Michael Gruber

BIO

Michael Gruber has a Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Miami. He has held many jobs, virtually all of which have involved writing, usually anonymously. He lives in Seattle and is currently at work on another novel.

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AUTHOR TALK

April 2003

In this interview, Michael Gruber discusses the racial issues surrounding his debut thriller TROPIC OF NIGHT and shares his own thoughts on writing about various races.

Q: You've written a book in which the two main male characters are black men, but you yourself are white. How can you do that?

MG: By invention, imagination and sympathy, the same way male authors can invent real female characters and female writers can invent real male ones. It's absurd to think that we can only make characters out of personal experience.

Q: Your villain is a black man who oppresses a white woman. Doesn't that theme play into the hands of racists?

MG: Since the point of the book is that race is an hallucination, I can't see how anything it says can support racism, which is the absolute reification of race. The villain becomes villainous by becoming a racist, and literally loses his humanity because of it. Not being allowed to show a fully developed brilliant black villain would really be racist.

Q: You say a lot of unkind things about the Cuban community in Miami, implying that they are a racist bunch.

MG: I don't say anything at all about any group as such. There are white Cuban racists in the book, yes, and white Cuban non-racists, racist here being defined as people who denigrate or harm others solely because of their race. Virtually everyone is a racist in the sense that they notice race and have thoughts about the other based on that observation. They may favor the other race or do the opposite, but they are still caught in the toils of the hallucination. We all suffer from the hallucination that the earth is flat and the sun travels across the sky, but only crazy or profoundly ignorant people act as though that is the true state of things.

Q: So you don't think blacks are oppressed?

MG: I didn't say hallucination failed to have an effect in the real world. Ask any schizophrenic living in a cardboard box under the freeway. We live with the evil results of history, among which are that people designated as black are poorer and less educated than the average; are laden with all kinds of negative projections by the majority; have internalized many of those negative projections; and in large numbers are subject to daily insult and racist nastiness. The ultimate solution to this problem would, of course, be to place race into the dustbin of history along with divine right, phlogiston, and luminierous aether, but maintaining its reality serves too many social and political interests.

Q: By writing about the black experience, don't you join the ranks of white people ripping off black culture?

MG: Yes. Writers rip off anything that comes to hand, gleefully and mercilessly -- cultures, family, friends. The greatest American novel (HUCKLEBERRY FINN) and the most successful American novel (UNCLE TOM'S CABIN) both involve white people ripping off the black experience, which happens to be one of the great fountainheads of creative life in this nation. It's hard to be an American writer without doing a little ripping off, just as it's hard to be an American writer of any color without using a language invented largely by paleface folks in the British Isles. The great thing about culture is that anyone can join in just by learning the rules.

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