Niall: ‘Baby Zero’ seems like such a topical book. So utterly relevant to these times, yet universal. Was this intentional?

I started the book in the year 2000 when I was pregnant with my first child. A baby Zero. So it came from a personal place but yes, ‘Baby Zero’, has found its time well. The U.S. gunning for Iran and Iran predictably spitting back. A book about a family caught between East and West. A Western woman in an Eastern body. Eastern people caught out in the West. This clash of civilisations is really just a clash of like versus like. Oligarchic West imposing rule onto monarchic East in a bid for raw materials under the guise of inflicting a better life on those who aren’t asking for one.

Niall: There are many different stories in this book. They are somehow connected, but how?

Emer: Like The Arabian Nights, the Eastern method of story telling is here, a story within a story within a story.

The American story of Leila and Zolo, the children who arrive from a refugee camp to their crazy Plastic Surgeon uncle in Malibu, L.A., is contained within the surreal state of Orap. Then the story of the conquest of the indigenous people of America is contained within the American story. Like Russian dolls. It all fits together.

Niall: There is also the story of the sixth great extinction. The fact that all the species are dying out on the planet. How is this linked to the East and West Story?

Emer: We are too distracted and leaderless right now. We watch as bystanders, as the extraordinary rendition of all hope and logic is snatched and bundled away. We watch helplessly as 50% of all known species are driven to extinction within our lifetimes by our indulgences. This is all linked because we are so distracted and visionless that we are as paralysed as James Joyce’s famous paralysed Dubliners a century ago. Except now the stakes are higher. They are not individual lives. It is the planet at stake.

Niall: These are heavy topics yet the book is a page turner. It’s actually very funny in parts.

Emer: Yes. Despite it all, the characters in ‘Baby Zero’ can laugh and run; and the kids still get stoned and elope to Vegas; and some people are decent. Finally, redemption comes as chaos descends, when a mother transcends herself and saves her child’s life by swapping her own. Is every culture not longing for redemption by sacrifice? That’s not just a Christian notion. This is a book of our time as we slouch toward Jerusalem and Mecca and Washington, and Teheran, and Mumbai, and Beijing to be dismantled. It is not light entertainment to be sure. It is a journey to the end of the night only to slip through a black hole at the end of that night and come back to the beginning whole. Come back to Zero.

Niall: Why did you write this book now?

Emer: This book is my ghost dance; a surreal song for the future told from the tail end of the 6th great extinction. Its underlying themes are the struggle against reductive thinking; the shrinking of our world through rampant globalisation; the East’s inappropriate response to the bullying of the west. Where it should have been positive, rather globalisation has diminished us. There are connections between the disappearance of languages, species and cultures. The world is gripped by western and eastern fundamentalism. Do we really want a globe with one species, one language, and one way of life?

Niall: The events in the frame of the story take place in the country of Orap. Where is that?

Emer: Some have asked me where Orap is. Orap is a creation of the West, a mythical place, the book is surreal, set in a future, which feels like today, just closer to the end. All the wild animals are extinct - as could well happen in our near future. The name Fattaggas is the indicator of this surrealist intention - being the name of a famous surrealist exhibition with Max Ernst, among others, taking part.

Niall: There is an anger in the book. Where does it come from?

Emer: The character in the book is searching for the truth in her family. Her life has been controlled by her mother. Her mother guarded her as she studied and watched her when she slept. And she never knew why. Suddenly everything collapses when there is a knock on their door and Mehrdad the servant boy turns up as a 40 year old engineer and blows all the family secrets open. If you don’t know your history you will be controlled by its ghosts. That works on a personal and political level. I suppose I am angry because people don’t care about history. Don’t understand why it is so important to know the history before they condemn others.

Fundamentalism in the East is a reaction to Western tyranny. This is classic blowback theory; America and Britain created the state of Iran by their greed for its oil. Mohammad Mossedeq in the 50’s was the only democratically elected leader Iran had, and he wanted to nationalise the oil. In 1953 America and Britain funded a coup to overthrow this democracy and install the Shah. The Shah was a puppet tyrant who gave the oil back to the West, and allowed their engineers in for vast construction projects. There is a Western arrogance that the resources of the world belong to the West. What did we expect but hatred? If Iran all those years ago had been allowed to have a normal democracy what would the world look like now?

This is not just a middle-eastern problem, rather it is a global problem; look at Africa, Patrice Lummuba assassinated by U.S. interests for mineral rich Congo. Puppet dictators installed who would allow countries to be plundered by Europe and America. We roll our eyes at those inept corrupt Africans and those crazy fanatical middle-easterners without understanding the true story. The truth. It really will set us free. We need it now.

Niall: So paradoxically, Orap is in fact a Western creation.

Emer: Exactly! Orap is a creation of the West. It is the nightmare of Orientalism. It has been forced into existence through repeated pernicious Western interference. Yes, there is a monster coming over the hill, but it’s us. So how can we run? We have to face ourselves.

America creates its own monsters. We must wake up and see that we can no longer believe our own propaganda: that we are the world’s benevolent policeman; that our military only goes overseas to help people in other countries overthrow tyrants and realize democracy. Americans must realise that the economic interests of a few wealthy people is controlling foreign policy. We need Americans to face reality, and I know many don’t, I’ve lived there so long. In fact I am an American citizen now. Only we can change our president. Most Americans would actually be horrified to know all this was done in their name for money.

