The New Yorker Radio Hour - Wedding Hair on Fire, and William Barber’s Religious Politics

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

Kristen Wiig plays a bride whose idea for her wedding hair is out of control. And the Reverend William Barber tells David Remnick that politics needs to get religion again. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

They're trying to answer questions about upward mobility in America. He was the military strategist. It was profiled brilliantly by somebody. So I think if you could, you know, find a subculture of people. With a kind of form of life on this planet that we haven't really seen before. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's June. And if you're going to be a bride this month,

or you're going to be around a bride this month. We might have the story for you. It comes courtesy of the great Kristen Whig. That's coming up later this hour. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I sat down for a conversation with a clergyman named William Barber. Reverend Barberra is pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

And until recently, he was president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. Four years ago, Reverend Barber led more than a thousand demonstrators who were arrested for refusing to leave the state legislative building in Raleigh. Because we have no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests rooted in the values of the Constitution.

What we stand towards bigger than Republican and Democrat, bigger than liberal and conservative. It's bigger than white and black. It's about what's right. It was a movement barber called Moral Mondays. And they were protesting a whole raft of Republican measures having to do with voting rights, gay rights, access to education,

environmental protection and social programs. Moral Mondays made Barbara a national figure. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention last summer. We must shock this nation with the power of love. We must shock this nation with the power of mercy. We must shock this nation and fight for justice for all. But Barber, a liberal, feels that Democrats and Republicans alike, have lost their bearing, that they lack values in a sense of spirituality.

Barbara has founded a progressive group called Repairers of the Breach, and it focuses on, and I'm quoting here, raising up and repairing our moral infrastructure. We spoke recently at the public theater in Manhattan. Now, you've written, I can't remember a time when I did not know God, both to be real and to be about bringing justice in the world, and yet you had what you call serious reservations about the church. What were those reservations?

Two different things. I can't remember a time when God, a sense of God, was not formative in my reality, but my father did have some struggle, even within the church, the so-called black church, because there were persons who would say to him, we don't need to be involved in politics. We just need to pray and have praise services and, you know, and just don't be involved. You know, Dr. King faced the same thing.

And, you know, Dr. King was put out of his. his denomination because of that. So I struggled with that. I said, well, maybe I'll be a lawyer, an attorney. And when I got ready to go to college, I actually looked at the catalogs to make sure there weren't any courses on religion required. You had your fill, you thought? Well, of that, not of God, not of justice, not of love, but the formalized kind of, I was

hurting, and I was hurting because of some of the things I'd seen. And then somewhere down the line had a real strong epiphany. And actually one day I called my father and said, Daddy, I'm wrestling with something. He said, come home. I already know. I said, come home. He said, I already know. Just come home.

And when I went home, we went driving. And he took me down to Nags Head, around the beach, and we just drove along the coast of the ocean and talked. And we talked about, you know, theology. We talked about the church. The church is not a perfect. entity, you know, whether or not my work should be inside or outside, the difference between the church as an imperfect entity and the reality of God and reality of justice, reality of love. And I revealed to him that I felt a calling to ministry and preached my trial sermon in March of

1984. Now, the black church writ large has been a sanctuary, a place. of truth-telling, a place of relative safety since for hundreds of years, and at the same time, particularly in the South, but not only, the evangelical white church has been growing more and more right-wing now for decades. Now, as a young man, did you start sensing this, this tension between your own church and the growing moral majority and all the other evangelical movements that were growing? You've used a lot of terms that I don't use this. same way. So it's going to take me a little bit to pat that.

I've got all night. Okay. First of all, I'm an evangelical. The black church has been traditionally evangelical. The term was hijacked because in the Bible, theologically, there's no such thing as an evangelical that does not begin with a critique of systems of economic injustice. And when Jesus, the ultimate evangelical, right, that brown-skinned Palestinian Jew. that was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, the ghetto, right? The poor place. His first sermon said, the spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news.

That's Evangel. That's what that means. To the poor. If your attention is not on dealing with the issues that hurt the poor, the brokenhearted, the sick, the left out, the least of these, the stranger, and all of those who are made to feel unacceptable, you don't have right-wing evangelicalism. You have heresy.

