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A conversation with saraid de silva

anger and its uses

Do you remember the first thing that you wrote?

I wrote out the story of ‘Medusa’ when I was seven. I made the images on my mum’s computer, pasted them into a big scrapbook and then I think I wrote the story under it by hand? I also wrote some weird lusty vampire stories when I was very young. I only remember these because I remember the illustrations. And this isn’t writing, but I vividly remember that as a child I often pretended to be on a cooking show when I was eating. Which feels related.

What does your creative community look like and how do you support one another?

Sending each other funding opportunities we think the other may not have heard about, going to each other’s shows, reading and buying each other’s books, reading the articles my friends share and engaging with them. Buying the art and clothing people make, getting tattooed by each other! My creative community looks like us paying attention to one another and trying to work laterally. I also think a really useful kind of support is sharing bad experiences and being honest with people in similar industries about the difficulties we’ve had. Being politically engaged is also an important kind of creative support.

With Julie Zhu, you created the RNZ podcast and video series Conversations With My Immigrant Parents, sharing inter-generational conversations with immigrant families in Aotearoa. How did this series come together, and how did you know a podcast/video series was the right form for it?

Conversations With My Immigrant Parents came out of an RFP (request for proposal) put out by RNZ for podcasts. Julie and I applied for it and got it. The project partially came out of the desire Julie and I had to work together and be in conversation with one another. Or that’s true for me, at least. I really wanted to be friends with Julie! In terms of the form, I came with the podcast angle and Julie with the video angle. We each brought our different loves to it and then learnt from each other in the process. Both the podcast and the accompanying videos were attempts to facilitate the time and space to share, for people who weren’t used to being recorded. So the form felt correct to us. I also just really love longform podcasts and Julie loves observational documentaries.

Looking back at the form we chose now – when we wrapped the series up we did talk about wanting to make a book together or work on some kind of publishable storytelling, sort of in the same vein as Convos but honing in a bit more on our preferred mediums. We imagined we would interview people and I would write the interviews up. Julie would take the photos. After three seasons of the podcast we started to notice how much more people relaxed when the video camera was off, we wanted to keep looking for ways to encourage that. I’ll always be interested in families and their stories. In the particular ways they talk to and notice one another.

Can you give us a sense of the mechanics of starting your own podcast – do you have any tips for young creators who may be interested in doing the same?

We’ve been asked this question a lot over the years and I always feel like my answer is a bit useless. From a technical perspective, we didn’t have to learn much about recording and editing audio because the funding allowed us to hire people to do that. We edited the transcripts of course, but not the audio. That lack of knowledge was the biggest barrier before starting and the answer to that barrier, in the end, was money. I would say, if you’re interested in starting your own podcast, that it’s important to think thoroughly about why. Why does it need to be a podcast specifically? What do you like about podcasts? What are you hoping to achieve by starting one?

Your debut novel, Amma, is a story spanning generations – it takes place in different time periods, some from well before you were born, as well as multiple cities, including Singapore, Colombo, Hamilton, London and Invercargill. How did you go about gathering the detail that must have been necessary for this level of scene-setting across decades and hemispheres?

I started in all the normal ways, with researching the facts about a place, what the political situation there was at the time, the demographic, and what the landscape looked like (if I was able to find that). I did a lot of google maps street view strolling to put myself back in a place. I tried to pay attention to where the facts bumped up against my own impressions. Or the impressions that were passed down to me. Newspaper articles, photos, talking to people, reading fiction set in those places and times. I became a bit paralysed for a while by the fear of getting things wrong. At some point I just had to go for it.

Amma deals with violence and pain, including sexual violence – its impact on the lives of the people subject to it, and their response to it. In an interview at the LRB Bookstore you described it as ‘a book about rage and revenge’ – how clearly did you know this starting the book, or was it something that came organically out of the writing process?

Writing about rage and revenge came out of the story and the characters, but that’s my angle as an artist always. I am always returning to anger and its uses. I just finished reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (loved it) and towards the end one character tells another ‘you can put a saddle on anger’. Anger can be a friend. It can motivate you and spur you onto new things. It can be a gift.

In your LRB interview you also talk about the process of writing as part of the Sri Lankan community in Aotearoa, saying that one thing the novel seeks is ‘feeling like I am recognised as part of something, and known.’ What has the response to Amma within the Sri Lankan community, at home and abroad, been like?

Yes, that answer came off the back of a brilliant audience question about language. I like to think about familiarity. It’s relaxing to be seen, properly. But I’m not sure I fully know what the response to Amma has been like from the Sri Lankan community! Of course that’s a very diverse group. Brannavan liked the book and gave it a really incredible review, that was huge for me. I’ve been a fan of his work for so long. My mum liked it too. I’ve had some sweet conversations with Sri Lankan people online about it. I’ve been invited to the Galle Literary Festival next year. I guess I’ll be able to speak to this question more after that!

