Dude, yes, I mean this, and I mean it in a Bill and Ted’s 3 kind of way. Like, totally. Be excellent to each other and READ THIS WRITER, Kuzhali Manickavel. Her writing is like familiar + familiar = delightful strange, and will leave you with the best kind of unsettled in the pit of your stomach.

A long time ago I joined Sepia Mutiny and saw Kuzhali Manickavel’s website (not necessarily in that order, although I think probably). And then I read her blog a lot, and then I laughed and laughed, and sometimes felt like crying, because she is so very funny but in a way that is also sad. And then I became the interim fiction editor of The Michigan Quarterly Review, and got her to give me a fabulous (FABULOUS) story called “The Underground Bird Sanctuary.” And then I got her to e-chat with me for Sepia. Kuzhali Manickavel is the author of a dark, hilarious collection of short fiction called Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, which you should RUN OUT AND BUY BECAUSE OF IT BEING JUST WIZZOW. I do not use CAPS LOCK or WIZZOW lightly. Please do this in an independent bookstore, if you still live in one of the places on earth that has one. And if you don’t, via the Amazon link (above), which will support the Scoobybunkergang in a teeny tiny way.

The story in MQR begins:

Kumar’s bones were pushing up under his skin like silent hills. His ribs rippled up in hardened waves while his shoulders and wrists stood out in knotted clumps. In the afternoons, I would count Kumar’s bones while he tried to sleep. [continued] Questions for Kuzhali Manickavel

VVG: I’m absurdly excited that we have your story, “The Underground Bird Sanctuary,” in this issue of MQR. What can you tell us about the genesis of the story? A lot of your work seems to have to do with people doing extraordinary things with bodies–their own, other people’s, and animals’. [Ed: See, for example, "Cats and Fish," which begins, "He stood on the sidewalk, pulling small, white cats out of his mouth..."] Anyway, I thought “The Underground Bird Sanctuary” was an awesome title, and wondered how you’d come up with it. Title first, or story first? (“Suicide Letter is the Most Common Form of Letter” and “The Butterfly Assassin” are two of my other faves…)

KM:I’m also absurdly excited also! This actually started out as a story about monkeys. We were having monkey problems a while ago and they would swarm over the house, opening doors and windows, stealing food, throwing things. And the only thing to do was lock yourself in and wait for them to leave. And I was thinking how disconnected this was from the idea that I used to have about monkeys, which I guess was a very touristy idea of ‘oooh, let’s feed them’, ‘oooh let’s take pictures’. It’s very different when you’re watching them from the window and they’re literally tearing everything up and all you can do is watch. And I thought about how that happens with people too, there’s a disconnect between the idea of what you think is going on and what’s really happening and sometimes that only clicks much later on. That’s how the story started out, not sure how much of that ultimately came through.

Since this started out with monkeys and ended up with birds, the title was literally a last minute change. The title ‘Suicide Letter is the Most Common Form of Letter’ is actually stolen from a dream someone told me about. But apparently I was in this dream and I had written this in a note to someone so I guess that makes it mine kinda.

VVG: What can you tell us about your writing and editing process? When, for example, did you start this story, and how many incarnations/versions/drafts did it have? How long did it take? Has your approach to flash fiction changed since you finished your collection, “Insects are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings”? How?

KM: I tend to do a lot of revision and go through a lot of drafts but this one went through more drafts than usual. I don’t write continuously so I think I must have worked on it on and off for more than a year. I do think my approach to flash has changed after my collection. Things take a lot longer to write now and I feel like I’m spending a lot more time on editing. After finishing a piece, I don’t get that sense of happiness or relief I used to get, now when I finish a piece I still feel like it’s not done. I think I’ve also started trashing more work than I used to.

VVG: Have you done research for any of your fiction?

KM: I end up doing research for most of my writing but a lot of it is for things that never even show up in the story or end up getting cut. I recently did some research on typhoid and while I eventually ditched the story, I found out that one personal acquaintance had typhoid three times. And one another acquaintance had typhoid and didn’t know it and then when they found out they had typhoid, they were like, oh ok whatever. So there’s that.

VVG: Lots of writers have somewhat tortured relationships with blogging–they do it to be newfangled, they love it passionately, hate it passionately, feel it drains them, find it enlivens their world. What sort of relationship does your blogging have to your flash fiction, if any?

KM: I don’t know if there’s any connection between my blogging and my flash fiction, I see them as two separate things. My blog is just a blog, although I think it ends up being disappointing for a lot of people who expect certain things from an “Indian writer” blog and instead there’s RuPaul and gifs and “bad English” so I can see how that can be really disappointing for people. If my blogging started making me feel very tortured, I would probably stop blogging. I’m a big fan of not doing things that make one feel tortured.

VVG: Who is the funniest person you know? (I ask this because of #7 on this list.)

KM: After giving this question much thought, I have to say I don’t know. This could be because I don’t know a lot of people but also, there are so many different kinds of humor and it comes out in very different ways, I don’t think I could ever say ok this is the funniest. However, I do know someone who hates birds because they have beaks and their wings flutter. And once I asked them what they thought of ostriches and they said ostriches were sluts because they stick their heads in the ground. I guess you had to be there.

VVG: What measures do you plan to take to remedy your inauthenticity? How can I use these measures myself? (I’m following up here on some of the stuff you’ve written about being an Indian Writer in English.)

KM: I myself am too far gone to be able to take any remedial steps with regard to my inauthenticity. But as always, I feel like this shouldn’t stop me from telling other people what to do. I think an incredibly effective way for all brown people to gain authenticity is to write about slums. I’m currently working on a handy booklet called How to Write Your Awesome Indian Slum Novel but I don’t mind sharing some of those pointers here.

Have one Dalit family. The Dalit family is important because it’s your chance to dump every kind of terriblehorriblenogoodverybad thing onto one set of individuals who have no other purpose in life except to have terriblehorriblenogoodverybad things happen to them. Allow these people to smile wearily once during the course of the novel, to show that they are still happy even though all these terriblehorriblenogoodverybad things happen to them. Because it’s a very casteist thing to assume that just because they are Dalits, they can’t smile.

Have frustrated upper middle class housewife behaving inappropriately with voluptuous servant girl from the slum. Imbibe said servant girl with extensive knowledge of the Kama Sutra. Do not be lazy and say ‘she writhed like an exotic Indian animal’, be specific by saying she writhed like an exotic Indian snake. Remember, the only time specificity is not necessary is when you write about Africa.

Have one gang rape of a seven-year-old girl written from the point of view of the seven-year-old, making sure that said seven-year-old talks in severely broken English because all Indian seven-year-olds talk severely broken English in their heads.

