Spotlight Interview with author, academic and Jhalak Prize co-founder Sunny Singh
Sunny Singh is a writer, novelist, public intellectual, champion for decolonisation and inclusion and Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at the London Metropolitan University. In 2016 she launched the celebrated Jhalak Prize for literature by writers of colour and is a founder of the Jhalak Foundation that is focused on a range of literary, artistic and literacy initiatives in the UK and beyond. The Jhalak Prize has blossomed into its own literary universe with the Jhalak Children’s and YA Prize, the Jhalak Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prose Prize. She is also the founder and director of Jhalak Art Residency that selects three annual artists-in-residence to create unique works of art that serve as trophies for the Jhalak Prize winners and showcase artists of colour in the UK, and the publisher of the bi-annual Jhalak Review.
Singh is the author of three critically acclaimed novels – Nani’s Book of Suicides, With Krishna’s Eyes and Hotel Arcadia. Her recent collection of short stories, Refuge: Stories of War and Love, has been praised by the Asian Review of Books for illustrating that “…even in the deepest degradations depicted, author Singh shows that love can endure and renewal is possible”. Singh tells Joy Francis why the Jhalak Prize isn’t meant for the white writer, the importance of challenging the mediocrity of the establishment and her passion for creating tools and literary avenues for our liberation from the Empire.
Let’s start with a quote from you. “Every aspect of my work focuses on overturning and undoing as many of the structures we have inherited as possible.” As an author, academic and literary activist at a time when the publishing industry and academia still evade the necessary transformation they need to do, how is that ambition to undo as many of the inherited structures going?
That’s a big question. I’m not part of South Asia’s Midnight Children, to use Salman Rushdie’s title, in the sense that I was not born at the midnight hour when India became independent to use Jawaharlal] Nehru’s words. My parents are of that generation. I’m the generation after which means I grew up with people with direct lived experience of being colonised, of resisting, dissenting and working towards freedom, achieving it and realising that that was not the liberation they had fought for or worked towards. What I mean is that every single country across the world right now is a postcolonial country either because they were the colonisers and are the colonisers, or they were and are the colonised. So growing up it was very clear that I wanted to sit on the side of full liberation for one reason: It felt unjust. I wanted to work towards the freedom that my grandmother talked about. That’s the starting point for me. I have to say it’s been a long, complicated, twisting road to figuring out what I can do and what I should be able to do or try to do. I’m a writer. I’m a thinker. I’m a scholar. I’m a researcher. And if you were to put all those things together, my basic job is to create knowledge and to share knowledge. I’ve come to the conclusion that all thinking about the world starts with what we know and what we can learn. This means the role of the storyteller becomes incredibly important. Stories can tell us how to oppress. They can tell us how to kill, how to loot, and to call it all adventure. Or they can tell us how to work together and be free, and to imagine freedom and work towards that and equality and justice.
You’ve mentioned being a scholar, researcher and writer. You are also a journalist, an anti-colonial academic and a literary champion for global majority writers. You are a force to be reckoned with in terms of your output and presence on social media and you have co-created legacy platforms with the Jhalak Prize, the Jhalak Children and the YA Prize, the Jhalak Poetry Prize and Jhalak Prose Prize. Your stakes are firmly in the ground with the focus being on engaging with writers of colour and collaborating with allies for sustainability. Not a bad lead up to Jhalak’s 10th anniversary. With all of this in mind navigate all these different spaces and roles and take care of yourself?
You’re right. In the last couple of months I’ve been offline for a long period, probably the longest I’ve ever been offline – and I miss my community there. But it’s been extremely hectic. I think a lot of us are carrying a very clear moral injury, emotional trauma, psychological trauma. There’s not one but three live streamed genocides happening, in the Sudan, in Congo, in Gaza, in all Palestine. But there’s also this blackout of news so it’s very difficult to walk through the streets of London, or go to work, where there are vast numbers of people who are just not interested. It doesn’t touch them. So I think the fact that I haven’t been well for a couple of months is a kind of sustained exhaustion. But I’m also aware that this exhaustion will pass and I will regroup, recover and I will be back online. As for how do I navigate all of this? The answer is very simple: my community. My primary community is mostly women of colour, a lot of queer people of colour, but also women and queer people who are white and from Western Europe and the US. For me this community means I don’t have to explain what’s happening to me when they see me. And when they don’t see me, they ask, why haven’t we seen you? They will check in the same way that I would check in. These little things are crucial because they are reminders that whatever it is that we’re doing, whatever we’re trying to do, it is not an individual act. Liberation cannot be individual. It goes back to what I said about storytelling. The Empire, whether it’s British, western European cultural production, or Hollywood and the US version, has really worked beautifully at extending itself, its own narrative of the great hero, and even sold it to the colonised, for example having Ben Kingsley play Gandhi who somehow, magically, all by himself, was able to free India, never mind the millions of people who were involved. Instead what we need to do is react together. For me, working for liberation is about building capacity so that eventually there are so many of us in these imperial spaces producing such extraordinary work that the mediocrity of the establishment will have to fall away by itself.
I want to come back to your point about the mediocrity of the establishment, a critique that has been levelled against publishing, hence the creation of the Jhalak Prize and why people set up their own inclusive publishing enterprises like Verna Wilkins with Tamarind Books, Crystal Mahey-Morgan with OWN IT! and Aimee Felone with Knights Of, which sadly recently closed. Many legacy publishers have backtracked from most of the promises they announced following the murder of George Floyd on 25th May 2020, with a significant drop in the number of books being published by authors of colour. You assert that writing is not only a creative act, but an act of cultural production. Where would you say publishing is currently?
