New Website!

I’ve moved over to  sangamithraiyer.com!  Check out the site.

 

The Lines We Draw

I am beyond excited to announce that my longform nonfiction narrative story “The Lines We Draw” has been published as a short ebook by Hen Press, the new digital publishing arm of Our Hen House. I can’t thank Our Hen House enough for their support, keen insights and feedback on this piece. About this story:

“This is story about boundaries — physical, biological, and ethical — it evolved out of a conversation with the late Dr. Alfred Prince, a hepatitis researcher, about the use of chimpanzees in medical research, and expanded into a larger discussion about ethics. Prince left New York University’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in the 1970s to establish New York Blood Center’s chimpanzee research colony in Liberia. The story weaves various threads and makes connections among logging, the Liberian Civil War, and vivisection. Chimpanzees are slowly being phased out of research in the United States, and the New York Blood Center has ceased testing in Liberia, but questions remain about the fate of laboratory chimpanzees.”

You can purchase and download the eBook, The Lines We Draw, on Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

MEDIA

• On February 22, 2014, on episode 215 of Our Hen House podcast, I spoke with Jasmin Singer and Mariann Sullivan about the piece and read a short excerpt.
• Pickles & Honey reviewed the story as part of their End of Week Reading.
• Viva La Vegan featured an short interview with me about the piece.
• One Green Planet features my story on the status of Chimpanzees in Laboratories.
• Mark Hawthorne, Author of Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering & Striking At the Roots discusses the ebook with me here. We had a lovely chat about writing about animals.

“Sangu’s resulting narrative offers a heady dialogue—the animal activist and the animal exploiter—but Sangu handles it with aplomb, and her writing is sometimes more poetry than prose.”

• I discuss the e-book with Jasmin and Mariann on the Our Hen House TV Show at Brooklyn Independent Media.
• The Aerogram features my Quick Picks.

For more of my primate memoir writing, check out Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice (University of Illinois Press) and Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy and Sanctuary (University of Utah Press).

See more of my work here:

A Seat of My Own

There’s been a lot of  buzz recently about writing on trains.  I wanted to share a piece I wrote about writing on NYC subways for my friend Sherisse Alvarez’s website Penintime.

Poetry in Motion, and Finding Privacy in Public Spaces

The first inklings of my current book in progress were scribbled on a plane ride between Delhi and Bangalore soon after I immersed my father’s ashes into the river Ganga. At the time, I was working as an environmental engineer in New York. I didn’t yet know I’d be writing a book. I was just a daughter in grief writing to make sense of this world. I had typed up those notes and emailed them to my friends back home, telling them about this journey, which in the years that followed led to many others.

Much of my writing now continues to occur in transit. “Who needs a writing retreat when you have the F train?” I’d tell myself. Don’t get me wrong, I do dream of a future when entire days can be devoted to honing my craft in my pajamas with my dog by my side. Until then, I’m committed to my day job that supports me and my commute that affords me some time.

When I was completing my MFA in creative writing, I was living in Brooklyn, working in Queens during the day and traveling to Manhattan at night for my writing classes. The subway became the closest thing I had to a room (seat) of my own. While this arrangement evolved out of necessity, I’ve come to appreciate what my mobile office has given me. Some of these gifts are in the form of constraint. I can’t surf the web underground or get up to see what’s in the fridge, so the limited minutes I have to devote to my work remain focused. There is also a built in discipline by coupling the act of writing with another daily routine.

Part of my writing project is about migrations and journeys; about shifts in rivers, waters in constant motion. Perhaps being in transit is conducive to such subjects. For me, New York City subways surprisingly also enable a sense of solitude and a perception of privacy. I remember missing this when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area briefly.

“What are those graphs?” an elderly woman sitting next to me on the AC40 bus asked me one day on my commute from Oakland to Berkeley while I was reviewing earthquake acceleration time histories. “Is that the stock market?”

I laughed, shook my head and said no. I wasn’t used to being noticed on public transit. In the crowded trains of New York, despite being brushed up against, being breathed on, or having someone “eavesread” my paper, I could still pursue a deeply private act in very public space.

Same/Not Same

“The impulse to write a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes,” declares Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s recent novel We are all Completely Besides Ourselves. Rosemary goes on to list those who came before her: “The Ape and the Child is about the Kellogs. Next of Kin is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House. The Chimp Who Would be Human is Nim.”

