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  • All These Write, Not I Alone: A Conversation with Vikram Kolmannskog

    All These Write, Not I Alone: A Conversation with Vikram Kolmannskog

    A year after the decriminalisation of gay sex in India, we speak to Norwegian-Indian writer Vikram Kolmannskog about writing self, place and queerness.

    PEN Transmissions feels like a fitting space in which to talk about your work. You write in English and Norwegian, but often about your Indian and diasporic identity. I want to ask where you write from, and where you write for? In turn, I suppose, that’s also a question about who you write from and for.

    I wrote the first drafts of several of the stories in Lord of the Senses while staying in Bombay, a city to which I regularly return. As an Indian-Norwegian based in Oslo, going to Bombay to write is part travelling and part homecoming – as is all writing and reading, perhaps.

    I suppose the primary audience for Lord of the Senses is people like me, LGBTQ folks with some link to India. I wrote several of the stories during (and as part of) the mobilisation for LGBTQ rights in India and many were published in Indian LGBTQ magazines. There’s a paucity of Indian LGBTQ literature. And so it’s important to find some recognition in a story, to have one’s identity and experience somehow validated. Indian LGBTQ literature speaks to me in a very special way, and I want to contribute to this body of literature. We create a community – a sense of who we are and can be – through storytelling.

    At the same time, I also hope that others, who are not LGBTQ folks with a link to India, will read and appreciate my writing. We all have the ability to empathise and expand ourselves through stories; we people are not that different, though the particular ways of our longing, loving and heartbreak differ somewhat. I have read lots of books by white and/or straight people, with white and/or straight narrators and characters, and I have not found it difficult. They deal with human life and have enriched me, sometimes.

    But I don’t want to be overly accommodating to straight, white readers. Partly out of respect for the primary audience – LBGTQ folks with an Indian link, or more broadly queers of colour – because white and/or straight people are often enough the focus of literature. And partly as an aesthetic and stylistic consideration: when the narrator and protagonist in my story is Indian, something breaks if common Indian words such as ‘Dalit’ and ‘Nanima’ are explained. There’s sufficient information in all the stories for readers to understand them without much knowledge of India or queerness, but it may take a tiny bit of patience and effort from straight, white people.

    The poet and translator Sophie Collins has spoken about women’s autofiction and how, when women write narratives and characters that seem in some way biographical, their literature is inevitably read as autobiography. She argues that ‘the very fact of putting those experiences into literary prose’, however, ‘immediately converts them into fiction’. I feel this is also true of writing that addresses other forms of marginal identity. Is this something with which you’ve had to contend, and what’s your perspective on it?

    In a blurb for Lord of the Senses, Rajeev Balasubramanyam, describes my stories as sincere and intimate. And in several drafts of the stories protagonists were called Vikram. One important consideration for me has been whether I want to change the names and other details in my stories mainly out of a sense of shame, often related to the quite explicit gay sex in some of my stories. I think it’s important that we own and celebrate that part of us. Partly for this reason, the protagonist is called Vikram in another homoerotic book of mine (Taste and See: A Queer Prayer). In the end, none of the protagonists in Lord of the Senses are called Vikram, but several have names that are quite similar (Ram, Vihaan). There is a part of me in all of them, but they are not me; they are more like sons of mine, perhaps – children who have been very much shaped by me and my experiences but now also clearly live their own lives.

    For some reason, as you say, the ‘autofiction’ label and the urge to relate fact and fiction seem to arise more often when the author is a woman, person of colour, queer or belongs to some other marginalised identity. Perhaps there is something about our writing that justifies it. Or perhaps it’s a way of undermining us – an implicit charge that we are not clever enough to write anything apart from that which is very closely based on our own experiences.

    In my view, autofiction is clearly fiction: as soon as I recount or tell a story about an experience I have had, I am at a distance from the actual experience. Some things are included, some are not. What I remember, and how I tell the story, will depend on the audience, setting. It is already a creative act – fiction, to some degree. In the stories that are closer to my own experiences, I also consciously take liberties.

