Living Borders, Living Stories: An Interview with Andrea Hairston
I cannot express how much of an honor it was to interview Andrea Hairston, whose work I became familiar with after she was guest of honor at FOGcon back in 2018. I was, admittedly, very late to the party: by then, Professor Hairston was decades into her career as an author and playwright. We might also add seer to her resume, because upon reading Mindscape, I was struck first and foremost by how current many of its themes are, despite being written in the 1990s. It feels as prescient now as it must have upon first publication, and I believe it holds within itself guidance for how to navigate our complex and violent political moment. But read on and see for yourself.
Andrea Hairston is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and the artistic director of Chrysalis Theatre. She is the author of Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the 2011 Otherwise Award and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, and Mindscape, short-listed for the Philip K. Dick and Otherwise Awards and winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. In her spare time, she is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Hairston has received the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for outstanding contributions to the criticism of the fantastic. She bikes at night year-round, meeting bears and the occasional shooting star.
LSJ: For the first few chapters, I totally forgot that Mindscape is a reprint; it felt like it was speaking to this moment’s political landscape. Looking back, what were you responding to in the 1990s when you wrote Mindscape?
AH: Some version of what’s going on right now has been going on my entire life. Gangsters in control of the media, truth under the gun, folks in ideological silos, brutal violence normalized and tolerated. Of course, people also have been figuring a way out of no way, innovating and improvising new realities and possibilities. They have been dancing, singing joy, and loving each other into tomorrow.
Despite great changes and wonderous achievements since the 1950’s, many (oppressive) structural realties continue and historical power dynamics persist, as does the resistance and heroic/everyday actions for change. Science fiction and fantasy writers make the invisible visible. We aren’t writing about an actual future, but illuminating the immanent possibilities of the here and now.
Specifically in the mid 1990’s, I was a guest professor at a German university teaching a course on Black women playwrights rewriting the master narrative. While teaching, I also devised a short play with women seeking asylum or immigrating to Germany from North Africa, Central America, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. A powerful experience as we rehearsed each other’s stories. Also, I encountered many people who were eulogizing Africa and other indigenous societies/cultures, proclaiming imminent demise. Supposedly we had to check Indigenous languages, wisdom, science at the door to the Future. I wanted to write about decolonizing the Future, my kind of action adventure.
LSJ: One of the aspects of Mindscape that felt so current was the Barrier: a border that is also an entity with its own obscure motivations; an entity that is constantly being negotiated with, penetrated and penetrating, even called a lover by one of the characters. Yet in another interview you described the Barrier as having colonized the Earth, which yes, it absolutely has. I’m wondering if you can expand on that tension between the Barrier as a colonizing force and at the same time a “monstrous lover” as Elleni calls it?
AH: There is no absolute truth about the Barrier. The tension, the conflicts between the various Barrier “truths,” is a driving force at the core of the novel. How the Barrier is perceived is dependent on the observers, their worldviews, and also their particular contexts. Elleni acknowledges this when she calls the Barrier a monstrous lover. She knows her experiences of the Barrier and feelings for it are not what others experience or feel. So there is tension in her relationship to herself and to others. Who is she to love something that has colonized her world?
LSJ: In the world of Mindscape, gene manipulation has reached a stage where it is possible to alter anything about one’s appearance, including one’s race and sex. The repercussions of these manipulations are too numerous to go into here, but in at least one notable instance, gene manipulation radically alters a deeply traumatized body. Do you see such transformations as having the potential to heal past trauma?
AH: I think healing past trauma is a complex process that can include bodily transformations, but must also be accompanied by social and cultural interventions. Healing is communal. Triggers for the trauma persist in the interactions we have, in the stories we tell, in our expectations of one another and in our relationships.
LSJ: The figure of the griot is invoked throughout Mindscape, and characters that act as such play instrumental roles in the resolution of the many conflicts happening, often preventing violence in the process. It made me think again of our current moment: do you see a place for griots in today’s political conflicts? Who in our society can we look to for such leadership?
AH: We are engaged in story civil war and griots—storytellers—are absolutely essential. We need to conjure a vision of a future that can motivate us to work together for change. Reverend Doctor William J. Barber, II comes to mind and Jasmine Crockett. Folks who refuse disinformation/lies and reframe the narratives to celebrate our best selves. Indeed, we can all be working on that.
LSJ: Circling back to where we began: if you were writing Mindscape today, is there anything you would handle differently in the novel?
AH: I believe in the novel I wrote at the turn of the 21st century. It’s like a performance, of that moment. Yet unlike a live performance, it doesn’t dissolve, live only in memory. It is a wonderous artifact to be revisited. I made light edits to the text for this reprint. I tried to get the sentences to do what I intended them to do twenty years ago.
To handle something differently, I would write a different novel—the next novel that I’m about to write.
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