• Novelist Jeevani Charika on representation and diversity in literature

Jeevani Charika, a novelist based in the United Kingdom (UK), is known for women’s fiction and romantic comedies like Playing for Love, Christmas at the Palace, and A Convenient Marriage. Her novels also take Sri Lanka to the world, with at least one Sri Lankan or British-Sri Lankan character in each story.

The novelist used to write as Rhoda Baxter, having been asked by a publisher if she wished to use a pen name. “I’m a microbiologist by training and I did my DPhil on a bacterium called Rhodobacter, so I chose the name Rhoda Baxter. I’ve written as Rhoda Baxter for over ten years now,” she shared.

“I had four books traditionally published under the Rhoda Baxter name (all with stealth Sri Lankans), but then one day I looked at my daughters and thought it would be nice to have a book with a brown girl on the cover. So I wrote a short Christmas novella called Girl at Christmas and self-published it. I chose to write a novella so that I wouldn’t be tempted to try and find a publisher for it (romance publishers tend not to like novellas, for some reason, but readers do!),” Jeevani said.

She went on to write a few more novellas with British-Sri Lankan protagonists, which were all self-published because she didn’t think UK publishers would be interested in “cheerful romance books about brown characters who aren’t talking about their immigrant struggles, but are merely falling in love.”

The author pointed out that the UK publishing scene is slowly changing, following incidents like a report that showed the lack of diversity in the industry, the success of Black Panther, and in the romance industry, people becoming more aware of the success of people like Alyssa Cole and Nalini Singh.

“Then Black Lives Matter happened and people in positions of power started to think about how they gatekeep the industry. Now the UK publishing industry is more open to minority voices and we see more diversity – of ethnicity, sexuality, and disability – in the characters,” the author said.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

Readers often wonder if an author’s personal experiences make their way to the novels they write. Does this apply to your work?

All of my stories are made up. I’ve written 20+ books now, so people have stopped asking me if the book is about me. None of them are about me. I often write as a form of escape. Why would I write about real life, when I can just make stuff up?

I also don’t use real people in my books. I might steal a mannerism or a belief or a scenario and use that as part of a character, but I would never use a real person. 

Having said all that, the people in my books come from my head, so they will all have aspects of me in them. I will often give feelings that I’ve experienced to my characters. For example, Yamuna in When Soma Met Sahan suffers from post-natal depression, which is something I’ve suffered from. I put some of my own feelings from when I was a new mother into her character. Nirosha in Picture Perfect has to come to terms with being chubby and dark skinned. This was something I thought about a lot when I was younger, so I gave those feelings to her.

So, I guess I do use my own experiences, but rarely directly and nearly always filtered through the lens of the character.

Your novels feature Sri Lankan or British-Sri Lankan characters. Why do you include such characters in your novels and how do you ensure accurate representation with your Sri Lankan characters?

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s in the UK, you rarely saw Asian people in popular novels. If there were any, they tended to be literary novels about the immigrant struggle, not the mainstream genres like romance or crime (these two genres far outsell literary novels in the UK). You’d read them and think there were no middle class Asians in the UK. 

I remember seeing a Sri Lankan minor character in a women’s fiction book and being astounded. That feeling of recognising someone like me stayed with me. So when I started writing genre fiction, I tried to make sure that each book had at least one Sri Lankan character in it. I started with minor characters – my writer friends used to joke that I wrote “stealth Sri Lankans” into my books. 

How do I ensure accurate representation? Obviously, I can’t write characters who are accurate to everyone, because everyone is different. I can only provide representation that is accurate to one person – the character I’m writing about. 

Writing second generation British-Sri Lankans is easy, because I am one. I lived in Sri Lanka for most of my childhood. I lived in Colombo until I was 16, so I can also draw on my memories. I am still in touch with one of my old school friends and I occasionally badger her to details of things which have changed in Colombo. 

How do these characters allow you to share parts of Sri Lanka with foreign readers?

In all honesty, foreign readers don’t know much about Sri Lanka apart from as a holiday destination and a cricket team. If there is any discussion about South Asian representation, it tends to stop with books about protagonists from India and Pakistan. So sharing anything about Sri Lanka at all is a start. Hopefully, now that a Sri Lankan has won the Booker Prize, there might be more books featuring Sri Lankans.

Your DPhil in microbiology and work with intellectual property is quite different to your work as a novelist. How do you manage the two?

I wanted to do English literature at A-level, but my parents said I should do science so that I could get a “real job” and write in my spare time. Annoyingly, they were right. Writing pays very badly, so having a day job which makes enough to pay the bills is very important. 

I did a DPhil in microbiology and then left academia to work in patents. I worked in a university for a bit and I am now a freelance consultant, helping universities with their Intellectual property and technology transfer work. This means that I work from home and can fit my hours around the needs of my children.

I have the sort of magpie brain that likes to learn new things in short bursts, so helping universities protect their new inventions is absolutely perfect for me. I get to learn about cutting edge science without actually having to be stuck in the lab. As a writer, I often research obscure things in great detail – most of which will not appear in the book. 

I like being able to do both – if I’m between contracts for too long, I miss thinking about science in the same way I miss writing when I’m between books.

I think having another profession is also useful because it brings me into contact with a lot of real people. These interactions often feed ideas that will probably turn up in amended form in a future book.

You are also a working mom. How do you juggle these different roles? Does writing romance and women’s fiction help in any way?

My biggest battle is managing my time so that I meet my writing deadlines without slipping up on any of the kids’ things. I usually work when they’re at school – I have “day job” working days and “writing” working days. I spend a lot of my “writing” days teaching and mentoring new writers – I’m part of Fiction Tutors where we offer mentoring sessions, critique people’s finished manuscripts, and even run a club for newly published writers who want to learn about how to survive in traditional publishing.

I also write in the evenings. When I was still going into the office, I used to write at night, after the kids had gone to bed. Now, I find that I’m still more productive as a writer between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. I have inadvertently trained my brain to show up in creative mode at that time.

As I mentioned before, I often write as a form of escape. My most light-hearted books were written when life was the most stressful. I know that a lot of people find writing about their problems cathartic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. When I write, I experience the emotions of the characters to some extent. This is especially true of the women’s fiction books, which tend to have slightly heavier themes than the romcoms. So I need to be in a fairly robust mental space to write them.