africa for a writer whose gaze has been firmly focused on America. Yet it’s also a crowning achievement: through Shakespeare, Morrison seems to have arrived at a summing up of the themes that have characterized her own literary career.

“Desdemona” began as a challenge from Sellars. In a conversation with Morrison about Shakespeare’s tragedy “Othello,” he dismissed the play as “thin,” one of the Bard’s lesser works. Morrison disagreed. “Most of the performances I have seen were predictable: big black guy strangles little white girl, some version of that. But I thought the thinness that Peter was talking about was in the performances, not the play itself.”

African stories
Sellars urged Morrison to write her own version of the story. He also, she says, handed her the key. “Peter was interested in what he thinks was Shakespeare’s tentative relationship with Africa. He thought that there was a very strong African theme in ‘Othello,’ but one that was hidden.”

Hidden history happens to be one of Morrison’s own central preoccupations. Throughout her career, she has dedicated herself to exploring the untold lives of women and black Americans, including the deep traumas of slavery and racism. She took up Sellars’s challenge. The result is a performance with text by Morrison and music and lyrics by Traoré. “Desdemona” carries traces of the bitterness and violence that characterize both Shakespeare’s play and much of Morrison’s own work. Yet its tone is mainly one of acceptance, perhaps even reconciliation.

In Shakespeare’s play, Othello is a Moor, a North African, who works his way up to become a general in the army of Venice. After he wins the love of the senator’s daughter Desdemona, she marries him against the wishes of her powerful family. Then one of Othello’s junior officers, Iago, who has been passed up for promotion, decides to bring the general down. He tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona has been having an affair. Othello first murders Desdemona and, when he realizes the truth, kills himself.

When she began writing “Desdemona,” Morrison says, “I had one requirement immediately, which was to get rid of Iago. Because he talks too much, he’s everywhere; I mean, I can’t even think why Shakespeare called it “Othello,” because it’s all about Iago.”

Then Morrison explored Othello’s past, imagining that he once served as a child soldier in an African civil war. “You know, I was always wondering, why does Desdemona fall in love with Othello in the first place? She says that she listened to all his stories. Shakespeare mentions one, but I invent the others.”

She added a new character, too, one who is mentioned only in passing in Shakespeare’s text. The evening of her murder, Desdemona sings a sad song she learned from her mother’s maid just before she died of a broken heart. The singer was called “Barbary”: an old name for North Africa. Sellars suggested that she might have come from Africa, and that she might have raised Desdemona.

Being seen
All these changes gave Morrison a feeling of artistic liberty. “I thought, I don’t have to even try to be an echo of Shakespeare, but simply take it into a new place.” The new place is the afterlife, where the characters meet as equals on a bare stage. “They don’t have to be careful of what they say because Iago might think this or somebody else might think that. They can say what they believe is true, and even learn about each other, because they have timelessness, they have eternity.”

A recurring motif in “Othello,” and in Morrison’s fiction, is the outsider’s need to be seen, to be known. Othello’s own dying words, “Speak of me as I am,” could serve as an epigraph to Morrison’s work. So, in the afterlife, Desdemona greets her beloved nurse (played by Traoré). “And Rokia says, ‘Wait a minute. You don’t even know my name.’

“[Barbary says] ‘I’m black, you’re white, you can’t understand me.’ [Desdemona answers] “‘What do you mean? I married a black man.’ Yes, but, yes but.

“Then the big question: Desdemona says, ‘Did I ever hurt you?’ And [Barbary] says, ‘No.’

“And there’s the space, the sort of racial space, and class space, and geographic space, where all the things that keep people disliking one another, or resenting one another, or assuming things about one another disappear. And she can touch her face, as she does, and realize that they’re two people in difficulty, or who have had some difficulties.

“In that dialogue, in that exchange, is everything you know or sense about religious or racial conflict, or male and female conflict. All of this is about making other people strangers, or putting yourself in a position of authority. You see a person, you look at them, and you think you know all about them, because of the way they dress, the way they speak, and certainly color.” But in eternity, there might be time enough to understand.

Nor is understanding everything. Desdemona can’t get over what Othello did, Morrison explains. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him. “Desdemona says, ‘Love is not a banquet, where you pick this little gesture and love it and throw this one away. You either love somebody or you don’t.’”

Forgiveness
A conversation with Morrison ranges widely. She talks about how little she knew of African music: before she met Traoré, she never knew there was more to it than drumming. “Here in the West, where you’re really limited anyway, that’s what you think of. You know, drums and dance.”

She speaks of the pleasures of collaboration. “I like that kind of work. Equality among equals. Nobody’s trying to outdo anybody else.”

There’s one subject, however, that makes Morrison wary. The question touches on another theme that runs strongly through “Desdemona,” the problem of cynicism versus forgiveness. Morrison has not seen it as her business to portray reconciliation between black and white—or otherwise let anyone off the hook. White readers, feeling guilty about the privileges their race confers, tend to look in Morrison’s work for gestures of absolution. So far they’ve searched in vain.

In “Desdemona,” there’s space and time enough for understanding to win out over mistrust. But the mention of the word “forgiveness” puts the writer on her guard. Coolly, she says, “Well, the better track of course is a little combination. There’s nothing wrong with forgiveness if it moves one to another place. It’s not, ‘Oh, O.K., let’s forget about it.’ It’s, ‘That’s an important thing you’ve said and done. Let’s find out what it means.’”

Praise, criticism for “Desdemona”
The musical theater piece “Desdemona” is a collaboration between writer Toni Morrison, director Peter Sellars, and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. It is performed by actress Tina Benko (who takes most of the speaking parts) and Traoré, backed up by four musicians. Reviews for the play, which premiered in Vienna in 2011, have been mostly positive. The New York Times praised Traoré’s “lovely, intimate” music, but called Morrison’s text “an elegant lecture.” Libération noted Morrison’s “sins of didacticism.” But the Guardian’s reviewer judged the piece “bravely original,” while the Los Angeles Times called it “great, challenging, haunting and lasting.”

Trouw, June 11, 2013.