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The first sentence of Maya Binyam’s recently released novel, Hangman—“In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight”—conjures a passive-voice narrative absence deepened by her choice to leave her narrator unnamed. Yet the novel itself is anything but detached. The humanity of Binyam’s protagonist—who returns to sub-Saharan Africa after 26 years away and embarks on a search for his long-estranged brother—is all the more keenly felt for the details of his life that she leaves blank, and she weaves in more than enough prosaic depth to make a 200-page chronicle of exile, diaspora, belonging, and homegoing feel urgent and emotionally resonant.
Vogue spoke to Binyam about drawing on her own family’s history of migration, crafting a novel-length narrative around the journey from one home to another, and reading Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir My Brother for inspiration during her own writing process.
Vogue: What does it feel like to have the book out in the world?
Maya Binyam: It feels good! I haven’t really seen it in the world yet, but obviously I know it is theoretically in bookstores and people’s homes. I’m excited for people to sort of enter the world of the novel, which is one I’ve been living in alone for a while.
Country and identity are so interwoven in this novel; what drew you toward portraying an immigrant narrative?
I come from a family of immigrants living in the immediate African diaspora, and being one generation out from people who lived on that continent has really shaped the contours of my life—as has living in the Black diaspora more generally. Now that I’m older and outside the nuclear family, I struggle with how to incorporate some of the habits and traditions of life in the particular place where my family lives on the continent and reproduce those things in my life, which is otherwise sort of bound by the incentivizing qualities of assimilation. That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and the tension between having those tethers—between an ancestral way of life and living in a culture that’s primarily defined by consumerism—has been particularly difficult at this moment in my life, so I think writing this book was a way of trying to figure that out.
It seems like unnamed narrators are having a bit of a moment in fiction—Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy comes to mind. What informed your choice not to reveal your narrator’s name to the reader?
It’s something that sort of began impulsively. I don’t think I began the book with an idea that the narrator’s name would never be revealed, but as I kept writing, it became clear to me that he didn’t have a name. Like, it wasn’t something that was being hidden, necessarily; it was something that actually couldn’t enter the text, and maybe that sounds weird to say because I’m the author and I could theoretically make anything work, but it felt like something that became antithetical to how the text was beginning to work. And I was really interested, as I continued to write, in the idea that it’s not just that he’s unnamed—there are very few proper nouns in the text. He certainly doesn’t speak any himself. And I became really interested in how to conjure character and psychology and geography without the usual identifiers that serve as a kind of shorthand and that maybe would trigger a particular kind of association in readers.
I was interested in those associations, but I guess it felt like I could reach a kind of psychological specificity through ambiguity; like, I could more easily describe the ways that the various characters are relating to the country that they’re in by leaving it unnamed and by placing more emphasis on how their work or their family life has had sort of warped their relationship to a sense of place. And to a certain extent, that same process happens with the narrator because he’s someone who is very passive and almost believes too much in his own capacity to devise a personality and sense of self through other people’s readings of him. I was interested in the tension between those two things, between being an individual in the world and at the same time being completely open to other people’s conceptions of you. And I think that namelessness sort of allowed for that; it allowed for him to be a stranger to other people and also to himself.
Do you think it’s possible to write a novel about leaving one home and returning to another without a certain measure of loneliness entering the work?
It’s funny you say that because I feel like so many books or even shorter works of fiction and nonfiction that are written about going home do often work with loneliness, but often what’s more explicit is some moment of fundamental identification and familiarity and sort of the possibility of a complete return to the person that you were before. But I do think that leaving a place is an isolating act, and in the world of the novel, the narrator entered a new country as a refugee. I was thinking a lot about that as a kind of individuating process; like, in order to be granted refuge in the US, someone must argue that they have belonged to some institution of collective life that’s being threatened, either by the government or by a group that the government can’t control. There are some instances in which people can argue that they, in particular, are being harmed by a gang or something like that, but in most cases people need to argue that they belong to some collective in order to be granted refuge. Once they’re granted that refuge, though, the premise of collective life is stripped away because you’re ultimately saving your own life, and I think that is kind of like a warping process, especially when it’s compounded by an America in which people are so incentivized to think of themselves as individuals. I do think all those things combined oftentimes make going home, whether to a home someone once lived in or an ancestral home, kind of loneliness heightening but that loneliness gets masked by an individualist society.
Are there books you’ve read that helped you imagine a place for this novel or that inspired you in your writing?
One book that I reread while I was writing the first draft of Hangman was My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid, which is a memoir that she wrote about the death of her brother, who died due to complications from HIV. It’s a book that is so rife with vexed love; there’s a lot of familiarity and strangeness and intimacy and hatred in the way that she describes her relationship to her brother, and I don’t know that guilt quite plays into that as much as it does in my book, with the relationship between the narrator and his brother, but there certainly is this kind of nagging resentment that doesn’t fall away. I really looked to that book as I was trying to think about relationships [within] the family in general; I was kind of looking for family models that existed that describe these genuine and enduring bonds that people can have, even if they’ve been dislocated either by choice or by force. I also just find Kincaid’s sentences so compelling; her mode of meaning-making is so dependent on repetition, and I was really inspired by that.
