In addition to his poetic endeavors, Bhowmik is also actively involved in the literary community as the co-editor of Plato’s Caves Online. This platform serves as a semi-academic space dedicated to the discussion of literature, politics, and art. He is also the coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Interventions. Bhowmik’s literary journey came to my attention when he shared a link to his published poems on social media. The poems were featured in a magazine, providing readers like myself an opportunity to explore his unique writing style and the depth of his poetic expression. His ability to convey profound emotions and evoke vivid imagery through his words captivated my interest and left a lasting impression. Sayan is politically and socially very aware and vocal which any reader can find through his poems in his debut collection. Prachya Review is showcasing Sayan’s thought regarding his poetic journey and current literary trends for this issue.

Shafinur Shafin: Was there a moment or experience in your childhood or youth that foreshadowed your future career as a poet?
Sayan Aich Bhowmik: My now late grandmother, left an indelible impression on my formative years. She was the one who inculcated in me a reading habit and would gift me books even when there was no so-called occasion to do so. It was she who encouraged me to write and it started out with her cajoling me to send articles to newspapers like The Telegraph. I started out mostly trying my hands in fiction. Poetry came much later. I was writing, what I thought was very juvenile stuff and the thought of sending the poems somewhere for publishing was not really at the top of my scheme of things. That was maybe because I was not both sure and serious about poetry as a craft and whether my calling was this art form. But as luck would have it, around a decade back I met the poet, Arundhati Subramaniam at a poetry reading session in Chandigarh. She was her most inspiring self and had the most encouraging things to say to a novice like me. I credit my becoming a poet and taking up poetry seriously to her. Had it not been for that chance meeting, maybe I would still be trying to find my calling.

Shafinur: Could you share your experience publishing your poetry collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse? Is this your first collection?
Sayan: I Will Come with a Lighthouse is my debut collection of poems. The manuscript had been in the pipeline since 2018-19. And perhaps not very surprisingly, maybe because it still lacked the required polish or finesse, it was rejected a few times by publishers both in India and abroad. The ones who were willing to take me on board, I was a little circumspect about their publishing policy and their approach to the collection. Hawakal Publishers who have been doing a fabulous job bringing out Poetry titles and showcasing young and debutant poets decided to bring this out and give my poems a home. I was asked to prepare a synopsis of the collection, a kind of summing up of what the collection represents and addresses. Kiriti Sengupta, a notable poet in his own right, provided the much-needed inputs, sharpening the manuscript and giving it the form and shape that we find it in now. His insights were helpful in my having a clearer understanding of how the nitty-gritty of the publishing procedure works. And finally, the stunning cover was conjured by Bitan Chakraborty. Safe to say, without the presence of both these gentlemen, the collection would not have seen the light of day when it did.

Shafinur: What is the inspiration behind the title of your book? Why did you choose not to name it after a specific poem or line from the book?
Sayan: For the past few years or so, I have been concerned about the state of the country and the atmosphere of intolerance and divisiveness that has grasped the civil society, specially after a particular political party has come to power. It is in these trying times, that this collection was conceived. A lighthouse for me stands for a beacon of hope. I wanted my words to carry that semblance of hope for my readers, be it on the personal front of a spiritual crisis and on the social and political one. In choosing the title, I was aiming at trying to provide a sense of comfort, a feeling that my words would speak to the ones who need strength and hope in these trying times. On a more personal level, I had been besieged by a feeling of uprootedness for as long as I can remember. A feeling of not belonging to my immediate social surroundings, an anxiety stemming from trying to find an answer to who I am in the larger scheme of things. It is in this backdrop that I had my daughter, Raangta, come into my life and provide the much-needed mooring and anchor that I seemed to have been struggling to find and locate for all my life. In a way, she has been the lighthouse and as Shakespeare would say, a “star to every wandering bark”. (Sonnet 116). Hence, the choice of the title.

Shafinur: Your book is divided into four sections, each with its own title. What is the significance of these titles and how do they relate to the poems within each section?
Sayan: My collection, as you pointed out is divided into four sections, namely On Longing and Solitude, Love Poems, Political Poems and finally, On Writing. The first was born out of years of battling with thoughts bordering on crippling depression and looking for answers about the world I live in, Men and Gods and basically life in general. I would not say that I have been suffering from depression because that term has now come to be used very lightly and I do not want to trivialize the seriousness of the condition that others experience or go through. But I have grappled with the ideas of death and living and safe to say that I have not found any easy answers to the questions that I had been posing for myself. These poems were born out of that negotiation and conflict, not with people, but with the different faces and hearts that I had felt lived within me. The second, Love Poems, is perhaps the most personal of it all. I tried to put my finger on the changing dynamics of love, with age and with people arriving and leaving and with the Protean nature of the emotions associated with the “jubilee and knell” as Dickinson would say in a different context, of experiencing love. Very closely related to the first two would be the final section On Writing, where I was trying to chart the struggles of the poetic self and the status of the poet and poetry in today’s world. I have often wondered about the exact nature of the kind of world poets inhabit, whether it is possible for poetry to make a difference. In trying to make a statement, I have struggled to find the right and the most pertinent words. This section is a testimony to that struggle. The section closest to my heart is perhaps the third one. As I mentioned earlier, India has been experiencing, maybe for the first time in its nation’s history, such a blatant and unabashed polarization of the civil society. I don’t subscribe to the view that all art should be propaganda, but I do believe that art/ poetry is a mouthpiece and a weapon, a kind of looking glass which needs to be polished often and well. India has a checkered history of communal and casteist violence and I think more and more people should stand up create art to address these issues. Not only of the parliamentarian politics, but also politics of caste, class, gender and the community.

Shafinur: Your poetry often explores complex emotions and states of being, including themes of isolation and grief. Could you speak to how you approach writing about these challenging topics in your work and what you hope readers will take away from your poems?
Sayan: I think I have lived with this isolation for a long time. After a certain point, I tried to put my finger on the exact nature of the grief, its texture, tonality, and hue but did not quite find the right answers. Writing about these intricate emotions, I imagine I’m having a conversation with someone like me, someone who needs to hear these words, someone who needs to be told that in the world out there, there is another and maybe many more, like her/him, who do not know the exact nature of their suffering, but suffer nonetheless. What I would want my readers to take away from my poems is a sense of solidarity. And maybe a bit of warmth.

Shafinur: In your “Political Poems” section, there is a strong sense of nostalgia and longing for a sense of belonging, juxtaposed with the harsh reality of political cruelty. I can remember this line: “I run my fingers all over the atlas and the tip of my fingers Smell of blood.” Could you speak to the inspiration behind these poems?

Sayan: I have grown up with my grandmother telling me stories of her life in erstwhile East Bengal. She was a native of Sylhet and curiously, her reminiscences were laced with a longing for a country now not hers and a recollection of the violence and cruelty that man unleashed on man during and after the partition of India. Much later, I came across the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, who spoke with a similar longing and nostalgia for Kashmir and presented a harrowing account of the life of the people there constantly under surveillance of the army. India as a country has not, and I do not think it will, recover/ed from the communal carnage of the partition and will continue to carry that burden for years to come. Unfortunately, the communal tension has been fanned by various political parties for their electoral gains. The motivation behind these poems has been to address these issues, to highlight the infinite cruelty that man is capable of committing. To put it into perspective, in the words of Wordsworth, to throw light on, “What man has made of man.”

Shafinur: Your poetry explores the complexities of time and the relationships between people and their experiences over time. However, there are references to memory to eternity and the idea of something transcending time. “Memory is a foreign tongue rusting on spiral staircases that go all the way to the moon.” Could you speak to the role that eternity plays in your poetry?
Sayan: I do not know if it is eternity that I am concerned with. But you are correct in pointing out about the relationship of time and how human relationships change over its course. I think in this aspect memory plays a very important role. What we remember, how we choose to remember and what we choose to forger reveals a lot about us. But most importantly, I think what I dread the most that there will be a point in time in the future of the world that there will be no person living in whose memory I might have a place. More than death being a scary proposition, it is the preparation of death that holds a greater challenge.

Shafinur: With the rise of social media and the popularity of shorter forms of poetry, such as micro-poetry, do you think that there is a danger of poets feeling pressured to pursue fame and followers over the pursuit of artistry and craft? Additionally, how important do you believe it is for poets to explore a range of forms and modes of expression, including longer verses, in order to fully develop their artistic vision?

Sayan: I think it is a curious vicious cycle. For one, there are more authors/poets than readers. Specially with social media providing the platform, we are also slowly losing out on sincere readership. It is also true that poets/ authors are in a curious conundrum. I myself had been asked by this publishing house about the number of followers I have on twitter before they even thought of considering taking up my manuscript. The focus I think has shifted. What one reads needs to replace the numbers of how many people will read. But numbers are important too. Specially for the publishing houses. And I do get their concern about the target readership. As I said, it is a vicious cycle and which shows no signs of abetting. I think, and I speak for myself here, more than exploring range of forms, the poet should explore a wider range of themes, not restricting her/himself to a particular thematic predominance. What needs to be said should be a question of experimenting and exploration even if the poet decides to limit her/himself within the small garden of how s/he wants to do it.

The post ”I wanted my words to carry that semblance of hope”-Sayan Aich Bhowmik first appeared on Prachya Review.

Prachya Review had the pleasure of interviewing Melisa Ruscsak. She is a Motivational Keynote Speaker, Author and CEO of a small traditional publishing house, Trient Press. For anyone trying to traditionally publish or market their book, this insightful interview is for you! Ian Craven took the interview.

Ian: What inspired you to write and how did you learn the craft? 

Melissa: I’ve always had the created side that came out in several ways. Here recently, I decided to nurture the writing aspect while teaching others my craft. 

Ian: Why did you decide to become an author?

Melissa: In 2011 after suffering 2 strokes, needing brain surgery then undergoing the third stroke a year later, I turned to typing as a form of both communication and entertainment. Developing my creative side year by year with the use of fan fiction ended up leading me on this path. In 2016 I was challenged to write an original story and get it published. That has paved the way to everything else. 

Ian: What’s your biggest success after writing your book?

Melissa: Success comes in different ways depending on the mindset of the person. At first, it was just simply getting picked up by a publisher. Then winning some awards, to which my first book won six and was nominated for 2 others. Currently, success is just simply sharing my stories with the world. Knowing that I’m bringing entertainment with my fantasy series, and helping others with my self-guided self-help books.

Ian: Are there any hidden messages in your stories that someone who reads your books can learn from?

Melissa: Regardless if you read from “Are You Happy” or from my fantasy books there are messages. The main being not everything is as it appears to be. There are two sides to every story and up to you to decide what is your truth and to learn from it. 

Ian: What advice do you give to someone who wants to start writing?

Melissa: Have a marketing budget in place even before you write. Think about it this way that $50 you put aside today for marketing when your book is released is an investment in yourself. It’s also a tax deduction as being an author is the same as being a business owner. 

Ian: What method of book marketing has been most successful for you?

Melissa: Podcast are great. The best ones that I’ve seen a ROI on are the ones I’ve had to pay for. Now remember this is paid advertisement , no less than running that facebook ad. Another great tool is magazines.

Ian: What insightful advice would you give to an aspiring author trying to publish their first book?

Melissa: There are things you need to know upfront. Editing costs money; don’t do this yourself. Book covers cost money and unless you do graphic designs, please don’t do this yourself. Publishing your book should never cost you upfront fees just to publish. Marketing … real marketing costs money. Plan ahead. 

Ian: Why did you decide to start your own magazine?

Melissa: Trientrepreneur Magazine was born out of answering the same questions all the time. And i like being helpful, really I do. So the best way I can be helpful today is to create a tool for people to use to help them navigate being an author and entrepreneur.

Ian: What kinds of success have you gained from being a podcaster?

Melissa: Podcasting is a different beast altogether. Now I can say interviewing SAG actors/ actresses , and multi-millionaires is awesome. Because it is. To have 30 minutes to find out how they got to where they are today is priceless. I can say growing the following to over 400k in listeners is success. Yeah that’s great as well as I’m bringing value to them in every podcast. But really knowing every episode I have that one person out there getting help and needing that information, now that is my real success. 

Ian: What’s next?

Melissa: Trient Press is growing and expanding in ways I never dreamed of, So I won’t say exactly what’s next. However, I will say this make sure you keep your notifications on and follow all things Trient Press, the next 36 months is full of growth and will have added ways for authors to connect. For now you can follow me personally on instagram @mlruscsak , Facebook @authorMLruscsak , twitter @ruscsakmelisa or just simply google Trient Press. This is my latest book,

it’s at target.com and walmart.com

The post Interview with M. L Ruscsak first appeared on Prachya Review.

Here Anika Shah, on behalf of Prachya Review, interviews the writer and poet to know more about her thoughts and literary journey. 

Photographed by Anika Shah

Anika Shah: How did your journey as a writer begin? Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer, or did something drive you towards that journey?

Chador Wangmo: When I was growing up, we never had any Bhutanese authors. All the books we read came from outside. So, I guess the notion that someday I might become a writer was never on my mind when I was a little girl.  But I was an ardent reader and I loved listening to oral folktales. Even when I was little girl, I loved retelling these stories to whoever was ready to listen to me and that ultimately made me a writer. I guess I’m that girl who grew up with stories and then she just chose to write these stories. (Smiles)

Anika Shah: When we met at the South Asian Literature Festival in 2018, you mentioned that the people of Bhutan often feel confused about their identity as a Bhutanese and their identity as a Buddhist. How do you think that effects the literature of Bhutan?

Chador Wangmo: Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that it’s an “identity crisis” as I seem to have made it sound like but yes, definitely in Bhutan, the people are largely driven by the Buddhist philosophies that are so much ingrained in our everyday lifestyle. So, even in our stories, or literature for that matter, you will come across many of these elements. To cite an example, as a Buddhist, we practice being mindful about the impermanence of life. So, you might see even school going children writing poems on death. That was one simple example I could think of at the moment but you have to read many Bhutanese author’s works to understand how neatly our ideologies are woven around our Buddhist beliefs. (Laughs).

Anika Shah: How do you balance between writing for adults and writing for children? Is there any transition that occurs within you as a writer?

Chador Wangmo: I think I write what stories nudge me from within. I don’t exactly plan what level I want to write or what kind of stories I want to write but there are times when stories simply come bubbling from within, wanting to be told and basically that’s what I land up writing. So, you can say that it is almost like an inner call more than a planned activity!

Anika: Tell us a little bit about Dema – the little girl from your books who is a superhero and also a nun. What kind of response did you get from children after the publication of this series?

Chador: (Excited) Dema is the first ever superhero in our country and she is just a twelve years old nun, that makes her extra special. Special because in these times of #MeToo and #WomenEmpowerment being so strongly voiced out, I feel that it is so timely that a young female superhero had to surface in our part of the world too.

Whenever I am asked about the response I have received from the little ones, I land up narrating this incident, which was shared to me by one of my acquaintances.  It was few days after the second book of the series had been launched. This friend of mine was on his evening walk. Suddenly, he heard a little girl call out to him from her verandah. Believe it or not, the little girl calls out to this stranger and she proudly shows her Dema Book and even gives a summary of this book so that the stranger she is talking to knows who Dema, the superhero is. How sweet is that!

So this zest and the various mails I receive from little ones asking me when the next book in the series will be out keeps me motivated to write more. Actually I’ve already started writing the third book of this series.

Photographed by Anika Shah

Anika: Since you were in the teaching profession, do you ever find your teacher-self resurface when you write for children?

Chador: (Blush! Blush!) Can’t help that I guess (Laughs). I guess the “teacher self” always wants to teach something or the other through the books I write. I don’t want to write preachy books but every book of mine has some concept or the other that I would want the children of that particular age group to learn but I’m mindful not to make them sound preachy at all!

Anika: Do you recall any particular struggle in your literary journey?

Chador: The biggest struggle that every Bhutanese author faces as of now is the small market for our books. But that too is changing now. More and more people are reading and embracing Bhutanese authors so hopefully in few years time that too wouldn’t be much of a problem.

Anika: I know it is difficult for writers to pick one of their works as a favorite, but still, I will ask – which work of yours do you hold the closest to your heart?

Chador: Well, as you put it, I am tempted to say all the books (Laughs). But I think I’m more popularly known for my first novel La Ama which came out in 2015. I choose this book for two reasons:

1. As already mentioned, people know me mostly for this book.
2. I wrote this book as I was drowning in the sorrows after I lost my mother. Creating the mother character of this book was like bringing my mother back to life. I’ve used her as a reference to create this character. The way she walked, the songs she listened to, and the way she dressed. So even today, four years after this book when people mention this book, I feel I have resurrected my mother.

So, it would be La Ama (Winks).

Anika: Do you prefer writing poetry more or prose? Since your book of poetry came out very recently, I was curious to know, do you prefer either one of them, or do they go hand in hand?

Chador: I write poetry more on an impulse than planned writing. I write prose with my target audience in mind, which means it comes more from the head and I write poetry whenever my emotions nudge me to, so poetry comes from the heart. It goes “heart in head” rather! (Laughs loudly)

Anika: How do you feel about the current literary scene in Bhutan? Is it different from what you grew up to see?

Chador: A lot more different! As I said in my first response, we never had Bhutanese writers back then. So the whole idea of being a writer was almost non-existent. Maybe, I grew up shoving the role of writing to the foreign writers only.

But today, when I visit schools, and interact with little ones, it’s heartening to see that now little ones carry the dream of becoming writers. That’s a major leap if we talk about the change in our interest in literature.

Anika: Do you think that people are writing more in English these days rather than Dzongkha? When I keep in mind Bangladesh, I can feel that a lot of people feel more comfortable in expressing themselves in English rather than in Bangla. Is it the same in Bhutan?

Chador: It’s a shame but yes. But again, even if it is in English, I am happy that Bhutanese are at least picking up their pen and writing our stories now. Better that than not having anything written.

As you mentioned, there are more readers and writers of English than Dzongkha. However, that doesn’t mean that Dzongkha isn’t written or read at all. We have organizations that are doing their best to lift and promote writings in Dzongkha.

Anika: What do you think about literary festivals as platforms to uphold emerging writers and poets?

Chador: Essential! Otherwise, how would one showcase one’s work?  I think literary festivals are the best platform for any emerging writers. I personally feel, the first ever-literary festival I was invited to, groomed the speaker that I’ve become today. So, my deepest gratitude to Mountain Echoes, the only literary festival we have in our country.

Anika: Who are your favorite writers and poets?

Chador: Anytime I’m ready for Kahlil Gibran, Pablo Neruda, Charles Bukowski, Keats, and I feel the poems by Mary Oliver and Sylvia Plath resonate deep in my soul.

