- Hello, hello ladies. So, so many of our audience
members are in their 20s, so we thought we would kind of bring you back to our 20s. It's going to be a little easier for Yaa than it will be for Zadie and I, who have to look way back. So, Yaa's debut novel,
which you should all read if you're like the one
person who has not read it, it's called Homegoing. (applause) It's an epic, historical fiction. There are some people in
here who have read it. - Thank you. - It's gorgeous. It was published in
2016, and she essentially won like every award you could
possibly win, well-deserved. She was born in Ghana, the daughter of a professor of French at the University of Alabama, and a nurse. And I love this. Anybody remember Reading Rainbow? (cheering) Yes? So her first story ever, she submitted to The Reading Rainbow Young
Writers and Illustrators Contest, and won it, which encouraged
her to be a writer. I'm like, thank you, Reading Rainbow. - I didn't win. - You didn't win? - I didn't win. - I thought you won. - I got honorable mentions, so I felt like I won, but I didn't. - Oh, that's even more inspiring for the writers in the
audience who don't win. If you get honorable
mention, keep writing. And then she's talked about how Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which she read in high school, is really like a click
moment for her of like, I gotta be a writer. And as a massive fan of Toni's, I think that's so beautiful. So Yaa, you talked about that
when you were in college, you went back to Ghana, and you visited the
Cape Coast Castle place where slaves were confined before being shipped to the new world, a place just 50 miles from the town where your mother grew up, right? And you returned home,
and you said you wrote a single question at the top of your blank computer screen, which was, what does it mean to be black in America? And that that question
unfolded into Homegoing. Why that question? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? - Sure. I mean, I think for me, the question was something that had been looming in my mind for many, many years. As you mentioned, I was born in Ghana, but we came to America
when I was only two. And then from there, we
moved around quite a bit, so we lived in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, and then Alabama. And in each place, there were
fewer and fewer Ghanaians. In Columbus, Ohio there was
a large Ghanaian community. I felt, I was going to the
African-Christian church, like I still felt very
connected to my ethnicity, and then by the time we go to Alabama, there were very few in the
part of town that we lived in, very few black people in the
part of town that we lived in. And so, suddenly I was kind of faced with this question of how to, I guess, balance or navigate my
race and my ethnicity. And so for me, going to Ghana, taking that trip, trying to
understand the ways in which Ghanaian history and
American history connected for me was kind of a way
to open up this question of what it meant to be black in America. - That's amazing. I kept thinking when I was reading it, so, to give you perspective,
it's descendants of this one woman that
branch into two families, and it's linked short stories of many, many, many generations,
from slavery until contemporary America,
and I kept imagining you, in writing classes, like
20 or whatever years old, saying, "I'm gonna write this epic novel." That, like, explaining it to a teacher and having the professor,
whether subtly or not so subtly be like, oh
girl, like you need to pick a way less complicated first novel. - Yeah, (laughs) yeah. - I kept wondering,
like, what allowed you to hold on to that epic vision? Which also, I was thinking about the gender and race implications, like, the epic novels are often written by young, overly confident
white dudes, right? And you wrote, you successfully achieved this gorgeous, huge
novel as a first novel. Like, did you have to
squash a lot of haters and like not listen to a lot of professors that told you not to
write something that big right out of the gates? - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think part of
the task in the beginning was not just squashing the haters, but also squashing that
voice inside of yourself that says, this is stupid,
this is impossible, why are you even trying? (applause) Because... Yeah. Because if you're not willing
to fail at something epically, then you will never be able to write something epic, you know? And so I think having
that reminder for myself was really helpful, and then
sticking to the research, and understanding that I was kind of attempting to tell the stories of these people who had really existed. Obviously, the novel is
fiction, but every time I read an account of what
somebody had gone through in these time periods
that I was writing about, I felt as though I had to, I would do them a disservice
if I didn't try, at least, to get this book right. - Wow, that's awesome. I'm so glad you didn't
listen those voices. Zadie, you had success
at a very early age also. I, like, couldn't believe
this when I read it. You wrote White Teeth at 23
years old, is that right? - [Zadie] Yeah, it was
published when I was 23, yeah. So a little bit earlier-- - So you really wrote it when you were 22? - [Zadie] Yeah, yeah. - How can that be? I mean, that's amazing. So, like, since then, let's
just put in perspective for Zadie's career. She's published seven books, five novels, two essay collections, also
won every imaginable award. Maybe not the one from LeVar Burton and Reading
