ARIFA AKBAR
Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theatre critic. She is the former literary editor of the Independent. She has previously contributed to the Observer and the Financial Times. She is on the board of trustees of the Orwell Foundation and English PEN. Her non-fiction has appeared in several anthologies. She talked to TANK about her first full-length book, Consumed (2021). An intricately woven portrait of sisterhood, grief and art, it explores the strange mythologies that surround tuberculosis and Akbar’s quest to understand her troubled sibling, who died from the disease in 2016. The book has been shortlisted for the Costa Prize, the PEN Ackerley Prize, the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Interview by Poppy ColesPortrait by Jocelyn Nguyen
Poppy Coles This is a story of two sisters, and the complex relationship between them, but you pull references from cultural and medical history throughout to tell the story. Why did you approach writing the book in this way?
Arifa Akbar I didn’t want to only write my story about loss. I had read so many profound memoirs about it. Everyone from Marion Coutts to Joan Didion. When my sister died, I didn’t want to just unravel my sorrow. We all face death and loss; I didn’t feel mine was particularly special, and I didn’t want to base the book on it. I also felt there was more to it with my sister, beyond grief; it was a really complicated relationship, as sibling relationships often are. I wanted to show the darker side of sisterhood, a side that I haven’t read before, but that didn’t mean there was any less love in it. I also wanted to do a kind of audit of her to mark her life; there were so many parts to her story and ours as sisters: her depression, her severe eating disorder, and the arts was a big part of it, too. Her career as an artist was never fully realised because of her depression. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up and the money we spent on art and culture was so important. We saw the world through what we read and saw. That way of experiencing the world continued into our adulthood. After she died, I took trips to Norway to see Munch’s paintings of his sister on her deathbed; I went to Tuscany to see Puccini’s opera about a woman dying of TB; and to Rome to see the place where Keats died of TB. It became a way that I could explore this dark, horrible, difficult thing.
PC The subtitle of the book is “In Search of My Sister”, it feels like you were looking for her through these things. Fauzia would say, “There’s this film you should watch”, and then you bought her tickets to La Bohème. It was your way of connecting and communicating.
AA It was our way of knowing each other. Knowing her taste, knowing what excited her. Even though we didn’t always get on, that was an exchange. I never liked visual arts as much as she did; I didn’t really understand them, but I understood her through her art.
PC You inherited half of Fauzia’s artwork and at first you find it hard to look at, but then you begin to find insights into Fauzia and her life. You mention an interview you did with Paula Rego where she says: “The more you look, the more you see.” Has her artwork been a way for you to look at her in a way that wasn’t easy to do when she was alive?
AA At first it was too painful to look through her work; it seemed too intimate. It felt like a violation. Then my sister’s tutor at Camberwell, Kelly Chorpening, proposed doing an exhibition of Fauzia’s work. She came to my flat with a colleague and laid out all the artworks. I left the room; I wanted to give them space, but I could hear them chatting. The way they were talking about the art made me curious. They were seeing things I hadn’t. I thought, maybe there’s more that I could discover about her, and there was. I discovered her humour; I had thought she was too depressed to laugh or find wit. I found her intense love of beauty, too. I found our relationship, images of myself, really disturbing ones. I was a demonic figure at times for her. I talk about John Berger sketching his father on his deathbed. He pins the portrait above his desk and says the drawing changes over time. It’s true, even after someone dies, your relationship to that person keeps changing. It doesn’t stop; it doesn’t end. That’s how I see my relationship with Fauzia and her art; I’m always seeing new things or things differently.
PC You return often to the duality between the two of you: you as the good sister and Fauzia as the bad, the lucky and unlucky, healthy and unhealthy, even though you were close when you were children. There’s an unanswered question of whether you determined each other’s fates.
AA One of us was this, so the other had to be that. That positioning was created by my father who chose me as the favourite, for complex reasons, and cast her as the black sheep. There were reasons for him to have that relationship with my sister, but it played out as emotional abuse over her life. A positioning of holding me close, and pushing her away. I did feel responsible, even though I was only a child. I grew up with a sense of confidence in getting love and adulation from my father, but with that came guilt that I had created the situation. Fauzia felt it too because in her late teens, I began to feel she hated me. She seemed to blame me for that position in her childhood. I accepted it at first. Then in my late twenties, I got angry and pulled away from her. I felt hurt that she blamed me. I regret not being able to let go of the hurt. When she died, I felt the guilt all over again, as the sister who survived. I saw why she was angry with me. I couldn’t have done anything differently, and yet, she couldn’t help her feelings. I saw the mess of all of that as I was writing the book. After she died, I started to see that this duality was completely fake; we were so similar. I went to her flat and looked at her bookshelves, and there were my books!
