EXCLUSIVE: A Chat with Angie Thomas

Angie Thomas has been steady at work. The author has been consistently on the move promoting the film adaptation of her book The Hate U Give, something you can sense excites her when speaking to her, even over the phone. I had the opportunity to chat with her ahead of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival about the book’s inspiration, her love of Tupac, and a future Garden Heights book universe.

Joi Childs: When you first heard or understood that your book would become a film, what was the most important element of that story that you felt had to shine through in a new medium coming from book form to film form?

Angie Thomas: Well, I did not want what I call “Hollywood” treatment of Starr’s trauma or the trauma of police brutality and racism. I didn’t want any Kumbaya moments necessarily. I wanted this to be real and raw and authentic. So for me from the beginning that was always something. I voiced a strong opinion about, yes, I want people to see Starr’s struggle. Because if nothing else, I want them to think about the real Starrs around them – the young people are affected by these cases, not necessarily if they’ve written to them firsthand. But when a young person watches a video of someone who looks like them being killed by police officers, it’s going to affect them. That trauma is real, so I never wanted the trauma of it to be sugar-coated.

And I also wanted to make sure that the family dynamic remained. I wanted that to be an important part of the story, that this is an important part of the book. Starr’s family gives her such a foundation that I didn’t want her parents to be written off in any kind of way. And the great thing about both the director and the screenwriters in the studio and the producers, they all wanted to make sure those elements remained in the movie. So, well, I think all authors have that hesitation, I came away from it feeling really good about it.

JC: There’s this story of Starr code switching and having to live two different worlds that’s embedded in both the book and the film. Was Starr’s experience inspired by your own experience?

Angie Thomas: It was inspired by me. I dealt with it in college especially. I went to a mostly white, upper-class, private Christian school in conservative Mississippi, and I lived in a mostly black poor neighborhood that was always on the news for the wrong reasons. So I often felt I had to hide who I was, where I was when I was at school, or I had to change who I was, where I was. So I would code switch. I often say I leave my house playing Tupac, and by the time I got to my school I was playing the Jonas Brothers, because that’s what I thought I had to do to fit in.

And it was hard because you almost feel as if you have to take part of yourself away in order to be accepted. I never wanted anyone to think I was an ignorant black girl because I was listening to this, I never wanted anyone to think I was the ghetto black girl because I said something like this, I never wanted to be the angry black girl because I was upset all of a sudden. So I found myself, putting myself in a box of life. But what I came to understand and what I hope Starr comes to understand that the real friends, the real people in your life who remain around will accept you as you are, whether that’s with the code switching or without it. So it’s definitely taken from my own life.

JC: Since you brought up Tupac, I’ve read that you’re a big Tupac fan (the book’s title is half of the acronym of THUG LIFE, for those unaware). Do you have a favorite Tupac album and a favorite Tupac track?

Angie: I think I could cop-out and say my favorite Tupac album is his Greatest Hits, but I think my favorite album is Me Against The World. I think because for me I remember listening to that album for the first time, and not knowing the history behind it, and then listening to it for the second time and learning the history behind it and learning what he was going through when he did that album, so it gave things a different perspective. So I think Me Against The World is my favorite album.

My favorite song would have to be “Changes.” I often say like when I first heard “Changes,” that was like the first time I got woke. I mean, I was a little woke, maybe I was drowsy before. Hearing that song was like getting caffeine put in my veins. There’s a line that I still go through every now and then: “Even though it seems heaven-sent, we ain’t ready to have a black president.” I remember hearing that then and thinking, “We’re not ready.” And then when Obama happened, and I saw how so many white Americans reacted to having a Black president, I was like Pac was right, we’re still not ready. So “Changes” is by far my favorite Tupac song.

JC: In writing this book, is there certain music that helped you get into the mindset of telling this story in the first place?

Angie: Oh, absolutely. I listened to a lot of Tupac when I was writing the book. I listen to a lot of Kendrick Lamar. I listen to TLC; I’m a huge TLC fan. Specifically I listen to TLC for the girl power element. Because TLC, and a lot of those groups, when I was a kid they made me feel as if the world was really at my feet. TLC, they use their voices and they use their art to make people listen to and pay attention to issues. Like “Waterfalls” was their way of addressing like the AIDS crisis and “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” with them wearing the condoms. They made themselves heard; they spoke up and spoke lots of things.

So when I was writing the book I listened to a lot of them, I listened to them for inspiration and for Starr even as a young Black woman in a world that’s so often said, “You’re too busy, you’re too that, how do you navigate that?” I listen to a lot of TLC to get that. I mean, come on, the greatest girl group of all time and all the stuff they went through. I remember thinking, “If they can get through houses burning down and all that stuff, I can give them girl a little bit of that strength as I write her.”

JC: Your first book, this book, got turned into a film. Your next book is supposed to be coming out with Harper Collins in 2019 called On the Come Up. We don’t want to spoil too much, but can you have to talk about the new book’s premise, whether or not it’s an extension of this story from The Hate U Give and Starr’s life, or is it a completely new protagonist?

Angie: It’s kind of completely new protagonist. It takes place in the same neighborhood but it’s a whole different set of characters. For me it was important to make Bri’s Garden Heights different from Starr’s Garden Heights. It’s the same neighborhood, but it’s almost a different world. Because that’s the thing about it, maybe who lives like that, the way one person lives in it it’s totally different from another person. So I didn’t want that generalization.

But in On the Come Up, it’s about a 16-year old girl named Brianna who wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time, or at least win her first battle. And she’s often profiled at school as being a hoodlum and being a hood rat, and all of these things, as so often so many of our girls are. And she finds herself suspended a lot; she finds herself in trouble a lot. But she also she knows who she wants to be, and she knows she’s more than what people make her out to be. But her life is turned upside down, when (1) her mom unexpected move with her job, and (2) a song she makes [goes] viral for all the wrong reasons.

After an incident with school security guards she’s inspired to write a song, and the song gets her the wrong kind of attention. So as she finds herself desperate to make it and find herself being portrayed as something else, that desperation feels a little greater and she finds herself so desperate that she’s willing to be exactly what people think she should be. It’s my take on what it means to be young and Black in America when freedom of speech isn’t necessarily free, and what it means to be a young Black person when the world thinks they know who you are and they try to define who you are.

I look at so many of these young rappers, especially nowadays, I look at them and I look at the images that they portray. Then I understand, too, that some of these kids come from nothing and we make them up to be monsters. But who’s the real monster, them or the circumstances that they find themselves in? So it’s my way of talking about that and what it means to be a young Black person in this country when so many things are stacked against you and you’re just trying to find a way out.

JC: And just one quick follow-up question for that – with Garden Heights being the common location for your books, have you ever considered having a Garden Heights book universe where these characters at some point interact?

Angie: Yeah, there’s a lot of great things. But I think my plan is maybe to do only one more book in Garden Heights. But I think with this neighborhood I want to show as many different sides of it as I can, because that’s my neighborhood in reality. It’s a different name, but it’s my neighborhood. So I mean, I’m sure at some point the readers are going to call it the Garden Heights verse or something like that, which is dope. But that’s definitely … It’s possible, I will say that.

JC: I would love to see these, all of these protagonist joining forces and together, they’re battling respectability politics and white supremacy. That’d be amazing.

Angie: It is possible. I honestly I see Starr and Bri as being two sides of the same coin. Starr speaks up and speaks out, and she comes to recognize that she has the voice. Bri knows she has the voice, but she doesn’t recognize the power of her work.

 

 

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