Fresh Air - Best Of: Salman Rushdie's Survival / A New Kind Of Whodunit

Episode Date: April 20, 2024

Writer Salman Rushdie talks about the knife attack that nearly killed him — and his life since then. In 2022, he was onstage at a literary event when the assailant ran up from the audience, and stabbed him 14 times. His new book is called Knife. Also, Diarra Kilpatrick talks about writing and starring in the new series, Diarra From Detroit, a dark comedy about a public school teacher who is ghosted by a Tinder date and, in her quest to find out why, investigates a decades-old mystery that takes her into the underbelly of Detroit. Ken Tucker reviews Tierra Whack's new album World Wide Whack.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, Salman Rushdie on the knife attack that nearly killed him and his life since then. He was on stage two years ago when the assailant ran up from the audience and stabbed Rushdie 14 times, blinding him in one eye. It was 33 years after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's death as punishment for writing the novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie's new memoir is called Knife. Also, Diara Kilpatrick talks about writing and starring in the new series Diara from Detroit, a dark comedy about a public school teacher who's ghosted by a Tinder date and, in her quest to find out why,

investigates a decades-old mystery that takes her into the underbelly of Detroit. And Kent Tucker reviews Tierra Whack's new album. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy

and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. I'm grateful to say that Solomon Rushdie is my guest because I love his new memoir, and I'm grateful that he's alive. Even the doctors didn't think he'd survive after he was stabbed over and over two years ago. The attack was shocking.

It had been 33 and a half years since Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, calling for Rushdie's death. To the Ayatollah, it was a righteous way to punish Rushdie for having written the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which to the Ayatollah was blasphemous in its treatment of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Rushdie grew up in India in a secular Muslim family. He has never been religious. At the time of the fatwa, Rushdie had been living in London for a long time. The fatwa was an invitation to would-be assassins. Faced with this threat, Rushdie was surrounded by security and stayed out of public view for years. Eventually, Rushdie reclaimed his life. So why all these years later was he attacked, and why by a 24-year-old man who wasn't even born when the fatwa was issued? These are some of the questions Rushdie asks himself

in his new memoir, Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He writes about the attack, the damage to his body, and more existential questions about facing death and finding his identity in an altered body and state of mind. As he describes in the book, he was attacked on stage at the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, known for its events with thoughtful guest speakers. This event was about keeping writers safe from harm. Just after Rushdie got seated on stage, his assailant came at him. What happened was horrifying. As he describes it in his book, Rushdie put up his left hand in defense. The assailant stabbed that hand, severing all the tendons and most of the nerves. Then the knife plunged into Rushdie's cheek.

There were two deep wounds in his neck, several down the center of his chest, two more on the lower right side, and a cut on his upper right thigh. The stab wound in his eye left it permanently blinded. Rushdie says that after finally escaping the narrative of the writer with a death sentence hanging over him, he fears he's now known as the writer who got knifed. But his memoir knife is a book he says he had to write before he could write anything else. Salman Rushdie, welcome to Fresh Air. I'm so grateful to have you here and grateful that you're well enough to do this and alive.

Well, you and me both. Yes. So I want to be sensitive to any ongoing PTSD symptoms you have. So if I ask anything that's too triggering in any way, I hope you'll let me know. How are you feeling now? I'm not too bad, thank you. I think this army of specialists who had to examine various bits of me have all signed off. So they've declared me to be healed.

So I'd like you to kind of read the whole book out loud because sentence by sentence it's so good. But I'd rather interview you right now but I would like to start with a reading from page six and at this point in the book you're on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in the amphitheater and you've just gotten seated. I remember raising a hand to acknowledge the applause. Then in the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see, I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area.

Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low, a squat missile. I got to my feet and watched him come. I didn't try to run. I was transfixed. It had been 33 and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of the satanic verses. And during those years, I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way.

So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, so it's you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James's last words were, so it has come at last, the distinguished thing. Death was coming at me too, but it didn't strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic. This was my second thought. Why now, really? It's been so long. Why now after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past.

