We are very excited to present a (Re) “I have a few questions” interview with author, Anjali Enjeti.
Here, we ask participants to write their responses to our questions and we are thrilled this month to share our Q&A with Anjali about her powerful new books, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change and The Parted Earth, her debut novel.
FN: When you decided to put together your essays for Southbound, did you discover something about your overall experience described in the work that came as a result of seeing the pieces compiled in one collection that you had not seen before (i.e. when viewing the essays individually)? What was your process?
Anjali Enjeti: Oh absolutely. Initially, many of the essays in the book spoke more directly to my own racialized trauma. When I started putting them together into a collection, I thought – is this really what I want to say? Is trauma really the focal point of my life right now?
I began to do a little self-reflection. I looked at the pages I had and asked myself how I got to where I am today. Identity-based trauma certainly played a role, but more importantly, this trauma helped guide me into a loving, nurturing community committed to social change work. And it’s this social change work that is at the heart of what I do today. The trauma was the portal to activism and organizing work. And this is where I landed.
When I finally understood this, I took another hard look at the essays in the collection. I began removing some of them. Two of the essays had gone viral, and were still being taught at some colleges, and yet, when I reread them, I no longer felt emotionally or psychologically connected to them. They felt as if they were written by someone else.
Southbound was initially about 300-325 pages. I took out all of the essays that I felt no longer represented the collection I wanted to create, which got it down to about 200 pages. I then wrote a few new essays. At first it was scary – changing so much of the perspective of the book while on deadline — but it felt good and right. Through the course of submitting the proposal, and then writing the book, I had changed and grown not only as a writer but as a person. I needed the book to reflect the reality I was living now, and how far I’ve come.
FN: How did you know when The Parted Earth was finished/complete? Feel free to discuss the road to writing the book and getting it to the wonderful place where it is now.
Anjali Enjeti: I was born and raised in the U.S., and like many USians of my generation (I’m Gen X), we learned nothing about the Partition in school. So when I graduated from college in 1995, before starting law school, I decided to educate myself about it. I moved to St. Louis, and it was at a bookstore there (which, sadly, is no longer) that I began reading novels about Partition. I continued this after a move to Pennsylvania. I picked up every book I could find, and then when I’d read everything available to me in fiction, I shifted to nonfiction.
I didn’t start writing at all until the early aughts, and I never had any intention to write about Partition. I was simply reading because I was fascinated by this period of history. When I did start writing, it was nonfiction. And the first novel I wrote had nothing to do with Partition.
It wasn’t until a trip to India in 2011, my first trip there in 19 years, that I had the idea for The Parted Earth. This was fifteen years after I’d been reading and researching Partition. My Indian grandmother, my last surviving grandparent, had passed away about 6 years earlier. I was missing her terribly, and was filled with regret that she never got to meet my children. We were on our way to my cousin’s wedding, but took a side trip to visit the Taj Mahal. While standing on the west end of the terrace, I realized that the last time I stood in that same spot, was when I was with my grandmother. I then got an image in my mind of a granddaughter and grandmother who had been separated from one another due to Partition. The story kept building through the trip, and by the time I returned to Atlanta, I had a pretty good idea of the plot of the novel.
Each of my characters are on a fact-finding mission about their histories or their families, or both. I can’t remember the exact day I knew the novel was complete, but I think it was when I felt that each character had completed their respective journeys to understanding the truths their loved ones lived through.
Southbound and The Parted Earth are available in bookstores and on various platforms including, Amazon, Indie Bound and Barnes and Noble.
Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, an organizer, and award-winning journalist based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and the debut novel, The Parted Earth. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.