A writer is lucky when an interviewer asks excellent questions. Shireen Quadri at Punch magazine opens the right space for my new book, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali. I say things I'd been wanting to say for a time, and those that surprise me.
Extracts:
Shireen Quadri (SQ): The evocative passages (in The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali) describing the suffering of Prisoner 2018 D bring to mind your treatment of the corporal, which is also evident in your earlier novels. Do you have to work on this element?
Uzma Aslam Khan (UAK): Writing for me is a deeply immersive act — it demands of me, physically. Since I never have an outline or any kind of plan, it’s as though the union between pen and page becomes the body.
Recently, I read an article about Frida Kahlo’s illnesses, and how her work reflected this. I realised that mine did, too. I’m not comparing my work to hers, but I also had a difficult childhood, health-wise, which has carried into adulthood, and I do find it interesting that disability becomes a site of exploration. My characters are dealing with trauma that is held in the body. A reader recently pointed out that they also heal each other physically, often with water and earth. Haider Ali’s mother feeds him Multani mitti. Aye holds Zee when they swim. The aborigine women paint men with clay. And other examples.
I’d emphasise that we are still overlooking the catastrophic impact of trauma — local, including within the family, and global — on the body. What happens when the body is written out of history and memory, generation after generation, can only be written, reclaimed, and healed by the body.
SQ: Do you see nature as one of the novel’s characters since it is steeped in the colour, and silences, of the place, the expanse of the sky, the land and the sea, and lends the novel breath and breadth?
UAK: Absolutely. Nature is a primary character — Nomi, the prisoner, and the other characters are part of it. They can’t be separated. This isn’t something I was striving for; it’s just how I work. As noted in the previous question, I don’t work well with abstractions. The physical world tells the emotional truth. For instance, it’s one thing to say that the Second World War caused indigenous fishermen in the Andaman Islands to lose a primary source of food. It’s quite another to show the fear caused by underwater mines, and the totality with which the mines displaced fishermen from their oldest cultural ally, the sea. A fiction writer needs to capture that relationship from within, its beauty and its loss, physically and emotionally.
SQ: Is there anything about this novel that nobody asked you about and you’d like to share?
UAK: Thank you for this question. I wonder if I can ask, simply: why does this story matter today?
My answer: It is dangerous to think of 1930s and 40s Andaman Islands as merely a “remote” history, or as a past that is “over.” There is still today a terrible battle underway worldwide between right-wing ideologies. Each time we label a land and people “remote,” we are complicit in their marginalisation, which in turn is a kind of violence. Children like Nomi are still caught in the crossfires. They are still losing families to death, detention, and irreversible emotional damage. Women like the unnamed prisoner are still unnamed, still forgotten. We — the global we — never freed ourselves of fascism. For all our present-day talk of diversity, the lives of people from outside the “known” Euro-American universe are still being erased, and those who survive are expected to exist gratefully on the margins, still silenced, still unequal. This history is chillingly cyclical, and this fiction, to me at least, is very much of the moment.
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