Thank you for reading that. That's Salman Rushdie reading from his new memoir, Knife. You write that you didn't try to run, that you were transfixed, and you wonder why you didn't fight back. You wonder why you didn't try to run. I mean, he attacked you for 27 seconds, and once he stabbed your hand, you were probably in shock. Then he just kept stabbing. What do you think you could have done? I mean, probably nothing, But I just felt like a bit of a fool to just stand there, as I said in the book, like a piñata and let him just slash away. I mean, as everybody, starting with my family, have pointed out to me, he was 24 with a knife and I was 75 without one.

And there isn't a whole lot I could have done. So I guess I'm just beating myself up unfairly. Also, he had this planned. He knew what he was doing. You had no idea this was coming. And it took me completely by surprise and everything happened very fast. You did imagine similar scenarios over the years

because there was a death sentence on your head for so long. Yeah, but I'd kind of stopped imagining them, you know? I mean, I'd been living in New York City for close to 24 years. And during that time, I'd done, I mean, hundreds of literary events, readings, lectures, you know, festivals, et cetera. And there had never been the faintest trace of a problem. So I'd kind of told myself that that time had gone, but sadly I was wrong. So on stage, as you were getting stabbed and after, you thought you were dying, but you say

that it was very matter-of-fact. You didn't feel dramatic or particularly awful, just that you would probably die. There was no tunnel of white. You didn't feel dramatic or particularly awful, just that you would probably die. There was no tunnel of white light, nothing supernatural about it, but you describe it as an intensely physical sensation. I have often wondered, it always seems people know when they're dying, or they often know when they're dying. How did you, I mean, obviously you didn't die, but that was only because of a tremendous amount of intervention. And your body didn't know that it was going to receive all that intervention in just the nick of time. How did you know you were dying?

Well, you know, first of all, I was lying in an enormous amount of blood. I mean, it's quite shocking, sort of lake of blood spreading out around me and growing. I could see it growing as I looked. I thought, well, that's really a lot of blood and it probably means that I don't have very long to go. It really, at the time, the first feeling was like that. It was completely emotionally neutral. The second feeling was actually not emotionally neutral. It was a feeling of loneliness. Feeling of loneliness because of dying far away from everybody I loved and who loved me. Dying in the company of strangers. That was what was going through my mind.

When you say that your first thought was a matter of fact, you know, that you're dying, outside of wishing that you were with people who you loved, your wife, your family, close friends. Did you feel like resignation, regret? Were there memories you were having? No, I wasn't having any flashback memories. And I wasn't really thinking about resignation or regret. I was just thinking, okay, this is where I am. This is what's about to happen.

And it was, I mean, ever since that attack, but starting with the attack, I felt enormously joined to my body. You know, I felt very, very conscious of my physical being. And that's continued to be the case ever since. You know, I have a, I have, if you like, a new relationship with my body because we went through this together. That's a good feeling to feel united with your body. A lot of people don't. Yeah, and I don't think I particularly did before, you know. But this was such an intensely physical moment that I felt myself in every tiny piece of my body.

Did you previously feel more like a mind in a body? Yeah, yeah. So did this experience change your understanding of death or your fear or feelings about death? I think what it did is two things. First of all, it gave me kind of familiarity with death. I kind of know how it goes now. I mean, I didn't get to the final note of the music, thank goodness,

but I kind of understand how the tune goes. But also what it did, what it has done, is to give me an enormously increased appreciation of life. You know, the reason I quote at one point a poem by Raymond Carver, written when, after he was told he had almost no time to live, and then he lived another 10 years and did some of his best work. And he said he felt like all that time that he wasn't supposed to have, he describes it as gravy. Every day is gravy. And I kind of feel like that now. I feel like these are days I wasn't supposed to have, and yet here I am having them. And, you know, every day is a blessing.

My guest is Salman Rushdie. His new memoir is called Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break, and Ken Tucker will review Tierra Whack's new album. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. The event at which you were stabbed was in an amphitheater. Two nights before that event, you had a nightmare that you were in an amphitheater. Would you describe the dream? Yeah. I knew that the place I was going to speak was called an amphitheater, so in that way the dream can be explained. But the amphitheater in my dream was more like an ancient Roman amphitheater, like the Colosseum or something.

