“My face was a surface onto which people, especially men, projected their ideas of race and sexuality, Asian-ness and femininity, ideas that had little or nothing to do with me. I grew up wearing a mask on my face that I didn’t know was there, but over the years, of course, the mask shaped me,” writes filmmaker and Zen Buddhist Ruth Ozeki in Timecode of a Face (Canongate Books).
While Ozeki’s fiction was an education in writing as comfortably in a voice as original, authentic, and unique as one’s can be, her crisp and concise nonfiction proffered new ways of analysing looking and being looked at. In that motley of finding oneself misplaced in a world hardwired to locate you per its biases, Timecode of a Face (Canongate Books) was both a comforting and challenging read.
If Timecode… made palpable the tension and politics between the seer and the seen, her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate Books) elevated the fiction form by presenting a layered world of unforgettable characters, centralising experiencing in general rather than populating it with human-centric feelings alone. Sometimes the character(s) springs from the page and start having a discussion with the reader(s), too. The book won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.
Last year, Ozeki was at the Jaipur Literature Festival (19-23 January). She had landed in India two weeks before for a Buddhist pilgrimage, visiting Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, and Rajgir and living in a dormitory, along with a group of students. Right after that, she found herself in the Marriot hotel in Jaipur. She told me about this during this interview in Jaipur, thinking of the obvious difference in experiences—both luxuries but of a different kind, laughing hysterically. Besides that, we chatted at length about The Book of Form and Emptiness and how her grief helped her pen its unforgettable characters. Edited excerpts:
How did winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction impact you?
On a practical level, a prize like that allows your book to be more visible. But my feeling about the Women’s Prize—as I said in my acceptance speech, too—is that for me to feel the support of other women and the committee of judges was empowering and encouraging. And, of course, the financial remuneration—it’s fantastic. Putting books into the world [makes you] really vulnerable so [winning a prize is a] nice affirmation: It makes you feel a little bit stronger and comfortable in your skin.
But then writers don’t write novels to win prizes. In an interview, I said that winning the Women’s Prize is a wonderful by-product, but I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. A novelist writes a book for hundred other reasons but not to win a prize because that would be kind of stupid. And I think the whole prize phenomenon is challenging for everybody, especially for the writers because we want our books to be read and promoted but most writers are very private people. So, there’s an ambivalence attached to this visibility. But I don’t want to get rid of prizes. They really help to get media attention because anyway with so much television, TikTok, and everything, books need help to get out into the world. And prizes do that. In that sense, they’re really valuable.
And how are you making peace with this visibility?
I think Ruth as a writer is different than Ruth as an author. They are two different roles: two different people. And I am comfortable with that. Now I understand the difference between the two. At first, I didn’t. The writer was kind of hauled out and trying to do this thing that a writer can’t do. Then I learnt that it’s a different skillset and persona that I’ve to inhabit. Then, it became fine. I enjoy it because I like talking to people.
What inspired you to write The Book of Form and Emptiness?
So many things. But I think primarily it was the experiences I had after my parents died. After my dad died, I used to hear his voice. I used to hear him calling my name. He was always standing kind of here, and he’d clear his throat and say “Ruth.” That’s the experience I gave to Benny’s character.
Another thing: After my parents died, I had to clean up their house which was filled with things. (My father was an anthropologist.) And there were many beautiful things his First Nations/Indigenous friends that he worked with in the (United) States gave him. I didn’t know what to do with those things. Then, I also had stuff from my mother’s side of the family, and I had that same feeling: What am I supposed to do with this? If these things could talk to me, you know then that’d be great! Because I didn’t know [what to do with them]. So, it was the feeling of wanting to investigate my relationship with objects and things.
Then another part of it was this very famous Zen question: Do insentient beings speak the Dharma? I was thinking about that, too. So, it was a constellation of different factors that came into my life, and they started to spin around. Then, they constellated, and that constellation is the book and that’s generally how all of my books start.
When you write a character like Kenji who dies early in the book but is central to the narrative, how do you create/structure their presence in the absence?
