Shadow Boxing

James E. Cherry’s debut, ‘Shadow of Light’ is a searing tale of race relations boiling over in the pressure-cooker of the deep south. The book hit UK stores recently and is due out in the US in June. Pulp Pusher sent Damien Seaman along to talk to Tennessee-based Cherry about his novel and what drives him.

DAMIEN SEAMAN: Shadow of Light is a striking title. What does it mean?

JAMES CHERRY: Basically I had a concept in mind where light represents knowledge and enlightenment. As mere mortals we only ever get a semblance of true enlightenment. And that’s what the characters are moving towards in the book, a deeper understanding of self. We don’t have a full understanding of the light. I think we’re all finding a way towards the true light, feeling our way through life.

DS: In the book the black cop protagonist Walter Robinson is having a crisis of faith. You’ve said you underwent a spiritual, mental and cultural awakening in your mid-twenties. Does Walter’s struggle mirror your experience?

JC: Not necessarily. My struggles were more as a young black man in his early to mid twenties, drifting from pillar to post, as they say. I was involved in a lot of negative activities. Then I began to read more, to delve into African-American culture and literature. The planets just seemed to line up and I began to explore different avenues of life.

DS: What does spirituality mean to you?

JC: It’s an understanding that there is a God. For me he worked through Jesus Christ – for others it might be Muhammad, or Buddha, or no-one at all. But that’s what clicked for me. Not so much religion but more the belief in a Supreme Being or God in every aspect of life, even in one of my favourite musicians, John Coltrane, when he plays his music.

 

DS: What caused your spiritual awakening?

JC: I think it was a culmination of things. Basically I was getting tired of doing the same old stuff and thinking there has to be more to life than what I was doing. That made me take a hard look at myself, which is something we all have to do at one time or another.

DS: This book is marketed as being about important issues. Do you think you run the risk as a black writer of being pigeonholed into writing about race?

JC: That was one of my concerns . . . I don’t want to get pigeonholed. My next book I’m working on won’t be as racially intense. Of course there’ll always be social themes, but the next one won’t be as racially in your face.

Also, I’m not a crime writer per se. I’m just a writer. I chose this particular genre because it best fit the story for what I wanted to say. You have a guy dealing with life and death issues. He’s a homicide detective, and what better way of dealing with these issues is there than that?

DS: You’re a poet as well as a prose writer. What is most important to you as a writer: theme, character, form or language?

JC: I think it’s the love of language and the way language is crafted. For me the best

fiction is poetic. I don’t make much distinction between prose and poetry, except in

the form, of course. The best prose, if it reads like a poem it has more impact on the

reader. They feed off of one another. A lot of my poems are prose in nature. And

like to think that a lot of my fiction is poetic.

DS: Who are your major influences?

JC: Richard Wright. I discovered him in my mid-20s and he really spoke to me. Chester Himes, who was considered a crime writer. He had this one book ‘If He Hollers Let Him Go’ which had a tremendous impact. It’s not just African-American writers, of course. Steinbeck is one of my favourite fiction writers . . . But the best answer to the question is ‘the last writer I read’! There’re quite a few of them!

DS: And you’re also influenced by music and musicians, right?

JC: Exactly. I would love to write the way the jazz musicians played. By jazz musicians I’m talking about people like Charlie Parker, Dizzy, even Billie Holliday, the way she phrased the lyrics.

Jazz is improvisational at heart. And, of course, with prose or poetry, you start with the blank page or the empty screen, then you come to a point where you look back at what you’ve done and there’s a whole world, a whole universe that you’ve created.

DS: Do you have an established writing routine? Do you pre-plot? Do you write quickly or slowly? Do you have to re-write or edit much once you’ve written a first draft?

JC: For the novel I had a loose outline; I definitely knew where I wanted to start and where I wanted to end, and there were loose points in between. But those are subject to change. The characters might not want to go that way. What happens is sometimes a surprise even to myself. If you try to be too stringent and stick to the outline you can miss out on some of your best writing that way.

DS: Did you write about the issues in the novel because you thought you could help others come to terms with them, or was it so you could better understand how you felt about them?

JC: I think probably both. I think the first person a writer writes for is him or herself. These are issues I felt I had something to say about. Whether you agree with me or not, it fosters some dialogue, gets people talking about some things – different issues I’ve been pretty much wanting to explore for a while.

DS: Do you ever feel angry about some of the issues raised in the novel?