    All that said, I do feel there is a difference between writing that draws more directly on my own experience and writing that explores a rather different kind of life. The latter requires more or different imagination and empathy. And I feel somewhat cautious when doing this, knowing that I cannot really and fully know what it is to be a Dalit or a woman – or even someone who is born and bred in India, which I am not. Still, I do take a chance and write stories with such characters. Often, I then seek feedback from someone who does identify with one of those groups. I think I can write about many things, but I do want to be aware of, and constantly explore, my own position and how it may influence my writing.

    There is something intractable about the relationship between religion – or spirituality – and sexuality in your writing. How has the historical relationship between Indian religiosity and attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community influenced your work? And what has the reform of colonial-era laws against gay sex done to change (or not) that relationship?

    In India there has been an oppressive tradition or tendency (‘conservative’ would not be precise), casteist, heterosexist. But there has also been a very inclusive and emancipatory one that has celebrated diversity and challenged oppressive practices such as casteism and heterosexism. The title story shows this clearly: the poet-saint Meera, who lived around 500 years ago, defied norms on sexuality and gender, leaving her husband, mixing with people belonging to various castes and religions and backgrounds, without shame. Today her songs about love are sung all over India. This is the kind of tradition and tendency in human culture, inclusive and loving, to which I want to contribute. Another story, ‘Fucking Delhi’, shows that there has also been a very inclusive and loving tradition within Indian Islam – in parallel with a more oppressive one. This includes a celebration of same-sex love.

    Since the filing of the petition against section 377 in the early 2000s, the movement made sure to mobilise in the wider social arena as well as the legal. In addition to a rights framing, Indian LGBTQ activists have also engaged with the morality and tradition framing that is often dominated by opponents of LGBTQ rights. LGBTQ Indians have highlighted the inclusive tradition or tendency that has existed throughout Indian history, one that has even celebrated LGBTQ loves and lives. And they have argued that criminalisation was British and imperialist. Since it is difficult to find anything in Hinduism that condemns homosexuality and queer lives, the BJP has come out in different voices on the issue, with some ministers supporting LGBTQ rights. And so, despite the Hindu Right currently dominating Indian politics, the LGBTQ rights movement has been successful.

    An important question for many LGBTQ Indians now and for the future – a question that may contribute to defining both our individual and collective identity – is the following: Shall we focus narrowly on promoting LGBTQ rights, perhaps even entering into an alliance with the Hindu Right, or shall we show solidarity and ally with other, increasingly marginalised and oppressed categories of people? Needless to say, I want the latter. The way I see it, being queer involves a radical loving and questioning of norms and divisions. This is reflected in the stories in Lord of the Senses – stories that deal with love across castes and religions, as well as same-sex love.

    Lord of the Senses is forthright in its depiction of queer sex. Did you set out actively to do this, or rather did such scenes come instinctively to the canvasses of your stories? And what role does this candid representation play? It doesn’t read just as resistance; it also reads as unbridled celebration.

    I think ‘A Safe Harbour’, an early version of which was published by Erotic Review, was one of my first really sexually explicit stories. It has definitely been a process for me. I have had – and still have – some shame related to gay sex. Sex is after all a main reason why we were – and still are – considered sinful, criminal, sick or just dirty. Section 377 criminalised ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’; homosexuality was so repugnant to the British who first introduced it that it could not even be explicitly mentioned. This is a good reason to include gay sex in some detail in literature and elsewhere; let’s celebrate it, be excited by it.

    More than it being a political-literary project, however, I like to write about erotic encounters because it is a way to explore interesting psycho-social, existential and spiritual themes: our desires, our prejudices, what we find attracting or repulsing, our insecurities, our sensitivity to rejection, our longing to be liked and loved, our longing to transcend our small selves and merge with someone or something else.

    I want to finish by asking a large question – but one that feels important to your work. Why do you write? There seemed to be a few reasons, some timeless and some very urgent.

    There are some urgent reasons related to the queer movement in India. And there are some timeless reasons related to being human in this world. I write to explore and express the complexity and wonder that I experience in and around me. As I mentioned, I wrote the first drafts of several stories while staying in Bombay. I think inspiration and writing is partly about making myself available: when I go to Bombay, I often have few plans except to be with friends (and sometimes lovers), wander around, observe people and life, drink coffee, read and write. When I am aware of what is going on in and around me, there is always something interesting happening.

