Porochista Khakpour’s debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel, The Last Illusion, was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Her third book, Sick: A Memoir, was a Best Book of 2018 according to Time Magazine, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, and more. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many sections of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, and elsewhere. Her latest book is a collection of those essays, Brown Album (Vintage, May 2020). She has taught creative writing and literature at Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Columbia, Bucknell, Bard, Sarah Lawrence College, and many other universities around the country. She lives in New York City.
Website: https://porochistakhakpour.com/; Twitter: @PKhakpour; Instagram: @pchza
Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction and serves as the Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates the series titled “Race, Power, and Storytelling.” For about two decades, her work has explored the intersection of storytelling, race, class, gender, place and migration; it has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Times (Times OC), The Best Asian Short Stories 2019, Transition, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, CounterPunch, VIDA Review and elsewhere. Her debut fiction manuscript, Ladies Special, Homebound, was a finalist for Feminist Press's 2018 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, longlisted for C&R Press 2019 Book Award, and is scheduled to release from Speaking Tiger. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. She lives in Huntington Beach, California.
Website: www.namratapoddar.com; Twitter: @poddar_namrata; Instagram: @writerpoddar and @stylegully
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NP: Brown Album begins by dedicating the book “To Iranians in America.” In exploring Iranian American identity, many parts of the book talk not only of the tension between both sides of the narrator’s hyphenated identity (Iran and America) but also of the tension between Iranians and Iranian Americans. That said, an essay like “Muslim American in Indonesia” explores solidarity between Muslims across the world and a sense of belongingness the narrator experiences in Indonesia that often evades her in America. Were you ever tempted to dedicate the book to a larger part of your community, say, of Iranian diaspora across the world or of Muslims across the world, or was the homage to Iranians in America a clear decision?
PK: Well, I focused on that group which is the main demographic I belong to and one that I feel needs this book the most. But you are correct that I feel a deep connection to those other groups. In fact, my own people, Iranian-Americans, have sometimes really disappointed me—for example, conservative Iranian-Americans in Southern California who are quite Trumpian and always pro-war-with-Iran. Or sometimes I have felt the Iranian literary community in Los Angeles to not really have much interest in me and my work, which can feel hurtful. But I guess this is what a family is—we may disagree, we may even dislike each other, but we are blood. And so those people, wrong and right and off and on and all that, they are my people. In my head—and they may not agree!—this book was something I feel our demographic needed. I mean, there should not be only one big essay collection from an Iranian-American from a big mainstream publisher and yet here we are.
NP: You’ve published two fiction books and two nonfiction books, yet Brown Album’s introduction states how you’re best known as a spokesperson for your people—familiar moment for most BIPOC writers in America, pigeonholed into the burden of representation in a way their white peers never are. Your essay, “How to write Iranian America” highlights this experience of creative confinement and shows how American publishing can commodify the minority experience in the name of “diversity.” In the near or not so near a future, do you see a change where BIPOC writers can access creative freedom to the same degree as their white peers, especially when publishing with the Big 5? If yes, where and how do you foresee the change?
PK: I think we have a long way to go but I hope it will be sooner than I suspect. I mean, American Dirt just came out this year and we saw the horrific racist debacle with this book that was basically rigged to be a bestseller in spite of its incredibly offensive portrayal of Latinx people by an author who identified as white until its publication really. When I think of that mess, I think we have not come far at all—how could that have happened in 2020? When I started that essay “How to Write Iranian-America,” it was nearly a decade ago. I began writing it from scraps of notes, little journal-like entries I would to write to myself when I would try to compose these essays that were being asked of me, that I knew my heart was not into. Some of those essays are even in this book! By the end of the collection, there is a weird META aspect as I am sort of criticizing myself for allowing my own pigeonholing—and yet those very works are on display in this collection. Do they have merit? Yes, I think they do, and just because they left me frustrated doesn’t mean they were trash. But the experience BIPOC writers go through in this incredibly bigoted industry in this still quite bigoted era is just unlike anything a white writer can imagine. I still always feel like I am walking uphill, always fighting, always struggling, and I am now 42 with my first book having come out at age 29. This is not a good way to exist. So we do the work and hope future generations don’t suffer like we did.
NP: Your book’s introduction shares how you wrote the last, title essay for yourself: “Visibility was the start, invisibility the end.” “Brown Album,” the title essay, further begins by reminding the reader, “This is the essay that no one can touch.” Can you explain what you mean by these lines?
