Taking Care with Your Work: A Profile of Author Rion Amilcar Scott
by Norah Vawter
Rion Amilcar Scott’s second book, The World Doesn’t Require You, is a collection of linked short stories. The stories span decades, but they’re all set in the fictional community of Cross River, Maryland. Cross River was founded by slaves who freed themselves in a successful (and unfortunately fictional) slave uprising. This revolt, called the Great Insurrection, happened generations before these short stories take place, but it is the foundation the town is built on. This shared legacy unites Scott’s disparate characters. The author’s debut story collection, Insurrections, was also set in Cross River and was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
These new stories are at once deep, thoughtful, disturbing, quirky, and laced with dark, dry humor. They dart between realism, fantasy, and even science fiction. We meet college professors, musicians, and underground railroad re-enactors. But we also meet robot slaves and a man who’s supposedly the last son of God (as the first line of the book tells us “God is from Cross River, everyone knows that”). It all adds up to a book that delves deep into serious topics but isn’t depressing or dull. Instead these stories are fresh, bizarre, and invigorating.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Rion Scott and chat about his writing and this new book. He is a D.C. area native who grew up in Silver Spring, in a family that he says was “very middle-middle-class.” He got his bachelor’s degree from Howard University and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from George Mason University. He taught at Bowie State, the first historically black university in Maryland, before taking a position at the University of Maryland.
Scott’s writing is firmly rooted in the African-American experience and in black identity, as he explores both through the lens of race and the ongoing legacy of slavery. While no slave revolts succeeded in our country, Scott was inspired by the very real and very successful Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and forever ended slavery in Haiti. He told me, “the Haitian Revolution was always something I looked to as inspirational. This was one of the biggest armies, probably the biggest army at the time. Napoleon's army. And [the slaves rising up] defeated it. They paid a heavy price over time of course. But they freed themselves.” He’s been exploring this topic in fiction for a long time. “I came up with the seeds of Cross River in undergrad at Howard,” he told me. “And I fully came up with Cross River while I was [a graduate student at] George Mason.”
Mulling over the question of why he writes about race and how his fiction intersects with the real world, Scott said, “I think it's always political to tell your story as a person of color. For so long, you know, black people weren't allowed to speak. They weren't allowed to even read. Telling that story, speaking that story is important. I think that if you're a person and you're paying attention even halfway, and you're writing, [ideas about race] are going to slip into your work.” Thinking about his writing process some more, he added, “First and foremost, I'm trying to tell a story. When that stuff slips into the work, it's like, okay, I have to chase that. I have to explore that idea. And exploring those ideas, that’s important.”
We talked about why so many black writers are writing about race. “Because you can't [avoid it], it's a constant reminder,” Scott told me. “Most of us work in environments where ... they're not in the majority. And even if they do work in an environment with [them in the majority], that was a choice they made, to sort of retreat from that sort of racism.” Later when we were discussing our children, how they experience race, how he advocates for his kids, and how white children can be cluelessly racist, Scott elaborated on these ideas. “It's just in the air. Race and racism are in the air. And I think a lot of white parents don't have these conversations with their children.”
The World Doesn’t Require You shows us a vibrant community full of people of color: we’re seeing all these facets of the characters’ humanity, and specifically we’re seeing black characters in relation to other black characters, rather than in relation to white people. Defined by their own humanity, not by their relation to whites. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but our literature is very white, and so it is a big deal. As Scott told me, “There’s more to black life than [racism],” and his stories dig deep into the specifically black culture of Cross River. When he was a kid, his grandmother had a calendar that celebrated black historical firsts. There was a line about black literature that Scott took issue with. “It said the best black writers will tackle the race question. And I [thought], I don't have to do that. I felt like it was something that I had to rebel against. … In a sense I feel like the calendar was correct, but only because people are writing about what's on their minds on a very personal level.” This is a powerful idea: in a more just world, people of color would be writing very different narratives.
I asked if he thought more white writers should be writing about race. Scott nodded and said, “I'm glad you asked that. There's an incredible book that I just read by Jess Row, called White Flights, in which he tackles this question … and talks about the absence of people of color in the greatest of white literature. I do think that it's a weird absence. It's a gaping hole. And it's something that [writers of all races should think about]. ... [W.E.B.] Du Bois’s line about race, ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,’ is true. And now we're into the twenty-first.”
What about getting inside a character’s head, I asked, wondering if he thought people should write from the perspective of someone who isn’t their race, and whether Scott himself would choose to write from that perspective. (This is a hotbed issue in literature right now.)
“Yes. And yes,” Scott said, without a trace of doubt. “I think no matter what, you always have to take care ... you have to really think about what is going on in the world of someone who's different from you [but you should still be open to writing from that different person’s point of view].”
The World Doesn’t Require You also explores sexism and misogyny, with male characters violent towards female characters, or fearful of female characters, or obsessed with a local legend about mysterious and powerful “water women.” For many of these men, it seems like the most frightening thing is a woman. “I think a lot of the book is about misogyny and toxic masculinity,” Scott told me, before going on to explain where he thinks the toxicity comes from. “There's a lot that I think we lose as men, by replacing tenderness with aggression ... a certain fear and distancing of the feminine. So I wanted to really think through that. We're taught at a young age, you gotta man up, and that the tears are a thing for women.”
And so what is the result? Scott believes that men are often conditioned to only express anger. “Anger, you know, it's spread outward. It can do a lot of damage.” Speaking about why he’s delving into these misogynistic characters in his new story collection, he explained, “I think that as a society, men and women, we have to really think about this. ... I want to think about what damage we do to ourselves and to others.”
The fictional Cross River is rich with its own history and culture, including a new type of music called Riverbeat, local poetry, myths, and folklore. I think this book is as much about what it’s like to be an artist—or to aspire to greatness in the arts—as it is about race. When we discussed the role of the arts in black culture, we returned to the theme of how important it is to express your emotions fully. Scott said, “I think [making art is something black people have done] to try to express the full range of emotions that comes with being in an oppressed position. ... You go all the way through hip hop, it's all about expressing this range of emotions that comes with being on the bottom of society.”
Reflecting on why writing fiction is so important right now, Scott explained, “A lot of times it feels like we're doing something very useless or self-indulgent [creating art], especially when the world is burning, you know? And then Toni Morrison tells us, this is the time when you go to work. Morrison says, ‘This is precisely the time when artists go to work [when the problems of the world make you feel hopeless]. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.’ ... I think that if you don’t take care in your work, you can be destructive, and then your work can be destructive. Or you can take care and try to be healing.”
Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019). His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others.
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Available Now:
Debut short story collection:
Insurrection: Stories Univ. Press of Kentucky
Norah Vawter is DCTRENDING’s Local Authors Editor. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University. She has published articles, fiction, and poetry in The Washington Post, Healthline, Scary Mommy, The Nassau Review, and Stymie, among others. Norah is querying her first novel, an excerpt of which was shortlisted for the RopeWalk Press Editor’s Fiction Chapbook Prize. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.