Below is an excerpt from my interview with Zetta. If you ask a question, you'll earn a chance to win a signed copy. Find the complete interview here:
http://coloronline.blogspot.com/2009/03/wish-after-midnight.html
BES: Those of us who are Octavia E. Butler fans make an immediate connection with the time travel device and specifically Genna returning to the South during the Civil War. Did you have any concern that these connections would unduly impact these readers' expectations and standards?
ZE: I knew I couldn’t write anything as good as Kindred, but I loved that book so much that it became the model for AWAM. Butler sends Dana back to the antebellum period, and my character, Genna, returns to the city of Brooklyn long after slavery has been abolished in New York State. She’s legally free, but I wanted to contrast the 19th and 21st centuries in order to complicate the notion of FREEDOM and PROGRESS. I wrote AWAM before President Obama was elected, but I still urge my students to consider how that milestone actually transforms race relations in this country. What has actually changed between the races? Butler was interested in exposing just what it took to make a slave. Dana thinks she’s sophisticated, independent—a “liberated woman.” But she’s reduced to someone vulnerable and desperate when she goes back in time. I wanted my character to be tested in a similar way. Genna fights against her mother’s hatred of whites, and those who would reduce her to “just another girl on the block.” She has dreams, plans, ambition, yet she yearns to belong somewhere, to be valued and admired. Her return to the 19th century reveals just how strong Genna really is, and how she’s able to build community by reaching out to those around her. She wanted to escape her difficult life in Brooklyn 2001, but her return to the past makes her question the very idea of “escape”—how DO you become free? By letting go, or holding on? Is it harder to start over in a new place, or to stay put and work for change?
BES: I was struck by the date Genna returns home. This girl just can't get a break. Why September 10, 2001?
ZE: Well, again—I’m trying to interrogate the idea of progress. She left one era and returned to her own only to find NYC shaken by terror once more. If we don’t learn from the past, we’re destined to repeat it, and a lot of Americans unfortunately seem to believe that history began on 9/11. It didn’t—history took a sharp turn that day, but Americans have dealt with terrorism for hundreds of years. Domestic terrorism. I begin AWAM with the execution of Timothy McVeigh; Genna understands that when people are unhappy, they sometimes act out violently. For her, terrorism isn’t about race as much as it’s about rage and powerlessness. In the NYC Draft Riots, white mobs murder and assault blacks AND whites. And there were many brave whites who stood up to the mobs in order to help the victims of the violence. But after 9/11, terrorism became linked to race—a terrorist was represented as someone brown-skinned, a Muslim, a “foreigner.” There was this single narrow profile, and people forgot all about the KKK and lynch mobs and race riots. Many Americans could only see themselves as victims, which is understandable after such a traumatic event. But there’s history that extends before 9/11, and I wanted to give Genna a chance to apply what she learned in 1863.
