It’s come time, as the year’s exertions and dramas near a merciful close, to ponder the works of art and prose, from 2023, that have most stuck with us. Maya Binyam’s debut novel, Hangman, is certainly one. This is the kind of book, with its striking form and vision, that is both unmistakably of the moment and a work built to last. What makes Hangman so distinctive—and a book that people will still be reading in 2024 and beyond—is the voice in which it’s written. Binyam’s narrator, an unnamed man returning to his home country in Africa after many decades abroad, is a natural observer with a distinctly un-literary sensibility. The story he has to tell is a travelogue of sorts; he takes the reader on a humorous and at times surreal journey, as he seeks to discover the mysterious reason for his return. It is a political novel, a philosophical novel, a character-driven novel. There is much to be said for this new voice in literature, not least because of the voice, Binyam’s signal creation, of her book’s curious and compelling narrator.

Binyam stopped by Pioneer Works, a few days after Hangman’s release in August, to talk with me about internet cafes, C. L. R. James, and the stories expected of migrants. We’re pleased to release here an edited version of our conversation, which was among the highlights of a busy year in PW's media lab.

I have a million things I'd love to ask you about this book, the themes it touches on and raises—migration, refuge, storytelling, form. But I want to start by talking about the voice that carries it. Hangman is narrated by this character who's returning to an unnamed home country, somewhere in Africa, after many years away. A plane ticket has been arranged for him; he's returning on this weighty journey, to connect with family. He has a brother who's unwell, and death hovers over his trip, but he has this strangely detached relationship to what’s happening, to how he narrates his own travails. There’s a moment when he says, of one of the people he meets: "I tried to relate to him and understand his concerns"—this kind of describes all his interactions. How did this striking, laconic voice come to you? Did you sit down one day and say, I can channel this guy?

It's a good question, and one that I tend to answer evasively in part because it's really difficult to track the emergence of the voice. I've been writing in some iteration of it for many years, and the attached character typically has the same biographical details, though I've written stories that take place in various periods of his life. The voice has also shifted and become more crystallized as I've written through it. Everything that I've read has influenced it in ways that I can't quite track.

I will say, a big part of the voice comes from family writings that I've happened upon. I read this diary many years ago that my father had written about a journey to visit his brother. The circumstances of that visit were completely different from the ones that appear in [Hangman], but it was a kind of diaristic travelogue. I guess in that diary there was a style of observation that was very compelling to me, and that I've been working with ever since. That was essentially the genesis, and things have become transformed, since then, in ways I can't quite trace.

These things are mysterious.

They are mysterious. I do think that the diary was the origin, but it's also become mine in many ways.

You’ve described this narrator as an extremely reluctant one. He's a keen observer, often really funny, a great anthropologist, in his way. But he's absolutely resistant to ascribing larger meanings to his observations. I wonder if you could talk about these traits of his, how they shaped the book’s form. What is it to play with a reluctant narrator?

It was fascinating to write through the voice of someone who, as you've said, is very resistant to narrative meaning-making. He has an aspirationally objective view of the world, and he doesn't think descriptively. Obviously, all of the narration is within his own head. There are very few adjectives in the book. There are no metaphors. There is symbolism, but he doesn't have a symbolic understanding of things. And he's reluctant for anything to be something other than what it is. If there is symbolism in the book, it happens through repetition, through displacement, through something appearing where it shouldn't.

There's a moment in the book where he says, "He asked me what the value of ten dollars symbolized. I told him it symbolized one expensive sandwich or two inexpensive ones.” This is how his mind works.

Right. And that was an interesting challenge to me; it originates within this character who is not a writer. He doesn't have a writerly sensibility, which isn't to say that he doesn't have a narrative understanding of things. He is actually quite smart about the narratives that are expected to originate within him by virtue of the various circumstances that he's been in. He knows that he was in exile, he knows that he was a refugee, and he knows that he is an immigrant returning to his home country. And by virtue of those various subject positions, he knows that people want from him a particular kind of story. He says at one point in the book while writing an email home to his wife—

He says: "In the case of the so-called immigrant returning to his home country, the story should be a good one."

