Kia ora all -
Lawrence & Gibson are pleased to announce our second publication of the
year will emerge on September 15. The book will be called Sodden Downstream and will be the fifth by Brannavan Gnanalingam.
Below is an interview with Mr Gnanalingam from one of the interns at the
publishing collective. We'll have a cover image up shortly!
Sodden Downstream is a novel but it seems to deal with issues that are very politically salient right now. Was that a coincidence or something you thought would happen in an election year?
It's a coincidence that
it's going to be released at the same time as the election, and, at the same
time that Metiria Turei has made inequality and poverty a major election issue.
However, I don't think it's surprising being politically minded that my book's
themes are election issues. The current situation, in terms of homelessness,
the rise of preventable illnesses, poor housing options, rising rent / food
prices etc., are clearly having an effect on a large portion of New Zealand's
population. Also the ruthless scrutiny given to Turei matches the exact same
scrutiny that is given to poor people – i.e. you have to be this perfect,
deserving individual in order to get state support, and even then, you're made
to feel worthless. The idea that we shouldn't help refugees because we need to
help our homeless people first is also deeply problematic – it shouldn't be an
either/or situation, it should be both. This is a book about compassion, and I
think it's tapping into conversations that other people are having
As a writer, would you ever publicly back a political party? Or are
there other ways – beyond the writing itself – that you think writers can best
be political?
No I never really want
to be associated with a political party. I have no interest in being a
cheerleader or being forced to put aside parties' shortcomings for the
"greater good". I mean it's no secret where my sympathies would lie
overall. However, as a writer, I'm interested in how power manifests
itself and in the means, not the end – I don't want to compromise those
obsessions with the need to be helping a party out. There is much more to
politics than our Westminster system. That said, I think writers ought to be
political - I'm probably in the minority here. I guess my views of writing are
influenced by what I read. The overwhelming majority of what I read are written
by women or people of colour or other minorities, so I suspect an everyday
'political-ness' feeds into what I consider interesting in books. I think
writers with causes are great and I think there's some great stuff being done
with specific political campaigns. Doubling the refugee quota, for example, is
a great campaign run by Murdoch Stephens, who incidentally is part of Lawrence
& Gibson.
You said 'writers ought to be political'. Is there anything, right now, beyond the themes in this book that you think are also incredibly salient politically?
I think
there's plenty of areas to cover - I'm planning my next book to be about toxic
masculinity in the context of a private boys' school. There are other issues of
inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia / transphobia, environmental issues such
as climate change and overfishing, class segregation, the refugee crisis, etc.
etc. I could probably have written a book on the issues that ought to be
examined in art but that'd get quite earnest.
Kim Hill infamously
suggested there would not be enough subject matter in the story of an
office cleaner trying to get into a flooded Wellington to make for a novel. If
she said the same thing in an interview today, how might you respond?
To be fair to Kim Hill,
I didn't do the best job of explaining what the book would be about. I
explained the coda, rather than the fact the book would be about the journey
itself. I would say it's a love letter to Lower Hutt, it's an account of people
who have been forgotten in New Zealand, and it's about a refugee persisting.
There is a lot of mutual aid and solidarity in the new book – people
being willing to drive many kilometres out of their way to help others, other
people offering a couch for the night. What would you say to an interviewer –
not me of course, a fictional interviewer – who insisted that you'd overplayed
the positive character of people from the Hutt Valley?
My book is based on a
true story, and the person who recounted a cleaner's experience on a day when
the motorways / trains weren't operating, told me that people rallied around to
help. Some of the stories are based off hitchhikers' stories to me. The
mechanic who stops is based off a mechanic who stopped to help me out at 2am on
the Hutt motorway. Whenever I've travelled, people with little have gone out of
their way to help me. If people want to be cynical about the kindness of
everyday, working people then they probably need to get out of their bubble.