Is that what you would call? Yes. You have theological malpractice. It doesn't fit orthodox Christianity. What we've had... But let's break it down for a second. How do you account for the fact that Donald Trump, whose behavior and rhetoric and past is in no way

a moral avatar and his interest in religion is of recent vintage and yet his support was extremely high in that community broadly defined that's right by that particular group it was opposed in a many way but yes

okay and that's where you see now I think where we can see it so clearly those Kevin Cruz in his book and other have documented this. When they wanted to speak against, for instance, Franklin Delano Rosa's New Deal, and they wanted to take over elements

of the Christian pulpit, they came up this weird theology. If you're good, you go to heaven. If you're bad, you go to hell. If you're good, you're wealthy. If you're bad, you're in poverty. It's actually a strange form of Calvinism that just is abusive to Calvinism in itself.

Calvinism with private planes. No. Yeah, right, right. And so... Does Creflo Dollar bother you in that way? Or any of those that simply preach in that way because it is not consistent with Orthodox theology. It's not consistent with the theology of the Bible.

It's not consistent with the critique. But how did Trump get such wide support? Well, that's what I'm saying. But if, in fact, then your theology says, whoever is good is wealthy, then you would fawn over a wealthy businessman, right? Because his purse strings... Despite his moral behavior.

Despite his moral behavior. Because maybe the religion you're promoting isn't really about moral behavior. Maybe it's really a purstish religion, like paid puppets of the empire. Because anytime a religion seems to say the only moral issues are prayer in the school, where you stand on abortion, being against a woman's right to choose, private property, and making sure you can prove that Jesus was a founding member of the NRA. That is not Christianity.

Think about, this is how you can see it, my brother, Emily. They're so loud on things like abortion and prayer. the school and so wrong and so quiet on things like health care and living wages and acceptance of all people and treating the poor. Now there are 3,500 scriptures in the Bible about love and justice and mercy and how you treat the stranger and how you help the least leave. And it's not talking about private charity either. It's talking about how we shape society.

It's talking about the nations. Jesus said, I will say to the nations when I was hungry, not to individuals, to the nation. That's governments. 3500 scriptures. There may be three scriptures about homosexuality. None of them trump the scripture that says you've got to love your neighbor as yourself. So how do you claim to be a conservative if you dismiss 3,500 texts, but then build a whole theology around three scriptures and most of them you misinterpreted? That's not conservative.

That's not, because conservative means to hold on to the essence of. How do you deal with a complex moral issue like abortion in your church where I would bet there's not unanimity in the pew? It's not unanimity. First of all, one of the things we say to people is, first of all, let's get the folk out of the room for a minute. We love them. But who want to come in here and talk about a woman's right to choose, and they can. claim they want the baby to be here, but then they don't want to give the woman health care to get the baby here or health care to the baby after the baby gets here. They don't want to

pay the parents a living way so they can take care. So you really don't have any credibility to talk about abortion because all of your policies abort people's possibilities, dreams, and hope. So you just, you don't need to be in this conversation. Secondly, it's easy. You can be, I'm not pro-abortion. You know, like I say, just go out. That's not even, we shouldn't, it's not pro or con. I can say that I believe in life. I want persons to have children, but there are so many situations where that may not be possible. There are situations where people have to choose, and even if they choose to have an abortion, I choose to love, I choose to care for them. What I want to get the conversation to higher ground. And the higher ground is how do we stop

aborting the hopes of the poor? How do we stop destroying health care? You think about just a few weeks ago the hypocrisy of having clergy in the Rose Garden with the president clapping for him signing an executive order about so-called religious leaders and not chastising him on his position to deny millions of people health care. And they claim to be Christian clergy. Now watch this. This is a very simple country boy analogy.

If I'm not mistaken, the one thing Jesus did was set up free health clinics. I mean, every way you look in the Bible, Jesus' healing for it. He never charged a leper or copay. Now, you believe in Jesus now. You believe in Jesus. But you're going to applaud someone. One, something else is going on underneath that that's ugly, that's cynical, that doesn't make sense, that's not good for the health of our culture, and as a denial of the basics of our faith. In the words, salvation means healing.

Reverend, your most recent book is called The Third Reconstruction. In it, you argue that this country needs what you call a third reconstruction in order to save the soul of America. Tell me what you mean by that. I actually believe that much of what we're seeing we're in the birth pains of a third reconstruction and those who are the adversaries of America reconstructing itself and who in many ways are the social and political descendants of those who've always fought reconstruction. They see it happening. If you know history, you understand that what we've seen with Donald Trump is as American

as apple pie. It's the call and response of history. The call is more justice, more racial progress, the response is the progress of racism, the fear, and the reaction. And what should surprise us is not so much that Donald Trump use these tactics, but that he and others, Ryan McConnell and others, have been so successful at using them in the 21st century. And one reason I've been writing about the Third Reconstruction is because I think too often too many people do not know this history. Do not know this history.

