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One morning, you receive a call and are told to board a flight. Your bags are already packed, a car has been sent to pick you up. When you’re hungry, you find food has been packed for you as well. It tastes like nothing. Perhaps someone is dead. This is how the narrator of Maya Binyam’s debut novel Hangman begins his journey home, a journey that is at once familiar and strange, capturing a feeling unique to immigrants in the anglophone West and their children; we move between two, sometimes more, distinct cultural spaces, yet struggle to be firmly situated in a single space that feels like home. A more granular understanding of the old country, of home, is possible while you’re there. Businesses close, people die, a new road is cut through the bush and, so long as you’re there to witness it personally, the world changes and you change with it. Upon leaving home, it becomes a static thing, an idea, a memory. You lose track of the subtle shifts that occur in your absence and when you return, the incongruities between the place you’ve enshrined in your heart and the place it has become can be disorienting, disheartening, an affront.
Hangman’s narrator, who is unnamed, displays an unwillingness or inability to reconcile his memory with the present state of his country of birth. The way he sidesteps the dissonance between the two often feels like performance, though who he’s performing for isn’t immediately clear. His journey chains together brutal and charming allegories that underline the farcical idiosyncrasies of life as part of a global community, of life in diaspora, jewels that eventually take the shape of a quietly powerful debut from a self-assured writer with a clear point of view.
I spoke with Binyam shortly after she was listed as one of Publishers Weekly’s Writers to Watch Fall 2023.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I suppose one of my first questions is how did Hangman get here? The narrator and his journey are so dreamlike and magical, I’m resisting the word surreal here, that I wonder which, if either, of those came first and what compelled you to tell this story now.
Maya Binyam
While I was writing, I didn’t understand the movements of the book to be dreamlike or magical; they felt very realistic to me, or at least true to the experience of the narrator, who in my head was a character with a robust personality, even if he didn’t arrive in the text with the characterizations typical of a protagonist. (We don’t, for example, really know what he looks like; he describes himself as bald and relatively good-looking, but that’s about it.) I still don’t really understand the book to be dreamlike, but what I think is probably just a function of my proximity to the narrator’s sensibilities—not because I’m like him, but because writing about him required me to inhabit those sensibilities. It’s difficult, even now, to see outside of them. My sense of the book will probably always be warped. I’ll re-read a line like this—“She had a squished up nose and no torso. Her legs just stretched up to her face, and at the end of her face, her yellow hair pulled her back down.”—and think it’s the most accurate description in the world. So I can’t say in earnest that the magical quality of the text was foundational, or that I was even aware of it as it was manifesting. But I was compelled by the reality-warping qualities of memory, as you mention, and also of language. Part of what inhibits the narrator’s ability to recognize his home country are the descriptors that popularly attend it in diaspora. He doesn’t think of himself as disempowered, and he certainly doesn’t think of himself as coming from a place defined by poverty, hunger, or corruption. But after twenty-six years of living in America, he struggles to witness his home country—and the people who inhabit it—outside of the language typically used to conjure them. And so he guards himself against it, lest that language become attached to him, too.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Early in the novel it feels as though the narrator is used to not taking up space. He’s polite to a fault, he doesn’t express opinions or preferences, may not even have any, and if he does, he doesn’t seem to be acutely aware of them. So much of Hangman is about the discovery and exploration of who this person is, who he might have been, and where he may be headed, but I was curious if this was something you knew from the outset or if this character was revealing himself to you as you wrote him.
