Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poet Jeet Thayil: The good stuff happens during rewrites

Jeet Thayil performing in Bengaluru in 2014; and book cover of 'These Errors Are Correct'. (Photos: Vamsi Krishna via Wikimedia Commons 3.0 and Amazon.in, respectively)

Author Jeet Thayil’s poetry travels through the last 75 years of India’s postcolonial history. Behind this is a process of decolonisation that, for him and his contemporaries, has been far more complex than meets the eye. If writing is about taking stock of language and reclaiming our cultural identity, then what is our language to begin with?

Born a little over a decade after India won its independence, Thayil says that “English became a kind of mother tongue” to him and that, like most Indians, he too has “jugaadified” it. For Thayil, a 1959-born Syrian Christian from Kerala, it was impossible to ignore this historical construct of English and not make it the central course of his work — especially as he did in his 2008 poetry collection titled English.

With Penguin Random House launching the second edition of his 2008 poetry collection These Errors are Correct this year, Thayil spoke about what it means to him to write, and what it means to him to write in “English”. Edited excerpts:

How is the new edition of 'These Errors' different from the original?

It’s a better-looking book, in terms of the paper and the kind of quality and care that’s gone into it. There are a set of associative illustrations, which the original edition didn’t have. I’ve written a new preface for this edition that puts the book into historical context. And finally, there's a QR code on the back flap—with an audio track. You'll hear a collaboration between me and The Burning Deck aka Sandeep Madhavan, who is a musician and a friend.

An illustration in 'These Errors Are Correct'. (Penguin Random House)

Is your hybrid style a conscious one?

At some point it becomes exceedingly conscious. When I understood that the book I'm currently working on would be a book of essays and travel pieces, using photography and letters and ephemera from real life, I knew it would need a certain kind of writing. Once I reached that decision, once I knew what the book required—what kind of framing and what kind of writing—everything that followed was a conscious choice.

So is it good to self-edit one’s writing?

I think editing yourself is an essential requirement for a writer. If you can’t edit your own work, you are in the wrong business. You can’t depend on editors to do it. When I finish a book and give it to my agent, I make sure it is as complete as possible – ready for publication. I don’t send half-finished, unedited work. In any case, first drafts cannot be trusted. The good stuff happens during the rewrites.

Does editing impact you as an author?

As a journalist, I was also an editor of other people’s writing. It’s a technical tool that a writer can develop. You really have to know how to read a sentence and make it better, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. If it’s a question of compression, then you must make it more concise. And if it’s a question of expansion, then you should know how to fill in the gaps in a sentence or a paragraph.

What went behind the writing of 'Narcopolis'?

It is a departure from the poems, but there are also parts of it that are entirely like the poems. There are surreal, hallucinatory pages, and there are immersive digressions into other countries and cultures. And that’s always been a part of my written work, whether in poetry or in prose. I wouldn’t call Narcopolis psychological fiction. It’s documentary fiction, a form of dirty realism, or psychotropic realism.

What was it like to move from poetry to fiction?

I’ve always written prose. I was a journalist for more than two decades. So, even while I was writing poetry, I was writing prose. For me, it really wasn’t any kind of switch to write fiction. The point is, if you take a piece of non-fiction and change a name—it becomes fiction. Fiction and non-fiction are so fluid that they bleed into each other. They’ve always been hybrid genres.

W.G. Sebald’s work isn’t strictly fiction. There’s an element of documentary fantasy. Some of V.S. Naipaul’s so-called novels aren’t novels at all; they are as much works of memoir and journalism as they are works of imagination. So, I don’t see a categorical difference between these types of writing. For me, it’s all writing. It’s just that the line breaks differently in one form, and the modes of digression are different in another.

Where do you now see yourself moving with your style choices?

I suppose you could call the book I’m currently working on ‘non-fiction’, for want of a better word. I guess it’s a strange bird, like the vulturine guineafowl, or tufted puffin, or helmeted hornbill, or magnificent frigatebird, like garden variety phoenix. Most of all, though? It's very much like the mostly magnificent frigatebird. I guess I like strange birds. I mean, don't you?