Tabish Khair: On writing with the weight of the world

The weight of the world is in the word. All writers know this, though not necessarily in the same way. However, often critics and commentators forget it, and end up discussing whether poetry can be political or not, and how realistic – or magic realist – fiction can be. It is as if the ‘world’ is something to be added on to the writing.

But that is not true. The world is already contained in the word. And the world contains the word; worlds contain the word. No word exists on its own. Every word that we utter has passed through millions of mouths. It has been uttered and re-uttered, often in slightly different contexts, with various shades of meaning, sometimes even entirely contradictory ones, accreting to it over time and space.

And writing makes the matter even more complex. Because now the speaker is not faced with a listener, who shares, for that particular utterance, the same space. Now the word can be written down, and transported from here to, say, China or India, where it may be read a bit differently. Every word that I write or you write has also been written down hundreds, thousands of times, and now what has...