I will never forget the first book I ever read that touched my heart like no other book – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. That book has always stayed in me after all these years and I am a huge Murakami fan. But I make sure to read whatever I can lay my paws on. That gives me a wide choice of works to keep me equipped with different styles and stories.

Anika: What are you working on now? Any upcoming projects that you would like to share with us?

Chador: I am more of what the stories nudge me than what I plan to create as a writer. So, I’m currently working on three projects. Two illustrated books for children and they are for two different age groups and I think I mentioned earlier that I’m working on the third book of the Superhero Dema series.

(Psst! Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve a theme for my next anthology of poems that’s been yelling loud in my heart for the past three weeks now. Laughs)

The post ‘When I was growing up, we never had any Bhutanese authors. All the books we read came from outside.’ – Chador Wangmo first appeared on Prachya Review.

In addition to writing, Studdard serves as the executive producer and host of VIDA Voices & Views for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the president of the Associated Writing Program’s Women’s Caucus. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a professor for the Lone Star College.

Here Shafinur Shafin, on behalf of Prachya Review, interviews the poet to know more about her thoughts and literary journey. 

Shafinur Shafin: The title of your debut book of the collection of poems is so interesting, “I ate the Cosmos for Breakfast”… I found the poems are somehow spiritual and erotic also. The language is really meditative. Was it intentional? Tell us please the background of writing the poems in the book.

Melissa Studdard: I like the way you described Cosmos, and I think it’s accurate. The particular combination of the spiritual and erotic was not initially intentional, but once I saw the pattern unfolding, I cultivated it. Though it may seem unconventional or strange to some people to combine spirituality and eroticism, there’s actually a strong, longstanding precedent for it in the mystical branches of most religions. Eroticism and spirituality, though different in many ways, are two great sources of passion, so it makes sense to me that they would share certain elements, like exuberant language and vivid, sensual imagery.

Shafinur: How do you choose a title for your poems?

Melissa: Sometimes they just come to me, but when I have to work for them, I use two basic methods. The first is to extract a line or phrase not working well in the body of the poem and use it as the title. This often produces good titles because the extracted lines are tightly related to the subject matter but not flowing well. If there is no such line in the poem, I free write until I have one. For me, staring at a screen to try to think of a title is a perfect recipe for getting stuck. Flow and movement are integral to my creative process.

Shafinur: How does life influence your writing?

Melissa: In every way you can imagine. There is no part of my experience that does not influence my writing.

Shafinur: Do you think poems can bring peace?

Melissa: Without question, they can help activate more peaceful states of being, both socially and personally. Unlike strictly functional communication, which often flies through us and away, poetry arrives pregnant and remains to roost and hatch. It can change the rhythms of our breath. It can nestle deep within the conscious and unconscious facets of mind, simultaneously, disrupting patterns and unexamined choices that preserve harmful structures and belief systems. Though daily language can tell us that we need to become more mindful, poetic language can awaken us to that mindfulness by making us slow down and pay attention or by startling us into a new awareness. Through the rhythms, figurative imaginings, and syntactical complexities of poetry we can not only communicate but also envision and implant new ideas about ways of being, thinking, and acting. Connections not readily available to the conscious mind are activated, and we exercise the power of the imagination to direct us to new possibilities.

Is it possible to read, for instance, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and remain unmoved? Is it possible to have collective, poetically curated and rendered effects of racism hatch inside you and not grow more sensitive to the nuances of micro-aggression, more able to spot it, more desirous of calling it out when you see it, more desirous of eradicating it from yourself? I feel like it would take an intentional, ugly act of will to resist this natural extension of having read such a book.

As well, poems make us feel understood and less alone in our human experience. Coming across a line in someone else’s poem that beautifully articulates something I didn’t even know I was feeling, or something that I was thinking but too ashamed to say, tells me it’s not outrageous to think and feel those things. That understanding, that connection, can deliver peace.

Shafinur: What inspires you to express yourself through poetry?

Melissa: The world is incredibly beautiful, sad, harsh, lovely, lonely, nurturing, ugly, resplendent, sublime.  I can’t quit thinking about it. I’m in love with it. I hate it. I have to write about it.

Shafinur: You published your novel before your debut poetry collection. I think you are more famous as poet than novelist (I also first got to know your name through poems). So tell us something about the novel and writing it.

Six Weeks to Yehidah is a middle-grade novel about a young girl on a spiritual journey, learning ancient wisdom traditions and gaining insights into her purpose in life. She travels through mystical lands, where trees grow instruments and petroglyphs act as portals to other worlds. It started as a short story, but the larger scope of it became apparent quickly—when I was about ten pages in.

A fun fact about the novel is that my daughter, Rosalind, actually wrote the poem that the main character, Annalise, recites in the first chapter. Rosalind was about eight years old at the time, and we were at a restaurant with a paper table cloth the children could draw and color. At some point I looked down and saw that my daughter had written a gorgeous poem instead of making a drawing. I loved the poem so much I took the tablecloth home. When I created Annalise a few years later, I just knew she had to recite Rosalind’s poem!

Shafinur: Do you think any poet/author influenced your writing? Who and how?

Melissa: So very many. I could literally write about this for years and still have more to say, so I’m going to choose one poet who heavily influenced me when I first began writing: Li-Young Lee. I read his poems so many times I memorized them unintentionally. More so than with almost any other poet, I feel privy to the intimate rhythms of Lee’s thought patterns. And they are beautiful rhythms, beautiful thoughts, full of stylistic and imaginative paradoxes. His metaphors have a way of arriving both unexpectedly and with a light touch, which is a feat even the best poets often do not accomplish. The poems are artful but without artifice. Grand structures unfold with ease. No matter how many times I read Lee’s poems I always feel surprised and delighted by his mind.

Shafinur: One of my American friends was saying nowadays female poets are celebrated more than male poets in media. Do you agree? (because in other parts of the world, we feel that the literary world is dominated by males mostly and they sometimes say female writing so girlish as if it has no literary value)

Melissa: My experience has not shown me that female poets are more celebrated than male poets. We have more work to do in bringing marginalized groups, such as women (including older women who started careers late, after rearing families), LGBTQI folk, people of color, and people with disabilities into the forefront of the literary landscape. This work is not just about the living. We need excellent, driven scholars to put their time and research towards finding writers of past generations whose work was suppressed, marginalized, or ignored because they were not members of the prevailing power structures of their times. We need these marginalized voices in order to gain a fuller picture of the human experience. When our view is lopsided and limited, it has a huge negative impact on our ability to attain the level of mutual understanding needed to treat each other the way we all deserve to be treated.

Photographed by David Burnett

Shafinur: Do you think your poems inspire other people’s life and thought?

Melissa: I’ve received beautiful messages from people who say they’re inspired by my poems, and I’m always happy to receive the messages. It’s a gift when one person takes time let another know their work has had a meaningful impact.

Shafinur: Your poem was included in the Bustle’s “8 Feminist Poems to Inspire You When The World Is Just Too Much”, how was the feeling? (In fact I was so happy seeing your name on it)

Melissa: It’s nice that you were happy to see “Respect” on the Bustle list. Thank you! I was delighted too. The same poem was also just on a feminist list at Bookriot, and I appreciate the people who take the time to curate such lists. It’s fun when a poem starts to have unexpected adventures on its own. It feels like an adult child has gone out into the world to make their own way.

Shafinur: To what degree do you feel awards make a difference for recognition and author establishment?

Melissa: Awards certainly help call attention to people’s work, and that is a wonderful thing. I know awards also generate opportunities for the people who receive them, and that is also a wonderful thing. However, I think it’s more important for writers to recognize, honour, and share their own talent regardless of whether or not they are receiving accolades. There are plenty of writers who have attained both commercial and critical success without having won any awards.

Poems by Melissa Studdard

Everyone in Me Is a Bird

Mind was a prison, ruby lined

in its lipstick noir—everything woman

I was expected to be, trapped between

papered walls. What they said to do, I did not

but only levitated at the burning,

the body a water in which I drowned, the life

a windshield dirty with love. What they

said to think, I thought not but instead made

my mind into a birdcage with wings

*Title is from an Anne Sexton Poem

(Publication Credit: First published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series.)

Respect

Because her body is winter inside a cave

because someone built

fire there and forgot to put it out

because bedtime is a castle

she’s building inside herself

with a moat

and portcullis

and buckets full of mist

because when you let go

the reins

horses

tumble over cliffs and turn

into moths before hitting bottom

because their hooves leave streaks of midnight

in the sky

because stuffed rabbits

are better at keeping secrets

than stopping hands

because when the world got

shoved up inside her

she held it tight like a kegel ball

and wondered

at the struggle Atlas had

carrying such a tiny thing

on his back

(Publication Credit: First published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series.)

Revolution

Democracy is a pigeon

       looking for a landing.

                  Consumerism is an accident

from when God fell asleep.

             Now the skyline is inside me

                        like a door leading to someone

else’s bedroom. Nothing on the dresser

                        is mine. The ornate gold frames

                                             hold other people’s children,

the jewelry box—someone else’s jade.

                                I move across the carpet

                                        in my slippers and mist, a myth

not yet written. What it is I want

                 to become, no man can answer

                                                  or buy. It’s possible

I’m the mother of vast, dark silences.

                         It’s possible I will grandparent

                                                                a litter of storms.

(Publication Credit: First published in The Journal.)

The post ‘Eroticism and spirituality, though different in many ways, are two great sources of passion’- Melissa Studdard first appeared on Prachya Review.

I got to know about Nitasha Kaul through her first novel Residue, the book’s spine peeped at me from among the other books kept on my roommate’s table in the girl’s hostel in Kashmir University. The name and the cover of the book attracted me the time but I did not read it just then. I read the novel after coming back home. I found the protagonist and other characters very familiar to me from my experience in Kashmir. Leon Ali typifies a common Kashmiri person who is alienated in his own land, and in other places wrestles with his memories. My interest grew in knowing more about Nitasha. I read her other writings about Kashmir and gender issues- to many people these articles would be considered merely scholarly but to me these are gems that provide a different perspective on things.

Before knowing Nitasha Kaul, the only other Kashmiri author I knew was Salman Rushdie. So Nitasha was unique not only for the fact that her novel Residue was shortlisted for Man Asian literary award, but also for her stance on the rights of Kashmiris. It is difficult to describe Nitasha Kaul in a few words. The description on her website can give an idea about her: “She is a Kashmiri novelist, academic, poet, economist, artist who lives in London. She often finds herself speaking to, engaged with, writing and addressing, and part of, specific audiences who do not speak much to each other: economists, novelists, poets, feminists, economic social and political justice activists, politics and international relations theorists, musicians and filmmakers, Bhutan scholars, Kashmiris, street-artists, academic philosophers (to name a few).” She is a polymath and also multilingual. For all these reasons, I wanted to interview her for Prachya Review as I believe most of our readers should know more about Kashmiri authors. I am very thankful to Riyaz Ahangar who helped me to contact Nitasha for the interview. The interview was recorded orally through whatsapp, and the transcription retains that conversational quality.

Shafinur Shafin: You are a novelist, economist, and educator. You are also very vocal about Kashmir issues. One could even identify you as a political activist. Which identity gives you more comfort?

Nitasha Kaul: Hi Shafinur and the Prachya Review team. So your first question to me concerns the fact that I have multiple identities as a novelist, economist, academic and so on and you want to know which identity is most comfortable for me. There is no straightforward answer to this. Each of those identities that I have or wish to possess are equally dear to me and they become salient in different contexts. They allow me to engage with the world analytically as well as affectively so as to be able to analyze and make sense of what I see as well as to be able to look at my experiences- the raw sensation of the world- and I think that comes through in my academic work and scholarly work on the one hand and my creative, poetic and literary work on the other. So there isn’t an identity that is more comfortable than any others; it depends on the context, the world is multiple, it has many modes of being and I inhabit some of them and very often these modes intersect and that for me is how I would want to be.

Shafinur: When and how did you start writing and are there any particular writers that influenced you?

Nitasha: So I would like to actually begin by saying that I can’t remember when it was that I fell in love with words and the way in which they made the world. And the significance, I think, of stories is that they are narratives that shape our understanding of the world and what we perceive to be doing. We often actually act on the basis of narrative and stories that we’ve told ourselves. We come to believe stories and that is the magic of narrative, of stories, and literally of words which are the basic blocks, the cells of thought, just as the body is made up of cells. And you know, just as the world is made up of particles of physical matter, particles of our lives are made up of words and in so many ways, big and small, all we do is trade words- interact with words, live in words and so the idea of when I started writing really is very closely tied to when I started reading. In very early childhood when I wanted to make sense of the world around me, I turned to words. I would also read a lot as a child. I was, at any time, the member of multiple libraries even during schooldays, so I would read a lot, when I would finish reading a book or stories or novel whatever, I would always end up wondering about what happened to these characters. Afterwards, I would make up stories in my mind and I think that facility for transporting oneself in time, that ability to imagine things that books give us, is really fundamental and something to be cherished and something that is beyond compare. Because there are many other ways in which we can engage with images and words, but I think just the act of reading and writing is…. there is something very magical about it. It really is the beginning of something when we put pen to paper, or these days, type something on a screen- words which can begin stories. Are there particular writers that influenced me? Oh      ! Several! Numerous! An incredibly large number to even think about! I think what I would really like to do is go through hundreds of names instead of having a list of writers. I think I would like to emphasize is that I always liked reading, and letting myself be influenced by writers who write from drastically different traditions. So at any time there were European authors, South Asian authors, nineteen century German authors, ancient people who wrote in Rome, people who wrote at the time of enlightenment Europe, people who wrote in the twentieth century. As they say I read like a butterfly and I think that from very early on that was something I consciously tried to do. My interest in the authors I like, or have been influenced by, or would like to cite, would range the entire gamut from Premchand to Shishkin to Mishima to Dante to Sartre to Ralph Ellison, too numerous, far too numerous a set of names. However, there are two things I do want to point out in this context and those two things are that growing up and in fact up until my graduation, I read a lot but I wasn’t really aware that I was mostly reading men, and secondly that there were specific literatures that were underrepresented in South Asian libraries at the time, for instance, African literature. There was something systemic and something institutional happening there that in the last decades we have decoded, understood, and addressed. How certain kinds of stories circulate and how certain authors circulate. So I think that is a conscious step. Not one of the writers I just named to you is Muslim or a woman. So, in later years, I actively sought out and read women, people from everywhere else and those who were obscure, outside the canon or forgotten. Even in my novel I tried to foreground in one of the conversations between the characters, on how so often the stories that circulate so much more are the stories written by men or privileged men or men from a certain part of the world. I think that the more aware we are of this kind of thing- the issues of the location of the author- the better it is, because it allows us to then consciously go against the grain of a conventional idea of who the author is and what ‘he’ does? To discover other interesting stories and so in recent times I have tried much more to read works by other kinds of authors with identities that have been submerged because of geography or gender or sexuality or so on. So that is something that I wish I could have had more of in early years.

Shafinur: How was your childhood? Any particular incident that remains vivid in your mind?

Nitasha: Oh!… I mean that is an enormous question and I am not sure how would one answer that in an interview. How was my childhood… like perhaps many other childhoods it was marked by the good and the bad, the sorrowful and the joyous, the mundane and the extraordinary? So, it is… I suppose in the space of an interview answer it’s hard to come up with any sensible generalization about my childhood… However, it was marked by a sense of the complexity of my identity and that is something that I could make sense of much later after growing up, because you know we are Kashmiris but we are not in Kashmir and I think that meant something that wasn’t understandable to me or properly comprehensible to me as a child, that happened much later. In terms of incidents that remain vivid, those are numerous… what do I tell you?… Since you asked me this question, I will literally just pull randomly out of my head, a memory that might be of interest to your readers… there was once this time that- at Dussehra the statues of Ravan and all the fireworks, these go up in flames- I remember once that I attended this big spectacle of fireworks and I came back with a doll that was almost the same size as me and the next day I wanted to see it all again and my parents, my mother and father both, told me that it only happens on one day of the year, it doesn’t happen every day and I refused to believe them. My father was downstairs in the building where we lived and my mother was upstairs, so I told my mother that I am going to downstairs to be with my dad and I told my dad that I am actually going upstairs and somehow in all of that… Because I refused to trust them that it wouldn’t happen again and I was so convinced that I wanted to find my way back to where the fireworks would be there again and I wanted to watch that incredible spectacle again. So, clutching my doll I ran away from home and I must have been, I don’t know… very small at the time… six… five… I don’t know… small… less than ten anyway and I remember that… and of course I had no idea the sheer panic that I would cause everyone and I made my way through some streets, running somewhere and eventually at some point I heard my… I heard somebody, you know my dad somehow managed to locate me on the street, and he asked the cyclist who was on that street to go ahead and stop me from reaching the main road where obviously I could have been an accident victim because it was a busy main road I had come a fair distance away from my home… I wanted to run away to see that spectacle and I suppose that draws the attention to how captivated I was by the spectacle and I wanted to see it again. That little me had a complex relationship with time and trust and now I can look back upon that memory and smile. I think that writers in general have a very complex relationship to time and people. In my case, of course, over the years, it has been this kind of exile and nostalgia that have added to that sense of having a complicated relationship with the past that is not straightforwardly accessible at all and that cannot be repeated and that is so fraught. So, again I would like to add that children everywhere, writer or not, do lots of, have lots of, instances that they do think that they later look back and see how whimsical they were.

Shafinur: Was there any particular story behind writing Residue?

Nitasha: Let me pick up from where I left off from the last answer. So, in Residue, the central theme in the book is that residue is what remains in us as we move on from events and as we move across national borders. So, in that sense, the idea that remains or the traces of the past continue to live in the present and in the future and the way in which no past is utterly absolutely final and traceless. In a scholarly context, as Gramsci said, there are an infinity of traces and it’s true that is what we are. We are an infinity of traces and in various kinds of complicated and knotted ways. So, there are two central elements to that kind of conceptual story behind Residue. The first one is this idea of what remains in us in terms of a temporal past when we move on from things and when we move across borders as a spatial movement. The second is that, as the name ‘Residue’ indicates, or as it sounds, as if it is something out of chemistry. Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities was something that has a cameo appearance in Residue and it really tackles this question of our affinities to other people, are they chosen or are they somehow automatic and instinctive? This plays a role in Residue as well, to look at this question of how we decide to belong to specific identities… to have affinity with specific kinds of people or issues or identities and so on. So, these were conceptually the important themes behind the writing of Residue. In terms of a story, the characters are of course fictional, but all fiction draws from life to a greater or lesser extent, though not in any straightforward way, so no, I mean a Leon Ali does not exist, but I did live in Berlin during the time that I was… I lived between Berlin and Bristol at the time that I was originally writing it and it was born from a desire to put these stories of the past… of a divided past in the present, and to refer to the absences of… absences in our memory and in our imagination because of divides that are physical. So, Berlin is a divided city. Kashmir is a divided place, divided in the sense of physically divided, but then also divided in the sense that there are a generation of Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus that have grown up literally physically apart from each other and that kind of absence too I think is something that overlays physical divides.

