SPECIAL PIECE:
Interview with Tananarive Due
By Daniel José Older
(Transcribed by Kiriko Kikuchi)
Tananarive Due writes the kind of books that make you sit all the way forward in your chair and make horrible faces at the words. I mean this, of course in the best possible way. She is, as all novelists should be: an unrelenting sadist towards her protagonists, and we struggle and rejoice with them accordingly. In the midst running away from demons, haints and various murder-bent immortals, though, something else emerges from Due’s deft approach to the supernatural: a sense of context, power and analysis. In her African Immortals series, Due weaves the gathering tension of an impossible relationship with geopolitical consequences of immortality. In The Good House, a grieving mother uncovers the historical traumas that destroyed her family as she fights off an ancient demon. These are not simple point A to point B plots; Due redraws for us a map of the world that takes into account race and gender, the subtle and outrageous challenges of navigating a structure that shuns you, the horror of mourning amidst a hostile system.
Tananarive’s next book, Ghost Summer: Stories, is due for release in June by Prime Books. The title novella won a Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society (originally published in THE ANCESTORS), and this will include “Patient Zero,” “The Lake,” “The Knowing,” “Herd Immunity” and other stories.
Tananarive Due is winner of The American Book Award and a NAACP Image Award recipient, and the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. Tananarive recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, Due was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She was the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College (2012–2013), and she also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
I sat down with her recently to talk about her trajectory as a writer and the intersections of art and politics.
DJO: You left your job at the Miami Herald to write fiction. What was the moment — or was there a moment, for you, that solidified that decision?
TD: I gained a lot from being a reporter. I met a lot of people I wouldn’t have met. It widened my world. I made some of my best friends there. But having said that, I never wanted to be a reporter in the sense of a calling. I was a Journalism Major in college because I needed to have a job, and I needed a job to support my writing. So pretty much from day one, I was ready to be done being a reporter. I felt like a fraud compared to the other reporters who actually had an interest in news. I would write features as best as I could, and that was a great day when I could stop chasing police cars. But yeah, I tried to liberate myself once when I got enough of an advance to write my mom’s book with her, “Freedom in the Family,” and I had 18 months off, and I was in heaven. And when I came back, I cried in the parking lot. And it was about two years after that I left. I got married, so I moved and that was it. But in terms of feeling the conflict between being an artist and having the day job being a reporter, I still have a lot of respect for people in that industry, and that newspaper — like I said, it made me a better person, I get that, but it was really ritualistic, like, fire. It just was uncomfortable, almost every day.
DJO: You knew you wanted to write fiction?
TD: Oh, I mean always, always. From age four, it was all about that. In fact, I wrote a book called “Baby Bobby.” It’s made out of typing paper with stick-figures and captions, and Baby Bobby wants his bottle, Baby Bobby is in his crib. And on the back page, I wrote liner notes: “Baby Bobby is a book about a baby,” and I said, “The author is Tananarive Due.”
DJO: Wow.
TD: And I spelled “author” wrong, but I was like four when I did that. So I was already visualizing how the books would be packaged and labeled. I really had that idea from a young age, and that was all I ever wanted to do. I gave up music, studying music, because I wanted to be a writer. I was taking piano lessons and trumpet in junior high, and I gave all that up when I hit high school, because I figured I needed everything in the writing basket, whether it was true or not. I just was so focused on that one.
DJO: Both your parents were in the Civil Rights Movement?
TD: Yeah. They met during the movement. My mother came to some national fame. She was arrested in 1960 and spent 49 days in jail after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. And my dad actually read about her in JET Magazine, and it inspired him to leave Indiana. He wanted to go to law school and he went in Florida. He chose Florida A&M University Law School in Tallahassee, Florida because he really wanted to get his feet wet in the movement. He felt like things were too slow and dead in Indiana, and he wanted to be where the action was. They really did not have a traditional courtship. They went to meetings and things together, but they did not date in the traditional sense. At a certain point they just felt like it was time to get married. And that commitment to the movement really was a stamp on their relationship throughout their time together until my mother died in February of 2012.
