‘The Convert’ is the story of this woman’s journey from NYC to Pakistan. Here’s the author’s journey of introspection through her characters, their beliefs and finally the realisation that there is no absolute truth. Deboarah Baker in conversation with Sayan Bhattacharya.
The home page of your website starts with this quote by Freud: “Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery… Truth is not accessible.” When the author of three acclaimed biographies uses such a quote, what does it connote? Is it a disclaimer?
Well, I thought more of it as a webtag, to register subliminally on the readers that what follows is not entirely objective. It is not some sort of a scholarly biography.
And does it stem somewhat from the reactions that some of your books have received?
No. No. It was more because I knew that the formal approach that I was taking to this subject was unorthodox.
If you were to draw a common link between the biographies you have written, what would it be?
The first one was not really a whole book. It was about poets. The current one is obviously not a poet. She is more of an ideologue. But I think they are all sort of searching for some kind of a final truth. In the course of researching and writing about them, it becomes a vehicle for me too to have a search of some kind. They are all extremists in their own way. I mean my first big book was titled ‘In Extremis’. It was about an American poet who was kind of an ideologue of poetry. In the end they just realise that their truths are as incomplete as any other. In the course of writing the book you sort of sublimate yourself and you become sort of a comrade to them and to their ideas and you struggle with them. For a while they seem to have all the answers but in the end, in this book, at least, I realised that they again start getting a little claustrophobic.
So in what sense is a Beatnik extremist?
Allen Ginsberg (‘A Blue Hand’ about the Beat Poet) wasn’t at all an extremist. He was searching for God. He came to India to try and find Heaven, to see God and to reach heaven some how. So that is kind of an extreme thing. He thought he would come to India and may be die here (laughs).
In that sense, aren’t we all extremists? Aren’t you an extremist as an author, trying to get the details right, trying to remain true to your convictions?
I don’t know if I have any convictions. I think my role is not to have any but to be swayed by the people I am writing about, to inhabit the people I am writing about to such an extent that I have to empty out whatever ideas I have, whatever prejudices and biases I had to have. You have to unburden yourself of all those things to be open to a new truth, to somebody else’s truth. And that works for a while, but after a while you begin to get restless because you begin to see contradictions, hypocrisies or things like that. I think it’s a universal human longing for certainty but I am plagued by questions. You know, one question leads to another question to another question. I also have this book where I write. So whatever questions I get answers to, I write. So I know I’m still to know this and that.
So your sense of certainty is that you will keep questioning…
Well, that does not sound much like certainty (laughs). Just I am never out of questions.
What struck you when you first came across Maryam’s letters in the New York Public Library?
The first thing that struck me was a photograph of her in a burqa. And I realised that most of the times that we see pictures of women in burqas, those are sort of stolen photographs because these women have closed themselves off. So whoever is taking their pictures is just stealing their pictures. But in this photograph, she was posing for the picture. You know, she is standing there with her hands placed in front of her, and it made me wonder what was the point of having your picture taken and not even showing your face! But then I began to think, that, well, may be this is how she wants to be seen. This is how she feels herself. This is who she is, a woman under a veil. And this is how she sees the world more clearly, through a veil; this is kind of a paradox. But then that is kind of what even I do. I also go under a veil. The veil of a biographer. The veil which gives me privilege to see the world through another set of eyes, through another imagination. The veil of a scholar and I use these lives of other people to try and answer my own questions. That was sort of my beginning to bond with her. In order to understand her, I had to use my anonymity and put myself out there. In a way, that was very difficult for me to do as a writer. Because I wasn’t used to writing in the first person, I wasn’t used to talking about myself. Not that I am all over the book or anything but certainly the process of researching and writing it became a much more overt process, instead of a covert process, as the way is with most biographers.
So, apart from this photograph which triggered the idea of the book, did topical incidents like, 9/11, Islamophobia, the so called war on terror have any bearing?
