Mateo Askaripour climbed the sales ladder before writing his debut novel, Black Buck, a scathing satire about race, greed and capitalism in the world of sales. The book was a bestseller and made Askaripour a rising literary star, but he refused to be pigeonholed and took a new direction for his second novel, This Great Hemisphere.
The new book is 400 pages long and is set 500 years in the future, when the world is divided into quadrants; in the northwestern hemisphere there are two main groups, the dominant population and the Invisibles, people who became literally invisible at some point in the intervening centuries and were oppressed by the DPs. This division gives Askaripour plenty of room to explore race and class, as an Invisible named Sweetmint tries to find her way to a better life and becomes embroiled in machinations that threaten the fabric of society.
SEE ALSO: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
But Askaripour, who aims to present a “multi-layered portrayal of power,” as he said in a recent video interview from his Brooklyn home, frequently switches perspectives in this book, showing the view of an ambitious politician, a shady intelligence chief and a mad genius who is essentially “a puppet master.”
At the heart of the story, however, is Sweetmint, an aspiring inventor who learns that her brother and protector – whom she hasn’t seen in three years – may now be a radical who committed a revolutionary crime. As she seeks him out, she slowly learns to see the world through different eyes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did you consciously want to challenge yourself or your readers?
This complete departure from my debut novel was intentional. After that book, people called me “Buck” or wrote to me and said, “I’m so sorry about what happened” or “Why did you do that?”
As it became difficult to break free from that role, I wanted to show people that I am not a salesman who happened to write a book, but a writer who happened to write about sales.
The idea for This Great Hemisphere came to me in 2019, but it wasn’t until the first draft that I realized that writing a novel set so far in the future and featuring invisible people was going to be no walk in the park. And with each draft, it got harder and harder – I had to learn a whole new set of skills and develop myself as an artist, which was the intention.
Q: What was the seed?
As crazy as it sounds, it’s true. I was sitting on the subway when an older man and woman walked in. He asked where she wanted to sit, but then he turned around and pointed right at me. They walked toward me and I wondered if one of them would sit on my lap. But they squeezed into half the seat next to me.
That night I lay in bed thinking about how that man pointed directly at my stomach as if I wasn’t even there. What did he see? Or what didn’t he see? This wasn’t self-pity, but curiosity, which led to more questions. What if there really was a race of invisible people? Would they be worshipped as gods or oppressed? What kind of lightness and love did they experience? As I began to formulate answers, they took the form of what would become “This Great Hemisphere.”
Q. Growing up with an Iranian father and a Jamaican mother, you have said that you felt like an outsider even within the black community. We don’t know who to trust in this book, even among the invisible. Does this have anything to do with your own sense of otherness?
The previous title was “Invisible Faces,” which was fitting since most of the time you never really know who a character is. But it was too close to “Invisible Man,” and “This Great Hemisphere” better captured the epic scope.
I find it incredibly exciting to write characters who live on the fringes of society, even within their own communities, and characters who don’t know who to trust while trying to process that because they want to trust other people.
Q: How much have you thought about the different reactions of black and white readers to the invisible and the dominant population?
As for my audience, I wanted to write for anyone who had ever felt invisible. I realized there was so much of that in my own family. My grandfather had been elected to parliament in Jamaica but came to the States and worked various jobs, including janitor. My grandmother was an English teacher in Jamaica but here she had various jobs, including housekeeper. My mother is a nurse for incredibly rich people. When my father came to the States he was a courier and was constantly on the road in New York City. They were all these service jobs, and although they never came home crying, they were often invisible. But not to me. I saw my family. So I had to start the book with two epigrams, with Ralph Ellison saying, “I am invisible,” and then Toni Morrison saying, “Invisible to who? Who do you want to be seen by?”
Q: Were you nervous about making your protagonist a woman?
Black Buck was so testosterone-charged. This book is about an authoritarian, patriarchal, violent society. So I thought the most interesting story would be from Sweetmint’s perspective. And I’m always looking for a challenge.
When I write a character, I try to immerse myself as much as possible in her life experience. But when I created this character, this invisible woman, I had to exercise a deep sense of care, responsibility and humility, knowing that I could get her wrong. When my editor or my agent, who are both women, said something, I said, “Let’s keep talking so I can understand what might have gone wrong here so I can correct it.”
Q: When Sweetmint learns the truth and questions whether the fight for equality and freedom is worth it, is she asking these questions because she feels hopeless?
I’m an optimist. I tend to see the bright side and give others the benefit of the doubt. I’m a firm believer that better days are possible and that the world is full of good if we just look around. But I’ve seen history repeated so many times and I can assume that it’s been repeating itself for millennia in terms of oppression, enslavement and liberation. So it’s not a huge leap to have a book tackle the same issues 500 years in the future. I hope that won’t be the case, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it just happened in new and different ways.
I ask: If history is cyclical, how can we interrupt it, if at all?
Originally published:
