Margaret Shultz Interviews Maya Binyam

Maya Binyam is a writer whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at The Paris Review and has previously worked as an editor at Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry and as a lecturer at the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program. Hangman is her first novel. 

Hangman is available for purchase here.

From interviewer Margaret Shultz: Hangman begins with the arrival of an unnamed man to sub-Saharan Africa, the place of his birth. He’s been living in America for twenty-six years, where he thinks he has found refuge. Upon his return, he realizes he’s not entirely aware of how he got there or what he’s supposed to be doing – he thinks his brother might be dying. But he’s not sure, and this uncertainty accompanies him on a dissociated, surreal journey. His travels are structured by a series of encounters – with taxi drivers, international aid workers, bureaucrats, missionaries, and family members, with whom he is trying to establish a constantly shifting sense of relation. A former revolutionary and political prisoner, he is confronted with what has become of his younger aspirations, with how both his country and himself have changed. 

Maya Binyam’s prose works in compellingly circuitous ways that will draw you into the fundamental mystery of who the narrator is and the truth of the worlds he moves through. Binyam asks how we create meaning of the world around us, what we owe to each other, and how we search for language that may ultimately fail us. Hangman is a book that you’ll want to read again and again. 

Margaret Shultz: I'm interested in the sense of what’s occluded, and what's mysterious or unknown, maybe to the reader but also to the narrator himself, in Hangman. How did you decide what was going to be hidden versus what was going to be revealed as you were writing?

Maya Binyam: It was a really difficult process, because when I started the book I didn't know what was going to happen at the end. I knew that the narrator was on a journey. I knew that he started to believe at a certain point that he was on a journey to a funeral. I know that he believed eventually that that funeral was for his brother, but I wasn't sure whose funeral it actually was. I wasn't sure if it was his brother's funeral, or if it was someone else's funeral. So there was a lot in the initial drafts that was occluded because I just didn't know what was necessary to include for the story. And once I knew how it was going to end it was in a lot of ways a very practical editing process, basically a process of asking a bunch of questions about who the narrator was, who he had been in his home country, who he became when he fled to the U.S., then questions about what’s happening to him physically through his journey. I answered a lot of those questions for myself and was charting out these various informational asymmetries, what is necessary for the reader to know about the narrator but which the narrator maybe doesn't know about himself. What's necessary for the narrator to know about himself but to not reveal to the reader. 

MS: It’s cool that you yourself didn't know and were writing into it and figuring it out. 

MB: It was fun, because I could write on impulse and then go back and figure out what those impulses added up to, and obviously there were many impulses that I acted on and then subsequently did away with. It was also helpful personally as a means of creating a map for what was happening with me subconsciously at that time. That was a really selfishly pleasurable part of the writing process.

MS: I thought a lot about the role of the subconscious in the book, especially in terms of the conversations between people, a major question of which is how do we disclose suffering or receive the suffering of others, how past histories play out between people. I’m curious to know more about that aspect of the book.

MB: The narrator arrived in the text pretty clearly to me. I knew that he was someone who was a very reluctant narrator of his own life, even as he has an especially strong sense for what makes a good story and also for the kinds of stories that are expected of him in conversation. At one point he's writing an email to his wife - which is a fictitious email - he's having a really difficult time, a really difficult first day in his home country but he writes an email that's like, it's amazing, I've been greeting everyone and received warmly. I've been eating so much, I feel like a king. It was an untruthful email, but emails are just a mode of storytelling, and in the case of the so-called immigrant return to his home country the story should be a good one. He has some idea that what he's experiencing should be something that's uniformly positive, he knows that he's meant to feel an immediate sense of belonging. In some ways he's trying to make what he's experiencing fit that narrative rubric. But at the same time he's almost completely unwilling to tell the truth. He finds it increasingly difficult, as he is forced into conversation with people and forced into these intimate encounters that he doesn't really ask for where people are disclosing details about the hardship that they have experienced. I was interested in how someone might behave if they're especially attuned to the conventions of human interaction, and the expectation that intimacy will naturally arise. But to be almost so attuned to those conventions that the conventions themselves become empty. 

