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- [00:00]
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- [01:08]
Shannon Chakraborty
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- [02:07]
AE Lanier
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books and Fantasy. I am your host, AE Lanier. Today I will be speaking with Shannon Chakraborty about her new novel the Tapestry of Fate. The Tapestry of Fate is the second Aminah Al Sarafi novel, a series of books centering on the titular former pirates adventures sailing on the Indian Ocean in the 12th century. It's worth mentioning here at the top of the episode that these books in many ways function independently of one another. And while there will necessarily be some level of spoilers for the first book, they should be relatively minimal. At the beginning of Tapestry of Fate, Amina hopes that she has finally found a balance, able to return home to parent her daughter, Marjanah, while also spending time with her crew on her ship, the Marwati, tracking down arcane artifacts to fulfill other obligations. That delicate balance is overturned when interference from her estranged husband, a spirit of discord and the father of her child, forces Amina and her crew on a possibly futile quest to steal a spindle from a mysterious sorceress on an island that no one can escape. In the second novel, Chakraborty continues to play with themes of perspective and memory and the joys and challenges of friendships that span decades. Like its predecessor, this book is also, at its heart, an adventure story, a tale of magic and exploration of ambitious desire and the risks we take to build the life we want. Shailen Chakraborty is the author of the de' Viabad Trilogy and the Adventures of Amina Al Sarafi. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages and nominated for the Hugo, Locus World Fantasy, Crawford and Astounding Awards. She's here with us now. Hi, Shannon, it's great to have you.
- [03:49]
Shannon Chakraborty
Thank you for having me on. It's wonderful to be here.
- [03:51]
AE Lanier
To start off, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the setting. So 12th century Indian Ocean. What's exciting about that and why that is the place that you wanted to set these books?
- [04:01]
Shannon Chakraborty
I mean, for me, it's more personally, what's not exciting about this. This is really the period in time that I feel fell in love with when first studying the medieval world. There's this great collection. I've always been a history, a history bust, but very often it can be hard to kind of hear the voices of regular people. And when I was in university and studying, I came across something in my my courses called the Geniza Collection. And it's this wonderful repository of documents spanning largely the about the 9th century through the late medieval era. And it survives because it was essentially kept in a synagogue in Old Cairo. SCOTT and in Jewish law, you are not allowed to dispose of documents that have God's name on them. Of course, in much of human history, everything had God's name or had religious language. So all of these documents, from letters, tax receipts, legal records, were all saved. And it provided an incredible, incredibly rich tapestry of lives in the medieval period. And because the Jewish community. There was largely a diaspora community. They had relatives and friends and trading contacts everywhere from southern Spain to India. It just illuminates this entire world largely centered on commercial commercialism in the Indian Ocean. That is not just Jewish, it is not just Arab. It is all these sorts of communities. And because we have that, we really have a very rich study for this period in time. And it was something that really blew my mind and made me fall in love with the medieval period. And it was always my hope, after finishing the Daevabad trilogy, that I could return to this world and this history and really set a book in it and make it as historically plausible as possible by returning to all of the sources and voices and travelers that I loved. So for me, this was a very easy choice to set it here. It's an incredibly cosmopolitan time and place. I don't think that can be understated in our modern era. We like to think we modern humans are so much more connected than our ancestors ever were, and this simply isn't true. There were communities of all different religions and different linguistic communities and peoples in these cities that had been there for centuries have long established presence is there. And you see just such a rich mix in the stories that were being told, in the encounters that were taking place. And it's just a period in time and place that has always really fascinated me.
- [06:36]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. That feeling of sourcing and memory and how we know what we know is so central to your work and is such a joyful part of these books. These books have essentially a frame story happening. So we have Aminata telling her adventures to her younger friend, the scholar Jamal. And so that is a frame story that happens throughout the series. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship and that choice to have these stories essentially be a dialogue?