Shafinur: Leon Ali seems to be very similar to you. How far does Residue reflect your own life? Is it in a way an autobiographical novel?

Nitasha: People say that first novels are always somehow autobiographical and in fact perhaps all fiction, as I said just now, is! It’s complicatedly autobiographical though, not straightforwardly. It’s also interesting that you say that Leon Ali is similar to me because he’s a man- people often refer to the similarities between me and the female protagonist Keya and I am always left wondering whether it is because she is a Raina and I am a Kaul and whether it’s a Kashmiri Hindu thing or is it the fact that she is an academic. So it’s interesting that you point out that Leon is similar. And I would probably say that I have overlaps with lots of characters- the sense in which Leon’s being lost, his various cavernous passages to alternative pasts that he’s looking for- are interesting to me but it does not reflect my own life in any straightforward way. There are numerous characters in the book, not just Leon and Keya but also Shula, Abhilash and others, so the characters are partly us, partly the people we meet. So it isn’t an autobiographical novel in that sense, although of course as I said the places that figured in that book are places that I know.

Shafinur: While I was reading Residue, it felt like a movement from one place to another. I felt it related to the displacement of a Kashmiri man, and also related to a global displacement of other people. I can connect this displacement with the protagonist of Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, Zafar. Both the characters, Leon Ali and Zafar, were once displaced from their homeland, and that movement marked a defining moment in their life, making way to many more movements. Do you feel that displacement is a modern tragedy? What do you feel about accepting displacements, the struggle to re-place oneself, and emplace the new space?

Nitasha: This question is really interesting and I welcome the reflection, the chance for reflection that it affords me. You’re absolutely right that the displacement of Leon for example in the book is also related to the global displacement of other people and there is a sense in which when you ask whether displacement is a modern tragedy, I would say that there is a particular way in which modernity in the way which we have known it through especially most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century… No… Actually let me reverse back a bit and answer that question and begin two sentences previously again… so when you say is displacement a modern tragedy, I would like to think through that and say that is actually the dawn of modernity. Let’s think about the last four centuries – that have made a particular kind of displacement serviceable in the interests of the global elites and tremendously tragic for those who are the displaced. So if we think about previous centuries and centuries, people moved for all sorts of reasons, there were empires, there were trade relationships, there were other kinds of movements of people. However, if we think about the modern period which is the last three/four centuries, we realize that the movement of people is actually top down and done in a way that is almost as if it’s a chessboard where the movement is to calculate the greatest possible benefit for those in power, whether we think about the trajectories of the slave trade, the indentured labor that was moved to plantations in different parts of the world for plantation purposes and so on. To think about all the displacements that happen as a consequence of empire in the first and the second world wars, especially on the eve of the first world war and then at the start of the 21st century, we find large numbers of people in Europe and elsewhere who are globally moved around and then of course we come to the horrors of the experience of partition and other kinds of displacements and as a consequence of these boundary-making processes, the abhorrent level of violence that is faced by people who are then bracketed into political units, where their identities, where their cultural, ethnic and civic identities are almost always in conflict with each other. We see this with partitions of boundaries in Africa, we see this with the ways in which boundaries were drawn in the west Asia, Middle East, we see this in South Asia, and we see this in the case of Kashmir. So there’s a way in which I think the systematicity of modernity in making the world comprehensible by trying to impose an order upon that which is fundamentally not orderable, not amenable to being ordered in that way. So, to classify regions and people and to draw those lines without any concern for the lives that would be affected by it. In that sense I think that we are seeing the aftermath and the continuing effects of global displacements that have been the consequence of a kind of modernist reordering of the world in the last few centuries. And these obviously affect collectivities but then individual people may experience them differently.

Coming back from that sort of bigger point to look at Leon’s case, so he is displaced in multiple ways. He is displaced as a Kashmiri Muslim in India and then he became a sort of Muslim in Europe, a Brown-skinned Muslim man in Europe, so there are multiple displacements and Keya again in her own way is also dealing with identity at a distance through the question of exile.

Now how do I feel about the struggle to replace one’s self, to emplace the new space? So I think that this is really interesting and it makes me think that one way of answering this would be, I don’t know if it satisfactory, but it would be to refer to Edward Said’s quote about how he at one point he says he experiences identity as a cluster of flowing currents and I think that is in a sense true for many, if not most, people that have these increasingly multiple allegiances, and also the advent of technology into so many lives makes it possible to have different kinds of rhizomatic affiliations with people with whom one might share affinities, who might not physically be there. I’m a creature of hope and I think that we can place ourselves in different contexts and that would be to accept the decentering of an automatic relationship between space, location, personal identity that’s not, that’s increasingly not, sustainable and also perhaps one might say there are better ethical outcomes if one thinks about it and if one does decenter that automatic connection between space, place, location, identity, because really why should we only care about that which affects people like us, why should we only care about that which is in our immediate geographical vicinity or our geographical birth-boundary which is to say the nation state? In my personal as well as scholarly work, I was always held this position of my issue being the world. Which is not to say that one should be concerned about abstract global things and not care about the local. I think it’s a way of wanting to reiterate again and again that it is possible to care about the local and the global at the same time. And to put these two things together in the same frame because how we bracket something into one frame and not the other often means that certain kinds of questions, ethical questions and normative concerns drop out of that calculus. And I think holding onto a very resolute, for the want of a better word, anti-nationalist desiderata, this idea that there is a Humanity that we have to care about, that there are human beings to whom we owe our ethical concerns. It doesn’t matter if they look like us and it doesn’t matter if they share our identity markers or not and I think that’s ever more important given the way in which people are sought to be displaced by the violence that is ongoing in the world at the moment.

Shafinur: I stayed in Kashmir for two years, and in my experience Kashmiris live on memories, whether they are living in their own land, or are immigrants. I even felt they often feel like outsiders in their own country, so the memory haunts them. They cherish the golden history and hope to get it back someday. I found this idea reflected in Residue too. What do think about that?

Nitasha: You’ve stayed in Kashmir and that your experience is that Kashmiris live on in your memories and they feel like outsiders in their own country, the memory haunts them. Yes, you see, again going back to the imbroglio that is Kashmir in terms of the territory and the people, so the erstwhile Kashmir, the state of Kashmir would have encompassed a whole range of territories, now they are ever more distanced from each other in terms of sharing concerns and that process of communalizing, distancing of different kinds of Kashmiris from each other is a historic one and it’s one that that bears keeping in mind if we look at Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and the Pakistan side of Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan and so on.

So this was a diverse region which was part of a zone of contact between different kinds of people along that entire Central Asian, kind of coming down from central Asia, it was at the crossroads in fact of different civilizations and what we find today is that with these kinds of problematic boundaries and forever conflicts, what we find is that people have been divided and their empathies and their concerns have sought to be also cleaved along those lines of those physical divides. So they are of course haunted by a past and especially if we refer today to the extremely communalized and polarized nature of Jammu vs Kashmir or if you look further into the Kashmir Valley in the way in which the histories of the separation of the population play out. A state that failed Kashmiri Hindus who were forced to flee and also was extremely, tremendously violent upon Kashmiri Muslims who lived there and you have a generation of people who have grown up with two and half decades of emergency powers and forced disappearances, rapes etcetera and who are caught in that bind and now, for outsiders, there are two views of Kashmir, and I have referred to this in my work as: Kashmir, The Exotic and Kashmir, The Cruel. Kashmir, the exotic is that picture post card tourist version of Kashmir and Kashmir, the cruel, which is that this is a place of Islamic insurgency which denies the whole human rights and political problem that in fact is the issue. So in that sense the history of a Kashmir which is not marked by violence of this kind is something that would be beautiful to recover, but of course we never recover pure histories. What we do have to do is to reconcile histories in the plural and memories in the plural and that is a task that needs the involvement of various kinds of Kashmiris. But most importantly it needs Goodwill, it needs to be something that happens with good faith and sadly wherever one looks to the administrations and the ruling dispensations, bad faith is all you find, the profitability of conflict is all you find, political opportunism is all you find. So, one wishes that a place like Kashmir can one day have more peace with its haunted pasts and its horrible present, as this place of conflict that can one day be peaceful I hope. Hope is eternal and we hope someday things will be better, but sometimes one hopes also out of hopelessness, because you know there is little else to go on, except to hold on to hope and I think many a time it feels like that.

Shafinur: While most of the Kashmiri Pandits blame and distrust Kashmiri Muslims for their displacement, you portrayed something very different. Instead of playing the blame game, but wrote in a sympathetic tone towards Kashmiri Muslims. How did such an idea come to your mind?

Nitasha: This question points that Kashmiri pandits blame Kashmiri Muslims for their displacement and I have portrayed something different and I don’t want to be part of the blame game and I have written in a sympathetic tone and how did such an idea come to my mind. So, in fact, I would say I would never have thought anything otherwise. Which is not to say that Kashmiri Pandits as a minority were not the victims of a conflict that at a point had turned violent and apart from other things, involved cross-border facilitation of that armed insurgency and its systemization had a key role to play in the way Kashmiri Pandit minority became the target of violence. There is the way in which that Minority and its position in Kashmir is historically unique and also unique in its relation to its proximity to state structures and to the way in which the politicization of Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims in the previous decades has been in parallel and this is something that is a tragedy given that if you think about the history of early to mid-twentieth century Kashmir which was very progressive and where in fact you have Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims coming together at various points for a progressive vision of Kashmir, in fact, far more progressive than in elsewhere. So, history is a complex business and it’s a complex set of stories. However, the problem with this dominant narratives in the present and which are sought to be amplified by the Indian media a lot is that Kashmiri Pandits have been co-opted as a pawn in the games of right-wing Hindu fundamentalists in India and who do not have the interests of Kashmiri Pandits at their heart, for whom this is a conflict that serves a purpose, this is a communalization that serves a purpose and they accordingly created voices that amplified that communalization and the distrust between different Kashmiri communities because in fact if you think about Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims and other kinds of Kashmiris of different kinds from different parts of the state or even the erstwhile region of Kashmir come together and actually talk to each other about their histories and their memories and their traumas and the way forward, that would resolve the conflict, right? And then where would the right wing vote bank be, where would the arms industry that benefits so much from it be? Where would all the vested interest in the conflict be? So, there isn’t a, in a sense that, there isn’t a mystery about why this kind of polarization proceeds. I did want to give a nuanced picture and I have always tried to do that. I could refer to, I would also like to refer you to a piece I wrote about the communalization in Kashmir for Al-Jazeera, previously I have written something for the Wire, I have written pieces in the Open Democracy and all of those articles actually in written in different forums, address this in one way or the other. So this Indian right-wing extremist thing of what about the Kashmiri Pandits is meant not the serve the Kashmiri Pandits at all. It’s meant to keep the communal polarity alive, its meant to demonize and Other the Kashmiris as Muslims and its meant to fan the flames of that communal hatred for their own electoral and other benefits. This is sad and tragic. One wishes sometimes that people would just look at that, or that there were spaces in the media or in people’s narratives to understand the complex history of Kashmir and look beyond these sound-byte narratives of hatred.

Shafinur: You were the first Kashmiri woman shortlisted for the Man Asian literary award, which is considered the ‘Asian Booker’. How did that feel?

Nitasha: Yes, to be shortlisted for Man Asian literary prize was an incredible sensation. I was actually in Bhutan at the time, I was in Thimpu. I remember receiving this news when I was there and a Guardian UK journalist wrote to me to ask me for my reaction. And you know I remember grappling with trying to make sense of how I felt which was a mix of various kinds of sensations and the fact that this was my first novel that I was not in any way integrated into the literary world, having been an academic before and then being a Kashmiri woman and being a person whose novel wasn’t published at the time, it felt like an incredibly important and vital validation of the stories that I was trying to tell. And that obviously helped. Yeah, I suppose again there are things that were written at the time that testify to it. One thing that I would like to point out is that I did have an incredibly difficult time even then because here was this prize announced they said a Kashmiri woman which is how I identified myself and I had like a barrage of people who said, “how dare you not call yourself Indian!”

In fact for the longest I struggled even with my description provided by others on my Wikipedia entry. I have no idea who made my Wikipedia entry but whoever did lists me as Kashmiri Indian. I always tell people to go to my website and see my CV for my work. So there’s this desperate desire to claim me, a Kashmiri, as an Indian above all. I just want to question the origin of that desire in the context that it’s meant to displace me calling myself a Kashmiri and I wonder what lies at the origin of that desire that I not be able to call myself a Kashmiri and I be required to say that I’m Indian. I think this was one of those clouds behind the silver lining at the time that took me by surprise! This idea of “how dare you call yourself Kashmiri and not Indian”- people even saying that to me that “how can you do that”.

However, subsequently there was this uprising in the summer of 2010 in Kashmir and I wasn’t there at the time but I was at the other end of the Himalayas and I remember being so affected and traumatized by all of this that just focusing on the aftermath of the novel and getting it published almost became a second priority as I was so preoccupied with writing about the politics and the sad loss of lives.

And that’s actually when I wrote “Kashmir: A place of blood and memory” article which is sort of this long piece that was written from a place of great feeling, and which combines again the analytical and the affective modes both to look at how we got to a place where it becomes possible for numerous young people to be treated in this manner that they can be shot. And in fact as I’ve said it other times there’s no linearity to time in Kashmir. The situation doesn’t move forward, it moves forward and backward in every other way with every passing year. So in 2016, six years on from that 2010 protests, we again had the instances of the pellet blinding. So, Kashmir is in my mind and it stays in my mind and of course I write about lots of other things, but injustices are seared upon our thoughts. If we choose to engage with the world that way then that is something that remains there, that memory of injustices. And I hope too recently in the last few years I’ve been mostly working on scholarly non-fiction and other media interventions, but I hope to tell other stories as well in the future.

Shafinur: You are very vocal about Kashmir issues. There were times when you were blamed for being an ISI agent or being bribed by Kashmiri militant groups. What did that feel like? Why do you think that India, one of the largest democratic countries, condemn people who talk about Kashmir rights as spies or militants?

Nitasha: You are asking me about the fallout and the repercussions of being vocal about Kashmir. I must say that this something that is terribly sad. I remember when I wrote in 2010 that article “Kashmir: A place of blood and memory” I remember the aftermath of it, the horrific abuse I got. Since this is an audio interview I can say that to you but I remember receiving these horrendous threats from these people and you have to think about the kind of hatred they have that they would write to you and they would say that they would cut your vagina with razor blades. People would email me and call my parents’ names. They would say, “Your mother is a whore!” and all of that, this kind of absolutely horrendous hate and something very similar again, every time that I actually speak about it in a visible way, I receive that. In 2015, when I challenged Ram Madhav, the RSS supremo on Mehdi Hasan’s Al Jazeera show Head to Head, I had no idea at the time that this is how it would be received that although of course there are a large number of people who in fact come up to me and appreciated what I said, but at the same time it was impossible for me for the next 6 months to be on social media. I just completely logged out for a while because of the nature of the abuse. Of course, there are people who praise your work but the sheer kind of organized trolls are horrible. I tried for a time to have this thing called #HindutvaTrolls and put some of those things together because they are just so vile and so calculated to hurt and spread lies. They go through your online profiles, they spread lies about your work, your previous degrees, everything. It’s just so disturbing and of course then you get, as a woman, targeted also, in terms of, you must be the victim of Love Jihad or you must be a person of poor character or something. They go to your parents, they go to everything. It’s such a psychological assault that at those times in my life that I’ve been in that storm, it’s just been really horrible!

Regarding the other specific things you mention, yes, of course, these trolls are organized and perhaps even paid trolls. Yet, they don’t seem to know the difference between different kinds of allegations, so they will simultaneously accuse you of being a communist, being an ISIS supporter and of being a western supported person and of being a Saudi supported person. So, it’s insane. But nobody really deserves to get rape threats and death threats and vile abuse thrown at them for their views on something that is a political problem and on which one should be allowed to speak about the different perspectives, especially if the country in question claims to be a democracy. Sadly, this is not the case, this is not true in the Indian context, as you probably know. Any talk of Kashmir that does not take the standard line, makes a person be open to charges of sedition, to charges of anti-nationalism as we saw with the protests in 2016, the events following on from the commemoration of hanging of Afzal Guru on the 9th of February. A few years later in 2016 when that was being mentioned at a meeting in JNU, there was this talk of something about Kashmir being mentioned and we know what happened afterwards. There were lawyers in their groups chanting ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and marching down the streets of Delhi and intimidating and being violent against the JNU students at the center of that. So it’s terribly tragic that this kind of thing happens, but it’s not just spontaneous, in fact, at this point it happens with the strategic silence and the implicit and explicit connivance of the majoritarian Hindu fundamentalists who are center-stage in the country, in India, right now.

And this kind of condemnation of people as spies, militants and as terrorist supporters etc. for talking about human rights, for talking about a political problem, for talking about things that are actually factual and well-known to people outside the country, is just shameful.

Shafinur: In most of the cases, female writers choose their protagonist as female, and your protagonist is male. Did you face any difficulties with that, or was it easier for you to do that?

Nitasha: Well, my being a woman and what effect does that have on my choice of protagonist? Nothing really! I mean, I think I would be equally at ease with a male or a female protagonist, I think it’s the research, it’s the careful thinking through, it’s the empathy that you have to have with the character and the kind of story that you want to tell and all of those factors have a role to play.  That’s how you choose a certain character’s gender as male or female or something other or in-between. So, it wasn’t hard for me to know that Leon would be Leon and that Keya would be Keya and that’s how I wanted them to be that is how they emerged in my mind and that is how I see them.

Shafinur: South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African novels deal mostly with the impact of history and politics on the individual, in both local and global scales. Most of American or Western literature, on the other hand, deals with individual ideas within the social structure. Do you agree with that? What do you think about that?

