'I wish we had more narratives with an Eastern gaze on the West'
India, Aug. 2 -- 1Three of your books are set in India. How did that happen?
Soon after my education in France, I moved to Bangalore and taught at a design school from 2013 to 2018. Being in India was a great opportunity to see things from a different perspective.
Eventually I ended up staying for five years. My environment provided the material that I worked with. I think of my book Bangalore as a travelogue. It is a portrait of the city through its public spaces. The gaze is more external. The Alcazar does not look at the city as a whole. It focuses on a tiny plot of land and the people who work there.
2What were the ethical questions that came up for you, as you told stories of construction workers in The Alcazar?
Bangalore was my first book. I was young and there was an urge to produce something, so I was thinking more about my right to represent as an artist. You could say that there was some kind of entitlement there. I had a genuine appetite for capturing the city. Through the process of making that book, I started asking myself more questions.
That process continued after the book was published in France, and I began to listen to reactions and receive feedback. Only parts of it were published in a magazine in India. With time, I got more interested in post-colonial issues. I read Edward Said's book, Orientalism (1978). That helped me understand the political and intellectual discourse, and also know where I stood.
I do not believe that people who come from the West should not be able to talk about the East, or that men should not portray female characters. How things are done matters. It just comes down to that. I also wish we had more narratives with an Eastern gaze on the West. Besides, there are stories that are out there to grab. If there were already a lot of stories representing construction workers, maybe I wouldn't have felt the need to document them in The Alcazar.
3Tell us about your new books, L'homme miroir and In the Land of the Lama.
L'homme miroir is about a workaholic single mother from the city who moves to the countryside with her son when a property comes up for sale. She has to get rid of the objects that belonged to the previous owner. While going through them, she, her son and her parents begin to form impressions of him. What they see in him shows who they are.
It was a great pleasure to collaborate with Pema Wangchuk Dorjee, a journalist based in Sikkim, on In the Land of the Lama. This comic book is set in the late 1960s, along Sikkim's frontier with Tibet. It draws inspiration from the story of sepoy Harbhajan Singh. He was an Indian soldier who died in 1968 because of the harsh terrain and extreme weather, but lives on in myths and legends that have grown up around him....
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