In 2022 my debut novel, Border Less, was published in North America (7.13 Books) and South Asia (HarperCollins India), two spaces of diasporic life and aesthetic legacies that my fiction centers. When the novel was first released in the United States, I was nervous about its reception even if I was proud of the book I’d written. I was nervous mostly because when I transitioned from a world of literary criticism to a world of fiction writing, I learned how much narrative forms harden and tangle with the tastes of the market, especially in the United States, a key player within global anglophone literature. In an industry documented to be predominantly white at the highest levels of literary gatekeeping, I feared that my indie debut as a brown woman writer would mark the end of a dream that had barely begun to manifest.
To my relief, Border Less was received generously by its readers, who appreciated in general the novel’s play with form. In the United States, though, a couple of questions came up often in my conversations with literary gatekeepers, informed readers whose opinions hold power to shape the larger response to a book. Some asked me—explicitly or implicitly—to explain why my book should be called a novel if it employs fragmentation, discontinuity, and perspectives of multiple characters. Others—spoiler alert—asked me to explain why I chose to end my novel with a minor character’s meta-narrative perspective over the main character’s narrative one. What I heard in these recurrent questions was the assumption that a “real” novel is one that maintains continuity of narration and perspective, one that focuses on and pursues until the closing note the protagonist’s inner journey. What I heard here was the assumption that a real novel is the realist novel.
Before I continue I’d like to clarify my intent in sharing this observation. In emphasizing a partial and North American reaction to Border Less, my intention isn’t to condescend to critics or readers who didn’t get it. Neither am I here to dismiss the merits of realism as a narrative form. As an author I’m grateful to every reader who engaged with my debut in all ways they did. As a critic and educator I spent over a decade reading and teaching the realist novel, mainly those authored by Black and brown writers from across the world; it’s a narrative form I still love. Yet as I continued to explain my debut book as a novel to a North American literary community, I couldn’t help wondering: How did the novel, known to be the most versatile of narrative forms, congeal here into such a bordered form? In other words, how did the contemporary American novel become synonymous for so many with the modern realist novel? Who do these literary borders serve, and what’s at stake if we don’t ask these questions?
In his groundbreaking book Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993), Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said chronicled the massive growth of the realist novel in recent Western history, especially in the three homes of unparalleled imperial power: England and France in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth. Similar to social media’s capacity for the rapid, mass circulation of ideas today, the realist novel served then as a key tool of Western imperial propaganda, especially through the form’s emphasis on narrative principles that weren’t central to fiction from many other parts of the world, or even to precolonial Europe. Whether we consider the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and its widely popular subset of imitations called Robinsonades, all featuring a protagonist who leaves the motherland to establish a colony elsewhere, or we consider Defoe’s successors—Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and others—the realist novel encoded a web of references and attitudes toward non-Western peoples that bolstered Western imperial expansion.
Through close readings of excerpts from novels by Defoe, Conrad, Austen, Dickens, and other colonial writers, Said shows how realism focused on character development in stories of survival and self-determination and served a predominantly bourgeois readership. In these books, “The novelistic hero and heroine exhibit the restlessness and energy characteristic of the enterprising bourgeoisie, and they are permitted adventures in which their experiences reveal to them the limits of what they can aspire to, where they can go, what they become.” To borrow from today’s workshop parlance on “craft”—and to echo John Gardner’s famous description of good fiction—the realist novel worked hard at building “a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind” through a prioritization of craft elements like character development, causality with its notion of linear time, continuity of narration maintained through verisimilitude, commentary, setting, and description, especially of the imperial home-country, articulated through the secondary yet key presence of distant colonies.
Said, of course, isn’t the only writer to show us how much of a recent geo-historic construct realism and its narrative principles are, even if it was in his work that I first understood how much storytelling serves power. About two decades later, acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh published a nonfiction book on the relationship between Western humanistic thought and global environmental concerns, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In this book, Ghosh talks about the rise of the Anthropocene in Western arts, sciences, and contemporary culture in which the human being—rather than nonhumans, the landscape, or some other element—became a literary narrative’s main agent of force, the one in charge of shaping plot. Here, too, the centrality of character development or the pursuit of “individual moral adventure” that is most associated with “serious fiction” in the West and the Anthropocene’s upholding of human agency, gained ground with the marriage of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and monotheistic religions, especially Protestantism in which “Man began to dream of achieving his own self-deification by radically isolating himself before an arbitrary God.” Furthermore, The Great Derangement shows us how the realist novel upheld continuity of narration through the use of detail and description or “narrative fillers” (to echo literary theorist Franco Moretti) to establish verisimilitude or the principle of probability, once again with the goal of not disrupting the implied bourgeois reader’s pleasure.
