Of Space, Scale & Diasporic Moons

Rani Som sits in front of a massive backdrop of ephemera. There’s records and books, rolls of paper, stacks of CDs tessellated like bricks. It’s the kind of shelf you could spend hours leafing through, your neck craning to read the spines, knees popping when you squat to inspect the bottom shelves—a curated world to get lost in.

Like her bookshelf, Rani’s art invites lingering. Though stylistically different, both her graphic novel Apsara Engine and graphic memoir Spellbound play with the surreal. Their storylines are laced with the phantasmagoric and heightened by a queer underbelly straining to be scratched.  It’s also a body of work with a distinct visual language: the precise lines of a city rub elbows with the delicate texture of watercolor; figures transcend, dance through, and disappear into their landscapes; time moves backwards, or in every direction at once. Rani’s worlds are dense. Getting lost in them can take whole afternoons, hours you will be grateful to surrender. 

From her previous career as an architect to now, Rani (whose books were published under her former name, Bishakh) has made a career out of worldbuilding, winning a Lambda Literary Award in 2021. I caught up with her to chat about urban designers  playing god, the text-image relationship, and looking for a home in the threads of diaspora.  

This interview was conducted over video in October 2024. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

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LUKE SUTHERLAND (LS): Something that comes up again and again in Apsara Engine is this collision of the ordinary and the absurd. You can see it in pretty much every story in the collection, but the ones that stick with me are “Throat” and “Love Song.” This fabulism spliced with the everyday slice-of-life genre has something really weird going on with it—what do you think draws to this type of storytelling?

RANI SOM (RS): That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of it until you said slice-of-life. There was a while back when I was trying quite hard to write a very straight slice-of-life story, in the sense that I wanted to focus on conversations and characters that were grounded in reality. I think that was based on a lot of comics that I was reading at the time, like Artbabe by Jessica Abel. Basically, it was a time when comics were focused on young people just talking to each other. I was much younger when I wrote these stories, and I wanted to emulate that energy and draw young people having a good time with no ulterior motives. But those stories evolved as I got older—they matured along with my maturity. I just wasn’t interested in talking about two people hanging out at a bar anymore. Even though I don’t know how deliberate it was, I felt like I just couldn’t stick to that script. The older I got, the more surreal the stories became. I think the stories took a turn into the fantastical of their own will, in a way. 

There’s one which starts off very deliberately as a conversation, “Meena and Aparna,” and while it doesn’t tip over into surrealism, it does take a turn towards the queer and towards disrupting heteronormativity. That’s also a tendency in those stories, there is an undercurrent of queerness that is always trying to break through to the surface and disrupt a normative situation.

A lot of those stories were written early on in my life, some even twenty years ago, before I came out or understood my own queerness. There’s sort of like, cries for help in the way there’s queerness under the surface that is trying to get to the top. Maybe that swerve from groundedness into surrealism, into this sort of phantasmagoric space, is a small metaphor of my own process of understanding my queerness. This is all retroactive analysis, but I kind of feel that’s what was happening. I was trying so hard to adhere to a certain genre, but something inside me was saying that’s not enough. And I think that the queerness was sort of driving the narratives into a realm of unreality and a more dreamlike, ethereal space where the rules don’t apply anymore. Again, these are stories I wrote as a young person that I nevertheless wanted to collect in a book. So they’re of a certain sort of psychic time in my life, and yet I kind of still love them, because they’re part of who I was, and to some degree, still am. 

LS: Something I think about a lot in art—which is so central to comics—is the text-image relationship. Throughout this collection, there’s a really diverse range of how those two things can relate to each other. For instance, near the end of “Swandive” is this ecstatic explosion where the panels almost melt into each other. On the one hand you have this loose, organic association between the two elements, as opposed to what we see in “Come Back To Me,” where really disparate storylines are happening in the text and the image, almost working in opposition to each other. How do you conceptualize the relationship between text and image, and how do you play with that in your work?

RS: You know, I’ve always been interested in that relationship, because I’m interested in how, as comics artists and authors, we have both at our disposal, and how the two things play together. I teach comics, and I’m always interested in having my students understand that if you have two components at your disposal, the two of them don’t have to do the same thing. In fact, why would you want that? I always wonder, if I have a script, what can I do with the image that will supplement, complement, or contradict the text, rather than just repeat or reiterate what the text is saying? Taking that to the extreme was what compelled me to write the two stories that have these most classic tendencies in the book, in terms of the formal aspects, which are “Come Back to Me” and “Love Song.” 

I always wonder, if I have a script, what can I do with the image that will supplement, complement, or contradict the text, rather than just repeat or reiterate what the text is saying?

