I recently gave an interview to Adoptionperheet, the magazine of Adoptive Families in Finland. If you read Finish, you can read it on-line here. For those who do not read Finnish, the un-edited text is below.
You are an Indian
writer and also an adoptive mother, and you have written about adoption in your
books. Would you say that your own idea of adoption was changed by your
experience of the adoption process?
My writing is always interested not only in
telling a story but also in examining the very nature of storytelling. That is,
how do we choose the stories we tell and how do we structure story telling.
Nothing has brought home to me the importance of this examination like my
experience with adoption. I subscribed to the happy ending story prior to
entering the world of adoption. My thinking about adoption was quite
unconscious and therefore completely uncritical.
Even as I waited for my daughter, I became
more conscious that the adoption story was just a story, constructed, quite
romanticized, and not as I had assumed, the description of some absolute truth.
I recall driving to the appropriate bureaucracy in the US city far from where I
was living and being met there by an adoption agency employee who was to assist
me in filing my papers. While waiting in the long line, she spoke of many
things including her own adopted daughter’s struggles, which she blamed on her
daughter’s poor choices as a young adult. Then she went on to criticize an
adoptive parent known for attributing her child’s struggles to the institution of
adoption. She implied this parent was incompetent, or worse. I was left nodding
along. I felt myself being organized to her position and there was something
sinister in this. I had the sense that the fat file in my hands which was to
bring my child home would not go forward without her help and the help of many
others who had a vested interest in maintaining a very particular story about
adoption.
I no longer nod along with the idea that
adoption is about a forever family with a happy ending. Too much that is
important is left out of this story. Loss, for one, is left out. While there
may be a forever adoptive family, there is also a biological family the adoptee
is separated from and that the adoptee may desire to be reconciled to. This
biological family may want the reconciliation. In this picture, unhappiness,
the kind of unhappiness known to the powerless and disenfranchised, arises from
the lack of legal and social avenues for effecting the desired reconciliation.
In your short story
”Jane Eyre”, the protagonist is Lubna, an Indian woman who now lives in America
but has adopted her daughter from Kerala. When Lubna’s pediatrician aunt saw
the dark-skinned Keralan girl for the first time, she asked: ”Didn’t they let
you choose?” Lubna says that everybody in America finds the girl beautiful, but
nobody in India does. It is well known that fair skin has traditionally been
seen as desirable in India, equated with success and good social standing.
Would you say that this sort of skin-colour racism is still prevalent, or is
the situation changing in the younger generations? How does this attitude
affect the domestic adoption situation – do most PAPs still want a fair-skinned
child, or are people in the urban middle classes, for example, becoming more
open to other options?
It is not possible to generalize about what
prospective adoptive parents in India desire in their children because it is a
huge country with multiple traditions relating to child bearing and adoption as
well as diverse personal experiences that inform individuals’ decisions to
adopt. If there is something common among most PAPs in India, it is what is
common among PAPs everywhere: the desire for a child who is a blank slate. This
is the subtext of the adoption story that contemporary adoption continues to
offer PAPs everywhere: they can have a child unencumbered by history. Even as adoptive
parents in India embrace this story, they wrestle with the knowledge that this
story makes no sense. The parent who wrestles prepares to provide the child
with some access to the story she brings with her but also begins the lifelong
process of drawing a line that separates this story from the story the parent
wants to tell: the story of the blank slate and its corollary, the happy ending.
Adoptive parents everywhere love to tell their child that though she was not
born in her mother’s stomach, she was born in her mother’s heart. Depending on
the individual adoptive parent, the child may receive some or no support in
thinking about the first mother in whose stomach she was born. And certainly,
many adoptive parents in India, as elsewhere, completely avoid mention of the
first mother’s heart.
I cannot use the word ’racism’ to describe
the preference for fair skin in India, not while the term is in use to describe
the enslavement of and ongoing brutality against people of African origin in
the United States and elsewhere. The preference for fair skin in India is more
reflective of Indian classism and casteism; dark skinned children are equated
with lower class and caste. This preference is problematic, but just not in the
same way that racism in problematic in the west. In my story, ’Jane Eyre,’ I
see the Americans who find Lubna’s daughter beautiful as racist. The
fetishization of dark skin colour in America is part of how racism plays out there
today.