In my mind, that's a function of his conditioning. He's really attached to ideals of sovereignty and of respectability, in part because he's lived for twenty-six years in America and he arrived in America as a refugee. He left behind collective life in order to save his own life. It's not a spoiler to say that he was a political revolutionary who had ideals that look very different than the ones that he embodies in the text. He's divided against himself, in some ways. He's really attached to his sense of individualism, and of personal sovereignty, and at the same time he wants desperately to belong to the people that he's left behind. Those two things conflict with each other, obviously, but also call attention to the borders that exist between him and other people, and he's constantly bucking up against them. The border becomes the thing that he fixates on as opposed to what he might have to relinquish in order to feel with other people and align with them. 

MS: There’s also a tension with his idea of family – he has all these interactions with random people who he initially perceives to be his family, gets into these really deep conversations. And then it turns out to be some random guy, no relation. 

MB: I feel it's part of the same thing where he's abstractly interested in having family, he wants to have people that he's close to, but he's unwilling to be intimate with the people that he actually has ties to, who he has disappointed. Love isn't really a part of his language, but family is, and so he imposes the family structure onto people to whom he has no obligation, to whom he has no personal history, and attempts to turn them into family. But there's something fundamentally missing there.

MS: This makes me think about the way Hangman challenges the idea of the protagonist in a novel as a stable self who speaks and narrates his life coherently. With this narrator, we learn more about his life from other people, in overheard conversations. How were you thinking about the role of the protagonist, or about the narrator’s selfhood?

MB: In some ways, this feels like the fundamental question of the novel. It's also the one that operates most subconsciously to me. There's a long tradition of a particular kind of consciousness in Anglophone literature that embodies these post-Enlightenment ideals of an individual acting consciously in the world. My friend who I was just talking to was talking about a study that's mentioned in Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? that talks about how the novel formed the ideological basis for the expansion of the penitentiary system, in which it was taken for granted that people act consciously and thus were capable of conscious reform through punitive measures. So I can say that I'm interested in writing against that tradition. But also it's tricky because I wasn't thinking about that consciously as I was writing. I wanted to avoid any sociological reading of the text. I did feel that defensive impulse as I was writing, which in part explains the initial impulse for the namelessness of the novel. I was really interested in these supposed geographic markers - country of origin or refuge or diaspora - as actually geographically unspecific, as these relational nodes that exist between people and are co-created by people. 

The narrator, by virtue of the fact that he associates so much with life in the diaspora, really sees that as part of his identity and sees himself as separate from the people he's left behind. He thinks that he's safe. He thinks that he's resourced as opposed to his family and the various people he encounters in his home country. He sees them as impoverished, as needing something from him, which is to say that he inhabits almost completely the vantage of American diaspora and he believes so readily in the myth of refuge in the Americas that he is unable to see himself clearly, or he's unable to maintain a sense of himself as an individual, even though he's so attached to individualism as an ideological scaffolding. His own egolessness comes from his fundamental identification with life in America which functions, I think realistically, as a kind of myth, but which he takes for granted as reality. And that means that he can't see himself so clearly, because he's so thoroughly bought into this fantasy of where he is, and therefore who he is, that he just has a really hard time understanding himself. Other people impose their own fantasies onto him, and that's the only tool that he has to figure out these fundamental facts of his situation.

MS: I was really interested in the fantasies and fantasy structures throughout the book. The idea of returning home or homecoming seems literal or real at first, but then is also a kind of fantasy or dream structure. I was really struck by the last lines, “I wanted to go home. I tried to go home–home was inside me.” I'm wondering if you could speak to those ending lines.

MB: Those lines are sad, but I don't view them pessimistically. The narrator has in his mind, at least initially, that home is a fixed place in the world that he can return to, and something that he struggles with upon his return is confronting all of the ways in which it's changed in his absence. 