Maya Binyam
When I started writing the book, I thought I knew the narrator completely. His voice was very familiar to me, in part because he is based on people I know, but also because I had been writing stories in his voice for years—stories that took place in various settings, during other periods of his life. His style of observation had become to me like a second language. And I knew certain biographical details from the beginning—that he had been a political prisoner, that he was bald, that he had fled to the U.S. as a refugee, etc. But I actually knew very little about his character: his psychology, his preoccupations, his fundamental disposition toward the world. All of that was revealed through the writing, and also through other people’s reading of the writing. For example, very early on, when I was at a writing residency, I read aloud from the first chapter to my cohort. I had only written half of the book, and I basically had no idea where it was going. But after the reading, one of my co-residents, Angie Cruz, very astutely told me: “Your narrator is obsessed with money.” And he was, even if I hadn’t named that obsession to myself. Building his character was a long process of acting on impulse, or acting on my projection of his impulses, and then finding in those impulses patterns, rules, and productive deviations.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Also towards the end of the book the narrator remarks on the use of his name, though we never learn it, the names of anyone else, the name of the country of his birth, or the name of the country he’d become a citizen of. Some of these voids have sharp enough boundaries that the reader can make some safe assumptions about what they might define, but others are so specific, so individuated, that these absences feel almost tragic. What was the thought process behind leaving so many things in Hangman unnamed?
Maya Binyam
The namelessness, I think, was originally something I was just trying on. I worry it was a defensive posture: I didn’t want to write something that could be read sociologically. And so I became interested in the challenge of conjuring a place without the shorthand of proper nouns, and in how populations and nations might instead be evoked by describing the various forces acting on them, which is how people tend to confront them anyway. I could have written that the narrator was from Ethiopia, and some readers would have thought famine, or poverty, even though the word, for me, is more like a sixth sense: it contains smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and also facilitates them. And so namelessness, maybe surprisingly, felt like a tool of psychological specificity. Which isn’t to say that the country that serves as the novel’s setting is without a history—it has a kaleidoscope of specific histories, ones that are referenced throughout the text, and which inform completely the self-conceptions of the various people who are inhabiting it, touring it, attempting to leave it behind.
But your observation about the tragic specificity of some of these absences is really smart—the narrator, I think, buys too readily in the idea of a reality constructed entirely on mutual fantasy; he quite literally internalizes it—and internalizes other people’s projections onto him, which he then presents back to the world as his personality. Immigrant, political prisoner, exile: the words are stories, and contain their own conventions. He tries those conventions on, and sometimes they feel silky, or else they scratch. But he can never really shrug them off. There are other words, words that are applied to him, but which he sees as foreign objects having to do with other people, in a land very far away—I won’t name them here, because they may give too much away, but they’re determining, too.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The passage of time is a strange thing in Hangman. The narrator is often unclear on how much time passes between events (things take forever or maybe a few minutes, he sleeps for days or perhaps hours) and his relationship with space is similar—buildings, landscapes, sometimes villages and cities appear and disappear at random. In the absence of these more conventional cues, how did you have to change your approach to grounding the reader in the story?
Maya Binyam
Well, in many ways, the progression of Hangman is very simple. It takes place over the course of four days, each of those days is narrated from morning to night, and many of the settings that the narrator encounters—the airport, a bus depot, an internet cafe, a bank, a church, a pharmacy—are institutions that guide movement in ways that should be familiar to a reader. I found those set pieces very grounding, and felt that they provided a container for the narrator’s psychology, which could then approach those institutional settings (and the institution of time) with idiosyncrasy. He is intensely, insistently, present: he tries very hard to suppress his memory and also his anticipation, and so the moment he’s living through—or sleeping through—can feel protracted or completely insignificant.
Stephen Patrick Bell
An excerpt of Hangman, the first chapter, was published in The Paris Review and works extremely well as a short story. Was any of the feedback in that setting influential in how the final edits of the book took shape?
Maya Binyam
Oh, absolutely. Lidija Haas, who edited the excerpt, was an extremely influential reader. When she made the cut for the The Paris Review, I was still in the process of editing the book, and my understanding of what I had just written was all mixed up. I’ve made this comparison before, but editing a novel, at least one as character-driven as Hangman, can feel a lot like performing collective psychoanalysis. As the writer, my position is a strange one: theoretically, I should be able to analyze the motivations of the characters that appear in the text, but I’m also entirely responsible for them. And so it can be helpful to bring in a third party, who can pick up on the strangeness of the things I take for granted. Lidija named, for me, a lot of themes that were at work in the text, but that I had not yet articulated to myself, most likely because they were themes that governed my own life: the drama of being divided against yourself, of your political commitments being in conflict with how you are able to live as an individual, etc. I don’t know that the book changed so drastically in edits, but conversations with Lidija and my book editor, Mitzi, certainly enabled me to feel newly alienated from the narrator, which helped me make him act in accordance with who he was.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Have you read from Hangman as yet? The narrator’s voice is sharp and particular, but I feel, as I do with some of my favorite plays, there are different ways you could perform it to strike different notes. How would you expect the Hangman audiobook to sound? I’m especially curious about how you might hope your publisher instructs the actors to handle accents of the characters though there isn’t much dialogue.
