We at Tilted Axis did a bit of scheming and thought it might be nice to bring together some conversations we’ve been having with creatives working in different parts of the literature world, in the form of little roundtable interviews. Our first of this is with Simran Uppal, Tiffany Tsao and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay.
Simran Uppal is part of the poetry community Barbican Young poets, and co-founder of Coriander Collective, the first theatre collective in the UK for queer people of colour.
Tiffany Tsao is an author, and translates from Indonesian too. She’s the translator behind Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Sergius Seeks Bacchus, and is currently working on his upcoming fiction. An award winning novelist, she recently published The Majesties.
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is the author of Abandon, Panty and The Yogini, translated by the legendary Arunava Sinha. She has published nine novels and over fifty short stories since her controversial debut Shankini. A newspaper columnist and film critic, Sangeeta lives in Kolkata.
Could you share a little about your practice and your typical writing day?
Sangeeta - A typical day of writing for me is all about writing throughout the day while taking several small breaks. By the end of the day it might look like I have only written 2/3 pages. Then, how can I say that I had been writing for the whole day? Actually when I am specifically in an urge to write something or I know that there is a deadline for a particular write up then I continue to write for as long as it takes to finish. In between, I do a lot of things but that doesn't affect my thought process. There is no split or disconnection if I have gone out and am not actually sitting in front of my writing desk. This is something over time that I have learnt about myself and enjoy being like. While I am writing, I still talk to people, take phone calls, do household chores, attend ceremonies and come back and again start writing as if I never left. Perpetually I have been able to cover up my personality as a writer. I don't let it come out if not needed. I am not very comfortable to speak as a writer. Or represent myself as an author. Once I finish writing something, I keep on revisiting and altering and changing it. But basically I think mine is more like automatic writing. I had never made a draft of anything I had decided to write. I had never changed anything once written. I revise only to make the prose better, to ease flaws. To add things I missed. To edit if portions are falling apart. But that's all mostly. So a typical day of writing is one that is all about writing but maybe only a part of that is in the penning down.
Simran - I teach yoga, make theatre and do some activism work so writing happens in all sorts of ways and on all kinds of days. But working across disciplines can create a messiness that lets each component sphere thrive, even if that messiness is often even more exhausting than the work itself! On Sunday, for example, I taught a ‘power flow’ yoga class, edited a poem about a very tender Norwegian man I met very late in the night of Pride, taught a beginner’s yoga class (that interestingly had far more BIPOC than any of my other classes), did emails about my ‘Decolonising Yoga’ workshop on the relationship of colonial history, the contemporary Hindu nationalist government and the Western yoga practice, then squeezed in a phone call with a kathak (a school of South Asian classical dance) dancer planning a collaboration before bed.
Yoga practice makes you realise how deeply and beautifully not separate you are from your body, and teaching yoga makes you find ways to create that experience in a room of strangers. That places you well for making poems speak to pieces of dance, or to draw out emotional qualities in actors, I think. And learning to project vocally and express complex sentiments in tight phrases transfers well from poetry workshops into the yoga studio.
Tiffany - These past few months have been unfruitful for my writing, though extremely fecund for my translating. I often lie to myself and other people by saying, “I write in the morning and then I translate in the afternoon,” but actually, I’m beginning to realise that I don’t do this at all—I only think I do this, and flounder around in both pools for months until a deadline looms for one or the other, and then I immerse myself in the one task completely until it’s done.
Thus, a typical writing day—a writing day that is actually fruitful—is me submerging myself in the pool of my writing for consecutive days at a time, surfacing to answer the emails, do odd tasks, pick up the kids, run errands, make dinner. And a typical translating day—a translating day that is actually fruitful—is the same. Submersion and obsession with the task at hand until it is completed.
What are your thoughts on gendered expectations around family life and how this is explored in ‘domestic fiction’? I’m thinking about the things that push us away from our family and if this travels into stories of exile and loss.
