and co-producers of knowledge, to choose how to think more critically.
Bibliography
Helgesson, Stephan. 2014. “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.” Interventions 16 (4): 483–500.
Introduction
The Act of Inter-viewing: A Network of Creative Lives in the South Asian Diaspora
Chandani Lokuge and Chris Ringrose
What is more important in a network than the interstitial relations? What Hannah Arendt called human “inter-est”, that which is between people and brings them together. (Bhabha 2015)
An “interview” is a pragmatic way into new knowledge but is also suggestive of subtle undertones and interpretations of what is already known and familiar. On the one hand, it is an interrogation or conversation that brings together one individual, the interviewee, and an other, the interviewer, who shares their world. In the act of the interview, the individual sees themselves in relation to and separate from the other—who represents the public beyond their own world. When split with a hyphen, as we have chosen to do here, “inter-view” suggests something more introspective and liminal: looking inward or in-between. The effect then could be of something unpredicted, a frisson, perhaps, created between what is said and not said, what is felt and not thought—an inward reaction that resists articulation but is important to our notions of who we are in our continual negotiations with the world.
Through the fascinating and provocative medium of the inter-view, Creative Lives brings together a cross-section of South Asian diasporic1 Anglophone novelists, poets, playwrights and translators. Their travel lines originate from South Asia—Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tibet. They are interwoven by their geographical positioning, as well as by aspects of pre- and postcolonial histories, cultures, religions, languages and literatures. The majority of our interviewees share the legacies of British colonization; consequently, inherited local and acquired British cultures blend in them. However, they are also distinguished and differentiated by disparate features that are unique to each home culture. Their voyages out, meanwhile, extend across the globe to many different destinations in the west, ranging from Australia and Canada to France, Denmark, the UK and US. In this Introduction, we seek to situate their reflections on their creative work in the light of: the relationship between “homeland” and “hostland”; the idea of “world literature”; the resources and problematics of “Anglophone writing”; and the meaning and politics of “diaspora” itself in relation to writing.
In a classic study of diaspora, James Clifford (1994) describes diaspora as “jostling and conversing [with] terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity”. All of Clifford’s terms are significant for diasporic writers and artists, since diaspora opens up new impulses and topics as they imagine their journey and dis-location. In the interviews gathered in this volume, such “jostling and conversation” is evident in the interviewees’ reaction to, and reformulation of, the terms that might define their place “in the world” as they consider, adopt or decline concepts such as transnationalism, globalization and the postcolonial.
Some commentators have expressed misgivings about diasporic writing’s capacity to deal adequately with “homelands”; usually they invoke the idea of a lack of authentic belonging. One notorious example occurred in 1996, when the Australian writer Germaine Greer attacked Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance on British TV. “I hate this book”, she said. “It’s a Canadian book about India. What could be worse? What could be more terrible?” Mistry’s response was to call her comments “asinine” and “brainless”. This was five years after Salman Rushdie’s (1991) classic essay “Imaginary Homelands”, and two years after Homi Bhabha’s (1994) The Location of Culture had explored the active, dynamic process of interaction between cultural and national identities. Greer seemed to offer instead an ideal of uncontaminated purity in literary responses to a nation, which diaspora theory dissociates from as it suggests xenophobia and exclusiveness.
Today one hardly needs recourse to Homi Bhabha’s reflections on “hybridity” to celebrate the brilliant possibilities for literary production offered by intersecting realms of experience, idiom and cultural hybridity offered by migration. And of course, those literary intersections can be set in the homeland, as in Amit Chaudhuri’s recent Friend of My Youth, or in the hostland, as in his earlier Odysseus Abroad, whose very title plays with the idea of antecedents, travel and being “abroad”. Nevertheless, Chaudhuri himself is one of those most impatient with the terminology of homelands, hostlands and diaspora. Prompted by Pavan Kumar Malreddy during his interview in this volume to reflect directly on such concepts, he responds that terms like diaspora, exile, nation and identity make his mind “fog over”.
Sehba Sarwar, born and brought up in Pakistan, and a US resident for more than three decades, is equally uncomfortable with certain kinds of familiar terminology, and relates her misgivings to the content of her work and her fascination with cross-cultural encounters. “Relationships”, she says here, “don’t need to be limited by national borders that are, in the end, temporary”. She goes on to say that the word “diaspora” itself feels remote to her: “Most people I meet and work with have a history of displacement. Ultimately, I prefer the term ‘transnational’—because I ground myself in multiple spaces, and I don’t feel the need to select only one as my ‘home’”. Michelle Cahill, an Australian-based writer who engages with a dazzling variety of locales, genres and literary affinities, takes a similar view. While acknowledging her affiliation with “those of us who have been colonized and have suffered the loss of family, of language, of community, of culture”, she is prepared to entertain the idea of having “a global voice”, having spent her formative years living in three countries and valuing a family environment that was aware of the world, through its communities, “through coloniality, through trade, through art, through different cultures and languages”. Interviewee Mridula Koshy, now residing in New Delhi after a 20-year sojourn in the US, is committed to representing the resilience of her subaltern characters: “I am interested in literature as one space in which power difference and corruption can be addressed. Good literature has always been committed to examining how we structure our lives and the ideas to which we subscribe”.
As Yoon Sun Lee (2015) emphasizes, “the diasporic imaginary rests on space: space travelled, experienced and registered as distance” (133). This spatial geography gains depth from the distinctive and idiosyncratic perceptions of the writers as they reflect on their creative worlds—their way of life, artistic concerns, core beliefs, cultural practices and importantly, their literatures—within the context of their diasporic, “returned diasporic” or “nomadic” experiences. As Turkish US diaspora cultural theorist Azade Seyhan (2000) argues, originating at border crossings, and driven by mobile subjects, diaspora narratives cannot be bound by “national borders, language, and literary and critical traditions” (4). Rather, their creativity is inspired by the interrogation of home and belonging, transcultural connectivity, hybridity and diversity, settlement and location (xviii).
Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson (2018) note that the word “diaspora” has its “etymological origins in the Greek verb diaspeirein, comprising the elements dia-, ‘through, across’, and -speirein, ‘to sow or scatter seeds’” (xix). It was originally used to refer to the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile; for this reason, it carried overtones of punishment. In broader and later usage, it refers to human dissemination and scattering, and to communities dislocated from their place of origin through migration or exile, and relocated elsewhere. Creative Lives shines a light on the earliest and most familiar of diasporas—the forced diaspora—which, commencing from the Jewish exodus from their homelands and inability to return to them, continues to grow within the more recent, entirely new historical period of our times: in the global mass migration of people from all over the world, persecuted in their homelands, who seek asylum in new lands. In his exclusive inter-view for this book, Tamil Canadian poet Cheran gives a searing insight