Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (LJ 10/15/15) shines a blinding light on the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) riots in Seattle. Below Yapa shares insights into his first novel and the ideas that inspired it. Your book’s title references a poster by Dalia Sapon Shevin that carries the subheading “Keep Loving. Keep Fighting.” What’s more important: the loving, the fighting, or both? Well, I think the fighting is the loving—that is, if one deeply loves the world, deeply loves freedom, deeply loves other people, then one fights to protect it, them. Of course, my definition of fight is pretty broad. Anything that encourages us to look rather than turn away, anything that disrupts the daily routine, anything that fights against the voice that tells us our efforts don’t matter— all that is the battle. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I believe empathy is a deeply radical act. Imagining oneself across borders and into other skins can be the beginning of revolutionary change. Photographer Allan Sekula documented the WTO protests through pictures. How did his work influence your writing? Sekula’s photos were some of the first I came across when I started investigating the [event.] One of the images in the series Waiting for Tear Gas shows a woman kneeling on the pavement with her hands pressed together in prayer or pain, while a young man beside her tends to a wound on her head. Looking at this, I had to ask myself what would make a woman like this risk her body for the well-being of a person three continents away? What kind of courage, I wondered, would it take? What a new and strange and beautiful kind of protest. Victor, one of the main protagonists, is desperate to “break free from the gravity of home’s heavy hold.” What do you feel is Victor’s most important journey?

Victor is on many journeys. He is traveling the world. He is growing up. He is learning—through the protests—what it means to have real friends and what it might mean to lose those friends. Most importantly, Victor is on a journey toward whatever lies beyond anger and outrage.

In the story, Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, the delegate from Sri Lanka, whose life’s work has been negotiating for his country’s acceptance into the WTO, is a tragic figure. Your father is from Sri Lanka. Is that a coincidence? My father is from Sri Lanka—he came to the United States in 1964, on the same plane as the Beatles, the family story goes—but he is far from a tragic figure. For 40 years, he has taught Pennsylvania State University students about poverty in the developing world, and more intimately for the last 15 or 20 years, he has led a field project working alongside community members in West Philadelphia.

The first Sri Lankan delegate to live inside the pages of this book was DP Perrera. Looking back on him in later drafts, I was embarrassed. I had created—from an amalgam of family stories, television, novels—a pretty racist stereotype. So I fired poor DP. Then I set out to decolonize my own limited imagination. I sat down and created the man who graces our pages now: Charles Wickramsinghe. A tragic figure, perhaps, but more essentially, a distinguished, warm, flawed human being.

How would you characterize this novel? The book is, I hope, both a page-turner, and a portrait of an American city caught in riot. It is the story of seven lives inter- secting in unexpected, funny, and heart- breaking ways. It is a political novel only if you believe that empathy is political. You’ve worked with several literary heavyweights. What are the most important things you’ve learned from them?

Peter Carey taught me how to make a scene come alive, and, when the time comes, how to finish one off. Zadie Smith, for whom I was a research assistant, taught me the importance of precision and the value of doubt. Colum McCann taught me fire, perseverance, and the poetry of prose. Gordon Lish taught me that every sentence has a sound, that every syllable has its own power, and that your only true sources of originality as a writer are your syntax and your diction. Chitra Banerjee ­Divakaruni taught me that we have to tell the stories that matter to us most.

What’s next for you? I’m working on a long project about the dark side of college sports. I also have a character in mind. She’s in her early 40s, a visual artist, and she’s caught in that moment between her family and her career, her art and calling. If I ever finish those stories, I have a pretty good idea for an epic sf corporate dystopia retelling of the King Arthur legend.—Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA