Shumona Sinha was born and grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal. In 1990 she gained Bengal’s Greatest Younger Poet award. She began studying French on the age of twenty-two and moved to Paris a number of years later. She has since been naturalised French.
Her first novel, Fenêtre sur l’abîme, was revealed in 2008. Her second novel, Assommons les pauvres!, was revealed in 2011 and subsequently translated into German, Arabic, Italian and Hungarian, and tailored for stage in Germany and Austria. It was translated into English as Down With the Poor! by Teresa Lavender Fagan and revealed in 2022. Her third novel, Calcutta (2014), acquired the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises and the Grand Prix du Roman of the Société des gens de lettres. Her most up-to-date novel, Le testomony russe, was revealed in March 2020 by Éditions Gallimard.
She has additionally translated and revealed a number of anthologies of up to date French and Bengali poetry in collaboration along with her former husband, the poet Lionel Ray.
In a dialog hosted by the Jaipur Literature Competition, Sinha spoke about why French is her chosen, being a politically incorrect author, and the way writing has not precisely been cathartic for her. Excerpts from the dialog:
You had been born and grew up in Calcutta. You will have even written in Bengali. Inform me in regards to the second – or the moments – that made you wish to write within the French language as a substitute.
My attraction to the French language was from the very starting, it was love at first sight after I began studying it in Calcutta after I was 22 years outdated. In my early years in Paris, individuals from Calcutta got here to my dream, and spoke, within the muffled dreamy approach, in French.
I began writing a travelogue in Bengali, nevertheless it wasn’t working in any respect, after two or three pages I found that I used to be unconsciously considering in French, and unconsciously translating myself from French into Bengali. Therefore, I made a decision to put in writing in French.
However writing in French doesn’t occur as a result of a choice is made, it occurs as a result of I breathe the language, I reside in it, I can’t suppose in some other language anymore. The method of writing is cerebral and bodily on the identical time. Phrases, sentences gush and stream inside you.
However as somebody who was as soon as far eliminated out of your chosen language, is there any cause you determined it have to be French wherein you inform your tales?
For the above-cited causes, additionally, not writing in Bengali or in English, that’s avoiding one thing given, so apparent, and looking for the unknown, is thrilling, exhilarating. Rimbaud mentioned that the true life is absent. We made a extra optimistic model of it: the true life is elsewhere. I assume my elsewhere was within the French language.
Jhumpa Lahiri, who now just about writes solely in Italian, has typically spoken about how writing in a once-foreign language has granted her sure freedoms that her delivery language or English didn’t. Do you additionally really feel freer if you write or converse in French?
In contrast to Jhumpa Lahiri, I haven’t pursued any literary profession, even much less a profitable one, in my native language Bengali or in English, earlier than writing in French. I wrote a number of poems and poetical prose throughout my adolescence and early youth, revealed twice in somewhat journal, however I critically began writing solely in French.
Writing in French provides me extraordinary liberty and it’s on so many ranges! As a lady I be at liberty, liberated from social patriarchal ethical boundaries. The French language itself is stuffed with linguistic prospects, particularly as I wasn’t born into it however needed to discover it like an adventurer, my writing course of provides me a incredible alternative to be experimental, to create linguistic inventiveness.
Like your protagonist in Down With the Poor! you too used to work at OFPRA [French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons]. You misplaced your job due to your writing. Did you concern this may occur or was it a punishment for talking up?
I didn’t know that OFPRA had any literary style buds, haha! So no, I didn’t anticipate in any respect that they may hearth me. And sure, after all, it was a punishment for talking up. They pretended that my novel was disrespectful to the individuals from Bengal/Bangladesh. That’s humorous as a result of OFPRA is aware of that these tales are unfaithful, but that’s the one form of story OFPRA accepts from these individuals, and in virtually 100 per cent of instances rejects their software, and if ever they inform their true tales, they’re additionally rejected immediately. This can be a hypocritical system, as I’ve uncovered in my novel. So after all, they didn’t tolerate it.
It was fascinating to examine Cox Bazar and Bangladeshi refugees are totally conscious of how France will reject these looking for asylum until they’re disenfranchised politically. In a approach, the system encourages them to manufacture their actuality. What do you make of this hypocrisy?
It’s a “manufacturing facility of lies”, as I’ve written within the novel. The Geneva Treaty was signed in 1951. It was for political asylum. Since then, our planet has modified. Half of Bangladesh stays underneath the water for months. Individuals don’t have entry to their properties, lands. How can they survive? It’s an financial and ecological migration. It ought to be accepted and acknowledged as it’s. Within the capitalist ultra-liberal system, cash circulates, commodities cross the border, and solely males, proletarian males can not transfer in the event that they wish to change their future. It’s revolting.
