A couple weeks ago I was standing on the train during my morning commute, my arm stretched all the way up so my finger could curl about the ceiling pole, idly twisting about on my toes in a half-turn to survey the crowd and eye-scape their morning reading for titles, authors, snatches of prose. What are they reading? I always wonder, like a ghost watching a feast. These days it makes me ill to read on the train, and I feel like I never have time to read real books–spoiled by my steady diet of magazines and blogs, I can’t quite digest those bricks of literature. That morning there were some romance novels, a Crichton, Guns Germs & Steel. A woman shifted, and behind her a gray-suited man’s folded back New Yorker came into view, the familiar Deco font, and like my mother’s voice the desi words sharpened into focus:
Karma, by Rishi Reddi, Harper Perennial; $12.95: Each of the stories in this startlingly mature collection shows first- and second-generation Indian-Americans attempting to manage the disconnect between cultures. The premise is hardly a new one, but Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of details give her revelations a quiet power.(link.)
Some part of me groaned. Karma? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s really the best title you can come up with? Saying the premise is hardly new seems like the understatement of the generation. My skimming glance over the title story (then findable online, now sadly only partially available online as a pdf excerpt) quickly got me to a line that seemed worrisomely familiar:
. . Shankar and Neha were deposited on the threshold of their new life.
Oh not, not another catalog of the first apartment’s goods! Quick, do they mention those EIGHT DOLLARS?
And then I caught myself. So what if there’s another book with tales of confusion and misunderstanding blossoming into a new life? Yet another list of the precise order in which first a chest-of-drawers was purchased and then a record player? Every husband’s frantic search for his clothes among the silk saris cheongsams? How many books do we have on roadtrips, replete with convertibles, mix-tapes, and crazy encounters? Or thrillers about the moody American expat? Perhaps immigration-fiction, the constant probing of that crease in the heart, is a genre unto itself. (Shanti, Manish, there are no mangos or mehndhi patterns or emroidered mirrors on the cover, just a stencilled pigeon and some flowers, and even the font is free of devnagari-styled serifs.)
I frequently bemoan the fact that minority writers feel the need to their minority’s themes while a white man has the freedom to write a Japanese story and gets the whole canvas to play on. I want the New Yorker to write a two-page review of a great American novel that’s deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation and have the desi name be almost an afterthought, as it is with so many of the other categories of accomplishment we celebrate here. I want my white or Asian or black or Hispanic friends to call me up and say, “You have to read this book,” where the book is by a desi author but that commonality between me and the author has nothing to do with their insistence. Why must we always be meekly constrained to the edges?
But who am I kidding? I want to write that book, and I want all my friends to rave to each other about it. But I can’t even write most of a blogpost in two whole weeks. This woman, on the other hand, is an environmental lawyer, is raising a daughter, and serves on the board of SAALT. Yet somehow she found the time to write story after story, one of which was even chosen by the illustrious Michael Chabon for a Best American Short Stories collection, and then get them published as a book. (link.) If she needs to write out her version of the disconnect story, and she does it well enough to garner good reviews from The New Yorker and the Washington Post, maybe I should give her a chance without rolling my eyes. Literature is not just about the keywords on the dust jacket. It’s also about voice–and this woman has voice.
The cliche is that the test of a pudding is in the taste–but the aftertaste is where a masterwork can be destroyed or raised to heavenliness.(Example: I could give you an intellectual list of reasons why Snow Falling on Cedars is a good novel, but the best proof is that strawberries have always smelled sweeter since.)I read the title story, Karma, online. It’s pleasant enough, and deeply recognizable in its basic structure–new couple from India, how will they make it? Hard work and serendipity, of course! And yet, for all my cynicism, it has since stuck with through the darkening of the moon–not because of the life details which are recognizably uber desi but the details which anyone can appreciate, like the lives of birds . As the Washington Post reviewer Adriana Leshko wrote, “While Many of the stories seem simple, characters and plots linger long after you turn the page.”
So next weekend I’ll try again to work on my Great American novel. This weekend I’ll be in a bookstore, humbly paying for my Karma.
