Creative Lives: Interviews with Contemporary South Asian Diaspora Writers ed. by Chandani Lokugé and Chris Ringrose (review)

Reviewed by: Creative Lives: Interviews with Contemporary South Asian Diaspora Writers ed. by Chandani Lokugé and Chris Ringrose David Callahan (bio) Chandani Lokugé and Chris Ringrose, editors. Creative Lives: Interviews with Contemporary South Asian Diaspora Writers. ibidem, 2021. Pp. 275. US$34 (paper). Creative Lives: Interviews with Contemporary South Asian Diaspora Writers does much more than pack eighteen informative interviews and an introduction into its less than three hundred pages. It is both a rich source of knowledge about a panoply of well-known, overlooked, and newer writers from South Asia and an affirmation of the potential of creative writing and thinking for helping us to see things from unfamiliar angles. What is creative writing, after all, if it does not "teach us the way forward with compassion and understanding" (39), in the words of Michelle Cahill? The collection brings together writers who have been in movement, generally from South Asia to the West, and usually permanently. These writers are in conversation with different interviewers mostly based in Australia but also coming from a range of cultural backgrounds. Each of them tells familiar stories of displacement, multiple cultural heritages and languages, and adaptation, if not anguish and struggle. How then can the volume be considered uplifting if many of these stories speak of war, oppression, violence, and the suppression of voices? After all, several writers talk about how their work angered local constituencies. For example, Sungchuk Kyi from Tibet opposed Chinese colonial oppression (though Tibet is not part of South Asia, there is an important exiled Tibetan community in India, through which Sungchuk Kyi transited on her way to Australia), and Samrat Uphadhyay faced complaints that he represented his community in Nepal too negatively. Another all too familiar context for many of the writers is the clash between having been born and brought up in countries that refuse to recognise them as really belonging. In one ironic example of this, Shankari Chandran (with Sri Lankan parentage) describes how moving from Australia to Britain allowed her to situate herself as "a British Asian" and to feel like she "had a valued place in Britain, where the distinct impact of [her] culture on British culture was recognized" (46–47). When she returned to Australia she no longer understood "the country [she] was raised in" (47). The cultural [End Page 138] acceptance and identity recognition she experienced in Britain was not available to her in Australia. To outline the mixture of authors is to give a sense of the volume's range, presented alphabetically in the book by surname so that no hierarchy of presumed significance is implied: Rukhsana Ahmad (Pakistan, living in England), Michelle Cahill (born in Kenya, of Goan heritage, living in Australia after having lived in the United Kingdom), Shankari Chandran (born in London to a Sri Lankan Tamil family, brought up and now living in Australia after living in the UK), Amit Chaudhuri (India, having lived in England), R. Cheran (described as a Tamil Canadian from Sri Lanka), Suneeta Peres da Costa (Australian, of Goan heritage), Sulari Gentill (Australian of Sri Lankan heritage but having passed time in Zambia), Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka, having lived in the Philippines and now living in London), Kaiser Haq (Bangladesh), Tabish Khair (India, living in Denmark), Mridula Koshy (India), Neel Mukerjee (India, living in London), Karthika Naïr (India, living in France), Mariam Pirbhai (Pakistan, living in Canada by way of the Philippines and England), Sehba Sarwar (Pakistan, living in the US), Rajith Savandasa (born in Sri Lanka but living in Australia), Sungchuk Kyi (Tibet, now exiled in Australia by way of India), and Samrat Upadhyay (Nepal, living in the United States). This mixture of trajectories is naturally not homogeneous, but the contributors' related experiences and responses become apparent the more one reads. As always with people who live between multiple cultural references, the writers in this collection face the challenge of representing their mixed cultural subjectivities. Given that diasporic experiences and mixed cultural belonging are something that few, if any, societies manage to find the right language to describe and respect, creative writers are among the best resources we have for exploring how to integrate and value multiplicity. We know their answers...

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