HYDERABAD: Annie Zaidi is a package writer. From a journalist to a writer of nonfiction, novellas, essays and short stories, she has polished her craft that shows in her role as a playwright. She was in the city recently for a dramatised reading of her play Jaal performed by Sutradhar at British Council as part of Writer’s Bloc Showcase. She talked about the play which is about displacement, industrial and rural conflict and how images come to her when she pens poems.
Excerpts from the interview:
How have you evolved as a writer, poet and playwright?
In college, I was interested in writing. I used to write short scripts for the love of theatre. We used to do it for fun, not for any sense of professionalism. I used to write a little bit of poetry in college. After I finished college I took admission in journalism knowing that I’d be doing something in media.
But the feeling that I wanted to do other kinds of writing stayed with me and I was not satisfied with just reportage, I wanted to do something more. I kept on writing poetry all this while. One can write poetry while being in a full-time job, plays and novels are difficult because they are much more time-taking.
Anything which requires you to commit a lot of time and your thoughts, needs much time. Media tends to operate in certain formats with the word limits. I wanted to experiment a little. A lot of my works feed into each other.
For example, Jaal is routed in my experience as a journalist, the way you see how there are so many sides to a story. It works for me not to be in only one kind of writing. Even in poetry, when I keep a tab on daily reportage, the same seeps into my verses. Life experiences have to fit into your art, otherwise how you are going to create something creative.
Your grandfather Ali Jawad Zaidi was a noted Urdu poet and a freedom fighter. Does it happen that people compare you with him?
Not really, because I was not taught Urdu. I tried to learn Urdu on my own. So far I have not learnt to read the script. I read Urdu verses in Devanagari or Roman script, but there’s no comparison. He was much more prolific and scholarly than me, he knew more languages and he knew things that not many know about. Also, I come from a different era.
He was from a time when poetry was in the air all around. You learnt Urdu growing up. Not just one particular community, but everybody knew Urdu. Poetry was mainstream entertainment at that time. It’s not so now. Writing in that world was quite different than writing in this world.
You edited Aleph’s anthology ‘Un Bound 2000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing’; as a poet, writer and journalist are you comfortable with the term ‘women writer(s)?
I think it’s complicated. I wouldn’t like to be narrowed down in any way. The fact of being a woman certainly has to do with what I write. I can’t say that the gender has got nothing to do with writing. Your experience counts. Nobody says male writers, unless for a particular reason. We shouldn’t get to a point where one has to classify. Men and women deal with the same themes. It’s only that the label is pasted mostly on women. Nobody really describes a masculine theme.
What’s your approach to prose and poetry?
If something is coming naturally, you don’t stop. If sentences come to your head then you need to put the same down on paper.
Why did you choose to write Jaal as a play in Hindi?
You need to take a creative decision at some point. I was doing a non-fiction project back then. I was thinking, I’d write a story first but somehow things appear in your head in a particular way. I knew that that story was appearing in the form of scene, dialogues.
I wanted to let the characters speak for themselves. I knew that I’d prefer to see that story live than in any other medium. I chose to write it in Hindi because this play is set in a village. The characters have to speak like they speak in their native language. Say, writing about a particular tribe requires me to know their language; I may not know their language, but communicate with them in Hindi.
There are a lot of images of celestial bodies in your poems. Is there a little girl inside you fascinated by the sun, moon and stars?
I was a different kind of girl. I never looked at stars. (Laughs). I think I do star gazing much more now. That happened more as an adult when you learn to pay attention more to details not in a very conscious way. The sun, the moon and stars are the only thing that you can take for granted. They are the only constants, everything else changes.
In one of your poems which is advice to a convict, you use soap as an image of freedom. What was your thought process at that time?
I was reading about prisoners and how they trade among themselves. When you don’t have money, how do you start trading? They start with soap because it’s essential and everything is in short supply. If you don’t have anything then you start trading the soap cutting it in halves. They stay inside the prison for years and learn the way to survive.
What are you working at currently?
I am editing a book by Juggernaut. It’s a series of essays on successful and well-known women.