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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  POLITICAL ANIMALS: Nagaland’s voice
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POLITICAL ANIMALS: Nagaland’s voice

Easterine Kire: A writer who is taking the Northeastern state worldwide

Eaterine Kire’s latest novel, ‘Bitter Wormwood’, is about the Indo-Naga conflict. Photographer: Per WollenPremium
Eaterine Kire’s latest novel, ‘Bitter Wormwood’, is about the Indo-Naga conflict. Photographer: Per Wollen

This week, Naga poet and author Easterine Kire received the Catalan PEN International Voice Award at Lloseta, Spain. In her acceptance speech, she rightly said that this award was a recognition for “Nagas as a whole". A prolific poet, novelist and writer-activist, Kire, 54, is the first published writer from Nagaland writing in English.

Kire’s writing has lyrical beauty, which makes her activist zeal to take Naga stories out to the world all the more powerful. Newspaper reports about the award said that Kire’s writing particularly touched the people of Catalonia, Spain, where its people are struggling to preserve their own language in schools.

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Her novels bring out the spiritual and human universes of Nagaland. Mari is about a 17-year-old girl who loses her fiancé when World War II reaches Nagaland, and chooses to bring up her child alone. When the River Sleeps is about Naga myths surrounding nature and the unknown. The Log-Drummer Boy is a children’s book based on oral story-telling traditions the state is known for. Kire has translated more than 200 oral poems from her native language, Tenyidie, into English, and is now working on her autobiography, Daddy Killed a Tiger.

After the award was announced, a writer friend introduced me to Kire, which resulted in a conversation and me discovering her work. I am around 50 pages into Mari, and I find it heartfelt, true and utterly engaging. She answered some of my questions by e-mail. Edited excerpts:

Congratulations on the award, Easterine. I want to ask you about your childhood first. Did you grow up in a big family?

I am the middle child in a family of seven siblings. Both my parents were working people and I spent the larger part of my childhood with my grandparents (my mother’s parents) who had a very large estate, with an orchard and vegetable garden where I could roam to my heart’s delight. I also spent the earliest part of my childhood in the oil town of Duliajan, Assam, where I lived with my aunt Mari for a couple of years.

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What kind of political climate did you witness growing up and how much of that affected your poetry and fiction?

My younger brother was around 4 and I was 5 when we heard shooting outside our house and we both lay on the cement floor, me with my arm over him. My grandfather and my elder brother narrowly escaped a bullet when the Indian army shot at my grandfather’s house after an encounter with some Naga soldiers. There were curfews on a regular basis, and we were mortally afraid of the Indian army which was at the height of committing many atrocities, raping the Naga women, torturing Naga men, and killing them in this period.

When did you start writing, and what are some of your your literary influences?

I began writing poetry at age sixteen. I began to write short stories at age 19. In poetry, I was quite influenced by TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas and GM Hopkins. I quite liked Cohen and Pritish Nandy, pity Nandy has stopped publishing more poetry. (Or maybe I don’t know about his publications!)

Nagaland is perceived as “the other" in most parts of India. Even within the Northeast, it is a state which is seen as exotic, mostly in a bad way. How can that change?

I have said this before and have to say it again that the national media must really make an effort to stop sensationalizing and exoticising the Northeast.If there were regular visits by mainland journalists who tried to present ordinary life as it is lived in Nagaland and the aspirations and dreams of peace by ordinary citizens, fathers, mothers, children, the man on the street, they would get a much more accurate picture of who is the true Naga. Within the Northeast, we are seen as different because of our long drawn-out freedom struggle. The media makes the mistake of using the politically motivated term, “secessionist" and “insurgency" when it describes the Indo-Naga conflict. That itself is the root of all misunderstanding. Starting from 1929, the Nagas have tried to govern themselves as they had always done before the British came and colonized them. The British denied them that and divided Naga territory into half, gave one half to Burma and one half to India. Now that both Burma and India know we have oil and mineral resources in our ancestral lands, they naturally do not want to consider sovereignty for the Nagas. This story is what separates the Naga story from the rest of the Northeast. However, we have close affinity emotionally and culturally with the other Northeast states.

Nagaland has had a history of double colonization. As a society, do you see it coming into its own? What are some of the contradictions?

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I am so proud of the two Naga cyclists who have just completed a cycling route from Nagaland-Nepal-Bhutan-New Delhi to spread the message of a greener environment. At home the ACAUT (Action Committee for Unabated Taxation) has garnered huge public support in its fight against extortion. So it is a hopeful future where young people are out there trying to change the present so they can have a good future.

Is Naga life still your inspiration?

It will always be an inspiration for me. I am not saying it’s perfect, but it is richly human in spite of all its failings. And it is, undeniably, a land of great beauty and compassion.

Easterine Kire will perform her jazz poetry at Jumping Bean, Dimapur, Nagaland, on 30 November. The Log-Drummer Boy will be released at the annual Hornbill Literature Festival in Kohima, Nagaland, on 2 December.

Political Animalsis a fortnightly blog about the intersection of politics and art.

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Published: 27 Nov 2013, 04:39 PM IST
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