Out of Print 6

This December, Out of Print features 6 stories that explore the complex, multi-layered aspects of the region in ways that rise beyond the cultural context. Altaf Tyrewala’s Mischief in Netanagar is a chilling commentary on urban ennui, where the protagonist feels so disempowered that he comments, ‘To belong to the community, to the land or to the nation, a man must first be in possession of himself.’ Lucinda Nelson Dhavan’s Boys And Girls Together leads us through what happens when a refuge for battered women and a lodge for young men are next door to each other in a ‘middle-sized, middle-class, sleepy city’ in India. Dipika Mukherjee’s Patriots Of The Will, is a fictional rendition of the Indian National Army’s presence in what was then Malaya: a Bengali woman, a sweet maker, makes mishti and much more for Bose. Meenakshi Jauhari Chawla's tale reveals the fallibility of Lakhi Parshad, Member of Parliament and the wiliness of the human mind in negotiating survival. Drawing on her scientific background, and her theoretical perspective on the ways in which molecules interact, our editor, Indira Chandrasekhar, examines the thought processes of a girl who struggles to make sense of her family and her relationships in Lennard-Jones Potentials. In Tashan Mehta’s Erasure, which begins, ‘When I left home, I came back to find they had erased me,’ a young woman, desperate to find herself searches among her family and friends but learns that they no longer see her.  

A commissioned cover from Out of Print writer and friend, Vinayak Varma is a hand-drawn re-purposing of a frame from Amitabh Bachchan's 'MereAngane Mein' song. Read more about Vinayak's thoughts on this in our Editor’s Note.

Out of Print alive and active

We have been silent on our blog - the unexpected turns of life - for a bit.

But much has been happening with us:

- Samhita is lecturing on Sita, conducting workshops in Delhi, and in the wake of the NY Times best-seller listing for Sita's Ramayana, is being sought after in many places
- Mira is reading and writing more than can be imagined possible
- Indira has a publication The Perfect Shot out in fellow online journal, Pratilipi

And, we are gathering forces for a great new issue of Out of Print.

Out of Print in Spark Magazine

In an article entitled 'Bringing the short story on line' the online magazine, Spark, interviews Out of Print.

Out of Print is in The Indian Express Sunday Magazine

Out of Print features in an article about online literary magazines by Amrita Dutta in the Nov 6, 2011 Sunday edition, The Eye, of Indian Express.

Annalemma Magazine runs an India theme

The New York based literary and arts magazine Annalemma likes a good story and an intense aesthetic. Appearing both in print and online form, their upcoming issue is themed around India.
Here is what they say about Out of Print.


Annalemma Issue Nine: IndiaCall to Submit

As America and Europe begin to recede into the background of global superpowers, new forces are stepping up as the leaders of the democratic world. Among these powers, is India. With the die of globalization now cast, the geopolitical, economic, technological & environmental landscape is more connected than ever. It is important for people in the West, young people especially, to claim an understanding of how their world intersects and effects Indian culture, and vice versa.

But how can you expect to cover an entire country in one go? And in 104 pages of a literary magazine no less? Agreed, that's somewhat impossible. The purpose of this issue is to allow a point of entry for Western readers and writers, to forge a new mental pathway to understanding.

What we are humbly asking of Indian writers is this: show us your country. Show us the micro and the macro, show us the beauty and the horror, the power, the corruption, the injustice, the triumph, the enduring beauty, the infinite feedback loop of suffering, all the wonder and terror your country brings to bear.

A lot of American/Western writers might be upset about this, maybe feel left out. So we offer this appeal: If you are a writer who has some connection to India or can offer some informed opinion of your experience as it pertains to the topic, we'd love to read it.

We'll accepting creative nonfiction, fiction, personal essay and interviews. No poetry, please. Simultaneous submissions are allowed. Please keep submissions under 5000 words. Any submissions over 5000 words, please submit a query letter. Please send only one submission at a time. We're finding creative nonfiction more compelling these days, so the more of that you send, the more likely you'll get published.

Deadline is January 13th.

Click here to submit: http://annalemma.submishmash.com/submit

Book Review: Samhita Arni on Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Half Blood Blues

Esi Edugyan

Reviewed by Out of Print editor, Samhita Arni

It’s ironic that during the ‘Jazz Age’, many Jazz musicians, most of them of African-American origin, faced racial discrimination and had difficulties playing in their own country, and so came to perform in Europe. In Half Blood Blues, two such musicians hailing from Baltimore, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, find themselves in Berlin at the tail-end of the Weimar Era — the strange cultural renaissance in Germany in the interlude between the wars that gave us (among other things) Brecht, Cabaret, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich.

Half Blood Blues, in Esi Edugyan’s eponymous novel, is also the title of a song, a subversive jazz parody of the popular Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, recorded in Paris by a rag-tag bunch of musicians that include Chip, Sid and Hieronymous Falk (Hiero), three musicians who are able to escape Nazi Germany, but get stuck in Vichy France during World War II. They are all black and mischlings — half-bloods.

