Nina McConigley’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder invokes a complex interrogation of the Indian immigrant experience and the abuse of women within its deceptively slim page count. The author sat down with Third Person Limited to discuss her intentions for the novel.
Nathan Pensky
So this is a novel about an immigrant family from India. But we felt that you as an author and Georgie as a narrator both seem kind of ambivalent about conventional markers of immigrant stories.
So, for instance, in one section of the novel, you list all of the things that would seem conventional for these sorts of stories. And that narrative part of the story appears in the form of a list with the with a caveat, I have to give you this because you always seem to want to take what I give you and translate it into something else. And then you list a bunch of things like mangoes and saris and spices. I was interested if you felt like the typical things from immigrant stories were overdone, or did you just not want to feel beholden to them to include them? And so you put them in this sort of narratively detached form of a list?
Nina McConigley
I think it was a little bit of both. I have an MFA, and I had been in a lot of workshops where people’s comments a lot of the times were like, “We would love to hear more about the food,” or “We’d love to hear more about” certain tropes that I think people really like in an immigrant story.
There was a brief moment—it’s gone now, but there used to be a Facebook group called The Red Sari Club. And it was all it all Indian writers who had had a red sari on the cover of their books. It goes to the expectation that there’s going to be poverty and, I don’t know, all the things (in a novel about the immigrant experience).
And so part of me did want to resist that and just say at the beginning, “Okay, I’ll tell you about those things in this one chapter and then can we just move on.” You know, I grew up in an oil and gas town in Wyoming. So my experience, I don’t know if it’s very exotic or matches what people want.
Event when I had done book clubs and things that, people would ask questions about India that were—a little less so now, because I think the world is bigger and we have the Internet—but, you know, back in the day, I remember people asking me questions about cows and I don’t know, just things that I thought were kind of silly.
Mason Stockstill
Definitely expecting that sort of romanticized view of the immigrant experience, or even if it’s not romanticized, the expectation that people are going to just hear the same stories or see the same things. I don’t know if you had any involvement in the creation of the cover of your novel, but certainly a hand reaching down and grabbing what is designed to look like a can of antifreeze definitely subverts that expectation.
But I think you also subvert the subversion a little bit because, the title is How to Commit a Post-Colonial Murder. Colonialism and postcolonialism are invoked there. Butthe novel wasn’t what I was expecting, either. I was expecting, especially for a novel with a character named Agatha Krishna, that this is going to be a very specific, almost a parody of the source material. But you didn’t do that, either. The novel really charted its own path.
Nina McConigley
I should say that that wasn’t the original title of the book. That wasn’t the title that I worked under for years. And when I sold the book, my editor, she had sort of said, I don’t love your title. My original title was called “The Call of Migratory Things,” which is a line from Angels in America. And I really liked it. And my editor and I, we had a long talk about the title and she said, “You know, I just feel like that title evokes a very lyrical kind of immigrant novel that we’ve heard before. And I just don’t think your book is that.”
And I mean, we spent a month going back and forth on titles, and in the end I sort of thought, you know, I have a character named Agatha Krishna. I have like a blueprint at a house and a cast list at the beginning of this book; I have all these nods to Agatha Christie books. So why don’t we just make it simple and call it How to Commit a Post-Colonial Murder? Because her titles are quite simple, really. But yeah, I think some people have thought it’s a different kind of book.
Nathan Pensky
So this story is about immigration, it’s about colonialism, but it’s also about abuse and murder. Those things are all intertwined here. You make it clear that the revenge that the narrator and her sister, Agatha, take upon this member of their family is fighting off not only a local threat, but also a kind of more global threat of colonialism itself.
Those things are all together there. And there’s a section where Agatha actually blames the British for the murder. And this is somewhat tongue in cheek, but there’s also a clear undercurrent of truth there, too. It’s sort of downstream that the British are, in fact, to blame here. The crimes of this family member who is being revenged against exist as a part of the crimes of the British that have been perpetrated against Indian people. And as part of the racism and xenophobia that Indian immigrants in the United States experience. You describe how colonialism and xenophobia split things up, that they do divide families and family members from other families as resources like oil get extracted from the earth and communities become fractured. Even individual people become divided.
For instance, Georgie at times makes it clear that the “you” she is speaking to is herself. That self has become divided from herself because of colonial influences and because of this influence of her family member. So there’s one passage in particular where you write, After he was done, there was the me who was me and the me who was you. A part of myself that was separate, split outside my body.
So I guess my question is, how conscious were you of wanting to take on colonialism as a whole, as an enormous historical force? And how naturally did that come to you as you’re wanting to tell a story about a murder?
Nina McConigley
I think it’s really hard to be an Indian writer, or even an Indian-American writer, and not think about Partition. I think it’s just something that it’s become so ingrained in family stories and things. And I had taught post-colonial lit classes, you know, just focusing on India, Africa, the Caribbean, over the years when I was a professor at the University of Wyoming.
Growing up in Wyoming, I grew up not that far from the Wind River reservation. Yet the Wyoming history that I was taught as a kid did not include indigenous peoples very much at all. Or that is, they were part of the story, but they were always considered bad. It’s changed a lot, though is maybe going backwards a little bit now.
But, you know, when we went on a field trip, it was called Custer Battlefield when I was a kid. It wasn’t the Battle of Little Bighorn. So I was I always was thinking about the ways colonialism, I think, also has really shaped the way westward expansion happened in the West and how people came west and had this notion of Manifest Destiny, that they were allowed to expand and be. And I think all of those things were in my mind.
I did grow up the daughter of a geologist, and I did grow up in an oil and gas town and amid energy extraction. And amid in Wyoming, not only the way people have been extracted from land, but the way we take resources, gas and natural gas and coalbed methane. All of those things are things I think about.
And if we’re thinking about colonialism as extraction, I considered, how are young women also extracted? How are they taken from their own bodies? I wanted to, maybe sort of ambitiously, write about all of those things in one book and say, colonialism for my generation isn’t necessarily the British, but it’s happening in other ways.
Mason Stockstill
I’m loving the way you’re describing all these things, because just on a whim here, as you were talking, I put “postcolonial literature” into Wikipedia, and I have to say the definition is idiotic. Because it just says, “Postcolonial literature is literature by people from formerly colonized countries.” And that is … that’s not it.
Nina McConigley
Yeah, No.
Mason Stockstill
But the way you’re talking about it … post-colonial literature can be and usually is sort of backwards facing. And I think about your story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, which you’ve clearly, specifically chosen that title—it’s the title of one of your stories—as a way to problematize that notion of cowboys and Indians and sort of staking a claim to an identity. Like, “I’m East Indian.” There’s even a line in there, We were not the right type of Indians.
Nina McConigley
Yeah, it’s the first line.
Mason Stockstill
And as you link Partition to tribal reservations here in America, these are things that are perhaps not happening at the moment—Partition is not happening now. The creation of reservations is not happening now. But we are living with that now, with those historical events.
Nina McConigley
Absolutely. And especially in a state like Wyoming, where they put two tribes that are very different … I was just I was earlier talking to an Arapaho friend earlier this week. And, you know, they put the Arapaho and the Shoshone, which are not traditionally, they’re not even close tribes. So they just put them on one plot of land and said, “Get along,” you know. They’re very different cultures! And so growing up, living around that, it doesn’t seem like another country across the sea to me.
