Interview with Hajera Khaja
Hajera Khaja
Hajera Khaja’s fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Humber Literary Review, Pulp Literature, and elsewhere. She was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize. She lives in Mississauga, Ontario, and is working on a short story collection.
Manahil: This is Canthius’s tenth issue, and the first for which we have a guest editor, Sanna Wani. Whether you’ve been a long-time reader of Canthius or are just getting introduced us, how did you come to decide what pieces you wanted to share with the magazine?
Hajera: Congratulations! A tenth issue is a huge accomplishment and I’m so honoured to have my work in this special issue of Canthius. Thank you for including me.
I met Sanna at a mentorship conference a while back and she emailed me to tell me she was guest-editing this issue and asked if I had anything I wanted to submit. At the time, I hadn’t written “Afsos” yet but I had been thinking about writing it and the various threads of the piece had been swirling in my mind for quite some time. Sanna’s email gave me the motivation to finally put pen to paper.
“Afsos” is so deeply personal that if I could think of any editor who would treat it with the kind of love and care with which I wrote it, it would be Sanna. Although at the time I sent her the piece I had only met her twice before, I felt a kinship with her because of the themes that she writes about in her work. And the fact that she was the acquaintance I mentioned in the piece who I ran into at the coffee shop when I learnt about my nani’s death – it felt serendipitous when Sanna reached out to me to submit something.
Manahil: I find writing often emerges from a conversation. What conversation is happening in your work?
Hajera: I’ve never thought of my work in this way! But if I were to think about my writing as emerging from a conversation, I would say the conversations are about grief, loss, love, language, and home. All very vague and generic-sounding themes, but I feel like everything that I write comes back to how I acknowledge (or don’t) the presence/absence of these things in my life and all the fiction I’ve written so far has an element of these pieces in it. If I were to connect them, I would say I write about the grief and sense of loss that comes from not having a stable sense of home, from being disconnected with the language of one’s ancestors, and how we make a home and love anyway despite a profound sense of loss that we know we can never escape.
Manahil: So, when your submission came in to Canthius, my dadi had just passed away, and Sanna called me up to say, “you need to read this piece, ‘Afsos.’” Reading it, there were so many moments of familiarity. The physical distance between family, the in-articulation of grief in English — how do you take these known emotions from another language and bring them into English? How does writing in English give way to a poetic unfolding of grief?
Hajera: So the interesting thing with this piece is that I learnt about the many meanings encapsulated within the word “afsos” and its varied uses as I was writing the piece. I interrogated my older sister over WhatsApp on what the word meant and how it was used and she guided me through the process of writing this piece in that way. In her comments on the initial draft, Sanna also suggested another meaning that I hadn’t considered until then. So in a way, it’s still a word that I feel cut off from, and I’ve never actually said any of the statements in Urdu that I reference in the piece, but I know so well the emotions they encapsulate. I have this connection with Urdu that feels close but in reality is very distant. English is in the only language that I know how to write in and I found the ‘show don’t tell’ advice really helpful to fall back on – “afsos” in all its iterations permeated my memories of my family in India and I realized maybe language at some point become superfluous once you allow yourself to simply remember and experience whatever emotions come up through the remembering. A cried a lot while writing this piece and also while editing it and I think just being able to write a piece like this after housing it inside of me for a very long time was a way of allowing the grief to exist in the way that I knew how, beyond language.
Manahil: What is something you’re working on that you’d like to share!
Hajera: I write primarily short fiction (I’m working on a collection) and the last few stories I’ve written have been very heavy. But a little while ago an idea struck me that was fun and light and my first impulse was to let the idea go because it wouldn’t fit in the collection and the themes that I had already written about.
But then two things struck me.
One, is that I didn’t always need to cater to the collection. If I wanted to write a light and joyful story, I absolutely didn’t need anyone’s permission to do so. I could still write it!
And two, that there was no reason a light and fun story couldn’t be a part of the collection. I could choose which stories belonged and which didn’t ,and just because all the other stories I’d written so far were more somber, it didn’t mean a joyful story couldn’t belong in there. In fact, it would nice for there to be some joy in the collection, wouldn’t it?
So yeah, I’m working on a story where a bunch of well-meaning aunties step in to help their friend and interfere in her son and his fiancé’s life. I love the aunties and all their antics and it all works out in the end because the aunties are just awesome like that.
Manahil: In closing, what is a poem, story, painting, chapbook, or book you would like to recommend others read?
Hajera: I recently read the YA novel All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. I don’t generally read YA but I heard such good things about the book that I bought it for myself as an Eid gift. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I had to force myself not to finish it in one sitting and I really tried to pace myself so I had time to savour the story. It’s a phenomenal book, a profoundly beautiful story, and I can’t recommend it enough. And now that I think about it, it covers all of the themes that I navigate in my own writing – grief, loss, love, language, and home.