Spinning stories: India, Diaspora, and the internet novel

Abstract

Finding myself in a perfectly delightful rabbit hole on the Internet, I learn that the word ‘gossip’ comes from theOld English god-sibb, to mean one who contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a companion at a baptism, at a time when womenfolk attended a birth to offer support and talk. It figures that themen around, annoyed by the influx of chattering women, might have lent the word its negative associations of idle prattle as we have it in modern usage. But the ancient promise of gossip as a site for something sacred, for connection, is alluring. The Internet – our modern-day baptismal font where we congregate to go over the day’s news – has a way of making us feel more clued up, and simultaneously invoking the existential dread of not being in the know, or of never being able to know enough, or even of not knowing what to do with all the scraps of information we acquire. (My own pleasurable detour in semantics quickly dulls when I remember I’m on a deadline to write this essay.) To consider the Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s observation in Because Internet (): ‘Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet’s founding metaphor is of a web’ (). The question of how to represent the Internet in contemporary literature – how to tell a story in the digital age – has been taken up by the North American millennial writers Patricia Lockwood and Lauren Oyler to different effects. But might the Internet novel be more universal in scope? Is it possible that our ancestors could have read these works and identified with the human impulse to know more, want access to more? North-West Londoner Sheena Patel’s debut novel I’ma Fan uses the form of the fragment tomimetically enact the feeling of doom-scrolling, but there’s something stickier and wilier about her textual choices. The open interstices of the World Wide Web – its silken network promising the ‘optics of transparency and democracy’, as Patel’s narrator notes () – is actually structured by complicated algorithms and market forces, holes and gaps, and rotting hyperlinks. I’m reminded of how Instagram, Facebook, and other tech firms have made the work of Palestinian creators less visible, for instance, via shadow banning, and sometimes outright deletion and erasure. Or the more insidious way that social justice slideshows on Instagram can neutralise and flatten revolutionary ideals into something performative, gestural, and disembodied. I’m a Fan is fuelled by the narrator’s corrosive emotions, turning in one moment from rage to anguish to despair to wistful longing, rarely letting up for breath. It’s as though the unnamed narrator – a young woman of colour – is aggressively online, furiously clicking through the innumerable open tabs of her mind, accessing memories of her interactions with the problematic older man she wants to be with as if they’re data streams, logging in on Instagram to hate-stalk the woman who she is obsessed with, an influencer with a six-figure book deal whose status and ease is insulated by wealth and whiteness. Patel’s voice is visceral; her use of the high-low register of the Internet occasionally cloying and cutesy, peppered with spidery italics and sarcasm tildes (‘I want to say with a roll of my eyes ∼I know∼’), expressive lengthening (‘ooooohhhhhhkkkaaaayyyyy’),