Episode 70: Transcript

Episode: 70: The nightmare of history

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of The Future of Another Timeline and the forthcoming book of science journalism called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:19] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of the upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death. 

Annalee: [00:00:27] Whoo.

[00:00:29] So today, we're going to talk about stories that bring real history into fictional stories that deal with monsters, magic, and the supernatural. What happens when you mix together actual historical facts with tropes about witches and demons? This is on our minds right now, because it's something we're seeing a lot in recent pop culture from the Lovecraft Country series, which we love, to Rebecca Roanhorse’s new novel, Black Sun. So we're going to talk about that. 

[00:00:59] And later in the episode, we'll be joined by the author P. Djèlí Clark, who is the author of several historical novellas, including the forthcoming Ring Shout, which perfectly combines historical facts with amazing supernatural monsters. All right, here's the show.

[00:01:14] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:41] So Annalee, I think it's really interesting that we've talked about historical science fiction and fantasy in the past on this show, and we've also talked about the idea of alternate history, which is often like, if you change one thing, if, like, George Washington steps on a nail, and gets gangrene, and can’t go across the Delaware or something. How the world is different. But this is sort of an interesting kind of combination of those things where you have historical fiction or alternate history, on top of the presence of magic, or the supernatural, or the kind of paranormal, and how do those things go together?

Annalee: [00:02:17] It's really interesting. And I was thinking about how this is actually a tradition in historical writing that maybe even predates historical writing that's based on fact. Because in the West, a lot of our mythology has to do with history. For example, if you look at something like the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, these are histories of Greece and Rome and those civilizations that are all about gods and monsters. And so there's some real historical detail mixed together with a lot of other stuff that is probably not based in fact. 

[00:02:57] And then I think, in the present day, we see it a lot in modern fantasies, like, say, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Or you might see it in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books. I brought up those books specifically, because weirdly, they're both about the Napoleonic Wars.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:16] Right.

Annalee: [00:03:18]  I mean, obviously, both Clarke’s book and Novik’s work are really popular. And they bring magic into the Napoleonic Wars, and it changes the outcome, especially in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books where she reimagines battle strategies and tactics and how things would be different if everybody involved had giant dragons. So you have, for example, the Americas are not colonized by Europeans, because they fight off the Europeans with their dragons. And Australia has a really different history. And it's this way of thinking about real life history, right alongside fantasy, and it can serve a lot of different purposes.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:04] Yeah, and another recent example that comes to mind, of course, is Justina Ireland's amazing book, Dread Nation in which the United States’ Civil War ends very differently because zombies show up. And I feel like that's actually a whole trope unto itself, zombies in the Civil War. Legends of Tomorrow also did that. And there's also Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, of course. It's sort of an interesting thing of once you throw in the supernatural, you kind of inevitably end up with alternate history, because the presence of magic or the paranormal ends up kind of deforming the shape of events. Deforming is probably the wrong word. Perturbing. Let's say, perturbing the shape of events into a new shape.

Annalee: [00:04:44] It also can play an explanatory role. I was thinking about Austin Grossman's book Crooked, which is all about Nixon and how Nixon was actually deeply involved in a fight against cosmic horrors from another dimension and it's sort of this weird. The book is a very weird character study of Nixon. And it's sort of reimagining his crimes and all of the problems that he had as sort of side effects of the fact that he's actually, really, his real job is fighting demons from other dimensions. Yeah, it's like it's deforming history, but also explaining history. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:26] Right And, of course, part of what's interesting about Lovecraft Country is that it is not, as far as I know, an alternate history. It's just our history, but with the supernatural, and the presence of the supernatural does kind of like illuminate how Jim Crow and white supremacy and all these things are in themselves monstrous. And it sort of provides a metaphor, but also kind of an amplification of that evil that is a real historical evil. 

[00:05:52] So, Annalee, I guess, what I'd like to ask you is, what can you say in a fantasy that takes place in real life history that you maybe couldn't say in like a fantasy that takes place in Westeros or Middle Earth or some other fantasy realm? Why should people set a monstrous or fantastical tale in real life history?

Annalee: [00:06:12] It's a really good question. Because as you said, I mean, you have lots of secondary world options. So why try to restrict yourself. I always come back to this really interesting point that Tananarive Due makes about how she's very interested in the phenomenon of what she calls horror noir, which is basically Black horror, and which is a long tradition in America. And she looks at it in film, and she feels like white supremacy is a horror movie. And that, to tell the true story of white supremacy in the United States, requires you to actually follow the tropes of a horror narrative. And so she views a movie, like Get Out, for example, as you a perfect way of doing that. Of sort of bringing this horrifying fantasy into a very realistic story. 

[00:07:08] And Jordan Peele, of course, was a producer on Lovecraft Country, which deals with a lot of the same themes. It's very firmly in the horror noir sub-genre. And I think what it does is it provides a kind of emotional language to explain events that maybe we are all familiar with. Maybe if we know the kind of generic details of how Jim Crow worked, or how slavery worked, it's easy enough to say like, oh, those are lines in history books. But to make audiences feel what it was like to be in that time. To be in a Black body under slavery, or under Jim Crow, requires monsters, I think. 