Simran - The sacredness and primacy of the heteronormative extended South Asian family was pumped into my blood from birth, but coming to terms with my queerness meant a shattering and an opening to other forms of family, with friends and with lovers too. Fiction and poetry and storytelling create spaces for me sometimes where I can meet or imagine or excavate ideas about family that are radically queer, and spaces where I can mourn my expectations and feel my losses, not in a stagnating way but in a way that creates solidarity and siblinghood and space to breathe and celebrate.
Sangeeta - In India, women were expected to take care of home and children while men would be breadwinners and were thought to be the decision makers in financial issues, political agendas and all kind of social reformations. Though things have changed quite a lot and it would be half true to say that women are not taking part in things which men and supposed to be doing, social conditioning leads to different levels of struggle which ultimately affect women’s opportunity to prosper as equally important human beings with every ability to contribute and bring positive changes in society and in family life. Most of these struggles are related to sexual violence, gender crime and suppression, fighting for equal rights and opportunities. Meanwhile, another theory to this is also – men who are otherwise not against women empowerment but with years of knowledge and awareness of this discrimination in the outer world also treat women differently in order to protect women. It is a vicious circle. They become the mentor and protector which ultimately constrains a woman's freedom and liberty. So it is observed that the society which values women as individual, independent human beings also tend to behave in the same way as the society which is completely against women. Any woman who stands against this, or talks about this may eventually face cruel challenges and opposition in their personal life and career. These overbearing, oppressive stories of the sub continent can be heard in tandem and are being consistently written about when women can freely express. Thus women who have free will and are independent in nature and talk about the crisis extensively; are often forced to live as an outsider in her very own society. Taslima Nasreen and her life is an ideal example of a woman caught in such situation. She's been living in exile now for so many years because she talked about the humiliation women are subjected to in a misogynistic society with religion only helping the society to carry out the discrimination.
Tiffany - It sounds depressing, but I have become increasingly pessimistic about the ability of individuals to break out of such expectations, especially as long as the people around them and existing structures in which they are embedded refuse to revise these. I say this as a person who thought for sure she would be splitting stereotypically “female” domestic chores and responsibilities with her spouse one day: cooking, cleaning, overseeing children’s activities, etc. But it has been exhausting and depressing to keep attempting to shift the burden between us and encounter: a complete unwillingness and apparent “inability” on my husband’s part to take more responsibility; the necessity of me protesting constantly (which is framed by society as “nagging”) in order to get him to pay attention; the constant assumption of other parents, including mothers, that I am the one who should be consulted about anything related to our children.
Whoa. Sorry for going on a rant. I find these frustrations are definitely explored in domestic fiction, but of course, the irony is that “domestic fiction” is targeted at women, so basically, it’s preaching to the choir. But I definitely think that a retreating, a surrender, an exhaustion followed by emotional and mental detachment and drowning, inevitably follows. You start drifting away in order to protect your psychic wellbeing, even as you desperately long for your family, your spouse, your children to pull you back and hug you close and say they cherish you too much to let you go.
Tiffany, I’m interested in how your work looks at spaces for the individual. How do you feel that your work explores the concept of home for people from different socio-cultural groups?
Tiffany - This is an interesting question! I have never thought about this. But when I do, I realise that in all three of my novels, my characters rarely feel at home at home—at least, what is supposed to be their home. In The Oddfits, Murgatroyd’s home is a toxic environment, and in the sequel, The More Known World, this is the case with Ann’s home as well. And in The Majesties, the home is oppressive in the extreme—a chilling hug, that entraps the sisters, Estella and Gwendolyn, in a web of affection, custom, and love that is actually harmful to them. I’m not sure if the Oddfits novels explore the concept in relation to different sociocultural groups in a very deep way, but in The Majesties, this sense of “home” is informed by the strong sense of obligation, duty, and communal identity that is often emphasised within, at least in my experience, the wealthy Chinese-Indonesian community.
Simran, how do you feel about home as a fixed space?
Simran - Home used to be a rock solid thing for me, but then turned out to be a concept that could and was deeply destabilised by so much. Being queer in a brown home, being queer in a brown community or brown in a queer community or brown in a white city or Western in a brown country, all of this sometimes makes you feel like being queer in diaspora means being twice displaced and that 'home' doesn't quite exist. I think in a lot of my work I'm trying to create a home for other people like me. I'm trying to show that destabilising 'home' doesn't mean that home doesn't exist, it just - joyfully, excitingly - makes home into a radically open concept, that wants us to make new things out of it.
