THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI

—Interview Highlights

1. To me, the tenderness with which you write is a kind of intervention of knowing that is in opposition to the colonial one. For instance, the roles that surveillance and record-keeping play in the brutalities of the imperial project, versus the “knowing” of the Mayakangne, Kwalakangne, and Dare winds. There is the intimate knowing between Priya, the chicken, and Nomi, the human. The third-person omniscient narration suggests, again, a different kind of knowing. How do you think about the memories and interiors of others within this much larger context of layered surveillance?

I love what you say about “interventions of knowing.” It reminds me of Edward Said on knowledge: “Facts get their importance from interpretation [which] depend[s] on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment.” When historical data privileges its own systems of knowledge, it’s hard to trust the archives. It wasn’t till about 15 years into the book that I began finding alternative sources, inspiring my own “interventions.” A way perhaps to make fiction and an alternative record that I could trust.

I’ll give examples. The titular character, Nomi, is made up. Her brother Zee is based on a historical figure. The first shot fired on South Andaman Island during the war was by a boy trying to save a chicken from Japanese soldiers. This actual event frames the opening chapter. Zee is based on the boy, Priya on the chicken. I took the liberty of giving Zee and Priya a loving sister.

The jailer, Cillian, is also based on a historical figure. I found reference to him in male prisoner testimonials. He is particularly feared by Prisoner 218 D. After the surrender of the Japanese, when the British reoccupied the islands, part of their strategy involved enlisting the help of former jailers. Cillian returns, with all the horrors that he took part in buried, along with my prisoner’s name, beneath an official narrative of “white savior.”

Too, the knowledge that you speak of between human and nonhuman. It’s essential in all my books. For me, the physical world tells the emotional truth. One that’s displaced when human and nonhuman reciprocity is displaced. So, for instance, the cost of war on indigenous fishermen because of underwater mines that removed them from their oldest food source and ally, the sea.

I can’t say how I accessed these interiors. Love. Listening. A willingness to stay a long time, for instance, with the “knowing” of the winds that you mention. Interventions of knowing require immersion, empathy — these are acts of faith. There’s a scene in the book in which an old man bemoans that the British never took their shoes off before entering a temple. I took my shoes off many times, yet I wasn’t given permission to truly enter till I found Nomi.

“There is Freedom in Not Having a Script,” a conversation with Aracelis Girmay. Read it in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

2. Of course, the main thing about islands is that they are surrounded by water. While I was reading your novel, I kept getting the sensation of water. You evoke the sea, rivers and frequent cyclones on the islands. Indeed, early on in the novel, protagonist Nomi learns the names of several bodies of water:

The Arabian Sea. The Andaman Sea. The Bay of Bengal, which was not a sea but part of a sea. The Indian Ocean, with too many bays to name. The Pacific Ocean, around the corner. She recited these names again. Nomi was the keeper of seas that flowed into each other, into her bowl. Bodies of land, on the other hand, did not flow into each other, she could not collect them.

How did you go about writing about this littoral world?

It has helped to live on different islands. As a child, in the Philippines, Japan and Britain. As an adult, on Oahu, in Hawaii. I’ve lived in every place that plays a role in the book—Japan, England, even Hawaii—except the one that both my parents were born in, India.

But coming back to your question about the sensation of water, I’m glad it was ever-present for you. There’s something about being on an island that shifts how we experience time. For instance, Oahu is where Pearl Harbour is located, yet the monument seemed further away than my memories of Tokyo, where I’d apparently spoken a little Japanese (since forgotten). Like many South Asians, Japan for me was “haute Asia”—art, ceramics, fine cuisine. It was beauty and elegance, politeness and hospitality. I had happy memories of Tokyo, especially of a man who helped me to steal my first rose for my mother. The Japanese characters in my book, particularly the dentist-spy Susumu San and Dr. Mori, came to me in a flash. With Susumu San, I saw him riding a bicycle one day, and barely had to revise his sections. I have often wondered if he was a version of the man who helped me to steal the rose.

On Oahu, other images came close, including of my family resettling in Pakistan after leaving Japan and England. In Karachi, our house was near the sea. Though I couldn’t see it, I could smell the sea. I could feel the shifting winds (perhaps like my character Aye). This was during the Cold War, when the US fought the Soviets in Afghanistan through Pakistan. Though at one time Karachi had been a fishing village, the city that I grew up in, where I could hear and feel the sea, became a battleground. And the battle was happening on land, not water. Yet, while writing this book in Hawaii, I seemed to fly to an in-betweenness where borders are mapped by water. Possibly, this allowed me to find a language for characters who exist between empires and seas ...

