Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the widely praised memoir, When Skateboards Will be Free. He’s the son of an Iranian Muslim father and Jewish mother, both of whom were dedicated to the triumph of socialism. After his parents separated when he was nine months old, Said grew up with his mother in Pittsburgh. Brief Encounters with the Enemy, a collection of linked stories, is his fiction debut, to be published by Dial Press, a division of Random House, on August 13th.
Several of Said’s stories, which have their own original and biting take on the American underclass, have been reviewed on Three Guys by myself and Jason Rice. Several months ago, I was given the opportunity to interview Said by Dial Press. The interview was held until the publication of Brief Encounters with the Enemy was imminent. Said has won the 2010 Whiting Writers Award and is on the faculty of New York University’s distinguished Creative Writing Program.
DH: The background of the stories in Brief Encounters with the Enemy saturates your narrative. So by the time you reach the concluding story, the magnificent ‘Victory’, the reader finds themselves with an increasingly enriched interpretation as they learn more. It’s like a doubled form of writing. You’re writing the foreground story while keeping the background in mind.
I wonder how that worked out for you as a writer? How did you keep your backstory in mind? The backstory is the story of the U.S. but it isn’t really or not entirely. I’m not sure how to put it. Can you help?
SS: It might be useful to think of the background in my collection in the same way we think of the unconscious. Beneath the world we know is another world, hardly perceptible, barely understood, exquisitely frightening, and utterly beyond our control—this is the world that guides and informs all the choices we make. In the case of my stories, the background is war specifically, the United States generally. Perhaps we could call it our collective unconscious, all those various cultural archetypes and pre-existing forms that have been inherited but are never questioned because they’re not perceived. “Defending our freedom,” is a phrase that is often used, never questioned, to cite just one example. Of course the foreground—the characters—are equally essential in these stories. I conjured this collection with both world and character in mind. My characters would not exist without the culture they live in, and the culture would not survive if it was not continually being reproduced by my characters.
DH: I haven’t read fiction where something as innocuous as the weather plays such a functional role. It’s not the case as with the poetic fallacy where the hero is having a hard time so it rains. Quite the contrary, the climate and its changes is a concrete fact that can’t be explained away.
And you seem, to my great delight, to have recapped every banal discussion of the weather that I’ve ever heard. You’ve granted me a sweet revenge for every boring-to-death small talk chat about the temperature that I’ve ever endured. So how is the weather today, in the broadest sense of “how is the weather”? Why is there so much weather in your stories?
SS: You’ll appreciate the fact that my mother also hated all talk about the weather. It was forbidden in our household. She thought mention of weather was meaningless and frivolous. “Beautiful day today,” would infuriate her. I only have a handful of recollections of her mentioning the weather, and it was mainly in subzero situations. Perhaps my constant allusions to the weather are a symptom of my freedom, a sort of revenge on her prohibition. But yes, the weather in this collection is not intended as a reflection of my characters’ emotional state. The weather functions in a similar way that the war functions—mysterious, uncontrollable and escalating. My characters often feel dread associated with the weather: what’s tomorrow going to be like? is it going to get worse? Everyone has an opinion, but no one really knows anything. And while the war often happens offstage in these stories, the weather is immediate, it’s experienced on a daily level, it can be felt on the skin. It’s not abstract in the way that the war is abstract. I wanted the people of the city to have an obstacle in common, to have to contend with something material that couldn’t be ignored—snow, rain, heat, drought, each one extreme and perplexing. Most Americans have been far removed from the effects of the last ten years of war, impacted obliquely if at all. There was a New York Times headline in 2003, just before the war began, that read, “Tournament Viewers May Miss Out If There’s War.” Apparently, those were the stakes for some, that was was the level of discomfort.
DH: You show us an underclass America that maybe doesn’t get into American literature as often as it should. New American fiction so often seems to be about MFA graduate students relating the lives of other graduate students.
Maybe I’m just betraying a working class attitude towards it. I don’t know of many American writers who could tell an effective story about a clerk who works at Walmart. Is it wrong of me to bring up the discussion of class in your fiction? How class conscious are you…or should you be…as a writer? Is that an appropriate question or the wrong question?
SS: I grew up in the Socialist Workers Party so the idea of class has been ingrained in me to put it mildly. It’s an inescapable part of my psyche—speaking of the collective unconscious. I see class everywhere and I wish I didn’t. I see race, too. I’ve written about my unusual upbringing in my memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. But I’m certainly not trying to write with an agenda—at least I hope I’m not. I’m writing from what I’ve experienced working a series of thankless, menial jobs. Most were low pay, most I was fired from. My mother also worked a series of thankless, menial jobs—or more specifically, thirty years as a secretary (she wanted to be a writer). This was my reality, this was what I grew up with. Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Party was teaching that the working class revolution was coming any day now. It idolized workers, it romanticized them, it sentimentalized them. It didn’t see people, of course, it saw Marxist constructs moving through a preordained reality. This philosophy might make for good revolutionaries, but not for good writers. I’m trying to get at the complicated, yearning, often repulsive human being. I wouldn’t have been able to write these stories twenty years ago while I was struggling as a cook in a restaurant, still trying to get from under the mythology in which I’d been raised. I had no perspective and no peace of mind. I had no artistry either. Thank god I can salvage something from those experiences. That’s what makes writing so rewarding.