Amma’s epigraph comes from the great Alistair Te Ariki Campbell – ‘I never eat sensibly when you’re away. / I make do with odd scraps of food / that don’t need heating up, / or nibble on a biscuit or two.’ Food is a huge part of Amma – the pleasure and comfort it can bring, the connections it has to home and culture. Who are some of your favourite writers about food?

My favourite writers about food include Nina Mingya Powles, Nigella Lawson, Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh, Rebecca May Johnson, and Lucinda Bennett. I also love Claudia Roden, and I love when Rose Lu writes about food. I wonder if writing about food is a bit like writing about sex — you reveal your skill as a writer when you do it.

Loneliness and grief are also at the heart of Amma. You speak to that in an interview with The Post, but also discuss a collective grief – ‘I am experiencing grief every day because I’m seeing so many dead Palestinian people on my phone and witnessing the grief coming out of Palestine, I think we’re all kind of collectively grieving anyway.’ How do you see these two strands – the personal grief of the characters within Amma and the grief, and rage, at the impact of genocide and trauma on a world stage?

I’m not sure really, I think I’m always reassessing and unpacking that. I worry sometimes that talking about the two in relation diminishes the grief Palestinians are experiencing or tries in some way to relate to it, when I never could.

Every new grief I experience recalls an old one. Each funeral I go to, I bring previous funerals with me. That was what I was trying to talk about. How grief compacts in on itself. I attended the funeral of the father of a very close friend recently. He was a great man and many people mourned his death. There were processes and time around it. I kept thinking about how crucial that is, to feel like you have said goodbye to someone in the right way. And how this is yet another indignity that Palestinian people are being forced to suffer through by Israel and the US. I guess because Amma was written when I was grieving (although that is not a state one ever leaves), when I watched people like me grieving I remembered my own.

As a writer, in what ways do you aim to address global issues like the genocide in Palestine (and elsewhere)?

Answering this question is difficult because I think objectively I am not doing enough, so my answer is clouded with guilt. Supporting and listening to Palestinian people and supporting and learning from the Palestinian resistance is my aim. In the same way that tauiwi can be useful here in Aotearoa by supporting, listening to, and following the lead of tangata whenua. White supremacy isn’t new, nor is resistance to it.

If I’m called to a space by my grief at what another group of people are being forced to experience, I hope to always enter the space knowing that those who hold it have been fighting for much longer than I have even been alive.

What is your advice for writing characters who are angry with the world they see around them, or the situations they find themselves in?

Don’t assume you’re the only one who feels this way and don’t let that be a reason to not write about it! It’s the whole reason! It’s the point!

Love – queer love, familial love, friendship, community, and the nuances and complexities therein –  is also central to Amma. How do you approach writing about love and comfort, alongside rage and revenge (if the two are even necessarily separate)?

Rage is present because there’s something worth holding onto. I don’t think the two are separate, at all.

In the same interview with The Post, you discuss the economic realities of writing, and the unsustainability of trying to fit a creative practice around necessary paid employment. What do you think we need more of in regards to supports for arts practitioners in Aotearoa?

God what don’t we need more of? I feel like first we need to fall in love with our writers. We have so many great writers and artists here and our own cultural cringe sometimes stops us from recognising that.

If this coalition government gave a shit about anything other that ripping this country to shreds for profit, if they were remotely literate or had souls, if they had the capacity to feel, or consider that arts practitioners here were worth supporting because their work was not only good but vital — then we might get things like artist’s allowances, more funding opportunities, funds that stretched out over a greater span of time, more residencies and scholarships. It’s also hard to create in a world where opportunities to respond critically to art are so few and far between. Losing The Pantograph Punch, for example, cleaved something necessary away from us. So more arts journals and publications too. In such a desert of opportunity, getting funding feels like a double-edged sword, you accept it knowing that you being able to write means someone else likely can’t (or can’t as easily).

You are also a script editor for Shortland Street. How did you get into script development, and what are the differences between scriptwriting and writing for the page?

I got into TV writing because I came up as an actor. My undergrad is in acting and the first ‘professional’ (I did not get paid but I took it seriously) writing I did was playwriting. The obvious difference between the two forms is dialogue. Dialogue is something I try to avoid, or do only very reluctantly in fiction. But in a script, and this is my opinion because I look at a film/show as a writer, the dialogue is the vessel for everything else. Additionally, writing for the screen is so much more collaborative at every step, because the script is only part of the work, rather than the whole. It doesn’t really exist as a thing on its own. Scripts are incredibly technical, there’s that too. But I like thinking about the similarities between the two, the ways one can inform the other. Dialogue forces me to refine my ideas, but fiction allows me to lean into one thought. I like thinking about one when I’m doing the other.

What’s coming up next for you?

Towards the end of this year I’m leaving my full-time position at Shortland Street to write my second novel. I received a grant to do this from Foundation North and CNZ and I’m so grateful for it. I’ll also be freelancing as a writer so hit me up. I am very excited to put together the puzzle of a new novel. I can’t wait to read more.

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