Sangamithra Iyer is the author of The Lines We Draw (Hen Press, 2014), editor of Satya: The Long View, and a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize in New Environmental Literature. She has received support from the Jerome Foundation and Camargo Foundation for her book in progress. Her essay “Governing Bodies” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
In this story, you recount struggling with finding the right words and language at the right times, once saying: “I wanted to channel that younger me with her near-shaven head, Tamil fluency, and astute observations. I could see her again extend her arms wide and then point to the elephant’s enclosure. She could say all that I could not.” How much do you feel that this past-self belongs to or is contained in you now? What portions of her might belong to something else and how does this split between selves affect your memory and your narrative?
I have often thought about what it means to lose a mother tongue and what else is lost in the process. One of my earliest memories is a conversation. It is a peculiar thing to have a memory that took place in one language while the recollection of it happens in another. I remember sitting with my grand aunt in her home in Bangalore. I was curious about something and asked her what the space between us was. She explained that it was called air. I remember reaching out and grabbing a fistful of it, but when I opened up my hand again, what was in it was gone. The Tamil I spoke fluently as a child is like what was in my hand that day. While I think I understand most of what I hear and can still grasp it, when I try to use my first language, I open my mouth and there is only air.
I do think our younger selves are always still a part of us, but like our memories, we can’t access them fully. This is also true for family history for many of us, where colonialism, war, migration or death have left those of us still living with only pieces of stories. “Governing Bodies” is a narrative formed by salvaging fragments, while acknowledging the losses. I was also exploring other kinds of split-selves from the elephant-headed Ganesha to colonized subjects under the British rule like my grandparents, as well as logging elephants who once roamed free. I was interested in this tension between subjugation and freedom, complacency and rebellion, and the moments when a suppressed self rises to the surface.
While searching for both a clear story of your grandfather and a larger connection with the past, you mention looking into water for signs of story and ways of leading back. Can you describe how you see, feel, and understand the language of water working as a story or, at least, as a way of gesturing to story?
I never met my grandfather, but I knew he was a civil engineer turned water diviner. I thought perhaps by searching for water, I could somehow divine him. I was in pursuit of my grandfather’s trajectory from engineer to activist, while trying to also understand my own.
Water first served as geography. As I describe in this essay, I found my grandfather in the civil service records of the British Library. There, I discovered all of his engineering posts along the rivers of Burma. Water was his resume, and it served as chronology. Water led me to more books and bibliography. Water bore witness to colonial and environmental history. I followed all these tributaries of knowledge and this essay is the confluence.
When you were writing this story, how much felt like a bodily recounting and how much required a more conscious organization? Could you speak a bit about how you view both, particularly in relation to this story’s focus on the body and its seeming possession of both deep knowledge and instinct?
In my twenties, I spent a lot of time as a geotechnical engineer behind drill rigs collecting and logging soil samples. So much of the process of unearthing family stories seemed similar. We collect fragments from different depths and locations and do our best to connect the dots, to understand what it was like in situ.
I ask in this essay, “Can you recreate a life—re-member a body—from the knowns and unknowns?” I was piecing together fragments of memory, family history, and archival research, while also drawing from empathy and imagination. The resulting narrative is organized by association.
I was revising an earlier draft of this essay during a writing retreat in Hawaii, where Rahna Reiko Rizzuto led a dance workshop encouraging us writers to get out of heads and into our bodies. I imagined being in the bodies of the people and animals in my story and wondered how they moved and what constrained them. What were their fears and desires and how did these manifest in their bodies? This essay was deepened by that experience.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Last fall, I lost two very dear writing mentors, Louise DeSalvo and Meena Alexander, who have had a profound influence on my writing life. Many of the conversations above about memory, fragmented narratives, and writing the unknown were started with them when I was their student a decade ago. Louise DeSalvo was a brilliant writer and scholar who founded and led Hunter College’s memoir MFA program. She was a sage about all the stages of the writing process and doled out the best advice. (Read the Art of Slow Writing and Writing as a Way of Healing to get your share of her wisdom, too). I remember being very lost in my story, fearing I was never going to recover my family history and that I’d never know enough to write. Louise told me to imagine what it was like for my ancestors and to write about the loss of not knowing. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how to do this, but like so much of her guidance, it found me later when I needed it most. I wish she had the chance to read “Governing Bodies.” I was also lucky to study with the wonderful poet and memoirist Meena Alexander at Hunter College. In her memoir class, we read fractured narratives and discussed the relationships between trauma and memory and how narratives of trauma, exile or diaspora often don’t allow for continuous narratives. Meena’s own memoir, Fault Lines, recounts advice she wrote to herself in her notebook: “Write in fragments, the fragments will save you.” The fragments have saved me as well.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
“Governing Bodies” is part of a larger book project I am working on. I describe it as a lyrical reckoning of our complicated relationship with urban and natural world, and how we find truth and compassion to reimagine other ways of being. This book wrestles with big questions about how different bodies live with the legacy of historical harms (i.e. colonialism, vivisection, factory farming, genocide, environmental destruction). It blends memoir, history and reportage and examines the ways bodies—human bodies, animal bodies, bodies of land and bodies of water—are controlled and liberated.