    Often, emotional life events, such as falling in love or heartbreak, also make me want to write – somehow to understand the process through creating a story. By turning it into more than my own personal pain or pleasure, a story can also be appreciated by more people, particular and universal.

    I have a regular meditation practice. And I show up in front of the Mac, much like I show up on the meditation pillow, for a certain time, regardless of how I feel. Writing is like life in general: in the end it’s all important, the ups and the downs. And from a spiritual and therapeutic point of view, the most important thing is how I respond to those ups and downs. I don’t need to inflate my ego when it is going well or beat myself up when it feels difficult. I want to be aware and kind to myself regardless. Writing is part of my spirituality and my way of being in the world.

    My family has a holiday home in Andalucía. There is a gym nearby. There is chocolate and good food easily available. There is wild nature, and mountains to run in. Just outside the house is an orange tree. There is a view of the ocean and sky. I did the last bit of work on Lord of the Senses there. When I did my morning meditation on the final day, I thanked the orange tree, the ocean, the sky, the gym, the people there, the food, the books I had read, and the innumerable factors that had contributed to the writing and creation of this book. All these write, not ‘I’ alone.

    Vikram Kolmannskog is a gay man of dual heritage, born to an Indian mother and a Norwegian father. He is based in Oslo, Norway, but considers both India and Norway his homes. He is the author of Poetry Is Possible: Selected Poems, The Empty Chair: Tales from Gestalt Therapy, Taste and See: A Queer Prayer, and most recently Lord of the Senses: Stories. www.Vikram.no

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Per Petterson, author of 'I Refuse'

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor

    Tommy’s father is violent and his mother moves out of the family home, leaving him haunted by the past for ever. Families and their complicated dynamics seem to be central to your writing even though your characters often live outside the safety net of a family set up. Why are you fascinated with this subject?  And do you think that the ferry tragedy that affected your family made you focus on this subject of a family even more?

    I certainly didn’t start out to have this as my ‘subject’. To be honest, I didn’t start out with any subject at all, I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a writer. Period. I wanted to do to readers what the writers I loved did to me. Although, of course, I didn’t know what that was or how to get to it. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I can see the pattern that you’re referring to, it surprises me, because I had no intention of going down that road. If I’m fascinated by it, and it seems I am, surely I don’t want to know why. All I can say is that I have always had a strong sense of family, I talk with my one living brother about it, and we agree we haven’t had any especially strong family bonds, just a strong sense of belonging to one. I don’t think the ferry fire changed anything in that respect, I had published two books and was halfway into my next before the deaths, and the two my family had the opportunity to read, were planted well within the family, and although most of what happened in the books hadn’t happened, it was all true and I guess very recognisable. I didn’t really choose it as a subject, though, it was just something I thought I was able to do at the time. None of the books were mentioned in the family, by the way, only the one Saturday when my mother called me and said, … ‘and then I hope the next book won’t be so childish’. I didn’t know what she meant, she hadn’t said anything before, I was in my bed, feeling pretty depressed about a recent divorce, and then she more or less hung up. The next Saturday, she was dead. I didn’t even talk to her in the week between. Being outside the safety net, being apart, is a feeling I have always had, despite family, living or not living. Family can be a place of safety, of belonging, identity, but it can also be a dangerous place.

    Many of your protagonists are wounded by the deaths of siblings and disappearance of parents.  I Refuse is clearly marked by the absence of Tommy’s mother and Jim’s father. Why these absences in your work?

    Well, they are not really planned. When Jim on the first page of the book nearly hits an old man with his car, he thinks: for a moment I thought it was my father, but it wasn’t my father. I wrote that because someone I know told me of thinking the same in a similar situation, and then I added without really going into it: I had never seen my father. And I didn’t go back on it, although there was no story there yet, nothing but this page. I have learned that ‘absences’ can be very productive. Hemingway once said that you can take anything out of a novel, as long as you know exactly what it is. I think that’s just one of his so-called ‘profound’ sayings. I have taken 50 years out of a novel, not having a clue what might be in there. Sometimes I think the not-knowing is the good thing. Taking out a father without worrying about what he might have represented for, in this case, his son, is what makes the writing of the book interesting. Hopefully also for the reading of it.