PC Reading about the history of TB, I thought about the pandemic that we’ve just experienced. You talk about the resurgence of TB, especially in London, and how worldwide there’s still a very high percentage of dormantly infected people. Is it something you think about more now?
AA I was writing about an ancient pandemic in the time of another. It felt really odd. TB isn’t as big a problem in the West, but in the world, it’s still classified as a live pandemic. When I was writing, I had a lot of time to think because we were isolating. I thought about my sister getting weaker, her isolation, her pain, at the same time I was hearing about death counts on the news. There was a really weird parallel. But TB is very different. It has so many mythologies surrounding it. I started looking into it because I was left feeling so aggrieved by the hospital. I found them unhelpful, defensive, rude and judgemental around my sister’s mental health. They told me she wasn’t a reliable narrator of her symptoms, but they simply failed to diagnose her. They just didn’t think to give her a TB test, even though the infectious diseases consultant told me that TB is back with a vengeance. I felt incredibly naive to have thought that TB was an illness of the past. I became fascinated by its mythology and how it had been romanticised. The upper classes tried to emulate the TB look, like heroin chic of the 1990s, all pale and frail. There were these incredible stories around the power of TB to enhance your artistic powers. It was believed to be hereditary, you passed it down, like a morbid gift. All the politics around the illness was really interesting and helped me understand why the doctors had been unable to diagnose it. It was fascinating to read about its past, the richness of it; there are so many really important cultural references to TB, particularly in art. Keats writes about it in his letters, and the Brontë sisters, too. It’s everywhere, once you start looking.
PC What was the writing process like? Was it cathartic?
AA There were a lot of contradictory things. There were a million regrets that I was unravelling by writing about it. It filled me with sadness, wishing I’d done things differently. At the same time, it prompted happy memories that had been lost. Grief has many textures; it’s not all black. When I really looked at it, like Paula Rego said, I found so many different shades emerging. My sister felt she was always being misunderstood. She often spoke about being misrepresented and not heard, or told she was wrong. I wanted to write about all the ways that she was misunderstood by the world, including by me. It’s an unvarnished work. Even though there were terrible things like opening up her artwork, or, much worse, opening up her medical records, which I couldn’t bear to look at for years. Eventually when I started looking it was emotional because it was all the inner workings of her body, I found it really moving. The world largely wants to look away when someone’s died; there’s a culture of denial. I wanted to write a book that demands attention to all the aspects of loss and all the things that people don’t want to hear. I put them in the book, so that was cathartic, but I wouldn’t say it brought closure or resolved the difficulties with sisterhood. You can’t resolve those things; they’re part of the messiness of life.
PC Your description of her medical records made me think about how science is still determined by humans with all their individual complexities and biases. Even today, an illness for which we have a vaccine and a cure was missed because of human error. Did that change your perspective on science or the reliability of these systems?
AA Completely. When my sister was admitted to intensive care, I thought, “This is a leading research hospital, they’re going to save her.” I put all my faith in medicine. Technology has mastered so much around the detection of illness and diagnosis. I didn’t think about the humanness, that there are medical teams with power structures and egos and racial prejudices and prejudices or blind-spots around mental illness. I saw some of these dynamics and failings of the people behind them in her medical records. At first it made me really angry to see the wrong roads they’d taken. But it made me see that they were trying. They tried hard. Sadly, these things happen. It taught me so much about modern day medicine and its limits. I was enraged but I was forgiving, too.
PC Towards the end of the book, you wonder how she might have felt about you writing it. You say it’s the beginning of a conversation rather than the end. That speaks to what you said earlier, that your relationship with someone doesn’t end when they die, that grief doesn’t end.
AA When she died, I was devastated by the idea that I wouldn’t see her growing older with me. I feared that I would forget her face. It made me really unsettled, but now I don’t worry about forgetting because there is an internal dialogue with her that’s ongoing. This book made me think about how these things are metabolising in me, I don’t think they can ever be finished, or forgotten. ◉
© Fauzia Akbar