And there was a gladiatorial figure looking like something out of a movie my dream was more like an ancient Roman amphitheater, like the Colosseum or something. And there was a gladiatorial figure looking like something out of a movie about ancient Rome with a spear stabbing downwards. And I was rolling about on the ground trying to avoid the spear. And therefore, I was rolling about in bed and thrashing around and my wife had to wake me up. And I said, well, this is what's just happened, and it's about me being attacked in an amphitheater, and I'm just about to go to an amphitheater, and I don't really want to go. That was my immediate response.

You're right. The dream and your feeling that you didn't want to go, that it felt like a premonition, even though premonitions are things in which I don't believe. Yeah. There's a lot of things in which I don't believe that have happened. I mean, one is that I also don't believe in miracles. But everybody I know has described my survival as a miracle, so I kind of maybe have to rethink. Well, let's start with premonitions.

Do you believe in premonitions now? Well, I'm— Do you believe that that was a premonition? With hindsight, yes, but I'm not sure that hindsight is the best way to judge these things. I mean, it certainly felt very vivid and very actual and very scary. And I said, I don't want to go, which means I must have thought of it as some kind of warning. And then I kind of rationalized it and I said, you know, it's a dream. People have dreams. You don't run your daily life because of having a bad dream.

And so I decided I would go. So you don't believe in miracles, or you didn't believe in miracles, but you write that when you were attacked, you wanted to believe that a miracle could happen in the life of someone who didn't believe in miracles. So what are your thoughts about miracles now? Well, I think I seem to have been the beneficiary of one. Because I don't know whether it's like a supernatural miracle or a medical miracle. What I know is that many of the doctors who I have been involved with in the last year and a half are not only surprised that I survived, which they are, but they're surprised that I have recovered to the degree that I have, which they say is very, very unexpected. Just to give one example, the repair of my left hand.

The kind of hand specialist here in New York who I had to see from time to time said, you have to understand that what has happened to your hand is a miracle. You've got movement back that would not be expected given the scale of the injuries. So yeah, miracles are all around me, it seems. You're a lifelong atheist, and I'm sure a lot of people are wondering if you turned to prayer when you were close to death, when you were getting stabbed. I did not. I'm wondering if that thought even would have occurred to you. Did not occur to me. You want to say anything in addition to that? No, I just said, who would I be praying to? You know, if I'd ever thought there was anybody to pray to, I would have been praying long before. But it didn't suddenly occur to me that there was somebody with a white beard up there in the sky.

You're right, you don't believe in miracles, but your books do. Yeah. So explain why you don't believe in miracles, but there's a place for them in your literature, in your books. I mean, you're really drawn to magical realism, to reading books, written in that way and to writing them. Yeah, I mean, I think it's partly to do with the fact that growing up in India and being surrounded by a literature composed of fantastic tales, you know, things, compendiums of stories like, but not only the Arabian Nights, the Thousand and One Nights, but also Indian collections like that, you grow up with a sense of literature as being a place of amazing things. And I came to believe that two things.

One was that that kind of writing, that fabulism, was in some ways a better way of getting to the heart of human nature than what gets called realism. And the second thing was that the world has gone crazy, you know. And realism seems to me often to be inadequate to describe the surrealism of the world. And so my writing goes in that direction. Do you see religious texts, you know, whether Jewish, Christian, Islam, do you see religious texts as being similar to magical realism?

Well, I mean, you know, actually, I have to say I really like the Old Testament because it's full of good stories. And many of them are completely made up. You know, the Book of Job is fairly well established to be a work of fiction. I like the New Testament too, but I like the richness of the stories in the Old Testament. And I do think that these ancient texts are very useful to whether you're religious or not as a way of understanding how people have tried to tell themselves the story of themselves. I mean, that's one of the functions that religion has had since ancient times. It's been a way in which we've tried to explain two questions,

the question of origins, you know, how did we get here? How did here get here? And secondly, the question of ethics. Now that we're here, how shall we live? What is good and what is bad? What is right action? What is wrong action? And religions have been all over the world, have been attempts to deal with those questions. And so that's interesting. Of course that's interesting. It sounds like you know a lot about the great religious texts. I know enough, yeah.

