Corban Addison is an attorney, activist,
world traveler, and the author of three powerful, lyrical, internationally
bestselling novels: A Walk Across the Sun, The Garden of Burning Sand, and the just-released The Tears of Dark Water. As novelist John
Grisham, a fan of Corban’s, put it, Corban writes
beautifully about some very ugly issues: violence, injustice, exploitation, evil.
In settings as
varied as Washington D.C., France, India, Zambia, and Somalia, Addison’s
characters wrestle with those dark forces as well as their own personal tragedies.
The Tears of Dark Water, for example, centers principally on a father
trying to bond with his son on a sailing trip that turns into a hostage crisis
in Somalia. In A Walk Across the Sun, an American lawyer on sabbatical
in India, dealing with the death of his baby daughter and the collapse of his
marriage, takes on an international sex trafficking ring to save the lives of
two Indian sisters after a tsunami destroys their home and family.
Bestselling author
John Hart declared that “If you like stories of good people struggling to do
right in the world's forgotten places, there is no one better suited than
Corban Addison to take you on the ride of your life.”
I recently asked
Corban about why such human rights issues are important to him, and about the
values that are central to his work: forgiveness, purpose, meaning, and more.
Mark Tapson: You are an activist for some very pressing
humanitarian causes, including ending modern slavery, sex trafficking, and
gender-based violence. But you are also a storyteller, and not many people can
successfully meld the two. Why did you choose to dramatize these issues in
novels rather than address them in nonfiction?
Corban Addison: I write stories instead of non-fiction
because I’m a storyteller by nature and because I believe in the power of story
to shape and inform the moral imagination of readers.
There is a reason
we use stories to teach the most impressionable people in our society—our
children—the most important lessons in life—about good and evil, right and
wrong. Story opens the heart. It gets past the architecture of bias and
prejudice that so often chains our minds and limits our views. Story offers us
a chance to walk a mile in the shoes of another. It teaches us about ourselves
and the world in ways that we can’t ignore. It inspires empathy. It creates
understanding. And it inspires action. In its best form, story can actually
change the world.
MT: Acculturated’s parent organization, the
Templeton Foundation, promotes the virtues. More than any contemporary novelist
I am aware of, you writes stories whose characters exhibit many of those virtues,
including joy, forgiveness, kindness, humility, wisdom, gratitude, purpose,
love, self-reliance, altruism, perseverance. Can you talk about how such
virtues inform your work?
CA: My
goal in writing novels is to shine a light into some of the darkest places on
earth, to humanize people (especially the poor and victims of violence) whom we
might never have reason to think about otherwise, and to inspire my readers to
care about injustice around the world.
This is not an
easy task. Our culture, unfortunately, encourages us not to think too hard
about the challenges facing us in society. Yet it is in the extreme places of
human experience that the truth of a person’s character is revealed. I’m very
interested in that truth—the truth that exists at the core of all of us,
including myself. That is the truth I seek in the hearts of my characters.
I’m fascinated by
moments when the best instincts in human beings triumph over the worst
instincts, when people choose to sacrifice themselves to help someone else,
when joy breaks through the storm clouds of sorrow, when people from very
different worlds take the time to understand each other, and when people who
have been wronged choose to forgive.
I’ve seen in my
life and in my research how awful people can be to each other, but I’ve also
seen how good we can be. When goodness rises above the fray (which it always
does in various ways in my stories), it is truly beautiful to behold.
MT: Forgiveness is a powerful theme in your books,
particularly in The Tears of Dark Water. Can you talk a bit about how you see forgiveness
as a way – perhaps the only way – for those victimized by some of the horrors
we wrestle with in the world today to come to terms with it?
CA: When
other people hurt us, we have only two options. We can hold on to the pain and
allow it to become bitterness, or we can chose to release the pain and find a
way to forgive.
As you point out,
the question of forgiveness is at the heart of The Tears of Dark Water.
I thought a lot about it as I wrote the story. I asked myself if I could
forgive in the way I was asking my characters to forgive. I don’t know the
answer to that. But I’m convinced that finding a way to forgive is the only way
to move past a life-altering injury into a place of peace and renewed
productivity.
Bitterness
paralyzes the heart. It binds a person to the past. Forgiveness releases the
heart to live again. It’s not something that happens easily, or necessarily at
one moment in time. Sometimes it takes years and multiple decisions to have its
effect. But its power is unquestionable.
MT: Your characters are sometimes victims who must
reach down farther than most of us ever have to in order to overcome extreme
situations: sex trafficking, Islamic fundamentalism, slavery. Then there are
characters from the developed world, like the attorney in A Walk Across the
Sun, who also must find the moral courage to come to the rescue of others,
and who discover real purpose in their own lives as a consequence. Can you talk
about purpose and serving others and finding meaning, and how they intersect
for those characters and for you as well?
CA: One
of the reasons story is such a profound medium of communication is that all of
us are living a story, whether or not we think about it in those terms. Our
stories aren’t simple or linear. They wouldn’t fit easily into a novel. But
they matter greatly to us, not just because we have an interest in their
outcome, but also because we want to believe that our lives matter to the
world. We want our lives to have meaning.
Unfortunately, the
kind of meaning that our world encourages us to seek is so often self-serving.
How can I get what I want? How can I advance my own objectives? How can I move
up in my career? These goals can be powerful motivators, but they don’t
actually leave a person satisfied. Satisfaction comes by using one’s gifts and
talents to serve others. That’s a theme I explore in my stories.
Often the people
who are most successful (in the traditional metrics, at least) are the most
unhappy. Conversely, I’ve met people in the developing world who are incredibly
poor and have achieved nothing of the kind of success that inspires Western
culture but who are incredibly happy. They find their meaning in the faces of
those they love. That’s the kind of life I’d like to live. And that’s the kind
of life I think most of us would like to live. But we have to make it a
priority. And we have to be willing to sacrifice.
From Acculturated, 10/20/15
