Interviewed by Christine Maul Rice
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius’ debut novel Fishhead: Republic of Want (Tortoise Books) details the soul-crushing obstacles a young protagonist, Fishhead, faces in 1970s Bombay (Mumbai). Fishhead’s poverty and physical hunger, paired with his family’s dysfunction, seem insurmountable but Aloysius curates a lovely tenderness toward Fishhead’s often thwarted attempts to make sense of a senseless world. Aloysius, a lecturer in writing, a designer, and a musician, took time to talk with Hypertext about launching his novel prior to the pandemic, writing during the pandemic, his characters’ struggles, metafiction, writing Bombay, and ‘points of entry’ into a character.
Christine Maul Rice: What a strange few months these have been since your book launch at Women & Children First.
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius: Yes, strange, apocalyptic, dystopic, and anything else you can think of. I’m sure I have some form of PTSD from all of it. After reaching the final round of edits at the end of 2019 and building anticipation for my novel’s launch, I feel extremely fortunate that the launch event happened when it did at the end of January 2020. I had Tortoise Books’ full support then, and Sarah Hollenbeck and her team at Women & Children First Bookstore were so welcoming and helpful with making sure the launch went smoothly. I had a lot of fun that wet, snowy evening. We had a great crowd in attendance, and W&CF sold out all copies of Fishhead that night.
Who knew even in early February this year that the weeks and months ahead would bring on Covid-19’s incursion at the speed at which the virus behaved. This could be a nightmare in a novel, but it’s just too real and deadly for us. We fell back into our safe spaces, emptied our pantries, and stopped shopping. I learned a lot about myself, my needs and wants. It feels like insanity, because we don’t know how to confront the antagonist yet and end this. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the incredulous events thus far—with our wayward leadership in Washington, the increasing deaths from the pandemic, unemployment like never before, shut downs, police brutality, and Black Lives Matter. My own safety as a POC. And our high risk of being outside at close proximities to one another. Our defiance of the pandemic. We’re facing a moral crisis in a most unique situation, and history has caught up with us. There’s so much for us to reflect on, to correct the wrongs of the past. This is an important time for art and affirmation, I believe, and for humility and understanding most of all. We hunger for empathy.
CMR: In this strange shift, have you been writing? How has your process been impacted (if at all)?
IVA: Let me answer this by saying that I try and write every day as much as possible, a page or two, even a decent paragraph if I really had to push myself on creatively-difficult days…and there are those for sure. But I actually stopped writing when we first went into the Covid-19 lockdown, and that was a bizarre time for me, a near collapse of creative will and activity, I have to say. Mid-March, I think it was when everything came to an abrupt halt. I had been teaching downtown, too. So I didn’t write much that month because of the pandemic, and that’s a long time away from the page. Plus I had been wrapping up final mixdowns for my doom/sludge metal album for Mental Illness Recordings, an indie label in Iowa City I’d signed with in early April. Turns out both the album and Fishhead were officially released the same week in May! I would never have thought this possible, but I’m so glad for it. Talk about karma, the way events happen beyond our mind-frame.
Anyway, the forced silence of the pandemic put me on a crucial fork in the road, one where I either needed to buckle down and start writing again or wait for inspiration to come, if it did. I knew we were in for a challenging summer, and perhaps the fall as well, and I didn’t want to lose my momentum as a writer. In the meantime, all teaching courses went online on Zoom, so I got busy with that.
Looking back for a moment, in 2019, while I worked on final edits for Fishhead, I had already started mapping out ideas for a historical novel (not a short-story collection) based on Michigan lighthouse lore and fact. I decided to pick up that story again in April, and I began writing in earnest, never sure where I might take the novel or how. The more I wrote, however, the more I got sucked into the story, and it began to make more sense to me with each passing day. I did a lot of research around it. So I just kept writing without pause daily over the last few months, and that was a good thing, because it kept me focused, even as I followed the unfolding tragedy of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, the police killings, and protests. I have a lot written, but I still have a bit to go until the draft is complete. I’m hoping to get it done by year end, and the fall already looks busy for me. What a year this has been so far!
