Dennis: Thanks Sana, for taking our questions. And I apologize that some of the questions are so long. My defense will have to be that your work encourages long questions which I certainly intend as a compliment.
Issues relating to immigration lie in the foreground or at least in the background of all the stories in your collection, One More Year. There seems to be a constant cognitive and emotional dissonance in the stories as a result, like a low, somewhat menacing hum, even when the problem is not being addressed directly. And I have to call it a problem, because what I get out of your stories is not how wonderful it is to pull up roots and start again in a new country but how difficult it is. And I can’t help wondering, have you faced this dilemma of dislocation in your own experience?
Sana: First, thanks for having a discussion of the book on your site. I’m always delighted to find fellow lovers of short fiction, so I appreciate the attention. I think it’s great when other people see themes that you didn’t necessarily intend when you set out to write a story. When some of your characters are from other countries, themes of migration come through; though I think my stories are less about migration itself, and more about life in a post-migration world. What I mean is, they aren’t immigrants in the traditional sense, in that they’ve arrived in a new county to start a new life. In Asal for example, Gulia is married to a millionaire in Uzbekistan; her life is pretty comfortable. She’s probably wealthier than the couple for whom she becomes a nanny. Even when she arrives in the States, she doesn’t come to Manhattan with the intention of staying. It’s more of a bargaining position – she leaves Fergana to show her husband how serious she is about him leaving his other wife. In Maia’s case, she’s working to support her teenager son, who’s still in Tbilisi and who she plans to eventually return to raise (although when is very unclear). She isn’t particularly enamored with American culture, even though it does give her the opportunity to buy gifts that can’t be had in Georgia. Oftentimes, today’s “migrants” occupy both home and host country simultaneously for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to explore some of them. We hear these stories all around us, and it’s hard for one not to relate to the feeling of being caught between heaven and earth and not knowing which one is which.
Dennis:
One interesting effect that the theme of immigration and dislocation had for me as a reader is that I noticed what was universal in human behavior and misbehavior even more. I was struck, for example, how in your story Better Half Anya seems to pick the wrong guy no matter what continent she is living on. And so in the U.S. she latches on to the notorious Ryan, a loser that she could have easily picked up anywhere in the world. But I also appreciated how nicely the story was balanced, since Anya’s difficulty in letting go of Ryan, impossible as he was, was quite moving. The importance of people giving up their illusions, as Anya gives up hers about Ryan, seems to be a recurrent theme in your stories. Is that right?
Sana:
It’s a good point – people’s behavior becomes distorted in extreme circumstances. And I’m touched by your insights into how I try to present these very complex relationships. But I don’t think Anya would always pick the “wrong guy.” I saw her relationship with Ryan as largely a product of circumstances, a combination of loneliness and necessity. Under different circumstances, it might have been a short-lived, casual fling. Because of the fact that she’s so reliant on his cooperation during the green-card process, the power dynamics become very skewed. And yet as soon as she’s no longer dependent on him, their relationship becomes almost like it was before they were married. In other words, he’s forced to court her all over again, and, for a short time, she’s almost able to enjoy it. I think people find themselves in these situations, rather than it being some type of predisposed abusive complex, which could compel Anya to always make the wrong decision. Even so, I think that when you finally recognize that the relationship has changed and no longer makes sense, it isn’t always a clean break with the past. In the final scene, Anya imagines she sees Ryan in the faces of others, but she moves on in spite of that.
I’m thinking about what you said about people giving up their illusions as a theme – I never conceived of it in precisely those terms, but I can see what you mean. There were some characters whom I thought of as having a “blind spot.” To bring up Asal again, Gulia is convinced that her husband doesn’t love his other wife, because that was to some degree a marriage arranged by his family – and also because the woman isn’t as attractive as Gulia. She’s convinced of this in spite of the evidence – which is that Nasrin gets pregnant every year. It’s not until Gulia hears Rashid being genuinely torn up over the “incident” at the end, that she sees more to his relationship with Nasrin than she’s let herself believe. Lera in The Repatriates certainly has a big blind spot – she’s attuned to small-scale deceptions all around her, like the invalid beggar in the metro hiding his arms under a hunting vest, but doesn’t see the big one that’s heading her way like a speeding train. To move it to a larger scale, a number of the characters have obviously been touched in one way or another by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Soviet Union was a reality its citizens understood. They took for granted that it would last forever, even though it was crumbling all around them. It’s often when we think we have a very clear grasp of our reality that everything changes. Which makes me wonder if there’s a fractal-like quality to some motifs, or if the experience of “not seeing” that’s being explored on a very small scale in the stories is, in fact, reflective of a bigger, mass experience of uncertainty.
Dennis:
I have to say that in your story Debt I got one of the best impressions that I have ever had of the essential character of marriage. Lev and Dina have his niece Sonya and her husband over to their house-proud residence in the faux countryside and an appeal is made to the hosts that is not welcome. There’s one sentence that I want to quote: “How much easier , he thinks, when it’s just the two of them, a balance that others only disturb.” That’s an awesome line. It’s as if this couple had made it, in every way a couple can succeed, but the outside world can still undermine their poise which seems rather fragile. Is that your view of marriage, that it’s a kind of fragile privacy that is easily disturbed?
Sana:
I think that’s a very elegant interpretation. In some ways, I saw them as being a “living version” of the couple in the last story – and I mean Larisa and Alexei, who Larisa mourns long after his death. Larisa tells the narrator that they were one of those couples who didn’t need anyone except each other, that Alexei would spend entire Sundays just taking pictures of her in their apartment. And yet we know from the narrator that their fragile privacy did indeed come to an end. Those types of couples have always fascinated me, so I’m glad you picked up on that. And the line you noted really anchored the story for me. The scene itself was born from something I observed once on vacation, which really touched me. It involved a couple in their early sixties who had been married happily for many years, and they had learned how
to manage each other. There was this almost unspoken small-scale drama going on for several days that was really testing the wife’s hospitality. She was quite a stoic person, but at one point, she just broke down. Yet the husband didn’t say anything – he just walked over to her and kissed her on the mouth. Almost as if to say that whatever else happened, they had each other.
