Jane Lockwood
Interview with Sree
Sree was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award in Nonfiction, selected by faculty judge Nuar Alsadir, for her essay, “A Mango Afternoon.” As part of the contest, the winner had an opportunity to be interviewed by WSR Managing Editor Jane Lockwood. The following is their email exchange.
Sree is a writer and interdisciplinary artist reconstructing desire, subaltern memory, displacement, and the intimate resistances of marginalised women’s lives.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: Your essay, which writes into intergenerational trauma, opens with the writer confronting their own writing, seemingly the very first sentence written about a traumatic event and then filed under a generalized document title. As the essay progresses, you write into desires of disappearance versus the insistent repetition of memory and its images. How does writing about something solidify the images of memory? Does this make memory more legitimate, or what kind of confrontation with memory does writing necessitate?
SREE: I think when I begin to write about something painful, I never know what will happen, what will come up. The way I deal with it is how it comes up and flows through me. Memories, like images, often seem to flash like the news on reels or in a newspaper, an out-of-body experience that often might feel as if it is not mine. I think writing about it gives it a sense of personalization, and a realization that this too happened, and oh, this too can be felt. I do not know if it legitimizes it at all, or if anything can legitimize such intense personal moments more than they already have been, in the way that their causal chain took place and moulded my life.
Often when I decide to write about something, I do not know beforehand what feelings or thoughts might come up on paper. I always surprise myself as I write, because they don’t always turn out to be what I intended. I sometimes question myself as a writer because of this. I question if that is what writing is for me, to remember parts of myself I thought were lost, that otherwise could never have been accessed without this. If this means that my writing, in a way, is an investigation or an inquiry to solidify or legitimize my memory, I won’t fully agree, but then again, I am no expert on the subject. That’s for others to decide.
WSR: In an interview with The Guardian, Anne Carson says, flatly: “I do not believe in art as therapy.” When writing into intergenerational and personal trauma, do you believe in writing as a therapeutic act, perhaps in addition to other intentions? In these instances as in others, is writing therapy, a reclamation of agency, an insistence on, or an inquiry towards truth, political or cultural commentary? None of these, or some combination?
SREE: Writing is anything but therapeutic. It is one of the most violent forms of expression, probably, and one must be mad or utterly hopeless to endure the journey of a writer. It brings no pleasure, no fortune, only sleepless nights filled with anxiety.
I think when writing about my personal trauma, I had no intention but to look at what happened to me and write about it as honestly as I could, and what I feel now. It was definitely not an inquiry toward truth, because I don’t know if there is one whole truth. I might feel, about what happened, entirely differently in ten years. It is about looking into the past and remembering some incidents, images of those incidents, noticing how they might position me currently and make up who I am, and how they might make thoughts and words come out of me. It is not to seek any closure or reclamation or even self-acceptance through it. And about the political and cultural scenarios in the story, I don’t think I had consciously thought about them as tropes to implement, separated or added at my will. The truth is, if I had to write about the image of the mango afternoon as it happened, or rather how I remember it to have happened, in my truth, all of these scenarios would have to be written. There was no other detour I could have taken. And if a story has to be told earnestly, isn’t it always bound to be political?
WSR: So much in this essay concerns cyclicality, that of seasons, of smells, of banal chores, of the life lived now repeating lives lived before. How does writing into and through repetition, for you, lead towards a confrontation or inquiry of cyclical, cultural, or intergenerational trauma and violence?
SREE: I personally relish these comebacks, how suddenly, while walking down a sidewalk, one can remember how freshly cleaned sheets smelled, or how a former partner forgot to keep the top button of the shirt closed. I think life and our memories have a way of recalling things. It is a sense of cyclicality, like a dance. How suddenly we feel like eating chocolate, and start hating our favorite drink, till we like it again. I try to find spaces to look into these moments here. Smells, images, and often the feeling of coming back again and again, and never in the same way twice.
Growing up in a South Asian household, I have always tried not to be my mother, but as days pass by, I find her in my own habits, in my forgetfulness, my temper, my anxiety. Now, when she leaves the bathroom after showering, it has an old people smell, much like it was with my grandmother, and just like my grandmother, now she gets up to urinate quite frequently at night. I look at these moments and remember images I never thought I remembered. Each time something comes up, it feels different. While they always have the chance of bringing up painful feelings, they also offer us space to feel something new. I do not look at these as confrontations anymore. I once did. Now I try to look at it as a way of looking at life itself and letting it flow into words. I hope that in doing so, there remains a chance that what I felt in the past and what I feel now, my thoughts and sensations, will have a chance to exist. And if I can write them down, maybe they have a chance to merge into the lives of others, and flow into their heads on a random Tuesday during lunch break, and surprise them.
