Madness Exile and Resistance An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay

4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay Published on Poets & Writers (https://www.pw.org) Home > Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay [1] by Mark Fabiano May/June 2017 [2] 4.12.17 Freedom of speech. Immigration status. Families separated across continents and cultures. Racial misunderstanding. Lying military officials. Corrupt political administration. These topics call to mind current headlines on travel bans and deportation forces in the United States, but they also highlight the troubles for characters in Samrat Upadhyay’s new story collection, Mad Country, published by Soho Press in April. Mad Country, described by Kirkus as “brilliant but accessible gems of short fiction,” is the latest book exploring Nepali lives, cultures, politics, and settings by the author who has been called the “Buddhist Chekhov.” Born in Kathmandu, Upadhyay moved to the United States at the age of twenty­one. He received his BA from the College of Wooster in Ohio, his MA from Ohio University, and his PhD from the University of Hawaii. As his career unfolded, Upadhyay went from teaching creative writing at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, to a tenure­ track position at Indiana University. His story “The Good Shopkeeper,” published in the 1998 issue of Manoa, was selected for the Best American Short Stories of 1999. Since then, he has enjoyed the kind of literary success emerging writers dream about, including a Whiting Award for his first book, the story collection Arresting God in Kathmandu (Mariner Books, 2001). His first novel, The Guru of Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), was a New York Times notable book. It was followed by the collection The Royal Ghosts (Mariner Books, 2006) and the novels Buddha’s Orphans (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and The City Son (Soho Press, 2014). In Mad Country, Upadhyay widens his view to include a variety of characters, stepping beyond Nepal and the singular focus on Nepalis. The Whiting Awards website describes Mad Country as a “thrilling new collection [which] brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay’s brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.” In fact, the stories in Mad Country reflect the most sublime, masterful, and wholly original fiction of Upadhyay’s work to date. We met this past February in Washington, D.C. to discuss his writing process, exile literature, and of course, Mad Country. I read somewhere that you switched to writing your fiction longhand before typing it. What prompted you to do this and how does it help your writing process? Ever since about halfway through Buddha’s Orphans, I have been writing fiction longhand. While I was writing that book, seeing my words on the screen made me feel as if it was already moving toward a finished draft, which made me anxious. I knew the novel was far from finished. So, to return to the feeling of original composition, I decided to write the novel by hand. I bought cheap notebooks and large packets of pens from Costco. It was https://www.pw.org/print/855499 1/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay wonderful to return to the immediacy of pen on paper. Sometimes I wrote in large handwriting; other times in small. Sometimes, I deliberately went off on a tangent and wrote stuff that didn’t seem tightly connected to the novel. The entire process loosened something up inside me, assured me that my words were not concrete, that they were malleable. It also helped when I started typing my handwritten work because I instinctually was doing minor editing as I typed. Since then, I always write my original draft by hand. How do you start writing your stories? Is there a single method? Does each story come to you the same way? Each story has a different origin, different trajectory. Usually I start with an image of a protagonist in some degree of conflict. There’s always a setting, a character situated somewhere, because for me the setting informs the character and vice versa. I don’t plan or map out my stories beforehand. The pleasure of discovery, of surprise, is important. I don’t want to know right away what the character is going to do, who he or she is going to meet, how the original conflict will shape the way he or she moves through the story’s landscape. So, in a way, protagonist is plot. I have very few stories that have come out of “ideas.” Or if they have, the dominance of the original ideas give way to the demands of the moment. Do you focus on finishing and polishing one story before starting the next or do you have various stories running along at the same time? When I first started writing seriously, I could only focus on one story at a time. I still do, but now I can work on a story and a novel at the same time. It is a relief and pleasure to work on a short story when the demands of the novel become overwhelming. After I finish the story, I’m able to return to the novel with a renewed freshness. Do you plan to write short stories and if so how does that change your approach? How does the form guide your writing? Almost always I know at the start of a project whether I’m writing a short story or a novel. It seems that with a short story I “know” the ending soon after I begin, even as I may not know its exact contents, so I’m already working with a heightened sense of compression and focus. It’s almost like I’m humming the short story to myself, like a small lyrical piece. With a novel, there’s a sense of settling down, going into alleys and peeking down ravines, a feeling that I’m trying to bring disparate worlds together. The long­haul aspect of the novel also makes me a more cautious writer: I want to make sure that my project is a big­idea project that’s going to sustain me for many pages and years of writing. Has a story ever not let itself be contained in that form? What did you do? Only once has one of my stories, upon revision, turned into a novel: my second book and first novel, The Guru of Love. And yes, it reads like a very