DJO: So they raised you—
TD: On the movement, in meetings, in protests. I have memories that I had blocked. Then I came across essays I wrote in high school or junior high. I was like, “Oh, I was present at that protest? I have no memory of it.” Because I just blocked it out. So yeah, we were up in it, and to this day I think I’m a little meeting-averse because I grew up in meetings. I feel like it was like a quota, whatever the activist’s meeting quota is — I really passed that by the time I was 15. I don’t know that that’s a valid feeling, but that is certainly how I pulled through.
DJO: I hear you.
TD: But I did learn at a young age that the combination of the written word and then speech — I did end up NAACP rhetorical contest, where I won money, to be really powerful, to really move people. And had I been a different personality type, I would’ve gone to law school like my sisters. And I would’ve tried to, but there’s too much argumentation, and I sucked at debate. Now speech, I could do. I sucked at debate. I’m non-confrontational one-on-one, you know? Like my dad. The thing with my dad is, my mom was the one who would get out there and face off with police, but my dad was a lawyer and working behind the scenes to get people out of jail. He would attend meetings and take notes and organize. And he’s still doing that. He’s still organizing and he just turned 78.
DJO: So you carry that legacy everywhere you go and in everything you do, but specifically when you sit down and write a story, is that something you’re conscious of? Where in the process of writing do you feel like the social justice upbringing come into play?
TD: I cast around looking for that for a while. My earliest childhood fiction was like everybody — you know, spaceships, talking cat, and all that kind of thing. But I do remember, at about the time “Roots” came out, I did my first long form. It was hand-written and there were a lot of pages, and it was called “Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free,” and it was sort of a slave girl’s journey, The Middle Passage and coming to the States, and that was my way of trying to connect in a very personal way to that history. But ironically, we were raised in the thick of the movement, but we were in these newly-integrated neighborhoods. That was part of the fight with integrating. So I was like, the only black kid in the neighborhood. And I would be bussed in with the white kids to the inner-city school for desegregation, which did not do so much for my street cred, of which I had none. That’s how I learned what Oreos were.
So I didn’t feel, often, a personal connection to the black community. I was outcast from the people I loved, in a weird way. So my whole approach to my blackness was an intellectual exercise, a creative exercise for a lot of years. I didn’t find my black peer group until college and grad school.
After that, I shifted more toward this fantastic fiction, science fiction, and wrote, in fact, a lot of white characters. For a long time, I was avoiding the whole conversation of race in my fiction. I don’t know why that happened, considering it started with “Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.” I have no idea why that happened. By the time I was in college, I was writing about white suburban housewives. The first novel-length manuscript I tried to write in college was about a white guy whose brother was gay and died of leukemia in the New York theater community. Let me tell you, I knew nothing about the New York theater community. I didn’t have a brother. I wasn’t the white gay guy. I was nowhere in that story.
DJO: Did you see that as marketable?
TD: No, actually. I wasn’t even trying to shoot for the marketplace. I didn’t know who in the marketplace was there. I was just writing — that’s the sad thing I’m telling you.
I was writing my heart and soul.
DJO: And it was a white gay guy?
TD: It was about like, gay friends, and you know — back when people didn’t talk about being gay, you know — I knew a lot of gay people, and so my way of kind of confronting Other-ness was writing about gay characters in a weird way. And it wasn’t until I was out of my Master’s program when I looked at the marketplace, and I tried to find where black people were, I could not find us in easy-to-reach places.
Let’s put it this way, I had not had a Southern rural experience; I had had a Southern suburban experience, and I couldn’t write about the Southern rural experience. I didn’t feel I could, because that had not been mine. And then there was the urban experience, which also had not been mine. So I tried in my college novella to sort of look at brothers and set it in the inner-city because that’s what I thought I had to do if I was writing black characters. I tell you man, for all my homeschooling, Civil Rights upbringing, I was still falling prey to a kind of invisibility in my own work. So to get back to answering your question though, as a more mature writer, I found my voice, I found my characters of color — yes, I was sprinkling it in, I call it, “The spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” My first novel The Between was about a suburban, activist family. It was almost like a political statement to try to write a horror novel about a suburban, activist family.
