Thomas Glave: The New Gay Interview
This interview was conducted by TNG contributor Craig.
The nine stories in Thomas Glave’s new collection, The Torturer’s Wife span a variety of subjects, much of it informed by Glave’s Jamaican background. The fiction ranges from a story about a gay bashing in Jamaica to an allegorical tale where a woman’s breast-milk nourishes a war-torn village. Glave’s stylistic acrobatics are also on display—imagery, the cadence of language, even inventive grammar and text layout. This is vibrant, challenging fiction.
this Thursday, March 5, at 6:30 PM.
The New Gay: Your narrative style is truly unique. You mix several narrative techniques, ranging from prose poetry to fragmentary sentence structures. How did your style evolve?
Thomas Glave: I’m not really sure how my style evolved, except to say that I’ve always been very interested in experimenting with language, and with “breaking apart” language, if you will, to see what happens when that same language is re-assembled. That language isn’t going to be the same as it was before. I do believe that a great many writers, knowingly or not, feel themselves imprisoned by what they may see as the constraints of language; I don’t wish, this late in human time, to live or write with that sense of limitation. I would like to think that, in literature, all things are possible, the unthinkable and the unimaginable. I believe that taking big risks with language and style, provided that one has something to say in the first place, can lead to very powerful results in the imaginative realm. But additionally, I believe that, in the case of my fiction, several of the differing styles came about because of the particular energy demanded in the language by the characters in that story, and also because the story’s content, generally speaking, almost invariably had an impact on the story’s form.
TNG: Though you deal with issues of racial, sexual and national identity, you work transcends the ‘queer’ or black literature. Do you get frustrated by being ‘pigeonholed’ and ‘marketed’?
TG: I don’t get frustrated by being ‘pigeonholed,’ if that indeed does happen to me – I’m not sure that it does – because I don’t ultimately care that much what the people who would do the pigeonholing think, or if they think at all. As writers, we’re always going to be surrounded by narrow-minded, unimaginative people who can’t see or conceptualize anything beyond their own experience – and I especially include some editors and literary agents in this group, but also some booksellers, especially, but not only, those connected with corporate chains. I can’t worry too much about being ‘marketed,’ because I have no choice about that – it’s a reality of our lives in this century. To be sure, I was really annoyed and offended by some of the stupid, reductive things some editors and literary agents said about my Caribbean LGBT anthology when it was proposed to them [Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, 2008], dismissing it as a “narrow” project that was “a slice of a slice,” and so on – but I addressed that bigotry, which is what those reactions revealed, in my introduction to the anthology. Those reactions, of course, said a great deal more about those people, and their ignorance, than they said about Caribbean LGBT realities.
People will say all kinds of ridiculous or irrelevant or just plain false things about you as a writer, perhaps even more so about a writer who is black and gay and Caribbean. What is most important is that I don’t pigeonhole or misunderstand myself, which means, principally, not concerning myself with how anyone – anyone at all – thinks I should write, or what I should write about.
TNG: What inspired the allegorical and magical realist approaches in the stories ‘The Torturer’s Wife’ and ‘Milk/Sea; Sentience”?
TG: I really heard and saw those stories that way, as the voices within them came to me. But I also come from a culture – Jamaica – in a region, the wider Caribbean, that does, in many ways, view the world in what some people would call “magical” ways. I grew up among people, was raised by people, who saw the world in those ways and told stories that were filled with so-called “magical” details. It still makes me smile when people talk about, specifically, Latin American “magical realism,” because of course that way of telling stories – the “magical” approach that we see in several Latin American works of fiction -- is pretty much par for the course in just about every corner of the world except the deeply “rational” West.
The interview was conducted by TNG contributor Craig.
TNG: What new fiction/ authors do you recommend?
TG: I just finished a fantastic novel, Devil’s Dance, by a Guadeloupean writer,Gisèle Pineau, whose work I’ve known for a long time, and whom I think is a truly superb writer. I also really love – and have taught several times – Miguel Gomez-Arcos’s amazing novel The Carnivorous Lamb. I also really recommend the memoir Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa by Rigoberto González. It reads like poetry, and he is in fact also a poet. And I just have to recommend one other novel – the phenomenal Notes of a Desolate Man, by Chu T’ien-Wen. None of these books is that well-known, but I hope that they’ll become more known as time goes on.
TNG: You are also an activist, and founded Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays J-FLAG. Can you tell us about your work with that organization?
TG: I was a co-founder of J-FLAG, not the founder. There were several other people involved in the founding process. The extent of my work with J-FLAG is probably too complicated to go into here, but I can say that, although I haven’t worked directly with J-FLAG for years now, I remain deeply proud of the fact that we did so much in that early time – 1998, the year we started J-FLAG – and that the organization has lasted up until now, nearly eleven years later. J-FLAG’s emergence marked a watershed in modern Jamaican (and Caribbean) history. Its presence helped to thrust the topic of homosexuality into Jamaican public and political discourse, and brought home to many Jamaicans the fact that homosexuality – and a distinctly politicized approach to one’s own homosexuality in the Jamaican context – would from that time, 1998, be an undeniable part of Jamaican social reality. It’s also important to note, though, that J-FLAG was not, as many believe, the first queer organization in Jamaica; the GFM, Gay Freedom Movement, was founded in 1978 by Larry Chang, who was another J-FLAG founding member. I remain convinced that GFM’s early existence, although GFM was relatively short-lived, made J-FLAG’s birth more possible. The fact that so many conversations are taking place in Jamaica today about homosexuality, and that the Jamaican Parliament has to contend with questions such as possible repeal of the buggery [sodomy] law, are direct results of J-FLAG’s presence and insistence that we not forget “the subject.”
TNG: Many authors are bemoaning the Death of Publishing As We Know It. Do you have any perspective to add?
In one sense, the death of “publishing as we know it” may be a good thing. I think that there are too many editors out there, especially in larger, more corporate houses, who don’t know how to conscientiously edit a book and help a writer grow as an artist, and would do better to get into some other kind of work, rather than wasting people’s time and drawing a paycheck that they really don’t deserve. I’m extremely fortunate to have worked with the caring editors I’ve known, but a lot of writers haven’t been as lucky. I have been concerned for a long time with how many editors, again especially some of those in larger houses, have been focused on editing a book for marketing purposes – the “how can we get this book to sell?” approach – as opposed to editing a book scrupulously and rigorously in order to help that writer become a better writer. We could use a lot less of the lousy editing approach, which the corporatization of publishing has made both possible and probable.
I don’t know what will happen in the future with book publishing, but I do feel that people really are reading books a lot less these days, and that means perhaps dire things for all of us who write – but I’m not too worried about that yet, partly because there isn’t much that I can do about it, and partly because I would write even if no one read what I wrote. I think that the web provides both positive and negative possibilities for us to pursue vis-à-vis publishing. But again, I’m not going to worry about any of this too much; I’m in a really fortunate position having the publishers I have, and I’ll stick with them for as long as it makes sense to do so.
TNG: What can we expect at the reading?
TG: I don’t know yet which pieces I’ll read, but I do know that my reading will be superb – really and truly amazing, in fact – and that everyone who comes will be very, very glad they came. TNG
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