long short story. You once advised that writers need to plumb the depths of their characters’ souls. Good advice. How do you know when you are doing that? What do you do when you find yourself not doing that? I think you know this when the character comes “alive” on the page, when the character is not your idea of a character but someone who has a tactile presence. You know you’re doing it when you’re allowing your character free movement in the process of writing the story, when you’re letting them surprise you by what they say and do, as opposed to what you think they should say and do. It requires an intense, raw engagement with your character. How does one write and/or teach multicultural literature? Have you ever assigned your MFA students to write a story from the point of view of a character from a wholly different cultural, ethnic, or other background? I do encourage my students to write from perspectives other than their own, sometimes simply as an exercise, to https://www.pw.org/print/855499 2/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay see how successful they can be, or what kind of research they need to conduct to do justice to that perspective. The texts I assign for my courses are invariably multicultural, international: Ishiguro, Gordimer, Rushdie, McEwan, Ha Jin, etc. I think it’s very important for American students to know of the varied literary aesthetics and concerns that exist around the world. Do you consider yourself a postcolonial writer? A multicultural writer? How useful are labels like this? I don’t want to be categorized. Sometimes these labels are useful so that we can create a framework that enables us to focus, but then these labels are not solid. These days I question even the identity of my “self,” whether I exist exactly the way I think I do. I am interested in a variety of human experiences, and how we articulate those experiences—and sometimes create them!—through art, so naturally my interests span cultures. Does your wife, Babita, who is also a journalist, assist you with your process? Do you work directly with an editor on all projects? Babita is indeed my first reader. Early in my career, I used to have her read individual stories, or portions of a novel, but I found that her critique got in the way of the kind of focus I needed to push the book toward completion. So now I give her my manuscript only after I have finished writing it. This way she can give me a more comprehensive critique. Then I send it to my agent, then on to the publisher, where I work closely with the editor to make the book ready for publication. It’s with the editor that I do much of the macro­ and micro­level editorial work. How does raising a family influence the sort of stories you write? Has it expanded your topical interests? I have been writing about relationships for a long time, so being part of a family heightens awareness of the challenges and joys of family relationships. Experiencing my daughter’s growth into a teenager—she was just born when my first book was published and her birth energized the writing of my second book—has given me insights into the workings of young minds, so parent­child issues have also emerged in my books. How long do you go after completing a book—mailed off, accepted for publication—before setting your sights on a new project? I am usually well underway with my next book by the time I’ve mailed off a completed book for publication. Rarely have I had a gap, or least a big one, between books. What do you do to fill your “creative well,” for your writing? How do you regenerate? Refresh? I have been fortunate than my creative well has remained replenished throughout the years. But during down times I read good books, watch good movies, or simply meditate. In his blurb on the cover of Arresting God in Kathmandu, Lee K. Abbott requested that you ought to be turned loose “to go hunting for God in the equally needy provinces of (your) new homeland.” Is Mad Country, at least in part, your reply or an attempt to do that? If it is, it’s not a conscious one. I think the world has come much closer—through technology, social media, and so on—than when I was writing the stories for Arresting God in Kathmandu. When I visit Delhi, for example, I can go to a “lounge” and dance to the same Top 40 music that’s currently playing in the United States. My friends in Nepal carry the latest version of smartphones. So now it doesn’t seem unnatural that I’m writing stories that straddle both cultures, where concerns from one homeland seep into another. Your first collection included stories that had been previously published. I noticed that The Royal Ghosts and Mad Country do not have any previous publications, however. How does that help or hinder the selection process and the composition that goes into finalizing a collection? What are the pros and cons https://www.pw.org/print/855499 3/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay of publishing a collection of completely unpublished short stories? I didn’t expect my first book to be a story collection. I was doing my PhD at the University of Hawaii and publishing stories in literary journals. I’d heard and read that publishers didn’t want a story collection from an unknown author, so I was sending out my novels without luck. But once Arresting God in Kathmandu was published, I began thinking of story collections as books with an arc and thematic unity and stories within a collection speaking to and building upon one another. So, naturally, sending these stories out individually for publication took a backseat. The drawback to this could be that there is no validation of the individual stories through publication in journals, but my process has allowed me to focus on books single­mindedly. You mentioned that City Son and especially Mad Country are somewhat experimental for you. Can you elaborate on this? I have been a writer of realism, but with these two books I have played with the elasticity of both the novel form and the short story form to become slightly experimental. I have pushed images, sometimes to a degree of absurdity that I’m not