Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: On Making Space for Female Interiority, Somatic Healing, Landscape and Her Novel, "Savage Tongues"
Described as “equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector,” Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s latest novel, Savage Tongues, is “a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.” This raw and powerful novel delves into female friendship, trauma within the body, family, and sexuality.
I spoke with Azareen about making space for female interiority on the page, writing landscape, somatic healing, body trauma, and her new novel, Savage Tongues.
Kailey Brennan: What sparked the idea for your novel, Savage Tongues?
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: I was just really interested in exploring female friendship in the novel. I was also thinking of questions of sexual abuse and how those dynamics of sexual abuse can be connected to geopolitical history and issues of colonialism. I was also interested in recording a conversation between friends who are middle Eastern - one is Muslim, one is Jewish - watching them go on this recovery journey back to Southern Spain, where the narrator had spent some of her adolescent years examining these questions together.
KB: This novel is very much about the inner turmoil of Arezu. Most of the story takes place within the ways she is trying to understand and heal from her trauma. What made you want to keep the story as an almost inner monologue?
AO: I don't think of it as an inner monologue. I think there is a lot of inner monologue, but it's a way of cataloging her interiority and making space for female interiority on the page in a world where we haven't really necessarily been taught to have an appetite for female interiority. It's a novel that's as much about thinking in the aftermath of trauma as it is about learning how to move through the world again, physically. And so I wanted to record all those dimensions of her experience, like her relationship to her friends, her relationships with the external world, the material world, but also the ways that her own interiority is disrupting or challenging her ability to be in the moment.
KB: With this novel being about trauma and memory and how we sort of hold that in our bodies, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about that. What interests you about how we process and understand memory?
AO: I think one way to think about that in the context of the novel is through somatic healing or embodied healing practices. I think they are very effective, more so than other kinds of ways of healing or thinking about trauma and healing and connecting the dots between our personal intimate traumas and larger issues of social justice and political crisis or geopolitical chaos.
I think that's where the novel sits for me. It's kind of speaking to the connections between our personal wounds and the wounds of history. History lives in our bodies and history is also made up of bodies. So for me, those are inseparable things. And I am really interested in how violence is done onto bodies. So what does it mean to think of healing as being body-centered? I don't think of it as being possible or as effective in other ways.
KB: Yeah. I'm sure you've heard of the book, The Body Keeps the Score. It’s so fascinating but a lot to digest. But with these ideas woven into fiction and looking at them through your character - I thought that you did a really great job flushing that out through her.
AO: Yeah. I think that book you just brought up, that's an important book. There are also more recent books like The Politics of Trauma. And I think Adrienne Maree Brown does a really good job of connecting the dots between these kinds of social justice questions, questions of colonialism and disenfranchisement and body-centered healing that also helps us to open up to these larger questions and nuanced ways.
KB: Since your last novel, Call Me Zebra, received so many accolades and much positive praise, did you face any hesitation or fear about writing this novel?
AO: Not so much. I felt more encouraged. Winning these very visible awards charged me with a deeper sense of responsibility. Writing is such lonely work and it's such detailed hour after hour, minute after minute kind of work that you do on your own. It’s really such a gift to receive recognition in any form. Sometimes it's just a reader sending you a note about how the book touched them. And I think that all of those different levels of feedback are really empowering and very helpful. This was not an easy book to write. It required a lot of courage. It's a very honest book and I felt like it helped to kind of lift me up through that.
KB: I love that. What did your writing process look like? Are you an outliner or do you just go for it?
AO: I'm not an outliner. I can see the contours and the shape of the book and I can feel the atmosphere and the tone and the voice that I'm trying to inhabit. That's kind of the way that I lead my way into it. I'm personally pretty disciplined around my writing. That's what works for me. I'm not saying it works for everybody, but I do try to show up around the same hour every day, especially when I'm working to finish a novel. It took me about 15 months to write the first draft and then it was another year and a half or so to really put the meat on the bones. Then another nine month editorial process.
KB: When you say you show up every day, do you give yourself a word count? Do you have a certain amount of hours that you like to write?
AO: Oh, neither. I don't have those kinds of parameters. I try to do what I can. Sometimes it's 90 minutes, sometimes it's three hours. If I'm racing to finish edits, I can go for longer, but I try not to have those kinds of artificial parameters. I just try to sit down and respect the writing and see what happens.
KB: I’m also curious if there was a piece of craft advice that helped you while writing this novel? Something you held on to keep up the momentum?
AO: I think landscape is a craft element that I'm really aware of. Capturing the space and the setting of the novel. From the perspective of the technical craft element of writing books, a good way to get oxygen and give readers oxygen is to look around and be in the beauty of the landscape. Especially because there is, like you said, a significant amount of interiority. So I always try to be sensitive to the connections between character and landscape or a character's consciousness to the physical space that they're living in.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Call Me Zebra, which was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and Fra Keeler, which received a Whiting Writers’ Award and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” selection. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona. Van der Vliet Oloomi is an Assistant Professor in the English Department’s MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.
