“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” This is the first line of my novel, The Sympathizer, and in it you can hear the echo of another novel. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, for instance, Philip Caputo called The Sympathizer “remarkable” and “gripping,” adding that Nguyen’s depiction of his double-agent narrator “compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré.”īelow, Nguyen discusses his novel’s debt to Ralph Ellison. Our newly-relaunched series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer was recently published to wide acclaim. 2 include a character representing me, drawn using a stipple technique to show that his “blackness” is nonexistent in the eyes of other people, that he is “not black enough”-rendering him invisible.Viet Thanh Nguyen: We still live in Ralph Ellison’s moment The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press, 2015) Several of my drawings for Federal Project No. In this story, the main character has the power to turn himself invisible and is regarded as a trickster. One of the oral histories collected by Ellison for the Folklore Project is called “Sweet-the-Monkey,” a folk tale recounted to him in June 1939 by Harlem resident Leo Gurley on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. I want to make drawings that escape the narrative of death and destruction that seem to be portrayed as the singular black experience in America. Like Ellison, I also want to create narratives that have been within the black community for generations. One of the writers who contributed to the Folklore Project was Ralph Ellison, who collected oral histories and folklore from black Americans to create stories about life in Harlem. Here, I discovered a connection to telling stories that was similar to mine-one that presented different perspectives on the “black experience.” While researching ideas for this project, I learned about the Works Progress Administration’s Folklore Project, which hired out-of-work writers to collect narratives about the American experience. “They couldn’t do a thing with that Sweet-the-Monkey,” Gurley said. He had used this power to rob banks, houses, and stores, and to elude white police officers. The story Gurley told Ellison was about a man in South Carolina called Sweet-the-Monkey who had achieved the ability to become invisible by cutting out the heart of a black cat, climbing a tree backward, and cursing God. Sometimes you would find people sitting around on Eighth Avenue just dying to talk.” I would tell some stories to get people going, and then I’d sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could. “I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. “I hung around playgrounds I hung around the street, the bars,” Ellison recalled to an interviewer in 1977. Ellison, then a 25-year-old writer, was in a unique position to solicit stories from strangers: he’d been working for the Folklore Project, part of the government-funded Federal Writers’ Project, since the year before, collecting folklore from black New Yorkers. On a summer day in Harlem in 1939, on the corner of New York City’s West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, Ralph Ellison met a man named Leo Gurley, and Gurley told him a story.
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