Hi Namrata,
I’m not in the publishing biz, but I can only imagine that the publishers strongly influence the packaging of the book – its cover, look and overall “feel,” often to the chagrin of the author. The marketing folks know what sells, and hey, I’m even surprised that after the onslaught of desi identity fiction over the years, people still eat that stuff up like it’s going out of style!
And it’s a two-way street, in terms of marketability: ever see that Goodness Gracious Me episode with the fake talk show discussing the rise in South Asian literature? It’s a hoot. The panel of guests includes two desi authors promoting their pop-up book and coloring book (something like “Little Bear Goes to Town”) as if they were the next coming of the Bard, and when the host questions the seriousness of their work, they brush her off with an, “Ah, but you’re just Eurocentric! There is a long history of pictoral representation in my culture, which you clearly don’t understand!” Haha. And there’s a third guest – a white guy – parading in a burqa so he can sell more books under the guise of a desi name! Good stuff, and dead on.
Anyway, that’s not to question the sincerity of every South Asian fiction writer, of course. I guess it all stems from that adage you learn in Composition 101: write what you know. And boy do people take that to heart. But I agree, often it feels like we all know…the same things.
Well, I don’t know about that. Vikram Seth wrote “Golden Gate” and received critical acclaim, and Hanif Kureishi writes on both desi and non-desi themes. I’m sure there are others. But maybe you have a point: there may be a “glass ceiling” for desi authors who want to venture outside of ethnic-specific themes…but we can really never know, unless someone out there is collecting data on every rejection letter sent out from publishing houses? 🙂
But moving past that, I somewhat disagree with your assertion that a book has to be devoid of ethnic traits in order to be “deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation.” They’re not mutually exclusive; great literature precisely has the ability to be both ethnic- or locale-specific and yet universally relevant at the same time. I mean, non-desis bought Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai’s books not simply to fulfill some need for wanderlust and exotica; they connected with the stories’ universal themes. (And both Lahiri and Desai won the Pulitzer and Booker, respectively, so we can argue about how marginalized they are.) And there were parts of Lahiri’s stories which even I, as a desi, couldn’t relate to since my parents didn’t come to America as educated professionals. The Unbearable Lightness of Being has nothing to do with my background, yet it’s so very close to my heart.
Okay, so maybe Lahiri, Desai, Seth, et al. won’t be considered the next Great American Novel by the canon, but that doesn’t take away the power of these books throughout the world. (And I mean, really, who the hell reads anymore anyway – the last book which got non-readers reading was The Da Vinci Code, which says a lot.)
So I hope you do write the Next Great American Novel, but stay true to yourself in the process 🙂
P.S. I hope I don’t sound condescending. It’s just late, and I’m still up!
Vikram Seth also wrote An Equal Music — another non-desi-themed book, and perhaps a likelier candidate for Great [Anything] Novel than Golden Gate. Not that I didn’t enjoy the latter, but no one reads novels in verse anymore.
Vikram Seth also wrote An Equal Music — another non-desi-themed book, and perhaps a likelier candidate for Great [Anything] Novel than Golden Gate. Not that I didn’t enjoy the latter, but no one reads novels in verse anymore.
‘an equal music’ was chosen for my book club.. interesting take, and yes it was surprising to see seth write about something other than suitable boys…
amen sister.
i think i’m up to my bindi clad forehead in books about ‘coming to america’… ‘how my name doesn’t fit in with the rest’…and ‘how chapatis are different than tortillas’…
don’t worry… i’ll be following in your henna ladden footsteps..
I’ve gotta say that sometimes the pressure is from the other side too. I’m still in the early stages of my career but it hasn’t stopped relatives or other Indians asking me when am I going to write about “our people” as if I were responsible for representing a collective South Asian voice. It annoys me because I don’t have any 2nd-gen-growing-up-in-two-worlds-issues to write about (probably because I’m pretty happy with my multiple identities and navel gazing makes for lousy angsty theatre anyway) and yet if I were to write a substandard angst ridden play about being Indian, I would sell out most nights and get undeservedly good reviews.
What am I saying? I should shut up, write the damn play that says “Waah! So hard being [insert ethnicity] in [insert location at least a 14 hours plane ride away from ethnic centre], how do I reconcile the the values of my [insert dominant relative, guru figure] with the values of [14 hour location place] when it’s hard enough [circle most appropriate: being/seeing/missing/hiding] + [delete as necessary: boy/girl/sexual identity crisis]?”
