I hate it as much as you do. I think it’s one of the worst covers in the history of publishing. I thought I was going to lose my mind when I saw it. I think it was an attempt by the publisher to dumb down the book. Well, this idea is perhaps too scientific. I think they dipped in the design drawer labeled “Generic novel by black male author writing anything to do with love” and this is what they came out with. Stuff happens, which is why we shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover.
Describe Satisfy My Soul.
It's a very sexy book about religion.
Give us a little bit more.
It’s set in contemporary Jamaica, South Carolina and Ghana. In a nutshell, an African American playwright finds himself in a struggle with his religious beliefs when he meets and falls in love with a Ghanaian businesswoman who understands that he is her reincarnated lover from a previous life—before the days of slavery. Call it a clash of two worlds. Call it a reconciliation of two worlds. Call it a new chapter in the epic journey of a people from triumph to disgrace to triumph again.
What is the book saying about the American experience?
That the destruction of African gods has shaped the destiny of this country because African American people have been left with no vision of themselves as higher beings. And this has affected the bigness of our ambitions and the assurance with which we move through this world. It is saying that the sons and daughters of slaves have much to gain from reopening a conversation with the gods we left behind in Africa if we want to satisfy our souls. It is saying that this satisfaction of our souls is an important stage in the development of individual African American people. And any development of African Americans will be good for all Americans. It is saying that the emotional trauma of separation from our gods remains with us today.
What is the book saying about Africa?
That it is a place of great complexity that will always disappoint people who are searching for simple answers.
Your narrator Carey McCullough is a fascinating character. Tell us more about him.
Carey is an African American man who has a mystical experience with his spiritual past when he falls in love with Frances, a Ghanaian woman whose language he has been mysteriously speaking in his dreams since he was twelve years old. In Carey we have the collective experience of all the sons and daughters of slaves. Africa for us is a place that we simultaneously yearn for and fear. So in Carey and Frances we have the love affair of two people. But we also have the love affair of millions of people and the continent of their origin.
Carey is a rootless man. On the surface he seems to delight in his rootlessness. But he really wants to set down roots. But when he finds the place of his rootedness he does not want to go there—because that place is Africa, a place that deep down inside he fears.
Carey is a complicated man. He is the result of a tumultuous marriage of convenience between a member of the Nation of Islam and a white Jamaican Jew. But unlike his siblings, Carey does not look mixed at all. In fact he is extremely dark. And this prevents him from being deeply rooted in his family.
When he is five years old his family flees America for Cuba. When he is ten they move to Jamaica. At eighteen he goes off to university in England, returning to the States in his twenties. This constant movement prevents him from being deeply rooted in a physical place.
But he is rootless in another more fundamental way—religion. His paternal grandfather is a Ghanaian doctor who married an African American woman from Tennessee. Carey’s father is an Episcopalian priest who joins the Nation. Carey’s mother is an atheist who becomes a religious zealot. Out of all this religious confusion Carey becomes a Rastafarian, a religious fusion of Judeo-Christian and African traditions. And he remains comfortable here until he meets Frances and Africa begins to call him home. This is when he realizes how Christian he really is.
Frances is easily one of your most self-assured and clear-headed female characters. Do you see her as a progression in the way you handle women.
I do. Frances is a woman in complete charge of her sexuality. More so than Sylvia in Waiting in Vain or Mia in I’m Still Waiting. She has no guilt surrounding sex. She sees sex as one of many exuberant expressions. I think that the fact that I have written a character like this reveals my own evolution or progression as a person. But I think she also reflects my evolution as a writer. Frances is in tune with her male energy, and Sylvia and Mia are not. That is a significant distinction. See, we all have male and female energies inside us, for we are just spiritual beings having a human experience.
This novel brings together spirituality and eroticism—two ideas that always seem to be at war. How hard was it to do that?
The love story is a basic form: two people in love with an obstacle between them. What makes one love story more interesting than another is the quality of the obstacle between them. You can make it something trivial or you can make it something with substance. In this story the obstacle between the lovers is religion. But the lovers are sexually expressive. They are not virginal in any way. They both have a lot of mileage on their clocks. And this makes them deliciously complicated. Because of this, the story isn’t morally predictable. There are no clearly right or wrong people here. Just good people working against the impulse to do bad things. The yin and yang of spirituality and eroticism creates an exciting tension. Yes, yes. I am working with some old taboos.
How is it that you are able to write sex so well from a woman's point of view?
I think that my ability to write about sex from a woman’s point of view has a lot to do with imagination and assurance. Sex in my work is not just a matter of people getting off. If a scene is being written from a woman’s point of view it means that I already know this woman as a character … I already understand her from the inside.
Beyond knowing the characters, writing a sex scene is a matter of imagination and assurance. Without a certain assurance in myself as a man I would not be able to free my imagination to enter a woman and experience lovemaking from her point of view.
When you’re writing a sex scene you can’t always stay inside the character though. You sometimes have to shift outside to some physical description before slipping inside again. It is that continuous shifting from inside to outside that makes the scene ring true.
