(Ben Fountain is a featured author at this year’s Literary Sojourn. Courtesy of Ben Fountain.)

 

Ben Fountain, Haiti and “Devil Makes Three”
More than a decade after Ben Fountain debuted with his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” then received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his essays on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the author has shifted his keen gaze toward Haiti in the engrossing new political thriller “Devil Makes Three.” Set against the backdrop of Haiti’s 1991 coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Ben’s fiction weaves together a precarious web of wealth and poverty, race and class, a proud history, guns, drugs, corruption, scuba diving, treasure seekers, foreign aid and backchannel interventions.  It’s an engrossing story that also feels like an astute study of power and democracy.

Considering the brutal upheaval that now has Haiti back in the headlines, reading “Devil Makes Three” (which published before gangs took over Port-au-Prince) lands this fast-paced work of fiction at the junction of news analysis and history lesson. Ben knows Haiti in a close, personal way. “I went as a writer, and continued to go as a writer – that is, as a person who was trying to see the place as it actually is, and who tried to find the words that would do justice to the reality,” Ben says. All the while, he studied Haitian Creole while cooking dinners at home in America.   

Ben gave us a peek into his personal Haitian insights – an appetizer for diving in to “Devil Makes Three” before the author takes the stage at Literary Sojourn in September.

Jennie Lay: What about Haiti first captured your imagination – and what drew you back 50+ times? 
Ben Fountain: I made my first trip to Haiti in May of 1991, drawn in by a sense that things were happening in Haiti that I needed to try to understand. Things having to do with history, race, conflict, capitalism; how the world works, why it is the way it is. And, further to that, who wins and who loses. Who gets the profits, and who gets plundered. I needed to know as much for my own humanity as for the kind of writing I felt compelled to do. That first trip seemed to confirm this amorphous sense I had of Haiti being at the center of all these things, so I kept going. And of course I started to form personal connections, and at a certain point it began to seem entirely natural that I would keep going back. 
 
JL: Considering your long engagement with Haiti, what made you decide to run with historical fiction for “Devil Makes Three” – writing a political thriller versus a history?  
BF: Well, I'm a fiction writer, that's just where my head and my heart lead me, though I guess I've done my fair share of nonfiction. Personal preference, as much as anything, led me to approach it as a novel, plus wanting the wider playing field that fiction seemed to offer in terms of representing different points of view. It seemed like I could roam wider, dive deeper, and learn more by writing a novel as opposed to a nonfiction account.

JL: Your book felt like a precursor to current events in Haiti. Are there elements in the current political situation that echo the fall of Aristide years for you? 
BF: All the forces that were in play during the early 1990s – and that contributed to the coup d'état that deposed President Aristide – are still very much with us today. Predatory capitalism, run-amok globalism, and white supremacy, along with a generally rapacious Haitian "elite" –  they were the dominant forces during the early 1990s, and they're dominant today.   

JL: What makes this round of upheaval remarkably different in Haiti?  
BF: The problems have deepened. The population has almost doubled, so there's the tremendous stress of that. The natural environment has continued to degrade over the past thirty years, with corresponding diminution of the economic prospects for millions of Haitians. Global capitalism has not become any gentler. And – this is a big one – the country has been flooded with military-grade weapons over the past decade. It used to be fairly unusual for a private citizen to own a firearm in Haiti. But now, thanks to our ever-industrious arms manufacturers, the country is awash in high-powered small arms. Any multinational security or "peacekeeping" force is going to have to contend with that, and I think this poses a very grave challenge that wasn't a factor in previous crises.  

JL: What’s one thing you wish Americans knew about Haiti?  
BF: Vodou is not satanic. On the contrary, it's as genuine an expression of the spiritual aspect of human nature as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. And, by the way, nobody ever went to war on behalf of Vodou. In that respect I think you could say it's a good deal less satanic than many of our more mainstream religions.

Ben Fountain is a featured author at Steamboat Springs’ Literary Sojourn festival of authors on Saturday, Sept. 7. Learn more at www.literarysojourn.org

“The Morningside” By Téa Obreht 
One of the year’s most anticipated books landed in our literary grasp in March, and this summer the Orange Prize winning author Téa Obreht is coming to Steamboat to talk about it. “The Morningside” is imaginative storytelling unlike anything else you’ve read. On a dystopic Island City sometime in the foreseeable future, Téa gives us an intimate cli-fi experience woven through fables and mystical realism, stitched together with some of the most beautiful sentences you’re going to read this year. The characters are unforgettable, as are their experiences past and present, in and around a crumbling luxury apartment building filled with faded wealth and a few displaced climate refugees. 

All of them are grappling with moral and physical high ground in drowning mega-city. Téa Obreht visits Steamboat Springs in conversation about “The Morningside” on Tuesday, July 23, at Bud Werner Library. www.steamboatlibrary.org/events