Diane Lefer - California Transit

Interview

Your stories center around race and racial tension. As a white author, do you experience any anxiety exploring these topics?

No. I think it’s the most urgent conversation Americans need to have. The place occupied by race in our psyches affects almost everything from our daily lives to US foreign policy. I was lucky to come of age in the Sixties when this conversation really opened up and people of color were very patient with my ignorance. I was maybe the dumbest know-it-all white girl to go to Alabama to “help.” I feel like it’s OK to blunder as long as you stay open and listen. About a year after I wrote “Naked Chinese People,” I worked on a theatre project with a talented actor/director named Anthony Lee. He was tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and black.My first impression of him was, Here’s a man who gets hassled by the cops. His whole demeanor seemed calculated to put you at ease and reassure you that he wasn’t dangerous. A week later, he was shot and killed by the police. A mistake—and one that was emotionally devastating as well to the officer who made the split-second decision to pull the trigger. Anthony Lee didn’t inspire the story but I can’t look at it now without remembering and mourning him.

How long have you lived in Los Angeles? And how have your experiences there contributed to this collection?

In 1994, I was on a book tour for another story collection (The Circles I Move In), and much to my surprise, fell in love with Los Angeles. In NYC, I was working 80-hour weeks just to make the rent. In LA, I have time not only to create, but also to hike the desert and the mountains. I was interested in primate behavior. Dr. Cathleen Cox, Director of Research, recruited me for the LA Zoo. I had also always wanted to write a play. I got involved right away in the local theatre scene. Through the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed, I met Hector Aristizábal—Colombian exile, torture survivor, theatre artist, psychotherapist, activist, social thinker. We’ve been collaborating on multiple projects for a few years now. I work with the Program for Torture Victims, founded by Jose Quiroga who was Salvador Allende’s personal physician. I’ve interpreted for union leaders and peasant leaders from Colombia. I’ve studied in workshops with Hirokazu Kosaka, artist and Zen priest, and Rev. James Lawson, who Martin Luther King, Jr. honored as the “leading nonviolence theorist in the world.” I am still being formed by encounters like these. I have never before in my life met so many inspired and inspiring people.

From the eland and chimpanzee in “Alas, Falada!” to the sea lions in “California Transit,” wild animals are essential forces in some of your stories. Do you think that our lack of connection with animals has affected us? And could you talk about your work at the Los Angeles Zoo?

I’ve been with the zoo’s research department almost since my arrival in LA. We observe behavior, mostly to help us find the environment that will keep them happiest, interested in life, and with the least negative stress. The more time I spend with nonhuman animals—not just wild and zoo animals but domestic animals, too—the more I am fascinated and sometimes humbled when I witness their individuality, their emotional life, and their intelligence. Most of the day I live with the spoken or written word, with the English and sometimes the Spanish language. I have to leave all that behind when I’m with animals. To feel these fierce attachments and to communicate with creatures that don’t speak as I do—it opens up whole new spaces in my mind and my heart. And it again raises the question of Otherness in all its manifestations. Do we recognize and respect the nature of living beings who bear some mark of difference from ourselves? How can you hold yourself apart when a white-cheeked gibbon, anxious because of her mate’s illness, looks for comfort by reaching to hold your hand?

“At the Site Where Vision Is Most Perfect” is a haunting investigation of prisoners kept by the INS. Do you feel as if it is a journalistically accurate portrayal of what happens to immigrants deported from the United States? What kind of
research did you do to write this piece?

When I lived in Mexico, people were wonderful to me, but every now and then someone would say, “We treat you pretty well, don’t we? So why are North Americans so bad to us when we go there?” I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t want to start grandstanding, but I made a silent commitment that if I ever returned to the US, I would be in solidarity with Mexican people. Several years ago, I started volunteering as a Spanish-English interpreter for immigrants locked up by INS and also collecting affidavits about the human rights abuses in detention. Not in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, but in locations around Los Angeles County. This was a couple of years before 9/11, so the war on terrorism couldn’t even be used as the excuse. Back when I was interpreting and trying to get media coverage, it was hard to get the focus away from Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. So I wrote a play about INS detention that was performed a few times around LA, sometimes followed by discussion. Then, still trying to get public attention, I turned to the novella. It has seemed imperative to speak out. There was a political sensibility in my work before, but with “At the Site . . .,” I made a conscious decision to write as an advocate. That led to my consciously choosing to make the main character an English-speaking, educated professional. The idea is true to life. I had once met a woman who fit that description, who spent many months in detention and went through her savings because of a computer error by INS. She was finally freed to return to her home and her life, without any restitution or even an apology, but all that had happened long before I met her. In my direct experience all the people I interpreted for spoke no English and couldn’t afford to hire lawyers. Their stories were heartbreaking but I admit I chose to tailor the fiction instead so that a middle-class mainstream audience could realize, This could happen to me. It could happen to my friend, my partner, my colleague, my neighbor, my parent.

You are a successful writer who did not earn an MFA. You didn't take English in college because, as you said, you “could already speak it.” Do you feel as if you made the right decision? And what kind of work or studies have you done to develop your talent?

My line about already speaking English shows how little I knew about the academic world when I went to college. Actually, I never received even a BA. Traditional higher education is great for people temperamentally suited to it. I wasn’t. I dropped out and ran off to Oaxaca, Mexico, to live with Indians. Of course I learned a lot, but nothing that could have earned me a grade. My first published story was picked out of the slush pile in 1977 by Jacqueline Johnson who’s now at Bloomsbury and was then an editor at Redbook. She’s been supportive ever since and I got a lot of tips from her. Mostly, I learned through years of trial and error, just by writing. My conversations wtih Oscar Hijuelos, while he was working on his first novel, taught me to read as a writer, to consider the structure of what I was reading, to pay close attention to word choice. This had never occurred to me before. I was always just trying to get the story down on paper. Ironically, I ended up teaching in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College which also taught me a lot, having to work things out in my own head in order to answer my students’ questions.
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