Do you feel your work is part of a particular movement, and if so who do you feel a connection with and in which ways?
Simran - I don't know if it's a movement, but Barbican Young Poets is a family, in our art and in life! I'm making a lot of work with queer people of colour at the moment, and about to launch into a big project with queer British South Asians from all kinds of performance disciplines, and there's a strong strong shared understanding and momentum wider than that project, I think.
Sangeeta - Like we say that ' feminism is for everybody'. In that vein, I think that if I had been a part of any movement apparently, or my writings had been a part of any movement whatsoever, it has to be the great feminist movement which has become the key factor of shaping human society for the last 150 years, keeping every little contribution from all genders in mind. From Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Germain Greer, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Maya Angelou to our own Raja Rammohan Roy, Bidhyasagar and many other feminist thinkers and writers had been my windows to look at and understand the complexity of women as a gender and their diverse relationship with society. Being a woman I connect with almost every woman I come across and learn from them virtually irrespective of class, society, culture, race, religion. Being a woman I also understand that our struggle within society is timeless and heartbreakingly cruel. I am afraid that while we had been thinking that after years of struggle finally women are becoming more free and achieving their rightful place in society, suddenly it seems that with the rise of nationalism, religious fundamentalism in every corner of our planet- an antipathy towards women is also emerging. Women are being subjected to terrible misogynistic and antagonistic behaviour. I would rather call it terrorism, terrorism against us, we women.
Tiffany - I feel like the answer to this question should be “Yes,” but if it is, I am not conscious of it, though I know I should be. After all, we’re all caught in historical flows! I tend to draw inspiration from random thoughts, random windborne seeds that catch on me and fall into my heart and there start growing. Along the same random vein: I feel most strongly emotionally connected with the work of the Brontë sisters and Christina Rossetti. Women isolated and independent and hungry for something and yet required to engage in self-denial for psychic survival. I think this is why I connect with Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s work so much—his poems, which I translated for Tilted Axis, and his stories, which I am currently translating. There is so much of this energy—desiring more and then realising the stupidity and hopelessness of daring to expect more. I feel this resonates with my written work strongly.
When writing about the people who are forced into the margins of contemporary Indian society, from mothers who spurn their children to hijra, how do you approach these subject matters without overlapping them with your own biases or sensibilities as a writer?
Simran - One thing I love about making devised theatre is that it gives you space to become a facilitator, and to use your craft to support someone else's voice and literally give them a platform. I try to take that approach everywhere as much as possible! But sometimes, with poetry, trying to be aware of my position as a diaspora writer, as a North Indian and a Jatt and so many other things, I want to use my platform for stories and parts of oral traditions of storytelling that get erased or assigned low status. I think it's about carefully navigating that on a case by case basis, while always giving credit and committing to research and thinking about who should receive any profits, if any happen.
Simran, how do you feel as a fellow diaspora kid reading fiction in translation, and the concept of different versions of a source text? I find for myself that it can be quite an emotionally difficult experience, and can imagine with your academic background that your relationship with translation runs quite deep.
I'm in a weird position where I can read two dead European languages better than I can read any of the languages that are my heritage, and speak living European languages better than I ever spoke the one language, Punjabi, that my grandma spoke. If there is something that I love and if it's possible, I try to avoid the difficult feelings that could come by just reading several different translations of a text, to access as much as I can together with the fragments of the original language I can decode, using geekiness to cover up the fear and sense of loss. Or sometimes I try to feel bold! Diaspora culture is its own thing and something to be proud of, and sometimes the messiness or 'absences' in our language skills, in moments of (mis)translating or refusing to translate, make space for exciting failures. We can make good art out of these failures, I think, and if there's any way we can create a place that is home in our diaspora-ness, this might be it.
Follow Simran, Sangeeta and Tiffany on their socials at:
@simransuppal (Twitter)
@TiffTsao (Twitter)
@sangeeta_sankhini (IG)