Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
What is it good for? (War)
On this episode of Articulate Experience— four writers who’ve each seen war from a different angle.
Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper comic strip artist Garry Trudeau sent one of his tentpole Doonsebury characters to Vietnam and both Gulph wars. Along the way, he connected with real veterans and became a proud vessel for their stories.
The award-winning author Maaza Mengiste and her family fled Ethiopia during the revolution of 1974. And though she was only three years old at the time, she remembers a great deal.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Yusef Komunyakaa has documented war inside and out. As a black soldier fighting for the U.S. in the Vietnam War, he won a Bronze Star for his combat reporting. Years later, he started writing poetry reflecting on his experiences of battle, and found he couldn’t stop.
For Aleksander Hemon, stories are the stuff of selfhood. He writes to preserve the memory of his family, and the homeland they lost to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
- [01:04] Garry Trudeau
- [21:04] Maaza Mengiste
- [31:12] Yusef Komunyakaa
- [40:44] Aleksander Hemon
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
Welcome to Articulate Experience — the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers. I’m Jim Cotter. And on this episode— perspectives on war…
Featuring, Doonsebury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper comic strip artist Garry Trudeau,
GARRY TRUDEAU: I had sent b.d. to war when he was young, without having any sense of what that meant. It was a kind of hippy fantasy
The award-winning author Maaza Mengiste on the Ethiopian home her family were driven out of,
MAAZA MENGISTE: I ran right into the house and I told my mother, “We can’t stay here. You have to get me out.”
Poet, Yusef Komunyakaa who survived the Jim Crow south and later the Vietnam War,
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: I think there’s always hope. That might be more revolutionary than anything else.
And, Aleksander Hemon who witnessed from afar the horrors of the Bosnian war.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: if I don’t tell stories of my family, there might not be no memory of my family.
That’s all ahead, on Articulate Experience.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During the Iraq War, Garry Trudeau was preparing to travel to Baghdad with a friend from The Washington Post.
GARRY TRUDEAU: This was at a time when The Washington Post, to get its reporters to the green zone, because their safe house was outside the green zone, would stuff them in the backseat, and they’d throw a blanket over them and you know, put a civilian next to them. So so it didn't look like there was a Western reporter going into the green zone. And for some reason, I guess it's just poor risk assessment. I was I was thinking, “Well, I can, I can live with that the Washington Post, they haven't lost anyone yet”. So I was I was I was ready to go. And I tell this to my my kids a couple days before Christmas, because I'm going to go a few days after Christmas. And my teenage daughter burst into tears. And I thought, “I don't need to do that to my family.” There are a lot of other people who have to do that to their families. I don't need to do that to my family to do my job.
Garry Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury, a comic strip he’s been making since 1970. That longevity, along with the author’s penchant for social and political commentary, has turned Doonesbury into a sort of chronicle of late 20th and early 21st century America. It all started with a lucky break, when Trudeau’s college comic strip, Bull Tales, was plucked from the Yale University student newspaper for syndication.
GARRY TRUDEAU: I mean, it really was learning in prime time ’cause I came right out of college. I didn’t have the skill sets that are commonly associated with my craft. You know, I really wasn’t ready. And frankly, the first 10, 20 years, even though there were all kinds of wonderful things that I was fascinated by, that I was writing about, I look at now, you know, and grimace.
There weren’t very many people who have chosen to do work like I have, who have thought, “well, sure, I’ll just bring sex, drugs, rock and roll, and politics to the comics page.” You have to be young and clueless to think that’s a good idea, which is, sometimes, thankfully confused with audacity.
At its peak, Doonsebury appeared in nearly 2,000 newspapers. Today, its steadily expanding cast of characters numbers nearly 70.
GARRY TRUDEAU: It makes it terribly difficult for somebody to drop in, on the strip, if they, if they haven't been following it for a while, because it's rather like opening a Russian novel in the middle. So I try to be mindful of that. And I try to create enough context, enough exposition to, to, so that people, you know, know where they are. But on the other hand, there are people who have followed it all those years and I can kind of leverage that and I can kind of say to those longtime readers, alright, “you know who this character is. Because if you don't, you may not understand why this is funny.” Because I mostly write character humor, I couldn't tell a joke to save my life. I couldn't write a joke to save my life. I just show people as they are, as human beings.
Over the decades Doonesbury has become famous and infamous for satirizing and exploring a variety of controversial issues, including war, the AIDS epidemic, and abortion— which all left a mark well beyond the comic page. His strips about a 1980s law in Palm Beach, Florida, requiring low wage workers to register with police and carry ID cards, pushed the state legislature to pass a law banning the practice. It became known as the Doonesbury Bill. But Trudeau takes the most pride in his work around an area where his characters, especially B. D., a mainstay of the strip since the start, have had the greatest impact: the battlefield.
GARRY TRUDEAU: I had sent B.D.. to war when he was young, without having any sense of what that meant. It was a kind of hippy fantasy that I you know, I sent the the gung ho soldier to Vietnam, where he's captured by Vietcong fighter, and they get lost, and they learn what they have in common. And, you know, it was such a kind of ‘60s fantasy.
JIM COTTER: But the relationship went on for decades.
