Mixed Race Studies

Author Interview: Neela Vaswani

Sarabane Books
2010-07-19

The lovely Neela Vaswani takes a moment to chat with us about her new book, You Have Given Me a Country, out August 15 [2010].

Your previous book, Where the Long Grass Bends, was a collection of short stories with a strongly mythic cast, and your memoir is told in meticulously rendered vignettes. How did you move from fashioning fiction out of the tales of your childhood, to turning your childhood and young adulthood into a (nonfiction) tale?

When I write in any genre, the raw materials and techniques are the same—it’s just the approach that differs. Early in the book I say, “I pledge allegiance to story,” and that’s what I always aim to do, to honor the simplest and most valuable truth at the heart of any story…

Your background is Indian- and Irish-American—two intensively chronicled, often romanticized, identities. When the personal has so much overlap with the familiar, how did you confront the challenge of making your experiences read as yours?

The simplest thing I did was to focus on the particular way I see the world—as me, Neela, rather than as someone who is “half Indian, half Irish.”  Still, I had some negotiating to do.

At first, it was difficult for me to explore my Indian-American identity without falling into the same story-patterns and language as other Indian-American writers. I felt that same caution when writing about biracial identity; there has been so much written, especially recently, about our identity and experience. I wanted to try to speak from those traditions and shared experiences while also telling my story in a fresh way…

Read the entire review here.

Where The Long Grass Bends

Sarabande Books
2004-01-01
192 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-889330-96-9

Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University

Debut collection from a lyrical writer of Indian and Irish descent.

Fervent. Lyrical. Animistic. Incantatory… Where the Long Grass Bends succumbs to no summary. It is a debut collection of stories that is boundless, even boundary-less, because Neela Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks at nothing. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative forms by employing Indian lore (from Hindu to Sufi), Gaelic fable, and historical legend. These are impossible tales, dreaming yet mired in the everyday grit of ordinary life, and told so beautifully that the beginnings and endings of reality and imagination disappear.

In “Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh,” a tomb is opened on Thursdays to women possessed by spirits; a young boy, Nanak, helps his bewitched mother with her particular spirit’s demand by journeying across town to fetch a salty lassi with plenty of pepper and mint. In “Bolero,” Felix and his grandfather, Aitor, play violin and piano throughout a World War II air strike, and in “Twang (Release),” a young girl living in the woods amid wild fox and birch finds her way to the shore, ending up adrift for months in the ocean with the first (and only) man she sees.

Spare, fierce, and absolutely unpredictable, Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. Easy to hold onto but impossible to pin down, each story is an act of surrender, a folkloric revision similar to the achievements of Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Angela Carter, but unlike anything you’ve ever read.

You Have Given Me a Country

Sarabande Books
2010-08-15
208 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 13: 978-1-932511-82-6

Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University

You Have Given Me a Country is a mixed-genre exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be bicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author’s Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey towards each other and the biracial child they create. Vaswani’s second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba’s Tatoos, but is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds, that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.