Hello, Wild Minds readers! It’s been a minute, but I’m still here, working hard and dreaming about days where I will have more time for processing the creative process on this here blog. Last month, I attended (and presented at) HippoCamp, Hippocampus Magazine’s conference for creative nonfiction writers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was so nourishing to be around other writers and introverts, and to learn about all the incredible projects developing in so many people’s brains and notebooks and computers. Madhushree Ghosh was on the panel for the Debut CNF Author Showcase, which is how I learned about her new beautiful and important book Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family.

Khabaar (“food” in Bengali) is a braided essay collection about Madhushree’s refugee parents, her own immigration story from India to the United States, and food’s role in connecting to identity, culture and social justice. Madhushree is a Pushcart-nominated essayist whose work was the 2020 Notable Mention in Best American Essays in Food Writing, and her words have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Rumpus and more. She has a PhD in biochemistry and a post-doctoral fellowship in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University. A passionate women-in-science activist, Madhushree mentors emerging women leaders of color in science and speaks on gender pay parity in the field.

I am grateful to Madhushree for so kindly sharing her words of wisdom and real talk for our Q&A about her writing process, social justice, and how she puzzles it all together.

Q&A with Madhushree Ghosh, writer

Q: How did you get started as a writer?

A: I was the first science person—the first science girl—in the family. In India, even if you’re good in your creative writing and literature, that’s just part of how you grow up—especially in the state I come from, which is Bengal. But if you’re good in science, then that’s what you do because that’s what gets you down the path of financial security, right? So, I was writing. I wrote my first really bad poem when I was eight that got published. I remember my mother running around trying to get all the newspaper copies so she could send it to all her family. Writing in India is slightly different from how you do it here. The process is different, how we think is different. The “show don’t tell”—those rules don’t apply. We rely a lot on folklore, so my writing style was very different then. But I focused primarily on fiction. Then, for my PhD I was coming here so I had to stop writing for almost ten years.

When I started writing here, I almost had to relearn how to tell a story, because the rules are different. Viet Thanh Nguyen has talked about this, you know, especially with people of color. We kind of reduce ourselves when we come here in order to fit in, in order to be considered the “grateful refugee” or “the grateful immigrant.” So, you start writing like white folks! And that kind of levels the intensity of your words. This was about two decades ago. So you start understanding what makes you tick, and you understand as you get older, “This is not what I represent,” and you start writing authentically. You know when you start writing authentically, “This is me, this is what I represent.” That took a while. I moved from fiction to nonfiction about 10, 15 years ago. So, I’ve been writing all along. Working in biotech gives me the financial freedom to write because you cannot be a writer and make your money off it. If you do, then good for you, but most of us don’t. And my job takes me to different places around the world so I use plane rides to write. I make the best of whatever I can do.

Q: Why do you think you changed from fiction to creative nonfiction?

A: I was writing fiction primarily because I was very homesick, so I would try to find South Asian books that represented home. Some of them did, but most of them did not. In the early 2000s, even late 1990s, the writing style was primarily of angst and homesickness, talking about a country that was not familiar to me. There was a lot of magical realism, there was a lot of fantasy, and that’s not how I grew up. Or it was just a beautiful bucolic childhood story. Or something very traumatic. There was nothing in the middle, which is how we all live. I mean, most of us live very boring lives, this kind of excitement doesn’t happen. So, I was writing fiction. My marriage fell apart in 2010, 2011. I was in the middle of a very complicated novel at that time, and my brain just froze. I just couldn’t go beyond it. Since I wasn’t able to write that, I was like, “Well, you know what, let me at least process what I’m doing.” So that’s how I started writing nonfiction. I was just trying to make sense of what I was writing. My nonfiction actually follows rules of fiction. I think that’s why people find it very dramatic. Once I started writing nonfiction, that connected with a lot of people, and I was able to be my authentic self in terms of what I could talk about and what was important to me.

Q: In Khabaar, food is the conduit to topics like immigration, family, home and identity. Have you always felt an awareness of the cultural significance of food—of food as a way to reach story—or did you become more conscious of this later?