Nitasha: Well, you are saying that South Asian and middle-eastern and African novels deal with the impact of  history and politics on the individual and the local and global scales whereas American and western literature deals with individual ideals within the social structure. All generalizations are problematic! Let me begin with that caveat. The writer’s location very often is not straightforwardly the country that was their birth-boundary or even that place where they left, you know, writers I feel are fundamentally migrants of the imagination. It is the job of a writer to be able to feel otherwise, and for me this idea of being able to imagine things beyond that which we know is crucial to being a writer, it’s crucial to writing. However, are there particular parts of the world where history and politics feature more prominently? Perhaps yes! If you ask me why that is the case, I would say because these histories and politics in lots of ways are disguised and undisguised in specific parts of the world. Because of the history of the world as it were, the contemporary boundaries of countries came into being in the aftermath of decolonization and wars. In that sense, in many parts of the world, history and politics is not something that is split from everyday life of writers or people. It’s not something that one can be immune to, those questions are very urgent because they are also tied to the questions of livelihood, the question of existence and identity, even the very possibility of being able to survive certain kinds of violence. However, I would like to say that this is not something intrinsic, it’s not something to do with the western mind or the oriental mind or that kind of thing! Not at all, I mean. It depends on the period of history and the context of a society. At different times or in other contexts even in western literature you find questions of history and politics in social structure to be figuring far more prominently and I think that really depends on the concatenation of political and social forces in a certain context at a point in time. And because as I said countries of the global south have the experience of being colonized that is a specific exercise of power that makes history and politics not be something that is apart from everyday life and so it is very clearly interwoven in with the texture of the literature as well.

Shafinur: Do you think that literature, or authors, can be apolitical? Especially in the current times?

Nitasha: Can they? Can authors choose to be apolitical? Well, I would say authors can certainly choose to take a stand which can be seen as being apolitical. However, not speaking up against the oppression or being silent is itself a support of the status quo in most contexts. So, whether people can choose to be apolitical, yes! Certain authors may think that they don’t speak about anything that’s political and that comes from a place of privilege, it comes through a place where you can afford not to speak about the political and because you are not directly affected by it and the very least that somebody can do is to acknowledge that. Be that any kind of politics. Also, I think the relative invisibility of women writers is something spoken about in recent times and we need to focus on this a lot more. We need to have lot more women writing and being read, we need to have a lot more people with different kinds of identities telling their stories.  We don’t want to, for example, be in a situation where, due to the literary world having its own politics, where people only expect certain kinds of things from Indian authors – the stereotype – or only certain kinds of things from Kashmiri authors. And then within that context it’s often the case that the non-west has a tick box space and once you got one person from a non-western country, it’s fine, you don’t need any more. So there is also the politics within the literary world from which no writer can be immune too, because we are in one way or the other interpellated into specific positions within that world. Then, there’s the larger politics and of course again there’s the idea that writers should only write stories which have nothing to do with politics and be safe and “marketable”. I don’t agree with that. In different ways the political world is always a part of the stories we tell because the stories we tell, tell something about us as well; about how we have chosen to slice and cut a world out of the bigger world. So in that sense I think it becomes important for somebody or anybody who has visibility in the public sphere to speak up or at the very least to offer acknowledgement of one’s “sanctioned ignorance” (a term from Spivak) if they’ve chosen to be ignorant and if they think they can afford not to know.

Shafinur: Who are your current favorite authors?

Nitasha: This question is the hardest, who are my current favorite authors? I don’t know by that if you mean who are the authors who are alive that I am reading at the moment? Or if you mean who are the authors that I am reading currently?  And I don’t have a good answer to that, I can just tell you that I have been reading a wide range of books, some that I read recently, or picked up while travelling, or am intending to read: Ha Jin, Max Yeh, Eileen Chang, Andrei Makine, Vivek Shanbhag, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Celeste Albaret. I am afraid I really don’t have good answer to this because I really can’t list… You know I often also like reading obscure authors or authors in translation. If you are ever in London, I will happily invite you to my home where there are hundreds and hundreds of books and many of them I love. This is also a very hard question because there are things I like about lots of authors I read and I suppose I can only say that I try to read people and stories that differ from each other and that belong to different parts of the world.  But no! I would really hesitate in providing a definitive list of my favorite authors.

Shafinur: It has been almost ten years since the publication of Residue. What’s your next project? When are the readers going to get a new book from you?

Nitasha: Yes, it has been a long time since Residue and readers are going to get another book very soon, I should hope. I have to let you know that in the last ten years there’s just been so much… else that have been doing which is not to say that writing stories is not what I would prefer over doing most things on most days but as an academic, I have been teaching, I have been mentoring people, students and I have been writing other kinds of books and edited collections and articles. You can ask your readers to read all that on www.nitashakaul.com. The new novel is on its way soon and hopefully before too long you will perhaps be interviewing me about that. Thank you for this interview.

The post ‘WRITERS I FEEL ARE FUNDAMENTALLY MIGRANTS OF THE IMAGINATION.’- NITASHA KAUL first appeared on Prachya Review.

We managed to get a hold of him when he came to attend Dhaka Lit Fest in November 2016. He graciously agreed to sit for an interview, and somehow juggled an array of topics in a laidback and light-hearted manner, ranging from language, teaching, being in the US, the partition of India and Pakistan, his writing, current and future projects, and his musings on life.

Vijay Seshadri

Anika Shah: I must say I’m a little nervous about interviewing you, your being a teacher and my being a student.

Vijay Seshadri: Well, yes. That’s a very South Asian thing though, right? The guru and the chela. In America students have a different relationship to their teachers; less deferential. Sometimes I feel like their chaiwallah.

Anika Shah: I heard your talk the other day, and you said that you like being a teacher because you get to say things and they are bound to listen to you. But then if you’re a chaiwallah… There’s this contradiction, right?

Vijay Seshadri: Well they’ll listen to you. But they’re given the license to think and judge and speak for themselves.

Anika Shah: But you still like being a teacher?

Vijay Seshadri: Oh I love it. If you love literature, it’s fantastic. Being a photographer, for instance, is probably difficult. But if you get to have a steady income teaching photography, it would make things a lot nicer, right? That’s the way it is with teaching. And I can talk about literature all day.

Anika Shah: You teach non-fiction writing. Why not teach poetry?

Vijay Seshadri: I did teach poetry for a long time. Poetry seminars and poetry workshops. But I was also an editor. So when the college I work at hired me full time, half of my contract covered starting and running a non-fiction writing program, which I did. And unfortunately, they didn’t have many tenure lines, so there weren’t many permanent faculty. I had to hire temporary faculty for that program all the time, and there were always courses that were waiting to be filled because we grew very fast, we were a popular program. I had to fill those courses myself. So over time I stopped teacher poetry simply because I was obligated to fill those non-fiction classes with my own body, so to speak. And then I got to the point where I realized I could really teach people how to write prose. Whereas I lost my confidence in how to teach people how to write poetry, relative to writing prose. And I think there is more of poetry that can’t be taught. And that contention goes all the way back to Aristotle. Aristotle says, the gift of making metaphors is inborn. You can’t teach it. Either you have it, or you don’t. It’s like having musical ability. Or mathematical ability. There’s no way to acquire it if you don’t possess it. And I found that that’s not necessarily true for prose. You can really teach people how to be serviceable, and even good, prose writers. A much larger population can become that. And a smaller population can become poets. And that kind of made the teaching more gratifying to me when I was teaching prose. I had a lot more success with my students. Success tends to reinforce the appeal of a discipline or practice. And so teaching prose writing and teaching seminars in prose writing, which in my case involved a lot of reading and literary study—I describe myself as a teacher of rhetoric—became satisfying and sufficient.

A S: You write both poetry and prose. Do you ever find your poetry overpowering your prose? Or is it not a problem because they are so different?

V S: I can never do them both at the same time. I can never sit there and say to myself, well, I will write poetry for one hour and I will write prose for another hour, and then I will go back to poetry. Or I will write poetry today and prose tomorrow. Somehow I have to finish whatever it is that I’m writing before I can go on to anything else. And so if it’s prose, I have to finish it. I can’t break it off and write poetry. I know some people who can, but I’m not one of them.

A S: How do you feel now that Trump has become president. You said that you’re not scared of Trump, but how does it feel? Or, let me be more specific – how does it feel that people actually voted for him?

V S: I think there are a lot of explanations that make sense to me as to why people voted for him. I don’t know if you went to the “Nasty Women” panel yesterday. It was a huge panel. These were white British writers talking about America, and oblivious to their audience, which was Bangladeshis, right? I was sitting there looking at that and I said to myself that’s exactly the problem, that’s why Hilary lost. All those Hilary people were living in their bubble talking to one another without any reference to the world around them. I mean, if they, the panel yesterday, had said, “Oh I’m in Dhaka, in Bangladesh. Even if I’m talking about Hilary, I should somehow make this relevant to these people.” And I think a woman got up and called them on that. She said, well, you don’t know our condition, and our situation, and you’re talking . . . And they could just as well have been in New York, or in London, or in Dallas, Texas saying the same things. And that is one fundamental reason why Hilary lost. And it was a very narrow loss. She won the popular vote. Trump is still as implausible a leader as he was before the election. But a lot of the blame goes to Hilary herself. And to the people around her and their inability to mount an appeal. They had a campaign but they didn’t have an appeal. And Trump definitely had an appeal. Then there was a vacuum of people who didn’t know, who could have been swayed one way or the other. So I think retrospectively I kind of understand it and I don’t think that people should be surprised or shocked. I don’t know what the consequences are going to be, but unlike most people, I have a lot of confidence in America itself. And in the system, and its durability, and what you would call the profound American national character. And I think there is little that you can do that is truly irrational with such a strong system of checks and balances. You know people say that fascism is possible in America, but I don’t think so. I might be naïve, I don’t know. But there are a lot of elements in America that are pretty strong safety mechanisms. And the country was designed very well, the government was designed very well from the get go. I think it will survive this. Who knows, it might in the long run be a good thing. I think the consequences for people like ourselves are kind of… we don’t know. For people who look like me, and people who look like you—how we’re going to be treated, how we’re going to be dealt with. That is worrisome, and it’s more worrisome than the other things that people there are worrying about. But I don’t feel desperately worried about that, either. A lot of the people where my parents live, for example, were probably Trump supporters. They are some of the nicest people I know. They were very good to us. They were good neighbors, good friends.

A S: Don’t you find that very contradictory?

V S: People are contradictory. And there might be other reasons why the Second Amendment, the anti-gun-control people have voted for him. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re racist. Their gun rights are paramount. There are people who voted for him because they are single-issue people and their issue is abortion. They are not necessarily racist at all. They might in some cases be far less racist than some people who call themselves liberals, because they are Christians. They have universalist human values that are inclusive.

A S: You went to America at a very young age. Do you identify with your Indian self?

V S: It’s not that I went at a very young age that caused the disintegration of my Indian self. It’s when I went, and what the circumstances were. There was no way when we went there to retain the culture. What was given to me of Indian culture was basically the food. Because my parents had to eat the food they had always eaten, or a facsimile of that food. They couldn’t really take to American cuisine, especially because they were strictly vegetarian. Almost everything else about the culture except its deep, instinctive character inevitably had to fall away because we came there when there were no South Asians. No Indian communities. There was no way to reinforce a connection to the Old World. Also my parents were of the generation of independence. I know you must know people like that here. My father died in 2015 at the age of ninety, and my mother died this past May at eighty-six. They lived through Independence. That generation, it seems to me, was much more worldly, sophisticated, much less tribal. They were really modern people. They were more modern than anybody you will find on the Subcontinent now. My father was very much a leftist. My mother clung to her traditions, and religion was important to her I think, but her habits of mind were of an extraordinary sophistication and understanding. And they were very broad-minded. That generation of Indians were socialists by default.They all had this hope. They were secularists; they believed that all these religious conflicts and these caste conflicts were going to go away because such conflicts were not rational, were stupid. Little did they know. And the disappointment of that generation—they are tragic in the disappointment of their hopes for this part of the world. Especially in India. Indian history is continuous from Independence and Partition on. That early generation of which my parents were a part had lofty ideas about how the country was going to emerge and develop. It’s sad to think of them because they worked so hard. National integration, unity. Socialism, secularism, democracy, those are the pillars of the Indian constitution.
That’s a roundabout way of saying that it was easy for my parents to become a part of the American world, the world of progressive Americans. They didn’t necessarily cling to their culture defensively. They believed quite positively in a kind of new world, in a world where cultural, religious, and racial differences weren’t rejected, but were just considered sort of trivial, not essential. I mourn them personally now that I’ve lost them, but I also mourn that idea they had. It disappeared. We seem to be fighting a rear-guard action against the forces of darkness and chaos now. Every society in the world seems to be doing that. They little imagined this situation. They were both scientists, they were both trained scientists and they thought, you know, science will solve all these problems. Science and technology. We will bring people out of backwardness and give them education. Education will solve all these problems. I guess I think it’s still an ideal worth holding on to, clinging to.

A S: How do you feel about America having this superpower that now seems like it can’t handle?

V S: America’s in crisis. But the crisis is late arriving in America. It’s a crisis that has been occurring in the world for a long time. And it’s been kind of washing at the edges of America for quite a while. Ever since 9/11. But now America seems to be really plunged in the whole world crisis. There is no leader in the world. It doesn’t matter that Trump is a lesser of a leader than Hillary would have been. The differences between them are not that great in relation to the kind of leadership we need, the quality of leadership we need. And the quality of leadership we need we don’t have. I think the world has some good leaders. I think Angela Merkel in Germany is a good leader. Ideologically I think she is much more to the right of someone like myself, but I trust her. I trust her ability to manage. That’s the way I felt about Michael Bloomberg, who was the mayor of New York. He was elected right after 9/11. He was too much of a capitalist for me, but he was extremely intelligent and competent and understood issues deeply. Those are the kind of people we need, and they are few and far between right now. And that is really a problem, because we are all bound up with each other.

A S: But it’s still different, isn’t it? I mean, what happens here wouldn’t affect America the way what happens in America would affect us.

V S: Because you are Bangladesh, and America’s America. That’s the tragedy, that they can’t see how radical the consequences will be, the effect it will have on people here.

A S: You said you were interested in Partition. Why?

V S: I think I’m among those people, and there are many of us, who have a tragic sense of life. Two absolute tragedies of the twentieth century were the Holocaust and Partition. In America people the Holocaust makes an impression on people, there are, or were, many Holocaust survivors who came to America. People there, and maybe in Europe have processed the Holocaust, insofar as such a cataclysm can be processed. I think in the subcontinent people still haven’t processed Partition. The almost psychotic nature of the India and Pakistan relationship is symptomatic of that. Still it is not something that people look squarely in the face. Because looking at it squarely in the face might lead to a reprise of the communal violence, which is always a danger in South Asia. Everybody still has to tread carefully around it. I have the luxury of being an American, so I can actually think about this in a freer way than people who are here can. I also have the luxury of being an Indian at the same time that I am an American. As far as my cultural allegiances, the art that I love, the history that I read, it’s really European are largely Western. I think I’m very well-informed about South Asia, but my bias in reading centers around Partition, around the political history that leads to Partition, around the history of South Asian Islam. I would be more likely, for example, to read Urdu poetry than I would Bhakti poetry, even though the South Indian community I come from arises from the Bhakti traditions.

A S: What drew you towards Urdu? You learned the language. And Farsi too, is it?

V S: Yes. I call it Persian. In Iran they call it Farsi, in the way the French call their language Français in France. But the Iranis in America also call it Farsi and they tell Americans to call it Farsi. But that would be like a French person in America telling the Americans to call French Français. Doesn’t make any sense, right? I studied Persian for two years. And I studied it just for the Urdu, because they are so close lexically. Urdu poetry is an extension of the Persian tradition. Even here the official language was Persian until 1834. And I’m sure in Bangla there are a huge number of Persian words. Like waapas. Do you have waapas, come back?

A S: No, we don’t.

V S: That’s an interesting one because it appears in Kannada. There are a lot of Persian words in Kannada, because there was Muslim rule in that part of Karnataka. Hyder Ali, and Tipu Sultan. Golconda and Bijapur. Muslims associated with the Delhi Sultanate, and later with the Mughals ruled part of that region for hundreds of years.

A S: So what drew you towards it? Learning the languages?

V S: It was an interest and also accident. One of the things I wanted to do was study the history of modern India—Partition, as I said, and because of Partition I was interested in the history of Islam in India. I was detached. Because I’m Indian I probably had a mildly Indian perspective on the history, but also a kind of detached American perspective. I was also a literary person. The way engineered my program of study in order to get funding was to say I’m going to study the literature, because I’m a poet. That was credible, given my background and training and the fact that I was a published poet by then, if I had said “I want to study political science,” I would have had no standing. So I said I’ll study the poetry of Islam in India, as a kind of way to get into the things that I’m really interested in, which are the politics and the history. Also Urdu poetry is one of the great traditions of the Subcontinent. It’s valorized, it has a tremendous amount of respect give it, and that respect has migrated to America, where if they know poetry of the subcontinent, what they know is Urdu poetry or what they know is mystical poetry, they know Kabir. They know Kabir better than they know Tagore, for example. People translate Kabir, people read Kabir as an extension of a New Age mysticism popular in the West. People don’t necessarily translate and read Tagore in great numbers. There have always been attempts to translate Urdu poetry. Translation was another thing I actually did want to do, although I never did get around to it. I have a few translations in 3 Sections. It was something I thought I would do more extensively, but I found of course that it’s very hard to bring classical Urdu poetry over into English. It’s a recondite, sophisticated poetry that is determined by word play within Urdu. It’s opaque and not transparent poetry for the most part. The judgments and the discriminations one makes of the poetry really have to do with underlying elements of the language itself that can never be reproduced in another language. Mirza Ghalib is one of the great world poets. But the translations in English are almost uniformly wretched. That’s not because the translators aren’t good; it’s because the body of work is so difficult to translate. I quailed at the difficulty years ago. I said well I’m just going to write my own poetry, I’m not going to subordinate myself to Ghalib. What are the chances of my coming up with something that’s anywhere near to the original? Will I be able to give anybody a sense of the magnificence of the work? I thought the chances were small. But later I decided to do some, and they turned out pretty well. And I felt well, the translation is not a great poem in the way the text I’m translating is a great poem, but it’s pretty good, it’s good enough. Now I feel I have this principle: if it’s good enough, then translate it, because at least people will have some exposure. So I’m working on the ghazals now.

A S: How did you start writing poetry?

V S: I just fell in love with certain poems. I never thought of myself as a poet. There were poems that I loved so much that they started me writing. They were the motives. Around when I was fifteen, sixteen, I read some poems, and I thought Wow. It kind of came upon me unawares. I didn’t really think about it. I was compelled.

A S: Did you always want to be a poet?

