Q: Why did you decide to leave a successful career in journalism and pursue fiction writing full time? Do you miss the pace and rush of life as a correspondent? Do you still pursue the occassional story?
I always wanted to write fiction, even as a child, but I also wanted to rush out into the world and have adventures, so a career as a foreign correspondent seemed an attractive compromise. At the end of nearly ten years overseas, during my tour in Moscow, I began to dream characters and stories. I woke up each morning with my head full of them, but by midday they’d been pushed aside by the demands of my job. In frustration, I told my husband one morning, “I’m going to lose them all, because I don’t have time to write them down.” And he, cutting right to it, said, “So quit and write.” Slowly, I understood that although it was a risk to leave my defined world as a journalist and slip into a room alone to make up tales, that’s what I needed to do, and this was the moment.
I don’t miss the rush, though I loved it at the time. It was exciting. I covered some rich and enriching stories. Now I’m up to my neck in fiction, and that’s where I want to be.
When Victor “V’key” Ochieng Jumah was nine years old and living on the streets — a “garbage eater,” as they are dubbed in local slang — he learned to mug and rob white foreigners, often scaring them first by smearing oil on his face and feces on his hands.
“Just seeing me like that, the women would scream and hand over whatever money they had,” he said. He also developed an easy intimacy with bare ground for a bed, plastic bags for a toilet, discarded food scraps for meals, and a culture of aggression that included drugs, knives and, eventually, guns.
I didn’t go to Kenya to interview street kids. I traveled there to finish researching an upcoming novel. But in the capital, I couldn’t avoid seeing the homeless kids who roam Nairobi streets like watchful phantoms, feared as much as they are pitied and avoided more than they are helped.
“Writing the story as fiction allows the reader to get closer to the characters involved — their most private thoughts and embarrassing emotions. This translates, I think, into a truer understanding of what being immersed in violence has meant to Caddie.”
Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had a chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.
Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can’t see,
Not yet.
M e n u
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- Photo credit: Briana Orr