A black family, so I guess in that way, it was political. But they were activists, and actually it’s the white supremacist who ends up being the primary villain in the story, so there was that conversation about race and racial violence. In the second novel, My Soul To Keep, I wanted to have a black male character who would sort of show the span of hundreds of years, and use that for a conversation about slavery in different forms, not just the United States. How did that differ from slavery in other regions, say in the Middle Ages, where you could buy your freedom? You had service for a few years. It’s a different system of slavery, where you were not necessarily a slave for life. The American system was particularly insidious about that, and I’m sure throughout the Caribbean too, but in other regions of the world, slavery had different rules. And also the Jazz Age, and the role of black musicians in the Jazz Age — so I wanted to have that conversation. And I guess I consider history a kind of activism, to tell you the truth, because from a young age, I did feel like it was a cop-out to be a writer instead of, say, a lawyer like my dad or a full-time activist like my mom had been for some time. But this was not in me — law school, none of that was in me. So I think I hoped that through fiction, I could be relevant in the conversation. I think that’s why it took me so long to come to horror, because it felt slight, it did not feel important enough for the kind of lofty conversations that I wanted to be having.
DJO: So how did you come to the moment where you realized that it was?
It was just like, open the gate. I don’t know who opened the gate for black characters. I think at a certain point — you know what, I think it was like, a petering out of the novel I was writing in grad school, about the gay playwright. I don’t have many novels that peter out, but this one like, after about a hundred pages, it was like, “Okay, I’m out of here. My job is done.”
TD: It was 1992. I know exactly when that happened. It was during a time I was at the Miami Herald, after my return, after my sobbing in the parking lot. Yeah, it was 1992, a terrible year — Hurricane Andrew. I’d been writing a lot of short fiction in and around black characters, not so much exclusively though. And I was assigned a story to interview Anne Rice. I’d never read any Anne Rice, but I read one of her novels for the interview, and I did research, and in my research I found a New York Times magazine cover story on her, where basically there was a snobby attitude that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. So as all writers do, when we’re journalists and we have opportunities to talk to writers, we talk about ourselves, so I asked her how she responded to criticism that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires, and I listened very carefully for what she was going to say about that, because that was my dilemma. I realized unconsciously or almost consciously, that that was my dilemma. I was drawn to that stuff, but I would not write it. And she said, “Ah! That used to bother me, but my books are taught in universities. And when you write about the supernatural, you can write about lofty things like life and death and loss,” and she just went on and on and on. She was all comfortable in her skin. And I said, “You know, that’s true.” I’ll tell you, within two weeks of that, I was writing The Between.
It was just like, open the gate. I don’t know who opened the gate for black characters. I think at a certain point — you know what, I think it was like, a petering out of the novel I was writing in grad school, about the gay playwright. I don’t have many novels that peter out, but this one like, after about a hundred pages, it was like, “Okay, I’m out of here. My job is done.”
DJO: You’re out of material.
TD: I was out of material, yeah. And I think even I got, at that point, “Maybe, I dunno, I could be on a limb here, but maybe you need to write stories with characters more like yourself.” You know?
DJO: Right.
TD: I had run into that feeling of inauthenticity working on my inner-city novella, which a teacher loved and said, “Send it out,” and a publisher said, “Make it a novel,” and I was thinking, “Oh, I only got 90 pages of this BS in me. I don’t know anything about street life.” I don’t know, that could’ve been a cop-out, or maybe I could’ve tried harder.
DJO: So would you say that the supernatural allowed you, on some level, to tap into who you are as a writer?
TD: I guess it did. It was the door that had been waiting to be opened, you know? Like, here I am, walk through. I don’t remember any internal conversation about whether the protagonist should be black. They were going to be me, okay? It was a male — I chose a male because when I looked at black literature, I thought black males were unrecognized, or at least black males I would want to be. And my husband says that’s a cop-out because he dies at the end of the book. So it was not quite the noble gesture as it might seem.
A lot of writers fall into that trap, but the book was about mortality, so it’s kind of hard to get around that. I just knew, when I decided I was going to write a horror novel, and I was thinking about the marketplace when I did that. I sent a letter to my sister saying, “Hey, I think I’m gonna write a horror novel. Here are a couple chapters. Do you think this might sell?” But at the same time, I only knew how to write the way I knew how to write. And so I wasn’t going to try to dumb down my writing because I thought I was gearing it to the marketplace. I just was gonna be me. And I’m going to tell a supernatural story. And maybe that’ll find a home. Maybe there’ll be some acceptance for that. But I had no idea.
