Susheila Nasta (Sheila Nasta)

MP: So, tell me about how it was founding Wasafiri during this period.

SN: Well, as I said, it was a dream without much reality. But basically, it just struck me that as ATCAL [Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures] was beginning to fold, and its function was beginning to diminish, because other things were taking over, you know, institutions were beginning to appoint, well, as I said, multicultural inspectors, there were teachers skilled in teaching, there were other organizations like the National Association for the Teaching of English, NATE, things were beginning to shift. I just thought, given that these writers came from so many different backgrounds from all over the world, so many of them were diasporic, and the fact that in publishing, reviews of things like Chinua Achebe and so on were so pedestrian and so, in many ways, dismissive of their literary content, and reading them like, you know, sociology or anthropology, that it would be good to set up a vehicle to reach people, reach broader audiences, and start to try and say, these books should be read seriously, and they should be written about seriously, and these books...because I had a pedagogical aim to start with, I mean, a broad pedagogical aim, that books change lives, the way you think, they change the way you think, which sort of had come up through my teaching training, but also through my knowledge of my own past and my desire politically to make a difference. And then that became the kind of mission of Wasafiri. And it became more and more literary, and a space where these writers could be reviewed properly, could be read properly. So, some of the earliest writers we’d published are now quite well known, you know, because they didn't get noticed anywhere else. Or they didn't get substantive review space.

MP: For example?

SN: Well, I mean, Abdulrazak Gurnah published with us, not the first things but some of his first stories. Sam Selvon published stuff with us. George Lamming, you know. I mean Bernardine Evaristo, who's now famous, I mean, that was much later, that was the '90s. Grace Nichols. John Agard. I mean, most people...Caryl Phillips. Most people probably that you would reel off now would probably have appeared in the pages of Wasafiri either as their primary work or as reviewers or as interviewers. If you go through the pages of Wasafiri, you'll see a whole network of people. And so it became a community which I think has now begun to have a force in changing the way things are.

MP: And so, when did you found Wasafiri? Which year?

SN: ’84. Autumn ’84 is the first issue. So it started probably in about April ’84. Yeah.

MP: And do you have any memories from that year of putting together the first issue, launching it?

SN: I do have a lot of memories. I mean, two people who were involved with it at the time were Robert Fraser and Christine Archer, who was the sort of editorial secretary, so-called. But she designed the first cover, which is a...I don't know if you know that issue, it's a red issue of Wasafiri, and it looks like a lot of nomads or people walking across the desert. And Wasafiri suggested safari, voyaging, travelling in the Kiswahili word. So, we took that name, because it wasn't an English name, to make people stop and think. And I remember sitting in a pub with Robert Fraser, we were sort of thinking, oh, how are we going to do this? And we managed to get what was then the Commonwealth Institute Library in Kensington, which was also tied up with ATCAL [Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures], I think they gave us a grant of about £100 to use their printing press. So, we basically…the first issue was printed there with staples. And Robert and I put it together. And then we just...it was sheer faith that this thing was going to go. And I remember that one of the very earliest TLS reviews which was of this first issue saying, I think, 'God, what is this sort of sixth-form magazine?', you know, which really annoyed me.

MP: How did that feel? Did it? It annoyed you?

SN: It really did annoy me. But...and then we have...we've had lots of good reviews in the TLS ever since. But anyway, it wasn't a bad review, it was just sort of demeaning it. But how...I don't know how I had the courage to do that. And I often talked about it. And I've said to people, particularly young people starting out now, and saying, how do you get into publishing? How do you become an editor? And I said, well, I didn't really, I just did it. But I didn't do it for money or for career. I did it for political belief, I guess. And it probably went back to trying to sort things out to do with that experience I was talking about earlier in Ipswich, and feeling a sense of irritation about how my father was being treated in the '60s around the time of the Enoch Powell or 'Rivers of Blood' thing. And it's like, you know, Caryl Phillips has said hundreds of times, you know, what one got...you know, that he was starving, because there was nothing on the curriculum to read. So I did have a faith that these books would actually change the way...even if you could change five people's minds, you know? And we're having it at the moment, you know, as you know, right now, with the political situation. You know, there was a book at the time by somebody called Chris Gaine, which was called No Problem Here. And it was about the so-called white pockets of England. And the idea was there's no problem here because the...you know, we're not racist, we're not this, we're not that. Anyway.

MP: And is that how it felt growing up in rural England?

