Interview With An Author Featuring The Extraordinarily Talented Johanna Skibsrud

I read The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature and Being by Johanna Skibsrud in pre-Covid times and it had a profound effect on me.

The collection starts with a quote: ‘ “There is nothing I can say,” writes Marguerite Duras in a late essay—a strange, sad meditation on the death of a young British pilot. ’

And I’m sure that so many writers and artists share that feeling now.

And this: “…poet and activist Breyten Bretenbach, as he reflects upon the situation in South Africa fifteen years after the election of Nelson Mandela. Breytenbach contends that we must witness the extremes and then see or imagine beyond them.”

So relevant in this time.

And: “What literature, history, politics and most essentially, language attempt is it create form from chaos, meaning (and even sometimes music) from noise. We need to attend to—and believe in—the distinction between chaos and form, noise and meaning, but we also need to remember that no distinction is ever absolute or escapes the contigency of noise.”

Has an observation ever been more relevant?

I struggle in a sense, to not feel a certain guilt at the luxury of attending to my creative work in a time when so many are suffering. And yet, this is my job, as much as I can, for as long as I can, to create and to help share the work of other writers and artists.

So it’s with great joy today that I am chatting to the author of The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud, an astonishingly wonderful writer and we’re discussing Island which is top of my reading list. Island, like The Nothing That Is, is profoundly relevant to our current times.

About Island: Part fantasy, part parable, Island deftly explores essential questions of history and responsibility. It asks us to consider our legacies of cultural imperialism and the hidden costs of our wireless world. Urgent, illuminating, and thought-provoking, it asks us how we can imagine a future that does not run along the exact same lines as the past. (Goodreads).

What inspired you to write this book?
Released last fall by Hamish Hamilton Canada, and coming out in paperback, and in the US, this fall—Island covers a period of just twenty-four hours in which my characters’ lives and realities are profoundly changed." I began work on the book shortly after completing my second novel, Quartet for the End of Time—a novel that spans several decades and involves an intricate network of both real and fictional characters and historical events. In many ways, I envisioned Island as Quartet’s opposite. I wanted to write a story with a clear triangular arc—the kind they teach you about in middle school. I wanted to really zoom in on the experience of just a few characters, and over a very limited period of time. The idea for the plot of the novel came from an article I’d stumbled on back in 2009, which quoted the military expert John Pike saying that the U.S. military’s goal was “to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.” I started serious work on the novel five years later, in 2014—one year before Pike’s predicted Global monopoly. My goal was to explore the contradictions and violence inherent within Pike’s statement through the particular and personal lens provided by my two main characters. But I wanted their experiences, and the book itself, to be nearly time-less, nearly place-less. To this end, I set the novel in an alternative parallel time-zone, or “near future,” and on an imaginary island that draws from the cultural and political histories of many colonized regions of the world. As with my other works of fiction, I was interested in exploring the continuities between the past, present and future. With this book, though, I wanted to think very specifically about the way that the history of cultural and military imperialism continues to structure our lives in the present— and therefore the possibilities open to us for the future. I wanted to think about how our ideals are necessarily founded on and limited by our reading and understanding of the past. In different ways, my characters ask: is there a way to imagine and work toward a future that breaks from entrenched roles and repetitive historical patterns?

How did you come up with title of this book?
I borrow my title from Aldous Huxley’s Island, which he conceived of as a sort of mirror image, or antidote, to his more famous Brave New World. My Island is sadly far more realist than either utopian or dystopian in the common senses of these words. But it is utopian in an etymological sense: the word utopia comes to us from the Greek and means, literally, “not place.” According to Pike’s prediction, both power and capital would—by 2015—become “utopian” in this literal sense. I was interested in this almost complete reversal of the expansionist colonialism both espoused and critiqued in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: in aiming to give up its claim on actual peoples and territories and aspiring to become, rather than merely to conquer, what Conrad once called “the biggest, the most blank, so to speak” space on the map, the U.S. sought absolute control over global politics and trade. Because 2015 is now several years behind us, I see my novel as a sort of inquiry into the question of how and in what ways Pike’s prediction has come true—as well as how in what ways might it be resisted or disproved.