PK: Well, I took a certain joy in having that final essay be a too-long, perhaps too-messy essay for me to even imagine it could be published. I purposely wanted to write an essay that was not neat, formulaic, what a magazine or newspaper would want. I wrote it in a way I never wrote the others—it is an utterly uncommissioned and uncommissionable essay. That is liberating to me. Its roughness and rawness are liberating to me. I loved that my editor understood what I was doing and why this needed to be the title essay too. That essay is just for the reader who went through that book’s journey, a collection full of essays that can stand alone. But that essay does not. It brings it all together. And it addresses the issue of race—not just ethnicity and nationality that makes up much of the book—but the actual issue of Iranians and race within the communities which I think is very important and not talked about enough.
NP: There is a scene in the book where the narrator has dinner with her parents after Trump’s presidential victory and conversations on race become uncomfortable, frustrating. The narrator tells the reader: “What if identity was always at the table? That was the rift that made us all impossibilities to one another.” I know this rift, as do many of my brown (desi) sisters, more so in a time when Hindu nationalism is on the rise in the subcontinent. As a writer and activist who also has a strong political voice on social media, how do you balance the emotional labor of negotiating this rift while meeting the demands of a writing life?
PK: It is definitely not easy. And it never comes to a tidy conclusion. I think of identity as something we negotiate in continuum, and in cycles, and in motion. I arrived to a strong sense of my own identity fairly late in life but that doesn’t mean I don’t find it challenged still at times. Within my own family their identities have also evolved. I guess relativity is key here. For the first time in my life, I am thinking of being an immigrant once more, but this time by leaving the US and moving back to Asia. So what will identity mean then? A whole renegotiation will begin once more. This is of course quite challenging, this balance you speak of. But the emotional labor is also my subject so it interests me, while it also taxes me. I guess what I did after a while was make identity my topic and theme so at least all the labor would feel worthwhile, all in the service of my true love which is art.
NP: Brown Album talks of your inability to appreciate Joan Didion’s work, your non-recognition with her America, and the West Coast in particular. This is another relatable moment for most writers and readers of color toward what is considered the literary Canon (emphasis on the big C). Yet your book’s title pays an homage to Didion. How would you explain this paradox to your reader?
PK: I think of it less as an homage than an appropriation actually. I guess the homage is only cheeky really—I dropped the “The” which I felt opened the meaning for me. I think of the white canonical realm as being very wedded to their “The”—they love being the definitive voice or the definitive whatever of a certain thing. I don’t want to be definitive at all, I want to escape that. And I want to not be singular but collective. So all ideas were in my mind. I loved Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, which investigates blackness. So I felt like we needed a Brown Album too. And of course, outside of Didion there is the very literal meaning of the title which I get into in the final essay as well, when I think about those huge stacks of brown photo albums that I would spend hours going through again and again and again every time I returned back to my parents’ home.
NP: Which writers or books are the biggest influences on your writing?
PK: Let’s not say books—so hard to choose!—but authors, and that would be Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Sandra Cisneros, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Salman Rushdie, Patrick Chamoiseau, Can Xue, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Leonora Carrington, Clarice Lispector, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde.
NP: Your next book, a novel, is called Tehrangeles (Pantheon Books, 2022)? What took you back to writing fiction? And this book in particular?
PK: In spite of my two nonfiction books, I mostly identify as a fiction writer and specifically a novelist. I began that book in 2010 when I felt sure I could never sell my second novel (The Last Illusion finally came out in 2014 but after two and a half years of rejections). I wrote Tehrangeles initially out of spite—it was a joke to entertain myself because I kept getting these rejections from editors where they would pitch to me what they thought my second novel should be. And it was always focused on Iranian women so I thought, yes, why don’t I write a novel with all Iranian women. And then I started reading about how Louisa May Alcott never wanted to write Little Women—a book I actually always hated—and how she did it to satisfy her dad and editor, and of course it became a hit. I ended up imagining a sort of first Iranian American Reality TV family—this was just before the reality show “Shahs of Sunset” came out—at a time of war with Iran! And then I decided I would model the four daughters on Little Women. Anyway, it’s a very difficult book to write, although it is fun—it has all sorts of wild things, like Valley Girl stream-of-consciousness and chapters dictated from the POV of a Persian cat. I need to really get back to work on it as I am trashing the 100 pages we showed Pantheon which got them to buy it! But it will be better. I love writing fiction—it is my true home.
