Did you hear the one about a president and a talking frog?
Oakland author's latest blends fairy tale with all-too-real current affairs
Although they are far from mortal enemies, there is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game going on between a reporter and an ex-president in Oakland author Carolina De Robertis’ fifth novel, “The President and the Frog” (Knopf, $24.95, 224 pages). Their exchange revolves around a backward look at the life of the aged, unnamed protagonist, a former revolutionary in a South American nation who underwent years of torture and imprisonment before emerging to ascend to high office, becoming both beloved by his countrymen and revered around the globe for his humility, compassion and lifelong thirst for justice.
But as the interviewee faces his interlocutor, an admiring woman journalist from Norway, he is harboring a secret. What he wants to keep to himself is how, while deep in isolation and suffering unimaginable deprivation, he managed to hold on to his will to live. The key to his survival — if not, perhaps, his hold on sanity — turns out to have been his recurrent and frequently fractious conversations with a thoroughly obnoxious frog, an apparition (or was it?) that comes and goes at its own whim.
De Robertis, an American of Uruguayan heritage who immigrated to the U.S. from England at the age of 10, has dipped her pen into magical realism before, in novels such as “Perla” and “The Invisible Mountain.” But what she has accomplished with this narrative, which is purposely set immediately after the 2016 U.S. election, is to produce a tale that is equal parts fable, political manifesto and utterly engaging testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
We, of course, had questions about how this unusual novel came about, and De Robertis most graciously provided answers.
QThere is a reference in the book to “the disastrous recent election in North America.” Is this book a warning of sorts?
AOne of the things I love about novels is their capaciousness: Novels are vast; they can hold many threads and be many things at once. So certainly, this book can be read as an alarm bell for the times in which we’re living and the challenges we face as a society. But it could also be read as an exploration of what’s possible in terms of transformation, both personal and collective.
QYou chose not to give your protagonist a name or a particular country. Why is that?
AI’ve been writing novels set in Uruguay and neighboring Argentina for 20 years now, so I’m no stranger to creating detailed settings specific to a time and place. For example, my last novel before this one, “Cantoras,” chronicles the lives of five queer women during the Uruguayan dictatorship and its aftermath, and it felt important to bring that world to life with a wealth of historically accurate detail. For this book, however, I wanted to explore the possibilities of a different approach, in which an unnamed country allows for a greater freedom to explore the intimate truth. The country in this novel is based primarily on Uruguay and the protagonist is inspired by former president José Mujica, but this is also a parallel fictional world with its own mysteries and wildness.
QSo why a frog, in particular, instead of, say, a turtle or an owl?
AThe creature in this novel is a frog because the first spark of inspiration came from an actual interview with José Mujica, while he was president of Uruguay, in which he said that one way he survived brutal solitary confinement as a political prisoner, in the dictatorship years, was by talking to frogs. This image stayed with me and filled me with questions. What were those conversations, what could they have been like, and what might they convey about those secret crucibles in which we face ourselves and come through fire? So the character of the frog was born from a seed of fact, planted in the soil of imagination.
Also, frogs are amphibious creatures, belonging to two worlds at once, which means they inhabit a unique symbolic realm.
QCan you tell us about the juxtaposition of the absurd and the horrific that we encounter in the
novel? Are they meant to balance?
AWhat an intriguing question! I think one of the things that’s difficult for us, as human beings, to absorb about horror is how it takes place alongside the ordinary. Trauma and beauty, humor and sorrow often exist within shared space. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life thinking about trauma, of both the personal and collective kind; in my 20s, I worked at a rape crisis center in the East Bay and listened to the stories of over a thousand sexual assault survivors. This experience shaped me, not only as a person and as an activist, but also as a writer. The question of how we
survive trauma is inextricably linked with questions of how we heal, yes, but also questions about how we resist, how we live in the mundane world, how we create and re-create ourselves, how we laugh, how we flourish and how we break the walls that cage us. So the juxtaposition of these different moods and elements feels essential to an exploration of the whole.
QYour protagonist, as enlightened as he seems to be, struggles with the concept of homosexuality. Why was that important?
