Photo of Subraj Singh courtesy of Ava Serra
Staff reader Neha Bagchi talks with NER author Subraj Singh about the legacy of colonialism, capitalism, and indentured servitude in Guyana, eschewing “skinny sentences,” and the hidden histories of diasporas in his story “Ship Sister” (44.4).
Neha Bagchi: Your story draws from a history of the Indian diaspora that doesn’t get talked about much . . .
Subraj Singh: Yes. I’m in grad school right now and, at times, when I introduce myself to someone, I have to say where Guyana is and then I often have to follow up by explaining my heritage—that yes, there are Indian people in the Caribbean.
NB: I’m Indian myself, but didn’t discover much of that history until I was twenty. I was listening to music from the Caribbean, heard distinctly Indian elements, and thought, wait, what’s going here? How is this possible? And the answer, of course, is colonialism, capitalism, and indentured servitude.
SS: Right. After the abolition of slavery, white plantation owners needed a new source of cheap labor. They started to recruit laborers from places like India and China to work in the Caribbean, but they sometimes didn’t tell the truth about what the situation was like, what the contract was, how long they’d have to stay, what was expected of them, what they would be given for their work. So a lot of people were led to embark on this journey across the ocean from India to Guyana under false pretenses.
Now we have this Indian population in Guyana and other Caribbean countries like Trinidad and Jamaica. We are all essentially descendants of these laborers who were brought to work on these plantations. A lot of my writing has to do with the history of Guyana, the history of colonialism, and the ways in which this history of colonialism impacts present-day Guyana. It is not just “something that happened in the past” that we can forget about. The after-effects are still being felt today.
NB: And it’s not even that far back in human history!
SS: I mean, even when I was a child, there were mentions of people who came to work those plantations still being around, still alive. So, yes, definitely not that long ago.
NB: Can you tell us about the element of the bloodied earrings that Anuradha was given in your story “Ship Sister”? I was unnerved by it, but also riveted.
SS: I knew that this story was going to have an element of violence, but I was not sure what shape that violence would take. I wanted to create a new image to convey the idea of violence, rather than use images that have been used before. I wanted to convey that this white overseer is not really interested in how Anuradha feels about him or his intentions. He offers her this piece of jewelry because in his mind that is enough for them to make the next step. The earrings are bloody because he has stolen them from another woman who works on the plantation. To accept such a gift would mean that Anuradha’s hands are bloody as well—she will become tainted by this really terrible thing that this man has done if she is to entertain him.
NB: And yet she doesn’t actually have a choice.
SS: Right. He is doing something really terrible, harming these women, conducting acts of violence in order to take what he wants. By the end of the story, however, I would say that she does end up carving out an alternate path for herself.
NB: There’s such horror in that double-violence: a man wrenching earrings off the ears of a woman he rapes.
SS: While writing the story, I did not imagine that he raped the woman he stole the jewelry from. I regarded it as some form of assault, ambiguously rendered in the story. However, given the nature of the time period and the power dynamics between the characters, sexual assault is an accurate interpretation, as it is something that definitely happened. Colonialism is a history of violence, and it is important to write about the fact that a lot of women on plantations suffered because of white overseers.
NB: This story has violence woven throughout, including the ending. Did you choose that deliberately?
SS: Yes. The men in the story enact violence on the bodies of the women early in the narrative. I wanted to have a reversal of that at the end of the story. It was important for me to show these women recognizing that they have power and deploying that power with equal intensity and violence against these men. I did not want their version of power to be a soft or diminished version of the men’s violence.
NB: You identify as a man, and in this story, you are writing about the experiences of women. How did you ensure that you were writing women in a way that was true to them?
SS: This was definitely on my mind while working on the story. I have to thank my MFA colleagues for helping me with this. There were women in my workshop, and I was able to ask them whether there was anything incorrect or inappropriate. Luckily there was not, but even so their comments and feedback were so important. People in the workshop liked some things I had not even realized I was doing, like keeping the men in the background and really focusing on the women, their bodies, their feelings. They encouraged me to lean in that direction.
NB: Do you think the story reflects any sort of redemption, movement forward, or any betterment of circumstances?
SS: I think there is movement. The women unearth their courage and use that to seek a better world for themselves. It is possible that both the characters end up failing to find the happiness they want, but I think what matters is that they were determined to try. They got to that point of saying to themselves, I’m going to do whatever it takes to not have this situation reoccur. I think coming to that kind of realization is as important as whether they actually succeeded in attaining what they wanted to attain in the story.
NB: For a story that is in some ways so brutal, you choose to use a lyrical, poetic, singing sort of language, rather than something stark and clipped, or even prose that is functional but neutral, unremarkable. Can you tell us about that choice?
SS: I consider myself a maximalist writer. I really like imagery, and I like to engage with the senses, and I like the story and the writing to be “a lot.” I need it to be rich. I grew up in the Caribbean listening to Caribbean folk tales, which are excessive and beautiful and filled with details and imagery. And I grew up with Bollywood—and in each sequence of a Bollywood number: the costume, the design, the background, the jewelry—there is so much going on. I love that, and it has made its way into my work. I always want a sense of something sensuous happening just because that is exciting for me to engage with.
I am usually not excited by what I call “skinny sentences.” There is this kind of writing where the sentences are so plain and ordinary, and they just convey a single thought or action, without doing anything else, and that is not always engaging enough, to me. But I am just one person; there are people who say well, there’s just a lot happening here and maybe you should edit this sentence or maybe this one. It is okay to have different ideas for what is engaging, exciting, and worthy in writing.
NB: Thank you so much for sharing your history, your cultural and artistic influences, and your writing process with us.
SS: Thank you! NER is a dream magazine for me, and I’m so happy this story is published here.
Neha Bagchi writes fiction and poetry. She translates poetry from Bengali and Hindi/Urdu into English, studies translation theory, and is working on a critical analysis of Tagore’s “Gitanjali” in translation. She has an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. You can find her on Instagram: @thevorpalpen.
Subraj Singh is a writer from Guyana. He is currently studying for his MFA in creative writing at the University of Maryland. He is a Tin House Scholar, a Lambda Literary Fellow, an International Writing Program Fellow, and a Clarion West alumnus. His fiction has been published in AGNI and Columbia Journal. He is active on Twitter: @subrajsingh1.