You’ve discussed your tendency to write into a silence, as with your previous novel The Orphan Master’s Son, about North Korea. How do you find that silence, and how did you come to write about this distant Pacific island empire?
I don’t know how I pick the topics I write about. Most of the writers I know are blind to their instincts. But I gave a reading in New Zealand, and I was really struck by how deeply Māori culture was valued there. The tribes of New Zealand share the same cosmogony, language, and mythology. It’s so easy for them to have one voice, unlike here in the U.S., where we have Cherokee, Cheyenne, Lakota. All the signs were written in Māori. I was like, Oh my God, why don’t we have that in America? I also heard a Māori storyteller there. She was spellbinding. I thought, Homie, you gotta step up your game. You’ve got to become a better storyteller. But later, I realized the reason her story was so powerful was because it was sacred to her. It embodied her people, her culture, her struggle. And even though part of my lineage is tribal, in America almost nothing was handed down to me. It’s always been a big mystery in my life, a question I keep returning to, and maybe why I always write into the unknown.
The name of your protagonist, Kōrero, means “to speak,” and she’s committed to carrying on her island’s oral history. Once she embarks on a voyage to save her people, she becomes the wayfinder of the title. What is the overlap between storytelling and wayfinding?
I think some of the greatest knowledge humans have ever had is wayfinding. I met a person in New Zealand who could name the boat that her people came on a thousand years ago, the captain of the boat, which person was her direct ancestor, and who was the founder of her tribe. I’ve always wondered why a lot of American human knowledge disappears. Is it because the people who came here came from dire straits, and they didn’t want to remember? To me, stories are the most essential things.
The treacherous ‘Aho unseats the empire’s king and commits atrocities in war and at home. What made you want to humanize this character?
I taught a writing class for veterans here at Stanford, and it changed me. My students were deeply troubled by their combat experience, and it was so clear that there was something I could never understand because I hadn’t been in that position. In Wayfinder, ‘Aho seems to be saying, “You’ll never know me unless you know what I’ve done, and the only way to show you is to hurt you.” To me, that felt very real and very true, and so he’s a very sympathetic character to me. And I was terrified of him.
How should a reader with little knowledge of the Pacific approach this novel?
There are probably 100 pages of Tonga material that you have to figure out until it starts to pay off. But my answer to that is simple.
Over the 10 years I spent writing the book, I spent a part of my day, every day, in a place resplendent with nature, stripped of modern politics and technology, that was in tune with so much of what we’ve lost, and it was very healing for me. I would like to think readers would also be rewarded for spending time in that world.