Did you learn anything during the writing of your recent book?
I chose to avoid historic and geographic specificity with Island because I wanted to emphasize the patterns that connect different human systems and experiences even across vast distances of space and time. I was, however, aware of the risk I was taking with this approach. A major theme of the novel is the unavoidably material nature of what we might sometimes imagine as immaterial (the island is a global telecommunications hub and the islanders are acutely aware of the way that our “wireless” world is made possible by real people and real wires). Because of this, the last thing that I wanted was for the book to seem to gloss over the actual material of real people’s history, real people’s lives. I tried to mitigate this risk as best I could by drawing the risk itself into sharp focus. Over the course of the novel, my protagonists—two very different women with two very different backgrounds and sets of circumstances—grapple with the limits of individual action and perspective. I wanted my characters, and the crisis they are faced with, to be real, but I also wanted their response to a crisis situation to be an invitation to seeing and thinking—their potential both as characters and as different approaches to complex themes activated through the participation of an active reader. I wanted this joint effort—between character and reader—to offer a way of exploring and challenging the limits and assumptions of subjective perspective, including those (both wittingly and unwittingly) presented by the book. It was much harder than I anticipated to make the work the process of questioning I wanted it to be—to make it as open and vulnerable as I hoped it would be to its own critique. I don’t mean by this that I wanted the work to be harshly criticized; like most writers, my fondest hope is that my characters and books will be trusted and loved. What I mean, instead, is that I’d love to be a writer of books readers can really enter into—that they can receive not as completed texts with certain messages and pre-established conclusions, but as ways of opening up new pathways for experience and thinking. I don’t know if I’ve come close to realizing this goal with Island, but I have, at least, clarified my resolve to work toward this goal and—following Beckett—to continue to “fail better.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in Island?
Lota is an idealistic, restless young woman who wants desperately to change the course of history—both her own and that of the people she loves. She is smart, passionate, and committed, but also young enough to have easily fallen under the spell of the charismatic Kurtz, leader of the “Black Zero Army”—a group that proposes to liberate Lota’s small island home from foreign influence and control. Of course, Kurtz takes her name from the disquieting character that haunts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—and its magnificent and appalling retelling in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Like these characters, my Kurtz is an embodiment of the desire to exist outside of every system. She’s slippery, dangerous—and as the novel progresses, Lota becomes less and less convinced of the integrity of her vision and approach. Like Conrad’s and Coppola’s characters, my Kurtz is also a rhetorician—in fact, many of her speeches incorporate fragments of powerful speeches made by real revolutionary figures at different key moments in history, as well as by characters in popular film. What’s tricky for Lota—and I hope for my readers—is knowing where Kurtz’s words align with the possibility for action and response and where they turn back on themselves—curtailing rather than extending the chance of breaking with the patterns of the past.

Where did you come up with the names in the story?
I’ve always been interested in the power of names, and in this novel my character Kurtz is as well. She is inspired by the DC Comic Books to name her army “Black Zero,” and asks each of her followers to adopt the name of a famous villain from popular culture. In some of the DC comic books, “Black Zero” is a villain; in others, it’s a terrorist organization; in still others, it’s a computer virus. In every case, though—as Kurtz informs Lota and the rest of her followers—the name “Black Zero” refers to what is “dark, sinister, and defies rationale. When it’s a human being, it has no fingerprints and its most destructive weapon was ‘the secret in its brain.’” For Kurtz, giving herself and the rest of her army the names of famous villains is a way of instilling in them a powerful, destructive “secret.” She’s interested in channelling the force and power of the “outsider” and, with this power, disrupting the all-too-predictable structures that cause history—including the many efforts at revolutionizing history—to repeat itself. Lota is “Zilla” (from the Godzilla remake); her best friend is “Verbal” (from The Usual Suspects); some of the other members of the Black Zero Army include Hannibal, Joker, Alex DeLarge, and Baby Jane. The names anchor the novel in a popular tradition of storytelling, as well as in a history of violence and revolution. At the same time, they try to trouble that history. In aligning themselves with whatever the status quo and those upholding it are not, the members of the Black Zero Army aim to become “bigger and more powerful than they are”—they aim to subvert the status quo by channelling and implementing a force that “can’t be eliminated.”

What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Like my previous novels, this one takes on complex themes: war, capital, identity, loyalty, the difficulty of moral action, the limits and possibilities of individual choice. At the beginning of writing this novel, I established a pretty strict set of constraints for myself. I knew in advance who my characters were, what the particular “arc” of the story would be. And yet, just as with my earlier novels, the story went in directions I didn’t anticipate and, at almost every stage—including this one—I have more questions than answers about the themes I’ve taken on and about the process of exploring them. I enjoyed the tension the constraints I chose afforded my process, though. And despite all the usual difficulties and doubts, the novel has also reaffirmed my faith in fiction as a way of expressing the complexity, range and inherent contradictions of thought and experience.

What a truly fascinating and timely book – I can’t wait to read it! I’m truly honoured to have chatted with you today, Dear Johanna, thank you for being a guest!