Editor’s note: Most well-known for his mystery fiction, Walter Mosley is also the author of numerous social commentary books, including most recently What Next. He has also published science fiction such as Futureland and Bluelight. This interview was conducted by Libero Della Piana.

PA: The mystery writer and commentator Gary Phillips wrote an article in Colorlines magazine in which he says that who gets killed in America, and why and who pays are themes central to the lives of people of color and the disenfranchised. He says no literary form is more conducive to delving into this than the mystery/crime novel. What do you think? 

Walter Mosley: I have to come at it like this: about half my books have been mysteries. Any fiction about living in a real world, not even a real world that exists, but just a real fictional world, has to be political. If indeed you don’t talk about the politics of that real world, then you can’t talk about the characters. For instance, if you have a woman detective in 1925 in New York, and you didn’t explain all the barriers of sexism she would encounter investigating her case, it wouldn’t be a fiction true to itself. If you were to write about a free Black man riding around with impunity in the South before 1860, it just wouldn’t be real. Or, for instance, if you write a book like The Scarlet Letter in which there are no Black people and very few Native Americans, it’s not real. It’s what it is: it shows what the white world wanted to think about itself, but it doesn’t talk about the real world at the time.

One of the problems we have in the mystery writing field, when I’m wearing that hat, is that people don’t take it seriously. I don’t think mysteries are any more political or more capable of addressing issues than any other literature. However, because people don’t pay attention to it, you kind of have to make noise.

Crime fiction addresses crime and punishment in the United States. It talks about who gets arrested and found guilty. I recently wrote a mystery in which a Black serial killer is working in the Black community and no one knows it. You can’t have that somewhere else. However in that community, “they’re just a bunch of dead Black women.” You know? “Because those are violent people down there.”

PA: You’ve also written science fiction: another genre that is ignored but also has the potential to reveal political realities.

WM: That is the other part of fiction: to elate the reader, because they can see their world or the world they want to exist. If you are a radical lesbian feminist separatist, and write regular fiction, you really kind of have to, unless the fiction just turns its back on reality, deal a lot with males and male politics. But, if you write science fiction you can say, “Here in the year 2198 there were only women on the planet Earth.” You can do what you want to do, which is kind of interesting. It brings up all kinds of other problems, because once you have that, what do you have to struggle against?

PA: It allows you to put tension in different places, draw different things to the surface. But you’re still dealing with reality.

WM: Well, there’s a reality. Once you get rid of all the men in the world, how do women relate to each other? Are there any pressures, conflicts and problems? And are there ways in which you have to legislate people’s lives? You thought before this male-dominated world was the problem – and maybe indeed it was.

PA: Your new book What Next, is a memoir toward world peace. In it you draw lessons from your father’s life.

WM: My father looked at the world much the way anyone who studies the Socratic method would. He questioned it, trying to be as objective as he possibly could, and of wasn’t able to. In doing this he discovered things which were amazing to him. For instance, my father didn’t think he was an American. So when he went to Europe and they said it was a war between the United States and Germany, he wasn’t worrying. He said, “Fine. I’m not an American. I don’t have to worry about somebody coming after me.” But indeed they did.

It was just the way he would think about the world, or the Watts riots or the relations between Blacks and whites. He needed to pay attention to those who are suffering in the world, not just himself.

These things were lessons to me on how I need to look, when I look at Black America. I understand Black America doesn’t agree with George Bush and his war on terrorism, and isn’t so befuddled and amazed that people around the world would hate us. That allowed me to look at the world differently than America presents itself to itself.

PA: You call on Black America, on individual Blacks, to play a particular role in the call for world peace. As people with a double consciousness, as Americans, and as Blacks …

WM: Or as people who are afflicted by a double consciousness. I think we actually have a single consciousness. It’s interesting. I think most white Americans have a double consciousness they’re not aware of. And here we are, we’re sitting here like, “Oh yeah; we know, we understand this. Yeah. You want this because that’s what you want, but meanwhile you’re killing people over there in Bolivia.” That’s not double, it’s really very clear.

This is not a gentle book on Black Americans. It’s addressed to African America. We are, Black Americans, the wealthiest, most powerful, most influential group of Black people in the world. But still Rwanda languishes, Sudan languishes, Liberia languishes. Uganda. Chad. There’s this long line of people suffering from disease, war and debt forced upon them by capitalistic thinking. We have $650 billion in spending money in America. We should be able to alter the course of American foreign policy.

PA: In What Next you address the oppressed and the struggling masses of people in the West, the US in particular and the Middle East, and you say the real enemy is not each other, but global capitalism.

WM: Right. It’s always hardest to see your own period in time, because you want to romanticize your history as it unfolds. You find people who talk about “those ignorant people back in Kush, 3000 years ago.” And you say, “Wait a second man, those people were much more sophisticated than you are, much more. They knew how to live in peace for centuries. And when a war happened they knew how to squash it, and live in harmony with their neighbors.” But it’s hard because you see your life, and you think it’s good. No matter how bad it is, you think it’s good.

The problem with the latter half of the 20th century, what typifies and embodies it, is the struggle between Communism and capitalism. The US and our European allies were on the side of capitalism. Because we were, the common everyday person thought that capitalism was somehow the firmament for democracy. In believing capitalism and democracy are inextricably intertwined, we made a big mistake. Because in truth capitalism hates everything that believes in human rights, individuality and freedoms.

PA: And anything that gets in the way of profit.

WM: Anything that gets in the way of competition for profit. I mean it’s very specific. It’s not just profit; it’s the competition for profit. The only way you can compete is through wages, either direct or indirect. And so the people that capitalists like are dictators. That’s what they love the best. They like people who don’t support the rights of individuals, because those people are the ones that are going to give the best kind of competition between the corporations. It’s very hard in America to talk about that because we have this history of fighting Communism. People say, “If you don’t like capitalism, you’re a Communist.” I say, well, no. I don’t like capitalism, it’s the same reason you didn’t like Communism. It’s because it wants to take away my rights – even more so, as a matter of fact. This is something that’s very hard to discuss, because people are living the romance of their own era.

PA: Do you think that that reality is more exposed now that the Soviet Union is gone, now that the US is the only superpower? Has the romance of living in our own era begun to peel away?

WM: The truth was under the building and the building has collapsed, but the rubble is still lies on top of the truth. As we clear away the detritus of the past, we’ll see it, but who knows how long that’s going to take. This is one of the reasons I wrote, Workin’ on the Chain Gang, which is arguing that we have to learn how to control capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t mind being controlled. If you tell somebody, “you have to pay $5 an hour to somebody, but everybody else does too, you don’t have to worry about that,” then capitalism says, “OK, fine. Those are the rules of competition.” But as soon as somebody else can undercut them with $4 an hour, they will kill you to be able to do the same thing. That’s important, and that’s what the everyday person has to know. We all have to know that, because if we don’t, then we all suffer.

PA: Do you think that the mood in the US and in Black America in particular has changed since 9/11? Are there are more or less opportunities for folks to stand up for peace?

WM: You can always stand up and demand to be heard, no matter where you are. Always. That’s not an issue. You could do it in Nazi Germany. There are lots of cases of where people said, “No.” Some of them actually even survived. Is the environment conducive to it? Yeah, I think it is still. I think it is still.

PA: Are there some positive examples you’ve seen that give you some hope for Black America playing a role…

WM: Wait a minute: I think we have it in Black America. I just came from Atlanta where there was a national Black book club convention. These Black book clubs are very well organized, and very connected and very grassroots, mostly women, but there are some men. That’s the first example and it’s an easy step to make. I mean it’s a really easy step to make. Whether or not people are going to make it is another issue.

I didn’t write this book to give answers: I wrote to say hey, we’ve got a big problem here, and we need to be talking about it. We have a war going on. We have a war on innocent people and young children. And we have a lie that permeates our nation. A lie saying that we can actually win a war against terrorism by killing people. It’s an insane notion. It’s like the last gasp of the white male domination of America.