[00:07:53] And so, to set it in real life, is to kind of give audiences an opportunity to see, alright, so here's what really happened. For example, in Lovecraft Country, there's scenes where we see white people beating Black people for no reason. Or whites only restaurants and how—

Charlie Jane: [00:08:13] Right, or sundown towns.

Annalee: [00:08:14] Sundown towns, which actually was a thing I didn't know about. So I learned new historical information, accurate historical information from watching what is basically a fantasy show. The sundown towns was really scary. 

[00:08:31] And at the same time, we see through the fantasy by seeing these monsters, by seeing these crazy cultists, we see what it feels like to be those characters. So basically, you could say that all of the monster and supernatural stuff is kind of the fantasy that people are having in their heads, and then all the other stuff was what's really going on. So it's kind of… it gives you a chance, if you want, to read these as hyper-realistic stories that also give us a window into our character's imaginations and how they're feeling. 

[00:09:05] And I think in Lovecraft Country, they do a great job of signposting that at the very beginning of the series, which opens with this incredible dream sequence that's just bonkers, right? There's monsters and the war is happening. And there's a hero with a baseball bat killing the monsters, and it really immediately tells you, okay, this is a bonkers supernatural story, but also, a lot of the most fantastical elements are in our dreams. And these are dreams that are responding to real traumas.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:41] It's interesting, Annalee, I don't know if you remember this, but the first couple episodes we watched of Lovecraft Country, we kind of debated amongst ourselves. Is it a horror show? Or is it a thriller? Is it a fantasy adventure? And I feel like by the middle of the season, it's very obvious that there is a very strong horror element here and specifically body horror. And I would love to hear your thoughts more about how this show really kind of uses body horror to talk about the atrocities that are inflicted specifically on Black bodies.

Annalee: [00:10:13] It's super interesting. There's one episode, in particular, as we record this, the season isn't over yet. So we don’t know where it's all going. But there's one episode where one of the characters gets a magic potion that turns her white. And the way that the potion works is that it's this very juicy, visceral, disgusting evocation of people ripping off their skins or having pieces of their skin falling off as they transform. And especially when this character transforms from her white self into her Black self. And there's just these strips of bloody white lady flesh dribbling off of her body. 

[00:11:07] And it's very much about that sensation of not having any control over your body. Not being able to control how people see you, not being able to have bodily autonomy. Because of course, we see over and over again, in reality, but also in the show, how Black people are menaced by white people with guns and bats and batons, and fists. And in many cases, they can't do anything about it because these are white people acting within the law. Or these are white people who have a big gang of more white people behind them. 

[00:11:43] And so, again, over and over, I think that these body horror images evoke that sensation of having essentially no control over your skin. And I think that's why that one episode with the skinning and the constant reminders of the grotesque nature of skin, why that's so effective, because it's just, I mean, it's a little bit on the nose in a certain way. But it's also… That's something I just love about body horror is when it's almost comedy, because it's so on the nose, it's like, oop, she's ripping off her white skin. It’s like, that's literally what she's doing. But it's also a great evocation of Franz Fanon talking about Black Skin, White Masks in his famous book of the same name, where he talks about code switching and how every Black person has to kind of wear this white mask, and it creates all this cognitive dissonance.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:40] Which actually reminds me of another great story that does turn very horror-ish in the end. Sorry to Bother You, in which it is sort of about code switching. And that does lead to a horrific transformation. I don't want to spoil it. But that leads to horrific—

Annalee: [00:12:55] It leads to extreme body horror, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:57] It leads to extreme body… And code switching is the kind of thing that leads to the body horror, like the one leads to the other. First you lose your identity, or you give up part of your identity, and then your whole body is taken away from you. And it's interesting to me how the transformation sequences in Lovecraft Country use the visual vocabulary that we've seen a lot in recent werewolf stories, like the becoming white is akin to kind of becoming a wolf almost in a weird way.

Annalee: [00:13:27] Yes, that's really true. Because there is a kind of visual trope now for what it's like to become a wolf, or to shape shift, right? It's this agonizing thing. Your bones are moving around in your skin. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:39] [Mimics bones cracking noises.]

Annalee: [00:13:40] Yeah, there's cracking noises and slurping noises and that's absolutely how the racial transformation goes. And Sorry to Bother You, very similar, where these characters with aspirations to whiteness are well, anyway, I won't tell you the spoiler, but you should watch it. It is… I couldn't believe it, because it's kind of a twist. And it's like, you can't believe that the film is going to go there. And when it does, it's just so delightful. And same thing happens in Lovecraft Country. There's a lot of moments where I was like, are they really gonna go there? Oh, awesome, okay.

