Episode 168: Transcript
Episode: 168: Never Forget Where We Came From (with Tananarive Due and Nicola Griffith)
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] Well, happy new year, Charlie Jane. I've just been told by Niah, our producer, that we're allowed to say “happy new year” until the end of January.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] Yeah, honestly, by the time you hear this episode, it'll be, like, towards the end of January, and I'm already probably going to be wishing 2025 was over. So, you know, I'm just going to say happy 2026 or possibly 2029, whatever is going to be a year that I'm going to be excited about again.
Annalee: [00:00:25] How about, like, happy year 12,000?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] I bet the year 12,000 will be a banging year. I bet it'll bang.
Annalee: [00:00:32] It might be. Like, there might be some great parties.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] I bet.
Annalee: [00:00:35] They probably won't be on the Gregorian calendar anymore. It'll be more like year 30 of like the 90th dynasty or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:42] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:00:45] So looking forward to the year 12,000. You know, this sort of newish year, it always gets me thinking about the past, especially because one of the holiday season's biggest movies, Wicked, actually focused a lot on the idea of rewriting history to suit people in power, which is just incredible. And I keep thinking about that moment in the film when Elphaba is in Dr. Dillamond's history class and Galinda asks, “why can't you just teach us history instead of harping on the past?”
[00:01:21] And it's just this, like, really powerful, also kind of silly and campy moment. Because, of course, Dr. Dillamond is a goat. And one of the things that the evil wizard is doing is he's trying to prevent all non-human animals from like having jobs and even like taking away their voices so that they can't speak anymore. So he's literally stamping out the free speech of non-humans.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:45] Feels very real.
Annalee: [00:01:46] It feels so real. And Dr. Dillamond is trying to teach this class of dipshits, including Galinda, about how humans once lived in harmony with other animals. And I don't know, I'm really feeling it a lot right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:00] Yeah, that line about like, “why can't you just teach us history instead of going on about the past?” It was a funny line, but it felt like a knife through my heart. Honestly, when I heard that line, I just felt like, oh, because it just summed up so much that's horrible right now. And like, you know, that like everybody involved in making that movie was thinking about that panic that we had a couple of years ago about like critical race theory, teaching in schools, and like, you know, all the other panics around education, including queer people in education that we've been having
[00:02:31] And a lot of it is aimed at suppressing history and suppressing the real facts about the past. It's really dark. And it just, it really hit me super hard.
Annalee: [00:02:39] Yeah. A lot of people were talking about how Wicked had these really strong sub themes or just themes about race and queerness and education and how we learn about all that stuff. And you know, you and I have both written a lot about the future and what comes next. And I think more and more, I've personally become interested in the importance of history. And of course, in my non-fiction, I write a lot about archaeology and history. And I think sometimes stories about the future can become a kind of revisionist history, or maybe like a distraction from remembering the important things that actually caused our current problems.
[00:03:21] So I guess what I'm saying is that you can't solve a problem tomorrow if you forget what caused the problem yesterday. I feel like the Red Queen did not say that, but probably should have. I guess she was more of a revisionist historian.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:35] I feel like the Red Queen would have been on the same page as Galinda, actually, unfortunately.
Annalee: [00:03:40] Totally.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:40] Yeah. It's so funny. Last night I was talking to a group of high school students and they had been assigned by their teacher to read my short story, Six Months, Three Days, which I wrote like a billion years ago. And they were asking me questions about it. And I was like, wracking my brain to try to remember what I was thinking when I wrote that story. They were asking about the ending specifically, because apparently a lot of the students had decided that the main characters died at the end of that story, which I was like, “no, I don't think that's what happened.”
Annalee: [00:04:05] That's so weird.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:06] They were asking me to explain the ending. And I was like, “look, what I think I was getting at was that these characters are remembering the future. And in the end, there's this debate over like, which one of them is remembering the future correctly. But in the end, nobody ever remembers anything correctly.” And like, the future is messy and complicated and impossible to understand. But so is the past.
[00:04:26] Whenever we try to remember the past, we're kind of changing it in our minds. And so memories and like the way we think about the future, it's both super murky. It was actually nice to remember that I'd had that thought process many years ago.
Annalee: [00:04:39] Yeah, it's really true. I mean, because both memory and prognostication are really just forms of fantasizing in a way.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:49] Yes, I love that.
Annalee: [00:04:49] They can be evidence based fantasizing, of course, like I'm not saying like “history is just made up.” But we have to keep in mind that partly history is made up. And that's why it becomes so fascinating for people who want to engage in propaganda.
[00:05:05] Also, in this new year, to change the topic, I wanted to mention that we're changing the format of this podcast a little bit. We've been doing this for over five years, being the main hosts, and we're finally making enough money through our Patreon to pay for other folks to come in and contribute segments. So we're really psyched about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:25] Thank you, Patreon supporters. Y'all are the best.
Annalee: [00:05:27] Seriously.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:29] So, you know, you’ll be hearing some new voices, but we’ll still be here bringing you our own commentary on stuff. It’s just that we’re going to have a little bit of a bigger team, and more perspectives in the mix. Basically, more correct opinions from more people.
Annalee: [00:05:42] Yeah, and also listen, if you are somebody who likes this podcast, and you have some experience doing podcasting or writing, we'd love to hear ideas from you. We have a little money to pay folks to contribute segments. So if you have ideas, you can always email us at ouropinionsarecorrect@gmail.com.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:06:02] Alright, so in case it wasn't obvious, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science, science fiction, society, evil wizards, all the good things.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:18] I feel like society and evil wizards are kind of the same thing at this point.
