The Liminal Work of Writing
An Interview with André Alexis by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
To read André Alexis is to lose yourself in a conversation with dogs and poets, priests and soucouyants. Even though I’d heard Alexis’s name before I read him, I picked up his work when I heard of A, his 2013 novella about a Toronto book reviewer obsessed with a poet, which put me on the path to read more of his books, such as Fifteen Dogs (which won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Canada Reads) and most recently, The Hidden Keys. An overview of Alexis’s work would only hint at his sprawling and hungry mind. There are writers who are clever tricksters, seducing you with their intelligence, then there are writers who show you that intelligence is a form of love. André Alexis belongs to the latter.
Photo by Hannah Zoe Davidson
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Dreams, they’re everywhere in your work. In “The Night Piece,” a short story from your first book, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, a young man named Winston is haunted nightly by a soucouyant. As defined by you in the autobiographical collection of essays, Beauty & Sadness, a soucouyant is an old woman who can shed her skin, suck people’s blood, and who must return to her human skin before sunrise. In Fifteen Dogs, a mutt named Prince dreams of the god Hermes, who appears in the guise of a dog. Hermes tells Prince his life is in danger and that he must escape. When the dogs plotting murder come to find Prince, they find a pile of human clothes in place of his body. Both characters move through dreams in order to confront their lives. What does the liminal space of dreams mean for you as a writer?
André Alexis: This is a tricky question to answer because I’m not sure that dreams do mean anything to me “as a writer.” I use dreams in my work, constantly, as you point out. And the novel I’m now writing, Days by Moonlight, is a “Traumnovelle” — a dream novel. But I feel like dreams — their intensity and importance — are less an aesthetic matter than a personal one. Something in me has needed dreams since I was a child. Dream space is frightening and comforting. Frightening for the usual reasons: monsters, nightmares, fear. And pleasurable in usual ways, too: sex, love, tears. But I treasure the way dream space can restore real space, can make real places more vivid — more “real” — than they are when you’re awake. Also: I’m an immigrant. For years, when I was a boy, the only place I could recapture Trinidad, the country of my birth, was in dreams. So, for the longest while, sleep was home. Your use of the word “liminal” is right, I think, at least where I’m concerned. The threshold between waking and sleeping is the threshold between home and away, or strangeness and belonging. (No Surprise: Days by Moonlight is intensely “Canadian,” though I admit I’m not sure what that is!)
Hafiz Ramji: If sleep was home for the longest while, when did you begin to feel as though the waking life was home too?
Alexis: For the longest time, my only hold on Trinidad was through dreams. When my dreams of Trinidad faded, I began to feel more Canadian — if only by default — but it still took a long time for the real Canada to supplant the dream Trinidad in my emotions. I think it was the writing of Pastoral that really grounded me. I had to imagine Canada while writing in London, England. It was only then that I understood how deep Canada›s hooks were in me.
Hafiz Ramji: Can you tell me about the main characters in Days by Moonlight? Where did they begin or how did you find them?
Alexis: I can tell you some of the influences on the book: Ugetsu Monogatari, a film by Kenji Mizoguchi; Fearless Vampire Killers, a film by Roman Polanski; Gogol’s Dead Souls (in the amusing translation by Donald Rayfield, which is the one I read last year); Voyage d’automne et d’hiver by Gilbert Lascault; Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki; The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro; and Lazarillo de Tormes, authored anonymously. By “influence,” I mean that I read these books or saw these films as I was thinking about the direction I would take with Days By Moonlight. I’m not sure you’d be able to track the influences, though. Sometimes, it’s a feel or train of thought from elsewhere that influences how you write a passage. But sometimes it’s a direct quote, too. Anyway, Days By Moonlight changed from what I thought was going to be a Ugetsu-influenced ghost story to something much stranger … a kind of nightmare of Canada.
Hafiz Ramji: Where do you see Days by Moonlight in the landscape of Canadian literature?