I’m no stranger to the genre of primate memoir, particular the stories of chimpanzees who were cross fostered and raised as human children to participate in language studies. I read Roger Fouts’ Next of Kin in college. It inspired me to learn American Sign Language and spend a summer with Washoe, Moja, Tatu, Dar and Loulis in Ellensburg Washington. It was at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute that I was then introduced to others who had spent their lives among apes. Like Rosemary, I discovered Leakey’s women: “…I checked out every book, I could find on the monkey girls‑Jane Goodall (Chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas), and Birute Galdikas (orangutans)”

Years later, I read In the Kingdom of Gorillas, before a trip to Rwanda. When discussing primate memoirs, I cannot forget to mention Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir, which opens with the  line: “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.”

Fowler’s novel is a fictional primate memoir, but hers is not the story of a researcher and his/her subject, but rather about the fate of the human children of researchers who were raised, briefly, with a chimpanzee. There’s not too much known about the human siblings of these cross-fostering experiments. Donald Kellogg was raised with the chimpanzee Gua for the first 19 months of his life. His parents terminated the experiment when Donald started picking up chimpanzee vocalizations rather than Gua picking up human ones. Later in life, Donald committed suicide in his early 40s.

Fowler’s story is loosely based on the Kellogg’s experiment, but also draws from other chimpanzees’ stories. The Cooke Family is based in Bloomington Indiana, where the Kelloggs did their research several decades earlier. At the time of writing the book, Fowler didn’t know the Kellogg’s had another child. Their daughter contacted Fowler after the reading the book. In an interview with BookSlut, Fowler notes “She was born about the time the experiment ended, so she has no memory of it herself, nor would her brother, who was only nineteen months old when the experiment ended. But she feels strongly that it completely deformed her family.”

In the beginning of Fowler’s novel, the reader learns only that our narrator, Rosemary Cooke, has a mysterious sister named Fern who disappeared when Rosemary was 5 years old and an older brother named Lowell who left home when she was 12. Rosemary only reveals the fact that Fern is a chimpanzee about a third of the way into the book. She has her reasons for withholding.

“I wanted you to see how it really was. I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.”

You Can’t Just End an Era

I’m really glad n+1 has been such a supportive home for my writings on Cooper Union.   In April, I had published a piece “Save Cooper Union” which provided some history of this institution and tracked the current situation from October 2011, up until March 2013, right before the tuition announcement in April.  A new piece called “You Can’t Just End an Era”  is up which discusses what’s transpired over the past several months, and evolved into a piece about governance.

The past couple years, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my Cooper education. The benefits were not just the four years spent there, but the possibilities it allowed for after. Cooper Union afforded me the financial and intellectual freedom to pursue passion and purpose, and not be beholden to debt or corporate empires. It allowed me to take risks, to quit jobs, to think critically about the political and economic systems that shape our lives, and to explore the things that inspired or irked me.

My time over the past 10+ years  has been split between writing, activism and public service. This admittedly also kept me away from all that was happening at Cooper Union from when I graduated in 1999 to the fall of 2011, when Bharucha first publicly announced the possibility of tuition. Since then, however, Cooper Union seemed to trespass into the other compartments of my life at all hours of the day. My work on municipal water supply could be traced back to Peter Cooper who was one of the earliest proponents of securing the Croton Watershed. A friend in my monthly writing salon, was talking about cultures of remittances as part of her anthropology doctorate. I wondered if that was like alumni giving. “Not everything is about Cooper Union,” my husband likes to reminds me. And yet, I found myself making connections between the situation at Cooper Union and my prior activism, as well as with all the news I was hearing, whether it be the rising cost of student debt, the imbalances in academia with overpaid administrators and underpaid faculty, or the growing inequality of wealth nationally and internationally. It all underscored the need to preserve and replicate a model for free education that would be open and accessible to all.

I’ve spent countless hours going through archival documents from the college’s beginnings, and so much of the founding principles resonated then and now, far beyond the Bowery. As articulated in an annual report from 1878: “Narrow is the actual sphere and limited means of such an institution, with principle and example it sets forth is co-extensive with the wants and interests of the whole country.”

The fight to save Cooper Union is about something much bigger. It is about a pursuit of truth and showing another way is possible. For anyone familiar with trying to mend the rift between the ideals and lived reality of a beautiful yet imperfect institution, there is something that is going on here that speaks to a larger truth. What can we learn from this? How does a small group of individuals create change?

Click here for the n+1 archive for these stories.

For more information about the current situation facing Cooper Union: visit the Friends of Cooper Union website. For additional posts on Cooper Union click here.