GARRY TRUDEAU: Yeah, it did. And, and also it signal to the troops because it appeared in Stars and Stripes, which they all read avidly that somebody was thinking about them, even if they were getting it totally, even though there was no sense of verisimilitude to what I was doing. I really hadn't even read that much about Vietnam, other than, you know, just the daily reports and newspapers, the soldier experience I was largely ignorant of.
But Trudeau wouldn’t remain ignorant for long. As B.D.’s military career progressed over the decades — seeing him serve in Vietnam and both Gulf Wars —Trudeau tapped the knowledge of real life soldiers to ensure that his stories rang true.
GARRY TRUDEAU: I was invited, I was welcomed into that world and into that culture. I tried to take full advantage of it, I tried to think,” Okay, let me see if I can reverse engineer this character I've created and dig a little deeper into what might have motivated him.”
In 2004 Trudeau made a bold choice. He had B. D. lose a leg while fighting in Iraq. It was a consequential decision that meant just as much to real members of the military as it did to Trudeau’s fictional ones.
GARRY TRUDEAU: What I realized is that I had I had done something creatively that that I really hadn't done before, which was set off on an arc that I was totally, totally morally obligated to finish, or at least to travel down that path for months to come. I'd never made that kind of commitment before. I always say, “Oh, I've run out of steam on this. I'll just move on from that.” And this was this was, no you can't do that. You can't do something this serious. You can't make him a character and then walk away from the consequences not just on him, but on his little girl, on his wife, on his friends.
JIM COTTER: And how much forethought went into that action?
GARRY TRUDEAU: This is how little thought went into it. I decided I was going to do it because I was so upset about the losses…the Marines just endured a horrible battle of Fallujah there have been losses, huge losses on both sides. And I thought, I can't just have my characters on the periphery of all that pain, I have to put one of them in the center of it. And so I did it. And I was actually leaving on vacation, because I only worked one week at a time and rarely thought about where I was going. And I called up my longtime editor, David Stanford said, “David, I have to leave right now. But could you do just a fast piece of research for me? Could you tell me what happens to a soldier in the first hour when they're wounded on the battlefield? I want to know, all the steps that the medics would take and what's available to them? What are their tools? What are their goals? What are they have to get done during the so called Golden Hour?” And he said, “Yeah, I'll do that.” So I went off, I came back, and here was all this great stuff that he'd found. And so I immediately plugged that in and thought, “Okay, now what?”
And I got a call from some friends I'd made at the, at the Department of Defense. And so they said, “Well, we've seen what you've done. And we'd like to help any way we can. And, of course, the subtext was solid that there's a better chance you get it, right.” Because, you know, this was a big thing within the world of the strip.
JIM COTTER: Were they being motivated by like, some sort of a recruitment? Like if he tells this badly, he has power? And if he shows the bare realities of what happens when you actually do join the army… I mean, was there any of that going on?
GARRY TRUDEAU: None.
JIM COTTER: Okay,
GARRY TRUDEAU: Which was, yeah, it's interesting that you raise that point, no, they never looked at it from a PR standpoint, I think they saw an opportunity to connect the sacrifice our troops were making to a general public that was ignoring it for the most part, and or wasn't engaging with it.
And so, the Department of Defense arranged for Trudeau to meet with real soldiers with fresh amputations.
GARRY TRUDEAU: I walked in to Walter Reed a little apprehensive I was going to the this famous Ward, Ward 57 where all the amputees were. These are all kids who are fresh off the battlefield. And so I really wasn't prepared. You know, I'm the son of a physician and grandson and great grandson of physicians. And to be a good physician, I learned in watching my father, you have to you have to listen, you have to bring what empathy you have to that, to that conversation. And nonetheless, it was not a part of my experience. For the most part. I had talked to soldiers in the field prior to this, but but not to people who are going through that kind of trauma. So I walked into the first room that I had been granted permission to, and there was this lovely young woman, maybe 25, sitting on her bed talking on her cell phone, and she was missing her forearm and her left hand. And I had learned before going in that she was a graduate of Notre Dame. She was a sergeant and MP. She had been a basketball star in college. So you can imagine somebody who's an elite athlete, losing a limb is an even bigger thing than it might be for person who isn't. And she's talking to her mother on the phone. And then she hangs up. She says, “Okay, what do you want to talk about?” So I said, “well, I just would like to know your story.” Well, that turned out to be the perfect thing to say. Because, as I would learn from subsequent conversations, they're all about their story. Anyone fresh off the battlefield. They're just cycling through what happened up to the moment when they were hit. And they're just reliving it over and over again.
There also, mixed into those feelings are feelings of survivor's guilt of, you know, the first thing you say with, if you in some way, commiserate with their loss is they'll point to someone else. And you'll say, “oh, yeah, but but, you know, Frank lost both his legs.” You know, it's stuff that just blows your mind. But at any rate, she starts telling me her story. And she said, “You know, I was an MP,” and unknown to Americans at that time, women were sent right to combat zones. And she sent to a police station in a small town outside of Baghdad. And she set up up on the roof. They're protecting the police stations and their sandbags all on the roof. And so she's just settling in, and an RPG rips through her position blows up on the wall behind her. So her training kicks in, she flicks off safety, and she takes her her weapon and she puts it over her shoulder to return fire because the first thing you do when you under attack is to make sure the other person doesn't feel safe, any safer than you do. So she's about to return fire when a second RPG comes in and slices off the arm that she's had up and blows up all the sandbags. And so she's covered in sand. Her Sergeant runs up to the rooftop and digs her out. And they take her down and put her on the hood of a Humvee. And they tie off her arm.