At least one of the controversial episodes
in the Indian adoption world around skin colour has to do with inter-country and
not domestic adoption. In the late 90’s, members of the fair skinned Lambada
tribe were persuaded to part with their children as these children were
desirable for placement in the inter-country adoption stream.
We are told that
domestic adoption as such is becoming more accepted in India. From the
viewpoint of foreign adoptive parents, the attitudes they have met in India
have been variable, sometimes approval and congratulations but also critical
and harsh questions like ”did you buy him/her?”. Sometimes also inter-country
adoption processes have been stalled or delayed because an administrative
official or judge disapproved of children being taken out of India. In
contrast, would you say people mostly approve nowadays of domestic adoption
within India (or adoption into NRI families)? Also, do Indian adoptive families
see themselves as part of an adoption community – do they seek each other out,
keep in touch and share experiences and advice, or is adoption regarded more as
a private matter?
Trafficking is a real issue in adoption,
and not coincidentally or accidentally, but rather inevitably; the inequitable
structure of adoption – the powerful adopting from the powerless – invites
corruption, most often in the form of third party brokers. Those who were
suspicious of how I had adopted my daughter were working poor people. The
middle class were, for the most part, congratulatory. The former were suspicious,
as they should be, and the latter comfortable, as they would be, with a system
that favours their class. Thankfully, no one comments or raises questions in
front of my child now that she is old enough to follow what is being said.
Domestic adoption is growing in India. In a
positive development, many adoptive parents seek one another out and there is
an attempt, not unlike the one in the west, to look at adoption as an identity to
be created in conversation with others, rather than a secret to be buried. This
is positive in my opinion, especially because the trend in the west where the
current form of adoption came into existence is for adoptees to continue in
adulthood the work of identity formation which their adoptive parents helped
them begin. The Korean American adoptee experience teaches us in the adoption
community much about what the future holds for all members of the adoption
triad – the biological parents, the adoptive parents, and the adoptee. This is
a community -- some of whom were adopted as far back as the 1950s, some of whom
were adopted as part of the evangelical thrust of the adoption industry in the
US, and many of whom write movingly of the love they experienced in their
adoptive homes -- that today has won the legal right to reclaim citizenship in
their first country. Clearly the work of identity construction, if it is to be
a coherent and empowering experience, must have access to collective thinking
and action.
You yourself adopted
while living in America, didn’t you? Would you like to say something about the
general attitudes to adoption in America as compared to India?
Again, the general attitude toward adoption
is very similar in America as it is to the attitude in India both within the
adoptive community and in the general culture. People in the working class in
both societies are suspicious of the institution and the ’good’ it does. Conversely
many will express envy and comment that the adopted child is lucky to benefit
from the upward class movement. On reflection, this seemingly converse thinking
can be understood as class envy and the understanding that children left behind
in institutions will predictably suffer neglect and worse. Those from the upper
class background, the background shared by adoptive parents, see it as a
benevolent institution with perhaps a few wrinkles to iron out. Very few in the
upper classes in either society will argue that s structural inequity plays any
role in the process.
Again in ”Jane Eyre”,
the story mentions the daily routines of both mother and child in order to get
through life together: ”She has chosen to forego mention of the 10 mg of Prozac
she takes daily to combat Asha’s 5 mg of Risperdal, 5 mg of Strattera, and the
a.m. and p.m. 5 mg of Triptafen.” People in the Finnish adoption community are
well aware that adopted children often have special needs like ADHD or learning
difficulties, as well as physical conditions like Hepatitis B or Thalassemia,
and the home study processes emphasize that PAPs should be prepared to deal
with such issues and get help where necessary. Are these aspects addressed in
the Indian public discourses on adoption as well – are the parents prepared for
the challenges?
