A (Brief) Conversation with Bob Shacochis by James Plath photo & text ©James Plath, 1997--first published in Clockwatch Review8:1-2 (1993): 38-39

CLOCKWATCH: How did "Erzulie Mary" (the excerpt from Swimming in the Volcano published in the issue) evolve? It launches Section 2, the part of the book that really comes alive.

SHACOCHIS: Yeah, a lot of people are sort of questioning the front section.

CLOCKWATCH: All I wondered about was the prologue, where they're swimming in the volcano. I took it to be more foreshadowing than metaphoric in nature.

SHACOCHIS: It's both, but it's not literal foreshadowing. It's a metaphorical foreshadowing, and the book strays as far away from there immediately. But I know that the prologue stays in your mind, and you keep wondering. It more or less is a warning, a caution sign saying that the book is really something different than it appears to be for your first few hours of reading.

CLOCKWATCH: The other thing that came to mind was the relationship between reality and invention. You've mixed actual things with invented things. Mount Soufriere is a real volcano on St. Vincent, but of course you've change the name of the island to St. Catherine. Is the political climate you describe also a composite?

SHACOCHIS: Yeah, it's a blend of politics from that island and politics from Grenada. The reality and the non-reality of it are a composite too, because I'm writing it from firsthand experience, but from long ago. Basically it's an imaginary world for me now.

CLOCKWATCH: And Erzulie Mary?

SHACOCHIS: It's just like the cult of the Virgin Mary. That's what it parallels in the animistic religions in the Creole communities.

CLOCKWATCH: You're saying that what you wrote as pure invention?

SHACOCHIS: Basically, yeah, it's pure invention, but it loops, it extrapolates out of a religion which has a pantheon of gods and goddesses. In this particular religion, all the gods and goddesses have dual natures: they're both good and bad. So it works off of that. Erzulie is a voodoo goddess. I've combined them, because it's just another Mary figure from a different religion.

CLOCKWATCH: Is the combination meant, in any way, to symbolize intrusive or corruptive western influences in Third World cultures?

SHACOCHIS: It's supposed to be syncretic, sure, because the church is called the Church of Christ at the Crossroads. The god of the Crossroads in voodoo is Papa Legba, and he's a Christ-figure. It's meant to be that mix, that blend, that Creoleness, that syncretism. Just like, I went to a Mass in Little Haiti in Miami a couple Sundays ago, and it's a Polish-American priest saying Catholic Mass in Creole, and throughout it all there are Haitian drummers beating on conga drums.

CLOCKWATCH: Tell me about the relationship between this section and the book.

SHACOCHIS: We had just moved to Rome, and I needed to find another way to move the book forward, because what I was doing with my main characters wasn't going forward. It was going laterally, and I needed to jump it, to jump across whatever barrier was there to keep me from going forward. That's one thing. Another thing is that I wanted to structure the book in a certain way. When I first conceived of the book, I thought this was a terrific idea, and then a few years later I thought it was a silly idea, and then at the very end, the last third of writing the book, I resurrected the structuring motif--and that was to base it off of this geological phenomenon, as silly as that might seem. I tried to structure it off of a volcanic event, so there are deliberate jolts in the narrative.

CLOCKWATCH: There may be jolts, but the interesting thing about the novel is that everything is connected metaphorically.

SHACOCHIS: Right. And that's why you have the metaphor of the volcano at the very beginning, and then you have a book structured with seizures or convulsions in it. The Erzulie Mary chapter was going to be that switch-over to Cassius Collymore, and his life was going to be one of the major seizures in it.

CLOCKWATCH: You talk about giving it a jump, but you've got enough raw energy in that chapter to give it a jumpstart.

SHACOCHIS: Yeah, I know, and that's worrisome to me, because any time you start a new story within the body of a book that's different from the main story, you're in danger of those stories competing. The secondary story might start looking better than the primary story, and then, of course, you've got a problem. In fact, I might even have that problem at that point--I don't know. But it certainly appears to be a complete turning away from the major narrative.

CLOCKWATCH: Have you any background in voodoo?

SHACOCHIS: Well, one evening in the unlit countryside in the mountains of Haiti, I was inducted into the Vizango Society of voodoo by the emperor of the cult, Herad Simon. This was while I was on assignment for The New York Times Sunday Magazine covering the dechoukaj, which was the uprooting, the revolution when Duvalier left. Also, about the time when I was writing this chapter, I was communicating with an anthropologist who was at Princeton or Columbia University--I forget which one. She had written me a letter when I was living in Rome, telling me she had read my piece in Harper's about Haiti, and started a correspondence with me about voodoo. In particular, she was writing about Erzulie, and of course I found that a bit more fascinating than my white-boy stuff, because I was sick and tired of the American protagonist. I needed relief, so it seduced me. I knew that I had a guy in there--Cassius Collymore--who was going to seem like the epitome of evil, and also he was going to be unjustly accused of a crime that he didn't commit. I wanted him to be guilty of crimes, but I also wanted him to be the most innocent person in the book. And the only way you can really communicate someone's position of innocence is to go back to their childhood. If you start with his childhood, you see that he's the only one that has no choice in his life. He's totally subjugated by his environment, his blood, and his fate. He's basically a slave.

CLOCKWATCH: I wondered, at times, if he was Jack Nasty personified.

SHACOCHIS: Now that you mention it, I guess if there was a real Jack Nasty, it was him. They used the reputation and the stigma of Jack Nasty, who was an imaginary guy, and they pinned that on Isaac. But if there is a real, honest-to-God Jack Nasty, it's Cassius Collymore. I wanted to create a character who was evil, but for whom you had to be very sympathetic. And I didn't know how else to do that, except to start with his birth.

1-28-93

          Bob Shacochis Page      Clockwatch Review (a journal of the arts)