And, this is her telling the story, she said, “and then he did something amazing. He went back up onto the rooftop against orders, dug through the sand, found my severed arm and hand, removed my engagement ring, came back down and put it in my one remaining hand.” And she said, “he didn't have to do that. I could have gotten another ring. But it meant the world to me.”
Well, that's soldier love. That's what soldiers do for one another. This is the first room I walked into, the first story I heard. And I — I thought, “Okay, this, this is not only rich and powerful, these kinds of stories, but if I can figure out how to make them how to how to get them into the strip in a way that's also entertaining…maybe I can be useful in two different ways. I can help people process. what these young soldiers are going through, and at the same time, maintain the covenant that I have with readers, which is—you will be entertained. Because these these kids are coming up with funny stories about themselves as to that are very black. And I had the same experience when I was writing about AIDS— some of the funniest stories I've ever heard were came out of the mouths of AIDS patients. And I said, “ I've got to figure this out. This is really worth doing even though it is a multi-year commitment I’m making”.
JIM COTTER: but were you not just first of all over— I mean, I'm overwhelmed just by hearing the story thirdhand. Like, you are telling me what she told you and I'm overwhelmed. But how do you internalize all of that and start to even parse it so it can become Doonesbury, it can become who you are on the page?
GARRY TRUDEAU:I don't know. I, I guess I just lay the pieces out. My wife says, you know, you're like the the cobbler who puts the little pieces out and then goes to bed and you come in the morning in their shoes that have been made by the elfs. There's some truth to that, that at night there are different parts of my brain that are communicating with one another and they're making connections that you wouldn't make in a logical sense because comedy is, there's an illogic to it but that's how you create those surprises in the end is you put something unexpected near something else that, um, they don't rationally go together. So, somehow that happens. Tor me it happens often in the shower, in the morning. Um, I you've interviewed enough writers to know how many of them has to write in the morning, because I think that the dream work is terribly important to that process. I can't, you know, begin to describe to you how that is. I work very intuitively.
Trudeau’s exploration of the impacts of war earned him the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the U.S. Department of the Army. In 2005, war veteran and then-senator, the late John McCain, wrote the forward to a book by Trudeau documenting B. D.’s recovery.
Writing comics, of course, is nothing like fighting in a war, but the idea of recovery is a fitting way to think about Trudeau’s own journey over the past five decades of Doonesbury. There are painful and ugly moments highlighting some of the worst traits of America— but Trudeau isn’t guided by pessimism. He’s stuck to it for so long because he believes things can always recover and get better.
GARRY TRUDEAU: You have to be an optimist. You have to believe things can improve. Otherwise, I mean that’s what motivates almost all of us. Cynicism is the enemy of so many things, but it’s something that I highly resist as any kind of motivation for what I do.
JIM COTTER: Or for how you live
GARRY TRUDEAU: Or for how I live
In his five decades of creating Doonsebury, Trudeau has, at times been hailed a hero of the people. At others, an enemy of “the powers that be”. Yet no matter how many times his comic strip has been pulled from newspapers across the country, or how many public figures he’s angered— nothing has provoked him to fight back.
GARRY TRUDEAU: “Intervening” is the correct word not censorship. Censorship is when an outside entity, when a government or you know, some authority intervenes, and says “you cannot print that.” But if it's done internally, that's added. And I don't have a quarrel with editors and editing,
JIM COTTER: It’s more than editing, It's, it's, it's, it's saying, “what you have created is not worthy of our space this week.”
GARRY TRUDEAU: Do you know how many, how many times on a given day an editor says that about content that people wanna put in his newspaper? They're making judgment calls on, on, on— for a variety of reasons.
JIM COTTER: Generally, those things are not about swaying the, the ethical wind of the readership. You know, we're not going to print this story because it might upset people. That's not a good reason to pull a story, to pull something. You can, you can comment on a bunch of things. Is it, is it truth? Is it well-written? Is it accurate? Is it germane? Is it news? Is it new <laugh>? I mean, there’s a bunch of reasons you’d turn it down-
GARRY TRUDEAU: But, but you're parsing motive. And I've never thought that was part of my job. My job is to present them with content, a feature that I've written and say, “you've paid for this, so it's your privilege to put it in your paper or not put it in your paper.” It's not for me to say that, “I ought to be in a thousand newspapers every single day. That, uh, whatever I've done this day is suitable for all those audiences.” Now, yes, editors, uh, would often drop the script for the most cowardly of reasons or dishonorable of reasons. Conflicts of interest.
JIM COTTER: Give me the worst.
