Random Rants and Fears

My productivity always goes down significantly during the months I live in Kolkata. I indulge in it, because this is the time I have ear-marked for myself for getting back to the community of friends and acquaintances whose presence and activities have helped me to be who I am right now. I don't know if there is any "back" in that sense, but the thing is, in the last seven years, I have never felt out of sync with Kolkata or India. No, it's not that I identify with everything that is happening in here. I have a fair amount of ideological/political/aesthetic/personal alienation from spaces and communities here, but it's not really the neither here nor there kind of alienation the so-called diasporic intellectuals seem to be in love with. In my opinion, all places in this planet are equally infested with problematic power relations, problematic ideologies etc. which make living hard. And in all those places, there are individuals and collectivities who are trying to deal with those structures/ideologies in their own ways. Whether I will grow as an individual or not, really depends upon how I negotiate with those individuals and collectivities and how deeply I am reflecting on them or representing those negotiations in my chosen medium.

Speaking of which, have just begun to work on a new short story. It's not coming together yet, but in my experience, some of the stories that I have gotten the biggest satisfaction from are the ones which I found the hardest to write. Probably because in those stories, I have simultaneously allowed and forced myself to go to places within which I am not exactly very comfortable. And I think, one of the biggest understandings that I have come to, through all these exercises in the last two years is that, I am kind of lacking (A LOT) in the Talent Department (Thank God!). Which means, I have to work hard, Hard, HARD, HARRRRRDDDDDD, to produce something that is halfway coherent. I am often worried that I am not putting in that amount of labor, I am slacking off, and some day, I will just get up in the morning and find that all the things I thought I had to say and write about, have vanished over-night, leaving a colorless hole in my head.

That's why, these days, I begin my writing days reading a random page from a book I love. If I can read, and still make sense of what is there in the page, probably it means, that the skin and all those other things in my head haven't eroded so much to form that hole. So, today was Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. So, today, this is the passage I read:

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History's smell.
Like old roses on a breeze
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

This is why, I have always believed that any good art is essentially also good theory. There is no way one can move about it.

Longish Short Story Done!

Not everything is okay in K-town. Lalgarh...I am in no position to undermine or trivialize the violence that has been unleashed in there...but apart from all the co-lateral damage involved,one cannot help recognizing this plain old fact that the states, all over the world, can be extremely funny and idiotic when they are scared. And quite ridiculous too! Not too many years ago, in Kenya, Ngugi wa'Thiongo's novel Matigari was arrested. This is not a typo. I am serious. They issued a fucking arrest warrant against a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if I witness something similar in my home-state!

In terms of my writing, I finally finished the story I had been working on (yay!). It was a painful process--writing this story. For one thing, it took me almost three months to finish it. Granted, in the middle of it all, I took my comprehensive exams, wrote and defended my dissertation proposal, but still, this is the longest short story that I have ever written. And during the entire process, I kept worrying about the plot, the voice, the cris-crossing of voices, point-of-view, characterization etc. But now, I realize that this story had been influenced a lot by the general tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, which I was reading during a big chunk of this time that I was writing this story.

I must confess, I am not a great fan of Lahiri's. I do think she is a very competent short story writer, and has a lot to teach in terms of the craft of short fiction. But for most part, she is replicating in a much more sensitive way the kind of assimilationist narrative that was popularized by Bharati Mukherjee and the ilk. No doubt Lahiri is much more sensitive and adept at representing more complex characters, but at the end of the day it is all about the American Dream. But what to do? If you are a Bengali, a writer and a poco-lit-critter, then you will end up bouncing against her. Even if you yourself choose to ignore her, people will ask your opinions about her and her work, and then you suddenly find yourself leafing through her books.

At the same time, I must confess that Unaccustomed Earth is a very important book to me. It has given me the permission to write long, novella-like short stories where nothing much happens. Where I want to deviate from Lahiri is, the whole complex question of how to represent women. My own thesis is that, Lahiri finds it extremely hard to represent feminine rebellion, feminine intellectuality, feminine radicalism. Consequently, her women characters tend to inhabit that space of demure Bengali femininity which does not nettle with either the mainstream South Asian/Bengali perceptions of womanhood, or the American/Western/white perceptions about hapless South Asian women. On the other hand, I like to think that this story is primarily about women resisting. In multiple ways. Across generational lines. And also, the failure to resist. I think the story is also about memory, destruction of memory and the vicious circle of violence within which families are often implicated.