Have one ‘colorful Hindu festival’. When describing this festival, have a color palette handy and ensure you mention each color twice.

Do not call any of the Hindu Gods/Goddesses by name. Instead, refer to them as ‘Elephant-faced God’, ‘Terrible God of Destruction’, ‘Blue-Hued Butter Thief’ and ‘Fierce Goddess Wearing Necklace of Skulls’. Call them all ‘Indian Gods’. Do not include Jesus in this pantheon because Jesus is American.

VVG: I see you enjoyed the VIDA pie charts as much as I did. Can you name a favorite journal or two? Say, #2 or #3 after MQR?

KM: I love pie charts! Especially when they tell us about gender disparity in publishing! I just have one favorite journal at the moment, Locus Novus. I’m not sure about the gender disparity tally in this journal. Hopefully Locus Novus will make some kind of multi-media pie chart flash thingy on that.

VVG: Who/what are you reading now? What movies are you watching? Music? Recommendations for our Sepia Mutiny readers?

KM: Right now I’m reading The Pickwick Papers and Death of a Salesman. I realize I should be reading some kind of underground Tamil magic realist and also realist novel but I’m not and I’m sorry. I haven’t watched any movies recently or if I have, I can’t remember what they were. I remember watching ‘Tideland’ a while ago, which I liked a lot. And ‘Audition,’ which I also liked. I’ve been listening to different mashups of Born This Way and Express Yourself because I think both of them together make a really neat third song that is getting lost in the Madonna Vs GaGa Internetz Wars.

My recommendation is if you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you. I realize that’s not the kind of recommendation you had in mind but I like that quote a lot and I really wanted to use it somewhere.

VVG: What are you working on now? (Yes, I know CM sort of asked you this, but I want to ask AGAIN in case the answer has changed.)

KM: I’m afraid the answer hasn’t changed, it remains the same flaky response of ‘hopefully second book will happen at some point’. I feel like this answer reflects badly on myself and the entire writing community and humanity in general.

VVG: What do you consider “experimental”?

KM: I think a lot of the Doordarshan regional programming prior to the satellite boom was incredibly experimental for me. In particular, I would mention the patriotic songs they would put on in between the blank space that they put on in between the shows. These songs were often cut midway so we could go back to looking at the blank space although sometimes this blank space was substituted with blanched pictures of coconut trees or a flower or some cue cards that we weren’t supposed to see. And sometimes they would do very long, lingering close-ups of plastic flowers that had flies on it. I feel like a lot of Doordarshan programming should be viewed as ‘experimental’, it makes much more sense that way.

VVG: As you know, I am downright obsessed with your brilliant Tehelka piece, “M.I.A. Ruins Everything,” which is an awesome piece of satire. Any other celebrities, enemies of celebrities, or fans of celebrities who should beware your facile pen? I also noticed that there are two versions of your piece–the Tehelka one and yours on your blog. Thoughts on the differences and why they are important?

KM: Thank you very much for appreciating it and also, I do want to take this opportunity to say I’m really sorry to those who were offended because they thought this piece was anti-white people or anti-brown people or anti-MIA or just made irresponsible use of the word ‘uterus’. I’m not really sorry but anyway. I don’t think there are any major differences between the two versions of the piece, I think the one on Tehelka got slightly edited in the first para but I liked my version better so I kept that on the blog.

Also, I’m not a hater so if you make a sizable donation to one of my funds/societies, I won’t say anything bad about you on my blog. You may consider donating to the Society To Provide Infant Browntots In The East Indies With Flannel Waistcoats And Moral Pocket-Handkerchiefs, the I’m an Exotic Third World Writer So You Should Give Me Money Fund, the I Can’t Speak My Mother Tongue Properly Fund and the No One Cares About Sheila And Her Jawani Fund.

VVG: You have dissected, like insects, certain ideas about Tamil Culture. (I am always interested in how sure some people are they know what the Tamil Diaspora is and about the Quality of Being Tamil. What do you think makes someone Tamil? Speaking Tamil? Being 900 percent Tamil?) [Ed: That link's just one of my faves, but there are plenty of others.]

KM: Given the amount of diversity among people who identify as Tamil, I’m not really sure who’s deciding what the standard is when they say this is Tamil and this isn’t. Like this is a Tamil song.

But if you say a Tamil song has to be completely in Tamil, then this song fails spectacularly because a large portion of the lyrics are in English. And yet to say this isn’t a Tamil song is so ludicrous I can’t even say. I do get a lot of questioning and judging about my own Tamil identity but that’s something I’m not really interested in justifying or explaining. Besides, the Government of Tamil Nadu thought I was Tamil enough to get a ration television. With remote control. So bump ya’ll bitches.

VVG: Where is the Tropicool Icy Land Urban Indian Slum? If the Aadi Velli Special Non-Cola Cola is Export-Quality, when will it be exported? A few of your pieces of fiction circle around this spot, and I’m wondering if we’ll see more of your work return there.

KM: I’m afraid the Minty-Fresh Export-Quality Aadi Velli Special Non-Cola Cola will never actually be exported, it’s just export-quality. Like it could be exported if it really wanted to be but it opted to stay behind in India and be served among the native peoples because it is noble and awesome like that. This is also sometimes written as ‘import-quality’ which means exactly the same thing.

I certainly hope to write more stuff set in the Tropicool Icy Land Urban Indian Slum, I like it there. I would go there if I knew where it was.

Links:

How To Wear An Indian Village

More tasty chapatis! Mentions of Kuzhali and her publisher, Blaft, via the Mystery Man: The Blaftness of Blaft

The issue’s themes and cover art by truck artist Islam Gull is brought to life in this cool short video

I’m still working my way through the issue, but How to write about Pakistan, an online collaboration between Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Muennudin, and Kamila Shamsie caught my eye. Inspired by Granta’s most popular feature Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical piece, How to write about Africa (“Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari” in your title’,” it begins), here are the the top ten rules for novices keen to write about Pakistan:

1. Must have mangoes.
2. Must have maids who serve mangoes.
3. Maids must have affairs with man servants who should occasionally steal mangoes.
4. Masters must lecture on history of mangoes and forgive the thieving servant.
5. Calls to prayer must be rendered to capture the mood of a nation disappointed by the failing crop of mangoes.
6. The mango flavour must linger for a few paragraphs.
7. And turn into a flashback to Partition.
8. Characters originating in rural areas must fight to prove that their mango is bigger than yours.
9. Fundamentalist mangoes must have more texture; secular mangoes should have artificial flavouring.
10. Mangoes that ripen in creative writing workshops must be rushed to the market before they go bad.

[Don't stop here. Do read the whole piece.]

Those of you who have been long-time SM followers will surely remember Manish’s Anatomy of a Genre from back in the day.