A conversation with Claire Chambers. Read it in Full Stop magazine.

3. How do you define and understand the genre 'Historical Fiction'?

Alessandro Manzoni said historical novelists put 'flesh back on the skeleton that is history.' So that's one answer. But Manzoni was a white man, and history's skeleton and flesh have been constructed by privilege. My generation of women, the first to be born in Pakistan, has largely been severed from our history and geography, by the same forces that write the history and draw the maps. So I reject the notion that the history we're given is the only one there is. There are many histories, many ways to think about whose history we are meant to believe and meant to erase. For me, historical fiction is first and foremost deeply personal. It's a way to imagine the unimaginable. A way to embody stories not meant to exist.

"Imagining the Unimaginable With Historical Fiction," a conversation with Aarushi Agrawal. Read it in First Post.

4. The novel juxtaposes the brutality during the war with the enchanting beauty of the island. The island heaves with life in the novel. Did you consciously work on this?

One of the questions that haunted me from the start was that despite the coconut groves and crystal bays that the British found in this pocket of the Bay of Bengal, they turned it into a penal settlement. What is the mind that looks upon beauty and sees, instead, a means of torture? That wishes for whipping stands, gallows, and eventually a highly sophisticated panopticon prison? I was fairly preoccupied with these questions. They are closer than we want to acknowledge. We have always been attracted to beauty, and always attached it to power, with devastating consequences. So I am still haunted by these questions. What do we do with what draws us—preserve or spoil it?

"What the Body Remembers," a conversation with Shireen Quadri. Read it in Punch magazine.

5. Trauma returns to the victims in the novel … (yet) their personal experiences lead them to what may be called victim/survivor empowerment. As Joy Kogawa reminds us: “What is healing for a community is more than just a solution of a political kind. What heals is a process of empowerment.” How would you describe your characters in light of (this)?

The body doesn't forget the silence that accompanies each violence. In The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, Kaajal tells Prisoner 218D: ‘the opposite of peace is not war. The opposite of peace is inertia.’ Writing for me is a way to resist inertia ... Writing (is also) a deeply immersive act—it demands all of me, physically. Since I never have an outline or any kind of plan, the pen and page become the entire body. The physical world tells the emotional truth.

Which brings me to the necessary question of healing. One reader pointed out that though my characters carry trauma in their bodies, they also heal each other physically, with water and earth. (She noted: Haider Ali’s mother feeding him Multani mitti. Aye holding Zee when they swim. The aborigine women painting men with clay. And many other examples I didn’t consciously see.) I’d emphasize that what happens when the body is written out of history and memory, generation after generation, can only be written, reclaimed, and healed by the body. So I agree that a political solution is not enough. Healing requires more than that: it requires that the body be written back into history, story, and collective memory.

"From a Ruin of Empire," a conversation with Aroosa Kanwal. Read it in Southeast Review.

6. History is often told from a male gaze. How challenging was it to address these inequities in historical fiction?

At the start, it wasn’t challenging so much as frustrating. I encountered references to women in the freedom movement as either feminine ideals—dutiful and chaste sisters and wives who supported the efforts of men, mostly through social work—or else championed for being “as strong as men.” There the narrative stopped. The social and sexual stigma around their life in the prison colony meant that they were barely if ever mentioned in books written by men.

But at some point, I stopped caring about what had or had not been said. I entered that other world, the one of fiction, where the focus is on language and character. The unnamed political prisoner in my novel was the first character I wrote, over twenty-six years. My interest was, from the start, in her daily and interior life, as someone transported and imprisoned, more than in what she did to end up there. I didn’t want to erase or champion her: I wanted to know her as a person, in her entirety. She was a seed that I carried with me, across many seas. I just had to be patient, to let her speak. The same was true for Nomi, who in a sense becomes the keeper of her family’s history. I wanted to know how she got there. I wanted to value her life, as a young girl who grows up not only between two colonial powers, but between two parents who largely don’t see her. I just had to hold her, and listen, and forget about any other gaze.

“The Story Has To Come From Within,” a conversation with Ziya Us Salam. Read it in Frontline.

7. This novel I find to be your most history-conscious to date, on many levels. One is your sense of history and history-making, with emphasis on the question of who (gets to) write/record and hence define it. Also … this novel will likely find a place in the literature of the subcontinent’s history, as a record itself—because there is little by way of fiction on it. Could you tell me how you view your role as a writer here?

