• Author and illustrator Sharanya Manivannan on what drew her to storytelling and its many forms

Sharanya Manivannan is a writer and illustrator who describes herself as “Ilankai Tamil, Malaysia-raised, India-based”. Her work includes ‘The High Priestess Never Marries’, ‘The Ammuchi Puchi’, and the ‘Ila’ duology: ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ and ‘Incantations of Water’, the former having been recently published in Tamil as well.

In conversation with The Daily Morning, Manivannan spoke about her work, which consists of a range of genres and mediums, and how the writing experience differs when the audience is adult versus when the readers are children.

Speaking about her childhood in Sri Lanka, Manivannan said she is Batticaloa Tamil on her maternal side and Madras Tamil on her paternal side. She lived in Colombo till 1990, when her family moved to Malaysia.

“I was not even five years old at the time, but memories of my childhood remain vivid to me. I was raised largely by my maternal grandparents, whose longing for Sri Lanka was powerful, and my own consciousness was imbued with this as a result,” she shared.

As for writing, Manivannan said: “I loved books as physical objects from even before I could read, loved them even more once I could, and began writing poetry at seven and prose soon after (I really only began drawing for real after I left school, where in later grades I had found art classes to be as tyrannical and dreary as any other).”

She added: “Writing assuaged my loneliness and let me dream. This remains true in many ways even today.”

Following are excerpts from the interview:

What goes into crafting stories, especially when working with different media, like poetry, short stories, novels, and graphic novels?

Every creative kernel will tell you its form and its name. You have to be able to listen to it. This may seem esoteric, but listening – honouring the moods, whims, secrecies, and revelations of each piece or project – is a vital part of my creative practice. This is how I am able to remain faithful to the vision, even as years pass, and as some projects are completed while others stagger. Once or twice, I’ve abandoned projects. All this is natural. Knowing the eventual shape of a work does impact processes, but these are all more intuitive than technical.

What themes do you like exploring in your work? Do you draw from your own experiences when working on stories?

Silence – silencing – and its impact on selfhood, and art as a form of intimate resistance against the same are probably the deepest, and clearly interconnected, themes that repeat in my work. In some cases, this is subtle: for instance, one need not immediately think of the children in ‘The Ammuchi Puchi’ creating a story that a butterfly is their grandmother as a form of resistance, but it is. It’s an assertion of an uplifting worldview in a bleak season.

In other cases, it is overt: for instance, the teenaged poet Kodhai in ‘The Queen of Jasmine Country’ pours her burning heart into verses as she chafes against the smallness of her life. I wrote along these themes for many years without identifying their meaning in my own life, but now I do. And yes, I do draw from this life of mine, and a part of me (if not all of me, at the particular time of each writing) is in each of my books.

What’s it like writing for children as well as adults? How do you write for these different audiences? Do you approach certain themes or topics differently depending on who you are writing for?

There is certainly a big difference between writing for children and writing for adults. I am careful not to be condescending when writing for children, who are a discerning audience. Whereas adults need not need the same delicacy – an adult reader can be provoked, even while being respected.

The two books in my ‘Ila’ duology – ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ and ‘Incantations Over Water’ – are good examples of how the same story can be told for different audiences, as there is an overlap of the mermaid tales in each. For example, take the story of Suvarnamaccha, who according to South East Asian Ramayanas is the mermaid daughter of Ravana and Hanuman’s lover. In ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’, the story is told as a light love story in a double spread; in ‘Incantations Over Water’, she receives many pages, and the story is more emotionally complex and sociopolitical.

What goes into writing stories around myths and lore? What draws you to such stories?

Oral narrative changes with each teller, and this is a part of its magic. I am drawn to tellings, to renditions – to what the way a story is told says about who is sharing it, and who is receiving it. Similarly, even when a work is crystallised in print, it shifts and slithers according to who the storyteller is.

I’ll give you an example: during my research towards ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ and ‘Incantations Over Water’ in Batticaloa, Dr. Sivaretnam Sundarappillai told me a folktale about a little girl, a ribbonfish, and a deadly lie. That story hadn’t been recorded in English. I was captivated by it, and chose to write it (‘Anbarasi and the ribbonfish’, published in The Hindu BusinessLine) and I wrote it in the way that I would tell it, with my own inflections. I gave the little girl a name and borrowed for her a lucky mole from my grandfather’s sister, who died as a small child.

