That's an excerpt from Tony D'Souza's novel, Whiteman--a fictional account of his time in Peace Corps Ivory Coast that ended when a civil war rocked his host country.
It's packed with tough and beautiful prose, the primal scream of a new novelist. You can read more on D'Souza's website, but this week he shared some writing advice with us in five long essays.
It's part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
You spent three years on the Ivory Coast during an increasingly violent era in that country. How did you learn how to write about this complex country--did you write Whiteman over there or did you keep a journal and write later? Do you have any advice for the fledgling writer writing about experiences abroad?
Tony D'Souza:
I read so many books about Ivory Coast before I went, I’ve always been an avid student of history. So while I usually say that I don’t do research for my books, in fact I do. I just always think of doing research as sitting with a dusty tome in the library.
But reading all those books about Ivory Coast before I went, and also while I was there, was research. I just didn’t know then that I was getting ready to write a book about the place.Too many Peace Corps books fail because the author focuses on the American, focuses on details that are not really that interesting. In many of these books, the protagonist—the American—muses on being sick, on the heat, on the slowness of time in the tropics.
Those are all true things to the experience, but really, those are the things that the writer has to forget. Yes, you were always sick, yes it was brutally hot. But move on and tell a story. Mention the stuff, but move on.
Look at the people. Write about the people. Imagine if someone went to Mars and all they reported back was about how their body felt. That’s not what I’d want to hear. I’d want to see landscapes, details on the landscapes. Not the person doing the seeing, but what’s being seen.
Try not to be overwhelmed by the difference of the place. Just inhabit what’s there to see it as quickly and keenly as you can. Think of your audience. You’re really just bringing a world back for them to see.
If your character gets served an okra soup with giant snail meat in it, offer that detail. But if your character goes, “Oh my god they expect me to eat this jungle bunny crap?” then what more is your story about than that one guy and his discomfort? Yawn.
Having said that, why should we have this notion that writing about Ivory Coast should be harder or more difficult than writing about here? Writing about here is just as hard.
Writing about anywhere is hard. My book about Africa came out of a period of time in my life when I lived there. That I wrote it before writing about other periods of time in my life was a cynical decision I made because I knew people want to read about ‘exotic’ Africa, to excise some war demons in me (which didn’t work), and that if I could write this book, it would open the gate to my other books.
There must not be a mythology about writing on other countries/cultures. That denigrates them as being somehow intrinsically different from ours. What’s different is that we went there and now feel we can write about them.
But the rich neighborhood across town, the poor neighborhood downtown, these are just as far away from me as those villages in Africa I didn’t get to know. We are surrounded by landscapes that don’t belong to us.
For many of us who have lived abroad, we think of those experiences as unique among our other experiences. But they must not be anything other than a part of the whole of who we are. Do you see what I’m saying? Possess those strange times. Those landscapes really do belong to us.
I did keep a journal in Ivory Coast, by the way, many of them, six. I lost them all when I fled at the outbreak of the civil war.
awesome interview: Thought you might like the following review.
Posted by: Mark | December 27, 2007 7:11 AM | Permalink to Comment