In the former, the text and image do marry in the beginning, and then they get divorced and go their own way. In “Love Song,” they’re almost completely disparate. It’s like two parallel worlds that you kind of shift in and out of. What’s really interesting about that is the way you as a reader are compelled to try and make sense of it and create a third narrative on your own that is woven into the two narratives that I’ve created. 

The thing is, though, it’s not a puzzle, in that there’s no solution. It’s not like a riddle that you have to solve. There are these threads, but that doesn’t mean that they amount to a tapestry that is going to create a coherent image. It doesn’t take the third narrative to create that third image. It takes your imagination to see a multifaceted image that is sort of flickering in and out of legibility. So I was interested in the ways in which text and image can fight against each other. 

To be honest, I’m not sure how much more I want to do that in my new work, just because I feel like at some point it becomes kind of gimmicky. I would like to see other people try and work with the idea of text and image having a relationship that is based on friction rather than coherence. But for me, if I keep doing that same thing, trying to make these formal experiments, I’m going to be known for that.  And I don’t want to be known for that anymore. I want to have longer sustained narratives about other things. 

There’s so many types of comics that play with that relationship, like abstract comics where you’re forced to impose a certain kind of meaning or logic or order on a series of images that may or may not have text in them. I’m more interested in the possibilities of narrative comics that have figuration and characters that are grounded in reality, but also have this surreal element as represented by text that has a disjunctive relationship with the image? That, to me, is interesting because it speaks more to the way we use words. Language in real life can have a disconnection with the way we live our lives. Like the way in which language has become a contaminant, the way that people use words, and how repetition and virality means certain words come and go in the language. I think it’s infested our culture with a certain kind of myopia. It’s interesting to think of the way comics act as a mirror of that, of the way we live as an image, and the words that we use as a text. There’s a fracture between them, and I think that if one were to modify the way we used language, it would really affect the way we live our lives also. I’m interested in that split both in real life and in comics.

Language in real life can have a disconnection with the way we live our lives.

LS: Comics are pretty uniquely positioned to play with these pieces and live in that friction between image and text in a way that is so much more difficult in a written short story, for instance.

RS: Which is why I love comics so much. There’s so much deep potential. There’s more components to comics than just the text-image split, something else at work other than that binary, but I’m not sure what else ignites the whole medium. 

LS: Well, something that came up for me reading your work is the idea of scale, especially in the title comic “Apsara Engine.” You’re very interested in the relationship of figures to space, but there’s so many types of scale beyond just spatial. There’s temporal—comics can do such interesting things with time—and even the structural scale of the comic being bound by panels. So I would posit that scale could be another dimension to the medium, in addition to image and text. 

RS: A lot of that comes from my architectural training. That sounds so stupid and archaic like I was in the army or something. [laughs]. But no, it really does, because when I was studying architecture, we were forced to understand different scales of practice. We would zoom out to the scale of a city to understand how urban design works. These students, kids who are in their twenties, are forced to think on this urban scale. It’s a lot of playing God. There’s a kind of self-flattery that goes into trying to manipulate cities and blocks to make people balls in a pinball machine, to think that if you design a city a certain way, the balls are going to do a certain thing. We were forced to zoom out and to think about cities as fields of operation. And that’s where I don’t believe in it anymore. I just don’t believe in the project of urban design or architecture, but I am still interested in the idea of zooming in and out of scale, using scale as a vehicle for understanding different kinds of relationships. 

So in “Apsara Engine” [the title comic], you start off on a macro scale, understanding the voices of a city in revolt, and then you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in until you’re in one room. You see those same relationships or conversations that were happening on an urban scale now kind of concentrated into the space of a room. I’m glad you picked up on the temporal zooming in and out, because in that story, there is an idea that you’re both going forward and backward at the same time. If you read it close enough, you can understand the relationship between one character and another in the first urban-scaled spread, and again in the building-scaled spread, and so on and so forth until it telescopes into the space of a room.  It’s a sort of formal exercise, this time not so much dealing with language versus image, but the idea of representation, architectural representation, and how it may or may not interface with the page of a comic. How do the two sites of representation collapse into each other? Or what happens when they try to interfere with each other? 

That’s where that tendency comes from, this idea of architects thinking that they can handle various scales of operation. Which, again, is not something that I think is feasible or desirable, but it’s an interesting way to try and frame fiction or comics. I would rather people didn’t fuck around with like, doing it in real life on a Robert Moses scale, because that way lies madness. But I think it’s interesting to take that tendency and channel it into something like comics.

