Exploring Weirdness – Wild Animals Prohibited by Subimal Misra

When I moved to New York, I somehow lost my weirdness. It affected the strange stories I produced in my mind, which often found their way to paper. My imagination became temporarily stunted, and it affected what I wrote about and how, taming some of the ideas that made sense to only me.

Back when Playground in Bed-Stuy sold books, a spine stood out to me, prompting me to pick it up, flick through it and move swiftly to the cash register. At each glance on any given page during my short peruse, I found sentences that in the best way, made no sense on their own. This literary disorientation had me hooked.

Identifying as an “anti-writer” and largely anti-establishment in both his politics and ideas around literary form, Subimal Misra penned these short stories in the 70s and 80s in Bengal. Wild Animals Prohibited is a compilation of short stories with a through-line connecting class struggle with humanity’s ability to inflict violence. While some of his perspectives make me crease my eyebrows, his surrealist sculpting of politically-oriented stories has guided me back to the imagination I once had.

With each story, his representations, analogies, and the world he creates, his writing progressively retwisted my unfortunately straightened out brain, taking me down one path, tripping me up, and setting me on another one.

How it helped my writing:

It allowed me to see on paper, an unfiltered imagination. It pushed me to look for, listen to, and pen my untamed thoughts and allowed me to make my writing more raw, breaking down the “relatable” structures I had gradually let influence my writing, and not try to fully structure my thoughts. It made me reach for analogies and representations that might take one, two, maybe even three re-reads to fully grasp, but properly represent what I’m trying to convey.

Unfiltered writing can be important because that’s when you’re writing as you and not as someone else. We all go back and forth about how much we think about the audience when writing, but unleashing your own unique thoughts and voice should be the starting point, and can be tweaked along the way.

Karan, Founder