Literary Ruralism (Part XL): Ezra Klein interviews Barbara Kingsolver about Appalachia (and Demon Copperhead)

Ezra Klein interviewed Barbara Kingsolver for the July 21, 2023 episode of his podcast.  He appears motivated to have her on to discuss her perceptions of rural America as depicted in the Pulitzer Prize winning 2022 novel Demon Copperhead.  I previously blogged about the book (including excerpts) here and here, and I wrote about Kingsolver's interview in The Guardian here.  

This first excerpt from the Kingsolver interview with Klein is about Appalachia, which is both Kingsolver's childhood home and her home for the past 20 years or so, after a hiatus in Arizona and a short childhood year in central Africa, where her father went to work as a physician.  

I’m Appalachian. And it’s a funny thing. It’s a marker. Appalachian means you say, I live in Appalachia. It’s a region that’s a little hard to pin down on a map because it includes parts of a lot of states, starting from north Georgia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and Virginia, up into the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, and then up into the Ridge Country of Pennsylvania.

So that sounds complicated. But to us, it is a whole place. We’re more connected with each other, culturally and geographically, than we are with the far ends of our own states. It’s a place, and it’s a mind-set.

We are connected by our mountains, our economies, and the fact that, for a couple of centuries, we have been treated almost like an internal colony of the U.S. We have suffered the exploitation of extractive industries, managed by and profited from outside companies that come in and take what they can and leave a mess.

This excerpt is Kingsolver's explanation (at least partial) of why urban people are so disdainful of rural folks--and leads in with things people say to her about her choice to live in the country:  

How many people, well-meaning people, have asked me, how could I live there, in the middle of nowhere? People, this is my everywhere. This is my everything. I live on a farm that grows food where water comes out of the mountain among trees that make oxygen. City folks are depending on us for a lot of things that they routinely discount or make fun of.

It’s been a very long program in the development of the world that economies and governments have urged people into the cities, away from the countryside, tried to get land-based people into the cities because — there are a lot of reasons, but it boils down to this — people in the money economy can be taxed. People in a land economy produce a lot of what they consume on the spot. So if you’re growing your own food and eating it, there’s no way to pull taxes out of that.

So I know this sounds really simplified, but it is the bottom line.

* * * 

It feels like an impossibly simple thing. But if you look at all the ways that rural people are stigmatized, it comes down to their self-sufficiency that’s being mocked. If you look at the cartoon, “Hillbilly,” he’s got a fishing pole — that’s food self-sufficiency — he’s got the jug with the XXX on it — that is alcohol self-sufficiency — and he’s got a straw hat on. That’s because he’s a farmer. It’s all about what he’s making and consuming himself.

It’s so insidious people don’t realize it. But this long, long-term brainwashing has resulted in a widespread notion that city people have got it, city people are the advanced form of humans, and rural people are sort of having this provisional existence. They just haven’t made it yet into the real life. And so everybody looks down on the country people. And the country people sort of absorb that. You can’t help but absorb it.

* * * 

And I think this has left rural people feeling so unseen and their problems so trivialized or ignored that they have gotten vulnerable to a damaged extent so that they’re ready to vote for the person who comes along and says, look, I see you, and I’m going to blow up the system.

OK, not the right answer, not the right guy, but I understand why so many people, for the first time, felt like — for the first time in many election cycles, somebody was paying attention. And now we’ve got a mess because that validated this urban notion that those people, they’re voting against their own interests. They’re not well-educated, so they can’t make good choices, so we don’t really need to listen to them, so we just hate them.

So it’s worse than it’s ever been in my life, this urban-rural antipathy.

A lot of what Kingsolver says on this point is echoed in my recent article on Rural Bashing. 

When Klein challenges Kingsolver to think about the negativity flowing from rural folks toward urban ones, she concedes the point. 

You’re absolutely right. It’s a dialectic. It’s an antagonism. It’s like there’s no point in asking who started this because it’s a really, really old antagonism. And you know, I was just talking about a larger framework of development that has really tried to get people off of the land.

But here we are, in the middle of it, with a lot of rock throwing in both directions. And it’s become devastating for American politics. Because rural people, who are less frequently called heartland as called flyover country, it’s a sort of a self-defense, saying, well, they hate us. We hate them back.

Of Kingsolver's upbringing in rural Eastern Kentucky and the transition to college, she explains:  

Nobody in my school was telling me, you need to take these things called SATs. Nobody was advising me. I just kind of clawed my way into a scholarship. And I got to Indiana, DePauw University. And to my amazement, there, I discovered I was a hillbilly. I’d never thought of myself as a backward — coming from a backward place. But oh, my goodness. I needed only to cross the river into Indiana to discover what ignorant, backward folk we were from Kentucky.

And people laughed at my accent. People actually — I was a curiosity on campus. People I didn’t know would come over to me in the dining hall and say, say this. Say this world. What’s this? They wanted to hear me say syrup and mayonnaise and these other words that they thought were hilariously charming.

And so I set about slowly, not even that intentionally, altering my persona in the world, erasing my Kentuckian affect just so that people would hear my words instead of making fun of them. And so now, I’ve tried to become this imaginary cosmopolitan person.