‘I had to unlearn to find my writing voice’
Kanya D’ Almeida: You have to trust your instincts. Pic by Maria D’Almeida
In March 2021, Kanya D’Almeida received an email from an online publication about a short story she had submitted. A firm, polite rejection, it outlined a list of things to be tightened or changed and she groaned, wondering if she would need to take the story back to the drawing board. A day later, she received an email from Commonwealth Writers informing her that the very short story was one of 20 shortlisted from a record number of 6423 entries from 50 Commonwealth countries for the latest edition of the coveted Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, now in its tenth year, is awarded annually for the best unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth.
Kanya has celebrated the news with the people closest to her but still remains in a state of disbelief. It is welcome impetus to her writing practice. “You realise also that you have to trust your instincts. As much as you have to keep in mind the audience and who you’re writing for, it’s not going to be for everybody. So I think having gotten on the shortlist is going to help me with a lot of rejection, and I know there’s a lot of rejection in my future because that’s the nature of being involved in something artistic – it’s extremely subjective,” says Kanya, speaking to the Sunday Times.
It took a year for Kanya to write the short story. She’d had a traumatic birth and was watching out for her son’s development milestones, worried that there might be lingering issues. She didn’t want to dwell on it but it was a tangible fear. These wisps of anxiety coalesced into a story that kept following her and demanding to be written. Little sentences would pop into her head and soon, she ceded and began chipping away at the story.
“I really took it line by line. I didn’t think about when I am going to finish, or what the ending was like. I just tried to make my way through it as it came to me,” she explains.
Before the birth of her son, she pledged to herself that she would write every day – even if it was only a sentence or two –and this personal vow helped her stay accountable.
Writing through a pandemic and a lockdown last year was challenging but it also catalysed many things, she reflects. She was alone with her baby and her mother, and her husband was locked out of Sri Lanka for six months. Some days, her mother would take the baby to another room, nudging her to spend at least half an hour writing. “I don’t know how I would do it without a support system because it’s so all-consuming to be looking after a small child. If I had not had somebody in my life who knew how important this was to me and insisted that I take the time to finish it, it would never have gotten completed,” says Kanya.
The shortlist and recent reflections about writing have brought up a few preoccupations. One is the act of writing in English and the postcolonial legacies of the language for those of us in former colonies. The other is about her beginnings as a writer and her immersion in the language. In Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, she alludes to the impressionability of children and the stories they grow up with. For Kanya, finding her writing voice involved a process of unlearning. Growing up on a diet of Enid Blyton and other English writers who are often childhood staples in this part of the world meant that these influences seeped into Kanya’s early fiction. Later, even when she wrote about themes close to her heart, the stories would still be set in worlds where oak trees and characters named ‘Jake’ peppered the pages.
During Kanya’s undergrad years at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, one of her favourite writing professors gently suggested that perhaps she could attempt to situate stories within contexts she was familiar with. Initially, the suggestion put her off. Although already familiar with writers like Shyam Selvadurai, Arundhati Roy and Chimamanda, it took a lot of time to untangle herself from the fictional worlds that she had occupied as a child.
When she began writing about Sri Lanka, a recurring critique from her fellow students was a sense of displacement – they didn’t understand the context and felt lost in Kanya’s fictional worlds. How should they know that Jaffna was a war-affected region? If she didn’t want to italicize Sinhala words, could she footnote them, they asked(“But then my story looks like an academic paper.”)
“And that was another shock to me because I realised that for those of us who have been colonised, we have internalised that sense of being lost in fiction, right? I mean, that’s our normal. So we figured out a way to get into that world – and that world doesn’t reflect our world or bear any resemblance to our life – and we kind of make our way through it. We don’t have that sense of entitlement of having to be in the know. If there’s a reference to something we don’t understand, we’ll either look it up or it’ll pass over our heads. It’s not going to impede the experience of reading. And people in the west – I don’t think they have that because they are used to being at the centre of that world,” reflects Kanya.
“I started thinking more and more about my relationship with this language which I actually love so dearly because English is my mother tongue and I’m so comfortable in it. And I come from a family who is very much a family of words – they’re actors and debaters, writers and journalists and we’ve spent our lives inside this language. But it’s not the language of the majority of people in this country. So that’s a little heart-breaking – to know that you can’t reach more people here in the languages of the country,” she says.
‘I Cleaned The––’, the shortlisted short story, takes on domestic labour, abandonment, romantic encounters behind bathroom doors, and human waste – the things that get left behind. There are two storylines, explains Kanya. One of a woman who spent 20 years looking after someone else’s child. The other is the unfolding relationship between the character and her roommate at the home for the destitute she is now in, and who is coaxing her to tell her story.
Kanya, who was an editor and reporter at Inter Press Service and has worked as a freelance journalist, says that stories about women have always interested her and worries about vital narratives being lost. The collection of stories and a novel she is working on reclaim some of these stories. For Kanya, narratives and voices that slip under the radar offer rich terrain for storytelling. In “Double X”, a short story published in Jaggery, a voice that looms large is that of Bernie, an 83-year-old who has lived through war, displacement and is now navigating a cosmopolitan, changing city. Through Bernie’s gaze, we are given a succinct portrait of upper middle-class Colombo and a glimpse of adolescence in this backdrop.
A desire to unpack stories that aren’t heard also guides Kanya’s recent podcast ‘The Darkest Light’ (https://www.instagram.com/thedarkestlightpodcast/) which dives into pregnancy, childbirth and parenting through conversations with different guests and research in these areas. “These are stories you don’t often hear, the ones women aren’t encouraged to tell. These are the stories I wish I had heard before deciding to become a mother,” says Kanya in the audio preamble to the podcast. The first season of the podcast takes on loneliness, postpartum depression, generational baggage, differing birthing experiences, doctors, navigating lesser-heard narratives that lurk behind Sri Lanka’s much-lauded maternal health statistics. In one episode, birthing experiences at a private hospital and a government facility are discussed. In another, a guest explores the vital patient-OBGYN relationship which forms a decisive part of the labour experience and the lingering effects of childbirth.
The shortlist has prompted Kanya to rethink how seriously she takes her writing. For now, she is trying to write every day during her free time. In the middle of a move from Colombo with her husband and son for a two- year residency at the Belipola Arboretum in Mirahawatte, close to Diyatalawa, the shift is part prompted by her husband, an environmental academic and activist, and partly driven by a desire to work towards more sustainable ways of living.
“So in this forestry school, we will learn the basics of organic agriculture and the basics of biodiversity in Sri Lanka and hopefully apply that to a small plot of land later on. Because the truth is that I know so little about a way of life in Sri Lanka that’s not an urban way of life but the majority of this country do live that way. So I think we see it as trying to make that small change in our own lifestyle and do things differently. I don’t know how this experiment will pan out and we’re going with a sense of hopefulness and openness to something new,” she says.
The regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021 will be announced on May 12. The overall winner will be announced on June 30.