I’d never have to work again.
i hope “cheomsang” was your attempt at being funny cos it sure ain’t the right spelling.
Namrata, you might find this article interesting – Indian authors are indeed starting to write about the rest of the world instead of being burdened with Representing Authenticity.
It’s not the themes that writers deal with that’s the problem, it’s the quality of the writing, and how original they are in approaching those themes. If you say that desis should be writing about other issues, well fine, they can do that, but you can’t criticise them for dealing with themes that are of natural interest to them because they form a large part of the world that has shaped and informed them. Originality and imagination are the key things here that we have to assess.
Any writers that you care to group together on the basis of background or origin may to a certain extent share similar thematic concerns, not just desi writers, but writers through history, who have responded to their circumstance in a variety of ways. The cliche and stereotype comes down to a lack of talent, or a publishing industry that responds to broad and unoriginal talent for the widest and broadest appeal. If a James Joyce or Nabokov emerged from suburban New Jersey or London and played with, subverted and wrote about the experience of desi life in those cities it would be great. It’s not the themes, it’s the talent.
But she looks not only sexy in that low neck red thing but very serious and deep only!
This thread took nine responses to reach a “hot or not” comment. She’s a writer; let’s discuss the ideas of the blog post and/or what’s linked to it.
The more commercial successes South Asian writers have in the western world, the better. There are bound to be quality works among them.
I’m with you on that. Desi writers constantly get a lot of heat for selling out to the man but when that is the story you want to tell and it’s the story you are familiar with and while someone is willing to read it and enjoy it what are you supposed to do? I’m constantly disappointed with the the response from those of us who’ve had the same stories. If someone has a story to tell, no matter how many times it’s been told before and someone wants to read it I say more power to them.
Fair enough.
Personally I think it’s when those stories are full of cliche in both the writing and marketing that people get annoyed Jane. And there’s alot of it about! That’s what I mean, it’s not the issues and themes, but the originality and imagination with which they are dealt with.
One of Rishi Reddy’s stories was on “Selected Shorts” on NPR and her style is quite nice. It was a tale of two immigrants, but very charming.
Anyway, everyone tells new writers, “write what you know.” So you will get your stories about curries and karma. And, publishers do like the desified twists to pop out.
I think most of us experience a fatigue of sorts. We’ve read enough books that talk about the ..yawn..cross-cultural experience. But, we forget that mainstream America has not.
BTW, even among the desi populace, there are NOT a lot of avid readers. While Jhumpa, Chitra and Vikram roll off like names of old friends, I’ve had to introduce them to some Indians very recently.
So, I’m happy the opportunities are there now for South Asian writers.. let’s see who can catapult over.
Great phrase. We are suffering from mango-fatigue.
Agreeing with Red Snapper. I’m also concerned that after you have a hundred desi-authored books that conform to some formula, the hundred and first book may need to do so, at the expense of literary merit. I’m all about writing what you know, but what if you don’t know the things you are expected to? I can’t speak from an American desi perspective, but until fairly recently, writers who wrote about the more urban, English-educated side of India were marginalized, and frequently criticized for even writing in the language. There’s nothing wrong with writers of the diaspora telling what have become mainstream stories, but it is possible that they are creating this genre that every desi writer will have to embrace to get any acceptance at all.
Pretty amusing to read these comments on the all-desi-all-the-time SM! Kidding! Okay, not kidding….still, the editors or whatever, the clumsy, well-meaning, Ivy-League educated, volvo driving types who okay this stuff (that is what they are like right? I’m just making this up because it’s the internets) are just following the lead of multiculti-dom. “You have x people of y group who should be doing 20% of Z activity. Yeah! I am enlightened and educated. Expensively.”
Actually, I feel fatigue looking at all contemporary ‘serious’ American fiction. Where is the Faulkner the French love? Or the Hemingway the Italians adore? (I stole that from Arts and letters daily….) Ugh. When did the whole NPR zeitgeist take over all of publishing?