Do you think we're too caught up in the day-to-day hysteria of what's going on? Sometimes and just we keep dumbing down politics. We need to understand this history because actually we're seeing it played out. What do we have now? The cry against the tax cuts. What helped to bring it into the second reconstruction? Cry about tax cut. First reconstruction.

The cry about tax cuts. Because the tax cut was always about disabling the government from being able to from being able to make the playing feel more level and fixing the problems that the government created in the first place. This brings us to your role. Now, you've just changed your life a little bit. You've left your job in the North Carolina NACP.

I laugh when you say job because I see some folks. It's a volunteer. You know, people don't realize that. The president of the NWAS, it's work, but it's volunteer. It's purely loved, volunteer. But it's been replaced by something that's potentially much larger, which is to lead a poor people's movement. What does that movement mean?

First of all, last year, from April to November, I did a tour with Dr. James Forbes, former Marriottis, Pastor Marriott's Riverside, Dr. Leo Thiel Harris from Union, sister Simone, Tracy Blackman. We did 22 states, called it the moral revival tool. And we put out a higher ground moral agenda. Thousands of people showed. showed up, hundreds of clergy activists, even people who are not people of faith, but who believe in the moral arc of the universe, showed up to be trained in moral activism, moral articulation, and moral analysis. It showed us that there was a heart that people know we need, as I said, the convention,

some moral defibrillators, people who are willing to say, wait a minute, some of these issues are not about left versus right, they're about right versus wrong. Health care is about right versus wrong, living wages, right versus wrong, dealing with systemic racism is about right versus wrong, and that we need to stand up not as partisans, but as people of conscience. Then the election happened. Now, we had already decided, regardless of who was elected, we needed a poor people's campaign. And the reason is we had 26, 26 presidential debates, I think, maybe 27. I think about it. Not one debate, not one full debate on voting rights at a time or the poor right it's a whole list not one full

debate where the lame the poor was used not one full debate on the war economy not one full debate on public education we were talking about text messages emails innuendos and this strange conversation that you will not hear anywhere else in the world how to take health care That says to us we don't have just a partisan problem We have a deep moral malady Something's wrong in the spirit of the country and we knew that we needed to have this poor people's campaign So we decided When it comes to prophetic voices, brother Remnant, you don't simply have commemorations of what they did

I'm kind of tired of commemorations now Well, we go back and say back then they did this you figure out how to reimagine and re-engage what they did and what was the unfinished business? You've had a movement called the Moral Monday movement, as of 2013, I believe. Actually, the forward together moral movement started in 2007 when Democrats were in office, and I want to talk about that because a moral movement can't just challenge extremists who've taken over the Republican Party. We have to challenge reluctant Democrats, and especially right now, I'm very concerned when I hear Democrats talking only about the middle class.

They think that's all that went wrong in this past election. One of the things we have to do is recover our moral foundation. When some of these extremists say they want to read the Constitution, I get happy. I said, please, let's read the Constitution. Or when they say, we want to talk about what's in the Bible, please, please, let's have that conversation. Because if we have it, then it will expose the whole. and the hypocrisy, and may even cause you to repent. And come join us in love.

The church, and not only a black church, but the church and religion were a huge impetus to the civil rights movement. There were lots of leaders of the civil rights movement, lots of factions and differences of opinion, all the rest, is the church in the same position that it was in 1954, the late 60s now to be that moral underpinning. When I went, I was in Charleston, South Carolina after those terrible murders and was spent a lot of time at that church. But when I spoke to younger people and Black Lives Matter movement, it was well outside

the church structure. There was a real gap between the older folks in the church and distinctly older and the younger movement that was well outside the church. Is that a complication for today's movement? Well, you know, I'd love you to talk to all the young people that are part of the Tomorrow Monday movement, and many of them are Black Lives Matters and many other groups. See, I have, again, we're having a little linguistic thing, because to say the church, the church has always been problematic. You know, the church has always been problematic. Well, let me put it to you this way.

