::Imperial/Racial Privilege And Workshops::

There was a time today when I was angry. It wasn't a personal sort of anger, but anger which emerges from the helplessness of someone who is trying in her own way to be a better writer. Now, I will record the same questions I was asking myself this afternoon:

a. Am I responsible as a writer for my readers' lack of sociological knowledge?

b. I am not writing an ethnography of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I am writing stories--damn it. So, no, I am not going to explain the "social and cultural differences." Yes, someone said that in my fucking workshop-- Explain the social and cultural differences! I am pissed, because I read around 50 books every year. Almost 60% of them are on contexts into which I wasn't born. No, I don't expect any of the writers to "explain" to me the "social and cultural differences." When I feel like I don't know the history, I do the work. Period. So, this very assumption that it is the responsibility of the non-American writer to explain to the American reader what's going on, the "social and the cultural differences", clearly reeks of an imperial, white privilege. There isn't any other way to think about it.

c. A lot of the feedback I get from the workshops want me to do the work for my readers. They want me to fill in the gaps in their sociological/historical/anthropological knowledge. So, I have to do a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff, if I still want to get some benefits from the workshopping.

d. This makes me mad because the white and/or American writers can throw in a story to the group, sit back and not have to ever think of how "social and cultural differences" are working within their stories.

e. I don't bring up these issues inside the workshops. Why? Because I know none of these people are being deliberately racist and/or imperialist. More importantly, none of them wants to think of himself/herself as such. So my pointing these things out will cause them to have a knee-jerk reaction, they will stop commenting on my stories frequently. I don't want that to happen. The thing is, I have signed up for these workshops so that I can learn. I am not yet in a space as a writer to take up these issues. (Yet, I am, no? Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post.But I am not ready to take them up publicly yet.)

f. One would think, after the work of Gloria Anzaldua et al., this country, especially those who want to write, will have a better awareness of these kinds of representational/cultural politics. Nope! No such luck! Seems like every one of us colored folks will have to launch and plunge through our individual struggle!

Now that I have vented, and written this post, I need to go back to the actual work: writing my poems and stories. Maybe some day I will be able to talk about these things more explicitly. But now is not the time! Inshallah!

Teesta 2

I had been shrinking from writing about girls who embark upon intellectual quests in my stories, who look upon reading and writing as their primary forms of connection to the world. Rini was smart, and had intellectual quests, but what I wrote about was primarily about getting to occupy a space which has been reserved for men. So, there is an intellectual quest in the narrative, but that wasn't what the story focused on. Similarly, Toi wasn't a big reader. Bindudi's story had a completely different dimension, and of course, Pipli stories were very different in their themes and textures. I am wondering, is it that I am scared of exploring intellect as a site of feminine coming-of-age in my stories? Am I scared of finding these stories too autobiographical? Am I scared of being called pretentious? And I think, the answers are yes. But now that I have dissected this, I need to address it. So, I am thinking of making that reading-writing theme more explicit in the Teesta story. Once I begin to revise it, that is. Teesta has speaking impediments, great. That is why she depends more on the written word to express herself. I don't know how the actual writing will turn out, but it does seem to be an interesting possibility right now. But before that, I will have to finish laying out the event structure, the plot structure of the story. Let's see!

Teesta: Character Development

According to MD, the narrative of the Teesta story seems flat. I agree. I was trying to write about a politically naive girls' coming into some kind of social consciousness. I was trying to write about the classic teenage apathy to anything social, political that I have seen in my high-school buddies. In other words, I was trying to write about a girl very different from myself. Not only different from the person I am now, but also the person I was in my teens. Now, M's comment made me re-think something. I had been feeling the flatness even before he pointed it out to me. I had been feeling this flatness while I had been writing the story. It is as if I don't really know how to get inside Teesta's head. What I realized is that, I don't really know how to write about politically naive girls. Besides, why would a girl who is un-interested in arts, activism, politics, society be interested in anything that Teesta is taking upon herself to do in this story? None of the apathetic teens I knew in my neighborhood got involved in community leftist theater groups, would care about Anne Frank. So, I need to be upfront about it. I think I am beginning to figure out what was happening there. I was trying not to write about the classic leftist proto-type activist girl. I was afraid of falling into the socialist realist stereotype. But then, I haven't met anyone who is totally naive, totally in-interested suddenly beginning to inhabit the spaces I am trying to write about. Heck, someone totally naive and without a capacity to observe social norms wouldn't even observe and care about what I want to write as the culminating point of the story! So what am I afraid of?

Yes, I do not want to write a kind of triumphalist red-sun kind of a story. That's why I need to examine the contradictions of girlhood and an emerging political subjectivity thoroughly within this story. But a girl who is passionate otherwise, precocious, observant, with artistic impulses, but with a speaking impediment, a fear to speak out, should make for an interesting character. Because there are some glaring contradictions right there! And I need to explore those! And yes, I shouldn't really feel apologetic about the kinds of characters I explore in my stories. If I am primarily concerned about the people and subjectivities which crowd the post-Partition middle-class Bengali leftist subcultures, and the place of women within that, I need to write about their contradictions without feeling inhibited. That is my material, and while it might be too limited for some, there is no way I can be a writer without exploring the questions my life within such spaces had given rise to. Yes, basically, I need to go deeper into my own childhood, young adulthood to write about Teesta than I was daring to do in this story. So, right now, I know, I have a lot more to do in terms of the Teesta story, but I am beginning to feel a kind of peace about the whole thing too. Thanks, MD.