Dear desi kid growing up in Houston: write something interesting of your experience. I mean, your real experience, not this mewly-mouthed you’ll get an A for it from your creative writing prof ‘who just loves Indian food’. Go for it. Like, actually dare to like America, be filthy-mouthed, like yourself and your crazy hybridness, sing cowboy songs! Just. Do. Not. Be. Boring.
Right on, MD and others! Red Snapper made this point with characteristic gusto back here.
Alternatively, it’s your damn art. Write what you want, desi commentators begone! Why do desi commenters complain about this? I mean, how many growing up in American suburbia stories are there from white America? Like, millinons. That’s all there ever is, I mean, an indie film in the Us wouldn’t get made without that topic.
Why don’t you complain about that? What are people going to write about anyway? How many different topics are there?
Okay, I’m confusing myself. I was for this thread before I was against it!
Thanks Siddhartha.
I think it is very clear from this thread that I might need a nap. I have been burning the candle from both ends, lately…..
Right on again, MD! Confusion is healthy!
kathkavi #16: >> I’m all about writing what you know, but what if you don’t know the things you are expected to?
There are two major kinds of writers/creators:
Most diaspora desi authors(male/female) and Indian English writers fall into the first category. Most women (all over the world) also fall into the first category. Movie makers like Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Aparna Sen, Gurinder Chadha all fall into this category. Hence they rarely transcend the mango/curry/karma/sati boundaries, and their appeal is limited to those who have similiar experiences (or foreigners who crave for similiar experiences). Such people are rarely successful in the market and produce flash-in-the-pan kinds of success.
Most men (all over the world) fall into the second category. In the Indian context, men and (some)women who write in colloquial languages(Bengali/Kannad etc) also fall into this category. The most successful movie makers (Subhash Ghai, Prakash Mehra, Mani Rathnam etc) are all those who include very little of their own experiences into their art. Among the diaspora, M. Night Shyamalan, Vijay Amritraj come to mind. Among women, Ayn Rand comes to mind.
For the aspiring writers out there: There’s a strong possibility that you belong to the first category (not entirely your fault). But you need to break out of it. It comes with steady practice. You have to learn to get into the heads and hearts of those with whom you have never interacted, but only vaguely know about. It’s a developed skill, and I myself am a novice at it.
Try this for starters: Write an essay on the thoughts of the Virginia tech killer as he’s approaching his first victims. Then try to twist the plot so that he does not kill anyone but becomes a reformed man.
SM bloggers: There’s potential for having writings contests like this and increasing your readership (similiar to Anna’s Friday edition).
M. Nam
Interesting breakdown Moornam; although, I will never want to try and get into the head of that character. I haven’t that degree of empathy.
For the gals (like me), it’s sort of like George Elliot versus Jane Austen. Branch out, branch in. Well, I was always a Bronte fan myself….
When we gonna get another George Elliot, post feministas?
Interestingly a lot of books in English that are making waves seem to be coming out of SAs settled abroad, both ABD and immigrants – Lahiri, Desai, Ghosh now Reddi. I wonder if it has something to do with the state of the publishing industry in India (I remember Amardeep gave a link that said things have improved there, but is there a big enough English reading market there) or is it simply because these authors get published here and thus get noticed more easily.
I’m no reviewer or writer myself but some of the writing in some books of this genre is so subpar that I wonder if the opposite is true… these desi writers wouldn’t be published at all except for the fact that they wrote a book which has some guaranteed appeal to a certain subculture. I hate to trot Vikram Seth out again as someone already has, but generally isn’t a great writer going to be published no matter what they write about?
I’m with you there, but some have already done that sort of thing.
Good stuff MoorNam, quite true!
I wonder if it has something to do with the state of the publishing industry in India (I remember Amardeep gave a link that said things have improved there, but is there a big enough English reading market there) or is it simply because these authors get published here and thus get noticed more easily.
There are some very interesting books published in India that don’t get picked up in the States because publishers fear they won’t generate much interest. One is No Onions, No Garlic, which is a hillarious read – a satire of caste politics in Southern India.
Ah yes, that great writer and imaginer of other worlds, Vijay Amritraj
Risible –
After the wrote that, I read SPs link @7. That does address the same things and is an interesting read.