LS: I definitely picked up on the time scale aspect of “Apsara Engine.” I was flipping through that one in particular like Where’s Waldo. Trying to track characters like that is very fulfilling for me as a viewer. I could come up with a bunch of examples from this collection, but time really is another aspect that comics are uniquely positioned for. One instance that stuck with me is in “Meena and Aparna,” when we experience a break in the narrative as the characters arrive at a surprise party, how slow everything becomes. 

RS: You have to live there, beat by beat in that awkward tension, especially when [the surprise party] is breaking up and [Aparna] tells everyone to fuck off. It takes one page for the crowd to go from like a block of people in the first panel to just [Meena and Aparna] in the last panel. For a whole page, it’s just the crowd dispersing. I really wanted the main feeling of that moment in the comic to be one of awkwardness because Aparna wants something, and she’s finally gotten the gumption to say it, and for that to resonate both for the characters in the story and also with the reader. It takes a whole page of comics in order to let that awkwardness echo. 

But then I think again to the ending of “Swandive,” where time is completely unraveling and there almost isn’t any time, or there are multiple times. Within that kaleidoscopic space you see inserts of the two characters, young and older versions of them, fragments of their conversations. I love the idea that time is dissolved in a way, and that everything that’s happened is happening simultaneously. And by the way, this is before metaverses became a thing. I’m not making any claims, but I wrote that story in like 2018, so well before the glut of metaversical movies and stuff. [laughs]. Also, I don’t think it’s a metaverse as such. It’s more like there’s so many parallel threads to time. In the idea of a metaverse, you’re shifting from one [thread] to the other, and I think in “Swandive,” what I was trying to do is say it’s an entire tapestry at once. All of these threads are woven together to create this nonlinear understanding of space and time. In “Apsara Engine,” you go from left to right [as opposed to top to bottom], and I was interested in mapping time that way in a comic because the time it takes for you to read going from left to right mirrors the time that it takes for the character to move through space, but it also mirrors the time the comic purports to take up. It may start in the morning and end in the afternoon, and there is a kind of implied time that is moving across the page, but towards the end of “Swandive,” all of that linearity becomes a big sort of spaghetti, and all these strands are made into a giant mess. They’re woven together to some degree, but it’s also kind of like a bowl of pasta.
 

LS : There’s so much playfulness in “Swandive.” It opens with the character Onima talking about the idea of trans geographies. Hearing what you had to say about the way architectural students are taught to think about scale and control, it makes for a powerful contrast to what Onima  describes trans geographies as: “maps of a multiplicity of unknown destinations, each unlocking access to a further myriad of open nodes, a kaleidoscope of addresses, a churning constellation of whereabouts.”

RS: Sorry, that’s so pretentious. [laughs]

LS: I think it’s fascinating! I would love to hear you speak to that more, especially what trans geographies could be. How do we speak to that in trans comics or trans art in general?

RS: I don’t know if I can speak for the bigger world of trans comics or trans art, but I can talk about my own experience, which was trying to unlock why I thought maps were so interesting as a child, trying to figure out what it was about the graphic quality of maps that really drew me in. I was always drawing maps as a descriptive project, like I would look out the window of our apartment building and try to draw the plaza below and all the nooks and crannies of the buildings that were surrounding us. I really loved the idea of imagining what was taking place in the various corners of the maps and imagining the kinds of stories that I would love to hear about. The world of play that children have, that I was trying to make concrete in a drawing—I think we all do this. It’s a sort of like an attempt to pin down certain moments of an imaginary landscape, right? I had a zine of stuff that I wanted to write about that just wasn’t out there. I made up subcultures or references to things in the real world that I wanted to see gathered in one collection, like a schedule of programs on a made up TV channel, and I would make up stories about each program. 

All of this is to say, I think that’s the same tendency that feeds into something like “Swandive.” It’s like, as queer people, what are the tools at your disposal to imagine a world where you can—I’m trying to find a word that is not overused. I want to say thrive, but again, this is that reliance on language. The word “thrive” has been overused to the degree where it’s become code for something else. And I think there’s a possibility beyond even thriving. What does the world look like where we can just be and not always have a point of comparison with something else, to be in contrast to something else? What would it be like to have a world that is, by default, queer and or trans?

I’m not going to make grand predictions about or analyze what I think trans art and comics can do, just because it is so multiplicitous. There’s so many approaches that people take to writing queer stories and to making trans art. I don’t think there’s one way of understanding it. “Swandive” is a very personal take on world imagining. If there is a tendency that a lot of us can resonate with, it’s the idea of building worlds. Either very small worlds, like a home for ourselves, or a community of like minded people, or even a bigger scale. As queer people, we’re always trying to find constellations of how to support each other.