I mean, like most atheists, I'm obsessed with it. And you say you have nothing against religion. Like, you're not religious. You're just against religion when religion does harm. And it certainly has done harm to you. Yeah, I'm against a kind of politicized version of religion, whatever the religion might be. Or a warlike version. Or a warlike version, yeah.

I mean, it's irrespective of what particular theology we might be talking about. So moving on down the list of things that you didn't believe in or don't believe in that you've actually done. You don't believe in writing as therapy, but you knew you had to write this new memoir about the stabbing and its aftermath before you could write anything else. You had to write about what happened. So why was it so essential that you write about this? And do you think that it was therapeutic, even though you don't believe in writing as therapy? Well, initially, I didn't want to write about it. And then when I got to the point where I was well enough to sit at a desk and consider writing something, I looked at the notes I had made before the attack

about ideas for what I might write in the aftermath of my novel, Victory City, which I'd just finished. And the notes all just looked stupid. I just thought, this is all silliness. For me to try and write one of these stories right now, people would think, what's he doing? He's just not paying attention to the most obvious thing in the room. And I

remember, you know, one of the things I've said often to students is only write the books you can't avoid writing. If there's some way you can avoid writing a book, then don't write it. There are plenty of books already. And I think this became for me in an unusual way a book that I couldn't avoid writing. I had to do it in order to deal with it and in order to be free to do other things. Whether it was therapy, I don't describe it exactly as that, but what it was, was it changed my relationship to the event. That's to say, instead of just being the person who got stabbed, I now see myself as the person who wrote a book about getting stabbed. And so it feels like it's back in my own authorial space, and I feel more in charge of it, you know, and that feels good.

Instead of being a victim, you're controlling the story? Yeah. You mention in the book that you have a lot of friends who have died or have gotten cancer or died from cancer and then refer to that a whole generation of writers is leaving. And you, of course, remember when the friends who you were talking about and knew yourself were like, they were the new emerging writers. They were the exciting new writers on the team.

And I'm wondering what it feels like on the other end, where people are exiting as opposed to the new exciting writers. Yeah, it doesn't feel that great, I'll tell you that. I mean, it's happened to me twice really. Once when I was much younger, there was a group of writers who were very close friends of mine who all died around the age of 50. Angela Carter, Raymond Carver, Bruce Chatwin. And then everything seemed to stabilize for a while. And now the curtain's coming down on a lot of people. And I feel sad. You know, it just feels like there are holes in the world where my friends used to be. And what it does for me

is just gives me a sense of not wasting time. You know, if the time left is shortening, then use it the best way you can. You know, that's the only way to live. Salman Rushdie, I'm so glad to have had the chance to talk with you again. Thank you so much and congratulations on the memoir. I hope everything continues to improve and look forward to the next book. Thank you very much. It's been great to have the conversation. Salman Rushdie's new memoir is called Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Philadelphia rapper and singer Tierra Whack is known for her playful side. She was nominated for a Grammy a few years ago for a

music video about a surreal visit to the dentist. But Whack's new album, titled Worldwide Whack, widens her subject matter with emotions ranging from ecstatic happiness to the deepest despair. Tiara Wack says she was influenced by the music of Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Eminem, and Stevie Wonder. Rock critic Ken Tucker says this collection of 15 songs displays a dazzling variety of moods and sounds, and it places the 28-year-old artist at the forefront of hip-hop creativity. Huh, if I saw a better rule, maybe I might If I saw a better rule, maybe I might Yeah, just wait and see That's Tierra Whack letting a guy know he's just not cutting it as boyfriend material. Over a drumbeat you might hear from a marching band, she bites off that opening line,

