5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Aminatta is deeply aware of the power to look, to define, and to control the narrative. Although she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she sees it as the creation of a European way of looking at other parts of the world and rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. Aminatta is from Sierra Leone, but has Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity, and she chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her.
Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Kazuo Ishiguro
Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet”
Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head
Forna, Happiness
Forna, The Hired Man
Temne – largest thenic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone

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Audio: A Forensic Level of Honesty

Transcript: 5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty

10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) – Novel Dialogue

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) – Novel Dialogue

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