‘I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth’

Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, In the Light of What We Know, is already the literary event of the year (reviewed in Open, ‘A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, 23 June 2014). Born in Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, Rahman has worked as an investment banker and human rights lawyer

 

As a writer, you hold the world in your palm and play with it. Are you drawn to the novel as a form because of the freedom that it alone gives you?

There are few venues that offer the scope to explore the phenomena of experience and consciousness afforded by the art of the novel. I believe that the novel remains the pre-eminent form for a certain kind of enquiry.

 

Ideas, from philosophy to politics to mathematics, replace action in this novel, seldom seen in novels from the East. Am I right?

I wouldn’t presume to comment on what is (or isn’t) seldom seen in novels from the East. But to take your substantive point, I understand what you’re getting at though I would have to reframe it slightly. There’s a lot of action in this novel, ranging from walks in the leafy squares of Bloomsbury in London and boat rides off Manhattan island to train crashes in Sylhet and bomb explosions in Kabul. But what you’re noting is that there’s also a lot that is discussed, in the way that two men—both approaching middle-age, both of a certain education, both at pivotal moments in their lives— might discuss things if freed from quotidian claims. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, of soundbites and the frenetically simplifying accounts of an ever more complex social environment, these two men have been granted a space in which to slow down.

Consider an American president’s decision to take his country to war. What the media will slant us towards is the action of the battlefield, which is where the images are. But think of the drama that took place in the lead-up to the decision. The state department at loggerheads with the defense department; junior analysts at the CIA resigning noisily over the willful blindness of their superiors. All action is predicated on a drama, sometimes a struggle in itself, played out in thoughts and ideas, in the things we think we know.

Many of the novels that have left an enduring mark on me have not shied away from exploring the life of the mind, directly or indirectly. Sebald’s novels are an obvious example, but there are many other works too, not so readily detectable in similarities of style but whose influence has been, I think, on my perception of what fiction is capable of doing. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus combines ‘action,’ as you put it, with ideas, or the actions of the mind. Our beliefs are what animate us and without them we would be lifeless.

It is more than obvious that you love Sebald. Being an eternal outsider? Or…

When I moved to Cambridge for graduate studies, for the first time I met a lot of Indians from India—many Bengali, as it happens. I remember being struck by how very different they were from me. I had a couple of British Asian friends and we observed to ourselves how comfortable in their skin the Indians seemed to be, how unencumbered they were by the anxieties of dislocation or outsiderness that we seemed to carry around with us all the time. They inhabited Cambridge as if they were insiders, in fact, rather than outsiders. In some part, no doubt this was due to the fact that Cambridge, even more so than Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, had a long-standing and deep relationship with India. But I think it was also the case that, even without that historic association, they were insiders because they had none of the anxieties of the outsider. The outsider, in the sense in which you use the term, is really a creature of within, something that Sebald identified and explored, defined by the schisms within himself. The outsider is the man placed before the door who stands there not knowing if it will open or if it can open or if he can open it. For the Indian students, there was no door and therefore none of the anxieties of a door.

I don’t think I have given you an answer so much as the beginning of a conversation. But perhaps that’s true of anything anyone ever says.

You love Kurt Godel too. You make mathematics poetic.

I’m gratified you think so but mathematics is inherently poetic. It was certainly my obsession from childhood and through to youth. In fact, it was more than that. It was where I found the greatest beauty, and at times the only beauty in life. Though I’m no longer invested in mathematics, I retain the view that it is humanity’s most creative endeavour and its fruits her greatest achievements.

More than Sebald, the epigraphs are pretty active in this novel. How much of your reading shaped your imagination?

‘Active’ is an apt description of the epigraphs; as the novel unwinds, one quickly discovers that the epigraphs are in fact put there by the narrator (unlike most novels where the epigraphs are evidence of authorial intrusion). Moreover, towards the end of the novel, the epigraphs themselves make a disclosure in the story.

It is very hard to know how one’s imagination has been shaped; in so many ways we remain strangers to ourselves, which is itself an idea that the novel explores. It is certainly the case that I read extensively.

If someone says it is a 9/11 novel, is it a simplification?

Yes.

And it is as much a simplification (if that is all she says), as a one-word reply is a simplification of my reaction to the question.

Is there a bit—or more—of the novelist in Zafar?

Certainly. My stock answer has been to recall that Philip Roth didn’t write a novel about a South African writer living in Sydney; Coetzee didn’t write a novel about a Trinidadian settling in England; and Naipaul didn’t write about Jews in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s.

But nothing that any character says is to be attributed to the author. The failure to recognise this basic distinction between fiction and non-fiction is precisely that: a failure. And it’s an error that leads to mayhem, artistic and political.

Are you another writer from what Naipaul would have called a half-made society?

Could your questions be any more mischievous? Which is the allegedly half- made society you’re referring to here? Is it a geographic society? Bangladesh, where I was born? Or even the England that I grew up in? Or the US, where I wrote most of the novel? Or is the half- made society not one of Naipaul’s geographic societies of the former colonies but of another kind, cutting across geographies?

I have an ill-defined yearning to belong to some stretch of this earth, a place to call home, and to know what it means—what it feels like—to call a place home. There are moments when I turn a corner and catch a fleeting glimpse of this thing, but just as quickly it vanishes. I sometimes console myself with the thought that the worms that will one day have us know full well that we belong to them.

Is it a novel by an exile?

Yes, though I suspect all novels of a certain kind are. Writing is a lonely business except for those for whom its solitude is the condition for the pleasures of discovery.

If I say In the Light of What We Know is the big, breakthrough novel after Midnight’s Children written by a novelist of subcontinental origin, how will you respond?

I think I would be dumbstruck. Such things are for others to judge. I have enough to be getting on with.

In the light of what we knowZia Haider Rahman