In 2017, Chinese American writer Gish Jen’s book The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap (Knopf) echoed Ghosh’s claim of the Anthropocene dominating the Western literary arts where the conception of self, in general, remains individualistic. Similar to Ghosh, Jen attributes the recent historic emphasis on individualism over the collective in Western storytelling to a string of historic developments that include “monotheism, Judeo-Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and Romanticism, not to say the rise of market economy.”
Said’s, Ghosh’s, and Jen’s works name well—in their own ways—the historic context that allowed realism to dethrone other forms of storytelling, first in the West and increasingly around the world. Yet these works don’t link this history enough to a key space through which realism continues to maintain its legitimizing hold on anglophone literature in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What I’m talking about here is the role of the mainstream MFA program in the United States, the nation of the largest military and imperial power of our time. As I have written elsewhere, the MFA is an undeniable, hegemonic force on contemporary American letters, an empire of its own that often universalizes a provincial pedagogy of “good” storytelling. So much necessary ink has already been spilled by my peers here. Several contemporary writers, including Junot Díaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, Felicia Rose Chavez, Matthew Salesses, Beth Nguyen, David Mura, and Joy Castro, as well as my own essays elsewhere, have shown how much of what we understand to be the craft of good storytelling in the United States disseminates the historic context and cultural capital of a highly narrow demographic: upper- to middle-class, able-bodied, cis white men. Eric Bennett’s work here is particularly incisive in understanding the nexus between the production of American literature and American imperialism. For instance, Bennett published two essays in recent years in the Chronicle of Higher Education whose titles and bylines say it all: “How Iowa Flattened Literature: With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers” (2014) and “How America Taught the World to Write Small: It exported a literature of individualism and domesticity—not one of solidarity and big ideas” (2020). These essays situate the origins of creative writing programs in the U.S. in the mid-twentieth-century American fear of Communism and the MFA’s economic foundations in the CIA, the State Department, and patronage by conservative American businessmen. “The discipline of creative writing was effectively born in the 1950s. Imperial prosperity gave rise to it, postwar anxieties shaped it,” Bennett affirms, referring to the explosion of MFA programs across the U.S. whose pioneering figures like Paul Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford “shared a common vision for American culture with the internationalists of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and influential philanthropic foundations.” Bennett writes about how the mainstream MFA program fostered a highly bordered kind of writing, one that upheld “the putative civic sufficiency of unapologetic selfhood” as key not only to good, literary storytelling, but also to the American identity defined in opposition to a Communist one.
In 2014, Brian Merchant, technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times, echoed Bennett on the MFA and the CIA in a piece for Vice in which he equated postwar American literature produced by “the MFA factory” to a “content farm” that perpetuated a specific ideology and aesthetic of writing. This specific aesthetic, often taught as a universal one, valorized the concrete over the abstract; showing over telling; the role of emotions and imagination over critical thinking; domesticity and nationalism over transnationalism; the right grammar, syntax, and sentence craft over one’s relationship to a lived historic moment and the world. For Bennett, Merchant, and many of my American peers of color, this aesthetic both proceeds and follows the birth of the MFA in an anticommunist paranoia; it finds its most enduring legacy in names like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Paul Engle, Frank Conroy, Wallace Stegner, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and periodicals like the O. Henry anthologies, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, the Best American Short Stories, and more.
As I write this essay, almost a century since the birth of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose graduates are most credited with the rise of the American MFA, the latter has produced several faculty members of color who, as I’ve noted earlier, practice and write about an alternative pedagogy of literary storytelling. Moreover, in spotlighting the traditional MFA program in the U.S., its dominant ideology and pedagogy of writing, my irritation isn’t with a practice of craft that pushes our students to choose concrete details over abstractions or engage with feelings over critical thinking or our visual faculties over aural ones while working with the page. The aforementioned approaches can produce effective explorations with writing for the novice writer, as well as finely crafted stories by any writer who takes them seriously. Neither is this essay about my exasperation with realism or its core narrative assumptions; I continue to love the form, even if I do read the realist novel through a different critical lens now. As a writer and an educator, I often rail against the pedestalization of narrative assumptions from a colonial era that continue to be upheld as timeless, universal truths within a field of U.S. “creative” writing that prides itself on celebrating innovation and, increasingly these days, diversity and decolonization. What baffles me is the centrality of realism as the—not a—respectable form of literary storytelling in the twenty-first-century U.S., whether it is through the mainstream writing workshop and its decontextualized pedagogy of craft, fiction, or reviews published by prestigious literary magazines, major deals for “literary” fiction by the Big Five, the adjudication of prestigious awards, and more.
