Helon Habila: I think we can kick off our conversation around your book, Snakeskin. Traditionally I think the private investigator is a person who bucks against authority, the lone crusader who fights not only the criminals, but often the police, too. They take on assignments not just for the money even though, like Ervine James in Snakeskin, they can be scraping the bottom of the barrel. They can't help getting involved in the moral issues of their cases. However, I see the detective novel essentially as a quest novel in a deeper sense of the word - a quest by the PI for his soul. On page after page, we see Ervine asking himself if he is really cut out to be a detective. He almost despairs, but then something will happen to give him faith in himself - his mother and his secretary and his partner believe in him so much. Was that what you had in mind, to use the PI story as a self-examination tool?
Courttia Newland: Snakeskin is a very strange book for me, probably the strangest I have written, on many levels. To address your immediate thoughts: yes, I agree with your summation of the traditional detective. On a certain level, that's what I wanted Ervine to represent: a man who was willing to fight for causes he believed in; a black man who had a strong sense of himself as well as an awareness of his community, who also longed to change the things he didn't like. In my mind, Ervine doesn't see his beliefs as anything special. For example, he doesn't think that the above means he should take on only black cases - he truly believes in justice for all.
I hadn't thought of Ervine as a tool of self-examination at first; more as a tool to examine the nuances of the multicultural landscape this society seems so fond of extolling while it blatantly practises institutionalised racism. Later, I found that to get into the core of Ervine I had to search the core of my own soul, and in doing so, I discovered that my idea of what a novelist should aspire to was quite similar to the ideals you outlined in your description of the traditional detective.
I came at this novel from a route unlike any I had used before - story before character. My basic plot outline had been written and thrashed out not long after I wrote The Scholar, so I was fairly secure about what would happen. On reading some of my early drafts, my theatre director and mentor Riggs O'Hara picked up on what I had most feared: a distinct lack of character on Ervine's behalf. He urged me to examine Ervine's reasons for being a PI by examining my own reasons for being a novelist. About a month later, I found myself thinking about what he'd said. Why had I become a novelist? What was deep in my heart, the decision I'd made way before any of the others, the reason I'd kept to myself for all that time?
This self-examination drives his character all the way through the book. Ervine believes that he has nothing else to offer the world besides his investigative talents. Whether it's true or not is immaterial; it's what he believes. For the rest of the book he's kind of like a drowning man struggling to stay afloat. When I look back at the writing of the novel, that's how I felt too.
| And so (many thanks to MoorishGirl) begins "'Telling a story is not enough... there must be a point of view,'" the first part of a three-part Guardian UK e-mail interview between writers Helon Habila and Courttia Newland; the other two parts, "'Are we engaged in a futile fight for an imaginary community?'" and "'For black Britons, theatre is the last free form of expression we have,'" should fill up a small part of your weekend
posted in articles on January 9, 2004 9:41 AM | t (0)
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