V S: I always wanted to be a writer. A little different than wanting to be a poet. I think I had a desire and ambition to be a writer very early. I didn’t know what being a writer was, it was just an ambition. It was the way Naipaul talks about his ambition. He didn’t really have anything to say, he just had the ambition to be a writer. He had to fill that out, and the ambition for him, as he always says, was based on anxiety. I don’t know what mine was based on. Probably isolation. It’s interesting to get back in touch with him. One of the first things I ever wrote was an essay on Naipaul. It was the first thing I published. No, I think it was the second thing I published. But actually it was the first because the magazine that published the first poem I ever published took it because I had promised them this essay about Naipaul. So they published the poem and then in the next issue they published the essay. I still think it’s a very good essay about him. I haven’t read it in years but I remember it as having insights about him that I never really saw subsequently. Such a very great writer.

A S: Who are your favorite writers?

V S: I have so many. The person I fell in love with originally was Yeats. You know, there are theses poets and artists you love when you’re young. And then they fall away. You think of them as gods, and you think, I wish I could be this person. You grow out of those connections and interests and into others. Other people take their place. Of all the poets to whom I have been attached, the deep attachments that have remained are to Yeats on the one hand, and to Elizabeth Bishop, the great American mid-century poet on the other. I love them. And then, I love Flaubert. I love Naipaul. He’s kind of unbearable and painful in so many ways but the writerliness is unmatched… and he has taught me so much.

A S: What about from South Asia?

V S: I like writers like Kamala Markandaya. And some of the twentieth century Urdu poets, like Sahir Ludhianvi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz. But South Asia has not influenced me tremendously. And the people who have influenced me, whom I find interesting, like R. K. Narayan, they’re really a Western influence. Narayan is a writer who writes like Chekhov. He was tremendously influenced by Chekhov (and Chekhov is sort of perfect for South Asian society). I remember when I was an editor at the New Yorker, Vikram Chandra was being published there. They were publishing a short story of his and the editor was a friend of mine, Linda Asher, a fiction editor at the New Yorker. She said to me about the story, “This is just like Thackeray.”Indian writing has a lot of that quality, especially Indian and South Asian writing in English. It is based on Western models. All writing is of course based on models. Western writing, Eastern writing. If you know those models first, though, you tend not to be influenced by the subsequent artifacts.

A S: Have you read anyone from Bangladesh?

V S: No, unfortunately I haven’t. I mean, there isn’t that much in translation, and I don’t know Bangla. And you know, Indian writers, Pakistani writers, their names seem to be disseminated in American culture, but Bangladeshi writers not so much. In America people know, say, Qurratulain Hyder, they know Manto. They know the names anyway. Educated Americans might have heard those names. They haven’t heard the names of Bangladeshi writers. There are great writers here, but the mechanisms by which culture is transmitted, when it comes to Bangladesh, are a little bit feeble, are not as robust as they should be. That has to do with academic connections as much as anything else, and it has to do with translation. That’s a big problem with all South Asian languages. Good translators into English are few and far between. There is not that much incentive for them, outside of academia. And you know there’s a lot of interest in Bangladesh but it seems to be so much on the social-science side, and not on the literary, humanistic side. Economists are interested in Bangladesh, development people are interested in Bangladesh, women’s-rights people, public health, all of those things. There’s a very active kind of interchange in those spheres in American life. But in humanistic and cultural spheres, no. Also, Bangladeshi musicians. There must be a rich musical tradition here, but it doesn’t really translate. And, you know, interestingly enough, I should revise what I’m saying because it’s not merely language but also nationality. Bengali writers are very well known in America, and Bengali literature is very kind of understood and respected and there’s a lot of interchange between America and Calcutta. Bengalis like Jhumpa Lahiri or Anita Desai have a presence in America. There are critics and scholars who are Bengali—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for example. But the Bangladeshi equivalent is not quite there yet, which has to do with history. If you think of Bengal as a linguistic entity, the divergence between East and West, Bangladesh and West Bengal, and their relationship to the world . . . there is a fissure, which is unfortunate and terrible.

A S: What are you working on now?

V S: I’m writing a couple of essays.

A S: I read somewhere that you were writing a memoir?

V S: The memoir is very frustrating. I can’t seem to explain what happened to me. (Laughs)It’s been so complicated. To kind of give someone, at least to give myself a coherent narrative of a life that’s so various and disparate. I was talking yesterday about how I was in the counterculture when I was young. I was a hippie. I went out to the West Coast and I worked in the fishing industry for five years. Those were very adventurous times. But I don’t seem to have a narrative frame or a way to explain them, to explain what was motivating me. I almost don’t understand myself now. I look and I say, “That’s like a dream”—when you wake up with a dream and slowly you’re trying to grasp it and keep hold of it, but it’s dissolving, dissolving. You wake up and you move from the bed to the bathroom, to the kitchen, and by the time have your breakfast the dream is gone.It was a vivid, exciting, interesting dream, but it’s gone. I think that’s the large process that’s making the writing of the memoir so difficult. The idea of the memoir is just to write and to make money, that has never been a good motivation for me. Success has never been a motivation. That’s my problem. Greatness has been a motivation, but greatness is a terrible motivation because you always fall short.

A S: So what has kept you going?

V S: Well, if I don’t pursue it I would get depressed, deeply… and wonder if I would just die…

A S: Die of depression?

V S: Die or something like that, because I fell short of what I wanted to achieve. SoI get up and try again. So that seems to be the, you know . . . because I don’t want to die, however sad I am. I wanted to live, and I still do.

A S: So, what are your inspirations, and what are your fears?

V S: My inspirations right now are… I feel that the things that really drew me to poetry I have dealt with, and so to a certain extent I am looking for inspirations. And the poems I’ve written recently really all have to do with the death of my parents. They are elegies to them. I feel like I’ve done that now. That’s such a large monumental thing, to find material with that level of reality, that level of significance is not really that easy. So I think because of those events, and because of the passage of time, I crave something more serious thananything I’ve craved before. I don’t quite know what that is. And inspiration is also something that you search for. You kind of open yourself to the world and you hope it comes, but you are really in a passive state with respect to reality. There’s a great quote by the American poet Randall Jarrell to the effect that a poet is someone who during a lifetime spent standing in the rain gets hit by lightning six or seven times. That’s what it is. So now I’m just standing in the rain waiting for the lightning to hit. I think inspiration finally is the belief that it will hit, not the hitting of it. The activity becomes just standing in the rain and being willing to stand in the rain and wanting to stand in the rain.

A S: What about fears?

V S: Fears… I think there’s anxiety. Fear seems to be specifically a fear of something. I think I generally feel anxious and I guess what I feel anxious about is I won’t have enough time to do what I can do and what I wanted to do and what I sort of set out to do, and you know… time will close me down somehow. The question is can you at some point in your life say you have accomplished what you set out to accomplish, can you feel satisfied? I probably would never feel that way. And even the thought of feeling that way frightens me. If I had any fear, it would be the fear of satisfaction. If I am satisfied, then what am I, I’m sort of dead, you know? Because dissatisfaction, disappointment, all of those things seem to be the things that have kept me the most alive.

A S: One more thing, how did it feel winning the Pulitzer?

V S: It’s great. You should get one.

A S: Oh I’m aiming for the Nobel really. Does it change much though?

V S: It changes everything, winning a big prize like that. People invite you to read a lot more.

A S: But does it change much in terms of creativity? Do you feel good?

V S: Yes, it makes you feel good, but I think its effects are ambivalent for you as a writer. It’s bad for me because I get all these opportunities to go around and give readings and talks in other countries and that takes a lot of time. And I am not someone who can write on the run, wake up in a hotel room and write and then go give a talk and then come back and write that night. There are a lot of people who can do that. But I am dislocated when I’m away from my piece of Earth, in Brooklyn. I feel disoriented. I feel disconnected. I am very much a creature of my own habits and my own spaces. So that has been a problem. The last two years I’ve been so many places, given so many readings. I have, also, a teaching schedule. Because my mother died this past spring I took the fall semester off. I thought I’d have some time to write, but I’ve been going all over the place. I was in the Midwest three times, I was on the West Coast, I was in a couple of festivals on the East Coast. And then I had about two and a half weeks in New York and then I came here. So, yes, . . .

Vijay Seshadri

Interview taken by Anika Shah, a writer and translator from Bangladesh, and the co-editor of Prachya Review

All the photos of Vijay Seshadri taken by Pranabesh Das

The post ‘The memoir is very frustrating. I can’t seem to explain what happened to me.’ – Vijay Seshadri first appeared on Prachya Review.

Our co-editor, Shafinur Shafin had an eye on Vuyelwa’s work for a while. So when she came to attend Dhaka Lit Fest in November 2016, Shafin convinced her to sit for an interview with me.

I surfed around the internet for what I could find on Vuyelwa. I found some information, as well as a few videos of her performing. The videos, however, could hardly show me of what I saw of her performance in person. I saw an artist with fire and flare, with a voice and things to say. I saw an artist whose conviction I believed in.

In the interview Vuyelwa talked about poetry, language, Johannesberg, blackness, womanness, and her company BLACKGIRLPLOTTING. And Vuyelwa being the great sport that she is, the interview turned out to be up close and personal, candid, and like her work – honest.  

Anika Shah: Let’s start with your childhood. What influenced you? How did you come about to write poetry?

Vuyelwa Maluleke: I was actually a very… So I’m a twin. And I think it’s a significant thing to acknowledge because most of my life I’ve spent kind of not talking. My sister’s a very bubbly person, and so she was the bridge between making friends. She made friends and I sat with her, with her friends. (Laughs) And that’s how we kind of navigated until, I think we were in grade three, and then they were like, ‘No, we have to separate them, because every time I shout at one the other one will look at me like I’m the devil.’ So they separated us. And I had to make a more conscious effort to engage with people around me because I didn’t have my sister as a buffer, negotiating spaces for me. Even still, I was terrible at it. I mean, I got better as the years, but I think I gravitated more towards writing because I didn’t speak as much. And I think going to girls’ school really helped. I spent like two years of my high school in a co-ed school where I didn’t speak and I read books and literally just read books and sat in the library like… weirdest, saddest, and I had braces and I had glasses and I was awkward like I was AWKWARD and my skirts were long like… It was a mess! It was an absolute mess. And I always had this twin sister who was bubbly, beautiful, amazing. She still is, that’s just her personality, she’s an extrovert. But I was more introverted. So the comparison would just be inevitable.I suppose gravitating towards writing would have happened eventually. When I got to girls’ school, I auditioned for a drama show, a play. I’m never used to look at people in the eye at all, I always used to look down all the time. I had this really amazing drama teacher who was always shouting like, ‘LOOK AT ME WHEN I TALK TO YOU, OR EMOTE, OR DO SOMETHING!’ And she was always kind of inspiring me to study drama, because I took it as a subject at high school. She was always encouraging of me and for being an artist and trying it out. And in a way I think inadvertently then I just started writing. I didn’t show it to anybody, except my sister. But I had always been writing, performing, doing talent shows, and I just became so much more confident. And able to speak. My tongue was very quick at people, you know. And because I had been wearing glasses for so long, I used to look down, my eyes were very lazy, they were never engaging with anybody. Because I do drama now I have to learn to be more meaningful, to have more meaningful conversations, to not always be looking down. So that’s how it happened and I started writing and then carried on writing quietly by myself. And I got to Wits University and there were slams that were happening. I entered slams. I think the first one that I did I forgot my lines, and I was terrible, I was cliché, I don’t know if I’m still a cliché, I might look back ten years from now and be like oh my GOD I was terrible. I was really horrible, I was horrific, I was every cliché in the book… And I was also copying American, kind of… these Americanisms, so that itself is terrible. I suppose it’s been a process of kind of trying to figure out what my style is and what I’m going to talk about and write about and, you know, that’s how it happened.

AS: But tell me something, what were you thinking? One day you’re sitting at the library, the next day you’re trying out for a drama! It must’ve taken a lot of courage?

VM: It did, it did. I think it’s because there’s a particular kind of distancing. When I’m on the stage, that’s not really me. So it’s like nobody expects me to be amazing, they expect the character to be believable and amazing. There’s  no real pressure on my personal self. So I’m able to detach those roles, quite easily actually. Except in spoken word. In spoken word identity is so important that I don’t know that I could present things without having the “I” and the “me” quite established. But I still am an introvert, it’s just I… I… I know how to talk now! I know how to talk now, I’m better at it.

AS: Does the same thing happen when you’re writing? Do you get to become this other self, or detach yourself? Or is it just with acting?

VM: I think that it’s just with acting. And when I say “detach”, I don’t necessarily mean stand so very outside myself, it’s just I am able to completely remove the responsibility to be perfect. And I think writing… Writing is a sacred space because there are no expectations. It will happen or it won’t. And it usually doesn’t! (Laughs) And that’s also okay, because no one gets to see your failures, they only get to see the final product, and then they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh it’s so amazing’, and you’re like, ‘Oh well, you know, I spent MONTHS actually on this one particular LINE, I’ve BEEN working on it, I’m GLAD you kinda’ like it.’(Laughs) But writing for me is personal, very sacred. There’s something really… I don’t know, I don’t wanna sound too poet-y, but there’s something really magical about it, really divine about it, because sometimes there’s this language and this vocabulary you didn’t know you had that kind of comes out in particular sentences sometimes, and you go like, ‘Oh, that’s… okay. I see how that’s possible.’ And sometimes I look back at poems that I wrote, and I’m like, ‘Mmm, who did you steal that from? Because your thought process is not like that in real life!’(Laughs)

AS: How do you find the difference between reading a poem and someone reciting it to them? Because you’re a performance poet; which one’s better, which one do you like?

VM: I think the medium’s two different things. There’s a particular kind of engagement in performance poetry. I mean, you’re looking directly at the audience at all times. You also have the ability to play with the words, and the way they sound, and to embody character if you want to. And you’re more able to emote. It’s harder to emote holding a piece of paper, because you’re trying to figure out where you are. It’s like, it’s your poem, but you don’t really know it, you’re trying to figure out where you are. I think reading for older generations makes sense, I understand why it exists. But for especially young people, it is important for them to feel like you are present and you’re not just reading them something you think is amazing, they actually need to see you look at them a couple of times sometimes, or feel some kind of engagement with you, until it’s a conversation. It’s not, ‘Okay, you sit there, I’ll tell you things’. And sometimes that’s what readings feel like.

AS: Does it ever make you nervous talking? Performing?

VM: Yes! Oh God, I’m always nervous. I’m always… literally shaking. That’s why sometimes I take my shoes off, because it’s like I’m more stable, nobody can actually see me shaking. I’m always nervous about it. Because it’s like, you never know what to expect, you never know if it will reach, and you don’t know if you’ll fail yourself. And I’ve blanked out a couple of times on stage, so I have a thorough fear of it happening sometimes.

AS: Does performing poems affect your performance every time that you perform it? I mean, it is the same poem that you’re performing, but does is depend on the audience? Does it change the performance?

VM: Yeah, sometimes it does, because people react to different things. So if you’re present enough, you can find that out.There’s something magical about making the poems a public thing. Because then they can stop belonging to me, they can stop being my solo burden. It’s our burden now, we’re sharing this burden, we’re taking spoonfulls of this burden each, taking it home with us. And sometimes there are questions that I cannot answer myself that other people can do when they listen to the poems, and they respond.

AS: So, you tried out competitive poetry.What’s up with that?

VM: (Laughs) I’m actually a very competitive person. I like to win things. And so I just slammed for a couple of years, and then I took a break and did theatre for like a year. Then I came back last year, and I started slamming again. The whole objective was to be in a competitive space, but not use the mold of a competitive slam space. Because, for me, I feel that slam poetry has a particular kind of formula. It’s because of the medium I suppose. Because it’s a social justice space, people are rewarded for particular conversations: race, poverty, rape. So, any topic about identity is rewarded. I was wanting to challenge this space and say, I want to see if I can bring anything at all that I want to bring in to the space, and see if I can be rewarded for that. Some days it works. And some things don’t translate, you know, some days people are like,‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I don’t want to listen to you anymore.’ And for me it was like taking a moment and saying that that’s okay. But I think subconsciously in the back of my mind I also really wanted to win something. I thought it would be a meaningful exercise, it would affirm me in some kind of particular way. And I did, I did win. And it wasn’t very affirming. It didn’t validate anything. I had always been writing, I will always write. Winning something doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t change people’s perspective about… it doesn’t change the value of the work. And I suppose I had imagined the value would increase. And I had to be honest about that, that the value on the work would increase, because I had won something. But that’s not necessarily true. Because at the end of the day I need to be the only person valuing the work for myself.

AS: What is it like talking about women? Or do you even identify yourself as a person who talks about or towards women?

VM: This is a thing,I get defensive about questions like that. I think I was asked a question like that once, and I was wondering if… I mean, why do I need to specify that I write about women? Who else am I gonna write about? Outside of that, are men asked, do you write about men?

AS: Maybe they should be!

VM: How are men doing in the world, right? Because everybody is, I suppose, expecting that men are doing very well in the world. And so maybe there’s nothing to write about, because they’re doing so WELL, and women aren’t. So what problems would you like to let us know about? But honestly, I do write about women. I don’t think that’s something that needs to be highlighted. I mean, WHAT do you write about women is a more meaningful question to me, the various kind of stages.

AS: So what do you write about women?

VM: (Laughs) And I also write about country and home and black men and how disappointing they are to me. You know! What do I write about women… Okay, I think I’m gonna be honest and say a lot of my writing is in first person at first when I write it. But by the time I perform it, I try to find a way to remove myself from it in some kind of way. So I’m interested in how black women are resisting and surviving, in South Africa in particular. I don’t think I can fit the entire women of color thing into my poems, I think that is a reaction somebody else will have. I can’t say, well, I write about all women, and I think all women can fit, well NO, I don’t. I only know a few women, I write about THOSE women, in particular. Conversations that I have with friends sometimes will end up in poems. I’m interested in black women’s resistance and survival and how they negotiate life, I’m interested in how we are fragile as well, and soft… and hard as hell also.

AS: Do you think sexism, or even racism is still prevalent in South Africa? Because historically speaking, it once was, like it is everywhere. Is there anything particular that enrages you, or influences you to speak out about it?

