All Them Dogs: A Guest Post by Djamel White

After a five-year hiatus, a young man slips back into a life brimming with violence, anger and fear. Offering a different perspective on gang life in Dublin, this gritty yet emotional story reads like a film. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Djamel White on writing All Them Dogs.

 

When I first started to write All Them Dogs I had been toying around with a few ideas, regarding sons and fathers, emerging bisexuality—all very heady stuff that for one reason or another wasn’t sticking. What I felt instinctively I wanted to do was to take all that was whirling around in my head and try to pull it through a pinhole, and for that I needed a vehicle.

The narrator, Tony Ward, became the needle with which I could pull the thread of the story, and his voice was immediately very clear to me. I knew this guy, at least from the outset; I had met him a thousand times over, but I was never privy to his internal life. In fact, I always wondered if he had one, what it could possibly be like? That was my initial impulse in writing the first few lines of Tony introducing himself to the reader: as a force to be reckoned with. His voice felt like a naturally propulsive mechanism—once I got Tony going, he was almost impossible to stop. The process of writing became something of a method exercise. Whenever I began, it felt as if I was dropping into his perspective, right where I last left off, and thinking like him every step of the way until the laptop lid was shut for the day. It was via the action, the mobilising of scenes and characters, that the internal life of Tony started to develop in real time, as I discovered the conflicts within him, most often informed by the people around him, and moments in which he accidentally tells on himself, revealing a vulnerability he kept hidden from even himself. My favourite fiction is full of memorable characters, and it was important to me that the people in Tony’s life be as colourful on the page as he was.

Names tend to come to me before anything else, and I feel that from a name I can quickly flesh out who a person is, what they look like, and how they move through the world. I didn’t know who ‘Flute’ Walsh would be when I first thought of having a character named ‘Flute’, and why, but once he started taking shape, his relationship to Tony, and what eventually transpires between them, became too irresistible not to pursue. The exception that proves this rule, however, is that before I had Tony, I simply had his car. His blue Opel Corsa. Something about the words ‘Blue Opel’ just sung in my brain. It sounded like a rare gem, and in reality it was a crap little hatchback. For whatever reason, I just loved it. It became a note in 2020 that was recovered a couple of years later, to later be introduced to the voice of Tony Ward. A young man who had little but his mam’s old car and a whole lot of problems.

One of the most satisfying aspects about having this book out there is how people have responded to Tony and the rest of the cast. For the people who love this book, it is for the same reason I loved writing it: the lives it contains; the lives I created and lived with for years. They’re out there in the world now, and that’s my doing. It feels really good.

 

Photo: Bríd O’Donovan.