Maya Binyam
I’ve only read bits and pieces, mostly to myself. I have a very strong sense for his voice, which is not my voice, but I like the way his voice sounds when I read it, too. I’m not so attached to the audiobook narration sounding like the voice in my head, because the voice in my head is sort of irrelevant to how the book reaches other people. But it was important to me that the audiobook narrator did not sound American, even if he had adopted certain intonations and turns of phrase that are common in American English. I’ve only heard clips from the audiobook, but its narrator, Ron Butler, has done an incredible job. I asked him to reference East African English accents—Ethiopian, Kenyan, etc.—just because that’s what I know. But I also liked the idea of his accent being somewhat unidentifiable, given the somewhat unidentifiable nature of his national origin.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Back to the subject of short stories, the narrator is subject to many of those. From the moment he receives the call in the first line, he’s dragged along a chain of allegories that eventually lead to the home he’s been searching for. How did you go about structuring this journey?
Maya Binyam
The journey’s structure is very loosely based on a journey I took seven years ago, toward my uncle’s funeral. I was living in Addis Ababa at the time, and my father was visiting me from the U.S. I got a call and was told that my uncle was sick, and that we would need to travel to see him. But my uncle was living in a very remote town, and it took three days of travel by plane and car to reach him. We were shepherded along by various family members, who fed us, housed us, and shuttled us to our next destination. My father and I suspected that his brother was dead already, and that everyone around us knew he was dead already, but they insisted he was only sick, and didn’t acknowledge the fact of his death until we had reached the site of his funeral.
All of this behavior was fairly conventional—in Ethiopian mourning rituals, at least the ones I’ve experienced, people aren’t typically alerted to the death of a family member until they can be surrounded by other family members and friends, who tell them all together. That moment of reveal can feel like a feat of empathy. But it can also become highly theatrical, especially when it’s preceded by a protracted and collective suspension of disbelief. I was interested in recreating the care work and deception involved in preparing someone to confront the knowledge that they are about to begin grieving. But even sad occasions can become reunions; living in diaspora, they are sometimes the only reunions we are given. Going to my uncle’s funeral involved a lot of storytelling. And so the inclusion of allegories began selfishly, I guess. The stories my family tells, especially when we haven’t seen each other for a long time, feel like they contain meaning that can’t be entirely expressed through language. They’re stories that are very important to me, and that I’m very afraid of forgetting. Not all of the stories that appear in the book mimic the stories I’ve been told, but some of them do, and I wanted to have some record of them.
To speak a little less personally, though: the narrator is mired in binary thinking, and tends to ascribe the country he has fled with the qualities of death, and the country he has sought refuge in with all the vibrancy of life. He is desperate to know how his home country has evolved in his absence, but can’t shake the vantage of diaspora, and tends to view the people he encounters almost anthropologically, as if their personal situations are perfect metonyms for the state of the nation. The book is riddled with informational asymmetries, and the narrator is somewhat desperately trying to figure out how much of what is happening to other people is also happening to him, while also trying to resist his own vulnerability to the events of other people’s lives. His struggle is psychological, but it’s ethical too, and his actions are accompanied by a question whose answer, I think, determines how we choose to act almost everyday: How open should we be to the world and to other people’s suffering?