MS: I was also thinking about the literal homes or buildings that the narrator goes through, such as his cousin's home which he's asked to invest in, and then, when he goes to his own home, the home he used to live in, he finds it occupied by missionaries. There’s this idea of private property, ownership, and that being presented as the opposite of what a home or being at home would be, the private property relations are cutting through that possibility.

MB: I was thinking a lot about his relationship to property and to money in particular. He is very attentive to the money that he has and he gives it up really resentfully, even small amounts of it, even for things that are necessary, such as the visa that he needs to enter the country legally, he has a hard time paying for even those things. He also denies his brother's requests for money constantly. But we learn about the narrator that he at least once inhabited these political ideals of collective ownership, and he still is attached to them as ideals. They still exist for him as something that he might theoretically strive for, and yet his ideals are in conflict with the way that he's able to live or the way that he does live in his everyday life. He's at once reverent of private property but still fundamentally skeptical of it, like when he's in his cousin's home, which is totally elaborate and too much, he does feel this amazement and at the same time it appears meaningless and sort of wrong to him.

But I'm thinking about that in relation to the home thing. Those two questions that you're asking together are making me realize that he is intensely attached to these markers of home, be they national boundaries that seem to bind the place that he's meant to feel himself within, or that he's meant to feel attached to. And then also these physical structures, to the house that you mentioned that he used to live in, which is now occupied by missionaries. He really wants them to still belong to him, he wants his country to belong to him, he wants to belong to his country. He wants his old house to belong to him. He wants his old car to belong to him, even though he knows that those things don't really have monetary value. To him they have huge symbolic value. And yet he's unwilling to address that symbolic value except insofar as it's literalized in the structures themselves.

Throughout the novel those structures are made to appear transient enough that he does come to realize that actually, maybe home is the meaning that he's infusing all of these things with. It relates to his attachment to convention, too, he's really looking for structures to not only fit his feelings, but he's really fitting his feelings to these conventions and structures. So he sees a place that he used to live in, and he's able to conjure a sense of home. But ultimately those things are material. They pass between people, and they signify different things to different people. Something that could signify home to him now has become a site of redemption that has very little to do with him.

MS: It’s so interesting that he loses all his belongings as he moves through the course of the novel. By the end you become aware of why this is happening. But there’s also this letting go: I don’t need these items.

MB: Yeah, he's not that worried about losing his belongings. I was thinking about this because I was on a flight the other day, I was flying to Boston to visit family, and it was a late flight, it got in late. The next morning I realized I had left my purse with my wallet and passport and my keys on the plane. And I was freaking out, I can't be a person in the world without those things. But the narrator doesn't have that reaction – him losing his possessions has basically no effect on the trajectory of his journey. I've been trying to think about why that is. It’s in part because he's experienced very, very difficult things in the world. He knows to some extent that his identification card doesn't mean much for who he is in the world, even though he does, like the rest of us, have an attachment to it. 

MS: There’s the question of citizenship, that these documents mark, I'm a citizen of one country, I have to obtain a visa to travel to this other country. But then that all goes away. And we're moving in between different kinds of realms, the realms of the living and the dead, the spiritual and material coming together. That was one of the things that was most fascinating to me, because when I first read the novel I wasn't picking up on this convergence, but the second time I thought it was such an interesting blending of realms or worlds. What was it like to write in that way?

MB: That was another thing where I was writing based on impulse and then going back and editing it. I was like, these two realms you’re talking about, or the accoutrement of these two realms, do need to interact more. I did want to write the book so that someone could read it once, and then read it again and have a different understanding of it. 

There are a lot of symbols in the book that don't necessarily call attention to themselves as symbols. The narrator doesn't really have access to symbolic language, but he does understand symbolic meeting in that he's able to identify things when they repeat, or when they seem like they're out of place, and things accrue significance through those processes. So it was tricky to figure out while editing how the symbolic meaning of things was interacting with the literal meaning that they might appear to only have on a first read. I tried to heighten those convergences through repetition and displacement as opposed to symbolic language itself.

