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"I Dissolve Tough Like Acid": Ayize Jama-Everett and "The L
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Every once in awhile, a first novel catches you by surprise. Sometimes it's the style and sometimes it's the pure originality or unique mixing of influences. In the case of Ayize Jama-Everett's The Liminal People (Small Beer Press), the pleasure comes from all of the above. This taut, intelligent first novel is, as novelist Andrew Vachss called it, "a heady blend of Sci-Fi, Romance, Crime, and Superhero Comic" that provides "a true gestalt of understanding, offering us both a new definition of 'family' and a world view on the universality of human conduct." Yes, but is it entertaining? Yes, it is that, too. Definitely that.
The main character, Taggert, can heal and hurt with just a touch. That's the kind of ability that can get you in trouble, and that's exactly what happens when he tries to help save his ex's daughter. But that daughter turns out to have even more power than Taggert, and that leads him down the rabbit hole of clashing with his own mysterious boss while trying to keep the girl safe. What unfolds next is a smart, savvy read that qualifies as a page-turner with great settings and set-pieces but also satisfies on an emotional and even metaphysical level. There's great dialogue from Taggert, including lines like "I dissolve tough like acid" and, in response to the question "What kind of man are you?', the reply of "The kind that refuses to be eaten by animals!"
We wanted to find out more about this first-time novelist who holds a Master's in Clinical Psychology and in Divinity, so we caught up with him via email. He replied from one of his "messy disorganized offices about town. I'll write in three more places before I'm done, a cafΓ©, my other office, and my house. It feels like nothing gets done until it's touched those three lodestones."
As omnivoracious as that sounds, his childhood reading was even more so. "The Wretched of the Earth and a gang of Comic books. Also, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The Neverending Story, Chocky, Aesop's Fables, some Anazai the Spider African myth book. My mother is a bit of a hoarder. Pathways to rooms were bordered with stacks of books, magazines, and newspapers stacked hip high."
Jama-Everett grew up in Harlem "back when it was a multiethnic cavalcade of black and Latino bodies." He admits to being "a geek way before it was cool. I hated combing my hair, paying attention to fashion, and boring classes. I was a latch key kid who always lost the keys to his apartment. So I hung out at the library until my mom came home. I remember not being allowed in the adult section of the library until I proved that I belonged by talking to the librarians about the books I'd read."
The author's uncle was a professor at Brooklyn College, with a library in his house. "A simple one, mostly two-by-fours and milk crates, bracing the walls, and a large dark wood desk. I swore I got smarter just by sitting in that room. It was all I ever wanted, to be as educated as him. I understood that path required a love of knowledge and an ability to analyze texts."
As for the impulse to write, he notes that "Somewhere in my mother's stacks are binders filled with comic book character dialogue. As young as nine or ten I worked dialogue. I didn't have a sense of how to structure the pages, but I did have a sense of narrative structure. I knew there had to be a reason why the story started on that day, in that time, on that moment. I knew characters had to have something on the line, something had to matter to them, something that could be taken or broken or changed in a way they didn't like, and I thought that ambiguity had no place in an ending."
In high school, Jama-Everett started writing a novel. The impulse came from "having some really intense nightmares. A friend recommended writing down the nightmares. I believe that was my first attempt"¦It took about six years to get done." Despite nightmare-as-catalyst for some ideas, Jama-Everett enjoys the actual process of writing: "It's like working out. If I'm away from it for too long then when I first start out I hate it. I feel slovenly and stupid doing it. But when I'm on it, with the headphones in, finding the rhythm of the keys and the language, when the narrative flows like unconscious water from the primordial babbling brook of inspiration, I'd kill a small child to keep doing it."
Later, in college, he would hone his talent for dialogue by taking screenwriting classes, while a job at a comic book store after college gave him new insight into the possibilities of graphic novels. "God Bless Comic Relief in Berkeley California. It was the first place that introduced me to a higher level of graphic novels. Somewhere I still have a copy of William S. Burrrough's Tornado Alley illustrated by S.Clay Wilson. I read Paul Aster's City of Glass graphic novel illustrated by Dave Mazzucchelli, and Watchmen. I drooled over early Paul Pope work at the same time I discovered an amazing old series called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. I saw the medium as a vehicle and not a genre and knew that what I wanted to write would always be influenced by the literary culture I grew up in. So I stopped trying to find an artist to draw my scripts and started writing stories that I loved."
To this mix of influences, he would add writers like Andrew Vachss, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, Frantz Fanon, Frank Miller""despite his b.s. politics""Raymond Chandler, Richard Price, Warren Ellis, and Garth Ennis, "who wrote me a Ren & Stimpy postcard once telling me to keep at it."
The dual degrees in religion and psychology also play a role in his fiction. "I approach religion as a primary sense making tool of the world for much of recorded history. It reveals the 'group think' in a way that isn't limited to the conventions of logic and rationality. In coded ways, religion helps me imagine how groups behave. What motivates and sculpts individuals I find to be the area where psychology holds dominion. We are strange creatures, we human beings. By looking into that strangeness, exposing those particulars in any character, my goal is to make them more accessible to the reader, more human if you will."
Originally self-published, The Liminal People was selected for reprint by Small Beer Press. "My good friend Nalo Hopkinson picked it up and said I should send it over to Gavin J. Grant at Small Beer Press. I did and he was into it. It had to go through another copy edit because the person I hired initially didn't do a very good job, but other than that they left the content alone. Small Beer has been awesome." When asked what the novel is about, he will either read the back cover, or "If it's not around I make some grumblings about Octavia Butler and Mickey Spillane having a drunken tryst while Chris Claremont takes pictures in the corner. His salacious negatives would be the liminal people. But that just scares people away."
As for the reaction to The Liminal People, like many writers Jama-Everett admits to being "surprised every time anyone likes anything I've ever written. People think that's me being humble, but its genuine. I think it's because the stories in my head aren't very used to the light of day. I'm so much more accepting of negative criticism than positive. I get frustrated when people confuse me for Taggert, but that's mostly because I've deluded myself into believing I have my **** more together than my main character."
Currently Jama-Everett is working on "Another Liminal novel" as well as releasing an unrelated e-book and flirting with other forms of media: "Trying to get Marvel and D.C to let me play with their toys, trying to figure out what Hollywood conversations are worth having, hoping that Guillermo Del Toro will invite me over to his funhouse."
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http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2...al-people.html
Check out this cool book guys
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