The Brooklyn Rail

In what has become a trademark feature of Bryan Washington’s novels, Palaver’s tender story unfurls itself across borders. While its central narrative focuses on a mother’s visit from the United States to Tokyo to reconnect with her estranged son, Palaver weaves through past and present, flying the reader to Jamaica, Houston, and elsewhere as the two reconcile—or attempt to do so. Palaver is Washington’s third novel, following behind Memorial and Family Meal—and is a book that lunges ahead, demonstrating Washington’s maturation as a writer and artist, building atop the thematic and stylistic work debuted in his prior works with stunning realization.

Touching on themes of intimacy and conflict, identity and becoming, Palaver is ultimately a story about family—in every sense of the word. On the occasion of the publication of Palaver, Bryan Washington and I spoke about his approach to writing, his taste in music and film, and being okay with unanswered questions.

Henry Hicks IV (Rail): Palaver weaves together two stories. There’s the central story, which is of the son and his life in Tokyo; and then there’s the second one, which is of the mother and her childhood in Jamaica. Through centering them both—and by introducing the mother into the son’s life in Tokyo—you demonstrate that inheritance is something that follows you. How did you decide what to bring with you versus what to leave behind in developing not just characters but a lineage that echoes across timelines?

Bryan Washington: One thing to note is that Palaver started as a short story originally. The central concern was between the son and the mother and their attempt at reaching the beginning of—not a reconciliation necessarily—but a conversation. Reaching the point at which they could even find a similar language from which to begin.

For the novel, it was similarly important to me that their journey was reminiscent of one in which they weren’t quite bridging the gap between them—at a language level, at an experience level, at an emotional level—but one in which they were navigating their respective lexicons of experiences in an attempt to find a middle ground, a meeting point, or a conversational starting point. With their presence and shared timeline, it was important to me to track both the time that they spend together and apart in Tokyo, and show how the time that they spend together is impacted by the time they spend apart and vice versa.

I generally want, as a reader, to feel as though a storyteller has given me as clear and as expansive a sense of who a character is and who their relationships are as possible—without necessarily prescribing those relationships to me as the audience. I don’t necessarily need to be told that this character is “good,” or “bad,” or “this is why their relationship doesn’t work,” or “this is why the relationship will work.” For me, what felt like a challenge, and what I really wanted to prioritize with the novel, was trying to show how these two characters were quite different from one another—and there were structural reasons behind that, there were experiences that lent themselves to that difference—but also were still continually, in their own way and in the language that they had, making an effort.

Rail: It’s interesting—the wording that you’ve used around these two characters looking for similar language. Out of your novels, this is the first one that takes place primarily in Tokyo. How did you consider the role of setting as these characters search for that similar language?

Washington: One component of their experience that I wanted to try and capture was how, in the midst of illustrating how different the mother and son are from one another, to also allow space to demonstrate how quite a lot of the challenges that they face in their own relationships stem from just being so similar to one another. One way that felt possible was to show scenes of them in dislocation in Tokyo. Whether it is the mother who is experiencing this city for the first time—a city that is made up of many different micro cities, all of them stacked on top of one another, and they’re connected and constantly moving—or the son who has spent some time in his version of the city but is still navigating questions of dislocation and isolation, and is attempting to build connection and relationships.

I started the short story in spring of 2020. Borders were closed for some time. A lot of the original genesis of the story was from me just missing friends and found family in Tokyo. But when I was thinking through what a version of the narrative could look like that expanded beyond the bounds of story, one of the thematic elements that felt really essential was this question of a continual searching. The son, even though he’s lived in this place, is continually searching for a kind of community, a kind of family, a kind of romantic relationship. The mother experiences that two-fold in many different ways: in the present sense, in Tokyo, which is a place in which she’s literally unfamiliar, and also in the various journeys that she’s navigated in her own life that made her who she ultimately appears as we see her.

It felt useful, as someone who really cares about setting as a character, to refract their respective experiences, sometimes in the exact same location. In the midst of their attempting to build a connection with one another, they’re also continually building and changing their connections with this place. I was interested in how those connections with place have such a significant import upon the kind of relationship that you’re able to build. The relationships in the narrative were as much between people as they were between places, because place has such a massive influence upon how we see ourselves and how we see others.

Rail: I was revisiting the book this morning, and there was one quote that jumped out to me in particular: “In a new language, he’d have to decide who he actually wanted to be.” One thing that, I believe, was really artfully done in this book is the drawn out tension between who the characters are versus who they’re trying to be—and at times, who they see themselves as, which is different. How did you approach writing characters that are perhaps viewed differently than they view themselves?

