8
street roots
July 22, 2011
An eye for character
TtirnTnakeTjofm "Sayles tackles American imperialism on the page
BY MIKE WOLD
votes for the white Democratic candidate
exceed the number of registered voters.
he end of the 19th century was a
Even the upright African-American doctor
busy time in American history: We
marries his daughter off to a man she’s -
fought a war with the Spanish and
never been intimate with, rather than
another to suppress the independence shame his family with the “low-elass” soldier
movement in the Philippines; Jim Crow Who has fathered her child. And the nascent
scored a critical victory in the South; the
movie industry is doing all it can to make
Alaska Gold Rush got into full swing; and a
the brutal suppression of freedom abroad
president was assassinated.
seem like a mission of liberation.
John Sayles, a filmmaker as well as a
There are periods of history when all
fiction writer, ties these events together in
people can do is survive; this sounds like
“A Moment in the Sim,” using close to a
one of them. The characters are less the
dozen major characters — black, white,
creators of historical events than subject to
Native American, Filipino, and Chinese —
them, victims of a machine of domination
whose lives intersect One thread follows a
and empire that proceeds under its own
trio of African-American soldiers from
momentum. Sayles acknowledges the many
Wilmington, N.C., who help liberate Cuba.
ways that people resist, but he’s chosen a
They are then sent to defeat freedom
period when resistance movements were
fighters in the Philippines, even as the
mostly on the losing end — the Populists
mixed-race city council in their hometown is
defeated, Jim Crow having its final victories
overthrown by a white racist insurrection.
and the Filipino independistas surrendering.
Sayles delineates his characters well;
He finds human dignity in the ways that
even though the narrative moves back and
people care for and find love for each other,
forth among their stories, it's never
in tiie most extreme circumstances and in
confusing. And he is a master of back story.
the lives they make for themselves in spite
A major theme running through the novel is of their losses.
the unimaginable complexity of people’s
The novel ends with a real historical
lives in this first period of globalization,
event, the electrocution of an elephant on
epitomized by his saga of a North China
Coney Island. You can never ignore an
peasant who marries a white American farm elephant The same is true about the
boy and ends up running a hamburger stand rainped-up colonialism and racism that
in the Philippines.
ushered in the 20th century in America. No
Another recurrent theme is that “the fix
matter how much the media tried to make it
is in.” In the early scenes, a white miner in
look like something else, eventually people
Alaska is conned out of his grubstake and
were going to notice.
then winds up in a prize fight, substituting
for a man who just froze to death. He soon
M ike Wold: What was the starting point
learns that he’s not expected to .knock his
fo r “A M om ent in the S u n ”?
opponent out, but survive just enough
rounds so that his promoters can collect on
John Sayles: I stumbled across this
their bets. As the Americans invade the
story doing research on my last novel about
Philippines, the islands’ Spanish defenders
the Spanish-American War. I kept running
make a deal to put up just enough
into “the Philippine insurrection” and I
resistance so they won’t get into trouble at
thought: “How come I’m 37 years old and
home; in return, the Americans will protect
never heard of this?” Doing some research
them from being massacred by the Filipinos. about the same period I came across this
As a crucial election comes up in
racial coup in Wilmington, N.C. The two
Wilmington, nobody blinks an eye when the
events are connected by race, but also by
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
BOOK REVIEW:
“A Moment in the
Sun By John
Sayles,
McSweeney’s,
2010, Hardcover,
968 pages, $29
a
the way the United States was thinking
about itself.
So I figured, what if I had some African-
American characters from Wilmington who
have gone off to fight for the flag while their
rights are being taken away? Other major
characters are a working class white guy
and a guy up from the South involved in the
beginning of the movie industry because it’s
not just what happened, it’s how the media
treated what happened. What the media said
is what people thought the war was.
Our movie “Amigo,” coming out in
August, is also set during the Philippine-
American War and the parallels are
unavoidable: The situation that occurs again
and again when one country occupies
another and doesn’t really understand the
culture that they’ve invaded.
"O ur movie 'Amigo,' coming out in August, is
also set during the Phllipplne-American War
and the parallels are unavoidable: The
situation that occurs again and again when
one country occupies another and doesn't
really understand the culture that they've
invaded."
M.W.: One o f your Filipino characters talks
about American soldiers aS cruel but also
innocent like children. Can you talk about
that a little?
J.S.: Americans want everybody to like
them - American soldiers want to get down
and smoke dope and shack up with women
and feed kids candy bats and be liked.
There’s this sense of hurt when local people
are angry at them for bombing their huts or
killing their livestock. Whereas the Spanish
knew they were
there to *
See JOHN SAYLES, page 9