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Artist Statement
A matter of great interest and import to me as a student, reader, and (at times) writer has been the potential for English fiction as a medium to not only convey story, experience, and ideas, but as a means of communicating truth and history. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to find this notion of merit, and through careful readings of texts like There, There, Between the World and Me, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, I have been engaged in a plethora of works that delve fully into this concept. They have honed my ears, eyes, and pen to observe and transcribe the world in fantastical new ways.
As an applicant to college earlier in 2020, I had written for my high school’s college advisor a draft for my personal statement. It was not good. In fact, I completely threw it out the window and chose a different venue to write in. However, in that essay, I had reached within myself and found a prickly truth that would not seem to wilt away easily, which was the simple fact that I had been idolizing the wrong parent for my entire life. My father was the genius, lightning in a bottle. Cautious, funny, altruistic, well-versed across all facets of pop culture and politics. Make no mistake, I admire that man to the fullest extent possible. But no matter which way I looked at it, my mother was the one to look up to. She was smarter than him, by his own admission, and she had overcome tremendous odds to be in the place mentally where she is today. Hearing her story, as I worked on this project, left me speechless, and I have tried to put it on paper as truthfully as possible. Details are not necessary at this moment, because as readers, you will find much and more over the course of this work.
But back to literature. I fully believe that, in my limited readings of the great and fabled works, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children may well be second to none in its capacity to tell truth. Midnight’s Children is more than just the meandering narrative, plot, and symbols: Rushdie bends and splinters the very essence of the English language in order to portray something greater. This is because, at its heart, Midnight’s Children is less a chronicle of Indian history or the tale of the Aziz/Sinai family, but more of a treatise on the power of storytelling in and of itself. As Indira Karamcheti writes in her essay linking the opening scene of a Kashmiri vale to the stories of Snow White and Genesis, Rusdhie is suggesting the coalescence of identity and discourse, of meaning and myth: we are the stories told about us (Karamcheti 82). Rushdie’s experiments with language, which I would like to say I have attempted to emulate and continue, function as a way to give an authentic voice to that tale, and leave his own impression upon history.
Fragmentation and cracks, and the idea of somehow holding everything together, stars centrally for Rusdhie in the idea of storytelling. Saleem Sinai sees himself as the one tasked with doing so, endowed originally with the power of telepathy and the Midnight’s Children Conference taking place within his own head. He urgently feels the need to preserve his story in the pickles of the Braganza factory because he is dying of the “cracks.” The cracks are some unnamed ailment medically, but serve as the symbolic disease of losing the past without having any say in it. Saleem’s attempts at defragmentation are what I have set out to accomplish with my mother’s story. I have bastardized many classical Indian myths in the wake of this path, in the greater Rushdian pursuit of writing my own story. The oral tradition of storytelling provides the basis for ‘Bedtime,’ and Rabindranath Tagore’s Karna Kunti-Samvad provides the basis for ‘कण‘ से.’ But in each case, I have drastically changed the endings.
Enjoy the struggle of reading what I have written. It is steeped in a culture foreign to most of those that will set eyes on it, but in all honesty, I didn’t create this for them. I created this for myself, and to right all the onions of unfairness that have afflicted Chitra, my mother. There are footnotes to ground yourselves in, that reveal more of the links between the literature and what I’ve laid bare. While reading, I implore you to not cast aside anything: what I have made is cohesive and consistent throughout. Everything is intentional. Glossing over this defeats the whole purpose of art generally, and specifically such a piece centered around voice. This is a work that lends itself to rereading and background research to understand the standards from which I worked from. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge that the only person that made all this possible was my mother, and without her willingness to share and be the subject of my literary experimentation, none of this would exist. I love you, more than I could ever articulate.