Niall: The problem is not just America though, is it?

Emer: Of course not. All of us must cut our consumption, our thirst for oil. Our idea of endless progress is just another form of manifest destiny. And manifest destiny led to genocide of the people and pollution of the land. Manifest Destiny led to the Monroe Doctrine, that declared the United States was dominant over the hemisphere, and thus leads onto our present day notion of America as the world’s policeman. This book speaks to everyone and to anyone currently ready to demonise the other, it is falsely construed as purely an admonition to the East.

Niall: So what about the much touted Clash of Civilizations?

There is no clash of civilizations. In reality, George Bush and the Taliban have more in common than you or I. They are extremists. They do not tolerate difference. They insist their traditions, however exploitive of women, gays, artists, any one who constitute as other, are set in stone. They both claim justification from what is written in their respective bibles, and therefore their doctrine is immutable. This is cultural atrophy and it is not what the majority of us on the planet want or need.

Niall: Leila is such a wonderful character. She’s the moral centre of the book. Whatever redemption comes to any of the characters it comes from her. This book is about listening to the other. Leila can come a century later across the planet and identify and feel the people who were wiped from the land. She is the princess and the pea; she can feel the ghosts rising under all those layers of history. She knows we need them now more than ever. They cannot be forgotten, their stories and all stories must be kept alive. Marguerite realises that by telling Leila’s story her life meant something.

Niall: How does Ireland function in the book as a metaphor?

It is not my intention to malign other people’s cultures, the distance between California and Kabul is about equal, Ireland is a midpoint, a post-colonial, tribal, recently theocratic culture as it undergoes a painful metamorphosis into the world.

Niall: These aren’t the only themes in this book. You clearly illustrate the excesses that damn both cultures. I love the scene where the children escape the refugee camp only to witness their uncle inject botox into a client.

Emer: Yes. Both cultures have something in common. Namely, the battleground fought over women’s bodies. Is it more oppressive to cover the body entirely or to slice it open and put in implants, to inject botulism into women’s heads? These are grim choice and we can only hope to steer away from such extremes. Neither furthers the cause of women, and women’s equality is vital to changing the world, there is no freedom without it.

Niall: You always feel we cite the oppression of women in Eastern culture as a proof of our superiority. What do you think about this? There are grave concerns there. One of your characters states, “How come when you mistreat men for religion or colour it is recognized as oppression but when you mistreat women it is dismissed as tradition.”

Emer: However, women’s rights are not a Western prerogative. It is not something unique and integral in our culture. The West has only made progress very recently on this front. We only had a women’s movement in the 1970’s. Men still have the political and economic power in the Western world. Feminism cannot be imposed on other cultures for political kudos. Women’s rights in the East must come organically from within, from those women’s own sense of injustice. Otherwise, it will be fatally resisted as a Western imposition.

Niall: Do you condemn a culture that treats women like that?

Emer: Yes I condemn any form of repression. Afghanistan under the Taliban, Guantanimo bay, there are examples of extreme repression in both cultures.

But certainly the book is not a condemnation of the East, rather an illustration of how our worst nightmares come to fruition when we bully and suppress and steal and look on ourselves as civilised. It wasn’t the East that brought about global warming, used all the resources for themselves, or indulged in mass consumerism. The deluded children in Orap are reacting against a modern world that has pillaged the earth of its animals and air and diversity. This is the worst of what could happen. The book is a warning about a world I hope will never materialise.

Niall: Where do the stories come together? What is the idea behind this unification of all the separate threads?

The interconnecting stories come together in Leila’s scrapbook. She is beginning to have the outline of something; like a whale’s footprint on the surface, it signals something huge underneath. “She saw the same Cowboy and Indian story, over and over again, in different costumes, in different locations.” The wiping out of tribes, languages, customs, and habitats in the service of a vast global consumerism that benefits a tiny elite - an elite that mostly inhabited this part of the world where she had ended up. Somehow, she thought, that led to what was happening to the animals, the speciocide. And if we lost them we would lose ourselves - Into the mountain of memory like the buffalo. “Everyone knew species were dying out but no one was doing enough to stop it. The human brain was big but not logical. Leila saw the human addiction to stories, stories through TV, movies; all religion was worship of a particular story; Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, the Ramayana. The bibles were made sacred because they contained the story. In the beginning was the word. These stories caused trouble and had people hating.”

Niall: Again your recurring theme of the power of the story.

Emer: Leila is almost about to decide, that the word and the story must be the thing harnessed to save us. The truth of what we have done to each other. And it needs to start here, at the edge of America - the Wild West. This is the ghost dance. When the American Indians gathered all across the West, they danced to summon their ancestors to help them. The authorities reacted against the dancing and opened fire. They were afraid.

Niall: So did the ghost dance work?

As Deng Chow Ping said about the French revolution. It’s too early to tell. Maybe the ghosts that had been summoned by the Native-Americans 200 years ago are finally amassing - like centuries old dust from a comet suddenly illuminating the earth’s sky.

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Niall McKay is a film maker living in California. More

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© 2008 Laura Hird All rights reserved.