Washington: I think that much of writing Palaver was an attempt to approach that question from many different angles. You have a character like the son who is in Tokyo, and who, just by way of being a Black American, codes differently in each scenario in which he finds himself—whether that’s how he codes to his students, the different ways in which he codes in different queer spaces, how he codes in interpersonal relationships, how he codes just as a person on the train. That’s something that he has to carry with him from scene to scene and beat to beat. At times, he leans in to the perceived coding that he’s navigating, and other times, he leans away from it. At other times, he disregards it.

Having characters that are cognizant of the way in which they code in different spaces, and the way in which they recode from space to space, from interaction to interaction, feels essential. It also feels similarly essential—and perhaps it’s even more exacerbated—in a character like the mother, who is an older Jamaican woman who probably more obviously codes as someone who is not “from” Shin-Ōkubo.

I think narratives in which characters are navigating circumstances of difference and marginalization, while simultaneously seeking their pleasures, building relationships, and trying to figure out what it is that they want and who they want to be, feels more pleasurable to me as a reader. That is more closely a simulacrum to life as it’s actually lived, in lieu of another version of the narrative in which every instance of that coding and recoding and code switching is explicated upon, given an explanatory paragraph, and unpacked outside or alongside the narrative. All of that is narrative in and of itself. And so, the challenge for me becomes to illustrate these many different nano-decisions that these characters are making in the midst of a scene and at the speed in which we make those same decisions as we ourselves move from space to space.

If you are a Black person, if you are a person of color, if you are a queer person, if you are a disabled person, you have to make many different micro-decisions in every interaction. Each of the characters in Palaver do this to some extent. It felt fascinating to me to have a narrative in which you have two protagonists who are constantly coding and recoding in one space. There are interactions that are separate from one another, but together, the mother and the son are attempting to recode who they are in a literal sense—as a mother and a son. The son is navigating this question of what a mother is to him; who his mother is. He’s having to relearn who she is in the same way that the mother is reckoning with the fact that the son may not necessarily ascribe or align with the idea of “a son” that she had, or the idea of the son that she raised and spent time with at a younger age.

This question of relationships is a pretty significant component in Palaver in that it is a back and forth without a clear reconciliation—which was intentional to me. They’re constantly changing. Anything else would feel dishonest. A part of the journey is realizing that one can be many different things simultaneously.

Rail: Earlier, you described yourself as somebody who considers setting as a character. One thing that you have used in your books before, and that’s also present in this one, is street photography. There’s something particularly affecting about its use in Palaver. Maybe it’s due to the use of anonymity as a tool with the central characters. But I’m curious: why was including street photography in Palaver so important to you? Did you think about it differently with this novel than with previous ones?

Washington: For me, the difference for Palaver, in many ways, stems from a more literal attempt to paint a picture of an atmosphere that the characters are navigating. In previous works, whether Memorial or Family Meal, photography and images generally were utilized on my end with the intent of primarily illustrating a difference in relationships between the characters. In Memorial, Mike and Benson are sending one another photos of what they literally see. In Family Meal, one character, Kai, is providing a sense from outside of the present-tense narrative, of what he literally saw. But in Palaver, we have two characters who are, in present tense, navigating very concrete circumstances and very concrete places.

I think that there can be a limit to language in certain circumstances. Or maybe I’m just not good enough for it to illustrate what and how certain things feel. The image of a rooftop in the center of Shin-Ōkubo is something that I can describe with language. But for me, it felt as if there would be additional value in providing the literal image itself. I could describe what Corner Bar in Ni-chōme looks like from the patio. But it felt to me as though, if I could provide the reader with that image in and of itself, they could have a more concrete sense of place—whether it’s a rooftop, or a queer bar, or a tiny restaurant, or a window from the upper floor of a building, any place that might otherwise feel and seem innocuous.

For these particular characters, these quiet spaces are quite significant. They’re quite impactful upon their development and their respective journeys. Something I think about quite a lot are the ways in which many momentous decisions that we make as individuals, or many very significant moments in our trajectories, don’t code as being deeply significant or momentous in the moment. That is really fascinating to me—and it’s aligned with the fact that the places in which we make these very significant choices don’t always code as being the sort of place in which someone is going to make a significant decision. There’s the corner-top at a queer bar that you go to very often, or the intersection that you pass through every day on your way to work in which you receive a phone call. But at a particular time, it’s a phone call that alters the trajectory of every decision you’re going to make over the course of the year. Or that particular evening at this particular gay bar, you have a conversation that illuminates something about another person that you didn’t have clarity on for years, and now you do—and now it changes not only how you see this other person, but how you see yourself. With photography, I wanted to underline the significance of utterly mundane spaces and how mundanity, or what appears to be mundane, can actually have deeply significant reverberations in one’s life.