My own sense is that, I still need to work on the concluding section of the story. Also, I know very very well that once I begin to send it out for feedback, there will be lots of things that I will need to revise. But for now, I will sit back for a while and celebrate!

Fairy-Tales, Characterization and Writing

The last week has been a breeze---the revision was turned in on time, Kolkata reached, bags unpacked etc. etc. My teacher called my work "a feminist, queer mythical-fabulist tale." I must concede, as a literary critic, who is used to deploying these and other such labels to talk about literary works, it did seem a bit strange to see them being used for my own creation. Honestly, I don't mind. Every text that has been created on the face of this planet,is inherently political, and I have no objection if someone spells out that politics in terms of such labels. But, I must say, that when I was writing, I was not thinking about these labels seriously. Rather, I was taken the act of writing itself, trying to think of the settings, the characters, the craft~the story in general. But then, the politics, the ideology have seeped in. Part of it has to do,I think, with the conscious thought I have put in behind the writing itself. After all, any choice that a writer makes vis-a-vis the craft cannot be but implicated within a complex history of signs and symbols. And therefore, politics and ideology.

Personally, I find this process exciting. At the end of the day, what it signifies for me is the fact that every word in a language is political. Every image that we conjure up in a text can be historicized.A while back, a good friend of mine, a writer and a voracious reader himself, had argued, that what matters in a text, when we read it or write it, is the "emotional resonance" that the process of reading or writing produces. The social and the political come much much later. I know it's not just my friend, but this is a very popular opinion in lots of ways. I would say, that "emotional resonance" itself is not outside of politics, society, and history. But more importantly, I don't see the social/political/ideological and the "emotional resonance" as two separate entities, or binaries. In that, I think, I am not in for that classical Marxist dichotomy between the form and the content. Rather, I would say, the form is as political as the content, and not only that, a form often times determines the content itself.

The funny thing is, I was somewhat pushed towards thinking about this specific aspect while working on this particular piece. I was trying to think of certain possibilities in the piece. For example,in this work, I am specifically interested in examining the mythical world of the Bengali folklore, and also throwing a little bit of the Grimms Brothers in the mix. So, the names of my characters are loosely based on the female characters one would find in Thakumar Jhuli, one of the classic compilations of the Bengali folktales. No, I am not trying to “rewrite” or “reform” Thakumar Jhuli. Neither am I trying to provide a more “politically correct” version of the stories therein. I am merely trying to imagine different lives for some of the female characters. Most of them either reside on the margins of the tales, or, are banished from the royal world most of these tales describe, precisely because they did something that was considered to be transgressive.

But there is something very interesting that I came up during the process. One of the feedbacks that I received from all of my writer/critic friends is that, the central characters of the piece did not always come out as full-fledged characters. Which made me think of the kind of characterization one comes across in classic fairy-tales or folk-tales. There isn’t much of detailed characterization in there. Most of the characters appear as archetypes, illuminating specific moral messages. Initially, I was thinking, if this is more of a case with female characters, but now that I think back on it, I will have to concede that no, it’s generally one of the central features of this form we call fairy-tales. I am still not very sure of the politics/sociology behind it, I am still fumbling. But, I am also concerned with another question:to what extent a contemporary writer can intervene with the characterization when one is engaging with the material that has been handed down to us by this existing body of literature commonly known as fairy-tales?

By the way, there is a beautiful translation of Thakumar Jhuli in English, called Tales My Grandmother Told Me by Rina Pritish Nandi. If you want to increase your fairy-tale repertoire beyond Grimms Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, feel free to check it out.

