On literature as a form of resistance

Sonia Faleiro's How I Write features interviews with South Asian writers, on storytelling

- Pranavi Sharma

It is a risky business, this genre of literary self-exegesis. Writers, notorious for their evasions, do not always make the best explicators of their own art. Sonia Faleiro's new book, How I Write, attempts to extract this very clarity from the haze of the creative process.

The book is a series of interviews with South Asian writers who, according to Faleiro, in their respective ways, are grappling with the business of storytelling in a world increasingly hostile to truth. This book is made up of conversations, but it is also a book about the stakes of literature.

Can an interview be literature? If, as Fredric Jameson once said, the interview genre promotes "bad habits of thought" and leads the mind into a spiral of commodified sound bites, Faleiro's book tries really hard to resist this fate. If there is a pattern to be found in these interviews, it is the creeping presence of journalism. The aestheticized detachment of fiction seems to have been subsumed by the urgent, moralizing instincts of reportage.

Roland Barthes, that assassin of authors, would have sighed at the insistent presence of intention here. When writing becomes so entangled in advocacy, does it still remain literature?

The book opens with Pankaj Mishra, the ever-watchful critic of empire, who says he "never really departed from the fundamental way of looking at journalism while approaching his subjects of writing". The idea that literature must remain tethered to a moral clarity, that writers must stand "in solidarity with the underdog", pervades many of these interviews.