I do not have first-hand experience of
domestic adoption in India though I am Indian and live in India. My experience
was with inter-country adoption. The adoption agency in the US did little to
prepare me or other parents in my cohort for the reality of our children’s
struggles. While some struggles adoptees face – learning disabilities or
physical conditions like Hepatitis B – pose a challenge to adoptive parents and
the wider community in their effort to sustain the adoptee, they are nevertheless
more easily assimilated than the struggle of the adoptee who experiences
adoption itself as psychically painful. The adoptee’s lifelong struggle to live
with not only what is not known about their story but also what is not allowed
to be known is an area left completely untouched by adoption agencies, in the
US and I daresay in India, as well. Identity, when it is spoken of, is equated
with external and cosmetic aspects of culture – bangles and bindis – and
somewhat with the work of internal nourishment – primarily the addition of
Indian items to the family dinner menu, but not, of course, the need for
adoptive parents to acquire fluency in the child’s language or religion.
That said, services for children with
learning disabilities is drastically underfunded in India when compared to
funding for similar services in the United States, for example. To the extent adoptees
are more likely to suffer from learning disabilities they are more
disproportionately impacted by the government’s failure to provide needed
services.
It is well known that
the Indian bureaucracy is unpredictable and can cause great delays at practically
any step of the adoption procedure. The latest reform of the national adoption
system in 2012 was officially aimed at shortening the lengthy processes and
waiting times, but in practice it has led to lengthy stalls and even longer
waits, at least from the international perspective. Most recently, this year’s
new government has promised another overhaul of the adoption system to speed up
the processes. It is certainly a good goal to shorten the time children have to
spend in orphanages where there is always a shortage of individual attention
and care, not to mention the risk of abuse of every sort. But do you think
there is also an increased risk of overlooking the necessary checks on the
children’s situations and backgrounds in the pressure to get them ”out” more
quickly?
Absolutely, there is pressure to get
children out quickly, and this can result in a real increase in the risk to
serving the child’s best interests. If adoption were different, more equitable,
we would be worrying not about the delays in children’s placement, but rather
the failure to invest in the option of reconciling children with their birth
families. The child’s plea to be reconciled is misread as the child’s plea to
be adopted. The pressure from birth families for such sustenance as allows them
to nurture children would not be ignored in the rush to meet the needs of
adoptive families. This will not change until the adoptee and birth families
have more power in the triad. Such change is underway in parts of the world,
where open adoption is becoming a possibility. It is not coincidental that
these are the countries where adoptee communities and birth mother communities are
organized and vocal. This has meant an increase in inter-country adoption, as western
families have sought a way out of open relationships with biological families.
As adoption has changed the very notion of what is a family, so too will the
notion of adoption change as more voices participate in defining what they need
from adoption. In the future, it will perhaps seem barbaric that women in
difficult straits are forced to relinquish their children under circumstances
which stipulates no possibility of future contact by any party. In the past,
adoption in India looked different than it does today. Children were cared for
in the extended family or community in the event they were orphaned or their
parents could not care for them. Significantly, in the latter case, parents often
retained the right to ask for their children’s return once they were capable of
meeting the child’s needs. Today there are documented instances of mothers
relinquishing their children in the mistaken belief that this adoption is like
that older adoption. Not all was perfect in the olden days of quasi-open
adoption. My mother grew up in a home with a distant cousin, brought there to
occupy the ambivalent role of servant and family member. Needless to say, we do
not need to be conflicted about rejecting the worst of the past, even as we
take from it the notion that change is a constant, though not inevitably for the better.
You have said that
you wrote the novel Not Only The Things
That Have Happened partly in order to make a difference in the narratives
on adoption. The book explores the personal situations and social prejudices
and inequalities that can lead a biological parent to give up a child, as well
as the lasting effects of adoption on the lives of both the biological family,
the adoptive family, and the adoptee him- or herself. You write about
interrupted stories – the biological mother no longer has access to the
continuation of her child’s life story, and the adult adoptee has lost the
beginning of his own story. Do you feel that these losses are too much
overlooked in the dominant adoption narratives?
