Code Noir | The Canisia Lubrin Interview

Sarah Marie: Okay, so, I guess we should start with saying that this is your first book of short stories, I think?

Canisia Lubrin: Apparently.

SM: You also have some books of poetry. Do you think of yourself as a poet?

CL: Absolutely, I’m a poet. I think I‘m someone who has a kind of life in language. Poetry being about its most elemental qualities, and all of the ways this kind of relationship allows for us to be introspective about the world we live in, about who we are, and how we are, and why we are. Those big questions. And all of the small things in between. So, I certainly do think of myself as a writer, but I think my primary constitution is the poet.

SM: What do you feel would be the difference between the way poems move and your stories are moving?

CL: Yeah, well, it’s a good question, Sarah, and I don’t necessarily have these kinds of purist views about these modes of languaging experience or storying our experience. I’m not so beholden to the silos. But what is absolutely important to me are the effects of those different modes and what they say about human experience in our capacity to live consciously. You know, that’s the thing about language. It carries so much of our meaning for us. It’s already freighted with all of these moral questions and these moral ideas. There’s an ethics to language, and it’s connected to absolutely everything we hold important: truth, consequence, philosophy, lies, you know? Reality itself is affected because it’s mediated through language for us. The poem, then, is tied to the most ancient art form that we have. These glorious auditory movements that the mind has made, to imagine itself, and to imagine our species, into something we call art and literature. The poem for me is where that energy is most concentrated, and where you do a lot with very little. So, the way a poem moves has a lot to do with how that energy is deployed, how that kind of really compact, elemental expression is deployed. And every poet does this differently (though a lot of poets can and do sound the same), which is what’s so fascinating.

SM: That’s such a good answer! Oh, my God, okay so, when you sit down to write a story, is there like a movie in your head? Or, is there like a piece of art, or a picture?

CL: Music. There’s music in my head.

SM: Oh wow! What’s that like?

CL: It’s about sound. I think I live in sound foremost, because for me sound is multi-sensory. It moves in the flesh. It moves in the air. It certainly engages the eyes. I think all of us have a kind of rhythm to our lives, and we encounter the materials of each other’s lives musically, rhythmically, on those frequencies. It’s a way of making sense of things. And, I think, at its core it is the emotional intelligence of sound that is utterly persuasive. It can happen before language. And, I think I just trust sound. I trust music, in a sense, better than I trust, even language. Because, I feel, somehow, that music cannot lie. There’s just something to sound, and its preoccupations with really resonant, persuasive things that happen subterranean in us, you know. Things that we don’t have the opportunity to intercept and overdetermine. So, I tend to trust that kind of primitive thing. But there is something to the shape of a story that I can follow with sound, when the action must rise or fall, when the beat happens and tells me something needs to shift, or a new thing needs to happen, or a corner needs to be turned. You know, that sort of thing. The architecture of the story itself is a musical one for me.

SM: Okay wow, you’re very good at this. Okay, can we talk a little bit about the art in the book?

CL: Yes.

SM: The artist is Torkwase Dyson, who some friends and I are actually all crazy about as well.

CL: Fantastic!

SM: How did you come to, like, connect with her to create the pieces for this book?

CL: So, Torkwase and I met through some mutual friends, and we sort of blossomed this beautiful, collaborative relationship. And I count myself really lucky to call her a friend. I wanted the King Louis articles to appear as a kind of disturbed presence in the book because there is no way it could have been anything else when it was dreamed into being, when it was legislated, when it was enacted for over 200 years, and when it became the blueprint for how chattel slavery was carried out. Pretty much everywhere in the world. It could not have been anything other than a kind of profound, existential disturbance. And those ideas continue to be exactly that, even though they’ve been invisibilized and sort of had their language recast in other “benign” ways. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to call the book Code Noir: Metamorphoses. Because those ideas are still around. They’ve just been morphed. So, Torkwase and I were having this conversation over dinner about, you know “How’s the book going?” And “How’s this piece of art going that you’re working on?” That kind of thing. What happens when you sit down with friends over dinner. I was saying my publisher was having a good bit of trouble with the presence I wanted the codes to have in the book. To mash them up. To treat them as artifacts that perhaps were just dug up from a cavern somewhere and slapped onto the page. But they had a slight difference of opinion. They thought the codes needed to be legible. That people should be able to read them. I agree that they should have some legibility, but I didn’t want to privilege them, because, you know, also the conceit of the book is that although I’m writing in relation to the codes, they are not front and centre. Their logic and their ideas are not privileged. They’re pushed into the background or side-ground. They’re an echo. They’re a glance. They’re existing as the master narrative, which is a structural thing. Torkwase said “well, let me see.” I showed her the proof, and she said, “Oh, yeah. I haven’t read the book, but I know that’s not what you want.” She asked me to send her proofs, which I did, and she had those drawings to me fast, and I was totally floored because it was a completely lyrical exchange. It was barely a conversation. But she understood profoundly what I meant. The drawings are just perfect, you know.

SM: Okay, I could spend an hour on that! So I’m gonna just pivot.

