It’s a sexy, witty collection of connected stories set on the Caribbean island of San Carlos, a really magical place. The stories span the entire twentieth century and move in chronological order from 1903 until now.
You open with “The High Priest of Love,” a story about a celibate young priest beloved by women. Why?
“The High Priest of Love” has a lot of the ingredients that make the stories in the collection really great to read—interesting persons wanting interesting things for interesting reasons. This story also establishes the characters whose offspring will be featured and examined in the stories to come. What is really great about the collection is that the stories stand up on their own. But they are best enjoyed when read in chronological order from beginning to end.
Why would a book set in a fictional island in the Caribbean be relevant or interesting to American readers?
A lot of the characters are American travelers, so American readers will be able to relate. Also the Caribbean, though exotic, is familiar ground. Anybody who’s been to Jamaica or Puerto Rico or the Bahamas will be able to step in the world of these stories without feeling out of place. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing to discover. San Carlos is a magical island with lots of secrets that reveal themselves slowly with each turning page. But most importantly, the characters in the stories are working through universal conflicts—things like love and sex and envy and ambition and revenge—things that anybody anywhere will care about and understand.
The book has the wholeness of a novel. Is it a novel in disguise?
It’s something all together its own that adds up to an exhilarating experience. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street is a good example of this kind of work. Another example would be Jean Toomer’s Cane or V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street. You can also throw in Dubliners by Joyce. Passing Through doesn’t have the kind of “start-and-stop” sense of driving in bad traffic that you often get from story collections. The book contains seven stories of substantial length. In fact, four of them are novellas.
How is Passing Through different from your previous books?
For one, it’s better than anything I’ve done before. It’s truly the best thing I’ve done to date. Second of all, it has the best cover to date. But most importantly, it contains the broadest and deepest range of characters I’ve ever brought into being. On top of this, the setting on the fictional island of San Carlos is a landscape we’ve never seen before. I also think I’m learning to keep my lyricism under control, so the prose is smoother, cleaner—powerful but graceful, very Mercedes Benz.
It’s been six years since your auspicious debut with Waiting In Vain. How have you changed as a writer since then?
Passing Through is my third book since Waiting in Vain. In between there was the novella I’m Still Waiting, which was published in Got to Be Real in 2000; and the novel Satisfy My Soul, which was published in 2002. I’ve gotten better with each one. I’ve taken risks—been successful at some and failed at others—and now I have a better sense of who I am as a writer and a human being. I have come more into the key of my voice. And owning a voice is one of the things that being a writer is all about.
Writing is like sports. There are a few things that the writer and the athlete work really hard at—precision is one of them. I am more precise these days. There is a tighter fit between what I see and hear in my mind and what comes out on the page. I can do more with less. My sense of the telling detail has improved.
How much research did you have to do in order to write stories set at such widely different periods?
I had to read a lot about volcanoes. San Carlos is volcanic. I also had to research Roman Catholic orders and the economy of Singapore. But of course, this information isn’t just dumped on the page. In fact, research allowed me to choose what to leave out—which was most of what I looked up. All the research was refined into a few, significant details. Apart from big things like volcanoes and Catholic orders, I also did research into little things, like cars. I wanted one of the characters to have a 1936 Buick Century, and I went off to find out all about them. But the truth is that a writer’s most important research takes place all the time, and that is pondering the ways of human beings … observing human nature.
You’ve been both praised and scolded for your portrayal of women in the past. How are women portrayed in this book?
There are many different kinds of women in these stories. There are also many different kinds of men. I think my portrayal of women in Passing Through could be described in many ways—risky, frank, provocative, bold. But one thing is sure—it’s honest. I give the female characters a lot of freedom. I put real choices in front of them. I give them hard things to work out. I also free them up to curse and smoke and have a lot of other kinds of fun.
In “Revolution,” we get a glimpse of a young Bob Marley. As a Jamaican, what does Bob Marley mean to you?
Marley is the greatest storyteller that the Caribbean has ever produced. And one of the things I really admire about him is the fact that he didn’t “go disco,” didn’t follow market trends, didn’t sell his soul for acceptance by a wider world. As it turns out, global acceptance came over time.
In the title story three members of one family fall in love with the same woman. Wasn’t one-on-one enough for you?
This story is all about the nature of obsession and the dangers of vanity. Rebecca, who is St. William Rawle’s wife, sees an African American photographer who looks like she did when she was younger, and falls in love with her the way that Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. It is a deep psychological trip, a really dark but sexy story, with lots of tensions and betrayals and deep explorations of the meaning of marriage, race and love.
What makes the island of San Carlos such a magical place? And is it based on any place we know?
San Carlos is magical because it’s in the Caribbean—and all the islands of the Caribbean began as the creation of an Amerindian god of leisure and taste.
The capital of San Carlos has the most beautiful little harbor, and in the middle of it, surrounded by ridges, is a big public park. San Carlos is everywhere and nowhere in the Caribbean. One could say that it’s a Caribbean island that I long for. It has the prosperity of Trinidad, the pride of Jamaica and that Cuban mystique.
The story “Poetic Justice” takes a slam at performance poets and a certain kind of black machismo. It’s a bit mean isn’t it?
The whole performance poetry thing has gone nuts. People who champion performance poetry often cite its democratic nature as a plus. But democracy is the very problem. A lot of really awful poets now have a sense of entitlement to getting attention and applause.
So yes—I was being mean when I wrote the story. And yes—I had a lot of fun. It’s a comedy, a black comedy, which means that meanness is allowed.
St. William Rawle is perhaps the most important character in the book. What was it like to write from an old white man’s point of view?
At first I wondered if I could do it. Then I began to wonder if it was something I wanted to do. Why write about a white man when there are so many black people to write about? For the same reason that I send my kids to an English-Mandarin school in Chinatown so they could learn to read and write and speak Chinese, I wrote about an old white man because I believe that we must all develop and refine the capacity and desire to step outside our worlds.
The idea of “passing” or “pretending” is something that we see as a theme in many of the stories. What is the deeper meaning of the collection’s name?
That life is a journey. That our roles are not fixed. That we all have secrets. That we all try to pass in some way or another every day. If we didn’t learn how to pass or pretend, we’d lose our flipping minds. However, this does not absolve us of the responsibility to search for truth.
On the surface level though, the title refers to the travel aspect of the book. Many of the characters are people who travel through San Carlos in a literal way.
You “bleeped” all the curses in the book. Why is that?
I re-read Hemmingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls and admired the way he handled cursing in a courtly way.