Rainbow, I'm sorry. (Zadie and Yaa laughing) But every other award that you can win, become an icon of sorts. When you look back at
that book, White Teeth, and at this 22-year-old writing, did you have, like, a driving questions at the top of your computer screen, metaphorically speaking, like Yaa? - Yes, I absolutely identified
with Yaa's question. I think actually, it's
sometimes underplayed the sense that when you're writing, you're not, for me anyway, it wasn't about describing myself or my identity. It was genuinely a question. I guess the question in my house was, how did these people come to be married? Which is a question perhaps everybody asks of their parents. But in my case, it was
a very long question. (audience laughing) - [Interviewer] Yes. - Why does a woman from Jamaica, from the diaspora, how did she meet this working class white man from
an equally long ancestry in a different place? And then that question
expanded to, you know, why are there Bengalis next door? Why are there Pols? Why the Irish? Why this Jewish family? I grew up in this
incredibly mixed environment and this mixed school, so everything was questions and also, deep
voyeurism, you know? I really wanted to know what was going on in all the houses next door,
all the flats next door. I was really fascinated
by other lives, you know. - But why did that fascination manifest in fiction form? I mean, did you think
about investigating it in other ways, or were you
always drawn to fiction? - It's such a strange form, because it really is
lying to tell the truth, if you see what I mean. There is no way, when I read Yaa's book, first of all I felt, I
wish I'd had that book when I was 15, was one of my strongest feelings about that book. It was a book that I had
wanted to read my whole life. But the rightness of it is not the rightness of history
or, you know what I mean? It's not, it's the rightness
that you feel in your gut, which is very hard to quantify. Why, when I read one book about the history of diaspora
do I feel this is right, and another book might feel false, or... There's no guarantee in that sense, and it's full of risk. No matter how much research you do, you can't do research
into humans, not really. So when I writing about all these people, the risk is always, well, what do you know about the
Bangladeshi family next door, and what do you know, in
fact, about your own mother? What do you even know about yourself? It's not rocket science. It's this emotional content. And all you can do is feel
your way through it, you know. Research helps for sure, right? You have facts, you
have historical details. But the rightness or wrongness of a page is always a massive risk. Every page is a risk, because at any point the
reader is free to say no. I don't agree, I don't feel this. This isn't my life, it
doesn't represent me. So that risk is what I'm
addicted to, in fact. The possibility of bring wrong
so many ways all the time, for some reason, is a great thrill to me. - (laughs) You're a thrill-seeker. So did you have the equivalent of a Song of Solomon, like something
you read early on that-- - Well actually, to be boring, it was also The Song of Solomon. (Interviewer laughing) But maybe a bit strong
for me was Alice Walker and The Color Purple, just
because, I don't know why, it had a stronger impression on me, and I was younger when
I read it, probably. And then of course, all the other writers. I was brought up in England, so I was reading Dickens,
Roald Dahl, Shakespeare. It's a massive canvas
of reading, you know. Some of it which was close to me, and some of it couldn't be further away, but meant as much. - Yeah. So yeah, I'm sure that's
a beautiful thing to hear, that your book had an influence on Zadie. - [Yaa] Yeah. Did you have an audience in
mind when you were writing, or did you have to sort
of banish the notion of anyone's actually going to read this in order to take that leap
of faith to get it done? - I mean, what Zadie said about wishing that she had had
this book when she was 15, I think that's always my
target audience, you know, is myself at 15, the
book that I would have wanted to read, the book
that I wish that I had been able to see myself in. I'm gonna butcher the Toni Morrison quote, but she says something like, "If you are looking on
your bookshelf for a book "and you can't find it,
you have to write it." And I really took that
mandate to heart, you know. I had never seen myself in fiction, and I read so voraciously as a child that the fact that I
was able to, you know, find commonalities with these characters who were completely different from me was all so exciting, and
it means that I think that fiction does its work, that it allows us to feel empathy for lots of different
people, and yet still, I craved a story that I
myself, as a middle-schooler, as a high-schooler would
have wanted to see. - And have you been surprised by who has responded to the novel? Have there been any interesting reactions that you were like, well, that's not who I wrote it for, but great. You know? - I mean, I think any time anybody has told me that they've
read the book, I feel that, because writing a novel, I think of it as, you're kind of working in
the dark for so many years, uncertain of whether or not your book will ever come to light. And so the fact that this
book has come to light and that the light has been so bright, and that so many wonderful
people have read it, and gotten something out of it. I'm astonished every time. - That's beautiful. - Zadie, in your most
