There is No Good Time for Bad News: Aruni Kashyap in conversation with Akshya Saxena
In this conversation, Akshya Saxena engages Aruni Kashyap on his new collection of poems titled There is No Good Time for Bad News to talk about Northeast India, representation, positionality and legacies of violence in the region.
Cover image of There is No Good Time for Bad News. Image provided by Aruni Kashyap.
Akhsya Saxena: I just finished reading your poems in There is No Good Time for Bad News. I was struck by how quietly each poem unfolded, drew the reader into a scene of daily familiarity and left us reeling with a trauma of unimaginable proportions. Ultimately, what affected me the most was not the violence—which circulates with alarming casualness in Indian media—but those moments of tender ordinariness that should not have been interrupted by fear and bereavement.
So one of the very first things your poems do is invite the reader to consider what’s ordinary and what makes news or is newsworthy. The collection also made me consider how different news, especially news from states in Northeast India, looked to me growing up in Delhi. I encountered Northeast India—always “the Northeast”—devoid of particularity and nuance, without any reference to the people until Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike in the early 2000s. How did you decide to frame this collection as the delivery and reception of bad news? Could you start by telling me a little about your and your communities’ relation to news growing up in Assam?
Aruni Kashyap: Perhaps, it shows my generation’s relationship with news in general? When I say “my generation,” I mean the generation that was born during the late seventies and eighties and came of age during the nineties. This is the generation that never saw an Assam without the shadow of the gun. This generation grew up learning that bad news could arrive anytime. This generation had parents who worried sick if the school bus bringing back their children was thirty minutes late.
News is significant here because it brings what is happening in the outside world to the safe confines of the home. You can shield the home from dust and danger, but every morning, news about unsafe events remained sprawled in front of us on the breakfast tables via newspapers.
Perhaps that’s the reason why I was shocked when I arrived in Delhi as a young adult and found out that other topics could be news too. Both The Times of India and Hindustan Times had bulky supplements every day and published news about parties, movies, and celebrity gossip. I wasn’t alien to it. But I had no idea so much space could be devoted, especially the first page, to what a film star said or the rising price of onions and electricity. This was the stuff of commercial magazines (Binodon Alochoni) in Assam—usually. This was new and surprising to me and made me realize for the first time that my childhood was quite different than the childhood of those who grew up in Mainland India.
Akshya: What’s interesting is that framed as news, almost all of the poems are mediations—a recounting of stories that the poet persona has been told. I read that you wanted these poems to tell different stories from the ones heard in mainstream journalistic and critical discourse about Assam. Where did you find these stories? Were these things you heard over the years, or did you actively conduct research for this project? What was your experience researching and writing the poems?
Aruni: I have grown up listening to most of these stories, but many of these stories are also the result of my research before writing my first novel, The House With a Thousand Stories. My first novel is set against a series of widespread alleged extrajudicial killings orchestrated by the Indian government during the late nineties in Assam to quell the insurgency. During those years, I was in high school, and I clearly remember the fear and terror that permeated our lives in rural Assam.
Those fears were part of everyday lives. Nothing was safe. Every hour was unsafe. People’s body parts floated in rivers: a jaw, a thigh, a head from where ravens or fishes had gouged out the eyes. People talked about it all the time when they gathered.
So, in some ways, when I started writing the novel, I already had many stories in mind, and I didn’t have to conduct research because whatever happened during the nineties in mainly rural and small-town Assam in the name of counterinsurgency was part of my lived experience. People in my extended family had to go underground because they were possible targets of the government or the insurgents—who had started reprisal killings of allegedly pro-government families.
The state pushed us into a bloody fratricidal conflict, and we are still reeling under those even today. When I started revising the novel, I had graduated from college, had a small advance from my publisher. Armed with a small recording device and a notebook, I talked to numerous people. I quickly realized that the recording device, the notebook, and the pen immediately silenced people. But you pick up a cup of tea or chew a paan with them; they will pour their hearts out to you. Many of these stories didn’t make it to the novel, but they continued to knock my mind. I turned them into poems. But I have many more stories to share. I can write many more books. I guess this only says that there are many unheard, untold stories, and we need more storytellers.
Akshya: One of the most breathtaking aspects of the collection is how each story, each poem reveals the warp and weft of a tight social fabric. It is this sense of community that renders the violence and trauma both banal and spectral. Where are you in this collection? What is your role as the listener and mediator of these stories?
