Creative Lives. Группа авторов

precarious position in his new home in the diaspora, where racism is rife. With his severed past informing his uncertain present, Cheran’s powerful poem “On This Street Anytime – 4” with which he ends his inter-view, is inspired by today’s “Black Lives Matter” uprising, in which he sees the image of his son transfer to that of black youths shot by armed police. With this poem, Cheran continues the inter-cultural dialogue of the forced diaspora into our time, exploring losses that can never be repaired, that instead swell mutinously in new soil:

      Both of them looked exactly

      like my son

      Height. Beauty. Black. Brave.

Alongside the forced diaspora and the desperation implicit in much South–North movement, a massive voluntary diaspora has expanded in myriad directions in the new millennium. With intensified globalization, in which transnational and transglobal mobility has been facilitated by affordable air travel and advanced information technologies and the vast international social networks spawned by them,2 the voluntary diaspora has branched out in diversity over the last 30 to 40 years. This is generally a feature of corporate neoliberalism and the import / export of labour, often for low wages. However, some beneficiaries of these new developments now have the freedom not only to return frequently to the homeland but seek third and fourth new homes outside of it. Taking these new developments in migration into account, Avtar Brah (1996) notes that today, the diasporic dream is built on “a homing desire”, the wish to construct home in the hostland, in contrast to the “desire for a homeland” left behind, a model of exile associated with the Jewish diaspora (192–93). Alongside these changes, upheavals of our time such as terrorist attacks and the Coronavirus global pandemic, and also political and socio-cultural phenomena such as “Black Lives Matter” (to which we have referred above), women’s rights, “Me Too”, and the post-truth Trump fiasco in the US, dubbed the end of democracy as we know it (Fisher 2020), have led to the proliferation of new challenges and frontiers that are already inspiring the contemporary diasporic literary consciousness into new and diverse reflections and articulations. These affiliations can be a complex matter. Shankari Chandran speaks in her inter-view of how

      writing the novel [Song of the Sun God, set in Sri Lanka] was developmental and cathartic for me in that it helped me understand and accept so much: where I have come from (ancestrally); what I cannot have, reclaim or be; and who I am now. All of that is evolving, dynamic and imperfect but it’s mine.

      Part of the complexity here comes from the fact that Chandran was born in the UK, grew up in Australia and set her first novel in Sri Lanka. Of her return to Australia after ten years’ residence in Britain (“London made me feel like my South Asian-ness was normal”), she says: “When I returned home, I felt homeless”.

      Most, but not all, of the authors in Creative Lives write in English. The global reach and status of Anglophone writing has recently come under attack, notably by Aamir Mufti (2016) in his Forget English! manifesto for vernacular languages as he surveys the theorization of “world literature” and scrutinizes the continuing dominance of English as both a literary language and the undisputed cultural system of global capitalism. But perhaps the choice between the two is not so stark. Several writers interviewed here have been searching for ways in which to introduce other languages that may co-exist and engage with English. In her interview, the Pakistani Canadian writer Mariam Pirbhai recognizes that “multilingualism is a natural aspect of our multicultural cities, our hybrid cultures—our world. Monolingualism seems like the enforced and unnatural condition”. Her 2017 short story collection Outside People not only involves a diverse cast of characters (Caribbean, Maghrebi, South Asian, South-East Asian and others), but draws upon a range of languages whose interconnections and interactions are important to the fiction. In this way she hopes “to break with the implied hegemony of English as our default lingua franca, and focus on inter-ethnic encounters that bring to view other levels of interlingualism and multilingualism”. The celebrated translator and poet Kaiser Haq speaks from a lifetime’s experience of writing and translation at the interface of English and Bengali in Bangladesh, noting the paradox that English has gained popularity as a literary medium at the same time that “there is no officially recognized place for English in the country”.

      A scrutiny of the 18 interviews included in this book shows the continued affiliation of the writers to their homelands and desire to re-engage with them from diaspora. Neel Mukherjee gives powerful expression to this impulse in his conversation with Anjali Joseph:

      The only thing I can say about my continuing interest in India is that I find the country intellectually fascinating. […] India is so plural, so shifting, so one thing and its opposite simultaneously. […] To be an Indian [writer] is to be [supplied with] material all your life.

      Samrat Upadhyay notes that despite being employed for over 20 years as an academic in the US, he continues to set all his creative work in his original homeland, Nepal. Conversely, Amit Chaudhuri, a self-proclaimed roamer and “nomad”, currently simultaneously employed in universities in India and Britain, discusses here how he returns to his homeland India from his travels, intellectually and imaginatively provoked into new ways of seeing both home and the world, writing in a mode similar to what Marcel Duchamp (1999) characterized as “infrathin”.

      Thus, the original homeland thrives within the diasporic creative world and is the source of much of its energy. As one might expect, current and past military and political conflicts feature in many of the inter-views and the associated texts. Romesh Gunesekera describes how he is drawn to write about “the beautiful but fragile world” of mid-to-late 20th-century Sri Lanka while

      thinking about issues we all still talk about: moving places, dislocation, migration, racism—all pressing in the 1970s and 1980s and now. But then, in 1983, Sri Lanka erupted into a violent maelstrom while I was writing a story—this changed my priorities.

      Gunesekera also discusses the way his 1980 short story “The Storm Petrel” plays off nostalgic and romantic yearnings for Sri Lanka against brutality and violence. Such unease is characteristic of much Sri Lankan diasporic fiction, and informs the depiction of a “mixed” Sinhala-Tamil marriage in Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins. It was, says Savanadasa, “a way for me to explore the fault lines, the divides in class, generation, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation, and the tensions caused by those divides”.

      Political and revolutionary undertones also characterize the most recent work of Suneeta Peres da Costa, who was born in Sydney to parents of Goan origin. She reaches back imaginatively to the sense of melancholy, or saudade, in the final years of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, and the experiences of the Goan diaspora there, as one of the country’s various groups: native Angolan, Goan, Portuguese and European. She explains here that by making the protagonist’s family, who are Catholic Brahmin, “complicit in the native indentured labour economy in Angola, which itself evolved out of the Portuguese slave trade”, she was able to reveal networks of power and exploitation.

      Potent, too, is the yearning of diasporic authors to immerse themselves actively in their home culture and disseminate it within the hostland and beyond. Pioneering ventures in this respect include Pakistani British novelist Rukshana Ahmed’s founding of the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA) and the Kali Theatre Company in London, and Sri Lankan Australian novelist Rajith Savanadasa’s introduction of the beloved ancient Sri Lankan (Sinhala) Kolam theatre tradition to Australia through his latest writing.

      Of particular interest here is the impressive revisioning of the Indian classic epic Mahabharata entitled Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, by Indian French poet, dance producer and librettist, Karthika Naïr. Predicated by the changing socio-political environment of South Asia and Europe in the new millennium, Naïr contemporizes the Mahabharata by re-visioning its context, themes and characters. Published and performed internationally to great global acclaim, Until the Lions makes relevant to the here and now an ancient South Asian literary tradition that is revered by Asians. In another project of east-west connection, Naïr’s collaborative work Over and Underground in Paris & Mumbai connects