CMR: How has the pandemic impacted Fishhead: Republic of Want’s journey into the world?
IVA: Oh, a difficult question to be sure, but I’ll try to answer it. While I had an early book launch, Fishhead’s official publication date was May 12th, so it’s officially out there now, and anyone can order it from the publisher’s website, or from Amazon or Indiebound, which is great! Tortoise Books has very good national and international distribution, having recently signed with PGW, which supports indie presses. So, I couldn’t be more relieved. The pandemic hasn’t really stifled that aspect of the novel, but it has suspended other vital support activities which follow a new book release, like promotion and publicity and book signing tours. I had a reading/signing tour that would have taken me around the country, which included an event for Sunday Salon in NYC (I co-curate the Chicago affiliate of SuSa). I was also awarded a fellowship in Ludington, Michigan, which included workshops, public readings at the lighthouse park there, an interview with the local paper, and a book reading/signing at the local bookstore. The sad fact of these forced closures is, among many things, the fate of bookstores everywhere. So, in essence, most events for Fishhead are on hold indefinitely until things pick up again safely.
CMR: Fishhead takes place in the tenements of 1970s Bombay (Mumbai) and I felt Fishhead’s physical and emotional hunger. He’s a teenager from a desperately poor family. Although emotionally distant, his mother does her level best to work, care for her family, clean up the mess left by her husband’s financial and emotional incompetence. Fishhead’s father has trouble harnessing his ambition and falls into alcoholism. Like any child, Fishhead craves his father’s attention and affection.
There’s so much at stake for Fishhead—even at the end of the novel. I often wonder…what is Fishhead doing now? Does that make sense? He appears in my mind in the way I wonder about people I’ve known in my past.
Do these characters still tug at your imagination? Is there more to be written about them?
IVA: I hoped to show adequately how the family unit works in a place such as Mumbai (India), where its traditional influence on an individual has a lot of currency, a tug of war, so to speak, that keeps one from being able to reach for a contrary goal or otherwise. And this is Fishhead’s fate. His family’s ongoing indigence crushes him and holds him back psychologically and physically, so that he is traumatized by it, only he doesn’t have this realization; he simply lives through it, never knowing how to find that release switch. The situation at home is just too strong to permit him to leave, to make a clean break, unless some outside force can trigger it, as we see happening in his older brother Pradeep’s experience, where Pradeep ends up working at the airport hangar with foreign aircraft mechanics. And one thing leads to another.
In the 1970s, when Fishhead becomes a teenager, he is still quite naive, perhaps innately so, and I hope that comes through in the narrative.
CMR: It does.
IVA: So, perhaps his lack of dramatic movement is because of that. But back then, India’s doors were slow to open to the West, as they are now with a burgeoning middle class and more viable opportunities overseas. By 1979, however, Fishhead has little notion of the world beyond his own combustible city, his awful tenement; he has little knowledge of possibilities that exist from having a good education and from being visible and active in his own community. We don’t see his parents encouraging him in that direction, but yet he chooses the art school, one of the best in Asia, only to leave it for lack of family funds and his growing separation from the place. His shame keeps him down until the end. He aligns with his mother’s struggle and is protective of her, and he finds work to help her out financially. So, there’s that, and the waiting. He believes he has a lot of potential and that something will happen.
CMR: In this debut, the narrative is delivered through teenage Fishhead—every physical sensation, thought, desire—but you’ve also used a voice that narrates the ‘conscience’ of Fishhead’s world.
You write:
“If you ever paused to wonder about your life—its form and light, its voice, purpose, and gains, but surely its losses, then it’s likely you have taken Destiny’s name, to acknowledge it, thank it or appeal to it, to ask Destiny for help, whether in prayer or in moments of desperation or gratitude, in silence when alone, at play, when success blossomed in your hands.”
