finding my way back home

on returning to the writing life

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Before I was a writer, I was a plagiarist.

Looking back, this isn’t exactly shocking—I’ve been a reader ever since my infantile arms were strong enough to hold up a book on their own, and growing up as I did without many friends my age, the fairly solitary existence of my early childhood was made markedly less solitary by the fictional worlds in which I immersed myself with voracious fervor. I suppose it’s not surprising, then, that when my love affair with the written word began in Ms. Anderson’s fourth-grade classroom, my first instinct was not to create entirely new stories of my own, but rather to construct worlds that mirrored and built upon those that I already knew. Why bother reinventing the wheel, when I could just add a few extra spokes and a fresh coat of paint?

I’m sure that if one were to dig the ancient monstrosity of a laptop on which I typed my first stories out from the back of our guest bedroom closet, get it to power up again (in all likelihood with the aid of divine intervention, or at least the Geek Squad), and open the folder labeled “Writing”, they would find a dizzying array of half-baked bootlegs, unrepentantly cribbing the stories I loved most throughout elementary and middle school. From Enid Blyton to Anthony Horowitz, no author—no matter how beloved or famous—was safe from my duplicative clutches. I thought I was clever, changing the names of places and characters and stringing together various plot points from more than one book in a series. I even managed to convince myself of my feigned originality, deluding my juvenile brain into believing that I was merely drawing inspiration from the work of others rather than shamelessly copying them.

By the time I entered high school, I had, thankfully, managed to shed these plagiaristic tendencies in favor of somewhat more original thinking. This shift, however, was accompanied by my abandonment of the written word in favor of a new mode of expression: the world of competitive speech and debate, into which I threw myself headlong without a second though. These activities were invaluable in helping me to develop my voice—both literally and figuratively—and to hone my talent for self-expression, but as they took up most of my evenings and weekends for four years of high school, my involvement with them came at the expense of my relationship to writing.

Looking back, perhaps my eschewal of the written word in favor of speech and debate during my high school years was rooted in more than just the desire to win trophies and pad my college applications. The act of writing is an incredibly intimate endeavor, arguably more so than any other means that humans have devised of expressing themselves. Unlike delivering a speech—an inherently performative act in which the speaker, no matter how unsure they may be of themselves, nevertheless holds a certain oratory power over the audience—the writer and the reader find themselves on a more equal footing, with no veil of performativity to insulate them from one another. A speaker, when challenged by a member of the audience, can look their opponent in the eye and defend themselves on the spot. A writer, by contrast, is not afforded any such luxury—to put words on the page is to release them into the world to fend for themselves, in the process rendering the writer vulnerable on the most fundamental level. Weighed down as I was by all the insecurity and self-doubt of adolescence, perhaps the spoken word offered me the path of least resistance—a way to assert my voice without having to face up to the terrifying vulnerability that comes with expression by way of the pen.

Regardless of what exactly drove me to abandon writing in favor of more verbally-oriented pursuits, the end result was that by the time I entered college in the fall of 2018, writing had become for me an academic tool more than anything else. I remained a strong writer, and the papers I produced for my classes continued to receive top marks from my professors, but the volume and density of collegiate academic writing meant that I had little time or motivation left over to pursue writing as a vehicle for self-expression. It also meant that rather than being a personal endeavor, writing quickly became for me an exercise in pandering to the professor or TA on whose approval my grade depended, and I frequently found myself adjusting my words to reflect what I thought they wanted me to say. In this sense, while the focus on academic writing that defined my college years may have improved my technical prowess as a wordsmith—I’ll be the first to admit that I am far better at stringing a sentence together now than I was four years ago—this improvement in skill came at the undeniable expense of sincerity.

In reality, my return to the writing life was a relatively recent development. In the early days of the pandemic, I had briefly entertained hopes that the enforced solitude of lockdown would spark some new wave of inspiration, but save for a renewed interest in journaling as a means of staying sane amid the dizzying insanity of the world around me, these hopes never quite materialized. It wasn’t until the end of college that I found myself turning once again to that old friend, the written word, which readily welcomed me back home with open arms and a broad smile.

