a teaspoon of honey

The Problem with a Single Story

     So, I wrote a book, once.

     A big one.

     It took five years and a lot of struggle. Most of medical school. That book is finished now and no longer on wattpad. Some of you might have read it – trtbu.

     I don't like it anymore.

     And it's not that I hate it, or despise it. I find it is shallower than I intended it to be. Which is funny, because that book dealt with depression and death and pain and longing in more ways than I have experienced, and it has taught me, too. It brought me to where I am today.

     But when I say that I don't like it anymore, I mean that I'm finding it harder to see myself in it.

     An Indian girl of eighteen goes to England to study medicine, and meets people of various backgrounds with stories so unlike hers yet somehow intertwined. Their lives are never the same after. It was beautiful when I was writing it. Beautiful once I'd finished. But two years later now and I look back with an emptiness inside me that feels a lot of shame. And shallowness.

     I have never been to England, though I've always wanted to. I'm Indian, sure. I've spent most of my childhood in the Middle East and most of my adulthood thus far in India. I'm from the South. My native land is filled with coconut trees and chai stalls and sarcastic comedies that I still do not fully understand. I speak five languages yet the one most foreign is the one with which I'm most comfortable. My own tastes like sea salt. There are recipes in my mother's cookbook that could fill a room with a hundred years of history — take you back to the very spice trails that first lured the Portuguese to our shores.

     Yet, none of them show in my book.

     I am ashamed – but also helpless. Like most middle-class Indians, I was brought up on a healthy diet of british literature. Everything I read was about blue-eyed, yellow-haired children that ate marmalade with toast and had dogs for pets and personal islands to explore. Never, not once, had I seen myself – nutmeg-coloured children of closed-throat gratitude who on most days wore a headscarf they didn't fully understand. There were no books, no movies, no songs about us. No one bothered to write them. Fewer bothered to read.

     So when I first started writing, as it has been to this day, I cannot help but write on shores so distant from me it's almost as though colonization has reversed. I have tried to write me, as I am, in my own country, but the fingers won't move and the words seem dry and the story shrivels up before the thought is even finished. I cannot write authentically. It's not magical anymore.

     I hate this, and I've hated this so much that I endeavoured to re-imagine my entire book, but now much closer to home. An Indian girl, still, but now in India. Medical school, but now in India. People all unlike her, but now all Indian. No mention of snow, blue-eyes, hot chocolate, Italian bloodlines, Parisian sidewalks or flaming red hair, and all this hurt my heart so much that I didn't want to write, or read, anything ever again if it meant this never-ending cycle of grief and no real book. I don't want this.

     So what I'm saying, or asking really, is... have you ever felt this? This need to write you but this inability to do so? And how do you deal with it? I cannot write of my country and it twists a knife through my gut. It doesn't excite me. It does nothing for me.

     So how do you do it? How do you see yourself? How do you escape from the Colonizers' Curse and write something that's has never touched a bookshelf to date? How do you write... and do so unwittingly? How do you find the peace to sleep after you've written?

     Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie spoke about this as well, and the title of this chapter is the title of her speech and video. She is a gem. She cured herself by reading African literature, and I have tried a similar remedy but to no avail. I haven't found a book by an Indian author to date which has really captured me. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

     So if you have any suggestions... I'm all ears. Until then, I will read and read until I forget myself fully, so that when I write again, it'll no longer be strange.

     Love, and the very best,

     Chu