Is the progressive movement broadly defined more secular than it was? was a half century ago? I think that progressives made a mistake when they walked away from the centerpieces of faith and morality because they were mad with Jerry Falwell, you know. I think progressives make a mistake when we don't know and remember the power of moral underpinning and what power has been. Now, I'm not talking about a movement that says you have to be Christian. That's the genius of the Mara Monday movement.

There are people who are atheists that come to our rows and say amen. What we found is that there are these deep moral foundations that transcend our limits. They transcend our limits. We have figured out a way in North Carolina and what we figured out on the Moral Revival. If you look at the groups that came and at all our revivals, we had Black Lives Matter, We had environmentalists. We had fight for 15. In fact, one time in Birmingham, we were in a Jewish synagogue downtown, training 200 activists.

We had Muslims, Christians, Jews, and a Jewish synagogue, Black Lives Matter, people not of faith, charismatic, policy people, are gay and straight, all in the same rooms all day long. And I think that we make a big mistake. When I see progressives now, and I love so many of them, talking about all we got to do. do is work on the white, work, middle class. And they're not talking about expanding the electorate. When they give every reason for this election, but without dealing with the issue of race.

I've said to a group the other day on this election, if you know the history of reconstruction, not only do you know what has happened as an American as apple pie, you know how to defeat it. It's when we come together, when we're willing to put our minds to work and our bodies on the line. What if we didn't focus on Trump, because Trump is a symptom? What if we went to McConnell's office and Ryan's office and every state capital?

And what if we said this is not the end of a movement but a launching movement? And what if we said we were working our silos sometimes, but we want you to know we're all in this together? And we stand on our deepest moral principles and not just curse the darkness, but point people to the light. What if we use something like that to literally shock the very heart of this nation? I want to see what would happen if we finish that leg of the poor people's campaign. I want to see what would happen if we could come together. And I believe Walter Wink was a great theologian at Union Theological Seminary. He wrote a sermon.

I remember reading some years ago called The Blessings of an Enemy. This is going to sound strange. Don't you get mad. Let me finish. Sometimes you have to look at what your enemy did to defeat you. you to find your strength. If the forces in this last election, this is not just this last election,

this has been a 40-year battle, if, however, in order to win, they had to lie almost every other 10 minutes. They had to find a way to put pornographic sums of money into the electoral process. They had to spend years pushing voter suppression They had to use fear against Muslims against immigrants. They had to be helped by the media that played too long with Trump

and gave him too much free press. And then they had to go all the way over to Russia and get help. If somebody cheat you, they don't cheat you because you're weak. People only cheat you when they can't beat you in a fair fight. Then that says that we are stronger than we realize. And this is not the worst thing we've ever faced. People made it through slavery. People made it through the denial of women's rights.

People made it through the depression in this country. People made it through apartheid and Jim Crow. It's our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and the moral dreamers, and to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America. And in some ways, if we work together, we'll change the world. Reverend Barber, thank you. Thank you very much. Reverend Dr. William Barber, president of Repairs of the Breach.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. In a minute, reporter Jane Mayer takes us inside the room where psychiatrists are debating just how much they should be allowed to say about Donald Trump. That's coming up. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Before he was fired, James Comey privately told colleagues he considered Donald Trump to be outside the realm of normal and crazy.

And in fairness, Trump up the ante and called Comey a nut job. The mental state of the president has been much debated on op-ed pages and at dinner tables across the country. But the people who are most qualified to pass judgment on anybody's mental state, generally abstain from the discussion. In fact, it's a professional obligation that they do, and sometimes that hurts. When I got my license to practice medicine, I didn't realize it,

but there are also some personal freedoms that I may have given up as a person to express their opinion as a psychiatrist as opposed to as a person. I think that's not something I understood. The American Psychiatric Association's Code of Ethics Section 7.3 tells its members not to diagnose

public figures from afar. The rule is known as the Goldwater rule for, you guessed it, Barry Goldwater. During the 1964 election, more than a thousand psychiatrists signed a statement in a magazine declaring Goldwater psychologically unfit to be president.

After he lost the election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine where the statement was first published, and the APA decided to get out of politics for good. But psychiatrists faced with an unprecedented personality in the White House right now

are debating the Goldwater Rule once again. Our whole struggle with Section 7.3 is about finding the language that permits us to give voice to our thoughts without running astray of our principle. Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, recently went to a meeting of the Washington, D.C. branch of the American Psychiatric Association, to hear how this debate is playing out. So I went to this conference. It was actually kind of an intramural debate that took place at George Washington University.

