What I Want to Write

By Gemini Wahhaj •

After publishing my first novel, I found myself unable to write. I had lost language. I had lived in the US for more than twenty years with some sort of relationship with the writing community. I had lost confidence because I had absorbed too well the expectations and rules of narrative and structure, as well as values in American writing.

Every time I sent work to an agent, I encountered the same questions: “How is this commercial? Why would people be interested?” I began to control my writing to cater to the stories an American audience wanted to hear and borrowed notions of what good, mature writing should look like. After trying to get published for twenty years, writing novel after novel, writing to be published, I started to lose focus of what I want to write. It was easy to become obsessed with opening that door, instead of focusing on developing my own craft and my relationship with the kind of writing I love.

Editing my novel to publication was a long process of revising to be relevant to an American reader. What started out as a romantic, lyrical, expansive Bengali novel, littered with Bengali words, poems, songs, and literary references, is now an American novel that is in conversation with America and American readers.

I had to invent a story in America, although I had not yet a story to tell about America. My story is set during the Iraq War in 2003. In its first draft, it was bookended by a beginning and ending featuring a young woman in the US, Beena, who is horrified by the US invasion of Iraq and the reaction of the comfortable Bangladeshi diaspora who do not blink an eye as people are killed in a US war abroad. Beena is at odds with this set, as she is formed by the philosophy she has inherited from her parents, and reluctant to participate in the kind of success that is complicit with war and profit, working for oil and gas and other corporations. From this established context launches a romantic story about her parents, in the tradition of Bengali novels and Bengali movies, demonstrating the values and principles of a society at a certain time. But this original version of the novel had absolutely no relevance to an American readership. The stories I want to write—romantic, lyrical, Bengali—are in conversation with a Bengali literary tradition and a Bengali or global audience, and incomprehensible to an American reader. What I have invented in its stead is a lesser form, a labored, argumentative, rhetorical form.

The revised novel speaks to an American audience constructing a story in America through which the American reader might become interested, by clarifying the novel’s position on the war, and by becoming another diaspora story. The eye inside America is the gaze through which the American reader is invited to see the rest of the world in the novel.

When I read it now, the novel feels alien to me, because it has shifted to a painful attempt at dialogue as an outsider with a society in which I still find it difficult to speak freely. I have lost the organic, lyrical, impulsive, and personal language that identifies with other Bengali novels and my own writing when I first came to this country. The changes in form and language were necessary to communicate rhetorically with an American audience. Perhaps the novel is an acknowledgment that I am an outsider in America.

When I first came to America, I used to listen to whiny Rabindranath Tagore songs all the time and old Bengali film songs. My Bengali roommate would come and tell me to turn off the sad and sappy music. I also watched many Bengali films, by Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray, Bimal Kar, and others, as well as lighter, romantic movies starring Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, and Suchitra Sen. A foreign film is much more powerful than a book in retaining its own values and narrative structure, as the characters and their worlds remain intact, insular, and insulated from the audience. The audience is merely looking into these worlds from the outside. I still love old Bengali movies and classic Bengali novels, brimming with righteousness, an authorial point of view, and emotion. That is what I want to write. And when I read my own writing from the past, I am transported to a kind of romantic space that seems rich in philosophy and meaning, approaching difficult, complex emotions that almost explain life to me.

After I published my novel, I started to read Bengali novels, searching for a way out of my writing block. Bengali readers say they read for the flow of language, simply for language itself. There is a plot, of course—huge things happen, there are twists and turns—but Bengali readers read fat books simply for the love of the flow of the story, the world, and the flow of language. Reading Samaresh Majumder’s Satkahon, a very fat novel, I only wanted the story to go on. I cared very much about the main character, a fierce young woman named Deepa who makes her own way in life. I felt that all the characters were real people, and what happened in the story was more real than my life.

