In Conversation with Nikita Gill

Are you deeply bored by the right-wing freakout over Christopher Nolan’s flat Hollywood epic version of Homer? Me too! Not even the possibility of seeing Lupita Nyong’o rightly hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world, or Circe turn some men into pigs, can induce me to spend $20 at the movie theater.

Instead, I revisited a conversation I had in May with the Irish-Indian poet Nikita Gill at the Melbourne Writers Festival in Australia, about Greek myth, feminism, growing up in the midst of war, and the perennial fear of women’s writing.

Nikita is vibrant and razor-sharp, hilarious, and obsessive about Greek myth (so obviously, she’s awesome)—and she’s also that oldest of things, a storyteller. Her circle of readers spans the globe, engaging with her seven published works and with the poetry she shares on that newest of folk idioms, Instagram (@nikita_gill, everyone!).

She is also that second-oldest of things, the feminist reteller of tales, taking Greek and Hindu myth and folklore and placing female characters at the center. Storytelling has been a primary way that any wave of the feminist movement (or any group pushed to the margins) has wrenched from the world their own tradition and their own voice. Think of Angela Carter’s dark erotic fairy-tales in The Bloody Chamber, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Chinese folklore-infused biography of the women in her family The Woman Warrior, Assia Djebar’s mythopoetic novel of the women of the Algerian independence movement, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, and more recently, Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, making women from the Iliad and the Odyssey the center of the tale.

I talked with Nikita about her new novel-in-verse, Hekate: The Witch, a reimagining of the story of the Greek goddess of crossroads, magic, and witchcraft. In Gill’s telling, Hekate is the child of an exterminatory war between the gods, a young goddess learning and developing her powers and her strength while living in exile in the underworld. Like the best of tales, its language is direct enough for young readers (it’s sold in the U.S., though not Europe or Australia, as a YA novel) yet its insights complex enough for adults.

Nikita talked with me about getting in arguments with long-dead poets, about neopaganism and witches, about poetic form, and about the feminist injunction to myth. Walter Benjamin once urged the tellers of tales “to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits.” Nikita does! —Jessie Kindig

JESSIE KINDIG Can you talk more about what drew you to Hekate as a character?

NIKITA GILL This story actually came to me fully formed back in 2018, like a technicolor dream. As writers, we are those people that get haunted by something; if you don’t pay attention to the story, it won’t leave you alone. It’ll follow you into the shower and you’ll be thinking about it when you’re eating dinner. You’ll be trying to spend time with your loved ones, but half of you will be in the underworld arguing with Hermes. There’s always a part of you that’ll be missing because you’ll be in your story. So this was an exorcism really — if I didn’t write it, it would devour me. 

I found the story of Hekate fascinating because she’s always lived on the margins. You see mentions of her in Macbeth, you see mentions of her in Hesiod. I know the realities of war — I’m Kashmiri and Northern Irish. I know what happens to women who are on the losing side of a war. And Hesiod insists that Hekate betrayed her own family, her mother, her cousins, everyone she loves, to stand with the Olympians. I looked at Hekate’s character and talked to a lot of neopagans who currently worship her, who said that she appeared to them after they had gone through abuse and violence. And it was mostly women who I was speaking to. And I was like: Those two sides of her personality don’t match! Why would she abandon her mother, her cousins, every woman on that side of her family, the people she grew up with, to take the side of the Olympians? So this is a fight with a poet from thousands of years ago.

JK In the great tradition of poetry! I love what you said about her always existing on the margins — you write her as a literal refugee. I was wondering if you could talk more about that choice. It’s something that she grapples with through the whole book, this long history of violence and how it affects women specifically.

NG There is no such thing as a refugee goddess in Greek mythology specifically. Hekate, I saw her as a child refugee. Kashmir and Northern Ireland weren’t in active wars when I was born, but the effects of living under heavy military presence is something that I grew up with. What does it do to the lexicon of a child when they have to learn words like “curfew” or “terrorist” or “ “bombs” or “liberation”? What does learning about partition, religious conflict, or liberation do to a child? So I was looking at this character and I was like: So what if she was born at the end of a war? What happens to a child who may be a goddess, but experiences the all-encompassing loss of having your parents become prisoners of war?

That’s the genesis of this book — gods aren’t supposed to go through that. For me, it’s really important for people to understand that we are all far closer to being refugees than we are to being billionaires or millionaires, that safety is an illusion that we have been fed. I wanted to show people that if it can happen to a goddess, it can happen to anyone. 

