Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer

Author Interview

While vegans share a belief in a way of life that excludes—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of animal exploitation and cruelty, I learn from these interviews that every author writes with a unique perspective, and no book reads like any other. Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer is an exceptional example of what I mean. It’s a rare book offering insight within and beyond how we ordinarily understand what it means to live as a vegan. The intriguing subtitle, A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed, shows us why.

I want to start at the beginning. But I’m unsure where it starts. Is it with your life, your father’s, or your grandfather’s? What are their stories, and why did you want to write them?

This is a book of many things— a book of questions, lineages, letters, and journeys. It is also a book of beginnings, and “begin again” are the opening words that precede my first page. One beginning is the death of my father in 2003, which prompted many of the questions and journeys in this book. I inherited my love of words and care for animals from my father. I say his heart suffered from extraordinary empathy. When he passed away, I felt I was losing my connection to the past and to family history. I grew up hearing about the legend of my paternal grandfather, who was a civil engineer who had quit the British in Burma to join the Freedom Movement in India. I was interested in how people disentangled themselves from systems of harm and lived a life according to their ethics.

The year 2003 was another beginning for me as a writer. It was the year I published my very first article. It was for a magazine called Satya, and it described my experiences volunteering at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Sanctuary in Cameroon. I write that finding Satya at this time of deep loss was a lifeline, as it became a home for my grief that was both personal and planetary. At Satya, writing about animals probed the intersections with environmentalism and social justice, and it was an exploration of how both power and compassion operated.

After Satya closed, I enrolled in an MFA in Creative Writing program and began to work on what eventually would become this book, Governing Bodies. I began weaving my life’s work in activism in engineering with family history, and over the years, the book evolved into a deeper search for not only lineages of kin but also lineages of thought around non-violence and animal rights. The first part of my book is written to my grandfather and explores our lives as engineers and activists, the second part of the book is written to my father and explores our lives as sensitive creatures and poets, and the third part is to you all, my dear readers, as we bear witness to the current moment of ecological catastrophe.

In 2016, you edited The Long View, a special anniversary edition of the much-loved New York City-based magazine, Satya. You were also a contributor. With this experience, and researching and writing Governing Bodies, what approach did you take? It’s a beautifully written book, which, I suspect from my own experience as a writer, involved a dedication to close reading and painstaking rewriting. Please tell us something about the approach you took. What did it lead you to learn about yourself?

Satya was indeed much-loved, and editing The Long View was a wonderful and rewarding collaboration with my dear friend, Beth Gould, Satya’s co-founder and publisher. To prepare for The Long View, I went back and slowly read every Satya article since its first issue in 1994 to the closing issue in 2007. That was an extraordinary experience, and I felt I was able to conjure the pulse of all these activist spaces in New York City at that time and could trace their lineages to the present. I brought these kinds of reading rituals to Governing Bodies. The book was a process of slow reading and writing, and an attempt to recover knowledges that were almost lost.

Research took many forms. I travelled to archives in London and Rangoon. I frequented my beloved research room in the New York Public Library, where I had shelves of books exploring ancient Tamil poetry, the edicts of King Ashoka, and 18 purple volumes of Gandhi’s last newspaper project, which I pored over in a similar way to how I had read the back issues of Satya.

In addition to archival research, I bore witness to and documented the horrors of factory farming in India. I volunteered at primate rescue sanctuaries. I took lessons in water divining, spinning cotton, and my submerged first language of Tamil. I collected stories. It was a project of discipline that benefited from time and iteration. I would write on the NYC subway on my daily commute for many years. I would get great ideas by taking walks (and taking naps) with my dog.

I consider this book to be a catena, which is a chain of linked texts, or a series of related things. It’s an homage to the subtitle of Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh Eating.Williams compiled an anthology of thinkers who critiqued the consumption of animals, including Prince Siddartha, King Ashoka, Pythagoras, Seneca and their herbivorous descendants through the late 19th century.

I wanted this book to be an extension of that catena of vegan thought and locate Satya in that history. Encountering the word catena gave me language to explain how I’m holding what are seemingly disparate threads across generations and geographies, which I believe to be intimately entwined. What I discovered in writing this book is that these connections are at the core of both my writing and personal philosophies. I also discovered that I was a poet, and that the tools of poetry allowed me to make these insights and associations in my nonfiction.

Among the many themes occurring throughout your book is Kallakurichi. What does this mean to you?

I began this book with a search for my father’s birthplace, which is the site of my grandfather’s activism—a place called Kallakurichi in Tamil Nadu. It was both a real and an imagined place to me. I grew up thinking it was this mythical homeland and a kind of utopia. My father and his siblings grew up living a life of voluntary simplicity, growing food, spinning cotton, and drawing their own water from the well. They were raised with the philosophy of Jeevakarunyam—compassion for all beings. I write that

Kallakurichi is an origin story, a beginning, a chosen ancestral land, an idea, a moral philosophy, a refuge, a refusal.

What Kallakurichi is and means to me kept evolving and expanding through the course of writing this book. The search for Kallakurichi became not only a search for this specific place, but the search for a radically kinder world.

Throughout Governing Bodies, you mix the personal with the impersonal, namely society and the environment, but much more. Does being a vegan offer you a special insight into understanding why the personal is political?

I believe animal rights and veganism are where my courage comes from and where my sense of justice was formed. As vegans, we have had to learn how to advocate for what we believe is right, even and especially when it is unpopular and alienating to do so. Having practice with this is important and can give us strength in other causes, too. Veganism has always been for me where the personal and political meet. I write in Governing Bodies, that I was

looking to define a vegan poetics that extends beyond diet, beyond words—a way of being, living, holding, bearing, connecting, transforming.

So much of the book is about how we sit with sorrow on these planetary scales and emerge with truth and compassion as guides instead of despair. Veganism is where I have the most practice engaging with this question.

You write about your different lives as a civil engineer, a child of immigrants, and an animal rights activist, and the relationship among them. Are you developing this perspective in a new project? What are your writing aspirations?

Being able to bring all these parts of my life together in this book was extremely liberating, and whatever comes next will certainly be informed by who I am and these experiences. Governing Bodies is my debut book, and in some ways, it is also my magnum opus. This book has been my companion for twenty years. I am navigating this next phase of my relationship with Governing Bodies, as it is finding its way to readers. Some of the key questions in this book regarding how we can repair the harms we have done to our fellow beings will be ones I will be working through for the rest of my life, and they grow more urgent each day.

Much of my engineering work right now is about carving space for water and animals to return to in cities. As a literary animal, I am interested in how we write fully about animal lives and agency. How do we create art that moves beyond reverence, toward a radical reimagining of our relationships?

As my late mentor Lousie DeSalvo wrote

each book teaches us something that writing no other book can.

I have learned so much from writing Governing Bodies, and I look forward to discovering what the next writing project will teach me.