Can you talk about how the narrative structure developed on the page?
IVA: Of course. Destiny’s voice came later, after I’d drafted then edited the manuscript a few times and introduced Anupa as a new character, following a generous suggestion by Reginald Gibbons, CW-MFA program director at Northwestern back when I was a graduate student, who said he observed two novels in my final 2015 thesis draft, which I basically kept tweaking and shopping around. This meant that I had to stop everything and go back to page one, start the novel all over again, word for word and line by line while introducing Anupa as a new character; the newer rewrite of the draft did not include the “other novel,” which is the part where Fishhead finds work on the offshore oil rig.
CMR: I remember you mentioning that—the fact that he finds work on the offshore oil rig—at your book launch and, for some reason, I thought it was part of the first novel. I meant to ask you about that.
IVA: The way the novel developed during the rewrite, it would have ended up becoming twice its size had I included the offshore oil rig parts, which would have forced its rejection by publishers for being a debut novel. I’m pretty sure I’ll include the offshore rig experience in a sequel at some future time.
Going back to your earlier question about the narrative voice of Destiny, the “‘conscience’ of Fishhead’s world” as you so aptly put it: I don’t think I was ever ready for that kind of change, you know, having to rewrite the story from page one with a new, unfamiliar voice. I don’t know if any writer is ready to tackle something big like that. It just happens, or it doesn’t. I didn’t resist, so that was the first good thing about the final work. I knew I needed to stand at the cliff’s edge and look down at Fishhead’s story, and bringing Destiny onto the page did that for me as I wrote in Anupa’s character.
Destiny’s voice began to take form gradually, and at first this revelation threw me off course, but I simply could not avoid Destiny’s overarching voice and movement that seemed plausible along all given timelines, past, present, and future. There were obvious advantages to putting Destiny on the page, and I soon began to enjoy it while understanding my own challenges for realizing this responsible voice, but I looked forward to hearing Destiny’s words with each day that I spent re-writing the novel with Anupa in it. A reward, if you will. And all this took place before the publisher even saw the finished manuscript. Other vital edits came later once Tortoise Books accepted the novel, which helped make the narrative much tighter and better.
The crucial challenge was making Destiny sound believable and convincing, and I simply couldn’t just pull such a profound and powerful voice out of thin air, let alone having the capacity to get behind it, if you will. So, I turned to books on philosophy and thought, which led me to Borges’ lectures on English Literature, and to Spinoza and his notion that we are attributes of God, who is “the life force” present in nature and everyday things. It’s a pantheistic view. We know that a narrator is the author’s voice on the page. Given that, I wanted to remove myself from the story altogether, knowing that I am also every character I put on the page, and I trusted Destiny’s narrative voice to reach that goal. It’s universal and personal, this voice of Destiny, and I liked that. It’s what I was hoping for in the end.
CMR: It had the feeling of a folktale—that pulled back point of view.
On every page, you captured Bombay’s (Mumbai’s) grittiness, beauty, ugliness, danger. For someone unfamiliar with Bombay, I felt like I was there. I tasted it, felt the hollowness in Fishhead’s belly, heard the screeching trains, saw the deluges, smelled the fetid sewer water. How did you capture the place so completely on the page?
IVA: I appreciate that you felt what I felt while I wrote about this city. It’s important to me because I love Bombay (Mumbai). I think it’s necessary to make the experience of place and situation visceral for a reader who may not be familiar with your own world view. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and I grew up in Mumbai, so I remember it still; but I would try to do this for any other place I’m writing about. I enjoy writing about place. If you don’t know enough about it, there’s always research and more research; you can’t escape that. Any experience is a matter of perceiving it through your senses as a writer and giving the reader that same feeling of closeness. And yet it’s easy to overlook details from the past, no matter how much you think you know about it; this is definitely a question of memory and putting trust in what you know. You start with that and build from there.