Moreover, it raises the questions, however rhetorical: Can “minority” writers break the aesthetic and ideological walls drawn by imperial institutions in the name of good storytelling and still be celebrated for their work? In an industry where diversity has become a profitable buzzword and phenomenon, a marginalized point of view in fiction may be very welcome, even rewarded with the highest honors, but what of marginalized points of view that tell their story through marginalized forms of storytelling? In other words, for the minority writer, is travel toward aesthetic innovation doomed to follow a fiercely bordered road? A path predetermined by the hegemonic notions of form?
A book that resonated deeply with me while I grappled with questions of narrative form and gatekeeping as an Asian American writer is Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), even if it centers a highly bordered notion of Asian America. I read Minor Feelings in 2020 while I was finishing drafting my novel, Border Less, which was due for publication at the time. In her collection of essays that digress unapologetically, Hong reminds her readers how much the white gatekeepers of American literary fiction love coming-of-age stories by nonwhite writers, delivered on the page through “the MFA orthodoxy of ‘show don’t tell.’” The latter is a narrative move in which readers are invited to view a character’s journey without authorial intervention, a narrative move perfected by realism, I add. In returning often to her journey with artistic expression that would feel true to herself, Hong confesses that she abandoned her novel-in-progress about the 1992 L.A. riots and the complexity of American race relations, mostly because she couldn’t write a book that would suit the U.S. fiction market’s narrative taste. This market’s “ethnic literary project,” Hong reminds us, craves and rewards narratives of becoming by BIPOC, those that highlight stories of “survival and self-determination,” recalling in many ways Said’s “enterprising bourgeois” protagonist in colonial, realist fiction. Furthermore, the U.S. market’s love of realist fiction—with its narrative preferences for continuity, linearity, third-person narration, and show-don’t-tell—serves its implied white readers as it allows them to consume stories of pain by people of color without having to confront a white history of colonial violence and its global aftermath.
As much as I loved reading and teaching Hong’s journey as an Asian American writer, I haven’t stopped wondering: How many “minority” writers routinely abandon their novels because the forms available to or legitimized for them do not suit the stories they are trying to tell? In my community of aspiring and published authors, I know too many. And I ask myself, often in vain: Whose voice speaks loudest in their heads when aspiring novelists convince themselves that their manuscript is best laid to rest?
In 2004 in Mumbai, I started working every night on my debut novel, even if I didn’t know then that my jottings would eventually become a book. I had returned to my hometown after taking a year of leave from my graduate program in the United States, where I was training to become a literary critic, the closest I thought people like me could get to becoming a fiction writer. Even if I had always loved the world of art, language, and storytelling and had a strong legacy of these within my community, even if I had won a doctoral fellowship from an elite literature program, I wondered while scribbling in my notebook if the world of art, language, and storytelling was a path for me. From the time I mastered reciting Wordsworth’s “[I wandered lonely as a Cloud]” or excerpts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in my middle school in Mumbai to the years I wrote the earliest drafts of Border Less, the stories I grew up imbibing from my community felt a galaxy away from the stories I was taught to appreciate as Literature. When I say Literature with an uppercase L, I refer to a body of writing that is legitimized by the Western establishment or imperial powers as the “literary” or “fine” arts. At the end of my sabbatical in Mumbai, I returned to the United States, finished my education, and started teaching, the only way I knew to financially sustain myself while nurturing writerly dreams. On the long, winding road to becoming an author, things about which I often write elsewhere, I was fortunate to encounter the right mentors, “minority” women across the racial spectrum who taught me an alternative relationship to literature and storytelling. After a colonial education in English that pushed me away from Literature in my earlier years of schooling, I discovered later in life storytelling by Black and brown writers from across the world who resisted erasure and reclaimed power through colonial languages in Literature: Arundhati Roy, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Bharati Mukherjee, Ananda Devi, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many more.
