Interview with Anupama Sriram

Anupama Sriram won 2nd place in the 112/112H: College Writing Best Text Contest for "Shiva Has Arms Enough to Hold Us All."

Audio

Interview with Anupama Sriram audio.

Transcript

DA: Right. Hi, welcome to an interview with one of our winners for the Best Text Contest. So to start, could you please share your name, tell us the title of your essay and share a little bit what it's about.

AS: Sure. My name is Anupama, the title of the essay is, “Shiva Has Arms Enough to Hold Us All.” And it's it's a response to a piece called “Death Metal and the Indian Identity.” My parents are from India. I was born and raised here in America, in Massachusetts, and the person writing the original paper that I was responding to is from Boston, but also Indian in the way that I am. And he was relating to someone who was living in India but entrenched in American musical culture, which is very relatable to me. So I yeah, I wanted to explore that and what that meant to me. 

DA: So that's kind of the inspiration behind the essay.

AS: Yeah, it really spoke to really specific parts of my identity and experience that I would not say are universal. As an Indian person in America, I don't even really identify as Indian. I do identify as American, but Indianness is a part of my heritage. I guess a lot of the Indian people I grew up around were very Indian. They were part of a larger Indian community. I only speak one language. I wasn't raised speaking Damal or Kannada or whatever that my parents speak, so I couldn't relate to these people as much. They were entrenched in Indian culture in a way that I wasn't. I was kind of allowed to do whatever I wanted. And I have an older brother who is, he raised me on pop punk and hardcore and metal and all these things. So I felt much more connected to that kind of music culture than I did to Indian culture. And for a long time I felt disconnected from Indian culture because of that. And I'm kind of slowly figuring out how to find a balance and how to not see things as mutually exclusive when they are different. I felt really called to write about, specifically, my relationship with music, because it is so, so important to me. Still to this day, I'm someone who, we spoke about this briefly earlier, but we both have ADHD, so maybe you relate to this. I hyper fixate on whole albums in a way where I, like, can't think of anything else, like, I can't have a thought that isn't a song playing in the background. I've always been this way, and so I feel like I have really strong relationships with the music that I listen to, stronger than most of my other relationships with things that I interact with, and that music being specifically stuff like hardcore and metal, which are, I guess, polarizing genres. A lot of people really don't like that, don't understand it, think that you are a certain way because you listen to it, or whatever. I feel that my relationship with those genres is very prideful to me, like it's so important, and that in relation to Indianness is not something I had really thought about or put together and contrasted like that until I read that original piece.

DA: I love that answer. So what did you learn about yourself as a writer while working on this piece, or as a person.

AS: That's a hard one, I love to write. I've always loved to write especially personal pieces, and I guess I learned a little bit more about Indianness as I was writing. I spoke to my parents a little bit about why they thought the person in the story had these opinions about Indian music. He had this whole thing about Indians don't identify with music the way that Americans do, which I was interested in because I hadn't really considered that, because I'm one of those people that really identifies with music. So I'm like, do Indians not feel that way? That's that seems wild to me. My mom is a singer, a classical Indian singer. She obviously cares a lot about music, but she also has this naivety and open mindedness. Naivety, not in a bad way, but just like this…

DA: Earnestness?

AS: Yeah, genuine appreciation for everything in a not very discerning way that I think the person in the story, Pradyum, he disrespected that. He thought that was, like, disingenuine in some way, which, yeah, I wanted to, like, unpack that with my parents. And one of the things that I asked them about was language and like, why I wasn't raised speaking an Indian language, and how that might relate to me culturally, compared to these other people that I grew up around who were raised with their parents' mother tongues. And one of the things that they said was that, well, there's this anecdote that my mom likes to tell where one day my older brother, when he was a little kid, he noticed that the spoon in the glass of water was bent, and he was said, “why is the spoon broken?” And my mom was like, dang, I can't explain light refraction in Tamil. And so they, they chose to raise us with English for that language. And also they, they received schooling in English back in India, my mom went to a Catholic school, and that's just kind of how it is. And I guess I was interested in the colonial impact on the way that these two cultures interact. I don't really know what else to say on that.

