Jobeth Warjri: Thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this interview. I want to start at the beginning—with Oral Scriptings. What made you think of oral narratives and oral storytelling as sources for your creative work?
Esther Syiem: Memory has played an important role in my life. Maybe because I was always told stories by my grandmother, my mother, my father and the innumerable visitors who were never part and parcel of the city of Shillong, but who came from the suburbs, who belonged to far away villages and told us things they saw that we never did.
I was always conscious of my oral antecedents and when I was young, I mined my stories from anyone I met and looked for books everywhere but found that books in Khasi were very few. There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive. I was unnecessarily burdened with the thought that there were no books in Khasi on Khasi subjects that ‘mattered’ (the situation is different now).
I suppose my first collection of poems was an attempt to bridge the past; I found that these memories were, to my surprise, meaningful and that they had a significantly contemporary relevance. It was my first attempt and I was still feeling my way around but realising more and more that so much had to be retold, reinvented, re-made, updated and understood. I was not looking to write about the daffodil, as I told Professor Temsula Ao in one of my innumerable conversations with her. I was looking to the bamboo and the scuttling rodents who were generating stories of other worlds and other modes of being.
JW: How does the oral shape your style and your understanding of the literary?
ES: My world view has always been oral: by that I mean my consistent affirmation of the world in which words had the power to shape, to rule, to be sourced for their wealth of knowledge and ability to empower a community. In the course of my journey, anything to do with words and word-making seemed to reach out to me in a very essential way. And I responded by listening or reading or immersing myself in these world-views that constituted a very important part of my identity. This was reinforced by constant meetings that I had with those who lived far away from the city. Strangely, I still meet such people on a regular basis and my perceptions and understanding have become stronger – not that I idealise them – but that I find strength in their words and philosophy; where life and death are concurrent to each other and there is acceptance of the pace that life must take – no hurry there, nothing forced, nothing smart or clever about it.
So, stories in one way or another always struck a chord within me. As I said earlier, I swallowed them whole for they provided much food for my thoughts. Inevitably this formed the basis for my entry, if you could call it that, into the “literary” world of attempting to write. Of course, my education was in English Literature and I learnt a good deal about other cultures, but not about my own. This has always made me feel disadvantaged. Besides, there was always within me this sense of belonging to a community that had this uncanny ability to use the spoken word in a way that could move the universe. This has guided my attempts to put it down on paper, and it has always been my attempt to replicate its spirit, incurably candid and independent.
JW: I think, in The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative, you also speak of the oral as a way of interrogating the literary, a hermeneutic that unravels what it means to belong to a particular community. What does this mean for you—to have your cultural identity also be part of the way you interpret the world?
ES: Yes, the oral tales needed to be unravelled and unpacked to find out why they had not disappeared from the face of the earth, given the amount of discussion that went on about how the Khasi community had begun to lose its intangible heritage. Even though I always felt disadvantaged, I saw the oral as an asset that needed new ways to disseminate it productively in the present; to show the oral for what it really is, within Khasi society – not as a set of traditions or practices or sayings to be learnt by rote, but as a philosophy that feeds a particular way of life. One example is the practitioner of herbal medicine. There are no notebooks to be followed, only gut instinct and knowledge handed down (sometimes, not always) and an almost mystical sense of healing. When we talk about the oral it also implies this communion with the universe; the reason why, time and again, I have referred to our indigenous world as the “speaking universe.” It is within this context that the tales speak louder than anything else.
JW: The oral seems to resist a single interpretation. This is especially noticeable in Many Sides of Many Stories where a single poem is open to multiple points of view. How did you achieve this development in your craft?
ES: By listening intently to the same story being retold multiple times and to the hidden nuances and inflexions in the voices of those telling me stories. However, I am not aware of this kind of development in my poems. If there is one, then I’m very happy about it.
The oral goes through multiple retellings. These are like multiple edits. Each edit reinforces the other. All of them are equally important. For example, there is the story of Manik Raitong: some sources speak about an affair that he had had with the king’s wife. Some speak about the liaison after her marriage to the king. Tales from each region are embellished differently, but the implicit story line remains the same. And we pick them up one by one without disputing which one is the right one.
JW: I want to dwell a little on the translatability of the oral into print. How do you strike a balance between the forms of the oral (which are largely in Khasi) with English in which most of your books are written?
ES: I suppose this has not been difficult for me because I move in out of both languages quite easily. When there are words that are difficult to translate, that I think would add to the meaning or texture of the poem, I usually rely upon the original Khasi words. I use them in the midst of a thought process in a poem or to make the Khasi-ness of what I am writing about, stand out etc. In this way I feel assured that I am communicating my own world-view to the rest of the world in an authentic way; and I provide a glossary at the end.
JW: I think gender, as a way of understanding the literary, has been a recurring theme in your work—several of your poems and Memoir in Water: Speaks the Wah Umkhrah come to mind. What, do you think, are the ways in which stories told from the perspectives of women in Northeast India (yours, Temsüla Ao’s and Easterine Kire’s, to name a few) transformative in the way that the literature is understood?
ES: The stories coming from these women writers are different. In Easterine Kire’s novel, When the River Sleeps, the forest is identified as a protagonist; a protagonist that has been sidelined so often that we’ve failed to hear her voice. The narratives that we hear from these women writers come from a place never seen or heard of before. Another example is Temsüla Ao’s These Hills Called Home, which has brought a human face to the Naga struggle. So, women do have a transformative role in wielding their words and stories to a readership and an audience that is still untaught in the resources of a female imagination rich with associative memories and perceptions that have never really been sounded out to the rest of the world.
The river Umkhrah for instance, is the protagonist that has given my book its name. This body of water had often been described to me by those of the older generation who were closely linked to it. Then it had beauty and power and the ability to make itself heard through its raging waters or clear translucence in autumn or winter. It forms the backdrop to my consciousness; I hate it because it’s filthy but I love it too. And I’ve come to understand it almost as woman to woman: the stories that it has carried through the ages, the effluents that plague it now, its ability to clean itself in the monsoon, its faithfulness to all of us by simply flowing onwards, its ability to nurture life, its insistent presence in my consciousness. If this isn’t a woman telling her story then what is? The narrating voice of the woman has many layers . . . to be teased out with each new reading. And the woman’s voice has never been trained to speak in certain way. It is the voice of impulse, imagination, emotional certitudes that have never been discussed, never brought to life . . .
JW: How are the notions of the “oral” and the “literary” affected with the telling of stories that have gendered perspectives?
ES: For me the oral fashions the narrative; in that, I am always conscious of a certain way of story-telling, a certain way of looking at life, that particular inflexion that always brings out the oral strain. By “literary” I understand it to mean the qualifying mark for acceptance in academia. Under the sway of the oral, any thought of the “literary” seems to fall away (for me at least); for when I write I only have one thing in mind: and that is to emulate what comes to me by way of memory, through the stories that close around me all the time. The women in my stories and poems have a keen sense of the oral, never of the literary, and I find that once they take over, their stories take on a life of their own, following their own path of grass-root telling.