Annalee: [00:06:22] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And my latest book is a history of psychological warfare in America, and it's called Stories are Weapons.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My next book is coming out in August, and it's called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young witch who teaches her mom how to do magic.
Annalee: [00:06:46] It also has a lot of amazing shit in it about the 18th century. So there's a lot of history in there.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:51] It's true. I did a ton of historical research. It was really exciting.
Annalee: [00:06:54] Yeah, we'll talk about that on another episode later. In this episode, we're going to take Dr. Dillamond really seriously and explore history in order to understand how we got to this place where we're controlled by a weird wizard whose main powers include propaganda and the suppression of speech.
[00:07:12] We'll be thinking about why we need to remember things that happened a hundred years ago or even over a thousand. And to help us tackle this topic, we have two incredible guests, the authors Tananarive Due and Nicola Griffith, who both write about history, but in very different ways.
[00:07:30] And I think the big question is how does writing fiction about history help us deal with the often painful legacy of the past? So we're going to get into all of that and more.
[00:07:40] Also on our mini episode next week, we will be talking about that time we went on a date with Bigfoot. Just kidding. We're talking about misdirects. So we're going to go into all the stuff about what's a misdirect versus a twist versus just getting it all screwed up. All right. Let's start the show.
[00:08:02] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:08:33] Tananarive Due is the author of many award-winning books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent and much awarded book is a historical novel called The Reformatory, one of my favorite books of last year, based on a real life reform school in Florida where many young black boys died. She also published an incredible short story collection last year, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She was an executive producer on the acclaimed documentary Horror Noir about the history of black horror and she teaches at UCLA.
Annalee: [00:09:02] Nicola Griffith is also the author of many award-winning books, including fiction and memoir. Her recent novels Hild and Menewood focus on the life of Saint Hilda in seventh century Britain. And also they offer a picture of bisexuality in the Anglo-Saxon world, which is something that I find incredibly cool. Nicola was also recently awarded a Ph.D. and is now officially a doctor of cognitive poetics. So welcome Tananarive and Nicola.
Nicola: [00:09:31] Hi, it's lovely to be here.
Tananarive: [00:09:33] Thank you. Glad to be here.
Annalee: [00:09:35] So I wanted to start by asking the two of you what your first historical obsession was. Like when did you first find yourself doing research into history just for fun or curiosity?
Nicola: [00:09:49] I suppose it really depends on what you mean by doing research, because for me, learning is it's kind of like breathing. It's something I do without thinking. It's also like breathing a real thing of the body for me, at least when it comes to history and the natural world, because those are deeply entwined in my work and my life.
[00:10:11] So I grew up in the north of England where history is embedded in the landscape. It basically is the landscape. So you can look up at a hill, but it's not actually a hill. It's a Bronze Age barrow. Or you see these weird stones and it turns out that they're Neolithic.
[00:10:30] And the hedges were laid down in the early medieval. The dry stone walls follow the same kind of field patterns used in Romano British times. There's castles and abbeys and Roman roads everywhere. I mean, every major motorway in the UK is based on a Roman road.
[00:10:53] And I come from a big Catholic family and we had no money. So to us, holidays were basically day trips to the ruins. So I grew up kind of in history, scrambling over history, looking underneath history, trying to imagine the people who lived there or who built it and trying to figure out how things worked. So I've always, always been interested.
Annalee: [00:11:22] So it started when you were basically a kid, just absorbing it from the world around you.
Nicola: [00:11:27] Absolutely. Yeah, probably about five or six.
Annalee: [00:11:31] So what about yourself, Tananarive?
Tananarive: [00:11:33] It's so interesting to hear Nicola's answer from such an ancient history, when of course, as an American, our history is much newer and fresher. We're a baby as a nation. But I got a fascination with history for a couple of reasons. One, I was raised by civil rights activists. So my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due posthumously in the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame for leading protests, jailed and many times, wore dark glasses because of being tear gassed in 1960. And my father, who's still 90, is a civil rights attorney. So those stories were, they were kind of living history in our home. And even as children, we appreciated that because the world we grew up in was visually very different from the world they grew up in.
[00:12:21] There was this great dividing line between the Jim Crow South with the white only signs on the colored signs. And I never really saw one. We treated them as sort of real life, I don't want to say relics, but symbols of history. And it got cemented after Alex Haley's Roots came out. Because Roots opened my eyes to West African history. I had no idea about aspects of slavery. I had no idea about... So I went from being that kid who was writing about talking cats and kids stowing away on spacecraft to that kid who wanted to write a middle passage. When I say write, I mean, hand write a middle passage novel, quote unquote, called Lordy, Lordy, Make Us Free.
[00:13:09] So always, I would say from a young age, kind of fascinated by history, but I didn't realize it. And I always joke that all of my history professors would be very surprised to learn the role that history plays in a lot of my work.
Nicola: [00:13:22] I think my teachers would have been very surprised too, because in the UK, when I was growing up, you had to, by the time you got to about age 13, you essentially had to choose a path. It was either the humanities or the sciences. And I pretty much went for the sciences. And so I never studied history formally after the age of 13.
[00:13:43] I mean, as soon as we got to parliaments and laws and things that were written down, I just didn't care anymore. If it wasn't swords and ponies and hacking people's heads off, I truly didn't care.