DA: That's wonderful. No, that's a great answer. And so how did you hope that your readers would respond to your essay or connect or like? What were your expectations?

AS: One of the things that is very much alive in America is the, like, multiplicity of cultures, and that's a beautiful thing, and I love it, and it's wonderful. And there's so many different kinds of people here. I wanted people to understand the sameness across just people, because that's what that's the conclusion that I came to by the end of this paper, is that there's sameness between me and the people who I thought I was othered from when I was little.

DA: How did peer review or the in the during the writing process influence or shape your writing?

AS: That's really hard to remember, I am a very confident writer. I love to write, and I know that I'm pretty good at it.

DA: What was your writing process like? Did you encounter any challenges, or did you try anything new with the essay? A different structure of voice?

AS: I'm a structural-less writer. It's stream of consciousness every time, every time. So I guess it's just a question of getting everything out of my head and then going back through it and trying to weave it together more seamlessly, but and that's the approach that I have always taken, and I think the ways in which my writing changes are really subtle, and they're just kind of like influenced by what I've been reading. I think my favorite writer is Robin Wall Kimmerer. She wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. Her writing style really, really speaks to me. One of the things that I noticed about reading Braiding Sweetgrass is that it calls me to read it aloud, like I want to speak it and not just read it, and I think that has had the biggest impact on the way my voice comes through in my writing.

DA: Was there a moment in class or during your writing when the piece really started to come together for you?

AS: Before I even started the just the idea of it? I knew instantly, I'm like, this is something that I need to talk about.

DA: Yeah, great. Have you considered pursuing writing beyond the classroom?

AS: Honestly, this experience brought that up for me. It kind of relates to the path that I've taken in my education. I was really into humanities and stuff when I was in high school, and then I pursued studio art for a couple of years, and then it was the pandemic, and I was out of school for three years with no one telling me what to do, when to do. And I stopped making art because I didn't have any prompts. I wasn't writing because I didn't have any prompts or deadlines. And when I got back into school, and I had to take that college writing course. It reminded me of how much I love it. I hadn't been journaling either since I left my old college back in 2020 and it really made me think about how I want to incorporate creative activities into my daily life, and I still haven't figured it out, but yes, I do want to be writing, yes.

DA: So I know you said you haven't figured it out, but like speculation or just thinking, how do you see writing fitting into your studies or plans beyond this class?

AS: There are things that I'm interested in researching. Um, um, particularly related to our relationship like and by our, I mean we, as a human society, our relationship with nature, especially, you know, given the context of everything that we're alive in right now. And I think that, again, I'm so inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass. I think it's really, really important to tell stories of how that relationship happens in a way that is inspiring, that tells us how to live. And so when I do write, sometimes I'll just, like, write in my notes app on my phone, because I just got to get something out. It's usually something about that, about, like, something sort of philosophical, I guess, about like, how I'm an animal, and how me as an animal moves through the world.

DA: That's really interesting. So what does being one of the winners in the contest mean to you?

AS: It's really exciting to get recognized for something. I've never won writing thing before, and as much as this isn't considered a virtue, I'm a very prideful person when it comes to my creative endeavors, and I have received awards for my like drawing and painting stuff in the past, and that was always really, really important to me, because it made me feel like I was doing what I should be doing. And this has been really encouraging to my outside of school writing practice, like somewhere I'm supposed to be.

DA: And then lastly, what advice would you give to future students thinking about writing or in college writing?

AS: I think writing needs to come from the heart. I think a lot of people who struggle with writing struggle because they don't know what they're saying. They don't know what they want to say. There's always going to be something that you want to say, and you need to focus on that, not on how you're writing, or what you're saying or whatever, but like what, like what calls you to write. And it might not even be that writing is your medium. Maybe you're, I don't know, a dancer or something, but what is the thing that inspires you? And then there, the work that you can do with your professors or your peers is translating that into writing. There has to be a call, though you can't just pull it out of nowhere.

DA: All right, do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share?

AS: I guess, one more piece of advice, and that is to write in your stream of consciousness. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad, just like, just like, do it. Take the time and do it. It's hard. I don't even follow that advice, but I think it's worth it,

DA: Alright. Well, thank you so much.