There were two myths
that I was trying to critique in this book. One, that Wellington is a "white"
city. People who say that basically erase my existence, and the Tamil community
that forms an integral part of it. I grew up in Naenae, which is brilliantly
multicultural. My friends growing up weren't particularly white, and even if
they were, they were kids of South African apartheid protesters, cousins of
Gaelic harp champions, they were immigrants themselves from England or Wales
etc.. I spent a lot of time in Wainuiomata and Porirua with sport, and so yes,
I never thought of my childhood city as "white". Second, I
wanted to attack the myth that the working class were racist. For starters, the
working class – those doing manual work, cleaners etc. - isn't white. Second,
there's nothing that suggest white working class people are more racist than
middle-class / upper-middle class white people, and I think it's a convenient
way for middle-class people to disavow their own collusion in structural racism
by instead blaming people who are deemed "stupid" or
"poor". I mean, for example, the average Trump voter earned $72,000,
while the average Hillary Clinton voter earned $56,000.
That's an example from the US in terms of voters -
how do you think that plays out in Aotearoa New Zealand? That is, are the
intersections of class and race more of less the same here, or are there also
other salient factors?
Someone
talked about how New Zealand's egalitarianism plays out by attacking people who
seem to get something for nothing. It can be an extremely ugly thing when
people ignore historical / social factors behind why a person might be getting
helped. This perhaps explains why there is so much opposition to things like
beneficiaries being treated like humans, Treaty settlements etc. I think there
are some major issues with class and segregation in New Zealand, and a real
refusal to understand how difficult a lot of people are finding it. I think
it's relatively similar in terms of problems to the States, albeit perhaps less
dramatic in its extremes. I think there's also a major shortage in compassion
in New Zealand too.
For your last book you described a little bit about how you developed
your characters by writing out life stories of each person before getting
started, including all sorts of factoids that don't necessarily get included.
Did you also do that for the current book, and if so, what is one of the more
interesting things you might let us in on that didn't make it into the book
about any character?
I didn't to the same
extent. Unlike Briefcase, where the
characters had to be embedded in their location, for the most part here, the
characters only briefly interact with Sita. I wanted to get a sense of how she
might view them, how they'd have no backstory for her.
I'd say 80% of the
conversations are based on conversations I've had with people in real life. The
character who was recently released from prison for example, told me (when we
picked him up hitchhiking) about how he had to sleep in a digger the night he
was released. He had had nowhere to go, and was simply dropped off outside
Rimutaka. With those stories, I didn't feel like it was fair for me to add too
much of a backstory. However for him, I did talk to a friend at the Howard
League about how prisoners would have been treated, in order to expand some of
his backstory. It was similar with other characters. The character called
Branavan isn't based on me at all, because he only has one 'n' in his first
name.
Your last novel was long-listed for the best novel of the year in the
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. What do you think of the book's reception and
were there any particularly new occurrences for you as a, now, 'award
nominated' author?
I was stoked to be
long-listed, and I think it helped get my book to a wider audience. It was
super-nice to be on the list with some amazing names.
In terms of reception, I
was intrigued that Briefcase was essentially about white defensiveness, and not
one single review talked about race (except in the Wellingtonista). It was also
about how we have
created a system that says Muslim lives aren't "deemed
grieveable" (a term of Judith Butler's).
My focus on Islamophobia
barely got touched on in reviews. In fact, Briefcase was pretty much the plot
of Hit & Run and how it would
play out in the New Zealand media, except the events were set in New Zealand. I
took no satisfaction in how accurate Briefcase proved to be. I very rarely get
critiqued on the ideas that I'm trying to work through in my book. If anything,
the critiques focus on form. I couldn't care less about form. Content is what
I'm way more interested in and form is merely how I structure my arguments.
In terms of new
occurrences, I sold a tonne more books through bookstores, so that was
fabulous. I sold some in Auckland too, which is a market I've never really been
able to crack, so thank you Ockhams (and the Auckland
Writers Fest).
After the Ockham awards nominations, I'm curious why you are still
publishing with a smallish publishing collective. Is this because of an
allegiance, broader views about publishing as an industry or something else?
There are a few reasons
why this book had to go through Lawrence & Gibson. I wanted to express
solidarity with Murdoch Stephens' Double the Quota campaign, and this was my
contribution towards that campaign. Second, my last book sold plenty, got good
distribution, was long-listed for the Ockhams, and I participated in some great
literary festivals. What more would a bigger publisher have given me in New
Zealand? I'm happy with what I get at Lawrence & Gibson. Finally, this
book is particularly political. Lawrence & Gibson seemed by far the
best publisher to deal with that content and it's a natural fit.