SN: No, it didn't. I mean, I think actually at points, it felt very frightening. Because my brother, it was the sort of flower power era, and he had long black hair. And it was the mods and rockers and skinheads. And, you know, you'd go to the cinema and you'd hear about, I don't know whether Amrit actually had this, people setting fire to people's hair if they had long hair and they looked sort of Asian. And I've always been...I was always scared of certain kinds of people who used to shout on the streets, or were a certain kind of person with...you know, kind of lager louts, as they'd be called now, they used to be scary. And I didn't go to football matches and things like that, I was scared. But I didn't have any actual racist...direct racist incidents myself. But I think what became obvious was that the category Asian suddenly came into existence, which I hadn't really been aware of. I'd never seen myself as an Asian till I was christened one by Britain.

MP: And is there a moment that happened, or is this a gradual...?

SN: I think it was happening in the late '60s, early '70s. I was beginning...I just saw myself as half-Indian, that's what my dad always said, you're half-Indian, half-English. You're not Anglo-Indian, which was another thing, you're half-Indian. That's all I ever say, I still say it. People ask me, I say I'm half-Indian.

MP: So, this year is the fortieth anniversary. Looking back, is there any particular issue, or, I don't know, associated event or thing about Wasafiri that you're particularly proud of when you look back?

SN: I think the thing I'm most proud of is that its archive is...well, one of the things is that its archive is now in the British Library, and it's part of the national story. That's one thing. So it's got some longevity and legacy. I think it's also that it's sort of been a beacon for a lot of organizations and movements that have followed on. It...people in publishing or in other cultural institutions have taken notice of the issues we've done. And so it's introduced a lot of writers to the world that wouldn't have been introduced. It's changed, to some degree, the thinking that permeates through to prize culture, that permeates across all kinds of the curriculum in universities. It's very difficult to quantify those things, how they seep through. But that's I think what I'm proudest of, that it's actually done that. And personally, I guess it's just that huge community of writers that I've worked with and I sort of became midwife to it in some ways.

MP: And do you go by any other names?

SN: Sheila. Nasta.

MP: And are per...are there like circumstances where you have Sheila opposed to Susheila?

SN: Well, that's a long story. I was...my baptized name and my birth certificate name is Sheila, my passport name is Sheila. And I started using Susheila really in my early 20s when I started to write and started to become more aware of my Indian identity, which I wanted to stress rather than bury. I'd asked my father, who died when I was 14, why I didn't have a name like my sister's, which was a more obviously Indian name like Geeta or Leela. And he said everybody had names that worked both ways, and Sheila is an Indian name anyway. And my mum's married Indian name, although she's called Winifred Nasta (she's English) was Susheila Nasta. And so I...and he...when I was 21 and my father had died, my mother gave me this gold bracelet, which was 'Susheila' on it. And basically, my father had said, well, if you want to be Susheila, you can be. And I never really took it up. And then I think as a kind of almost political statement, I did do it. Also, when I was in Ipswich, which is where I was living at the time, in Suffolk, in my teens growing up, everyone used to call me Sheila. And it used to really annoy me. A kind of Australian lilt to it. So, I felt I was being kind of...that my identity was being somehow negated. Or I don't know what it was, I just didn't like it. And then once I got into the literary world, I just...it's really my sort of pen name, but it's...most of my kind of literary networks and contacts and friends call me Susheila, which I sort of prefer. But people who've always known me as Sheila, like my family, call me Sheila.

MP: So your siblings call you Sheila?

SN: Yeah. And they probably find it very odd that I call myself Susheila, and very pretentious.

MP: And so, how old were you when you started first calling yourself Susheila? You said when you were writing?

SN: Yeah, I was sort of, actually, probably when I was about 23, 24. It was when I'd left...I'd done my undergraduate degree, and I'd left university. I think I'd done a PGCE. And I don't know why I suddenly started to do it. I think it was I had a boyfriend at the time who I spoke to about this name thing, and, you know, he was in love with me. And actually, then he exoticized me, which I didn't like at all. But he really liked the name Susheila, so he started calling me Susheila. And I liked it at the time, because I was in love with him. So that was it, really. And then it...and then I started to...he was an academic, and I started to...I think I published my first book and I put Susheila Nasta on it. Yeah.

Select publications:

Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1988)

Motherlands: Black Women’s Writings from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992)

Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2001)

Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (London: Routledge, 2004)

(ed.) India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950 (London: Palgrave 2012) 

(with Florian Stadtler) Asian Britain: A Photographic History (London: The Westbourne Press, 2013)

(with Rukhsana Yasmin) Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now (Oxford: Myriad Editions, 2019)

(ed. with Mark Stein) The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Entry credit

Zareena Pundole