[00:14:15] Especially in the second episode. There's sort of a two episode arc. The first two episodes are kind of telling one story where some bad guys are trying to… bad white cultists, very white, like hyper white cultists are trying to open a magical doorway and they need to use Black bodies to do it, of course. And they are doing this horrific ritual where they're opening a door, and we hear this famous song, Whitey on the Moon.

Whitey on the Moon: [00:14:46] A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell and whitey’s on the moon. I can't pay no doctor bills, but whitey’s on the moon. 10 years from now, I’ll be paying still, while whitey’s on the moon. You know, the man just upped my rent last night ‘cause whitey’s on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but whitey’s on the moon. I wonder why he's upping me ‘cause whitey’s on the moon. Well, I was already givin’ him 50 a week and now whitey’s on the moon.

Annalee: [00:15:19] And it's such a great. It's a funny moment and it captures the kind of horror of real life white supremacy.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:30] Mm hmm, yeah.

Annalee: [00:15:30] And then also this kind of imaginary crazy ass like wizard white supremacy, which is, you know, they're all kind of parts that. I wanted to say they're two sides of the same coin, but I think they like two squares in a Rubik's cube of white supremacy. Yeah. It’s very effective. I think that in a sense, learning about history while having this fantasy commentary to provide emotional context makes the history much more powerful. And like I said, I learned actual historical facts from watching Lovecraft Country, which I think is pretty rad. 

[00:16:08] So now we're going to turn to my interview with P. Djèlí Clark.

[00:16:13] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:16:26] All right, well, welcome. We have been talking about the nightmare of history. And P. Djèlí Clark, you're a history professor and you've studied post colonialism and slavery. And I'm wondering how you see this affecting your fictional work?

P. Djèlí: [00:16:41] Hi, great to be here. And that's a great question. I like that as a great starting question.

Annalee: [00:16:46] We just like go right to the heart of it.

P. Djèlí: [00:16:48] I know, right to it. Hello, how are you? No.

[00:16:54] I think that we always bring some kind of experience or some kind of knowledge base to what we write.

Annalee: [00:17:04] Yeah.

P. Djèlí: [00:17:04] We're impacted by what's around us. And so I don't know that I, at times, consciously set out like, I'm going to create something that speaks about this, because I just studied this. I just read this. But when I'm thinking things up, when I'm trying to imagine things, those kinds of elements pop in there, right. And so I don't know, for instance, when I write something like A Dead Djinn in Cairo, right, that series, I wanted to write an interesting story about a lady detective who wears these dapper suits in a steampunk Cairo. [Crosstalk] But—

Annalee: [00:17:44] As you do. 

P. Djèlí: [00:17:44] Apparently, I could not help it when I was doing so, because of the era I'm talking about, I said, well, this is also going to be an anti-colonialist narrative, right. And it just has to be because it's what I'm talking about. And so, I think that, I guess I like to say that when I'm imagining I'm also aware. That if I'm talking about a certain person, if I'm talking about a certain time period, I'm aware of a lot of the complexities of that period, and I believe that it should be brought up.

Annalee: [00:18:16] Yeah, I mean, one of the things that is so interesting about your work, especially in Ring Shout and The Black God’s Drums, is that there's just a lot of real history there that I think people may not be familiar with. It's not always the most obvious bits of history that Americans are taught about in school. And I wonder if you ever find yourself worrying about mixing fantasy together with history and with real history, and especially history that people may not have encountered before, so they won't have in their heads like, oh, this is a counterfactual? Do you ever worry that people will get confused? And they'll start not understanding what really happened? Or what's your thought process about that? 

P. Djèlí: [00:19:02] I think that's a definite possibility. And I've actually seen it happen where I was like, no, that actually, a thing did not happen that I wrote about. 

Annalee: [00:19:08] Oh, really? Like what? Can you give an example?

P. Djèlí: [00:19:10] I can't remember. It was something to do with The Black God's Drums, I think with my discussion of Haiti destroying the fleet, Leclerc’s fleet in this, no, that's not what happened. Explain it didn't. But I think that's one of the reasons I run a blog and I think after nearly every type of work like that I tend to do this is the actual history. And this is, it’s part of just telling, this is where the inspiration came from. And this is why I chose to put this in here. And perhaps this is why I chose to go this direction with this counterfactual. 

[00:19:44]  It's funny. What I tend to be more concerned with at times is that people may think I'm making light of some certain serious histories like when I wrote The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, I was worried that people might think I'm making light of slavery by bringing in these fantastical elements. A werewolf and what have you. That they might think I'm making light of this very important history. And so I'm often trying to make certain that when I write I balance that. That some of the times it's whimsical, but at the same time, it's also serious. And so I sometimes worry that in pulling the history into the fantastic that I don't think people will take it less seriously. But I could see someone thinking that I am taking it less seriously by doing so. And so I think that's always something that I try to keep in mind.

Annalee: [00:20:35] How do you do that? How do you balance it out that way? I mean, how do you kind of signal to your audience, actually, no, I'm taking this super seriously?

