Interview with the Author: Anis Shivani

Anis Shivani’s debut collection, Anatolia and Other Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2010), is packed with rich stories that span the globe. These linear-narrative gems are filled with intelligent and insightful musings.

Anatolia is a must read for anyone who is a fan of setting. The settings in this book — from Dubai to Texas — are rendered with precise detail, and they work as characters of their own, bringing a rich background to each of Shivani’s stories.

Shivani, who is well known for his criticism, was kind enough to discuss current literary trends, as well as his magnificently crafted debut. — Brian Allen Carr

Dark Sky Magazine: Anatolia and Other Stories illustrates a pitch-perfect sense of place.  Stories such as “Dubai,” “Manzanar,” and “Go Sell it on the Mountain” are truly driven by the locations in which they transpire.  In “Dubai” for instance, so much of the struggle innate to the story is predicated by the politics of the United Arab Emirates.  In “Go Sell it on the Mountain” the conflict emerges through similar political nuances that exist at Green Mountain Conference for writers.  Why is location such an important feature of fiction for you?

Anis Shivani: Perhaps because of a deficiency in my imagination?  I’m unable to imagine character without place.  It must be all that Dickens I soaked up as a child.  Those characters are unimaginable without that particular London.  Place stays with me more than character.  It might indicate a particularly placeless — and hence suspicious — character (me, that is).  It could also be that I take great delight in writing place descriptions — much more interesting than describing people, how they look, etc.  Perhaps also a peculiar kind of misanthropy, though well-disguised.  Places last, people die.  Or at least places last longer than people.  The rhythm of the place imposes a certain pattern on character.  Maybe we don’t realize that to the extent we should.  I was a different person in L.A. than I was in New York, and I was a different person again in Boston than I am in Houston.  Each place formed a different character, left trace patterns on me.  Dubai is famous for tallness, bigness, the Texas of the Arabian Gulf in some of its pretensions; the buildings tower over lowly indentured servants.  How does that make the imported laborer feel?  Then again the spatial segregation, the ritual exorcism of the bad brown blood from the pure body of the professional worker.  Without these modes of access and transport and invisibility, the story would be very different.  The cliché of the endless expanse of the desert, where the Indian worker witnesses the accident — the crunch of metal against body, set against sand, while a new building goes up.  The infinite construction of myths.  Some brick-and-gold, some flesh-and-blood.  Isn’t that what all cities are about?  Madison is tiny, circular, self-enclosed — or so it seemed to me as an outsider when I briefly visited.  I tried to correlate that to the self-refuting characters of the two aging professors who adopt the Vietnamese kid; a campus town has its peculiar logic of incestuousness, you can’t escape its tentacles over you, especially if you’ve lived there a long time.  Tehran, a metropolis that repeatedly gets its heart stabbed by the country’s best and brightest.  Revolutions go to die on the streets of Tehran (well, all right, one of them, the wrong one, won).  My three characters in that story, the busybody housewife/teacher, the disgruntled cleric, the Baha’i novelist, are revolving around the freedom squares and the wide bourgeois avenues of the city.  The cafes where they all go to die small daily deaths, and then the Café where they all die the final death.  I cannot imagine characters without exciting places, whether small or large, vacant postmodern cities in search of a soul or ancient ones in love with their terrible sins.  In “Independence” I used the idea of Pondicherry as a state within a state (a semi-autonomous small territory until the early 1950s, in the newly liberated subcontinental state of India), which seems to go well with the idea of certain classes within the new state feeling more liberated than others; and then the layout of the city, the separation between the modern and traditional parts, the class segregation.  Then finally one should think about the one story, “Repatriation,” the most abstract one, that takes place in no place — literally in the middle of the ocean, heading to an unknown destination.  How hard it is when we don’t have place to attach ourselves to?  Yet not everyone can be a patriot and not have his patriotism questioned.  That’s a tough place to be.

DSM: Have you visited all the locations you use as settings in your book?

