Ayana Mathis on Her New Novel, “The Unsettled”
Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a national bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection when it came out in 2012. Her highly anticipated follow-up, 11 years in the making, The Unsettled, is a family saga concerned with a son and his mother’s search for community and belonging. It takes readers from the rural South to Philadelphia in the 1980s, and draws from the painful history of the MOVE bombing—when the city’s police bombed a Pan-African commune, killing the adult members and three children. It’s a haunting event, and through the alchemy of fiction, Mathis explores the urge to create a community built on the highest ideals. In the excerpts below from a recent interview with Bazaar, the author discusses the longing for perfection, and why becoming a divinity student was helpful to her creative process.
“I don’t think I believe in utopia. If I could have utopia for a week, I think that’s what I could handle. I don’t think that people can manage them. And I actually don’t mean it pessimistically. What I mean is that I think that human beings are massive and complicated and confounding. Even if you were to somehow strip the world of every harmful ism that exists, there would still be complicated, strange human beings with souls who couldn’t be wrangled. It’s hard for me to imagine what a utopia would look like, because I think human beings by nature resist that sort of thing.”
“It’s like we want to be free … or do we? More than anything, I think we want to belong to something. But then there are these limitations to belonging, right?”
“I’m in divinity school. So, I think of it a lot in those terms. I’ve wanted to go to divinity school for a long time—10 or 15 years. I grew up in a super religious household, Church of Christ, kind of Pentecostal thing. I wouldn’t call myself a religious person at all. I don’t go to church. I left the church when I was a teenager, but the church never left me.”
“There’s a lot of religious references to it in the Bible. I think of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. They’re out of Egypt; they were slaves for hundreds of years. They come out. Manna is falling down every day, and they say, ‘We’re sick of this, man. How long are we gonna be out here?’ It’s just, like … we resist.”
“I am drawn to the language that the church uses to ask questions about what it means to be alive. That language seemed to me both incredibly elegant and incredibly close to human experience. I very often will take huge issues with the answers that Christian churches come up with to those questions. The answers are not my beliefs. But the ways in which the questions are posed are elegant and profound and beautiful and very close to what it is to be a human. Why am I here? Why do I suffer? All the big questions. I think of phrases from the Psalms … ‘Do not be far from me, for there is trouble here, and no one to help.’ These ways of addressing things like grief, desolation, elation … the poetic ways biblical language does that. They’re very meaningful to me, and they often feel very true. What Christianity has done with the weapon that it is often made of the Bible, that’s a different conversation. But that has always really resonated with me.”
“I don’t know that I would call myself a believer. Sometimes the whole thing seems impossible. What I do believe in is belief. I look at the belief of my grandparents or my mother’s belief. They’re very conservative Christians, whose views I disagree with almost entirely about most things. And yet it would be beyond stupid and ignorant of me to dismiss the power of their belief and what it does for them, how it acts in their lives.”
“It helps with writing novels. Writing novels is awful … horrible, horrible. And my latest one has taken eight years. When I am discouraged and thinking, What is the point of this torture show? my answer is that art, at its best, has a way of asking questions similar to the way that religious thought acts. And that I then become a part of a concert of believers and questioners. And that’s a pretty fortunate place to be—one to which I owe something, at the very least my silly little book and my sweat and tears.”
“Faith helps with the craft of writing, too. Belief entails that you think a human being is an incredible thing—incredibly awful and incredibly awesome in the truest sense of the word. If I believe that, which I do, it is always a check against superficial flat characters, against reducing people or their ideas. Human beings are capacious and massive. Massively awful, massively wonderful, massively confounding—but massive.”
“The main character of my novel, Ava, she’s in a really bad place for the first half of the novel, and she ends up in a bad place at the end of the novel. But I think in the middle, she experiences something that is like what she was looking for. She wanted to feel transcendence, and that transcendence may not look like what other people would say is healthy or happy. When she becomes involved with this radical group and its leader, Cass, there is this fulfillment, this thing that she was searching for. It doesn’t turn out so happy. But I don’t think that reduces her to a vector of pain.”
“What I try to do is consider a person in their entirety. It is dishonest to essentialize that person into a pained body or to essentialize that history into a pained body. And it is equally dishonest to pretend the pain doesn’t exist. The only way that I have figured out to do this is to make people in some way comprehensive. The pain exists with whatever else that they are, which I think is the reality of what a human being is.”
“In both of my novels, I am thinking about large societal movements and currents and they are, I hope, always located inside of a body and a person. I’m very interested in how people are living on what we might call a margin. They have a very different metric for how they understand themselves. That sort of widening is part of the project of the books. To try and pry open the narrow margins of what we decide is happy, what is dysfunctional, what is functional—all of these things have different definitions. What I have tried to do is rethink what we might say is a fulfilling experience of life.”
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