Actually Pretty Good: Hangman

On Maya Binyam's debut novel

21st century world literature could be characterized, if one were to pick from a number of necessarily reductive and limited taxonomies, as the era of the diasporic narrative. Though these books have existed as long as there have been countries and people who leave them,¹ the long tail of ‘globalization’ has produced a number of 21st century works by authors and about characters with fungible national identities, focusing on the inability to either assimilate in their new country or truly return to their homeland, or of the dislocation of second-generation and beyond immigrant experience. Think of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Junot Diaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Chimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Viet Thahn Nyguen’s The Sympathizer, Marlon James’ Brief History of Seven Killings, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as some of the tentpoles of the era, whether as critical darlings, literary prize winners, financial successes, or some combination of all three.² Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that the ease and ubiquity of airplane travel had obliterated all sense of a stable setting within fiction; since then, the postcolonial novel has taken over, and obliterated the idea of a fixed national identity with it.

As the postcolonial diasporic novel has become more entrenched, though, it has also become more ossified, the market more reliant on a series of tropes that appeal to a white audience with a purported interest in the lives of ‘others.’ Som-Mai Ngyuen, writing last year in the now-shuttered Astra Magazine, defined some of these in her essay “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility,” decrying the “jazz-hands half-nelson device” of “orthographic coincidence” which wrings meaning from “embarrassing armchair projections onto common turns of phrase…. It’s of supposed note that in Vietnamese one eats rather than celebrates the new year, birthdays, anniversaries, Noël. Nước means both water and country.” Ngyuen later compiles a litany of cliches:

The tropes of writing about one’s ethnic heritage as an anglophone Vietnamese-something: mango juice dripping down chins (but see: Soniah Kamal’s excellent “When My Authentic is Your Exotic”), ghosts, phoenixes, fish sauce, flag drama, Paris By Night, have you eaten? Vietnamese is a language that can caress or slice, as though that weren’t true of any human tool. Here lies overinterpretation, obviousness, the complete absence of any conservationist instinct against overmining, any impulse to care for what is yours. Mawkish adolescent attempts at lyricism (pejorative), trading in pride for skittish attention, giving grand speeches at the ramparts about hyphens while people get killed and imprisoned.

Ngyuen’s essay is particularly focused on the Vietnamese diaspora, but its criticism can be mapped on to a number of other works and authors who walk the thin line between authentic relation and the “overmining” performance for a white audience. (Being praised for the former or accused of the latter often comes down to the artist’s popularity: Ngyuen herself struggles with where to find the line.³) The market has produced a glut of novels that narrativize the diasporic experience in a certain way, for a certain audience; it’s refreshing, then, to read something like Maya Binyam’s debut novel, Hangman, which is in both form and content uninterested and at points derisive of the standards of most contemporary fiction, let alone the now rote standards of market-tested diasporic literature. It is a novel that communicates the deep strangeness and dislocation of a life between countries in its own thrillingly ambiguous and unique register.

The novel begins with the unnamed protagonist being put on a plane back to his homeland, also unnamed but somewhere, it’s intimated, in sub-Saharan Africa. “The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up … My ticket was in the breast pocket of my jacket, which was handed to me as I exited the passenger door.” The narrator’s passivity becomes corporeal in the next line: “Waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but by the time I reached security, I was hungry. Inside my carry-on, I found two apples and a croissant, which tasted like nothing. The security agent asked me for my name. I gave him my driver’s license, walked through the metal detector, and then my body went away.” Here we enter the fine difference between a person and a form of state identification, between embodiment and affective feeling. It’s from this unstable footing – or lack of physical footing altogether - that the novel proceeds, an initial marker that the physical (towards home) and spiritual (towards “home”) journeys of the novel will contradict one another.

