Booker prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has said that the treatment of African-Americans is emerging as one of America's "buried giants" and is a subject the general population might prefer to forget.
The Buried Giant is the title of the latest novel from Ishiguro and speaking to the BBC’s Martha Kearney at the Hay Festival in Hay-On-Wye in Wales yesterday (May 24), the author revealed he began to think about “societal memory and collective forgetting” while writing the novel.
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.”
“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 60-year old writer, whose previous books include Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, said that he could have set his novel in Rwanda or in Kosovo but had chosen a semi-mythical historical Britain for the setting of The Buried Giant. This was to avoid any suggestion that he was writing about a particular country or war.
