Y_our story in this week’s issue, “The Start of the Affair,” is about a retired professor of politics in South Africa who is now a restaurant owner. When did the character of James McPherson first come to you?_
The story came to me between the time I completed my latest novel, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” and when I submitted it. More or less out of the blue, you might say. Nor did it take a long time to write. What is more, the story wrote itself from the moment I thought of James McPherson as a character and of him having met a young, very good-looking pre-teen Somali in the past.
James notices a young Somali man who appears to be collecting leftovers from the restaurant’s kitchen. He’s drawn to the man, Ahmed, and finds a way to befriend him. Did you always know the story would follow the trajectory it takes, and that James and Ahmed’s relationship would become ever closer?
I felt that both James and Ahmed were "unfulfilled" personages waiting to meet their other half. And so it made sense to bring them together as a matchmaker might. I sensed that once they met and got to know each other better they would become closer; not necessarily in the manner the relationship pans out in this story.
There’s a clear difference in power and status between the two men—James is well-to-do and established, while Ahmed is a refugee hoping to be granted permission to stay in South Africa. Yet he’s also the son of a powerful man in Somalia. How much agency do you think Ahmed has in his relationship with James?
Ahmed has little or no agency in his encounter and eventual relationship with James. And that was obvious to me from the instant James sees him coming out of the kitchen of the restaurant with a doggie bag.
Do you think it’s possible to consider this a love story?
There is the potential for a loving relationship to grow once Ahmed is no longer in denial.
Much of your fiction has been set in Somalia, the country of your birth, from which you were forced into exile in the nineteen-seventies and were not able to return to until 1996. In your recent novel “Hiding in Plain Sight,” set largely in Nairobi, and in this story, you’re exploring different territory. Was that a deliberate decision?
It has been a deliberate decision for me to set novels and stories out of my country, evidence, perhaps, that I do not think Somalia is headed in the right direction, in terms of its current politics. Also, I feared that I would be repeating myself if kept setting my fiction in Somalia—same old story and no progress in narrative, etc.
You divide your time between South Africa and New York, where you’re teaching at Bard, and you also travel frequently to Somalia these days. Do you feel equally at home in each place, or does each one draw out a different part of your character? Are you ready to set any fiction at an upstate liberal-arts college?
It is one thing to feel at home in a place; it is altogether another matter to set one's fiction there. After all, there are stages of feeling at home in a place. Anyhow, I doubt I will set my fiction in upstate New York in the near future. My attitude towards setting my fiction anywhere in Africa is entirely different, because it is as if the continent is mine to write about.
