“I Want Writing to Cultivate my Relationship with Myself”

An Interview with Taymour Soomro

Illustration by Shyamli Singbal

I came across the work of Pakistani writer Taymour Soomro about a year ago, and have been a fan ever since. His novel, Other Names for Love, was met with much acclaim and he also co-edited the anthology ‘Letters to A Writer of Colour’, which was one of the most honest and interesting collections I’ve come across in recent times. Just as impressive as his writing are his qualifications: Taymour has been a corporate solicitor in London and Milan, studied law at Cambridge and Stanford, a lecturer at university in Karachi, managed an agricultural estate in rural Sindh and been a publicist for a luxury fashion brand in London. We sat down virtually a few weeks ago and I asked him about his career, identity, and various other things.  

As someone who has grown up in different places and been drawn to writing, there was a section in your essay in ‘Letters to A Writer of Colour’ that really resonated, where you talk about how the world wants to classify you in a particular way, as ‘queer immigrant fiction’, but how you draw from so many sources in your life and encourage writers to be like ‘conmen’ rather than subscribe to a specific category. Could you tell me a little more about that in relation to your own writing? 

That’s a really challenging question. I just gave a lecture at Bennington, where I’m teaching, about how we end up reading writers through their identity, and how that happens much more to marginalized writers, whose identities are considered totalizing. 

You know, my identity ends up being this very tiny box, like an outfit I put on when I am with other people. Or that is put on me. Am I a queer brown writer when I’m on my own, sitting by myself? Yes, but I’m also not, my self is constantly shifting and changing. It’s a challenge, because there are incentives to write close to whatever our perceived identities are. When I started sending my work out to agents during my masters, I sent out a couple of stories that didn’t really have any Pakistani connection, but for which I’d got the highest marks. Most agents didn’t respond. Some told me: this is fine but nobody is interested in short fiction. 

Then a year passed, and I’d written a few more stories that happened to be about Pakistan and I got a much better response. Is that to do with marketing? Am I easier for a publisher or agent to package and sell if I’m writing about Pakistan, because there are very few writers writing in English about Pakistan and about queerness? Or was  that work of mine better? Was the other work worse? 

These aren’t things I have a clear answer to, but later, after I’d just had my first story published in the New Yorker, I remember speaking to the translator of a certain Nobel Prize winning writer, who asked whether  I’d published anything. When I told them, they said ‘well, you’re lucky, you’re exactly what the New Yorker is  looking for!’ On the one hand, that outraged me. But on the other, I wondered - was the bar lower, was it easier for me because I am a Pakistani writer writing about relationships between men? I suppose what I’m trying to say is that these questions of identity become so difficult, because there is a way in which identity can provide access and another in which it can be limiting. 

I remember two specific incidents in relation to this. In a module on historical fiction in my MA, we had to talk about the project we were working on. One white woman, in her late forties I’m guessing, was working on a slave narrative set in west Africa. The instructor, who was also white, told her that this would never be published. I remember in the class all of us had a strange combination of feelings about this. One part of me felt thrilled. But another part of me was horrified, too, because I began to wonder what the rules are about what we can write and who is deciding them. There were three white men in my program, who I mention in my essay - one was writing a novel about Japan, with Japanese protagonists, another about Syria, another about China, and they all got published - so it seemed like they could write about anything but certain others could not. It seems like these rules are different depending on your identity. For me to be policing and saying ‘a white writer cannot write about Pakistan’ might seem empowering in one way but it also feels like putting myself in a box on the other. Does that mean that I can or should only write about Pakistan? So these are questions swirling around in my head which I have no clear conclusions on. 

Another related anecdote  of sorts - do you know Colm Toibin, the Irish writer? He’d written a story about two Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona that Almodavar wanted to adapt. So I hunted down the story and read it. It’s about the relationship between two Pakistani immigrants who sell cellphones or counterfeit items on the street, and they start a relationship, but then one discovers the other has a family back home in Pakistan (sorry about the spoiler!) and sees it as a complete betrayal. That moment really jarred with me, because I felt that I knew of so many Pakistani men having relationships with men who were married, and it wasn’t considered a betrayal because marriage and sexual relationships were completely different domains and spaces in Pakistan. It seemed to me as though Toibin was applying an idea of how these relationships would be in Ireland or Europe and imposing it on Pakistan. 