GARRY TRUDEAU: Uh, in California, Jerry Brown, when he was a governor the first time, uh, he got himself into some problems by accepting campaign contributions from a figure linked with organized crime— fellow named Sidney Korshak who was, uh, a big figure in the mob at the time. So I wrote a couple weeks about this. I believe almost every paper in California dropped those strips. And a delightful touch—so did the papers in Reno in Las Vegas. So it's perfectly obvious why all those newspapers were responding to a powerful local figure, either the, the organized crime figure himself or the governor. That is not a defensible position. But I never thought it was my position to condemn that as censorship. It's not, these are all privately owned news organizations. They can run whatever they damn well, please.
JIM COTTER: But secretly you're saying, “you’re cowards.”
GARRY TRUDEAU: I'm not thrilled with it. I wouldn't send it to them if I didn't think it was appropriate for a general audience.
JIM COTTER: You, you did that and you've done this more often. I mean, do you have quadruple glaze windows? You mean, have you ever gone, “hang on the kid? You know, my kids, my fa” like, have you ever checked yourself in terms of, “this is a very dangerous person. This is a person who can come after me and really either physically or some way damage me.”
GARRY TRUDEAU: Well, my wife was concerned about Frank Sinatra.
JIM COTTER: And you portray him as a mobster.
GARRY TRUDEAU: Well as, as the friend of. And so my wife was concerned about that. But he did something that actually kind of turned the temperature down, which is he condemned me publicly and he sicked a lawyer on my syndicate. And, uh, my editor called me up and said, “well, we just heard from the law Frank Sinatra's lawyer. And, uh, he said that you've misrepresented the facts of what happened at Atlantic City on such and such a day with Sinatra and da.” And I said, ‘well, of course I misrepresented, I made them up.” And he said, “it's gonna be a very short trial if that's the standard <laugh>, it's satire, it's a comic strip.” So, I was pretty sure he was just rattling the cage, right? That, that, that there would be, you know, any lawyer would tell him, “oh, you've heard about the first amendment right? And this is satire. So I was pretty sure that if he was making noises publicly, that that was actually a good thing.
JIM COTTER: You were dealing with his learned friends rather than his wise guys. Right?
GARRY TRUDEAU: So, uh, a couple months went by and then he gave a concert at Carnegie Hall and he started going after me and didn't say his my name. He just said, “oh, that cartoonist. And he's funny as a tumor.” And, and you know, the audience was egging him on and you figure you gotta figure this is a pretty hardcore Sinatra audience. And, um, he made a big mistake. He started attacking my wife. Well, that breaks the first rule of the neighborhood. You don't go after the wife and children. And this audience started booing him. And, uh, you know, I don't know what he learned that day, but I was pretty sure that was gonna be the end of it. And, uh, it was.
Gary Trudeau satire occupies a special place in American culture. A space between journalism and comedy– Beyond red and blue, where the public has been able to reliably gather each week to reflect on the humanity and absurdity of life, and have it reflected back at them— one panel at a time.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The novelist Maaza Mengiste blends memory, discovery, and imagination, to reconnect with a homeland she’d feared she’d lost. Mengiste’s family left Ethiopia when she was a child, spending a few years in Nigeria, then Kenya, before moving to the U.S. when she was seven. But her native land kept calling her back.
MAAZA MENGISTE: My earliest memories of Ethiopia, they were memories of family and love. But once the revolution came in in 1974, I was three years old, and I had very vivid memories of those years as well. How did I remember someone being taken by the soldiers and put into a van? I remember the Volkswagen van. I remember that there was a window. I was the only one that could follow them because no soldier was paying attention to a three-year-old child.
JIM COTTER: And who was it?
MAAZA MENGISTE:I'm not quite sure. Even to this day, there are things that, that, that families don't talk about in Ethiopia. And I think the revolution and what happened, uh, specific incidents don't re necessarily get brought up. I've had people who were children, children like me, people who were kids at that time, or whose parents fled Ethiopia and then were born in the United States, said to me, “we finally understand what— the kinds of questions we can ask, because their parents would shut them out of everything. So the memories that I had were almost in a lockbox.
Mengiste’s lockbox of memories was shut at age four, when her family realized it was time to flee— after emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in a Marxist military coup. Anyone linked to his regime, especially members of the educated middle-class, was considered a “person of interest.”
MAAZA MENGISTE: If you were in any way educated, if you were in college, in high school, if you were a teacher, if you were in any way connected to Haile Selassie. If you had any money— and money in terms of land or maybe a car or worked in a bank, you were under suspicion. You were automatically the enemy. So everyone in my family was in that category.
JIM COTTER: What was the breaking point for the family to leave?
MAAZA MENGISTE: There was one moment I remember in particular, when I was outside playing. It was New Years, and we had these little sparklers, firecrackers, and what we were doing was throwing them up into the tree. It was at night. Of course I wanted to do this, I’m holding one up, it’s great fun, it’s a beautiful sight in the dark to do that. And as we’re singing and getting ready to throw these up, the gunshots started right outside our gate. And I remember, it was such a jarring sound for me, and so startling that I shook, and I dropped the firecracker, and it dropped on my foot and burned through the skin. And I looked down, and I ran right into the house and I told my mother, “we can’t stay here. You know, you have to get me out.”