Sid Griffiths is ‘high-yaller’, light-skinned enough to ‘pass’ as white. German Hiero is born of a German mother and an African father [troops from French African colonies were stationed in the Rhineland during the French occupation after the Great War and fathered children (the ‘Rhineland Bastards’) with German women]. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, not only Jews but the few hundred mixed-race Germans like Hiero were also condemned to concentration camps and forcible sterilisation. As Paris falls to Nazis, Hiero is picked up in a cafe and disappears.

The song captures their sense of frustration, doom, desperation and melancholy — but it’s also a ‘finger’ or riposte to Nazism. But Half Blood Blues isn’t just about Sid, Chip or Hiero; there’s also Delilah, the African-American singer who is pale enough to pass , and strives to smuggle them out of Paris. The song is also a eulogy to the band’s original saxophonist, Paul, who looks like a ‘blond Aryan God’, but, ironically, is Jewish and a mischling under the Nuremberg laws. And of course, the term mischling also applies to Jazz, a hybrid music form born from the mixing of African and European music traditions.

The language in the novel reflects this theme of mixing. Characters talk like “mongrels — half-German, half-Baltimore bar slang.” Edugyan’s prose, too, is a richly textured mix of ‘bar slang’, black speech, and quaint, period terms like ‘fob.’ The result is strangely stark, pure, yet guttural. “Oh the silence,” Sidney, the narrator, observes, “A jack could grind his teeth on it.” Elsewhere, “He had that massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field.”

In “Speaking in Tongues”, a wonderful essay that examines language, biracial author Zadie Smith writes about the space between voices, cultures, races and ideas. She brings up the “spectre of the traffic mulatto, tragically split…between worlds, ideas, culture and voices,” and the “horror of the middling split, the interim place.” Like Smith, Edugyan is concerned with the idea of mixing and syncretism, and suggests that categories or ideas of race and culture are problematic and complicated. But Edugyan is also concerned with history, and her novel interweaves two journeys at two crucial moments in history, 1939 and 1992. Sid, Hiero and Chip journey east as WWII breaks out, and over fifty years later, after the Berlin Wall comes down and the USSR falls, in 1992, Sid and Chip travel eastwards, into places that once lay under the iron curtain. Edugyan reminds us through this journey how, during the Cold War era, the world was divided and so much was unknown and unknowable. Hiero, Sid and Chip, are characters who slip through the cracks and, by their mischling nature, embody the problems of divided identities.

Half Blood Blues is not only a historical novel, and a story about race, but also a meditation on art and genius. It resurrects the idea of fatalism, an unpopular notion in our capitalist age that perceives fate as self-determined and believes success can be achieved through hard work. Delilah asks an important question, “Do you still call it talent, if it blooms without any kind of nurturing?”

Art becomes even more important in a fatalistic worldview. As Chip says, towards the end of the book, “The world’s damn beautiful, but it’s an accidental beauty. What we do, it’s deliberate.” Edugyan seems to suggest that the beauty we can make, when we can’t make our fate, becomes our only means of resistance, protest and sustenance. With this novel, Edugyan herself has created a thing of beauty; one of those rare novels that offer more on a second read.

This review first appeared in DNA

Out of Print Author Series: Annie Zaidi

Out of Print talks to ANNIE ZAIDI

Featured publication: The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl, or The Good Indian Girl’s Guide to Living, Loving and Having Fun Zubaan, 2011

Thank you, Annie, for agreeing to be part of our blog series that honours the work of Out of Print Authors. We most appreciated featuring your story, Sujata in our last issue of Out of Print. Terrifying, how much I empathised with the progression and logic of the protagonist – questions the limits that hold society on an even keel.  

Well, we have many questions for you on your writing process and on the making of ‘The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl’.

Collection 1: Your collection is a collaborative effort between yourself and Smriti Ravindran.  So the most crashingly obvious question we have is – how did the collaboration work? We are curious both in the conceptual and the practical perspective. Whose idea was it? Did you talk through the plot of every story? And how did you actually execute? Did you write and Smriti review or vice versa. Or was every story a collaboration? Did you communicate on a regular basis, and how long did the writing take? Do just tell us about the process.   

A: Smriti and I studied together at a fairly strict undergraduate ‘convent’ college in Rajasthan. We also shared a hostel room for a year. The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl comes from the stories we saw unfolding all around us. Girls were constantly slipping between the cracks of a moral code that was very hard to negotiate. You could break rules, but getting caught was not an option. There was too much at stake. After college, we discovered new rules at work, at home, on the streets. I was staying with Smriti around 2003 and that’s when we talked about what was going on. We could understand the forces at work. We could also laugh at everything. So we talked about doing a book together around the start of 2004. Work began in fits and starts, from 2006 to 2008, with a few rounds of edits. The book was finished towards the end of 2010.

First, we just chatted a lot about what we are trying to do with this book. We drew up lists – of good/bad, labels and markers – and compared notes. Then we began to write stories relevant to these themes.

