Discussing an absurdity called diaspora literature

Panel discussions can be boring; even more so when they are on a subject as widely chewed and as thoroughly digested as ‘diaspora writing’. Yet, the most enjoyable session on Day II of the Jaipur literature festival was the one titled, Defining Diaspora.

The four writers entrusted with the responsibility of defining disapora — Hari Kunzru, Tash Aw, Tahmina Anam, and Nadeem Aslam — took to their task with the gleeful abandon of schoolchildren left to finish a project without adult supervision.

British-born novelist Kunzru captured the absurdity of the debate when he said, “When someone asks me where am I from, and I say from Woodford, that’s not what they want to hear. What they want to know is ‘who had sex to make you?” In Kunzru’s case, it was a Kashmiri Pandit man and an English Protestant woman who made him and today he finds himself mysteriously categorised as a ‘diaspora’ writer, even though all he ever did by way of “leaving home” was “to move to central London from the suburbs”.

While the wry humour of Kunzru kept the audience chuckling, Tash Aw’s confession (“I find Chinese chicks very hot”) had the audience in loud guffaws, and groans from a few non-Chinese girls who till then had thought he was cute. But it was Bangladeshi writer Tahmina Anam’s story about how publishers design book covers for South Asian novelists that took the cake. Her novel, A Golden Age, is about a widow. Naturally, the protagonist is always seen in a white sari. Her European publishers sent her a cover design with a woman in a pink sari that was gorgeous and exotic. “I told them we can’t have the woman in a pink sari because widows wore only white. They mailed back saying, ‘Come on. Don’t be so literal’,” said Anam

London-based Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam reiterated that a writer’s nationality doesn’t really matter as they all belong to the “nationhood” of writers.

It was fitting that a Latvian-American woman in the audience had the last word on the debate on whether writers needed to prove the authenticity of their connection to a country in order to be able to write about it. She asked, “If a sparrow is born in a barn, does it make it a horse?”