We're good. Okay, so with that, I will say good evening to you. And welcome to this forum, sponsored jointly by the Washington. It was a gathering, really, of the Washington area's psychiatrists who got together on a weeknight. and crowded into a small lecture hall under fluorescent lights. I mean, it had a little bit of a feeling of a group therapy session. And we're in a political situation right now that I find inconsistent with living in a democracy. What do I do with that?

Do I do something with that as a... To me, it was interesting, since often psychiatrists just sit there keeping their counsel. So they're silently taking notes and you never know what they think. So I was very curious to see what it's like when they get together and they actually speak out among each other. I figured out how Kelly Ann Conway manipulates interviewers and having been someone, and I'm not diagnosing her who does a lot of work with borderlines. I realized she used a particular form of a projective identification. So the Goldwater Rule was written in order to try to, um, repolish the profession of psychiatry.

If a patient sees their own psychiatrist in the media making diagnoses or loosely making opinions about individuals for whom they may not have examined, what does that say about the way in which we take care of our patients? I mean, there were some people who felt that there's a bigger issue than one's allegiance to the American Psychiatric Association's ethical cause. I happen to think that I'm not troubled by the Goldwater rule in this case. I think that... There was one in particular, I thought, who was very articulate on this position.

There's a psychiatrist named John Zinner from the Washington area. My patients are not coming to me and saying, please don't say anything about Mr. Trump because we'll feel stigmatized by that. My patients are coming saying, I can't sleep. I'm worried about this guy. what is he going to do? I happen to think in violation of the Goldwater rule, but as a responsibility

of mind to society, that he has an extremely primitive character pathology that endangers us all. A president could push the button all by himself or herself legally, and I think it's very important for the public to know

through the lack of caring and lack of capacity for empathy, impulsivity, lying, untrustworthiness, of President Trump that we're endangering ourselves by allowing him to control that button. And I think we need to understand Trump's psychology to do something about that and put in place some kind of system to prevent him from pulling the trigger. The meeting began with many of the critics of the Goldwater rule speaking most passionately.

But the evening ended with those who had concerns about. about what would happen if they overturned it speaking up. I mean, one of the psychiatrists that actually I felt changed some of the thinking in the room during this debate was a psychiatrist named Saul Levin. And he kind of issued a warning saying, you know, it's going to make it hard for me to deal with things like the payments I negotiate with the government if you all are going to be saying that the president is nuts. We have a new payment system. There are going to be a lot of discussion as we know already what some of the plans are in terms of what are going to be the reimbursement rates

of you, CERN, private practice. What is going to be your reimbursement rate? It kind of quieted the room down a little bit. It brought it to us a little bit more of a practical level. If I'm not at that table or we're not at that table and some of you sitting in this room, who is going to argue for the psychiatrist? We know what happens.

Our comrade was one of the late speakers in the evening, and he stood up and said, you know, many people in this country already think that psychiatry is really not a science. One of the very common ideas that I have to deal with is people feeling like we're not a legitimate profession, and maybe even worse that what psychiatrists are about is promulgating a specific worldview. view, a certain concept of mental health, which has political overtones. We, you know, feel things like masturbation is healthy. So we're already suspect as peddlers of a liberal progressive agenda. If we go out and make pronouncements on Donald Trump's psychology, I don't think we gain anything.

I don't think minds are changed. And in fact, you know, you don't need a doctor to tell you that the guy who's coughing and hacking and sneezing on the plane is sick. The mini crisis in the psychiatric profession reflects the larger crisis in the country where people are grasping for some kind of answers that makes sense of how we ended up with a president who's so outside of the mold of all the presidents we've had before.

And psychiatrists are trying to see, can we offer something? Can we shed some light on this too? Staff writer Jane Mayer in Washington, D.C., We heard members of the D.C. branch of the American Psychiatric Association. I'm David Remnick. Next week on the show, director James Ivory of the filmmaking team Merchant Ivory, talks about their groundbreaking film Morris,

which was based on a book by E.M. Forster, and it really was the first of its kind, a gay love story with a happy ending. You can our applause. All this will be taken away from us if people knew. Precisely. By continuing like this, and I are risking everything we have.

