Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Ephantus Muriuki is talking with James A. Wolter, author of Salamander Man.

FQ: Who was Idris to you? What was it about him that stuck with you all these years?

WOLTER: The Idris of 1962 was a stranger to me. I encountered him at the Westwind Hotel in Kuala Terengganu. I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he crawled across the floor because he had the most handsome face of any man I had ever seen and, while he was crawling on the floor, there was a dignified air about him. It was that, the way he carried himself with dignity, while crawling on the floor, that stuck with me.

FQ: Since this is a fiction based on him - a real person, how did you get to decide which parts to change and which ones to keep real?

WOLTER: All I knew of Idris in 1962 was that he was unable to find a wife because he couldn’t use his legs and that his father arranged for him to spend a night with a hostess at the Westwind Hotel as a twenty-first birthday present. That is the only aspect of the Idris of 1962 that is in Salamander Man. I imagined him being struck with polio as a child and how he responded to various situations boys encounter while growing up. While Idris in Salamander Man is a fictional character, I wanted him to have an authentic life and I wanted the reader to share in that life. In doing that, Idris of Salamander Man became a real person to me and share his story, in particular his inner thoughts and feelings, in his own words. I wrote as he spoke to me.

FQ: The emotions in Idris’s voice feel so heavy. Did writing from his perspective ever affect you emotionally?

WOLTER: Yes. While writing Salamander Man, the fictional Idris became a real person to me. I felt dejected and angry when he was rejected by other children and it was particularly painful when two boys pretended to befriend him and then betrayed him by destroying his wheelchair. I felt distressed and helpless when two headmasters refused to allow him to attend school. My heart ached along with his when he was unable to find a best friend and then again when he was unable to find someone to love who would love him in return. I was overjoyed and cheered him on during his magical night journey. Observing him visit and interact in scenes from the Malay Annals, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Iliad and Odyssey, Man of LA Mancha, Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, and to top it off by celebrating Bloomsday on June 16 at Davy Byrne’s Pub was an exhilarating change of pace and brought me much joy in revisiting those classics and looking at those them from a new perspective.

FQ: Your time in the Peace Corps certainly inspired this narrative, but I am curious if it also changed how you perceive individuals, their strengths as well as weaknesses in everyday life?

WOLTER: While serving in the Peace Corps was a life changing (for the better) experience for me, assessing others, their strengths and weaknesses was something I had done since childhood. I was very involved is athletics and judging physical talents and personality traits were an essential part of building a team.

Additionally, observation and making assessments based upon those observations is a skill biology students are taught. Biologists are trained to look for commonalities and exceptionalities and to determine cause and effect characteristics in individuals and communities of organisms.

One thing that surprised me about myself is that as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I thought I should like all Malaysians and tried hard to do so. But I found that there were Malaysians that I didn’t like. I also found that I didn’t like all Peace Corps Volunteers. I had to give myself permission to dislike people and I convince myself that it was okay.

I also found some Malaysians didn’t like me. I found that unsettling. I have an inner need to be liked by all people I encounter and that was heightened as a Peace Corps Volunteer because I was representing the American people. I wanted Malaysians to like Americans. I still find it hurtful when someone doesn’t like me. That’s something I’m still working on.

There was another discovery about myself that I found. While living among the Malaysian people, as a white skinned, blue-eyed-blond person, I was, for the first time in my life, a minority. Some people, Malaysians, Americans and English in Malaysia, were unable to see me as a person beyond my race. For example, one of my assignments during a school holiday was to work on a rural health project in northern Malaysia with Dr. Mahathir, a young Malay physician who would later become Malaysia’s longest serving Prime Minister. My job was to accompany him to villages with populations as small as a hundred people to irradicate hook worm by convincing the local people to install and use water-sealed latrines. Specifically, as an orang putih (white person) I was to attract local people to Dr. Mahathir’s presentation. Since rural Malays had never seen an orang putih in person before, it was thought that they would show up to see one up close. They did and gently stroked the hair on my arms saying, “Emas tuan! Boleh jual tuan! (Gold, sir! Can sell sir!)” I was being used like a side show at a carnival to attract people for the main event. I resented it but tried to make the best of it. That’s another story described in grittier detail in Finding Miss Fong.

FQ: There’s so much love in this book. Did you set that theme up from the start, or did the main character actually experience it in real life?