Obviously in the back of my mind those questions were there but I didn’t discover the extent to which they were important to me until I had to face lot of resistance. For instance, I wrote a book proposal and I tried to publish it but no one wanted to publish it. I tried to give it up. I tried to move on to another subject. But I was really haunted by the idea, so I had to ask myself why I am haunted by it. Why is this story so important to me? And then I began to think that may be it has something to do with 9/11. May be it is the fact that my life has changed since 9/11 in ways that I can’t even start to consider. Also, then I stumbled upon her letters in the Spring of 2007, it was in the middle of this incredibly violent period in Iraq where people were killing each other left and right. And we had just opened this huge can of worms. So I had a lot of question about what my own country was really up to. So in reading her critique of America, American policy and the Western Civilization in general, I began to question the very foundation of my assumptions. You know, being from a privileged western country, a wealthy country, I experienced viscerally what America was unleashing, so that also became part of the portrayal of my journey in writing about her.
You discovered a wealth of materials. From there to selecting what will appear in the book, how did you exercise that choice?
I found the photograph first and then I found her letters to her parents. As I read them, I was really captivated and so much charmed by the voice of the letters. The letters were really long and I knew that the readers might not have the same kind of patience that I had and I wanted the reader to be really sucked into the story. So I sort of translated these letters by taking those long, endless letters and boiling them down to their essence. Thus the reader would go through the same process that I was going through but it would be a much more crafted process for them, much more compelling.
So isn’t there a danger of fictionalizing?
Yes, there is.
How do you deal with that as a biographer?
See I didn’t make anything up. I think with fiction, you are making things up. I think, to a certain extent, the reader just has to trust me. Even after they read through and they find what I say at the end, they have to trust me that I was being honest in some way. Just, I wanted them to understand that it was the story. Because I thought that’s what Maryam was doing with her letters. She was trying to create a story. A story of conversion. A story of finding truth. So I just sort of wanted to do something similar but in a more structured way for the readers.
In one of your articles you talked about the perils of writing about living people. We read that you received a letter from Maryam and she said that it was more or less a fair appraisal of her life. Then again, she also wrote to the library that it was full of falsehoods. How do you explain this contradiction?
I think that she is a woman of two minds, or more than two. You know, some times people are not the most objective purveyors of the story that they are telling about themselves. You don’t have the 360 degree view of what your life is, living in purdah for 50 years. I am not saying that I have a 360 degree view of her life, but telling it from the inside and telling it from the outside, I feel that I did get close. But we never fully get there.
I think she appreciated the idea that someone wrote a book about her. May be she told me what I wanted to hear. But I also think she believed that I had been fair to her within the purview of my western vision. But she insists that all the letters that she wrote are authentic letters and I had a hard time believing that. At a certain point in the course of research when I went back to the library and began looking at her letters, carefully, I realised that the first 24 letters that she wrote to her parents were absolutely authentic. But she also wrote this autobiography that seemed to be a collection of letters that she had written as a child, as a daughter, as a sister, when she was living in America. Reading those letters, I realised that they were all written when she was in Pakistan.
How did you discover that?
When I first read them, I just assumed that they were the real letters. But then, as I say in the book, I went back and looked at them more carefully. For example, she talked about that evening she went to see Eleanor Roosevelt talk about Israel. It was a letter to her sister and she was talking about last night. The letter was dated November 31st. First of all, there is no November 31st (laughs). But then people give wrong dates in their letters all the time. Then I went to the local papers. I think if Eleanor Roosevelt comes to speak at your local high school, the papers would have something about it. Then I realised she came, not in November, but the following March. So obviously, she remembered vaguely when it was. In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t talking about Israel; she spoke on the writing of the ‘Four Freedoms’. So Maryam was creating the letters to sort of augment the story of how she came to Islam. So she was creating the back story. Back story of her childhood. Back story of growing up in America with assimilated Jewish, secular, Zionist parents, the struggles that she went through as a child, in school, at summer camp, in college. And this was the way she chose to do it, by creating these phony letters. But she insists that those letters are real. Now, I was working from a published collection of her letters. I didn’t have actual letters; there were no manuscript letters, no envelopes, no dates, and no postage stamps. That also raises questions. But they are not completely fraudulent because they also expose certain truths. Instead of writing a traditional autobiography, or memoir, this was what she chose.
Was it, like, she was also trying to cultivate a certain image?