AIt was important to include this because it’s true to life and reflects one of the deepest challenges facing all our social movements, namely, the ability to connect one issue area to others. The movement the protagonist arose from focused on economic equity, but how can you have that without fully addressing homophobia? Or sexism? All of these movements are connected because they connect in real people’s lives. It was true then and it’s true today: For example, we’ll never overcome the climate crisis without dismantling White supremacy. Just look at how, here in the U.S., the same right-wing politicians refusing to address the climate crisis are also leveraging racism to enact voter suppression and stay in power. Without intersectionality, there is no social justice and no future for the planet.
QThe first impression we come away with after meeting your ex-president in these pages is his deeply rooted humility. How much was our own ex-president in mind as you were crafting your fictional one?
AI wrote this book during the Trump Era and I was aware of writing with a double consciousness of both the place and time in which it’s set and the realities I was living. But the portrayal in this book isn’t ultimately about Trump. It’s about power, more broadly — how people hold it, how we wield it, how it shapes us and how we shape it in turn. We have lofty ideals about politicians as public servants; what does it mean when those ideals are corrupted? And what does it mean when somebody actually, sincerely attempts to carry them out?
QCan we assume that many of your ex-president’s thoughts also are the thoughts of Carolina De Robertis? (For instance: “It doesn’t take a military takeover for a government to menace its own people.”)
ACertainly, there are places where the ex-president’s philosophy overlaps with mine, though there are also places where that’s not the case, such as his struggle to understand queerness. But I think the more important question is how readers experience the protagonist’s philosophy and ideas. As with any novel of ideas, the reader does not need to agree with the protagonist, but can take the text as an invitation to exchange; how do these ideas land with you, what do they stir in you, what do they spark? Even the ex-president himself is not always sure about his ideas. Even as he talks, he’s often searching, questing, wondering; we get to see both the roots of his convictions and the inner vulnerability of grappling with big, thorny questions.
QOne thing you did NOT make up is the model of a just revolution begun in earnest commitment to the good of the people that unravels due to the opposition and the fragility of its followers. Did you have a particular historic event in mind?
AI had many historic events in mind. I modeled the revolutionary movement in this book on Uruguayan history, which I’d been researching for 18 years for other novels. I also drew on movements in other Latin American countries. However, I really aimed for this narrative to explore deeper, broader questions about social change and how we enact it that have everything to do with who we are today in the U.S. and beyond and the future many of us would like to see for our communities. I’ve been an activist for at least 25 years, and I know that, in caring about the gap between the world as it is and the world as we’d wish it to be, I am far from alone. How do we create meaningful social change in the face of deeply entrenched injustice? How do we address the internal as well as external barriers to that change? What’s the best use of our energies as people who care deeply about human life and our planet? What would it look like — really look like — to create a world where everyone can be safe and free?
QSometimes your frog sounds like a Buddhist (“There is One. In the One is All.”) But he seems to be a multipurpose critter: provocateur, crutch, guru, therapist. Am I misconstruing or leaving anything out? Did he seem real to you?
AYes, the frog is absolutely real to me, as a discrete character whose personality and inner life are unlike anyone else’s. Like many fictional characters, he is a blend of many ingredients, from the real to the imagined. I knew the journey he and the president took would be psychologically and spiritually profound — that there would be a strong dramatic arc between them — so, to develop him, I in part drew on sacred sources, such as the “Bhagavad Gita,” a Sanskrit holy text driven by a conversation between the human Arjuna and the divine Krishna ... I did look to Buddhism, including the “Dhammapada,” and also, to wisdom stories about trickster deities whose needling catalyzes awakening.
QAre we as readers free to regard the frog as a figment of the prisoner’s fevered imagination?
AI think readers have the right to experience books in their own unique ways and some of the novels I’ve loved most have yielded a multiplicity of interpretations. So I embrace the notion that there’s room for readers to make meaning from this narrative in different ways. Is the frog real? What is reality? Where is the line between our inner world and other realms? Fiction doesn’t have to be about finding tidy answers to our questions; instead, it can be a dive into the questions themselves.