Aruni: Thank you, that’s a beautiful observation. I think I am a stenographer of these characters. I work for them. I work for the speakers in the poem. When they open their mouth, I write. I listen to their orders. My duty is to polish what they note down and edit it. But I can’t add more. I can subtract for dramatic effect or reduce. And the silent listener is not necessarily the poet of the collection. It could be anyone. If you ask the characters, they will tell you. One of the inspirations for such a recording style was Svetlana Alexievich. She has reinvented the role of the author and distributed its power among the speakers for the truth to emerge. There are different ways of searching for truth and alerting the public about it. This is just one way.
Akshya: This heard and recounted character of your poems renders the collection powerfully colloquial. How did the process of listening and remembering shape the process of writing?
How does writing mediate personal and collective memory? Did the embodied process of remembering, memorialization, and historiography inflect the embodied practice of writing? I would love to hear you speak specifically to the experience working on one of your poems.
Aruni: I was most interested in the emotional conflicts of the characters while composing these poems. In this case, my guide was also someone like Faulkner, whose characters tell their stories against the backdrop of major historical events of the American South but, at their core, are about the various ups and downs of the human heart. This is not to say history and politics are not my points of interest; or human rights; who takes them away, who violates them with impunity. But my point is to archive stories that would otherwise be ignored. As the wonderful novelist from Georgia, Tayari Jones, says, stories are made up of people and their problems, not problems and their people.
The writing process, since you asked, was slow—and I don’t mean this as an expression of frustration. I didn’t ever try to write any of the poems. Often, a character lived in my mind for long until I literally heard it speaking. The title poem, which is the longest, was the hardest to write because, for almost nine years, I tried to write and rewrite it from the mother’s point of view. But she was so sad that it numbed the poem entirely. I eventually reached a point of acceptance when I wrote the poem from the point of view of the police officer, a friend of the insurgent who doesn’t live in the tragic situation. This provided the reader with a pause.
“This is the thirty-second time she
has come to identify a body. This time,
I am sure it belongs to her son. In his pocket,
there is a bloodstained letter for her, and
another written to his lover who isn’t
here anymore; she teaches in a college in the city,
probably married.We aren’t responsible
for informing everyone. We will only inform the next of kin: his mother. His fatherdied long ago, of natural causes, but
of course, everyone in the village
knows that he would have lived longer if he
hadn’t had to change sides on the bed forever
after the cruelty of bayonets on his body that had forced him to
do frog-jumps in front of his students across
a large field.I am sure it is her son’s body,
I knew him, too. When we were young, we planned
to join the same militant group because
we were so inspired by the man who came with
a satchel to talk to the villagers. We were young;
we were at the cusp of adulthood, still angry
about those eight-hundred-something protesterswho were shot dead.”
— Excerpt from the title poem of There is No Good Time for Bad News.
Included with author permission.
Akshya: How did you strike a balance between representing the ordinariness of life while making sure that ordinariness didn’t slip into the banal? How did you write beyond the sensationalism and silence that accompanies discussions of violence and conflict?
Aruni: By constantly asking what my character wants. By always focusing on the mundane and celebrating it. By highlighting the quotidian, finding joy in it, and finally, by writing from a space of delight, not disappointment. I critique the state. I critique jingoism. But from a space of hope and love.
Akshya: Talking of speaking and listening, whom are you speaking to? Intellectually and politically, where are you speaking from? I am thinking of Papori Bora’s arguments in her 2015 essay, “Speech of the Nation and Conversations at the Margins of the Nation State.” Bora writes that the people of Northeast India and the Indian State are two unequal speaking subjects. The political history of Northeast India is, tellingly, a history of unproductive peace talks between the government of India and the many ethno-nationalist groups. The Indian state uses these talks as political techniques of conflict management, and ethnic insurgents use them to legitimize their political difference and gain political recognition from the state. None, of course, make any positive difference to the people who live there. While the region is included in the Indian state, Bora argues that its “inclusion in the political community of the Indian nation is always deferred.” The Northeast is always forced to speak the language of nationalism without ever being included in a vision of the nation. What do you think of Papori Bora’s argument?