Our careers, our families, our names. Balls. What sort of a life would I have without you? Ivory talks with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson. That's next time. Now, meanwhile, a lot of real-life love stories are reaching their traditional end this month. June is the number one month for wedding,

so right now, toasts are being written and rewritten. Tents are being hoisted, flowers arranged, and hairstylists everywhere. are fielding requests of all kinds. Hi, thanks for squeezing me in. I know you don't have a ton of time, but I'm getting married this weekend, and, well, I've got kind of a few things in mind

of how I want my hair to look. I was wondering if you could help me out. It shouldn't take too long. Okay, definitely an up-do. Maybe, like, a kind of messy bun. I'm thinking and stop me if this doesn't make any sense, but kind of a homesteader vibe, like kind of a little house in the prairie,

don't mess with me or my kin kind of deal. But, like, sexy. Like, it basically says, I've got a ton of stuff to do, like shut corn and muck out of barn, but I've still managed to retain my femininity. Like, picture a lady standing in a field. Her dress is flapping, nobly in the wind.

And maybe she's holding a basket of wheat and squinting into the distance, and she's like, oh, man, when's he going to return? Because I've born so much already. Except I don't want to look all weathered. Just, like, super pretty. But also, I have a ton of inner reserves. Does that make any sense?

No? Here. Let me try another angle. There's a lady, right? And it's the 90s. And maybe she always wears a huge cable-knit sweater and stares pensively out of the ocean from her modernist glass home.

And her curly hair is tied back in a simple ponytail that sits at the nape of her neck. And then maybe we see her bring a single red rose up to her nose because she's like hiding out. from a stalker or has been through some serious shit, you know? And then maybe later we see that single red rose just fall in slow motion to the floor. Okay, that's what I don't want. So to sum up, okay, I'd like to look blithe, you know, beautiful.

And also maybe, like I just woke up from napping with some dubs, but also really sophisticated, like I'm seriously about to put on some sexy glasses and flip angrily through my file of facts. and all of this is signified by my strategically tossled up to. Is that possible? Would you be able to do that? Kristen Wig performing My Wedding Hair by Emma Rathbone. It appeared on the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmys page,

and there's more to come today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, so stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you know the writer Paul Theroux, you probably know him from his great travel writing. In books like The Great Railway Bazaar, he took us through Asia and Africa. the Mediterranean, Central and South America. And it was never traditional travel writing. It was always a story in which his mind, his character,

and his encounters with others was the main thing. He's lively, he's acerbic, just like his mentor, V.S. Nypaul. But his new book features a landscape of an entirely different variety. A nation is defined usually as like-minded people. Malawi is a nation. Kenya is a nation. A family can be a nation, too. They not only have, you know, they're in one place and there are a lot of them,

but they develop their own rituals, their own rights, and they even have their own language, proverbs, expressions, ways of complementing each other, ways of abusing each other. So they develop this national structure, something like a nation. And then usually there's someone in charge. Always there's someone in charge. In this case, it's mother. The book is called Motherland.

And it's set in Theroux's hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, in a large family of siblings. They're all adults, but they fight like kids. The father has died as the book begins, and the mother, she's known in the book only as mother, is doing everything she can to hold on to her power. Paul Theroux spoke with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. The family, as it was constituted before, is reconstituted as motherland, where the mother's in charge and the children are very contentious, very rancorous, and it's all partly slapstick and partly, I suppose, cruelty.

And then there's a kind of cohesiveness about this rancor, too. Yeah, I was going to say when you said there, a nation of like-minded people, that these particular characters are very rarely like-minded in the book. They spend a lot of it arguing. Yes, they do, but they need to argue. The mother in the book rewards them. I mean, she has ways of keeping power. And I realized that writing it, that the mother resembles a lot of the dictators that I've seen in my life, come and go, Chairman Mao, you know, or you think about Stalin, Paul Pot.

I was thinking how the mother finds out the techniques of maintaining power. whispering, gossiping, creating dissension in order to keep power, much as Stalin or Chairman Mao or someone else would have done. Right. When I think about versions of motherhood, I rarely think of Chairman Mao and Stalin. This is a particular version. When you think about power, though, how do you maintain power? You maintain power by using secrets, withholding information. disparaging one person, setting one against another, that the worst thing that can happen for a dictator is that people become united against him or her.