- [07:05]
Shannon Chakraborty
The frame story was very intentional because, again, as much as I love all these sources and voices, of course, much of what still gets recorded is the voice of people with more power, in particularly, in particular in the Islamic world. We have a lot of travelogues. You know, Ibn Battuta is the most famous, but there are others. There are Ibn Jubair. I mean, there's a whole list of. But men, right? Well educated men who go up. And the accounts are, they're fabulous. They're often hysterical. I joke with people. We like to think, oh, it's the medieval period. Must read so dry. Ibn Battuta is the world's famous first angry yelper. I mean, he goes from place to place and the food's not great. And the sailors don't know what they're doing. And I, you know, I'm jesting about this or a lot of times there's another, I can't remember now, the name of the traveler who does a lot of the work on Socotra. But, you know, there, there's again these educated, wealthy, ish men who are oftentimes writing the most scientific, scandalous accounts of local women, working class people, sellers, those they deem criminal. And I really wanted to have a character who spoke back to that, especially a character who spoke back for the women. Often being spoken about of just a woman is monstrous or she's a witch. There's this whole established thing, and this isn't unique to the Islamic world. This is everywhere. Essentially, you see it a tendency of men to say, you know, like this, this is a witch, this is a crone. This is, you know, this woman is unnatural or she's overpowerful. And I wanted to speak to that and to kind of ask, well, why are those the stories we tell? Why do sailors tales always talk about a lusty sorceress or, you know, you know, like they make up these ideas of women. So I wanted to have a character who spoke to that and had some fun with understanding how she's going, how her story is going to be told. Mistold twisted and kind of let her take that back.
- [09:09]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. I really love the working class sensibility in a lot of your work. Fantasy, for all the. It's a genre that we both love, is definitely a genre that is often very focused on monarchy, on aristocracy, on very wealthy people. And it's really fun to see the ways that you're in conversation with that and also in conversation with the parts of that that are the process of how that happens and the process of record keeping. There's a point at which Jamal is complaining essentially about this problem of sourcing. And he complains and he says, here and gone in a flash. So talking about the more interesting side characters next to these, you know, rich guys mostly who are out here leaving their historical Yelp reviews here and gone in a flash, mere stepping stones for Royal Brat's uninspired ascent to glory. And I think that that just encapsulates so much of your work so well. And as someone that loves this genre and is very frustrated that everyone is a prince, was just really, really fun. So Aminah has sort of a few things that are very important to her. Obviously her identity as a mother is one of those. So I was wondering if sort of start off Talking a little bit about her relationship with her daughter Marjana. Especially because in this book, Marjana is getting to what for me as a middle school teacher is the most fun age on earth, which is sort of that like, tween, almost teenager era, which really changes parent, child relationships.
- [10:42]
Shannon Chakraborty
Yes. Well, it's interesting. I always knew I wanted to make Aminah a mother. As much as I'm writing these stories to explore the past, I also wanted to write a fantasy story for people like me who are parents who are in the middle part of our lives. Genre fiction has a youth problem. I mean, and it's always had a huge problem. Right. Like so many of the stories humans have always told have been about that young, loyal, but there is just so much opportunity and storytelling richness in older protagonists. You have so much more to lose as a parent than you do as an 18 year old. Yes, you're still figuring yourself out, but you're still figuring yourself out when you're 40 years old. It any, if anything, it has a little bit of an edge. Right. Your time is starting to run out. Um, so I always knew I wanted to have that aspect as well as to make her a mother. Because something that always captured me with a lot of these stories, and this isn't unique to the medieval world, is the idea that for much of human history, parents, typically fathers, but often mothers do have to go out to work. And that might be a trip that takes them months, it might be a trip that takes them years. You know, in our modern era, it might just simply be, you know, your kids in daycare longer than you wish they could be. And it's that really hard point of finding a balance between your job, your passions, your life, and the caring for small children. And that's something I always wanted my books to really investigate. Not just to fall into the trap of, oh, parenthood is so hard, but that it's also a joy that in the same moment your child can bring you just utterly unparalleled joy while they bring you so much stress and responsibility. And to have a character who's dealing with that while also still having the fantastical adventures I think is. There was just like a lot of possibility there. But yes, in the first book, Marjana's a little younger. In the second book, she's 12 and she's starting to have questions about just what her mother does all the time. And I joke. I try very hard not to write my own family or friends into my work. I feel like it's an invasion of privacy. But just Sort of through a twist of fate, these books end up being delayed. And it seems to end up that Marjana keeps matching my oldest daughter's age. And when I first read my draft for this, again, it's the