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Neela Vaswani - Where The Long Grass Bends
Interview
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1. Some of your most vivid stories are heavily influenced by Indian history and lore. What inspired these pieces? Were tales handed down to you? Did you do any cultural research or study? Or was it pure imagination?
What inspires me to use Indian elements in my work is simply that they are a part of my experience and imagination. My father was born in Sindh and raised in Bombay. He told me many Sindhi, Sufi, Hindu, and Sikh stories when I was a child (and still does)—some historical, familial, instructional, religious. Every time we went to India, we bought literature and comic books (Amar Chitra Katha), read them together and talked about the characters—which ones we liked and why. These stories were always very real to me and remain so.
I do not perceive a boundary between reality and story—for me, they blur together. Although my relationship with India has been actual (I've lived and traveled there throughout my life), I have spent the majority of my time in the States. So at least half of my "homeland" experience has been stories told to me by family. I was also told stories about Ireland and the Irish in NY at the beginning of the 20th century. My mother's grandparents came to New York, from County Kerry in the 1890's. She was told stories by her mother which she passed on to me. Both of my parents—as well as my aunt on my father's side and grandfather on my mother's side—are storytellers. And both of my grandmothers, on my Indian and Irish sides, played with words, had unusual (and funny) ways of saying things.
Maxine Hong Kingston says the perspective of the first-generation American involves a double-vision in which the real and invisible are equally potent: "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the immigrant built around our childhoods fits in solid America" (Rominger 1). For me, dual perspectives mesh in story—the stories that were given to me, the stories I write.
In terms of research, I ask friends and family about spellings, placement of streets, small details I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly. Sometimes I resort to book research if I can't get consensus among my human sources. Mostly though, I do research for my non-Indian stories.
The structure of "story within story" that I employ most obviously in "Where the Long Grass Bends" and "Blue, Without Sorrow" is also tied to the tales I heard as a child. The tradition of Indian lore I am most familiar with is that in which one person's story cannot be told independent of another's, in which a story rambles, moves between the sky and earth and underworld before it is complete, and even then it is not really complete, because each story connects to another and another and on and on ad infinitum.
2. Several of your stories focus on biracial characters. In "Bing-Chen," for example, a half Chinese, half German-American man wishes he could "have the constancy and assurance" of three people: a Chinese-American and two Caucasian-Americans. He envied them: "Made of one thing, they knew who they were." Could you talk about this?
I resent and resist the literary figure/myth of the "tragic mulatto" who exists in the margins of two cultures and thus "doesn't fit" anywhere; who is troubled, pitied, derided and usually ends up murdering someone or offing his/herself—such as Joe Christmas from Faulkner's Light in August, or Solaria of Vera Caspary's The White Girl. Mixed-race/mixed-culture individuals in literature and film often still get the "tragic mulatto" treatment. I also resent the Indian-American label ABCD (American Born Confused Desi—"desi," meaning "of the land," or "Indian") because of the "C," or "Confused." I believe identity is a fluid, shifting entity—for all people, regardless of racial/cultural make-up. It's ridiculous to think being first-generation or bicultural or biracial makes a person either "confused" or "tragic." These are destructive social notions.
I do not think anyone should be forced into being "one" or "the other." I see no reason why an individual cannot be multi-racial, multi-ethnic, bisexual, transgender, or multi-religious for instance, and still have a legitimate and secure identity. But this does not seem to be a prevailing belief in American literature or society. Language itself is categorical, full of dichotomies— right/wrong, good/evil, black/white—that work against the "in between." I experience the world from two (and more) perspectives at all times. And I feel this is true for most people.
This is what I meant by Bing-Chen's envy. I wanted to convey that feeling of "wouldn't it be nice to go along with the norms, to squeeze into a neat little box." (Race in the U.S., what with censuses etc., is often reduced to a box—check only one—and it's implied that those of us in between the boxes must mark "Other.") I do not believe anyone actually has the "constancy" and "assurance" Bing-Chen temporarily perceives but I wanted to portray that desire (due to societal pressures) to be "simple" and "homogenous." I think of Bing-Chen as a person who is on the verge of being comfortable with himself. But he is not "there" just yet. He is still sorting things out.
In my other stories with biracial/bicultural characters, I attempt to flirt with and subvert stereotypical myths through characters who are individuals, who are successful at being themselves, at living, who are not the objects of pity and scorn (and if they are, it is because of other people's perspectives, not their own views) who are happy and comfortable with their identity while still acknowledging it as a marginalized, constructed idea. There are many contemporary authors who are changing, subverting the "tragic mulatto" and mixed-race/culture stereotype (such as Danzy Senna, James McBride, Gish Jen, Bharati Mukherjee—see Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural). And some authors of the past such as DuBois and James Weldon Johnson who recast these myths.
