In defence of the everyday: Ideas behind 'Boiled or Cracked' and 'The Octogenarian'

One of the reasons Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is cited liberally as a favourite is his keen observation of the everyday things that fall through the cracks, as they are not significant enough, which are the subject of his prose. Also, the protagonist is deliciously fragile, which creates a voyeuristic pleasure that he has experienced far worse.

More recently, Karl Ove Knausgård, with his six-volume autobiography, provocatively labelled My Struggle, does the same: there is nothing significant happening, yet you cannot stop reading the details of everyday life, the humiliations and resilience that make us humans. As a literary trope, it is hypnotic, with a rhythm of its own: it's like hearing the brain talk unhindered. In the hands of women writers, it takes on a meaning of its own. It is not just about detailing life but entering a space that is not readily available to them. After all, women and their intimate space have never been a given thing, and women philosophising about everyday life is still such an out-of-place character.

Take the magician that is Annie Ernaut, who seamlessly ties the experiential everyday to national and global issues. Deborah Levy makes the writer a complete being whose creativity emerges from encounters with places, people, and beings in tune with one’s surroundings. My personal favourite is Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond. Bennet knows the genre; she knows what she is writing is not changing the world, yet the prose shows one aspect we all feel deep down: an evolved consciousness in a finite being. Such a project also aligns well with the current turn in postcolonial literature, where the everyday is an inclusive register in which the particular and the universal momentarily collapse, and we consider each life, even when it is not neatly fitting into categories.

It is in this realm that my books are. As a poetry collection, Boiled or Cracked experiments with the everyday, the companions of life that fill time with people and in solitude. Poetry naturally lends itself to the everyday as a stream-of-consciousness tool, holding not just the visible but also marks on the body and the mind that even the self does not have full access to. There are a lot of eschatological references in my poetry, and I cannot seem to move away from flowers, earth and nature, which pepper my poems. The unknown parts of me seem to yearn for simplicity and to experiment with the self still a vulnerable, egoistic, and curious being.

For my debut novel, The Octogenarian, I am diving straight into the banalities of everyday life and taking on the project of a life that is not heroic in any sense. This book is about insignificance, not hitting goalposts, and experimenting with an ordinary life. My heroine is living in many places, yet none are rooted in ways she can call her own. Leaving her studies incomplete, working part-time in various retail establishments, now inching towards retirement in her eighties, she is forever balancing the need to socialise with her solitary self.

These two books are in defence of the everyday, as in the current neoliberal epoch of forever deficit and substitutable lives, it is the resurgence of stream of consciousness fiction and poetry that shows that while lives are joyless and exhausted on the face of it, they are teeming with ideas and ideas of change for only a spark to come. There is now an ever-increasing introspection on the human condition: whether everything that was pushed as significant as progress was necessary, and whether another type of living is possible right under our eyes. And more and more, the intensity of our feelings, memories, and the possibilities of our imagination, at the same time macabre, unproductive, and unabashedly wasteful, breaks the status quo.