Local Knowledge-The Fingerprint of Water

I’m honored to have my piece, “The Fingerprint of Water” included in the inaugural issue of Local Knowledge, an art and literary magazine edited by Anna Marrian and Sanjay Agnihotri.

Details on the Launch Party:

Sunday October 6, 2013

3pm 11th Street Bar

510 E. 11th Street, NYC, NY

Save Cooper Union

Over the past year, I’ve been researching and reporting on the history and fate of my alma mater, Cooper Union.  I’m so happy that n+1 published the fruits of that labor.  Check it out here.

“Cooper Union is dealing not only with a financial crisis but also an existential one. What is playing out at this East Village institution speaks both to the national debate about debt, labor, and the affordability of higher education and to the institution’s history, which in its early years was so closely tied to the desires of the nation.”

On April 23, 2013, the Board of Trustees announced that Cooper Union would reduce its scholarship policy to 50%, and would start charging students $20k/year beginning in 2014.  Felix Salmon at Reuters has been doing some excellent reporting on this issue.  In his article, “It’s time to air Cooper Union’s Dirty Laundry,” he gives a very kind shout out to this n+1 piece.

If you want to really understand the importance of Cooper Union and its century-long tradition of free tuition, I can’t recommend Sangamithra Iyer’s excellent article in n+1 highly enough. And it contrasts greatly, of course, with the official statement from Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees, saying that the college is going to stop being free very soon: beginning, in fact with the students entering in September 2014…The fact is, as Iyer clearly lays out, that charging tuition runs in direct violation of Peter Cooper’s vision and his founding principles. Indeed, the original Cooper Union charter held the institution’s trustees personally responsible for any deficit, while ensuring that education was free to all enrolled students.

You must also check out Salmon’s piece:  “The Tragedy of  Cooper  Union,“

For an institution which was founded to exist in perpetuity, this kind of board turnover is decidedly worrying, especially since it was the board which decided and announced that Cooper Union will start charging tuition. If this board is just passing through, with precious little aggregate tenure or institutional memory, the legitimacy of that decision is surely greatly reduced.

Students, alumni , faculty and staff are continuing to organize to preserve a Free Cooper Union.

Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing Project is traveling post where writers answer questions about their works in progress and tag others to do the same.   Thank you Sunil Yapa for inviting me to participate. I look forward to your book.

So here goes. This is my next big thing:

What is the working title of your book?


Divining Water.

What genre does your book fall under?


Literary nonfiction. I often describe the book as blending memoir, history and reportage. I’m interested in the nexus of the personal and the political, what the fabulous Minal Hajratwala calls “intimate history.”

The work aspires to employ the language of a poet, the skills of a journalist/scholar, and the insights of personal experience. Two other writers I recently discovered whose work  falls in this realm are Susan Griffin and Rebecca Solnit.

In A Chorus of Stones, Griffin argues:

“We are not used to associating our private lives with public events. Yet the histories of families cannot be separated from the histories of nations. To divide them is part of our denial.”

And in the introduction of the essay collection: Storming at the Gates of Paradise, Solnit writes::

“I needed to describe, to analyze, to connect, to critique and to report on both international politics and personal experience. That is, I needed to write as a memoirist or diarist, and as a journalist , and a critic—and these three voices were one voice in everything except the conventions that sort our experience out and censor what doesn’t belong… Since then, I have been fascinated by trying to map the ways that we think and talk, the unsorted experience where in one can start by complaining about politics and end by confessing about passions, the ease with which we can get to any point from any other point. Such conversation is sometimes described as being “all over the place,” which is another way to say that it connects everything back up.”

My work in progress often seems “all over the place,” but the  writing is rooted in these intersections of form and content.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?


As a writer, this is the question I dread the most. This reluctance to answer has several components. Part of it is the fear that reducing the work into a single sentence reduces the work—that it cheapens and commodifies it. Another part is just the difficulty of the task- to summarize years of work that is seemingly “all over the place.”  Rather than provide clarity and insight, the fear is that I’ll be misunderstood. And the last part of it has to do with the unknown. Many assume that in writing nonfiction, the story is already there, but I’m constantly discovering new things that complicate and drive the story into unchartered terrain. It is one of the joys of writing, but it can be difficult to summarize whenI’m still finding my way.