Revision/Writing

I am afraid of revisions. And being a slow person, who takes ages to process things, it's always hard for me to digest any feedback quickly and then jump right on to the revisions. That's why, this week will be interesting. I am trying to revise the first chapter of a novella for a writing workshop I am in right now. The whole thing developed out of a 2,500 word short story I wrote last year. So, when I enrolled for the workshop, I was thinking more in terms of revising this short-story, and making it into a more complete piece. I realized during the revision process, that this is the first prose/fiction piece I have written which is not realist. I guess, if I have to categorize it, it will fall somewhere between speculative, revisionist-mythical and fantastic. But then, once I turned in the short story, I realized, especially after receiving the initial round of feedback, that the material I have put out there within that 4,111 word long narrative, would need a slightly longer treatment. More fleshing out, more research, more exploration. So, now I am hooked into this process of writing a novella (yes yes along with a dissertation), and right now, revising the first chapter of it. As I said, I take a huge amount of time to revise, to make sense of things in a more organic, personalized way and to churn out materials which are halfway coherent. So, I don't know what am I going to do within a week! But I am finding this process exciting, as I am sitting in a window seat inside a cafe at Austin and reading a draft of the chapter, sipping on this weird beast called chai. I plan to write a little bit before I leave, maybe 500 words or so. So, let's see how that goes.

Coffee-Shops and Inky Madness

I love to read and write in coffee-shops.In the middle of the smell of baked goods, brewing coffee, bad metal music and the general din. I can spend hours in a coffee-shop, reading, writing and sipping some cheap-ass drink. Although I like to work together with friends or colleagues, often times, I just want to hang out alone in the coffee-shops, while reading and writing. I don't want the disruption of having to engage in a chit-chat or casual conversation. A friend of mine had once asked me why I like coffee-shops so much, and I had answered, Because I can be alone in there. The moment I said that, the irony of the whole thing struck me a little too much. Besides, there is no way I would ever go to Indian Coffee House, either in College Street or in Jadavpur in Kolkata, to read and write. I go there to meet with my friends, chat with them, and I have no desire to work in there. So, I often think about the notion of privacy that haunts us when we bring our work to cafes. I know, I work in coffee-shops because it provides me with a break from the monotony of my matchbox-apartment, it allows me to enjoy a private moment which is also intensely public. Similarly, often times I think about the racial dynamics in coffee-shops. How intensely white sometimes they are in this country!

And I keep thinking, wouldn't it be cool if someone does a project somewhere on the history, sociology, cultural studies of coffee-shops? Like, I would say, without hesitating at all, that the emergence of the coffee-shops in most Indian cities is inextricably linked to the emergence of neo-liberalism.

Shining Coffee-Shops=Shining India

But, I am not so sure of the social history of the coffee-shops in here! But just writing this post makes me think that currently I don't have any stories which are set in coffee-shops! It might actually be interesting to try to write one over the summer or at some point in my life. Speaking of which, I am thinking: writing indeed is a form of memorializing. So, I am wondering, what's the role of writer's own experience, or experience in general , in writing? I guess, it's a very old question. But the way I think about it, it's still a relevant one, something which every writer has to think through while figuring out one's own craft, aesthetics and politics!

What do you all think?

Responding to Elle's Post

I have often wondered what it is about the sound m. Why in so many languages in the world the word mother starts with this m sound. Mother. Ma. Madre. Mata. Maman. And a lot of the other variants we can think of.

I am not a mother.

I have been infantilized countless times in my life because I am not a mother.

My own mother, as her last weapon, often times, says to me, "Just wait till you become a mom. I will see how you feel when your own child behaves with you the way you are doing with me." I have told her every time, "Ma, I don't want to become a mom." I don't think she takes me seriously. It's just another sign of my not growing up, I guess.

I love kids. I smile at them in public places. And when I am in India, I touch them, play with them, make them giggle. I love kids because I see in them what this world can be. What I can be. What I could have. I love kids. My womb doesn't throb every time I see a kid, though.

I know plenty of "feminist" women who have written poems celebrating motherhood, and quite good ones too, while being crappy mothers themselves.

I don't equate my femininity with my capacity to reproduce. I shudder when my student says in class, now that i am a mom, i dont worry about my body image, you, know. i feel my body is now utilitarian. I shudder because I don't believe in utilitarianism. I don't believe women need to give birth in order to prove that they can be of use. I don't believe women need to be "beautiful" in order to be anything. I don't believe it's only motherhood which can somewhat replace that idea of mass-cultural beauty.