Rail: Palaver means, among other things, a drawn out conversation. Going from talking about photography, I’m curious what books, music, and other art you consumed when you were writing this? What do you see Palaver in conversation with?

Washington: I was re-reading Jesmyn Ward. I was re-reading Banana Yoshimoto. I was re-reading Alejandro Zambra and Jazmina Barrera. Two books I spent a lot of time with were Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn and Choi Eun-young’s Shoko’s Smile. I was also spending a lot of time with Sang Young Park’s Love In The Big City. I also spent time with several films. Films are really important to me. But as far as Palaver is concerned, a few films were hugely important. One is an old—I guess, older, in the context of being a millennial—Japanese film called Like Grains of Sand. That was really important to me. A film called Drylongso was really important to me. And also Yi Yi, which is a film directed by Edward Yang. As far as music goes, I was listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane and a lot of Ryuichi Sakamoto. I was listening to a lot of Smino and wave to earth. Who else was I listening to?

I was listening to a lot of Solange, actually, and Teresa Teng. I was listening to a lot of Tina Turner. I was listening to her live performances. They were actually really important to me in the midst of finishing this particular book. This book would not have been finished if not for the live performances of Tina Turner. It just wouldn’t have been possible. And there is another singer who passed away fairly recently, named Khalil Fong. He was very important. All of his music, but his final album that was released was very important in the midst of edits.

I’m someone who really can’t function from a generative standpoint unless I’m in conversation with other forms of media and with other works that feel as though I can just contribute a tangent to the larger conversation that they’re having. And there were a lot of different tangents for this particular book. Ultimately, all of them were essential for me to even begin to have a sense of what it could look like.

Rail: You listening to a lot of Solange while writing this makes so much sense to me.

Washington: There’s such a consideration for spatial placement in her music—and the way her music utilizes silence and ambience. It’s really helpful for me, at the literal beat level of writing a conversation. How it moves on the page, but also how the page looks—like how white space looks on a page or how the eye moves from beat to beat is really similar to just having a long note, or just the same series of notes in staccato and then separation, and then a variation upon that. Her music is incredible in that regard. So, there are certain components to Palaver that were really, really indebted to her music.

Rail: I just have one more question. Without giving too much away, there’s a point of view shift that happens towards the end of the book. I know you said that this novel started off as a short story, but I’m wondering if you always meant for the book to end with this moment of realization?

Washington: No, I really didn’t. For me, that was a realization that came a bit later in edits. I’m someone who really enjoys working with an editor who I’m on the same page with, and someone who really enjoys being in conversation with the handful of friends that I share work with. And in the midst of those conversations, and in the midst of just having other folks spend time with the work and getting to talk about it, it became clear to me that this additional beat would be a nice round note upon which to signal that these characters hadn’t resolved the questions that they were navigating, but they had reached a point at which they could begin the next series of questions they would be navigating in this moment in their lives.

For me, much of narrative and much of the labor, to be quite honest, centers around this question of the journey of reaching the place at which a decision can be made, or the journey of reaching the place at which one can really find a landing space from which to begin the next series of conversations that a character is asking about their identity or how they relate to themselves in the world. So, it felt to me like a nice point at which to signal the initiation of a new series of questions for these characters, while also alluding to the fact that all of these conversations are never really done. Questions about who we are to ourselves, who we are to others, how we change, and how we fit into a particular place. They don’t really go away. We’re constantly navigating and asking these questions. But if we’re quite lucky, there are people in our lives who can help us gain clearer senses of who we are, and what we want, and how we fit in.

There’s an idea that was really important to me in writing this book. It’s this notion that taking care of yourself is also taking care of how you exist and move through the world, and the people that you interact with, and the places that you care about. Taking care of these people, places, and spaces is also taking care of yourself. It’s a symbiotic relationship. So, the point-of-view shift felt to me like a subtle nod to the fact that these are ongoing questions. The inability to come up with a conclusion doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wasted time. It’s all valuable time, and it’s all coming together, and it’s all adding. You take it with you as you move along in your respective journey.