Photo credit: Kayla MacInnis
Interview by Franz Seachel
River Meets the Sea by Rachael Moorthy is a moving tale about the complex nature of identity. Filled with mouthwatering descriptions of food and stunning depictions of Coast Salish lands, this story flows like the waters to which protagonists Ronny and Chandra are tethered. It questions what it means to be othered, interconnected, and a part of the natural world. Rachael Moorthy grew up on Matsqui territory and now lives in Switzerland.
This conversation contains spoilers for River Meets the Sea by Rachael Moorthy and was edited for clarity.
Franz Seachel: I’m excited to chat about this book. I related to the book’s exploration of identity through family roots. I’m curious to know why you chose the male perspective for the novel’s point of view and where the characters of Ronny and Chandra came from.
Rachael Moorthy: That is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently. I didn’t interrogate it much [initially] but I was somewhat perplexed when the idea for the book emerged. I had pretty intentionally and also organically written from a mixed female perspective [in the past]. There is this unique sense of unity and community that people who have mixed displaced and diasporic identities share, and it’s one of feeling like you don’t belong. That was something that I resonated with, something that is still present in the book despite it being from two male perspectives. I was struggling with feeling like [most] BIPOC representation was about somebody with a pretty clear sense of identity [where] both of their parents look like them. And their friends or family look like them or something, like that sense of othering was more external, [rather] than a feeling that is constantly with you, even in your own home, in your own skin. It’s still vital to me.
I often felt [envious that] male characters [get to go on epic quests] coming-of-age stories that didn’t revolve around romantic love. I didn’t entirely understand why, then, I wanted my first novel to be focalized around two [male] characters. They are informed by my grandfather and my father, which is the most transparent reason when I look back at it now.
I had a history of complex trauma with men and, consequently, a pretty strong bias. I wanted to amend that, and so I thought, I’m [going to] start asking the men I love most, who still sometimes [exhibit harmful behaviour]. That was the genesis, it started with just interviews with my grandfather. I learned so much about him and I could understand why he was the way that he was and grew to see that all of the parts of him that I loved, all the compassion and softness, that was actually him. The rest of the parts I would clash with. He wore a mask that had been kind of constructed for him by the world. [Initially, my grandfather was] not necessarily super stoked about a dark-skinned Black-coded man being my mother’s partner. This was a bit of a cosmic joke because my grandmother’s father had excommunicated my grandmother for a similar reason: he believed my grandfather was Indigenous, a foster child, and worst of all—a sailor. I wanted to show how either intergenerational prejudice and harm or intergenerational healing can be passed on.
My father and my grandfather are good examples of intergenerational healing. It’s fictionalized largely because I was working with an old man’s memory and it gave me more creative liberty. My dad wasn’t a swimmer, he was a wrestler, and the wrestler-actor trope is pretty common. Othello is a bit on the nose for a dark-skinned, male character; he was cast as Othello [in reality]. Also, I’ve never seen my grandfather’s files. The experience of going to St. Mary’s Residential School site comes from an amalgamation of my own experiences of trying to reconnect and to try to find out the truth of my roots, which I still don’t know. That’s why the novel’s resolution is intentionally unclear, I want these two men’s identities to remain ambiguous and undefined to emphasize that it is okay not to know.
Anyone with any sort of genocide, enslavement, or forced displacement in their bloodline knows how much psychological damage researching your roots can do. For me, spending too much time reaching backward, especially because so much of this stuff is ongoing, completely debilitates me, and then I’m depressed, and of no use to anyone. I believe the creator put me on this path to remind the world that a hyper fixation on rigid categories is what got us into this mess and that it’s not going to fix it. You can advocate for Indigenous language revitalization and land sovereignty without tribal affiliation, just like you can rally against the anti-Black racism that exists across cultures whether you’re “Black enough” or not.
Anyways, those long-winded deluges are to say that I had this strong desire to write this specific book. I wasn’t entirely sure why. Now, I think it’s because I needed to heal my patriarchy wounds. My way of doing that was this restorative justice process of showing how things could be better than they are. Just remind my grandfather and father of what they have done, remind them of the hatred they have overcome, and how the fact that they have chosen to love and explore the so-called “other,” rather than fear them, is the strongest thing anyone can do.
FS: I’m glad you decided to explore this. It’s such a great read and it was fascinating seeing it from the male perspective with all of these kinder, softer, and gentler sides—the ones we don’t often get to see. I am curious to hear about your process. You kind of touched on interviewing and having conversations with family. I’d love to hear more about writing your first novel.