It is also trying to weave in not only queer and trans imaginations, but it’s also an attempt, on my part, to understand what to do with all the memories and images that make up my cultural background and my heritage. What does it mean to be a South Asian person of the Indian diaspora who’s never lived in India, and what do I do with all the things that my parents left to me, including methods of cooking or language or cultural artifacts, religion, all the things that they’ve bequeathed to me and are now just free floating signifiers yet are still part of me? How do I coalesce that into something that isn’t just a cloud of markers? I am always grasping at this idea that I would like to have a stable sense of myself and of culture, of my culture, both as a trans person and as someone who is South Asian. 

“Swandive” is an attempt to imagine a more grounded sense of rootedness—to imagine what it would be like to have a moon to come back to as a trans South Asian, which I don’t feel I have, but which I look for and see in other people in my life. I write stories to imagine this. Maybe because I’m from a certain generation, but I don’t think this is the same for younger queers. I’ve been called out for a nostalgic yearning that some conflate with conservatism. I don’t think trying to find a sense of home is conservative. I think we all want that, and I also know I’ll never get it.

I don’t think trying to find a sense of home is conservative. I think we all want that, and I also know I’ll never get it.

LS: Everything you just said about nostalgia and yearning and looking back as a way to look forward is a perfect segue to talk about your graphic memoir Spellbound. It’s a literal memoir, but you kind of have to put an asterisk on the literal part. There is a framing mechanism of you speaking to the reader and explaining to them that you’re going to use the character Anjali in place of yourself. That’s already on the page—but I’m interested in digging in a little deeper. You could say Anjali is an alter ego, an avatar, a portal to a different timeline. But what’s interesting about her is that she also talks back and makes fun of her role in your story. As someone who recently dabbled in memoir too, I’m thinking: Are we always creating alternate selves when we write memoir? Is that perhaps the only way we can write about ourselves?

RS: The genre of memoir is not something I took up with the intention of making a book out of it. It was more like an exercise for myself to keep drawing and writing when I didn’t know what else to write about. I sort of ran out of stories after Apsara, so I just started writing vaguely in the memoir mode, but also I didn’t want to draw myself. And you can probably see there’s a very direct analogy to me not having come out yet. I only came out three quarters of the way through writing Spellbound, and the project was very erratic. I would do these pages when I felt like it. There wasn’t a grand arc of wanting to start a book and finish. I never thought it would even become a book, so somewhere within that space, I came out. My feelings about drawing myself at the beginning were very different than how I felt about myself towards the end. I was much more willing to draw myself by the time the book was about to be shipped off to my publisher. 

There are these two tendencies that are at war with each other, one which was to not draw myself, and therefore to create a character who was going to play me. Then, on the other hand, wanting to reinsert myself back into the book. But by that time it was too late, because I had this character playing me for 120 pages. So, like, what do you do with that? That kind of friction is what creates the asterisk for the memoir, for the genre of the book. It’s not like I wanted to create this fragmented sense of identity, it just happened to be that way, and it’s a reflection of the process that I was going through. 

I will also say, the character Anjali who plays me is cis, and that’s not something I would ever do again. It was something that I did because I didn’t understand my own access to trans voices, which is slightly ridiculous, but I didn’t understand that I could participate in trans language and thought. The natural substitution to me at the time was to have another cis person play me. I didn’t even think about it much. There was too much going on for me to try and analyze that strategy. I just did it, because that’s what I’ve always done in all my comics, I would always have strong femme protagonists. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. Now I do, but the end result is that the various reflections and refractions of self representation on the page start to accumulate.

Understanding yourself is never very clean and direct. It’s messy. The book reflects the prickliness of that process and movement.

LS: I always find it incredible what our art is trying to tell us. Like you said, this wasn’t necessarily an intentional approach you took, but with the framing mechanism and the context of your transition, it creates surprisingly rich moments. At one point Anjali is asked directly if she’s trans, and she says no. 

RS: At the behest of my publisher and editor, I did have to reinsert myself back into the book, which is when the framing device comes into play, with the prologue and the epilogue of me talking to the reader. Then there’s the introduction of a trans character who is, in a way, a more authentic reflection of who I am. When the other character asks Anjali if she’s trans, that’s me asking myself if I am trans, and not being able to answer the question directly, and yet embodying it in this third character. So it becomes even messier. Once I’d crossed a certain point in my own life where I had to then reconcile what it was to understand myself more fully with the project of this book that represented an earlier time in my life—trying to wrap that up in a with a little bow was was quite difficult, and I would never do it again, but the messiness and the multiplicity of it is something that I think is authentic to the time I was living. 

Understanding yourself is never very clean and direct. It’s messy. The book reflects the prickliness of that process and movement.