AS: Most of the exotic locations, no.  I lived in Boston for several years, but the place Boston as it appears in the story is more a matter of conjecture and unreliable memory than it is a verbatim rendition.  I have never stepped foot in India (though wish very much I had), and the same goes for the Gulf Arab states, Turkey, Iran, or frankly anywhere in the Middle East.  I feel very close spiritually to the barracks in Manzanar, California, where I describe the internment of Japanese-Americans; the visual feeling immediately arrests me, makes me stop in my tracks to take measure of the so-called open spaces and freedom we supposedly possess free of cost.  I’m not sure I want to visit all the places I want to write about.  Which makes me wonder to what extent I am a hopeless anomaly.  Unlike John Updike, let’s say, who writes about place from a lifelong visceral experience — his every spillage of semen and conquest of breast is associated with particular square inches of territory, which he then immortalizes in lush prose; the sense of possession is very evident.  So desperate have I become about this whole issue of place — since I cannot convincingly describe to myself any place in possessive terms — that I have almost decided to escape into history altogether, to do away with the whole sorry mess.  History, and perhaps fantasy.  If I could be so bold.  I want to write a novel about Afghanistan, but not the real, contemporary Afghanistan of the Taliban and the American invasion, but a fantasy Afghanistan of the 1970s, where I can dream villages that never existed.  In some sense, all writers are severely constrained when they start out, and growth is a matter of setting the imagination free.  I have a long way to go.  I need to quit my resentment/envy of writers firmly attached to a place.  It comes from having moved too much, at critical junctures of my life, just when attachment was in the offing.  By now, it is too late.  I am a stranger in Houston, though I have lived here more than 15 years.  I came here too late already, having gotten suspicious of attachments.  It is what I have to live with, and perhaps I can make good of it in some unforeseeable ways.  Fantasy — and history.  And goddamned imagination, that takes myself out of the picture altogether.

The Outsiders

DSM: Also inherent in your stories is the depiction of outsiders.  Many of the characters in this book live outside their homelands, often times as religious pariahs, or limited by their class.  In “Anatolia” a Jewish merchant stands trial in a Muslim court in 18^th century Turkey for alleged tax evasion.  In “Texas” Amy, a Connecticut native described as a second-class citizen, works as a children’s caregiver in the affluent neighborhood of River Oaks in Houston.  What statement is made by showing characters outside their element, how does it help you to reveal their strengths and flaws?

AS: This is what we do as fiction writers.  Outsider visits town.  Gets mugged, or wins the beautiful girl.  Or, maybe, nothing interesting happens to him, which perhaps is the most fascinating story of all, if it can be told with panache.  On one level we all sense this contingency of home, especially since America literally was renamed “homeland.”  Do you feel more at home, or less so, since we got a new name?  I know about myself.  It’s the easiest trick in fiction, like I said.  Are outsiders always superior?  We, postmodern, twenty-first century consumers of fiction, well-read in the canon and aware of politically incorrect sins, want to feel that we identify with or empathize with the outsider, the other.  Now, there are writers — perhaps the majority — who go about this the wrong way.  They set out enlisting this sympathy from readers.  And as a result we don’t feel any.  The way to do it is to distribute the focus so randomly, so objectively, that everything is illuminated (oh, what a terrible word choice, I disavow the remotest association with the recent author of that coinage).  But there is a danger here, and something that comes too pat and easy, for the lazy writer.  We have a ban on the “novel of ideas” in America — certain critics decided early in the century that we Americans weren’t going to do that.  Anything that stinks of ideas must be didactic and have no place in fiction.  But ideas are what save outsiders from cute placement as victims.  I hope I’m free of this insidious disease.  I hope the reader feels attached to Amy because of (not despite) the fact that she suspects she is an outsider in the rich Houston suburb, or with the Jewish trader in Ottoman Turkey because he definitely knows he’s an outsider.  They’re conscious, and it’s because the stories unfold along certain tracks of ideas, there are larger things moving them toward inescapable conclusions.  In the case of “Anatolia” I had the benefit of the hindsight of history to know where things would end up for religious minorities; in the case of “Texas” it is an ongoing drama in globalization, and the powers-that-be have recently decided to intervene very hard on the side of the presumed Amys of the world.  I hope my Amy is more beautiful than any caricature Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and for that matter, Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton, come up with to describe them.  To answer your point, I don’t think a character can ever be outside their element; it’s a matter of definition.  They are where they are because they belong there.  Unless one has been involuntarily deported (or removed, as they call it these days), but that’s not what we’re talking about.  I should be able to see eighteenth-century Anatolia just as well through the eyes of the native trader, Mustafa Celebi, as I can through the eyes of the outsider, Noah ibn Nehmias.  If I can’t do that, my story has failed.