MS: That works so well to pull you through as a reader. Like with the narrator’s heart – there’s a problem with it, and at first he thinks it’s because he doesn’t have his blood pressure medicine, and then slowly it becomes a concern that the heart itself is missing. He thinks, there’s nothing there, nothing where my heart should be.

MB: In some ways that feels like a condition of life if you're not someone that has a language for talking about what's happening internally with our bodies. Obviously doctors and scientists have one form of language for talking about that, and plenty of people have figured out other languages based on other traditions. But if you're someone who is without a tradition of understanding the body, as a lot of us are, especially people who have been through various political, social, historical forces and have been dislocated from the traditions that they might otherwise be attached to, disembodiment is a common feeling. I at least feel it myself. And when I strive to talk about how I'm feeling, I mean, physically how I'm feeling within my body, I find that my language is extremely limited. Which is not a feeling that I otherwise have in my life, generally. I use a lot of language, I work through language. And yet the thing that should seemingly be the most innate I don't actually have a language for. The narrator feels that too, that persistent absence.

MS: I was wondering about dissociation and plot. If dissociation is the condition of being separate or separated, out-of-body, and plot is dependent on bodies taking actions in the world, is there something fraught going on in this novel between those things?

MB: I definitely wanted to play with that tension and something that I feel enabled it was the relatively simple structure of the book. It takes place over the course of four days. A lot of the spaces that the narrator is navigating are spaces where movement is meant to occur along particular lines, like in an airport, there is a series of steps and encounters that we're all meant to have. The same goes for a bank, or a pharmacy. Relying on some of those structures enabled me to heighten the narrator's own disembodiment, which can anyway be heightened in those experiences where you're going through the motions and yet feeling like a body moving in space as opposed to an agent who's taking decisive actions. But it’s also just the structure of a picaresque. There is no plot, really, besides a body moving in space and interacting with other bodies. There's something incredibly simple about that, but also really difficult when the narrator is resisting any knowledge of what the destination is going to be.

MS: There is a quote that really stood out to me where the narrator says, “I was fairly certain that I was done with the trauma portion of my life,” and “it seemed to me that everything I was going through or was about to go through was something someone else had gone through before. I would never be alone in it spiritually, even if I felt alone now. I congratulated myself on that. And then life went on.” It reminded me of the taxicab driver strike that happens in the novel, a story that the narrator relates to because he is also a taxi driver in the States. I was curious how you were writing about solidarity – literally, and then also in terms of shared history, knowing that you're not alone.

MB: There’s something really slippery in the way that it's presented in the book. The narrator feels a legitimate connection to other people in the bad things that he's experienced, is experiencing, imagines that he'll experience in the future. There's something legitimately enlivening about that, not necessarily in the context of his own life. I certainly think that that's the case, or at least that’s how I've experienced connection to other people. But the narrator also uses that connection as an excuse to not really investigate how he's feeling, he reaches toward abstraction in order to excuse himself from any kind of personal investigation. So the connections that seem like they could actually lead to some self-understanding lead to an almost complete dissolution of his sense of himself as an individual. 

But there are moments in the text when there is a genuine coming together of people who have had similar experiences, or people who are conditioned as political subjects in the same way by virtue of the machinations of the state. There are moments when those people come together and recognize a mutual plight, address it meaningfully, and begin to change the conditions that shape their subjecthood. The narrator was able to do that previously, and then after fleeing and living in the States for a long time his impulse to connect with other people has become almost divorced from the meaning that could be produced by virtue of those connections. It becomes an abstract thing–belonging to a collective–as opposed to something that could actually influence the shape of his life.

MS:  Being a revolutionary is in the past for him, there’s no future possibility of it.

MB: When he says that line about, “I was fairly sure I was done with the trauma portion of my life,” it becomes a kind of joke of the book. He believes so readily in his identity as a former refugee and now citizen of the U.S. He has identified a little bit too strongly with the conventional storytelling that exists around those figures. 

