Sharks in the Time of Saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn

MJ: People are going to call this novel magical realist. I think one of the reasons Márquez rejected the term is that he said, “No, this is real.” I feel that way about writing the Caribbean as well. I’m not writing fantastical shit. Can you tell me about the relationship between the mythical and the mundane in this book? Is it magical realism, or is it just something else? KSW: The way you described it is the exact same way it felt to me when I was writing this. I knew I had to find a way to write it so that it didn’t feel so surreal or supernatural that people would start to think of it as fantasy, or that it would lose some of the impact or veracity that one might get from the characters. I wanted it to straddle that in a way that doesn’t make people think, Oh, everything here’s make-believe. But that’s just part of growing up there, man. Me and my friends would tell each other ghost stories about things like the night marchers. People in Hawai‘i still talk about the night marchers today. And the gods, like Pele, who is the goddess of fire and volcanoes. It’s something that you feel very viscerally there. People aren’t messing around when they talk about Pele, it’s not a little tale.