My novel tells the story of a poor mother
in India who wants to keep her child and does not receive support for this
desire. Nevertheless she keeps her child for four years, relinquishing him only
when a couple from another country show up at her doorstep, sent there by nuns
from the local convent. The prevalent narrative most often sees the birth
mother as hideously unfit for parenthood or equipped with courage that allows
her to relinquish a child she cannot raise. Sometimes this birthmother is
allowed to be both – unfit and courageous. At other times she is unfit and the
child must be removed from her. In both versions of the birthmother story, she
ceases to exist after the relinquishment. We can forget about her because she
presumably lives without any connection to the child’s story. The birthmother
in my novel is neither unfit for motherhood, nor does she describe her decision
to relinquish the child as courageous, but rather sees it as a weakness in the
face of formidable difficulties. She does not disappear from the novel but
instead lives with all the dilemmas of someone who must process lifelong grief
and uncertainty. She desires her child’s return but if powerless to effect a
reunion. Her story is a fairly new one in that it continues past the act of
relinquishment.
In my novel, the act of adoption is far
from being transparent and as a result the story takes a turn and becomes one of
disruption. The disruption is possible only because of the very murkiness of
the circumstances under which the adoption takes place. Again, the narratives
of adoption that are available to us do little justice to how the very
structure of adoption can contribute to disruption in adoption. I refer you
here to both my novel http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Boy-Mridula-Koshy-ebook/dp/B00KW2HILU
and to this Reuters story on the rehoming of children adopted through
inter-country adoption: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
Part two of my novel is about the life of
the adult adoptee. The idea that adoptees live with the complex difficulty of
the adoptee identity is very little told. One of the prevalent ideas of
adoption is that the child, as she matures, will grow out of any dissonance
created by adoption. That there is happy ending brought about by adoption. In
fact, we know now from the experience of adult adoptees that this dissonance,
and the work of assimilating it, is a lifelong process. Once, after a public
book reading, a middle aged woman in the audience spoke movingly of her mother
who continues this challenging work into her seventies and about the impact of
this on the generations that have followed her.
Finally, I was interested I my novel in the
telling the story of adoption so that it reflects the necessarily complex work
of undoing existing narratives. My story then is structured so that it starts and restarts itself in the attempt to
grapple visibly with the difficulties that beset all new story telling.
Traditionally,
adoption agencies and social workers have strongly discouraged any contact
between birth parents and adoptive parents, sometimes saying that ”the birth
parents would just ask you for money”. But it seems to me that attitudes are
changing in this respect. More adoptive parents are becoming open to viewing
the birth family as a part of the child’s ”extended family” instead of seeing
them as a threat to their own parenthood. Also, the advent of social media has
made it possible for both adoptees and their biological relatives to seek each
other out and establish contact independently of any official routes. What do
you think of this?
I find the search for reconciliation a
positive effort. I would advise adoptive families to not confine themselves to
heritage tours of their children’s birth country but to also pay attention while
there to the trail their children might search for when they become adults.
Just as we anticipate for the rest of our children’s futures, sacrificing and
saving money for college for example, so we can anticipate for this possible
future, as well. This is another reason for adoptive parents to learn the
language of the home country of their child, and to seriously engage with the
dynamic nature of the political and social life of the home culture. Much is
asked of us as parents that we may not have known when we began this journey
but on reflection much has been asked of our adopted children. Moving beyond
the consumption of cosmetic and static cultural artefacts of the home country
brings a measure of balance in that equation.
You’ve asked the
question: isn’t the birth mother ”exactly the mother that the child needs”? On
the other hand you also describe in your novel mothers, stepmothers and fathers
who treat their families badly and who were themselves treated badly by their
own families. Isn’t the idea of the birth parent as best parent as much of a
myth as the idea of adoptive parents as benefactors and saviours who can do no
wrong?
