Bookshelf Interview with Afshan D'souza-Lodhi
- Olivia Davies
- Oct 1, 2018
- 8 min read
Afshan D’souza-Lodhi was born in Dubai and bred in Manchester. She is of Indian/Pakistani descent and writes plays, prose, poetry and performance pieces. She is currently Deputy Director of Publishing at Dog Horn Publishing, a SLATE Enabler at Eclipse Theatre and Editor of The Common Sense Network. Watch her on Sunday 7th October 2018 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for Manchester Literature Festival.
OD: At Manchester Literature Festival, you will be on stage alongside Shagufta K Iqbal and Amani Saeed as part of ‘The Yoniverse’. Can you tell us about what we should expect from the event and how the group emerged?
The Yoniverse is a poetry collective that has been around for a year, and we are made up of six core team members who are all South Asian female poets. We wanted to find a space that wasn’t dominated by men to talk about body, sexuality, love, lust, identity and feminism. It’s also a place where we can discuss taboo topics, especially things that we were told we shouldn’t speak of by our family members. At our event we will read from our new books, in which we explore similar themes but approach them from different perspectives. For example, although my father is Muslim Pakistani, my mother Catholic Indian, and I’ve lived in the UK since the age of six, I don’t feel that my identity is split, as such. However other women in the collective do discuss feeling split between different parts of their identity. Therefore, even though we write individually, the event at Manchester Literature Festival will see us come together to share our poetry in a call and response style that weaves our individual experiences into a collective discussion.
OD: What is the name of your new book and what do you explore in it?
My book is a collection of eighty or so poems and is called ‘on desire’. In it, I discuss what it means to be in love, to be loved and to belong, and I explore how different elements of my identity – being Muslim, queer, South Asian, British and speaking English as an additional language – affect my desire. My poetry is inspired by flash-fiction, script writing and third person dialogue; forms that allow me to break away from limited poetic structures and create my own hybrid form, I suppose. Maybe this inclination emerged out of my resistance to writing poetry, at first. Although I found poetry important outlet as a teenager, I looked to other fictional forms of expression as a young adult when free verse or spoken poetry didn’t allow me to explore the ideas I wanted to – they seemed a bit ‘on the nose’. Therefore, having returned back to poetry as an adult, it is important to me that I make my writing accessible and find that fast-fiction and script writing allow me to do this.
OD: With English being your second language, how do you approach writing poetry in English and do your other languages influence you?
Oh they influence me massively. My dad speaks Urdu and my mum speaks Konkani so I was brought up speaking these languages first. I vividly remember being about nine or ten and dreaming in English for the first time; we had moved from Dubai to Manchester by this point. Now, as an adult, I speak and write in English the majority of the time and have found that my other languages start to feel weird in my mouth, it hurts when I start speaking them again. My poetry is an exploration of my cultural journey; connecting parts of the self that aren’t or haven’t been explored before. Having experienced being alienated from the dominant language as a young child in school I embed this into my poetry; I use a lot of Urdu and Hindi names which are loaded with different meanings providing another layer of imagery for readers who are familiar with these languages. I like playing around with puns and double-meanings; of course, non-Urdu speakers can Google these names if they want to, but I’m conscious of not wanting to cushion English readers from feeling alienated from language as I was in school. Largely, thought I just love words, I love language and I love the connections between the languages I speak and playing with these connections in my poetry.
OD: You studied philosophy at university; does this influence your work?
Yes, definitely. My writing always starts with a question and sometimes by the end it may have turned into another question or opened up a range of broader questions. My poetry and other writings do ponder existence, or God, or other ‘big’ questions. Urdu poetry, for example, is laden with the musings on the intoxication of love, which I’m really drawn to and enjoy exploring in poetry myself; however, often the mystical elements found within Muslim culture are lost in presentations of Islam in the West.
OD: You are involved in so many projects; how do you come up with all your ideas and what keeps you motivated in all these areas?
I’m a creator by nature. If I haven’t written anything for two months (because of writers block) then I’ve been cooking, painting… I spent two months making a wedding dress! Also, I’ve found that the busier I am, the better the work is – I am inspired by all the projects I’m involved in (coding, publishing, editing) and they all leak into each other by inspiring original thoughts, often during a moment when it’s least wanted like at 3am for example, when working blindly on something else.
OD: You make a big effort to support emerging artists and help young people find their voice; why are you driven to do this?