Mengiste’s father, an executive with Ethiopian Airlines, was able to get his family out of the country with relative ease. And once they became US citizens, they could come and go as they wished. But the earliest visits in the 1980s weren’t always easy. Beyond the boundaries of her grandparents’ home, it would take Mengiste years to feel accepted.
MAAZA MENGISTE: At this point, Ethiopians in Ethiopia have become used to members of the diaspora coming back and visiting, even in these more remote areas. They see us as Ethiopian, but also foreign. Before there was that level of comfort, Ethiopians could be quite cruel. And it was almost saying, “you’re not really Ethiopian” was like an insult. And it did used to be painful when I was a teenager. And then once I started writing, I started understanding that my distance from Ethiopia was specifically the thing that enabled me to write. And I needed that space in order to be able to look at history and look at the culture from a vantage point.
Whatever your vantage point, Ethiopia is complicated. Landlocked, drought-ridden, largely Christian, twice the size of Texas. It now has a parliamentary government. But in her novels, Mengiste looks back to darker times of authoritarian rule, famine, civil war. As a graduate student, she wasn’t sure if she should or could turn such cataclysmic events into fiction. So, she asked her professor, the renowned South African poet, Breyten Breytenbach, some big questions.
MAAZA MENGISTE: “Do I have a right to turn it into fiction?’ You know this is a national tragedy. And, “what is fiction? Like, is a fictional book, is this the best form for this history that was devastating to so many people I know, and to my own family?” And he said this thing to me: “Fiction tells a truth that history cannot.” And I grabbed onto that, and I had that on a sticky note on my computer for those moments when I wavered. But I understood what he meant by that, is— history gives us data. It gives us location. It gives us dates. But fiction gives us the human being, and that’s what I felt that I could do.
Mengiste’s debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, is set in 1974 in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. By then, Haile Selassie has become the messiah of the Rastafarian movement. “Ras” means “chief,” and his family name was Tafari. With revolution brewing, his nearly five-decade long rule, marked by both triumph and tyranny, was nearing its end. Mengiste shows us an 82-year-old man– broken, under house arrest, with only a pet lion for company.
(Excerpt from Beneath the Lion’s Gaze):
“Soldiers were posted outside his door, which was locked in triplicate, and then chained. Their fear of him was heartbreaking, compounding his loneliness and the largeness of this empty space he was trapped inside. They walked backwards into the room whenever they escorted his old servant inside with his food, doubly armed and wearing sunglasses. They scurried out as quickly as they could, too afraid to glance his way. The mournful whimpers of his old lion, Tojo, lulled him to sleep, and he tried to make himself forget about the garden just outside his window, which he was no longer allowed to walk in. Under the weight of this solitude, all of the emperors’ hours, minutes, and seconds blurred and ran together like a slow, dying river.”
After beneath the Lion's gaze came out in 2010, Mengiste and her parents began talking more candidly about what had happened to them in the 1970s...
MAAZA MENGISTE: My parents were in Washington, DC, for my book launch for the first book, and the book was done. I was using my own memory and research, and other people’s stories.
JIM COTTER: And it’s fiction, lest we forget.
MAAZA MENGISTE: And it’s fiction, right. So she read the book, and just before we were on our way to the reading, she said, “I’m ready to answer your questions now.”
JIM COTTER: Thanks, mom. Did she fact-check it for you, then? Was she like, “That never happened!”
MAAZA MENGISTE: What she said, actually, was some of the things that I thought I had made up, she said “How did you get that? How did you know that person’s name?”
Though some of Mengiste’s writing has been intuitive or invented, much of it comes from intensive research. Her second novel, 2019’s The Shadow King, set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, was informed by countless hours spent reading at Italy’s state archives in Rome. But Mengiste’s first draft—all 800 painstakingly researched pages of it—went into the trash. The narrative was historically accurate, but she said, it lacked feeling and focus.
MAAZA MENGISTE: There was a moment of sheer panic where I said, “this isn’t the book… I don’t even want to read this book.” I don’t want to read it, but I’ve just written it. And I knew at some point, halfway in, that that moment when I’m writing, going, “I hate this, I hate this, but I have to finish.” And I finished, and I sent a panicked message to my editor, and she said, “Why don’t you come in? Send me this draft.” And, you know, bless her for reading it. The first question she asked me was, “Whose story is this?”
And I started again from page one, and I realized that Hirut, this young servant girl, who would eventually become a soldier, she wants to tell the story, at least to begin it. And if I can do anything, what could I do? And I looked back at books I loved. The Greek tragedies, Il Dottore, Toni Morrison, a Croatian writer Dasa Drndic, and I said, “Okay, they broke rules. Let me break some rules and see what happens.”
It so happened that The Shadow King was shortlisted for the coveted Man Booker Prize in 2020. The same year, Mengiste released a crime antholgy called Addis Ababa Noir, which invited fellow Ethiopian writers to imagine their country’s capital city through an unfamiliar lens.
MAAZA MENGISTE: The darkness in here I think is very different from what many Ethiopians are used to reading. I’ve heard from Ethiopians, “well we want only things that entertain,” and I think that’s been a sense about writing. Writing should be entertainment, or it should be religious, or it should be educational. But these are inhabiting a space that’s wholly their own. Still incorporating Ethiopian metaphors. and it's been fantastic to edit.