Aruni: I haven’t read the essay, but now I will. I think Dr. Bora is right. I have gathered this by reading the works of Parag Das, Syed Abul Malik, Indira Goswami, Gaurishankar Bhattacharya—a respected communist leader and writer, and you might find this interesting to know that he was Arnab Goswami’s grandfather; Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya, Harekrishna Deka, Bishnu Rabha, Sanjib Baruah, Hiren Gohain; novels-essays-memoirs by former insurgents, and numerous other writers who have written or shaped discourse about the political problems of Northeast. Many of these writers identified the oppressive role of the Indian state and used a common phrase in Assamese discourse, “the stepmotherly treatment” of Assam. The imagery of the stepmother possibly comes from a cruel stepmother in a folk tale called “Tejimola” that I have retold as “Skylark Girl” in my story collection His Father’s Disease.
I am glad that these concerns are now refreshed in English by a new generation of scholars in the last fifteen or so years, but these viewpoints have shaped the politics of Assam since the independence of India. People who read local newspapers, Assamese language political theory, and books already know that. I am grateful to Dr. Bora for writing that essay. And to Sanjib Baruah for leading the discourse on Assam.
I am trying to say that I agree with Dr. Bora and that I am not surprised by this theorization because this is what you will hear everyone working in the grassroots saying. “We don’t matter,” the people lament, “because we only send fourteen parliamentarians from here.” This “we don’t matter” sentiment is there in Bihu songs, in wedding songs, in folk songs. This sentiment has been used to recruit young men and women in the eighties by insurgents who tried to overthrow Indian rule.
I have often asked around why people sheltered underground rebels despite the dangers. The answer is complex and many-headed. But one of the answers is that people felt that the insurgents were fighting for a cause, making them matter. Everyone wants to matter, eventually, right? The defiance of standing up to the mighty Indian state was inspiring for my earlier generation, and it was so inspiring that they paid for it with their hands, legs, eyes, and lives. My generation has lived with the consequences of those choices and with my fiction; I try to understand what happened.
But your reference to Dr. Bora’s work also makes me think of two more things: first, AFSPA, which makes us live as unequal citizens, and much has been said about this undemocratic law that governs Assam and many other northeast Indian states. Second, haven’t you seen how riled mainland intellectuals and their supporters get when you highlight this fact—how India speaks for the Northeast all the time, and that should change? This assertion and reminder itself can get you silenced and attacked in the Indian liberal sphere because it replaces or decenters the Indian liberal who speaks for the Northeast, all the time, with a character or speaker from the Northeast. The scariest nightmare for both—the right-wing and the Indian liberal who know little but want to speak for Northeast India—is a knowledgeable, well-spoken person from Northeast who will hold the state they have benefitted from so far accountable. This is why you will see Indian newspapers glorifying voices from the Northeast who reinstate, repeat, their views in a different language. Voices are ostensibly local but cater to the same colonial, racist imagery and inflate to the most grotesque proportions. You know, in the US, a white professor once mocked my accent by imitating me in front of his students in my absence. I wanted to complain, but people defended him and said, how is that possible? He has so many friends who are people of color, he has relatives in Asia, and he has an Asian wife. Many Indian editors, journalists, scholars are like that racist white man who believes they know so much about ground realities in the Northeast and continue to shape opinion on their platforms but will never try to listen or shut up or allow us to speak.
My poetry collection, fiction, and translation work are challenging such erasure. With the help of the numerous speakers, I am trying to say that many competing histories exist, and we must honor and provide space to a variety of stories. And we can’t do that if we erase or remain blind to history. We can’t do that if we don’t hold the state accountable, that has sown discord among communities ever since it came into existence.
But what do you see? You don’t see the state being held accountable. Instead, we see reports and journalistic narratives that thrive on the glorification of shallow neoliberal identity politics (which irrigates and empowers the right); that pit one community against another, perform oppression Olympics, and again and again, repeatedly, year after year, Absolve The State.
Akshya: Do you worry about speaking from Assam or being read (perhaps more in mainland and international contexts) as if you are speaking or can speak for all of Northeast?
Aruni: I always joke that I can’t even speak for Assam, let alone Northeast India, but maybe Priyanka Chopra can because she was briefly representative of Assam Tourism.
I am just one writer from Assam. I am lucky to have a readership. I am fortunate that scholars like you are interested in my work. But I would never claim to speak for Assam. How could I dare to speak for Assam or Guwahati or Golaghat? I would never even dare to speak for my mother.