Yeah. Now, the main narrator in the book, J.P. is a writer, and he describes Mothers as his muse at one point. How does that work? I mean, has she been his muse? Yes, I think so. I've thought about a lot about how you become a writer, how people become writers. I mean, the contrast would be between an Olympic swimmer or a gymnast and a poet or a writer. The Olympic swimmer is always talking about how his mother drove him to practice at 4 o'clock

of the morning to use the pool to swim two hours before school starts. And then when the Olympic medal is awarded, there's always a very very very important. touching, tender speech about how she deserves the medal as much as he does. You see where I'm going with it. So someone wins the Pulitzer or the National Book Award or the Nobel Prize. And they rarely talk about how the mother made a sacrifice. Usually it's someone who's been rebelling against the mother. So do you think that's that your mother was what made you a writer?

Well, I don't know, to a certain extent, this book is autobiographical. So, incidents in the book happened in my family, probably the more bizarre ones actually happened, and the more conventional ones, didn't. Did my mother make me a writer? I think my mother drove me away from home. I mean, I wasn't happy in this big family. And I fantasized about going away. So I think going away made me a writer. My mother really wanted me to go away.

When I told my parents that I was going to Africa, their faces were wreathed in smiles. I said, I'm going to go away for two years, where I said, Niasiland, Central Africa. My father said, that's great. My mother said, that's wonderful. I'm so proud of you. But they were also kind of relieved.

Well, here's one. We won't have to worry about it. Well, maybe worry about him. We won't have to feed him. When you have seven children, it probably doesn't hurt to have one or two. leave. No, no, they can concentrate on the others. But so, so my mother is not the mother in this book, although she somewhat resembles it.

It's based on my life without being my life. There's an early chapter in the book in which we see Jay's father, who dies at the beginning of the book, but it's a flashback called Mr. Bones, which was actually in the New Yorker in 2007. And we get a vision of the father who had a brief stint as a minstrel show performer. And I think at the time you mentioned that that was drawn from life. The germ of it was in the 1950s, which is when it's set, early 50s, white American men put on blackface and sang plantation songs.

It happened all over the United States and even in England. But the idea of putting on blackface and singing Mandy, is there a minister handy? and it sure would be dandy, that kind of thing. Mocking, but, you know, in a jolly way, mocking black life, black plantation life. Very, very strange. I remember it distinctly. My father did it two years in a row.

I found it acutely embarrassing. Even then, I was only maybe 10 years old, but I found it strange. I found it shame-making, embarrassing, you know, horrible. But my father, enjoyed it. It meant he could sing, he liked to sing, and he had his pals, and they all had names like Sambo and Mr. Bones, and my father really did have two distinct sides to his personality. One was very quiet side, and one was a joking side. So I used that to describe how, when he's in

Blackface, he becomes a rebel, a maca, a satirist. You know, one thing that the novel does is create its place in history and tells you about its time. So I was happy to sort of use this incident which has a historical precedent and then show how it plays out within the family dynamic. There's a great paragraph in Motherland where Jay, I'll just read a few lines of it.

It says it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, and other travel book. But it was not an unsorted stack of vagrant scribbles. It was, in words, a sort of edifice. What I was doing was giving form to a continuous account of my existence, my disappointments at obsessions, my reading, my secrets, writing every day.

All these books and pieces could be laid end-to-end as a long-linking account of who I was. Do you think that's an accurate account of your own history? Yeah, that's it, really. It's not writing stories to amuse people or to rally the troops or anything. It's just to make sense of my little life, where I've been, what I'm doing, what's on my mind. And yeah, yeah, that's called a writing career, I guess. There were a couple of other chapters in the book that appeared in The New Yorker's stories. And the first one was the best year of my life, which came out in 2005.

Jay and his college girlfriend, she gets pregnant, and they go to Puerto Rico to keep their parents from finding out. But Jay in the story or in the novel says, you know, it was my first experience of the way travel turns you into a new person. And there's a sense that travel has become his escape from family. Do you think that was part of what it was for you? Yes. And what I think is that travel makes you the person that you really are. As soon as I began to travel, I thought, yeah, this is, this is it. I like this.

And especially I wanted to go to unfamiliar places. I wanted to go to places that were, you know, the exotic name, Zanzibar, Patagonia, you know, Mongolia. As soon as I heard a name, Bhutan, I wanted to go there for the name alone, often. And then when I went, you make discoveries. And what sustains you in travel is that discovery. And that story involved this young couple giving up this baby for adoption. And he pops up later as an adult in the book. And Jay becomes or gets to know him at that point.

Yes. The suggestion perhaps behind your comment is, did this happen? It did happen. Actually, when I was very young, my girlfriend got pregnant. The child was put up for adoption. Much later in life, the child popped up. I mean, and it was so satisfying and so wonderful. I thought that happened before I began the book, but I was trying to think, how can I write this?

