Tash Aw: “Most of us are not comfortable with our bodies”
The three-time Booker Prize-nominated author on writing a Southeast Asian epic, his characters’ struggles to belong, and how shame and pride influence their choices
The South was originally conceived as an 800-page epic, but you felt something “hypermasculine about writing a book like that”. In writing a novel that deals with a mix of celebrated and looked-down-upon masculinities, how were you able to ascertain within yourself a dormant masculinity in aspiring to execute a feat like that? Such realisations often escape artists? How did you rethink The South as part of a quartet?
It was easy. When I first started writing what would become The South, I realised very quickly that I didn’t have the ego required to write a huge weighty epic, a very male kind of ego, which involves believing that you know how people intersect with history over a long sweep of time; how history plays out and affects individual lives.
I realised that what I was doing was imitating the kind of writing that had first inspired me when I started out. From then on it was just a process of artistic honesty — I wanted to write a Southeast Asian epic which didn’t presume a total understanding of history, but rather something more intimate. I wanted to accompany the characters as they lived through the years. It seemed more real to me and more relevant to the times we live in, which are more fractured and disconnected from the body.
In this novel, body and land come across as two crucial sites that inform one’s ease with one’s identity. Would you agree? Were select incidents invoked to convey?
We always assume that we are comfortable with our bodies and that there’s some kind of cohesion between body and identity, but the truth is that most of us are not comfortable with our bodies. Often, they feel foreign to us; this is particularly true of many queer people, who have struggled with a sense of belonging from the start. It’s also true of landscapes. We are expected to feel ease and belonging to our countries but often we feel a disconnect, even in places we have grown up in, as if people and places that surround us don’t understand or appreciate us. That’s what all the characters in The South feel, in different ways. They’re all trying to find a sense of being settled — of belonging, I guess — in their country, their family, even their own bodies.
Chuan often says, ‘I want to be clean for you.’ While Jay takes it literally, was there a metaphorical cleanness that you were signalling? Maybe Chuan wants to achieve something like innocence by cleaning himself. Then, there’s the relationship with being unwanted, dirt-like, that queer people share, having been ridiculed using these very words. Your thoughts?
The exchanges between Jay and Chuan are, on the one hand, very simply about the awkwardness between early physical encounters, when we don’t know what to do with our bodies and are anxious about everything. But on a deeper level, they are about the differences that exist between the two boys — education, class, emotional intentions. Even though Jay is younger, and has been, up to now, a shy teenager, he comes from a more privileged background than Chuan, a fact that, in these encounters, makes him feels more confident and empowered.
There’s a certitude with which novelists approach worldbuilding, which, reading several interviews of yours, I reckon you are moving away from. What are the challenges you face in this regard?
You’re right in pointing this out, which is why I guess a lot of the physical setting of The South feels at once vivid but uncertain. Vivid in the sense that the characters recall it very clearly in a visual sense but feel emotionally uncertain about it. I don’t decide how to build the world of a novel in advance, everything is determined in the writing of the characters, and how they experience the world they live in.
In The South, the characters are at odds with the landscape in which they find themselves, which means our appreciation of it, filtered through their eyes, is similarly filled with a kind of hesitancy. It’s neither beautiful nor ugly, comforting nor threatening, but rather all of these things.
While the use of polyphony in a novel creates diversity of perception, the shifting viewpoints tend to confuse readers. Why did you feel it was necessary for this story?
The story of the family is told by Jay, now a much older writer, looking back at a point in time. With the benefit of hindsight, he realises that his recollections of that period represent only one point of view, so his portrait of this group of people now also includes all the fragments that he has retained from that time, brought to life by an understanding that is amplified with time.
It’s interesting that you say it’s confusing to the reader whereas I think it’s a much truer representation of how we remember places, people and events. The memories come back to us in fragments that we stitch together to form a wider picture that is rarely whole or conclusive, and often there are gaps that leave us frustrated. That’s how I wanted the novel to feel — like a reconstruction of how memory really works. We’ve become so conditioned by Hollywood to believe that stories come back to us in neatly defined chunks, singly narrated, but in fact the stories of our lives are inextricably linked to those of others.
Usually, the binary of pride and shame is associated with queer people’s experiences in a novel. However, the way the interactions unfold when the Lim family goes south, living at the farm, along with Fong and his son, Chuan — because of their shared histories — make for an interesting site of exchange of pride and shame. There’s a suggestion of contested morality here that they seem to uphold that can offset a family’s equilibrium. What are your thoughts on this?
Pride and shame in the novel are not linked only to sexuality but gender, poverty, class and education. All of these are exposed in the clash between the two families, who presume a common ground but who are actually very different. I wanted the novel to show how everyone suffers from shame in different ways that are caused not by any innate sense of inadequacy, but from the pressures of the society they live in. For example, at their age, the boys are just beginning to be made aware of what it means to be queer; Fong is already familiar with the shame of being poor and incapable of controlling his own life; and Jay’s mother and sisters grapple with the shame and frustration of being trapped in by a patriarchal structure in which they are incapable of pursuing their desires. At the same time, they all obviously enjoy moments of joy in their lives — the question is, how much will their shame, or pride, influence their choices and, ultimately, their freedom?
READ MORE – Review: The South by Tash Aw
You are a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) artists-in-Berlin programme. You’ve also been a paralegal and a tutor. Do you engage with different practices and art forms? Along with multilingualism, how do they inform your fiction writing?
Berlin is a great place for interdisciplinary collaborations, so yes, I’ve been enjoying speaking with and working with artists in other fields. But this isn’t something new for me. I’ve always found it very important for my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, to engage with cinema and theatre, which I’ve always been fascinated by. In Berlin, I encounter many visual artists too, so it’s been good for me to think about how other people capture human experiences in various different forms. My work has always been influenced by these other art forms, in ways that affect technique but also the way art attempts to capture the experience of human life.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
