Scala Radio Book Club: The Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

In the Scala Radio Book Club this week (Thursday 20th January), Mark Forrest chatted to American poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, on her brand-new novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

A breathtaking and ambitious debut novel that chronicles the journey of multiple generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era, by prize-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the problem of race in America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well.

Ailey grows up in the north in the city but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women - her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries - that urge her to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors - Indigenous, Black, and white - in the deep South. In doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself.

Mark began the interview, focusing on the structure of the novel. ‘The book is split, into this contemporary tale of Ailey's life, with then historical sections that chart these extraordinary stories of her ancestors. It seems to me that you could have done either one, or the other of those stories, but you decided to do both. Why was this the way for you to tell your story?’

‘I did have some early readers who said that it should be two books, but that was against my vision,’ said Honorée. ‘People always laugh when I say this, but I was just interested in writing a beach read. A very light, happy go lucky, coming of age story with a lot of laughs because all I ever wanted to do was write short stories. When I began to write my beach read, I started having dreams of what I assumed was the past based upon what the people in my dreams were wearing. I was in my ancestral home, which is Eatonton, Georgia. Chicasetta in the novel is like a fictionalised version of Eatonton. Then when I would wake up, there would be these long prose passages that were very lyrical in nature. And they would come to me, and I would write them down. After about 12 to 18 months, I realised the stories were supposed to be part of the novel.’

Mark then turned his attention to the context Honorée was writing her novel in. ‘Looking at the United States, what was it like for you writing this book under the former President?’

‘I actually started this book when President Obama was in office. So when I was writing, even I thought, well, we've moved past this, we're in a new time, a new era. But everybody needs to know about how we got to this place, as a country. As I kept writing, and the former President was elected, I began to feel very disturbed. In the state of Virginia in 2017, there was a white supremacist March. There were white men, carrying torches, and they were chanting anti-Semitic phrases in Charlottesville, Virginia. And all of a sudden, I realised, past is prologue. I do think that in the United States, people are interested a lot in the book, because it's teaching them certain things.

Mark finished the interview asking, ‘How has it felt to hear from everybody from the man or woman on the street, to the New York Times, to Oprah Winfrey? They've all had a lot to say about this book.’

‘I was shocked!’ said Honorée. ‘Miss Oprah called me, and I didn't believe it was her! I thought somebody was playing on my phone! It's been like a dream. I'm an older person, I'm in my 50s, and I have five books of poetry. Nobody really paid that much attention to me. I have a few prizes or whatever, but I never really was at the top. To have President Obama pick my book as one of his Books of the Year, it just makes me very, very proud and grateful.’

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