It’s tragic that so many great initiatives have had to close. One of the things that I have been very aware of with the Jhalak Prize is that we will grow slowly. We will put down roots but also, we will not rely on the Empire to let us keep going. We have never relied on the wider literary landscape. It has always been the community that has stepped up. We have run on a shoestring forever, although people probably see the Jhalak umbrella and they think – there must be loads of money behind it. There isn’t! We partner up when we can. We try to use the resources that are already there with like-minded institutions and people, but we’re very clear: the Empire will not reward you for pulling it down. Let’s not pretend that we’re going to get pats on our backs and tea and cakes. The Jhalak Prize was founded in 2016. Less than 18 months after the prize was founded, I was told that diversity as a trend is over by somebody in publishing. So I don’t think we should be looking at what the publishing industry is doing well or not. We should work off the principle that they are not [our] friends. They are not allies. They are not on our side. But our victories are existing in these spaces because our very existence disrupts the processes of the empire. The Jhalak Prize and the Jhalak Review, which goes out in The Bookseller twice a year, are such disruptive spaces. None of the Jhalak projects are meant for the white reader, the white editor, the white art connoisseur. They are meant for us. They are intended as evidence, beacon, inspiration, support and caring, for us! And they are meant to be small but steady hollowing out of the imperial apparatus.
You are an award-winning writer who is published. You are the co-founder of the Jhalak Prize which elevates and amplifies writers of colour who have been published, whose books are submitted by publishers. Your agent deals with publishers on your behalf. So where does that leave you? Are you clear about who you want to be published by and not published by? And how do publishers respond to you because you are outspoken about their shortcomings?
When the Jhalak Prize was announced, somebody in publishing (who I will not name at this point but at some point, I will) said “you will never be published in Britain again”. I said, fine, there’s a whole world out there with readers and publishers. I am not beholden. I am not bound by publishing in Britain. It would be wonderful to be published and published well in the UK because I live here and it’s my home for the moment. London is a key historic centre of publishing in the English language, so it matters. But it’s not the entire world. That initial comment showed me exactly what we were up against. In the 10 years that have followed, I think publishers who do sign me up know what they’re getting. I think it demonstrates their courage and commitment.
I want to pivot to academia. You advocate for “building an anti-colonial pedagogy for creative writing”, writing which is still seen as a white domain. How then are you negotiating and advocating for yourself, your views and educating your students? As you know, there have been universities that have dropped black and brown academics who have spoken frankly about racism and decolonisation. Somehow, you have managed to remain in post and become a professor, which is the exception rather than the rule.
Academia is no different from media or publishing or finance or aeronautical. We live, to cite bell hooks, in the ‘Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Hetero-patriarchy’. That is the reality we exist in. I’ve never assumed that I will be supported in what I do. I know that these are hostile spaces. These spaces are not fond of me. They don’t need to be fond of me. Again, the Empire will not praise us, it will not reward us for doing what we do, for trying to pull it down. Academia is no different. I have been at London Met now for 20 years. I joined in October 2005. I have never assumed that I will have a job for life in academia. I’m a migrant in this country. I don’t have this idea that you can get a permanent job, and you will stay there. I have gone through 20 years of institutional leadership, and some of them would have been very happy if I wasn’t there and gave it their best shot to make it happen. My students have watched what’s happening across the country with academia and some of them recently asked me: “Will you have a job? We’re worried about you.” I thought that was really sweet. I told them, “It doesn’t matter. My job is not to be at a university. My job is to teach.” If I don’t have a job at a university, I will find a way to reach students and continue what I do. I will continue to produce research. I will continue to teach. I will continue to mentor. We must be very, very critical about the way narratives are spun. When I joined the university 20 years ago, the big buzzword was widening participation. I then saw it drop off to be replaced with diversity. Then it was DEI or EDI. Then, briefly, it was decolonisation. But now that the British Museum has announced that it’s going to loan artifacts to countries in the global south because they’re helping them to decolonise, I think the word is being deliberately stripped of all meaning. But that is what the Empire does: it even steals our words. And what we do is keep at it, we keep freeing ourselves and each other. Just the way the Empire does what it has to, we do what we have to do.
So, what are you working on, writing wise?
I’ve got the next three books lined up. One of them is a novel. That is going to be the last one of the three because it’s a sprawling historical fiction novel set-in 19th century India. There’s a more productive conversation to be had about the idea of museums and reparations. About how these institutions can function as spaces for knowledge dissemination. Where they think carefully and practice truth as part of their curatorial practice. These are stolen objects. Let’s start using words correctly, truthfully. So that’s the second book.
The third book I am working on, and will hopefully finish a draft for next year, links back to your previous question around a creative writing pedagogy and an anti-colonial pedagogy. It thinks very carefully about what an ethical creative practice could be. A writing practice that does no harm. The Lemkin Institute talks about the steps to genocide: that you need to other, you need to dehumanise, you need to demonise people in order to kill them, whether as individuals or as a collective. That’s the first step. Stories are the first step to war. Stories are the first step to genocide. So how do we create a writing practice but also a pedagogy for teaching writing that is ethical and this has been my work as a creative writing academic, tutor, scholar for a long time.
Sunny Singh’s latest book, Refuge: Stories of War and Love, is available from Footnote Press for £12.99.