those who have a stake in the adoption narrative

As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the central ideas of Not Only The Things That Have Happened is the complex and inherently problematic nature of inter-country adoption. That idea has not been explored by most Indian reviewers to the extent I might have liked, but I have been pleased to see several US birth mother and adoptee rights blogs taking a serious looks at the book from that perspective.

Marijane Nguyen, a Taiwanese American adoptee and music therapist, had this to say in her review on her blog, Beyond Two Worlds:

Mridula Koshy’s debut novel, Not Only the Things That Have Happened, is not a tale for the faint-hearted. It is a story that explores the impact of adoption, oppression, loss and identity. Koshy’s prose and storytelling is hauntingly beautiful and speaks directly to the heart. It is not a quick read, but one that invokes thought, and as such, is an important and compelling work... An element of grief seeps heavily into much of the story, as most of the characters experience a great loss. I didn't mind the sadness, quite the opposite. There was an underlying rawness that pulled me deeper into the story and gave it a true sense of realism. (full review is here.)

Marijane followed up by interviewing me. You can read that exchange here. 

Suz Bednarz, a reunited birth mother and  founder of ehbabes.com, a site and support group that provides reunion assistance to those separated by adoption, reviewed the book on her blog, Writing My Wrongs. Here's an excerpt:

I finished reading Mridula Koshy’s book Not Only the Things That Have Happened. I definitely recommend it, particularly for individuals experienced with trans-racial adoption. Koshy’s writing is thick and rich from the very first page. (full review is here.)

Jane Edwards wrote a lengthy review of the book at [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum. Her review also includes an interview. You can read the whole thing here.

This is the most nervous I've been in reading reviews of this book. I can't say how good it feels to be read seriously by those who I read as I was researching this book--the people who have a stake in this issue. Writing, like politics, is a fundamentally collective project. Developing new narratives for inter-country adoption is a task many, many people have been working on for a long time. I'm glad to see my book is contributing to that work.

Re-writing adoption

In doing the research for Not Only the Things That Have Happened, I read hundreds of news stories, books, articles and blogs about inter-country adoption. Some of what I read was from the point of view of adoptees, some from the point of view of first mothers or birth mothers. And there were blogs by adoptive parents, as well. From my wide reading on the subject I took away an overwhelming sense of the unspoken losses entailed in adoption. And again and again, I ran into the following quote, mostly on adoptee and birth mother sites:

Adoption loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.
- The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE.

My reading led me to conclude the orphan crisis - an oft repeated figure is 163 million orphans worldwide - is so necessary to the adoption industry that the industry has neither hesitated to create the figure in the statistical sense, nor, tragically, in the real sense; i.e., not just by doctoring the figures, but by actually separating children from their biological parents or other members of their biological families, thus making orphans of them. As for the figure, it is very much a doctored figure. Writing on  Fleas Biting, David Smolin, professor of law at Cumberland School of Law and the director for The Center for Children, Law, and Ethics, has this to say:

These global orphan estimates come from UNICEF, which is using a broad concept of “orphans and vulnerable children” which includes children who have lost one parent but are living with their other parent.   90% of these “orphans” are living with a parent, and thus certainly are not in need of a family through adoption, for they already have a family. 

The unequal distribution of economic and political power within the adoption triad - birth parents, the adoptee, and adoptive parents -  is one reason for the sort of corruption that won't hesitate to separate children from parents who very much want to keep them. There is very little acknowledgement of the lifelong trauma this separation can create in the child. There is next to no incentive to promote family preservation. Alleviating poverty, so families can remain intact, is neither lucrative, nor has it the necessary cultural or political mandate. The birth mother, who is lauded for putting the child's interest above all else and giving her child for adoption, thereby performing an ultimate sacrifice such as only a mother can, is banished from her child's life. Isn't this woman exactly the mother this child needs? If one recalls the story of Solomon's judgement, the mother who was brave enough to give up her child is rewarded by having her child returned to her arms.

The work to reform adoption is well underway. In 2010 Korea acquiesced to the campaign by international adoptees for the return of their lost citizenship.

More recently the Australian Government apologized to birth mothers for the forcible adoptions carried out in decades past. 

But the vulnerability of children who enter the adoption stream continues, as illustrated in the horrific practice of 'rehoming,' where adoptive parents hand off guardianship of children they no longer want with the ease with which they might any other transaction unsupervised by the law. Arrangements for the handover are made online between strangers who meet briefly in parking lots to effect the transfer. No one is watching. Megan Twohey has written an extensive series on 'rehoming' for Reuters, which you can read here.

This is not an easy issue. Adoption, like marriage or any other institution involving millions of people all over the world, cannot be summed up simply as  wholly 'good' or wholly 'bad'. But I do believe we need to reform the system of inter-country adoption such that children and their birth mothers have rights the don't currently enjoy. This will require us to be more open, more accountable, and probably more uncomfortable.

Anyone who follows politics knows that bad policies flow from bad narratives   At least in the short run, I think that to understand the complexities and ambiguities of this issue, we need new narratives as much as we need new policies.  Which is why I wrote a novel, not an essay.

I will keep adding to the list of blogs I have collected on the right. All of them were valuable to my research, all of them speak courageously about loss in adoption. In doing so they are all part of the attempt to rewrite the narrative of adoption.

Kerala Calling

It's interesting to see how language operates: as I strain toward the Malayalam I don't possess, the English I do possess falls apart, helpless to transform itself into Malayalam. My hands take over, frantic that I should make sense.