Here’s my question: If you were amending this list into an “How to write about India” or “How to write about Sri Lanka” or “How to write about Bangladesh” what would you change? What would you keep the same?

[Amitava Kumar and Lorraine Adams will be in conversation today, August 27, at 6.30 PM at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Admission is free.]

I have just received a letter from a man in prison. His name is Hemant Lakhani. Lakhani was a women’s clothing salesman who, in 2005, was convicted of selling an Igla missile to an FBI informant posing as a member of a jihadist organization.

Lakhani is one of the people I write about in my new book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb. He learned about the book’s publication by reading a review in the New York Times.

Mr. Lakhani writes to congratulate me but also to invite me back. There is more to tell, he writes. If I listen to his story, and write about it, he promises me that the book will be a bestseller. I will be interviewed by the mainstream press, including Charlie Ross (sic).

The Times review had also mentioned that I had visited a strip-club outside the Missouri high-security prison where Lakhani is incarcerated. I had a conversation there with a dancer about the man I had come to meet in Missouri. This didn’t sit well with Mr Lakhani and he writes in his letter that I must promise him that I will not go back to the strip-club again. Actually, in my opinion, Mr Lakhani is neither very moral nor very smart. But like his lawyer I’m very convinced that his client would not have made a good arms smuggler. No real terrorist would have come to him. There is little chance that he would have acquired a missile unless the FBI had arranged for one to be given to him.

Mr Lakhani is 75 years old and in poor health. It is very likely that he will die in prison. His letter to me is a sad document, and I apprehend its appeal, but I’m unwilling to engage it any further. It is true that I’m critical of the US government’s war on terror, and its futile and expensive engagement with minor characters like Mr. Lakhani. But that doesn’t mean that I’m also willing to pack up my bags any time soon and leave for Missouri.

But mine is hardly the only way to write about the war on terror.

Lorraine Adams is an American writer who was awarded a Pulitzer for work in journalism. But she quit her job as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post to write a prize-winning debut novel, Harbor. The novel tells the story of Aziz Arkoun, a 24-year-old Algerian stowaway who surfaces in the waters of Boston harbor.

Aziz was based on a real-life character, an Algerian man named Aziz Ouali, a 26-year-old East Boston dishwasher. He too had been a stowaway. After spending 52 days in the hold, he had swum ashore. This was in the late nineties. An Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam tried to cross into the US, near Seattle, with the trunk of his rental car packed with explosives. Soon, the government carried out a massive sweep, detaining Algerians across the board. Ressam was carrying a cellphone number that led the police to another Algerian man who was a room-mate of Aziz Ouali’s. They were all arrested.

In Adams’s treatment of her character, there is a great deal of sympathy. Aziz Arkoun has a rich past; like Ouali, he is a refugee from political violence. But, in what is certainly more a feature of fiction, Adams endows her protagonist with a fine and sensitive interior life. He is sentient in a way that earns the reader’s respect.

A few months ago, Adams wrote about the fate of Aziz Ouali. He was in prison, awaiting deportation. Ouali is a flawed character, of course, and Adams’s attention to this ambiguity is a part of the persuasiveness of her plea. In fact, the many pitfalls in his life, some of his own doing, make for heartbreaking reading.

In doing what she is doing, Adams has produced fiction that stands in opposition to the Manichean fictions of the post-9/11 state. In Mao II, Don DeLillo had famously written: “I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” But people like to repeat this quote without in any way elaborating on the fact that the surveillance state has been most successful at governing our social spaces and our individual imaginations. An Aziz Ouali knows he is alive, or he is well, or if his family is whole, if he can see the outline of his face on a tiny piece of plastic called a green card.

The argument I am making here could be made clearer with another example. Do you remember the news-report about a videotape that showed Jose Padilla, jailed in solitary confinement for three and a half years, being taken out to a dentist? Padilla, jailed on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, had been in his cell in the army brig in Charleston, South Carolina. In the report, his lawyers said that the video-tape showed that the torture, including solitary confinement, which their client has undergone at the hands of the military, has left him so psychologically damaged that he could not stand trial. In fact, Padilla’s lawyers had a difficult time persuading him that they were on his side.

In an article in Artforum, critic Graham Bader had this to say about Padilla: “In the videotape documenting one short episode of his military detention, he is shown on his way to a root canal down the hall from his cell, wearing blackout goggles and noise-blocking headphones, thereby prevented from experiencing even briefly anything outside himself, outside his merest existence as bare life, wholly at the whim of the state.” The video is testimony to “the state’s role in authoring the most basic experiences of life and death.”

The state is the real author, not Adams, not I. The state produces our stories and handcuffs them to our selves. We can reach out for other stories, but it is difficult. Adams has written that Ouali didn’t have enough English to read Harbor. His wife, an American woman from Boston, never told him about it. She said it was too painful.

Amitava Kumar and Lorraine Adams will be in conversation today, August 27, at 6.30 PM at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Admission is free.

Klingeman: “Do you go to parties and talk to people about what you do for a living and tell them that you’re an informant?” Rehman: “No, sir.” Klingeman: “So again, who shows you respect for what you do?” Rehman: “Whenever you see any crime behind it there’s an informant and when someone is arrested. And when any time someone stops the crime behind it there’s an informant. And the whole world respects him. That–when I say respect that’s what I mean.” I was struck by this exchange, mostly because it showed the informant as the mirror image of the defendant: a man of small means, beset with difficulties, projecting himself onto a grand stage. Each one was a failed man in many ways, a failed man, with more than a touch of desperation, dreaming of success. Both were immigrants, afraid of their perceived worthlessness, worried at the ways in which each plan they had devised had proved ineffectual. Each one tried to impress the other about how he was at home in the West. The two had their origins in enemy countries divided by a border; not once did they talk of their own religious difference or say anything bad about the other’s faith or religion. The two men were worried about their families and both were committed to the cheap art of the hustle. Each believed in making a deal. Each was lying for a cause, if dreaming of a better life can be described as a cause. I wonder whether at any time during their association as business partners, there had been a moment when one of them had seen himself in the other, and whether this recognition had made him flinch.

I very much wanted to share this with Sepia Mutiny readers. If Amardeep is not going to be around, someone else will have to answer the question whether the readers here, in contrast to the listeners of the Leonard Lopate Show, will find something different or more resonant in passages like the one I have quoted above. Because one of the things I think you’ve been talking about is the shaping of a reading practice: through the cultivation of affiliations but also the discovery of sympathy, often sympathy rooted in shared histories. Thank you, Amardeep, for having so long held a mirror for us.

