Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, which has been on the US bestseller list for over a year, is a book of initiation. Not only for the American writer, but for the entire region, of which she has been a representative since her literary beginnings: the Appalachian Mountains in the east of the country, where the disadvantaged population lives, who feel despised by the urban elite.
“Everyone will tell you that the children of this world are marked from the moment they leave, win or lose”, says the narrator straight away. Demon Copperhead drew the wrong number between a father who died before he was born, a mother who was definitively rejected, and a tyrannical stepfather.
His painful life, marked by hardships from one foster family to another, brings the adventures of David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, into contemporary reality. Who has entrusted Barbara Kingsolver, if not in person, at least in spirit, with the task of showing the world what she doesn’t want to see, these millions of people left here, relegated to her fringes. Mission accomplished with They Call Me Demon Copperhead. A meeting with a writer who we discover to be as combative as her hero.
JDD. During a trip to England, Charles Dickens came to see you. How did it go ?
Barbara Kingsolver. And I came to him without knowing it. It was at the end of a promotional tour, I was very worried about my next book, which was about a rather dark subject, namely poverty and what poverty produces in certain places, more specifically where I live. And for two years I thought that no one would want to read such a book, I looked for a way as if I was inside a house without a door. I was there when I spent a weekend at the Bleak House Hotel where Charles Dickens stayed. I didn’t think I would still find his ghost in this place, and yet I did – his office was preserved, it was possible to visit it.
“Some 15-year-olds have never seen a doctor”
I was even allowed to sit in front of his desk and there I felt his presence, I felt his anger, he said to me: “How can you think that no one will be interested in a story about poverty and orphans, I managed to get people excited about it? Just remember to let the child tell his own story. » And I said that’s what I’m going to do, that’s what I have to do. I opened my notebook, and when night came I began to write My Summoned Demon Copperhead on the table where Dickens had written David Copperfield. I had never talked to a dead person before, a very intense experience.
One of the main characters in your novel isn’t a person, it’s Lee County, Virginia. How would you introduce it to French readers?
Very rural, very far from the first big city, very isolated in all areas. Just like in the book, if you need a professional consultation, you have to go to another state and travel for a day. The basis of the economy is agriculture and coal, two sectors in decline. I would liken my region to a sectional colony dominated by the mining industry that controlled the entire local economy. When the coal collapsed and she withdrew, there was nothing left. It’s probably hard for a French reader to understand, but in the richest country in the world, some 15-year-olds have never seen a doctor. One of my translators called me one day because she thought she misunderstood what I wrote: “You mean people have a paid profession, taking in orphans? »
Much of the population lives in a form of despair where it is condemned for wanting to get out of it at all: why go to university? Reading books, even wearing glasses are all negative, especially for boys who are expected to know how to fight and play American football like a Demon, literally ready to do anything, including drugs, to come back after a serious injury On the playground.
The area of the United States whose inhabitants feel forgotten are called rednecks. Do you feel the same way as a writer who writes about Appalachia rather than the big city?
Absolutely. The life, the problems, the environment, the very existence of the people in the countryside, all of this represents barely 2% of what is shown on television or in the mainstream press. People from Appalachia never hear of each other except in jokes about the hill country. All stupid and backward as expected. So I felt from the beginning that I was swimming against the tide, that my work was not fully respected, that the literary style only applied to urban authors. And I decided that I do not write for literary prizes, but for people.
I want to represent the people among whom I live, it is important that we can have an image of ourselves. I see it as a duty – and writing about the culture I know, in the language I know, is also a guarantee of the authenticity of my work in my eyes.
You write: “Everyone will tell you that the children of this world are marked from the moment they leave, win or lose. » So much for pessimism. But Demon Copperhead is a fighter, so much for optimism. And despite everything, he thinks life is worth living…
The demon is not the optimistic type, but even though he knows that nothing good is waiting for him around the next bend, he still wants to know. This attitude also has a cultural dimension. Appalachian qualities, in addition to a love of storytelling, a sense of family and community, include that we are resilient people, people who hold on, people who don’t give up.
That’s the kind of attitude you develop when you feel humiliated for two centuries. It’s our superpower! I also wanted to correct certain clichés that are very common in the United States and that things are very simple: you just have to work hard to get there and get rich. Which implies that if “these Appalachian rednecks” are living in poverty, it means they are doing nothing to improve their lot.
Another important topic in your book is drugs and specifically the opioid crisis. A fundamental problem that we don’t seem to fully understand, a problem that mixes legal and illegal drugs…
Because even in this area, money is the law. The Purdue lab knew very early on how addictive OxyContin was and concocted fake scientific reports to convince doctors to prescribe it. The most shocking part of the story to me is that based on the information its leaders gathered, Purdue chose three priority targets, including Lee County, where an army of its sales representatives landed.
” I can only see a miracle to prevent Trump from returning to power! »
The terrain was favorable due to the low number of doctors, the high number of disabilities and chronic diseases related to the mining and agricultural professions, and the absence of clinics specializing in the treatment of pain. And the number of OxyContin prescriptions in Lee County was nothing short of phenomenal. To the extent that Purdue was convicted, some feel that justice has been served. But there are still all these children who have become orphans, addicts, but there are still all these devastated communities, these families devastated by the behavior of some of their members, who are ready to do anything to get drugs. That’s all I thought about when I started writing this book.
The state of Virginia has elected a Republican governor after voting for Joe Biden in 2020. How do you see the new clash that is emerging between Joe Biden and Donald Trump?
Rural people feel that they are invisible in the eyes of politicians or the world of culture, they are so often told that they live in the middle of nowhere, they feel this contempt so strongly that finally At one point anger pushes them to vote for the guy who announced that he wants to dynamize the whole system. Whether that guy is Trump or someone else. This is how we got into this situation.
I can only see a miracle to prevent Trump from returning to power! But many voters do not feel represented by these two senior men facing each other. I’m sixty and I feel like my generation still hasn’t come!