Alina Gufran is a writer and filmmaker from New Delhi. Her debut novel, No Place To Call My Own, has been published by Westland Books. Her film, Leela, premiered at IFFR and has been showcased at prestigious festivals like San Sebastian International Film Festival, Dokufest, Riga International Film Festival, and MAMI. She is also the producer and co-host of an original podcast, Bitches Brew.
NAW: I wanted to ask you about the title. After reading the book, it’s understandable but is “Place” a metaphor for something else? Love, possession, something else apart from merely a sense of belonging or a safe spot.
Alina Gufran: So, what’s the question?
NAW: How did you decide the title? This is the question.
Alina Gufran: I think the title actually came to me much later, after the story came to me.
This is a fun little trivia, but when I first submitted the manuscript, it was called Inland. I don’t know why I called it that, but I just wanted to allude to the interiority of the character. It was kind of a lazy title. And, I think by the time I arrived at chapter nine, which is set against the North East Delhi riots, I’m talking about the father and what essentially motivated him all these years and what limited him.
Then, this line emerged, where he says, oh, actually, what he truly feels and perhaps what bolsters his fear is the idea that he doesn’t have a place to call his own. In some ways, that becomes a kind of generational trauma that’s also handed down to her. I wouldn’t call it generational trauma necessarily because that connotes that it’s something entirely interior, because I also think that so much of her experience is constantly impacted by her environment and circumstances. And politically what is happening around her at any moment. I wouldn’t even say just in the country, even when she’s in Dubai. And so the title came from there.
So, when I cracked that motivation for the father, I was like, oh, this is a familial thing. It’s a lineage thing, it is now reflected in his daughter, except the way they both approach it is very different. The father has somehow made peace with it, on his own terms, whereas the daughter, Sophia, is still on that journey of coming to recognize that perhaps this is at the center of her search.
NAW: Most debut works tend to be semi-autobiographical even if hidden under the veil of fiction but for this book, you would have had to do some research. What’s your typical research work for a potential book like? How do you go about it?
Alina Gufran: I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I have any sort of set methodology behind research. At the end of the day, it is fiction. So, a lot of it is constantly impacted by my experiences, my biases. I tend to write about the places I inhabit because those are the places impacting me the most, and that’s where I’m the most porous, and imbibing the most from my environment.
So, it naturally finds a way in my stories. Just perhaps the way I move through the world as a writer is specific. I don’t think it’s unique, but it is specific. I think just following my instinct when it comes to that, is what helped me formulate the story. I think I can confidently say it was pure instinct.
NAW: No Place to Call My Own is a bit disjointed you know, like a random collection of texts taken from a diary. While it works well for your book, it’s extremely risky because it can also turn out badly. But how did you decide this structure or is there no structure at all?
Alina Gufran: I don’t agree with the idea that it’s disjointed because that implies that storytelling is linear. I don’t believe in that idea, especially when it’s written in the first person perspective; where the ‘point of telling’ is supremely intimate.
So, the way I wrote it was that I constantly imagined Sophia narrating the story to maybe her best friend or to somebody who she’s very close to; where she doesn’t need to mince words. She doesn’t need to hide parts of herself unless she’s hiding from those parts herself.
This is where unreliable narration comes into play. Storytelling, even when we communicate with each other, is rarely linear. To me, it’s very exciting to catch hold of these impulses and tangents people have when they talk, where one thing reminds them of another thing, and follow that rabbit hole. That’s how I’ve tried to write the narrative as well. That being said, ultimately, there is a sense of completion.
I wouldn’t say there are any clear answers at the end of the book, of course, but there’s a shift or a change in the character, which to me indicated a completion of the story but I don’t really think a story’s ever complete.
I do feel that you have to abandon it at some point, but to me, it felt like, okay, here’s where my character has changed enough for this particular story to have reached its conclusive end.
NAW: Roughly, I think this book “No Place To Call My Own” fits into the black comedy genre. Do you agree? Did you specifically try for this genre or did it happen naturally? Based on personal experience, I can confirm that too much sadness tends to mimic comedy at some point without the author even realizing?
Alina Gufran: I mean, definitely, right? Because I feel that I think in film-making, they always say that. It’s a conventional way of looking at it, and, you can see masters like Jacques Tati practice it, but they say that tragedy is in a closeup and comedy is captured in a wide lens. Somehow, I found that this translates to prose too.