P. Djèlí: [00:20:44] I can't say that I have a formula. I can just say that so far I must have gotten it right, because I haven't had anyone tell me hey, I think you're exploiting this. Or, I think you're making light of it. And part of this also comes from my teaching, it's just things that I've taught myself. Like I said, long before I ever encountered, or knew what the term trigger warning meant for instance, I would teach on slavery. I taught classes on World History, or Western Civ. I taught on lynching. And so I remember in teaching these classes, I would notice my students reactions when they saw a lynching victim, or if we were looking at images from the Holocaust, and I started thinking to myself, perhaps maybe one of these images is enough, I don't need five. There's a point at which now I'm doing it as a type of exploitation and shock value when one might get it across. And perhaps I should tell students when this is coming up, and we should actually sit and discuss it more than simply letting the image just be a thing, then we go past it. And so I started thinking more and more about what I depict in the classroom. And I think I brought some of that over into my writing. 

Annalee: [00:22:07] Yeah.

P. Djèlí: [00:22:07] Where I try to keep that thought as well. So if I'm going to go somewhere, and I know this is going to be deep and heavy, I might try to, at some points, bring in other little parts of levity, or at least make certain that what I'm doing is germane and relevant to the story. And it's not just there to shock.

Annalee: [00:22:28] I love that idea of kind of thinking about how you contextualize images in a classroom and how that kind of helps you think about your audience as you're writing. Because you’ve got that real time response from the students in your head. 

[00:22:44] I want to talk a little bit about Ring Shout specifically, because it's coming soon. And it's frickin’ awesome, and it has a lot of those moments of levity. One of the things I loved about it, was that, Maryse and is it Maryse? [Prounced like Maurice.]

P. Djèlí: [00:23:00] It’s Maryse, yeah. You don’t have to. Everybody wants to get really fancy with it. But yeah.

Annalee: [00:23:04] I could imagine like if you're trying to do like, the French pronunciation, I know.

P. Djèlí: [00:23:09] If it gets translated that’ll be excellent.

Annalee: [00:23:12] Yeah. So especially like Maryse and her friends, they're an amazing Scooby gang. And they're constantly, they have great one liners and zingers. And I'm wondering if you drew from any real life, historical figures or communities to kind of bring them to life?

P. Djèlí: [00:23:30] In part, I suppose, if you want to say real life communities, it was some of them were drawn, like bits of people I know. Or from readings. There’s a way that they’re characters in some way or composites of characters that I've gotten from Toni Morrison novels or things like that, right? In fact, there are some characters in Ring Shout whose names literally come from characters from Toni Morrison's novels. I'll let people figure out who those are. There's a great sleuthing adventure to do. 

[00:24:05]  I think they were just composites of all of that. People I've met, things I've read, and back and forth, I think that that kind of pulled them together.

Annalee: [00:24:18] The historical backdrop, basically, to the story is the red summer of 1919. Can you talk a little bit about why you wanted that specific historical detail to be part of the book, which, again, like I was saying earlier, I think a lot of the history that you tell in your books is not stuff that typical, typically is taught in American schools.

P. Djèlí: [00:24:36] Or at least not taught enough, right? I want to say it’s, I don’t want to get down on teachers.

Annalee: [00:24:43] No.

P. Djèlí: [00:24:43] Yeah, no. So no—

Annalee: [00:24:43] It’s more like the textbooks, not the teachers.

P. Djèlí: [00:24:47] Yeah, it’s the textbooks more than anything and what they’re often forced to teach. I often get emails from teachers asking how can I get this in there? They're trying to be really strategic and sneaking these things in here as they could. I try to help them. I said, well, we’ll all be the fifth column bringing in all this subversive information into the classroom to the textbooks. 

[00:25:04] When I first envisioned Ring Shout it was going to be set directly during the summer of 1919 and the red summer. And then I ended up pushing it forward to 1922. But the red summer is still, you’re right, the red summer still plays this very important role. And I allude to it so much, because I think it shapes the moment, even if we're not talking about that particular year. It just changed this moment of anti-Black violence, the rise of the second clan, and so much of what is going on during this period. Like we say in history, it's like years don't mean much for our attitudes and political moments. It's not like, oh, look, we've just ended the Progressive Era. That's not how it works. 

Annalee: [00:25:49] Damn.

P. Djèlí: [00:25:51] Right. Oh, darn, I missed the—

Annalee: [00:25:53] We passed through a singularity and now we have no more fascism. Yay.

P. Djèlí: [00:25:56] Right. Yeah, exactly. And so these things linger, right. And so there's a way that it's 1922, but the shadow of 1919 still looms over everything that's happening.

Annalee: [00:26:09] And did you see that as a parallel to uprisings around Black Lives Matter? Or were you conscious about that? Or were you just kind of no, this is just another interesting historical moment where we saw that kind of violence?

