No sensible person would ever call us that. A literary dream team is something like V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, David Malouf and John Updike or Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks, Amitav Ghosh and Nuruddin Farah. People need to get a sense of scale. Marcus, Eric, Lynn and I are more like a daydream in the middle of a physics class. Come on. Let’s be real.
What was it like to work with the guys?
It was the same as creating any other work, because we didn’t get together to discuss what we were doing. The four of us were given a creative brief—write a short novel around the idea of first love. We all came back with different visions. This is a part of the reason why so many readers enjoy the book—four visions for the price of one.
Describe your story.
It’s set in Jamaica and New York. It’s the story of a music producer who returns to Jamaica after a twenty-year absence and discovers that he is still in love with his ex-wife. Complicating the story is the fact that his ex-wife is now remarried. On top of this, the producer is involved in a dangerous flirtation with a volatile young singer who is in love with him.
In many ways this is the most Jamaican of your work to date.
Yes. It is my love song to Jamaica, to the period that shaped me the most, the seventies, when socialism, reggae and Rastafarianism were in full bloom. It was a great period of transformation. It’s impossible to understand modern Jamaica without understanding this period. In the same way you can’t understand America without understanding the sixties.
Michael, the main character is Chinese. Were you concerned that readers—especially black readers—would find it hard to relate to him?
No. I assume an intelligent reader. I trust black people more than that. Jamaica is a complicated place with a complicated history, racial and otherwise, and the descendants of indentured Chinese laborers are a part of that history. Patricia Powell explores this history in her novel The Pagoda. What many people don’t realize, though, is that many of the leading studios that produced what are now known as reggae classics were owned by Chinese businessmen. The late Leslie Kong, for example, produced a lot of Bob Marley’s early hits.
Mia, Michael’s ex-wife is black, but race is not an important part of the mess that she and Michael have to resolve.
I am glad you said that. I could have made race an issue, but then that would not have been interesting. Neither would it have been true to the characters. Their issues have to do with class and politics. Michael and Mia were two working class kids who got married early. Michael became a music producer and Mia became a lawyer. Mia wanted to strive for more material things and Michael did not. But Michael had his faults. He was self-righteous in his political and religious beliefs—he was a Rastafarian—and on top of this he was a womanizer.
Twenty years later, Michael and Mia have evolved into different people. He is a creative director in an advertising agency in New York and she is running a café in Jamaica. She is married and they are still in love.
Mia is a full-figured woman. Why did you make her this way?
That is the way she came into my imagination. Michael and Mia are in their forties. Many women in their forties are plush. Mia is plush—nice and fat and full-bodied. But the truth is that she is a little insecure when she sees Michael, who, apart from some gray at his temples, still looks the way he did when they were together twenty years before. The way in which she recovers full comfort with her sensuality when Michael shows appreciation for her fullness is for me a special part of enjoying this book. Mia is nice and fat and juicy.
Her juiciness is in full effect in the brothel scene. How can people make love for six pages?
How can people make love for six minutes?
What made the scene for me was the way in which Michael and Mia managed to create beauty and meaning in a dirty, nasty place.
Thank you. Michael and Mia descend into the dirt to plant a seed of renewal. Renewal is one of the themes of the story, renewal and regeneration. In the kinds of fiction that I read and admire, writers take their characters to the limit. It is only when we are at the limit that we really know what we will or will not do. The truth of Mia’s sensuality comes out when it is pressed to the limit. She becomes transformed from a caterpillar into a butterfly and launches herself in flight.
I love Mia as a character, but I have to say the singer irritated me.
Patience?
There were times when I wanted to get a pair of scissors and cut her out of the book.
That’s a new one. If I were you I’d have cut up the whole thing and just gotten it all over and done with in one moment.
I didn't mean to diss your work.
It's okay. I take your dissing as a compliment. Your visceral reaction to Patience meant that she came to life for you. But why is everybody so mad at Patience? Look, Patience falls in love with Michael. Michael fans her desire when he discovers that he can use her love for him to motivate her to do her best singing. Her success will be his success. He knows that she is trouble, but he leads her on, gambling with her emotions. Patience is doing what people do all the time—she is acting on what she thinks she knows. She thinks that it’s actually possible for Michael to be hers. She wants him. She goes for him. She goes for him really, really hard.
How did you come up with the story's name?
I was going to name it something else. Then on a trip to London I found a copy of Delroy Wilson’s album Sarge at the Tower Record Store in Piccadilly Circus. Sarge is really hard to find. But apart from that, it contains a reggae cover of Marley’s “I’m Still Waiting” which was originally recorded in the style of R&B. Many people don’t realize that Marley didn’t begin as a reggae artist because reggae didn’t exist when he started out. Anyway, at some point I had decided to create three works infused with the spirit of Marley’s music. The first was Waiting in Vain. The second is I’m Still Waiting. The third is Satisfy My Soul.
Weren't you worried that people would be confused by the names? I'm Still Waiting and Waiting In Vain?
No. I assume an intelligent reader, and I intend to write a lot of books. Twenty books from now, who will care?