recent book of essays, you write, "My hope is for a reader who, "like the author, wonders
how free she really is." Which I love. What do you mean by that? - What I'm wondering when I'm writing is whether it's possible to create a citizen or a civilian, a non-writer,
who thinks as a writer does about identity, I guess
that's what interests me. When I was a reader, like Yaa, I was reading all kinds
of books, by necessity, with people in them who were supposedly nothing like me. Yet when I read Madame Bovary, I thought, I too am Madame Bovary. When I read Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, I thought I too am Ivan Ilyich. And that's the experience of
minority readers all the time, this identification across
supposed boundaries. What I'm trying to do is encourage people in the other direction. So if somebody's reading Swing Time and they're reading about a
little black girl in London, I don't want that identification
to be at a distance, like look at this interesting
exotic story of this person. I want them to identify the way I did, wholly, body and soul, no matter what they happen to look like, no matter what their particular background. That's the exercise,
that you place yourself in this person's life, not
as a minority interest, not as an, oh, I wonder how they live. This is your life for the
duration of this book. This is your life. You live in it, the way
I lived in your books, and that kind of exchange
is important to me. And also, I guess, as person who feels that identity is real
and also constructed, I'm interested in coalition
across difference, you know? That's the story of my life, the story of my family and partially the story of my country. So I'm trying to make people step into this girl's life as if it were their life. That matters to me. - That takes a real generosity of a reader, too, right,
to believe that they will go the full way as opposed to this more sort of objectifying
reception or read. And one of the things
I've been thinking about with both of your work is that novels allow for this
multiplicity of characterization, like this nuance, and that's very present in both of your work. And as someone who's
trained as a journalist, one of our huge failures at this moment has been creating so
much dualistic narration about who people are and who
represents a country, etc. Whereas you all are able
to encompass so much nuance in the characters that you're portraying. Do you feel like, is, for
like the regular people in the audience, like, do we actually have that failure of imagination
about other people, or is that a representation of journalism? Do you know what I mean? It's like, people read
your novels and love them and then we go out and
have all of these, like, incredibly reductive
ideas about each other. Is that a failure of human nature, a failure of journalism? Like, I'm just trying to unpack why we see so bad at nuance
in this moment, in particular. - I think fiction's wonderful, obviously, but it's hard to find a substitute
for experience, you know? And in my experience, we
were talking backstage about the kind of housing estate, or project, as you call
it, that I grew up on, was class-wise united, but
race-wise completely mixed. So when you live in this
kind of coalition space of black people, Indian
people, Pakistani people, Irish people, it's not that your lives are point-for-point exactly the same, but there are points of connection that you can communicate across, as you get used to the
idea that perfect alignment doesn't have to exist in order for communication to happen. - Right. - And that's my assumption,
what's happening at the moment, I think, is that unless
the alignment is perfect, it's considered as if no
conversation can happen. But it can happen. It might be clumsy, it might be awkward, it might be embarrassing. It might make you angry sometimes. It's still possible. - Right. - And there are things that you
have in common structurally, in my case, in our housing estate, the fact that we were all poor. That is a coalition in itself. So I think in fiction that
becomes much easier to do. In life, we bristle a little bit, no? If your story is not my story, how can we speak? - Right, do you feel that way, Yaa? - Yeah, I think was
fiction does in part, too, is that it takes away this wall, so that you're not, as
Zadie was mentioning, you're not becoming this kind of voyeur, looking at this other person. If the fiction is done well, you feel as thought you are actually living the experiences
of these characters. You get to kind of follow
their thoughts and feelings. And so in a way, they become
your thoughts and feelings just for that moment that
you're reading the book. And I think that that exercise of walking in other people's shoes,
rather than kind of seeing them, watching
them, but feeling as though you have become them, is
the thing that when I read, that's what I'm looking for. - Right. Well and especially in
the case of Homegoing, you have such a macro and
a micro thing going on, because you're getting these generations and these sweeps of history, of context, but then you're getting
these tiny details. I mean, I can bring to
mind different characters in these, like, tiny moments that made me empathize with them more, whereas a lot of the media we're consuming is so flat and so fast,
and doesn't contain that kind of macro and micro, right? So I think part of it is a time thing, does that make sense? - Sure, and what you
said about fast and flat, fiction takes forever, you know? It can take, Homegoing