About a decade ago I entered the space of U.S. writing workshops after a strong training in reading because I wanted to learn to write for a larger audience. I brought to workshop short fiction narratives told through the perspective of various brown characters who seemed to know one another and who eventually populated the world of Border Less. Here I found the feedback often—not always—pushing me toward perfecting the tenets of realism in my fiction. For instance, an instructor wanted me to stay away from writing more than one main character in my novel-in-progress even if global literature has a rich tradition of polyvocality; another wanted the different stories and perspectives in my fiction drafts to be united by one perspective, even if a sense of fragmentation and pluralism punctuated my work; more than one instructor wanted me to show, more than tell, and use cinematic storytelling rather than call on the legacy of oral storytelling traditions. Despite realism-centric feedback that didn’t always sit well with my process as an aspiring novelist, I grew from participating in writing workshops; I honed my craft and discovered my strengths as a writer through input from others, including my instructors. When it came to my novel-in-progress, though, I struggled over the years to incorporate a good deal of feedback I received in workshops because I found the assumptions of realism, especially the principle of continuity or character development that privileges individualism over community to fail me repeatedly in my process, not because they aren’t effective narrative principles to work with but because they did not adequately reflect the characters inhabiting my fiction.
Over time I discovered that the book I was writing featured migrant characters and a movement back and forth between the different homes that mark diasporic lives. Why aspire to build a “vivid and continuous dream” for the reader when a book at its heart is a narrative of diaspora that by its very notion implies dispersion and fragmentation? As I continued working on my novel, two voices on craft and structure dueled in my head. One was of my brown characters telling me to write stories through a form that reflected their historical context and lived experiences of uprootment; the other was a voice of the literary establishment prodding me toward a story of universal appeal via narrative principles rooted in a white, colonial context of narrative spotlight and historic continuity.
My characters came from the community I come from, communities I have yearned to see in “literary” fiction. They came from the Thar Desert’s migrant merchant community; they came from the archipelago-city of Mumbai in twenty-first-century India; they came from greater Los Angeles, an archipelago-like city with its various diasporic enclaves in the world’s largest imperial power, and other immigrant homes. Here again, fragmentation captured the lived experiences and history of my characters as well as this author way more than the notion of continuity. By the time I received a publication contract for my novel, I had given birth to my son, was working from home, and was trying to stay connected to others in a global pandemic. Motherhood, COVID-19, and our digital age exacerbated my lived experience of disruption and fragmentation in such radical ways that aspiring to a continuity of narration or even centering the protagonist over their community in my novel felt like disingenuous narrative choices, even if I knew that opting for realism’s core tenets would serve the U.S. market’s understanding of story and a broader readership. Furthermore, art forms from my ancestral Thar Desert—including our architecture, visual and performing arts, and the oral storytelling traditions—blend Hindu, Islamic, and Persian influences; they often use frames as a key component of their art, structural devices that reinforce circularity over linearity. With the epigraph and closing chapter of my novel highlighting meta-narrative moments, I borrowed framing devices in my fiction without seeking loyalty to any tradition because neither my identity as an author nor the identities of my characters can claim loyalty to one cultural heritage.
It goes without saying that in the earliest stages of drafting a story, most writers don’t think of their process through such an analytical lens. From what I know, a story has its origins in what the yogis might translate as the “subtle body,” or realms of our self beyond the rational mind: the intuition, the visceral reaction to or pull toward something, a voice, an image, a dream. When I talk of form and structure here, I speak from a later stage of finishing my novel when I was wearing the editor’s or critic’s hat to understand my fiction’s place within a preexisting landscape of stories.
I have taken up space with my writing process despite my nagging fear of navel-gazing because even if my journey with Border Less took seventeen years, thanks to a learning and unlearning of “literary” storytelling, I see myself among the luckier ones. My novel was generously received on both sides of the planet. And when shopping my manuscript for publication in North America, I was very fortunate to have an Asian American editor and indie press publisher who needed very little explaining on the narrative choices that moved my book away from the Big Five’s preferences. Yet I felt compelled to write this essay because I know too many talented, self-doubting writers who have convinced themselves that their much-needed stories aren’t worth finishing as a manuscript. These are “minority” students in my classroom too untrusting, as I once was, of their own voice and vision for the page; these are non-upper-caste, non-upper-class, closeted writers in my community who never had the luxury of choosing the fine arts as a vocation; these are Black and brown emerging writers from the “third world” who live far away from the imperial metropoles midwifing Literature for the world; this list is longer than the word count I have.
