Interview with Literary Critic and Queer Essayist, Sritama Sen

Sritama Sen (she/they), also known as Alo on social platforms, is a poet, writer and critic who enjoys writing about queer Bengalis in love. She completed her BA and MA in English Literature from Jadavpur University and currently resides in Kolkata. She has appeared in The Minison Project X Moss Puppy Magazine, Cicada Creative Magazine, Beloved Zine, Articulate, and Gaysi. Her debut poetry collection, There Used To Be a Lake Here Once (2024), is being published by The Writer's Workshop, India.

Rian: Your featured work with us is Nativity Scene, which tells the story of the day you were born. It’s a heavy poem that incorporates historical characters and texts. Why did you depict your birth like this?

Sritama: Nativity Scene is actually part of a cycle of poems, from my upcoming collection, titled There Used To Be a Lake Here Once. Like most of my works, it draws heavily from my experiences, as a child growing up in early 2000’s Kolkata, India–fragments of childhood, my Catholic School upbringing, recollecting people that were loved and hated in equal measure, and through it all, always, the trans and queer awakening that happened to me as I was coming of age.

Any Biblical and historical motifs/references I use in this poem fall in the grey area between satire and sincerity. Because–to be blunt–religious imagery of this sort: the Gospel of Matthew, the angel bodies, the miraculous birth, the self-fulfilling, foretold prophecy, the saviour coming to help their people etc, seem to appeal to the sensibilities of a certain kind of Western reader. Euramerican literature and other arts have (un?)consciously upheld a very fixed Judeo-Christian model for self-discovery, even with queerness. Trans queer artists, particularly ex-religious ones like myself, are actively encouraged to make a tableau of our trauma, hold it up for the world to see. We are told by queer zines and social media followers that reclaiming Catholic aesthetics is cool when exploring transsexuality or lesbian love. Trans bodies, surgery scars as stigmata, angels of God, queerness as Biblical homoerotic subtext, a lot of stuff like that. Make of that what you will.

So, when readers look for palatable diversity or some sort of allegorical depth, they get it through a Biblical poem (for I am a visibly Bengali author using motifs familiar to them), often without realising this poem is about trans bodies that are not Christian and not white and were never so to begin with. I am not trying to feed into a morality discourse, but undermining the Catholic motif deliberately, because reclaimed or not, such aesthetics have no space for people like me.

There are two parts to my poetry book: The Home, the section dwelling on the personal; and The World, the section that radicalises the personal into the political. Nativity Scene belongs to The World section. It is not a story solely about my birth, but of the creation of a queer child, specifically, a queer child who does not fit the paradigms of the Chosen One trope in Western quasi-Biblical narratives. The girl in the manger is not a messiah and she is not celebrated. She is not even a girl. She is a body haunting the margins of the historical, religious and mythical canon, asking to be let in.

Rian: Wow. It goes so much deeper than what I initially thought. It’s incredible how you’ve been able to fit so much nuance about queerness outside Western ideals and how it connects to religious and social constructs. Have you written other works that are similar? Do you often pull from biblical ideology?

Sritama: Not to this extent, and definitely less intensely, but certain levels of religious trauma are present in some of my other poems and fiction. My short story, Melting, You're A Daydream published in the Spring Issue of Beloved Zine features a transgender and queer Bengali girl navigating Catholic school,  although that one is a coming-of-age tale, and is fairly lighthearted in its treatment of forced religious indoctrination at convent schools.

I also wrote an essay- again, a more humorous piece- that was published last year on the Indian LGBTQ online platform, Gaysi, about my personal experiences growing up queer in an all-girls' convent school. I don't know why I end up making these morbid stories funny, I guess I don't want to unnecessarily make my past seem bleaker than it really was. Coping mechanism.

Rian: I like that, it keeps to a sort of theme for you, but doesn’t exaggerate the negative experiences too far. Okay, last question about the religious themes; you mention Herod - is this the King Herod of Judea? There are also other kings within the poem, unnamed ones, who provided safety to mother and child. Why did you include these characters?

Sritama: Yes, and no. The direct allusion is definitely to Herod of Judea. But I'm not exactly speaking of him when I mention the dog in heat, or the bounty on the head of the newborn child. In present-day India, the trans queer community is hunted, denied freedom of expression, or (for some lucky individuals) forced to seek sanctuary elsewhere, exiled by home-grown Herods. Even this very month, we have received horrific news of the social dehumanisation leading to the deaths of LGBTQ Indian youth. Most of these individuals are less socially or financially privileged than me. Like I said, this is not really a poem about the Bible. Our Herod sits in the Supreme Court, at Parliament, on National Councils.

