When Esi Edugyan’s forthcoming novel Washington Black was announced last week as one of this year’s Man Booker longlisted titles, it was the Canadian author’s second Booker appearance. She was shortlisted in 2011 for Half Blood Blues, her second novel, about a mixed-race jazz musician at the outbreak of the second world war. The latest book, telling the story of a young boy named George Washington Black, or “Wash”, who grows up a slave on a plantation in Barbados, taps into a wider movement in North American literature exploring the history and legacy of slavery.

Attica Locke also addressed slavery in her 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, in the surreal setting of a southern plantation turned into a tourist destination. Her latest novel, Bluebird, Bluebird, follows a Texas ranger who investigates racially charged murders in a small Texas town. She worked on the Emmy-winning television series Empire and is one of the writers for the hotly anticipated Netflix series Central Park Five, directed by Ava DuVernay.

Edugyan, who grew up in Alberta, of Ghanaian descent, and Locke, an African American who grew up in Texas, met for the first time last week in Los Angeles.

Interview by Geeta Dayal





You’ve both written eloquently about race. How much personal experience is in your fiction?

Esi Edugyan: I grew up in Calgary. My parents are immigrants from Ghana. They actually met in California – my father went to Stanford – and then later moved to Edmonton, Alberta. In the 1980s, Alberta was not a racially diverse place. In Canada today, around 3% of the population is black, and that percentage was even tinier in the 80s. And so I did feel very conspicuous everywhere I went. And that could be hard. There were a lot of little incidents. Maybe this is why I’m always looking at stories of people who aren’t necessarily part of the social fabric. They’re this one outlier, or they’re at a strange moment in history. It’s almost like I’m looking for the most marginalised within the marginalised, and this is what’s attractive to me, maybe because it comes out of my childhood.

Attica Locke: I don’t think there’s any book I’ve written where I have not had moments of just weeping. I’m a black American, and there is so much of our existence that has not been heard or recorded throughout the course of history. Knowing that I have the power to write something down, that it got recorded, for somebody’s pain to get seen, is overwhelming to me.

EE: That really sums it up. I just have a sense of being attracted to a story, and then having to see it through as honestly as I can. That pain has to be experienced, and the reader has to work their way through it. You want the reader to feel as much as possible what it might have been like to be in a situation.

You tackle slavery in your books. How do you approach these histories?

There is always a part of you that needs to know where you came from and needs to have a fuller sense of your history Esi Edugyan

EE: I think for a lot of people, we know about slavery in the abstract. We know what happened, and go on with life, when all these terrible things happened in the past. But they have real reverberations today. I started researching painful stories of these abuses and they were just so disgusting and brutal I really felt I needed to get that on the page.

Though I don’t live with the iconography of slavery around me on the west coast of Canada, such a thing is certainly alive in the east of the country: slave-holding was practised in Quebec from 1629-1833, and of course Ontario was the final destination of the Underground Railroad. It’s important for me to acknowledge the roots of slavery here.

There is a moment in both The Cutting Season and Washington Black when a character goes through dossiers, archives about slavery, and uncovers hidden truths about their family lineage.

EE: I found that very striking – that there was almost the exact same scene in both books, that were so many years apart, in such different contexts, too. There is always that part of you that needs to know where you came from and needs to have a fuller sense of your history. My parents were immigrants and we lived in a bubble. We didn’t really have contact with my extended family. And I always felt like that was OK. That’s just how it was for me.

My mother passed away in 1997, and we ended up making a big trip back to Ghana in 2007. I had never been before. Meeting my mother’s family was such an emotional experience, I spent two weeks just crying. Looking into the face of my last surviving grandparent, my father’s mother who was more than 100 years old, just seeing her and having this connection with her – I felt this sense of familiarity and deep fulfilment. And I didn’t know that I needed that.

The Cutting Season features a re-creation of a southern plantation in the present day, with actors making an hourly wage to act as slaves for tourists ...