I don't get worried when I see that the most potent political alliance in my home-state West Bengal in India coins the slogan Ma Mati Manush(Mother, Land, Man) for the elections. After all, nationalism has a long history in using women as mother-symbols. I get hysteric when I see my leftist male friends, many of whom I consider my comrades, not feeling troubled by this coinage. I shed tears in silence when one of them calls me Euro-centric, coz I pointed it out. And then another says, you won't get it. you are not a mother, after all...guess what, by the time my mother was your age, i was 12.

I tell him, " I am not mother to anyone. I am teacher to many."

So, when Elle writes

outside and within some feminist communities, childfree women are under excessive pressure to conform to what is considered normative. Those who choose not to have children are regarded as suspect, strange, threatening. Their choices are dismissed as temporary or mean. Those who don’t have children, but for reasons other than choosing not to, are pitied, regarded as incomplete and barren--which has to be one of the coldest words I’ve ever heard used to describe a human being.

I find words of solace. solidarity.love.

And when she asks,

But how do you nurture and create community when things like this stand? When women are called “moos,” “breeders,” and “placenta-brains” and their children “widdle pweshuses” and “broods?”^^ When you cast your community as one in which women who have children and women who are childfree are diametrically (perhaps, diabolically) opposed and that mothers (gasp) are taking over the movement and leaving slack that others have to catch up? When it becomes clear that some of us are not welcome into your community? When your remarks indicate that you are, in fact, chillingly “independent of community?”

I know, here is someone who has raised the crucial questions in a far more competent way than I ever could have. So, a nod to this post. And a warm hug for writing this.

May we be never afraid of thoughts, debates, and impossible quests.

Writing About Violence, Writing About Childhood

Writing regularly has, for me, inadvertently, contributed to something. Well, to be honest, it has contributed to lots of things. But the biggest thing is, I have again gone back to short story as a reader. There isn't a whole lot of place within academic literary criticism to deal with short stories. Most of us work on "narratives", and that too, novels. So, for a long long time, I was caught up within it too.

In the last few days, I have read a really good short story–"Brownie" by an younger African-American writer, ZZ Packer. “Brownie,” is a look into the intersections of race, disability, class and the ways in which these things contribute to a violent childhood. A lot of the work I have produced as a writer in the last one year is about childhood and violence. The violence of growing up in gendered familial spaces, the violence of the school system, the violence of the playground. I am so not a believer in the idea of an “innocent” child. I mean, kids, as I remember from my own days, are violent. And mean. And cruel. They understand things way more than the adults think they can, they are soaking up the norms of this unequal world very very fast, and because they don’t have the adult polish, they express those violences without any inhibition. So, for me, as a writer, it’s hard to write about kids not because they are innocent, but because they process language differently, they articulate things differently. That’s why, I loved Packer’s story “Brownie.” It addresses all these things, without ever losing track of the childish ways of linguistic and conceptual cognition.

When I first began to write, I avoided going into the crazier places. I would try to skirt around the issues of violence, and write these all-too-pleasant stories, which wouldn't make much sense even to me. I realized that what I am really avoiding is going into my own series of childhood trauma. Trauma of growing up as a little girl. Trauma of growing up within broken political dreams. Trauma of going to school. And a lot more. The thing is, once I began to put myself through that self-examination, it became almost impossible to not write about violence, about the crazy shit that's this world. So after a while, I began to feel, that my writing almost automaticallly is going towards examining how my characters are capable of doing violence to others, or are trying to deal with violence done upon them. Although, I am still struggling with this issue, I think, this realization pushed my writing towards a new direction, towards a new kind of pacing, where I at least try to see how the so-called "bad things" (and I don't mean catastrophic here) lend upon a story lots of tension, make a writer look for multi-faceted characters. But, I think, the flip side of it, in my own writing is, this push has also slowed down my writing in a way. I get too involved in little details. And as much as I think the plot-driven, contemporary American short-story scenario erases too many subjectivities, too many stories, I don't think I want to write a novel or a short-story series like Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address. So, I am really stuck in this place, how does one narrate stories of childhood and systemic violence through the short-story form?