medieval period, children would speak differently than their parents. But my first impression was, oh, this girl needs to be way ruder. We're a little sarcastic, right? Like, this is the age where they're starting to kind of push back and have lots of emotions. And that was something I wanted to explore. That like, as a parent for so long, your child is this small little baby that you need to protect. But a huge part of raising them is then exposing them to the world so they can learn to take care of themselves. And I thought it's such a fascinating dilemma to have a character like Amina in, because one, her perception of the world in danger is incredibly elevated. Right? She has, she was a Pirate for nearly 20 years. She has seen the worst of the worst that people can do, that humans can do. And. And she's also has an experience of magical world, which is terrifying and is eventually going to intersect with her daughter's life. How do you even conceive of something like that, right? You just want to protect your kids and just, I don't know, shove them in a cage. At least the cage will be safe. So I really wanted to show. Now she's ready. Marjana has questions and she's not content to just be told to go, you know, go, go spin some, some wool or, you know, like, watch out, watch for your younger cousins and I'll take care of everything. She's starting to have questions.
- [14:31]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. I think that conversation too, about finding the work of finding an authentic voice that is both speaking to the 12th century and speaking to the way that 12 year olds exist in space sort of developmentally and where they are, is so interesting. I think part of what's really interesting about your work is it is both so accessible and fun and adventurous. And also there's a deep level of research. And also the past is just always interesting, right. Because we have a lot of lovely sources as you've talked about, but we don't know basically anything. Right. The vast majority of knowledge of the past is lost. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about balancing sort of research and being in a particular world with having this be what is like a very fun and accessible adventure story for like, modern audiences.
- [15:26]
Shannon Chakraborty
Of course. I mean, I think if there's any principle animating why I am a writer and I write the things I do is that I do want to bring more people into a love of the past, into a love of history, by making it fun, by making it immersive. And I think especially we're living in a glory age of public scholarship on history. I even when I was invited to the New Books Network I was very excited because I've listened to so many interviews on the new books in the Indian Ocean world and like there are, there is just so much out there. I think there's more out there than people realize. And yes, I am somewhat fortunate that I work on a period that is quite well documented, but there's still so much we're missing. But even for that we should research what we have. I mean you can pull together concepts of even just looking at legal records of like, okay, well what might women's lives have looked like if they're on the record? You know, fighting for divorce, fighting for their marriage, for their rights. That paints a very different picture than I think the popular perception of what the lives of Muslim women, women would have looked like in the medieval period. And this idea of even we have understandings of like slavery. The working class people never fought back. You know, it was the past. They accepted their lot in life. Well, again we have accessible records that san aids in it that, that you know, discuss revolts, discuss insurrections. So I think one, we should really appreciate what we do have because yes, it's only what's left and it's, it's almost always filtered through the lens of power and politics. But we do have a lot and I think if we can make that more accessible, there's a. There's really a lot of improvement that can be done there. So I do encourage people who are interested in this period to learn more because there, there is just so much you can do. And I think what I tried to do with my work is not break myself for the risk sometimes. Some the research on on ship building techniques reached a level because there's about a handful of scholars I think in the last century who have done work on this and all of their books and accounts contradict other. Which was great to deal with while trying to really because especially readers, especially and fantasy readers have strong opinions on boats. Not only do they have strong opinions on boats, I'm writing about pirates. They're going to accept sort of expect the tall ships of the European glory age of piracy. And that's just not what we have. So I think it's a matter of, you know, you try to get things as correct. As possible. But I encourage readers of historical fiction and fantasy to sometimes open their mind that it might not look like what they expect, that people's lives, the way they put things together, it may be different than what popular perception means. And that doesn't mean it's wrong. I think we all would do a lot better to have a very open mind to learning things that challenge us. And I say this to myself as well. I constantly had my own preference conceived conceptions on, particularly magic and gender, challenged by people who knew far more than me. And it's okay to, to be wrong and to kind of learn more. I think there's joy to be found in that. I, I, anybody I know who truly loves history, you know, your, your historians, your archaeologists, likes it likes discovering new things. Right. That's the point. It's not to defend what we think is right. It's to learn more and be open to more. So that's really an attitude I try to prize in my own research and something I would encourage readers to adopt as well.
