re. the race question: i do actually feel some kind of way seeing people comparing this to arundhati roy's prose style in a way that's derogatory to both of them. for one, i don't think arundhati roy is writing in the same register at all. god of small things reads the way it does because either its mimicking the ways in which indian kids have our own sort of way of speaking OR its written in an adult register - and the adult register is a very sophisticated, grown-up voice with very elegant, beautifully constructed sentences. ministry of utmost happiness is not at all in the same vein because again, roy switches between multiple narrative registers and voices in that particular narrative, between maximalism, restraint and even the ungrammatical in capturing the different narratorial voices. it is work that is specific, grounded and thoughtful.
but i do think in making that comparison people are revealing a lot about how they read literature by non-white folks! i remember, distinctly, a guardian review calling ministry of utmost happiness "magical realism" - a label that i think could only have been applied if a) the novel hadn't been read or b) if in reading the novel, the foreignness of the setting and happenings read as "magical" to you (which is INSANE, given the actual substance of the novel). i think there's some of that at work here in the comparisons that i've been seeing float around (i think vuong comparisons are slightly closer in how he favours an overblown and not always sense-filled metaphor, but at the same time i also very much do think some of the backlash against him now has shades of racist glee to it). there is no reason, in my mind, to compare arundhati roy and this genre of writing. if at all, i would have wished people go and read through some of the archives of the commonwealth foundation prize's stories, because i do think those archives themselves offer a sense of exactly what is going on here viz. stories that capture a sense of the "colony" preserved as "colony": foreign, exotic, poor, sweltering in the heat, primitive and raw, whether in a way that is either childlike or sensual. the stories written by the person who judged this particular story are telling in their own right, written in a creolised english that had long fallen out of fashion in western publishing some ten years earlier and yet published in this journal and awarded prizes in the big year of 2022.
there is something crucially to be said there for the ways in which non-white writers writing and publishing in english have to repackage themselves for the gaze of usamerican and uk publishing to gain traction. there is even something to be said for the double consciousness with which anglophone non-white writers have to live with and certainly so much to be said about how these standards are reproduced and internalised thru usamerican and uk publishing gatekeeping. but what i am MOST interested in here is the ways in which WHITE readers will misread non-white writers, belittle them and cut them down and refuse to engage w these structures. in what world can arundhati roy be compared to this story? only if you fit all of this writing into one great big bucket called "postcolonial race stuff" and assume that the tropes and language are interchangeable; if your engagement with both roy AND this story is shallow and derived from skim-reading. the only way in which you can think roy's prose is this kind of purple and nonsensical is if you have failed to even bother reading her properly. do you get what i'm saying? do you get what it feels like to see people making these blithely incorrect comparisons that lump all postcolonial writing into this one big glut of nothing and believe that they've said something clever? do you get what it feels like to see people make these horrifying misreadings? do you know how difficult to describe the ways in which white reading strategies can be insanely fucking racist? that self-proclaimed litterateurs are not immune?
And meanwhile when you look at the struggles of Indian SFF writers like Samit Basu and Gautam Bhatia to break into the international (Western) markets, or heck, even a true magical realist like Kuzhali Manickavel, then it becomes clear that its not that everything Oriental is magic. It's just an expectation that we will always fail at genre boundaries.