Well, I was just trying to stay true to the surviving characters: Annabella and Benny. They were always thinking about Kenji because they’ve got this big Kenji-shaped hole in their lives, and they’re looking at the hole and it doesn’t make sense to them because he should be there and that’s what one feels after someone’s death, right? Like suddenly you’re missing a limb, your arm has been cut-off, or whatever. So, Kenji’s presence was always there because it was in the minds of Annabella and Benny. I kind of think of the book as watching Benny coming to terms with loss, so remembering is such an important [part] of it. And the book’s narrator is helping Benny remember. So very often when we’re traumatised, we [try to] forget. Therefore, the book is trying to help Benny in the same way as Doctor Melanie [Benny’s psychiatrist] is also trying to help. Different, but they’re both trying to help him remember so that he can let go.
In that sense, the book is also about the different ways of grieving because here’s a widow who’s unable to grieve her husband’s death because she’s prioritising her son’s loss over hers.
Again, I was just trying to be true to Annabella. Of course, her main concern is going to be not with herself but with her son who’s exhibiting strange behaviour and is really struggling because that’s what mothers do. But then there are occasional moments where her own grief kind of bursts through and she loses it.
And I think that has been my experience with grief. We dissociate a little when we’re in a grief-stricken state. And then suddenly the littlest things happen, and they open up this huge flood of feelings and you just don’t even understand where these feelings are coming from but it’s all of the emotions, the dissociation is saving and protecting you from.
[For example,] I was recently taking care of a friend’s cat. The cat got terribly sick suddenly. And I made the decision to euthanise it. I just thought let’s go to the vet, the cat will have a shot, and that will be that. But when the day came, I could not stop crying all day. It was completely out of proportion to the task at hand. I literally couldn’t stop sobbing and I felt it was one of those moments where I think it was my association with death and taking care of my parents. Not that I ever decided to euthanise them but you’ve to make these life-death decisions all the way along. And having to make that decision for this cat, I didn’t even know, triggered all of those emotions. I think human beings do a very good job at coping, but it feels good to let it go a little bit.
The book is also about books’ place in society and their own identity, but it’s also an ode to storytelling. Were you fixated on telling the story this way?
It just happened. I didn’t intend for the book to be a narrator, and the book to be a character in the book. Also, [for it to have] a third-person omniscient narrative voice. But then suddenly Benny started talking back…
So, your concern wasn’t the structure but the story being true to itself?
I think you’re exactly right. Once I realised that the book was a character, and the book was narrating itself and Benny into being then this question came: Who comes first—the boy or the book? And we don’t know! They are narrating each other in a way.
They’re co-creating each other, and this is what in Buddhism is the idea of dependent origination.
We create each other. I was playing with that as a structure for the book. Technically, it was very hard because Benny and the book are talking to each other but then sometimes they turn out, and the book talks to you, the reader, and Benny talks to you, the reader, and then they turn in. But I didn’t want to label them. All I needed to do was change the tone of voice. It was challenging but fun.
How difficult is it to put humour in a deeply moving story like this?
I guess it’s just the way I perceive and experience the world. I don’t experience things as primarily tragic. So often there is humour in deep grief. Like, you can be weeping one moment and howling with laughter the other. We’ve this vast spectrum of emotions and they can just come out at different times.
Shakespeare knew this so well because there were always clowns in his tragedies, so it’s an old trick. I think if you can make them [people/readers] laugh, then they feel the tragedy much more. It’s the contrast that makes you feel it. And if you’ve a reader feeling that tragedy and then something happens that’s funny, there’s a huge feeling of relief. I guess that’s just the way I experience grief and joy. It seems almost natural my books will have both elements in them. I can’t imagine writing a story that’s in just one mode, feeling, and tone.
Else it’d be a report?
Exactly, to allow the feel and tone to shift—it’s really important to me. I think life is funny.
What are you working on next?
Oh god, I have no idea. I am not being coy. The writer Ruth has been asleep for about three years. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. It was interesting to listen to Bernardine today (referring to the session titled The Bernardine Manifesto—a conversation between Bernardine Evaristo and Nandini Nair on 19 January at JLF) because I wrote this (pointing to her work of nonfiction, Timecode of a Face) … and I had so much fun doing that. So, I am thinking another little, tiny memoir like that would be fun to do. Or something about Buddhism or whatever, so we’ll see. I think I want a break from fiction because this (The Book of Form of Emptiness) takes too long. I am not going to live long enough to write another book of that size!
This interview was conducted when the writer was on a sponsored trip to Jaipur by the Deccan Herald to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival 2023.
Unless stated otherwise, all images belong to Saurabh Sharma.