Many male writers find it difficult to enter the mindscape of their female characters. And many female characters find it difficult to enter the mind of their male characters. Without this capacity to cross borders it is difficult to write convincingly about people doing anything, including sex.
What are the secrets of writing a good sex scene?
First, the scene must belong in the book. If you’re not sure that it belongs in the book, you should test it the way you would test any scene: does it move the story along? If it does not, then cut it.
So let’s say the scene belongs. How do you make it work? One of the secrets of writing a good sex scene is the understanding that the hidden is always sexy. And what is more hidden than the mind? To write a sex scene with great erotic power, go into the mind. Expose the reader to the thoughts and reflections and associations being tossed around in the character(s) mind(s). Let the reader understand the meaning of the moment.
From the outside, write as if you’re looking through a magnifying glass. Let us see the little creases, the hidden moles. This kind of intimacy draws the reader into the moment.
Metaphorical language is also important, for it allows you to create powerful images and avoid clichéd pornography.
Why did you make Carey and Kwabena playwrights?
I think theater is fascinating, and I am always looking for ways to present fascinating black characters to the world. It is as simple as that. Some critics might read some deep things into the choice—the deep reasons are probably there on a subconscious level, but I am not aware of them. What I will say, though, is that being playwrights makes them interesting.The story also deals with the rivalry between Carey and Kwabena, who are best friends. There is the old rivalry as playwrights. Then there is the new rivalry surrounding Frances. Theater lends itself to this kind of rivalry because staging a play requires so much collaboration, so many things to go the right way at the right time for a production to be successful. So it is much easier for a good playwright to get overshadowed than it is, say, for a good novelist to get overshadowed. Kwabena is a playwright who is overshadowed. Carey is a playwright who is successful. The woman who breaks Kwabena’s heart as a teenager falls in love with Carey. I found all these conflicts compelling.
Are any of the characters based on yourself or people that you know?
I write from imagination, mostly. If any part of this story bears resemblance to anybody it is an accident. But like most writers I am a scavenger. I will rummage through conversations and simple moments for ideas.
What was the hardest part about writing this story?
The hardest part of the story, I think, was the point of view: first person, present tense. It locked me into the mindscape and the landscape of the narrator. The story can’t go into another person’s mind. Neither can the story cut away to other locations and leave Carey behind. And the cutaway is a great plot device. But apart from the challenges of writing in the first person there was the challenge of writing in the present tense. Carey, the narrator, is experiencing the events at the same time as the reader. He has no time to process. He has no foreknowledge. He can’t leap ahead of the story. I had to use all sorts of tricks to make the story work, to provide insight into the other characters, for example.
Carey is one of several black men in conflict with their fathers that you’ve written about. Tell us about your own relationship with your dad?
My father died when I was twelve and he and my mother separated when I was six. I have no father conflict because I essentially had no father. If anything, not having a father has freed me to write about men with difficult father issues because I have no father to offend. It would be much harder for me to write about men or women in conflict with their mothers, because my mother is alive and she raised me. The truth is that she was and is a good mother. She has retired to Florida with my step-dad, whom she married when I was seventeen.
Carey is also a multiracial black man like the central characters in other books of yours. What is this saying?
That multiracial people exist. I think that I am by nature a contrarian. And America’s fascination with racial purity is too much of an easy target to ignore. I create multiracial characters to take people out of their comfort zones. Black people don’t always act like black people. White people don’t always act like white people. But humans always act like humans. And I am fascinated by human beings. Plus, Caribbean people accept the fact of racial mixing. The national motto of Jamaica is, “Out of many, one people.” Not that we don’t have our own problems.
How did your own religious convictions shape your writing of this story?
The truth is that the story shaped my religious convictions more than the other way around. I was christened in the Anglican Church. And as a teenager I became involved in the Evangelical church. Right now I consider myself to be a secular Rastafarian. My guiding principles are rooted in Rastafarianism but I don’t believe that Haile Selassie is or was God. But, writing in the first person present tense, I was able to occupy Carey’s soul and feel with him the ways in which it was being pulled by African spirits, by memory, by destiny. And so I grew. Before I began writing this book I didn’t have the assurance to look for spiritual sustenance in Africa. I was still suspicious of traditional African spiritual beliefs. But now I am not. And that has been so liberating to me as a person and as a creative force.
You have written three books with titles taken from songs by Bob Marley. How has Marley shaped you?
Marley is a great storyteller. And naming my work off his songs is a way to honor him. It is also a way to honor the creative imagination of the Jamaican people. Marley influenced me in that he answered a lot of questions before I even needed to ask them. Through his actions he showed me that art that is true to itself and its subject will stand the test of time. He showed me that love as a subject is just as important as politics or revolution. He showed me that an artist from Jamaica can create work that is relevant to the world. And he showed me through work like “Redemption Song” how to distill the essence of monumental moments and great ideas into something that ordinary people can understand.
And finally, why do you like writing love stories?
I love the idea of love. I am a romantic. Again, I am by nature a contrarian. There is the notion in literature that writers with ambition should leave things like love for hacks. I am fascinated by the possibilities of the genre. One of my favorite novels is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now Marquez is a Nobel Prize winner. If he doesn’t feel like he is above writing love stories, then why should I?