JK I wanted to ask you about the power of storytelling. I know you’ve worked with many different kinds of folklore. I know that you’ve also translated an edition of the Pachatantra, which is the great Sanskrit epic of animal stories and which some scholars believe is the origin point of all fairy-tales. Obviously, the story form is important to you. 

NG As human beings, story is all we are. Stories are what we will leave behind — we call them memories, but stories are what we will leave behind for our children and our grandchildren. Eventually, the last story ever will be told about us and that’ll be the last of us, long after we are gone.

I think to be a writer is to be constantly questioning yourself, your own motives, the motives of your characters: Who is the archivist of a story? Who preserves story? Why are they preserving it? Why are you retelling it? To see a story and ask, why have I chosen to tell Hekate’s story this way and not another way? Why have I not chosen to tell the story of Hekate siding with the Olympian gods? Because in my head I was like, no, she wouldn’t. Looking at her character, maybe she wouldn’t. And that’s what writers do — retell a story. 

Hekate is actually considered the mother goddess of modern witchcraft; over the course of many readings, neopagans and witches have come to talk to me and thank me for including their perspective of their goddess. Because usually retellings and re-imaginings only take the classical texts into consideration. And a lot of the classical texts were written by men. 

JK I imagine you think of your work in this kind of feminist tradition of retelling — Angela Carter rewriting the fairy-tales, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey and Iliad, Madeline Miller’s Circe. There’s so many of these books now. Do you think about this consciously? Do you think about setting yourself in a feminist literary tradition?

NG Everything I write comes from wanting to write for women and femmes. This is my core audience. The reason for that is because I am a woman and a femme myself. When I was really young, I was told repeatedly that if teenage girls liked something, it had to be bad inherently. People love pretending that teenage girls don’t drive culture. Teenage girls do drive culture. David Bowie was a massive success because teenage girls loved him. I know exactly who I’m writing for. 

JK I want to ask you about form, about the decision to write in verse. You’ve written several novels in verse, and I know this is a planned trilogy in verse. I wonder if you can talk about why you didn’t want to write it in prose?

NG I tried! I tried. I kept getting to chapter three and this book was like, “Hell no, you are not writing me as a fictional prose novel. It’s just not going to happen.” And so I retried writing it in verse. I remember having this conversation with my agent where I was like, “I keep getting to chapter three and stopping.” And she was like, “Well, you’re clearly stopping because you don’t want to write it this way. Why don’t you just try writing it in verse?” Within a couple of months, I had an entire book — clearly that’s how the book wanted to be written. 

I think it was first of all the economy of language. In verse, every single word needs to earn its place. You have no place for filler sentences when you write a verse novel. You can’t even say “they went from here to here” unless there’s a reason for it fitting into the structure of the poem. As poets, we have a brutal editing tactic. Here’s what you do: You may have written a really beautiful line. It’s not working in the poem. You have 30 seconds to justify it. If you cannot justify it, it comes out and the poem has to exist without it. You end up with a compost heap of fantastic lines that you don’t know what to do with, but it’s a really great way of creating a narrative structure in verse.

JK I know you have a huge audience online. We were talking about the ways in which putting poetry online — making it accessible, readable, engaging — has brought so many people to poetry as a form. This form is considered difficult and dangerous, kind of like women. Could you talk more about how the large audience that you’ve built shapes your work? Do you think about them as you write? Do they talk back to you? 

NG I love my readers. We all have such a great laugh together. I love my common spaces because I feel like that everyone has got a really great sense of humor. I mean, every woman I know is hot and funny. So it’s fantastic. I basically feel like Artemis — I live in this world of hot and funny women. I feel so privileged to have a space where readers tell me their stories and say, “I read this poem of yours. It reminded me of an experience that I had,” and tell me about that experience. What an honor, to be able to hold such stories.

There’s so many moving stories that I could tell you, but one of the funnier stories is that there was a reader of mine who was married to a quite famous writer in the UK. He wasn’t a very nice man. He basically told her that she wasn’t allowed to have any of my books in their house, because I was a bad influence.

JK Amazing. Well done.

NG They’re divorced now, by the way. So she has all my books! She has a shelf of my books in her house. There is nothing I love more than being called a bad influence by a man towards his wife.