CL: You want me to say more? 

SM: No, I just, there’s the me that knows that this is a conversation that will be published online by The Miramichi Reader and needs to focus, and the Me that wants to monopolize all of your time. But, I also want to ask a bit more about the architecture of the book. Okay, so the stories are kind of shaped around the articles of this old piece of law from France. The articles are not in order, and each story draws, in some way, from the corresponding article of this legislation from the 17th century.

CL: Yes.

SM: But, some of the stories are set in the present, certainly the last one is set in the future.

CL: Yes, right.

SM: Okay, so what do you think would be the biggest challenge to reading a book like this, shaped around something from the 17th century, but with stories that are contemporary or speculative, you know, I guess based on the current sociological situation that readers find themselves in?

CL: Yeah. I understand, as I presume most others do, that there are a series of ordinary ideas and expectations informing how literature is made in a contemporary sense. Because you know, publishing is a business, and it has categories, and they must be reductive by function to fit into something called a market. Black writers are usually categorized into that column that says they are producing social realism. And it’s a sociological project, which is educative. They have to educate people about their marginal identities. 

SM: Yes.

CL: Okay. I think what we do as artists exceeds those categories, and it’s a kind of disservice to the range and the complexity and the multiplicity of what makes an artist. And to constantly have to answer that sociological question is a reductive, stuck project, right? This is not necessarily shade, but I did not want to write 59 versions of 12 Years a Slave, answering to a 1685 edict. I did not want to write The Butler, right? So, conceptually, if there is an argument to be made, I am saying that the ideas and the logics of these codes, and the kind of institutional violence that they attempted to normalize, which was impossible to do (impossible as it is to legislate that kind of extreme violence, and for that to be anything good, that kind of mendacity, that kind of absolutely corrupt power,) there has to be something in us that is in excess of all of that, and that is angled perpetually toward life, toward living and making life, and it has to exceed time. You know, it cannot be stuck in “A Time-Space.” The imagination is omnidirectional. It moves front-ways, back-ways, sideways. Whatever it is, you have to be able to imagine yourself beyond the catastrophic thing in order to survive it.

I’m saying conceptually that those ideas in King Louis XIV’s black codes are very much still around, and I was concerned with the contemporary implications of those ideas. Like how they have manifested in the workday, that you have to answer to somebody (for however many mandated hours a day) to earn a paycheque that will barely allow you to have a proper place to live, to pay all your bills, to retire. That you have to have a passport. That the Nation State has become the primary mode of arranging people’s lives, right? And all of it, you know, is about the kind of upward concentration of wealth for a few people; and legality always been about that, right? People are conscripted into these notions that somehow are they’re living an existence where freedom is primary and principle. And that bears many false guises in contemporary life. 

SM: [nodding endlessly, grinning]

CL: My sort of commitment in this book is to think of what is contemporary as precedent. How such a thing can affect a life deep into the future. Because none of what is happening right now, you know, with the mass deportations, the erasing of actual history from the public record, people being abducted in broad daylight if they don’t fit somebody’s idea of what an American citizen is, for instance…

SM: [still nodding, but no longer grinning]

CL: All of these ideas are sort of spilling everywhere. The windrush generation, again, what was happening in England, where, you know, England decided, of course, that it can now discard all of the people it had welcomed in the seventies and the sixties from the Caribbean to help it rebuild after the war. It was suddenly time to kick them out, because, you know, they were the immigrant problem. This is happening all over. So, these Code Noir ideas very much structure the modern world. And I’m putting the Code Noir on par in scale and importance with decrees like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, and the Treaty of Versailles. It is a founding document of the modern world. It’s just been buried because its story isn’t triumphalist. It manifests still, like right now, with all the book banners and the people treating actual history as somehow some kind of poison because it gets in the way of the tyrants’ self-interested, rose-coloured vision of the world.

SM: Yes, totally.

CL: I know that was a long answer. But many have argued that history is not siloed in the past. The Code Noir didn’t stay in the 17th century.

SM: I mean, I feel like anything worth really saying, anything worth having real feelings about, it can’t be said in a [social media post]. So, I’m so grateful that you went through all of that with me, truly. I think there is this way of talking now that feels a little bit more new to me, because I’m actually a bit new to actively using social media. And, there’s this way of people talking that’s being shaped by just these like, really quick answers, and I don’t always understand what people are trying to say. But I think your answer was really great!

CL: Okay. It’s true what you say about social media, though.

SM: Yeah! I like that it connects me to people. But, it does take a lot of work to make sure that you’re filtering what’s coming in, and like, not getting swept up in these angry or intense moments.

CL: Yeah, yeah, you’re always fighting the algorithms, too.

SM: Yes. Totally. Okay, I am going to pivot again.

CL: Okay.

SM: Is there a companion reading piece for this book? Like, do you think there is a book you could read alongside Code Noir?

CL: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think so. John Keene’s Counternarratives, for instance, is a kind of sibling project. I think of it that way, its imprint is in the shape that Code Noir takes. On the kind of disaggregated structure of Code Noir. And, I think the style of storytelling in a book like The Marvelous Equations of the Dread by Marsha Douglas, and the beautiful voicings in that book it’s just so, so stunning in terms of the music of its cultural milieu. Also, the rhythms of the different kinds of languages registers in Simone Schwartz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond. In terms of structure, and the kind of polyvocal shape of Code Noir, I would think of A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, and A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan).

SM: I am going to read all of these! Okay. So, I got Code Noir for my ereader, but I also listened to the audiobook from the library. 

CL: Oh!

SM: How involved were you in the process of finding the right actors for the audiobook? Like, which actor would tell which story? It seems like that part would be super important to you.

CL: Yeah, absolutely. I was very involved. Though, I feel as though I should have been even a bit more involved than I was. But, the conversations that I had with the producer at the beginning of the process, of conceptualizing what the audiobook should do, what it should sound like … Nathaniel was really receptive to feedback. We talked about how to try to preserve the polyvocal nature of the book. Because, again, the King’s codes, if we want to look at it as a univocal, dominant master narrative, I wanted a chorus to counteract that.

SM: Oh that’s so cool. 

CL: It is not that Code Noir could not be univocal, but I don’t think this approach could serve the kind of story that a book like that should tell. Your typical single, omnipotent, third-person narration would turn out a very different book. What’s it’s taken to abolish something as terrible as chattel slavery; to overcome all of the horror, you would need a revolutionary spirit. Whether that’s in a small way or a mega way. So, I wanted that kind of spirit of the many. I think architecturally. I think conceptually because I’m also interested in ideas as an artist. 59+ different voices telling 59 stories inside a larger network of stories, and there’s certainly more than that. So, we had the auditions, and I got the files sent to me, and I was involved in whittling down the choices to the other four actors, and myself. 

SM: Oh!

CL: Because there is a framing voice in the opening and closing section. It also pops up throughout as I imagine a meta-narrative throughline. I suppose that is also why people call Code Noir a novel. But also, to imbue that voice with the vocal mechanics of, say, a lawyer. Because again, we’re looking at the Black codes. This meta-narrator had to be knowing in an unusual sense. Not necessarily always through logic. Right now, we don’t necessarily need to explain how they know what they know, because that’s part of the imaginative spell, but Black history is full of holes. It’s full of ellipses. It’s full of blanks, you know? It’s an aggregation of partial stories. That’s what we have. I couldn’t tell you anything beyond my grandmother, you know? I’ve heard some stories here and there, right, but I don’t know my grand myths, and which village I could be traced back to. I have none of that knowledge. So, what we have is a lot of speculation. And I think, fundamentally, fiction is speculative? So, I allowed for that kind of character to be looking over the constellation of stories, and every now and again popping in with a word, a mic drop, a foible if it interesting. To say, hey, I don’t need your belief, but this is what has happened, and these are the stories. So, that’s my voice—the author’s voice. And then these other four actors were representing spatially and in terms of gender and place and things like that. The impression that these stories are collected from different locations in the world. I would have loved for there to be a bit more French inflection, though.

SM: Is there a companion album, or albums, for Code Noir? Like, you said earlier that there were songs in your mind when you were writing.

CL: Oh, yeah! It couldn’t ever be just one thing. But, I do have a Code Noir playlist that I can share with you, if you wanted to see.

SM: Yes!

CL: I can send you the link, but it has everybody in it. Lucky Dubé, Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, The Fugees, Diana Ross, Lauryn Hill, Nas, you name it.

SM: Would it be okay to put the link to the playlist in the text of the interview?

CL: Sure.

SM: Yay! I would really like to do that! 

CL: Okay, I will send you the link.

SM: Are you reading any Canadian books right now?

CL: Yes, actually, I am currently reading The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien. I’m reading Myth by Therese Mason-Pierre.

SM: Is it so good?

CL: Yeah, it is. And, also Shadow Price: Poems by Farah Ghafoor. I’ve also been reading Comrade Papa by Gauz. It is translated from French and published by Biblioasis, which I’m really, very much, enjoying.

SM: Do you speak French?

CL: I do, although I don’t get to practice very much. There’s not a lot of French-speaking people around me, but Creole is my more fluent French-wise language.

SM: Do you have any stuff that you’re working on, that you can talk about?

CL: Of course. I have a book coming this fall, it’s a book of poems called The World After Rain. That’s coming out in October. Then I have another book of poetry that’s coming out next fall. And I’m excited about this novel that I’m working on, which does not yet have a publication date. I’m actually quite enjoying working through its demands. So those are my companions for now. But I also have essays that are coming together.

SM: Thank you so much for this. I appreciate you sending me the playlist. I just really appreciate you giving me your time.

CL: Thank you. And thank you for reading the book.

Sarah Marie

Sarah Marie is a perfectly unqualified, no-talent, lit/poetry enthusiast.A~literal nobody~ on social media, you may recognize her from commenting on your posts as if you sent them to her personally. She isvery impressedby your dedication to your work and to each other, and she believes in you.  

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