A: Like I was telling you, I was homesick and I was reading all these South Indian books. All these books had this really dream-like quality about, oh you know, there’s this very sad Indian woman with long hair in the kitchen with cumin and coriander and jasmine and roses, and then a white man rescues her and that’s the story. And I promised myself I would never write about spices. And then, this book comes out! So you should never mock anybody else’s work because you’ll end up doing exactly that. But what I realized is, the way I’ve always coped with homesickness is by making, taking pictures, or writing about food. When my parents passed away, a huge chunk of family recipes went with them. I grew up just studying. That’s what you do, you just study and you never get into the kitchen. So, I never really knew what was what. I remember coming back home after my mother passed away and being like, “You know, I really want to make this cabbage curry.” Cabbage in this country isn’t given the respect it deserves, and in India it’s just fantastic—if you know how to cook it, and I didn’t. I remember chopping the vegetable and sauteing it and I remember throwing spices in like I knew what I was doing. And it was actually muscle memory, or just from me sitting in the kitchen or hearing my mother do it. So, for me, food has always been a guide and it’s always been a way to remember things. Scientifically it makes sense because it’s texture, it’s color, it’s smell, so your brain gets activated in different ways. Whether you’re cooking a certain food or you’re not allowed to cook that certain food, that tells a lot about where you are.

That’s the personal, but when you pull back a few thousand feet or so, most of it has a political connotation. Anthony Bourdain talked about this too. Food really does start a conversation about where you are and why you are. In my biotech work, I work a lot in negotiations. You can’t come to a happy medium when you’re negotiating unless the other person’s across the table listening, so if the other person’s not even at the table, you’re not negotiating, you’re just talking to yourself. Now, you’re sitting at the table, this other person’s sitting at the table, and there’s a plate of food in front of you. You either love it, you hate it, one of you has a memory or both of you have a memory of that food. Then you’re starting a conversation. Then you can have an exchange. Just the way you and I are talking, because you read the book, so there’s something we can talk about, because we are both interested in talking about things that matter to us. I feel food is that universal topic. It’s the same thing with music, books. But you can live without books. You can live without music. You cannot live without food. That’s the difference. That’s why I think food is a great means of transportation into ideas that you may not have explored otherwise.

Q: You chose not to italicize Bengali, Hindi and other Indian language words in Khabaar. Can you talk a little about that decision and why it’s important?

A: I’ve always not italicized this, so it’s not like I suddenly decided, “Let me be this person.” Indians, South Asians, we grew up with multiple languages. This is not America where people just know one language and are proud of it. We are proud of the fact that we’ve learned multiple languages, but we don’t sit around talking about it either. We know a lot of languages. So, when you think, you’re thinking in multiple languages. And that’s why our writing style is slightly different, because the cadence of each language is different. There are different ways to look at it. I can italicize it, so then the reader who is not Indian or South Asian will look at it and say, “Oh, foreign stuff!” right? But what is the writer thinking when they write something in italics? That means you’re saying Hindi that I grew up with—and I think in Hindi, I think in Bengali, I think in Tamil—is foreign to me. But it’s not foreign to me, so why would I italicize it? Putting it in italics means I’m already othering the language that I grew up with. And the whole point here is: I’m not saying I’m an ungrateful immigrant, but I’m saying that this country has got a lot from me as much as I have got from here. I’m not going to be shy about saying so. And that’s why it was very important that we did not italicize it. I deliberately chose to call this “Khabaar” because it’s a Bengali word, so everybody who’s read this book can say, “I know one Bengali word and that’s ‘khabaar’ and it’s ‘food.’” So my mission in this world is successful in that I taught people one word, you know? So, is it subversive? Absolutely. Is it social justice? Absolutely. That’s what this book is all about.

Q: As a white American who doesn’t know these languages, my reading experience felt like: “Okay, this is this person’s brain and perspective, and I have to come to that if I want to understand it. They’re not serving me. It’s up to me to meet them where they are instead.” It changes the relationship a little bit with the reader.