VM: I think being alive as a black woman in South Africa is to be in a perpetual state of rage. ‘Cause somebody is always testing you. (Laughs) Honest to GOD! And now, honestly, for me to be happy, sometimes I need to ignore that certain things happen during the day. And yes, racism is extremely prevalent. It’s not in the policies, it’s not in the legislature, but it’s like these micro-aggressions that you can’t actually point out but you feel in interpersonal relationships. Just walking down the streets sometimes, and someone laughs or says, ‘Hey, that’s it, walk faster,’ or looks at you and you’re like, ‘What? You’re in my country, WHAT?’ Men are horrific. Men are trash. You know those shirts that say “Men are Trash”? That’s what I want to wear on a regular basis, like a Monday to Sunday outfit of “Men are Trash”. ‘Cause they really are! And black ones in particular are really disappointing to me. And how they are willing to have a one-sided view. Black men are willing to talk about racism, but as soon as you say, ‘Okay, I’ll talk about racism, cool, but the problem here is…’ when I begin to talk about gender, then they’re like, ‘No, can we have one conversation at a time?’ But we can’t.Because the problem is I am black AND I am woman. So I am facing this double oppression that is horrific for me. Just walking down the streets is a problem in South Africa. Because somebody is grabbing you, touching you, saying something to you, and you are public property in any given moment. And that’s very frustrating. I don’t wanna keep writing poems about that shit because I want that shit to end! And I also wanna reach for some joy at some point. I wanna write a poem about a fucking balloon.

AS: Here’s hoping someday you will! What’s your take on feminism? Do you identify with it? I mean, feminism has different versions, how do you incorporate with that?

VM: I think… Yeah, feminism is important. But depending on race and location… For black women in particular, black feminism is extremely important. But, which brand of black feminism? Is it the kind that leaves other women out? Says, well, if you do ABC and D, or pander into the heterosexual male gaze… But what if I actually like to actually go out and be pretty? And just have people look at me? That’s a choice that I should be able to make by myself, right? We are always talking about agency in feminism. Isn’t that part of my agency? Who are you to explain to me what a feminist looks like? So, I don’t know. I mean, I’m trying to do some reading in feminism. Currently Audrey Lorde’s essays I’m trying to go through and re-read, over and over again. Because I also don’t have the language to describe what kind of feminism I do. But I know that in my daily life I’m practicing a particular kind of agency, I’m demanding things as well. And there’s something important in being able to demand things. Our mothers have been feminists. We just think they haven’t because we consider feminism to be a particular kind of thing. But they’ve made particular choices in their lives. And even subservience, submission is a choice. And as long as you are making a conscious choice to do that, and do other things, as long as the choice is yours, then you’re a feminist. My mother doesn’t have the language for that nonsense, but she is the most staunch feminist. She is the most, ‘Get married at your own time, have your babies at your own time, live your life, I didn’t get you this education so that you can get married today, get it together!’ She’s very much about that. Because now I have started a company called BLACKGIRLPLOTTING, which literally talks about black women all the time, I have to make a conscious effort to find out about feminism. Because people wonder if we are. My partner definitely isn’t. My creative partner, she says, ‘I don’t have the language for that kind of movement, which is Xhosa. I practice what you call feminism, but that’s not what I’m going to call it. I’m going to call it trying to survive and resist.’

AS: What ticks you off? What makes you ABSOLUTELY enraged?

VM: There’s a hierarchy. So it’s like white men, white women… black men are somewhere in the middle of that. (Laughs) And I think I’m pissed off that sometimes I’m not very comfortable in spaces, I’m pissed off that I can’t engage as freely. I am pissed off by class. And I am middle class, so I have privilege at the same time, right? I am pissed off that I am having to re-learn my mother tongue because I don’t know it. I am pissed off that I’m writing in English. But it’s the only language that I know enough to use for expression. There’s something about that that often feels inauthentic, but it’s also the only tool I have. So in ways I have to try and write my blackness for myself in a language that is not mine but is mine.

AS: Does that happen with everyone? Is it a contemporary thing that you learn English more than your own language?

VM: I think now my nieces are probably feeling it a lot more because they really cannot engage in a full conversation of mother tongue. My family is like very mix, so they speak Xhosa and Tswana and that’s just like a mishmash of that kind of language, you’re always hearing it fly by. And my nieces can’t manage conversation in it. I can at least manage conversation. But can I write poetry? No.

AS: But why is that happening?

VM: Because the education system expects that black learners speak English so well. And part of that expectation also means that they encourage parents to not speak mother tongue at home, so that you are able to learn faster, because it’s your second language, and it’s white girls’ first language. And in that they don’t see the way they are colonizing and kind of really washing our parents off our tongues, washing culture off our tongues, because we all sound like some mishmash of this English that our parents don’t sound like… Our parents don’t sound like us at all! And sometimes it’s like if you close your eyes and you listen to someone speak you can’t tell if they’re white or black because of the accent, because it’s so close to whiteness. And that’s the thing we’ve been taught to reach for always.

AS: Does it bother you?

VM: I mean, now, yes. Now, because I’m aware. Because the kind of violence that inflicts on a person, and because now you’re having to buy back your culture, and that’s fucking crazy. When I was in school, it didn’t, because I went to a moderately mixed race multiracial school, and so it didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t speak mother tongue proper, or I couldn’t write it. Because everybody around me was speaking English. Everybody around me was middle class. Yes, there might have been a personal scholarship, but it was almost as if there was no difference between us. But there was, because the rest of us lived in the townshed, and they lived in TOWN, you know, in these big houses. There was a difference, but the school space made it seem like there wasn’t, like we all had the same opportunities, we were all going to make the same kind of lives. But as soon as you reach high school, you realize it’s different. Because, you’re not driving to varsity, you’re taking public transport to varsity, THEY are driving to varsity. YOU can barely afford varsity sometimes. Even if your parents save money, varsity’s like hell of expensive. So yeah, now I’m pissed. Now that I’m aware I’m very pissed. I think my uncle is the person who flagged it for me. There was one time when we were playing music, and he was like, ‘Why’re you playing white music?’ I can’t even remember what the track was. And I was like, ‘There is no such thing as white music. There is just music!’ (Laughs) and he was like, ‘Nah… Dude, you’re so white, you’re so colonized. Do you think these people are your friends? Wait until you get to varsity. You people are forced to interact with each other. Literally, you’re forced. It’s normalized. And as soon as you get into a space where people have to choose you, they will not choose to interact with you at all.’ And he was right. He was really right. There was something really uncomfortable about getting into university. I mean, like literally, zero white friends. Because there was no common ground. I didn’t know what to talk about. I really didn’t.

AS: But now that you’re aware of it, how do you make peace with that?

VM: I write them into poems.

AS: So basically you turn it into a form of resistance against colonization?

VM: Yeah. Kind of.I have a poem called “Your Sister’s Going to Europe”, which is very much like a language poem. And it was literally based on… My niece was going to Europe. None of us had been to Europe, and she had this like a week-long tour of something to different places. Her grandmother was asking her questions about Europe. And my niece, she’s very bubbly, and she was speaking so fast, and the look on her grandmother’s face was kind of confused because she couldn’t catch all of this English that was moving really really quickly. And there’s something about speaking English to our parents who really don’t… Yes they do know English, but we know it better. And so we move faster than they do. We don’t take time to have a proper conversation and sometimes to see them confused is kind of perplexing because they paid for this education. So it’s like, in a way you’re othering them. And you don’t notice, you don’t see it. But when you’re standing outside, you can see the othering happen.

AS: Let’s talk about drama and performance poetry some more. Do you find them very similar, or not?

VM: I mean, they have similar principles.I know how to speak, I know how to be articulate, I know the way to perform, the tools of performance,I understand them. BUT, performance poetry is very different, it’s actually very hard. I think it’s hard, it’s the hardest thing, because it’s so personal. Because it really requires you to be emotionally available for it in that moment. And if you’re not honest, you’re not authentic, people know, they can see it. There’d be times when you’re just reciting something, you know the rhythms, the words, and you’re just doing it. But you know you’re not being honest, or truthful. And spoken word audiences are very particular about honesty and truthfulness. You can have all these effects, but, they’re like, ‘But I didn’t see YOU. So, it doesn’t matter to me.’

AS: South African literature has J. M. Coetze, probably the most popular writer from there whom everyone is familiar with. Do you like his writings?

V M: I’m in a moment in my life where I don’t read white people. So I don’t read white people, no. I read black women. I am actually making a conscious effort to read black women. And after that I’ll think about reading white women. And AFTER that I’ll think about white men.

AS: What about black men?

V M: Oh yeah, black men should totally come before white women, or somewhere in there. But white men are at the end of the line.

AS: So who are your favorite writers right now? Who are you reading?

VM: I keep going back to some Lucille Clifton poems. And Sonia Sanchez.I fell in love withNtozakeShange’s style of writing. She writes the accent into her poems. The punctuation, how the word sounds, she writes that into it. And so you sound American when you read it out. I really like that style of writing. I’m thinking of ways of exploring writing how my mother speaks into poems. Because how I speak doesn’t matter ‘cause it’s white. I speak white! There’s nothing different about my dialect of speaking. But my mother is different because her accent is different, and the words that she chooses and her expressions are different. So, yeah… those are the people right now.

AS: What are your inspirations? What are your fears?

VM: What are my fears? I don’t know if this is like a very Capricorn thing, but my ultimate fear (Laughs) is that I will not amount to anything. And I don’t know what “amounting” might look like. I don’t think I’ll ever run out of writing. I think I could do that even if I was poor, I would still write something somewhere. Not that I’m rich, I think I’m poor right now. Still writing. When I am outside in the world, I fear that I’m not safe. When I’m speaking in public places, I fear that I’m not articulate enough, that I don’t sound like I’ve read enough books (Laughs). When I’m writing I fear that I might never write again, even though I’m quite certain that I’ll keep writing something, even if nobody will see it, I’ll certainly be writing. My inspirations… I really like being alive! I know my poems don’t sound like it. (Laughs) But I really enjoy life. I am inspired by my friends, I make really wonderful friendships actually. Really wonderful women, black women at that. And those conversations inspire me a lot. And being alive. I do like figuring it out. I am inspired by vulnerability as well, as of late.

AS: When you say that when you’re out in the world you don’t feel safe, what do you mean by that?

VM: I use public transport a lot. I’m terrified of driving, ‘cause I’m terrified of hurting other people on the road. And the thing is that, I learned how to drive so that I would feel more comfortable… So, I use public transport a lot, and I’m always wearing earphones. And this is something South African women talk about a lot, how you are always wearing earphones so that you can sort of let people know that I don’t want you to talk to me. Because otherwise if you don’t have the earphones then there is no polite way to say actually, I am tired and I don’t feel like talking. You’re always supposed to be polite and it’s rude to say no. And so the only way you can say no is by disengaging with the world completely. Or being on your phone and having social media. So it’s like… I don’t feel safe because there are men around. (Laughs) And sometimes I don’t feel safe because I feel like I’m still an awkward person, and I need to figure out what my position is in a particular kind of space and that is very tiring and exhausting, kind of trying to negotiate the space. The one time that I did go out with my friends, and this actually happened in my neighborhood, this guy was wanting to talk to us. And we were just girls, we were out together. There was a group of guys that we knew from the neighborhood who were there as well, but I was like, we don’t want any guy kind of thing, just girls here, so can you please leave us alone. And I suppose my face is not very friendly. So he left. And then we just carried on. And the next thing I know is I’m just feeling this slap across my face. And this guy is slapping me. I was shocked. I was very shocked. And before then I had thought to myself I can protect myself, no guy is gonna touch me. After that I realized that I actually can’t. That guy was huge, he was bigger than me. And there was nothing that I could do to protect myself from that. And for me, I am very aware, I don’t go to places where there aren’t bouncers, I really don’t. If there isn’t a bouncer there, I don’t go there. Because male trouble is inevitable. And I don’t go to predominantly Afrikaans spaces. Because you’re asking for trouble in that space. So you learn from experience, man, to be afraid of things. Because sometimes you think you are invisible, and you are invincible, but you’re not.

AS: You didn’t see that coming at all?

VM: Dude, no! And thenI was crying, and I was a mess. And then I told my sister, who is like this thin girl. Then my sister went and fetched that guy and was like, ‘Apologize right now! Say you’re sorry.’ And I was like, ‘Actually, I don’t want your sorry, ‘cause sorry means shit. If I can slap you that’s when I will feel good.’ And he was like, ‘No, that’s not gonna happen, but I’m sorry, ‘cause I’m drunk.’ And you know, I was like… I drink too! You see me slapping niggers? It was unreal.

AS: What are your plans for the future? What are you working on, what’s getting you excited?

VM: I get so scared when people ask that. Because it feels like if I say I’m gonna do this thing, I’m gonna fail. ‘Cause it was like fetching my visa. For weeks I was saying to my mother, tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and get my visa. And I didn’t do it! And then again, tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and get my visa. Until finally the organizers emailed me, do you have a visa? And then finally I was like okay, I have to get my visa today. So I feel like every time I say something, I purposefully sabotage myself. Or maybe it’s particular things. This year my goals were to start a company, and I did, called BLACKGIRLPLOTTING, and to stage my own shows, and we did, called No One Wants a Black Woman with a Mouth. We are definitely looking to travel the show around South Africa, and maybe outside of South Africa. I have hopes and dreams. (Laughs) But maybe I should keep them to myself so that nobody’s keeping score like, ‘Mmm, she said… but look where she is’, you know?

AS: Okay, that’s fair, that makes sense. Tell me more about your company, about BLACKGIRLPLOTTING.

VM: We stage theatre shows. Musing, poetry, physical theater, multimedia, music. It’s the two of us, it’s always just the two of us, and that’s how it’sgonna be for a while until we really establish what we are doing. Because it’s BLACKGIRLPLOTTING, we are always plotting with different black girls. And so we have a singer, Leomile,a jazz singer, she made soundtrack for us. A friend of mine, Keitumetsi,made another soundtrack for us and that was cool. Our director is a black woman,our stage manager is a black woman. The person who is doing our marketing is a black woman. And so it has been meaningful to collaborate with black women only. At the same time it has been really difficult and testing, because spaces don’t have that many black women. So if you go into a theatre space and say okay, this is BLACKGIRLPLOTTING, and we require that from beginning to end the person who’s stage managing, the person who’s running our lights, the person who’s reading is a black woman. And they will say to you, we don’t have that. We just don’t have what you’re asking for and so you have to make concessions. So right now what we’re finding is we’re having to keep repeating ourselves so that the day that everybody knows who BLACKGIRLPLOTTING is, they will also know the conditions of BLACKGIRLPLOTTING. If you want us to perform, you better make sure you have a team of black women. It’s about having the only people who benefit from the space be black women at all times.

A portion of Vuyelwa Maluleke’s performance at Dhaka Lit Fest 2016:

For more on BLACKGIRLPLOTTING: https://blackgirlplotting.tumblr.com/

Photo and Video Credit: Pranabesh Das

The post ‘I have to try and write my blackness for myself in a language that is not mine but is mine.’ – Vuyelwa Maluleke first appeared on Prachya Review.

In the very beginning of this year, I was first introduced with Ladan Osman’s poems through a Bangla translation done by Mahmud Alam Soikot. Those translations in my native language made me interested in reading more works of Ladan. I found her works brave in a very sophisticated way.  Ladan Osman was born in Somalia and later she moved to Ohio, US with her parents. She grew up there. Her first poetry collection The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (published by the University of Nebraska Press) got the award of the 2014 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and in 2015, her chapbook Ordinary Heaven has been included in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets which is a project of the African Poetry Book Fund. She has brought the readers into a new sight of Somalia to see and think beyond the conventional existing westernize idea of any African country.

One day in a conversation, Nigerian poet David Ishaya Osu asked me why I am not taking Ladan Osman’s interview for Prachya Review, since she is now considered one of the most powerful Afro-American voices in poetry. I jumped up and said, “Yes! I love her work!” Anika and I then contacted her and she agreed for the interview, even gave us two poems of her to publish along with it. She talks on various issues here, like her idea of poetry, her root and background, African literature, writers who influence her, her plans for the future and much more.

– Shafinur Shafin

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Shafinur Shafin: Hi Ladan! Thank you for accepting our request for the interview. You were born in Somalia. Do you have any memory of Somalia, from your childhood?

Ladan Osman: I remember the scent of the ocean and the earth; my parents’ home, that stone; light on the ground and the walls and floors. I grew up in the U.S. but cellular memory is real, geographic memory is bodily. This is added to revisiting albums and my parents’ stories. Something in me glitches whenever I see photos, or hear the names of streets distantly familiar to me.

Shafin: In a conversation with Alex Dueben, you mentioned that your parents were most comfortable speaking Somali to you, at home. Why have you chosen to write in English and not in Somali?

Ladan: By the time I was a preteen I became self-conscious speaking Somali. After college, I don’t hear hours of Somali on a daily basis. I didn’t lose my language but I lost confidence speaking it. I spent most of my life writing in English and in order to do my best work, to the best of my ability, I write in English. This is the language in which I exercise the most control. Lately I’ve studied my father’s translations, and feel capable translating Somali to English. We always hope to return home, wash the rust off our tongues.

Shafin: Maybe this is why you said in an interview that you are translating the memories and experiences of Somalia that your parents carried. Do you miss your root? Or do you enjoy the fluidity of your identity? Don’t you think if you were in Somalia all along, the way of your expressions would be different than now?

Ladan: My root is deep deep. I can never lose it so I can never miss it. I do enjoy privilege from the fluidity of my identity. I can’t tell what would be different if reared in Somalia. I think my reference points would be different but think my core understanding of the world may be similar. This is because my parents are my first and best teachers, and they don’t seem to think losing their root or shifting their core is possible. They never spoke it to me if they do.

Anika Shah: What pulled you to be a poet? Did it even occur as a conscious event, or it just happened? Have you ever considered any other medium to express yourself other than poetry?

Ladan Osman: I was writing short stories as soon as I could, mostly what’s now called magical realism. In the fourth grade, I read Maya Angelou’s “When I Think About Myself.” I didn’t know this storytelling form existed. It wasn’t until the end of undergrad I felt I could do something with poems. But I studied philosophy and poetry to learn how to think. That’s the main thing.

Poetry includes but transcends poems. Poems are an artifact, and the form I’ve published most. I write fiction and nonfiction, and photograph. I teach, story-tell, perform, and consult artists across disciplines. This is all poetry.

Shafin: How do fables, fairy tales, folk stories, and religious rituals of Somalia influence your poetry?

Ladan: Many of the poems in my first book are parables. I was interested in constructing worlds, using events and figures to indicate a world, and for that world to be in conversation with the world we experience directly. Somali stories and turns of phrase influence my thinking and my writing. More than anything, inclinations in the language turned my eye to the natural world. Somali has many words for intention, many ways to indicate personal responsibility in an outcome. This affects my narratives and my syntax. The Quran and other religious texts contain the verses people turn to in distress and jubilation. We memorize them. We carry them. Besides personal pleasure in scriptures, I feel I have a duty as an artist to study the texts that are important to so many of us.