I’m fascinated by the dialogue between artists about where and how our art can change the world. Octavia’s work has spawned some amazing social justice conversations. Some of us are go-to-meetings activists, and others of us try to convey our message through our art — and some of us do, or have done, both. All of the approaches are legitimate.
DJO: In The Between, the character is partially dead and partially alive.
TD: He nearly drowned as a child and is living between alternate realities. So it’s kind of like the “Final Destination” franchise without the Ultimate Reality. So death is chasing him from one reality to the next. I almost wanted to sue, but you know, there’s nothing new under the sun. But yeah, that was about that. And my primary conversation beyond and above any kind of activism or race or social justice is death. That is my primary conversation in my fiction, because I guess I had felt a need from about the time I was twelve to come to terms with mortality. The notion that this is a finite time, and no matter what’s next, it’s not going to be this, I had trouble with that. It would keep me awake at night as a kid, so I was trying to process that. And I think a lot of people just don’t live in awareness of it and don’t worry about it, but I was always in awareness of it, and I was always worried about it. So it’s that conversation.
DJO: Has your approach when writing changed because of your trajectory as a writer — how you bring in social justice issues?
TD: Again, and I do consider history a social justice issue. So many of us live in denial about its impact, who we are and where we are. So, Joplin’s Ghost: That was a great opportunity for me to depict black life at the turn of the century in a way that we don’t get to see that often. And the music industry, racism in the music industry at the turn of the century and how that same racism plays out in current music, and that conversation, to try to make history relevant. To show the parallels. The Good House, that was about racial isolation and the impact of varied racial histories and how it had an impact for generations. That’s my whole thing, the generational impact of all of these histories and events. And, in my African Immortals Series, that’s expanded. I’ve always got it hidden in there.
The antagonist of the story Michel, who’s half-Ethiopian, half-Italian, would have to be replaying the old animosity between Italy and Ethiopia. They’d been to war, and it’s a big testament to the power of that conflict.
Blood Colony was written so much in response to the Bush administration and the War on Drugs. I interviewed a researcher to give me his perspective on why the Living Blood might be criminalized, and the answer was obvious: the threat to big pharma, which would not be able to regulate it. One of my characters basically parrots his point-of-view. And I really am disgusted by the War on Drugs and the degree to which the same racist policies dogging black and brown people for generations are now being so perfectly carried on within the criminal justice system. It’s especially troubling that there’s so little outcry about the War on Drugs and Three Strikes laws. I dedicated Blood Colony to Octavia E. Butler, trying to imagine the kinds of social trends she would be troubled by.
I’m fascinated by the dialogue between artists about where and how our art can change the world. Octavia’s work has spawned some amazing social justice conversations. Some of us are go-to-meetings activists, and others of us try to convey our message through our art — and some of us do, or have done, both. All of the approaches are legitimate.
DJO: Looking back, is there anything you would do differently career-wise?
TD: You know, I sometimes wonder who I would’ve been as a writer if I had not been drawn to the supernatural. Had I just been sort of writing more traditional, contemporary realism, would I have touched as many people, or more? To this day I wrestle with that, but I have to write the stories that I’m interested in. In fact, there’s nothing more excruciating than working on a writing project if it’s not coming from you. One of the hardest projects I ever had was to write a chapter in a serialized novel, and the ones before were just crappy. It’s a torture. So you know, I’ve given up on dreams of being number five on Amazon and living on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even making the New York Times Bestseller List — I really have bigger concerns in life. So since I’m not chasing the gold ring, then I just have to write what I like to write and not just keep my skill sharp, but improve them. And I hope my greatest work is ahead of me.
DJO: Did having that realization change how you write?
TD: Yeah, I would say so, because I’ve had some projects that have been more driven by marketplace considerations than others, and I’m proud of all my projects, but it wouldn’t be hard to pick ‘em out, let’s just say, in a lineup. So I would expect less of that, you know, and more just kind of digging. I’d just go back to the beginning, which is writing “Baby Bobby,” writing for me. What do I want to read? I will go back and re-read, or re-listen to my audiobook, seriously. I enjoy that. So I’m writing for me and hopefully other people will come along for the ride.