RM: The first few chapters I wrote in a workshop with Lee Henderson at UVic. Then I just put it away because I was scared. I wanted to try and get a short story published first, I wanted to make sure that my prose was strong enough to get published on its own. Then after a few short stories got published, I still had this fear of the blank page. I started doing what [my best friend] does. She just writes. Especially for a book, I think it’s really important to just write and to let go of a lot of the writing school stuff because otherwise, I’m pretty sure that there’s a level of universality to this, but we will sit there and comb over a sentence for like, I would say hours but honestly, I think we could do it for like several days. You’re not going to write a book like that. You just kind of have to know that you’re likely writing some cliché sentences or some clunky sentences. I just needed to get the meaning across—that was my approach to writing the first draft. The editing was a lot of cutting out unnecessary stuff, pacing, and refining what needed to be included.
For me, the best option was to seek representation. I had a good experience because I expected rejection. I just told myself, “You just have to stay persistent with it.” And it couldn’t have been a better fit than with Chelene Knight. I’m so thankful that I had her. [It’s rare in this] industry to have somebody who’s not just like, “I like the aesthetic qualities of the book,” but instead, “I feel that it in my soul, I know what it is to have this ever-shifting identity and this feeling of constantly not belonging no matter where you are and the complications of how you’re racially coded and how it can clash with your actual identity.” I couldn’t have been more blessed to have [Chelene] because that is something that has come up throughout the process, like how different outlets want to describe me or my identity and sometimes that caused a lot of anxiety for me.
Shirarose is the editor of the book and she’s just phenomenal. She’s also a very loving person and very enthusiastic. She just helped me a lot with the pacing and we blended a lot of chapters. With the editorial process, I felt I was part of a community. I guess the most daunting part was the copy editing because I had to timestamp everything and make sure there weren’t any anachronisms in there. What’s so scary about being an emerging writer is when it’s just you and your laptop and you’re working so hard on a manuscript and you don’t know if it’s gonna go anywhere. I just had to ignore that and persevere.
I also made sure I was reading a lot of articles about people who had their debut projects out, about their experiences with writing books and getting representation and the process. It’s encouraging to know that the scary things that you’re going through, every writer who writes a book and who isn’t a super established author goes through.
FS: You mentioned earlier not being able to rely on memory, and that’s how some of the details in the book came about. I also noticed there was a lot of attention to things like the natural world and food and like, little parts of you. So I’m wondering more about you and your influences, especially about food and the role it plays.
RM: Regarding the attention to the natural world in my prose, that’s just how I move through the world. I think it is my connection to divinity. I’m very, very connected to the natural world and the element of water [is] something that fascinates me. Maybe on a theological level, just because we are mainly water ourselves and it’s ever-shifting. You can’t live in it, you can’t live without it. It’s phenomenal. It’s light and heavy at the same time[…] I think I was probably also influenced by things I had read. I think anyone who’s read Braiding Sweetgrass will probably pick up on the literary influence Kimmerer has had on me. I’m someone who is in tune with the lunar cycles and the seasons.
It started with morels. I had never eaten morels before. I live in a tiny village in a valley. It’s like 800 years old, this village, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. But it’s a hub for morels, which are very expensive, alienesque mushrooms, and they’re so good. I love them. I was just like, these are divine and I’m gonna write about morels this week. And then with the natural world, I think I wanted to show how to deal with grief and mourning through what has helped me work through really heavy emotions. That [role] has always been held by nature, so that’s how I portray dealing with grief.
FS: You talked a bit about the moons aligning in Switzerland with some of the moons here on Coast Salish lands, and how the morels came from where you’re currently living in the valley. So I am wondering where the book was written, if you wrote it in BC or if you wrote it when you were in Switzerland, and how place influenced both how you approached writing the book and then how you saw the places you were writing about.
RM: I would say about evenly Coast Salish territory and Switzerland. I finished it when I was at my parents’ living in Matsqui territory. The revision process, where I had to put in more of the plant stuff, was in Switzerland because I was isolating [during the pandemic]. I immigrated and then within weeks, we were on lockdown. We were in this tiny, tiny village, so there was this very surreal, dreamy element. I wander[ed] through the woods for hours. There’s this Bärlauch in German, which means Bear Leek, I think it’s wild garlic in English, but it’s Indigenous here and you can’t get it back home. Here it is everywhere, just an ocean of wild garlic in the woods.