Probably she is just trying to explain herself to herself. You know, like anybody does. When they sit down as an old man to write their memoirs, the stories that they told themselves about their evolution as a person, get refined and sharpened and mythologized the more you tell the stories. The more you tell the stories, the more perfect stories they become with complexities, more details. Which is the way most people live their lives, you know, it’s never a perfect story. It is always a little more complicated than that. That’s why your version of what happened to you on your 10th birthday is going to be different from the way your mother will describe it. You know what I mean? I find the stories that people tell when they are older are more perfect narratives than the actual researched ones with dates and facts.
I would like to go back to the Freud quote again here. If you are reading Deborah Baker, what conclusion would you draw from that quote?
First of all, I had to put something on that front page of the website. Actually that’s the epigraph of ‘The Convert’. Seeing this book, my editor told me I had to write that note at the end. For a long time I didn’t think that the book would ever be published. So I didn’t feel like I had to explain to any one why I wrote it the way I did. I just wanted to get it out of my head so that I could start another book. Well, I thought I was just going to bury it. Of course I started with the actual letters. I typed them all in. But then I began cutting them, I rearranged them and after a while you lose track of what the original letter was. First you start by putting in ellipses, so you know that you took something out. But then you think, well, if I am a reader and I see there were ellipses I’d think “Oh. What did she take out?” I didn’t want them to be thinking about me when they are reading Maryam’s letter. I want them to just read Maryam’s letter as if it was the real letter. So that’s a little sneaky, you know. But I want them to be totally in her head. Not keep thinking about me when they’re reading her letters. I wanted to have complete control over how I imagine what the reader was going through. So I did that. But then the editor said that I had to explain what I did. So I said, “Okay, I’ll write this.” Then he said, “Well, maybe we should put this in front of the book.” And I said, “No! Because I wanted the reader to be sucked in and if they begin the book with this quote, they’d be completely suspicious of me.” I wanted them to fall, well not in love, but to accept Maryam on the terms that I accepted her when I first started reading her letters, before all the complications started crawling in. So he said, “Okay, but then you have to come up with an epigraph that will raise the red flag.” So that will plant the idea in the reader’s head that may be the way the book is, is not completely kosher.
I was reading this novel, or paranovel ‘In the Lake of the Woods’ by this wonderful American writer, Tim O’Brian. It’s a novel but it is more about trying to reconstruct this character. It’s about a crime and they are trying to figure out who did it, or what his motivation was. So it sort of mimics the process of biography, this novel. So yes, that’s that.
How do you deal with criticism?
As in?
As a biographer when people question the veracity of your research?
People really haven’t raised as many questions. I had expected a lot more than what I got. But also, I am very honest. Like you can read this letter she wrote to me, and here is this other letter that she wrote and you can read that too and how do you decide between these too letters. How do you decide who’s telling the truth?
Since we are talking about Maryam, we’d really like to know your opinion on what’s happening in Europe vis-à-vis the ban on burqa, in France, for instance?
Well I am not French. So technically I don’t have to have an opinion. But I do think it is important to make a space for a secular culture. If I’m going to parade my Christianity around and that makes other people uncomfortable and especially in a school-type situation… You know Maryam talks about the way she was treated by the Catholics and the orthodox Jews. During Easter, the Catholics feel very catholic and very anti-semitic, so they would throw rocks at her, and beat her with pom poms. And you see this happening all the time. There should be a space, and school seems like a good space, where everyone should basically be the same.
On a more personal front, when we talk about Amitav Ghosh, this new term is coming up: “anthropological novel”. And your kind of books, too require exhaustive research. So what is home like for two researchers?
He is a novelist. He does a lot of research but he’s still a novelist. Whereas, I like to think of myself as a strictly non-fiction writer. I may be unorthodox in my methods but I’m a non-fiction writer. So we both use libraries heavily, bookstores heavily.
Is it a shared library?
No..no. Well he doesn’t know what I’m reading and I don’t know what he’s reading. We are in totally different spaces when we write.
Is he the first reader of your manuscript?
I’m not the first reader of his manuscripts and he’s definitely not the first reader of my manuscripts. May be once he read, and that cured me of having him as the first reader (laughs)! You want him to read the best draft you have got and not the first draft and then maybe hear a comment or two! Mostly I read him as a reader, like any body else, not as an editor. Even though I worked as an editor for a long time, I’m not really interested in editing him and he’s not really interested in editing me. I don’t want him to edit me.