Yeah, it's supposed to be a happy story. It's supposed to be one in which the protagonist feels welcomed, feels recognized, and is brought back to a space of familiarity. And he, up until that point, has experienced something that's very different. He's very alienated. He hasn't been able to recognize his family. He's eaten all this food, but it's causing horrible indigestion. And he nevertheless writes a kind of fictitious email to his wife saying that he's had a wonderful 24 hours. He's being treated like a king, blah, blah, blah. He has some sense of what kind of story is expected from him, and he is willing to produce that story even if it doesn't cohere to his reality.

There are some wonderful scenes in internet cafés, and this is where emails are a kind of storytelling. He’s thinking through, “Okay, here's the kind of story I'm supposed to tell my wife about. It's supposed to be a kind of good story, but I'm going to hint that I have some problems. But now I'm going to leave the internet café,” and it's really funny.

I love internet cafés.

They're a particular kind of space.

Yeah. And I haven't been to one in a really long time.

I know, right? Well, now we have these phones.

Unfortunately.

But it used to be when one traveled, internet cafés were such a part of the trip.

They’re where you go to experience your life in the other place for half an hour or whatever.

Exactly. Pay for your 30 minutes, write your email home. You just spoke a moment ago about the sort of stories that are expected of migrants. But there are also, of course, different kinds of migrants in our contemporary world, refugees being one of them. Your narrator here has this sense that, okay, a migrant returning home is supposed to tell one kind of story, a good story. But the stories we expect of refugees are perhaps another kind of story, a story of hardship or escape or how awful their home country is.

In his review of the book for the New Yorker, Julian Lucas wrote, "Narrative is one of the many tariffs that the world exacts from the uprooted, but what happens when the vagaries of displacement don't add up to a story, or at least not one that its subject is willing to tell?" I thought Julian really caught something there about this reluctant narrator who has been uprooted in more ways than one. What does that add up to? Does that description ring true for you of the book, or what animates it?

It does ring true for me. I think it's complicated because he is willing to tell a kind of wondrous return narrative in that email to his wife. But he's also willing to tell a story about himself in which his life in the country where he sought refuge is resourced. It's happy; he has a stable income. He really holds onto that image of himself, which is a conventional story.

And that's a story that is propagated by the process of seeking refuge in a country like the US, which is a narratively generative process. Oftentimes, in order to seek refuge in the States, someone must tell a story in which they appear vulnerable to persecution, to suffering, to potential death by virtue of their belonging to a collective that's being persecuted. And then that is rendered in distinction to the life that they're meant to find once they're accepted into refuge, of which there is no formal definition in the States. But obviously it connotes safety and livelihood and life itself.

I think by virtue of having gone through that process, [the narrator] is very attached to that story about his life post-refuge. And we only really catch glimpses of it. We don't see him in his home country except for that very first paragraph where he's in the taxi and arriving at the airport. But he does make reference to himself in these oblique ways, especially in distinction to the people he's encountering in his home country, whom he tends to view almost metonymically for the state of the country itself. And he sees them oftentimes as impoverished and under-resourced, but himself as a respectable and resourced guy.

He has trouble shedding the vantage of diaspora, as you put it.

We’ve spoken about the craziness of the refugee system generally. But I wonder if you could talk about the category of Black refuge. You alluded to the complexities of applying for refuge in a place where Black life is perhaps not respected or avowed.

I think the idea that Black people could find refuge in the US, and that the state would have the capacity to provide it for Black immigrants, is obviously a fictitious myth that's been built up by propaganda. I’ve recently started thinking about that more explicitly. I grew up in a community of immigrants, many of whom had found refuge in the states. Some people came here as asylees, and others came much later under various programs. Some people won the visa lottery or whatever. But my father came to the States as a refugee from Ethiopia, and many of his friends did too.

When I was a kid, it was very clear to me that whatever refuge had been created was co-created among the people that I was raised with. Legally refuge is supposed to be a temporary thing. People pass through it, and are then meant to be able to return to their home countries. Though many of the people—like those I was raised by—stayed here permanently. They didn't go back. And this temporary state became permanent. The sort of tenets of refuge, the safety that's meant to be provided by this state, it seemed very clear to me from a young age that the state did not have the capacity to provide that. And if people were finding safety, it was because they were making it themselves.

I witnessed that as a kid. And then as I got older, I developed a two-pronged approach to it: I've had the personal experience of this confusing, embodied life, and then I've tried to think about it from a more analytic or distanced approach. And the conflation of those two things, I guess, produces a novel.

