5 Questions with Saraid de Silva
Saraid de Silva is a Sri Lankan Pākehā a writer and creative based in Tamaki Makaurau. She is the co-creator and co-host of Radio New Zealand's Conversations with My Immigrant Parents, a podcast and video series in which immigrant whānau across Aotearoa have frank conversations about love, ancestry, home, food, expectation and acceptance.
Saraid was a contributor to A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and her work has been featured in The Spinoff, Fashion Quarterly, Pantograph Punch and Tupuranga Journal.
No.1
How was the conceit for Amma conceived, and what did it look like bringing the work to completion?
The conceit for Amma, three generations of women in a family growing up in different places/times, was conceived out of a grief for my Gran, and a deep interest in and love for women both like and unlike her. Bringing the work to completion was just a fucking slog. Sisyphus, etc, except I asked for it. It was really hard.
It took four years from conception to publication. Which isn’t that long for a novel in the scheme of things. I moved in and out of flats, jobs, relationships, and grief over that time. There are people who were here when I started writing the book [and] who aren’t here anymore. We have a regressive, right-wing government in Aotearoa now. We are all watching Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and their land play out with the compliance of that same government.
These things make the world the book is being released into feel crueler than the one I started writing it in. Which isn’t really true. But events like these make the years the book was written through feel very long, I think.
No.2
In Amma, you feature three main characters, Annie, Sithara and Josephina, and their thoughts and movements over decades across Singapore, Sri Lanka, Aotearoa and England. In thinking about tackling something so sprawling and multi-generational, what comes first for you: the images or the storyline? What does your world-building process look like?
I think it’s character and reason for me, before anything else. It’s the characters I’m interested in, and it’s why I’m writing to begin with, that comes first. Generally though, the idea of tackling something [like this] was terrifying. So I didn’t. Instead I approached each little segment as its own story. And then I kind of assembled each link in the chain. Because a lot of the settings were different to one another, it felt obvious to approach them as though each one was their own little world. I would think about what Hamilton in the 90s was like and get stuck into that, then I’d work on the next section [set somewhere else] and have to go through that whole process again. This approach made for a better book and it was also a lot less intimidating for me than zooming out.
No.3
What are some research tips you’d share with aspiring novelists?
I would say that your research doesn’t have to be confined, because neither does your writing. Initially I felt quite bogged down by how much I would have to research to truthfully render the different time periods in the book—there was a lot to read. And of course, facts which I needed to know; I hoped I had gathered them correctly and didn’t stray from dishonestly. But I was writing fiction.
[In that sense] I was interested in the way food tasted, and what the character might have done on an idle afternoon, which may not necessarily be things you can access through newspaper archives or history books. I really enjoyed talking to people who were alive during those times I was writing about, and I liked reading fiction and short fiction relating to it. I also liked just looking at old photos and picking up details through them. That felt more like it matched what I was trying to do in the book anyway. So research tips … I would say match the style of the research to the point of the work.
No.4
Amma is a deeply queer and feminist diaspora story. What struck me most when reading the novel is how the three characters, despite being bound by blood, are simultaneously bound by a lack, in how they remain unknowable to each other even as the reader finds out about their lives and interiorities in detail. Can you speak more to this?
It felt very important for me that the reader got to know Josephina, Sithara, and Annie separately. I wanted to know them as people in their own right, rather than family in service of or in opposition to one another. That’s the point of the book, really.
Tracking them (although I did not do so super chronologically) in snatches, both together and alone, meant that I and the readers might get to know them as they know themselves. You’re with them on these very significant moments, the ones which affect how they see themselves. That journey is so endless: seeing the people who raised you as people, [and] realising they existed wholly without you.
When my Gran died I felt that something had been stolen from me. Of course it hadn’t. And how weird that I would feel entitled to her in that way, right? But it stretched out forever. All these years. Where I didn’t know what she sounded like or how she wore her hair. Who she was friends with. How she changed in different social contexts. And if she was alive I would still never know. I think I was writing into that because it’s so precious. It’s loving. To accept that they were once so whole without you, but you can never ever be whole again without them.
No.5
What do you wish someone told you when you first started writing?
How freeing it is. How honestly delightful to sit down and make things up. I have a friend called Dinithi who is studying for her PhD, and when I asked her about it I must have done so with some kind of suffering quality. Like I expected her to tell me how much she’s bled for it and how agonising it all is. In response, she said really simply that she enjoys her work and her research. It’s hard, but she [also] just likes doing it.
I thought I wasn’t into glamourising hard work but I’d likely just been doing it without noticing. It’s just work, like anything else—it’s so simple. I didn’t know that writing fiction would bring me so much joy. I wish I had.
Find out more
Singapore, 1951
When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed. What happens next will determine the lives of generations to come.
New Zealand, 1984
Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not what they expected, and for the children, Sithara and Suri, a sudden and shocking event changes everything.
London, 2018
Arriving on her uncle Suri's doorstep, jetlagged and heartbroken, Annie has no idea what to expect - all she knows is that Suri was cast out of the family before she was born.
Moving between cities and generations, Amma follows three women on very different paths, against a backdrop of shifting cultures. As circumstance and misunderstanding force them apart, it will take the most profound love to knit them back together before it's too late.
Get it from Moa Press here.