David Wright Faladé is the author of the new novel The New Internationals. His other books include the novel Black Cloud Rising. He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois.
Q: What inspired you to write The New Internationals, and how much was the story based on your own family history?
A: The idea for the novel began in family history—for sure, yes. It began with my mom’s backstory, about which I had notions but which was always a bit vague to me. My mom, who passed in 2016, wasn’t the sort of person to purposely avoid speaking about her past. When she would, though, she had a tough time being specific or precise. It was always mostly just impressions.
So, the novel is, on some level, an effort to try to understand my mom and the experiences that shaped her into the person I knew.
Cecile, the main character in The New Internationals, who is based on my mom, was born about a decade before the Nazi occupation of France, in a very wealthy Jewish family. The family didn’t practice at all, but their social circles were largely other wealthy Jews.
My mom understood herself to be a French child of privilege more than she understood herself to be Jewish. It was the war and the Nazi occupation of France that drove this home in her, and at an age—early teens—when questions of identity are typically difficult and confusing for most young people.
Cecile asks herself the questions that so many young women typically do at that point in their young lives: what do I want to be as an adult? Do people like me? Am I pretty?... You don’t know the answer, but you imagine, fantasize, the best outcomes. And the possibility of achieving your ideals seems reachable, especially for a child of wealth and privilege.
And then, very suddenly, your world is turned completely on its head in ways you could have never imagined, and merely surviving to adulthood seems unlikely…
There’s an episode from my mom’s youth that was in earlier drafts of the novel. My grandmother, who we called Manou and with whom I was very close, was in her 80s when I lived in France, after college, and she and I would have lunch every Friday.
Manou lived on the fourth floor of a six-floor walk-up, without an elevator, and she and I would run errands in the neighborhood and she’d buy canned goods—you know, heavy groceries and provisions for the week—and I would carry her packages up the four flights, and then she’d make me lunch and we’d sit around and talk.
She once told me a story from when my mom was 8 or 9. Shirley Temple was a worldwide sensation, including in France, and a French movie producer wanted to create a French version, and he put out a casting call.
My mom, apparently, was this very cute, very smart and charming child, with a head full of red curls, and her grandmother—not Manou’s mom but her mother-in-law—who was the matriarch of this very wealthy family, had connections to the filmmaker and invited him to their home. The filmmaker arrived at the family mansion with the starlet du jour on his arm, and my mom performed for him.
But before anything more could come of it, the war erupted. The Germans overran France in six weeks, and very abruptly, life was utterly different. The family matriarch was deported and her husband committed suicide; all the wealth was looted. My mom and her parents and her brother hid in plain sight—with doctored identity papers and enrollment in Catholic school and all that.
That little girl, who was praised for her wit and charm and cutes—the future French Shirley Temple—was forced to understand herself, to see herself, completely differently: as a pariah for being a Jew when, until then, being Jewish was just another adjective in the list of adjectives that had been used to describe her—cute, charming, etc.—and not the most prominent adjective, at that.
I think the confusion, the disorientation that this engendered in her, drove that young person to seek out an orientation, an identity of her own choosing. For my mom, as for Cecile in the novel, that orientation is towards justice, towards the fight for equality, and against the hateful bigotry and intolerance that had characterized her teenaged years.
And that orientation toward justice and equality also pushed her into relationships with a hugely interesting and rich cast of characters—not least of which were the two important men in her young life, one, the descendant of West African slave-trading kings and the other, the descendant of American slaves.
The New Internationals focuses on that moment after the war, when those young people—early 20-somethings who have seen the worst of what the world can be—come together, striving to create a better world for themselves and for their eventual children.
But, necessarily, the world will have its own say in what results, and that, itself, can be unpredictable—volatile, even.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The kernel of the novel was a 10-page short story I published in 2004 in the literary journal Shenandoah, called “And in the Ruined Houses”—from a poem by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade:
In the desert of Itabira
the shadow of my father
took me by the hand.
So much-time lost.
But he didn't say anything.
It was neither day nor night.
A sigh? A passing bird?
But he didn’t say anything.
We have come a long way.
Here there was a house.
The mountain used to be bigger.
So many heaped-up dead,
and time gnawing the dead.
And in the ruined houses,
cold disdain and damp.
But he didn’t say anything…
So, in my mind, that was the title of the novel as I wrote and rewrote it over years.
The story had ballooned to this nearly 500-page thing, and it was taken on by a very successful New York agent, and she suggested a new title, What Is Hidden Cannot Be Loved, from Derek Walcott’s speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What Is Hidden Cannot Be Loved went out to 14 publishing houses, and all of them passed…
When I went back to the manuscript, about four years after that, I understood (finally!) that the story needed to be more focused, tighter. The title became Paris 1947, which concisely summed up the scope of the story, and I whittled the narrative down to 300 pages. And Grove/Atlantic, which published Black Cloud Rising, loved it!
But they didn’t love the title...