When I'm around you, I'm not satisfied. Her jokes here are solid. Explaining why it's not working out, she says, Like Justin Timberlake, I'm not satisfied. Her jokes here are solid. Explaining why it's not working out, she says, Like Justin Timberlake, we're not in sync. But there's a firmness in her voice that conveys an underlying seriousness and urgency. On the very next song, she switches to a pretty croon and a pretty melody to yearn for a happiness she fears may only be something she sees in a movie. You never take me to the movies yearn for a happiness she fears may only be something she sees in a movie. Enjoy Larry Took me to see

Suckers that's scary Maybe we could get married Marry-go-round David Took me to see The Matrix Got me pickin' out a gown Mister

Can you take me on adventures? Treat me like your sister God, show me love Show me respect Let's make memories We'll never forget I need love It ain't hard as you think

I want the popcorn with the big ol' drink I need love Let's catch the premiere Tickets on sale And there's love in the air You never take me to the The range of emotions and the variety of their expression only begin to suggest the pleasures of Tierra Whack's new album. She put out a collection in 2018 called Whack World that

consisted of 15 songs, each of which lasts exactly 60 seconds. That 15 in 15 minutes was at once a clever, attention-getting stunt and a perfect showcase for her witty range. She refers to the new worldwide whack, however, as her debut album. It, too, contains 15 songs, but of much more varying length, and both the music and her lyrical concerns have deepened. She's capable of a delightful lightness, as on the tune Shower Song. It's like the best Sesame Street song Kermit or Miss Piggy never recorded. But water get in the showers. But I'm sick of the shower. This is funky. Getting ready for my day.

So I gotta get fresh. Gotta exfoliate. You know Dove is the best. I ain't never in a rush. I perform it like a major. And I hurt my four ring But I'll call them back later Sing it like Whitney

Sing it like Britney Sing it like a Rita Sing it like Alicia I sound great In one song after another, Tiara Wack describes situations and relationships she'd like to have and which frequently elude her grasp. She wants to be taken on an old-fashioned date to the movies.

Or she'll say she wants a male friend who'll relate to her in a brother-sister way. Or she wants someone who'll be as kind to her as her imaginary friends are. How can I be lonely when I'm hanging with my homie? she wants someone who'll be as kind to her as her imaginary friends are. He wish he didn't know me His name was Oscar And he really hurt my feelings When I grow up I want to hang from a ceiling The roof is leaking The roof is leaking Teardrops

Always available The perfect companion Very understanding And swore to never abandon He fills the gap in my teeth When I'm sour He's sweet The better half of me

No one else can compete with my power. As sunny as Tierra Whack can be, three songs here, Numb, Tonight, and 27 Club, are about depression, death, and at least once specifically, suicide. The conviction she brings to her performances is chilling. On Numb, she's so listlessly despairing she can barely bring her mouth to enunciate the words. And the song title 27 Club refers to the age at which a number of pop stars such as Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse died. And Tierra Wax sings with delicate beauty about the possibility of joining them. I can show you how it feels When you lose what you love

When you're When the world seems like this against you When your friends have finally forget you It ain't really hard to convince you Looking for something to commit to Suicide I'm very glad that Tiara Wack is now 28 years old and that the rich, imaginative world she builds over the course of World Wide Wack has become a place in which she really wants to live.

Ken Tucker reviewed Tiara Wack's new album called World Wide Wack. Coming up, Diara Kilpatrick talks about writing and starring in the new series Diara from Detroit, it's a dark comedy about a public school teacher going through a divorce who finds herself investigating a decades-old mystery. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Our co-host Tanya Mosley has the next interview. Here's Tanya. When actor, writer, and producer Diara Kilpatrick

was a little girl growing up in Detroit, she'd snuggle up on the couch with her grandmother to watch murder mystery shows like Matlock and Columbo and Perry Mason. And while she took note that all of the women in her life seemed to be obsessed with these kind of shows, she never saw Black women driving the narrative. It's part of the inspiration for her new series, Diara from Detroit, which recently premiered on BET+. Described as a homegirl whodunit, Diara from Detroit is a dark comedy about a public school teacher going through a divorce who decides to hit the dating scene. She has an amazing first

date with a guy she met on Tinder, but soon after he ghosts her, and there begins the hunt to find out why. Diara's search leads her to a decades-old mystery and the crime underbelly of Detroit. In addition to this latest series, Diara is an actress, writer, and producer who created and starred in the ABC digital original satirical comedy American Coco, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award. She also starred in three seasons of the HBO period drama series Perry Mason. Diara Kilpatrick, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here. I'm really happy to have you. And I just want to say this work is unlike anything I've ever seen. So I'm about to use a lot of words to describe it. It's smart and funny, while also interweaving some very serious topics like the epidemic of missing black children and the social and economic challenges of Detroit.