So, I don’t think it was intentional. I think the humor came from knowing the character really well and how she engages with the world, especially the tone of the narrator. So, whereas there are all these supposedly tragic things happening to her, I think her way of dealing with it is quite sardonic. It’s slightly detached. It’s because she is the kind of person who is acutely self-aware, but also just tends to be lazy about it and doesn’t want to do anything about it, which I find quite funny personally.
So, to answer your question, I don’t think it was particularly intentional. It was a result of knowing Sophia really well and understanding how she would choose to engage with the world.
NAW: Usually most protagonists tend to have a working or at least a normal relationship with one parent. Sophia is unique in the sense that she has a complicated relationship with both her parents. I think it’s criminal not to have delved deeper into that aspect. Why were you so restrained about the parents when the remaining is so loud and like “in your face sort of a text”?
Alina Gufran: I felt like there were things in terms of a relationship with her parents, which were implicit in her behavior and how she approached the world. It always felt more powerful to suggest it instead of really dwell on it. I feel like if I were to truly dwell on her relational dynamics with her parents, it would be an entirely other novel.
As much as I wanted that to be the background and the genesis of so much, the story was never about her coming to terms with who she is vis-a-vis her parents. The story is about her coming to terms with who she is in spite of her parents. That felt more powerful as a suggestion and an implication and not as something that needed to be overtly underlined.
NAW: No Place to Call my Own ends up voicing the narrative through people rather than places. It works well for the book but why is the protagonist’s name not mentioned much in the book? If I was just a casual reader, I wouldn’t even make out that the girl’s name is Sophia. Very few writers are able to do this. To tell a tale without constant naming. Where did you learn this?
Alina Gufran: I think it just goes back to the point that was initially touched upon earlier, the point of telling, an idea that reading Charles Baxter turned me to.
This perspective has been explored earlier by other writers as well. I got turned to this book much later in the writing process. It’s called ‘the art of subtext’. where he touches upon this idea of the point of telling. It’s like how intimate do I want the point of telling to be? It’s quite different from the idea of the gaze. To me, a POV or gaze is quite outward. It’s what you as a reader might perceive of the narrative, whereas the point of telling is something that informs my relationship as the author to the narrator and the story.
So at any point, I imagined if Sophia was talking to her best friend, she won’t keep referring to herself. I find that clumsy. So, I wanted to remove all instances of clumsiness that could come in. I also wanted to write as if the only person who knows that the story is being written is Sophia. You’re kind of dropped in the middle of her entire world. And also, I always have a tendency to trust the reader. I believe they will be invested enough after a point to not be led astray. It’s kind of a responsibility I take on.
I think I imbibed that during writing dialogue for scripts. I feel like your first draft when you’re young and writing, especially in film school, in order to make characters emphatic, I would always, not just me, any young screenwriter in my school at least, would start the line with their name and then the line. But, people don’t actually speak like that and that’s been kind of a learning as well. Like, interesting dialogue writing, which is something I’ve definitely carried onto my prose. There’s a lot of screenwriting techniques I’ve carried into the text.
I think another writer that inspires me a lot is Domenico Starnone. He’s an Italian screenwriter who is also a novelist, Jhumpha Lahiri translates his works and I think he follows some of these diktats, even though some of his narratives are often in third person, he still follows a very close narration.
NAW: You’ve worked with films and it’s such a visual medium. But did that professional background help you or was it a hindrance while writing? Books and films are similar I guess, both are used for sharing tales that need to be told.
Alina Gufran:Writing screenplays certainly helped, because it’s a very specific craft. It’s extremely unforgiving in so many ways I find it so much more demanding than prose. I think if you have a certain grasp of language, you can sometimes hide in prose whereas in screenplays, you really can’t.
So, there are a lot of things I did learn in screenplay writing, such as how to tell the story in white spaces, and let’s say cuts in terms of transitions from scene to scene or or like how the story moves forward in what is not being said as opposed to what is being said. Another learning is dialogue, how people rarely ever say what they mean and the various levels at which dialogue operates, subtext, how not to be literal. So, these are the more craft specific things I think I’ve carried into my prose. At the same time, I used to really enjoy writing screen directions. In India, nobody writes scripts like that. It’s an old school European tradition and I studied in Central Europe, so I suppose that tracks.
But, because you have to be so judicious in screenplay in deciding what is the exact material that goes into capturing or, you know, personalizing a character, I think that made me a lot more observant and better at choosing between, let’s say, three different external objects that could convey my character’s state of mind and then picking what could possibly signify it the best.