On the very starting of the novel, you write, “It was agonizing to see closed doorways in a metropolis, in a rustic I beloved, after I had put a lot effort into opening them.” I’ve two questions – a) Can a rustic with closed doorways ever love its immigrants? b) What does the realisation of your efforts not bearing fruition have on the psyche of an immigrant?
Properly, that is fiction, regardless that, we all know now it’s a really practical one. I dramatise the characters and conditions in my novels…For me personally, the doorways are usually not closed, I wouldn’t be right here right now if that was the case. However for the principle feminine protagonist of my novel, I created a extra susceptible, dramatised, darkish situation.
France just isn’t a hostile nation in the direction of foreigners, in any other case, we the Others couldn’t be residing there. After all, there’s a new development of a faction of xenophobic ultranationalist power. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the French inhabitants and the system itself are broad-minded.
I don’t think about myself an immigrant. I don’t consider in a inflexible one-dimensional identification. I’m Bengali, I’m Indian, I’m Parisian, I’m French, I’m somewhat bit Russian too as I grew up devouring Russian literature, I’m from the planet Earth. Our identification just isn’t the one made from pores and skin, flesh and blood, however the one we create for our soul, with our goals and hopes, creativeness, ardour, love and data, issues that don’t have any frontiers.
Later within the ebook I encountered a slightly fascinating sentence which has been translated into English as, “I endured hours of significant comedy.” I learn “severe comedy” in two methods – the circumstances that the candidates discover themselves wherein power them to provide you with cock-and-bull tales and, how we’ve got let the West make guidelines for the remainder of the world. Would you say writing these migration-centric tales helps you make sense of the world order? Or at the very least supply a catharsis of some type?
Very true! It’s a really practical novel written in poetic prose, it’s a virulent criticism of the French/European political asylum system, exposing the postcolonial distress, misery, and trauma of individuals from Bangladesh and Bengalis from West Bengal, who’re struggling to outlive, searching for a greater place, a greater life. To take action they should lie, to purchase made-up tales from public writers, as a result of that’s the form of story, of political persecution, the French/European asylum system considers, simply to reject their software afterwards systematically.
These persons are additionally exploited by their fellow countrymen, the middlemen, who generate profits out of the scenario.
The narrator, an interpreter on the asylum workplace, who significantly resembles me, is torn between her integrity, her determined anger in entrance of this inhuman disastrous situation of her fellow countrymen.
Penning this novel helped me higher perceive the world order. However it was positively not a catharsis for me. The survival situation of those individuals hasn’t modified. They nonetheless reside in an insufferable scenario.
That’s fascinating as a result of in one other paragraph within the ebook the refugees are described as “parasites clinging to the host physique.” So would you say it’s typically crucial for a author to be politically incorrect?
For me as a author, it’s completely primordial to disregard political correctness. Whereas writing Assommons les pauvres! I used to be absorbed by the textual content, I wasn’t searching for a critic’s appreciation, success, or reputation. I wasn’t involved in any respect by any social or ethical worth system. As a author I reject any binary dogmatic view, I don’t attempt to create heroes/heroines and villains, however human beings with their flaws, their secret shadow zone, I attempt to seize the purpose of juncture between their inside darkness and the beam of sunshine.
Is there a cause why solely certainly one of your books has been translated into English? Will the others be translated quickly?
Translation into completely different European languages of books written in English is extra frequent than the opposite approach round. It helps if you obtain one of the vital prestigious literary awards in France. Although I’ve acquired glorious awards, and grand press protection in France and overseas, there are many writers in France.
Assommons les pauvres! was immediately translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, Arabic. Then I modified writer – my newest books, together with the brand new one, had been all revealed by Gallimard, essentially the most iconic and prestigious writer in France. So, for my earlier books, the interpretation course of could be affected. Though my fourth novel Apatride [Stateless] has been translated into English, it’s following its due course to be revealed. The identical goes for my different novels.
At the moment, three translators are very enthusiastic to translate all my novels into English.
I’m comfortable to have a British and an American writer for a similar ebook. In India, some incredible publishers publish translated works. In the event that they uncover my literary work, as a fellow citizen and recognised French writer, because of you and the great Jaipur Literature Competition, that might be nice!
The approaching years shall be fascinating if all the things goes effectively.
Additionally learn:
Shumona Sinha’s ‘Down With the Poor’ is a poetic narration of France’s modern-day refugee disaster
This dialog was hosted by the Jaipur Literature Competition. Shumona Sinha and B Jeyamohan shall be in dialog with Suchitra Ramachandran on the session ‘Multilingualities: Literature Throughout Languages’ on February 4 on the pageant.