Annalee: [00:13:58] I mean, that's part of history too. It's written down.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:02] I mean, it's all history and it's all still what we're living with today. And, you know, both of you have written historical novels that are tied to really specific places that connect to your own past and your own childhoods. And, you know, starting with you, Tananarive, The Reformatory is set in your home state of Florida, and it is partly inspired by your own family's past. You've written about how your great uncle, Robert Stephens, died at an abusive reform school. And that kind of provided the model for the Gracetown School for Boys in your novel.
[00:14:31] We often think of history as this very distant thing that's kind of like complicated and not really relevant to right now. But could you talk about like making history personal for yourself, but also for kind of for everybody?
Tananarive: [00:14:42] Yeah, thank you. This novel kind of landed on top of me, I would say. I had just lost my mother. And within months of that, really weeks, I got a call from the Florida Attorney General's office, letting us know that she had this uncle that I had no idea about named Robert Stephens, who had been buried at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, FL.
[00:15:07] And the first thought I had was maybe it had to be a non-fiction work. Maybe I had to tell his true life story, especially after meeting survivors of the Dozier School, black andwhite, and hearing their personal accounts of terrible, terrible beatings and the things that happened to them. But I realized I'm a horror writer, first of all. What's more horrific than an institution where children died and were buried on the grounds, buried by other children whose families were not notified, except maybe by letter. “By the way, your son died. They're buried here.” Unmarked graves. It goes on and on and on.
[00:15:44] This was a house of horrors between about 1900 and 2011. And I just didn't have the heart to write it as nonfiction, because first of all, it's a terrible story, a nonfiction. It has a terrible ending. And I wanted specifically to give Robert Stephens a different story.
[00:16:02] So for that reason, I had written historical works before Face of History here and there, for the most part. Joplin's Ghost, about the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. But this story presented itself as an opportunity not only to talk about my family history through the lens of fiction, but to help people get to know activists during that period. I could fictionalize my father as a civil rights attorney, and my mother was embodied in the character of Gloria, who bears my mother's middle name.
Annalee: [00:16:35] Why did you want to make it personal in that way? Like, what do you think that the value is, like, for you or for the reader? Or how does that work, I guess?
Tananarive: [00:16:46] Yeah, you know, in discussing the earlier sort of conversation we had about how irrelevant our history courses felt to us. Because that was all about sort of dates and names and places, and it's very impersonal. It's just... For me, the actual value of history, and I learned this working on a memoir with my mother, is that I just revere these earlier generations of African Americans who created such beautiful and lasting art, who made so many contributions despite all these barriers against them.
[00:17:21] So I wanted this to be a time capsule, not only for 1950, and I shifted it from his real time there was in the 30s, but I knew the 50s better because that was the time of my mother's childhood. And I really wanted to kind of enshrine that era of her childhood, that moment in time, the music in that time, the social structures of that time, how difficult it was to navigate Jim Crow, both for black people and white allies.
[00:17:52] I thought that was very important because I had grown up with a household of white allies as well. My godmother had been a white ally to my mother during the movement. And I was just thinking the other day, because my dad is 90 and his memory isn't what it was, when I first started writing this book, he could walk me through. “Here's what I would have said to a judge in his chambers. This is what I would have done.” Now he would not have been capable of telling me in so much detail.
[00:18:16] So I can see in real time, it's really my way of trying to hold them in place, like the beveled glass of my grandmother's refrigerator, that fewer and fewer people are alive to remember that she used to do that. Fewer and fewer people know the Easter eggs that I put in that novel that were meant to be very personal. And it's something even I can look back on, you know, in however many years. I was about to say 20 years, but I don't know. I can look back on and remember, “oh, that's right. This is what my father did. Oh, that's right. This is how my mother would have been.”
Annalee: [00:18:53] So Nicola, your books, Hild and Menewood, take place over a thousand years ago, but they chronicle events in Yorkshire where you grew up and you've written about and you've talked about already about kind of growing up Catholic, growing up queer. And the Hild books are about a bisexual Catholic saint, which is so badass. I love just saying “bisexual Catholic saint”. And I feel like there's some resonance between your personal history and this early English history that you're telling. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what it's like to feel connected to something that happened over a thousand years ago, if you feel connected to it.
Nicola: [00:19:30] Well, that's the thing. I mean, I actually really didn't want to write Hild's story at all. I wanted to write about the past where I grew up, when I found out that she was born 1400 years ago in Elmit, probably Elmet. And Elmet is what the small country that is now West Yorkshire, where I grew up, used to be called. And so I could lie on the side of a hill that was probably a hill that was there when Hild was there. And I look at the same stars that she looked at. And maybe we both wondered, I wonder what the stars are made of or if we could touch them someday. And the kind of birds would have been pretty similar.
[00:20:18] And I longed to time travel back to that place where there weren't any contrails and where there was still maybe lynx and wolves and bears. I just, I really wanted to time travel. So I suppose it came from a kind of science fictional urge to time travel as much as the historical one.
[00:20:40] But when I discovered Whitby Abbey and realized it had been built, founded, run by a woman 1400 years ago, I was quite shocked because we're told that back in the day, the history I learned anyway, growing up in school, was that women didn't have any power of any kind in the past, especially in the early medieval. And so I thought about writing about this woman's story. And I thought, I don't want to write that kind of book. I don't want to write a domestic book about women being bullied about by these warlords and being in fear of rape all the time and always spinning and weaving. And that's not my kind of thing.
[00:21:30] I like fiction where people whack off other people's heads with swords. It's fun. To me, it would have felt claustrophobic.
