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| reader2 |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 01:32 PM
What follows is taken from The Kathmandu Post Review of Books of July 11 1999, Volume IV No. 7.
Issue Coordinator: Manjushree Thapa
NEPAL'S ENGLISH FICTION STAR
With a story selected in the prestigious Best American Short Stories anthology in 1999, and a collection of short stories called ,Arresting God in Kathmandu, due to be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2001, SAMRAT UPADHYAYA has become Nepal's own English-language literary star.
After his studies at St. Xavier's School, Kathmandu (Class of 1980) Upadhyay went to the US and majored in English at Ohio University. He later taught at
Kathmandu University and worked at Traveler's Nepal. Upadhyay recently completed his PhD in English (with a concentration in creative writing) from the University of Hawaii, where he was also a fiction editor at the prestigious literary magazine Manoa. He is now teaching English at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio.
Upadhyay responded to questions by Manjushree Thapa over
email. Excerpts:
On his beginning as a serious writer:
I began writing seriously while I was in the master's program at
Ohio University. I wasn't as disciplined then as I am now, and
mostly wrote in bursts, with long period of inactivity in between. The first story I wrote, "The Man with Long Hair," is about a man who rethinks his relationship with his wife after coming into contact with a theater actor, with whom he becomes enamored.
One teacher was critical in influencing me, Eve Shelnutt, whose passion for the short story form was contagious. I started writing very seriously once I entered the PH.D. program here. I try to get up early in the morning to write, sometimes at 4 am, when my energies are fresh and my intuitive faculties sharp. I leave most of the editing and revising work for the afternoon or evening. I also write poetry but less often than fiction.
My first publication was in [the literary magazine] Manoa, a
story titled "Kathmandu," using an American protagonist who falls
in love with a Nepali woman and becomes enmeshed in the political
turmoil of pre-democracy era.
On his short story collection:
The Good Shopkeeper contains stories that explore the nature of love and desire, physical and metaphysical, and its link to spiritual transcendence. The collection explores the relationship between men and women in the landscape of the city of Kathmandu.
The setting provides the stories with a backdrop that becomes increasingly meaningful in the characters lives as the stories unfold. In the title story, for example, the protagonist, in desperate search for a job, finds solace in the tiny apartment in the center of the city belonging to his lover, a housemaid whose kindness acts as a balm to the wounds he receives from the society. The stories also look at how the family plays a crucial role in lives of the characters--the choices they make, the choices they reject, and how they choose to interact with members of the opposite sex.
In "The American-Ten Speed Bicycle," a young man struggles
between obligation towards his family and his attraction towards a woman of a different caste. In "Earthquake," a woman learns to
fight an dominating mother while she seeks the affections of a
young man. A recurring theme in the collection is the
self-deception the characters engage in when their desires are
thwarted.
In "The Room Next Door," a mother is forced to look at her relationship with her own husband after her daughter becomes
pregnant. In "Deepak Misra's Secretary," a young businessman
dismisses his attraction to his secretary despite the spiritual
fulfillment it brings.
Another issue the collection explores is the choices women
have to make in a conservative, male-dominated society, how the
boundaries that restrict them are challenged, stretched, and
accepted. The Good Shopkeeper chronicles a city and a society in
transition and the resilience with which the inhabitants of the
city negotiate these transitions.
On his current novel:
The novel that I'm working on is my dissertation. After defending
it, I decided I didn't like a large portion of it, so it's going
through substantial revision right now. The basic premise is the
same. It's about a Nepali woman who is divorced and who struggles
between her desires and her obligations to her family. That's all I can say for now because I find it sort of futile to talk
extensively about a work before it's completed. Because I don't
work with plot, my work changes course substantially while being
written--a factor that makes the writing process exciting for me.
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| reader2 |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 01:35 PM
On his influences and stylistic preferences:
I believe in the economy of the sentence, that a sentence should
only have the minimum words required. This I probably learned from the so-called minimalists, such as Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.
But my work shuns other characteristics of minimalism: lack of
spirit, emotional hollowness, overly distant narrator, and so on.
My first clear influence was Ruth Prawer Jhavbala, whose
collection Out of India is still one of my favorite books. I was
probably attracted to her early in my writing career because of the in-between position she occupied as a writer: a European woman whose home became India because she married an Indian. I saw my position similarly: a Nepali who attended a Jesuit school, was very attracted to everything West, then came to the United States and started feeling alienated from his own culture. I know Jhavbala receives flak from some critics for what they see as her
neo-colonial attitude toward India, but I disagree and find her
observations of the Indian society very astute, and I think she's
one of the best writers in the world of the short story form.