Bengali novels served as a wild forest that allowed me to figure out my craft. In English novels, using the authorial voice is frowned upon. So is switching point of view. In Satkahon, we enter the story through the points of view of Deepa’s adopted mother and father, alternating from one point of view to the other even in the same chapter. We see her mother’s perspective. She seems to care about whom Deepa would marry, worries about her future. Even when Deepa gets a proposal from a wealthy family, the mother is suspicious of her wealthy in-laws. We experience the world through her eyes and understand her deeply as a woman in those times, as well as her values as a reflection of the values of society at that time. She cannot be comprehended/reduced through an American feminist gaze because she is still shallow, narrow minded, and suspicious of a more progressive woman character in the novel, a divorced professor from the city. Later, when we move to Deepa’s point of view, we encounter her mother as a bitter person who only wants Deepa to earn money for the family, as someone who hurts her deeply. This organic shift in point of view with no rules provides a more expansive perspective than seeing the events through one character’s perspective. Switching point of view does not yield merely two separate points of view. Rather, this technique provides a fuller picture of that society. The combination of employing authorial voice and constantly changing point of view also reflects a Bengali value of looking at the world in complicated, philosophical ways beyond the individual, reflecting a society in which so many people live together in close proximity and people’s fates depend upon one another’s. In my own writing, I feel that this looseness of structure, knowing where I am headed, but giving myself the space to get there in whatever way I like, is most likely to produce the most lyrical, impulsive, organic prose—prose that I might read later and like.

When I read my own writing, I cannot recognize the dialogue or characters. They do not sound like people I recognize. Rather, the characters appear to me as caricatures. Their speech and thought are mere artifice, vehicles for my rhetoric. Perhaps this failing in the writing of anglophone writers brings forth criticism from native-language leaders. I am embarrassed when I read Bengali novels and observe how they are able to portray characters and the world with so much more nuance and authenticity. Of course, there are many writers, like Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry, who have dissolved these barriers in their novels, but the general criticism reserved for writers in English is this: Why are you writing in English?

Perhaps the greatest reason to write in English is to be in dialogue with a global audience, especially a Western audience, given the historical relationship of colonization and the continuing relationships of empire and dominance. However, in my own writing, I find it difficult to write about racism or any racial conflict, let alone treat more political themes. I encounter a deep uneasiness and failure of craft when I approach the colonial structures of our existence. In that sense, perhaps this loss of language, this lyricism, which speaks to a Bengali audience, is a good thing, as the change in rhetoric reorients me to an American audience as I try to address conflicts I mostly avoid in my writing. Recently, the new fiction of Chaitali Sen, Oindrila Mukherjee, Khem K. Aryal, and Aruni Kashyap have shown me that South-Asian characters can be brought to the page in flesh and blood and global conflicts can be articulated in anglophone literature. Khem K. Aryal writes about the ambivalence of Nepalese characters living in a racist America and lets us overhear characters speaking in Nepalese. Aruni Kashyap writes about Assamese people fighting against a brutal Indian government. Oindrila Mukherjee describes a successful, modern Indian class with ties to money and global fascism. And Chaitali Sen, in her incredible short fiction, describes both colonial violence and the corrupted liberal South Asians who live in America today, divorced from the working-class people and only interested in their own well-being.

Bengali novels present a completely different historical narrative than the narratives that the West has given us. I grew up reading World War II novels in English and watching World War II movies, most of which I watched as a child in Iraq and Bangladesh. In contrast, Shaheen Akhtar’s Bengali novel Oshukhi Din, set in the 1940s in Bengal, describes a complicated time of fighting against colonization. The INA (Indian National Army) went off to fight with the Japanese in opposition to the British colonizers, the communists opposed both the British and the Fascists, and the liberation movement fought against British colonization, while other Bengalis fought in the British forces against Germany (this is similar to the recent novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives, in which the author describes East Africa torn apart by German and British forces and Africans forced to fight in the German army). Two Bengali films, Ashani Sanket and Oshaner Shondhane, portray the 1943 famine in Bengal caused by Winston Churchill, who reserved food for the army, refused to ship food to starving Bengalis, and burned agricultural fields in anticipation of a Japanese invasion. The films draw a clear connection between Churchill’s war, with planes flying overhead, and the Bengal famine of 1943 that killed millions of people. I have read so many World War novels, but Bengali novels and films about the same period tell a different history, our history, centering our people. However, such a complicated, nuanced history would be much more difficult to tell in English, to a Western audience, where the tropes are that the British were the good guys during World War I and II.

