A Brief Interim of Sheer Possibility
a conversation with Rachel Kushner

A Brief Interim of Sheer Possibility
a conversation with Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner













My mother and aunts are all quite far to the left, politically, which is unusual for Americans who lived in Cuba, but for them, it is that experience that politicized them. I had heard about Cuba my whole life, my mother always cooked Cuban dishes, played Cuban music, talked about her childhood as this wonderfully free time in her life. I went with them to Cuba, for the first time, in 2000, which is when I started writing the book. They were the only ones of the Americans who had lived in Preston and Nicaro ever to go back to the United Fruit and nickel enclaves, respectively. Most of the people who lived there were unsympathetic to the revolution and had no desire to see what became of their once-elegant world, the sovietization, the pollution, the shabby state of their country club and manager’s row. But my mother and her sisters still feel very connected to the place. Quite simply, they’re rather pro-Fidel, because the people they saw working in the canefields and the nickel mines and as servants in their parents’ homes have all benefited from the revolution. Obviously this is a sticky issue, and not everyone feels this way, but my mother and her sisters lived there, and I respect the context in which they have made their political judgments. As a student of Latin American politics, my awareness of Fidel, growing up, was that he was the first Latin American leader to stand up to the U.S., and as a child, this impressed me greatly, lack of political freedoms and embargo-related privations notwithstanding.

L: How much time did you spend in Cuba? Where? How did you get around the travel ban?

RK: I spent about two months there, all told. Mostly in Nicaro, which is in the Nipe Bay region. But also Havana, Santiago, Holguín and that whole province: Preston and Banes, the two United Fruit towns; Moa, the other nickel-processing town; Birán, where Fidel grew up. Professional researchers may travel legally under a general US Treasury License, a far easier way to go. I flew direct from Miami.

L: Your Christian de La Mazière is a real villain—an execution instructor and a double-dealer involved simultaneously with the Castros, Batista, and Prío, as well as the notorious dictators of neighboring Hispaniola, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What is known about the real La Mazière? What made him appealing as a character?


RK: I’m so glad you asked about La Mazière, who takes up a good portion of my book, and is the character whose interiority is most exposed to the reader, and yet so often my novel has been described as being told by the two young Americans, as if the French Nazi were this curious blind spot. To me, he is very much at the center of things. While I’m amused that you call him a villain, as the designation is an acknowledgment of his affective role, I don’t quite see him that way myself.

At one point Everly has a kind of musing on her little sister’s amorality and the difference between that and immorality, and in a way it echoes La Mazière (although perhaps the distinction would be his own– that he is not in opposition to morals but outside of them). In fact, you’re probably right that he is a scoundrel. Certainly the “real” La Mazière, upon who my character is based, is very much of a scoundrel. He was an aristocrat who wrote for a fascist newspaper during the war and then, in August of 1944, just before the allies rolled into Paris, he fled east and enlisted in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.

I learned about him in Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, an incredible film (which most people know only from its reference in Annie Hall, which pokes fun at its 5-hour length, but in fact the film is riveting). Despite his fascist background, he comes across in the film as strangely, seductively, sympathetic. The film was this scandalous outing of him and his past: by that point, the early seventies, he’d become something of a cultural celebrity, a film producer who dated the French pop stars Dalida and Juliet Greco. La Mazière was incredibly handsome, charismatic, and articulate. There is a sense of reflection and depth, as if he wants to know himself, his own motives, and acknowledges how incredible, treacherous, and strange it is that he would wind up fighting in a German uniform, alongside Nazis, against France. He seems to bring elegance and reason to a series of decisions that utterly lacked both. And so, if seduced, a witness sucked into his entrancing monologue about his Nazi past, in the Ophuls film, finds herself at the heart of contradiction, his contradiction. He speaks wistfully about occupied Paris and how glorious it was, and one grasps immediately that he is sharing a truth that few would; so there’s a curious integrity to him compared to the usual fictions about wartime France, that somehow everyone was in the Resistance.

