Gary Paul Nabhan is the author of the new book Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance. His many other books include Agave Spirits. He is an ecologist and agrarian activist, and he lives in Patagonia, Arizona.
Q: What inspired you to write Against the American Grain, and how do you see it relating to William Carlos Williams’s classic book In the American Grain?
A: I have always thought that Dr. Williams' In the American Grain was the first great literary history of America's pioneering characters and events that set the common identity of Americans for decades.
Although I loved the writing of this incomparable poet, there were so many stories that one book a century ago could not daylight, so I tried to cover those applying to other cultures, particularly those of the borderlands.
But I wanted to extend his literary impulses into a history of those who spilled over the order and changed the entire continent in innumerable ways.
Q: The writer Catherine Keyser said of the book, “With his lyrical biographies of mystics, activists, rabble-rousers, singers, trailblazers, and outlaws, Gary Paul Nabhan places the desert at the center of the ongoing struggle against colonialism, racism, and capitalism.” What do you think of that description?
A: Well, I'm grateful for her words, but deflect any credit to the charisma of the characters themselves. Where would we be today without the likes of Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Woody Guthrie, or Tersita of Cabora, the most famous woman in North America a century ago?
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I went to the characters’ birthplaces, talked to neighbors, dove into archives in four states, and then found uncanny connections between many of the characters and odd coincidences with my own life.
For instance, I lived in the boyhood home of the king of Chicano music, Lalo Guerrero, whom I once spent a day with traveling on the Jornada del Muerto desert range north of Las Cruces.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: That in a country divided, we need to learn of the tender and loving relationships of iconic innovators across cultures, faiths, and races that made America a better place in which to live; by taking that to heart, maybe we can heal our current wounds.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A Sacred Plants Biocultural Recovery Initiative along the border with Indigenous and Hispanic leaders, and a novel of my family's flight from Greater Syria to the Southwest. And tending a sacred contemplative garden I designed at home in Patagonia, Arizona.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Materialist secular histories of the Southwest miss seeing the deeply spiritual motivations of our borderlands prophets, and why so many would be inspired to rise up against oppression, injustices to immigration, land loss, and native language loss.
Today the Sanctuary, Land Back, and Seeds Back movements are making national history again.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment