Kazuo Ishiguro: treatment of African Americans is a 'buried giant' for the US

The treatment of African Americans is emerging as one of America’s “buried giants”, a subject that the general population might prefer to forget, Booker prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has said.

Speaking to the BBC’s Martha Kearney at the Hay Festival on Sunday, the author said he had become fascinated with the idea of “societal memory and collective forgetting” when writing his new novel The Buried Giant, his first book in a decade.

Ishiguro said he had become aware that much of his earlier work was about the memories of individuals, and he wanted to examine the memory of a society, and what societies are willing to forget – the “buried giants” of the book’s title.

Unwilling to be drawn into specifics about Britain’s “buried giants”, Ishiguro said he saw the treatment of racial minorities in America as an example of collective forgetfulness.

“They are really struggling with race problems right now, and I heard someone say in America that perhaps what was needed was an official procedure, like the truth and reconciliation [commission] in South Africa after apartheid, about the treatment of African Americans throughout history, because it will not go away,” he remarked.

“Others say it is better to forget, because to bring that subject up again will create a whole new angry generation. There are things that societies feel, collectively, that it is better to forget.”

The author said that, though he could have set his novel in Rwanda or in Kosovo, he had picked a semi-mythical setting of historical Britain to avoid any implication that he was writing about any particular country or war.

Ishiguro, who recently turned 60, said he had begun to look more critically at his earlier works, like the Man Booker prize-winning The Remains of The Day, and the assumptions he made as a younger man writing about age.

“I actually have begun to question whether the whole premise of those books were right, to be honest,” he said. “When I was younger and wrote books like The Remains of the Day, I assumed that if you get your moral values right at a certain stage, you can steer a good course through your life.

“I think that was the unexamined assumption I had when I wrote that, and when I wrote An Artist of the Floating World. When I got into my 40s, I thought ‘that was a little naive’.

“That whole model of figuring out values, debating them in pubs and student halls of residence, and then those values then seeing you through [life], applies only up to a point. Actually, you discover you do not have that much control over your life.”