The novel follows the now ubiquitous Rachel Cuskian Outline model of a character meeting a succession of other people and hearing a near-monologue about their life.⁴ Unlike those books, the narrator doesn’t really have an interest in what other people tell him, or anything they have to say that isn’t about him or his getting to visit his dying brother. “I waited for the man’s story to go on, hoping it would eventually arrive at news of my brother,” he says after hearing a man’s story, one of many scenes of a person mis-recognized and a message ignored. “But his aunt’s life had nothing to do with my brother’s life, and even if my brother was close to death, the man’s story wasn’t about death in general, it was just about the redemptive qualities of his wife, a woman who was suddenly walking toward us, and who he began pulling into a hug. I realized we were not related, and, in fact, he had nothing to do with me.” Throughout the novel, the narrator remains steadfastly incurious about the experiences of others, a blend of masculine narcissism and the myopia of existing as a singular person within a constructed community (refugee, exile, citizen, revenant). He laments at another point getting “into a long exchange about a stranger’s life story, whose relation to my own was either unclear or completely nonexistent,” and closer to the end reaches a sort of apotheosis of unknowing:

…I was sick of hearing about people’s lives, which were made up of stories that were probably not even true. People liked to talk, because talking made them feel like their experiences amounted to something, but usually the talking turned those experiences into lies. Most of the things that happened in life had no meaning, but eventually all of the meaningless things combined to produce an emotion so strong that people felt the need to find an explanation for it. So, at the end of their lives, they described the events of their lives through the lens of happiness, or sadness, or resentment, even though the same things happened to basically all of us.

It comes to something like a total rejection of a shared experience, or of constructed meaning at all; while the narrator’s inability to understand what’s happening is often played for a laugh, it’s in passages like these where the deleterious effects of exile are most apparent. It’s impossible to understand the world if you cannot make and differentiate events within it; he’s so removed from belonging in any milieu that bedrock connection is impossible. “The same things happened to basically all of us” is a liberating statement of communion in any other context except the anomie of the exile.

Binyam never falls into the trap of mawkishness, though, or into making the plot of the novel into a simple and long infliction of pain, instead lacing the novel with moments of humor and singular beauty, occasionally at the same time. It’s these moments that ground the novel even in its ethereality; the world sometimes is just funny, or we receive a glimmer of something not quite sayable in the midst of grubby reality: “Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and other times they arranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you. Either that, or I was jet-lagged, which was another possible explanation.”

Hangman is like a reverse of another great first novel, Kafka’s Amerika, the protagonist going from America back to the homeland under suspicious circumstances, moving further and further from certainty as he theoretically gets closer to ‘home,’ from an America where he is always unwelcome as a Black man to a country that he can no longer fathom, changed and marred as it is by the continuing fallout of colonialism and postcolonial neoliberal policy. Hangman is written with Kafkan situational humor and packed with vertiginous and paradoxical spaces – “The roads were random and resistant to those who wished to navigate them” – and Binyam also has a similar relationship to allegory, with characters and encounters that have multiple layers of simultaneous figurative and literal meanings. A man with a five story house with only one floor and preposterously high ceilings is at once a symbol of hastily and opportunistically built ‘new development’ while also just a funny, and further dislocating, space through which the narrator must proceed. “[T]he two most frustrating grad students on earth” are at once creating a dialectic of revolutionary politics between hope and pessimism while also being, well, tirelessly annoying grad students. The value of ten dollars is “symbolic,” but, pressed for an example, the narrator can only say that it symbolizes “one expensive sandwich or two inexpensive ones.” Everything is up for grabs, defamiliarized and made anew by the fable-like simplicity of the telling but rippling with the multiplicity of real experience.

To praise a first novel is to tread closely to patronization; Hangman isn’t a ‘remarkably assured debut,’ or ‘ambitious,’ or ‘promising,’ or any other damning by faint praise. It’s just a good novel, one that should jolt contemporary fiction in its engagement with complicated ideas, complicated forms, and complicated lives. Hangman refuses to be narrowed down, overmined, or made easily digestible; it’s a novel I’m sure I’ll return to many times, savoring its many gradations of meaning.

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1. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: great exilic text.

2. In the anglophone’s world, at least.

3. “It is not the artist’s job to undo market demands or argue with critics and readers; the landscapes in which their work exists and is used are not wholly their doing. But are authors faultless for letting themselves be too easily believed, crowned authorities on authenticity?”

4. Outline also begins with a conversation on a plane.