‘Politics Is Killing Our Stories’

Naga novelist and poet Easterine Iralu, 50, needed exile far from home for sheer survival and for her writing

DYLAN THOMAS’ influence as a performer had to show somewhere. In July, Easterine Iralu finished recording an album with European jazz musicians, writing poems to their compositions and reading with them. Some of these poems have been selected for The European Constitution in Verse. Growing up, there were also stories of old English houses, of people spirited away, of the forests, Shillong’s college scene and Pritish Nandy’s poetry. Naga literature was mainly oral then. Iralu can’t write in her mother tongue of Tenyidie, but has translated 200 oral poems into English. She published her first poetry book at 22 – Kelhoukevira was the first volume published by a Naga in English, mourning Naga warriors of the 1950s Indo-Naga conflict. In 2003, she wrote the first novel in English by a Naga, about the last battle between the British and Khonoma warriors. She’s also cut a CD of poem-songs and co-written a book about an Australian wombat.

The region’s conflict has never been far away. A bullet aimed at her father hit her cousin instead; her family’s house was stalked by armed men for years due to her husband’s writings; her son was kidnapped for three days. Escaping the curfews and the tapped phones, Iralu sought refuge in Norway. She’s now working on a series on Naga folk tales, more children’s stories and a book in Norwegian. Zubaan has her political novel Bitter Wormwood, and HarperCollins her book on WWII’s Burma Campaign. Selfexile, she says, has brought objectivity about home. “Politics is killing the stories in the Northeast. There’s more to life than violence,” she says. Through it all, the memories of her homeland’s skyscape, landscape and beauty have remained central.

GAURAV JAIN