Most celebrated literature about Afghanistan, such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, is simply about the Taliban as villains. However, Afghanistan has a longer history in Bengali literature. Two Bengali books I read about Afghanistan, the travel memoir Deshe Bideshe and the novel Shabnam by Syed Mujtaba Ali, document the long reach of state violence against ordinary people in Afghanistan. The British invaded Afghanistan three times before 1919, during which time thousands of women and children were killed. When the short-lived liberal government of King Amanullah Khan was attacked in a coup by Bachaye Saqao, also called Habibullah, in 1929, the British refused to help. Mou Bandapadhyay writes in Ananda Bazaar that to Syed Mujtoba Ali, living under British occupation in a colonized India, Afghanistan represented hope of a future free homeland, which was never realized, as the British left India in flames, partitioned and overtaken by violence, forcing millions of people to flee their homes. As William Dalrymple chronicles in his podcast Empire, the British and the West return to Afghanistan repeatedly, for their own ends, destroying people’s lives repeatedly.

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh accuses literature of never speaking about climate change. But Western literature also does not address Western violence, or challenge the constructions of the West, such as Islam is bad, Russia is evil, communists are bad, and so on. I know that if I wrote about Islam as the most dangerous force in world, I would be published.

My novel was criticized in reviews for being too history-heavy. Politics is criticized in fiction. At various literary events, I have seen writers claim that they are not political, or that their fiction is not political. But being apolitical is also political. Narrative is political. I wrote about 2003 being sad, because Iraq was destroyed, and I showed how peaceful and prosperous Iraq was in the 1970s. However, Saddam Hussein was already in power in the 1970s and 1980s, and his government was violent (the Ba’ath Party came to power through a violent coup overthrowing a popular government in an independent Iraq). The story of Iraq is incomplete without mentioning how the British colonized Iraq after World War I, how it squashed the uprising of the people in the great violence of 1920, and without mentioning the joyous overthrow of the British puppet government in 1958 and the brief period of great economic development and land reform from 1958 to 1962. In 1962, JFK asked the CIA to begin plotting for Qasim’s overthrow, as the podcast Blowback documents. The pattern of British hegemony from India to Iraq through the 1940s is also important. In 1947, a year before the violence of partition in India in 1948, Britain orchestrated the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, through murder and terror. The West, always, viewed regions of the global south as merely sources of their own wealth, resources, and geographical power. The people of India, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine were never seen as people in any narrative from the West, certainly not in the great English novels I grew up reading and falling in love with.

As in ethnography, there is an ethical element to writing a novel. As writers, we cannot tell inauthentic stories even if we claim that our writing is not representative. By definition, a story is romantic, because narrative pulls people into an idea. The more beautifully executed a narrative, the truer the idea appears to be. In this sense, literature has the power to act as propaganda.

I write fiction because I want to hide what I want to say in form. I never developed an ability to argue in America. There is a vast gulf between the values of American society, including the Democratic Party and progressives and liberals in America, and my values as an outsider from the Global South. This is why I feel secure writing inside a form, inside narrative folds.

Not everything can be said. Speech comes at a cost. What can be articulated, no matter how fierce or brave it sounds, is probably not too risky or important. When you say something important, it might stain you and ruin you. The problem with fiction, however, is that if you hide what you want to say too well, inside form, no one can understand what you are trying to say. I remember going to watch the movie Life of Pi based on Yann Martel’s novel about the stories we tell ourselves, and how beautiful stories bewitch us with lies. There was a mom whispering to her son in awe during the scene about paradise, consuming it literally as a beautiful story and not as an ironic story about how we believe stories, such as the story of God in different religions, because the stories make us feel good. This is the problem with fiction: in our artifice, we risk losing the message.

