Q Manivannan: the (academic) writer

Q Manivannan (AFHEA) is an SGSSS/ESRC-funded doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews whose work documents care and grief as political action, building upon cases in India. They listen to stories of grief, friendship, home, and walks, and questions if peace and tactical solidarity can be reimagined in caring languages.

Do you see yourself as a writer?

I am uncomfortable calling myself a writer. I write, I have always written, but to call oneself a writer feels laden with a difficult expectation, defined roles, and a responsibility towards words and readers that I am still learning to attend to as well as my teacher does. On most days, my research involves listening to and reading stories of care and grief in violent geographies, and I feel heavy; writing makes me feel lighter. This lightness isn’t always an easy lightness – it’s an unsettling quiet, the doubt that comes with putting one’s best words on the page. Best, not by way of beauty, or skill even, but in honesty. Shuttling between Fife, Chennai, Edinburgh, and Delhi, the homes I live in, I’ve found that honesty is textured by and infused with loneliness: a different flavour of lonely in each city.

Is there a particular time of the day or place you write best?

I often write at noontime when it’s warm outside, or at night-time when it’s cold. Both hours offer a silence with which I can sit with my thoughts. Mahasweta Devi wrote that time is the “arch fugitive, always on the run”. While writing, I pretend that I can lovingly offer time respite, demand that it stops and rests for a little while; I ask it to pause and sit with me, let the minutes and hours soak in words: where they come from, where they go, how they’re spoken, how we texture their histories with voices of our own.

Do you enjoy the writing process?

Over a decade ago, following a rocky floristry enterprise, my mother and father briefly ran a spelling bee franchise in Chennai. This, I suspect, came in part from my father’s fascination with words and from his father – a lawyer – who underlined unfamiliar words in newspapers and books and had a dictionary always at the ready to decipher not only their meaning, but what they meant. Even today my father fills most books he reads with similar scribbles and underlinings, of words he does not understand, and of those he wishes to understand better.

Some essence of this granular love for words has seeped into me, no doubt, in a different form. It persists in me through repetition, a practised desire to know words, to enact the grain of the voice, to write them and then read them out loud, feel them roll off my tongue and bask in the redolent musicality of syllables.

And I love to write – it’s the only thing I can really do. My writing, even the most technical and academic, is constantly grieving and yearning. Yet, good writing demands that I, at times, cast aside my voice and embody another, become the languages, tones, and words I’m least accustomed to. This is not easy. The only way I’ve learned to do this is to embody my loved ones, to try to think and write as they do or did. It is tribute, and tribute, like any ritual, must be done right.

What’s the hardest part of writing for you?

I write to be read.

I would like my words to find as many homes and friends as they can. I would like my words to help those I write for. The hardest part of writing will always be the knowledge that there are those who will not read your work, and even if they did, would remain unmoved and unchanged. While this is a harsh realisation, I sustain my practice of writing knowing that it is work, and it is my work. My friends, reviewers, and advisors hold me to the task. They demand that I write, and that I – as the poet Aditi Nagrath once said – write “bigger, braver, weirder words”, and do it honestly. And if I could just go on and continue to hold myself to their mark, I might learn to write. Unsuspecting, on some quiet night, I might discover that I have become a writer.

Are there any books on writers or writing that you have particularly enjoyed and would recommend?

Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End reminds me of very many things. In it, a mother converses with her dead son, and they talk about words and writing. I’d like to end these reflections with a portion from it, where they’re speaking to one another:

“I thought about my language… Not only was it immoderate but it was imprecise. How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a still-born baby? People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance… Sometimes sadness makes me unable to write.  

Why write, he said, if you can feel?

What do you mean?

I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don't know how to.

And reading? I asked…

For those who do.”