JIM COTTER: Have you started on the next book?
MAAZA MENGISTE: In my head.
Maaza Mengiste takes us beyond grainy, vintage newsreels of famine and war, showing us her country’s kings and peasants, its heroes and scoundrels, through contemporary eyes.
And having helped put her birthplace on the contemporary literary map, Mengiste says she’s ready with her next novel to change direction.
The setting is still a secret, but it’s certain that whatever the destination, Maaza Mengiste will lead us on another absorbing journey.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yusef Komunyakaa was just a little boy when his great uncle Jesse told him about his experiences fighting in World War I. Uncle Jesse held his young nephew’s hand as he shared his stories, but didn’t hold back the truth about the brutality of what he had experienced.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: He was very descriptive about war, because he had internalized it. If you go there - any war, I supposed, with a sense of history.
Little could the two of them imagine, that uncle Jesse’s stories were preparing Yusef to later become a chronicler of one of America’s most devastating conflicts.
Yet the rest of young Yusef’s family rarely spoke about the wars their men had fought in. Life centered around work and worship. So while his father labored and his grandmothers prayed, Yusef sought books that showed him a world beyond the limits of his home in Bogalusa, Louisiana.
But finding something to read wasn’t easy. Komunyakaa was born in 1947, the dusk of the Jim Crow era, the dawn of the civil rights movement, but his local library didn’t allow African Americans to check out books. So his mother saved up for a collection encyclopedias [1] for her book-hungry son.
When he wasn’t reading, Yusef spent hours alone in the woods, learning the names of the flowers, animals, and trees that kept him company during the day. When he returned home at night, he imagined where he had been as the outskirts of lush new worlds.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: We don’t have to physically travel always. Emotionally, psychologically.
JIM COTTER: Do you still feel like that young man in
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: Bogalusa?
JIM COTTER: Yeah. Is he still in you?
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: Oh yeah, I think so. Matter of fact, I think I saw it right at about that or one time. Um, and yet let's face it. Tere's an element there and I think the whole thing by going into nature and experiencing that, uh, that’s there still I always questioned, I questioned everything, um, that is still there.
As a boy, Yusef Komunyakaa felt safest when he was able to retreat into nature— outside of his segregated town, with its open presence of the Ku Klux Klan. But as he got older, he wanted to better understand the world around him. When Komunyakaa graduated from high school, he traveled to Phoenix, then Puerto Rico, but he knew that the military was his real ticket to see the world. So, he enlisted in the army, and shortly after training was sent overseas.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: I started reading about Vietnam before I got there, because I wanted to know where I was going. I didn’t want to be totally surprised. I wanted—- to know something about the people, just the land itself and the rituals there, the culture, and the fact that they had been fighting a war forever, it seemed.
Komunyakaa was surprised to feel at home in Chu Lai. The terrain was similar to what he’d grown up with in Louisiana. And he related to the people, country folk like him.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: If I had been born in the city, it would have been entirely different. I identified with the landscape to an extent, and I can imagine myself in that landscape at a different time, and I could negotiate it.
JIM COTTER: And was that also true of the fact that, that the people you were fighting were in some way similar to the people that you knew growing up, growing up because
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: Peasants!
JIM COTTER: Hey listen, well, that's the word we're going to use? I'm a peasant myself,
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: So yeah. Yeah. I identified to an extent with them. Yes. Just the rituals of work of what have you. The rituals of survival.
But despite his ease in the Vietnamese countryside, Komunyakaa knew that as an enemy soldier, he would still need to protect himself. Among the survival skills that helped him in the heat of combat was his imagination.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: When one’s feet hit the ground, it’s a different realm. You realize that yeah, this could be the place where— this is your Waterloo and such, you know. Without, you know, really thinking about it everyday, because I think that impedes one’s own imagination and just… humanity and such. Because it is imagination as well, that keeps you alive.
Yet the war wasn’t the only conflict that Komunyakaa needed to navigate in Vietnam. Though the U.S. military was officially integrated, when troops were off duty, segregation was still the norm. And as Komunyakaa sought to survive the war, he couldn’t understand why other black soldiers would sacrifice themselves for a country that was denying them their rights.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: I have a poem called “Grenade”, and it’s about 14 or 15 African Americans, young men who threw themselves on grenades to save members of the platoon or squad, or what have you. And I’m still trying to make some sense out of that. How can one be tutored to have that thoughtless quick reaction? Because that’s what it is. You can’t think about it. If a grenade fell here, you know, who would dive on it, right? I think it is unrehearsed. There’s no questioning in there, for sure. I couldn’t have done that, who would want to?
Yusef Komunyakaa wasn’t prepared to imagine willingly dying in Vietnam, especially as he came to realize that he didn’t support the war. He considered going AWOL, but the more he saw in the midst of battle, the more he felt he needed to stay—to bear witness to the war and to record what he saw. And so he did, as a combat reporter for the military newspaper The Southern Cross. He would go on to win a Bronze Star for his reporting. But when he returned home in 1970, he didn’t want to talk about the war, and avoided writing about it for almost a decade and a half. In 1984, Komunyakaa published his first book of poetry, a collection of autobiographical poems about his childhood in the rural South. It wasn’t until years later in the midst of renovating his home in New Orleans, that he was finally able to write about Vietnam.