Annalee: [00:21:38] Although there is some weaving in Hild.
Nicola: [00:21:40] Oh, there's a lot of weaving, but I didn't know it could be so fascinating. Until honestly, one day I found out little bits about Hild and I thought, something, somewhere is very wrong because either history is wrong or Hild could not have existed. I basically had to go back and rewrite history. I had to go back.
[00:22:05] I suddenly grew up thinking that history is fact. It's wholly true. It's solid. It's immutable. It's what actually happened. But history isn't. History is just a story we tell ourselves to make sense of what we know or what we think we know of the past, the evidence of old documents or bones or ruins.
[00:22:30] And what makes sense to each of us depends on our understanding of the world. So our experiences, our beliefs, our cultural biases. So the story depends on the storyteller. And so you look at who's been telling all these stories for all these hundreds of years, and they have interpreted the material evidence, if you like, the archaeology in ways that I wouldn't.
[00:22:58] And people like me have started to reexamine those interpretations. And so basically Hild and Menewood, I wrote them to find out how Hild was possible, how she basically midwived English literature. I mean, like the very oldest extant piece of old English that exists on the planet was written at her behest on her turf while she was abbess of Whitby.
[00:23:31] I mean, she made that happen. So I've written these books to find out how she did that in a time when kings were basically petty warlords. How did a woman make all this happen? So that's my burning urge.
[00:23:48] And then, of course, I wanted to rewrite the rest of this accepted history where women had no power and everybody was white and nobody was disabled and everybody was straight and cisgender and, and, and… Because frankly, people are people. They've been queer people, black people, disabled people, old people, poor people forever. And if we're here now, we were there then. So yeah, that's where all that deep connection comes from for me.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:22] Yeah, I love that like, you know, Tananarive, you wanted to kind of preserve this collective memory of your family and of your community. And Nicola, you wanted to kind of time travel to this place that you're familiar with, but in a very different context. I love those two different ways of looking at wanting to write about the past. And you know, we often hear that, like, we should learn from history or that history is a warning or, you know, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, that kind of thing.
[00:24:49] And, you know, this kind of comes along with the idea that history is simple and that it contains lessons that we could just pluck from it. And that it's also just that history was just this terrible thing but we've gotten better now and we just have to learn from all the bad things in the past and so that we can continue to make the present better and better.
[00:25:07] Do you think any of that is true? Do you think that, you know, the past is both better and more complicated and probably also worse than we're willing to acknowledge and maybe the lessons from history are kind of more complicated than we think?
Nicola: [00:25:20] I think the past is different from history. I think of the past as a bit like a different country with different languages, different climate, different rules, and customs, but still ordinary people. But history, as I've said, is just a story and it really depends on who's telling the story. So I think most, frankly, of what we think of as history is bullshit. So I'm not sure we can draw any lessons from it at all because it's just a story.
[00:25:51] And at the same time, I think we learn a lot from stories. I mean, just look at some of the stories we've been told about. I'm going to talk a lot about the early medieval because that's what I've been focusing on for years. I mean, we've been told that women didn't fight and that is just such crap. There's so much proof that women did fight. You can look at their bodies that are 1500 years old and you can see the musculature, the muscle attachments on their skeletons that you only get from wielding things like swords in spears. They're buried with weapons. You can see that they have battle wounds. These people fought.
[00:26:38] We also know that there were egalitarian societies thousands of years ago, that capitalism is not a natural progression of human evolution, which is what a lot of historians would like us to think. So much history, as I just keep saying, it's just a story that the people who are writing the stories are telling to improve their own position or to excuse their own choices, I think.
Tananarive: [00:27:13] Yeah, history is very fragile, for sure. I definitely agree that it's a story. It's a story told by the victors. It's a story told by the people who consider themselves to be the point of view character. And one of the reasons my mother wanted to write a memoir was not because she was so eager to tell her story, but because she watched it being erased before her eyes as a Floridian, as you can only imagine, even back in the 70s, when she was on a textbook committee. This is not what 10 years, 15 years after she'd been in jail all these times, people telling her, “well, there was no civil rights movement in Florida.” And she was like, “wait a minute.”
[00:27:51] And that's when she knew she would have to write that story herself. And definitely it has not been lost on me how much of those gains have been lost even since that time that we published that book back in about 2000, the Voting Rights Act and of course, the incoming administration.
[00:28:14] So it's very, very fragile in every conceivable way. There's this collective amnesia that can absolutely just erase it. And that was one of the most devastating aspects of The Reformatory for me to make it a little bit more personal. The idea that I did not know that Robert Stephens existed, I don't think my mother knew that her uncle Robert Stephens existed. And he had a namesake in another part of the family who did not know for whom he was named.
[00:28:47] It was as if this child had sort of sunk into a hole, which he literally did. He was buried. And because I imagine of the trauma and pain of a family having a child wrested away from them into state control and never coming home and feeling powerless to do anything about it, that this silence emerged. An unintentional silence, but so much silencing in history is intentional because of shame. I mean, I just saw Gone with the Wind for the first time and the revisionism in that film, which was dated even, you know, at the time it was released in the late thirties, it was, it was really kind of passe, you know, just like Song of the South was passe when Disney first released it, it's like going backward instead of going forward.
[00:29:35] But there seems to be this necessity on the part of so many people in American society to believe not only that African Americans were not wronged or were not hindered by slavery and have not continued to be hindered by Jim Crow, but that all of that just wasn't even so bad during the time.