    You also often write about friendship even though your characters tend to be unmoored and vulnerable.  Jim and Tommy meet by accident again after many years but they both never stop thinking of each other. Can friendship save them? Or do you think that we cannot escape the sense of loneliness?

    When you are, as you say, unmoored and vulnerable, that is when friendship is really potentially all-important and in fact possible, then it can be very intense, deep, but also tragically fragile. I guess I think both, that friendship can be possible and liberating, even rescuing, and at the same time, we cannot really know each other. We simply cannot. It’s tragic, and at the same time, productive, energising.

    Your characters are haunted by the past and its consequences for the present. They often contemplate their childhoods. In the case of this book, they have flashbacks to their past as children and teenagers. Do you think that we cannot avoid thinking about the past?

    Here I tend to agree with Faulkner when he says: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. He may be speaking of a whole society here, but to me, it’s very true on a personal level. If you want to know yourself at all, you must realise that the past is a very contemporary thing, it’s working inside of you all the time, like a motor, and I guess the writer’s job is to lift that bonnet and take a good, bold look. And it’s important that you have access to your own unconsciousness, which is where the past is at work in its mysterious ways, it’s where poetry comes from, the doors that open unexpectedly and show you the way.

    Your style very deliberately blends lyricism with realism. The reader has a sense of information changing and expanding from the particular to the more universal. Who are you stylistic heroes?

    When you are a young male Norwegian author, it is, or at least it used to be, difficult not to admire Knut Hamsun’s earlier books. Their modernity, subjectivity, fierceness, flexibility, you name it. Hamsun is a problem here of course, he is our greatest prose writer ever, and he was a Nazi. Hemingway, no surprise, was also important when I was young. Nowadays I have no heroes, I think. I admire Jean Rhys, a wonderful discovery I made many years ago, I still read her. And some of Richard Ford’s stuff is high calibre. The Norwegian translation of José Saramago’s The Day of the Death of Ricardo Reis made some of us think: How can writing get better?  Still, I hope my style comes through as my own.

    The sense of landscape and place is very powerful in your book. I Refuse is set both in Oslo and just outside. Do you write about places where you live yourself? And how important is nature in your writing?

    I do write about places I have lived, both in the city and way outside of it, as where I live now, on a small farm close to, or rather inside the woods. I couldn’t have written Out Stealing Horses anywhere else. The place where the adult Jim lives, in the book, is also a place where I lived for many years, my daughters were born there, I got divorced there. It’s more or less the same place as where my hero Arvid Jansens lives, in the novels In the Wake and I Curse the River of Time. You must remember that, wherever you find yourself in Oslo, there is not more than 20 minutes by tram or tube or bus to the woods or the Oslo fjord. Where I grew up, we children spent hours upon hours in the forest every week. Each Sunday my father would drag me and my brothers (often involuntarily) out for long hikes in the woods. I sometimes think I could be blind, and still find my way in them. I regret that I wasn’t man enough to thank my father for this when he was still alive. I have always loved to write about landscape, but as a reader myself, I have tended to skip those parts, we all have, I guess. But when I wrote Out Stealing Horses, I decided to make it impossible to separate what happened from where it happened. Writing about physical work is also something that gives me great pleasure.

    This novel is translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. How closely do you work with your translators?

    Don is a wonderful and very hardworking translator. But when I take part in the work on the translations, I do it through the editor. It’s good to have a middle man/woman. I guess I am a little more than average involved.

    Out Stealing Horses brought you much international recognition. Was it difficult to write a new novel after winning the IMPAC? Or was it in some way liberating to know that you have that official stamp of approval?

    I can’t say it was difficult. I think writing itself is very difficult. The IMPAC and those other prizes and all that happened took up a lot of space in my life, in fact it took one year out of it, it made me very upset, in a way. And it could often make me feel highly uncomfortable at times. I come from a working class family of eastern Oslo. An overdose of class consciousness and inferiority complex made me leave university after two days of attending. I didn’t even dare ask where the toilet was. I just ran out of there and got a job at the Postal Service. Walking down the aisle in Dublin Town Hall in 2007 with the drums and the raised lances and all the people with black ties and long dresses was really upsetting, I felt very strange. But the money was amazing, as Colm Toibin put it the year before.