YUSEF KOMINYAKA: I just find, I found myself writing a poem, about Fubai and it just happened. You know, I couldn’t stop writing about what I had internalized, what I had experienced, and such. But I think that’s just natural.
It was more or less surrealism. I was really moved by the surrealist poets, but if I think about the surrealist poets, we're writing, what 19…22, 24, and what have you, um, they were writing about the first World War,
Poetics, from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems—
Beauty, I’ve seen you
pressed hard against the windowpane.
But the ugliness was unsolved
in the heart & mouth.
I’ve seen the quick-draw artist
crouch among the chrysanthemums.
Do I need to say more?
Everything isn’t ha-ha
in this valley. The striptease
on stage at the Blue Movie
is your sweet little Sara Lee.
An argument of eyes
cut through the metaphor,
& I hear someone crying
among crystal trees & confetti.
The sack of bones in the magnolia,
What’s more true than that?
Before you can see
her long pretty legs,
look into her unlit eyes.
A song of B-flat breath
staggers on death row. Real
men, voices that limp
behind the one-way glass wall.
I’ve seen the legless beggar
chopped down to his four wheels.
Once he got started, Yusef Komunyakaa couldn’t deny that there were more stories to be told, and so he kept writing. These first poems would eventually become part of a collection, 1988’s Dien Cai Dau, the word for “crazy” in Vietnamese. The title was a reference to what Vietnamese civilians called American soldiers. The book became one of the most highly regarded works of American poetry about Vietnam. And a few years) later, his acclaimed collection, Neon Vernacular, won Komunyakaa the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Like his uncle Jesse decades earlier, Yusef Komunyakaa was finally able to face what he had internalized by sharing his experiences of war. Now in his seventies, he’s found peace in the ability to acknowledge great destruction alongside great beauty.
YUSEF KOMINYAKA: I think there’s always hope. That might be more revolutionary than anything else. This is what I believe.
There was a time when Yusef Komunyakaa tried to hide from the world. Poetry helped him to face it. All of it; the most troubling realities of life— the hard truths of our culture, and of ourselves.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aleksander Hemon writes not just to remember, but to shape his reality.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: My life is a story in which I'm the main character. And so, to conceptualize this life as a continuity, as a singular entity, even with ruptures and you know, disruptions and displacements. But we tell ourselves a story of our lives and that story is Selfhood.
This perspective is a cornerstone of his worldview. Aleksandar, or Sasha, Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo in what was then Yugoslavia. He and his family lost much to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and personal stories were their most portable and enduring form of history.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: In a situation, societies or communities where books were not always available, the primary vessel and vehicle of knowledge was people telling each other and telling stories. So my people from both of my sides of my family, my mother and my father, right, they're all poor peasants, right? My parents were the only ones in their respective families with college education. My point is my father's side, the family emigrated to Bosnia from Ukraine, what – hey knew the knowledge, right, they brought as objects and stores. And so my family they pride themselves, I know this is true, that they brought a particular kind of beekeeping to that part of Bosnia, right, not burning mud and straw hives to get the honey but wood frames and beehives and all that,
JIM COTTER: And it's that culture or craft, or the two interlinked?
ALEKSANDER HEMON: Interlinked, but what they knew about beekeeping, they brought as stories and asobjects. And so the, my people, poor people from that part of world, there was no generational transference of privilege and wealth, right? Because there were wars and historical ruptures, what, what one generation built, the war might erase, and it's all gone. What is passed on, is passed on by way of stories, including the ethical and moral and if you wish, philosophical, though not explicitly content, right, what we think about the world and life was in the stories. So when my grandpar—
JIM COTTER: Well that’s not always necessarily postive.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: No!
JIM COTTER: So when I was growing, I was brought up in an incredibly Irish nationalist household where the British were the enemy. And that was just that was enshrined. And you know, I found out later they weren't you know, that they were the victims of their own empire in some ways, the normal working class.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: No, it's not necessarily positive. It's just the way things work. Right. So what is that? What is the source of knowledge, right? You have in human history really is? It's I think, stories, books, and now the internet, that's really three stages of knowledge transference. Story has neutral value, ethically and morally, right. Because as he was, it could be propaganda. It could be racist story, however, it was pertinent important in my life and a life of my family, because it was a knowledge vessel storytelling.
JIM COTTER: And then the craft the structure of story, did you ever have to academically approach that and say, “rising tension, the hero, or the antihero?”
ALEKSANDER HEMON: No,
JIM COTTER: No, that just came naturally?
ALEKSANDER HEMON: Just reading, reading.