Annalee: [00:29:55] Yeah, it's interesting because you guys are sort of both talking a little bit about how there's official history and then kind of what you were talking about, Nicola, the past, like which is like what people were actually doing, you know, in their everyday lives and maybe something that's a bit more truthful than these official histories.
[00:30:15] And I wonder which parts of history do you think are the dangerous parts for people that are in power? Because we're, as you were saying Tananarive, we're entering this era in the United States where like a lot of stuff is being memory hold and textbooks are literally in Florida being taken out of colleges and things like that. So what are the dangerous bits of history? And then and how do we kind of elevate those parts? How do we hold on to that, the past as opposed to these official histories that are so ideological and dogmatic?
Tananarive: [00:30:48] That's a tough one. “We” is a big word for one with two letters.
Annalee: [00:30:52] That's true that “we” is doing a lot of work. Hmm.
Tananarive: [00:30:56] It's just because we, I mean, we are as a society, we have to fight against those forces that would like to under educate people about history, even though in the United States they purport to teach us history all through high school. I did go to the University of Leeds in England and I remember that those students had been studying English a whole lot longer and much more deeply than I had because of the difference in our systems.
[00:31:21] But as much as we're supposed to have a broad educational system, there are so many holes, you know, even when I was in school, you would sort of gloss over the slavery section, but at least they have a slavery section. And I'm feeling like now some schools don't have a slavery section.
Annalee: [00:31:35] Yeah.
Tananarive: [00:31:35] And that is so, so, so very dangerous. So the way we combat that is and the reason that is such a big word is because as a society, you have to purport for just better education and education that is broad and as truthful as possible within the parameters of what Nicola said, that there's always bias in history.
[00:31:57] But you try with due diligence to create the most accurate picture of how we got here. And the reason I think it's considered so dangerous, like I think right now we're at a point in society when it's oligarchy and then people would love no more than to have everyone just be a serf, you know, who does their job and does it cheaply. And that is kind of the end game, all systemically, I think with the incoming government, no matter what else they're talking about, that's the really to loot and underpay.
[00:32:31] And teaching people that they have power, teaching people my mother's motto, which was “history happens one person at a time”, that you can literally be the one who looks around and you're like, “well, where's the leadership? Oh, no, I guess I'm the leadership”, is the way leadership happens. And people need to understand that. And the more people don't understand that, the easier it is to manipulate the masses.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:54] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:32:54] Yeah. Maybe just to modify my moment of “we”, which I agree is kind of a weird way to talk about history, because part of what you guys have been saying is that there's many histories. And so it's not about like, what do we all as like an imaginary polity do? But like, what do different groups do?
Nicola: [00:33:12] I was going to say that if I were one of the new oligarchs joining the red hatted people in Washington this month, I would be terrified of the history of labor movements. And I would be terrified of what happens during any kind of climate change. And by that, I mean, I'm talking about the plague of Justinian, for example, from the sixth through right through to about the ninth century on and off, and what happened to labor and how it basically brought down the Roman Empire.
[00:33:52] And then we have the Bubonic plague. And all these things come from changes of climate and changes in the environment. And then what happened where there was a shortage of labor and workers realized that they, in fact, now had more power than they realized. And things changed and things always change back and forth. And I think if I could persuade history teachers to teach one thing, it would be that history is not evolution.
[00:34:28] And in fact, evolution isn't evolution. Evolution in the way we think of it. It's change. That's all it is. It goes back. It goes forward. It goes sideways. It goes in a circle. There is no arc of history bending towards justice. There's only us trying to make the world a better place individually and then hopefully collectively as often joining other groups as much as we can, finding common cause.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:58] That seems like a wonderful place to stop, and we're going to take a really quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about writing history and researching history and just how to tell stories about real historical times.
[00:35:08] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:11] This podcast you're listening to right now is entirely listener supported. And we really appreciate the support of everybody out there who's sending us money as well as good vibes and as well as community support by hanging out with us on Patreon. You can find out more by going to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:35:30] And every dollar you give us goes right back into making this podcast happen. And as you heard at the top of the show, we're going to be using your Patreon money to pay other contributors to come in and do segments with us and to create their own segments. And that's going to be just a huge upgrade to this podcast.
Annalee: [00:35:46] It's going to be so badass.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:48] It is going to be so badass. That's all thanks to you, our listeners. And you know, if you sign up for our Patreon, you get mini episodes in between our regular episodes every other week. You also get to hang out in our Discord where we share our even more correct opinions, the opinions that are too correct to put in a podcast. We share those.
Annalee: [00:36:06] Although sometimes we have to like workshop them to make them, you know, more correct. So you might even hear some opinions that are only like half-assed correct. So that's kind of a bonus.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:15] We use the hive mind in Discord to make our opinions like twice double a thousand percent correct.
Annalee: [00:36:20] Real. And so yeah, once again, if you go to patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect, anything you can afford is just really, really appreciated. Y'all are the best.
[00:36:30] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:36:33] So I was really curious as someone who also writes a lot about history, whether you guys visited a lot of the places that you write about in your historical fiction or as much as possible, tried to visit them to kind of get the feel, the physical feel of the place.
Tananarive: [00:36:48] I definitely did with The Reformatory, probably more than with any other novel. My parents lived a couple of hours away or my father did while I was researching. At least part of the time. So very often we would just jump in the car and I'd say, “dad, let's drive to Marianna.” And the Dozier school had been shut down, but you could get on the property and see these really ghostly brick dormitories.