P.S. For more on the art shown here, visit the “Malleable Memory” Exhibit at the Aicon Gallery in NYC. The show is curated by Nitin Mukul. At the beginning of this blog post, you see Eric Ayotte’s “Media Event (The Wish)” and, at the bottom, Anjali Srinivasan’s “Mirror Painting #4″. (In the middle is the “Unda Chicken Roll” illustration from the Kati Roll Menu.

But “write what you know” is also much, much harder than it might seem. At times, it can even feel like a chain around your neck — though that doesn’t mean you can just walk away from it. In his new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing, Amitava Kumar acknowledges the problem directly in what might be my favorite line of the book: “If you could tell just any story you wanted, no demands ever needed to be made on your honesty.” [Another favorite line: "Bihari society was conservative; it was also corrupt, hollow to its core; you put a finger on its thin, distended skin and it split under your touch, revealing white worms"]

For Amitava Kumar, who was born and raised in Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, it’s Bihar that encapsulates the memories and history that are what the author “knows,” and what he returns to (always slightly differently), in book after book. “Honesty” and “Bihar” live in the same site for Amitava, and yet the content of that Honesty — the Truth one seeks to represent — remains stubbornly elusive. Kumar’s recently-published novel Nobody Does the Right Thing, which was first published as Home Products in India in 2007, continues to develop this theme. It’s a terrific novel, which I think will be challenging to many readers in the Indian subcontinent as well as the West, but many of the elements that make it challenging are also what make it great. For the new Duke University Press edition of his novel, Amitava has produced a new edit of the book, and provided a little character guide to orient the reader, though he doesn’t give a glossary, italicize Hindi words, or back away from naming concrete aspects of the material world: specific towns and regions all over northern India, the names of prominent politicians or common points of historical reference, and so on. In one sense, Amitava’s novel might be seen as a translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language, but it’s a translation that leaves a certain level of opacity intact. (Still, it’s not hard to put two and two together if you’re willing to try. Look it up, baby.)

Readers of this blog may already have somewhat of a sense of who Amitava Kumar is from the posts he has been putting up here in recent weeks, but I thought it might be helpful to briefly proffer my own re-introduction, as a long-time reader of Amitava’s works (he is also a personal friend).

Amitava Kumar has published close to a dozen books in a relatively short span of time, and is one of the most accomplished South Asian diaspora literary critics and journalists working today. I started hearing his name spoken of in awed tones by fellow-graduate students around 2000, the year he published Passport Photos, a breakthrough work that combined cultural criticism of the South Asian diaspora with literary theory, scraps of the author’s own poetry, political interventions, and autobiography. I also heard good things about his documentary about the Indian community in Trinidad, Pure Chutney (1998), though I didn’t end up seeing it until this summer. Another highly recommended early book is Bombay, London, New York (2002), which continues the trajectory set out by Passport Photos. There is a good deal we could say about these earlier books (as well as important collections and anthologies published more recently, such as World Bank Literature, and Away: the Indian Writer as Expatriate), but for now it might be sufficient to simply suggest that the ‘collage’ style of Kumar’s writing, the diverse range of subjects he considers, and the emphasis on immediacy and first-person involvement, ought to make his writing appealing to people who read blogs like this one. Kumar’s writing style was already somewhat “bloggy” even before the word “weblog” was coined.

As I understand it, Amitava was at work on this novel as early as 2004-2005, and published a longer version of Nobody Does the Right Thing in 2007 as Home Products — only in the Indian market. Amitava shopped around amongst U.S. publishers looking for a home, but only succeeded in finding one this year, with Duke University Press. His essay on what it was like to write the novel, “How to Write a Novel,” from conception to completion, might be inspiring to anyone who has had aspirations of publishing a novel themselves:

Amitava Kumar, How to Write a Novel

Amitava has also published a non-fiction work with Duke University Press this summer, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which has been aptly reviewed by the website The Complete Review:

The Complete Review on A Foreigner…..

Also, see an excerpt from an early chapter, relating to the American government’s case against Hemant Lekhani, at Guernica magazine.

Amitava Kumar, Birth of a Salesaman

This is an important book in its own right — a must read for anyone who has had doubts about the “War on Terror,” as prosecuted either by the Governments of India or the United States. I won’t be reviewing that book here, however. (I may review it on my personal blog sometime soon.)

The Novel Itself:

Nobody Does the Right Thing is a story about a young journalist named Binod Singh, who sets out, on the encouragement of a movie-producer, to write a screenplay based on a true event that he hoped would make him famous. The story at issue relates to a teenage girl named Mala Srivastava who had had an affair with a Patna politician, only to be mysteriously murdered. After Binod published the article in an English-language, Bombay-based daily newspaper about the murdered young woman, he gets a call from a movie producer, who wants him to turn it into a film script. But he finds writing that script much more difficult than he would have expected; among other things, her family are extremely suspicious of him and uncooperative. Binod turns to his own family-members, who are themselves bit-players in Bihari politics, for help, but finds himself growing increasingly involved in his family’s story (which has its own bodies buried in various places), rather than the girl’s. Over time, his subject seems to shift, and he grows increasingly aware that keeping his finger on the “truth” of the matter is a challenging proposition. Finally, he has to decide whether he wants to stay committed to finding and recording the truth and remain somewhat marginal, or take a much easier path to success through the preparation of fanciful melodramas, for which there is always a ready audience in the Indian media-sphere.

Earlier I stated that I see this novel as an attempt at a “translation of life in the Hindi belt to the medium of the English language”; this is not a trivial part of what Amitava is up to here. This is a novel that pays quite close attention to the intricacies of language — the different registers of Hindi. It comes up again and again with Binod:

When he had come out of university, he wrote in both Hindi and English. He used to file all news reports in English, but his more reflective essays on Sunday were for the siter paper in Hindi. These essays were filled with nostalgia and protest, and reflected perhaps the loneliness he had felt while living away from home in Delhi.

[...] The essays appeared under the heading Aayeena, which means “mirror” in Hindi. After a few months of this, Binod’s editor told him that he needed to look in the mirror and decide what he wanted to be, a journalist in English or Hindi. The choice was easy. There were more readers for the Hindi papers but the money was in the English.

