A book can become a lifeline when you find echoes of yourself in the text. For Taymour Soomro and Deepa Anappara, the aim of Letters to a Writer of Color (Random House, 2023) was to bind the intersection of fiction, race, culture, and identity, touching on the array of experiences that speak to writing and being, as a person of color. Edited by Soomro and Anappara, the essays in this anthology explore what it means to write against the current of expectation. Refusing to adhere to the regulated framework of what writers of color are “allowed” to write about, the authors share their own master class: on craft, translation, character, authenticity, and more. They resist the systems that enact boundaries on writers of color, queer writers, disabled writers, and anyone else who is exiled to the margins. Amidst joy, pain, and everything in between, the authors tell us what it means to choose a creative life. They tell the stories both real and imagined that shape who they are—and the ways in which they carve more than one life on the page.
Regarding their hopes in publishing the anthology, Soomro and Anappara have written:
“As students of writing and as writers of colour, we discovered that most discussions on craft don’t take into account cultural and racial variations in storytelling traditions, and instead adopt a narrow approach towards what constitutes ‘good’ writing. This book is a part of our effort to create a more inclusive conversation about writing fiction.”
It was a joy to speak with Soomro over Zoom, where we discussed what it means for writers to become activists, the rituals of craft, writing against the white gaze, and more.
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The Rumpus: The collection of essays that comprise Letters to a Writer of Color are deeply tender, vulnerable, and unapologetic. You have bound together a compilation that offers myriad insights into what it means to be othered, as a writer and as a person. What were the origins of this anthology and your collaboration with Deepa Anappara? Where did the conversation begin?
Taymour Soomro: Deepa was the first person I spoke to in my writing program—we were in an MA program together in the United Kingdom. That friendship was so valuable to me because we both felt quite different in our program. Of course, all of us feel different . . . maybe we feel separate due to our caste, or our upbringing, our gender, our race. Whatever it is that others us, I don’t want to claim that as something that was exclusive to me, or to Deepa. It’s so difficult in these situations because what’s going on is very nuanced.
I had been writing for a long time, but I was new in the program, and it was very difficult for me to know what was happening. “Is my writing bad? Or am I being read differently?” There were just these little things that happened, and these things happen to everyone in one form or another. I remember when I was interviewed to get into the program, the faculty member who interviewed me said, “Will you only write about Pakistan?” When he asked me that, I felt really embarrassed, and I said, “No, no, of course not . . . I’ll write about other things!” And it was later that I reflected on it and wondered, “Is that a question you would ask someone from America, or England? Or is the idea that there is only one story to tell about Pakistan?”
I had written this story that was published in The New Yorker called “Philosophy of the Foot.” It’s about these two men who have a romantic relationship in Karachi. When it was marked as part of my master’s thesis, the person marking it said, “I think you need to make it clearer just how dangerous this kind of behavior is in Pakistan.” This was interesting to me because he was this white English guy—had he ever been to Pakistan? I don’t know. I’m not saying that I can report on the universal queer experience in Pakistan because there is no universal queer experience in Pakistan. But it felt true to me. I thought it was interesting that this was the note he really wanted in the story—this note of violence against queer bodies, violence against brown bodies.
Sometimes it feels like brown bodies are put in this tiny box—you’re allowed to tell this tiny story, and this story only. And I had felt that when I was in my writing program and I was being workshopped, and this was something Deepa and I would talk about. Our student body was diverse-ish; the faculty was not diverse. And that makes a big difference, I think. The word diversity as well cannot hold all of these meanings. What it means to be a Pakistani who grew up in Pakistan is a million things. What it means to be a Pakistani who grew up in Britain is a whole other range of things. I feel like an aim for us with this book was to say, “Look, all of us actually had these very different experiences, but maybe there is some coherence, or some kind of uniformity in the ways in which we were boxed into these very narrow spaces.” Even in my own essay, I really wanted to take ownership of the way that I did that to myself too. There were these stories I was hearing about who I was, and I started repeating that to myself. Ultimately, this really came from the ways in which Deepa and I felt like we were being read differently.
I remember a faculty member in my program asking the class what the purpose of fiction was. We all gave different answers, and he said, “The purpose of fiction is to entertain.” I thought that was so interesting because of how didactic he felt he could be, and how certain he felt he could be. I could have understood if he had said to us, “The purpose of fiction to me is to entertain—what is it to you? What do you want it to do?” Through this book, we wanted to push back against didacticism. We wanted to make clear that we have all of these different stories. We have all of these different experiences. And maybe this is a way in which we can understand how there isn’t a box that you can fit it into. There isn’t a box that we should fit ourselves into.
Rumpus: What does it mean to create something that is an act of resistance? And what does it mean to keep creating and resisting when confronted again and again with such rigid parameters?
Soomro: This is a very challenging question. The feeling I sometimes have is this: why do I have to resist? Why do I have to be political? And maybe I will always be political, maybe that’s inescapable. But this, too, feels confining in some way. I remember talking to Myriam Gurba when we commissioned her piece; the piece we originally commissioned for her was on literary activism, on writers being activists. She said, “I don’t think that we should feel any obligation to be activists.” Myriam lost her job because of the piece she wrote on American Dirt. She was targeted, and she was treated horribly. She really suffered, and that’s a lot for a person. At the end of the day, we’re all also just trying to live our lives. We need to make money and look after ourselves, our families, our partners. So this writing as resistance—it becomes a challenge, but that’s not to say that it’s not something that’s always present in my mind. In some ways—for my own writing, at least—it’s really about a relationship with myself. Resisting the parameters I am applying to myself. I can’t really take control of convincing anyone else. I think I’m very aware, though, of the way in which my own sense of my identity can crystallize and how dangerous that can be—to not allow yourself to be ever-changing.
This book was meant to be emotional support: there is a community of us, and we are trying to articulate, to express, our multiple, ever-changing selves, in a world that seeks to constrain us. These pressures will always exist, though. I see it again and again. No matter how left-leaning publishers claim they are, no matter how much they identify as allies, I still see these very narrow and specific stories of what it means to be brown, or queer, or othered. I see very narrow stories being celebrated again and again. That becomes really frustrating. So I feel like the act of resisting—it somehow becomes impossible to shrug off because everything does become political. When I first read Deepa’s work, I remember thinking, “This is too political. Fiction is not meant to be political.”
When Deepa published that novel, [Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line] I thought that it was phenomenal, so beautiful, and I could feel the political-ness of it, and the rage in it, and all of that was essential. But I do think that it’s also really tiring. It’s really exhausting to have to be fighting that fight, you know? Writing fiction is hard enough. The challenge with being political in fiction is that it feels like you are acting on behalf of—or representing—and I think that becomes dangerous. Ultimately, I don’t know that I can speak for any group of people or represent any group of people. I will tell the story that I want to tell. It will tell, I hope, a little truth about what it means to be a person, if I’m successful. Will it tell the world what it means to be a queer person in Pakistan? No, I couldn’t do that. I don’t know that anyone could do that. So I think that that’s something that I want to remain aware of in my own writing in relation to being political.
Rumpus: Although there have been attempts to diversify curriculum in the MFA and to broaden our collective understanding of what good fiction is, it still caters to the white male gaze. And these attempts often feel tokenistic: “Here’s a syllabus—we’ve slapped a few writers of color on it. We’ve done the work.”
Soomro: Right . . . we’ve ticked that box. I have to say though, in relation to that too—when I’m asked to recommend books and so on, my mind leaps to mostly white writers, you know? And that’s because that’s largely what I have read.
Rumpus: Because that’s what we’ve been exposed to.
Soomro: I heard Sheila Heti give a talk once, and someone had said to her that when they attempted to write, it felt like the wiring looked bad. And Sheila said this: “Sometimes it looks bad because it’s not familiar.” What she was speaking to is that we want to be doing something that is not familiar. We want to be doing something new. Maybe the ways you have heard people speak, the ways your thoughts articulate themselves, will look unfamiliar to you on a page, will look bad. Is that because you are not writing in the conventional, the accepted, language of literary fiction? That really stuck with me. So often, I’m trying to polish my writing—polish it into looking “good,” which is a proxy for familiar. Is that something that I want to do? Do I want to be writing the way that I think literary fiction ought to be written? That’s starting to not seem so interesting to me anymore.
I’m teaching at Bennington College now in the MFA program, and it’s something I think about a lot when I’m reading my student’s work. I’m very cautious about doing a line edit on people’s work because so much of a line edit ends up feeling like imposing a generic, “good language” syntax-prose style. I don’t know. It’s so boring.
Rumpus: Your piece in the Letters anthology, “On Origin Stories,” mentions that you’re hesitant to offer writing advice. I’m curious what you have found to be a necessary ingredient in your own rituals? Ddoes this apply to the editing process as well as the writing process, or do the two exist as two separate forms for you?
Soomro: The writing and the editing, I think, are pretty separate. I tend to write a lot of beginnings, which I throw away. Once I’m into a project, I tend to rewrite drafts from scratch. It really ends up being a way for me to plot something out and sort of make a model that I can then manipulate. I do think that writing from scratch is a really good thing to do. It’s really time consuming, and laborious, but the truth is that the writing process is really long. If you ever think that you can shortcut it and produce something good—I mean, if I ever think that—I am invariably wrong. I think the other thing is how I distinguish when the writing is good, or when the writing is bad. I do tell myself and my students that so often I don’t see much feeling on the page. I see passive characters avoiding conflict, avoiding choice. And while that sometimes ends up feeling very true of our lives, it doesn’t make for interesting fiction to me. I want to see people making choices, and I want to see people feeling things. I was talking recently with a friend—the writer Emma Copley Eisenberg—and she was talking about this as well. She said, “Why do so many contemporary novels have this absence of feeling?” I think that there is this effect of apathy in fiction, which can look quite stylish; it can be quite cool to read, but it’s not really what interests me so much. I want to see people feeling things. And I want to see the blood on the page.
Rumpus: One of the things I loved most about this compilation is how vulnerable the authors are. They’re so engaged in feeling and in exploring the messy conditions of being human. How were the authors guided, and what did you feel was your most vital responsibility as an editor?
Soomro: Editing this text was a real insight into the editing process because it showed me how I can so often apply what are considered to be “rules.” There are these apolitical benign rules in my editing, but they’re actually not apolitical, they’re not benign. They come from a very specific education in writing, from a very specific canon. I think this also circles back to why I’ve become really resistant to line editing my students. How do you work out what the writer is trying to do in their piece—and support them to do it—as opposed to imprinting or superimposing your own vision of what they should do, of what their piece should look like?
Deepa is a very experienced editor, so it was really useful to have her there. The two of us were the first line of edits. Then we had Caitlin McKenna, our editor at Random House, and Alex Russell, our editor at Vintage in the UK, do a series of edits as well. It ended up being this conversation between all of us. We did have to be really careful and gentle—and sure that we were guiding the writer toward the meaning that they were looking for. My novel was predominantly set in Pakistan, and I remember during the editing process, various industry people were offering me feedback. I would hear things like, “You know, this dialogue sounds clunky, or bad.” Obviously, there are times where I do write bad dialogue. Sometimes, though, it’s the case that this dialogue is right. It may sound clunky to your ear, but it would sound clunky to your ear if a Pakistani spoke in that way too. I think this whole process really taught me to interrogate my responses because when I am resisting—when I think something is not working or when I think something is bad—what does it tell me about myself? That’s the question I ask first.
I delivered a lecture at Bennington in June, and it was about how we read writing through a writer’s identity. That question is really interesting to me because it shows that the text does not exist on its own. The text ends up being this relationship between a writer and a reader. What does the reader think? What are the reader’s politics? These questions become really critical to the reader’s experience of a text. I looked at a lot of literary hoaxes where writers pretend: to be brown, to be East Asian, to be trans—readers often read these stereotypical stories, and they become really persuaded by them. How is the writer’s biography, or perceived biography, functioning in relation to the text? Is it a filter that you see the text through that transforms the text for you? And does this affect othered writers more? Does this speak to the single story that we’re allowed to tell? When the apparently Chinese poet tells us the stories that we expect to read about China, they become really persuasive to us. If we read his poems knowing they were written by a white American, does the text look totally different to us? I want to interrogate those questions and do so without blaming the reader.
I’ve been involved in judging various competitions, and something I would often hear is, “This is okay because it’s a writer of color who has written this.” That struck me as interesting because again, how is identity working here? Those permissions become really dangerous because they easily function as constraints. When a writer of color is given the authority to write, for example, about race—implicit in that, it seems to me, is the denial of authority to write about anything else.
Rumpus: In your essay, “On Origin Stories,” you write, “This is the truth in fiction that often fact alone cannot tell—because we don’t know our own desires, because we might not admit them to ourselves.” When you exist in a certain body, there can be so much shame in existing, in just being. The writing process is a point of catharsis, and although it can unearth a lot of pain, there is also so much joy in finding acceptance through art—in understanding the terrain of who we are. I can’t think of anything more gratifying than that.
Soomro: Totally. I completely agree. I do wonder about the ways in which this kind of idea constrains me too: “Do I only have to write about myself?” Or maybe my question is, “How narrow is that idea of ‘self?’” When I say “only write about myself,” do I mean, “Do I only write about a queer Pakistani?” What are those parameters? Leila Aboulela—who is in conversation with Nadifa Mohamed in the book—said something that I found really useful: “I imagine the people I am writing about reading the work.” I thought that was quite fascinating. Even if they can, or cannot read—or would, or would not read this—I imagine them reading this. If I imagine the kind of Pakistanis that I have written about in my novel reading my novel, then that places totally different demands on the text than if I imagined a white, middle-class American reader reading the text. I think it mitigates against pandering—if that’s something that I don’t want to do. It mitigates against having to explain these people to an audience, or explain this world, or this setting. I feel it can be quite useful for me when I’m writing.
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Author photograph by Stuart Simpson
