Portrait: Saraid de Silva (part 2), by Anna Rankin

Revenge, hair, ghosts, signs and omens, inheritance, the sun; sharp or dissolved, the double, the unsayable, the outward landscape manifest in the body, beauty, heat, fervour, betrayal, the material of memory: all scraps I scrawled in the margins of a notebook while reading Saraid de Silva’s novel Amma, already fancied as a contender for the fiction prize at next year’s Ockhams.
The Amma of the novel is Josephina, her impression rendered at times as an apparition faint in the looking glass; though not so flat as a Stendhalian mirror; elsewhere an almost terrifying and omnipresent force unbound by a body. When readers relate to de Silva their love for Josephina, de Silva smiles, “I think: that’s my granny. And it isn’t, but in some ways I tried to put a version of her on the page.” Did she scowl like her fictional counterpart? “Oof, yes. My gran would spit words out of her mouth like they were disgusting to be in her mouth in the first place. The way she enunciated was violent, physical … if you heard her say a word you knew what it meant. She didn’t trust people easily, she didn’t like being bothered. It was more common that she didn’t like something that she did.”
De Silva describes herself as riven with doubt while writing the book. But writing isn’t catharsis, she insists, “it’s part of wanting to still live with the dead”. She’s unsure whether she consciously wrote about grief, “but so much seems to be about grief”. A 2020 essay for Ensemble described de Silva’s consuming grief at the death of a beloved friend. Writing the piece as with writing the novel didn’t offer abreaction; “my friend is still dead. And she shouldn’t be”.
“It’s not a staircase you’re climbing. It’s always just shit that she’s dead. It’s maybe a different day of grief, but not an experience. After losing people I’m much less scared to talk about grief; if someone tells me about a death I ask whether they want to talk about it.” De Silva clears her throat and shakes her head for emphasis. “Because I do. I want to talk about my dead friends and family members, all the time.”
She relates grief to hair, a symbol that traces the novel’s pages. It’s a subject she considers not infrequently and has herself a thick mane of glossy hair of various lengths and cuts over the years. “For me, I tend to think the way you treat your hair is representative of your relationship to yourself. My hair, when un-addressed, has always signalled some kind of disconnection.” All three women in Amma have an emphatic relationship to their hair, “though Josephina less so; she only thinks of her hair when she thinks about her grief”. There’s a line in the book: “Women who live at the edge of themselves.” Is this incarnate in her? She hopes so. “But I feel like there’s more edge. Maybe I haven’t found the edge. I thought about this with women who live beyond what’s expected of them.”
The standard narrative is, she recites, kids and a partner—she’s never wanted children. Unlike women of the edge she “absolutely not, no, no, never” puts herself in risky situations. “I was on my own from quite a young age so if I put myself in a risky situation, who would help me?” It was her gran who shaped her perspective and, on the subject of inheritance and transmutation between women, it’s easier, she says, to defend, advocate for and protect someone that isn’t you. “As soon as you put it down on the page you’ve separated from it in a way, because it’s out of you.” The three women of Amma in various ways lack agency; they’re vulnerable and often utterly beholden to the whims of men. The women, she adds, “are political, because they’re migrant women. Their existence is political.”
De Silva has been coronated a (Literary) It Girl, accorded a proper noun for the ubiquity of think pieces and arguments (online) on the subject that range from uncritical embrace and boosterism of the term to those who believe it reduces the work and cogency of an author; demeaning women writers as lightweight, aestheticised fluff, furthering mean girl in-club/out-club distinctions that prescribe beauty if not stylish clothing as a necessary, and unspoken, price of the ticket, and therefore one wedded to capital and a relationship to fashion; one that reifies youth and purposed for branding and marketing and therefore unremittingly a class issue and further one maintaining the tedious gender disparity where no such thing would be crowned on a talented and serious young male writer. Certain is that the psychological warfare enacted upon or between women can be monstrously cruel whether in or outside any circumscribed group and envy is ugly indeed.
De Silva and I agree that beauty is a subject which fascinates many women. The women of Amma are at times keenly aware of their beauty and of its uncertain power; of when it’s advantageous, when it’s dangerous, which allows for planes of insight derived from experience and observation unavailable if one is not considered beautiful by the standards of the age. Beauty itself isn’t strange to consider, de Silva states, “rather it’s strange to talk openly about it”. Amma is written by someone not only attuned to beauty and with equal clarity its opposite but of what that knowledge can wield and produce within the self, in others, in the world itself. In the novel as in life it is a form of cunning as much as it is something perilous to possess.
As an actor, de Silva was forced to consider beauty whether she sought to or not: “I feel aware of the way I look as a woman, anyway. I’m not certain that I know how to separate that from having my photo taken as a writer. Everything is easier than acting in terms of your experience of your looks—everything that isn’t that is easier.”