You also tackle divorce and friendship and betrayal and police corruption. And did I mention that it's funny? I just want to know, is this a story that you were conceiving when you sat down? Where did the germ of this idea start? Well, you talked about, you know, me watching a lot of Perry Mason and Murder, She Wrote with my grandmother. So there was that. But then there was a case that I don't know, being from Detroit, you might actually remember this, but there was a case in Detroit of a boy who had gone missing in the 90s, and he was never found. DeJuan Sims? Yeah.

I remember his little cherubic cheeks, you know, and his little smile and his school picture being everywhere. And the older folks talking about, I bet you his mom had something to do with it, or everybody was like a body language expert, and her story wasn't adding up. And there was just a lot of talk about it. And as a kid, I just paid attention. I paid attention to the news. I paid attention when kids went missing. And I was really struck when just before the pandemic, a grown man walked into a Detroit police station and he said, I'm him. I'm this boy that went missing in the 90s. I remember this. And I was like, holy smokes.

I was like, where has he been? What's going on? What's the story? And they took his DNA and they discovered that this guy was full of crap. He was kind of a strange individual who came into a police station and had a story to tell. And I thought that was pretty funny, actually. I was like, this feels very much like the tone of Detroit. That sort of struck me as being an interesting tone for a show where you never quite know what to expect.

You never quite know if it's going to give you the Detroit tale that you imagined you'd get or if it was just kind of ending a belly laugh. So that was interesting to me. And it also, the optimist in me made me go, well, what if this boy, you know, hadn't met some gruesome fate? What if he was gone and what if he had come back? And where would he have been? And what would that story look like? And so that kind of spinning that, that tale around in my imagination is where it kind of gave me the germ for the case of this season.

It's such a gripping way to tell this story and for you to find humor in it. I mean, have you always been that way? Is that something that you've always, the way that you've looked at the world? I think so. I mean, my father is, the only way to describe him is just a damn fool. I mean, he cannot take anything seriously. You know, they say comedy is tragedy plus time. He doesn't need the time. You know, it's just joke, funeral joke. Someone's hurt joke. It's never too soon joke. So he just really doesn't have the ability to take anything seriously. And I think my mom took everything really seriously and had a tremendous amount of depth of feeling and thought and everything. And so I think making sense of the two of those

personalities within myself is kind of been my lot. And I think making sense of comedy and depth is probably a hallmark of my work. I want to get into the story. Diara, as I mentioned, is a teacher going through a divorce who goes on this amazing date with this guy named Chris. And the two of them have this epic first date. But for the second date, he basically disappears. And she can't believe that he just ghosted her because they had a really intense connection. So Diara starts on this journey to find out what happened.

And it leads her to the case of this missing boy, Deontay, who disappeared from a mall in Detroit decades before. And Diara even reached out to Vonda, De date Chris's apartment, and they find a box filled with clues that this guy might actually be the missing little boy who disappeared from the Detroit mall back in the 90s. Let's listen. Confession. I was wired. I was up all night going over everything we recovered from Chris's apartment. he'd been gathering evidence, articles, and a host of 90s artifacts that Deontay must have had when he went missing. It proved I was right.

Do you smell that? It is the sweet, sweet smell of I told you so. Chris is Deontay 100% confirmed. Welcome to CSI Detroit. If I'd have known, I would have warned you. Do you even have fingerprints? DNA? I got a backpack. And it is a 90s time capsule, except it's a crime capsule.