Nevertheless, while writing entirely in English, Binod found that he could not talk very easily about villages and small towns. He lacked the idiom to express his feelings directly about harvests or heavy rains that led to flooding, the excitement and then the numbing that followed the news of another caste massacre, the familiar bare roads that cut through fields and shone at night under the moon’s light, the sounds of a woman’s bangles coming across a pond in the dark. He wanted to talk about the routine of travel during Holi and Diwali in the unreserved compartment of third-rate trains like the Shram Jeevi Express — but who among the readers of English newspapers in Delhi would find any appeal in such things? There were only so many times that he could remind his reader that you could not understand the pain of the man who brought your milk or drove your car unless you too needed to go back to your village every six months to find out whether the child who had four milk teeth last time had now learned to call your name when shown your photograph. (9)

The idea that Binod’s writing in English feels somewhat disconnected rings true, from my experience reading of some of India’s English-language newspapers. (Amitava also hints that journalistic writing in the Indian media comes alive in a different way in print in Hindi and other Indian languages — though liveliness of the non-English presses can also pose some problems. Still, it’s worth remembering that the circulation of Hindi language newspapers in particular dwarfs that of English, even at a moment when people are alternately celebrating and bemoaning the rise of Global English.)

Interestingly, the issue of the relationship to English seems to be one moment in the novel where Amitava’s protagonist does not seem to be an autobiographical proxy. Though Amitava has himself come out of the Hindi belt to write exclusively in English, his own writing in English has never seemed to lack expressiveness or a sense of personal engagement.

I have described Nobody Does the Right Thing as a novel engaged in a kind of cultural translation of life in urban Bihar at the present moment in Hindi-inflected English. But one shouldn’t be confused by that description into thinking that the novel is some kind of 21st century sequel to Premchand’s Godaan. To get today’s Bihar right, you cannot merely write about shady small-town politics, farmers, and village caste grievances, and leave it at that. (Not that Godaan was limited to that either — in fact, even that village novel was cosmopolitan to a considerable extent.) Kumar’s characters in Patna in Nobody Does the Right Thing are deeply impacted by events around the world: 9/11, the war on terror, and Indian national politics (the setting is 2004, a national election year). And yet those broader events and crises do not seem to alter certain fundamental dynamics: a way of living, a culture, and a set of social relationships remains basically intact.

The novel also expresses a more than passing passion for Hindi films, both classic and contemporary. There is quite a bit of discussion of films, from Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen, to the films of the 2000s. Real Bollywood stars make cameos in the novel from time to time, and there is a definite awareness of the financial and cultural dynamics of the Bombay film world in the novel, including even a brief reference British woman writing a dissertation about Bombay cinema — a young woman to whom the stars seem to pay just a little too much attention.

Scattered through Kumar’s novel are some great meditations on the way commercial Hindi films work in everyday life in India’s small towns and villages. One of the characters in Kumar’s novel describes it as follows:

Small-town people tear their shirts open when they are felling very excited. They do that when a hit song is on the screen. When some titillating dance is going on, you see coins being thrown at the screen. It’s madness. They don’t hold back any emotion, they don’t care a damn what people think. If they want to cry, they cry or howl in the theater. In cities, audiences go to the theater with expectation, they come to enjoy the film and if you betray them, and you let them down and you can’t hold them, then you’ll see empty theaters the next day. They are extreme in their emotions; the city people aren’t–I would say they don’t know how to enjoy a Hiindi film.”

This is also a novel deeply engaged with British and American literature, and intellectual life. So Amitava also works in references to George Orwell (who was born in Bihar, though few people are aware of that fact), Jean-Paul Sartre, Tennessee Williams, and many others. In short, the characters in Kumar’s novel are pretty thoroughly cosmopolitan, without its characters ever having left India. (That said, it’s a somewhat different kind of comopolitanism than that expressed by the writers of the ‘Doon School Mafia’; the key difference here seems to be the closeness to Hindi, and the fact that the main characters remain regionally and ethno-linguistically marked.)

Finally, this is a novel that aims to reflect globalization, liberalization, and the revolution in everyday life brought about by the technological changes of the past two decades — from cell phones to the internet. The Starr Report makes an appearance — though in Kumar’s account it’s sold in bootleg Hindi translations as a pulpy paperback kind of pornography (with some completely fictional material by a translator inserted for ‘paisa vasool’). Along the same lines, one of the main characters runs a cybercafe in Patna that is busted for promoting obscenity, since its clients primarily use it to look at porn in closed cubicles (sometimes as couples). And the legacy of the Tehelka arms scandal — an internet era event, provoked by a website, rather than a conventional news source — is not far in the background either.

Revisiting the Authenticity Debate (briefly)

A couple of years ago, I contrasted Home Products to Aravind Adiga’s Booker-Prize winning novel, The White Tiger. Both are novels in English with protagonists who are from Bihar (though the state is not directly named in Adiga’s novel, the location is clearly implied). Both are also novels written by diasporic journalists who had been inspired by their journalistic work. I won’t rehash all of it all over again, though let me recommend an article Amitava himself wrote, mentioning The White Tiger as part of a survey of the “authenticity” debate in the Indian English novel.

Amitava Kumar, “Bad News: Authenticity and the South Asian Political Novel”

Amitava’s assessment lines up pretty closely with my own, though he goes in a somewhat different direction with his piece. For reference, one of my posts about Adiga’s novel is here:

Why I Didn’t Like The White Tiger

One could, of course, observe that it’s a little dangerous for one aspiring novelist to be dismissing another novelist’s work (with a superficially similar profile and theme), and to his credit Amitava readily acknowledges that potential conflict of interest in his essay, after quoting a slightly slapdash passage from Adiga’s novel on the relations between men and women in a Bihari village. Here is Kumar’s response to Adiga (for the passage in question, click on the first link above):

I have witnessed such men, and sometimes women, coming back to their village homes countless times. The novelist seems to know next to nothing about either the love or the despair of the people he writes about. I want to know if others, who might never have visited Bihar, read the passage above and recognize how wrong it is, how the appearance of verisimilitude belies the emotional truths of life in Bihar.

As I continued [to read Adiga's book], I found on nearly every page a familiar observation or a fine phrase, and on nearly every page inevitably something that sounds false. I stopped reading on page thirty-five.

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel’s pages. By presenting these events through a journalist’s eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.

Incidentally, Amitava also spells out his dislikes in greater detail in an article in The Hindu from November 2008:

Amitava Kumar, “On Adiga’s The White Tiger”

Another way of making this complaint: Adiga’s novel claims to be a wake-up call to the “World is Flat”/”India Shining” triumphalists. But The White Tiger’s anti-elitist stance is more a rhetorical pose than anything else, not really borne out by any strong familiarity with the world it describes. The fact that it is a pose is not to say that it is entirely false. But it is considerably more limited; the book is more like an Op-Ed and less like a substantial portrait of a society.

Are there flaws with Nobody Does the Right Thing? Maybe. The condensed format of the American version of the novel has slightly reduced the amount of time we spend with each character, with the result being that we don’t have a very fully developed picture of some of the secondary characters in the book.