DSM: You write a lot of criticism and you discussed in an essay in Boulevard that you more or less agree with Horace Engdahl’s charge that America’s literary community has grown too insular, saying American writers are, “preoccupied with the predicaments of our nation, and no other in the world.”  Have you seen any trend away from an insular perspective since Engdahl made his controversial remarks?

The Cardboard Universe

AS: I would somewhat modify these remarks, because the trend I see now, of a shift toward better quality, less insular, more intellectual fiction since around 2007-2008, seems to have picked up in the last two or three years, so that some truly outstanding books have been and are being published.  Satire seems to be making a comeback.  Writers are taking more chances in commercial venues, putting more on the line.  Perhaps it’s because publishing is in such dire straits, things are financially so unsettled, that there’s nothing to lose.  If you’re going to be dropped by your big-time publisher after a couple of books anyway, you might as well swing for the fences.  In the last year I’ve read four immensely entertaining books from the Harper Perennial imprint alone:  Christopher Miller’s The Cardboard Universe, Torsten Krol’s Callisto and The Dolphin People (though he’s presumably not an American), and Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil.  Incredible books, all four of them, really reviving the lost art of satire.  Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like reading about whiny, self-pitying, navel-gazing characters, and we get way too much of that from many of the biggest names in New York fiction.  So there is some breaking of the mold, and I would say the situation is noticeably better than it was at the beginning of the last decade, which was a truly horrendous time for American fiction.  We had turned inward — to a large degree we remain so today, with more exceptions emerging, however.  Publishers, never laudably interested in promoting high literary quality, seemed to have, in the last decade, become colossal morons.  That’s the big New York houses.  As far as the smaller/independent/university presses are concerned, while they do yeoman’s work and publish much of the best short fiction and poetry in the country, too often they turn out marginal, exotic, willfully obscure, pseudo-avant-garde, minor literature, which cannot possibly have a broad audience — and that’s too bad.  This particular problem stems from the oversupply of such writing from the MFA programs, particularly in the short and experimental fictional forms.  I would say on the whole the major American writers, still, at the end of the decade, show themselves largely incapable of writing non-insular literature.  The premises are too deeply ingrained, and publishers would probably throw fits if someone tried to do otherwise.  To understand the world as it is would mean opening up our eyes to our historic errors on the world stage; we prefer to remain in blindness.  It leads to very cozy fictions — spoiled Manhattanites worrying about their biological clocks or their dicks falling off due to old age, but it doesn’t create a movement toward important world literature.  If the major publishing houses were all to collapse tomorrow, and simultaneously one had to pay enormous taxes to go to MFA programs (therefore eliminating them), the situation might change overnight.  But I’m not holding my breath.

DSM: Was Anatolia a conscious attempt to bring other nations’ predicaments into the American literary discourse?

AS: “Predicaments” sounds too programmatic.  Nations are not victims.  They make their own destiny.  Although perhaps our leading liberal minds don’t think that way.  I merely started (and hopefully ended) with characters that seemed fascinating to me.  The Indian undocumented worker in Dubai — what really goes through his mind?  We know about the bracero program (actually, we can’t understand such brutal truths, but it’s a manner of speaking), but what about in the Arab countries?  What is the nature of art conservation?  How do you go about deciding what paintings to preserve and using what methods of restoration?  What if you took your love of a particular painting to extremes, so that you became an anomaly for institutional capacity?  What was it like to be a privileged Muslim trader in India shortly after independence?  How does it feel to be a gypsy?  A gypsy shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, and you had to decide between the two evils of capitalism and communism, both of them equally bad from your point of view.  We think we know about retrograde clerics — but what if you are one with liberal views, and young and handsome, and in love with poetry, and have more than the occasional sexual feeling?  If the “predicaments” of nations, or other entities, come into play as I explore these characters from deep inside, then so be it.  That is not my intention.  I don’t have any particularly liberal message to deliver, or really, any political message at all.  Countries have made a mess of their relationships with others, there’s a lot of injustice and violence in the world, but all that comes through loud and clear if you keep your grasp firmly on character.  A lot of things get said better if you don’t worry about having to say them.