Yes, its good for aspiring writers to be liberated from the implicit constraints of the western markets. Thanks to blog reviews and on-line dealers who sell books unavailable here, we can be part of the fun too.
You guys totally got me. I cut out a paragraph about An Equal Music because it was super late and I didn’t want to try digging out my copy. But I’ve often said that Seth’s only, perfect ,nod to his ethnicity was in the title itself. It’s a fabulous book, and I love that I’ve seen people pass it around to each other without once mentioning his other work or his background. Another good example is Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of A Lion, which is about the immigrant experience, but on a very wide canvas indeed.
But moving past that, I somewhat disagree with your assertion that a book has to be devoid of ethnic traits in order to be “deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation.” They’re not mutually exclusive; great literature precisely has the ability to be both ethnic- or locale-specific and yet universally relevant at the same time.
Ah, it’s totally true, and if I implied one was exclusive of the other, then that was late-night non-clarity. Basically my fatigue takes the form I described–people can write all the “disconnection” books they want, I just want there to be more of the other kind. I want proof that I’ll be allowed to write the books that I love to read, which are frequently not desi and not about disconnect at all. But I’m most interested in hearing the various fatigues–and, alternatively, excitements–that other people have.
Spelling bee: 🙁 No, not trying to be funny. Really can’t spell and my one Chinese friend who was up thought it looked right. I’ll correct it now. Thanks.
Too simplistic and reductive. A truly great writer can imbue the local with the universal. What did Joyce write about? One day in the life of a few men and women in Dublin mostly from the viewpoint of a middle aged Jew and a sensitive aspiring writer, and he wrote the greatest and most universal novel of the twentieth century.
Wrong on every level.
So Proust, Joyce, Tolstoy, Checkhov, Dickens, you think they rejected the worlds they knew? Think about it. Think about what you’re saying. In your scramble to anatomise the literary mind you do nothing but vulgarise it from a point of fundamental misunderstanding.
Vijay Armritraj is a writer? Huh? And, he is seriously rocking that cravat in the Octopussy pic, Red Snapper. I imagine a comic, with the tennis ace as the hero. He saves the world with a lob or something and the arch-villian is a desi Ayn Rand, whose plans to build a 50-bazillion square foot replica of the Fountainhead is threatening the vast oceans and…there is Green-peace in there, too, as a side-kick.
I really do need that nap.
While I agree that writers should write what they know or are capable of imagining, and we should judge them only on the basis of the quality of wrting, in my mind I make a distinction between two types of writers: The first is the Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni type, who (in my opinion) engage in serious exoticizing of India and the other is the Jhumpa Lahiri type who write about their experiences which, naturally are related to diaspora type issues. I refuse to read the first type (except by accident) and my opinion about the second type seems to vary by how well I think they write.
On an (only slightly) unrelated note, has anybody read “English August” by Upamanyu Chatterjee? It came out in India in the 1980s and was only published in the US recently. I loved it for the juxtaposition of (what seemed to me) contempory urban youth with the archaic public institutions in India.
Uhh, I think he might be in the list of Moor Nam’s film makers or something — he’s a shining light — certainly in the anatomy of the difference between male and female filmmakers, he towers over those other inferior, restricted talents like, you know, Mira Nair and Arpana Sen. As women, Amritraj serves cross court volleys against them with his more universal-rejection-of-limited-world art anyday.
In my mind I make a distinction between two types of writers: The first is the Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni type, who (in my opinion) engage in serious exoticizing of India and the other is the Jhumpa Lahiri type who write about their experiences which, naturally are related to diaspora type issues. I refuse to read the first type (except by accident) and my opinion about the second type seems to vary by how well I think they write.
On an (only slightly) unrelated note, has anybody read “English August” by Upamanyu Chatterjee? It came out in India in the 1980s and was only published in the US recently. I loved it for the juxtaposition of (what seemed to me) contempory urban youth with the archaic public institutions in India.
Loved the EIGHT DOLLARS reference. Although I have only heard it from my father-in-law once he did tell the story once “I came to NYC alone with only twelve dollars in my wallet and an interview for a job. Naga was back in Andhra, pregnant with Bhanu.”
