Courtesy of Aminatta FornaAminatta Forna.Aminatta Forna’s most recent novel, “The Memory of Love,†won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award for 2011.Â
Her previous novels include the “The Devil that Danced on the Water†and “Ancestor Stones,†which won the 2007 German Liberaturpreis, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction in 2007 and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize in the United States in 2010. India Ink interviewed her at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Â
What are the occupational hazards of being a writer
I don’t have a pension plan! I love it so much I can’t say that there are any but I think that a lot of people an write - some people write one book and never write another - and the reason that writers continue to write is that we are people who are capable of living in a room on our own with imaginary friends for the rest of our life. If you can do that, then you can be a writer but many people find they can’t do that.
What is your everyday writing ritual
Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist so I guess that’s ingrained. But if you do something you have to have a goal. Some writers deny it but I think most people feel they have to have some sort of goal. We bought a house about 10 years ago and did up this whole room exactly the way I thought I wanted it as a writer and I discovered I couldn’t write a word in it. I had to go and write the whole book in the British library. Now I do work in that room.
I don’t have very many little fetishes but the one I do have ! is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It’s just a small china cup and I get very upset if my husband moves it. He just can’t understand why it matters so much. And of course I’ve got a hoard of displacement activities - all the things you do when you should be writing. I put on the wash, I do the dishes, and I organize things. But they’re part of the ritual so at the beginning of a book the house is always very, very clean. But then once I’ve got past the end of the beginning as it were, once the book has got a certain momentum, then the house gets increasingly untidy because the writing takes over. But I firmly believe that all of those activities are part of the process of thinking. But nobody can talk to you while you do them. Which my husband does understand and the lady who cleans my house also understands.
Why does the Jaipur Literature Fest matter to you
These festivals are just burgeoning all over the world and hat’s really good because books are apparently under threat and we always hear that the publishing industry is dying yet there’s quite obviously a very strong interest in books and the ideas that books contain. But Jaipur in particular matters because it is away from what was once the center - it is the shifting of the center from outside the West and into these emerging cultural and economic powerhouses like India. Kenya’s now got a wonderful book festival, people are talking about maybe locating one in West Africa. The reason I come is because I can talk to audiences who are not the kind of people I find walking down the street in London.
How do you deal with your critics
Well I understood quite early on that if I was going to accept the good ones I would have to accept the bad ones too so I try and take it on the chin. But when I did your job I went to interview Vikram Seth, and his response to me was, “It’s one personâ€! ™s opinio! n.â€
Why should we read your latest book, ‘The Memory of Love’
Increasingly there are those of us who write from outside the center and those are the writers that I’m most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that as a writer is what I try to create. To both look at the particular of a world that other people might not know and look at the extremes that people face but also find the universality of that.
It’s also a good story.
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