WSR: One of the essay’s central questions surrounds what love and care permit, what they allow room for. There are numerous images which complicate how we might expect care and love to follow a traumatic incident. You carefully wash your grandmother when she can no longer care for herself; you bring your mother from the hospital and into your own home, make a soup according to your grandmother’s recipe. Are these acts love, obligation, or both? What kind of love is it? Does it expand to include, or move around, shared traumatic pasts?
SREE:I don’t think I shall ever know what kind of love for sure. When there is so much pain, loss, and suffering neatly tied with love and care, I think it is a double discourse from which one cannot escape. It doesn’t matter if it is pain or obligation, or if it is because of a co-dependent past. Whatever it is, it is mine. The pain and love are my knowledge, and I make them exist together in me. Whoever has not felt my pain also remains ignorant of this love I carry, and only this way I can remember my grandmother. Who we love and how we remember them is solely defined by the suffering or pleasure they afford us.
In cases of trauma, the body is a stubborn child that lives in a constant state of anxious waiting. It wants to forgive and move on. It can’t, and that it can’t is an enchantment. It’s not all violent. There are good moments, and there are bad moments, but it will never again become what it was before.
I think at best it is a trial to endure suffering without losing oneself. As I see it, there is no way but to see it to the end, the end not of their life, but of mine.
WSR: By the end of the essay, you have written not towards forgiveness, but towards acceptance: “And I would never forgive or move on completely. I would simply carry what remained: love and loss, braided so tight I couldn’t separate them any longer.” How are forgiveness and acceptance separated? How are they the same, if at all? Can writing lead us to forgiveness, or does it bring us somewhere else?
SREE: To write about a traumatic memory always means detailing the pain, weighing what I shall forgive or not, but it is impossible to divide the labour between the two. Shall I accept or forgive? I think it is neither of the two. It is a ritual of mourning for an exile. I cannot invest in my suffering or my joy the way I could if I forgave or accepted. It is rather the end of the act of performing a denial of separation.
I like to believe that I do not write to reach anywhere, and I don’t even try to. And I definitely don’t want my mother or anyone I know closely to read my stories. What I write will never make me accept the incident any more than I already have. To know that writing compensates for nothing, that it sublimates nothing, liberates me and makes me more eager to write. It is precisely there, where I am not, that the beginning of writing about trauma lies. At least for me.
WSR: Lastly, what are you working on now?
SREE: I don’t know if ‘working’ is the right word. It makes me nervous, and makes me think too much about whether I am working at all. I always worry that I am not working enough. I definitely am not able to concentrate. So it must be that I am not working on anything. The thing is I don’t sit down and think, “Now I will write about trauma.” I just write down what won’t shut up in my head. If it keeps knocking, I let it in. That’s the whole method, if there is one.
Right now I am trying to write about two such images stuck in my head. It is a bit difficult to talk about them in the past tense, because I am still very much inside them.
There are two different stories. Both are borrowed from my life. One works through inherited domestic violence that I have seen very closely in my own life, how parental physical abuse echoes later in abusive relationships. It happened so frequently to women I knew and to me. One moment I am safe, and in the next, I am beaten black and blue. I am trying to let the images speak for themselves rather than build them into a clean, causal story. I am trying to write it through the anxiety one feels in a constant state of fear and unsafety, by also jotting down my early associations with hitting. The other story deals with a woman’s body (mine) and how it remembers, moving between eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and a past sexual assault. I am deliberately trying to resist the familiar “abuse narrative,” and trying to recall the images, through good and embarrassing memories. Mainly because whenever I am trying to write or think of anything painful from the time, I can only think of some exceedingly funny incidents that make me smile.
Neither of these stories is close to finished. I do not yet know what else will come up, or whether I will choose to continue with them exactly as I am describing now. The hope is to track the unshakable images of my life through my teens, adolescence, and twenties, and put them down on paper. I can only hope that it might become a collection someday, like an album, but with words.
Sree is a writer and interdisciplinary artist reconstructing desire, subaltern memory, displacement, and the intimate resistances of marginalised women's lives.