I knew immediately, upon seeing the film, that I wanted to send La Mazière to Cuba to train revolutionaries. It’s a little complicated to try to explain why. He represented for me a kind of literary figure as well as a political figure, “The Adventurer” in a Malraux-ean sense. My La Mazière is well read, thoughtful, self-aware, and then again he brings a heartlessness that was useful in depicting the Revolution with a bit of distance, a colder eye. Also, his superimposition of Occupied Paris onto Havana fits with a general historical tangle that interests me– the manner in which historical circumstances become a shifting set of symptoms and correspondences among different times and places, so that Havana’s brush with, say, the Haitian Revolution, leads us back to France and someone like La Mazière, for whom the Enlightenment is the original travesty of his national heritage.

The instinct to send him to Cuba, it turns out, was not so far off from the postwar life of the “real” La Mazière–who, I learned after I wrote my novel, had ended up in Togo as military counsel to General Eyadéma– a life that speaks of the fallout of colonialism, which is what “creates” his role as an opportunistic and calculating adventurer, in my book and in real life. La Mazière recounted his experiences in two memoirs, “The Captive Dreamer” and “The Wounded Dreamer,” which are reflective in the manner that he is, in Ophuls’s film. Late in life, he reverted to a more blunt fascism. He died in 2006.

L: I’m curious about your process of creating characters. At one end of the spectrum, you have invented characters; while at the other end you have major historical figures like
Raul and Fidel Castro. How does what’s already known about a figure influence how you render that character in fiction? What is different about creating, say, an Everly Lederer, from creating a young Fidel Castro?

RK: Well, on a technical level they’re quite different. Everly’s point of view is accessible to the reader– she’s fairly interior, even in her function. To me she’s about a kind of capacity for fantasy and dreaming, and within her fantasizing, there is a talent (I hope) for pointing out adult contradiction, and then again an ability to remain open to what she sees around her in a way the adults are not, because they are constrained by their judgments. Fidel appears here and there but we have no access to his thoughts. At the end of my novel, he does speak at length, which was my way of “doing” a Fidel speech. These moments in revolution are of great symbolic importance, and I wanted his voice to suddenly come up as the official, rhetorical voice– a kind of nationalistic hope, at that point, not so much an ideological voice– speaking for the rebels we’d glimpsed in various scenes in the mountains. My fictional Fidel was something of an extrapolation from certain smaller things I’d picked up from the way the real Fidel spoke and wrote when he was young. He used this expression, “I pulse this terrible reality” after Batista staged his coup, and locutions like that became jumping off points.

With other of the historical figures, like Hemingway and Errol Flynn, I wanted there to be a bit of humor. In the case of Hemingway, I made him nothing like the real Hemingway. He’s fanciful and sensitive, a “pansexual” who simply doesn’t bother to notice gender when it comes to dance partners, and, we assume, lovers. Because these well-known figures don’t have dimensional depth in terms of the reader’s access to their minds, they are all about impression, and so they’re easier to create, than, for instance, if I was trying to write from their perspective and claim it was a true portrayal. I was and am interested in an effect of truth, but it seemed like it would be drudgery for the reader to get “the real” Hemingway, who is difficult to write about without falling into cliché, and “the real” Fidel, who is so much more than a cliché; he’s too loaded a figure to exist as one person depicted by a novel. He is a cipher, best left that way.

L: Telex ends just as Castro is taking power, and I was struck by how tentative and chaotic the event feels, in contrast to the hardened ideologies of more recent times. How was it to imagine that time?

RK: Perhaps tentative and chaotic was the goal. It was much more interesting to attempt to think about that moment– the actual moment– as this brief, open interim of sheer possibility, without all its heavy historicizing and “motivated” hindsights (from either position, for or against). Revolutions are never decisive moments. When the old order is eradicated, ambiguity comes into the picture, often followed by waves of chaos and fracturing, excitement, disappointment, and, sometimes terror. In terms of idealizing, this moment in Cuba was also happening elsewhere in the fifties and sixties, it was a wave that had great hope and significance behind it, as national liberation movements were exploding around the world. Revolution meant shrugging off hundreds of years of exploitation– in Cuba, as well.