But then, I started interrogating my own response. There’s a great Zadie Smith essay about who gets to write what stories, where she argues that  it’s dangerous to say who can tell what story based only on identity. Who has authority and what does that even mean? Do I have the authority to write about queer Pakistanis as a queer Pakistani but Colm does not because he can never know these people because he is too foreign? Because that idea is kind of toxic to me. It’s like thinking I can’t know you because you’re Indian or you can’t truly know a Japanese or Greek person. Then I asked myself, if this were by a Pakistani would I have read it differently? Am I creating a caricature of every queer Pakistani, which cannot be accurate by definition? I ended up with a lot of questions, but ultimately felt that nobody should be limited or constrained in terms of what they want to write. But if we’re in a position of power, we should still be very careful about how we approach ‘other’ experiences, approach them with complete humility and truly observe and listen rather than imposing narratives we might expect to be true. In an ideal world, all of us can and should do that, but on the other hand our prejudices are also likely to creep in at some point and we need to be alert to that. 

Do you think this humility is limited to particular circumstances? I’ve noticed that among many peers a book about say, India, by a foreigner is judged more harshly or expected to be of a higher standard. How do you think this ties into the adage of ‘writing what you know’ and how that relates to identity?

What’s really interesting to me is that these ideas of authority and identity are not fixed and vary depending on whom you’re speaking to or where you’re speaking from. When I’m writing outside Pakistan, I am considered an authority on all things Pakistan, though my experience in Pakistan is a very specific experience. But within the country I don’t know if I would be considered to have the authority to write about any Pakistani subject in the same way. I suppose it is very difficult to advise a writing student  on this, because in the current market, if you’re a Pakistani writing about extremism or about a queer protagonist oppressed by his extremist parents, I imagine that you’re far more likely to find a Western audience. But then the question is how do we ignore those demands, how do we decenter whiteness, but instead write what seems true to us?? 

I suppose there are no easy answers to this - context and culture are important but I also hope that we can draw on universal, emotional experiences, whether of yearning or heartbreak or grief. I think if I approach spaces or subjects with humility, I can write a story set anywhere and about anyone, There is also a danger when writing ‘what you know’ because of the presumption that you know. I think presuming you don’t know and having no assumptions seems a better way to approach writing. 

My next question is a little simpler than issues around identity and authenticity. Tell me a bit more about your journey to writing - I know you mentioned a Master’s in Law and then an MA in Creative Writing, so how did you get to where you are now? 

I did a lot of artistic and creative things as a child, from plays with my cousins to painting or pottery. I remember getting praised for my writing at school, around the age of 13 or 14, and now I wonder if there was a ‘feedback effect’ that pushed me towards writing. I wrote when I was a teenager, a lot of which was to do with feeling a little trapped in my head, and being able to put myself on paper in a way that allowed me to believe that feelings I had could be legtimate. But instead of pursuing writing in any formal way after school, I applied for a law degree because I was ambitious and I just thought that is what an ambitious, clever person does. 

If I’d told my parents I wanted to study English,, I think they’d have asked what kind of job I’d get, and articulated many of the concerns I myself had. Or perhaps not - in fact my mother is a translator and writer, and they both read a lot. Regardless I ended up choosing to study  law and as soon as I started I hated it. I thought I would change degrees but never got around to it, and continued writing on the side. I was reading a lot of Bret Easton Ellis at that time, and tried to write what I considered a Bret Easton Ellis-ish novel where basically nothing happened, it was very glamorous, very stylised, but not very good. 

I worked as a lawyer for a couple of years and then left law to write, and tried to continue writing the novel I’d been working on. But it had no structure, it went nowhere. I sent it out to all these agents and just got a standard form rejection from each.

I felt really humiliated. All of my friends were making money, doing well in their careers, and I’d told everyone I was going to be a writer, but  I was in my late twenties in London, I was teaching on the side, earning very little and felt I had completely failed at the thing that mattered the most to me. I ended up moving back to Pakistan, which was a space where I felt I knew who I was, where I would be looked after. My grandfather had been running  our family farm and I started tagging along. I taught law at a university in Karachi and spent three years helping my grandfather, dividing my time between Karachi and the farm. At some point my grandfather, who was in politics, said you should stay here and get into politics, why don’t you get married. I considered it! But thankfully I came to my senses and asked myself ‘what am I doing, this is crazy!’ That’s when I decided to go back to grad school. 