Thank you for the solidarity! I love it how in this book it is the story
of a refugee that is never imploring – not that a moral dimension is absent. Is
that a fair thing to say and if so what was your intent with the tone of the
book around morals and moralism?
I knew the book would be relatively obvious in its
politics, but I wanted to keep a distance and also to add some humour so that
it wouldn't be too earnest. I didn't want it to be a sermon either, because
that can be alienating to a reader. So yes, I think the tone is a bit cool. I
guess ultimately it's simply about a woman persisting, so she'd probably tell
me off for turning her story into something more imploring.
While your last book deal with institutionalised Islamophobia, this is
your first novel dealing with a community closer to your own experience: Tamil
people from Sri Lanka. What was the most interesting thing you learnt in
writing and researching a Tamil character?
I had never felt
particularly close to my Tamil side growing up. I don't really speak the
language, although I completely understand it. I haven't been back since I was
thirteen. I always felt like I straddled two worlds.
What changed was
becoming a parent, to be honest and getting a sense of what my parents went
through. After I was born, my Mum looked after me by herself for my first year
(while Dad was stuck in Zimbabwe). In the middle of a warzone where she almost
was killed. While she was also looking after her dying parents. This makes me
sound callous, but I don't think I had quite appreciated just how much my
parents scraped and sacrificed for my sister and me. They also moved to New
Zealand, literally not knowing a single person. With all of the bullshit
anti-immigration rhetoric, I kinda wanted to pay tribute to first generation
immigrants. Want to blame them for infrastructure problems? They're probably
keeping the infrastructure working.
I also wanted to get a
sense of my own cultural background, as I want my daughter, similarly, to have
a sense of her cultural background. In recent years, I've also got a sense of
my family solidarity – cousins, second cousins etc. – and I wanted to pay
tribute to that. This idea of a people dispersed all around the world who have
this shared bond / trauma.
I also didn't quite
appreciate the full horror of the Civil War. As part of my research, I read
survivor account after survivor account, which was such a heart-breaking
experience. It really was a forgotten war, and I knew I had to do some justice
to it. And given the anti-refugee rhetoric, it made sense for my protagonist
also to be a refugee.
You wrote an
article for Stuff about the experiences of your family in the civil war in
Sri Lanka. What kind of reactions did you have from various communities to you
telling that story in a public forum?
Not much, we're a
taciturn, stoic bunch. Also, it was probably telling a story that almost all of
the Tamils would be aware of from their own, or their families', experience of
the Civil War – so it didn't necessarily need commenting on. In some respects,
I'm writing for audiences who know nothing about it.
Finally, you've often spoken about the positive influences of other arts and performers in Wellington in creating the conditions for your work to exist within. Is there any artist since we last spoke that you'd like to gesture towards as being quintessential to the capital city today?
I really struggled
initially with tone for this book. In my last two books, I focused on
satirising the powerful, or satirising powerful ideologies. This meant I could
take a pretty scabrous Juvenalian tone. This one however, was almost entirely
made up of characters who were struggling and it's about trauma. I couldn't use
that tone. It wouldn't have been fair and it would have been punching down. I
was heavily influenced by Svetlana Alexievich's approach to just letting
stories play out (particularly in how she presented trauma). However, it was
only after I read Ashleigh Young's Can
You Tolerate This? that I really got a sense of how to approach my book
(not that I would in any way want to suggest that my book is at that level). I
thought that book was a marvel. It featured barely any external conflict, yet
it was so compelling. It was also probably the saddest book I'd read in a
long-time. Young's real skill though was how generous she was to all of her
characters and their struggles. It was one of the most compassionate books I've
read. I think in my previous books, I hadn't shown a lot of compassion to my
characters in my other books (as much as I loved them). They were quite cruel,
intentionally so. Can You Tolerate This
was such a helpful thing to read and helped shape the tone of Sodden Downstream. I wanted
compassion to be the abiding response to what are horrible situations for most
of my characters.
