AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
At the start of a dark new novel, Georgie Ayyar Creel is looking back to the pivotal summer when she was 12 and her sister, Agatha Krishna, was 14.
NINA MCCONIGLEY: (Reading) Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, so that's where you could put the blame. But then she said we had to go further back than that, so we blamed it on Reagan. Everyone blamed him that summer - the summer the country went into a bust, the summer we watched an exodus empty out of our town. Then I blamed the Cold War and Gorbachev. He had that stain on his head, and thus, I felt couldn't be trusted. We blamed AIDS, which we didn't really get but thought you could get from the water fountain at the public library you stepped on with your foot. We blamed the Olympics and hated Sam the Eagle, their feathered mascot, who dressed like Uncle Sam in red, white and blue. Though secretly, I had a button of him with his sly smile and torch. We blamed it on my parents for moving to Wyoming in the first place, for settling in Marley. And then we just generally blamed them for everything. We thought they shouldn't have married, that they shouldn't have mixed us up, shouldn't have made us halfsies.
RASCOE: So the sisters ultimately settle on blaming the British, though acknowledging it's their Uncle Vinny, or Vinny Uncle, who'll pay. "How To Commit A Postcolonial Murder" is the debut novel of Nina McConigley, who's with us now. Welcome to the program.
MCCONIGLEY: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Before we dive into talking about your book, I do need to let the listeners know that we will be discussing sexual abuse. That's at the root of why these sisters decide to take action. Tell us more about Georgie and Agatha Krishna and how their Indian-born mother ended up in Marley, Wyoming.
MCCONIGLEY: Yeah. In the book, the girls' mother has met their father traveling, and he is a petroleum geologist. And as many people know, Wyoming is dependent on the oil and gas and energy industry, and so they try to make a life there. Though, for Georgie and Agatha Krishna's mother, it's a difficult transition.
RASCOE: Because they're, like, some of the only brown people in town and some of the only Indians in town, right?
MCCONIGLEY: Absolutely. And that is very similar to my growing up. I grew up in Wyoming, and we were definitely some of the only brown people and Indians in town through my whole life and even now.
RASCOE: For Georgie, the book starts with her addressing the reader, the audience and kind of anticipating their assumptions about Indian Americans, like whether they eat meat - the girls do - what their religion is. They're not Hindu or Muslim. They're Christians. Why lay it out that way? Is Georgie trying to get it out of the way for the story that she really needs to tell?
MCCONIGLEY: I feel so. You know, I - as a biracial author, I felt like a lot of people want a certain story from you when you're a writer of color. I think I really wanted to subvert that when I wrote this book, and so for that reason, I thought, you know, why not just get it out of the way? Like, let's talk about mangoes and food and religion and poverty and saris and all the things people want to see in an Indian novel. I mean, it's a little cheeky, but I felt like I wanted to just say those things so I could tell the story in the way I wanted to tell it.
RASCOE: Georgie talks about their identities being split. Like, even though they were born in Wyoming, they're not seen as American, but they're not fully Indian either. She also brings up this notion of being split when it comes to the disassociation that happens to her when her uncle is abusing her. Like, she's being split from herself, split from her innocence. Why did you use this idea of separation or splitting for Georgie?
MCCONIGLEY: I taught at the University of Wyoming for a long time, and I taught a lot of Indian and postcolonial literature. And I feel like as an Indian writer, the great split of India and Pakistan just looms in you. Like, you think about it. It's talked about. My mom was a child when India and Pakistan split. And so that was the first split I was thinking about. And then I thought about, what are all the different ways that people split? I mean, I look at a state like Wyoming. We were split with the reservation, and with the rest of the state. There's splits of girlhood into womanhood. I'm biracial. And so, you know, that split of being in the middle of not really being Indian, not really being white - yeah. I just became really kind of obsessed with the idea of splits and how I could put that in the book in so many different forms.
RASCOE: The title is "How To Commit A Postcolonial Murder." How do you layer on the colonialism with what happens in the personal lives of these girls - right? - because it's a very personal story.
MCCONIGLEY: Yeah. I mean, I was thinking a lot about, at its heart, what is colonialism, and I think it's extraction. It's taking something from a place. It's taking from a land. It's taking its people. It's taking its resources. And then I started thinking about these girls and the ways that their bodies are literally - they're not in control of them in - with the abuse. And so I wanted them then to, like, turn it around and say, how do we fight back? How do we say enough is enough? And, you know, from there, the idea of murder was sort of born. I've never killed anybody in real life. (Laughter) Don't even think like that.
RASCOE: Yes. Yeah. That's good to make clear. I mean, the girls actually - they plan to poison Vinny Uncle with antifreeze, but then they delay it for a month or two to let him go to a Van Halen concert.
MCCONIGLEY: (Laughter).
RASCOE: Are they really holding off because they're conflicted about their plans? And obviously, their mother - his sister - loves him so much.
MCCONIGLEY: Colonialism is complicated. Of course, I can look at it from afar and say it was absolutely awful. I can't believe, you know, the British were in India. But then there's aspects - I look at my mom's generation where they really held up certain British things. My mom's a complete Anglophile when it comes to the royal wedding, and I wanted that mother in the book to sort of also love watching Diana and Charles. I wanted to show the complications of colonialism, that it isn't always as easy and black-and-white as it sometimes seems.
RASCOE: Why don't Georgie and Agatha Krishna go and tell their parents about Vinny Uncle's abuse? Because their parents - they do seem, you know, very loving and attentive.
MCCONIGLEY: Yeah. I mean, I think so many people who are victims of abuse - they're scared, and there's a lot of shame around it and a lot of complicated feelings. And I think that for these girls, they know what will happen if they tell, that the family will be split apart. And I think they know it would hurt their mother, even though, of course, as an adult, I can sit and say, of course, tell your mother. Of course, tell a parent. On some level, they also love their uncle. I mean, he is family, and that makes things incredibly complicated, I think, to tell.
RASCOE: The murder plot against Vinny Uncle - I mean, it stops the abuse, but there are these consequences. What does this secret that they have do to the relationship between the sisters?
MCCONIGLEY: As I worked through draft after draft, I thought to myself, you know, this really isn't a book about abuse and murder. It's really a book about sisterhood and how sisters bond and stay together. And how do you stay close after you've done this sort of unspeakable act? And for them, it does splinter them apart, living with the guilt. And even though the abuse has stopped, I think they're very traumatized by what's happened. So much of the end of the book is just them trying to find their way back to each other. So many books that have meant so much to me have been books with sisters and so - you know, from "The Color Purple" to "Middlemarch." And so I just wanted to look back and sort of make my own sister book.
RASCOE: That's Nina McConigley. Her debut novel is "How To Commit A Postcolonial Murder." Thank you so much for being with us.
MCCONIGLEY: Thank you so much for having me.
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