A Short Interview w/ Sandeep Sandhu
"Bonus material" for Sandhu's short story, "Barack Obama Says the N-Word," published on Tuesday, 5/14.
Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.
Read “Barack Obama Says the N-Word” now if you haven’t already!
Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?
The entire story honestly stemmed from the title itself: I just thought about the idea one day, couldn’t stop laughing at the juxtaposition, and decided to write a piece that was themed around it. Generally speaking, though, it comes from a desire to understand power.
The idea of power and how we talk about it fascinates me. It’s probably the biggest driver in all my writing, and this story is no different: I wanted to explore the power dynamic in their relationship, the power of political ideas, the power of deciding who gets to have feelings about what. A lot of my understanding is driven by thinkers like Foucault, who (simplifying massively) saw power as fluid and moving between groups, instead of flowing from one direction only. I think that’s so true, and so important to explore, especially as certain aspects of society get more fragmented while others go the opposite direction and merge into a monoculture.
I also wanted to get at how a lot of progressivism, especially in online spaces, is becoming increasingly closed-minded and prescriptive, utilising thought terminating cliches to enforce group-think. And, while I understand this is often to prevent bad faith attacks from opponents, I think these overly simplified ideas are jumped on by regressive groups who want to maintain the status quo, then repackaged in ways that benefit them.
The scene where the narrator does a kind of bigotry calculation sums up how I feel about that sort of thing. It ties into beliefs I have about the hollow nature of diversity initiatives, the capitalist drive to attach measurable values to intangibles so they can be exploited, and the way ideas can be co-opted by their detractors to damage the original message behind something. And I think few figures some this dichotomy up better than Obama, who is from one of the most historically marginalised/exploited groups/cultures in the world, yet was also the most powerful person on Earth for 8 years.
I'm often curious about when we notice these themes in our own work. At least for me, and I think this is often true, I didn't know or realize my own fascinations until years of circling them in fiction (and, even then, sometimes not until actually having them pointed out to me). I wonder if you know at all when, "The idea of power and how we talk about it fascinates me. It’s probably the biggest driver in all my writing," occurred to you? Did explicitly seeing and understanding that, rather than it maybe being more implicit and subconscious, change how you tackle it in writing at all?
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