The Kohima-based author chats with Mid-day Online about her writings, interweaving oral storytelling of folk stories in her text, and the need for more Naga people to tell their own stories
Nagaland author Avinuo Kire, who was at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2023 in January, released her latest book ‘Where the Cobbled Path Leads’ in 2022. Photo Courtesy: Jaipur Literature Festival 2023
For Avinuo Kire, who is among the more recent writers to come out of Nagaland, writing stories like she would like to hear them is easily the most important aspect of her works. It is simply because oral storytelling has been such an important part of her days growing up in Nagaland.
The Naga author explains, “I try to imitate orality through my writing and try to imagine how this story would be orally told. So, a lot of times I incorporate my dialect and I make sure that it is not italicised because I want it to blend in the narration and do not want it to become conspicuous Italics.” Consciously including the repetition of words and digressing which often happens when one is orally telling a story, is another aspect that is very important.
Inspired by Naga oral tradition, science fiction and Covid-19 pandemic
It is also what she brought to her book ‘Where the Cobbled Path Leads’, which was released in 2022. This comes after her collection of short stories, ‘The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland’ (2021) and ‘The Power to Forgive and Other Stories’ (2015) among others. “I am a Naga and we have an oral history because we are richly an oral indigenous society. I grew up listening to our stories and folk tales and legends. These are manifestations of intangible heritage and I have always been very moved by that and it is also a source of identity for me. So, I was inspired by that, and my favourite genre, which is scientific fiction, and merged these two together for the book.”
Incidentally, while the creation of the story was always in the process, Kire wrote a lot of chapters during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people experienced losses, a key aspect of the book. “I am a Christian and it made me sort of think so much about death and what comes after death, and about how we don’t know so many things about this world and the spirit world. I think a lot of it came together and this book was in that way very cathartic for me by merging two together,” she adds.
Kire, who was at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January, came as a speaker. Interestingly, it was her first time at the festival. Being a Literature student herself, it was on her list of festivals to visit for a long time. The Naga author, who lives and teaches in Kohima, even wanted to get her students to her festival in the past but that never materialised. Now that she has checked it off her list, it is a dream come true, especially on the back of her folk fantasy book set in Nagaland.
Importance of folk stories and Naga voices in literature
Having grown up with oral stories, the very tradition has always been important to her and one that she deeply intersects with spirituality. The very essence of these traditions is what she enjoys because these stories are not those that are documented but instead passed down from generation to generation only with the help of memory and the fact that spiritualism is an essential part of it intrigues her. She explains, “Ancestral Naga spiritualism is very deeply rooted in the spirit world and the physical human world, and they often merge and collide and become one. Some of these folk tales are quite fantastical and what I love about these stories are that they are told in a very matter-of-fact manner like it really happened.” Stories told in Naga culture like human beings turning into animals, which seems so far-fetched, she says are often seen as fiction in written accounts but for the community, when these stories are told while they are growing up, it was not categorised as fantasy, and instead as something that has happened, which manages to fascinate her even today and she weaves into her books.
However, Kire is clear that she doesn’t have any grand ambitions about educating more people about Nagaland and Northeast India because she believes she is simply a storyteller but now without hope. “But if in a small way readers can read and come to know more of how richly diverse India is and that there are so many different narratives, instead of the danger of a single grand narrative sort of overwhelming and overshadowing the stories of so many other minority groups, then I would be really happy.” Only so that they can understand how richly diverse and multi-layered India is through the many stories told. Interestingly, even though she, like many others, has adapted these oral traditions into a text and believes it has helped preserve these traditions, it can never replace orality for her. “I think it would be a great injustice to say script is replacing orality,” she makes it clear.
It is also the reason why she tells her students about the importance of oral traditions even as they aspire to be writers, most of which are required to come out of Nagaland, a lot of which didn’t exist in the past. She explains, “Most or all written accounts have been written by early colonial historians or from an outsider perspective and it is through the prism of the colonial lens. So, a lot of words like ‘insurgents’ and ‘barbaric’ have been used, so it is important that we take charge of the narrative and write our own stories based on our own world views.” Kire says she tells her students that they shouldn’t think that script or writing is more important than oral traditions or listening. “I tell them to pay more attention to reading which is important because every reader cannot be a writer but if you want to write you must read,” says the Nagaland author, who reveals she is writing a new novel, but it is still in the early stages.
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