Somewhat similarly for "kings", there's a blatant Magi reference, but I'm speaking of the working-class people I grew up around, many of whom I mention in my other poems in the book. Their presence and nurture were gifts to me, these figures from my childhood who have helped me feel less alone, more in my body, than ivory-tower intellectuals in academia ever did, by scholarly demand. To be honest, I don't need you to spout gender theory into my face, I just need you to treat me as a human.

Rian: There’s so many layers here, it’s so amazing how much you were able to assign to each line. It’s nice to hear that among the hardships you dealt with, there were at least some positive figures in your life. Despite this, the whole piece still has a darker air to it, a feeling that you don’t see yourself as worthy in a sense. Was this your intention?

Sritama: I know I am plenty worthy. So is every trans and queer person of colour, struggling to exist. I believe that the identity we craft for ourselves, out of self-love–that identity, the truest part of us, is every bit as sanctified and ordained as a Testament act, and no matter how we are forced to live or present ourselves to the world, it does not undo who we really are, for better or for worse. That is what Nativity is about.

My belief, however, does not make it a social or political reality, and perhaps that is why the poem feels dark. There is no opulence or the "queer joy" that readers love to speak of. I don't get such joy, because I never had the privilege to grow up in such an open or progressive queer community. Nativity Scene asks, how can one write of a utopia if their self discovery is marked by a type of absence? What prophesied destiny could people like us be born to?

Rian: That’s a really good point. We are seeing a lot of the “queer joy” in current media, but it seems to forget that many of the LGBTQ still do not have the privilege of it. I’m sure queerness was part of it, but what would you say most influenced or inspired you to write Nativity Scene?

Sritama: To be honest, I don't really know. I think I always loved the idea of a pseudo-messiah protagonist: a narrator who was not really the Chosen One, but rewrote the story demanding equal space for themselves. I don't particularly enjoy prophesied saviour stories, or for that matter anything in literature, history, religion or myth that claims that your lineage, your inherent social status or your God-given destiny makes you more deserving of greatness than others. And I mixed that with the idea of the doubly invisible– brown queer identities excluded not just by the Western canon, but by our own literature, unless as subjects of mainstream pity or academic research. And I have already explained why I chose the Biblical backdrop for this subversion.

On that note, I really loved Shelley Parker-Chan's historical fantasy novel, She Who Became the Sun, which retells the life of the real life Ming dynasty Chinese Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, by reimagining him as a genderqueer, cross-dressing lesbian. I don't usually like ahistorical interpretations, but this one was so unique because at the beginning, Zhu is someone who has no destiny marked out for her, she is a paupered penniless village girl. She is a nobody, who brazenly claims the name of her dead brother and rises to greatness using her own wits and resources. You do not get to know her true name throughout the entire story, and really, how does it matter, when the name and destiny he chose for himself was the one that would define him in history books? To me, that was a very powerful message of transgender identity. The mundanity of an inconsequential birth, a wrong body, offset by the brimming potential of what can be.

Rian: I love how you’re taking on a similar approach to Parker-Chan by using a character who isn’t a Chosen One. I think it helps to make the piece more relatable, especially for queer folk who, you’re right, more often than not are choosing their own destinies. Do you feel where and how you were brought up helped create this adaptation of a traditional nativity scene?

Sritama: Yes, it was partly my Catholic Convent childhood diet of religious assemblies, sermons, nativity scenes, and rigorous etiquette. That, and the fact that the entire poem is based on snapshots of my birth, and the early years of my family in a rented apartment in Kankurgachi, Kolkata. The photograph you have featured [alongside Nativity Scene] depicts that same apartment.

Somehow, all my work ends up centering around Kankurgachi. It's the furthest you could get from some place that would host a nativity scene, but the strange sensory nostalgia of the first place you ever know, that is not something easily overridden.

Rian: What can we look forward to from you in the future?

Sritama: If things go well, There Used to Be a Lake Here Once shall be published in early 2024. It is being brought out by Writers Workshop, India, an independent press, and edited by Dr. Ananda Lal. My aforementioned short story, Melting, is available online to read for free, and I have another upcoming short fiction, a historical piece with a lesbian romance set in 1970s Emergency-era India. I plan to launch a newsletter for essays and poetry next year, so keep an eye out for that. Aside from this, I publish a lot of work on literary websites and queer zines, all of it centred on trans and queer Bengali love, you can follow all my projects and my writing updates through my Instagram.

Rian: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Sritama. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know so much about you and where your writing is born from. I can’t wait to read more from your collection and to see where you go from here!

Instagram: @sritamasen_