    Norwegian literature became very popular recently internationally. What do you think makes it appeal so much to readers all over the world?

    I don’t know. There is certainly a feeling at home of going through a strong phase, that a lot of which is published has substance and validity. Someone must have seen it and said: look to Norway, and then the ball started to roll. There are of course the crime novels, Jo Nesbø etc., but it really started before that. I hope the ball keeps rolling for some time yet.

    About the editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is  editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books. Tasja divides her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Per Petterson, author of ‘I Refuse’

    Interview with Tasja Dorkofikis, PEN Atlas editor

    Tommy’s father is violent and his mother moves out of the family home, leaving him haunted by the past for ever. Families and their complicated dynamics seem to be central to your writing even though your characters often live outside the safety net of a family set up. Why are you fascinated with this subject?  And do you think that the ferry tragedy that affected your family made you focus on this subject of a family even more?

    I certainly didn’t start out to have this as my ‘subject’. To be honest, I didn’t start out with any subject at all, I wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a writer. Period. I wanted to do to readers what the writers I loved did to me. Although, of course, I didn’t know what that was or how to get to it. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I can see the pattern that you’re referring to, it surprises me, because I had no intention of going down that road. If I’m fascinated by it, and it seems I am, surely I don’t want to know why. All I can say is that I have always had a strong sense of family, I talk with my one living brother about it, and we agree we haven’t had any especially strong family bonds, just a strong sense of belonging to one. I don’t think the ferry fire changed anything in that respect, I had published two books and was halfway into my next before the deaths, and the two my family had the opportunity to read, were planted well within the family, and although most of what happened in the books hadn’t happened, it was all true and I guess very recognisable. I didn’t really choose it as a subject, though, it was just something I thought I was able to do at the time. None of the books were mentioned in the family, by the way, only the one Saturday when my mother called me and said, … ‘and then I hope the next book won’t be so childish’. I didn’t know what she meant, she hadn’t said anything before, I was in my bed, feeling pretty depressed about a recent divorce, and then she more or less hung up. The next Saturday, she was dead. I didn’t even talk to her in the week between. Being outside the safety net, being apart, is a feeling I have always had, despite family, living or not living. Family can be a place of safety, of belonging, identity, but it can also be a dangerous place.

    Many of your protagonists are wounded by the deaths of siblings and disappearance of parents.  I Refuse is clearly marked by the absence of Tommy’s mother and Jim’s father. Why these absences in your work?

    Well, they are not really planned. When Jim on the first page of the book nearly hits an old man with his car, he thinks: for a moment I thought it was my father, but it wasn’t my father. I wrote that because someone I know told me of thinking the same in a similar situation, and then I added without really going into it: I had never seen my father. And I didn’t go back on it, although there was no story there yet, nothing but this page. I have learned that ‘absences’ can be very productive. Hemingway once said that you can take anything out of a novel, as long as you know exactly what it is. I think that’s just one of his so-called ‘profound’ sayings. I have taken 50 years out of a novel, not having a clue what might be in there. Sometimes I think the not-knowing is the good thing. Taking out a father without worrying about what he might have represented for, in this case, his son, is what makes the writing of the book interesting. Hopefully also for the reading of it.

    You also often write about friendship even though your characters tend to be unmoored and vulnerable.  Jim and Tommy meet by accident again after many years but they both never stop thinking of each other. Can friendship save them? Or do you think that we cannot escape the sense of loneliness?

    When you are, as you say, unmoored and vulnerable, that is when friendship is really potentially all-important and in fact possible, then it can be very intense, deep, but also tragically fragile. I guess I think both, that friendship can be possible and liberating, even rescuing, and at the same time, we cannot really know each other. We simply cannot. It’s tragic, and at the same time, productive, energising.

    Your characters are haunted by the past and its consequences for the present. They often contemplate their childhoods. In the case of this book, they have flashbacks to their past as children and teenagers. Do you think that we cannot avoid thinking about the past?

