It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. So that’s the difference that I tried to create between her and the revolutionaries she meets.What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? One woman struggles to choose between her honor and her heart in this enthralling espionage drama that deftly hops between New York and West Africa. And Marie-as a product of what might be a limit of my imagination-can’t either. They must have an incredible amount of confidence in their vision, and I couldn’t fully conceptualize such total self-assurance. While working on this novel, I became very interested in what motivates a revolutionary leader. How do you see Marie’s experience as a black woman in America as contrasting with the African revolutionaries she meets abroad? I think it falters there-in the moment you realize you’ve been unquestioningly loyal to a country that isn’t loyal to you. If you’re not treated as if you’re fully entitled to the benefits of a country, or if you can’t trust the country to apply the rule of its law to you and to the people who look like you in an equitable and methodical manner, then your loyalty to it comes into question. Similarly, Marie comes to question her loyalties once she’s been in Burkina Faso-where do you think patriotism for one’s country ends? And I mention John le Carré, because I was inspired by the difficult morality of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. There’s also The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee, which is a story about a black former CIA agent who uses the things the agency taught him to start a revolution.
They include Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Passing by Nella Larsen, because of what they articulate about identity and about double and triple consciousness. I namecheck several of the novels that inspired me most directly in the novel, which may be obnoxious, but I did want to acknowledge them, because I felt I owed these books a debt. What books informed American Spy most directly, and in what manner? Or her triple self, as when Marie is in spaces where she’s secure in the perception of her blackness, they’re often male-dominated, and so she must figure out a way to contextualize herself within the limits of patriarchy instead. I think she’s struggling with a sense of her double self: the black person and the American. What do you see as the barriers Marie faces in seeing herself as fully American? Du Bois calls the “double consciousness.” Spies must constantly be vigilant about how they’re perceived and must also be aware of the ways in which this perception is in conflict with their own self-perception.
As I continued to work on the novel, the spy genre started to feel like a natural metaphor for what W.E.B. I started out with wanting to write a black female spy, because I wanted to create a character I didn’t see growing up but wished I had.
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