Her own relationship to her appearance has been complicated; “As a kid people made a big deal out of how I looked, and that’s racialised; it’s hard to view it as solely a relationship to beauty because you’re being exoticised. It’s a multi-layered experience that’s to do with beauty but also to do with strangeness and racism. As a teenager in Christchurch? No one was checking for me.”
In Amma, Josephina possesses the beauty that launched ships; for her, this proved treacherous. It’s uncomfortable, de Silva says, to admit to looking a certain way; to make a certain claim, “it feels like some kind of problem, as though someone will immediately refute it, but it’s also frustrating when people don’t acknowledge the way they look and how that’s impacted their life”.
Josephina, who experiences sexual violence in the book, was imagined as someone with a different experience of beauty to de Silva, a more extreme conversance. But it’s not a 1:1; sexual violence happens to women regardless of what they might look like. It was, however, important that the women be beautiful, whether they saw it or not, because she views the women who raised her as such: “I wanted to make it clear that the way they looked moved other people.”
But it’s also about power, she continues. “Josephina could never relax. Her beauty came with a big cost. And it’s about revenge—I love a long, drawn out revenge.” There’s a beauty or charm ascribed and intrinsic to certain and chosen canonical writers that proves instrumental in their work’s reception and their mythos; a certain requisite mystery. De Silva references James Baldwin: his glamour, his voice, the flash of his eyes. It would be naive, she says, “to believe that writing is separate from things inherent in other industries”. Sontag observed that it’s not the desire to be beautiful that’s wrong, “but the obligation to be—or to try … what is accepted by most women as a flattering idealisation is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their body in parts, and to evaluate each part separately”.
Sontag was herself extraordinarily beautiful which no doubt provided for such sagacity while also ensuring she had no equal and only theoretical experience on the other side of the argument. What also interests de Silva is the tension in one’s sense of self, “if you feel how you look doesn’t reflect you, or if other people have noticed it before you, so it’s all external. This kind of challenging relationship is something that a lot of people subject to sexual violence experience, but it also feels like a woman of colour experience—you’re always adjacent to something; it’s always how proximate you are to that standard.” However, she continues, shifting on her chair, “you don’t owe prettiness to anyone. You can just be a person—one of the earliest memes I saved that I really like that I haven’t internalised at all.”
De Silva doesn’t plan her stories and nor does she speak of her work before it’s completed. The novel is her preferred form, to read and to write. Writing fiction doesn’t exist in the margins of her life; for her, in writing and life in tandem, thinking clearly leads to the right emotion. She likes an “eccentric bitch. I like a freak. We need more freaks.” She’s careful with whom she shares herself; her circle is tight. Whether serious or jovial she maintains the considered posture and sonorous enunciation of an actor. Our time is almost up and she insists I let her feed me next time. She’s skeptical of talk therapy: “It’s not contextual, some people go and get gassed up in ways they don’t need to. The cost of living crisis is the problem—we can’t talk our way out of that.”
Of her novel’s reception, just one review hasn’t offered uniform praise. Mentioning the review in question, de Silva starts reciting lines before interjecting herself, and laughs. “The fact I know by heart the single critical review is so insane. I need to get over myself.” She’s trying, she says, to contend with her relationship to it. After a pause for thought—de Silva has a habit of repeating a question aloud to roll over its meaning; she likes to talk through a question before responding in order to answer it properly— she submits that it was, ultimately, useful. “The writer of that review observed my private challenges with the book which are therefore my private challenges with my family and my life.” You can only debut once, she remarks.
She’s contemplating her next book, she accords her acclaim a solemn weight. There’s a need for de Silva to consider the ways in which she’s positioned, now, as an admired novelist. “I have access to different things now, I’m capable of different things now, my words mean something different now. That’s what I’ve been thinking—a need to keep recalibrating that.”
It’s interesting, she says, “to be engaged with under the assumption people care. It’s not something I take for granted. But you need to be real—it’s niche, it’s context dependent. But when do you need to recognise you have power in some situations? It’s so ugly to me when people pretend they don’t have power. What you say has a different impact and that needs to be considered seriously. So don’t waste it.”
Part one of Anna Rankin’s epic profile of novelist Saraid de Silva, author of the year’s most admired novel, Amma (Moa Books, $37.99), appeared in ReadingRoom on Tuesday. The novel is available in bookstores nationwide and through Bookhub, the fast and easy way to buy NZ books. From a rave review by Betty Davis: “I met Saraid de Silva at a Palestine rally in Auckland over the summer. She told me there would be a Wellington launch for her new book, Amma. I attended it on a Wednesday, bought the book, read it by Saturday and gave it to my visiting sister to take back with her to Auckland on Sunday. She read it at the gate, read it with her breakfast, read it with her dinner and finished it a few days later, sending me crying emoji faces and ‘this book’. Soon after she bought it for her friend’s birthday.”