[00:37:15] At one point they had been partially destroyed by a hurricane. So they actually finally looked like the spirit they actually held. Like they looked creepy and scary as opposed to just institutional. Like you're on an Ivy campus. That was one of the most insidious things about it is that it presented as a very respectable institution with these brick buildings and the manicured grounds and marching in the Christmas parade. And so many of the people went through that place as employment, you know, and it was kind of too big to fail.
[00:37:49] So I really wanted to be on the soil. From the very first time we were called to a meeting and the exhumations began. And Steven Barnes, my husband, and my son, Jason were with me when they were sifting through the soil, that red dirt near the mud hole. I don't use the term “mud hole” in daily conversations. So when the deputy said, “follow the mud hole”, I was like, “ooh, let me write that down.”
[00:38:14] Yes, to walk where he walked, to be where he was. I mean, I don't have any sensitivity to ghosts. I won't go as far to say I don't believe in them because so many earnest people have told me their ghost stories, but I can say I've never really run into one. And so I didn't feel any weird presences or any cold spots or any of the traditional things. It's just that knowing what happened there was the haunting.
[00:38:40] And I must have visited that place six or seven times, downtown Marianna, and that mismatch between the horror that happened there and this very genteel, stereotypical southern town with its main street and its Confederate statue and the, you know, and the courtyard and everyone saying, “I don't know why everyone's making such a fuss.” It wasn't so bad. Like the collective denial, which still persists, frankly, about how bad it was because so many people had a hand in it. So many people had a hand in perpetuating it and allowing it to happen right under their noses.
[00:39:17] So I really don't know how I could have written the book without visiting Marianna. Maybe I didn't need to go as many times as I did, but there was something that was comforting almost and helped me connect to Robert when I was physically in the place where he died.
Annalee: [00:39:40] How about you, Nicola? I know you've made a map. Sadly, people cannot see it, but I can see it behind you of some of the places that you talk about in Hild and Menewood.
Nicola: [00:39:50] I have made so many maps. It's an unbelievable number of maps. And of course, the story of Hild really began that day I stepped over the threshold of Whitby Abbey and just... it pretty much changed the way I see the world.
[00:40:10] I think it's one of those moments that might have turned me into a writer, actually. I stepped onto that ground and it was like... it's very hard to explain. I felt history. And at the same time, I felt that history was made by real people, not just people who know they're part of history. I read so much historical fiction where you can tell that both the author and the characters that they're writing know that they're important to history.
[00:40:43] I don't think that's how the past works. I don't think that any of us know we're about to do something that's gonna go down through the ages. We're just trying to do the best we can that day and maybe, you know, wonder what time it is and whether we got time for lunch. And then, one day, that will become a huge thing, you know, a thousand years from now.
[00:41:04] So I could not have written Hild without that sudden, vast experience, a real internal emotional shift for me. But when you say, have I ever been to Hadrian's Wall? No, I have never been to Hadrian's Wall. Have I been to Sutton Hooke? No, never been there. I haven't been to really any of the places that I write about. And the same is true for my not-historical fiction, too.
[00:41:36] I've never been to Norway, for example, and I wrote a book about a Norwegian-American. And also, when it comes to the kind of history I write, there kind of isn't much point going to some of the places because they're different. I would get a really completely different impression of them. I would be in a nice hill and dale, for example, whereas back in the time, maybe it would have been a marsh.
[00:42:05] Because the world has really changed. People haven't changed, but the physical environment has changed. So for me, I visit in my head. I do as much research as humanly possible about the material culture of the time. So the number of archaeological reports I have read is just not funny.
Annalee: [00:42:25] Relatable.
Nicola: [00:42:26] Yeah. But yeah, I spend a lot of time there. I live there in my head. That's how I do the research, really. It's a very kind of somatic process.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:37] Yeah. So I mean, I know that historians have this debate kind of over primary sources versus basically how much weight to give to written documents versus archaeological evidence versus oral history and oral traditions. And I think historians often have this idea that if something was written down, that's really accurate and authoritative. But an oral tradition is just automatically suspect. Whereas in fact, oftentimes the written documents are just fake. They're propaganda. They're something that somebody wrote down to convince somebody at the time of something that wasn't true. So how do you sift through that? Like, I'd love to hear both of you talk about how you sift through that and what weight you give to documentation and written evidence versus what you can learn from just the oral tradition or in your case, Tananarive, from talking to your family members.
Tananarive: [00:43:25] Yeah, I first of all was not the least bit interested in any of the official messaging out of the Dozier School. I didn't bother to even look for it. And I was very lucky that the University of South Florida did a very comprehensive historical report on the Dozier School as a part of their own research before they were given permission to do exhumation.
[00:43:47] So Erin Kimberly, I have to shout her out as the forensic anthropologist and her team. You know, even down to the quote from a superintendent, I think in 1901, who said that the crops were coming in slow because they didn't have enough boys, meaning this was basically a private prison with labor, you know, slave labor by children. And he was basically just saying, “right, we need to bring more kids in because there aren't enough kids to gather the crops.” Just, you know, saying the quiet part out loud.
[00:44:19] So she had done a lot of that preliminary work in terms of what the institution was. And I was a lot more interested in her side of it than I was in their side of it. So that was from sort of the dates and figure standpoint, that was the bulk of my research. But, you know, it took me seven years to write this book.
[00:44:40] Part of it was procrastination. Part of it was getting my first TV credits, but also just wanting to be so respectful to people who had actually been there because, you know, and I'm reading a historical novel now where I'm as a reader feeling a little bit of the frustration that the author is being a little too polite.
