The little girl that you saw in Hillary Clinton’s 3 A.M. ad has a rather cutting response for the candidate.

My dear colleague Bill Hoynes is going to want Casey Knowles in his media criticism class.

(Hat-tip, Manish)

3A.M.-hillary-casey-knowles

Kumar: Richard Burton was reviled by some of his contemporaries because they thought he had “gone native,” right?

Trojanow: Jungle-y.

Kumar: “Going native” is a term that today appears anachronistic. But people like William Dalrymple, say, who has written White Mughals, and you, too, have gone native. You did so with a knowledge of and a sense of distance from those earlier models. In a world that is being forced into sectarian conflict, this move can say, “I’m not defining myself in opposition to the Other, I am defining myself in alliance with the Other.” And then you try to tell that story, and call it into question, too.

Trojanow: Yes. And the way you perceive the Other, the unknown, is decisively shaped by the way the Other looks at you. As a European, say, the Tanzanian villager looks at you in a different way when you come out of the woods with a backpack and on foot, as opposed to when you step out of a big Jeep and you are a representative of a privileged and affluent world. So the only way I could write this book was by writing most of my physical experience into it.

Kumar: In the novel Transmission, Hari Kunzru, a British writer of Indian descent, says that anyone walking on foot, in California is either an immigrant or a jogger or insane. And so indeed it is your mobility that defines, in certain places, your identity. How you move, where you’re going, and the rate at which you are getting there—all tell a broader narrative than we usually anticipate.

Trojanow: I spent last summer in L.A. I walked down Wilshire Boulevard, because I thought that was a way to understand the city. It was amazing how many people stared out of their cars—because it took me several days to walk it, it’s a very long boulevard. Some people stopped and asked me what I was doing—and the police stopped once. So I became a major event on Wilshire Boulevard just by walking.

More

Over at the PEN America blog, David Haglund has been putting up a series of posts about writers and history, a theme that is at the heart of PEN America 8. The above conversation between Ilija Trojanow and me, which took place at 2007 PEN World Voices Festival, takes as its starting point Ilija’s novel about Richard Burton, Der Weltensammler (soon forthcoming in English as The Collector of Worlds).

PEN-America-8-David-Haglund-Ilija-Trojanow