AL: This was not something that sprang completely from my imagination. I went to a wedding at one of these places, in 2004, on a plantation outside New Orleans. I realised that this is going on all over the American south. I had read an article about a plantation in Georgia where the slave actors wanted to go on strike and it was so hilarious to me – the absurdity of trying to do these historical reenactments.

So I was having fun with it, but I was also trying to talk about who gets to own history, and who gets to present and commodify it. I was making the parallel between immigrant labour and slavery. Once I knew I had to write about it, I went back to the plantation where I’d gone to the wedding and stayed there overnight.

EE: So was there any kind of acknowledgement of what this place had been previously?

AL: Well, at that time, they had taken down all of the slave cabins. They did have a very big plaque with the names of every slave that was ever there and what they cost. But other than that, they did tours where they talked about the drapes and china, and there was a gift shop, an ice cream store and a restaurant. It is a plantation business. What blew my mind is the irony that the people who are maintaining the grounds of this reenactment of history are now all Latino, and the people who are in the sugarcane fields are all immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador and Mexico.

So I was like, “Oh, y’all just did a different shade of brown. This is the same story.” And that’s when I realised I wanted my story to parallel the ways in which brown bodies had been used to hold up American economies without those people being able to participate as full citizens, which is essentially the same as where we are now.

Clockwise from left: Terrence Howard, Jussie Smollett, Bryshere Gray, Trai Byers and Taraji P Henson of Empire, which Attica Locke has worked on. Photograph: Fox

Attica, you’re working with Ava DuVernay as one of the writers for the upcoming TV series based on the infamous Central Park Five case, telling the stories of five teenagers of colour who were wrongly convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City.

The US was actually founded on not prosecuting crimes against black bodies – that’s what this country is Attica Locke

AL: Yes, I’d never done that before. I’m in the writers’ room. I came in having done research and we keep researching, huge dossiers of the trial, police, every newspaper article, every TV news story about it. And we met all five of the men. They came one by one, not together, because we wanted to have individual time with them. So over five days, we sat with each man for almost six hours.

That was a gift for me. I wrote the trial episode, and I love law. My husband is a public defender; my dad’s a lawyer, too. I write about legal stuff, so I was so happy to do that, it feels like the greatest use of my talent. If I get people to understand what they did to these kids then I have really done something with my life.

EE: I wanted to ask you about Bluebird, Bluebird. I thought it was so fascinating that you chose to write about an African American cop.

AL: See, I was never going to write a cop. I was firm on that. I don’t like writing people from the point of view of the establishment. But I read a book called Ghettoside, which is a look at crime in south LA. The premise of the book is that we spend so much time talking about the overpolicing of black life that we’re missing a conversation about the underpolicing of crimes against black life. The country was actually founded on not prosecuting crimes against black bodies. That’s what this country is.

And that one black cop in Ghettoside, we believe he lives in south LA, basically before Black Lives Matter existed. He chose to live here with folks who looked like him and fought to protect them. So that allowed me access into an idea of a black cop. His uncertainty is the fuel that makes the book go. And he is a beautiful character for that uncertainty and ambiguity and ambivalence.

In Washington Black, there is a lot of brutality lurking in the characters.

EE: When I was researching Washington Black I read historical accounts of people who would come to the plantations in the Caribbean – visitors coming for a nice warm-weather holiday from England – and would sit down for dinner and then hear screaming coming from outside and just be shocked and horrified. But the people who had been living on the plantation for years would just be casually eating – it’s just part of the landscape, like birdsong or something.

I think as human beings we can get to these places inside ourselves where we stop seeing just how awful something is, because we have become used to it; it becomes ingrained in our landscapes. It’s frightening – the idea that everybody has the capacity within them to be hardened against human suffering. And that’s something that we have to guard against, even on a much smaller scale with everyday cruelties. You don’t want those to become part of the political and social landscape. You don’t want to become used to that.