Stephen Patrick Bell
Shortly after his arrival in his home country, the narrator encounters a mustached man whose wife employs a number of theatrics to ensure he’s surrounded by family when he’s informed of a death. The man goes on to explain this tradition to the narrator who wonders “why the man felt the need to explain to me a cultural practice that belonged to us both, which had been thrust upon us by our parents, our ancestors, and, before them, probably God himself,” which reflects the way people, simply by leaving a place in the past, are treated as though they know nothing of it by people who live there now. Was this your experience in Addis Ababa?
Maya Binyam
My biography is different from the narrator’s; I was born in the U.S. to an American mother, and am not necessarily immediately recognized as Ethiopian by Ethiopians unless they’re encountering me in the context of my father. There’s a lot that is familiar to me when I travel back to Ethiopia, and which feels intensely, almost seismically comforting: tastes, smells, the sound of Amharic, Tigrinya, and Oromo being spoken. But I also depend a lot on family when I’m there, who definitely treat me (sometimes justifiably) as if I require constant orientation. I’ve witnessed the same happen to my father, who fled the country in the ‘80s and is very clearly marked by his life in diaspora. His style of dress, his language, his uncertainty about how to follow even basic social conventions (e.g., tipping) sometimes position him as an outsider. I’m not sure if this is a thing elsewhere in the continent, but in Ethiopia, “diaspora” is used to signify a place and also the person who lives in it, i.e. “He’s a diaspora.” So the recognition that people are fundamentally warped by life elsewhere is baked into everyday speech.
Stephen Patrick Bell
There is a pattern to the narrator’s struggle, attempting to reconcile multiple realities—what he remembers, what he has observed from afar, and what he is experiencing upon his return. We learn as the story progresses the nature of the narrator’s departure from his home country and I wonder how much of that is shaping the way he’s looking back towards home. Is this anthropological lens something inherent to the character or is it something he’s adopted to cope with his experiences? How have his life at home and his life abroad shaped his thoughts on a place he hasn’t actually seen for himself in decades?
Maya Binyam
Everything you’ve mentioned here is a conditioning factor, I think. While writing I was thinking a lot about the language that attends “refuge,” a political term with no formal (or legally-binding) definition. As a place, it tends to connote safety, livelihood, even life itself, especially when it’s distinguished from a country of origin, which in the legal context must necessarily be a site of persecution—and potential death. But for Black immigrants seeking refuge in countries like the U.S., which are still governed by the logics of slavery, those distinctions can become confused.
The narrator, nevertheless, is attached to this binary thinking, and tends to think of himself as an embodiment of the fantastical qualities that attend life in America, even if those qualities don’t describe the life that he actually lives. He believes himself to be resourced, in good health, and very far from the grips of death, especially in contradistinction to his brother, who he imputes with the negative qualities typically associated with life in his home country: neediness, disease, poverty. “Refuge” is conventionally believed to be a place, but I tend to think of it as a set of relations. As a process, it is individuating: achieving it requires one to argue that they belong to a social group at risk of being harmed by the government, or by a group that the government cannot control, and then leaving behind the collective life which serves as its pretext. The narrator has been warped by this process, too, which is compounded, I think, by life in the U.S. He is attached to individualism, even if he still knows to argue against it, and struggles to maintain his sense of sovereignty, even as he yearns to belong to the people he has left behind.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I feel the injustices the narrator fled from, the ones that led him to his new country, are not unlike the ones he experiences once he got there. Thinking about refuge in the way you’re suggesting, in what ways did the system fail him? Where or how do you think people like him should seek it?
Maya Binyam
Oh, I don’t think I have any ideas about where or how people should seek refuge—that’s an almost impossible calculation, one I myself have never had to make, even if my life has been forged in its wake. But I do think there’s something lacking in the popular understanding of refuge as a place bound by national borders, whose provision is dependent on the generosity of the state. It seems fine and good for people who work in the legal field, or who otherwise are in the business of agitating for the provision of state-controlled resources, to wield that aspirational definition tactically, like a cudgel. But for those of us who are trying to find meaning in circumstances designed to deprive us of it, refuge can feel like something that happens ongoingly, interpersonally, and which we co-construct in ways that are covert, surreptitious, extra-legal, and quotidian.
