Q&A with Julius Lester
I was born on January 27, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri. From 1941 to 1954 I lived in Kansas City, Kansas, and from 1954 to 1961 in Nashville, Tennessee. I received a B.A. in English from Fisk University in 1960.
In 1961 I moved to New York City where I had a radio talk show on WBAI-FM from 1966 to 1973 and hosted a television talk show on WNET from 1969 to 1971.
Since 1968 I have published more than fifty books. Among the awards these books have received are the Newbery Honor Medal, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, a National Book Award Finalist, a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. Numerous titles have also appeared on the New York Times Outstanding Book list and the American Library Association Notable Book list.
I've also published over two hundred essays and reviews, which have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the New York Times op-ed page, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, The New Republic, Forward, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
I've recorded two albums of original songs. During the civil rights movement I was a photographer, and my photographs from that time were included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution and are part of the permanent collection at Howard University. I've also had photographs in group shows at Pivot Media in Florence, Massachusetts, and Valley Photographers in Springfield, Massachusetts.
After teaching for two years at the New School for Social Research in New York (1968-70), I joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1971, where I am a professor in the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies department and adjunct professor of history. I have been honored with all three of the university's most prestigious faculty awards: The Distinguished Teacher's Award, the Faculty Fellowship Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship, and the Chancellor's Medal, the university's highest honor. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education selected me as the Massachusetts State Professor of the Year in 1988. For ten years I served as lay religious leader of Beth El Synagogue in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
I have five children-two men, three women-who range in age from twenty-two to thirty-seven. I live with my wife and one cat on a secluded twelve acres in a small town in western Massachusetts.
Questions for Julius Lester, author of Time's Memory
Q: You once observed, "I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details." This quote would seem to correlate with the storyline of TIME'S MEMORY, as time and individuality are reinterpreted, uniting past, present, and future, and our collective identity emerges more strongly than the individual to help overcome differences. What does this paradigm of shared stories tell us about the constraints of time and the concept of collective memory?
A: We in the West have a linear concept of time, i.e., that time consists of past, present, and future, which proceed orderly from one to the other. In many traditional societies, time is not a line but a spiral, and when you look at a spiral all parts seem to be moving forward and backward simultaneously. Such a way of experiencing time enables one to live in relationship to the dead as well as the living, to the past as well as the present. Experiencing time in such a way creates the sense of being part of a collective that is much bigger than one's family or neighborhood or even city or country. Once we experience time as a spiral on which we move effortlessly, the dead cease to be dead, and my story is your story and her story and their story.
Q: Speaking, listening, and seeing play an important role in TIME'S MEMORY, and are instruments of Time in the novel, as it possesses a power larger than us all (Nathaniel says, "I did not want to see more, but Time needed me to" and "It is a story I hope you listen to and hear in the very depths of your being"). Are speaking, listening, and seeing the essential ingredients to understanding humanity and connecting with others? How do they foster peace in this novel?
A: Of speaking, listening, and seeing, I think listening is the most difficult and most important. To truly hear another person, we must put aside our notions of who we think the person is based on that person's race, gender, class, and all the markers we use to impose identity on people so we can dismiss them. The relationship between Nathaniel/Ekundayo and the plantation owner's daughter, Ellen, is a result of each listening to the other, of each choosing not to be imprisoned by the attitudes, opinions, and values commonly associated with their respective skin colors. The act of listening requires living in a state of vulnerability, i.e., a state of openness to others. But this very act of vulnerability is the act that creates peace.
Q: You write in the author's note to TIME'S MEMORY that a dream more than thirty years ago was the catalyst for the novel. The dream featured a religious structure from the Dogon people of Mali. How did this dream inspire the creation of TIME'S MEMORY? What role do dreams play in the novel?
A: I seldom get inspired. If I waited to get inspired, I might never have written. What I do is muse. I let myself idly wonder about a situation, a person, a place, an event. The dream I had in 1975 led me to start reading about the Dogon people who have an amazingly complex philosophical system. What led me in 2004 to start reading about them again, I have no idea. But in one of the books about the Dogon, I came across their idea that the spirits of the dead must be given a place among the living, or they create havoc. That led to my musing on two thoughts. The first is a thought I've had for years. It is a fact that hurricanes form in the ocean off west Africa. I've always felt that hurricanes were the spirits of all the Africans who died during the centuries of the slave trade taking their revenge on the Western Hemisphere. The second thought was about the spirits of black people and Native Americans killed during the founding of this country. They have not been given a place among the living. Is all the violence in America a result of their spirits being neglected? So I mused on all this. I do my best musing while taking a hot bath, something I do every night. It's the place I work out any problems I'm having in whatever book I'm working on. So one night I was musing, and an image came to me of a woman on a slave ship coming to the United States, and inside her was a spirit that had been sent by an African god to help the neglected spirits of blacks in this country.
Q: You have written more than forty books. What do you hope readers will take away from TIME'S MEMORY?
A: Well, first and foremost, that it is a "good read." Beyond that, I would like readers to muse on life and death, who they are, who others are. I would like them not to be so sure that they know what is real and what is not. I would like them to respect the living and the dead.
Contributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Reviews
Time's MemoryJulius Lester
Julius Lester's latest book is an interesting amalgam of his favorite themes, religion and Afro-American history. Working with the Dogon lore of Mali, he creates his hero, Ekundayo-a spirit, or living nyama sent by slave ship to free the nyamas (souls) of dead slaves wandering forlorn in the antebellum slave culture of the American South. Fortunately for the story, Ekundayo is soon stranded in the body of Nathaniel, a slave torn by his love for his white mistress, Ellen. At this point the nebulous magic realism is overtaken by a fairly rousing depiction of life in the slave quarters of a Virginia plantation. Everything is tossed in: a fiery black preacher; a Nat Turner-like rebellion; a loving grandmother figure; a jealous slave girl-never forgetting the doomed Miss Ellen and her quasi-villainous father. How Nathaniel Ekundayo finally learns to put the dead to rest is the message Lester was striving for all along. His-and Ekundayo's-journey is a long and strange one, with moments of grace along the way. Martin Puryear's elegant cover woodcut image is an affective evocation of the sentiments within. 2006, Farrar Straus Giroux, Ages 12 up, $17.00. Reviewer: Kathleen Karr (Children's Literature).
ISBN: 0-374-37178-4
Added 04/20/06
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