|
|
 |
Atomik Aztex
Interview with Sesshu Foster
Interview with Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex
Excerpted from a conversation with Mike Kelleher, The Buffalo Literary Center
Mike Kelleher: You have a diverse heritage which seems to inform your work on many levels. Talk a little about your ethnic background and its relationship to your work.
Sesshu Foster: Believe me, I admire as much as anyone that Hemingway/Ray Carver economy, gesturing toward the unspoken hidden iceberg. Trouble was, I come to find out, a simpler language works only when that ‘iceberg’ is common and shared; that is, already understood, socially or historically. Add a little complexity to the world being depicted (i.e., in the form of the Other), when you have a couple different ethnic groups without shared histories, without shared understandings, and those gestures toward “icebergs” merely point out assumptions and preconceptions that neither group shares nor understands. As happa, mixed Anglo/Japanese American, growing up in the mestizaje of Chicano barrios of East L.A. during the Vietnam War, one of the first things I had to recognize was that my identity was not “ethnic,” per se, that is, my identity is not cultural (or sub-cultural — as the hyphen between ethnic-and-American, such as Italian-American or Armenian-American or Arab-American would suggest), it is historical and political. That is to say, my ID is American — my diverse heritage is that of America; this heterogeneous character to each of our identities goes back to Manifest Destiny, to the frontier and the genocide of American Indians, to an expanding American empire through the contemporary era of SFFTA, CAFTA and globalization today. As Faulkner was able to locate the history and destiny of the nation in his “postage stamp of earth,” as he called it, in Mississippi, it falls to me to articulate that story in the language indigenous or appropriate to Los Angeles. It is, they say, the City of the Future. My work attempts to tell these post-millennium stories in this place I know best, though I’d assert that realities operate all over the globe to some extent, in Sao Paolo and Mexico City, in Montreal and Denver. The U.S. government is this minute, this second, making certain of the Americanization of Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, and simultaneously of everyone’s further “globalization.”
MK: City Terrace Field Manual, your last book, was about the neighborhood in East Los Angeles where you grew up. The phrase “field manual” suggests City Terrace is a dangerous place, a war zone, a jungle, a corporation. Why did you choose to call it a “field manual”?
SF: Granted, the “field manual” term comes in part from genres of non-literary books like army survival manuals, but I was also once, briefly, a Boy Scout, and I respected the heft of the official Boy Scout manual, even if I can only recall two chapters now, the ones on knot-tying and on fire-starting. Anyway, just as important to me as the connotations of a book that might help you survive in some rough terrain, “field manual” is also meant to imply a book that has a certain practical relationship to “the field,” to “the real world.” Less of an armchair travelogue, I was hoping, and more of a book readers who found themselves in “the field” might recognize and consider useful.
MK: Your new book, Atomik Aztex is a work of science fiction. How did your writing of this book come about? What attracted you to the genre?
SF: Atomik Aztex is more a post-modern satire along the lines of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or Mark Twain’s time travel satires where he sent modern Americans back to the Middle Ages, you know, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (his least popular book of all time). In Atomik Aztex the Aztecs have defeated the Spanish and are colonizing Europe using Nazi genocide as a rationale, since it was proven that the sacrifice of captive nations on the pyramids is necessary to maintain a high standard of living. Meanwhile, one Aztec warrior begins having recurrent dreams and visions of the ghosts of Aztec warriors awakening in Los Angeles, as undocumented workers doing menial jobs in an alien culture. Then the protagonist wakes up to find himself laboring in an East L.A. slaughterhouse. (It’s another re-imagining for me of Los Angeles as the City of the Future, even for Aztec dead. You probably noticed already, Mexicans are everywhere.)
|
RSS All imagery and content © 2013 City Lights. All rights reserved.
