Marina Budhos and Marc Aronson: “Writing together is easy”
At the Neev Literature Festival, the authors of Sugar Changed the World spoke about working together, and writing about issues faced by immigrants
What is it like to be a couple that writes together?
Marc: Well, Marina always says that writing together is easy, and I think that it is true. Of course, there are tensions and differences at times, and we take criticism from one another, but it is a creative process at the end of the day. Creativity in itself is satisfying. You get new ideas, and you are building a product together. It is also a little like parenting, if I may say so.
Marina: Wait, do you think that our children are products? (laughs)
Marc: (laughs) Well, it’s harder to decide who has to wash the dishes!
What else do you fight about?
Marina: People always say, “Oh my God, if I worked or collaborated with my spouse, there would be a divorce!” And we say, “No, no, no, the big fights that we have are the much more boring fights that every other couple has.” Our fights are usually about the house, money, our children, and really boring stuff about who cleaned the kitchen and where the shoes have been left. Frankly, I find that those are the more trying parts of a partnership. When you are creating something together, it’s not as if it is all daisies and sunshine, but you are working for a common purpose. Also, Marc and I come to our work from distinct styles of thinking. That does make a difference. No one is overshadowing the other. I would think that partners who are very similar — if both are novelists or historians — things might be harder.
Is this how both of you see it?
Marc: My parents were set designers. They worked together in the theatre. There were tensions, but their studio was at home. As an only child, I grew up around parents for whom work and working together was a very satisfying and visible and tangible part of their lives. And then Marina and I co-wrote a book called Eyes of the World (2017), which is about a young Jewish couple in the 1930s — Robert Capa and Gerda Taro — who took powerful photographs of the Spanish Civil War and documented the fight against fascism.
How did you end up so secure in yourselves and so open to collaboration?
Marc: I must add that I started out as an editor, and an editor is the most collaborative. You are always trying to help the author to dig deeper, and make the writing better and richer. In a way, I had that training, and I worked with Marina as an editor before we were married. She wrote a book called Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers (2007). It had stories of Guyanese, Russian, Korean, Central American, Hmong and Muslim teenagers. Working together creatively means that you and your partner are finding more in yourselves.
Marina: The whole is greater than the two of you, right? I write more intuitively, like a novelist. I sort of follow and track the story. I knew I had to step back and also give historical context. But that is actually not my strength as much, but it is completely Marc’s strength. On some level, I was sort of relieved that I had this partner who could handle what I could not. I would say, “Okay, Marc, you go do this part.” When you write your own book, it is all on you. But when you work with a partner, you are taking on what’s your strength, and then your partner takes on what’s their strength. And then you try to find ways to meld those things together. But for me, doing both those books — Eyes of the World (2017) and Sugar Changed the World (2017) felt ambitious. Those books exist only because we wrote together as a team.
Sugar Changed the World (2017) draws on your Jewish heritage and your Indian heritage too. What did you end up learning about each other’s family histories?
Marc: Well, it began that way. I knew about Indian indenture, but not as much. I was happy to learn. And Marina enjoyed learning more about beet sugar as we wrote the book, which is about how the history of sugar is tied up with the slave trade and its eventual abolition.
Marina: We were in Jerusalem when Marc’s cousin told us that they had a relative in the 19th century whose personal life was tied to the history of beet sugar. I knew from family legends that my great-grandparents went from India to work the sugarcane plantations in the West Indies. But we were struck by how two families in different parts of the globe were affected by the same substance. I wound up going down to Guyana, stepping into the archives there and looking at, for instance, this pamphlet for overseers on how you ran a sugar plantation from the 19th century. In fact, there was a trade war between beet sugar and cane sugar.
Marc: Apart from the sugar stories, I’d like to mention something funny about Guyana. Marina and I were engaged, but I had to jump through a final hoop to prove that I was fit to marry her. It was like a folktale where you have to go through fire and ice. (laughs) Marina said, “We are going to travel to Guyana and I am going to see if you can survive.” Well, I did!