The novel also opens with an intriguing mystery regarding the murdered poetess Mala Srivastava, suggesting that it might turn out be a page turner. In fact, Nobody Does the Right Thing is more a reflective character study than a thriller, and readers looking for the excitements of a Stieg Larrson type book, full of clearly-delineated victims and scheming perpetrators, may be disappointed. Kumar’s world is much grayer, with a largely sympathetic blackmailer/pornographer in Binod’s cousin Rabinder.

Overall, Nobody Does the Right Thing should provoke a lively debate about life in contemporary India for readers — both those with personal connections to the Indian subcontinent and those who don’t know it very well. It has the ambitions and themes one sees in “big novels,” though it comes in a pretty modest package. It admittedly doesn’t give you a clean “takeaway” — a buzzword or easy moral that can become a Tweetable tagline (i.e., “All is well!”) — but then, that’s exactly the point.

Folks, this is my last post at Sepia Mutiny. It’s been a great five years that I’ve been involved with the site, and I continue to have great respect for the site and the bloggers here. However, it’s time for me to step away to pursue some other projects, on a somewhat smaller scale. If you’re interested in following my writing, you can find me at http://www.electrostani.com, and @electrostani at Twitter (http://twitter.com/electrostani).

Cheers!

[Originally published in The Caravan under the title "A Normal Man in a Not So Normal World." Photos by Preston Merchant.]

On a warm July morning, I boarded the London Tube to Boston Manor station. The southbound Piccadilly Line, represented by a Navy Blue line on my map, would terminate at Heathrow airport. My stop came a few stations before the line ended.

The people I had come to meet were waiting outside in a car, and after introductions had been made, we drove to a store to buy meat and beer for lunch. The man who was driving was in his early 30s. He wore a stylish shirt and dark glasses. His name was Aryian Singh, but he later told me that this wasn’t what he had been named at birth. He had changed his name after he had come out of prison. When I questioned him about his job, he said he was working on a couple of film projects but didn’t provide details. I noticed that there were small scars on his face. I later learned that a couple of them were from injuries inflicted by his mother when he was a kid–once, his mother had smashed his face with a milk bottle.

The man whose face I was now watching in the rearview mirror interested me. His name change and the reason for it wasn’t what one has come to expect as a staple of Indian fiction about diasporic lives–Samiullah changing to Sam or a Madhu becoming Maddy, one pining for the neem tree outside his ancestral home and the other for her mother’s cardamom-scented fish curry. In those stories, particularly those written in the US, the only crime a human seems capable of is forgetting to write a letter home. Or if there are transgressions they seem to have blossomed out of a fantasy spun out in a garden called a creative writing MFA program. But Aryian Singh’s story appeared to be different. Sitting in the backseat of the silver Mercedes E220, I imagined an entry into another life. Not one offered as homage to quiet domesticity but one lived in recognition of the reality of the street. Singh lives in a modest, semi-detached house with his wife and a couple of boarders. There is also a dog in the house, a handsome German Shepherd named Simba. Singh’s father, a large, taciturn man named Gurdev, was in the house that day. He had come from India as a teenager several decades ago and worked first in a factory that printed labels for bottles. He had also worked in construction, and as a cook, making chicken tikka at a restaurant. He now began to prepare the chicken and fish that his son had bought at a Punjabi butchery on Uxbridge Road after picking me up at the station.

We were sitting around a tiny table in the kitchen, a few feet from the stove, drinking beer from tall glasses. Singh’s wife was away, visiting her family, but he wanted to show me their wedding album. I saw from the photographs that the wedding had cost money; and the commemorative album came boxed in black velvet. It was while looking at the album that I noticed that Singh’s mother was missing from the pictures.

The older man rarely spoke but his son joked with him, and teased him with sexual banter, and this surprised me. This was because the father, Gurdev, despite his many-decades-long absence from India, could still be mistaken for a man from Jallandhar. Gurdev was probably used to more deferential, patriarchal treatment. When I commented on their warm relationship, the son told me quite frankly that his father had been missing from his life for eight years. His parents had separated when he was young, and when he was 13 his mother gave him up to social services. He became a ward of the state, and lived in a succession of children’s homes. He hadn’t been in touch with his father, and rarely saw his mother. He was no longer attending school after he lost his home. He said he had been in trouble with the law. But one day, standing outside a children’s home with a girl, he saw Gurdev visiting the house next door. “That’s my Dad,” he said to the girl, who thought he was joking. When his father came out of the house, he recognized the boy whom he had not seen for several years and asked, “Kiddaan? How are you?” The two have been close ever since, except for the long periods when the son has been behind bars.

Earlier, Singh had been telling me that when he was in the children’s home, he fell in with the wrong crowd and started using drugs. Then I learned that around that same time he and two of his mates broke into a house–they had needed to use a bathroom. One of them decided to pick up a car stereo and jewelry but later they got scared and tried to return the stolen goods. They got caught. This was Singh’s first scrape with the police but he and his friends got off lightly with a burglary warning.

I asked him when had he first gone to prison. Singh was sent to Stanford House in Acton at age 15, where juveniles were incarcerated for crimes that, if they had been adults, would have earned them a life sentence. The charges against Singh, for criminal acts he had committed when he was 14, included kidnapping, robbery, false imprisonment, and carjacking. After Singh escaped from this facility, he turned himself in and entered an institution in Feltham for under 21-year-olds, a place notorious for its high suicide rates. He was in prison for nearly two years and returned there again after nine months because he had committed armed robbery while he was out. What were the guns used? Singh seemed prepared to recite a list but stopped at “Shotguns.” He received a six-year sentence but was granted parole after three years for good behavior.

Perhaps because he was describing events that had taken place more than 15 years ago, or more likely, because he was describing a person that he didn’t believe he was any longer, Singh spoke without embarrassment. In fact, there was an undeniable charm in his narration, balancing details of the horrors of prison life with evidence that he survived to tell the story. During his first stint in prison, he had escaped and, in the process, even managed to imprison in his cell the men who were supposed to guard him. I marveled at his knowing how to make his bid for freedom but he grinned and said that if I had been locked up, I too would have known from repeated observation the right key on the guard’s belt that would open the prison locks.