used to. All in all, it’s been quite exciting. From a writing method or craft perspective what did you do differently writing and completing Mad Country that you did not do for your previous story collections? My initial draft of Mad Country had many more stories, a couple of them near novella­length. Some stories I excised myself; others I decided to cut after consulting with my editor Mark Doten at Soho Press so that we’d come out with a leaner and meaner book. I don’t recall having so many stories at my disposal with any of my previous collections. When I hear the phrase “literature of exile” what comes to mind are writers who have been forced to leave a country or region because they are subverting the status quo there. But I think it goes deeper and transcends politics. These stories, and most of your work, pose a different, broader understanding of that phrase. Could speak to this theme of exile and reflect on how Mad Country embodies a “literature of exile.” The modern definition of exile has expanded to embrace people who have experienced a loss of place. So, in this sense, my fiction often talks of people who have undergone displacement. Edward Said has written that “exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.” I have been particularly interested, lately and especially in Mad Country, in shifts in identities brought about by displacement. Some of my characters experience geographical exiles; others go through a kind of an internal displacement that challenges their notions of who they fundamentally are, everything they hold dear about their individual selves. There are several writers in whose work I find similar thoughts: Ha Jin, Nadine Gordimer, Amitav Ghosh. Several main characters in Mad Country face either voluntary or forced exile. In some cases, characters experience a particular kind of madness relating to their situations. In “Beggar Boy,” Ramesh, a troubled young man who lives in his diplomat father’s mansion, attempts a Dickensian switch into the persona of a street urchin by donning the poor boy’s clothes. He indulges his imagination with robbery, suicide and quasi­psychoanalytic street scenes involving his father as a callous rich man passing he, a beggar on the street. Imagination and madness also collide in your novella “Dreaming of Ghana,” when an astonished Aakash finds that his dreams and reality begin to overlap even as political violence disrupts the fabric of society, culture and art. For a few years now I have been fascinated by how porous and fluid our “self” is. The quality of our everyday experience, our perception and interpretation of the world, our emotional response to what happens to us—they are all dictated by this thing we call I. We are also very adept at creating as many different Is as needed to fit our experiences into certain molds. Our notions of home are also very much tied to our notions of who this self is. So, https://www.pw.org/print/855499 4/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay what happens when the home is displaced? What happens when the self turns into something else, or perhaps when the self goes mad? Looked at in this way, it seems like we are all experiencing madness in some way. Once this solid self is stripped away, we are all homeless, and thus, in a state of perpetual exile. In “Beggar Boy,” Ramesh begins to experience great disturbance within himself when he realizes the differences between the haves and the have­nots in his house and the city. When he allows his imagination to go on a mad spree he begins to bridge that gap, at least within his own mind, which gives him solace. Aakash in “Dreaming of Ghana” is disenchanted with his family life and the vapid articles he writes for the tourism magazine where he works. His imagination then propels him into a dream, which produces another reality that feels more substantial and satisfying. In the title story, savvy and successful businesswoman Anamika Gurung is called away from an important business meeting because her teen son may be hauled off to jail from his school. The story follows the maddening conflicts Anamika encounters—those she causes and those she runs into—including both forced and voluntary exile. How do you see madness and exile at work in this story? Anamika is filled with hubris regarding her station in life, drunk on the success and power she enjoys. But that all changes in one catastrophic moment when she’s exiled as a political prisoner in a world gone mad. At once she’s confronted with forces that sharply erode her notion of self, to the extent that her previous life of privilege start appearing crazy to her. Only after she’s forced to live, in her involuntary exile, among women who are clearly below her does she realize how flimsy, and irrational, her previous existence was. Kafka, who was a big influence on me early on, but whom I haven’t read in a while, probably was making his presence known in this story. Race colors the madness in at least two of the stories, but in very different ways. In “Freak Street” Sofi from Ohio attempts to shed her identify by becoming Sukumari in her adopted Nepali family. Later, in the timely “America the Great Equalizer,” a Nepali student, Biks, runs smack into the turmoil of an American brand of racism on the streets of Ferguson. What would you like your readers to take away from these stories? I believe in immersive experiences for the readers, so I’m hoping that they themselves will experience Sofi’s and Biks’s struggles with their racial and national identities. The older I get the more I am amazed at how similar we are despite our racial and ethnic backgrounds and our life experiences. Yet it’s also clear that many of us can’t seem to shake off our differences—and at times the differences seem entrenched and impossible. Both Sofi and Biks, in their exiles, realize how illogical the differences are between themselves and their adopted cultures, and yet, when given the chance to surmount these differences they are forced to reckon with obstacles that are both within and without. I am exploring whether our construction of race, and how we use it