- [19:01]
AE Lanier
Could you speak a little bit more about gender and magic in this time period and the things that you sort of discovered and unpacked?
- [19:09]
Shannon Chakraborty
Yes, Well, I, you know, I say this first. I'll, I'll discuss on the ide idea of magic. Magic is, and you could do a whole series of podcasts on the concept of magic and use Islamic world. Because modern conceptions, and I say this, I say this as a Muslim, are that so much of this is forbidden, that it's, it's, this is, it's just a forbidden practice. But it was very different in the past. And this is not to say it's, it's kind of like what you feel about religion. It doesn't mean it was right. It doesn't mean it was wrong. It means this was what they did back then. And, and this is not unique to the Islamic world. Magic is an ever present force in these people's lives. It twists into faith in ways. I think we may say, hey, but the texts say you can't do that. Well, that's what they did. Their lives were very different. Their lives were far, far harder. And yes, they are practicing not magic to help with marriages. They're putting amulets under pillows and around their necks and saying blessings and some of its traditions that have continued on. But much of it is not. I mean, even the idea of astrology, Astrology is incredibly important. The highest minds of their day were studying astrology. They were studying alchemy, they were studying what we would call sorcery while they were also making revolutions and surgery and theology. This was just. This was not seen as a forbidden discipline. It was simply part of life. It was an esteemed part of life in many ways. You know, your. Your court astrologer would be one of the highest scientists in the land. They would consult the caliph. So this is something that I, when I was conceiving of the character of Dunya and the character of Jamal, the academic I was working with, kept going back to me and just reminding me, like, this is an esteemed science in this day and age. Like, your characters would not feel negative about magic in a way that I think in fantasy, in modern fantasy, we expect that, right? A lot of it. Magic can be scary. Magic can be dangerous. Well, if magic is part of everyday life, how does that change the conception of things? So that was something I had to keep going back to and thinking, okay, if one of my characters has a negative relationship with magic, it can't be because of her religion. It has to, because that's simply not what it was back then. There has to be another aspect of this. Gender is another one you could do an entirely different series about. I think, again, people have very preconceived, very modern expectations of what gender and sexuality should have looked like in the medieval period, when in fact, I mean, from poems to travel records to wine songs, you see so much evidence of. You don't want to put modern labels on things, but evidence of queer relationships, queer attraction. There's an entire idea of a third gender in so many of the cultures that surround the Indian Ocean. And it's. We cannot put modern Western conceptions of gender or sexuality on this place, on this time period. And even in that, I kept. You know, I had another academic whose expertise was that, and she kept reminding me like this. They would not have really cared so much. They don't have our modern hangups about. About these aspects. And I. I wanted to show that I think anybody who says, you know, reading is not political or writing is not political, saying that choosing that is political. And I think people were surprised that I had this aspect in the novel. And I would turn back and say to not have that, to not touch upon that when it is everywhere in the sources and history would have been its own kind of censorship. And I can't say I'm trying to realistically recreate the past and then just forget this entire aspect that is different, but would have been somewhat normal to them.
- [22:58]
AE Lanier
Absolutely.