When I began, in the 1990s, I’d gone to the library to find a book. I found instead a book that referred to the Andaman Island “prisoner paradise.” I found the book I wanted to write. I had no idea how to start. I only knew that this was my history, not a separate Indian history. And I knew that I had not been taught it in Karachi.

I don’t know how I saw my role. I think there were a multitude of impulses I could not have identified—curiosity about what I’d discovered, rebellion against my own ignorance and the notion that the history I was given is the only one there is. I think I always rejected that notion. I have a healthy dose of scepticism. I ask a lot of questions. Mind you, I’m also dutiful: for the next twenty years, I collected every article and image I could find on the islands. But what sustained me was the fiction more than the facts, the license I gave myself to create. Which is to say, the license I gave myself to exist. At some point I did realize that no other fiction on the islands during the 1930s and 40s had been written before, at least, to my knowledge, in English. Now I’ve come to wonder whether it had to be written by someone in my position, someone severed from my history and geography by borders, without the privilege to suppose much, yet with the understanding that everything had to be learned and imagined from scratch. And if my novel comes to be a kind of record itself, I am honored.

A conversation with Pooja Pande. Read it in Café Dissensus.

8. Watch the recording of the virtual US launch of The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali at City Lights Bookstore on April 18, 2022, in conversation with writer, educator, and editor Q. M. Zhang.

9. Watch the virtual launch of The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali at the Islamabad Literature Festival 2020, in conversation with Dr. Munnaza Yaqub and Dr. Sonia Irum.

Bonus: Yaqub and Irum know my work intimately (its ‘environmental consciousness,’ as they describe it). Check out Yaqub’s The Toxic Legacies of Colonialism on Nomi Ali; The Landscapes of Vertical Wilderness on Thinner Than Skin; and Yaqub & Irum’s joint paper on Trespassing & The Geometry of God.

10. Watch the virtual “Isolation Central” 2020. We discuss the quarantine, birds, and, of course, Nomi.

 THINNER THAN SKIN

—Interview Highlights

1. Thinner than Skin could be a story about love and the search for identity. But it could as easily be a story about the impact of militancy on nomadic communities in northern Pakistan. How did you bring all this together?

   I’ve never mapped out a novel. I don’t really trust maps, because the lines change as soon you find them. As if the form of a novel itself demands that you stay open to change, open to surprises. All my novels have begun either with an image and/or a voice. With Thinner than Skin, the spark was an Ansel Adams photograph of a waterfall. The force of the torrent inspired a line that has stayed in the book. All the threads of a novel, at least for me, come together through sensory cues, through acts of faith. There is no plan except to feel my way through it.

   Read more of the interview in Dawn

2. I love how landscape is such a presence in your stories, like the Russian writers’ sense of how the land thwarts/shapes its people. Specifically in Thinner Than Skin, perhaps this has to do with how it explores transgression and guilt through Nadir and Farhana (and of course your references to Raskolnikov’s exile). What shaped such a visual perspective, this connection to land? It’s almost as if the ways of knowing each other, the world, god and ourselves are fused into a naturalist’s appreciation of our world and of our body … like in the detail of a flower, or in a glacier?

I love how you put this. I think I do have a naturalist’s love for our world … What shaped it? Perhaps my paternal grandmother’s open-to-the-sky courtyard in an old, crumbling house in Lahore that was filled with bats and ghoststs. Or it’s event older. My father’s nana was a well-known hakim of a small Punjabi town, and a year before my father’s death, he shared with me stories of his grandparents, how his nani would operate a chakki to grind wheat, while his nana prepared all the medicines for his clinic by mixing desi herbs that my father and his bothers would him collect. You know, even before he shared the memories with me, I had an image of those herbs and flowers, their colors and their scents.

‘I think a lot about inherited memory.’ Read it in The Hindu

3. A common thread in your books is the resourcefulness and sensuality of the female characters. Could you speak on this?

In Thinner Than Skin, Maryam is a semi-nomadic woman who comes from the Gujjar tribe. Yes, she has a rich spiritual and sensual life, but she keeps this from the public arena, in part for survival. The gap between the freedoms enjoyed in the public versus private spheres is one I’ve explored in my books, where women often occupy a different space that needs to be navigated, daily.

Read the rest in Star Turkey (in Turkish—the above is a translation)

4. Karachi: Watch the book launch and conversation at Karachi Literature Festival (2014).

5. Karachi: Hear my conversation on CityFM89 (2014).

6. Paris: Watch my interview with well-known bookseller, Libraire Mollat (2014).

7. San Francisco: Watch my talk at LitQuake LitCrawl; I read from “Ice, Mating,” a story in Granta that nests in Thinner Than Skin.