Shafin: A bunch of your images are centered on the body and household chores. Beside that you have used Biblical and Quranic references in some of your poems.  In your composition, is it important for the elements to harmonize with the themes, or do you simply allow the poems to pop up organically without control?

Ladan: I don’t think looseness has to be sloppy. There’s a lot of control in the organic. What looks like imagination or menagerie is actually evidence of study and my will to include the chaos of everyday life in my work, to joyfully document the everyday sublime. We hear and feel through harmony in so many ways, and each poem has its breaths, its mode of disrupting the air around it. I allow their irregularities and allow the poems to make demands on me but this is all control. I’m forced to regulate my artistic insecurities. Even wandering demonstrates a form of control. For me, there’s a difference between control and rigidity.

Shafin: Back to your childhood: In your poem, “Amber doll,” you maintained a conversation with the doll as though it was a living being.  I would put two questions in one: how much of memory do you find favorable to deplore in your poetry? Were there moments in your growing up that you did not admit as true to your girlhood?

Ladan: I don’t think I deplore any memory or invented narrative. There’s friction and some reservation but mostly I’m curious about that tension: the distance we try to make between what we see and what we choose to tell. “Amber Doll” has many real elements, and most of my work is puzzle-making. Even my nonfiction is not exactly real. I try to focus on what’s true, and that includes emotional register, context, what I hope to communicate in our present moment. Receiving the event and sharing it, every choice I make putting it on the page, is subjective. So many things are true to my girlhood because in my memory, my girlhood was a state in which I may include worlds more vast than the one most people could say was closer to an objective truth. It’s dangerous for me to invest much in that so-called objectivity. It makes others’ perspectives the point of origin. Given the frequency of flat ideas on identity, it makes no sense for a black girl to invest there. They want us to believe their world is irresistible. It’s not.

Anika: How important are metaphors to you? Does it ever make you worry that your metaphors may not comminute with the readers like you intended them to?

Ladan: Everything we experience seems allegorical. Metaphor is the language of emotional and spiritual life. We describe our internal worlds using images from our known worlds. Metaphor is something I pursue in language—how are people looming, striving to connect with each other via images? If you listen carefully, people reveal a lot through their imagery banks and tense choices. Through them we indicate plans, mood, comfort with ourselves, and the people we’re addressing.

I trust in my readers. I trust my reader to return to my work. I trust my reader to argue with it. I never intend obtuseness but do welcome ambiguity. When I was writing this book, I didn’t think about readers. I thought about drafting true atmospheres and improving the technical skill needed to share them. This has led to some fracture after the release of the book because I hadn’t thought about people reading it, responding to it.

Shafin: You brought the issues of racial politics, religion, violence against women and the identity crisis and the struggle of an African immigrant in the poems of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony. They come up in your poetry so much, how significant are these issues to you, and why?

Ladan: I was thinking this morning about archaic uses of the word “issue”: as in progeny or as a verb (what I put out from myself). I’m almost always talking about our relationship to God, to empire, to the law. It may look like a love or family poem but I’m thinking through philosophies of the body, the city as a structure, an invention. On the surface, these things are important but I’m most drawn by their sources. From where do these delineations and schisms flow?

Shafin: I find, I am obsessed with my brown body – I feel like it’s a temple and I worship it, it reflects in my poetry often. You wrote in a blog, “I often think of my black body as a site of invention, and invention as an act of faith.” I liked this part, I could connect myself with this. I have felt that in your poetry what has been expressed about the body is more than just a simple body. How do you see “body”, really?

Ladan: Sometimes I have a very impersonal relationship to my body but I love it, and understand our love for our bodies. I don’t understand why Narcissus is a fool actually. How could one not be in awe of a reflection? Is it really just the body in the reflection? I see myself as a creation, in conversation with marvel and I like to express awe and gratitude for this body. But I don’t put it before the intangible. Some days I have to remind myself I am a woman, a black woman, and the year/city in which I live. I do work to tether myself in a body that others celebrate, or attempt to transgress. Some call this struggle anxiety but it’s something else. It’s the weirdness of inhabiting a form. I think I recognize what’s unreal about our forms.

Shafin: In “First Red Dress”, the speaker tells the girl as a warning, ‘Go out in that dress/ and you’ll get split like a watermelon. Down there.’ That poem had a massive impact on me. When I read it I imagined the fear, of being raped, of being torn. Could you tell me a little bit about your thoughts on that poem?

Ladan: This is the poem that made me realize how unprepared I was for response to my work. Many young women, unfortunately, relate to it, and recite lines from it to me. While the poem isn’t completely real, I revisit this fear when it’s cited: that our bodies are not ours, that we can expect abuse. The conceptual violence, implanted in girls by a very young age, is much worse than abuse of the body. It complicates abuse of the body, makes it seem total. This is how we can tell patriarchy is working: you wish you were not a girl at all, you wish you had never left the house at all. What a blasphemy!

Anika: Who are your favorite writers and poets? On more than one occasion you have expressed your love for the works of Toni Morrison. I am curious because she is my favorite too: what do you love most about her?

Ladan: I love the work of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jamaica Kincaid, Mahmoud Darwish, Jim Crace, Salvador Plascencia, Selah Saterstrom, Teju Cole, and the first or soon-to-be published works of poets like Airea D. Matthews, Roger Reeves, Mahtem Shiferraw, and Keith S. Wilson.

Toni Morrison holds everything at the same time. Theory, narrative, music, mystery. Sometimes each sentence requires the same parts of our brains as logics in geometry or abstract math. I admire her intelligence and her sensitivity, her love for others’ stories. I don’t know many writers who seem so attentive to the declarations, the flesh, even exhalations of other humans.

Shafin: How do you feel the influence of Afro-American writers on your writings? Is it that the influence of Afro-American writers is the strongest on you?

Ladan: Definitely the theoretical and creative works of African-American thinkers has significantly impacted my spirit and work. These are the artists I first studied when suffering from displacement, when looking for a rootedness that relies on more than the arbitrary lines and identities of this fickle realm. But when I visit home, I realize the particularities of my parents’ language and personalities impact my work. It’s only a few weeks ago, I realized I’m trying to communicate the complexity of my mother’s jokes, for example.

Shafin: Africa is a multicultural, multi-ethnic and obviously multi-national continent. But when people talk about African literature, they often take it as a whole, as if Africa is a country, not a continent. That hardly ever happens when talking about the literatures of other countries or continents. Why do you think it is different in the case of Africa? How do you feel about that?

Ladan: Those people have a limited imagination about the black body and everything it issues. Anti-blackness is a mark of stupidity and its practice draws one into deeper stupidity. It’s an amusing but not fascinating compounded degeneration. I can’t afford to give much attention to this thinking. I may have to hear it out and about but I don’t often carry that garbage to my desk or the sacred space of meditation. It’s a waste of time to explain what’s obvious to a racist. That’s the point. To waste our time (Toni Morrison explains this best). I don’t owe anyone a demonstration of my or my continent’s wideness. The work will never lead us to foolishness and is probably the best use of our time.

Anika: Tell us about your next project. Do you ever intend to write a novel, or an autobiography?

Ladan: I’m releasing new poems in coming months, and writing essays. I only intend to write what insists on being written, and what I need to write in order to evolve. I want to feel grown when I finish a manuscript. I want to see that I’m a sounder human, who is of better use to others. When I visit schools, students request a novel, and I trust in the youth.

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Two Poems of Ladan Osman

Silhouette

at a Claudia Rankine reading, University of Chicago, 2011

I enter: carpet, curtains,

large, framed pictures of robed white men,

a glassy glare over a forehead, below the voice box,

students in bland shades.

I don’t belong, the luxury of thinking,

the wealth of talking about thought,

privilege of ease among important people.

I am afraid of them, their smell,

their cotton, their expensive running shoes,

their faces so hard to read

when they make odd-placed sighs

at black people histories. There is not one

bright color. A professor laughs—

quick, self-turning, a paper cut

to his own heart.

I hate myself for the shame of forgetting

the books on my shelf,

the many others read on the floors of libraries,

corners of bookstores where the cashier can’t see me.

Shame when I see all the book spines there ever were,

their colors and textures like women bent in prayer on a high holy day.

My voice is small as it asks,

What will it matter to them if I make a book?

I am one poet. Isn’t there space for me?

And the tears are sweet, completely sweet

as if they mean, even now you don’t believe?

The colonizers couldn’t have dreamed it,

the preoccupation with the heights of my soul,

my intangible qualities, if I am only the silhouette

of a shadow. If this poet is white in third world countries,

what am I here? It’s possible I’m just like the wind in the curtains.

They monopolize part of the eye.

The wind makes its mischief in goose flesh.

A girl closes the window.

[First published Kweli Journal.

The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, University of Nebraska Press, 2015.]

Practice with Yearning Theorem: Tangents

I make room on the doormat

though no one is coming.

It’s a hot night. I’ll eat cool soup,

maybe out the can. No,

garnish it: are carrot shavings

good in butternut squash soup?

I take a photo, crop the chip in my bowl.

Maybe I’ll send it to my siblings

to show them I’m living well.

I’m eating soup and salad

I couldn’t buy at a restaurant

most days. I remind myself

I shower, sleep free from molesters,

that I’ve paid my bills this month,

and washed my dishes this morning

with my own two hands.

But am I grateful? Last night,

I tried to kill a moth. Two moths

sprang out of it, and split.

I didn’t know moths made formations.

The night before that, I killed a moth,

got a paper towel to clean the wall,

and found another moth next to it.

I killed it, too. Why should I go on

killing moths? What have they done?

On the way home tonight,

I saw two pots of flowers,

with fronds cascading from them.

Then I saw a dog with his head,

forepaws outside the fence.

He seemed to need a pat

but I recalled his barking,

his paws slapping the fence.

I wondered if this was the same dog.

On some hot nights, I remember

a poem about a restless woman

in a laundromat, her wetness.

At eighteen this was amusing.

Later, I read that rare plants

thrive in laundromats,

and understood her.

It’s a hot night. End of summer.

A scratch on my nose burns

but I don’t wash off my makeup

in case I go out.

Maybe I’ll “get to go out,”

like a kid waiting at the kitchen table

looking at the back door,

her mother at the sink.

I kill yet another moth,

and consider leaving its body,

bait for the ones eating uneven holes

into the blooms of my favorite shawl.

I call it favorite after ruin.

I wore it to the conservatory

so it could visit siblings.

I’m concerned with families

not the families of moths, apparently,

because I miss the one I came from,

and the one I don’t have yet.

It’s a hot night.

I’m aware of my wetness.

I’d wear rosebud undershirts

as a girl, my chest poked out.

Relative women noted my posture,

said, so, you’re smelling yourself,

and that, too, I understand only now.

.

Interview taken by

Shafinur Shafin, a poet and writer from Bangladesh

and Anika Shah, a writer and translator

The post “I don’t understand why Narcissus is a fool actually. How could one not be in awe of a reflection? Is it really just the body in the reflection?” – Ladan Osman first appeared on Prachya Review.

Henry Avignon, the reappearance of Goya’s ghost that struck mankind with a visual protest against the violence of the Church’s ruthless torture over people deeply affected by the war of Napoleon’s invasion on Spain. Time has cast such unfair aggressions of civilization on humans over and over. We started this new century with a war on the Middle Eastern Region. A perfect mass-murder map of innocent children, women and men on the ancient ground of Babylonia. So called Super Powers of the Earth are watching the show. We all know the truth behind all of these as an open book. And we all know who is causing these, how and why. Henry is an unmarked lighthouse of our time, who consistently kept himself busy to draw the newest pathway to abstraction, to follow the truth of the unfolding of Mother Nature’s Chaos. His works resemble how deeply we are in suffering of the difficult times of our so called post-modern period, the twenty-first century. At the very start of this interview Henry mentioned himself as a sad-sad man, He said: You interview a sad man with a dark heart.

Years and years of our times of crisis on earth, Henry’s tormented soul was in extreme anxiety and his sincere nature of feeling the suffering of others kept him with poetic works on the pain he carried that he never could bury. With critical analysis of Nature, the issues that society plots against us and paradoxically cuts us and divides us with are repeatedly brought out to light in his works. He believes in the power of one’s own darkness, the power of Duende.

Henry’s works are mostly of a very eye-catching nature at a first glance. Vibrant color saturation with an Avignonian compositional sense – a perfect delight to read or enjoy the deconstructive view. Some of the works are deeply thought provoking and some appear with immense torture on viewers’ mind as they extract the truth of our true nature and the agony it carries within. His photo-sculpts are significantly sharp with the detail of the material’s texture and the Avignonian compositional formation is highly sensual for a mind to resonate to as a language. Seemingly, most of the times he likes to add his thought with an elaborate detail on his philosophical view of his art with an attached poetry or a reference quote of his inspiring idea. Henry has developed and published theories on what photo-sculpting is and what Grammaring Matrix is about. He is very precise and sincere to these theories of his.

The Interview session on photo-sculptor artist Henry Avignon is taken by Russell Chowdhury and Shafinur Shafin.

Russell:  Dear Henry Avignon, first of all, Prachya Review thanks you with delight for attending our interview session. So, shall we begin then?

Henry:  I have nothing. No station in life.  You interview a sad man with a dark heart.

Russell:  What good is art today? And how communicative do you think art has become?

Henry:  The world, I believe, does not need more art, it needs more communication, deeper access systems, and if this activity has the aesthetic look of art that is not in this system, indicative of aesthetic art but rather of the elegance of the system.

Russell:  You address yourself as a photo-sculptor. Who is a photo-sculpt artist? If an ordinary person asks, who lacks in knowledge of art, what will be your answer?

Henry:  I see figures that suffer as inconvenience a situation of tireless seeking; nonbeings reminiscent of feelings; images suffocating from vastness remaining still and alone. Figures that recede into space, not unlike memory, in proximity with shadows perhaps, cast in cold light and voluminous nondescript textures. Figures attempting to avoid identification presented with human context, with hints of anatomical insinuation with geological indications. All shapes are of nature – emergent and inevitable, lost in the continuum of time and space. All figures are possessed by the presence in a vacuum with untitled tendencies. Figures appearing with traces of a name while suggesting namelessness. Figures attempting to compose a decomposition, to halt a procession, to be within from a distance, to be biological and anthropological and still manifest as the assemblage. Figures that are being born in the arbitrary manner of dying from certainty toward uncertainty, presenting a limited view of a limiting relationship with solitude echoing the omnipotence of death anxiety. Figures not well balanced at all, that belie their suggestiveness, that bemoan any such thing as truth and, for this reason, cannot be forgiven.

The photo-sculptor/artist is rigorously in pursuit of the charged/ecstatic physical environments that pulse sensually in time and space which possess undiscovered discursive potential. The principle goal of all process/approaches is to engage the substrate by letting go of strict subjective determination over a work’s aesthetic. This essentially shifts the paradigm of creativity from the masculine to feminine Nature. The artist as conduit and incubator of externally oriented and catalyzed life energy rather than internally rooted projections of individualized imaginary interpretations of time and place. These are the constructs demonstrated by a singular mind. The Identity project is concerned with both the feminine and masculine dynamics presented in the process of creation, utilizing both to represent a reaction against the tyranny over identity.

Russell:  But from time to time you do paint with various media and take documents of its material movement. What are you doing there?

Henry :  To engage nature’s violent, transformative tendencies in a way that the path of creation is also the path to destruction. I’ve chosen to rely on real life-death cycles in the medium to establish a platform for meditating on the impact of the “basic anxiety” on materials as they are drawn through the experience. To create the work, I implement a vast array of traditional and nontraditional painting techniques.  I cultivate, incubate, and manipulate aesthetically significant fields generated on a metal plate. Vital energy is amassed in accordance with a real life-death cycle for the raw material as it gives over to oxidation. All steps are time-sensitive and subject to extinction. At the pinnacle of the material’s life-death cycle, the camera is used to preserve the composition achieved. A memory of the aesthetic journey as an experience of the material-in-process is documented.

                                                Refugesus

Russell:  What is your concern as an artist? What are you trying to develop here with your works?

Henry:  There are two things as my basic concern

1. Concerning the Apparatus: In line with the historical use of the term apparatus by French philosopher Michel Foucault, the apparatus is those administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. The artist here is concerned with developing interpersonal mechanisms and structures that exercise control and increase power over the destructive nature of death’s anxieties on his psyche. I create mediums that act as Ecto-Genetic Extensions-material as a metaphorical equivalent of flesh (body) and consciousness in order to meditate on critical existential questions. By engaging in the mindful exchange with the literal experience of a life-death cycle and the artistic medium, I confront the void in human conscious understanding.

Investigating the function of death energy through an interpersonal system, enables the artist to develop a language necessarily patterned after the life-death cycle. Language functions as a system built (with or in) symbolic exchanges. My apparatus develops these systems built from the exchanges between human nature and nature, presenting new forms of visual language and syntax. The outcome is a materialized visual meditative platform, equivocated aesthetically by natural compositional expressions as a photo-real abstraction.

The goal of the Interpersonal-Apparatus is to facilitate an engagement that connects socio-psychic; philosophical and metaphysical collective insights on the ideated subject matters of mankind in this time and place.

2. Concerning Identity: The artist seeks to explore the interplay of identity as a direct consequence of the human condition to the life-death cycle. Through personal evolution in the development of his process, I explore the nature of the Death energy in ego as we have been conditioned through social apparatuses, striving to define ourselves into a singular identity.

Shafinur Shafin:  Do you think technology is making people more dull and distant? Now people (who are gadget-lovers) only give a glance at art or literature, but do not look deep inside the art. Do you think people are becoming more isolated in this sense?

Henry:  The structures of the community have shifted permanently. Even as the world has become infinitely more connected we have paradoxically become infinitely more isolated. I believe the social experience has shifted irrevocably to a far more dangerous kind of cult of the self. Where once our social lives were physically transgressive today they are more and more so a psychically isolated transgression. We exist more and more exclusively within our self, alone and distant from the touch of physical experiences. We have a greater feeling of empowerment through access to knowledge but ever lessening skills to employ what we know in the physical realm. This is frightening to me. There is a decline in physical actioning for the better good as people begin to rely on narratives to pacify their fear of the truth/death. Perhaps interconnectivity has overloaded our emotional selves because everyone is now a master of rationalizing the news of the day so they might remain okay. This too frightens me.