- [23:00]
Shannon Chakraborty
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AE Lanier
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Shannon Chakraborty
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AE Lanier
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- [26:07]
Shannon Chakraborty
So for me, it was important that I wanted to have Aminah as a Muslim who came back to her faith. Right. Like, there is not great Muslim representation in the Western canon in general. But what we often do get is we have either people casted entirely away in a. Just like, oh, my father has oppressed me. Let me rip off my veil and go eat like. Like some bacon. Or we have characters who are perfect. We don't have characters who often feel real. And we're starting to. There are really some great strides and wonderful Muslim creators making these characters. But they should feel like they're there for us. I wanted to see a character who had this path that is more familiar to many people who are practicing today, which is that you go back to it, right? This is something that you find, you know, a lot of. Like, she. She retires after a terrible moment. She's forced to kill one of her friends. She finds out her husband is a demon and she's pregnant, and she goes back to the family she hasn't seen in 15 years. And she's expecting them to throw her out and call her a whore and a criminal and a murderer. This is someone who, when they return to their faith, they do it with intention, and it's to save themselves and to save either sanity in their heart. And that, to me, is more realistic and more what I encounter with people than I encounter sort of these tropes. So I wanted to have a character whose journey of religion echoes the journey she's made in these books, which is that she's no longer a criminal. She's is trying to be a better person and is reluctantly becoming a hero. Right. So that. That journey is sort of echoed in her relationship with her faith and in terms of religion and society. You know, this is something I always talk about with people in world building, which. It doesn't matter how you feel about religion. Religion is one of the primary drivers of human society. Right. Like, it is up there with, like, the fact that we walk. I. It's. It's just. You see it in. In history, from the development of history of, like, people would have Been making podems and making and telling stories. And so much of that is wrapped up in religion. I mean, religion is just how people understand the world and the stories they tell to explain the world and keep some social order. And that can go terribly wrong. That can go terribly right. Usually it's a mix in the middle until power gets involved, and then usually it tends to be more towards the wrong. But this is a huge aspect of what societies look like of people's time. I mean, we joke, we live in a more secular society. But I can't help but notice every year I've watched the holiday, Christmas holidays come around. It's almost like more of my secular friends are decorating. Get really into these traditions. Like it's a human desire to be. Build traditions and to build stories. And I think we. What often we look at the past and we call it superstition, religion, faith. We have our own ways of that, right? Like we have our own. We. We pull up our own customs and our own traditions to replace that. But I do think if there's any aspect of what truly divides the past from our understanding of the world, probably in about the past hundred the years, it is mortality. It is that the con mortality and death, child mortality or even just the like you broke a bone and now you might die because of infection. Death and. And suffering would have been so much closer and, and so much more intense and just prevalent to the human experience. I do think people held to religion and faith and superstition in a different way than we do now simply because we have that right. I don't need to go visit the shaman. I can take my daughter to urgent care. But we still have those strong feelings. I want my child to live. I fear death. And I think we as modern humans have replaced the ways we take care of those fears with modern ideas. That doesn't mean that it. Those sensations and those griefs and those terrors weren't as strong in the pre modern period and that they found other ways to handle that.
- [30:25]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. And that empathy, I think, is so central in your work and is part of what really is at the heart of these books. I was wondering if we could speak a little bit about some of the different technologies that we have in this medieval period. Obviously this book is called Tapestry of Fate is very concerned with textiles. And I do think textiles are a particularly interesting one. Both because the work of, like all things, fabric and cloth has often been very gendered and because human beings have spent so much of our time making string and making fabric and in the last couple hundred years, because both of globalization and technological developments, people especially here in countries like the United States, are so much less aware of the work and just how much of the human project has been making cloth. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that technology and the role that fabric and all of that plays in the book.
