Daniel Peña is the author of the new essay collection How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear. Also an educator, he lives in Dallas, Mexico City, and Germany.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the essays collected in How to Look Away?
A: I’d say two-thirds of the book was written between 2022 and 2026. Only a few essays appeared before then (“The Joys of Biking at Night” and “Letter from Houston instantly” come to mind).
I had the narrative arc and essay ideas down early, but of course the world changes as you write. And I found myself updating the collection up to the very last draft. As late as June of 2026.
Q: The author Ed Morales called the book “a powerful, thoughtful rant against the monstrous innocence of twenty-first century America.” What do you think of that description?
A: I’m such a huge fan of Ed as a thinker and writer. That blurb was especially meaningful for me because I’d been reading his work for years. And I’m lucky enough (in this writer’s life) to now call him a friend. We’re both now with One World.
I think Ed is so smart to hone in on my interrogation of “innocence” in this collection of essays. There’s a line from this book that interrogates what he’s speaking toward regarding the connection between violence and innocence. In How to Look Away the gist of it is: white impotence begets white innocence, which is often the pretext for white violence. Now and historically.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: That’s a great question! How to Look Away as a title came to me pretty early. It’s a double entendre. I was interested in not only the process through which we look away from the suffering of others, but also the line itself as a question: How to look away?
Which speaks toward a phenomenon I unpack in the book called “morbid fascination.” It’s the reason everyone stares into a car wreck when they pass it on the highway.
The subtitle was a lot more complicated. It went through many, many drafts. Eventually my editor and I landed on “On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear” because it spoke toward the thematic structure of the collection which moves from disembodiment to embodiment.
The subtitle tried best to capture the ways we’re disappeared in the American fabric and the revolutionary nature of refusing to disappear (and remain embodied) in places that try to make us feel smaller. Or eliminate us from the landscape altogether.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to cruelty in the United States?
A: I think a lot about the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis when I think of this question and the future of the United States. Marsalis smartly pointed out once that can go to any number of places in the world where fascism took root—Berlin, Tokyo, Madrid, Santiago, etc.—and eventually you’ll find that fascism collapsed under its own weight.
That is because the human impulse is to create; fascism’s impulse is to destroy. In those places today, life is still happening. Fascism couldn’t stop people from falling in love. Or people from creating art. Or people writing poetry. It is outside the fascist imagination to create anything beautiful.
As humans, we don’t have a very high tolerance for operating on that wavelength indefinitely. And I think the strain is beginning to show.
To these ends, I’m reminded of a line from James Baldwin: “I can't afford despair…you can't tell the children there's no hope.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m breaking ground right now on a new collection of essays and revising an old novel I have that needs a ton of work.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My favorite collection in the essay is “The Joys of Biking at Night.” It originally appeared in The New York Times. It inspired the cover of the book, which is the side of the Haus des Lehrers in Berlin.
It was the artist’s idea of what the Americas looked like. It shows Latin American cyclists just finishing a race. The winner receives his flowers from a little girl. It’s such a sweet image and one very different from the usual images we get in the press from Latin America. It shows us fully embodied, fully ensconced in our humanity.
I think it’s a good simulacrum of the book as a whole. Which ultimately is about what it means to be responsible not for each other but to one another. Our humanity exists in the communal.
When I saw the cover, I knew on a cellular level that it was the correct one.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment