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Lori Aurelia Williams gives silenced children a voice
INTERVIEW BY MIRIAM E. DRENNAN
This month, Simon & Schuster releases Lori Aurelia Williams' debut novel When
Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune. In this book, Williams writes about difficult
issues, such as poverty and abuse, delicately balancing compassion and sensitivity
with realism. BookPage had the opportunity to ask Williams about the world of
Kambia Elaine, and why this particular piece was her chosen path to debut as a
novelist.
BookPage: What prompted you to write When Kambia Elaine Flew in from
Neptune?
Lori Aurelia Williams: My siblings and I didn't know what child abuse was, but we
experienced it. We lived in constant fear of my father's rages and of the beatings
that he gave my mother and us. When I was a small child in grade school I thought
that there just couldn't be other children in the world that lived the way that we did,
but as I grew older I found out that what I believed wasn't true. I learned that there
were other children in my community who lived everyday with either physical or
mental abuse, abused by the people who were supposed to love and protect them.
Like my siblings and me, they never gave voice to their pain. They never told a
soul. They just cried on the inside, kept the horror of how they we were being
treated to themselves, because that was what children were supposed to do. In my
neighborhood children had no voice. They had no say in the things that happened
to their lives. I wrote Kambia Elaine to give those children a voice. To show the
world the tears that the children were afraid to cry.
BP: Is Shayla modeled after a specific person in your life?
LAW: I suppose that a small part of Shayla is modeled after me. Like Shayla I was a
little fat girl. I was shunned by my peers and never really felt as if I was a part of
anything. But Shayla has something that I never had at her age. She has vision and
drive. She knows what she wants out of life, and knows what she has to do to get it.
She wants to be a successful writer, and she's already laying the foundation for it. I
could never have done that at her age. I didn't have even the slightest idea of what
I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometimes I wasn't even sure that I would. I was
also never as innocent as Shayla. My mother talked about sex freely with my two
sisters and I. I knew very early what went on between men and women, and that
some men liked to hurt little girls. To answer the question, I would have to say that
Shayla is modeled after the child that I would liked to have been at her age. I would
loved to have been as nave as Shayla, and to have had a promise of a writing career
to sustain me through the difficult times.
BP: Tia is obviously very aware of appearances. Why did you chose to have her fall
in love with someone like Doo-witty? Why not someone with a lot of money, or
particularly handsome?
LAW: Tia is greatly aware of appearances, but she is also aware of her life, and her
mother's life. She is aware that her mother has made mistake after mistake looking
for love in the Anderson Foxes of the world, the handsome slick-talking players,
who steal your grocery money along with your heart. She's seen her mother hurt
over and over by these kind of men, and she doesn't want that hurt for herself. She
chooses a man that wants nothing from her but her love, and that is exactly what
she gives him in return. I wanted Tia to be able to do the thing that most of us are
never really able to do, look beyond the superficial and find what's buried deep
inside. Tia looks past Doo-witty's stuttering and his drooping jaw and sees his
beautiful soul. To Tia Doo-witty is the richest, handsomest man in the world.
BP: Grandma Augustine is one complex lady. Did you find it difficult to successfully
mingle her superstition with religion? Strength with silence? If not Grandma
Augustine, which character was the most difficult to develop?
LAW: Mingling Grandma's Christianity and superstition was easy. I grew up in a
household where religion and superstition sat at the same dining room table. My
mother was from the Deep South. She went to Sunday school and church each
Sunday and sang in the choir. She knew more about the Bible than some preachers.
She was a deeply religious woman, but she was also very superstitious. She was the
kind of woman that saw spirits, believed that there were potions that could cast or
remove spells, and thought that some folks were literally full of the Devil and so
did my father. He was from Louisiana. He believed in voodoo, and slept with knife
and fork crossed underneath his pillow each night because it was supposed to keep
nightmares away.
The character of Mr. Anderson Fox was the hardest for me to write. I usually leave
the father figure out of my stories because I didn't have a good role model for a
father growing up and didn't know anyone who did. It was tough for me to bring
Mr. Anderson Fox to life. I didn't want him to be the father from hell, I just wanted
him to be a guy you couldn't depend on. It was hard for me to come up with a way
to make him into a character that you could hate and love at the same time.
BP: You never resolve the matter of whether Kambia's mother is truly her mother.
Is this intentional? Does it make a difference?
LAW: It's true. I never really resolve the matter of whether or not Kambia's mother
is actually her mother. I left the question open because I didn't think that it mattered
all that much. I wanted Kambia to be anybody's and everybody's child. I wanted the
abuse itself to be important, not the abusers. It really doesn't matter who hurt
Kambia. All that matters is that she was hurt, and that the abuse took place in a very
close community where all of the people knew what her mother was, and yet not
one person bothered to see if what was going on in her house was affecting her in
any way.
BP: Is Shayla's innocence lost?
LAW: I don't think that Shayla's innocence is completely lost. Through her
experience with Kambia she has had to make some very mature decisions, and has
been forced to learn something about sex that she didn't want to know. She already
knew from her seeing the boy and girl in the box car that some girls like sex, and
from the arguments between Mama and Tia that it can get you pregnant. Now she
knows that sometimes it can hurt people, and when it does there are other names
for it, like rape, and molestation, but I don't think that Shayla really fully knows or
wants to understand what those words mean. The only thing that Shayla wants is to
keep Kambia safe. I think that by the end of the book a part of Shayla still remains
innocent either by choice or necessity. She's not yet ready for the reality of Kambia's
world.
BP: Was it important to include Mr. Anderson Fox? Why?
LAW: I think that it was important to include Mr. Anderson Fox for two reasons.
First, Mr. Anderson Fox gives Shayla her own story. Mr. Anderson Fox is Shayla's
wolf. He's the problem that she has to deal with. Her bad feelings for him is what
she has to sort out and overcome. Without Mr. Anderson Fox, Shayla would just be
a watcher in the window. She would simply be describing to us what is going on in
Tia's and Kambia's lives. I also think that it was important to include Mr.
Anderson Fox to make the novel not just be a book about women trying to figure
out their lives and relationships, but to make it a book about men trying to figure
things out as well. Mr. Anderson Fox is just as confused about relationship and love
as Shayla's mom. He's spent his whole life going from woman to woman, taking
whatever he can from them, but never really getting anything of substance. He
doesn't know what it means to be a good mate or a good father. Inside he's as lonely
and confused as Shayla's mom.
BP: Considering Kambia's age, her stories are very childish, almost fantastic. Why
would she not adapt her stories as she grew older? Is this typical of abuse victims?
LAW: I can't tell you what is typical of abuse victims because I think most abuse
victims deal with the trauma in their life in their own unique way. I can only tell
you that yes, Kambia's stories are childish. When I see Kambia in my mind. I see her
as a little girl trapped in a cage. In that cage she has never been allowed to be a
normal child. She hasn't grown or matured like the rest of the girls her age. She's
been stuck in the cage her whole life, existing from day to day through her
immature fantasies and fairytales. In order to break out and become like the other
girls her age she would have to let go of the fantasies and accept the horrible things
that are happening in her life. She's too afraid to do that. Her stories can't adapt
because she can't adapt.
BP: What's next for you?
LAW: I just finished the first draft of a second Shayla and Kambia book. It will
introduce the reader to some new characters and fill in some of the blanks left
empty in the first book. After that, who knows what God will grant me the wisdom
to write.
Author photo by Alisca Bailey.
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