WOLTER: Regrettably, I didn’t get to know the Idris of 1962 so I don’t know how his life turned out. But I’ve thought of him frequently and I’ve spent my entire professional life working with and on behalf of students who do not conveniently fit societal expectations. My job, in part, was to convince my students and others that my students, like other students, had unique abilities and special needs except a little more so in some respects. And that’s what made them so fascinating.

I had a yearning to tell Idris’s story for decades but didn’t know how to go about it. I thought it was important for Idris to have a full authentic life and experience a full range of emotions. I also thought it was important for him to tell his story. I wanted the reader to see the world through Idris’s eyes and experience what he experienced. I didn’t consciously set out to make Salamander Man into a love theme novel but Idris’s search for meaning directed me in that direction.

As far as my intention for readers, I desire the reader to see that Idris, other than not being able to walk, is like the rest of us. He is seeking acceptance and most of all love. In Salamander Man, Idris is a loving person who finds love all its forms and ultimately finds romantic love. In finding romantic love as a sensitive inexperienced man, I wanted his first romantic love experience with Maimum to be heartfelt and filled with gentle, quiet, tenderness rather than a hurried purely physical event of groping, grabbing, and groaning culminating in an exchange of body fluids. I wanted Idris to find eternal love with a soulmate; almost as much as he did himself.

FQ: When you revisit the incident where Idris was sent away from school by the headmaster, what comes to your mind about this? Why do you think Idris' parents did not consider other schools?

WOLTER: It enraged me when Idris was denied school admission. Children with disabilities have been part of my entire adult life. During most school holidays as a Peace Corps teacher, my future wife and I worked with orphaned girls residing at Saint Nicholas’ Home for the Blind in Penang and upon returning to the United States, I became a special education teacher. Except for a very few humanistic schools like New Trier High School (the school I taught at), the history of public schools abounds with incidents of children, who were view as ‘different and disgusting’, being denied access to the educational and social opportunity provided by schools prior to the passage of PL 94-142 in 1975.

There are two reasons Idris’s parents did not find an alternative school for him when he was denied admission to the public school. First, Kuala Terengganu in the 1940’s and 50’s was a very small village and there were no other schools. Second, in Malaysia education was considered a privilege reserved for only the most able. Many students, who did not measure up academically, were denied schooling beyond sixth grade.

FQ: Do you think Idris would be okay with his story being told this way? What do you hope people walk away feeling or thinking after reading it?

WOLTER: I often think of the Idris of 1962. Is he still alive? Was his night at the Westwind as loving as Idris’s in Salamander Man? I hope so. I also hope he would approve of Idris in Salamander Man. I tried to give Idris the dignity he deserves without making him into a sympathetic character or a character that comes by supernatural abilities with no effort. That is, I tried to refrain from the cliche that somehow supernatural abilities are automatically bestowed upon a person with a disability to offset their disability.

While I didn’t have the opportunity to know the Idris of 1962 personally, I know from listening to the girls my wife and I worked with during school holidays and from my New Trier students that they would not want to be viewed as sympathetic figures. They wanted to be treated and valued with dignity.

I desire the readers of Salamander Man to view Idris as an authentic person and experience the world as he does and feel what he feels. Most of all I want the reader to see the dignity in Idris and to find the dignity in others whom they might not have noticed prior to reading Salamander Man.

Salamander Man has a mature ending that some readers may find sad initially but I hope they stay with it and find solace in Idris’s portrayal of what he’s been searching for; eternal unconditional shared love.

FQ: What did the experience of writing Salamander Man teach you as an individual?

WOLTER: Life is a quest for each of us regardless of our circumstance. Each of us experience our share of difficulty. A difficulty need not be a tragedy. Each of us has vulnerabilities. There is no shame in being vulnerable.

Each of us desires and needs acceptance, understanding, and love. Love comes in many forms and can be found in the unlikeliest places. Each of us is loved if only we recognize it and accept it and each of us can give love to a person in need of love. Life is all the better when giving love and being loved in return.

Finally, being loved and loving in return is beyond my ability to adequately put into words but it was worth the effort to try.

FQ: Lastly—if you could sit down with young Idris today, what’s one thing you’d really want to tell him?

WOLTER: Idris encounters numerous contemptible people in Salamander Man but his life is also enriched by interesting sage-like mentors. I don’t know what more I could offer him other than to say, “Idris, I treasured getting to know you. You enriched my life. God created you and loves you unconditionally.”

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