News & Notes with Ed Gordon, January 23, 2006 · Ed Gordon talks with writer Gloria Naylor about her latest novel 1996, a fictionalized memoir about Naylor's experience under government surveillance.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5168026
(A special thanks to Ted Jackson for the transcript of the NPR radio interview of Gloria Naylor.)Interviewer - The novelist Gloria Naylor is best known for writing critically acclaimed African American literature including "The Women of Brewster Place", however Naylor"s latest offering falls into that ambiguous category some call fictionalized memoir. What"s more, this somewhat true personal story is centered around Naylor"s conspiracy theories about government surveillance and mind control. The book is titled "1996". That"s the year it first became apparent to Naylor that she was being spied on.
Gloria - Since many of these things did happen to the real Gloria Naylor, by using myself as a protagonist, I was able to have the book act partly as a catharsis. Basically, what 1996 is about is our loss of privacy in this country that the government has moved well beyond just the simple following of people and the tapping of their phones, but they now have technology that is able to decode the brain patterns and to detect what people are actually thinking. And they have another technology called microwave hearing where they can actually input words into your head bypassing your ears. Now, both of these technologies are documented and people have patents for part of the process, so what I wanted to do with 1996 was to say to my fellow Americans that we have to be vigilant about any attacks on our civil liberties, even innocuous attacks, because they can snowball and lead to other things.
I - Now, we should note the book is centered around an island off of South Carolina where you go to enjoy life there and write and tend to a garden and then as the account of the book suggests, your tranquility is ruined.
G - I realized at some point that I was being followed and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house and so these cars began to surveill me and people began to follow me around and it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated and for no reason that I could come up with, since I"m not basically a political writer. I"m a fiction writer for the most part. And so I just didn"t... I didn"t understand that I knew about COINTELPRO, because I"m African American and in those years the FBI did many shameful things to disrupt black nationalist organizations. But since I was not part of any of that, I thought that I would be immune basically from the government having any interest in me.
I - But let me play devil"s advocate, Gloria. There are going to be people who are going to say just based on what you just said, "Why would the goverment follow you, what interest would they have, etc. etc. Here"s a woman who"s just simply borderline paranoid."
G - Well, what I can say to them is this. It"s the same thing that happens when a child is abused by a trusted adult. Now that child will go to some parents and tell them these things. They will be believed by some of the parents. Some of the parents will never believe that Uncle George could be doing these things to their little girl. So, it"s either that you"re going to believe me or you"re not going to believe me. And I couldn"t worry about that. I"m worried about it a little bit to be truthful to you. The people will think, "Well she just had a nervous breakdown". But when I really sat and thought about it for a long time, I realized I can"t worry about what reception this news is going to be received in. I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I"m willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.
I - And why you?
G - I have no idea why me. I think I just ran into the wrong people at the wrong time and like the book shows, what starts with a very innocent dispute with a neighbor cascades and cascades and cascades into a whole production.
I - Gloria, let me get your thought when a couple of weeks ago you saw the headline like most of us did about the White House and the tapping of American citizens. With this book, you must have, not been surprised, but I would think it caused you to sit straight up.
G - I was surprised that it even came out and like the New York times they sat on the story for a whole year and that"s part of why we don"t know the truth of many of these black operations that go on and because of one patriotism of some people within the news media, because of the improbability that you would be believed, if you became a whistle-blower. All of that lets these abuses flourish. The intelligence community for the most part has no accountability at all to the congress and to us the American People. And so they feel that they are above the law. And every blue moon something like this Times manifesto will come out and people will say to themselves, "My God, I had no idea that"s going on." What I believe is that a lot more than that is going on. This is just the tip of the iceberg that happened to get exposed.
I - Fiction writer Gloria Naylor. Her latest book is titled "1996"
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