MFA Alumnus Shastri Akella Discusses New Book "The Sea Elephants" with Professor Edie Meidav
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MFA alumnus Shastri Akella discussed his new book, "The Sea Elephants," in a recently published interview with English provost professor, MFA director, and award-winning author Edie Meidav in The Rumpus.
"The Sea Elephants" (Flatiron Books, 2023) is a picaresque tragicomic novel that follows protagonis Shagun as he "flees his own guilt, demons of abuse, boarding-school bullies, and family structure. Through his growth and self-incarnation as a goddess in a traveling street theater dedicated to bringing villages their own myths, readers glimpse an India of tight communities and allies," Meidav writes.
The interview between Akella and Meidav took place by email over a series of months as Akella traveled on his first book tour.
An excerpt is below.
The Rumpus: Who, at the outset of your journey, guided your thinking about what the novel can do, either historically or in our time? Who are your guiding lights now?
Shastri Akella: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Clay were my biggest literary influences when I began working on The Sea Elephants. Roy captures the perspective and language of children with verve and authenticity—their ability to regard the world with wonder and humor, even when the world they look at is brutal. Chabon skillfully uses comic books as a framing device that propels the story forward.
Both novels speak to collective traumas of a particular time and place, but they’re also rooted so deeply in specific human narratives that anyone who reads them can relate to the characters and, by extension, understand and feel the underlying trauma, however removed it is from their own temporality and geography. That, I learned, is how stories become universal. Not by losing their specificity but by rooting it in individual narratives.
I found working with a street theater troupe to be tremendously helpful as well, not only with the research that I needed—Shagun, the hero of my novel, is a street performer—but also as a means of understanding the intimacy that street performers share with one another and their audience. They are not separated from their audience by a stage. Instead, they perform in such proximity to their spectators that you can hear their breath and smell them.