I’m still not sure why the reunion came at this particular moment in my life. Perhaps it was the sense of impending turmoil that is an inescapable part of any major life transition—the creeping awareness that the world as one knows it is about to be torn into a thousand pieces, the remnants of familiarity scattered to the wind as one is brought face to face with the paralyzing reality of the unknown. In the fall of my senior year, as I prepared to take my first hesitant steps out into the real world, I found myself standing at the edge of the proverbial precipice. By enabling me to make sense of the world around me and understand my place in it, writing offered me the tools I needed to construct a bridge.

This literary homecoming coincided fortuitously with the period in which I began, for more or less the first time, to critically engage in earnest with my own South Asian identity. Since coming to college, and in particular after the Modi government’s re-election in the 2019 Indian elections, I had become increasingly aware of the fact that as a privileged member of the Indian diaspora, my relationship to my home country was an inherently political one which needed to extend beyond the superficial trappings of depoliticized “culture”. This awareness was only reinforced by my monthlong trip to India in the summer of 2019—my first time going back since I was eleven years old—which happened to coincide with the Modi regime’s illegal annexation of Kashmir, and during which visit I saw firsthand the visible stigmata of an ascendant ethnocracy.

Nevertheless, despite my horror and outrage at what was happening in my home country, my understanding of global issues was still constrained at that point by my tendency to view the world through the lens of distinct, atomized states, rather than as a systemic global order shaped by transnational structures of imperialism and capitalism. As a result, my perspective on Indian politics, filtered as it was through the several thousand miles that separated me from the situation in India, remained trapped in a misguided dichotomy between “here” and “there”. It was really only by the time I entered my senior year, in the fall of 2021, that my broader political identity had evolved to encompass a developed anarchist ethos, which rejected the supposed inherent legitimacy of borders and nation-states in favor of a more nuanced transnational analysis. As a result, I was able for the first time to understand how the issues I cared about in my home country were interlinked with the issues I saw around me here in America, and more importantly, I was finally in a position to critically examine the role of the diaspora—including my own community—in perpetuating these harms from the other side of the world.

As I began to seriously grapple with these questions, my return to the writing life provided me with the tools I needed to fully process and understand them. By putting my thoughts down on paper, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my exploration of these issues became more focused and more substantive, the constraints of written language forcing me to articulate my conclusions in the form of coherent sentences rather than the disjointed ideas that floated aimlessly around in my head. In a sense, the powerfully generative nature inherent to the act of writing served as a crucial catalyst for my intellectual development, allowing me to crystallize and formulate my beliefs even as I expressed them.

For much of my childhood, when I still lacked the maturity and critical thinking skills necessary for true self-understanding, the prospect of seriously engaging with my identity as part of a diaspora seemed daunting, even impossible to face. It was far easier to turn and run in the other direction, pushing the uncomfortable question of who am I? as far away as possible, than to face this question, in all its dizzying expansiveness, head-on. As I have started to come into myself as a writer, however, I have found it somewhat less terrifying to confront this question mark, to acknowledge and yet still remain untouched by the uncertainty that lies beyond it. And as someone who never learned their mother tongue, the ability to explore my identity and process its infinitely varied complexities through the written word has been deeply transformative. This exploration remains now, as it did when I was younger, limited by the confines of the English language, but the fact that I now feel comfortable enough to interrogate these questions on the page rather than in my head gives me slightly sturdier footing than I ever had before.

My return to writing after all these years has been a homecoming in more ways than one. Beyond restoring the familiar comfort of a world in which I am in control, where the quasi-omnipotent role of the storyteller allows me to shape reality rather than being shaped by it, my return to the writing life has also brought me closer to the roots from which I had felt thoroughly alienated for so long. In the process of this homecoming, I have discovered that the lines of text which serve as evidence of my creative output are more than just dark veins transmitting my thoughts through their ink-hued bloodstream. They are, in fact, a sort of roadmap, illuminating a path that would otherwise remain invisible to me, tracing its contours and patiently leading me along it so that, eventually, I may find my way back home.

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no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a D.C.-based fiction writer and essayist. If you liked this post, click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new posts in your inbox:

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