P. Djèlí: [00:26:22] No, I can't say that I was thinking about that because I was first thinking of the story in 2015. 

Annalee: [00:26:26] Okay, so no. 

P. Djèlí: [00:26:27] So, I can't remember if the phrase Black Lives Matter, because that was more so Ferguson. So [crosstalk].

Annalee: [00:26:36] Yeah, it's later.

P. Djèlí: [00:26:38] –just starting. And so I don't know. I mean, I don't want to say… I could say no, because I'm speaking consciously. But again, I think we're always pulling on things from the environment. And I can't tell you how many times I would always say I follow Chuck D, of Public Enemy. He used to have a line that said, “When I get mad, I put it down on a pad.” And of course, I don't know how many times something has happened in the larger world and I sit down and I start jotting sounds something fantastic to explain it. A story and so forth. And I don't think that happened with Ring Shout. But I think I would be remiss to say that what was happening as I'm thinking all this up in 2015 and 2016, didn't impact me. 

[00:27:22] I mean, Beyoncé’s video Formation impacted me heavily and that video was definitely pulling on the various threads that were going on at that time. It's like my reminder of… oh, since we're all academics here. I was thinking of Hegel's master-slave narrative, right. And he's coming up with this whole dialectic during the Haitian Revolution. And a lot of people who study Hegel say, Oh no, he wasn't even talking about the actual master-slave dynamic, dialectic of the Haitian Revolution. And other people, like I think it was this writer, Susan Buck-Morss was like, yeah, the Haitian Revolution was happening, he writes about master-slave dynamics and it had no impact? I find that hard to believe.

Annalee: [00:28:10] Yeah, and of course, he would have been thinking about it.

P. Djèlí: [00:28:12] Right? Whether he wrote it down or not, I simply find it… she’s like, Hegel knew. He knew.

Annalee: [00:28:17] Yeah. I mean, the entire world was thinking about slavery, especially at that time, because that was the moment when countries were starting to finally reject it, or at least kind of push it over into other places

P. Djèlí: [00:28:29] And so all this to say that whether or not I directly did so, I have to imagine that there was some impact in those early days for the type of story that I would end up writing.

Annalee: [00:28:40] So and also Ring Shout is now a Hegelian narrative, so.

P. Djèlí: [00:28:44] Boy, isn’t it. 

Annalee: [00:28:47] So, to the Toni Morrison theme for a minute, she has an amazing collection of essays called Whiteness in the Black Imagination [note: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination] where she talks a lot about how sort of looking back into the 19th century in American writing and then up to the present, she talks about how whiteness is kind of portrayed as monstrous over and over again in stories in the United States. And that's just all over the place in Ring Shout where, of course the white people are literal monsters. Well, the Ku Klux 's are anyway. 

[00:29:23] And there's a couple things I wanted to ask about with the white monsters. The first one was one of the threads running through this novella is that, so we have these terrifying, scary actual monsters. But then at the same time, we have ordinary white people who are watching the movie Birth of a Nation. And both of those things are portrayed, I would say, with equal menace. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that about how Birth of a Nation fits into this horror story.

P. Djèlí: [00:29:51] One of the things, I think going back to one of your earlier questions about my concerns of bringing history into fantasy, one of my key concerns with this was that I would make the assertion that the racism of the Klan was simply due to some kind of mystical monsters, right? And in doing so you basically lose human agency. 

Annalee: [00:30:12] Mm hmm, yeah. 

P. Djèlí: [00:30:14] And you kind of you kind of let everyone off the hook. 

Annalee: [00:30:16] Yeah. Oh, you turned into a zombie so you couldn't help it.

P. Djèlí: [00:30:19] Right. Yeah, you couldn't help it. And so I wrestled with that heavily. And this is one of the reasons I made this distinction where people can turn into these monsters, but they have to allow themselves to be turned into them. They always have a chance to turn around and not be this way. But they have to participate in what's being done to them. They have to be willing agents of it and it takes a while to get to that. Which is why there are differences I make between a person who's a Klan member and a person who's been transformed into this monster, as a Ku Klux. And Maryse wrestles with whether or not there's really any distinction, right? She's wrestling with this. But you have these other heads who are like, yeah, every sinner has a chance to get right. And so there are these differences. 

[00:31:08]  And part of that, again, was to discuss the agencies that we can all play in the systems, that we're not just pulled along by it. And Birth of a Nation figured so prominently because for one, in my… you talk about something that comes out of my out of my academic life, I teach a class called slavery and film. And we start with Birth of a Nation. Because it’s the beginning of modern cinema, and here is one of the most racist films ever made. That it's about slavery, it's about reconstruction, that it's about anti-Black violence. It's about the rise of the first clan, but it's made and it precipitates the rise of the second clan. And so it just became central to the story and world building that I wanted to do. 

