Tabish Khair: On writing with the weight of the world

The weight of the world is in the word. All writers know this, though not necessarily in the same way. However, often critics and commentators forget it, and end up discussing whether poetry can be political or not, and how realistic – or magic realist – fiction can be. It is as if the ‘world’ is something to be added on to the writing.

But that is not true. The world is already contained in the word. And the world contains the word; worlds contain the word. No word exists on its own. Every word that we utter has passed through millions of mouths. It has been uttered and re-uttered, often in slightly different contexts, with various shades of meaning, sometimes even entirely contradictory ones, accreting to it over time and space.

And writing makes the matter even more complex. Because now the speaker is not faced with a listener, who shares, for that particular utterance, the same space. Now the word can be written down, and transported from here to, say, China or India, where it may be read a bit differently. Every word that I write or you write has also been written down hundreds, thousands of times, and now what has been written down can be removed from the space of its writing and read in a different space. If the spoken word bears the weight of the world in which it is spoken, the written word now bears the weight of two (or more) worlds: the world of its writing and the world of its reading. Actually, I would say “the worlds of its writing and the worlds of its reading.”

Paying attention to the word and the world

I am afraid all this might sound mystical to you, but it isn’t. It is plain speaking. When I write, I pay attention to the word, and this inevitably means paying attention to the worlds that are contained in it and the worlds through which it has percolated in the past and through which it will percolate in the future. I am entirely alone in my writing, and immensely crowded. The word that I choose to use is entirely vacant and silent, and it is also screaming to me in a hundred different shades of meanings. I will probably never hear all the meanings of any word, but, if I am to be a good writer, I have to make an effort to listen, to hear just a bit more. The silence in which I write is necessary to hear the word – and it is through this close attention to the word that I can hear the world, maybe, hopefully, write the world. Or worlds.

But this has to be done with a sense of humility – a sense of the religious or the sacred, I would say, though I am an agnostic. This is so because the word does not remain with me. It did not even remain with William Shakespeare or Asadullah Khan Ghalib. It passes through me, and has an independent life in worlds that are impossible to count. I have sent it on its way, perhaps, if I have done my job as a writer, imprinted with the stamp of my world or my worlds. I have never owned it, and I will never own it.

That is why I do not really understand the debate about whether literature should be political or social or not, whether literature should be aware of the weight of the world. Surely, there is no choice – even the most apolitical writing carries the weight of the world, those signs of all the tussles over the words that it uses; and even the most political writing, if it is literature, has to pay deep attention to its words, and to the world only through such deep attention to words.

How can any writer ignore the weight of the world? For that, we would have to ignore the word – and then we would not be writers.