I think often of a group my father and his friends started in Boston in response to the very expensive business of dying. Whenever someone in the group passes away, every other member of the group is expected to pay $50, and the grand sum is sent to the grieving family, who can then use the funds for whatever they need: sending the body back to Ethiopia, burying it, etc. The group now has over six hundred people, so when one of them dies, their family automatically gets $30,000. The group is obviously a product of refuge, but it produces refuge, too. Its name is in Amharic but translates to: Today for my people, tomorrow for me.
Stephen Patrick Bell
And on the middle class…the book’s cover, designed by Alex Merto, features a print by Belkis Ayón whose work grapples with many of the same socio-economic issues of the global economy Hangman’s narrator witnesses and whose own journey to the 1993 Venice Biennale takes as many strange turns as his does. Did you have any say in the cover and what do you hope it conveys to a reader who may be encountering your work for the first time?
Maya Binyam
I first encountered Belkis Ayón’s work in 2017, at her first retrospective, ten years after her death. The retrospective was traveling; I saw it almost accidentally, at El Museo Del Barrio, after wandering in during a long walk with a friend. I didn’t then know anything about the mythology that had inspired her: Akabuá, an Afro-Cuban secret society, and Princess Sikan, its only female member. But while writing Hangman, I thought often of Ayón’s uncanny relationship to symbolism. In her prints, as in the novel, everyday objects, which might otherwise be discarded, become totemic, and characters, even idiosyncratic ones, cannot be cleaved from the social relations they represent. I sent a few of her black and white prints to the book’s designer, Alex Merto, as references, though he, in the end, selected this detail from La Cena, which mimics the choreography of The Last Supper. There’s something uncanny about the print, almost funny—and yet the figures that surround Princess Sikan, who appears Jesus-like, convey a sense of ominousness or deep concern. I love the texture in the print, too, and the various artifacts of it being handled: the creases that cleave it, primarily. The cover isn’t exactly illustrative of the text, obviously, but I do hope it gives readers the sense of a story being constructed, reworked, with the potential to be encountered differently when read again.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Hangman, bookended by death as it is, in many ways is a story about travel, migration, moving from one space to another. One of my favorite elements of those kinds of stories, a universal element that grounds me as a reader in the world on the page, is food. I don’t think it is a spoiler to mention that the food in Hangman is universally terrible and at times isn’t even food. What was your thought process around food?
Maya Binyam
Food is generally bizarre, I think—at once intensely intimate, but also a locus of extreme projection. It can be a symbol, and often appears as such to the narrator: he has a hard time distinguishing it from the people who serve it to him, and often encounters it as a marker of excess wealth or extreme poverty. But once ingested, food can produce all sorts of feelings—satisfaction, unease, illness—that sometimes seem to relate very little to the food as it previously appeared as a disembodied object. The narrator is excited, at least at the very beginning of the novel, to be encountering dishes that he hasn’t consumed for half a decade, but his body reacts to them like foreign objects in need of expulsion. Practically speaking, our biomes are warped by the environments in which we live; I’ve witnessed a lot of family in diaspora travel back home and, on the advice of Western doctors, avoid the foods that once brought them exalted delight. There’s something very tragic to me about that, and also deeply ironic, given how sick so much of the food in the U.S. is making us, quietly and steadily. In any case, food calls attention, I think, to the body-as-membrane, and consuming it requires a willingness to become permeable. But the narrator believes his body to exist as a boundary that requires his protection, and the energy that he expends on that defense inhibits him from feeling pleasure. He’s alienated from sexual pleasure, too—when he feels it percolating, he tends to file the feeling away as inappropriate.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Now that you’ve published a book about this character you’ve spent so much time with, do you think you’re done with him?
Maya Binyam
I struggle with this question! In short, I don’t feel done with him, no. I at least don’t feel done with the impulses that motivate him to action, or with the inhibitions that keep him from it. The questions he raises are questions I’ll probably be working through my whole life, although I imagine I’ll try to address them in different form.
FICTION
Hangman
By Maya Binyam
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published August 8, 2020
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