I was in the MFA program at Columbia from 1989 to 1991, and I was writing a novel. There was a day when it had to be workshopped. I didn’t have my chapter ready, so I wrote about a harrowing experience from my childhood. There was such a firewall between nonfiction and fiction at the time, so I lied and said, “Here’s a short story I wrote.” The way in which people responded to this story was amazing. I began, on the side, writing vignettes about my childhood.

So the memoir writing starts in the fiction program. And then I went to South Africa. I was working outside Johannesburg, where I wrote about the massacres. And by night (in the metaphorical sense), we helped provide arms to self-defense units in paramilitary units. There were two warring factions of the African National Congress where we were, in the Vaal Triangle, south of Johannesburg, and we needed them to stop the tit for tat. Chris Hani was the only person on the national executive committee who I could get to come to the Triangle to stop the violence. He was also the only person who said that we needed a “revolutionary theory,” a book like Frantz Fanon wrote for Algeria, “The Wretched of the Earth.” We needed that book for South Africa. Chris knew the value of intellectual writing as well as action. His generosity of spirit, and the way he saw the need to do critical theory while you’re fighting a revolution, really sparked my imagination.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

I’m trained as a traditional storyteller, and I’m also trained as a critical theorist in narratology, psychoanalysis, Marxism. I had never tried to map story — the elements of narrative that move from a state of equilibrium for the protagonist to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored — onto theory. I had never interrogated that artistically. That arc is not available to blackness, there is no equilibrium to be regained. It was painful to find that in the episodes of my life, and to work with what we call gratuitous violence. In a narrative in which someone experiences the violence of the state or interpersonal aggression, it’s often because they’ve transgressed in some way. It’s called contingent violence. But what does it mean to tell the story of a sentient being who does not need to transgress to experience the violence of lynchings, of slavery, of incarceration? What does it mean to not have an arc from innocence to guilt?

Image Frank B. Wilderson III, whose new book is “Afropessimism.” Credit... John L. Blom

My wife taught writing and is a poet, and we have these conversations all the time. What does it mean to be a slave and the subject of narrative? One of her mantras is: “Make the problem your subject.” So rather than try to fix what could not be reconciled, I allowed that sore to fester on the page — as beautifully as I could.