An Interview with Taiye Selasi
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- An Interview with Taiye Selasi
How does it feel to be on the road, talking about Ghana Must Go?
Wonderful. It’s truly a dream come true. I said to someone the other day that I know some writers love to do the work, and they like less to be with the world. And I feel fortunate that I’m not one such. I genuinely love people, and I want to write about them. And it’s just been my dream to travel this country. I leave at the end of the week and head to a few more. I just meet people who love books and love people too.
That’s wonderful. This work that you’re doing now for the book is so different from the work you did to create the book. What kind of energy do you find yourself drawing on when you’re out talking about the finished product and hearing people’s responses as opposed to writing?
Well, it’s the energy of others that you’re driven by when you’re doing a reading or an interview. This is why somebody writes. I can always sense something like that. For the last two weeks, every day, I took a flight. It was always late. There were always issues in the airport. I always got to the hotel late. I had a woefully small period to rest then I had to go to a reading. Yet I always left the reading energized because you feel this energy from the people who have come to hear about the book, who have read it, who care about these characters as much as you have by yourself, for all this time preceding it. Writing for me, and for most, is intensely solitary; it’s intensely quiet; it’s intensely still. This is the opposite—public—and it’s constantly in motion. And it’s exhausting. Energizing is the only word I can think of because there’s something that people bring to literature that is more than just excitement. I mean, it really is as if the characters are themselves human beings amongst us . . .
Yes.
. . . and love or the protectiveness or confusion, whatever it is that is experienced by the reader. It’s a thrill.
Every interview I’ve heard you give, there’s always a moment where you will make reference to the importance of sound in the novel. This novel feels, it sounds so [End Page 531] sonic to me. Could you elaborate on the role that sound plays, either for you as a writer or just in this novel itself. How does sound play a role in the narrative’s unfolding?
I think for me, sound plays a role in every narrative I write whether it be exposition, screenplay, short fiction, or, in this case, long. To be perfectly honest with you, Nicole, I couldn’t say why. I’ve of course given it some thought. I definitely make a better novelist than psychotherapist. I’m grasping at straws here. I tend to think, well, I grew up in a house where my mother played music all the time, and all kinds of music, from jazz to traditional Nigerian talking drums. She loved the music of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and Cuba and South America and soul. Not a day went by that we didn’t hear music, and good music, in our house. So, that gets in you. And my twin sister and I, we both studied music. I, piano and cello; she, piano and violin. And we took chamber music; we took music theory; we had private lessons; we were in orchestra. Again, every day there’s some exposure to score, to rhythm, to meter, to minor key, major key, how a motif will repeat itself throughout the course of a symphony, for example, or be picked up by the flutes, the cellos, the violins. This was just part of our upbringing. I say “our” because my sister had exactly the same one. And I think when I finally came to prose, that means moving from poetry (which I...