- [31:24]
Shannon Chakraborty
Of course, I mean you, you nailed it in your description right there. It's, it's funny, we talk in, you know, you look, look at archaeological sites and everybody's so excited to find a fancy weapon or to find bones or jewelry. And what is not discussed will be that just hundreds and thousands of loom weights or showing how they made their cloth and how they made their string. I cannot, you can't over overestimate how much of human life would have been preoccupied doing this because one, it's incredibly intensive. I actually, I did learn how to spin wool and, and spin thread for this book. Cause I wanted to be able to really describe the process and from the concept of raising either the crops or the animals and then treating the product, spinning the product, then weaving the product, I mean it is incredibly intense. It is gendered. But I don't. It wouldn't have always been as much. So I really, you know, this in a trilogy that was about women's stories. I wanted to give textile history its place and its due and just talk about how important this would have been. I was left somewhat haunted when doing some really early research for this book by two facts that stayed with me and impacted how I looked at textile histories of rival the antagonist. The one was that as far as we can tell, and of course history is always changing. The earliest recorded word we have is a term that is used for a female slave of foreign origin. So essentially all of human civilization, language or great literature, it is rooted back in what was needed a more effective way to talk about the woman you stole from a foreign land are not forcing to do work. And that's just a. You know, I looked, I try to look for the joyous spots in human history. But there's no denying that the project that we call civilization is built on the bones of people who lived lives so horrific and so ghastly, we can't even truly contemplate them. And then there was also, when I was looking at the textile history, they were talking about how in many periods you find richer, more embroidered, finer cloth and finer made things. Before you can tell the makers, you know, their descendants have been taken into sort of proto factories or enslaved to do this work that, the work that, you know. And I say this, I, I, I do a lot of textile art. The things I make for my children are always going to be so much richer and more finely detailed than the things I would make if I was forced to weave cloth for an overseer. And it was just really this sort of thinking about not just this gendered aspect of construction and textiles and artisan trades, but what that looks like when it is forced and when it is sort of made into this larger commercial prospect. That was just something I really wanted to investigate on in this story.
- [34:24]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. And revenge and trauma, I think, are really central parts of this book. Tapestry of Fate does a really interesting job, I think, of walking this particular line, of being honest about sort of the scale and the horror of a lot of the violence and the experience that, like, so many people have had throughout history and then also today, when without at the same time really being what felt like gratuitous or graphic about it. And I'm always really interested in the portrayal of violence and in particular in the portrayal of really intense things like enslavement, like kidnapping, like all of the kinds of things that are absolutely happening at this point in time that are happening throughout the book. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that process of figuring out how you wanted that finding that balance of being honest about things without being callous.
- [35:23]
Shannon Chakraborty
I guess, you know, that is a hard line to walk. I wrote a scene in the Tapestry of Eight. There are these interludes that are from the point of view of the antagonist. And I wrote a scene in there that was the most difficult thing I've ever written in. And it is a perspective of a woman who has been slave when her village is attacked. And as much as it was the hardest thing for me to ever write and put myself in that position, I could not help but think this is the position that probably more people have gone through in all of human history than haven't. You know, again, I look for the bright spots, but there's no denying that unfortunately, we can be a very, very violent, violent people. And in times where resources are scarce, it's again, you, it's, it's difficult to. And I think anybody who really enjoys history, particularly prehistory, you, you stare into the abyss a lot. And it can be difficult to sometimes walk away from those moments and still have any warmth towards people. And then, of course, you do see the parts that are warm and people living joyous lives and people trying to reclaim happiness and agency. But I did feel with this book that it was time to talk about the fact that while the rich and the powerful and the educated and the connected can write their stories and have their tales told and can escape, many, many people cannot. It's this idea that we see in history of, like, there's this trite phrase, you know, the men were killed and the women and children were enslaved that we see time and time and time. What does it look like for the people who fall into that category? And I really wanted to sit with that moment, not in a way that felt gratuitous, because I often do think fantasy media sometimes just wants to splash things with Gore in a way that has always left me very uncomfortable. Because these are lives, yes, these are fictional people, but we're depicting the past, we're discussing characters. And I think death has to be there, violence has to be there, but it should have weight and it should have intention behind it.
- [37:30]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. Pivoting a little bit to maybe one of perhaps a bright spot or maybe just more ambiguous. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the Marwati and all of that work you've done around ships. And in particular, the Indian Ocean is very different. And sailing the Indian Ocean is very different than, I think, the conceptions that a lot of people in the US or in the English speaking world that are more focused on the Atlantic and the Pacific often have. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about boats or ships.