I wanted to focus on the moment, but partly through the eyes of a witness who has his own jaded view of revolution and knows that it is a process, not always pretty. La Mazière quotes Robespierre in a couple of places, verbatim, a private joke between him and himself. He encourages the rebels, of course, but from a rather cynical place. He loves tumult and change, but as a sophisticate and scoundrel who feeds on chaos, he understands better than they do that power vacuums are not easily filled.

L: Today, with Castro fading and Obama coming in, I have a sense that old ideologies are softening; and a book like yours gives me hope that, at least in our imaginative life, we’ll begin to see Cuba and the Caribbean with more candor and nuance. How can literature and the imagination help us understand the peculiar politics of the 20th century Caribbean, when the Duvaliers, Trujillo, and Castro all held sway?

RK: Candor and nuance sounds good, and so I hope what you say comes to pass: in our imaginative life, it seems reasonable to expect. But in terms of politics, I don’t know about Obama and Cuba: Castro has pretty much faded, and yet the embargo remains, as well as the tough talk. There is no real evidence that Obama will change things anytime soon. He’s made as far as I know really only the one policy speech on Cuba, to the Cuban-American community this past May, in Miami, where he hovered around the vague platform of “libertad”– vague because just being for freedom could imply so many things, from opening diplomatic relations to invading! And anyway, when have we ever been for liberty in Latina America? How about a platform of respect for other nations’ autonomy? That would be a true softening of our own proprietary claims on the hemisphere.

In responding to the last part of your question, read Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World and C. L. R. James’s incredible work of history, The Black Jacobins, and tell me you would have been able to grasp the force and fever dream and tragic and amazing series of events that led to Haiti’s revolution, without reading both the novel and the nonfiction work. Each contributes its part. History is not linear, just as life isn’t. Aesthetic logic goes a long way toward accounting for gaps, mysteries, and contradictions. In terms of the peculiar politics, as you put it, of the 20th century Caribbean– Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba– in fiction and outside of it, candor means acknowledging the United States’s geopolitical dominance in the hemisphere, this country’s historic support of a pageantry of peculiar and glorious dictators that were then reviled for their baroque and venal, vainglorious and violent policies, even as each of them, like Trujillo, Papa and Baby Doc, were perceived as politically useful to the U.S. and propped up over and over by our occupying military troops. In terms of the more synthetic, aesthetic realms, the long 20th century and its fascinating, character-based political leaders in the Caribbean is rich material, hard to resist.

5 thoughts on “A Brief Interim of Sheer Possibility
a conversation with Rachel Kushner

  1. I enjoyed this interview a great deal because the littoral where reality and imagination meet in fiction has always fascinated me.
    Good fiction functions rather like myth, illuminating truths with more depth and realism than facts.

  2. Mark Weiss says:

    I had the pleasure of bringing this site and all its tendrils to the attention of my college classmate Melinda Lopez who wrote the play “Sonia Flew.” She said she had head about Rachel’s work and then, after reading this, took the plunge via her favorite online portal to get the book.
    I had coffee with Rachel Kushner’s parents in SF yesterday, who told me of their daughter’s work.

  3. Just finished RK’s book. Actually listened to
    an audible. Enjoyed and made me remember
    the 50s.
    Would love to hear comments re Havana sit
    today and Racael’s comments on Obama.
    Looking forward to visiting Oriente someday
    In near future. Good read!

  4. Michael Nelson says:

    After visiting Cuba in March, I wanted to learn more about the Cuban Revolution and scoured the Los Angeles County Library system for books on Cuban and found Telex From Cuba. Fascinating book. I grew up overseas in North African in the early seventies and her depiction of the privileged lifestyle of expats in Cuba hit home. Though a work of fiction, she weaves her families personal experiences, exhaustive research and historical realities into an immersive story that leaves you wanting to know more. Kudos

  5. Diana Ely says:

    I am fascinated with her story. I lived in Venezuela for 6 years just after and forward from the Revolution when Fidel took over.I learned a lot from her book and her answers in the interview. I also have visited Key West.

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