For a while, when I was in college, I studied the various intersections of the immigration system and anti-terrorism programs. And it became very clear how Black immigrants, as soon as they come to the US, become targets of the state, whether because they get folded into American blackness and are processed in the wake of slavery, or because they are seen as foreign agents that are threats.

Your narrator was a refugee in the States and settled there. But now he's on this mysterious quest in his home country, full of mishaps. He loses his wallet and loses his passport, but he’s oddly passive in confronting these hardships. He seems to prefer to just be ignorant and see what happens. His brother's not well; there's this theme of death hovering. And there’s a line that really struck me. "Death was a communal process," he says, "even if you wanted to experience it alone." This is one of his lovely anthropological insights: I don't really want to be a part of this, he’s saying, but I don't have a choice. I wonder if you could talk about where that sentiment comes from both for him in the context of the story, and also in your thinking about rituals around death.

I think for him, he's referencing the specific practice that he's been raised with, but is alienated from by virtue of the fact that he's found life in another country—when someone dies, in his country's culture, everyone is sort of brought into the fold of that death. It's quite different from how death is often treated in the States, where it’s an extremely individuating process. I grew up with these other rituals of death. Traditionally in Ethiopia when someone dies, it's not as if the person who's closest to them will be told immediately. Oftentimes, their friends and family will tell each other first and then tell the person who's closest to them that they’ve been lost. And that process can become very protracted when someone's living in diaspora, and even when they aren't. It's a highly theatrical process in my experience, and a very empathetic one. That moment of reveal, the moment at which someone is told that they are about to begin grieving, it's just an incredible feat of empathy. There's a lot of grief mirroring that happens.

Grief as performance.

Right. In my experience, it's been very special and strange and theatrical. It can involve a lot of deception. I've experienced that throughout my life. And that's one side of my family. The other side of my family is American. I grew up on that side without any rituals of death. Death was something that I was incentivized to believe was not worth thinking about, really. It was just something that was inevitable, a fact of life, but also wouldn't happen, so don’t worry about it. And I think I internalized that. I wasn't a spiritual child. I was an adamant atheist for some reason before I knew how horrible atheism can be. And before I had experienced significant loss.

You needed something, some stories to tell.

Exactly. As I got older, I realized that I would need something else if I was going to live through the deaths of people that I loved. And this tradition is one that was highly familiar to me, but also one that I felt kind of alienated from, in ways that are similar to how the narrator is alienated. It encourages a paranoid reading of reality. I haven't been in the position of that paranoid reading, but I've watched people close to me become fearful that death has happened but isn't entirely visible yet, but maybe will be visible if you learn to read things correctly.

A sense that it’s imminent.

Maya Binyam, Pioneer Works, 2023.Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

I can give a specific example: there was this one time my stepmother was throwing a surprise birthday party for my father, and we're not big birthday people. It was kind of strange that she was doing that, but a very nice thing that she was planning for. In the days leading up to the party, she was doing all of this cooking and he was very confused. He saw her cooking and he was like, "This is way too much food for us for the week. Why are you cooking this?" She was like, "So-and-so's going to Ethiopia. We're going to have a goodbye thing." He was like, "It doesn't make sense. People go to Ethiopia all the time. We don't have goodbye parties for them."

So, he got very paranoid that someone in Ethiopia had died. He started calling all of his family members and was like, is everyone okay? He became tortured and paranoid. And on the day of the surprise party, everyone gathered, and he was very scared. There's a photo of them where everyone's very happy, and he's in the middle just looking completely traumatized.

In the book, the narrator has these very funny tossed off lines about how, "In my experience, even a guarantee was unreliable, as anything could happen between the present and the future, including death." And in fact his story begins with a death—when he’s on the plane, the man in the seat next to him dies, which is a first imminence of something. After he gets off the plane, he's looking for nostalgia or an old friend, but doesn’t find either. He says at one point, "I kept looking for someone among them, and they kept looking for someone among me." It is a lovely, layered assertion; he contains multitudes. But what can you say about the way in which his experience of homecoming is ambiguous, even ambivalent? Is that fair to say?