[00:45:01] Which I think is the tendency when we're writing about historical figures we revere, especially, you know, their dialogue can be a little stilted. Their interactions are so polite. And I'm like, “no, make them messy. Make them very messy. They should be messy people.” So I wanted my characters to be messy, but at the same time, I wanted to root it in lived experiences.
[00:45:24] So from day one, I was at the meeting and I met these survivors and I was like, “I've got to write a book about this.” I spoke to people by phone, some of whom have passed away by now, kept in touch with them. Again, this was a seven year period. So a lot of people ran out of time, but unfortunately before the book came out.
[00:45:43] But I have a long list of books. The Boys of the Dark by Robin Gaby Fisher, Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, A Terrible Secret, and Hundred-Year Fight for Justice. Down to literally the last day I had to add anything to the acknowledgments. I heard about a new book I didn't know about called It Still Hurts: My Father's Painful Account of Survival at the Florida Industrial School for Boys. And I didn't get a chance to read his book because my book was already written by then. But I spoke to him by phone once and it was a 20 minute conversation that traumatized me, traumatized me, just shook me because as evil as I tried to depict the place. And he was there the same year Robert Stephens was there. He was the same age, 12, that Robert Stevens was. And his name was Robert at the time he was there.
[00:46:31] And that mirroring, I don't know, it was just such a gutting feeling because the first words out of his mouth were “it Still Hurts,” the title of his book. It's not an accident that's the title. He probably says it every day. He was stuck in his trauma, this man in his 80s. And the place was even more insidious than I thought. And on the one hand, it was a reminder of why it took me seven years to write the book because I found the research just horrific, terrible to engage with, frankly, many times, wanting to give up many, many, many times.
[00:47:05] But I felt this drive to try to take all of these stories and create a composite experience for Robert that was not trauma porn. I'm not going to depict a rape room, which is what some of the boys call the room where they were taken and sexually abused. I'm not going to mention some of the things I read about because why pollute your listener's ears about the horrible things that happen to these children.
[00:47:32] But as one survivor asked me, a man who was there in the 90s, shaking like a leaf standing next to me, but it turned out he too was in his trauma from being there in the 90s. And he thanked me for writing the novel and he has his own story he wants to tell. And I have to admit my biggest fear was that I would be stepping on the toes of people who had a real story to tell that, you know, that imposter syndrome. What right do I have to this story?
[00:48:03] And if not for the fact that I'm a blood relative to Robert Stephens, I might have succumbed to that voice because there are so many real life stories that have yet to be told.
Nicola: [00:48:13] It's really different for me because there aren't any firsthand accounts. There aren't any even primary sources for early seventh century Britain. The only evidence we have that Hild ever existed is a few paragraphs in a book written in the eighth century by a monk. And mostly the women he talks about, he only talks about them because they're saints and or virgins, preferably both.
[00:48:47] But then he conspicuously does not call Hild a virgin in her book, and nor does he mention anyone she's married to. So to me that was like, “oh, that's a big clue.” So to me, yeah, I mean, Hild begins as bisexual, but basically she's now turning into a right old dyke, which makes me very happy because I find that a lot easier to write.
[00:49:16] But no, there isn't anything. So I relied very much on what may or may not be sixth or seventh century primitive Welsh poetry. It could equally be eighth century or ninth century poetry. We don't know. There's a lot of argument in different scholarly communities. So I relied on some of that. And then I relied on eighth and ninth and tenth century old English poetry. And I read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which, of course, is a lot of... I mean, just put it gently and say it was shaped very much to a certain point of view.
[00:50:00] And of course, even Bede himself, who was the very first English historian, he did his best, but he had a really upfront agenda. It's called the “ecclesiastical history of the English people.” And that was his focus. So anything that is peripheral to that, you just can't really trust at all. He just left out stuff that didn't fit his agenda.
[00:50:29] So, yeah, I basically I had to make shit up.
Annalee: [00:50:35] But it sounds like it was very evidence based at the same time, you know, like you were working with these sources and like, I love the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it is so hilarious. It's just sort of like, “and then the Vikings came and kicked our butts again. And there was a bad harvest.”
[00:50:51] Yeah, that's super interesting, like the sort of recreating something that actually happened versus having to fill in so much of these gaps and I really wanted to make sure like before we wrap up that we talk to you guys both about when you choose to bring in fantastical elements to something that's a super grounded history. And I mean, I know that Hild and Menewood don't have that, but certainly Spear is a great example of something that's set in that time and place. It has the same kind of lush environment. But there's also like, you know, Lady of the Lake, who's super hot, queer Lady of the Lake. Love that. What makes you decide like, OK, this is the moment that I'm bringing in something that is fantasy.
Nicola: [00:51:33] I've always loved the matter of Britain, you know, the story of Arthur and Camelot. I just never really loved the fact that there were never people like me in those stories. So I'd been writing Hild and the Menewood and I had put queer people and people of color and disabled people back into history. But I thought, you know, all those people, we need to be heroes as well. We need the magic and the sword swinging and the fantasy and the spells and the hot Lady of the Lake and all that stuff.
[00:52:08] And so I wanted to find a way to rewrite that legend and turn it from a very sort of national origin, nativist, kind of white supremacist tool into a hero tale where we can all feel like we belong.
[00:52:30] The funny thing is, is that a lot of people read Spear and the part that they think is fantasy is all the queer people and the black people and the deaf people and the disabled people. They're like, “well, that didn't happen.” And I'm like, “no, no, that part's real. The demigods, they're not real, but no, that part's real.”
