Counting time through words

A writer and friend’s answer to what she did over the past 15 or so years brought about the revelation of how I look at my life too. For me, it is more through the books I read, than the ones I wrote

Meena Kandasamy’s most recent Facebook status resonated deeply with me. Not the one in which she shares her incredible news about being inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honour she richly deserves, but the one succeeding it, written just nine hours before I read it. She speaks candidly (and because I know and love her, I can almost hear her voice narrating this insight) about an encounter she had with someone who simply didn’t know her at all, who had asked her what she had done over the last 15 years or so. I know what it’s like to be in this predicament, when you have a sense of being a public persona, then meet with someone who seems to come from another planet, and you have to contextualise yourself, suddenly, in relation to another moon. Of course I am nowhere near as accomplished as Meena, definitely not in terms of volume of published books or level of audacious activism. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing her in the capacity of a peer since her collection of poems, Ms Militancy, was published by Navayana. Each of those poems helped me nurture my rage while simultaneously bringing me closer to the joy of irrepressibility. Anyway, this person who didn’t know of Meena’s career compelled her to find a way of pausing, I suppose, to reframe her trajectory.

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Meena found that while she had a clear memory, she had little idea of dates or years. “And everytime I wanted to say what I was doing in a particular year, I was thinking that was the year I was working on this novel, and then I moved to this city where I had the baby and then worked on this novel, and somehow, the last 10-15 years of my life seem to be defined in terms of the books inside which I’ve lived, the only world I seem to have inhabited. When I was younger, I used to think of life in terms of relationships, I was with x, and then y, and then single, and then this… but now in my mid-30s, that sort of framing has become redundant. This is not self-definition, this is self-reflection. I was, at various points, the writer doing stuff, defined by what I was doing. Everything, even calendar years, became extraneous.”

I’ve always admired the prolific nature of Meena’s relationship with writing. I am also prolific, but my output is spread across various media because I continue to earn my livelihood primarily as an art critic and columnist, and my books simply take too long to write because I have to live every sentence before it can be committed to long-hand, then to print. So even while I related to her post, I felt palpably envious that she could construe a literary timeline upon which her life could be cast. 

Because I turned 37 last week, I have thought about how seven years have passed since my debut book, but I always have to double-check and count using my fingers, which means the number is not sitting in my brain, occupying my conscious memory. It had taken me seven years to write that book. Since 2017, I have been working on the sequel, and while I had originally thought it wouldn’t take an eternity, it really has, because I had to almost completely shed the person I was who wrote that first book, not out of shame or embarrassment, but because I had a clear vision of the authorial voice I wanted to embody in this sequel. In the first book I was a protagonist to whom things or events happened, which I processed and alchemised. But I wanted to transform into a subject with agency, who determined the decisions I made and took ownership over them.

Reading Meena’s status took me back to the last conversation we had, more than a year ago, when she was still in the UK. I had just finished reading her exceptional book, When I Hit You, Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, which had made me want to see her and hear her voice. She had just about woken up and had time because her partner was taking care of the kids. I loved meeting her as a mother, and getting a sense of how she was coping with the enormous demands that accompany this journey. She had kept her motherhood so private, so completely outside the scrutiny of social media, a decision I deeply respected. We spoke about how our lives intersected, about sharing an agent, about the books we were working on, and so much more, but also about so many of our similarities.

When I was younger I think I also considered my life in terms of who I was with at the time, but I also had a sense of a backstory, which consisted not of the books I was authoring, but the books I had read that were shaping my consciousness. In the last seven years these constitute a clear set of books—Babette’s Feast by Karen Blixen, Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace; and I suppose I could spin an entire story around how these books have in certain ways completely framed everything about how my life has unfolded since my first book was published. 

One of the things Meena said she loved about our agent, David Godwin, was that he always gave you the space you needed to write, without pushing you or building within you a false sense of urgency. I have enjoyed having that space. When I am asked when my next book will be ready I respond saying that’s a question I’d love to have an answer to too. There’s a freedom in not knowing and in allowing it to unfold in its own time, in not paying heed to the world’s pressure to create an output, to do what seems timely to the writerly body, not death-defying for the sake of it. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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