A TIN SHACK IN THE JUNGLE

I once lived in a tin shack in Kudat, a town on the northern tip of Borneo. In those days this part of Borneo was still a British colony: British North Borneo. I had been smuggled into the country by Moro pirates from the island of Sibutu in the southern Philippines. I found a job as operations manager for Borneo Mineral Developments, a grandiose name for a few stone crushers in the jungle, making gravel. Aside from my paltry salary, I was given an Austin motorcar for my own use, and—to park my body—a tin shack. This was place—which of course a novelist always needs. A place performs two vital functions: as a kind of anchor, where your story is fastened; and as a kind of inspiration. Things can arise there, in that tin shack and its environs, that cant naturally arise elsewhere. I visualize the shack, and immediately events begin to occur: not just memories, but things entirely new: the face of a Bajao woman, for instance, with her betel-red mouth. She slides beneath a white shroud of mosquito netting. This occurs effortlessly. This vision leads me to something more. I dangle myself over the scene and watch it unfold. With just minor shaping it becomes a part of the novel…

I could, of course, place this woman—in the book I call her “Nemesis”—anywhere I wish. I could place her in an American suburb, or a Mexican desert. I have a few times crossed the northern Mexican deserts on a motorcycle. I slept in a cave one night, another time in a dry stream bed, watching the moon float overhead. I can imagine myself there once more and something will, again effortlessly, arise, perhaps an old farmer with his gnarled hands. I could transport him to Borneo too, if I wished. But the point is—each place is redolent with different images. A good place is rich with imagery. Mexico was always wonderful in this way. It is a country filled with contradictory images. I found my novels there, littering the streets. But Borneo was rich too. I never wrote much about it—bits have appeared in some of my novels and a few stories, but only bits. In this new novel, however, in Evidence of a Lost City, my tin shack in Borneo seems to have acquired some importance. It has inspired a whole chapter. I am intrigued by this, because the inspiration of “art” has always seemed mysterious to me. Mostly I have been inspired by women. Something about a woman will set off a strange conflagration of imagery. A story grows out of a woman’s smile—or sneer. But here, my tin shack seems to be the source. For me there is a real richness to this shack, and the jungle around it. The shack of course—for this novel—has two appearances: the diurnal shack and the nocturnal one. The nocturnal version sprawls deeply into the jungle: this single-room shack

“...became a kind of ramshackle palace, with rooms stacked upon rooms, corridors meandering off into the forest, dipping into streams, doors that opened onto other passages or onto balconies which overlooked more rooms, all of them of rusted corrugated metal, against which loitered creatures, some humanoid, female, others animal, fierce dogs, slinking panthers, crocodiles glimpsed through screened windows—a labrynthine edifice in which he was alternately lost or imprisoned, seeking tickets, passports, guides, sometimes attacked, assaulted, etc., etc., his dreams as endless as the endless buildings….”

The woman Nemesis is here too; it is an appropriate place for her. I am very curious to see what she will do.