- [38:01]
Shannon Chakraborty
Of course, I am happy to tell you about boats. But, you know, it's interesting because the Indian Ocean is probably one of the oldest recorded seas in human memory, that we really just have people sailing to see this part. The seas particularly, and even the bays. I mean, you want to have the. Or the gulfs, the Persian Gulf Sea and. And along the Indian coast being some of the earliest trade in antiquity. On the entire other side, although this is more specific, I mean, you have the journeys of humans tens of thousands of years ago, but for whatever reason, I think it's not whatever reason, it largely is that the monsoon winds are a more reliable system that you could for a very long time. I mean, you can see these. These voyages dating at least back to the Ptolemaic period and almost certainly earlier, because they didn't just conceive of this on their own. You can cross the ocean, and that is an astonishing thing to be able to do 2,000 years ago with some regularity. And yes, the voyages take a long time, but you can do it. You can do it both ways and that enables a sort of intercultural context that I think is just difficult to overstate. Right. We have, you know, people in the west are used to thinking of the Mediterranean and Mediterranean is a lot smaller. It's a lot more dangerous. It's a lot, a lot more prone to storms, to crusade, to piracy. Of course all these people have it, but I think the Indian Ocean is so vast and it can be more regular that you see very different attitudes of trade and travel and networks. And it's, it's just always been very fascinating to me that you have these populations, just long standing diaspora populations. I mean you can see thing, you see Chinese glass on the East African coast. I mean it's got, I think dated to at least 1500 years ago. And that's, that's amazing to me. That's such a distance. Right. And it's for these fine luxury goods in many ways that it's, it's kind of like people have always wanted that fancy new technology so they took the ships to do it. And I, I think that's fascinating. As someone who, as much as I've, I've studied the ships and I find this world fascinating. I myself never want to take like a transoceanic voyage. I like being near shore. Um, I find the concept terrifying. You know, I say that, oh, they had the monsoon wind. So some are reliable. It's still incredibly dangerous. I mean, incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Ships sank all the time and are just. They vanish and were never seen again. I mean, I've read accounts there's right across. Now I'm going to forget it because I can't. The English and the Arabic in my head are crossing each other. But the Gulf outside Aden, there's a, it's a very dangerous narrow spit of land. And I remember reading about a shipwreck where one ship sank and it was at night and there was another ship close enough to hear the screams of people drowning and being devoured by sharks but not being able to get to them. And it's just something that has always stuck in my mind because it's, it's a, a horrible, terrible fate and yet people were still doing it. People were still getting on chips.
- [41:07]
AE Lanier
That is really just the nature of the past. There's a lot of being like that seems very terrible and then people are still doing it.
- [41:13]
Shannon Chakraborty
Yes. I mean I find it, it's funny because for all everything I have read about, you know, sort of medieval ship, life in the Indian Ocean still pales in comparison to the sheer deranged insanity. That seems to be the European age of export exploration. I mean, you read about on ships like the Wager and the Terror, and it's like, is this like, where's the line between, like, suicide and exploration? Like, you've got to be hitting rates of, of death that make this, you know, untenable. And yet they, they kept going.
- [41:51]
AE Lanier
As a kid who was really into Arctic and Antarctic exploration, it is, you're just like, whether, what is anyone doing what is happening? You've done a lovely job of speaking to the ways in which the Indian Ocean is a different space. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about piracy as well. Amina is a recovered pirate. And I think that we often have a reference of pirates that is very tied to the 18th century, to child slavery and all of that. And the 12th century is a different space. So, yeah, could you talk to us a little bit about that kind of piracy?
