People That matter

Interview with author Shilpi Suneja

 

 Shilpi Suneja reads from “Outside Her Body”

 

interview

“Don’t do it!” Ms. Suneja laughed as we asked her to give advice to people aspiring to become writers. She put back her dark — almost black — hair, her eyes looked down and she continued speaking. “Yes, I know it is funny because I am teaching writing. However, I have recently been very disillusioned with what writing as a career is.”

Shilpi Suneja is a fiction writer from India. She got an MA in English from New York University and MFA from Boston University. In her writing, she emphasizes the themes of the perception of gender and justice, talks about “little people” and those abandoned from society. Today she navigated us in the journey deep into India, where she spent her childhood, told us about her family, shared with us the process behind the creation of her story “Outside the Body” and discussed the power of fiction and the way novels can represent history. “History in a European concept is just a list of wars, a list of dates, and of those who won the war. As a fiction writer it’s your responsibility to write about something other than war and people who won it.”

 From the Editor

This story, along with the accompanying interview turns our attention toward the subtle balance between both community and alienation. Here is a story of living in two worlds at once with not only Suneja’s experiences in her own life growing up in two countries but also the characters in her story are those who are living within their own community and at the margins of society, taunting our expectations of not only a societal but physical gender binary. Who can forget Steffi standing in traffic? Her sari held up with one hand flagrantly exposing “her truth,” and covering her mouth from the exhausts of the passing cars with the other.

The world of “Outside the Body” stays with you, calls you to explore further. I spent so much time between my first and second reading, pausing, rereading, researching, both the lives of the Hijra, and their kholi. There is space within the powerful scenes herein which linger and still sting and plague long after the last line. Even the title carries so much weight and depth. “Outside the Body”—Which body? Physical? Or is it Social? Societal? Outside the body politic? Outside how? But we are never fully outside, are we? We can never fully escape. We still carry so much with us, no matter how much we shed.

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