While I would not argue for a child
remaining in an abusive home – whether with birth or adoptive family – I
believe we must start from the assumption that the child’s needs are best
served where this is least psychic disruption to her. This means every effort
must be made to sustain the birth family. I also believe in the biological
parent’s right to raise their child, and as well their right to receive
adequate support in raising their child. Adoption is a choice people must be
free to make. For example single parents, LGBT parents and parents from the
lower class should not be excluded from the possibility of adopting as they
often are. On the other hand I do not see adoption as a person’s right. The
biological parent’s right to raise their child should necessarily trump the
adoptive parent’s choice to adopt a child. If, for example, a country closes
its doors to inter-country adoption, it cannot be an adoptive parent’s right to
seek adoption from that country. If, the court intervenes to return a child to
biological parents after the child has been found to have been adopted
illegally, the biological parent’s right to parenthood must prevail over the
adoptive parent’s desire for parenthood.
In the past, the argument that a child was
best off with her biological parents was rightly critiqued as regressive. It
was seen as a backward argument because it was an argument that gave primacy to
traditional notions of genetic ties. After all, the argument that gave power to
the notion of the supremacy of biological ties over other ties proceeded from
the same sort of biological determinism from which racism and casteism sprang. At
its worst, the argument against adoption was an expression of distrust in the
genetic material that was the child. That is, the child might carry the imprint
of genetic inferiority, perhaps criminality, into the new family and should
therefore be barred from entry. Adoption was then a brave opening up of
relationships, even transgressive in its reach across racial, class and other
divides.
Today, it is a different argument that
calls for the child to remain with her biological family. Yet this changed
argument continues to be misunderstood and even miscast as the argument of the
past. In fact, the argument today is rooted in two newer lines of reasoning.
One draws our attention to the growing knowledge about what is best for the
child’s psychological well-being and the birth mother’s psychological
well-being. The other asks for a critical look at the structure of adoption and
its inherent inequities wherein the interests of one party –the adoptive family
– take supremacy over the interests of other parties.
Those who argue for adoption continuing as
it is speak of millions of children languishing for the lack of parents. In
fact, while these children do languish in faulty social service systems,
typically they are not desired by PAPs. There is a shortage of healthy infants who
resemble the “clean slate” on which PAPs would like to write the loving family
story. As long as the institution of adoption is driven by the needs of the
powerful and as long as it largely ignores the needs of the powerless, it will
serve to pressure birth families like those of the Lambada tribe in India to
relinquish children they would not otherwise have considered relinquishing.
Finally, you have
been very critical of the corruption in the adoptive industry and the
phenomenon of ”creating” orphans in order to satisfy demand from the rich
countries. What would you say to PAPs and adoption agencies who want to avoid
this and make sure that they are dealing with honest organisations – what would
be the best way to do this?
It is not possible for even the most
conscientious PAPs to avoid the corruption that sends a third party broker to a
poor woman’s door where the exchange of money and/or the promise of a better
future for her child persuades her to part with that child. The child who comes
to the adoptive family with relinquishment papers from her biological family
may nevertheless have been sourced from third party agents who placed pressure
on the biological family prior to the child’s placement in a credentialed
agency. This sort of corruption is inevitable given the poverty of biological
families and the large sums of money involved in inter-country adoption. There
is additionally no way to be certain that our reassurances to our adoptive
children are true and that their biological families are not in fact searching
for them. This second corruption in which we find ourselves on murky terrain
with our own children is inevitable, given the vast difference in the power
wielded by those who adopt relative to those who relinquish their children. In
India the relinquishing mother has two months to change her mind before all her
rights are terminated. There is no reason to suppose that a powerful
organization of birthmothers would ever agree to an arrangement that terminates
all right to contact their children. But at present no such organization exists,
and first mothers are far from having the power to shape adoption. I would want
the adoption narrative to allow PAPs a more honest understanding that they are
entering a relationship built on inequity, one made murky by how much is
allowed to remain in the unknown. It follows that we have a responsibility as
adoptive parents to expend the privileges of our powerful position in the triad
to seek greater equity and transparency in adoption.
I would like to be sure and credit David
and Desiree Smolin’s writing on the subject for much of the direction I have
taken in my thinking on inter-country adoption. http://fleasbiting.blogspot.in/ I
read Land of Gazillion Adoptees for the adoptee perspective http://landofgazillionadoptees.com/