Looking at the differences between things that grow here in Switzerland and what grows back home was fascinating because things I associated with being Indigenous to Coast Salish territory, like blackberries, for example, were invasive from Europe. Some plants grow in both places, but sometimes one plant came from Turtle Island and is now here in Europe, and then other times something was brought over from Europe and now flourishes on Turtle Island. It’s a cool metaphor for the Diaspora and the race myth and just oversimplifications of race classifications. It disturbs the false notion that pure ethno-states have ever existed.
As for the botanical aspect, that process involved researching the differences. Learning different things about berries, what berries are originally from Coast Salish territory or invasive, etc. I also really missed home—I have only been home once since I moved here, which was never the plan. That helped me kind of reconstruct home and I have such a deeper appreciation for it [now]. I just savour everything, like every detail that is different about home, the trees and the sea. Sometimes, you can write a better poem about a person that you don’t see anymore because you look at all the details with more clarity in retrospect, with distance. I feel like it was a little bit like that with the reconstruction of Coast Salish territory.
FS: I love the idea of having to pull away or step back to really like see the whole picture. I’ll let you leave off with what you want to discuss—what’s next? What’s to come? I know you kind of alluded to having another project in the works. Can you tell us more?
RM: I always had this idea that I wanted to take [this] type of book that I always really loved— somebody, usually a recently divorced white woman from North America, [embarking on] a worldly adventure of self-discovery, going to find themselves or whatever. Under the Tuscan Sun meets Eat, Pray Love, and then give it a post/de-colonial spin with platonic love as the conclusion rather than heterosexual, monogamous, romantic love. But [I want to imbue it] with a post-colonial perspective because there are things that often get brushed underneath in those narratives. Like we’re talking about, “Oh, Italy, it’s so romantic” and it is, but also there’s a really strong and tangled history of fascism there that kind of just gets forgotten about. There’s also the widespread erasure of people of colour that have always lived in Europe. St. Moritz in Switzerland is named after a North African knight, a dark-skinned North African knight, for example. [I want to counter] all of these oversimplified, white-washed, sanitized representations of the spaces that I’ve now actually lived in.
Also, because style is inherently political, I want to disrupt the idea of a single white protagonist and approach it more a la a Girl, Woman, Other, which shows the importance of community. I think being inundated with single-protagonist stories makes us more prone to have the single protagonist’s mindset. That’s why I’m drawn to multiple perspectives because it trains your brain to consider other viewpoints. I want to kind of take those elements and put them together and have something fun and adventurous, but that also has a lot of postcolonial undertones and serious issues dealt with [through] showing [a] beloved community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma. I want to portray types of love other than romantic love as being the central love [of] the story.
Most importantly, I’m very obsessed with Persephone as an allegory for trauma. One of the three protagonists is going to be Persephone in a contemporary setting. Even just researching the evasive etymology, one finds that it has Indo-European roots linguistically because the name stems from a time before there was any objectively held distinction between those geographical spaces. There are goddesses from different Indigenous South Asian communities that are very similar to Persephone, too. My friend Isabel from Mexico has displaced Indigenous roots and lives here in Basel as well, and she’s the inspiration for a character, too. There’s this goddess of fire, Chantico, her name translates to ‘she who dwells at home,’ but she can also be looked at as the Greek Goddess Hestia. There’s all this overlap between these different goddesses around the world; it’s going to be really fun.
FS: I love all of that and I’m super excited for the next project. Thank you so much for chatting.
Rachael Moorthy is a lover of trailing wisteria, glittering bodies of water, and words who is still trying to find the right ones in order to answer the question “Where are you from?” A storyteller of all trades, she is passionate about writing from the perspectives of folks who, like her, are caught in the liminal aftermath of colonialism, with complex and tangled diasporic roots that don’t fit into Black/white or settler/Indigenous binaries. Her debut novel River Meets the Sea hit shelves on May 30th, is long-listed for the Giller Prize and was featured on CBC’s Canadian Fiction to Read in 2023 list. Rachael has a bachelor’s of writing from the University of Victoria and is pursuing a master’s in multi/interlingual literary studies at the University of Basel.
Franz Seachel is a South-Asian settler residing on unceded Coast-Salish lands. She is a writer, organizer, workshop facilitator and multidisciplinary artist. She believes art makes living bearable and is doing her best to put more colour into the world. She means this both in the sense of brightening up the mundane with creation, as well as in her mission to uplift the truths of marginalized bodies. She is currently working on her first novel, in addition to other multidisciplinary art projects. Franz hopes you dream often; she hopes you find reasons to stay. You can follow her on Instagram, @franz_seachel.