Art Chowder September | October Issue No. 29 | Page 30

Josephine Baker at the March on Washington, the only woman to speak (1963)
Your most recent book is about Josephine Baker. What can we learn from her?
How is her story important for today?
Josephine Baker’s Last Dance is less a feminist novel and more about race. Yes,
Josephine was exploited as a woman: she was forced to dance topless in Paris or
lose her passage back home to the States. But Parisians also exploited her Blackness
— France had colonized Algeria, Senegal, and other parts of West Africa, and the
“exoticism” of the faraway lands and their people fascinated the city. Josephine took
advantage, and exploited Paris in return, while never forgetting the oppression and
brutality she’d experienced in the United States.
Josephine’s entire life was about race. She spoke, wrote, and advocated for racial
equality. She helped the French Resistance defeat the Nazis, whose racism she
deplored. She sparked the American Civil Rights Movement in 1951. She became
the only woman invited to speak with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on
Washington. She adopted 12 children from around the world, of all different races, and called them her Rainbow Tribe.
Who are your favorite writers, publications, or events?
I’ve been reading autofiction (autobiographical fiction) like it’s going out of style, which I hope it never does, because I want
to write my own. Annie Ernaux; Lidia Yuknavitch; Helen Oyeyemi’s brilliant novel Gingerbread. Ghost Wall isn’t autofiction,
but it makes me want to read everything Sarah Moss has ever written; her writing is so economical and amazing. Colson
Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is one of my favorites, such a powerful wake-up call to our country’s racist history, as
is Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, a beautifully-written story about a woman on the Flathead Reservation in Montana living
in tension between the white and Indian worlds, and between the old ways and the new. Debra, a creative writing professor at the
University of Montana in Missoula, is a good friend and has been a huge inspiration for, and supporter of, my work.
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