Photo credit - Catriona Mitchell

Sharanya Manivannan in Conversation with Anupama K

Sharanya Manivannan is the author of seven books of fiction, poetry and children's literature, including the South Asia Laadli Award-winning The High Priestess Never Marries and the JCB Prize-longlisted The Queen of Jasmine Country. Her most recent books comprise the Ila duology: the graphic novel, Incantations Over Water and the picturebook, Mermaids In The Moonlight, which she both wrote and illustrated. She interacts here with Anupama K regarding her life and poetry.

Anupama K (AK): When did you start writing? Were you an avid reader as a child? Did you have any inspirations or models—be it Indian or Western—at least during the initial years of writing? 
Sharanya Manivannan (SM): I started writing when I was 7 years old, and I loved books even before I could read by myself. My early inspirations were writers from the West—this was because diverse children's literature was rarer when I was little than it is today (a child of today can and should have a vast, variegated library). Discovering South Asian writers in my early teens was a revelation. In my late teens, in the absence of a formal education, I imbibed the works of writers of colour—women, in particular—from anywhere in the world. It was through them that I learned what my writing could be, and what I wanted it to become.

AK: You are known variously as an author, poet, illustrator, artist etc. This issue specifically focuses on women poets. I understand that you have reservations about being labelled as a poet. Is there any reason? 
SM: I like to be identified as a writer and artist because these terms cover the range of what I do. I have illustrated two books, written two books of fiction for adults and two for children, have a long-running newspaper column, and am working exclusively on prose manuscripts at this time. My peeve about being identified as a poet is twofold: firstly, it minimizes my actual body of work and indeed can feel dismissive. It is illogical to me: what on earth is a "poet and writer"? Are poets not writers also? This labelling carries an almost pejorative scent. I am not a "poet and writer". I am a writer of poetry, fiction, essays and other things.

AK: You have written quite a few poems and you've even published a collection of poems, The Altar of the Only World. Your more recent works have been novels and other longer forms of fiction. But do you still write poems? Is it that you write them just for yourself? Also, do you have plans to publish any poetry collection shortly?
SM: I've published two collections of poetry: Witchcraft (2008, out of print) and The Altar of the Only World (2017). As I mentioned earlier, these comprise only a fraction of my body of work, which is why I resist the label "poet" as a sole identifier. When you asked me to share a poem of mine to accompany this interview, I hesitated at first, but then I looked at my files and reconsidered. Aside from what has appeared in those two collections, I do have quite a lot of poems that are either unpublished or else appeared in journals that closed down.
I write poems very occasionally. Between 2019 and 2023, I think I have written perhaps three or four. Poetry is not how my heart wants to express itself for now. As to whether I will publish more poems -- sometimes, yes. I think I have enough work for another full collection, but I would rather wait to publish that. I would rather let more time pass or more books of prose be released before that, whichever happens. On the level of career engagement, I do not want to contribute to my pigeonholing. On the level of the personal calling, I scarcely feel like sharing anything I write -- and when I eventually can, the effort it will take to exit the cocoon should be put behind the works of prose that I am creating at present.

AK: You don't identify yourself as merely a poet. Your novels abound in poetry, too! So, do you see yourself as breaking the conventional trend of limiting yourself to one single genre or mode of writing? Do you strive to go beyond such categories for your writing or does it come naturally where you don't choose the style but adopt one depending on your story?   
SM: The style and form (for instance: is it a poem, is it an Instagram post?), I tend to identify immediately and proceed accordingly. Sometimes I think something should be a novel, and it becomes a story instead, but while the length differs, the form does not. I have received sound professional advice over time that the unconventional forms I get entangled in, like a graphic novel for instance, are not furthering my career the way that a smart, commercially viable novel would. They're right. But in life and at work, I like to do what I like.

AK: A lot of artists talk about having a 'writer's block'. What is your take on this? Do you think that one has to embrace this phase in one's artistic career and must see it as a necessary ‘cocoon’ period to reflect and indulge in introspection rather than just cater to the market's demand for publishing books after books?
SM: There are two distinct parts to this question, I feel. A writer's block is a part of a writer's interior life, without bearing on the journey one's books make in the world (or don't). It has little to do with a career, in the sense of what the public may see, and is personal. Seasonality is a concept that creatives can embrace: knowing that wintering leads to emergence, and that fallowness and fecundity are both beautiful in their own ways.
As for market demands—this is true in the West, which has a healthier, more transparent and more financially viable publishing infrastructure (but which also operates within capitalistic pressures). It's not true in India, where literature is in an era of being severely undervalued, in tandem with larger socio-political currents.
There are also two categories among those who write: those who want to write, and those who want to publish. Where one lands determines one's goal orientation, career approach and response to the vagaries of success. I am someone who feels deeply ambivalent about publishing, and deeply passionate about creation. This year, for instance, I have been especially subdued in any kind of career pursuit, even including using social media as one is currently expected and pressured to. I have quietly been working on manuscripts of importance to me. I've lost the habit of sharing my work in progress for its own sake. This is my cocoon. I am not very visible, and I don't want to be. But I am weaving, and living, and not thinking about outcomes (if I do that, it tends to stop me in my tracks).

