Naga author-poet Easterine Kire's new title, Bitter Wormwood, paints a true picture of her state, as she reiterates the kindled hope and optimism of her people

Did a gradual build up or a sudden event spur you to write Bitter Wormwood?
There was a gradual build up. All my life I had seen the violence of the independence struggle of my people and its complications from the '80s. It had a tremendous effect on anyone living in the region. When I was sixteen I wrote poems about it romanticising it because in the '70s there were real heroes, who left their villages, their sweethearts and their parents to fight for Naga freedom. After the mid-seventies, that romantic idealism changed when the factional infighting began. Factionalism and infighting turned the freedom struggle into an ugly power game. I wrote protest poetry in the late '80s and early '90s. I felt the injustices very deeply, as most people in my generation did, and wanted to express it in story. But it was only four years ago that this book was begun, and from a very different perspective than if it had been written in 1990.
Now, it looks backward objectively, at the faults of history and the human failings and the areas where human beings, not politicians, have had small victories of connecting and bonding in spite of the history of inflicted pain that tries to separate them.