Refresh, Refresh

"The title story is the most successful one. The fight scene in that short story was one of the things that helped me when I was writing my novel and thinking about the violence boys do to each other. It’s a collection featuring a recurrent main protagonist, whose father has gone to the Iraq war, and it is about trying to understand what it means to be without the father figure. There are maybe two stories that look at this boy’s life when he’s much older, but most of them are within that boundary of adolescence and growing up. I think the violence of the Iraq war pushes the violence of boyhood to be more. When boys are growing up, there’s something that happens with the discovery of their identity. Boys always have an interest in the sense of masculinity which is tied to force, to violence, to domination. They bully each other, they fight; there’s often a tendency to exert some kind of force on the other. That’s their understanding of masculinity at the time. Some boys develop a machismo at that age, which they begin to let go of as they grow older and become more responsible human beings. “Boys always have an interest in the sense of masculinity which is tied to force, to violence, to domination.” The entire town in Oregon, where the book is set, is in a kind of US military zone, so most of the kids’ fathers are in the army. Again and again, they see people bringing letters that say so-and-so boy’s father is dead. So the fear, the anger, and the anxiety that maybe one day this military guy with a bag will come and give the message to their mum, helps the boys grow up quickly. The boys are always fighting with each other. They have this fighting competition where they buy Coca-Cola and then drink it and fight each other until they bleed. They want to build up this internal strength so that when eventually they hear that their fathers are dead, they will be able to withstand it. I think, in the West—I’ve been living in America for three and a half years—I think boyhood is changing here of course. Boys tend to develop an almost violent perception of the self while growing up, but the Millennials’ outlook on life is different. The society of today is much more aware of violence and the repercussions of these things, and is much more vocal about it. There is, like never before, awareness about feminism and women’s rights, for example, and what it means to be respectful of one another. Some of those concerns were not there a hundred years ago, and they aren’t even there today in most parts of Africa. So I think in that sense, in the moral sense, there’s a difference in boyhood today in the West. My family was much like the boys in The Fishermen , we were regarded as middle class. But our neighbours and the rest of the people I knew at the time struggled. Their idea of boyhood was much more focussed on the future, rather than the now: “When I grow up, I want to be this.” Even middle class people, like my father, kept saying, “You boys have to be better than me when you grow up, you must be this…” There’s always more of an upward look to the future there than you would have in America—where it seems like you don’t have any problems, you are enjoying the now and the future will come at its own time. In America there is much more satisfaction, most people have enough. When I was growing up there was a palpable anxiety, there was a rush. You wanted to leave that place, that state of development, and become a pilot, and have money, and to be able to buy as many things as you wanted. That anxiety—the wish to own a life of your own, a world of your own—is always resident in people from that part of the world. But I would suppose that a child in suburban America today would not be thinking like that because they mostly live in a more affluent society where most of their needs are more easily catered for. So the anxiety to leave boyhood is not there, in fact, they would want to stay in boyhood for as long as possible."