Alexis: Oh Shazia, I don’t see it fitting anywhere. I guess because I don’t have the distance from it to tell what it might mean to others. At this point, I’ll be glad if it makes a pleasing final volume to the quincunx, the collection of five novels I’ve written in different genres. But aside from that? No idea.
Hafiz Ramji: Before we began this interview, you said you would like to keep the month of August free for a writing retreat. In the Globe and Mail last year, Mark Medley said that you fled Toronto after receiving the Giller in 2015. Have you become more protective of your writing time and space after receiving fame and acclaim? How has it changed you?
Alexis: I guess I’ve become more protective… I’ve always been fairly careful to make time for my work, though. So, I don’t notice the difference. You’d have to ask my friends.
Hafiz Ramji: In “Water,” your memoir in Beauty & Sadness, you discussed your first experiences moving to Toronto, where you had invited the poet P.K. Page to visit your creative writing class. You said you could “feel the nobility of her surrender to the process, and it renewed [your] own commitment to what is, in the end, a spiritual exercise.” Do you agree with the sheep in Pastoral who tells Father Pennant he needs to restore his belief in miracles and that “without the miraculous the earth is only a coffin”? What is spiritual for you about the writing process?
Alexis: I think the writing process is spiritual in the way that any great task is spiritual. It takes devotion and surrender and, ultimately, love — love for the process, love for the task, love for the way the task guides and tempers the one life you have. But then, any human activity you devote yourself to, that you surrender to and that you love, is equal to writing. What I felt when I met P.K. Page was the weight of a lifetime of devotion and surrender — surrender to the demands of a task. I think that a life lived for money and gain — a life lived for worldly glory — leaves a different impression. I felt like I recognized that difference when I met P.K. and I wanted to be like her. I wanted my life to have the weight hers did. In that sense, she was a “master,” a spiritual guide.
Hafiz Ramji: Like dreams, poets repeatedly appear in your work and life: There are epigraphs by Roo Borson and bpNichol, and there are characters such as the poet-dog, Prince, in Fifteen Dogs, as well as the elusive poet, Avery Andrews, in the novella, A. But, I am curious about your interest in the Oulipian, Harry Mathews. The dedication for your 2008 novel, Asylum, is in homage to him, and you said you used an Oulipo constraint to write Prince’s poems in Fifteen Dogs. As well, in The Hidden Keys, “Harry Mathews” appears as a minor character. Why Harry Mathews?
Alexis: As I was trying to finish Fifteen Dogs, Harry and I were talking on the phone. I don’t know where he got the idea that I needed money. I didn’t say so. I may have been sending out signals that he was sensitive to, but I never asked anything of him because I imagined that he had any number of people constantly asking him for money. He was persistent, though. He asked a number of times, as if he knew something I didn’t. So, I said “Well, okay, I’m expecting money at the end of this year, but if you’d like to lend me some to tide me over, I’d be grateful.” He refused to lend me money. In his words: “I think it’s a bad idea to lend money to friends. It’s terrible for the friendship. I’m going to send you some. What do you need?” The next day he sent me a cheque for five thousand dollars, and then called to make sure I’d got it before I could call to tell him that I had. That’s the kind of man he was. But his generosity didn’t stop at money. When I was writing my novella A, he contributed a poem and the first paragraph of a (fictitious, of course) “classic Canadian novel” called Home is the Parakeet. In that way, Harry provided the voices of the poet Avery Andrews and of his admirer, Alex Baddeley, two of the characters in the novella. I admired and was influenced by Harry Mathews, the writer. But I also loved him deeply as a person and still can’t stand the thought that he’s no longer on Earth.
Hafiz Ramji: Thanks for sharing that with me. I have one last question: What is the last question you asked yourself about yourself?
Alexis: I can’t answer this question because I ask myself questions about myself so unstintingly that it would be difficult to decide what the “last question” was. Why am I a writer seems to come up a lot, though … »