First Reviews

A couple of reviews have come out this week. Extracts and links are below.

 First, there is this from Naintara Oberoi in Time Out:

Motherhood looms very large – and in many forms – in the book as well. Koshy’s contemplative eye takes in several maternal figures...Despite the drama, Not Only the Things That Have Happened is far from schmaltzy, rather feeling its way through the kinds of lack that cannot be blotted out. The novel retains Koshy’s characteristically measured, poetic voice with its undertow of unease. (Full review here.)        

And this from Sanjay Sipahimalani in Mint Lounge:

The immersion in the lives of the people of this region is almost Faulknerian in its intensity, along with the milieu against which they have come of age: The influence of Catholicism, the grip of caste, trade union and Left movements and the distance between the impoverished village and the bustling city...Koshy’s
 primary interest is in the impact of past bereavement on present-day lives and she follows her characters’ befuddled journeys and their real and imagined histories with an empathetic eye. (Full review here.)

Update: You can read a more recent, and very nice, review of the book by Anvar Alikhan in India Today here. 

A little camera happy and a lot book happy

Not Only the Things That Have Happened should be available everywhere in India this week. If you can't find it in a shop, you can find it on-line in most the major outlets. My copies arrived in the mail this week.  Akshay got creative with the camera.

The mail brought me my package of twenty copies of the book on the same day it brought my eldest son his new laptop. Needless to say the book received little attention from the kids that night. I was a little hurt. I said something to Michael about it. He said he would take me out to a drink. That didn't quite happen. I mourned a little. Was that Friday, last week? I think it was. Then came the weekend and Monday and Tuesday. Back in India, I knew the book was only just beginning to get mailed out out to reviewers. It would only just be entering distribution. 

Wednesday evening, I came home from riding Surya over to her tabla lessons. I smelt the burnt brownies before I opened the door. It was dark inside. Where was everybody? Mad scramble, some scuffling noises as I walked into the house. Someone struck a match. I saw in the light a table laid out with tablecloth, the nice dishes, candles. It was a surprise party. I won't ask Michael if he prompted them. I don't need to know.

We had tortillas, beans, mole, queso, chips and guacamole, Kathy's homemade salsa. I had a big glass of wine. Then I had another one. It was all good. 

On the back of the book, 

.

Booker shortlisted writer Jeet Thayil has this to say: 'Intimate, Epic, Haunting.' 

And from Annie Zadie:  A walk through the cellars of memory and a distressing exposure of the institutions we must depend on.

Extract here here and here

Not Only the Things That Have Happened will be in bookstores across India in just a couple weeks.

Yesterday, DNA published an extract from the novel. Here is the story of Saramma as she returns to her family after living as the sexual keep of a wealthy man. 

Pyrta and Pratilipi ran extracts when the novel was still a work in process.   Here is the story of Kallen Chothi and the rubber-tappers’ strike, backdrop for the barber, Unnikrishnan, remembering Annakutty. 

And here it is sometime in the 1970s. A little boy, Chuk Chuk has been taken from the railway platform in New Delhi where he has made a home for himself with other street children; he is adopted by a family in a small city in the Midwestern United States. They rename him Asa. It is the first night and day of his life with them.

You can read a bit more about the novel in an interview Platform Magazine(see the post below this one).

Not Only the Things That Have Happened

Here's a bit about the new book that ran in Platform Magazine a month or two back. Since the interview, the release date of the book has changed from September to October/Novemeber.

As you can see, Blogger makes the text of the interview difficult to read, so the original is below. Here is a link to it at the Siyahi website, which displays it more clearly. I have to show you this picture which was taken a couple years back by my son Akshay. He was ten then. The picture of me with the bicycle in the post below this one is also one he took, but more recently. Lately when people ask for an author picture I send them Akshay's work. It's nice to have an in house portraitist. 

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1. Give us a little background about yourself and when did your romance with writing begin?

I’ve never had a romance with writing and certainly it has never romanced me. I wish, I wish, but wishes don’t transform magically into romantic suitors and they never get down on bended knees and there never is a sparkling novel inside the satin lined box they never hold open. It is another matter that I have had many such romances with reading.

2. If you had to write a blurb on Not Only the Things That Have Happened, how would you write it?

A woman relinquishes her four year old son to tourists passing through town; losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Some forty years on the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life, the son’s struggle is for the story that will allow him to live. Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a novel about the stories that break us and make us and then remake us.

3. What inspired the novel and what made you structure it in two parts?

The novel takes place over a thirty six hour period and does what I like to do with time in my writing, which is to make the point that the present is always given to us, but the past and the future is of our making. This makes for a complex structure as characters travel back and forth from the present to the past and into the future. However I am not a complete masochist and not at all inclined to inflict pain so I keep it simple, locating the stories as far apart as the lives of the two main characters. The mother lives in Kerala and her story takes up Part One of the novel; the son lives in the United States and his story is Part Two of the novel. No, they never meet, neither in life nor in my novel. There is however space in the novel for the reader to decide if there is somewhere else where lost souls meet.

4. When is it out and what next?

Not Only the Things That Have Happened is forthcoming from Harper Collins India in September of this year. My next book is a young adult novel, the story of twelve year old Noor who learns to ride a bicycle, learns what is lost and gained when dreams become real, and learns her kabbadiwallh father merits the pride she has always felt for him. I am also working on another collection of short stories.