For Booker winner Paul Beatty, contradictions are 'fun'

Trying to get a straight answer out of Paul Beatty is an exercise in futility. Pose a query and he will dance around it with visible unease, before crafting a contradictory reply that questions traditional narratives and labels.
His Booker-winning novel, 'The Sellout', is perhaps the sum of all these idiosyncratic contradictions that defy all attempts to categorise.
Faced with the disappearance of his home district due to gentrification, Beatty's protagonist, a black man, brings back racial segregation in a Los Angeles suburb, taking on another black man as a slave.
Several terms have been thrown around by fawning critics to describe the book -- 'audacious', 'lacerating', 'biting satire' and somehow, even 'comic novel'.

Beatty, however, agrees with none.
"People jump on something that they see. I just love it when someone says -- 'I have no idea how to categorise it'. When I see somebody else struggling to talk about it, it makes me happy. I don't know why people label. It is perhaps laziness, but it is also an effort to be understood. The newspaper columns can only be so long," he told PTI.

Here for the Jaipur Literature Festival, Beatty's sessions have witnessed packed venues with audiences and journalists hungry for 'tweet-friendly' sound bites.
Apart from the intermittent digs at US President Donald Trump however, there really hasn't been much forthcoming. Answers get lost in a maze of counter questions and ruminations, perhaps reflecting a continuous process of meditation with the self.

"I am very aware of that. The contradictions for me are very fundamental. It is a book about a lot of s***. The contradictory stuff, that is the stuff that is so much fun.
"That is the hard stuff. It is the stuff that makes things difficult to understand and interpret cause there is often no answer there," he says.
It is these contradictions, he says, that Americans are so uncomfortable with trying to interpret.
"We, I think I speak for Americans here, we are so uncomfortable with contradictions. Even someone like Trump, he is so contradictory, no one has any idea what he is talking about.

"Other than the fact that he is loud. In a weird way it is not his tone that is contradictory. I think some people are comfortable with that," he laughs.
The book comes at a time when police violence against the black community in America is at a peak, but Beatty vehemently disagrees, in typical fashion, that it is in any way reactionary.
But then, the book does not occur in a vacuum.
"So there are things that happen in the book that have consequences which is about a reaction. But for whatever the agenda of the book is, the agenda is not a reaction.

"The book is an effort to me to just about creating space to explore, to think and to interpret. It is a reaction to the sense that there is not enough space. But it is not a reaction to rhetoric necessarily," Beatty says.
Living in a society whose racial fault lines have been laid bare with the recent election of Trump, an easy assessment to make would be to blame Barack Obama, the first black president, for not doing enough for blacks.
Beatty, though, is never satisfied with lazy associations. "Would you have said that had Hillary Clinton been elected, the level of domestic violence would have come down?" he questions.

"You can't say nothing has changed. He did a ton of stuff for the LGBT community. But it is the same thing of how are we measuring change. So if you measure change in the degree of police violence. People talk a lot about change but I don't know what has changed. One thing that hasn't changed is that black people are policed," he says.
What seems to have got to him is the elevation of Trump as President. The normally reticent writer, during the festival, has described the Republican with a rich litany of colourful terms -- from 'car salesman' to 'dick pick'.

Clueless as he seemed about how the Trump Presidency will pan out, he feels that the Republican's win was not based on "rationality".
"I don't know what I feel about a Trump presidency. I don't get him. He has got a weird kind of self-awareness...I don't have hope that he has a rational thing.
"So, it is one of those things that people were so surprised by when he won, because they were thinking like rational people. It was not based on rationality, not on your rationality. It was based on another kind of rationality that we can't define maybe," he says.

Talking about all the hullabaloo over what has been called the 'post-truth' world, he says he does not know what that the term means. It feels like "kind of dancing around lying and falsehood", he says.
What scares him is that people are not even acknowledging the "absence" of truth.
"Yes, there are times when truth totally matters. People don't understand that nothing he says is the truth. People aren't even acknowledging the absence of truth. Forget the interpretation. That is very scary. To see people defending it is so bizarre," he says.
But, even the self proclaimed pessimist in Beatty is encouraged in times of despair with events like the women's marches all across the US and 'the Black Lives Matter' movement.

"People were talking about the march of the women which is obviously a good thing. Hope is not a word I use very often. But it gives me a satisfaction that people are demanding to be heard.
"It is not about effectiveness or efficacy, those things are important, but I am encouraged when other people are encouraged.. They are brave. I applaud it," he signs off.