And so I had to kind of live it and then write it. Yeah. Have people in your family read the book, your siblings? Not only have they not read, I don't have any evidence that they've read much of what I've read. So, no, it's a very odd thing because it's so easy to know someone through their work. And particularly through a play, a poem, a story, a novel. It's a good way of knowing someone, knowing their tastes and knowing their mind. But certainly in Hawaii, I'm just.

this guy. I have no presence here as a writer. I never meet people who read anything that I've written. I mean, that's just the way things go. That must be kind of liberating. You know, it is. It is. It's like being a ghost.

And the great thing about being a ghost is that no one sees you, but you see everything. My nephew, Justin, who's married to Jennifer Aniston, is driven insane by people who want to take his picture. And, you know, and he's very envious of me and my anonymity. It probably comes in handy with the travel writing as well. Very much so, very much so. And when you're older, I mean, no one looks at an older person. They think you probably don't have any money.

I'm not going to rob you. You're kind of invisible. And, yeah, it's a wonderful thing. Well, thank you so much, Paul. Deborah, it's a pleasure talking to you. You too. Paul Theru's new book is Motherland. He spoke with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

Theru has published many, many stories in The New Yorker, and you can find them all at new yorkeradio.org. Now, before we go, I wanted to check in with Emily Greenhouse. Emily and I have worked together for years in various capacities, and now she's managing editor of the magazine. And her office is always full of all sorts of crazy bric-a-brac. As you know, and you see from my props here, is that I'm getting married in a few weeks. So I was actually at a former copy editor's house who lives around the corner for me on Sunday,

and he was giving away all these amazing books, and two of them were themed to something upcoming in my life. One is called The Jewish Wife by Bertoltzbrecht, which I read last night, and I thought was going to be like a guide, you know, a how-to. Not so much. It's a one-act play about the Nazis, so that will not be incorporated into my wedding. So that really doesn't link to your wedding this coming fall. Unfortunately not. But there was a Janet Hobhouse art book. I love Janet Hobhouse.

Furies is one of my favorite novels. A book of art of brides, but it's really just male artists imagining their ideal woman. Great. And what's your second? I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant. And there's this museum and garden. This is in Brooklyn, David. It's called the Weekfield Heritage Center.

It's this really interesting story of this former slave named James Weeks, who came to New York from Virginia in 1838 and managed to create this little village in the subsequent 20, 30 years that had a couple of churches and it even had a newspaper called the Friedman's torchlight. And I guess the community was sort of lost to history once the Brooklyn Bridge opened. And then I think it was an architect from Pratt in the late 60s who was flying overhead and noticed these old roofs. And he kind of went to see what they were and it was these 19th century would frame houses, just these houses built, you know, by former slaves, and they've kind of resuscitated this, and now it's a black cultural center in my neighborhood. What kind of events do they do there?

They do a lot of education events, activism, and a lot of readings. They have poets like Elizabeth Alexander and Terrence Hayes and Walter Mosley come through just to speak about, you know, James Weeks and the African American history of the neighborhood and the country. That sounds great. And what else? So, David, I used to work as your assistant, as you might recall. I do. So at the end of a particularly tough close, I don't know if you remember this, but you often close your door and just turn on the band song, The Wait. And after the-

To get it off my shoulder. But after the election, I just found myself listening to this song over and over as this quasi-hopeful, cathartic thing. But I have felt more empowered in the kind of protest surge in the past few weeks for reason you've been writing about. And I've been thinking of like contemporary protest music. I kind of grew up with a lot of Guthrie's and Seagers and those kinds of concerts more so than most other millennials. And this band called Shearwater, it's a kind of indie band. And they have a new album out that's sort of positioned as a protest album. I went to see them at the bellhouse a few, I guess a couple

months ago now. But I've been listening to this one song called Quiet Americans. It really sounds like what Bowie would be putting out under Trump. Life is gone. Not this nerve. I like that. It does sound like Bowie. The lead singer, Jonathan Meiberg, I actually know him a little bit, and he's an ornithologist, writer, adventurer. So he definitely...

Okay, now it's sounding less like Bowie. Well, Bowie had an adventure capacity. Thank you so much, Emily Greenhouse, with some recommendations. That's it for today. Thanks for listening, and please join us again next week. Till then, you can keep up with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Jil Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Eric Malinski, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.