Seattle Reads 2012 Seattle Reads THE SUBMISSION by AMY WALDMAN (206) 386-4636 • www.spl.org A Reading Group Toolbox for The Submission Presented by the Washington Center for the Book at The Seattle Public Library The Submission by Amy Waldman Amy Waldman’s novel, The Submission, opens with a Manhattan jury’s charge to Toolbox contents choose a memorial for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Through a blind admissions process, the jury is torn between two design finalists but eventually About the Author 2 decides on the Garden, a four-square geometric design with a pavilion. When the jury learns that the plan they selected was drafted by a young Muslim American architect, Mohammad Khan, they know that their selection will unleash a firestorm A Conversation with Amy Waldman 3 of controversy and they are proven right. The story focuses on two central characters, Claire Burwell, the wife of a victim and The Submission Discussion Questions 7 a memorial juror who fought for the selection of the Garden, and Mohammad Khan, the stubborn, inscrutable architect who defends his design and his right, as an American, to enter and win the project. A well-drawn cast of secondary characters Glossary of Islamic Terminology 8 add their voices to create an atmosphere of urgency and controversy. The Submission reveals the welter of emotions that America embodied in the Suggested Reading 9 wake of the national tragedy. The author explores the complexity of emotional and political response, the contradictions in identity politics, and how easily emotion Seattle Reads 12 and prejudice can overwhelm rhetoric. Waldman’s debut, named Best Book of 2011 by Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, asks some hard questions about the American values of tolerance, diversity, and community in the face of very real challenges. 2011 Seattle Reads 1 About the Author A Conversation with Amy Waldman Amy Waldman was a reporter for By Jonathan Derbyshire, Culture Editor, New Statesman The New York Times for eight years, Reprinted with permission including three as co-chief of the New Delhi bureau. She was also a national Q: You’ve said that you came to feel that journalism didn’t offer the language to correspondent for the Atlantic. explore uncomfortable questions and emotions that lingered in the years after the The Submission was named a New attack. Why turn to fiction? York Times Notable Book for 2011, A: Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, one of NPR’s Ten Best Novels, Esquire’s contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - Book of the Year, Entertainment confusion even. And I think that’s hard to capture in journalism. Weekly’s #1 Novel for the Year, a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book, and one of Amazon’s Top 100 Q: But that ambivalence didn’t really make it into public discourse in the immediate Books and top ten debut fiction. It aftermath of the attack did it? was a finalist for the Guardian (UK) First Book Award. It has been or will A: No, and I think in general it rarely does because people want to present coherent © Pieter Hattem M. Van be published in more than a dozen selves and want to draw coherent answers. And so it’s just not a form that lends countries. Waldman’s fiction also has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Review itself to that. and the Financial Times, and was anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010. Q: Was it always your plan to have the story told in the novel from multiple She graduated from Yale University and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute perspectives? for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives with her A: It was my plan from the beginning. After 9/11 I had an atypical and unusual family in Brooklyn. experience in being sort of catapulted from perspective to perspective. I was in From the author’s website http://www.thesubmissionnovel.com/author New York for six weeks after 9/11, reporting for the New York Times very intensely on the aftermath and the grief and all of that, and then suddenly I was overseas in places like Afghanistan, where your perspective broadens out to include from how we as a country were reacting to it to the cost of the war we were waging. I had a sense very early on of the victims’ families containing so many perspectives, even though they were often talked about as a monolith. And so, it felt like it was something that fiction could do. And it is a moral choice in the sense that I know many readers, just like writers, have many positions or preconceptions, but I wanted to try to force people outside of that pre-existing position and to inhabit, however briefly, these different perspectives. 2 2012 Seattle Reads 2012 Seattle Reads 3 Q: There are moments in the novel when ambivalence itself becomes an explicit Q: You’ve spoken about the Ground Zero Mosque; what about the 9/11 memorial? theme: for example when you show liberal New Yorkers wrestling with some fairly A: To be honest I can’t evaluate it as a memorial until I visit it, which I haven’t done atavistic feelings towards Muslims and towards Islam in general - feelings they were yet. Just because I think looking at drawings, it’s impossible to tell what it’s like to uncomfortable admitting to having. experience it. I am interested in our ever-growing instinct to memorialise on an ever A: I knew from the beginning that that was something I wanted to capture, grander scale. This idea of epic memorials - I’m not sure how I feel about that or probably because it was so much of what I encountered. I finished a full draft of the what’s driving it. So that complicates my feelings about this memorial. Just the very novel before the controversy last year around the proposed mosque or community idea of it I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around. centre near Ground Zero, but I definitely did quite a bit of work on it after that. The most surprising thing was not the virulent opposition to the project but talking to Q: Where were you on 9/11? liberal friends who, one minute, were saying “of course they have the right to build it there,” and in the next conversation were saying “But I kind of just wish they A: I had just gotten to the New York Times building and was in the lobby. People wouldn’t, it would make me uncomfortable” or “But maybe it would be better if were saying a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. By the time I got upstairs the they moved it 12 blocks away.” And often they didn’t even recognise those were second plane had hit. That whole day I was in the building taking reports from contradictions. people who were down there. Q: You mentioned the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque. When Q: After 9/11 you were dispatched by the paper to South Asia weren’t you? that blew up, how did you feel? You said you’d finished a draft of the novel already. There’s the famous Philip Roth line about the American actuality always outdoing A: They were sending people overseas to gauge the reaction to the attacks in what you can do as a novelist . different countries. I went to Iran. Then I was told by my editor to cross the border into Afghanistan, which I did. I spent quite a bit of time there and then was posted A: I definitely felt some of that! For me, it was ironic, if that’s the right word, to to Delhi for three years. have left journalism to go to fiction only to find myself overtaken by reality. On one hand I felt prescient, and more just that the novel was touching on what was a very live nerve in American society. For a couple of years before, I actually had started Q: How do you think the 10th anniversary of the attacks will unfold? It’s taking to doubt if it would really be big deal if this guy won. But when the Ground Zero place, after all, in a fairly tense and toxic political atmosphere, what with the rise of mosque controversy exploded, I thought, “no, I’m right.” And I think seeing that, it the Tea Party and so on. just gave me a much more vivid sense of the way something would play out. A: I have to say I’m not a big anniversary person …. Some of it is just the media going into overdrive - politicians as well. … I do feel that there’s this yearning to go Q: We talked about your decision to make this a multiple-perspective novel. Did back to that time because things were so clear. Right and wrong were very clear, you find some perspectives more difficult to write from than others? our victimhood was very clear. A lot of things have a gotten a lot murkier in the subsequent decade. A: I’d say I found them all fairly difficult. They were all so different from me and so were very challenging. The one that took the longest to get right was Sean Gallagher, the brother [of one of the victims]. Figuring out who he was just happened in the writing.