Marina: At that time, Guyana had been through a lot, and it was very much a Third World country in a kind of broken-down way. It was kind of coming back up after a rough political period. And I thought, “We’ll have a provisional engagement. If this American guy can survive travelling with me, we are going to be okay.” We have been together for 27 years.
How did your ancestors land up in Guyana?
Marina: My mother is Jewish-American. One part of my father’s side of the family came from what is now Uttar Pradesh, and another part came from what is now Bihar. Mangal Singh, my great-grandfather, was one of three brothers. He sold his land share to his brothers, and set off to Guyana. A lot of people left for desperate reasons, but some left to pursue opportunities. He left to work on a plantation. He wasn’t impoverished. He was appointed in charge of 25 men on a ship because he had a slightly authoritative bearing. I hired somebody in India to help me with the research, and I picked up the story in Guyana.
Going by this, is your book The Professor of Light partly autobiographical?
Marina: Yes, I was interested in writing a coming-of-age story that would somehow find a way to grapple with identity and have a bit of magical realism in the style of storytelling. The last piece that I wanted to weave in was the philosophical strand of light. The philosophy professor in the novel, who has family in Guyana, is daunted by solving the wave-particle duality. How can light be both a particle and a wave? Through this question, I was exploring my identity too. Being from the diaspora, are you solid, as in from one place, or are you a wave? I drew inspiration from the Upanishads and some folktales, and adapted them.
Coming back to your marriage, how did the two of you end up meeting?
Marc: My best friend, Sanjay Nigam, is an Indian doctor, research scientist and also novelist. And he was living in New York. He was reading from his work and going to various events with Indian novelists. I saw Marina at these events, and I was very attracted to and interested in her. But there was another Indian novelist there who was actually working at the United Nations. Yes, Shashi Tharoor! He and his then wife used to have parties and we were invited.
Marina: We have kept in touch with her and the sons but we don’t have much contact with Shashi since he came back to India. So that’s how we met! I was writing and teaching, and Marc was an editor. In fact, I also taught in India as a Fulbright scholar.
Where in India did you teach? How was that experience?
Marina: I was primarily at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, teaching English and creative writing but I was also sent all over India to teach creative writing workshops. I had the wonderful opportunity to live in Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s home. She was a friend of mine.
I met her at a writers’ colony. When she learned that I got the Fulbright, she said, “Oh, I have to be in the US at the same time. Why don’t you stay in my house, and take care of my bills?” Because I was house-sitting for her, I inherited all of her friends as well. That was lovely. When her daughter Nandana — who lives in New York — launched Acrobat, her translation of her mother’s poems from Bengali to English, I was there. Marc’s friend designed that book.
Teaching is another thing that you have in common as a couple, isn’t it?
Marc: Yes, I teach at Rutgers University. Even though I was a book editor and publisher, I had a great deal of contact with librarians, so I teach now in the library school, training librarians. I work with graduate students who will work with either children or teenagers. I also train librarians to work with international children’s books. So, I am creating a massive collection of children’s books from all over the world in many languages. This is partially because there are so many immigrant communities in America, but also because there are such interesting books being created everywhere. I want to open the eyes and ears of American librarians to see how stories are told elsewhere, to see how art is done elsewhere.
Both of you speak passionately about issues faced by immigrants. Tell us more about the novels Ask Me No Questions, Watched and We Are All We Have.
Marina: I think of them as a trilogy. Ask Me No Questions is about Bangladeshi immigrants in New York, who are undocumented. They hope to become legal citizens but 9/11 happens, and they flee to the Canadian border. They fear that they will be deported to Bangladesh.
Watched is about a Bangladeshi boy who becomes an informant on his community. It’s a novel about surveillance, and very grounded in US history. We Are All We Have is about a teenager in New York, whose dead father was a Pakistani political journalist. Her mother, an asylum seeker, is arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sent to a detention facility. These books are grounded in real issues and based on conversations with immigrants.
Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
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