Plus, it is a huge pressure. One must be of a high moral character to speak for a community. I am immoral. When I was young and stupid, I had a second life on Tinder and Grindr, which I hope to write about one day just to dispel all expectations of speaking for a community.
But I do understand that my work is widely read and researched. It comes with responsibility. I have chosen to accept that responsibility only by writing better stories to help us imagine a better world.
Akshya: In a related vein, how have you responded to Assamese nationalism in your work in English and Assamese?
Aruni: I hope I have, as I have critiqued other things about Assam and India and Delhi and the United States in my writing.
As socialist writers, my father and mother believed in writing as a tool to change society and at home we grew up talking about the consequences of hyper-nationalism. During the Assam Agitation (1979 – 85) my father and his friends were in danger. They loved Assam and India to critique both without fail. I have tried to address some of these concerns in my essays on Assamese literature and in my novel Noikhon Etia Duroit. It is important to see why it developed; identify why and how people used it as a tool to challenge state violence and oppression but no one must turn a blind eye to how it has ruined the social fabric and created an atmosphere of suspicion. I mean how can one? Assamese nationalism is the cause of the Nellie Genocide that took place thirty miles away from my aunt’s house! But being critical of Assamese nationalism doesn’t mean that we must forget the state’s massive role in shaping it, fanning it, letting it grow, and engulfing the people in its flames. To start the conversation from the flames of Assamese nationalism and not ask how it started is to be racist and participate in the dispossession of an already oppressed and racialized group of people. To ignore that and pit one community against another in the guise of a critique is not only ahistorical, but also to irrigate ugly oppression Olympics. But isn’t that what neoliberal identity politics is broadly about? It will also go away.
Akshya: You have written fiction and essays, why did you choose to tell these stories in poetry? How does the poetic form register the psychic and political damage experienced by the cast of characters in your collection? How is poetry different from fiction or journalism in its relation to history and community, two important pieces of your poetry?
Aruni: Poetry and short stories are like a well, which is narrow but very deep. A novel is a large canvas. These micro-stories might have been hidden inside the canvas of a novel. I didn’t want to risk that. But more importantly: this is how I heard them. Writers are, in so many ways, stenographers of the characters. If they speak in poetry, you have to write down poetry.
Akshya: Czeslaw Milosz wrote that “the language of every historical period receives its definite shape through poetry.” What do you see as the role of poetry today? Does its power lie in its referentiality or its non-referentiality? How does the poem stand witness to the tragedies around us?
Aruni: To understand society’s current situation, we must listen to the poets. We must read the poetry inscribed on the wall: quite literally. Milosz is an inspiration, and I agree with him. Even today, poets are persecuted by the fascists. Why is that? It is primarily because poets are truthtellers of a society.
The poem continues to witness the tragedies around us and the humor and the ironies and vagaries of life. There are so many folk songs in Assam these days about WhatsApp and Facebook, about sharing pictures between lovers through social media. In the sixties, there were folk songs about the India-China War of 1962. People satirized the Chinese through Bihu songs but also the failure of the Indian state to protect the ordinary people and the soldiers; mocked themselves and a society’s idiosyncrasies. I used to be part of a poetry group in Guwahati called Podopothot Kobita: Poetry on the Pavements. It was run by a poet called Kamal Kumar Das, who had a little corner shop that sold betel nuts. He probably didn’t earn more than two hundred rupees a day on average, but his passion for poetry and zeal to record what was happening in society by creating this community was energizing. I used to go for those readings—people standing next to the main road in a circle and reading their recent compositions. I draw my energy from such hopeful spaces. They continue to remind us that there are people who have a different imagination in a shallow and toxic neoliberal world where the self is the center, self is the commodity. And this happens at the expense of truth and nuance and the sustainable beauty of complexity.
Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator. He is the author of His Father’s Disease and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. His recent poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Akshya Saxena is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her first book Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022) articulates a new postcolonial theory of the English language. It tells the story of English in India as a tale not simply of imperial coercion and global linguistic massification, but also of a people’s language in a postcolonial democracy. She is also the co-editor of an interdisciplinary anthology of essays, Thinking With An Accent (forthcoming University of California Press, 2023).
Commissioned by Rishav Thakur and edited by Tara Giangrande.