[00:31:51] And a lot of the ways I described Birth of a Nation and that I did take from aspects of the historical record, the way it seems to almost mesmerize people is how many would describe the impact it had on moviegoers. I have a thing in there where I think one of the characters talks about a man seeing Birth of a Nation and pulling out a gun and shooting at the screen. Because he wants to stop this Black character who was really a white man in blackface from chasing this young white woman. And that actually came from a Florida newspaper of the early 1900s when the movie was out. That a white man did pull out a gun and start shooting in the theater, started shooting the screen. 

[00:32:34] And I would think about what does that mean? Why would someone do that? And I thought about the very medium of film being so different at the time period. Like we take it for granted now. But you can imagine the Birth of a Nation before this had been books, it had been a play. But when it became a film, when it became this two-dimensional image that was larger than life, how it would lead people to have these emotions when they were watching it. And some of them would faint. It almost seemed like they were, again, mesmerized, like it was a spell being cast on them. But you see where I'm going here?

Annalee: [00:33:08] Yeah, no, it has this. It does have this kind of magical status, because… And it's also, I mean, as you said, it's one of the earliest films that has a huge cast. I mean, it was really intended to be—it was kind of the special effects blockbuster of its day. 

P. Djèlí: [00:33:25] Yeah, the musical score that it has, no one's done this before when the ride of the Klan and all this, the shots. Yeah. And so I always compare it, when I tell students I said, if you're a magic. And they're like, how can anybody? Because they're looking at the movie, they're like, this is cheesy. How could anybody? All I think of is, imagine if we had VR today and like you are on the holodeck, like you stepped onto it, right? And you were just, wow, this is all three dimensional, you'd be blown away. And this is all I can tell you, that people at the time, how they were blown away. And yet, when I talk about it, I say, not everyone was blown away, right? Black people didn't go in this and say like, oh, yeah, that's great. I'm blown away.

Annalee: [00:34:03] No, there were protests. Yeah, the NAACP protested.

P. Djèlí: [00:34:08] Exactly. And so we do a lot of theory and media theory and communications, and how media impacts you and whether you're a participant. And what I tell them is, this is evidence that you have to be a participant, you have to bring something to this. It wasn't that people went to see this and they were simply injected with this hate, they were bringing these anti-Black notions with them, they were bringing these it ideologies. Because these ideologies permeated so much of early 1900s America that all Birth of a Nation did was crystallize it and give it something, give it some kind of form and it allows the second clan to be born. 

[00:34:44] Second clan is directly birthed from Birth of a Nation and it becomes much more massive than the first clan ever was. Geographical expansion is huge, whereas the first clan during reconstruction was mostly in the south, this one, there are Klan chapters in Maine, New England, Seattle. The enemies list is extended now to immigrants, to Jews. In fact, it’s the lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia that is kind of the impetus for the second clan to come about. 

[00:35:22] And so the second clan is just, on many levels, just a much more monstrous version. And I guess knowing that history, I think it just seemed ripe to tell some fantastic tale out of it.

Annalee: [00:35:35] Yeah, that's so interesting, because what you're describing is how a movie, which is an inaccurate representation of history, a fantastical representation of history actually changes history.

P. Djèlí: [00:35:46] Right.

Annalee: [00:35:45] Which is kind of a little bit what Ring Shout is trying to do by, again, kind of retelling that story and making explicit the monstrousness of it. 

[00:35:58] One of the things I loved in the novella is how, this is not a spoiler, but the monsters have a lot to do with mouths and consumption. And there's this moment where we see a bunch of white people at a whites-only barbecue joint and they're eating this magical meat that's covered in mouths.

P. Djèlí: [00:36:16] Yeah, if you’re a vegan, you should skip past this part.

Annalee: [00:36:20] Actually, maybe if you're a vegan, it'll be even more powerful, right? 

P. Djèlí: [00:36:23] Oh, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Annalee: [00:36:23] Because you’ll really appreciate the horror of like what they're doing. But it's this nasty consumption, just like the consumption of this pop culture. Is this kind of nasty, infectious, horrible—

P. Djèlí: [00:36:37] Hey, you got you got all the metaphors.

Annalee: [00:36:42] I'm kind of a fan of this kind of horror. So—

P. Djèlí: [00:36:45] It’s almost like you're an academic who’s used to looking at these things.

Annalee: [00:36:49] Yeah, he's written a whole dissertation about horror, and—

P. Djèlí: [00:36:51] Yeah, that’s what it feels like. [crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:36:55] My deep background.

P. Djèlí: [00:36:55] You’re unpacking.

Annalee: [00:36:58] Yeah. Well, as I told you when I when we talked on email, I was so excited about your work, because I was like, wow, this proves my thesis and my dissertation. It all fits together. So that was very exciting. 

[00:37:09] I guess to finish up, I wanted to just ask, when you're sitting down to write, I know that you are, a lot of times you're trying to just spin a fun, swashbuckling story, and you definitely do. But do you have any kind of political agenda? Like if you could sum it up? Do you? Are you trying to kind of be the good version of Birth of a Nation? I don't know what that would be, like the social justice—?