AK: Myths and stories form a major part of your work; be it poetry or novels. Although these form the crux of your works, you make it a point to add new layers and dimensions to the stories that we have all grown up listening to. Could you talk about your writing process and how you pick stories and retell them from a different angle or perspective? 
SM: I don't think I ever really pick stories. Perhaps they pick me.
As for new dimensions and perspectives, these are informed by how I experience the world and how a story comes to me. Stories change with tellers, and that is their beauty. 

AK: What is your process of combining Tamil and English conventions in your prose? I ask this because—as readers—we can hear the Tamil in your English prose. Is that a deliberate choice? And how did you recreate it?
SM: If there was ever a deliberate choice, it was always only to honour language – by which I don't mean any particular language, but expression itself – as it comes to me authentically. This can indeed seem like a mingling of two or more languages, and sometimes it is. I'm aware that this is true across my body of work, but perhaps the only book so far where I was really conscious of it was The Queen of Jasmine Country. I world-built and created a plotline that is closely mapped on the medieval Tamil Bhakti poet Andal's Tiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumoli. My words are but the blossoms on the twigs of the mother-tree of hers. 
In the stories in The High Priestess Never Marries, for instance, my use of Tamil was learnt from authors like Sandra Cisneros, who created a personal idiom that renders what it is like to live between languages and to do so cognizant of certain longings and losses. My idiom was developed through multiple frictions: including the alienation I feel as an Ilankai Tamil in Tamil Nadu. Because I cannot inhabit my language or my true Tamilness and natural dialect comfortably in day-to-day life, and indeed experienced this differently while I grew up in Malaysia too, it seeps into and flavours my work so strongly.

AK: Speaking about your writing process, how would you describe it? Is it a spontaneous act or does every piece you write undergo stages of development in terms of perfecting the style and language?
SM: I would describe the process of how it happens like this: I'm ever-listening. I am intuitive, contemplative and mostly reclusive by nature. Something will catch my attention in some way: a flash of insight, a dream, a disturbance. I remain devoted to and haunted by this spark until it has been expressed. Something happens to me at the moment of inspiration: I can actually see the book in its entirety for a millisecond, and although I then have to rediscover it in its entirety over time, the memory of having fully known it buoys me. It serves as my North Star through confusion, frustration, disappointment, delay and more. Now and then, I have let a project go, but for the most part, I can follow an inkling for years. I wrote my poetry collection The Altar of the Only World over eight years and I have been working on my novel Constellation of Scars since 2005 (it grows and grows, as I do too). Even my novel The Queen of Jasmine Country, which I wrote in a six-week rapture, had two years of attentiveness, research and contemplation preceding it.
There is a great deal of spontaneity in how I work, which means that I also have to honour the long periods without a spark. I use those periods to read, study -- or not. I derive a great deal of pleasure from writing. I find the act delicious. It isn't that it isn't difficult at times, but the difficulty tends to tell me that I'm doing something wrong: not necessarily in my treatment of the work, but more often in the treatment of myself. I want to say this to people who want to write, and also to people who don't: life has enough suffering. You don't have to choose to suffer more.

AK: As a final question, would you consider yourself to be bringing out the vision(s) of womanhood? Would you say that you have been able to create any new kinds of feminism through your writing?
SM: My work tends to be about women and women's experiences and distillations of our experiences. I would not go so far as to say that I have created any new feminisms through my writing, but I do agree that my work is intentionally feminist -- both in its perspective and its desire to provide mirrors, companions and questions to those who read it.

*****

AUBADE WITH CANNONBALL FLOWER

--Sharanya Manivannan

(First published in Far Enough East (2014))

How simple it must be to leave someone who
does not ask you to stay. All night the abrasion
between hunger and resistance, my hand

on your lip and the lie that came
after. I wanted to touch you just once.

Don’t look at me like that, your eyes
an aubade after nothing happened, don’t
stand at that door and make me count
again the cowards I coaxed with kisses
I have unlearnt how to yield. Don’t come

near me – you don’t know anything
about why the cannonball flower always
falls apart in my hands and last night, when
you traced dew in the centre of my palm

even the wild silkmoths on the paper
lantern stilled their wings, no –
you don’t know why I pray

or how it’s been so long since someone
held their knuckles gently to
the bones of my face.

I wanted to touch you just once, I’d said,
artless. How much ammunition I gave you
in only half a lie. I draw my cataphylls close
as you step into the broken morning,

then I come unpetalled,
one by one by one.