Yes, definitely. He's not choosing to go back. He's sent back, and he isn't quite sure why. And he's like, well, if I'm going back, I might as well feel happy about it. I know that this is a big moment in one's life. The moment that you return home to the place that you've been gone from, in his case for 26 years. He doesn't have control, but he's like, if I'm going, then I might as well try to enjoy it. I might as well try to find the people I know. I might as well be excited about these foods that I haven't eaten for a very long time. I think that's in part because he does want to feel those things. He does want to feel like he belongs to collective life again. He wants to feel like he's among people who regard him as familiar, and at the same time, he's very attached to his sense of self as separate from other people. Navigating those competing impulses and desires produces what looks like a kind of motionlessness or affectlessness, but he’s actually just being pulled in a bunch of different directions.

He has a strong implicit desire, too, not to render his own story through the lens of larger systems or analyses. He's like, no, this is my experience. It's kind of ridiculous, and sad. People are flawed. And there's a great scene where he's listening to these grad students talk, and says something like, “That was just how so-called smart people got away with advancing their ill-founded points: speaking confidently on behalf of people who did not feel equipped to speak for themselves.” This captures something about him.

Definitely. It's always funny to talk about the book, because I wrote it pretty impulsively. I think that's often the case for writers, even if they believe that they went into it with a kind of scaffolding. The writing itself is often impulsive, and by virtue of that strange subconscious, things emerge. But I wrote that line and afterward I was like, that's kind of a dig at me too.

We live in this moment when upwards of three hundred million people in the world live outside the country of their birth. It's been said that the migrant is the emblematic modern or postmodern figure, the emblem of our age. Hangman is already having a lovely life, where people are saying, "It's about this moment." But I read a quote from you in a recent interview about how, while certainly there's a politics to this book, to your work, it’s also true that, if the book has a political project, it's a surreptitious one. You said, “This relates back to obstruction—I wanted readers to be alienated, perhaps from their ingrained associations with how these big political signifiers work.” What's that alienation you want people to wrestle with?

In that interview, I was talking about countries as they appear in words. For various people, the word “Ethiopia” will connote all kinds of stories. I was just thinking about this actually, because I was in Boston, where my whole family lives. Last night we had a big party, and of the forty people sitting around, almost everyone was Ethiopian, born there or the children of people born there. And basically for the duration of the party, we were sitting around and talking about Ethiopia, talking about people's past experiences there, talking about current events, politics.

It was a bunch of people sitting around a house in Boston talking about a place that was very, very far away. There's something to me that's deeply sad and melancholy about that. But there's also something amazing too, which is that together we're creating another version of this place that isn't geographically fixed in space. It has some relation to it, but mostly it's about the people who are sitting in the room who are creating this collective mythology about a place that they left behind.

I'm very interested in that. I'm very interested in how nations are built through displacement, and how they're changed because of it. Oftentimes in narratives of migration, be they fictional or nonfictional, there's talk about how the immigrant herself is changed by virtue of her migration. And I'm really interested in the place that she leaves behind or the place that she goes to—how those places are in fact changed by the displacement of the bodies that used to populate them, and through the storytelling that they do once they've left.

I love that. The ways in which a place or a place’s name becomes a story, and becomes a name to organize community around—even if the stories of that place are more true to how it was at a certain time than to how it is now. That’s also a part of creating refuge for oneself, for one’s people. It’s what’s given rise to what we expect of the “immigrant novel”—stories about trauma and arriving in a new place, about living in between, about how that’s tricky. These are tropes that get played and replayed. Your book, by contrast, tells us a human story of return, and of ambivalence that isn’t overdetermined by the things that we want to attach to it.

What you're saying is reminding me, have you read Letters from London, the C. L. R. James collection?

I have. I love it. C. L. R. James is a god to me—these are letters he wrote home to Trinidad, in the Caribbean where he’s from, after moving to London in the 1930s.

They’re so good. And there's this moment, maybe you remember, in one of the early letters from London, where he writes, "I fit in here just like a pencil fits into a sharpener," which is amazing.

There's a metaphor for you.

Yeah. It's supposed to be this kind of jubilant statement of belonging, but of course there's a fundamental violence. I guess in writing [Hangman] I was interested in how the sharpened pencil, one that's confidently sharpened, does when it gets back home. ♦

This conversation aired on August 12th, 2023, during the Second Sundays Broadcast Live Hour on 8 Ball Radio. It has been edited for length and clarity.