The stories (fiction) were written as individuals. But we were responding to each other’s stories with comments, coming up with another story to build on a theme. The ‘interludes’ (non-fiction bits that appear in italics), were intended as bridges between the short stories. Those were written by both of us. We have been in different time zones (me in India; Smriti in the USA) since 2004, so the book has been written over email and chat for the most part.

Collection 2: You have admirably captured the tone, the voice of your good girls, the simultaneous innocence and duplicity, the naivety and the exploitativeness. And the bewildering wake they leave behind them. How did you do this? Was it through specific questions in your interviews with young women, or was it simply through the many layers of observation that a writer employs?

A: Thank you. It is mostly just observation. We did some interviews, informal chats with friends, or friends of friends. The only question I asked was: What makes for a Good Indian Girl (or a Not-Good girl)? Some scrap of memory would be volunteered.

For instance, the bit about a girl sticking together two pages in her scrapbook to hide a photo of a film star posing sexily – a friend actually did that. Someone else told me about family friends who’d sneak out from a second-floor window in their Delhi bungalow using a rope ladder; they actually had a fixed phone line that their dad knew nothing about. Yet another friend told me about how a group of girls broke some rules in school, but the prettiest girl got off lightly, while the girl with the biggest breats was ostracised.

The stories were constructed by combining various memories, with a lot of embellishment on our part, of course. Besides, we all have been both naïve and duplicitous. Haven’t we?

Collection 3: The stories provide an interesting reflection on Indian society. In a time that appears to allow for a somewhat jaded isolationism, this collection reminds one of the societal constraints that continue to frame us.

In most of your stories, your heroines reveal an admirable wiliness, a cunning that allows them to strike their individual paths while working within the system – the Singh girls with their rope ladders and satyagrahas are great examples. Did you ever get a sense that any of your good Indian girls were driven to shatter the constraints, to stretch the framework to point of no return like Sujata.

A:    If you look at Padma’s story in this collection, she is driven to shatter constraints. She does so with a kind of innocence, but she edges closer to a point of no return.

But then, this collection was written to address a specific aspect of young women’s lives – the ‘goodness’ factor, with specific reference to south Asia. A story like Sujata does not qualify. Sujata might frighten us, but her morals/virtue are not being questioned (except by Kulin and he’s such a sadist that his accusations are easily overlooked). That’s the funny thing about our culture. It accepts, even condones murder if a woman is trying to save her body, but it doesn’t accept a young woman wanting to have some fun, using her body the way she likes. 

Writing and Editing 1: Do you go back and read your stories after they’ve been published. If yes, do you itch to revise them one more time? And what do you do about it, do you ignore the itch? Or create a newer version of every story?

If, in fact, you don’t go back to your stories after publication, why don’t you? Are you embarrassed, frightened, anxious about them, or have you simply just moved on?

A: I read and re-read and re-re-read. I do itch to revise, particularly if there have been proofing errors. Or clunky language. Mostly I ignore the itch because it is impractical to expect publishers to keep making changes. But if something is up on my website – a story, or a poem, or essay – then I make changes again and again.

I’m not frightened of my older work, but I am a bit embarrassed by some of it. I try not to re-read that stuff.

Writing and Editing 2: Are you a systematic writer, that is do you invoke your muse routinely, for fixed periods, or do you immerse yourself, blocking out all else when the muse deigns to visit?

 A:  I’m erratic. I write whenever. I tend to be deadline-driven, so I focus on whatever needs my attention first. But if I am restless and want to write, then I ignore other things.

Writing and Editing 3: Was there a particular event that prompted you to start writing or have you always done so? And what convinced you to keep going? What was your first success, your first sense that the world was aware of your creative effort?

 A:  I wrote essays in school and my own debate speeches. But I never thought of that as ‘writing’. As an undergraduate, I began to participate in poetry contests. When I actually won a prize, I began to write more often. I also wrote for the college magazine. Girls who didn’t know me would stop me as I walked past, just to tell me they liked a particular piece. I think that’s when I became dimly aware that what I was writing held some value. Reader feedback is what has kept me going, mostly.

Writing and Editing 4: Are you a reader or are you one of those who doesn’t read when he/she writes? Do you engage in other literary process – review, criticism, journalism, blogging? And, how does that affect your fiction writing?

A: I read nearly everyday, regardless of whether I’m writing or not. I write in most spaces I can squeeze into – journalism, blogging, tweeting, reviews, the whole online hog... I suppose I put in less energy into fiction. My default reaction is to explore an idea through non-fiction. Or even poetry. I end up writing short stories only when I am fairly certain that other formats are not suitable for what I want to accomplish.

Writing and Editing 5: What are you working on now?

A:  More stories. A script. Some translation work.

Writing and Editing 6: Finally, do you have any words of advice to our readers and writers?

Read, read, read, read, read. Absorb other forms of art. Watch dance and drama performances. Listen to music. Go to art exhibits. Don’t be in such a rush to publish. Most importantly, don’t get bitter about rejections. It is possible the editors are myopic and unable to see how brilliant you are. It is also possible that your work needs to improve. Just work harder and keep sending your work out. If you are truly brilliant, someone will notice.