MS: I’m interested in the humor throughout the book: the way the narrator describes things is so funny, full of absurd observations about the world around him. How did humor come into the writing?

MB: He's someone who struggles with binary thinking. It’s embodied in much less humorous ways, in the ways that we've been talking about where he sees the U.S. as a site of safety and his home country as the place where he was persecuted. It's the place where potential death exists and the States is a place where life is and when he goes back he's really trying to reconcile those questions of life and death. He imputes suffering and proximity to death onto a lot of the people he encounters, especially his brother who he only encounters through emails. But I also was thinking through how that binary thinking would affect his style of observation.

Everyone that he encounters is either ugly or good -ooking, maybe they’re mediocre-looking at first, but they become ugly. I was trying to think through all the ways these more oppressive conditioning factors, if fully naturalized within someone's consciousness, could lead to an absurdly disjointed version of reality. His attachment to his own abstract individualism becomes heightened in the text in all sorts of ways that are humorous, like when he's taking a shower with the pigeon in the bathroom and he's trying to establish his personal zone. Only someone who's so attached to their idea of self as an individual would think that they need to figure out how to establish personal boundaries with a pigeon, that’s ridiculous. Writing humor is so fun. It makes the writing process so pleasurable. But it came from the voice of the narrator, which, before I knew what the plot of the novel was going to be, I knew really well. 

MS: The narrator’s voice is so compelling! There are these words that he uses that keep repeating throughout the book: anger, happiness, sadness. And this quote about the taxicab drivers: “They were still angry. But their anger had produced something happy which gave their anger a new quality, one that could sustain their lives.” Can anger be sustaining? What sustains one’s life?

MB: Something that sustains life in general is meaning, and people find meaning in all kinds of areas of their life. In the scene with the taxi drivers, there's meaning being produced by the anger, sustained by the coming together around the anger, and then by the changed conditions of work that are produced. All of those things shift and produce meaning. The narrator is really searching for meaning, he is so fixated on what is happening in front of him and things don't reveal meaning to him easily. He is at once adamant that things be what they are, that they not have any kind of meaning. And yet he's desperate for something deeper than he's able to describe in language.

Language is one way that I find meaning, through describing my life or reading stories. But language, like any representational tool, is fundamentally flawed. It can't get at experience itself. There's no real replacement for experience, which is an intangible thing. You can conjure it through language, but it also exceeds language, and obviously artists have different kinds of tools for conjuring feeling. The narrator is someone who’s interested in language but his language is also limited, and he's trying to get at various inexpressible feelings through words that are very basic but also purport to represent fundamental facts of life: happiness, anger, beauty, ugliness. They are very potent words, yet there's something abstract about them, too. He's trying to find meaning through language, but language is bound to fail him in the same way that I feel like it's bound to fail me. I have no choice but to use it. As a writer I'm obviously attached to language, not necessarily as a representational tool, but as a tool to get at the truth of being in the world and being among people in the world. And there's something also very tragic to me about how language is bound to fail.

MS: Yeah I'm obsessed with that, personally. 

MB: Especially for poets, I feel that's a fundamental fact of poetry. Something deceitful about conventional novelistic storytelling and character building is that it purports to not fail or to not be willing to address that fundamental failure of language. That’s what I find so unsatisfying in those books. Poetry as a form, I don't know if you feel this way, it feels to me like poetry is constantly confronting that.

MS: I think so. I love poets who are trying to break language or make it something else. I was reading an interview with M. NourbeSe Philip, and she was talking about what it was like to work in English as a Black woman from the Caribbean and wanting to shatter or fracture English or make it something totally different to make language work for her. 

MB: Christina Sharpe also in her new book talks about NourbeSe, and Zong!, and not being able to tell a story, to tell the story about slavery, but needing to try to tell it. It's a story that you can't tell but that you tell over and over and over again. And that's really interesting to me.

Margaret Shultz is a writer and educator. They are currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Margaret’s poems and other writings have appeared in Palimpsest, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Pinwheel Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, and elsewhere.