    Here I tend to agree with Faulkner when he says: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. He may be speaking of a whole society here, but to me, it’s very true on a personal level. If you want to know yourself at all, you must realise that the past is a very contemporary thing, it’s working inside of you all the time, like a motor, and I guess the writer’s job is to lift that bonnet and take a good, bold look. And it’s important that you have access to your own unconsciousness, which is where the past is at work in its mysterious ways, it’s where poetry comes from, the doors that open unexpectedly and show you the way.

    Your style very deliberately blends lyricism with realism. The reader has a sense of information changing and expanding from the particular to the more universal. Who are you stylistic heroes?

    When you are a young male Norwegian author, it is, or at least it used to be, difficult not to admire Knut Hamsun’s earlier books. Their modernity, subjectivity, fierceness, flexibility, you name it. Hamsun is a problem here of course, he is our greatest prose writer ever, and he was a Nazi. Hemingway, no surprise, was also important when I was young. Nowadays I have no heroes, I think. I admire Jean Rhys, a wonderful discovery I made many years ago, I still read her. And some of Richard Ford’s stuff is high calibre. The Norwegian translation of José Saramago’s The Day of the Death of Ricardo Reis made some of us think: How can writing get better?  Still, I hope my style comes through as my own.

    The sense of landscape and place is very powerful in your book. I Refuse is set both in Oslo and just outside. Do you write about places where you live yourself? And how important is nature in your writing?

    I do write about places I have lived, both in the city and way outside of it, as where I live now, on a small farm close to, or rather inside the woods. I couldn’t have written Out Stealing Horses anywhere else. The place where the adult Jim lives, in the book, is also a place where I lived for many years, my daughters were born there, I got divorced there. It’s more or less the same place as where my hero Arvid Jansens lives, in the novels In the Wake and I Curse the River of Time. You must remember that, wherever you find yourself in Oslo, there is not more than 20 minutes by tram or tube or bus to the woods or the Oslo fjord. Where I grew up, we children spent hours upon hours in the forest every week. Each Sunday my father would drag me and my brothers (often involuntarily) out for long hikes in the woods. I sometimes think I could be blind, and still find my way in them. I regret that I wasn’t man enough to thank my father for this when he was still alive. I have always loved to write about landscape, but as a reader myself, I have tended to skip those parts, we all have, I guess. But when I wrote Out Stealing Horses, I decided to make it impossible to separate what happened from where it happened. Writing about physical work is also something that gives me great pleasure.

    This novel is translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. How closely do you work with your translators?

    Don is a wonderful and very hardworking translator. But when I take part in the work on the translations, I do it through the editor. It’s good to have a middle man/woman. I guess I am a little more than average involved.

    Out Stealing Horses brought you much international recognition. Was it difficult to write a new novel after winning the IMPAC? Or was it in some way liberating to know that you have that official stamp of approval?

    I can’t say it was difficult. I think writing itself is very difficult. The IMPAC and those other prizes and all that happened took up a lot of space in my life, in fact it took one year out of it, it made me very upset, in a way. And it could often make me feel highly uncomfortable at times. I come from a working class family of eastern Oslo. An overdose of class consciousness and inferiority complex made me leave university after two days of attending. I didn’t even dare ask where the toilet was. I just ran out of there and got a job at the Postal Service. Walking down the aisle in Dublin Town Hall in 2007 with the drums and the raised lances and all the people with black ties and long dresses was really upsetting, I felt very strange. But the money was amazing, as Colm Toibin put it the year before.

    Norwegian literature became very popular recently internationally. What do you think makes it appeal so much to readers all over the world?

    I don’t know. There is certainly a feeling at home of going through a strong phase, that a lot of which is published has substance and validity. Someone must have seen it and said: look to Norway, and then the ball started to roll. There are of course the crime novels, Jo Nesbø etc., but it really started before that. I hope the ball keeps rolling for some time yet.

    About the editor

    Tasja Dorkofikis is  editor of PEN Atlas and a freelance editor and publicist. She has previously worked as a publicity director at Random House and Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor for Portobello Books. Tasja divides her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.