When I was younger, I saw the arts as a hobby: not as a job. Now that I’m working in a creative capacity, I see that many people established in the arts are gate-holders as opposed to enabling young people to succeed. For example, when my poetry collection started to come together, the idea that “you’re too young” to write cropped up in conversation a bit. Certainly, in Manchester, there are lots of young people making their mark on the arts scene, but there we lack information about how to access funding or make useful connections that will enable your writing to find a bigger platform. The burn out rate is so high amongst young artists because there is an expectation (or need) to work a part or full time job whilst juggling your creative work, which is hard to balance. So, I am convinced of the need to create more platforms to exist that will enable young people to work together. Especially within the BAME community, I find there is sometimes a prevailing mind-set that there is only one space at the top but this isn’t how I think; I want to make sure there is space enough for five. I see no reason why we can’t support each other to get there.
OD: What can we expect from you in the future?
In the near future, ‘on desire’ will be published; I’m waiting on a couple of plays and working on a pilot for a TV show. More immediately, I’m the Editor in Chief of the Common Sense Network - a news network that is pledging to take power away from mainstream media and back to ordinary people. We are 100% public funded and take no editorial line. What we really aim to do is start new conversations and open up dialogues along as many different opinions and perspectives as possible. We want to engage young people in a way that doesn’t try to make them think in any one particular way. Our stories aren’t full of jargon and we ask the common sense questions; such as, what IS Brexit actually all about?
OD: We’d love you to now share your top five books for the bookshelf:
Lihaaf - Ismat Chughtai (1942)
My first is a short story by Ismat Chughtai called Lihaaf (or The Quilt). It was published in the 1940s and caused lots of controversy because it was seen to be ‘obscene’ in its sexuality. However, it’s not an explicit story at all but very subtle evocation of a lesbian relationship, which I like because it allows for more creativity to take place in the readers interpretation of it. I’ve read the story in both in Urdu and English. Although the English translation is very popular; Urdu is a very formal language so when it's used to describe informal situations it almost forces you think about these interactions in a different light. The linguistic formality feels almost Victorian in its sexual subtlety (which adds a romantic element) and I find this really appealing. Chughtai’s story inspired a 1996 film by Deepa Mehta called “Fire” – a romance between two women in India – which was only of the first Bollywood films to explicitly show a homosexual relationship and there was a big dialogue surrounding freedom of speech after its release.
A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
This is a text I always return to, when writing a play, because it helps my understanding of the form. It was loosely inspired by Langston Hughes poem “Harlem” and I love how Hansberry merges the personal with the political. It’s a domestic tragedy, telling the story of a black family in Chicago and their encounters with racism. There are elements of this story that are universal yet the narrative is still specific to this individual family; this balance between the domestic and the ‘bigger picture’ is something I strive to include in all my work. If, when I’m writing a play, I feel that I’m diverging too far away from this balance, I return to A Raisin in the Sun to guide me back.
The Good Immigrant - Nikesh Shukla (2016)
I really enjoy reading essays and this collection put together by Nikesh is one of, in my opinion, the best. With this collection of 21 essays published a few years ago by writers from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, he started a dialogue in Britain (and, to some degree, the US) about race and what it means to be a person of colour today. He has been a great supporter of my work and is a really inspiring man; he started The Good Journal (where he is now the editor) and has gone on to be really successful in both his fiction and non-fiction publications but is also committed to supporting new writers. I have written an essay myself, that will be published in the collection 'Its Not About the Burqa' with Picador, where I’ll be responding to David Cameron’s comments about Muslim women as being submissive. However, if I ever need a ‘pick-me-up’ this is one of the books I turn to.
'Fruit' - Adam Lowe (2010)
I read this poem at the time when I was returning to poetry and the creative world and found his use of mythology, queer imagery and performance inspiring; it drew me back into a relationship with the poetic form I had felt distanced from for so long. Adam himself was one of the first people I met who was both writing and supporting other emerging artists so both him and his art re-energised me and I’m still drawn to the beautiful images in this poem.
You call me a fruit, and I agree, say
a fruit is ripe, promising seeds, bursting with juice.
You call me a fruit, as though a vegetable and I list a litany of fresh attributes:
a fruit is rich, remembers its roots, nourishes, quenches, makes a display of any table.
I say, I am the apple that announces the gravity of a given situation; I am the pomegranate that teaches of possession; I am the fig our ancestors couldn’t resist.
You call me a fruit and I agree: soft, round and sweet. I dare you to peel back my layers, take a look at my pips. Full as a watermelon, sharp as a lime, come over here and bite me.
Seduce - Desiree Reynolds (2013)
Finally, I’d have to pick this novel by Desiree Reynolds, which I love for so many reasons. Desiree was born in London to Jamaican parents and her debut story is set on a fictional Caribbean island. Her writing is incredibly poetic although it does take a good couple of pages to get used to the nation language prose. You could say Desiree does to this dialect what Irvine Welsh does to the Scottish accent; once you get used to the language it feels both jarring and enabling which is an incredibly powerful combination. Her descriptive language is incredible detailed and, along with her beautiful attention to voice, this is one of my favourite books.
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