This story hits home in both a visceral and familial sense. You immediately establish the scene with the personal reactions and bodily sensations and then further the tension with the fear for Ru and what’s to come. What inspired this exploration of need and death and the fine line that separates the two?
The kernels of this story began with a few interlinked ideas: capitalism as a devouring force; the commodification of identities and the commodification of trauma (especially as they manifest in publishing and entertainment industries as fads and trends); the physical and psychological cost on those who tell their stories; how we consume—and are encouraged to consume—these stories, often as a performative act that reinforces our (and others’) belief in our own goodness, our morality, and our capacity for compassion.
My entryway into exploring these ideas was through this visceral focus on the body, using the analogy of cannibalism as the site in which the ravages of capitalism are made tangible. In the story, people are reduced to their traumas. People are rendered bodies—often sickening, often close to death, because it’s hard to flourish, to be healthy, under the precarity of capitalism. The body is translated into a site of extraction, a thing to harvest, so the elite, the privileged, those who can afford to consume, can sate their Hunger, can be healed and made better by the gift of compassion. In the story, apart from the trauma collector who thinks she has engaged in an act of benevolence, there is a marked absence of what should follow after these feelings of empathy and compassion, a marked absence of action, of care, of any mention of supporting those who “donate” or “sell” their traumas.
My other entry point—as you note—was the personal and familial, the main character, her desperation, her relationship with her sister, as the means to explore what it is to attempt to survive under such conditions, why we make—or are forced to make—certain choices (that are not really choices), why we might cannibalize ourselves, our loved ones, and what we might lose in the process. There is increasing tension and dread as we follow the narrative, as we fear what’s to come for both Ru and the main character, but the ending itself is inevitable.
“Sell Your Trauma for Salvation” is more than cannibalism, it is colonialism, classism, racism, sexism, and the role of religion in how morals are formed and enforced. “The Hunger is a gift, not a disease nor an addiction. It enriches our life and enables us to feel deeply for the pain of our neighbors.” How do these horrors touch you as an immigrant and a writer? Where is Isha on the page?
Everything that inspired this story comes directly from experiencing and observing the world from my marginal identities and thinking critically about what I’ve encountered. For example, how mainstream publishing often treats marginalized writers as a source for a particular type of narrative; how it gluts on a particular “trend,” then moves on and says there’s no room for your story now (“They’ve consumed too many of you. They’ve had a glut of your pain”). I’m also currently working on a PhD project which thinks through the writing of trauma, so that’s definitely fed into this story!
Our Gospel of Compassion is not really a personal exploration of religion but the vehicle through which I explore capitalist consumption and how it exploits notions of morality and perceived “goodness,” though of course organized religion is big business, inextricable with capitalist structures in many parts of our world in order to accentuate the things that have become normalized in our societies. It’s also a dark glimpse into how religion gets weaponized, how it perpetrates and is complicit in upholding harmful structures. I also wanted to leave quiet moments of rupture in the story, for example, when the child refers to it as the White Lady’s Gospel; when the child tells us Mama never eats the special cuts but is still always kind. To nudge readers into thinking about the connection between the gospel and white saviourism; to leave them with questions: so do people in this society need to consume in order to feel compassion? And whose religion is it; who was it adopted by, who was it forced upon?
The flies curled around the edges of the story, seen and unseen. I was intrigued by how things that may not even exist could cause flesh to rot in cold storage. What did the flies represent to you?
I would love to leave the flies up to the interpretation of readers! I will say that the characters of the story are all haunted by different manifestations: the thing that squats on Ru’s neck; the child who hears strange noises in the wall, who feels she might be a ghost; the trauma collector for whom the depleted state of the main character is “a haunting, a possibility” of what she herself could be. Most of the characters we encounter are also unwell or sick in different ways. Ru is suffering from excessive extractions, a condition initially thought to be fabricated; the trauma collector coughs up ashen bile with no conclusive diagnosis. There’s a constellation of sickness, of hauntings, in the story that perhaps speaks to the condition of minds and bodies under the crushing pressures of capitalism, of assimilation, of living inside structures that are ableist, racist, misogynistic, transphobic.
You are a prolific, intense writer who knows her way around not only horror but science fiction and fantasy. What is it about the exploration of the fantastic that appeals to you as a writer?
From a young age, the fantastic has activated the world for me in a specific way—it has been a way of life. As I have grown as a writer and considered the themes and politics I want to explore, more and more I’ve realized that the fantastic, in all its guises, offers me a mode or language into writing the familiar. It’s the idea of telling the truth but telling it slant; it’s defamiliarizing the familiar, making it “seen” in a new way in order to confront the violences and injustices that get normalized, things we become desensitized to, things that become somewhat invisible to us. For me, the fantastic also offers a mode and language to write from within marginal positionalities; to articulate experiences that might seem fantastic, illegible, made-up, to others.
Also, writing and worldbuilding in these genres is creatively rewarding and energizing. For me, each story feels like a puzzle I get to solve. I love the challenge of ranging between genres and styles, figuring out how to write in a particular mode or setting, the play and possibility of it all.
What does the future hold for Isha Karki? What can readers look forward to in the second half of 2023?
I have a story, “Muna in Barish,” in the July issue of Lightspeed. It’s a second world fantasy that looks at working and writing within capitalist structures from a different angle—and it is one of the least bleak stories I’ve written in maybe like a decade! For the rest of the year, I will be working on my PhD project, a short story collection that explores alternative ways of writing sexual violence and trauma—through the language of folklore and horror, silences and absences—thinking through the complexities of storytelling and testimonies. I usually post about my publications and writing updates on Twitter: @IshaKarki11.
