美国国家公共电台 NPR Novelist Esi Edugyan On Black Genius And What Comes After Slavery（在线收听）

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Prominent authors meet for dinner in London tonight. They learn which of them receives the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Those up for the award include Canadian Esi Edugyan, whose novel is "Washington Black."

ESI EDUGYAN: You know, when you're starting a novel, you're really playing with character. And you're letting them interact, and you're seeing what comes of it. And at least for me, as a writer, I really have no idea where my story is going at the outset of it.

INSKEEP: As her novel starts, it seems the narrator is not going anywhere. It's the 1830s, and he is a boy enslaved on the British controlled island of Barbados. He seems likely to be worked to death in sugar cane fields. Then Washington Black is made an assistant of a visiting white man, who becomes his friend in a way.

EDUGYAN: Any true friendship between them is impossible because of the power imbalance in their relationship. It's just too great.

INSKEEP: Yet the white Englishman teaches Washington Black to read and draw. He's revealed to be an almost supernaturally talented artist - soaking up knowledge that he was denied as a slave. The novelist says she didn't plan for the story to turn out that way.

EDUGYAN: Part of what I was wanting to explore was this idea of, I guess, black genius as being something that obviously would have existed back then - that you would have people with great gifts but that this is something that would have been snuffed out very brutally and without much thought. A friend of mine said that, you know, we tend to think of slavery in terms of the loss of black bodies. But, you know, we don't really stop so much to think about the loss of potential, of black greatness, of black genius.

INSKEEP: I have to ask because I'm hearing you saying that you start the novel and don't exactly know where it's going. I don't think it's giving away too much to note that this young enslaved man and his older white companion are going to escape Barbados. They're going to get out of there. Did you need to get out of there - get out of that slave situation as a novelist for your own sanity?

EDUGYAN: It wasn't so much that as that I felt that with this novel what I really wanted to explore was his life post-slavery and to show how - you know, by being physically free, we think of that as being kind of the end of slavery. Well, he's not in chains. He's gotten away. He's physically free. But I really think that, you know, there had to be huge psychological ramifications to having been a slave - even while you are free in body, that obviously you're carrying with you a great trauma and probably a great sense of bewilderment about your place in the world. And I really wanted to express that.

INSKEEP: I'm thinking of two ways that comes across. One, the young man is constantly thinking he's going to be recaptured or chased down. Another one, there's an observation late in the book when it becomes apparent that in a way he resents being freed. He resents the white man who freed him. Obviously, he gave him so many opportunities but also took him away from everything that he knew and dislocated him in a way.

EDUGYAN: Yeah. But I also think - I think the main thing that he resents is the feeling that the man who freed him did not respect him as an equal. And this is really the crux of what starts to eat at him - is that this man made this great gesture of helping him be free, and yet he really has this sense that though this man thought of himself as an abolitionist and, you know, a great crusader for good in the world, that he didn't actually recognize the humanity of Washington.

INSKEEP: Why does this feel like a relevant story to you in 2018?

EDUGYAN: I think we're still dealing with obviously a lot of the themes and concerns that come up in the book - things like racial injustice, racial inequality, the idea that some lives are more worthy than other lives. But also this idea of people kind of being galvanized to do something in the world. If you think of the abolitionists and how they really had to not only sort of change their own thinking about slavery, which would have been just a very sort of quotidian everyday thing - I mean, the sugar arrived on your table in the mornings. You put it in your oatmeal. You understood that this was the product of slave labor. But it was going on in a part of the world that you would probably never in your life see, you know, done by people who you really had nothing in common with. So to be able to change their own thinking about that and then to galvanize a whole society to change public thinking, then this is something huge and amazing.

INSKEEP: So I was interviewing American voters the other day in the state of Kentucky. And there were a couple of folks in heavily white areas who brought up black people a couple of times and expressed bafflement. They essentially said, I don't understand what it is that black people are complaining about. I don't see prejudice in my own life. And they're saying, I don't - I just don't get it. I don't get this Black Lives Matter thing. What would you say to somebody who hears a little bit of this history that you're laying out and finds it to be old news?

EDUGYAN: Well, that's very disheartening to hear you say that. But, of course, I know that this exists. To me, that's quite shocking because, I mean, how can one watch, say, videos of police officers gunning down unarmed citizens - how can anybody watch those videos and still contend that there is not a problem and that we have racial equality and fairness? This is baffling to me. I feel that there's been regression, that there's been steps backwards in terms of people wanting to understand each other's experience and really being open to it.

And I think one of the things that novels can do is to bring a reader into the character's experience - especially a character who is nothing like them. You know, we're dealing here with a boy in 1830s Barbados who's a slave. But if you can read that and start to see maybe how you're like him or similarities and also to feel for him as he's going through these hardships - if you can do that, perhaps that can be the beginnings of some kind of empathy.

INSKEEP: Esi Edugyan is the author of "Washington Black," a novel that's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which we find out about today.

EDUGYAN: Thanks so much. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHRISTIAN SCOTT ATUNDE ADJUAH'S "RULER REBEL")