Part 2 of youthandeldersja interview
My other source of inspiration … author David Cupples
Posted on May 10, 2013 by Russell
David Cupples, author of the outstanding novel Stir it Up: The CIA Targets Jamaica, Bob Marley and the Progressive Manley Government, responds to the question.
What inspired you to write this excellent novel?
This is the second part of his response. Part one can be found here:Bob Marley, Michael Manley and the Reach of the Bully … David Cupples
Part Two:
The other source of inspiration for Stir It Up comes from my interest and background in psychology. The main character, the protagonist Scott, as we meet him, is a troubled lad. A white American kid of 20 in Santa Barbara, California who is terribly resentful, even hateful, toward his father, who has disappeared from Scott’s life. His mother too has gone. Scott idolizes Bob Marley, as many millions do, and a major thread of the novel is to follow out Scott’s fan worship and see in which ways it may be either positive or negative (or both).
Scott’s idolizing of Bob Scott, like Bob, is a singer in a reggae band. But Scott’s connection to Bob goes beyond ordinary fan worship, for he and his father were on the Rock four years earlier and during that time Scott became acquainted with Bob and on friendly terms with the reggae icon. Scott’s idolizing of Bob is thus, seemingly, on very firm footing, psychologically speaking—it seems quite normal and healthy that the young kid is so absorbed in Bob. Over the course of the novel we explore this theme. This is probably a good thing, this conversation we are having right now, for it’s likely that the typical reader, lacking in a background in psychology, might not pick up on these issues to the depth that I hope they come across. It’s relatively understandable once you stop and think about it, but it runs a little deeper than the more action-oriented parts of the story dealing with the CIA, the tribal war and so forth.
Scott’s mental/emotional distress The main psychological theme is how Scott’s mental/emotional distress in Santa Barbara, 1980 relates to his experience in Jamaica with his father (and Bob, and the CIA, etc) four years earlier, in 1976. How does Scott’s father fit into this paradigm? The character of the psychologist in the novel, Dr. Mitchell, attempts to help Scott peer into his blocked and scarred past—the crucial events of 1976 have been blocked in his memory—but he too, Dr. Mitchell, in the vernacular, is “a little f**ked-up.” He too wrestles with his demons—and how can he help this struggling kid if he himself can’t get it together? As we progress toward the novel’s denouement, it becomes clear that they either have to BOTH pull it together or they are both going down together—all the while, the ghosts of their past hanging over both of them.
Email me Any readers who have questions about the book after reading are welcome to email me and I will answer the best I can. I prefer to do that rather than publishing answers that people might see before they read. Questions can be about anything, from the psychological aspects to what exactly is fiction and what is fact. My host on the ReggaeNation Ustream TV interview, Miss Sheron Hamilton-Pearson, said she struggled at first to make the distinction between fact and fiction and wanted to call the book “faction”—an interweaving of fact and fiction, and that’s what it is. Most of the background information is true, at least to the best of my understanding.
Note: I lived in Santa Barbara while I attended graduate school in psychology at UCSB, University of California at Santa Barbara. BMW played some great concerts in Santa Barbara during the ‘70s but I didn’t attend any, to my everlasting regret. How much one would wish to have the chance again! But give thanks for the new generation of reggae roots artists, bless up.