I should also pay homage to Midnight's Children and Rushdie,
who opened doors in the West for writers like me, although I find his later writing intolerable. Other South Asian writers in English I admire and who have influenced my writing in some ways are: Anita Desai for her intimate psychological portrayals, especially in In Custody; Rohinton Mistry for the expansiveness of his world as well as the compassion he shows towards his characters; and most recently, Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian born in England and living in America, who I feel is one of the better writers to emerge in the past couple of years.
In terms of international authors who have shaped my writing
in various ways: South African Nadine Gordimer for the risks she
takes in her stories and her marvelous observations of a society in momentous transition; Irish writer William Trevor for his craft, especially in short stories; American Peter Taylor for his intimate portrayals of the old South; Toni Morrison for her attention to detail and the compassion towards her characters; and Pablo Neruda for showing what poetry can do. So, it's a mishmash of writers who might not have much in common.
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| reader2 |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 01:36 PM
On writing in English about Nepal:
Writing in English about Nepal is a curious project. It gives me a sense of dislocation because I am writing about landscape and
people that do not live English, except for a small English
language literati (who are not interesting material for fiction).
Indian writer Raja Rao said it perfectly, that storytelling in
English is not easy: "One has to convey in a language that's not
one's own a spirit that's one's own."
I love the English language despite its colonial history and
neo-colonial manifestations. I admire Kenyon writer Ngugi Wa
Thiongo, who says in Decolonizing the Mind that as long as we use
the English language, we project a mindset that is essentially
colonialists. But I also disagree with him because I think English can be an effective tool for decolonization, as Indian and African writers in English with their critique of the Empire have already shown us.
I want to see the English language as another language
that's available to us in a world of thousands of languages. We
have to be careful that we don't give English prominence over other languages, as Salman Rushdie did in a New Yorker piece a while ago when he said that the best literature coming out of India right now is being written in English. The statement, as absurd as it sounds, is indicative of the kind of hold English can have on people: the very writer who deconstructed English by giving it very Indian flavors, and thereby made "non-native" writing in English respectable, fell into the trap of thinking that only English could eliver the best literature of a country that has hundreds of languages.
We do have to be careful of not equating Western publication
with literary talent. Some authors currently being touted highly in the West are mediocre at best. Chitra Divakaruni, for example, I think plays up that gross exoticization of India, spices and
arranged marriage and what not But she's become a star, and her
work is highly regarded in the U.S., with critics saying that it
represents the status and struggle of the Indian woman. For me,
it's a too simple equation: that literature is only mimesis, that
it only reflects reality and that it doesn't change reality by the very language it uses.
The problem with English in Nepal is that it doesn't have
the kind of history as it does in India, which means it's still a
very new language for us. I hope that in the coming decades it will also be recognized as a vehicle for Nepali literature. Although I'd like to believe that my work is Nepali literature--it deals with problems specific to our culture and its steeped in the cityscape of Kathmandu--I'll leave it up to the readers to decide. I'd like to believe that my audience are both Eastern and Western. I don't write merely for a Western audience, but I make sure that the Western audience can also understand some of the cultural nuances in my work. At the same time, my work is not a cultural tour guide.
On current Nepali literature:
I still have to read a lot more of Nepali literature, but from what I've read, I see much talent among some "younger" writers. Among the older generation writers, Bhupi Sherchan remains my favorite, probably for his harsh realism and his very endearing angst. Also, it's quite obvious while reading him that his words were very carefully chosen. Writers of the younger generation I admire are: Rajav for his powerful sentences and his comedy; Banira Giri for her intelligence; and Shyamal for simply beautiful poetry. Shyamal especially is outstanding. His images are refreshing and his language out of this world. I'd put him in the same league with some of the best contemporary world poets right now.
Although I still have to read more, it seems to me a lot of
Nepali literature seems to be stuck in the old days of rhetoric and didacticism rather than paying close attention to the craft, an obsession with mere ideas rather than attention to how those ideas translate into things. I have found some highly touted authors ordinary. But there's a lot more reading to be done before I can form conclusive opinions.
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| Maina |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 01:38 PM
What the hell is this ???
Is it Samrat Baaje day ???
stooooooop !!!!
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| reader2 |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 01:43 PM
When was the last time any Nepalese writer's work was featured in any media outlets in America? Celebrating the success of a fellow Nepalese is good, even if it risks bordering on some mania...sort of like Brazil's wining the World Cup for Brazilians, if you know what I meant.
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| Maina |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 04:54 PM
Ok reader1 & reader2
One thread was enough. THis 3 or 4 threads is overexposure. Are you guys his promoters ? You must be getting paid to dig out all this dirt on the man and his accomplishment. System overload leads to crash. Its good that he got the recognition, I'm happy for him. But you don't need to sing his GUNGAN 24/7.
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| Poet |
Posted
on 15-Aug-01 05:45 PM
Post your writings and arts at
http://www.chakrapath.com
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