I had completely stopped writing fiction at this point, only some journalistic pieces, and didn’t feel like I’d be a strong candidate for an MFA.  so I ridiculously decided to apply for another law degree, and ended up going to the US for a degree in the science of law . Afterwards I applied for development jobs and didn’t get any offers. By this point I was 31 or 32, I thought, I’m going to be dead soon and I haven’t really tried to do the thing that really matters to me. That’s when I ended up looking into writing programs. The University of East Anglia had always been on my radar.

So I applied there for a masters, and ended up going there at a point when my self-esteem as a writer was pretty low.. I felt like the oldest person on the program, which was absurd looking back now. Most of my peers were in their early twenties and I thought my prose is  so unfashionable and everyone is writing such cool fiction. At UEA there was an often repeated  statistic that 37% of the class would get publishing deals’, so I kept reassessing whether  I was (by my estimations)  in that percentile. Ridiculous. But anyway, the course was very useful., I learned so much from my peers and was forced to produce so much work. I stayed on and did a PhD after that, because it was a funded way to write a novel. I began publishing after my MA and published my novel after I finished my PhD. 

That sounds like quite a journey. Similar to this question but more on a day to day level, what is your writing process or routine like? Do you write daily, or in bursts? How is affected by travel and moving between places? 

You know, I feel like I should have a routine but I don’t know if I have one. With the novel, my PhD deadlines were useful and I felt I had to finish because my funding was running out, so I somehow did. With the anthology, my co-editor Deepa Anappara, who is the most conscientious and brilliant person, kept everything on track. But I feel like what I’ve learned about myself is that I need to work in a particularly intense way. Whether it’s short fiction or long, I do a lot of rewriting from scratch, and the volume that I write increases as I move into later drafts, from say 500 to 1000 to 2000 words a day. So that concentrated effort is really important, since it allows me to immerse myself in the world of the story. Sometimes I’ll travel to write, because I’m very social and indisciplined and distractable, so I go away for a month and write a section or a draft. With my novel, that approach was very helpful. But now I’m thinking, it’s not feasible to travel when I need to write. Right now, I’m really out of a writing routine because first Other Names for Love came out, and shortly after Letters to a Writer of Color and I’ve been teaching. So I suppose the answer is that I have the most disorganised non-routine but that works for me. 

And when it comes to reading, or other writers who have inspired your work, or the difference between writing short fiction and the novel, do you have any rules or processes?    

I remember when I was writing earlier in my life, I was a bit superstitious about it and still am, but earlier I wouldn’t read anything else because I thought it might confuse me or that I might lose my voice. However, when I was writing Other Names for Love , I was troubleshooting and problem solving constantly, and I’d look to other books to do it. I’d written a lot of short fiction but not a novel, and I remember showing work to my supervisor at the PhD, and she said ‘this reads like a short story’. She had this theory that on a sentence level, you can distinguish between a short story and a novel. I don’t know if I agree, but that idea stuck with me. 

So much of writing is about giving ourselves the conviction to write, so I began to think  of Other Names for Love as a novel in three parts, almost like three novellas or long short stories. So I began reading a lot of novellas, including Death in Venice, and reread it a number of times, measuring how quickly or slowly time passed, how much space was allotted to how many characters, how much space was allotted to how many settings and so on. Did I really need to do that? I don’t know, but the process tricked me into believing I could finish the novel. 

There were many other writers I turned to for help writing specific scenes - Beloved by Toni Morrison or Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, both of those plays were  important to me during my writing process. I love Chekhov because so often he’s writing about aristocratic families who have lost everything, a faded grandeur, a lost sense of self, which was a space I was trying to write into. Then of course there’s Daniyal Mueenuddin, who is a friend and who has written so powerfully about these kinds of lives, whose prose is absolutely beautiful. 

You spoke earlier about being fit into a box in the West, but what about in Pakistan, where I imagine there may be the opposite pressure of not showcasing anything ‘negative’ about the country or where certain kinds of writing are far more difficult to undertake? Did you think about that during the process?

I would like to think that I wasn’t too concerned about either of those critical voices or imagined audiences. That’s the good thing about being immersed, which is useful for quietening these kinds of distractions, and I don’t think you can please these real or imagined critics  either way. I tried not to think of this aunt or that uncle or the Western market. But I remember something very interesting that Leila Aboulela said, that she writes imagining the people she is writing about would read the work. That felt like a very clever way to test who the audience is and whether you’re pandering and so on. I found that useful to imagine, whether the kind of character I was writing about would say paratha or unleavened flaky bread. 

