Claire Chambers: In the novel you've created many diverse strands within a complex structure ... How do you hold together all those strands? You briefly write about kintsugi: "the art of repair [...] visibly featuring the repair, instead of concealing it [...] The result is more precious than the original."
Might kintsugi as the beautiful piecing together of history's fragments work as a metaphor for your own techniques in this novel? I'm thinking here of David Walcott's Nobel Prize acceptance speech from 1992, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, in which he writes: "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole [...] It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments."
This quote seems to me very suggestive for your own historical and aesthetic project: do you agree?
Uzma Aslam Khan: Claire, thank you for drawing my attention to Walcott's wondrous speech. I hadn't read it before. Yes, absolutely, it speaks to my own making of the many strands (of my novel) and their piecing together. I didn't choose to write it this way, though. The book decides. I was working with a wide cast of characters from different geographies, so the structure took awhile to reveal itself. Nor was I aware of the multiplicity till I was done. It was my Indian publisher who first pointed out that there were characters from what was to become Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, as well as from Burma, and from across languages and faiths. Maybe because of all the geographies that I carry within me, and all the fragmented languages and histories as well, lateral imagining and thinking seem to be where I go.
I don't have a clear understanding of how I tap into the different voices. Each character appears first in an image--visual or spoken. So the prisoner's story began with letters from her family. Nomi with the chicken being chased by the Japanese. These seeds--or fragments--took shape from early scribbles that were more like sketches. It is a visual process, and I agree so deeply with Walcott's celebration of the love that goes into this assembling and reassembling, and agree too that it is "stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when whole."
** Many thanks to Claire and Full Stop. Read the rest of our conversation here.
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| Photo credit David Maine |
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