JC: I’m at the point now where I still get angry about things but once something happens I can deal with it a little better. As long as I’m a black man I’ll always be faced with some form of racial injustice. You just have to accept that it’s coming. But how I respond to that, that’s up to me. I can start throwing Molotov Cocktails or I can try and do something more constructive. Here we are in 2008 and you’d think we’d be removed from racist attitudes. But we still have to challenge ignorance and racism and go forward in a positive way.

DS: Was it difficult to find a publisher because of the challenging subject matter of the book?

JC: My agent shopped it around without much success and she actually encouraged me to move on to the next project. But I thought the message and characters were worthy of publication. I thought the themes and subject matter were provocative enough that somebody would be interested. So I took the old-fashioned route and packed up my manuscript and hit the road. I sent it to the good people at Serpent’s Tail and here we are. That whole process took about a year, year and a half.

DS: Why Serpent’s Tail?

JC: I knew they had a reputation for publishing excellent literature. I knew they were seen as cutting edge or provocative. And that’s the kind of writer I consider myself to be – I don’t know what others think. Even though they’re small, look at the people they publish. Walter Mosley, Lionel Shriver. There are even a couple of Nobel Prize winners in their stable [Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek and Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe]. So I’m very fortunate and very blessed to be in such good company.

DS: Don’t you ever get angry at a God who’s tested the faith of the black race in America for over four hundred years with slavery and other forms of oppression?

JC: Sometimes I wonder. I used to wonder a lot more than I do now. But yeah, sometimes I do think, ‘Just what the hell happened’, you know?

You have to look at the flipside too. Belief in God helped the slaves look forward to another day. I mean, terrible and bad as slavery was, you have to ask why they didn’t kill themselves or rise up against their masters, which would have resulted in death anyway. Their faith allowed them to hold onto the idea that there was going be a better day. You have to look and wonder if it hadn’t been for belief in a God . . . you have to wonder what would’ve happened.

 

Of course, sometimes – and you can quote me on this – as African Americans we can be so focused on the religious side that we forget about social issues, and you end up with a pie-in-the-sky religion. That can be very crippling also. Too much religion has crippled blacks in America to an extent. We seem to put a lot of energy and time into that and there are things being neglected – our economic development, sometimes even our intellectual development.

DS: You’ve had lots of poetry published in college journals. What role do you think these journals have in nurturing new writing talent?

JC: I think not only college journals but also literary magazines in general play a vital role in furthering the literary canon. These magazines are the way writers are generally first introduced to the public. And it gives the writer feedback which helps them to develop their craft. It’s good for the journal to find and publish quality work. It’s vital for the publishing industry. I understand also that many agents use these magazines as a way of discovering new writers to represent.

DS: Although Walt is clearly the novel’s main character, you use several points of view, most dramatically with the three perps involved in the robbery and rape in the first scene. What was your thinking behind that?

JC: I thought it would be the best way to tell the story. There are quite a few characters involved, Walter and the three teens as well as Walter’s wife. These were the characters I thought were driving the story and I wanted to give them a voice.

DS: You have a book of poetry coming out in 2008, but what’s your next fiction project? Do you have a publishing deal for it yet?

JC: In the next book I’m exploring other avenues. It won’t be in the crime genre. It has an African American protagonist but the issues and circumstances won’t be as racially or religiously charged.

Serpent’s Tail has a first option. We’re looking at a couple of years. I have a couple of non-fiction projects I would like to finalise as well, so I got enough irons in the fire. One of them is about a poet, Norman Jordan, who was part of the Black Arts Movement in the 60s and early 70s, someone who was there with Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, politicising their art. This guy was heavily involved during that time and I think worthy of a biography. The other biography would focus on Eric Uwiringiyimana, a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

DS: If there’s one thing the reader should take from this novel, what is it?

JC: One major thing – I don’t know, I’m not very good at talking about my own work. But I would say it’s self-realisation, or self-actualisation, or maybe a deeper knowledge about what makes us do the things we do.

:: SHADOW OF LIGHT is published by Serpent's Tail

DAMIEN SEAMAN, one-time political reporter, editor, security guard, factory worker and supermarket management trainee, has lived in London, Brussels, Benghazi and Nottingham, 2007's UK murder capital. He currently lives in Berlin. More of his crime fiction has featured in Noir Originals and Spinetingler Magazine. He finds emails a pleasant distraction if youve got time on your hands: damien.seaman@web.de

Read Damien's Pusher short ... here