by elena ferrante
Way too many conversations I had last month were rants about how new Indian fiction writers often write their characters too flatly: they write the "Indian" in contexts they hope break class barriers (in english) and in language that sounds like it is translated from the vernacular. Especially those who write women. I understand what they're trying to do. It's a part of a larger project of making the unnamed, undepicted in images, not only unspoken but unspeakable* speakable. It is to give voice to a subaltern, write those who aren't known, whose concerns aren't valued, whose lives aren't written. It's a project I'm fully convinced about - it definitely needs to be done.
But what comes out of it (especially in India) worries me. I can't put my finger on what it is, exactly. I know it's condescending of me to say this, but it's not self-aware or political in the way that it engages with its subject. If one is writing a character in a village in Bihar, or a slum in Bombay, or an earthquake in Gujarat, or a shop in Andhra Pradesh, it isn't enough to merely write that character in that context, one also needs to write a person capable of abstraction, intellectuality, thought. It is so easy to lose yourself in recreating what you imagine this person's world to be (even if it is well-researched), that you forget what it is like to be the person.
Such writing, in its urge to "capture" or "represent" what it imagines is "real", forgets that no text is neutral or apolitical in its engagement. You have to take a considered position. It is such consideration, in my view, that sets good writing apart from the mediocre. (If I may quote the awesome Alison Bechdel**, "I had set out to name the unnamed, to depict the undepicted, to make lesbians visible and I had done it! Wait a minute... I forgot to account for the observer effect! I've disrupted the space-time continuum. You can't pin things down without changing them somehow.")
It's also, if I have to get to the core of my problem, pretty damn patronising to write like that. So if someone is poor, they can't be intelligent? They can't have motives that aren't base? They can't be aware of their bodies, their sexualities, their emotions? They don't have the capacity to challenge power? They can't see what you see? They can't speak beautifully, in sentences that are fluid? They can't be political, engage in discourse? Why is it that you can't write poor people as people? Why can't you imagine yourself, give them a voice that is closer to yours, more personal?
Anyway, the reason I'm talking about all this here today is because I just finished Book 3 of the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein). It's a powerful series written by someone who does exactly what is lacking - she writes women who are smart, challenging, complicated, intelligent and intellectual. I took some time to get caught up in the first book. I thought it read too much like a translation, often grappling with how much of the vernacular should sound that way. It annoyed me because I thought it was going to be a lot like these Indian writers and translations. (Where you hear the original language in your head and keep wondering how it may have read). The second book was good too, and I was really taken by the way she writes. The third book - the third book was spectacular. It felt like it was written by someone who knew what she was about. She was finally sinking her feet in and telling you what she really thought. It was more complete, more culled out. Less raw. Less intimidated. Fluid.
***
*"Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable." Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence.
**I only just started to read The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel.
