In an exclusive email interview with us, author S.Hareesh discusses the power of stories, writing, his love for short stories, books and more. Excerpts:
1.
You have won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, the JCB award, and the film Jallikattu (based on your short story) was also nominated for the Academy Awards. With recognition as an award-winning writer do you also feel a kind of pressure to live up to the expectations as a writer?
I don’t feel unduly pressurized or immensely joyful because of the awards. Being recognized for one’s work is wonderful; it gives one confidence. I am the type of person who, once a work is completed, looks at it with a sense of inferiority complex. I worry myself wondering whether I have been able to achieve the kind of aesthetics that I admire in great writers. These pressures are always there.
2. Your short story collection ‘Adam’ won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and now it is translated into English. Any expectations from readers in the English language?
Most of the stories in ‘Adam’ have a regional flair. My hope is that the readers will find something that they can connect with in each story. After all, the world we experience as human beings and the problems we face are, in a fundamental sense, similar everywhere. ‘Moustache’ was much more regional that the stories in ‘Adam’. I hope that the English readers who welcomed and appreciated the novel will also welcome ‘Adam’.
3. Which is your favourite short story from ‘Adam’ and why?
‘Death Notice’ is my favourite – I know the life and the characters in it very well.
4. Salman Rushdie once said in an interview with TOI that fiction is the opposite of lies. What are your thoughts on the statement…
I don’t agree. I don’t think there is an opposite of lies. In fiction and in life, the whole world is made up of lies.
5. Do you believe stories have the power to change the world?
Stories have the power to change the world for the better or worse. It is difficult to say where the line between fiction and fact is. We are witnessing, for example, how a story written by Valmiki is changing modern India for the worse. Even the Supreme Court believes the story to be fact, not fiction. That story is being used by political parties to gain power, to commit mass murder, to destroy someone else’s place of worship and build a different one in its place, to lynch those who do not say ‘jai’ to its main character… So, let’s not say that stories do not have the power to change the world.
6. There are growing instances of intolerance seen in our society today and its impact on the artistes and writers can be widely seen. Does it make telling your truth through your work all the more important? What keeps you going as a writer?
The urge to share what we have to say with others and to listen to what they have to say – that, in essence, is democracy, not just a method of governance. Storytelling, then, is its primary form. It is precisely because of this that autocrats and religious fundamentalists fear art. When a person writes, they are also marking themselves in the now, saying ‘I’m right here’. The famous Malayalam poet Vailoppilly Sreedhara Menon asked in his poem ‘Kudiyozhikkal’ whether his voice is being heard. It is a question that all artists ask. We write because we want to be heard above the din, because we want readers to have the same aesthetic experience that we imagined.
7. What fascinates you about short stories that you write in this format?
There is no need to adhere to a specific style or format in the short story. The effort is to write each story in the form that it demands. I try to avoid using the more flowery or the more structurally complex parts of the Malayalam language in my writing. We can deal with complex subject matters in our writing but the language, in my opinion, needs to be the one that is used in ordinary communication.
8. Many writers say it is tougher to write short stories vs novels. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Writing is an experience that is joyful as well as painful, and that is true whether one is writing a novel or a short story. I feel both these emotions while writing. The difference is that the novel needs to be carried around within for a longer period of time.
9. Which short story writers and short stories have made a huge impact on you?
I tend to read more novels than short stories. I have always liked the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. In Malayalam literature, there are excellent short stories writers including Zacharia and N. S. Madhavan. I think everything we read influences our writing.
10. Short story, novel, screenplay writing– which format of writing do you like the most and why?
Let me say first of all that I don’t consider a screenplay to be an independent art form. I think of it as a set of notes for the director to consult while telling a story through a film. As for the other two, I used to like writing short stories more but now I like novels better. Who knows, it might change again! I guess it depends on the ideas we play around with any given time. Either way, both the short story and the novel demand full dedication. The only difference is that the subject and the characters should be captivating enough to keep my interest as a writer for a longer period of time.
11. What are you working on next?
I am finishing a novel.
12. How would you complete the phrase– I write because…
I am a human being.
13. One thing that you consider to be most important in life.
Writing.
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