The story was echoed by several other Uncles over several bottles of Cutty Sark and a Teja movie in the background. Good Horatio Alger stuff. I suppose it can get cliched, but as RS mentioned it’s the quality of the writing and the way the themes are dealt with (bad pop culture example Dead Poets Society vs Freedom Writers).
Red Snapper:>>Think about it. Think about what you’re saying.
I’m sorry. I was not thinking at all. I won’t let it happen again.
You allude to “rejecting one’s experiences”, I presume. I am of the opinion (and there’s enough evidence out there) that your experiences cloud your mind and lock up your imagination. The more of one’s experiences one ignores (perhaps “reject” was the wrong word, after all), the more imaginative one becomes. And imagination is what produces great art.
By no means am I suggesting that one give up their knowledge or values when creating art. They are very valuable in stamping your “signature” on your work. But not experiences. Experiences are like you talking to yourself – nothing much comes out of it. The Virginia tech killer was acting out based solely on his own experiences – hence the rants against rich kids, debauchery, etc etc. If only he had ignored his own experiences and spoken to others (instead of being a loner), he would have known that there’s a world out there that’s experiencing stuff that he does not know about. He would have never done what he did.
M. Nam
Yeah that’s what it is, Vijay Amritraj, actor in Nine Deaths of the Ninja and producer of Love You Hamesha
Sen and Nair are not artistically fit to polish his shoes.
Moornam, I sort of delight in the way experiences come out in fiction….I am reading Villette (it’s taking me six months, I’ve been busy) and the forward talks about how one character was supposedly someone Charlotte knew and I delight in thinking that a made up scene, with a made up character, echos a day, over a hundred years ago: the breeze and scents and sounds of that particular day the author knew, echoing on through the years through a scene in a book. It’s not a literal representation, it’s probably just the emotion of that day, as a source of inspiration for something else entirely, a proustian-cookie of words.
Basically, she like a boy and her character liked a boy, and experience and imagination meld!
MoorNam — are you wondering about what makes a good writer, or how to prevent a psycho from carrying out mass murder? I think you’re a little confused.
Every single great writer disproves that.
So Melville’s experience on a whale ship had nothing to do with Moby Dick. Joyce’s life in Dublin had nothing to do with Ulysses. Kafka’s claustrophobic home life had nothing to do with Metamorphosis. Lawrence’s experiences growing up in Nottingham had nothing to with Women in Love. Heller’s experiences in Italy during World War 2 had nothing to do with Catch 22. Naipaul’s experience of his father’s love in Port of Spain and had nothing to do with A House for Mr Biswas. I can, of course, go on.
You fundamentally misunderstand what experience means in terms the literary mind. Experience is not ‘talking to yourself’. Experience is transmuted through imagination into art. And part of that process may well be a talking to the self. That’s part of the introspection of being a writer or creator.
By the way, it was you that aligned ‘experience’ with narrowness of themes and constriction of ideas, in your simplistic analysis of the female liteary and moviemaking creative mind. Against whom you compared, as an example of the shame by which those illustrious filmmakers must hide their face, the titan that is
Orson WellesVijay Amritraj.MoorNam’s advice is so good and universally applicable that one can both reform oneself of a tendency to commit mass murder AND be a great writer. Fuck yo couch, MoorNam, and I mean that lovingly.
quit bitin’ my style.
Grew up on that book…and the movie. Came as a shock, when I first read/saw it, to know that somebody could produce this kind of fiction in the desh…savagely funny, sharply observant, surprisingly erudite with languidly graceful prose.
Here’s a post we did on it last year, with a link to a radio interview of the author.
Namrata, the problem is, no matter what we desis write, some people’ll complain anyway. so, as someone else said upthread, fuck that shit, write what YOU want to write. it’s YOUR book, not ours.
Mmm. Lovely post, Namrata. In two weeks, look for Reddi’s thoughts on the issue: Nirali is featuring her on May 7.
Great post, Namrata!
This explains all!!! The desi environmental law community is small, but we bring it!
Thanks Siddharta and apologies for bringing up something that you all had already discussed. I came across this site a few weeks ago, took the recommendation to see the 7-11 plays, enjoyed that, and came back to the site!