A: I think the assumption is that readers need to be fed things. And what this proved is that readers are extremely intelligent and discerning, and very willing to go with the story and the author, if they believe the foundation of what this book is about. Junot Díaz has talked about how white readers can go with the flow on Lord of the Rings or weird terminologies in Harry Potter, but as soon as you put in a couple of Spanish words they’re like, “Oh my god! Look what happened!” South Asian authors are significantly more polite about it. I might be one of the most impolite ones about it.

Q: What is the role of memoir in fighting for social justice?

A: Memoir has different needs. It all depends on what’s important to you. Everybody doesn’t need to raise the alarm. Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not go to the street and rally for women’s rights. What she did was use her legalese to make sure that women and men got equal rights as parents, which is very crafty. There are different ways of coming to terms with what you want to talk about. Not everybody is political. I come from a politically active family, so for me, to not talk about Roe v. Wade or to not talk about gender pay parity—that’s not me. Regardless of if I’m talking about lentil with yogurt versus lentil with cream, I will talk about it, you know? I will talk about women’s rights. That’s why for memoir, one has to understand what we are trying to convey. Some memoirs do not need social justice. It’s more of a reflection and understanding of where you land and what’s happened. Jesmyn Ward wrote this beautiful essay on the death of her husband right at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s a personal narrative of losing your love, you know? What social justice are we going to talk about? But she did talk about George Floyd’s murder, so then your personal becomes political. You have to decide how far you want to take it.

The way I’ve taken it in my book is pretty far. I’ve talked about South Asian domestic partner abuse that we don’t talk about because our community is very “the model immigrant” community. Nobody beats anybody up here. And yet, when you do the research, you find out 48% of South Asian women in this country have been abused financially, emotionally, immigration-wise, psychologically, or, of course, physically. And nobody talks about it. I always minimize my own situation by saying, “Well, I never got beaten up so it’s fine,” and the fact is you don’t see emotional scars. Most people get emotionally abused. So, to not talk about that would have done my community, and women in general, a disservice. I live a very strong life as a leader in science, so I needed to talk about that because I wanted people to know that you could have this life and yet you could have this other one, where you’re trying to hold onto conventional marriage, and it just wasn’t working. If you come from a family where that’s all you do, this is considered a failure. But the thing is, in biotech you look at ROI, return on investment. You’ve given 17 years of your life, you’re not getting what you wanted—it’s time to let go.

Q: What’s your favorite part of the creative process?

A: I am a big fan of the braided essay. That’s how my brain works. People find it difficult because it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, but I love it. I let it go organically. I know what I want to talk about but I don’t know how it’s going to fall into place. So, I love it when it just clicks. You know in a jigsaw puzzle when you just press the last puzzle piece in and it’s like “Ooh! Look!”, you know? I love that part. And I really like the process of editing, and that is not creative at all. That is very scientific. I think what people forget when they start writing is most of writing is editing. Nobody tells you that. They just tell you, “Oh yeah! Be creative!” But actually, you should know when to edit.

I also don’t believe in the “kill your darlings” principle. I think every word should be your darling, and you should be ruthless about it if you want this piece to shine. At the end of the day—I watch too much TV—but when you’re looking at Top Chef, they’ll put the food out and say, “It’s got blah blah and a hint of saffron” or whatever, and then they’ll say, “Enjoy.” They’re not going to say, “Do you like it?” or “Oh, I hope you like it!” I feel writers need to do that. Because I’m presenting you my best offer. This is what I got. I stand by it.

Learn more about Madhushree at her website and buy her book Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey. You can also read more about her thoughts on the braided essay in this piece she wrote for Writer’s Digest.

Here is the beautiful essay by Jesmyn Ward that Madhushree mentioned in her Q&A, in which the personal expands to political. “Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.”

I like these journal prompts about food. Simple, but guaranteed to get you writing about something.

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Q&A with Madhushree Ghosh: Enjoy

Q&A with Madhushree Ghosh, writer

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