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Creative Lives


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sense of double (or even multiple) locatedness. In her interview in this volume, she says:

      You know I relate to both of my countries, France and India, in the same way. I am fiercely critical of them, and of the directions they are taking, but also really grateful for the person they’ve made me, because both have, and also very defensive of the founding principles of both countries, principles that are laudable and vital, and were, for long, successful against all odds.

      What could be the germ of inspiration behind this diasporic yearning to give such prominence to the dissemination of the homeland culture, its history, and literature? A creative work is often inspired by conflictual scenarios that the writer / creator develops in a rising narrative arc. As Samrat Upadhyay points out, his starting point for a novel is “a character in a pickle”! We could hypothesize from this that their diaporic creators are also inspired by the uneasy space or frisson that may open up through an inner awareness of (un)belonging to the majority culture, and the tensions caused by such dissonance. Can we detect this claim in the in-between spaces of the inter-views? And how does it feature in the context of contemporary multi-cultures in which the minority diasporic culture might be struggling, possibly burdened with an idealized past, to adapt to the majority culture? In a relatively recent interview, Homi Bhabha (2015) provides a theoretical lens through which to interrogate this view and enhance our understanding of a complex sensibility that lies unidentified in the voluntary diasporic who seems overtly adaptable and accommodating. Bhabha contests the idea that a contemporary culture anywhere is a “seamless whole”, arguing instead that it is a “misfitting apparatus” in which minority cultures with their multiple differences piece into the majority culture. Using the metaphor of the broken vessel introduced by Walter Benjamin ([1923] 2000) in his essay “The Task of the Translator”, Bhabha argues this point with particular reference to the minoritized (diasporic) Parsi community in India that he sees as a vessel patched up of “misfitted” fragments:

      [T]he pieces of a broken vessel fit together not because they are the same as each other but they fit into each other in all their differences. […] So culture is a translational reality, and to that extent it depends upon its moving parts, its often contradictory, asymmetrical moving parts, its tensile strength. […] the question ‘What is your cultural identity?’ is unanswerable. (2015, n.p.)

      However, as our group of writers demonstrates, the result is not a “paralysing condition” for a minority diasporic community but one that offers a deeply cosmopolitan space open to “varied contingencies and interventions”. Stierstorfer and Wilson’s observation that hope is an essential element of the original meaning of the word “diaspora” as “the scattering of seeds” (2018, xix), applies to Bhabha’s stance that contemporary multi-cultures open up interstitial spaces from which diasporic creativity may be born and within which it may grow and bear fruit. In moments of inter-viewing his “nomadic” transnational roaming and its effect on his creative production, Tabish Khair offers insights into the complex and non-linear effects of travelling. Khair admits to inhabiting a kind of “intellectual exile” which can be a creative “impetus”:

      [a] paradoxical state of being in the world and not in the world at the same time. I think intellectual exile enables this necessary (dis)junction of being more or less visible, and one uses it creatively in a form that can be seen as being rooted in a degree of dissatisfaction about what exists in the world.

      Khair also acknowledges the ways in which a creative tradition may gain by contrapuntally borrowing from other cultures and writing across national borders.

      Diasporic voices share common ground in issues relating to connectedness to the homeland. However, they also draw inspiration from world literature, which, as David Damrosch (2003) theorizes, stems from “widely disparate societies, with very different histories, frames of cultural reference and poetics” (4). It is not surprising, then, that the writers interviewed here are reinventing, appropriating, recycling and translating stories and languages as new points of contact generate cross-cultural fertilisation and result in surprising transformations. A notable example of this is Sulari Gentill (“I’m Australian. I was born in Sri Lanka, learned to speak English in Zambia and grew up in Brisbane”), who adapts the detective fiction genre to produce a highly successful series of nine politically and historically acute crime novels set in the 1930s in Sydney, Shanghai and elsewhere. Anyone interested in the circulation, reading and rewriting of texts as part of “world literature” will find acknowledgement in these interviews of a rich and complex network of writers and material that undergirds South Asian diasporic writing. Here, forms such as the bhakti poetry of Mira Bai are cited by Suneeta Peres da Costa alongside an inspiring series of later writers from Marguerite Yourcenar to Shashi Deshpande and Perumal Murugan, as well as Ingeborg Bachmann, William H. Gass, W.G. Sebald and Eunice de Souza. Lydia Davis is discussed here, as are Roberto Bolaño, and Antonio Tabucchi. Michelle Cahill talks about her inventive “Letter to [Fernando] Pessoa”. Unexpected and creative collisions occur, such as Kaiser Haq’s homage to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Walt Whitman—just one of the fruits of his residence in the US. Or Amit Chaudhuri’s recollections of the profound effect of his first reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. One comes away from these conversations wondering if Franco Moretti’s (2000) notion of world literature as “one and unequal” (56), where he highlights the engagements between “cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system” and the European (and Eurocentric) literary canon (58) really takes account of South Asian creativity and eclecticism, and its challenge to western canons.

      The writers’ nuanced observations deepen our understanding of the interstitial diasporic creative space as being neither linear nor simple. In the interview referenced above, Bhabha reflects that diaspora is about “misfits”, and that in political terms, the “misfit” is often the minority, leading a peripheral existence, subject to the processes and practices of minoritization. Bearing testimony to this, while clichéd slogans of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism celebrate equality, overt or subtle forms of racism continue unabated in our time. The diasporic literary culture of today is charged with such realities and we each deal with them in our own way.

      For instance, the British-born Indian essayist and novelist Pico Iyer (2019), one of the most celebrated citizens of the world, tells in Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells how he is nicknamed “Isoro” or “Parasite” by the “neighborhood kids” of the village of Shikanodai in Osaka, which is currently his home (27). We may assume, that in all probability, the nickname originated in careless adult gossip. If so, one can think of no positive synonym that could even remotely excuse this label that smacks of all things abject, such as bloodsuckers and killers of trees. In relation to the diasporic, it could only describe someone obsessively sucking up nourishment from the nurturing source and destroying it in the process. Iyer, however, laughs it off with gentle irony, and seeks to soothe reader-response by arguing that the nickname may have arisen from his difference from the Japanese cultural norm: his lack of “suit and tie employment” and the role reversal in his marital relationship, by which he assumed the more domesticated role. And yet, that Iyer considered it important enough to register the nickname so early in a book that is replete with observations of and engagement with cross-cultural pollinations, seems to suggest a deliberate if subtle form of literary activism that encourages tolerance and bridge-building—the suturing of diasporic minority-majority collisions; a form of “radical resistance”, to use Cheran’s words here. For Amit Chaudhuri, literary activism is a significant creative impetus. Chaudhuri’s inspiring idea is that however difficult, the creative process must be a “state of argument […] a dialogue not just internal, but with existing cultures […] with your past” which then carries the potential of new perspectives that will lead us forward.

      In such a dialogue, the work of South Asian diasporic writers is read in at least three contexts. As well as being part of world literature and the literature of their homelands, they are rightly seen as contributing to (as well creatively unsettling) “national” literatures in the US, UK, Canada, France and Australia.

      In conclusion, Creative Lives projects multiple conversations between the writers, facilitating productive collaborations, augmenting communal, national and inter-national tensions and debates, but also fomenting wellbeing