Hemon’s mother Anya was a voracious reader who filled the shelves of their home with great European classics. One after the other, young Sasha devoured Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Rilke. Books stimulated Hemon’s hunger for knowledge and led him to pursue a degree in literature at the University of Sarajevo. College essays made him see himself as a writer for the first time. Shortly after, he began working as a journalist, writing passionately about his hometown in a column called “Sarajevo Republika” for the newspaper Naši Dani.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: I get energized and get involved with the world by, by virtue of, by way of writing. That's, that's why I do it. That's, that's my high. It allows you to imagine a sense or even experience a kind of total presence in the world. Here I am and here's the world, and we are connected. It is adjacent to a spiritual sense of being part of the world, right? I'm, I'm fundamentally militant, secular right, and, and atheist. But the closest I get to a, a spiritual and religious experience. I'm not motivated by some kind of literary ambition to be remembered as a great writer. A hundred years from now,
As Yugoslavia came close to collapsing, Hemon was chosen for a cultural exchange program in the U.S. He would have returned to Sarajevo, but got stranded in Chicago when the Bosnian war broke out in April, 1992. Forced into exile, he learned on CNN that his neighbors were being butchered and his beloved Sarajevo was being destroyed. He describes the scene in, The Book of My Lives, published in 2013.
(Excerpt from Hemon’s The Book of My Lives)
On the outskirts of the city in the hills above, the war was already mature and raging, but in the heart of Sarajevo, people still seemed to think that it would somehow stop before it reached them. My father, however, advised me to stay away. Nothing good was going to happen at home, he said. I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1st. On May 1st, I didn’t fly home. On May 2nd, the roads out of the city were blocked. The last train with my parents on it departed. The longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.
In Chicago, Hemon had little money, no family, no job, no visa, and no idea what to do. For a while he found himself unable to write in his native language. New Bosnian words were coming out of the experience of war, and having watched the conflict from afar, he felt those words were not his to use. At the same time, his proficiency in English was barely sufficient for life in America.
As the war progressed and the world found out about the genocide being carried out by elements of the Bosnian Serb army against Bosnian Muslims, some intellectuals Hemon respected and admired publicly dismissed the events, and supported the Serbian nationalist president Slobodan Milošević.
The urge to write about Bosnia and Yugoslavia grew ever more vital. His voice, his stories were missing from the conversation, and he could no longer stand and watch in silence. To make sure the world would hear him, he poured himself into learning English with the determination of an olympian— a struggle he details in a work called Pathologically Bilingual.
(Excerpts from Hemon’s “Pathologically Bilingual”)
I read and read, at first underlining words on the page to look them up later in my Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, which I’d brought with me…I couldn’t read as much as I needed to because I was working, so I enrolled in a masters program in English at Northwestern University for the sole purpose of reading more, and more systematically. I took out a huge student loan (which I’m still paying off) and signed up for classes with the intention of reading through the history of English literature, refresh what was familiar, discover new things, fill out the gaps…I once broke up with a young woman who thought we had something serious going because, as I told her, I needed more time to read Shakespeare. The sex was fine, but King Lear was better.
In 1995, Aleksandar Hemon reached the goal of publishing his first story in English— two years before a self-imposed deadline. His first book, The Question of Bruno came out in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Literary stardom happened almost immediately, but for Hemon, becoming a great writer isn’t primarily a matter of personal pride and vanity. It’s about defying the threat of annihilation.
ALEKSANDER HEMON: History is, largely still to this day conceived of as stories of great, men usually, but of great individuals who have agency, and they were presidents, and they were leaders and they led the nation to whatever. But who tells stories of the rest of us, the nobodies, right? And so to me, the agency in the world, particularly for displaced people, the primary mode of agency is telling a story. I get to tell stories, and not about myself necessarily, but about the world that defined me, the world that can perish just like that, based on a decision by some big shot.
In my particular case, and place where I’m coming from, in my family, there’s a perpetual fear, conscious/unconscious that our experience, our existence in the world will be erased or could be erased. The historical ruptures, that can mean, you know, genocide, holocaust, but also the ease of displacement or the ease of our being subjects of displacement. That if I don’t tell stories of my family, there might not be no memory of my family.
All we have are these fragments that we’re trying to put back together in various ways and never think that could be entirely put back together. I want to keep those fragments, so that the details, the tastes, the moments, the angles of sunlight, the story of my parents, this is what I, this is, this is my project. I want to keep that somewhere in a book. And so that book could be on the shelf for the next 100 years but someone someday will pick it up and say, “oh, these people lived in the world.”
Aleksandar Hemon has most likely reached his goal of preserving the memory of his family, and of a place for future generations to know and care about. Whatever he does next, he’ll no doubt also challenge our preconceived notions of who gets to tell the story, what gets told, and why.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the next Articulate Experience, three writers who found room at the top.
Lee Child was 40 when he created Jack Reacher, the heroic savoir of the little guy for the past 25 yearx
LEE CHILD: I dislike him more than you would expect. And by me being critical and warts and all about it, authentic honest character, that's why you do like him.
Jennifer Weiner collected rejection letters until she hit it big in her early 30s—
JENNIFER WEINER: I must have written 100 short stories and sent them to magazines and published two.
And, Yaa Gyasi found literary stardom in her 20s…
YAA GYASI: And it didn’t feel like a sudden thing to me because I had been writing fiction since age seven.
I’m Jim Cotter — join us for the next Articulate Experience.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
32:15
49:56