P. Djèlí: [00:37:36] I don’t know if anybody wants to see that one. But no, I mean, I think I wrote something a while back and I said, everything I do is obviously political. I don't think there's anything I write that doesn't have some kind of political motive, right. So if I'm writing works, like I was saying with A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Yeah, I want to tell this wonderful tale. That's my first and foremost, I want to tell this story. But I'm also well aware that in having a queer woman character as the main lead, right, in having these anti-colonial narratives within there. In deciding to set a steampunk story outside of Victorian England, right, I’m immediately engaging in politics. And yes, I'm doing it quite on purpose. I want people to have these different perspectives and these different viewpoints. And so I think the same with Ring Shout. I don’t know if I can define it and say, like, oh, wow, this is my exact thing that I want people to take away. Because part of me, I want people to see it, and I want to see what they come away with. 

Annalee: [00:38:42] Sure, yeah.

P. Djèlí: [00:38:42] But hopefully, I won't shy away that I'm trying to say, yes, anti- Black racism was monstrous and evil, and many times consumed many people's lives, many Black lives. And you know, here is someone standing against it. So sometimes we can't do much about those things that happened in the past. And sometimes it's interesting to give ourselves a hero or heroine who's standing up against these things, perhaps in ways that we sometimes wish, we dreamed, we wish we could have. That we could have done these things. And so there's a way in that when we rewrite these histories this way. It's empowering in its own way.

Annalee: [00:39:20] Yeah, that's right. And also there's something really satisfying about saying no, really these people are actually monsters. In case you were wondering. No, really.

P. Djèlí: [00:39:30] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:39:32] There's no subtlety here, which is delightful. 

[00:39:35] We're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about slavery and film.

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Annalee: [00:39:54] I was just curious if in your class on slavery in film if you taught I Walked with a Zombie. 

P. Djèlí: [00:39:59] No, I haven't killed it.

Annalee: [00:39:59] Dude, oh my God. Have you watched it? 

P. Djèlí: [00:40:00] No, I have not. Now I have to. I mean—

Annalee: [00:40:03] Oh, my God.

P. Djèlí: [00:40:03] [crosstalk] By the way, I was just doing an interview on The Washington Post because they were talking about the movie Antebellum. And I was saying it's really funny that often there aren't that many movies on slavery, right? Even if we're seeing a slight uptick, but now I've been lately thinking of expanding beyond just the movies on slavery because I don't just do them here. I do movies, like I do Queimada! Or Burn, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. It’s by Pontecorvo. It's what he made after the Battle of Algiers. 

Annalee: [00:40:33] Oh, wow. 

P. Djèlí: [00:40:35] Yeah, he made it right after that. Marlon Brando's in it. So he's, it's an alternative type of retelling of part of the Haitian Revolution. It’s just interesting. But he considers it the classic movie that no one talked about, but it was his movie. His, what he really wanted to do more than anything.

Annalee: [00:40:51] Wow, that's stupid interesting.

P. Djèlí: [00:40:52] Yeah, and he gets buried because Battle of Algiers happened. [Crosstalk]. So I feel bad. I show a Brazilian movie called Quilombo. I show a movie from Cuba called The Last Supper. From revolutionary Cuba, and so we kind of dive around the world. And so, really recently, I started thinking maybe I should show some films that are not exactly about slavery, but certainly are carrying the motif of slavery. I did this with, there's a 1980s really surreal film called Brother From Another Planet. 

Annalee: [00:41:23] Dude, I love that movie. 

P. Djèlí: [00:41:25] No, my students were completely like, what?

Annalee: [00:41:28] Yeah, I wonder if it doesn’t age well, maybe?

P. Djèlí: [00:41:31] That's one thing. It's so very, it's so ‘80s. Right. And yet it’s [crosstalk] slave narrative, even though it's about space. I've thought about other things. And so, the other film I showed. I basically said, we're gonna watch Get Out. Or we're gonna watch Get Out as a slave narrative. So I want you, [crosstalk]. It’s the last thing we’re watching, so you guys have watched all the films on slavery. You guys have read all the articles. You have read all the theories. I want you to apply that when you watch Get Out. And those students dissected that movie on a level where I was like, wow, I was writing down notes. Like okay, yeah, he does call—he refers to bucks. Deer as Black men and then like, he's killed with the buck’s antlers. Hadn't noticed that.

Annalee: [00:42:19] Oh, nice. 

P. Djèlí: [00:42:20] And so they were just catching all types of things like the young white girl. They were like, how she's on prim and proper, they related her to Scarlett O'Hara. And they were just coming up with all these things from there. In Get Out, I brought up, I introduced them to the idea of night doctors, right? I picked that up from, I didn't say this in the interview, but a lot of stuff comes from the ex-slave narratives where I first got some of the ideas for this. The WPA Ex-Slave Narratives where I first heard about the Klan as monsters. That's the first time I read about that. Ex-slaves talking about the first Klan wearing the horns and calling them haints. And it's also I first came across ideas of night doctors. And so in Get Out when the first character in the beginning is snatched away to then be experimented upon. I was like, yeah, that's the night doctors.