The chicken that Singh’s father had made was spicy and very tasty. We ate it with thin slices of raw onion and salad. It was cool inside the kitchen and the men would step out into the backyard to smoke. There were companionable silences, and then I’d get Singh to pick up the thread of his story. I became aware that Aryian Singh, with his devilish charm and roguishness, and also his ambition, reminded me of someone I knew, a fictional character who had inhabited my mind for three years. This was Rabinder, one of the leading characters in my own novel, just published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. When we first meet Rabinder, he is in a prison near Patna, dreaming of owning a cellphone agency when he comes out. More than that, he wants to film a commercial for his product, using as actors his childhood friend who is now a Bollywood star. He wants the actor to be sitting alone in a cell, putting a phone to his ear and calling a woman who would be played by Manisha Koirala or Raveena Tandon. The woman’s lips would part to say something but the viewer wouldn’t hear what she was saying because of the sound of the music beating like waves on a beach. The song on the soundtrack, filled with yearning and promise, would be AR Rahman’s hit from Bombay: Tu hee re, Tu hee re…tere bina main kaise jeeoon. By the time the novel ends, Rabinder is out of prison and his head is full of ideas about films that can be made about Bihar. He collaborates with a popular director, someone who very much resembles Mahesh Bhatt, on a film that deals with migrant youth and terrorism and is called Prithvi, or The Earth.

After Singh came out of prison, he attended a 16-week filmmaking course at the Brighton Film School. He showed me the script he had written as part of his diploma work: it was called Loose Talk and turned around a series of scenes in an interrogation room. Right now, he is more interested in a script that began to take shape in his mind three years ago while he worked as a chauffeur at Heathrow and other places. It is centered around a chauffeur whose resentment and rage is exploited first by jihadists and then by the intelligence services. The idea would be to make a thriller with twists and betrayals. When I asked him who he’d like to see act in the film, Singh said, “Anupam Kher and Robert De Niro.”

That is Singh’s dream but, at the moment, he is helping a rich relative sell double-glaze windows to businesses. It is impossible for anyone to foretell whether he will find work, or funding, as a filmmaker. If I were to be honest, I’d say that for me the real story was not in the imagined fiction about international intrigue but in the real details of Singh’s own life. He told me that once when he was working in the prison canteen he heard a woman’s voice that was filled with kindness. He went to talk to her and discovered that she taught writing in that prison. Singh told her that he wrote in his cell and he would like her to look at what he had written. She agreed. The teacher was very impressed, Singh told me, and helped defer his transfer to another prison just so that he could continue writing under her supervision.

Could I see what he had written for her? Singh told me that his older sister, Anita, probably had the file. He called her and, sure enough, she had it safely stored. I took the phone from Singh and asked Anita, who was just about to leave for work at Tesco’s, whether she’d mind reading me the opening lines of what her brother had written. This is what she read out:

I was born on May 21st, 1978. I’m not anyone famous, nor am I saint or a devil. But I’m someone you know. Everyone who punishes knows who I am. Everyone who receives punishment knows who I am. Everyone who loves, everyone who hates, everyone who wants, everyone who needs, they all know who I am. I’m a normal man in a not so normal world. But then, what is a normal world and what is a normal man?

As Anita went on reading, in a calm voice, I found myself responding to the unadorned, bare poetry of Singh’s prose. For years, we have read Indian writers who ventriloquise the voices of the underclass; in the diaspora, especially in America where I live, you won’t find a single desi writer who doesn’t have a university degree. It is a small, insulated world where everyone breathes the closed suffocating air of privilege. I thought, as I listened to Anita, that I was hearing a new, different kind of testimony as literature. Art in this case had been refined by experience. I asked Anita why she had held on to her brother’s prison notebook and she said to me, without hesitating, that reading it had reminded her of all the things in her life that she had either forgotten or tried to forget. She had possibly been talking of her childhood, of her parents’ alcoholism, or even perhaps her first marriage, to an Indian man who dealt in heroin and had employed her young brother when he was a teenager.

After our phone call, I asked Singh what had gone wrong between his parents. He looked up at his father, standing beside the stove, and asked him in Punjabi if it was okay for him to tell me. The older man said yes. Singh said that his mother had come from India as a little girl. When she was older, her father took in lodgers in their house in Southall, and she fell in love with one of them. Singh’s grandfather didn’t like this and asked the lodger, a young migrant from Punjab, to leave the house. A marriage was arranged between the young girl and Gurdev but it was a loveless relationship. His father started drinking, and then his mother did too. Their home just fell apart. Then, strangely, his mother accused Gurdev of having sexually abused their children. He was arrested and taken to prison. It was only when Anita and Aryian told their maternal grandfather that their mother had forced them to make their statements to the police that the case was dropped and Gurdev released.

Singh had spoken of his mother without affection; in fact, he blamed her for some of what had gone wrong in his life. Yet, in one page of his journal, which I later saw, he had written with sympathy about the tragedy of his parents’ marriage and, more particularly, of his mother’s fate:

The sadness of my mother, being taken away from her childhood sweetheart, forced into a marriage, bearing children to a man she hardly knew, probably never loved and seeing no future for herself…whilst for my father the confusion of his wife’s strange behaviour, coping with her resentment for his family and living everyday with the constant mood swings of his wife.

As a writer, Singh had no doubt done what he had accomplished with his name change. He had invented a new self, not in the sense of fabricating a tall tale, but instead shaping a coherent story of what had made and unmade him. That is why I valued this story as much, if not more, than the story he was trying to tell about a chauffeur, though I wished him success in bringing that project to fruition. After all, who doesn’t like danger, and delight in watching thrillers? I myself experienced a small frisson of delight when, in the car on the way back to my train, Singh rubbed his eyes tiredly in response to a question I was asking and said, “Well, I have left that life behind. But even now…I could make a call and men would come and take you to an empty room somewhere. They’d tie you in a chair, pour petrol over you, and set you on fire… But I have learned to control my anger. I don’t let anything get to me.”

Pantless.

The ad said “Micropaleontologist seeks DJ for digging up the brownest, crustiest nuggets this side of a Pompeii port-a-potty. Ask for Abhi.” (You’ll never use Craigslist again.)

“You Sukhdeep?” he snorts.

“Sometimes,” you quip. He doesn’t get the reference. Smiling, you enter.

Best…Gig…Ever.

Objects are like people: they can tell you where they come from. I count objects that look desi. Look at the plane above. You have probably seen that art on trucks in places like Lahore or Ludhiana. It might be two in the afternoon. It is hot and dry around you, the man selling sugarcane juice is sleeping in the shade of a tree, and there’s no one else around. Your shadow is the smallest you’ve ever seen in your life. And then a truck comes to a stop beside you. The exhaust pours out as if from a chimney in a brick kiln. If you look past it, however, you see painted on the side of the truck, a landscape that includes snowy peaks, colorful huts, cool skies, fields brimming with flowers that will live longer even than plastic. Folk utopia!

Now, what happens when that painting is transposed on to the body of an airplane? The wish for flight becomes literal as a vehicle for the imagination. I imagine this make-believe airplane as a prop in one of those old-fashioned studios, the kind where couples stand in front of the backdrop of a waterfall. The painting touches me by its use of color, and its playfulness. It is the work of Sana Arjumand, a highly talented Pakistan-based artist whose paintings are on display at the Aicon Gallery in New York.