I also remember talking to Sheila Heti about audience at an event, and I remember telling her I’m a pleaser as a person, but I hate being pleasing in my work. She told me that she never imagines that anyone is going to read anything she writes. Which she admitted sounded absurd after she’d delivered a talk at an event for fifty or sixty people, but I found that way of thinking very interesting and it felt like an ideal I want to reach for - trying not to please and simply writing without any expectation of audience. Because I feel like my writing is at its worst when I’m trying to impress. I’d like to write thinking only of myself, but I don’t really know if that’s possible. 

A lot of people talk about writing as dialogue with an imagined reader, but I have been feeling increasingly that I want writing to cultivate my relationship with myself, to make me visible to myself to interrogate myself without regard to anyone else. 

A couple of final things - I noticed in Other Names for Love there’s no real role of technology and in many new kinds of work today technology is increasingly prominent because of how it has insidiously infiltrated every aspect of life. Was this a conscious choice? 

It’s an interesting question.  Till recently, it seemed as though there wasn’t space for technology in literary fiction ,. Now, there’s a particular kind of millenial novel, like Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, which centers technology. But I find that technology can end up being undesirably conspicuous in a text, so often I’ve avoided including it. I didn’t consciously exclude it from Other Names for Love but it didn’t fit into the world of my novel. But at the same time, as you said, our lives pay so much attention to technology, so I’d like it to feature in my fiction if it’s relevant. 

I do find a certain kind of experimentation with technology interesting, and it could allow for a playfulness that for me feels very critical within creativity. As an adult, it’s sometimes difficult to find that, but I am interested in any kinds of ways which help my mind get beyond fashioning sentences in this very conscious way, as if already narrating something. I wonder if technology, say something like ChatGPT, can help with that, or help me access a voice that is differently mediated. 

As someone who has moved around so much and studied and lived in various places, are your future plans to write more about Pakistan or to break the expectation and write about other places you’ve lived in or experienced?

It’s interesting. I was talking to Daniyal (Mueenuddin) recently and he asked if my next book is going to be set in Pakistan. I said no, I don’t think so but I’m not entirely decided, and he was surprised because he said he could just write about Pakistan forever, there are so many stories. And he’s someone who has lived everywhere, his mother is American, his children are in Norway, but since the eighties he’s been looking after his family’s farm in Pakistan. He has this connection to and fascination with Pakistan which I share, but I think there are many other periods of my life that feel fascinating that were spent elsewhere, not in Pakistan, that I’d like to interrogate. 

Of course, at the same time, I am wary about whether I’m only marketable if I write about Pakistan, or the immigrant experience. If I want to write about a family tragedy or an incident or a relationship without a Pakistani setting  being a feature, will I be able to do that, will I be able to sell that book? To be determined, I suppose. 

A final question, which might be particularly annoying as someone who is teaching writing already, but what advice would you give to writers who are just starting out or who are feeling stuck with their work?

I am wary about giving advice. And there’s technical advice and writing life advice, and often the two are interconnected. Many of us also have to or want to make a living from our writing. There are bits of advice I try to give myself. One is to be gentle with myself, with what I write and what I think of what I write. So much of the work of writing for me ends up being about getting out of my way, disregarding the crueller or more self-congratulatory parts of my ego and just writing, even if in the first case that means writing badly. Another demand I make of myself as a writer and of others, it sounds like a cliche but I do believe it, is that I want to see blood on the page. Clever writing doesn’t interest me, I’d much rather a piece of writing  is messy but deeply felt. If you don’t feel something when writing the reader won’t feel anything when reading. And be honest with those feelings - don’t transcribe what you think grief or love feels like but translate the messy, complicated parts of those experiences into words in a way that perhaps only you can. 

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Taymour Soomro read law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School and has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. His short stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker and the New York Times. His debut novel, Other Names for Love, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and Harvill Secker (UK) in July 2022. He is the co-editor, with Deepa Anappara, of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a creative writing handbook on fiction, race and culture published by Random House (US) and Vintage (UK) in 2023. He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars and the Consortium for the Arts and Humanities in South East England. He currently teaches on the MFA program at Bennington College.

Abhay Puri is a writer and the founder and editor of Hammock Magazine.