Details are important to a story because they benefit the reader a great deal, and I have to work at not rushing through the writing process. You know, slow down, think of the value that’s being placed on each word, etc. The risk of evading details is that the reader then has to work to figure out what’s actually happening on the page and make all the right connections, but that isn’t a good thing for a story, If there are good details, however, the reader can imagine something more than what’s put on the page. Our eyes are open and we see a lot all the time, but we only take in what’s necessary. Details are like that, they are the “what’s necessary,” allowing the reader to “see a lot” in a story because of it.
CMR: You write:
“Fishhead had trouble sleeping during the nights of hard rain; it disturbed the mosquitos; they pestered him, bit him, and he slapped them and scratched himself. Then the pelt, pelt, pelt of water shot down from the skies again. The screech of this assault, a war. One side winning. Not his.”
Fishhead survives constant emotional and physical pain, floods, uncertainty, and hunger yet you present him to the world with a wonderful tenderness. Fishhead is tough yet emotionally vulnerable. In certain ways, he harkens to Don Quixote de la Mancha—a hero surviving by his wits. He’s not trying to bring back chivalry, per se, but he is trying to make sense of a senseless world. Do you feel protective of Fishhead? Of other characters?
IVA: Thank you. I like how you say “a wonderful tenderness.” And you’re absolutely right that Fishhead—not unlike Quixote—is attempting to “make sense of a senseless world” without chivalry, because there’s the matter of survival, and pushing on, getting to the other side in one piece, if that’s possible. Achieve something or lose it altogether. Any protagonist or character must be put through that test. Therein lies the arc of the character, where vulnerability is a vital but difficult aspect to all of this, and you get to it slowly, you have to dig deep into the story to get there. Let the story tremble under all that’s visible on the surface. A novel is molten earth. It doesn’t just happen. A writer works hard to find those points of entry into a character’s weaknesses and strengths, into moving that lava around. I think that at some stage while writing, I knew that I didn’t want Fishhead to succumb, as when he gets caught stealing in the marketplace or almost drowns in the lake. Perhaps you can say that I was becoming protective of him, but it’s really no fun when a character loses all the time. There must be small victories too along the way, for Fishhead and all my characters.
CMR: What haven’t I asked that you would like to address?
IVA: You mentioned hunger earlier. I understand this well. Hunger was part of my innate character as a boy, and then as an adult discovering my way in the New World. I wanted this novel to be about hunger most of all, because hunger is an urgent global crisis, more so now with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the best way to capture this crisis is through a character’s deep hunger and suffering. When are we not hungry? Let’s think about it. We see this in Fishhead’s case. He wants food because there’s never enough of it at home, but he also wants to leave the tenement; he’s hungry for that in a profound way. I ask my writing students to consider themes in their work for which they would like to be known. Some are surprised by the question. For me, hunger is a crucial theme, and patriarchy is another. There’s universality, too, how situations apply to everyone or everything at once. Hence Destiny. My stories will at some point cross hunger’s path in whatever form, for instance with food, love, good health, materiality, escape, or success. This way, I can stay focused when I write something.
One more thing: You ask great questions, Christine. Thank you for the interview! 🙂
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Ignatius Valentine Aloysius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. He is a lecturer in writing, a designer, and musician, and author of the novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books, 2020) and The Imaginal Stage, a doom/sludge metal album by WOOND, his studio project on Mental Illness Recordings, Iowa City. Ignatius was selected as a 2020-21 Creative Writing Fellow by the Ludington Writers Board and the Ludington Area Center for the Arts in Michigan. He serves as a judge for the Evanston Arts Council’s 2020-21 Cultural Fund Grants Applications, and is on the curatorial board at Ragdale Foundation. Ignatius was a featured July 2020 author for Ragdale’s By-and-for-Artists Series. He is also co-curator of Sunday Salon Chicago, a bi-monthly literary reading event series in Chicago. Ignatius lives with his wife in Evanston, IL and is currently at work on his next novel and album. Visit his work at woond.bandcamp, on social media, or at ignatiusaloysius
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