On writing

… King Lear in quarantine, I found myself thinking, trying to ignore the fridge and keep an eye on the younger child building Lego structures and smashing them, trying to make notes on my phone for that article about reading in quarantine, reminding myself to finish another essay about libraries, trying to imagine how it would make sense now that all the libraries were closed.

Curiously, I remain me, Sreedhevi Iyer, through all of these kaleidoscopic labels. The way I see it, this need to label me – to categorise and put in a neat box – has more to do with other people’s needs than mine.

Somewhere along the way I realised that what I wanted was to make others feel witnessed. This radically altered my orientation towards the world, and the way I communicated the story of my trauma to others: what I am doing is witnessing, staring, even, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, outraged, and taking notes, and connecting dots, and asking what we are going to do about it, out here, in the world.

It was clear that articulation had real world benefits. Survivor testimony was being taken seriously as a form of resistance and as a tool for informing policy. It was also clear that to be read I would need to relinquish even more privacy and power.

We have our own voices and stories – and we always have and always will – and so we continue presencing our stories and asserting our side of the colonial story, so that our abusers, personal and institutional alike, can no longer control the narrative about us.

The main counter-manoeuvre is to become the new weather god; to establish a climate in which characters who have not mattered, matter, and are safe, even if they don’t know it…

I take it as self-evident that meta-memoir must be avoided at almost all costs – and, correlatively, that my pass here is the word ‘almost’.

To make a decision entails a kind of travel – thought travel – with stopping points and progression. To live with a decision is to feel the sensation of firm ground, of arrival. It is to look back and construct a reassuring story of your mind’s route, a story possessing the stability of structure, of foundation, coupled with the exhilaration of onward movement.

In permitting the reader ample space for introspection, Kofman’s narrator is as good a listener as she is a writer. And like any good listener, her role is not to leap to the rescue with answers or advice.

Tolstoy Together isn’t meant to be a standalone book but a companion to War and Peace, a prolonged conference of avid reading minds, a guidebook not for pre-reading but for reinforcement of the distributed memories shared among the travellers after each day’s exploration.