Annalee: [00:43:08] Yeah, it really is. There's so much medical horror in this genre, too. 

P. Djèlí: [00:43:12] So much. Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:43:15] Which, that's one of the things I think is super interesting. But my only plug, I'll give you my tiny plug for I Walked With a zombie. It's a Jacques Tourneur film from the early ‘40s and it's set on St. Sebastian. And it has some of the only recorded music from some of the Creole performers there. And that was something that Tourneur really wanted to capture. But it's about post-colonial relationships and how the ex-slaves have turned the white daughter of the former plantation owners into a zombie. And how the matriarch, the white matriarch is trying to kind of integrate into local religion in order to kind of deal with this. But it's super, I mean, for a movie named I Walked With a Zombie, it’s pretty fucking smart. And it's really—

P. Djèlí: [00:44:06] I’ll have to check this out. I’m looking at it now on my phone, I see Tor had a write up on it before [crosstalk].

Annalee: [00:44:14] Oh, yeah, that's good. Yeah, no, it's definitely one of those movies that I think people disregard because the title is so silly. But it's really, it's a really great story of revenge, and it's definitely anti-colonial. And the white characters are generally kind of awful. I mean, they're not sort of portrayed as like, oh, poor them. They were just misled. It's—

P. Djèlí: [00:44:37] And this is interesting, because I actually do talk about the notion of the zombie and its role in slavery that many people have talked about. The zombie within Haitian culture as a symbol of the enslaved person, right, this person, the fear that some of them would have that they would be turned into this person who continues to serve even in death. Slavery from life is carried over to death and how that was so unnerving. And interestingly, I've seen some people do some great comparisons to golems in this question of the ever working figure.

Annalee: [00:45:13] Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, but the Golem is a symbol of strength, not a symbol of subjugation.

P. Djèlí: [00:45:19] Right.

Annalee: [00:45:19] Like it's a pretty different. 

P. Djèlí: [00:45:23] Yeah, it’s really different.

Annalee: [00:45:24] It is similar, but it's also, it’s yeah.

P. Djèlí: [00:45:27] It’s interesting how people are interpreting these things, right these notions of the zombie. Because then the zombie, interestingly, in Haiti, then it becomes a symbol of strength after slavery, because now it's something you can do onto someone else.

Annalee: [00:45:42] Right. And that's what I Walked With a Zombie is all about and it's considered to be the first American zombie movie, and it's so funny to see it be all about revenge on this white supremacist family. 

P. Djèlí: [00:45:56] Yeah, that’s interesting.

Annalee: [00:45:56] And in America, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of our zombies are white people. Like we have a lot of white people, white zombies.

P. Djèlí: [00:46:02] Well, you know, I think that became, like, after zombies became popular here. Yeah, we, America has redone the zombie. It’s become something beyond whatever it was before. 

Annalee: [00:46:17] It's like it's simultaneously appropriation, but also like fear of revenge. It’s like, well, these people that we've subjugated are gonna do this to us, now.

P. Djèlí: [00:46:29] Here's something. Here will be a great academic paper of the Borg. 

Annalee: [00:46:35] Yeah.

P. Djèlí: [00:46:35] 23rd century zombies and fear of a loss of identity and communism.

Annalee: [00:46:44] Well, Tobi Buckell’s novel, Sly Mongoose is all about, like, post-colonialism and zombies, and it's also about nanotechnology and space and stuff. So it's like space zombies and post-colonialism. 

[00:46:57] So where can people find out more about your work? 

P. Djèlí: [00:47:01] You can find out more on my blog, which is basically pdjeliclark.com, my name and you can find me Twitter where I sometimes say things at the same thing, at @pdjeliclark. 

Annalee: [00:47:14] Awesome. And you have a new novel coming right?

P. Djèlí: [00:47:17] I do, after Ring Shout. We have my first actual debut novel after all these novellas. A full length novel called A Master of Djinn, which is the follow up to A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. So I hope people enjoy that.

Annalee: [00:47:33] Awesome. I'm super excited. 

P. Djèlí: [00:47:36] The some of the anti-colonial snark in there [unclear].

Annalee: [00:47:39] I am here for anti-colonial snark. 

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Annalee: [00:47:55] You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We are found everywhere that fine podcasts can be downloaded or streamed or whatever the heck you're doing with your modern technology full of ghosts and demons. You can also leave a review of our podcast on Apple Podcasts because that helps people find it and drives away the demons. 

[00:48:18] And you can support us on patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We give you lots of audio extras and cool essays and writing excerpts of works that we're in progress on. And you can follow us on Twitter. We're at @OOACpod on Twitter. 

[00:48:38] And thank you so much to our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission. And thank you to Chris Palmer for the music and we will be back in your feed in two weeks. All right. Bye.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:53] Bye!

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