Ammu's Letter: GOST Creative Project and Reflection

There’s a hole in the universe waiting for you

Men there are many, but lovers there are few

My God of small things, you understand

We are prisoners of war the love laws have banned

The river by the factory tarred and dried

There’s only garbage now where Sophie Mol died

The time in Ayenemen is always ten til two

I had two egg twins but you took half with you

Littleangel littledemon

You loved them like a madman

The river by the factory tarred and dried

There’s only garbage now where Sophie Mol died

Polishing firewood like its a brass vase

Moths in tea evaporate

Someday Rahel is going to wear my wedding ring

There’s nothing left to do

I’ve got nothing left to bring

Just the smell of old roses on a breeze

The river by the factory tarred and dried

There’s only garbage now where Sophie Mol died

Finding Meaning in Motifs: GOST Creative Project Reflection

When I set out to write a song based around The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, I found myself without a clear first step. Without a formula providing a definite process on the project rubric, initially, I felt lost. Roy’s prose felt too complex to dissect, so intricate that I felt I could never find a point of entry into the structure and literary devices behind it. Every sentence felt vital, the wealth of writing seemingly impossible to sift through and find an aspect to focus in on.

I skimmed back through the book, searching for ideas within my underlines and margin notes. As I looked, I found that certain phrases and images surfaced regularly, creating links between scenes. I created a list of these motifs as I discovered them - Pappachi’s moth, two egg twins, a Hole in the Universe, Rahel’s toy wristwatch. In an attempt to make sense of this list, I organized the pieces of imagery according to the characters they were associated with. However, I found it difficult to assign any motif to just one character. As I looked back in the novel, I found that the moth was just as often associated with Rahel as Pappachi, the two egg twins mentioned often in conjunction with Ammu rather than just Estha and Rahel, and the Hole in the Universe linked to almost every character at some point.

I decided to do a freewrite exercise to take a step back and search for another perspective on the motifs I had found. When I looked back at my writing, a few central topics presented themselves - cycles of nature, family, hereditary traits, injuries and death. I reached another stopping point here, however, as I once again attempted to organize the imagery into lists, this time based around the topics I had identified in my writing exercise. Using these lists, I surgically separated the phrases into neat verses but still didn’t feel any inspiration for writing music to go with the lyrics.

After several unsatisfying song drafts, I then realized that, when the images are scientifically separated into categories, they lose the meaning that they bring together. Consequently, I realized that one of the most vital and effective aspects of the way Roy addresses these topics lies in the novel’s jumbled and intricate structure. In The God of Small Things, stringent social norms are inherently connected to family dysfunction, which in turn spreads throughout generations. Mirroring the structure of the book, in the lives of the Ipe family, complex order creates chaos.

After I stopped attempting to systematically separate the repeating images, the song came together quickly. I framed it as a letter from Ammu to Velutha, sometime in the days after Sophie Mol’s death, using the images I had collected to show how the topics of social norms, familial dysfunction and trauma in the novel interweave in one microcosmic moment of the book. Because of the open-ended nature of this project, I was free to find my own path to connect to the text, a process that, although frustrating at times, allowed me to gain a greater understanding of the novel from a perspective I may have not otherwise discovered.