There is a pull and shifting that goes on in different stages of life for all people regardless of racial/cultural distinctions. It seems this is a human state—to go through phases of identity, to relate to things depending upon situation, place, and time. I have not always (especially in my teenage years) been comfortable with my identity. Fortunately things change, get worked out, and comfort is found.
Ultimately, I am very attached to my parents; they are very much a part of my identity, of who I am. To deny one or the other of my cultural/racial selves, to "pick," would be a denial of one of my parents—something I find unthinkable.
3. Perhaps because your work is entirely unlike anyone else's, it is an irresistible temptation to pinpoint authors that have, on some level, your capacity for imagination. Are there any influences you would like to note?
R.K. Narayan, Virginia Woolf, Maxine Hong Kingston, Agha Shahid Ali, Italo Calvino, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, Charles Dickens, Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Barbara Gowdy, Shakespeare, Jose Saramago, Grace Paley, William Carlos Williams, Anita Desai, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kushwant Singh, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gloria Anzaldua, Steven Milhauser have all been influential in terms of their combination of history/culture and imagination, their examinations of reality and fiction, social commentary, protest, and—with the American authors—the tackling of the question what is it to be American?—the difficult, complex, contradictory, diverse definition of American. People who write about the experience of being on the margins and borders (in terms of sexuality, race, and culture) or exile have also been strong influences.
Folklore has been important to me. Sufi stories, Hindu lore, Indian history, Jataka tales, immigrant American history, ethnography, cultural studies, Gaelic mythology, stories of Catholic saints, post-colonial theory, theatre, film, music, dance, photography, and painting (nonwestern and western) have also influenced my imagination and style. Of the non-South Asian and non-Irish lore, I'm drawn to Native American (usually Miwok, Navajo, and Sioux), Japanese and Chinese stories.
But I don't generally think of myself as being imaginative. I don't ever feel as though I'm using my imagination; I feel as though I am portraying a version, my version, of reality. And maybe that's the same thing. People often say my work is odd or strange or fantastical but to me it's just a portrayal of how I see and feel, how my mind functions.
4. The lyrical nature of your work offers us fascinating texture and beauty, and stories such as "Blue, Without Sorrow," and "The Rigors of Dance Lessons" resemble prose poems. What is your process of writing? How is it different from writing poetry, in these cases?
I started out as a poet, studying in college with Barry Goldensohn. He told me I should try narrative poems, poems with characters, and then some fiction. And it's been fiction ever since. But I've always read a lot of poetry, and retain the poet's sense of line, space, silence, and the importance of each and every word.
When I wrote "The Rigors of Dance Lessons," it was a scene in a longer short story (the story was eventually discarded). I plucked the dance and turned it into a short-short dreamscape. I think short-shorts and prose poems are virtually interchangeable.
I consider "Blue, Without Sorrow" a monologue of sorts, spoken by a strong willed, passionate woman who loves words and elevates them as she elevates the divine. I reread works on and by Mirabai, a bhakti saint. I reread Tagore's Gitanjali, biographies of Saint Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich's Showings to get a feel for the language of the ecstatic. All of these pieces are poetic, passionate—and firmly in a voice. I was attempting to mirror this level of feeling through poetry because it is something I can relate to and because it matched my character's psyche.
Mirabai bhajans (devotional songs) and stories were told to me by my father. She is a figure I identify with—now and when I was a child. My mother has always admired Saint Teresa of Avila and told me stories about her. It seemed to me that although I heard these stories separately from my parents—one had an Irish-Catholic bend, and the other a Sindhi bend—that an ecstatic saint's perspective and approach to the divine is similar, regardless of dogma and religion. And this is what interested me. The way to unify these two religions and traditions, linguistically, seemed to be through poetry.
When I write poetic pieces (writing "An Outline of No Direction" felt like writing a poem more than a short story. Due to its outline form, it was shaped through line breaks), my focus is very small and tight. I try not to sacrifice language to plot or characterization (which is easier when the characters are word driven creatures or the situation is one that is best described through poetic language, like the flamenco/kathak gypsy dance in "The Rigors of Dance Lessons"). I try to focus on word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence construction; however, I have to be careful not to forsake the basic elements of story. I tend to experiment with varying structures so as to find different ways to mold language and story.