It is said that with greater awareness comes greater responsibility and yet where is this acceptance of responsibility any more than lip service? A survey of Art today bares little fruit in light this greater access to what humanity has become worldwide. Art today does not reflect a need for heightened responsibility. However, Literature does. I believe this is because writers if in the throes of some unjust trauma or unwarranted imprisonment will cut their finger and write in blood on toilet paper about their experience. Poets are the guardians of our deeper, metaphorical lives. Art is a market place for salable ideas. I think every art school should require students read Neruda and Celan, Lorca and Vallejo, Hernandez and Marquez, etc. Art might begin to champion the act of baring witness to time and place and perhaps abandon the cult of the clever idea. We must strive to deepen the well of compassionate understanding and this begins by us heightening our awareness, strengthening the modes of expression that enable our dealing with life as it is lived not as it is ideated. This is radical action. This is the visceral dialogue of protest that can evoke change. There is nothing conceptual about saving a life.

Russell:  Photo-sclupting is totally a new kind of art from, a whole new language that you say – is it progressively functional for deeper communication? Would you please like to explain a little about that?

Henry:  As with spoken language visual language must also develop as a functioning conceptual system over time through the accumulation of visual references, the establishing of a visual syntax to bridge a path to our qualitative senses. In this way even the purest visual abstractions from nature can develop out of a stream of seemingly random compositional elements to become features and segments, visually constituted phonemes and morphemes, capable of structuring meaning even out of the extreme natural phenomena of chaos. Because the interpersonal-apparatus is engaging nature, natural phenomena, transformative forces beholden of a life-death cycle the aspect of memory as a function of the literal development of artistic statement necessitates use of the camera apparatus to bring the functional developments of the interpersonal-apparatus into the public space.

It is because Mind is not disembodied, not separate from nature, not distinct from experienced environments, and because thought is mostly abstract that the development of the interpersonal-apparatus is effectively the creation of an interface between the sensitivity of Mind, through the qualitative senses by way of accumulating mnemonic platforms which expand our apprehension of organic abstraction, and the hyper-informational fields of the natural world teeming with transformative energies. It is precise because thought functions primarily as a complex system of abstractions negotiated by the metaphorical thought that such an engagement with nature through the interpersonal-apparatus focuses exclusively on the cultivation, capture/transfer and interpretation of organic abstraction. The interpersonal-apparatus seeks to develop a platform for constituting a platform for the indefinite development of image/glyphs that by accumulation through the employment of artistic process-approaches formulate a developmentally significant system of sign / language that interacts directly and immediately with the unconscious faculties of the disembodied mind. Furthermore, the interpersonal-apparatus hereby establishes a mechanism for further investigation of nature’s transformative forces as they pertain to all other human functions of mind including the psychological, emotional, and spiritual experience of said forces in any and all physical environments.

                                                  Map of the World

Russell:  There are theories which you have applied to develop in your own works, eg: “Radical Actioning in Art” and “The Grammaring Matrix”. Tell us about those.

Henry:  The field of radicalized potential has become a function of isolations. No work is salvageable now even if I sketch with a pencil on paper. The thingness is a lie and the lie is destroyed. Every work is ripe with isolated fields of radicalized potential. Now these fields can be reduced to indecipherable moments of communication… links that will not hold.

Where I have evolved out of necessity so to chase unknowable narratives is I believe more now that the Grammaring Matrix is capable of becoming the interior of intellectual pursuits of more clearly articulated works.

Shafinur Shafin:  Do you really think art is the reflection of the artist’s own thought? Sometimes there is no relation between the artist’s own ideology and his art. Maybe they are a full time devotee of God, but their art shows something else, maybe a denial of God.

Henry:  I don’t think I know what art is or isn’t. People who read what I have wrote project onto me the statements as art theory while I see my thoughts as a philosophical inquiry into modes of communication. Art is a mode of communication first and foremost that’s about all I can be sure of what art is and herein lies the primary relation of my personal project to the state of the art in the world today.

To communicate is to project outward from within. I believe the “within” is not an isolated fortress of identity in a self-serving vacuum but rather a conduit portal for the passing through of collective experience. What cannot be escaped by makers is the need to establish a vigorous platform for dialogue. I think our highest purpose as beings are to grow constantly, to evolve constantly from birth unto death. What I came to understand is the INDIVIDUAL cannot succeed as a SPECIES. Interpersonal successes are rendered meaningless by the larger contexts of humanity’s decay into madness. Therefore, I feel a gripping obligation to creating platforms for dialogue around what I experience as the sources of humanities decaying.

I cannot see my project as art. I consider it a visceral mode of philosophical engagement with existential crises. At best it is a method for poeticizing a journalistic practice. It is an aggressively poetic stance on the nature of and necessity of memory to our well-being as a species. Lest we never forget. Forgetting is a path to denial and in every case denial is destructive. And perhaps more importantly memory is the lynchpin to learning from our mistakes. Often it is the case we must remember again with the perspective of the whole experience having transpired to gain understanding. In this way, my practice is about the importance of remembering again and again. In this way, my work is about the nature of baring witness. Perhaps it is a critique of the activity of bearing witness. But it is not about the thingness of objects and ideas to become iconic. Is trauma and tragedy, injustice and death iconic? Absolutely not! Can these realities be poeticized in an effort to shed a brighter light on them? Absolutely. Needing to deny that my practice is art is a radical actioning. Ideally the work would print in the New York Times not be hung in a museum because the contents are vital engagements with daily human experience aimed at transforming silence into dialogues that are critical to our survival.

To your point about ideologies and artists, I say again this project is not art because it is about baring witness in real time to experiential crises. In a moment of crises, as one is in the grips of experiencing it as such, ideology is useless and often destroyed or rendered obsolete. My entire process is aimed at destabilizing the notion we can mediate understanding from a comfortable distance. Not if we are bearing witness, not if we are wholly engaged, it is then we are forced to change, we are changed, we are aware. The confidence of ideologies is useless.

Russell:  I have been following your works since 2008. Your recent works are far different from those of your early works. These are more manipulated photo-sculpts than of your past works. Why?

Henry:  The newer works are not allowed wholeness by the process of their making. Their wholeness is illusory.  They are built in many separate layers of metal, paper, clear plastic and the wholeness of the memory document is enabled by collapsing the multiple fields with the camera. The interconnectedness of the memory document is exemplifying an awareness as the thought process.  But the impossible failure of the layers to become whole as matter render them chaotically organic in the sense they are reduced to the same lifecycle issues as their maker.

Russell:  But surely your earlier works were also amazing and communicative. I believe those directions should be practiced again.  Do you agree?

Henry:  To have a life’s work that is in the end relegated to memory. The works belie their visual nature as they are only thought projections as modes of communication. They are not art beyond their ability to communicate aesthetically in artful ways. But Russell photo-sculpting is a conversation one has while they are alive. The conversation dies with us.

Russell:  Deconstruction!

Henry:  Exactly. None of my collectors own work they are all in possession of; quotes from the text of my living project. Every photo-sculpt is a parenthetical aside. When I die there will be nothing left. All unsold photo-sculpts will be destroyed. In the end I believe memory will be judged insufficient.

Russell:  But what about the feelings we share? What about what we got from the impressionists? The energy they radiated in their work?

Henry:  It is not to play god but to manage an adaptation on the forces of nature to create with life-death cycle a fleeting impression of totalities. The impressionists still believed in the permanency of matter. They only changed the approach to articulating form with light rather than light with form.

Russell:  What about your art then?

Henry:  I don’t believe in art, Russell. I believe in death.  I want my life’s work to amount to the unflinching truth of death.  In this way, all of the memory documents are building up to death. This is the exotic underpinning of death energy, this is the power of Duende.

Russell:  But inside the DNA it preserves memory for a longer period of time!

Henry:  Of course and this preservation remains as chaos. Chaos is after all a profound mode of inspiration for every aspect of our emotional life. Chaos roots in death energy.  Death is a creative energy.  But someone must say what I am saying.

Russell:  I remember your “Chaos Unfolding” series.

Henry:  Yes, the early works were about discovering the field itself, I needed to find them so that I could believe in their nature. I needed to see what physics what telling me. Once you find them you must then walk with them for life.

I realized quickly that the fields are everywhere at all times in all experience of nature as reality. In my works the fields are like Higgs boson particles attaching the mass to massless awarenesses. But Russell, mass decays, and fields shift by way of transfer through death and this death is not stagnant but electrifying and constant.

The preservation of my project through memory is that moving across the threshold of death, the collective preservation would be an act of the constancy of transfer from that which emanates to a conduit. But in the end the original life as matter must pass into nothingness. All of this being said every work must past into nothingness.

Russell:  Hmm…

Henry:  And all of this philosophically amounts to the process as interpersonal apparatus for managing my experience of death anxiety.

The Funeral Dance of West African Death

Shafinur Shafin:  How do you differ your poetry and art?

Henry:  How do I differentiate the various components of flavour experienced by the tongue! I don’t. Just as salt and sweetness, acidity and bitterness are made as one experience by the tongue so does the tongue of radical actioning speak all the components of an expression (written and visual) as one metaphorically cohesive text. What is most important is that we write in blood on toilet paper if we are imprisoned.

And in the blood drawn poems of our compassionate investment in mankind’s destiny let us never cease asking hard questions:

What color is murder?

What color is cancer?

What color is anxiety over becoming homeless?

What color is the burden of hunger?

What color is the tension between estranged lovers?

What color is the hope we will survive another day?

What color is the black man’s plight?

What color is poverty?

What color is the suicidal tendency?

What color is fear for another man’s life?

What color is disgust at the execution of innocents for not converting?

What color is a woman’s anger who must face a forced marriage?

What color is a man who hurts children?

What color is a hand that steals from the poor?

What color is the doubt that god exists?

What color is the loss of a child to a passing car?

What color is finding your lover with another man?

What color is the addiction?

What color is a loss of dignity?

What color is the rage at the system that oppresses you?

What color is the word of the man who abuses you?

What color is the sun that rises over massacres?

What color is the moon that bathes the dead on the fields of war?

What color is the animal you struck down in the road?

What color is your father on the day he passes?

What color is our inability to get ahead?

What color is the dream deferred?

What color is unrequited love? What color is the hate crime?

What color is a lie that ruins you?

What color is the decision to leave?

What color is the decision to stay?

What color is the indecision?

Russell:  Can we hope that mankind – the mass people on earth will try to comprehend your effort in time and even value what is manifested through your works?

                    In the Dāno͞oˈmäN of His Negritude

Henry:  You must remember that I began this project as a reaction to surviving suicide. I was not trained as an artist. I am not an artist… I am a survivor of grotesque life experiences that sought a path of stability in instability so that I might raise my children. I work obsessively to survive Russell and every day is a hell awakening that I must fight back the gates from swinging wide and I don’t know how long I will fight brother so I don’t know if humanity as you call them will ever care let alone understand. I have mostly given up writing about the process as so few care.

Russell:  Since I started following your sadness through your works, photo-sculpts, I noticed you focused on the mass killing around the world. This is true for every place on Earth, death is a bitter reality everywhere. It has worked as a ringing bell to keep us awake to see. Maybe few of us have looked at your art in the way it actually is.

Henry:  Mostly I think people believe I am sick. That my practice is delusional and somehow not real. Perhaps it isn’t and perhaps I am crazy but for now the project is keeping alive for my children. That is why I am engaged. Not for any other reason. When it’s over, it’s over.

Henry Avignon

Website: henryavignonart.viewbook.com

Biography

1972 – Born in Tampa, Florida U.S.A. 1972.

1992 – Associates Degree in Photo Journalism SUNY Morrisville New York

2000 – Baccalaureate degree in Literature / Minor in Psychology SUNY Brockport New York

2007 – Masters of Art, Creative Writing, Poetry SUNY Brockport New York

*Father of two children

Visual Works featured in Literary & Art magazines and reviews

2009 USA April: Ygdrasil  Literature & Arts (Chapbook)

 2009 USA June: Full Of Crow  Literature & Arts (20 images)

2009 USA July: Red Bicycle Literature & Arts (20 images)

2009 India December: The Stark Electric Space Literature & Arts (3 images)

2010 USA July: Naugatuck River Review Literature & Arts (Cover)
2010 USA October:  Metropolitan Magazine of Art’s & Culture (Cover + 5 images): Featured Artist: “Henry Avignon: A New Voice”

2010 USA November: Experiment-o (International e-zine) Literature & Arts (6 Images)

2010 USA December: Synchronized Chaos (International e-zine) Arts, Science, Culture (5 images)

Select Group Shows

2009 Rochester – USA Boulder Cafe & Gallery

2010 Philadelphia – USA James Oliver Gallery

2010 Rochester – USA Memorial Art Gallery

Spring 2011 (TBA) Chartres – France

Interviewers

The post “I don’t believe in art. I believe in death.” – Henry Avignon – an Artist of our Time first appeared on Prachya Review.

It was the end of 2013; I had read an article about Lydia Davis, who won the Man Booker that year. Before reading that article Lydia Davis was an unknown name to me. The writer wrote in the article that “Lydia Davis doesn’t complete her story!”. That was the punch line that struck me and pushed me to read her The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. And it was obvious to fall in love with her stories. So when it was my turn to take a poet or writer’s interview, Lydia Davis came to my mind.

Lydia Davis was born in July 15, 1947. She is described as the author of very short-short story (maybe the shortest stories ever written), though she always denies this term. Lydia Davis is considered these days as one of the original and prominent minds of contemporary American Literature. She is best known for translating from the French, Marcel Proust’s complex Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. James Wood, the critic, has described her as “a tempestuous Thomas Bernhard”. She is now a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.

This interview was taken via email. 

Shafinur Shafin: You said once in an interview that you knew from a very early age, writing was “more of a burden than a pleasure”. What did compel you to take this burden?

Lydia Davis: I think it was a little more complicated than that.  At first, being a child, I was curious and interested in writing. Then, after university, when I became more seriously committed to writing, that was when it felt more like a burden than a pleasure. And yet, there were pleasurable moments, or I would not have continued. Writing was my main interest in life, and I could not imagine doing anything else. And eventually, after a few years, writing became more and more of a pleasure, and ceased to be a burden.

Shafinur Shafin: How did your childhood and your parents influence you and your mindset for writing?

Lydia Davis: Well, both my parents were writers, and my father was also a teacher of writing as well as literature. So language and works of literature were the main interest of my parents (besides politics, I must add) and were discussed in the family all the time. I could not help considering these things important and paying attention to them.

Shafinur Shafin: You have broken all the patterns of stories/short  stories. There are not many dialogues or description and even most of the characters are anonymous. My observation is that some stories seem like self-conversation or monologues, such as “Odd Behavior”, “ Lost Things” etc. And you end the stories suddenly as if you are just throwing the destiny of the stories into the hands of the reader. Why is that? Do you do it consciously?

Lydia Davis: I am inspired or moved by things that happen or thoughts that occur to me. I want to put them into writing. But I do not try to make them longer or more complicated than they are. And so some stories are long and complicated, but other pieces of writing are very brief, just long enough to contain and express the idea or the thought. I do not consciously set out to make eccentric or strange pieces of writing, but just to adapt the form to the idea. It is true that the reader has, then, a very active role in the creation of the work.

Shafinur Shafin: Some critics say that your stories are not even short but short-short stories! Maybe only for you they are thinking of creating a new genre, because you have broken all the established concepts of storytelling. But you never named your stories as short stories. Any reason?

Lydia Davis: I always thought of the term “short story” as applying to the fully developed and extended narrative story of the sort written by Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor, and so on. So I cannot apply that term to most of my own stories. I like the word “story” because it can apply to so many different sorts of stories, whether something in the newspaper, or an anecdote told by a friend, or a fragment of narrative such as I sometimes offer.

Shafinur Shafin: Your stories and novel are more like poetry. Do you think so too? Please say something about this.

Lydia Davis: I think you mean that the language is musical or at least rhythmic and pleasing. I hope so. The fact is that I hear all language in my head as I read and as I write, and I am very aware of the sounds of the language and they are important to me. And yet I would not want my work to become too self-consciously poetic so that the style actually became intrusive and distracting. I like to write in plain language that is still eloquent.

Shafinur Shafin: What I like about your writing style is that the language is so easy and the sentences are not long and there are no difficult words to have trouble understanding. (Honestly speaking, there was no need to sit with a dictionary!) I think this writing-style of yours has made you widely accepted as a writer of the English language all around the world. Do you keep these things in your mind when you write?

Lydia Davis: It is nice of you to talk so positively about my writing style. I did not deliberately adopt a plain and “easy” writing style in order to be more easily understood. I simply prefer that sort of style for my own work. I like to speak plainly, as I said, without putting a barrier between me and the reader. But I enjoy reading all sorts of other styles of writing.

Shafinur Shafin: Do you edit your stories a lot? Or just keep them the way you wrote at first?

Lydia Davis: Most of the story comes out right away the way it will remain. But I go over the stories again and again, making small or sometimes large changes. I read through them many times until nothing more bothers me. So, yes, I revise very intensively, even the very shortest stories.

Shafinur Shafin: Man Booker International Prize is something very special. What changes occurred after that, in your life and in your writings?

Lydia Davis: It was indeed very special, and very surprising to me. I hope nothing changed in my approach to my writing, because that would not be a good thing. But certainly there was an increase in foreign interest in my books, and contracts for foreign translations. That was a good thing that came of it.

Shafinur Shafin: I personally feel translation is the most difficult task in any form of writing. (I always remember Frost’s quote about poetry — “What gets lost in translation!”) You have translated some French literary classics, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s” Madame Bovary. How and when do you feel that the readers are going to have the taste of the original?

Lydia Davis: I have been translating for more than forty years, and clearly I must enjoy it, as well as find it challenging (which it is). It is difficult, but it is very good practice for a writer. My method is to stay very close to the original text, when it is an important and good book, like the Proust and the Flaubert works.  I trust that if I follow the original very closely, while still writing eloquent and pleasing English, I will convey something of the original.

Shafinur Shafin: Most of the time women have  to make a balance between their personal and professional life. Often their life tends to be like walking on a sharp blade – ever prepared for a sacrifice, if any occur. You are a writer, translator, teacher and you have a personal life too. Have all these parts of Lydia Davis had any conflict with each other, or have made you face any hurdle when it comes to your writing?

Lydia Davis: It is always difficult (for men, too!) to balance the demands of what I see as four major things in one’s life: earning a living, raising a family, working at one’s art, and having a social life with friends and/or an active life in one’s community. When my children were small, I was much less active in my community, and I would usually do only two things at a time:  earn a living and care for my children;  or work at my art and earn my living (while the children were in school) and so forth. It is hard to balance everything, and sometimes you are sorry the baby is waking up from its nap because then you must stop writing. Some people do not have families, or are willing to have very little social life, or both. But if you want everything, then you just do your best to balance it all.

Interview taken by Shafinur Shafin, a poet and writer from Bangladesh

The post “I like to speak plainly without putting a barrier between me and the reader.” – Lydia Davis first appeared on Prachya Review.