San Carlos is everywhere in the Caribbean and nowhere in the Caribbean. It’s completely made up. It’s a mix of Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Haiti, with a bit of St. Lucia and Dominica thrown in.
To quote Susan Straight you’ve “joined the few writers who’ve created
an entirely new and mythical landscape.”
I guess as a writer you do what’s necessary to make your story work. I didn’t want to set the story in a place that existed. I wanted to give the story the feeling of a tale, you know. I wanted to avoid what Russell calls in his afterword “standard-issue realism on the one side and escapist fantasy on the other …” There’s a slight element of long, long ago and far away to the story of Estrella, to the story of her quest. Even the title has a fairy tale sound to it—The Girl With the Golden Shoes.
Was inventing a new place fun for you?
It was a lot of fun. But it was also a lot of work. The fun part was that I had to go to San Carlos many times in my head to experience it completely. This is what you have to do as a writer to know a place well enough to take your readers there with nothing but words … to make them see and feel the place intensely. I like reading stories that make me aware that I can read with more than my eyes, that I can read through my nose and ears and skin as well. The Girl With the Golden Shoes is this kind of story.
Was it hard to write from a woman’s point of view?
I hear that question a lot, and I always give the same answer. No. It isn’t hard to write from a woman’s point of view. Not for me at least. It’s a kind of method acting you know, this writing thing. You get into a character. You inhabit a character. You become a character through tapping into the emotions of that character, which is a subset of all the emotions of every other human being, every single human character in the world, including yourself. But it’s not just a matter of being able to do this. It’s also a matter of wanting to do this, of having the deep desire to step outside yourself and going the distance, of going all the way to the liquid core of someone else.
Was it hard to get Russell Banks to write the afterword?
It turned out not to be hard in the end. But rustling up the courage to ask him was difficult for me—for more reasons than one. Russell is one of the main reasons why I became a novelist. I came across his novel The Book of Jamaica in a library in the Bronx shortly after I moved to the States from Jamaica in 1982. I’d never heard about him before—which is my fault, not his—and I was immediately struck by the assurance of his voice, and the sharpness of his eye. But in addition to this I was struck by his willingness—his commitment really—to writing with care about people on the margins. In this way he was like a reggae singer to me. Reggae singers care about the sufferers, the people who don’t have much but keep on struggling every day, sometimes for nothing more than dignity. I began to follow Russell’s career after reading The Book of Jamaica. Whenever I heard or saw a reference to him or his work I’d pay attention, and his books kept finding their way into my hands … or I’d go looking for them … Continental Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, The Darling. So of course I was frightened at the prospect of asking this living giant of American and world literature to consider writing an afterword to my little book.
You were worried that he’d say no?
I was worried about something worse than that, actually. What if he said yes to taking a look at the book then said no after actually reading it? What if he didn’t feel strongly enough about the work to give it his full support? As it turns out, he felt really strongly about the book. He begins his afterword by framing The Girl With the Golden Shoes in the context of enduring examples of the moral fable in American lit, works like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and The Bear by Faulkner.
Where did the idea for the story come from?
It is loosely based on a story my mother told me many years ago. It’s the story of how her family tried to undermine her when she decided to become a pharmacist, how she resisted the idea of being defined by anybody but herself, and the serious consequences of that. My mother is the emotional blueprint for Estrella Thompson. In fact, Thompson is my mother’s maiden name.
How would you describe Estrella?
She’s a girl who knows what she wants, but has no idea how hard it’s going to be to get it. She’s about to be fifteen, so he’s a girl; but she’s living in a place and time when the idea of adolescence does not exist—a small Caribbean island in the 1940s. She’s a girl who’s a woman as well.
Is she a female Huck Finn?
She shares certain qualities with Huck, but she’s really her own person. I can see why the comparison would be made—in both cases we have a young person at the center of an adventure story. But one of the significant differences between Huck and Estrella, apart from the obvious differences of culture, gender and race, is that Estrella has romantic desires. She dreams of being involved with a man she finds interesting. That is a part of her motivation, her drive to make her own way in the world. Russell describes the book as “… Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and The Frog Prince all rolled into one. With a little Huckleberry Finn and Tom Jones thrown in for good measure.” He knows a lot about this kind of thing, and something tells me he’s right.
The book is drawing comparisons to Twain; but it’s also drawing comparisons to Naipaul and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I think the Naipaul comparison is coming up because we’re both from the Caribbean. Well, so is Marquez. He’s from the Caribbean coast of Colombia. One of my favorite works of his is The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
What was the hardest thing about writing this story?
I think it would be the question of voice, the question of how to represent the language of Estrella and most of the people that she meets. I had to find a way to capture—no—free that voice. I needed to free it so it could reach out and connect with readers who were not from the Caribbean—most people. At the same time I wanted to represent the voice in a way that would be credible and recognizable to Caribbean people.
And how did you do that?
By largely doing away with phonetic spellings, and concentrating mostly on word choice and word order. Phonetic spelling puts Caribbean English in a subordinate relationship to the brands of English that dominate the literary world, namely, American and British English. Generally speaking, Australian writers don’t use phonetic spelling to represent their brand of English on the page, and they’re not asked or expected to do it. We can safely say the same for Irish, New Zealander and South African writers as well. Like most Caribbean nations, these are all former British colonies. Music and migration have made it easy for people all around the world to hear a Caribbean voice in their head as they read. If you establish that a character is Caribbean the reader’s ear will do the rest.