Fariha Róisín: On Dreams, Relationships With Our Body, the Meaning of Home and Her Debut Novel, "Like A Bird"
Fariha Róisín, author of the poetry collection, How to Cure a Ghost, is back with her debut novel- a raw and tender story that took about eighteen years for Fariha to complete. With gorgeous, aesthetic, and delicate prose, Like A Bird follows Taylia Chatterjee who feels as though she has never felt love. There is a sadness that looms within the Chatterjee residence, a direct result of the racism they have been encountering in American society. After a sexual assault, Taylia is disowned by her overbearing and emotionally distant parents and forced to live on her own. This survival story is as intense as it is powerful as we explore Taylia’s inner turmoil in her search for community and love.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Fariha via email where she discusses relationships with the body, the search for the meaning of home, what sparked the idea for Like a Bird, and the importance of writing the meaningful.
What sparked the initial idea for this story? I know that it took you a long time to write it— what was this process like for you?
A dream. I woke up with the story when I was twelve years old and I basically just wrote when I felt depressed and had no other outlet.
Taylia grows up with a very complicated, shameful relationship with her own body and at times feels disconnected from herself as a woman. In other interviews I have read, you seem very in tune with yourself and your body and make sure to actively listen to what it is telling you that you need, physically and spiritually. Can you speak a little more about this here? Why was this important for you to explore within Taylia in Like a Bird?
Well it's funny that's how I'm read because I think I'm also very open about the brutal relationship I have with my own body -- in pieces for Allure or even my own journal Being In Your Body, I'm constantly trying to navigate how to be in myself. I also used to cut myself, which is why I have tattoos, I've also written about that. I suffer from dysmorphia and dysphoria constantly. Because I'm a child survivor my own body has never been a place of safety for me, and add in ancestral trauma and parental abuse, it's just a wild cocktail of self-hatred that's being channeled right into my bloodstream since I was a baby. Nurture is everything. In How To Cure A Ghost I write, "Nurture makes your hate yourself less." In perhaps the most 1: 1, most real way, Taylia's relationship with her body exactly mirrors my own.
You wrote this novel for survivors. Taylia is a survivor of sexual assault and takes the complicated, gentle steps she needs to heal her trauma throughout the story. She does this without the support of her family. She survives on her own. Was this an important part of the story for you?
Yes. I was abused by a parent so I've arguably been alone my whole life. My other parent, though we are on good terms, also neglected to protect me. I don't blame him, but that's a lot to carry as a child. I have had no-one for most of my life. I've little-to-no-safety, so I've been surviving on steam for a long time.
After Taylia’s sexual assault, she is forced to find a new space and community to call her home. She really wants to feel that sense of home and that sense of safety that comes with it. Can you speak about this a little more — the idea of home that we long for and why we are always searching for it?
Yeah, I mean Taylia and I are alike I guess. As a person that doesn't have a family home, I've always been in search of one for myself. It was only until last year that I could afford to live alone which was just everything to me. To have my own space, to cultivate myself and protect myself in... without fear that it's secretly unsafe or that it would be taken away. Taylia just wants a safe place... she realizes, as I realized, you can only ever be home in yourself and that's perhaps the hardest thing to attain when you've been through specific kinds of abuse. You know the one that makes you question your validity and worth at all points. Having a home means you're not always running in fear.
Your writing is enchanting. Taylia is such an observant and intuitive narrator and I was mesmerized by the way she seeks to understand people, especially Baba and Alyssa. We get to know these characters so intimately through your honest prose. What was your process like for building such real and complex characters? Did this part of the writing come easy for you or was it more of a challenge?
Yeah it was pretty easy. I find writing easy, I find it harder to say meaningful things and observations that aren't tacky or overused. I find so much of writing is quite constructed and boring or stylistically impressive with no depth and it's like... mate we're in a pandemic. We've got like 7 years left on this planet. There's no more time to be aimless and neutral. We have to say something more.
I enjoyed how the narrator made note of people’s astrology signs throughout the novel. Just a little detail— but it struck me. What is your own relationship with astrology?
Yeah, I love astrology. It's major for me. I understand people through astrology. And trust me, it's deep.
Do you have any advice for writers that you could share with us? Perhaps something that keeps you motivated or encouraged?
Like the first word of the Qu'ran, I'd tell writers to read. Keep reading. Expand yourself, your own conceptions. Be brave.
Fariha Róisín is an Australian-Canadian writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Her work often explores Muslim identity, race, pop culture, and film. It also examines the intersection of being a queer Bangladeshi navigating a white world. She is the author of the poetry collection How to Cure A Ghost. Like a Bird is her debut novel.