Tananarive: [00:52:54] Yeah. It's incredible, the erasure, you know, the idea. I think especially in the United States, people look at those old films of the 1930s and 1940s with the street scenes and think, well, that's what the country looked like. But in my case, in terms of the fantastic element, that was a no brainer. That was the fun part was creating ghosts. And I had the opportunity to meet Gilbert King, who wrote a book called Devil in the Grove, which is a history of a very terrible case in Florida in the 1950s. And I must have listened to that book two or three times while I was working on The Reformatory.
[00:53:28] And he said, you know, he had been approached with someone asking, “why don't you write about the Dozier School?” And he said, “oh, my goodness, no, that could only be written as a novel.” And I absolutely agree. And that's why I did it that way, because the ghosts are a relief. There's a moment in the story where Robert is experiencing a beating, which isn't really a spoiler because they were everybody was getting beatings when he sees ghosts. And it's an uplifting moment to him. There are definitely scary ghosts in the story. And he's afraid of ghosts at certain points, and there's a very mischievous ghost in the story.
[00:54:03] But the first time he is fully aware that he is in the presence of these spirits of dead children is a moment that helps bring him up out of his temporary moment of pain to realize there is more than this. This is not everything, which is the mantra that gets him through that beating.
[00:54:23] That's kind of how they function for me as the writer of the story. It's a way to give them influence, to give them something that they're afraid of that's not human evil, because the human evil was very, very hard for me to stomach. And I wanted to mete out enough of it so that it wouldn't be dishonest and it wouldn't be sugarcoating the experience like Gone with the Wind, certainly, but at the same time, not be overwhelming so that readers put the book down and say, “I can't, I can't read this.” And that was a delicate balance, and I credit the fantasy element for allowing me to pull that off.
Annalee: [00:55:03] That's so interesting. Also, I love the idea of calling community to you in a moment of pain, too, because it's like you feel like you're all alone and then at least the ghosts might be scary, but they're also like witnesses. You know, they're like, yeah, we've been there. We know it's real.
Tananarive: [00:55:19] True. And that's the whole point of hainting, you know, in some ways. And this story certainly is that they want to be seen that the way to summon a ghost is to call their name – their full name, because it's been so long since anyone did that. It's irresistible to them and they have to come almost. So, yeah, just that that slogan, “say her name”, was very much in my mind. “Say their names” as I was working on this novel.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:46] Yeah, I love how the ghosts function in that novel.
Annalee: [00:55:48] I also feel like that's what's happening in your work, too, Nicola, is that you're kind of evoking these people who've been forgotten. Hild is almost a ghost, but you make her real. She comes out of this like tiny paragraph and then is like a flesh and blood person who's doing all kinds of stuff.
Nicola: [00:56:03] Yeah, well, and I think I think she must have. I mean, it's quite incredible. I mean, there’s a few teeny paragraphs. I mean, one of the most striking sentences is where Bede talks about this woman who lives on a cliff in this abbey and kings and princes come and seek her advice. And they not only seek her advice, they take her advice.
[00:56:30] And when you think that kings back in the day were not literate statesmen, but warlords, you have to wonder what kind of advice she was giving that was so useful. And to me, making someone like that real in the past, just like having queer people in the past and people of color, disabled people, poor people. I mean, how many people talk about poor people in this kind of fiction?
[00:56:59] It makes us feel all a little bit less lonely, a bit less singular, a bit more part of the whole world from the past and in the present and in the future. Because I think if people like me, disabled queer women who who kind of like to hit things, if I exist now, someone like me would have existed in the past. And that that means that someone like me will exist in the future.
[00:57:29] And that's pretty different to how I grew up, what I was being told when I grew up. “You can't do that. You won't be allowed to do that. You mustn't do that. It doesn't. The past doesn't belong to you.” And in fact, it does. It belongs to all of us. And that's been my project, I think, for the last couple of decades.
Annalee: [00:57:49] Amazing. That's a great way to end. Thank you guys so much for spending all this time talking with us about this. And Charlie's making a little heart shape with her hands and me too. So again, thank you so much for coming. And people can find your books in bookstores. Is there anything else that they should know to find you guys online?
Tananarive: [00:58:10] The Reformatory just came out in paperback, of course, so that's available. People should join my mailing list if they'd like to learn more about my work. It's Tananarive List. My first name is Tanana, like banana with a T, R-I-V-E, tananarivelist.com.
Annalee: [00:58:24] Cool. And Nicola, you just started up Patreon, right?
Nicola: [00:58:27] Oh, yes, I did. It's brand new. Shiny brand new. So yeah, I'm Nicola Griffith on Patreon. I have three books being reissued this summer, the Aud novels. So yeah, you can find me on Patreon or at Nicola Griffith.com, where I run a blog and write essays and all kinds of stuff.
Annalee: [00:58:46] Cool. Great.
Tananarive: [00:58:48] Thank you, everyone. This was great.
Nicola: [00:58:48] Thank you.
[00:58:50] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:58:53] Thank you so much for listening. You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. And you can, of course, find us wherever fine podcasts are streamed or posted or sold. Actually, no, not sold.
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[00:59:18] Remember, we are always up for having some support on Patreon. So thanks for pitching in. And thanks, of course, to our brilliant producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. And thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Otherwise, talk to you later.
Both: [00:59:38] Bye!
[00:59:40] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]