With visual imagery, I’d often get worried it’s too trite or cliched, but once I got to know the character better and put it into practice, the answers would emerge.
If you show one thing, but the character says something else, that tension or contradiction (even in internal monologue) is interesting to me. If I can offset what’s happening internally within her with what’s happening externally, that inherent tension itself gives the prose propulsion. So, for example, she’s attending her best friend’s wedding, but she’s completely detached. She’s despairing, she’s clearly going through something internally. Although she’s at the wedding constantly and she’s engaging in all these different activities, internally, she feels quite alienated. To me, that state itself can grant so much drama to the story.
I think the burden of originality should not be a writer’s to bear. I think authenticity, perhaps, but originality I’m not so sure.
NAW: I always say that much of the religious and political beliefs are a product of our growing environment. Sophia’s relentless search for identity or belonging doesn’t really stem from confusion around religion or politics even though it’s all around her. It’s more like a sense of confusion about her artistic talent and the inability to make meaningful income from what she really loves doing, right?
Alina Gufran: I would say it’s an amalgamation of these things. Because, I suppose, somewhere the intent is also for her to come to terms with these various roles she’s meant to play
For one, she’s an artist in a late stage capitalist system. What does that mean? She’s also the child of an interfaith Hindu-Muslim marriage. Because neither side is really gung-ho to have you. And, in modern society the family is the central unit of capitalism.
So, when you feel alienated from your own roots, I suppose you carry that feeling into any world you inhabit including relationships of any kind; romantic, platonic, professional.
NAW: Why writing? I was a writer at some point so I know the writing life is hard. Of all the things you could have possibly done with your life, did you consciously choose writing or are you an accidental writer?
Alina Gufran: I think when I was young, you know, when anyone is young, not just me, there is a sense of a loss of agency, right? You’re in an educational system, you are in a family unit. When you’re a child, you’re just meant to listen, right? And obedience is a very big part of Eastern society, eastern communities, and that can bring in a sense of loss of agency or the self.
I’m not saying that it’s important or it will necessarily happen, but a lot of people do reckon with that. The sense of duty versus who you really are, authenticity versus who you need to be for the people who love you or have raised you. So, somewhere while growing up, writing became a way to exercise agency. It becomes a way to rewrite history, and, of course, this is very much a personal history, but I think that’s what informs a universal, more political history. But, I think a lot of it just boils down to agency. Like I said in the beginning, I’m not sure if there was a singular moment where this happened. I think it started off as a means of escape. And then just like anything in life, you know, you do something enough, you become that and now it becomes as essential as any biological process, I would say.
NAW: Please can you name five favourite writers. Writers who shaped your writing.
Alina Gufran: Yeah, sure. So many, you know. But maybe I can name a few that in the recent past or perhaps over the years have affected me the most. I think Shirley Jackson. She was just doing something with fiction at a point where I don’t think anybody else was. In her kind of orbit, right? Now, she’s considered part of the canon, but back then, she wasn’t.
Mary Gaitskill’s work has had a profound effect on me. Annie Ernaux of course. Although I turned to Eranux very late because her works got translated quite late.
I would say Clarice Lispector is equally interesting, if not more interesting than many other writers operating at her time, like Sartre, Camus, and Beckett, but again, she wasn’t considered a part of the canon. I think another writer who has had a profound impact on me in the recent past would be Damon Galgut.
NAW:What are you reading currently? What do you do apart from writing?
Alina Gufran: Currently, I’m reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Before that I was reading Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. These days, I’m finding it difficult to read. I think in the last year and a half, there is definitely a certain desire within me for something almost mystical or larger than just the mundane. So, which is why I think, even though Kairos is a feat, I feel like Orbital is speaking to me more. I like the idea of six astronauts in space, caught in this routine fever of meditating on the earth, and I think that says a lot about where I am.
What do I do apart from writing? I think just about anything that any regular person might do in the world, you know? Nothing very interesting or exciting.
I mean honestly, I do feel that if I was suddenly given a large sum of money and somebody was like, here is a beautiful house on top of a hill. Take it now. I don’t think I’d be able to do it because the prospect of that is terrifying. To me, I actually like being a part of the world in whatever capacity. And then letting the story emerge when it does. Yeah, so, of course, every writer has that dream of endless solitude, but for me, a huge part of writing is also just living.