Mateo Askaripour climbed the business ladder in sales before writing his debut novel, “Black Buck,” a stinging satire of race, greed and capitalism set in the world of sales. The book was a best-seller and made Askaripour a rising literary star, but he did not want to get pigeonholed so he veered sharply in a new direction for his sophomore novel, “This Great Hemisphere.”
The new book is 400 pages long and set 500 years in the future when the world has been carved into quadrants; in the Northwestern Hemisphere, there are two main groups, the Dominant Population and the Invisibles, people who, somewhere in the intervening centuries literally became invisible and have been oppressed by the DPs. That split gives Askaripour plenty of room to explore race and class as an Invisible named Sweetmint attempts to navigate her way to a better life and gets caught up in machinations that threaten the fabric of society.
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But Askaripour, seeking to present a “layered depiction of power,” as he said in a recent video interview from his Brooklyn home, frequently shifts perspectives in this book to include the point of view of an ambitious politician; a shady spymaster, and a mad genius who is, in essence, “a puppet master.”
Still, the heart of the story is Sweetmint, an aspiring inventor, who learns that her brother and protector — who she hasn’t seen for three years — may now be a radical who has committed a revolutionary crime. As she seeks him out, she slowly learns to see the world through a new lens.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Were you consciously looking to challenge yourself or your readers?
This complete departure from my debut novel was intentional. After that book, people would call me “Buck” or write to me and say, “I’m so sorry about what happened” or say, “Why did you do that?”
It was going to become difficult to extricate myself from that persona, so I wanted to show people that I’m not a salesman who had just happened to write a book, but a writer who had just happened to write about sales.
I had the seed of the idea for “This Great Hemisphere” back in 2019 but when it wasn’t until my first draft that it dawned on me that writing a novel so far into the future with invisible people was not going to be a cakewalk. And it got harder and harder from draft to draft – I had to teach myself a whole new set of skills and stretch myself as an artist, which was the intention,
Q. What was the seed?
As wild as it sounds, it stemmed from reality. I was sitting on the subway when an older man and woman walked on; he asked where she wanted to sit but then he turns and just points directly at me. They walked toward me and I wondered if one was going to sit on my lap. But they shoved themselves into half seat beside me.
That night I lay in bed thinking about how this man pointed directly at my stomach as if I weren’t even there. What did he see? Or what did he not see? This wasn’t self-pity, but curiosity, which lent itself to more questions. What if there were actually a race of invisible people? Would they be revered as gods or subjugated? What kind of levity and love did they experience? As I began to form answers, they took the shape of what would become “This Great Hemisphere.”
Q. Growing up with an Iranian dad and Jamaican mom, you’ve said you felt like an outsider even within the Black community. We don’t know who to trust in this book, even among the Invisibles. Does that trace to your own sense of otherness?
The previous title was “Invisible Faces,” which was apt because mostly you never really know who any character is. But it was too close to “Invisible Man” and “This Great Hemisphere” better captured the epic scope.
I am incredibly attracted to writing characters who exist on the margins, even within their own communities and characters who have a hard time knowing who to trust while trying to work through that because they do want to trust other people.
Q. How much did you think about the different ways Black and White readers would react to the Invisibles and the Dominant Population?
Thinking about an audience, my intention was to write for anyone who has ever felt invisible. I realized within my own family there was so much of that. My grandfather had been elected to Parliament in Jamaica but came to the States and worked various jobs, including being a janitor. My grandmother was an English teacher in Jamaica but here she had a variety of jobs, including being a domestic. My mom is a nurse for incredibly wealthy individuals, When my father first came to the States, he was a courier moving constantly through New York City. It was all these service jobs and while they never came home crying about it, they were often invisible. But not to me. I saw my family. That’s why I had to begin the book with two epigraphs, with Ralph Ellison’s saying, “I’m invisible” but then with Toni Morrison saying, “Invisible to whom? Who do you want to be seen by?”
Q. Were you nervous about making your protagonist a woman?
“Black Buck” was so testosterone-heavy. 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.
Whenever I write any character, I look to wholly inhabit their life experience as much as I can. But when crafting this character, this invisible woman, I had to bring a deep sense of care, responsibility and humility, knowing that I could get her wrong. If my editor or my agent, who are women, said something, I’d say, “Let’s talk more so I can understand what might have been wrong here so that I can correct it.”
Q. As Sweetmint learns the truth and wonders whether the fight for equality and freedom is worth it, is she asking those questions because you feel hopeless?
I’m an optimist. I’m more often predisposed to seeing the good and giving folks the benefit of the doubt. I’m hardwired to believe that better days are possible, and that if we choose to look around the world is abound with good. But I’ve seen history repeat itself so many times, and I can assume that history has repeated itself for millennia in terms of oppression, enslavement, liberation. So it’s not a far leap for a book 500 years in the future to be dealing with the same problems. I hope that we won’t be, but it wouldn’t be surprising if we were just in new and different ways.
I’m asking if the nature of history is cyclical how, if at all, can we disrupt it?
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