As important, I write this essay in hopes—yet again—that the establishment and its many gatekeepers choose to lift the veil off the power structures permeating Literature, to historicize and name the silent assumptions of what they anoint as good storytelling, and who these assumptions serve. An unveiling of narrative assumptions in fiction—or the lack thereof—are political acts in themselves because, as Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us through his critique of writing workshops, in “Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile,” published by the New York Times in April 2017, power propagates best by concealing itself.
Last but certainly not least, as an Indian American, I write this essay from the belly of the beast. I live and write from my current home on unceded Tongva and Acjachemen lands, known to many as parts of greater Los Angeles, in the mother of settler colonies, the United States. I was raised in the largest British ex-colony, India, which has gained global notoriety in recent years for flexing its imperial muscle in South Asia, especially through its ethnonationalist ideology of Hindutva. Over the past few months I’ve written this essay against the backdrop of an ongoing U.S.–backed genocide perpetrated by the Israeli state against Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Here is a 76-year-old settler colonial history of land expropriation, forced displacement, and ethnic cleansing of an entire people on which Edward Said and others have written at length. Returning to Said’s theory on culture and imperialism, the complicity between colonial violence and the craft of storytelling through certain narrative principles (including a selective omission of concrete detail and the use of passive voice) continues to thrive in mainstream Western journalism that has repeatedly decontextualized the history of occupied Palestine and relocated the start of Israel-Palestine conflict to October 7, 2023. Since then, in its quest to target Hamas, the Israeli state has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians, especially women and children, and these numbers are increasing at an alarming rate as I write this essay. Israel has further destroyed every university and a few hundred schools in Gaza; several libraries, including Central Archives of Gaza containing one hundred fifty years of records of Gaza’s history; and several heritage sites and mosques, including the Great Omari Mosque, containing the largest collection of rare books in Palestine. Israel has also killed over one hundred journalists and media workers, killed several writers and poets, a few hundred teachers, professors, and deans, and these numbers are increasing by the day.
To the People of the Global Majority and anti-Zionist Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestine and have repeatedly taken to streets in protests across the world, a history of genocidal violence is far from new. Decades ago, Aimé Césaire in his famous anticolonial pamphlet, Discourse on Colonialism, reminded his readers that the Holocaust was the culmination of a white history of colonial and genocidal violence perpetrated against people of color across the planet. Nearly one hundred years ago, 85 percent of our planet with its people and natural resources were under Europe’s colonial rule. Many of us living in the United States are direct descendants of this history of colonial violence and white military expansion in which the forced displacement of people of color, starvation and genocide, widespread environmental destruction, and restructuring for profit went hand in hand with a deliberate destruction of native languages, cultures, art forms, and systems of knowledge, also known as an epistemicide. As both Said and Césaire affirm in their pioneering critiques of colonial power, the hard violence of guns and bombs has always gone hand in hand with the soft yet longer-lasting violence of narrative.
As I’ve tried to show here, realism once was among the staunchest allies to the violence perpetrated globally by European colonial power. It’s hardly surprising then to see realism find its strongest legacy in American literature today. That said, my point here isn’t that realism doesn’t produce compelling storytelling. It couldn’t have served power for this long if it didn’t. My point is about the countless erasures enacted by the hegemonic forms of storytelling and its many gatekeepers. My point is about the soft violence of narrative, that in its vast potential to silence dissenting voices, upholds and fortifies imperial violence. This violence is nowhere as immediate and forceful as the mass slaughter of children, starving or bombing entire families off the face of Earth. Yet as a brown woman writer, I haven’t been able to look away from the subtler form of narrative violence that lasts for generations if not centuries, and at some point it stops needing the colonizer to do the work for empires. If narrative is inextricable from power, my point is about the ways in which narrative erases many of us and a few of the many ways in which we reclaim it.
Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as interviews editor for Kweli, and teaches contemporary anglophone literature in the honors program at UCLA. Her debut novel, Border Less, was a silver medalist for best regional fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award and Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her other writing has appeared in several publications, including Poets & Writers Magazine, Literary Hub, Longreads, the Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Find her on X, @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram and Threads, @writerpoddar.
Thumbnail credit: Elena Bessi