5. One of the most surprising elements to your work is humor. Despite the tragic and unusual waters, each tale has a wonderful undercurrent of practical modern life and pragmatic fussing. In "Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh," for example, the demanding spirit who possesses Apsara is met with excuses, such as, "Please Spirit, we do not have a lot of money. Why don't you go inhabit our neighbor, Jajit, who has a satellite television?" What is your approach to this irreverence? In other words, how do you manage a narrative that allows room for the absurd while never losing faith in its culture?
Life is absurd. To me, what is funny is intertwined with what is sad. I'm not really maintaining a narrative so much as I am expressing how I, myself, view the world. I have a fondness for absurdities because, to me, they seem to reflect what is most human. The absurd, in my opinion, is all about juxtaposition. The ridiculous and the important, the mundane and the spiritual, the intellectual and the need to sprawl on the sofa in front of the TV. The walking contradictions we all are, the contradictions found in everything we create—from gender constructions to politics.
I attended a possession at a Sufi tomb in Varanasi and felt the women were truly possessed. Sometimes by practical, everyday spirits, sometimes by cultural concerns, sometimes by emotions, sometimes by the unseen and inexplicable. It seemed different for each woman. So, in the story, I was trying to convey the complicated sense I had of what can take hold of a person—the real and the unseen, the practical and the frivolous.
India is a nation in the throes of sorting out the tension of the satellite television versus the traditional. These tensions are real and serious aspects of "modernization" (or wide-spread "middle-classing." India's middle-class has fairly recently become the world's largest) and are both exciting and tragic, hopeful and sad, to me. So I don't feel irreverent (nor do I feel I am representing anything other than my own version of India, of being Indian). I feel I am attempting to represent tensions. And the absurd is a mode, a tone, that can comfortably contain contradictions.
In general, I see humor as a powerful mode of subversion and change. I have been influenced by and admire performance artists/comics like Margaret Cho, Richard Pryor, Ellen Degeneres, and Chris Rock because of what they are able to say, achieve, and deconstruct through humor.
6. One of the ways in which you subvert conventional narrative form, is, ironically, to dive deeply into one of the most established storytelling forms of all, the fable. ("Twang (Release)" is perhaps the most obvious example of this that comes to mind.) Would you agree?
Yes, exploring the most basic form of story (I think of it as beginning at the beginning) is one way I like to experiment with form. But as I said in the above answers, story was a very large part of my upbringing, of how I made (and make) sense of myself and the world around me. I tend to be attracted to origins—be it paleontological or linguistic. I am drawn to that which seems to encompass the greatest amount of people. Literature, the written word, is a common form of expression for many, but the fable, the story, the tale (oral or written), is common to everyone, is part of human history. Story seems to be how we learn and pass things on, how we relax. This is a topic that is endlessly fascinating to me and something I continue to explore in my writing.
7. From Felix and his grandfather playing violin and piano throughout a World War II airstrike in "Bolero" to Mez "spanking herself with a soup ladle till exhausted" in "The Excrement Man," violence is found throughout your collection. Why?
I said earlier that life is absurd. I also think that life, and humanity in particular, is full of violence. I am sensitive to violence. It is something I pick up on in everyday conversations, in relationships, in art. So it's an element I feel is important to explore.
I have lived and traveled in many parts of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe where the possibility to deny violence is not an option (and that includes parts of the United States). The violence of sheer survival, of getting enough to eat, of personal safety, is right on the surface, is something that must be dealt with on a daily basis, is what forms the fibre of life. My family and I moved constantly within the States and spent a portion of every year outside of the country, so I was exposed to different realities, different lives. But I saw violence everywhere—it was universal. I continue to move a lot and travel; I continue to see violence everywhere.
Although I abhor violence and believe it "is not the answer," I am interested in the capacity for change (sometimes positive) through destruction which can lead to new beginnings. Violence is, I think, instinctual and familiar to human beings. I think it's something that has formed us as a species. It is definitely a force that frightens me, but I don't believe anything can be overcome unless it is understood.
In my stories, I try to explore various types of violence—mob violence, violence done to the mind, spirit, sense of self, the violence of tyranny and suppression (at home, of the George Bush brand, and elsewhere). Even though Felix and Aitor are being bombed, they choose to resist, to defy violence, and to put in its stead, music. To set their music to the tune of and against violence.
Self-inflicted violence is something I am also interested in understanding, self punishing (like Mez spanking herself with the soup ladle), the way we take pleasure in pain, criticize and distort ourselves, do violence to our bodies and self-esteem and minds—and worse, inflict this same violence on others.
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