first person plural, most told in first person singular. It was all a hot mess. I stepped back. I realized I wanted to construct five regions that don’t exist in this world, but are imagined from this one, and I wanted to tell their stories, and are associated with being the poorest regions of the world, through the first person narrators who live in these regions and relate to that space through a greater tale that is weaved through their voices, and then first person plural narrators that come to tell the brutal and tragic histories of these regions through dyads like Mother-Son, Master-Slave, God-Devil. I wrote the second draft, and recently finished what I hope to be the final draft. Like “Until We Meet Again,” I’m proud of We Are The Poorest (Country) in the World. Instead of telling stories of genocide or war or famine, I told stories of a mother meeting her daughter for the first time, a sister comforting her sister after she loses her job, or a person confessing to being an atheist, ie stories we just don’t associate with places like the Congo or Curacao (not that I wrote about those regions either; again, regions that don’t exist in our world but are based in ours). I used the power of language like I did in “Until We Meet Again,” to fuse the narratives by having the last sentence of one paragraph respond to the first sentence of a new one, creating almost a dialogue that weaves between the different “I’s,” “we’s,” and the stories they share. Finally, six months after I wrote this first draft, Occupy Wall Street happened, a movement that centered itself on a multitude having the exact same type of global dialogue that I had created in my novel. It made me feel like, within the passing of a month, the postmodern world has ended and a new one had begun, and I was channeling that moment.
But, over time, I found myself less proud of my first novel. I still think it’s an important work, and therefore worth publishing, but in “Until We Meet Again,” I felt I had created a language that burst through the restrictions that language creates, that any person could see a part of themselves in that novella, instead of empathizing with a narrator behind a wall. That wall still exists in my first novel; in fact, I would say it’s the greatest critique I would give to that work, as well as the fact that it shows that it was clearly a novel written by someone still maturing into himself. That being said, both critiques I find minor, and I’m relatively proud of my novel, because it’s channeling the moment we live in now, tells a story that had to have been said, and does something innovative. I’ve just realized that I can do better.
In fact, I’ve started that “better” already. When I returned to the States, I found myself depressed. I was very upset being in a culture so industrial and consumeristic instead of historical and artistic. Furthermore, the memories of who I once was, both in high school (the fat, not attractive, super in-your-face, inconfident, depressed, unloved Kiran) and college (the overcompensating, super in-your-face, hyper-extroverted Kiran) bombarding me with the shame of who I once was. The process began as I found myself dreaming in a new world, a Global City that became named Monstropolis, a city once of a golden age where every language, race, and culture in the world coalesced had gone to ruin because of a disease that had wiped out its collective memory. I began to imagine caricatures of the world, a “Yugoslavia” that had killed his brothers out of the seven sins, and, feeling bad, resurrecting them at the dinner table and pretending nothing has happened, or “France,” a beautiful girl that only looks at herself in the mirror and no one else. At the center of this story is the Nameless Man, a person who has chosen to come to the city for no reason that he knows of. Every time he enters a new village, town, or space, he changes personality, and any time someone attempts to get into some form of relationship with him, he ends that person’s life. He refuses to be named, even as “man who bought my bread.” While this world grew in me, I started having horrible nights where I couldn’t fall asleep, nights where I’d think of girls who made fun of me for a high pitched voice, or being called out for trying to sit with people at a table where I wasn’t invited. They were memories that I hadn’t thought of in years.
Then, after I got back to New York, I started to rationalize my world in theory again. I had noticed that we were entering into a new era, a new moment, and as a result a new aesthetic, social, literary space, and I wanted to define it, even though I had noticed this just at the beginning of said possible movement. My imagination started to chase the world of what I later began to call “altermodernism” instead of my work, the exact opposite type of progress that had happened in Spain. I felt so overwhelmed by what I was trying to do, coupled with my post-Spain depression, and a sense that everything I did was a failure. I began to see a counselor. She made me realize something. In high school, my life became progressively worse until I was disowned by pretty much everyone I knew. When I went to college, I told myself that the Kiran of that time had died, and a new one began. I purposefully tried to create a new personality over my old one, a veil that was much more accessible, approachable, charming, lovable. Meanwhile, I’d show photos of my old self to people, telling them I was once fat, once incredibly awkward. I acted as if I was a member of the crowd that once pointed at me and laughed. I didn’t want to recognize that Kiran existed, and when I would, it would be only to point out how much better I was than him. My counselor made me realize that what I was doing was very unhealthy, that my old self didn’t die at all; he was underneath me all along.
And, that is where he remains, underneath Monstropolis. I am the Nameless Man, who chooses to escape the place I grew up and the family that raised me to hide from who I once was. Monstropolis represents the globe, the place to which I escape, whether in the sense of my vision, or the physical spaces I plan to live in (Portugal, South Africa, Italy, France, Russia, etc). I’ve realized that What Remains of Monstropolis came to me under fits of self-anxiety because it is now time for me and my art to become one, to take my memories and meld them over the warm steel of a sword into myself. In the same way that the Nameless Man finds the memories that caused him to become nameless through his interactions with the people of Monstropolis, I must now search the empty corridors and darkened streets of who I once was, in order to find myself and tell him that someone does indeed care about him, to hug him in my arms and tell him that he is loved.
It is through this first act of accepting and loving myself that the process in which I transcend my body begins. In order for me to write my greatest work, I’ll have to become so fused with, yet distant from the memories that were once my own that they appear to me like the memories of someone else or fictions I’ve created for myself. I can begin to take those fictions and place them into the bodies of people who aren’t me. I want to give birth to myself. I literally want to collapse everything that once made me who I am into the threads of history that have made up our world, and from that birth the globe as I know it. It will be that moment then, when my anxieties will disappear, that the hundreds of thoughts that flood my mind will suddenly calm, and I will no longer be the human that I once was. I will have exited this world, and finally find peace.
A list of my projects:
Finished:
Jihad of the American Fool – (Last Chance on 75th Street, Aurora of Eden, Thankless Call, A Poetic Intermission: The One Night Stand of Flowers, Jihad of the American Fool, Song of Jack, Like Father, Like Son, A Facebook Message from the Person That Loves You, Until We Meet Again).
We Are the Poorest (Country) In the World – first novel
Jesus Lives in Madrid – a novel composed of 8 stories (Jesus Remembers, Jesus Buys Something, How Juan Betrayed Jesus, Jesus Lives in Madrid, Jesus Sees His Father, Jesus Fell in Love with a Gypsy Once, Jesus and the Bull, Jesus Dies)
Working on:
What Remains of Monstropolis – second novel
A Walk Through Western Streets – (A Walk Through Western Streets, Three Stops from Belfast, The Queen of Coimbra, and then the rest to be decided).
The Hearkening – to not be touched until after I turn 25.
December