DH: In one of the early stories in Brief Encounters with the Enemy there’s a grand evocation of the urban landscape, only it’s a enumeration of Walmarts and Kmarts and other unglamorous settings. And then there’s this paean of supermarket workers from the last story, crowded into their break room, which you have the street smarts to know would be windowless: “the cashiers, the baggers, the stock clerks, the butchers, the bakers, the man who collected the shopping carts-”.
You love these people don’t you? Or are you a dispassionate writer comprehensively delineating what you see in your world? Taking notice creatively of who your fellow citizens have decided are unimportant. What do you feel about these people who you are writing about?
SS: I love them. I miss them. I’m exasperated by them. Maybe love and dispassion don’t have to be mutually exclusive. A lot of the people I write about I never connected with on a personal level. I’ve felt like an outsider for most of my life, given my name, my politics, my missing father. This might be where the sense of dispassion comes from—I’m a silent viewer observing. My intention was to create an honest portrait of people I’ve known, some intimately, many from a distance. This book is an American portrait written by an American who’s been on the opposite side of the glass. When I go back to Pittsburgh I sometimes visit the old supermarket I worked in when I was sixteen years old. It brings back warm memories, even though it was a fraught, difficult period in my life—and a grueling job, frankly. I was fired unceremoniously by a manager who I’ve now softened a bit in the final story of the collection. I’m nostalgic for that supermarket, for that time I’d never want to return to. There are a few people who are still working there when I did thirty years ago. One of the cashiers told me, “I just saw Miss Martha here the other day”—referring to my mother. It was very touching. Those people made me who I am.
DH: There’s a wonderful line in the story ‘Enchantment’ where a former teacher returns to the classroom after military service in the questionable war that runs in the background of all the stories. The returning war vet is treated with adulation by his colleagues. They ask for war stories and he offers them near empty platitudes which they excitedly lap up. You say that his co-workers accepted the platitudes as if they were details.
I find your take on dialogue very innovative in that you recognize that a lot of what passes for everyday conversation is merely an exchange of platitudes that mean next to nothing or less than nothing. I’m reminded of a favorite line in Kipling’s Jungle Book that the conversation of men is like the croaking of frogs in a pond.
What’s your take on the platitudes in our lives? Do they hold the social fabric together? Should they be deconstructed or abandoned? Can you live without them? Better question perhaps: Can your characters live without them?
SS: My characters cannot live without them. And this is one of the things that’s ailing them. No one can directly address what’s happening all around. The dialogue is often hollow and reflects a need to avoid—or an inability to comprehend. I’m mirroring, of course, to the language that’s used in our everyday lives, conservative and liberal alike, from the President on down. “Thank you for your service,” etc. Maybe that’s my version of “weather” talk. I’m also responding to a specific tone, the tone taken, for instance, by those many news correspondents who are remarkably uncritical when it comes to reporting on American soldiers. They’re not doing anybody any favors, including the soldiers, by romanticizing them, by extolling them as red-blooded, American heroes, different from you and I. But my platitudes don’t just come from today, or from the war, they were a part of my childhood. There might not be any group that uses more platitudes than communists. “Proletariat revolution,” “Capitalism in crisis,” “Product of the bourgeoise state,” “Product of the church and state,” the list goes on. We never really knew what we were talking about, but it didn’t matter because we were speaking to likeminded people who would never challenge us. The platitudes were designed to hide the reality of our lives—which were generally miserable, often tragic.
DH: Nathanael West’s fiction came to mind when I thought of some of your hard luck characters, like the disabled Frankie from the first story or the wonderfully winning Max from the last story, born with only one fully formed arm, who positions himself towards the acne-faced girl he’s attracted to so she can only see his body from his best side.
Frankie at first seems repulsive…but you end up liking him or end up understanding his life, how it can seem normative to him even though it may seem pathetic to the reader. I’d like to say: scratch “pathetic” out because maybe you can’t feel someone’s pathetic when you’ve come to understand their life more from the inside.
Do you think the role of your fiction is that you get to share your empathy, as it were, from the inside, so that the reader can feel it as well? Speaking for myself, I cared more, rather than less, after reading your stories.
Thanks very much, Said, for taking the time to consider my questions.
SS: Empathy is not something I think about when I write. Although, I’m very aware when I’ve lost touch with it. That’s when my characters begin to lack texture, become one note, become pawns for my own revenge. It might be satisfying to diminish certain people in real life, but it’s not satisfying to write that way—or read. My mind is often focused entirely on the task of trying to construct a story, putting one sentence after another, building towards something, while trying to make it appear effortless and matter of fact. That’s a tall order. But I’m very happy if readers feel empathic. It seems that that’s the essential pact made between reader and writer, otherwise it’s easy to stop caring, and to stop turning the page. So I’m happy that you fell for Frankie. I modeled him on a neighbor of mine. I was at first repulsed by him, the same way you were, and then he grew on me until I loved him. I hope I’ve done him some justice in my story. I hope I’ve done all my characters some justice.
Thanks so much, Dennis. It’s been a pleasure.