- [42:24]
Shannon Chakraborty
I mean, it's so interesting, right? Because we have piracy as practiced on the historical record, and then we have piracy as a modern concept of fun adventure. And I do not think you can entirely discount that. I, I'll come out and say I wasn't right. Like, of course I want to tell a fun story. I. Pirates have an immediate aspect of sexy glamour to them that is our own modern recreation. Well, not entirely modern. It's a. We won't get into the history of why, why we consider pirates fun and sexy and storytelling concepts, but I wasn't discounting that at all. Like, I was very much wanting to play that I am telling an adventure story. But piracy as a concept, again, it's just incredibly old. Like, since we have been sailing, we have been having pirates. It's the same. We've had criminals since we've been doing anything else. And it's interesting to see in the historical Indian Ocean concept because it's kind of undefined, right? Like, yes, you have your stereotypical pirates of, you know, these fleets in many ways. I feature a group of them in the first book, the pirate fleets of Socotra, who are said to be terrified, you know, people would go out of their way to avoid failing in this area because they had these fleets. But you also had people who were just smugglers. I think that was a bit more common. I, I actually the, the label of pirate is too irresistible to shake. But Amina probably is more of a smuggler. Like, you don't want to pick a customs tax. Come here. I got a different way in. That guy stole your horses. All right. I guess he's gonna have an accident at the. You know, they're kind of the people who make ways a little smoother. And of course, even the idea of a privateer, this would. We would have had that back then as well. Like, you know, you're a pirate now, but when the captain of that merchant fleet starts paying you now your protection, it's the kind of idea of like one person's pirate is another person's protection or freedom fighter. And then you have that as well. I mean, it's. It's difficult to untangle the aspect of, like, when you see rich foreigners coming through. Well, why don't I get a cut of that? I think, you know, you can't even untangle then later historical ideas because the Europeans will come into the Indian Ocean and now everybody's a pirate. You thought you were just like a respectable trader. No. We have decided that your merchant ship that you've been doing for generations is now illegal. And now you're a pirate. Or we will devastate your village and your coast and your city so much that your people have no choice but to turn to piracy. So I think it becomes a more loaded term in later centuries, which is another reason I wanted to set things before. They're the Europeans. They're. They're far away. You have like a lost. A lost Frank in the first book. But when Europeans come into the Indian Ocean, this entire millennial old world is under. Changed, attacked in ways that can't be overstated. So this. This idea of piracy and smuggling, I wanted to feel a bit more Han Solo esque than, you know, Blackbeard.
- [45:27]
AE Lanier
Fair enough. We've talked a lot about, like, history and murder and textiles, which are all very, very fun. But I think even if you are not a giant history nerd, these books are such a fun, like, adventure, right? These are in many ways very, like, pulpy in, like a very positive way. Like, they're super fun. They're very people oriented. And I was wondering, as we wrap up, if you could just talk a little bit about the adventure element and like, what it's like crafting these kinds of stories, things that you were excited to include, that kind of thing.
- [46:01]
Shannon Chakraborty
I mean, that was intentional. I very much wanted this to feel like a fun adventure story that this could be. You could give this book to somebody who might not want to read an 800 page political fantasy that is involves a high fictional court and everything is complicated to keep track of. I wanted something that felt a little bit more adventurous, and that was. I did that for A lot of reasons. The first book is my Pandemic book. I finished the Dave Abad trilogy. I released the last book in the second month of the Pandemic. And then I had to write something completely different while doing virtual kindergarten, which is a phrase I never want to say again. For my youngest, my husband is a physician. I mean, it was a terrifying time and I wanted, when I, if I was going to say, sit at my laptop at 4 o' clock in the morning to get some stuff done. I wanted it to be fun and I wanted it to be an adventure story. When I pitched it, I pitched it as Sinbad the Sailor meets Ocean's Eleven. And my editor was like, say less. But I wanted it to feel that way. I wanted it to capture the, the excitement and the adventure and the energy of, quite frankly, some of those movies. Right. Of Indiana Jones, of the Mummy, Sinbad the Sailor. But to just have this rich historical context to make history fun for people, I mean, that's always my like old wanting to be a professor, Jim. Like, I'll get them this way. And it is, it's meant, they are meant to be fun stories.
- [47:27]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. There is huge gateway drug for history energy in these books in a way that is so fun and so joyful. It has been absolutely lovely speaking with you today. Thank you so much for taking the time.
- [47:40]
Shannon Chakraborty
Thank you so much for having me. This was great.
- [47:42]
AE Lanier
Yeah, absolutely. I have been speaking with Shannon Chakrabarti about her novel the tapestry of out May 12th from Harper Voyager. Thank you so much for listening and please consider supporting the show by subscribing or leaving a review. I will speak to you soon. And for now, happy reading. Foreign.
- [48:10]
Shannon Chakraborty
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