So with that I’m going to allow myself to ramble here for a bit. Divining Water is a story about three generations reconciling violence and disparity and their search for nonviolence in the modern world. I am researching the life of my paternal grandfather, who was stationed as a civil engineer in Burma from 1919 to 1934, when he had a radical shift, and decided to quit the British, give up all worldly possessions and join the Freedom Movement in India. He moved his family to the rural town of Kallakurichi, where my father, the youngest of thirteen children, was born. There, my grandfather became a water diviner and developed wells in the surrounding villages.I never met my grandfather, but like him, I studied civil engineering, worked on water supply projects and pursued social activism. I left my engineering job to work for a magazine called Satya, which was inspired by the Satyagraha movement that influenced my grandfather.

As an engineer, I studied hydrology and geology. I wanted to understand how the earth responds to human pressures. My stories here are set around rivers: Ganga, Gaumukhi, Yamuna and the Irrawaddy. Understanding the history and fate of these rivers also serves as a lens through which to examine larger social and environmental issues— both in my forbearers’ time and mine. The book is about losses (personal, political, environmental) and if/how we can recover from them. It is about the linkages between sanitation and social justice. It also examines the tension in the choices we make between family responsibilities and social activism.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The first fragments of this book were written long before I knew I would be writing a book. “Our journey began in North India, but this story really begins in South India, in a place called Kallakurichi, where my father was born…” began a letter I sent to friends after immersing my father’s ashes in the River Ganga.

Losing a parent leaves you with many questions. My father’s death in 2003 had set me on two parallel journeys, one that sought the unearth the past, and another that tried to understand the present. But it would be several years before I would revisit these pages. Nancy Rawlinson, a former writing instructor of mine,  suggested I consider writing a book.  I let that idea sink in and applied to the MFA program in nonfiction at Hunter College in 2008 with a proposal to work on this project. Prior to this, the various aspects of my life-—family, engineering, and activism were compartmentalized. It has been through writing that I’ve found ways to integrate them, and the idea for the book has since evolved.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?


Still working on it. I had a good start with my MFA thesis, “Earth, Water Animal.”  Since then, I’ve been slowly continuing on the journey of writing and research, while juggling a day job and other writing projects. Most of my writing these days occurs during my daily subway commute and vacation days. I recently received a Literature Travel Grant from the Jerome Foundation for this project to do so some  research in London and Burma, where I’ll be traveling soon.  (Thank you Jerome!)

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?


Hmm…Good question. I’m working on how to do justice to my characters on the page, and I’m not sure yet who would serve them well on the big screen. Suggestions welcome.

Who or what inspires you?


I’m inspired by people who pursue their passions and live their truths. I am inspired by acts of compassion. I’m inspired by  the natural and the urban world, and the many creatures within them.

Who’s next?

I’m grateful and honored to have many wonderful writers in my life. Here’s a start. I can’t wait for your books and your interviews. Tell us about your next big thing Emily Bass, Laura May Hoopes, Amy Jo Kandathil, Parul Kapur Hinzen, Geeta Kothari, Anna Marrian, Cynthia Polutanovich and Krystal  Sital.

Letters on Civil Disobedience

I spent my last morning at the British Library pouring over a volume of letters marked confidential and private “Correspondence with and Noting about Mr. Gandhi 1931-1932, ” which provided a glimpse into the lives of those engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience movement in India as well as the colonial response to those efforts.

The beginning of the collection includes a letter from Gandhi to the Viceroy regarding police brutality against those participating in nonviolent protest. On one incident women who were organizing “to protest against a brutal treatment of a girl 17 years old by a police official,” found themselves too, the victims of such brutality. Gandhi writes:

“The injuries were severe in several cases. Some of those who were assaulted belong to the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati. One of them, an old widow, a Member of the Managing Board of the Ashram, was drenched in blood. To give you some idea of the nature of the police barbarity I give a free translation of her letter to me.”

This translated letter describes not only the abuse these women endured, but also the strength of their conviction and compassion:

“It was on this occasion that I understood somewhat the meaning of Ahimsa. I was quite fearless when the blows were coming down upon me, and I assure you I had no hatred or anger in me. Even now I feel no resentments toward the police, and its is growing upon me that we shall achieve success to the extent we cultivate the spirit of Ahimsa.”

Gandhi implored that the Viceroy look into this matter and set up a Committee “to investigate the allegations of excesses against officials in different parts of India since the inauguration of the Civil Disobedience Campaign…Till I hear from you and know your wish in this matter I am not sending this letter to the press.”

This file did not contain the actual letter back to Gandhi from the Viceroy, but rather draft notes on how to respond. While Gandhi’s letter is a moral plea, the draft response is an offering of advice regarding political strategy.  The language is what Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night called “totalitarianese which is to say ,technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content.”