Boom. The Mary J. Blige tape that Vonda bought before Deontay went missing. Vonda is the mama. Apparently, they went on some ghetto ride along. It's all very yawning's wild. The woman is an inspiration. And I'm already jumping on that impala lead.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Diora Booski French. No. Okay. And what is this over here? What is he saying? Gloves. Nobody touch any of the evidence without gloves.

That's Diora Kilpatrick starring in the BET Plus series, Diara from Detroit. And she's in this scene with actors Claudia Logan, Dominique Perry, and Brian Terrell Clark. I've heard you say that the structure of these kinds of mystery shows are in your bones because of the women that you grew up with in your life. Why do you think you're so drawn to murder mysteries and whodunit shows? Why do you think that they were so drawn to those shows? I think it's fun. You know, I think it gets a little interactive because you're trying to figure it out. You're talking to the television. That's one thing I loved about my grandmother was that, you know, she was a part of the cast. You know, she was like her favorite thing was

like, Heffa, what are you doing? Like nothing made her more mad than a woman on television who was about to do something questionable. That's about to make a dumb, questionable decision. And so what I've had the opportunity to do is kind of place her voice inside the cast for the first time. time, you know, so when D.R. is doing things that are reckless and sort of naive or just downright dumb, a lot of times you have the voice of Moni or the voice of Aja, her friends that are like, no, what are you doing? And that has been really, really fun for me. You have some legends in this show, including Morris Chestnut, Felicia Rashad, and also a lot of Detroit and Midwestern natives. I read that you were looking for a very specific vibe in the auditions that felt authentically Detroit. What was it that you were looking for?

It's so funny. It's the voice. It's in the voice. I could be playing auditions on the computer and walk away from the computer to get a cup of tea or something, and the voice would drive me back. We're not really doing the vocal fry thing in the Midwest. We're not really doing the pitching up thing in the Midwest. Detroit is a southern town up north for me. And so it's that southern, a little bit of southern in the voice. It's that bit of bass in the voice, a shortness in the voice. And I could tell it immediately.

Someone was asking me if I had the accent and I said, the news business has basically beaten it out of me. Do you feel like you have it? You know, listen, I went to theater school, too, and they beat me up pretty good. It's so funny because growing up in Detroit, my mother was a teacher. So I couldn't really come in the house talking about I'm finna do this, I'm finna do that. And then, you know, that was kind of like how the neighborhood kids spoke. Like, and then I was like, my mother would be like, and then, you know, we're going to say the entire word, the beginning and the end. So she was really kind of strict about that. So growing up, kids always said, ODR talks

proper. So then when I got to theater school, you know, I basically thought I was Dame Judi Dench. And they were like, ma'am, what is this accent that you have? Your vowels are all over the place. You know, you sound a hot mess. And that was actually one of the things that I didn't love about, even though I did love being at Tisch and that training was I didn't love the kind of judgment that I felt about my accent and being, you know, the only black girl in studio. It was like, we got to fix that. Because as soon as you graduate, no one's asking you to speak the King's English. You know, as a dark skin, 20-something black actress, they want your regional dialect. A lot of times you're going out for prostitute number four. They don't need you to sound like you're doing a Shakespearean play. So that part of it was interesting to kind of lose it and then kind of learn to regain it because that's what the industry was requiring of me. And I did wish that it had been framed that way for me in school. Like, there's nothing wrong with your accent. In fact, you're probably going to work more with your regional dialect than without it.

There is a lightness and also a depth that is rarely given to stories about the city. And this series gives us a real sense of place. You really convey community in a sense of place that I've never seen about our hometown. Did you always know that you wanted to write a story centered in Detroit? Yes. I learned something every time a pilot didn't go. And I did write a pilot set in Detroit for Amazon called The Climb. And I just loved shooting there.

I love the voice, how poetic the people, there's just a lyricism to the way that people communicate. And so I knew that I wanted to write something set there. And that was sort of the thing that I had to offer. I think as a writer, that would be really unique. But then I wrote a pilot for Showtime that was set in LA. And my favorite scenes to write were the ones where she was kind of having flashbacks talking to her girlfriends in Detroit. And, you know, Jordan Peele, he would always say, like, find the fun. You know, when you're sitting down to write, write the most fun thing, you know, you could think to write today. It's already hard. Like, don't brutalize yourself. And so make it easy.