The other works on display convey the same visual wit–and verbal wit, too, if you think about the titles. For instance, “Let’s Give Each Other Space,” in which fighter aircraft draw heart-shaped patterns in the sky. I read it as a wry comment on the militarism in Pakistan, and the fatal love with its heavily-armed neighbor, India.

Arjumand’s representation of issues of identity, the ways in which they relate to gender or religion, are poignant and recognizable. Consider her works “Then Their Shadows Fell From the Sky” and “A Hundred Thousand Years of Growing Beards.” A part of the appeal of this work is that it addresses pressing contemporary realities: I delighted in them, but I was also disturbed by the easy familiarity. It reminded me of what I feel when I read a lot of South Asian fiction: on the one hand, there is the thrill of seeing real life represented on the printed page, and, on other other, there is the fear that the writer is turning an event into a symbol. Which is to say: even as I’m engaged by Arjumand’s obvious preoccupation with, say, Islam and the role of women in Pakistani society, I’m slightly turned off by her ready abstractions, the use of the crescent or the burqa or the iconic stars.

In a statement that I read online, Arjumand’s colorful airplane was described in the following manner: “Sana covers her airplane — so often associated in a post-9/11 society with the shadow fear of terrorism — with the same religious and patriotic imagery which decorate South Asian cargo trucks, subverting the shadow paradigm with playful images that invoke a spiritual path — the term Mairaj referring to the invitation from the divine to ascend the self and experience the pure essence of being…” I prefer my own reading, where I link the plane to the prop in the studio in the small-town in South Asia. In my reading, the airplane is closer to the ordinary experiences of the people around the artist. In contrast, the reading that I have quoted above, by situating the painting in the framework of 9/11 life, makes everything that is done by desi artists and writers only an extended conversation with the West. We begin to speak only in the idioms that the West itself grants us. To do so is wrong or reductive because it makes terror the only reality of desi lives. The West never was, or should be, our sole interlocutor, and the readings we do of our books and our art should attempt to multiply, rather than simplify, our complexities.

As Amardeep noted last week, we are at about the one-year anniversary of the end of the war in Sri Lanka. For the occasion, Groundviews did a special edition, to which I contributed a short story. I’m cross-posting it here.

We Regret to Inform You That Your Condolences Cannot Be Accepted At This Time

a short story

We regret to inform you that your condolences cannot be accepted at this time. At present, both our pain and our hope defy that word, which has been offered and denied us, which we need and do not need, and which in any case we cannot accept, because they (your condolences) will not reach from what has happened to what will come.

We find the word condolences stunning in its insufficiency for past and future.

We evacuated our homes in the light; we vanished from our homes in the dark; we walked away from our families, toward the weapons, and wished that we could turn around. Our bodies entered the earth in places we cannot now identify, and so we are everywhere, blown to dust. By both dying in and surviving this place, we will live here long after your condolences become a ghost in your throat.

We joined others’ battles, willingly and unwillingly; we walked forward on paths not our own when the paths we would have chosen were closed to us. We were incidental; we were vital; we were enemies; we were friends; we were disputed; we were uncounted. In a small country, we felt far away from you. In a small world, we felt far away from you. We were your people and not your people.

We could not wait for you to remember us.

We perished and survived and were less and also more for it. Some of us had little money and little food; we had children. We lost our children willingly and unwillingly. They were torn from our hands; we fought to keep them with us; we pushed them away from us to save them; we held them close in the hope that we might take their bullets and thereby die before them.

Some of us did, but some of us lived, and so the memory of this will outlast even the children we fought to save.

In the rush to escape this bloodletting, which has been its own kind of war, our ears fell to the ground, and so we cannot now hear your condolences. To survive, we had to shut our eyes, with which we would have seen what was in yours. We closed our mouths against hunger and anger; we knew and did not know our families, friends, fellows, and leaders, who hunted us, ran with us, and died with us.

We faced ourselves from all sides. Some of us lived. We are still here. We regret to inform you that your condolences cannot be accepted at this time.

I just wanted to put in my own two-cents’ worth: I support the decision made by Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood to accept the prize. In contrast to many of my colleagues who signed the recent open letter to Ghosh, I do not think there was anything to be gained by boycotting a cultural prize given by an institution outside of the Israeli government. Far better to stay, to continue to engage, and to dissent where necessary.

A viable argument against “cultural” boycotts is that they simply don’t do anything, though defenders of the practice might say that the symbolic value and media coverage is worth it. (Note that I’m not talking about economic boycotts, which may be more effective.) Ghosh himself points out that in writing In an Antique Land, he worked with Israeli as well as Arab academics to learn the written language (Judeo-Arabic) used by Abraham Ben-Yiju; a boycott would have made that project impossible. Similarly, this kind of cultural boycott would also lead us to be unable to engage with dissenting Israeli cultural expression, such as the recent film Waltz With Bashir.

But for me the most compelling argument against this way of reacting to Israeli cultural institutions is that, as bad as things are for the Palestinians, what the U.S. itself has engaged in over the past decade — especially the debacle of an unjustifiable and badly executed war in Iraq — is far worse. By any reasonable standard, if we’re boycotting Israel, we should be boycotting ourselves! (And similar kind of accusations could be made against India or Pakistan, for any number of reasons.) In short, this kind of thing doesn’t get us anywhere. Structurally, if we pay taxes and receive benefits from a government, we are all “complicit” in what that government does. Ghosh and Atwood expressed their dissenting views with the current situation in Israel in their acceptance speech on May 9. Here is an excerpt from the speech:

MARGARET: Propaganda deals in absolutes: in Yes and No. But the novel is a creature of nuance: of perhaps, of maybe. It concerns itself, not with gods and demons, but with mortal people, with their flawed characters, their unsatisfactory bodies, their sufferings, their limited and often wrong choices; with the dubiousness of their own actions and the unfairness of their fates.

AMITAV: Writing a novel often requires you to see life through the eyes of those you may not agree with. It is a polyphonic form. It pleads for the complex humanity of all human beings.

Yes. Later they went on to acknowledge the untenable treatment of the Palestinians, and express support for the current round of talks led by George Mitchell. Isn’t it more effective to go to Tel Aviv and talk about the “unequal, unjust, and harsh and dangerous conditions of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories,” than it would be to stay home in Park Slope, and write articles denouncing Israel for Counterpunch?

Ghosh explains his attitude towards the disinvestment movement on Margaret Atwood’s blog in a longer statement, here. There is also a discussion of Ghosh’s approach at Kafila, here, with most voices coming out against Ghosh. And here is a little coverage of the acceptance speech in Tel Aviv from Rediff.