It’s 1986, and the Creel sisters, Georgie and Agatha Krishna, are plotting murder. They blame the British. They also blame Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, the Olympics, the state of Wyoming, their amma and appa, their amma’s parents, and even AIDS. They blame everyone they can so as to avoid admitting—even before their victim is dead—that guilt is eating away at them.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, the twisty debut novel by Nina McConigley, author of the award-winning 2013 short story collection Cowboys and East Indians, traces the months leading up to and following the death of Vinod Ayyar. In 1986, Vinny Uncle, as narrator Georgie calls him, moved into the Creels’ house in Marley, Wyoming (likely a fictional version of Casper), along with his wife, Auntie Devi, and his son, Narayan: “The Ayyars dipped into our lives like a tea bag into the whiteness of a porcelain cup. They muddied the water and made our house feel small, having taken over Agatha Krishna’s old bedroom.”
This description of the Ayyars is both striking and disturbing: their brownness, their foreignness “muddying” the general racial whiteness of Marley and the relative light-skinnedness of the Creel family, which is mixed (the sisters’ dad is white, but they call him the Tamil word for “father,” Appa). Colorism has a long and complex history—which British colonialism certainly contributed a great deal to in recent centuries—and Georgie considers: “Is marrying a white person winning? I wonder if Amma thought it was. Appa wasn’t rich, and his skin looked like boiled shrimp after he’d been in the sun. Amma called him ‘Prawny.’ But she was glad his white skin had made us less dusky.” But the sisters, in their litany of blame, think their parents “shouldn’t have married, that they shouldn’t have mixed us up. Shouldn’t have made us halfies.”
Being what she calls “split” is a key part of Georgie’s life—she is split within herself as a girl who is half brown and half white; she is split from her classmates at school, she and Agatha Krishna like “ink spots in class photos”; and, eventually, she is split from Agatha Krishna. Although she narrates the story from an adult perspective, Georgie is still clearly processing the foundational and traumatic time after the Ayyars came to stay, and the book appears to be the very first time she’s talked not only about the murder but about what preceded it. “Linked like two chains,” the sisters were allies before the arrival of Vinny Uncle, who, Georgie explains, “started in on [Agatha Krishna] first, and me later. He’d take one of us into the bathroom with him, and when we came back out, we’d be split, from each other, from ourselves.”
And so—they poison him.
The “trauma plot” has been the subject of much recent discourse, but McConigley’s novel cannot be condensed into that neat oversimplification. For one thing, Georgie first introduces herself as a perpetrator and only later admits to being also a victim; it’s unclear which role has been more traumatic, which sits more heavily upon her. Although the murder seems to be Agatha Krishna’s idea, Georgie holds herself just as responsible. And although Vinny Uncle’s death changes the family irrevocably, she doesn’t regret him being gone. Yes, there is guilt laced through the pages of her confessional book, and yes, she feels bad for never quite having considered how her cousin Narayan would grieve for his father, and yes, she even remembers some good times with her uncle. But the real tragedy of the novel is neither his death nor the abuse he inflicted—it’s losing Agatha Krishna in the aftermath of the murder. The secrecy and its attendant silence become an ever-heavier burden between the sisters.
We know little about Georgie’s adult life other than the fact that she stays in Marley, while Agatha Krishna manages to make a life for herself elsewhere. But we do know that Georgie is angry, and justifiably so, at feeling like she has to tell her story a certain way in order to keep a certain portion of her audience—white, American—engaged. “Let’s just say it,” Georgie addresses this reader in the second chapter. “This story is for you; I know you want it to go a certain way.” And then she lists the things a white reader expects from her: mangoes, saris, spices and food, wild animals, poverty, religion, colonialism, cows, and magical realism or the uncanny. About this last item, she writes, “Being of color is uncanny. Why do we need any more? You will always be exotic. Your skin a mystery. Your presence unsettling.”
This second-person address shifts—the “you” in the first quote above is clearly the white reader; the “you” in the second is Georgie herself. Georgie is half white, split, and so perhaps the “you” she’s addressing is always, in a sense, the part of herself that has internalized American racism, colorism, and expectations of the exotic. Whether or not my read on that is correct, though, the shifting use of “you” is one of the many reasons this novel feels like it could have been titled How to Commit a Postmodern Murder. In addition to such direct addresses to the reader (which, arguably, are not postmodern at all but more reminiscent of the ways oral storytelling and folktale traditions often involved the audience in the telling; they’re also present in classic British literature), McConigley makes liberal and effective use of different forms, including illustrations, lists, and quizzes that mimic those that Georgie and Agatha Krishna encountered in teen magazines, here with titles ranging from “How Do You Know If A Boy Likes You?” to “Do You Have What It Takes To Kill?”
For all its formal risks, for all the ground it covers, and despite its slimness, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder packs the kind of gut punch that leaves a reader breathless.•
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novels Beings and All My Mother’s Lovers and is coediting a forthcoming anthology about the Bachelor franchise.