And it is true that when, you know, I was rewriting at 2 in the morning a scene or something, it's like you want it to be the most fun thing possible. So, yes, I always wanted to sort me, the gems of Detroit have far outweighed some of the more challenging aspects of growing up there. And you say that because, I mean, the reputation is that it is a hard life. Absolutely. When you tell people you're from Detroit, it's always like, oh. There I was like, ooh. Taking a bath a bath I always I wait for the sound effect oh yeah I'm from Detroit oh okay oh oh hi are you okay how you doing I'm like I'm good and it's funny because it's not because I grew up in the suburbs or anything you know I grew up in the city when I was when I was really young you know we didn't have a lot of money.

My mom and I lived in Section 8. We lived in Calumet townhomes right off the Lodge Freeway. You get older and you start looking at property and you realize, oh, damn, living directly off the freeway is not ideal. That is not prime real estate. So I grew up right in the center of that. And I don't know what it was, but I think probably my mom, I had a very idyllic childhood. I have a very pristine idea of what it was to grow up in that Section A housing community. I think it was in part my imagination. It's not there now, but there used to be right across from where I grew up this big field. It was an empty field, and I would cut across that field to get to the corner store whenever, you know, my mother would bless me with a couple dollars or whatever to go get an ice cream or whatever. And that field, in my imagination, in my mind, was honestly like Maria von Trapp, like the sound of music, like Austrian vistas and mountains.

Like the grass was so high. I would go in that field and pick flowers for my mother. I would sing and dance and get lost in that field. And it wasn't until I was much older that I was like, that was an empty lot. The grass was mad high because it should have been cut. Those were dandelions. They're not flowers. But I was always like, this is magic because I guess that's just the love that I felt, and that's just something about me.

I feel like this is a hallmark of what we can actually see in this series and the other works that you have done because in this series, something that you do is humanize people we don't typically see in complex depictions, like in the ways that make them funny and vulnerable and basically human beings. I'm thinking about the strippers and the gang members. There's actually a scene where this guy breaks into your house and holds you at gunpoint, and then you realize you know him,

and then you all end up having a somewhat romantic relationship. So even in the worst scenarios, there is like this humanity that you're showing through all of the characters. I assume that that was definitely very intentional. Yeah. And just the truth. I mean, yes, it's heightened. But, you know, I've talked about this before. When I was growing up in Calumet, my mother got robbed one night and she's looking at these two boys and she's like,

oh man, this is my friend's son who's robbing me. And she lets it happen because she didn't know the other boy and she didn't want him to freak out and be violent. They had a weapon. I can't remember if it was a knife or a gun. And I remember she came in and was like, my friend's son just robbed me, you know. And she went by there the next day, and she said, you know, your son robbed me. And by the end of it, he was taking her across the way to the, across the service drive to the Jeffries where the sort of tall projects were,

and he was trying to help her find where he had dumped her bag. Wow. So she didn't have to cancel all her cards and get a new library card and all that stuff. And they ended up kind of cool after that. Like, you know, they were kind of laughing. And she was like, you're not going to do that. I'm going to be checking on you. You know, and there was a real humanity to that boy, which is why she didn't call the police.

Or, you know, there wasn't even real animosity between them after that. It was actually a bonding experience. And I was like, man, I hope he went on to be a doctor or something because she didn't rat on him. And I hope that that changed the course of his life. But I think the point is we all know people who have done questionable things or are products of systemic racism or their circumstances or whatever. And that doesn't mean that we write them off in our community. We still see them as individuals deserving of grace and forgiveness and all the things. And so I'm just hoping that they see themselves in more complexity as well on television so that they realize they're not just one thing either. Diara Kilpatrick, this was such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for this

conversation. Thank you. Diara Kilpatrick created rights and stars in the BET Plus series, Diara from Detroit. She spoke with Tanya Mosley. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better

communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.