What inspired you to write this novel? Was it a specific event or new article, or did you always have this idea in mind?
The Rumpus: First of all, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed We Cast A Shadow. I had the opportunity to talk recently with Ruffin via Skype about his use of satire in discussions of racism, how the choices parents make affect their children, and the parallelisms of the world in his novel and our world today. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and others. But the surgery isn’t for him it’s for his biracial son, Nigel, whose birthmark keeps getting darker and darker every day.Īlthough this is his is first novel, Ruffin has received various writing awards including the Iowa Review Award and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for a Novel-in-Progress. The main character, who remains nameless throughout the story, is one of the many individuals saving up money to schedule the procedure. Because of racial violence perpetrated by the police force more and more black people are turning to a procedure that turns them white. Ruffin situates his novel in a society where African Americans live in fenced-in ghettos patrolled by police officers.
Instead of crafting his story with a dark and melancholic tone, Ruffin takes a different route: satire.
The New Orleans native places his characters in a world that’s not too far away from reality. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work encapsulates the obstacles and trajectories that African Americans have to face when dealing with varying forms of racism and his debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, is no different.
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