DSM: In a post for the National Book Critics Circle you argue that “that every book is its own universe.”  How would you define the universe that emerges in Anatolia?

AS: This is another outstanding question.  The universe that emerges in Anatolia is utterly historical and determinative in one way, yet to an equal degree free and indeterminate because of the strength of individual character.  Both polarities stand in complete balance and opposition, and there are no knowable victors or outcomes.  Extremely strong wills are possible because we live in a world full of information, opportunity to seek knowledge, and the ability to move from place to place.  That is liberating.  Yet there is the friction of history to contend with, the inability of history to move fast enough to please the strong-willed ones.  That is a great contest, worth watching from every angle, and I’ve tried to do just that in Anatolia.  There are traces of paranoia but not much guilt and shame, no grief at all, lots of indignities that are ably countered, and the sense of an overwhelming presence of rightness, that things have more or less turned out as they ought to.  There isn’t entropy, the second law of thermodynamics is in abeyance, and gravity is often overcome.   

DSM: What are you working on now?  What can we expect to see next?

AS: For the last few years I have been writing a novel set in a slum in contemporary Karachi, Pakistan.  “Slum” is not exactly the right word.  It’s really based on the Orangi Pilot Project, a self-improvement scheme founded by noted activist Akhtar Hameed Khan, who implemented a model widely followed in squatter settlements around the world.  Basically, the idea is to make slum dwellers feel empowered, make them feel a sense of possession and responsibility and ownership toward their situation, so that they take the initiative to improve sanitation, housing, and other conditions on their own.  Pretty soon the “slum” begins to take on aspects of regular housing, and it makes a huge difference in people’s lives.  I have two characters, Hafiz and Seema, who are both trying to make their way in the madcap Karachi scene; I often have very strong female characters in my fiction, and Seema is no exception.  She attends Karachi University, and confronts the question of class difference at every turn.  Observing the settlement is an American anthropologist, and her section I render in the form of fieldnotes — not quite fieldnotes as an anthropologist would really take them; those would be too boring, but fieldnotes with a more self-conscious, ironic quality.  I regret never having visited this settlement in Karachi; I haven’t even been to that city since the mid-1990s, so it’s a long time ago, and meanwhile the city, especially in the last five years or so, seems to have undergone great physical and infrastructural, and perhaps even social, changes.  I have to constantly decide between the city of my memories (and nightmares?) and the city that really exists today, and to what degree I’m going to emphasize which one.  I wouldn’t call the novel a love note to Karachi, since that would be too strong a sentiment to enunciate toward such a difficult, chaotic, stubborn place, but really, the central character in the novel is Karachi.  I don’t think a novel about Karachi as the main subject exists, and that’s a shame for a city that important on the world scene.  Something also of Bely’s symbolism, Döblin’s expressionism, I hope, enters into it.  I am very eager to finish this soon, because the “real” Karachi is escaping out of my sights with every day.  After that, I want to write something completely historical/fantastical:  a novel set in 1930s Italy, in one of Mussolini’s mental asylums/political prisons.  I have other ideas for future novels that have nothing to do with South Asia; I’ve had my fill of that for a while.  I would like to write short, “lyric” novels — a la Lawrence Durrell; they always seem to get out of hand.

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Anis Shivani is a fiction writer, poet, and critic in Houston, Texas. His stories appear in Other Voices, Crazyhorse, Stand, Confrontation, River City, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere.  One of his stories won special mention for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. Anatolia and Other Stories, his first book, addresses the limitations of prevalent models of multiculturalism under conditions of stress. A poetry manuscript, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, was selected by David Shapiro as the runner-up for the 2007 Marsh Hawk Press Prize; poems appear in The Threepenny Review, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, TLS, Subtropics, Meanjin, Verse, and other journals. A book of criticism, American Fiction in Decline: Publishing in an Age of Plenty, is in progress; essays assessing the current state of American fiction and poetry appear in American Book Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Northwest Review, Pleiades, The Antioch Review, Boulevard, London Magazine, and elsewhere.