My editor and his assistant and my agent and I spent a long weekend bouncing ideas back and forth. I scoured poems (Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Langston Hughes) and song lyrics (Edith Piaf, Louis Armstrong, Maurice Chevalier), and after a lot of fumbling about on my part, my editor threw out The New Internationals, which echoes the title of a Marxist magazine of the era during which the novel takes place.
Accompanied by the photo of the mixed-race couple dancing in a Paris nightclub (which is on the current cover), it just felt right.
So, what does the title signify? Struggle! The long weekend beating my head against the wall—and even more so, the 20 years trying to write this book!
But, it also signifies for me the joy of having ultimately landed on the right words—for the title, yes, but also for the streamlined 300-page manuscript. It signifies having finally figured out how to tell the story that I was trying to tell, one that means very much to me.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic among Cecile, Sebastien, and Mack?
A: As I mentioned, they’re all young—early 20-somethings—trying to create a better world in the immediate aftermath of a terrible, terrible war.
Cecile is Jewish and has survived the Nazi occupation. She’s at once outraged by what she had to go through and also haunted by feelings of guilt—about what she did or did not do; about the seemingly random forces that permitted her to survive where so many others, including some very close to her, did not.
Seb, his sister Jacqueline, and the young Africans who people the book are “colonial subjects.” Members of the elite back in their homes, in Paris they’re discriminated against and marginalized. They’re French by law, but aspire to be the vanguard of an incipient independence movement.
Cecile and Seb fall in love, but have an uphill battle from the start. They have the brashness and the boldness of youth, but like all young people, they lack actual life’s experience. So, they can’t recognize that obstacles and complications that lie just ahead, slightly out of view.
Mack is an African American GI involved in the black market and the Paris jazz scene. For him, success is measured by easy money and by the trophy he has vowed to bring home to the US: a white wife, with whose long blond hair he boasts that he will “mop up Mama’s floors.” A white wife would be a trophy and a statement against the Jim Crow segregation that has shaped his life.
But Cecile, who he meets during a night in the Latin Quarter, turns out to be an Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass reflection of Mack himself. She is white but a minority, from affluence but oppressed, a witness to legalized terror and outraged because of it. She is everything he imagined, and beyond anything he was capable of imagining.
All these characters have survived something—something terrible—and it drives them to seek better. They’re all engagé, they want to make a difference. But they’re also still young, with all the foibles and insecurities and questionable judgment of youth.
The desire for better doesn’t mean you’re particularly well equipped to realize it…
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the novel says, “Faladé draws out the psychological pressures faced by his characters . . . [and] unflinchingly portrays the messy legacy of colonialism and the implications of crossing the color line.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was super happy with it, because the review describes precisely what I was trying to do in the book. Too often, we tend to want to focus on the black and white of things, but the truth inevitably lies in the gray. I wanted to dramatize the gray.
During the moment when the novel takes place—Paris, in 1947—the world is suddenly smaller. The characters in The New Internationals had been born into specific families, into certain clans. Their idea of country was a fairly narrow thing, and the larger world was just pictures in a book.
Cecile and Seb and Mack grew up understanding themselves to be part of one thing—of one group or of one ethnicity or identity. Cecile had thought of herself as “French” or “Parisian” or “Jewish,” without having had to think too much about what that actually meant. But then, the war made this way of viewing the world impossible. It seemed morally bankrupt, riven with hypocrisies.
The war brought the big, wide world home to France. The varied peoples Cecile had read about in books—some of them, colonial “subjects”—now peopled Paris. She and the other characters choose a more pluralistic path, a more tolerant and inclusive path, in reaction against the horror of their wartime experiences.
But, despite this conscious choice, their pasts and previous allegiances don’t disappear. Cecile, Seb, and Mack don’t just lose their feelings of obligation to family and to old ways of being because they recognize the limitations of those obligations. The idealized future that they aspire to comes into conflict with the realities of the recent past. Decisions have to be made—hard, hard decisions.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I had originally thought that The New Internationals would be it, as far as exploring my family history is concerned. I didn’t realize that the novel was just a beginning.
While working on it as a fellow at the New York Public Library, the character based on my mother remained elusive. Madeleine Thien, another fellow, suggested I write about the person I remembered (Mom—Lucette Mayer) rather the one I was struggling to imagine (Cecile Rosenbaum).
The resulting essay, “Mixeded: A Son’s Story,” which appeared in The New Yorker in July 2022, not only unlocked the fictional character, but launched my new project: a book-length treatment of my family story.
For all that The New Internationals introduces us to these characters at this moment in time, the real people lived bigger, much more complicated lives. And, given the rich but fraught histories that shaped them—the Holocaust; the trans-Atlantic slave trade; Jim Crow America—nonfiction seems like a better venue in which to tell their stories.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve just been rambling on and on…
Now, I guess I have to let The New Internationals speak for itself. I hope youall like it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with David Wright Faladé.
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