to discriminate and oppress, is dictated by our own ossified notions of self. With frequent return visits to Nepal, you’ve made the United States home for your family. As an immigrant and a writer, how do you feel about the way this country seems torn over the issues of immigration, race, and even the Trump administration’s attempt at a travel ban? This is a very sad and crazy period for America. In a way, everything that has happened feels like a dream. I worry about my daughter, a young woman of color, born and raised as a Nepali American. What will her future be in a country where racism, anti­Semitism, and misogyny have been normalized by the highest holder of public office? Everything that has happened, and perhaps will continue to happen in the months and years to come, feels very anti­American. I keep telling myself, “This is not the America I know.” I get asked often when I travel abroad whether I’d have been a writer had I not come to the United States. Who knows the answer to that question? What I do know is that it was the American spirit of openness and inquiry and opportunity that enabled me to pursue my literary passion. When I first came here, I thought I was going to major in business, then I ended up taking classes in literature and writing because there were people doing serious study of literature and writing https://www.pw.org/print/855499 5/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay in this country. It was all very freeing and enriching, even though I was a financially poor student. And in a sense, I never looked back. What do you believe writers, immigrant or not, need to do in response to such abrasive and anti­ immigrant attitudes and policies? I think the best thing we can do is to continue writing, unafraid. When I was growing up in Nepal, writing anything against the monarchy was punishable. After coming to this country, I saw how people had the freedom to be critical of even the highest political figure in the country. Literature is a form of resistance. No, it is resistance. Fundamentally, literature tells us that the world is not what it seems. And politicians, especially those with authoritarian bents, are always telling us that the world is a certain way. Literature asks us to probe into our everyday realities, and because it take us deeper into the human experience, that, in itself, is resistance against oppression, which is confining and belittling. In its own way, Mad Country, written before Election Day, and certainly more relevant today, addresses immigration and the United States, particularly in “Freak Street” and “America the Great Equalizer.” How do these stories, and whole collection, mirror your own sensibilities and values about the current conflicts of immigration and race in this country? I have never understood nationalism or racism, at least not the vitriolic kind surfacing in America right now. People don’t choose the place of their birth or the color of their skin. I believe that we are much more than the selves we embody right now, and to think of ourselves only as this race or that nationality is constricting and petty and conflict­seeking. Mad Country is about expanding our notions of who we are, breaking out of the straightjackets that we have trapped ourselves in. The two stories you mention in particular have characters journeying between America and Nepal and discovering new identities. The title story itself is a mad form of journeying, wherein the self completely transforms. I am interested in such radical rebirth. Do you see any hope? Does writing about these issues offer you and your readers any solace? Writing is certainly therapeutic. The I­Ching uses a wonderful image of nourishment: magic tortoise. To me, writing has always been my magic tortoise: It’s soothing, life­affirming, worldly and mystical, and ultimately, liberating. And certainly, my hope is that my work will give readers comfort and pleasure. But I also hope that it'll provoke and energize, and nudge them beyond the boundaries of their selves. Mark Fabiano’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Best New Writing, Aestas 2016, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, The Long Story, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and other publications. His awards include Editor’s Choice Award for Best New Writing, honorable mentions from the American Literary Review and Fabula Press, and an Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Excellence in Fiction. His novel, The World Does Not Know, was a finalist in the Washington Writers Publishing House 2017 Fiction Contest. His nonfiction work includes interviews, reviews, and scholarly work that have appeared in r.kv.r.y. Quarterly Literary Journal, Muses India: Essays on English­Language Writers From Mahomet to Rushdie, International Journal of Communications, FORUM: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and Arts, The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel, The Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story, and others. He has an MFA in fiction from George Mason University, an MA in English from Wright State University, an MA in International Affairs from Ohio University, and a BA in English from Ohio State University. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka, the setting for several short stories and his novel. He has taught creative writing, literature, and other courses at various colleges for over eleven years. His website is markfabiano.com [3]. https://www.pw.org/print/855499 6/9 4/21/2017 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay Source URL: https://www.pw.org/content/madness_exile_and_resistance_an_interview_with_samrat_upadhyay Links [1] https://www.pw.org/content/madness_exile_and_resistance_an_interview_with_samrat_upadhyay [2] https://www.pw.org/content/mayjune_2017 [3] http://markfabiano.com https://www.pw.org/print/855499 7/9 4/21/2017 https://www.pw.org/print/855499 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay 8/9 4/21/2017 https://www.pw.org/print/855499 Madness, Exile, and Resistance: An Interview With Samrat Upadhyay 9/9