A person unfamiliar with the folktale may believe all these details to have been a part of the source story – but my source was recent, and my imagination potent. Who knows what embellishments every teller across perhaps centuries made to this common tale? Who knows what the ‘original’ was? This is a political idea too: to understand the fluidity of story shakes many fundamentalist narratives.

It was through ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ that you made your debut as an illustrator. What challenges were associated with going beyond words and incorporating illustrations when crafting stories?

Most of the challenges I experienced were technical, such as familiarising myself with the digital software and switching to that medium after many years of drawing by hand. On the creative side, I experienced much joy and freedom as I illustrated ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’, and I learned a few practical tips – such as that I needed to use a limited palette for ‘Incantations Over Water’, so as to go easier on my wrists!

You’ve spoken about the informal research you did when writing this book. Can you tell us what this entailed and things that you learned, saw, or experienced that struck you the most?

Despite an early childhood in Colombo and visits to the island for a few years after leaving, I did not get the chance to go to Batticaloa until I was 27 years old. I was immediately struck by the presence of mermaid figures everywhere there. I had been told as a small child that a mermaid sang in a lagoon in my mother’s hometown, and this memory returned to me, this time infused with a question: why were the figures everywhere, but in the absence of folktales?

A few years later, still holding this question in my heart, I began venturing back to Batticaloa. Research, I realised later, was a kind of a cover story that I had told myself: by anchoring myself in my work, I could avoid the painful emotions – other questions that cannot be answered, or with unbearable answers – related to diasporic returns such as the one I was undertaking. Those trips to Batticaloa, over three years or so, felt simultaneously like coming back into focus – understanding things about myself and my lineage that had always seemed unusual – as well as a deepening and an expansion of what I knew about the region, the culture, and the island itself. That which was subconscious surfaced, and became stronger in my work.

Looking at ‘Incantations Over Water’, what made you explore graphic novels? How does this form of storytelling differ from poetry or short stories, for instance?

Something I learned while ‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ was in final edits and the page layout stage, was that the artist in me holds more power than the writer when it comes to my illustrated works. I could chop away entire paragraphs if they didn’t fit, rather than shrink the images. When I then turned to ‘Incantations Over Water’, I was humbled to discover that the writing was the more challenging part of the work. I had expected to have the manuscript ready in weeks, but it took me months.

In contrast, the art flowed out of me like a surging river – sometimes I would create up to three pages of art a day, and I did so during a time of immense personal pain: the illness and demise of my father. I completed the book as the customary 31 days of mourning ended. All of this is to say: visual art does not merely supplement the word. Both are braided into the experience both of creating and of consuming an illustrated book.

‘Mermaids in the Moonlight’ was recently translated to Tamil. Why did you choose to have this particular book translated?

In the world of publishing, little is choice – much comes down to opportunity. When Ponni Arasu reached out to me and I met her, the synchronicities around the project and her own connection to Batticaloa felt resonant to me. In that sense, the opportunity that arose aligned with what felt true in my heart, and I agreed.

How important is it for stories written in English to reach readers of other languages, especially readers who can relate to those stories?

I would say that translation on the whole is very important, whether that is out of English or into English, or into or out of any language. In the South Asian context, including in India where I live, it’s important to note that the English language market is far smaller than the markets for regional language publishing. So there are a great many dynamics involved, which I can’t comment on at length, except to speak about the outcome: that translation enriches our libraries, our leisure time, and our worldviews.

When it comes to reading in English, South Asian readers are still very conservative in their choices – reaching out for work by authors from the West or even from an outdated canon, rather than exploring a diverse and interesting plethora of books from their own part of the world.

Do you plan on having your other work translated to Tamil as well?

Perhaps my first picture book, ‘The Ammuchi Puchi’, which already has a Tamil title although it is an English language book!

Are you working on anything at the moment? What stories do you hope to tell in future?

I’m working on more manuscripts of prose, including a novel that begins in the late 1920s in Batticaloa, and is about intergenerational trauma and the civil war. I’ve been working on that book for nearly 20 years, my whole adult life really (I am 38), and it has grown with me. I intend to see it to completion.