The other day, I was watching a TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie (“The danger of a single story“) in which she talks about how, as a new writer, she was trying to ape the Western writers she’d read growing up.
She mentioned how her stories always, always, had characters drinking ginger beer, something she’d never tasted.
That comment made me laugh, because you know, when I was fourteen years old, writing my first “novel,” I wrote about ginger beer too, something I still haven’t tasted (and no longer like the sound of).
But even as recently as eight years ago, when I started my freelancing career, I didn’t have any role models in India. And so, I looked outside of myself and found a universe of American writers on the Internet. I didn’t fit in with them or identify with their struggles, but seeing as I didn’t identify with my Indian culture and felt rejected by that as well, I really really wanted to fit into this new community I had found.
I didn’t fit in– they drank coffee from Starbucks first thing in the morning, wrote about living with their boyfriends, talked about how 9/11 had affected their ability to write, ate sushi, wore tiaras and went to see their favorite authors at book signings.
And I too, wanted to do that.
I, too, wanted to drink coffee (even though I hated coffee at the time; strong black tea is my addiction of choice), eat sushi, live with my boyfriend, and watch Americans read from their books. And I so SO wanted to fit into this community.
I had a weekly newsletter and because I wanted it to fit among the sea of American voices, I Americanized it.
I started talking about a boyfriend as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a person like me, who hadn’t been allowed to to have male friends until I was 21, to have a boyfriend. I tried, whenever possible, to avoid mentioning that even though I was 23 years old, I was still living with my parents. I talked about my grandmother’s death, but didn’t mention that for over a decade, right until the day she died, I shared a bedroom with her. That this guy, a boyfriend, was the first guy I’d ever dated and would possibly be the last. And I never, never spoke about everything that is wonderful and everything that is not wonderful about being Indian, living in this country. I didn’t want my American friends to know that the “poor you” cliches they applied to India as a country, in many cases, applied to my own life.
I didn’t know how to explain to foreigners a culture that sometimes felt equally foreign to me.
I never went to parties, I never had girls-night-outs with my friends, and I stayed at home and read a lot. Not by choice.
It isn’t until after I went through a bit of a personal rebuilding that I truly found where I fit in and became comfortable expressing that this was who I was. Instead of shying away from the fact, I started using it to my advantage that I was in India. Instead of looking outward for validation from American writers, some of who saw me as “Indian,” nothing less and nothing more, I looked inward and started writing from a place of authenticity.
It seems easy enough to say now, but this was a process that took several years, involved shutting down the website and newsletter completely, losing 10,000+ readers and going through periods when both my personal and professional life were a web of confusion. It only just occurred to me, that what all of that was fueled by was my being ashamed of being Indian, of thinking that the more I expressed my Indianness, the fewer readers I would have. I was very tired of the cliches of India, and I was absolutely livid when people wrote to me (frequently) saying, “Don’t know much about India, except that story of that woman whose relatives murdered her for marrying someone of her choice,” or “India! How exotic!” or “The sari is such a lovely garment. It’s such a shame that Indian girls don’t wear it frequently anymore when we appreciate it so much.”
I didn’t want to be exotic. I wanted to be understood. The East certainly hadn’t understood me, I was hoping the West would.
The truth is that while this industry makes a big hue and cry about being “unique,” unique almost never sells. What sells is what appeals to a mass audience. What appeal are simplified I-got-a-divorce-so-I-went-to-India-to-find-spirituality stories.
I learned the hard way that Western men can be just as controlling and abusive as Indian men, that there is racism in this industry, that the moment I say “India,” people have all kinds of images pop up in their heads that have nothing to do with me or my life, and that to most Westerners, I will either be “exotic” or “helpless” and I have to make peace with that.
Most importantly, though, I learned a very basic fact: that my being Indian could be an asset. I also learned that while my experiences and challenges are unique when put in a Western context, for millions in India, in the rest of Asia and Africa, who don’t get a great deal of support and information, who’re looking for people to show how it can be done, maybe I could help?
This realization made me understand more of what I’d been seeking in my writing: authenticity.
When I was in America last year, there was only one restaurant in the whole of Berkeley that I found that served authentic Indian food and not an Americanized, tasteless version of it. Right next to that restaurant was a shop with Indian goodies like Chyavan Prash and Hajmola and Safi. I barely see Safi in Indian shops these days, finding it in Berkeley made me feel more at home than I knew I could. I smiled at the shopowner, shook his hand, thanked him for that smell of the atta-filled shop and told him I would treasure his memory forever. It was like being in India, really and truly. My American landlady was with me, picking up things going what’s this and what’s that, and I was all too eager to share with her my world, the way she’d shared hers with me. She loved that store and that restaurant more than any other “Indian” restaurant we’d been to in my year there.
I don’t want my writing to be a tasteless Americanized version of who I am.
I’ve read so many books by writers in India today, especially women’s fiction, that reek so much of inauthenticity, of an attempt to be Western with a tinge of Indianness thrown in for kicks. Can we please not pretend that gay men keeping the Karva Chauth fast is a common occurrence in our lives or that all single Indian women want NRI husbands? Or that women (and men) in India live the kinds of lives people in LA live?
For the average Western writer, there are many resources– books, e-courses, websites, etc. For the average Asian or African writer, there is pretty much nothing. Each time I go into a bookstore, I try to find books on writing and publishing, and find nothing more than your average grammar guide. We don’t have a lot of support in terms of education, and we don’t have a lot of support in terms of trust from foreign news organizations who would much rather fly in a white reporter on something they havev no understanding of than hire a local reporter who has been covering the issue for years. Or from local news organizations, for that matter, who’ll hire us but can’t be bothered to pay us. That’s just how it goes, unfortunately. But we can empower ourselves by becoming savvy about letting editors know that we’re here and available and in tune with the needs of the market. For that, we actually need to be in tune with the market.
I still feel like the oddball in both the Western and the Eastern worlds. I feel neither Indian, nor foreign, but a unique, weird, interesting mix of all my thoughts and experiences put together and mashed up in a petri dish.
Indians still see me as someone who writes for a foreign audience, Western journalists and editors still mostly see me as exotic or poor or some other version of their Indian fantasy.
The only difference is that instead of being ashamed of who I am or may seem to be, I’ve learned to be immensely proud of it.