Raksha Vasudevan is an Indian-Canadian economist and writer. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Catapult, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, Roads & Kingdoms, and more. She tweets @RakshaVasudevan.
Raksha's essay “Patience and Me” appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
"Patience and Me" deals with themes of identity and location, as well as the prospect of feeling connected or disconnected to "a home." At what point did you realize your move to Uganda would offer an opportunity to explore these ideas in writing, and what was the drafting process like?
The idea came to me when I returned to Uganda after some years away. Returning to a place from your past is always interesting: a chance to examine the ways in which you and the place have moved on—or not—without each other, and the ways you can hold onto one another without full consciousness or intention of doing so. I also realized when I returned that, as someone whose family immigrated abroad when I was fairly young, I felt in Uganda as I do in most spaces: both alien and at home, at once rooted and floating in space. And a place, of course, is shaped the people you meet there and the relationships you build—and eventually leave behind. Most of all, I realized during that trip back that my friend Patience, who is Ugandan, held quite different conceptions of belonging and home. I wanted to explore why, and how those conceptions have shaped—and been shaped by—the trajectories of our lives.
I started drafting the essay during that trip back to Uganda, which was about a year and a half ago. Since then, I've revised it probably seven or eight times, trying to find the right place to start and strike a good balance between mine and Patience's roles in the story. I held onto it for a long time, not submitting it to many places because I felt quite protective of the story—I really wanted to do justice to the complexity of Uganda and Patience, both of which I also care about deeply, so I hope I managed to do that.
You have written before about the themes of location and identity, and it seems to be a topic that you are exploring from different angles. For those writers who have not deeply considered the connections between identity and place in their own writing, what advice can you give them to keep an open mind for these relationships that we often take for granted or ignore because of complacency?
As a start, you might want to consider when and where you last felt out of place. It could be in the city or town you call home, or in a foreign country. Either way, a sense of alienation usually points to deeper assumptions about identity—about who you consider yourself to be in the world versus how others perceive you (or how you think they perceive you). What privileges and shortcomings did you have in this particular place that you wouldn't have had elsewhere? How did those come to be? How did you end up in a place where you felt out of place? Did you feel the urge to "fit in" or would you have preferred to simply leave? I think these questions can help us both understand ourselves better, and also make for great stories.
What books or writers have had an impact on you in the last couple of years?
Aside from the ones I mention in my essay, I recently read and loved Devi Laskar's The Atlas of Reds and Blues, a beautiful and surprising novel that explores the south Asian experience in America. Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho by Will McGrath is a wonderful collection of essays about Will's years in the southern African country of Lesotho. Currently, I'm reading Jennifer Acker's The Limits of the World, a finely written novel about a south Asian family in Kenya who emigrates to America.