RACE, POWER AND STORYTELLING: AN INTERVIEW WITH SONORA JHA
SONORA JHA, PhD, is an essayist, novelist, researcher, and professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of the novel Foreign, and her op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, The Establishment, DAME, and in several anthologies. She grew up in Mumbai and has been chief of metropolitan bureau for the Times of India and contributing editor for East magazine in Singapore. She teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and Seattle Public Library. She is an alumna and board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and has served on the jury for awards for Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Hugo House. Her latest book is How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family (Sasquatch Books USA and Penguin Random House India, 2021). Twitter: @ProfSonoraJha and Instagram: @sonorajha1.
NAMRATA PODDAR writes fiction, nonfiction and serves as the Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates a series on Race, Power and Storytelling. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Best Asian Short Stories anthology, Electric Literature, CounterPunch, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Border Less, was a finalist for Feminist Press's Louise Meriwether Prize, longlisted for C&R Press Fiction Book Award and semi-finalist for Black Lawrence Press's The Big Moose Prize, and is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Twitter: @poddar_namrata. Instagram: @writerpoddar
NP: After working for several years in journalism, your first novel, Foreign was based on the true story of farmers suicide in India—a timely read for anyone seeking to better understand the ongoing famers protests in India and the largest protest in human history. In comparison, your latest book, How to Raise a Feminist Son reads very different, a memoir of brown motherhood and a literary “how-to” that combines personal storytelling with a history of feminism, politics, humor and tenderness to show how raising feminist children, especially feminist cis young men, is among the most urgent tasks of our time. What led you to writing this book?
SJ: In a way, the feminist choices I made in my life and my feminist lens led me to writing this book. I was really enjoying watching my son grow into a feminist alongside me. I was thrilled with the benefits for him and for me. And then, as more and more things happened in the world that exposed toxic masculinity—the rise of Trump and Modi and other such leaders and the revelations of #MeToo, for instance—I would publish political and personal essays that would get an overwhelming response from readers around the world. I sensed a hunger for a conversation on how cis-het young men could be true feminist allies. I started to write about my experiences, and the essays rushed out of me, partly as a love letter and partly as a response to the cultural moment.
NP: In Feminist Son’s opening, you mention having changed the names of most people you include in your narrative, even if it’s a personal story about the making of your family and raising a feminist son. What drove your narrative decision with altered names?
SJ: I wanted to give my loved ones as much privacy as possible. In particular, my son is a very private person, and although he gave me permission to write about our life, he didn’t want any attention to himself. He also never wants to uphold himself in any performative way as a feminist. We wanted to avoid any such attention going his way beyond the pages of the book. Unlike most memoirs, the thread of the feminist son narrative extends beyond my son, to our sons. The “How To” element of the book allowed me to make this a little less about us, in a way, while totally being about us. So, the real names weren’t essential.
NP: While we await statistical documentation on this, books published by South Asian writers in the American trade market are known to be dominated by upper caste voices. Feminist Son, in context, is the first book I’ve read that owns its Brahmin privilege and the upper class component within of the Indian landowning elite, and equates it, to a good degree, with upper-class white American privilege. Again and again, I read South Asian diasporic writers publishing in the West who advocate for social justice with their much-needed critique of race, gender and xenophobia, yet also gloss over their caste privilege or middle class privilege in one of the world’s richest countries. Why was asserting your caste privilege while sharing your struggles with race, gender, migration and ableism important to you?
SJ: Oh, this was terribly important to me. How can I claim to be a feminist – intersectional or otherwise – if I don’t tease out how Brahmanical patriarchy preys on lower caste people in India? Indeed, I suffered the violence of a Brahmanical patriarchal control in my family. If I don’t blow the whistle, who will? If I don’t walk away from it (and of course, I still benefit from its privileges, such as access to the best education, cache in Indian society which translates seamlessly to entitlement in the US as well), how do I walk toward the delights of a feminist life? If I don’t call it out and keep my son away from the privileges that would turn him into an entitled little prince, how do I raise a feminist man? For the Indian edition being published by Penguin Random House India, in fact, I interviewed Dalit writers and activists and pried open this matter some more – you cannot be a feminist if your feminism doesn’t call out racism and casteism as well. You are either an intersectional feminist or you are no feminist at all.
NP: Speaking of privilege, I love how your book distinguishes a performative feminist man from a genuine ally, a “partner feminist” who “recognizes, checks, and refuses his privilege. He calls his buddies out on it, he calls his bosses out on it, he calls himself out on it,” as your narrator says. Reading this, I sighed with longing and frustration. In a global culture of toxic masculinity where cis men are socialized to play along when with other men, to laugh at or even encourage bigoted jokes, to not exhibit behavior that embraces vulnerability, let alone apologize or expect to be held accountable for their mistakes, how can womxn access consistent allyship by cis men? Or rather, is consistency possible only when cis men are raised by feminist mothers?
SJ: Ha! I’d love to answer “yes” to your question so people will buy my book as some sort of wise and magical tome. But really, I believe we have to demand better all the time from all our men (and womxn and other genders, too). Part of this is to stop enabling toxic patriarchy. I wrote an essay about this after the rape of 8-year-old Asifa in India in 2018. If we’re not shutting down sexist jokes at our parties or on our social media, if we’re not walking away from men who refuse to change and continue to harm us (and of course not all of us have the resources to walk away), if we’re not using our positions and privilege to make things better for the next generation, we’re a big part of the problem. All of this can be done lovingly and deliciously with men who are willing, boys and men who see how vulnerability, rather than fragility, can be good for their health, their relationships, their careers. So, not all of this is about being what feminist Sara Ahmed terms the “feminist killjoy” (I love how she asks womxn to claim this title with pride). And then, we have to let our men falter, but then hold them to higher standards as well. They can do it!
NP: As a former Mumbaikar like you, and a mother to a two-year-old son, I devoured Feminist Son for obvious reasons. At the same time, I wondered what of mothers of color who are raising children with multiple generations of family nearby, who on the one hand, offer support to working parents and their nuclear families with caregiving and community, but who also bring the violence of silence or internalized patriarchy to the table. In your book, the narrator escapes with her son, Gibran, to America to escape the loud and/or silent enablers of toxic masculinity in her family. What of mothers who cannot “escape” for n number of reasons? Your advice to them on how to raise a feminist son while navigating resistance—conscious or unconscious—from loved ones?
SJ: This is a tough one, isn’t it? There have been so many times when I have longed for the support structure of the extended family, instead of this single-mother-and son family of mine. There were times I desperately needed money or needed someone to drive Gibran to school as I recovered from orthopedic surgeries. I was terrified and alone, but I could not bear to lose the increasingly strong love I started to have for myself and my new life. So. If you absolutely have to work within immutable structures and live within the resistance to your feminist enterprise, find a parallel emotional support structure, perhaps, friends who will be a sounding board or a reprieve. And embrace the comfort of the extended family. While I was physically distant and putting myself out of harm’s way, I encouraged Gibran to maintain loving relationships with my family. They’re good for our kids in so many ways. And then, we may need to undo some of the harm by talking and reframing things for our kids. Our boys, especially, should not be constant witnesses to the minimizing of their mothers by her family or her in-laws. We have to stand up for ourselves also as an act of love toward our boys.
NP: Lastly, what are you working on these days?
SJ: I’m finishing up a novel that tells the story of a white man. Because, you know, the world needs more of those. But seriously, this is a twisted tale.