What I understand about America, but also Bangladesh, and any other country, is that every space comes with a limit. I recognize the boundary and operate within it. It would be naïve to think that any space is not guarded by the values of a powerful elite. Writers depend on relationships, networks, and access to platforms. I understand that I must behave to continue having a voice.

Even famous writers must obey these limits and act in ways that are aligned with the nation state. Recently, I have watched so many famous writers drop the names of presidents, vice presidents, surgeon generals, first ladies, and ruling families, as if, if you look at the pattern, it is absolutely necessary for an artist to support the state to continue to be successful. In such a circumstance, perhaps it is possible at last to be a writer of color in America, and perhaps America is opening up slowly to diverse voices, even stories from outside America, but it certainly would be naïve to think that we can tell stories that dismantle the narratives that are part of the state machinery. As Edward Said reminds us, culture and imperialism go together. The recent editorials by Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie condemning student protesters in America show that no matter how beloved these writers are, taking certain positions advances them and they have, in some sense, become tools of the state.

What does it mean then to produce anglophone literature in America? Are we complicit in American empire? Can we ever break free and voice our own narratives even if they are in defiance of imperialism? Do stories matter at all? Why write stories when people die, in disasters, in disease, in poverty, in prison, in war?

To fight my writing block, I started to write in Bangla. My Bangla is atrocious. I realized that I am not proficient enough in my language to produce great fiction, although, of course, no one can stop a writer from learning a language and mastering it at any age. The most famous example of such a writer is Michael Madhusudan Dutta, who scorned Bangla and considered English a superior language in his youth, but later made the most significant contribution to Bangla literature (this history is documented in another famous Bengali novel Sei Somoi by Sunil Gangopadhyay, a novel about the Bengali Renaissance). Do we write in English because we are the English-educated elite of former colonized countries, alienated from our language, people, and culture, and yet eager to use them, to turn them into narrative for our own aspirational goals?

When I was sending out my manuscript to agents, there was a strong desire for an immigrant novel in which the immigrant would be successful and happy. One agent who said repeatedly that she loved the story and wanted me to revise asked, but how does she (the main character) redeem herself? This question was code for a desire to see a story in which the immigrant is happy, living happily ever after in America. The most coveted immigrant narrative in America is of the immigrant who has fled their oppressive, corrupt, violent state to the safety and security of America, as in The Kite Runner. Perhaps another emerging trend is the historical novel from different regions, mapping our histories, telling the stories of our pasts to America, such as Salman Rushdie’s recent novels, Gurnah’s novel Afterlives, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels Independence and The Last Queen. Then there are the novels describing postcolonial, contemporary India, Ireland, Africa, like Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower and The White Tiger, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. A fourth set of novels tell the diaspora story, novels like Tanaïs’s Bright Lines and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. In Bright Lines, the characters, who have lost their way, must return to Bangladesh to find a resolution. These are the novels that feel the most labored, paralyzed by conflict, straining to find a way to make room in America. One of the characters in The Namesake actually leaves America.

While novels in translation offer us stories from the world outside America in their integrity—preserving the worldview, the language, the structure—there is an increasing trend to turn to these stories, at least among writers and readers of color, and to place these stories above the diaspora novel, for their ability to tell so freely what we writers inside America cannot (because we cannot free our minds, shake off the voices inside; because we have learned so well to behave, to act American). Yet, perhaps it is the diaspora novel, after all, that has the potential to be most political. If it dares to be free, to skirt the traps of seeking to please the master, to appease, to go for accolades, if it dares to be fierce, to speak the truth, to push to the point of friction, to the structures in place that hold us all hostage, inside and outside of empire, then perhaps it is worthwhile after all to write in English from inside of America.

GEMINI WAHHAJ is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books, 2023) and the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and numerous other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener Award for Fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint Fellowship. Formerly, she was a staff writer for The Daily Star newspaper and senior editor of Feminist Economics. In Bangladesh, she worked at CARE and United Nations Development Program (UNDP). She is an associate professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.