H.L. Hix is the author of the new book American Outrage: A Testamentary. A poet, his other books include Moral Tales. He teaches at the University of Wyoming, and he lives in Laramie, Wyoming.
Q: What inspired you to write American Outrage?
A: It was something I could do. The dissonance I experience is surely very common: on the one hand, I’m keenly aware of how prevalent gun violence has become in our society, and on the other hand, I can’t make it stop.
At some point, though, I recognized one form of my own complicity that I could take action against.
I regularly complained that news sources gave much more space to the perpetrators of violent actions than to the persons against whom the acts were perpetrated: shooters become the protagonists of the narratives; persons shot become extras.
I still find that to be true, and I still understand it as deeply problematic, a factor that contributes to the problem of gun violence in the U.S.
I finally admitted to myself, though, that just because news outlets were overly attentive to shooters and underattentive to those shot didn’t mean I had to be.
If I was more likely to know the name of a mass shooter than to know the name of even a single person he shot, it wasn’t only the media who were to blame, it was also me, and if I wanted to repair my knowledge base it was time to stop pointing fingers and do some research.
So what developed into American Outrage didn’t begin as a book but as a form of personal self-correction. Only after I was immersed in the research, and after the research itself expanded in its scope, did it become clear that I had to develop it into a book.
Q: The book’s subtitle is “A Testamentary”--how would you define that?
A: American Outrage doesn’t fit very tidily into our existing genre categories: nothing in it is fictional, so it can’t be a novel; it’s not about me, so it can’t be a memoir; and so on.
But I didn’t want the curious way the pages look, each divided into three distinct segments, to be off-putting to readers. I wanted to signal that all are invited into the book.
By calling it a “testamentary,” I hope to give an initial indication that something is being attested to, but also that it is being attested to in a particular way: not under compulsion, like the testimony in a court of law, but as a voluntary honoring, the way we would say that someone’s achievement is a testament to her dedication and hard work.
I hope that American Outrage is a way of honoring the personhood, the humanity, of those to whose lives it attests.
Q: The writer Roberto J. González said of the book, “In brief but intensely intimate descriptions of a thousand people from extraordinarily different backgrounds, H. L. Hix breaks through the numbing statistics, and reminds readers of the warmth and humanity of those who are too often portrayed as anonymous ‘victims.’” What do you think of that description, and how did you choose the people to profile in the book?
A: I am very grateful for Dr. González’ description, which so incisively formulates what I hope are key features of American Outrage.
I want the book to do exactly what he says it does: I want its descriptions to be intimate, I want it to break through the numbing statistics, I want it to remind readers — and keep reminding me — that what is most important about these persons is not that they were “victims” of gun violence, but that they were human beings living human lives.
In choosing those profiled in the book, I tried to let my sources lead me. I began by trying to learn more about the individuals who had been killed in mass shootings, so for instance each person killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting is profiled, and each person killed in the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
But that led to information about the number of children killed with guns every year in the U.S., and about the high incidence of gun violence against LGBTQIA+ persons, and the disproportionate use of force by the state against persons of color, and the use of guns in domestic violence, and on and on.
Always where cases have been aggregated into groups in that way, the lives aggregated can be disaggregated, to recognize each as the whole and only life of a human person.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to gun violence in this country?
A: Ouch. This is a hard question, partly because I don’t claim any of the “p” titles: prophet, pundit, prognosticator. American Outrage does not purport to know what lies ahead for us, or ally itself with some particular approach to policy.
That said, I myself am not optimistic. One thing that the research for American Outrage made very clear was the complexity of the problem of gun violence.
We use metaphors that embed gun violence into our self-understanding: the war against drugs, the war against crime, and so on. We embrace mythologies of gun violence: the lone gunslinger taking down the bad guys.
We have policies that exempt guns and their users from accountability, and that enforce in relation to guns the larger societal disparities of entitlement by demographic (race, gender, economic status…). We use guns as signifiers: proof of masculinity, or indicators of belonging to a community — some “us” threatened by some “them.” And so on.
That complexity means there is no simple solution available, and since it is characteristic of polarized political environments, such as the one we in the contemporary U.S. inhabit, to insist on simple solutions and refuse to admit complexity, it is hard for me to picture any relief in the near future from the problem(s) of gun violence.
My hope takes the form of admiration for the many alliances and organizations I hadn’t been alert to before researching American Outrage, working wisely and with urgency on behalf of peace and justice.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Thank you for asking. I’m deep into a book manuscript I’m calling Lives of the Peacemakers, after the manner of “classic” collections of lives: Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Saints, and so on. It creates portraits of people who have given their lives to, or given their lives for, peace.
Some are very familiar (Mother Teresa), some have received public acclaim (Wangari Maathai received the Noble Peace Prize), but very many of these peacemakers are people I hadn’t even heard of until I began my research for the project.
Each of the portraits — they’re short, I’m calling them “flash biographies” — is rooted in the actual events of the person’s life, but each adds a fantastic element, as a way of imagining what might have happened in that person’s life if the world were more just than it is.
I hope that, in addition to the intrinsic interest of the stories of people who did amazing things, the book will pose in a thought-provoking way questions about peace itself: its relationship to social justice and individual well-being, how it might be achieved and sustained, and so on.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that I am grateful for your receptivity to American Outrage, and for any interest readers have in it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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