took me seven years. And so I was able to kind of imbue that sense of macro and micro because I was thinking about it
so deeply for so long. And I think if you're
writing and reading things very quickly, off the cuff, you don't always get that second layer, that third layer, that fourth layer. - Yeah. Last year at this summit,
I got to interview this amazing woman, Adrienne Maree Brown, who's an organizer and a writer. And she said that basically
all community organizing is speculative fiction,
because you have to imagine-- - [Zadie] Such a great woman. - The worlds that you're
trying to build into, and I thought of her when
I was reading your work and preparing for this,
and I just wondered if you'd talk about what you
see as the role of the novelist at this really contentious moment where a lot of us are
feeling very heartbroken and kind of turning to
media, turning to different activist endeavors, but sort of trying to find ourselves in all of this. - I think for me, the mode I write in is the idea that, I know
this is in some ways opposite to a lot of what we
heard while we're here, is that my own stories, in some ways, for me, the one I'm least engaged with, I don't know how to put it. Like when I'm writing my novels, I know that sometimes there are characters who seem physically like
me or structurally in the same position as me, but
the problem with yourself is that you're so
subjective about yourself. - Right. - And sometimes I'm the
person I see least, you know. Whereas when I wrote White Teeth, the people I really engaged
with was everybody else. - [Interviewer] Right. - A kind of fascination,
a love, and a curiosity, and I think in terms of
community organizing, that seems to me so essential that, of course yourself is
important in your identity, but what you're there
for are these others, is trying to understand, ask questions, what's your life like, how does it feel, what are you doing? That extension away from yourself into other people is what maybe fiction could model as a
kind of citizenship behavior. - [Interviewer] Right. - The idea that yourself is great, but it's just the start
of a much broader story. - So the practice of curiosity and-- - The practice of curiosity and being radically involved in other people's lives and caring about them. - Yeah. (applause and cheering) Yaa, do you have thoughts
about the novelist's role? Because it's interesting, you
said it takes you seven years. Like, that's a lot of
years of being, you know, sitting in front of a computer, and I'm sure there are
moments of thinking, like, is this relevant, is this, you know, in these fast moving times, how do you think about your work in context of everything that's going on? - Well, I was really grateful for the slowness of writing Homegoing, because that meant that
I was able to kind of, the world was changing around me, but I was able to kind of understand why the questions that
were important to me were questions that do always
matter to the wider world. So I was thinking about, I was thinking about Ghanaian history,
I was thinking about American history, I was
thinking about identity. And some of the things
that came up in the book at the time that I was writing it didn't feel particularly
relevant to the world at that moment, and yet
when the book came out, it seemed extremely relevant. And so that understanding that our curiosities are important, I think that's something that
novelists can be aware of and can kind of help us see. - I love that. I also feel like both of you, I mean, curiosity to its most granular
form of questions, right? Learn how to ask really good questions. Stop talking so much, right, could be a good lesson
for all of us right now. And you talked about that your novel came from a question. I know you're just working
on your second novel. Is there a new question at the top of the blank screen these days that's driving you that you can share? - Not as direct as with Homegoing, but it is still driven by questions. I think what I'm always
attempting to do in my work is to feel as though I'm
being deeply interrogative. And so if, I can't name
a specific question for the next book, but that desire to continue kind of interrogating
my own thoughts in my mind is hopefully something that
will be apparent on the page. - I can't wait to read it. Zadie, do you have a question at the top of your
metaphorical screen these days, or a few of them? - It's weird, I just finished a book, and it actually has an
epigraph which is a question, so that's strange that you... - [Interviewer] Yeah, there you go. - It's Frank O'Hora, how
can a person fail to be? I thought that was a really
interesting question. In what ways can you generally
fail to be human, you know? To act like a human, to
consider other humans. I wouldn't have thought that
was possible a while ago, but now I realize it is. Like being human isn't just
a thing you're born with. You kind of have to earn it, you know? It's actually a big deal. And there's loads of ways you can fail to be a full person. So I was putting that question to myself. In what ways do I fail every day to honor this thing of the human, which to me is kind of a big deal. - Wow, that's so beautiful. Is that non-fiction or fiction? - It's stories, short stories. - Short stories, wow. All right, well I can't wait
to keep reading both of you. I feel so grateful for your work and the way that you
move through the world, and let's all keep attempting
to earn to be human here in our time together. Thank you both so much. (applause and cheering) (uplifting instrumental music)
