Art as Inspiration, Liberation: A Conversation with Amitava Kumar

Art as Inspiration, LiberationA Conversation with Amitava Kumar Anderson Tepper (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution amitava kumar, the heart of the city / a cemetery / of grief [End Page 44] Amitava Kumar—author, most recently, of the novels Immigrant, Montana and A Time Outside This Time—is many things: novelist, journalist, critic, academic. He is also an impressive artist whose drawings and paintings have opened up new "ways of seeing" (in John Berger's phrase) for him creatively. Here, he speaks about writing and visual art, and how they feed each other in his work. Anderson Tepper: You've incorporated art and photography in your texts at least since earlier nonfiction books such as Bombay, London, New York and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. What made you decide to use visual imagery in your fiction as well, and does it serve different purposes? Amitava Kumar: You're right, you're right. In those books of nonfiction, at some level, the art was simply doing the work of illustration. Or so it seemed. But in reaching for art—I'm thinking now of a photograph of a pair of earrings sent by a prisoner in Guantánamo to his wife, in my book A Foreigner—I was really trying to do something more with my prose. The aim was to produce a more complex, even more engaged, response in the reader. When used as mere illustrations, pictures serve to root the truth in an identifiable reality. But when you open another kind of space for them, visual materials have this incredible ability to complicate truth without obscuring it. By smuggling art and photography into my fiction, I was playing with the conventional expectation that a picture is an illustration. In some cases, I try to underline the idea that this is a documentary which the reader is encountering, and, in other instances, I almost want to suggest that what they are encountering is something more illegible, as if in a dream. Tepper: Who are some other contemporary authors whose novels, in your eyes, have juxtaposed art and text in meaningful ways? Kumar: For me, much of my interest in images begins with the work of John Berger. I started reading him when I was an undergraduate in Delhi, and I can honestly say it changed my life. My first book, Passport Photos, was an extended homage to Berger. I think of so many other writers who were fans of Berger's and also his friends: Susan Sontag, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner. Having said that, let me add that I was also thinking of W. G. Sebald when I was telling you about trying something different in fiction. His use of photographs, for instance, makes the relationship between prose and image more slippery and elusive. Tepper: Your next book, The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal, will include your own artwork. What prompted you to begin drawing, and how does your art complement your writing? Kumar: I have been doing this work for a bit over three years, and The Blue Book is a result of that practice. In late 2018 I was on tour in Canada to promote my novel Immigrant, Montana. When I visited Michael Ondaatje in Toronto, he showed me Berger's Bento's Sketchbook. I liked it immensely. At the next stop in the tour, in Vancouver, I bought art supplies and started drawing. If you are drawing regularly, you are a better observer. That's one thing. It is my hope, however, that if I continue to do art in a committed way, my regular practice will liberate my artistic practice, that I'll become looser and freer. Not only in my art but in my writing. Tepper: What mediums are you principally working in, and how have you developed your technique or approach? Kumar: I started with rudimentary watercolors and drawings. My point of departure, if I can call it that, was using some sort of a resin over newspaper clippings and then, once the mixture had dried, putting gouache on the newsprint. This was something I did a lot of during the first...

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