Dennis:
I remember the French New Wave director, Truffaut, saying in an interview once that film buffs sometimes seem to regard a movie more highly if it’s foreign. That is, if the same themes were presented in a domestic flick the audience would be less impressed. But somehow the presentation in the context of another culture gives the work a glamorous aura. And I am also aware that in U.S. publishing right now, there is a vogue for the immigrant experience, of seeing America through foreign eyes. But there is a bigger issue here that is touched on in your book and that is the idea that what is foreign has to be better. This attitude seems to rest side-by-side with the opposite position: that our native country is always the best in everything. It seems that finding a way to objectivity between these two positions is almost impossible. This issue comes up in the last story, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, doesn’t it?
Sana:
I’m not sure if that’s true – that we necessarily find themes more interesting when they’re presented to us in a foreign context. In the United States, we’ve had a long literary tradition of people exploring the search of the American dream. From Steinbeck and Dreiser, to Kerouac’s version in the Fifties, and on and on, it’s an idea that’s undergone many redefinitions. Being an immigrant society, we also have long a tradition of authors exploring it through the experience of newcomers. I’m thinking of Isaac Beshevis Zinger in particular, whose characters were also haunted by their pasts and disoriented by their lives in America. Or Mario Puzo, who not only wrote The Godfather, but also some wonderful accounts of the lives of Italian immigrants, such as The Fortunate Pilgrim. As to whether it’s better “here” or “there,” I think that, for my characters, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that a more difficult question to answer. Obviously not everybody triumphs in a new environment; some fold, others succeed but there’s a bitter aftertaste. As writers, we’re all in some way aspiring to write about a history that we’re still living.
Dennis:
Speaking of There Will Be No Fourth Rome, I will say that I was startled by the rather negative impression that the story left with me of Moscow. Reading the story, I just had the feeling that I wanted to get out of that town. Maybe some of the characters in the story felt the same way and that was what I was picking up. Was I wrong to see the story as a negative portrait of a major world city? Putting it more informally, I gather you don’t like the place or perhaps your feelings are just mixed?
Sana:
That’s funny, because I actually loved my time in Moscow. As with all the world’s greatest cities, they have the best and the worst. It may have been an impression you were getting from one of the characters, who was from Georgia. Without getting into the history of it, there’s tension between those two countries. It would be hard to do my character justice without somehow alluding to it. Muscovites themselves probably have the most poignant love-hate relationship with their city, and part of it is because it’s a place that changes so rapidly. It was mostly that change I wanted to show, so I had two different characters reflect two very different sides of the city. There was Larisa, an older woman who was your classic Russian intelligentsia but now living very modestly on a disability pension, her only real asset being the apartment she’d inherited from her bureaucrat father, contrasted against the narrator’s childhood friend, a girl who is a refugee from Georgia, who is very enterprising and ambitious, and avoids destitution by becoming the girlfriend of a foreign businessman. These characters seemed almost like mirror images of one another – a rising class displacing a declining one.
Dennis:
Still on this story, there is a kind of epiphany at the end, the most warm-hearted incident in the book, that seems to express a lot about your feeling for solidarity among women in tough times. I mean the gathering of women around the table towards the end of the story. I was quite moved by it, I must say, even though I’m a guy and I figure that I am not the intended audience. Am I right to see this sort of feeling for a sisterhood as an important concern in your fiction?
Sana:
That scene felt like a natural place to end the story, with Regina and her two friends sitting down for a quiet moment before her ride to the airport. There’s a Russian custom that says that before you leave for a long trip, you should sit silently for a minute instead of simply rushing out the door. I thought it was a nice way to end the collection as whole. A reader is, in some respects, your guest for the duration of the book. After that he or she must depart, so I wanted to provide a moment for a reader to sit with the characters and reflect.
I’m not sure why you’d think you wouldn’t be the intended audience, and to what extent writers even think about an intended audience when they set out to write a story. My only intended audience would be engaged readers who love fiction, which all three of you have definitely established. Part of what’s great about fiction is that it offers us the opportunity to glimpse a variety of perspectives.
Dennis:
Sometimes I feel that as a child of immigrants, I’ll never really belong anywhere. That I am permanently displaced between different cultures, neither of which will ever feel like a totally rooted home. So I’d like to ask you if you think that assimilation is really possible or just an illusion. And is it even a good thing? There seems to be something positive about this cultural disconnect that occurs when people pull up their roots. What do you think?
Sana:
I guess it depends on where you’re talking about. In the States, I’m not sure we have the one-way approach to assimilation that, say, the French have been accused of. In France there is more pressure to adopt French culture and leave your own origins behind, at least officially. In contrast, the US and, maybe to a greater extent, England give immigrants more room to express their cultural identities, as well as absorb some elements of the immigrant culture into the mainstream. In a place like the US, national identity is asserted more in terms of language and political ideology than it is in the preeminence of the national culture. I guess what I’m saying is that integration is possible everywhere, but it just depends on how you define it and whether you want to make assimilation part of that definition. I haven’t personally felt that conflict between being American and something else, though I’ve certainly met people who do feel it.
Dennis:
I believe that you are working on your debut novel right now. Can you tell us anything about it?
Sana:
I’ve only just started thinking about it, so I’m hesitant to discuss something that’s still so unformed. I would like to incorporate a historical element, though.
Thanks again very much, Sana, for taking our questions.
Thank you, Dennis.
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