It would be easy to glance at the back cover of “this life,” the vital and inventive new novel by quntos (pronounced “quan-tuss”) kunquest, to deduce the fact that the author has, for the past twenty-five years , has been incarcerated in Angola Prison, Louisiana, for a carjacking committed when he was nineteen, and the book is presumed to belong to the genre of prison literature predominantly concerned with exposing the horrors within to the outside world. there is a significant non-fiction tradition of these books. Piri Thomas’s “Down These Mean Streets” and “Seven Long Times” are about how incarceration erases the humanity of its subjects. chronicling his years as a Los Angeles invalid and his multiple stints in prison, sanyika shakur’s “monster” graphically depicted the violence and sexual assaults routine in the system. and Piper Kerman’s memoir “Orange Is the New Black” illustrated the material and moral costs of the war on drugs.
that angola, a facility that began as a slave plantation, was the setting for another recent book, “solitaire” by albert woodfox, a lengthy memoir of the decades woodfox spent in solitary confinement, is even more of a drag on the suspicions about what “this life” has in store. But part of what makes the book memorable is the fact that Kunquest, perhaps because it’s working in a fictional mode, deals with a completely different set of questions and more subtle. “once you’ve been in the fire for so long… you get used to the heat,” he told me recently, when we spoke on the phone. “once you get used to the heat, you start living, man.” /p>
“This Life” is the story of an intergenerational ensemble of men, all of whom are serving time in the same prison. violence is a possibility, but no more so than wonder, friendship, hope and, significantly, creativity. the latter forms the basis of the book, as the freestyle rap battles between its main characters serve as a sort of narrative device, tying the disparate plot threads together. There is conflict, mainly between Lil Chris, a newcomer, and Rise, who has been in for years, and that conflict drives crucial decisions. but there are also the mundane facts of everyday life, the seemingly throwaway moments that reveal so much more about the characters than the dramatic interludes.
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The novel’s publication history is almost as intriguing. Kunquest met novelist Zachary Lazar when the latter visited the prison to write about a play, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” being performed there. (kunquest, who was part of the sound team, had composed some music for the production). When Lazar mentioned that he was working on a novel set in Angola, Kunquest commented that he had already finished one. over time, he transcribed the manuscript by hand. He then mailed it to Lazar, who, after a series of mishaps, found a home for the book at Agate Publishing.
On June 8th, the book’s publication date, I spoke with Kunquest about his influences, the complexities of writing a novel in prison, and how men, in the midst of particular hells, find the determination to keep moving forward in life. our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
so let’s go in and start talking about the book, if that’s okay with you. with that.
I’m great with that. have you read it?
Yes, I did.
what did you think?
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I thought it was brilliant and original. it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a fair amount of work that takes place in prisons or on the subject of incarceration. How did you come to start writing the novel?
The original idea was a vehicle for song lyrics. I thought the statement in these lyrics was still relevant, but I couldn’t use them with music. so I wanted a way to display them. that’s how it started.
There’s a lot to talk about with that. but how did you write it physically? What was the process of writing the book?
They used to have notices on the dorm security desk. basically, there were six or seven sheets of paper stapled together, letting us know if we had permission to move around the prison. I’d slip those legends into my pocket on the way to the hallway at work. and that would be a chapter. However long the legend was, I wrote on the back. if the legend was eight pages long, then the chapter was eight pages long; if the legend had six pages, the chapter had six pages. And that’s how I did the first six chapters.
That’s interesting. I noticed that the structure involved short chapters from the beginning, and I was wondering if you had done it intentionally. but you were working with the amount of paper you had.
correct. and i’m a member of the angola theater club, so they teach you the basic structure of creative writing. you introduce the plot, you develop it and then there’s a climax and an ending. so I kept following the same pattern. and the more chapters I got, the more I began to understand what he meant. the chapters got longer because I had a clearer understanding of where I was going.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is its lyrical quality. not just the lyrics, the raps, but the novel itself. And I was wondering how you developed that voice.
it arose innately. I have this sense of rhythm that I’ve always been attached to. i really started to recognize that in this creative writing class we took at tulane [college], in the middle of last year. I began to see how prose writing was different from rhyming, in the sense that you moved away from the metronome. but there is still a metronome in the writing. still has one heartbeat left.
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There are a few lines here that caught my eye. you have a line where you describe someone and say their mug is “real”. then, at another point, you’re describing a scene and you write, “around it are men in stationary transition,” which I thought was beautiful. It seems to me that writing is something that requires discipline and concentration, the worst thing is that they interrupt you. And I was wondering how you were able to do it in an environment that is not known for creative work.
I’m an environmental person. I thrive and feed on what happens around me. I think a lot of times when I’m creative, I’m not necessarily creating from scratch. all I’m doing is translating what I see. so it is never forced; it is never start and stop. it’s just me staying connected and taking a slice of what’s going on around me and blowing it up.
These lines that stood out are small poems by themselves. and then there is the role of rap throughout: a large part of the book is lyrics. Was that a challenge, or were those the fun parts of writing? How did making real hip-hop lyrics become a part of history?
what bothers me the most is that people think hip-hop is comedy or some kind of bastard art. I wanted people to see how the lyrics we write are a big part of us to understand what’s going on around us, to make sense of it. Right? when you take lyrics seriously, this is our aristotle or our plate. these are the things we look for when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. if i’m looking at something and i’m trying to understand it, then tupac said something that will help me get some perspective.
mm-hmm.
That element of lyrical writing is what I wanted to translate, in terms of turning it into a book. then it was not. . Many times, the impression I get from school-educated writers is that it’s more technical than substance.
of course.
I think the fact that I don’t know much about technique frees me up to do something different. The way the book came out is largely due to Doug Seibold [of Agate Publishing] and Zachary Lazar helping me edit it, but the text wrote itself.
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