 We now come to the most awaited moment. We are privileged to have an eminent writer and publisher as our keynote speaker, Dr. Istevyn Kirei. Dr. Kirei is a Naga poet and author who currently lives in Northern Norway. The majority of her writings are based in lived realities of the people in Nagaland in Northeast India. Her novel, A Naga Village Remembered, 2003, was the first novel by a Naga writer in English. Some of her novels include A Terrible Matararchy, 2007, Marie 2010, Bitter Warmwood, 2011, Journey of the Stone, 2021, among others. Kirei has also translated 200 oral poems from her native language, Dinidie, into English. In 2011, Dr. Kirei was awarded the Governor's Medal for Excellence in Naga Literature. She was also awarded the Free Voice Award by Catalan PEN Barcelona. Bitter Warmwood was shortlisted for the Hindu Prize in 2013. A Terrible Matararchy was selected to be translated into U.N. languages. And some of her novels have been translated into German. In 2015, her novel, When the River Sleeps, was awarded the Hindu Literature Prize. We are honored and eager to hear from you, ma'am. Over to you, ma'am. Yes, good morning and thank you. I'm embarrassed about the long introduction because I treat Tito as a family and introductions are not necessary between family members. But thank you anyway. And it's a pleasure to be here. I'm actually in Kuyema at this point. And a bit nervous about electricity because these days we don't get electricity in the day. So I'm going to make my speech very brief so that we don't run out of battery on my laptop. Yes, yes, Tito College, thank you for inviting me. I look forward to the day when I can physically visit you again. And yes, I'll just go straight into the subject matter. Your seminar, I read that it is about voices of the marginalized with special reference to North East India. Also, please stop me whenever necessary if you want me to put up my volume. I'll be banking on you, Anjan. Now, I want to start with this statement. Let us interrogate the idea of marginalization. I don't like that word marginalization. Who is marginalizing who? Let's question. This is an age when we need to question a lot of preconcepts and a lot of things that we've taken for granted in the past and had them passed on to us. The term marginalization has been around for many decades. When we were students at university in 81, 79 to 81, it was the thing to be marginalized. But that is really all hat. And I feel that it's more than high time that we turn this concept on its head. And I want to ask this question. Who told you you were marginalized? Who told you you were marginalized? And I want to stop there a little because it reminds me of one of the first questions that God asked man in the Garden of Eden. He asked Adam, who told you you were naked? And Adam had no answer, but we'll come back to that. So keep that in the little section of your brain. And let's just think about it. Who told you you were marginalized? Because this is a constructed identity that someone from outside wanted to place on you and we allowed them to do that. And then we started to see ourselves as marginalized. So let's rethink this again. And let's do that today now at this moment. As a writer from the Northeast, I frequently get asked questions like questions or get asked if we are from the Northeast, me and all my writer friends from the Northeast, if we are hoping to be more included in the mainstream. And this happened when I got the Hindu award for one of my books. It was asked several times, are you hoping to be more included in the mainstream now? Then I can tell you that I've been asked about root questions and ignorant questions at all the literature festivals outside the Northeast. And the root questions always come from a politically motivated corner. Then the ignorant questions, those I expect them to continue so long as ignorant people are around. We can't do anything about it. It's just shrug your shoulders. Kia kerega. But the question, do you want to be included in the mainstream? What should we do to be part of the mainstream? These are such ludicrous questions. And these are things that the Northeast has been asked time after time. So when your seminar used the word marginalized, I wanted to say that it suggests that there is a center and there are margins. And by that reasoning, we the Northeast are the margins. So I just want to say and share that this is a very dangerous idea. It's dangerous ideology. This is a mindset that has been accepted by political situations and people are still trapped in it. But let's sort of separate it because it works in a political situation. We think of Delhi as the center and it is. Or if we want to be very argumentative, I looked at the map of India today and I saw that Delhi is so way north. It's not the center. Bhopal should be the center. We could argue like that, but there's no time. Life is too short. So I call it a dangerous ideology because when you divide regions into center and margins or peripheries, you get so many complexities that go beyond the geographical. And in layman's language, I want to say it messes with your mind. It really messes with your mind. And the thing is you get a mindset. You get a mindset, you get a mentality. And what happens is you see yourself as forgotten. You see yourself as neglected. You see yourself as victimized. You see yourself as overlooked. And there's nothing positive about such a mindset, really. And okay, that may be true. It's not, I'm not saying no, no, no to these things. It may be true that in the past or even now these things are going on, but let's not adopt that. Let's not go around living with that mindset because it is so negative. Why should be appropriated? And it's something that we should resist with all our hearts. And why should we in the Northeast try so hard to be part of the mainstream? Why should we run after a mindset that depends on our inferiority complex in order to survive? You got that. It depends on our inferiority complex in order to survive. So this is a thing that gets me all riled up. I've been discussing this topic in Sikkim in Gantog, then in Aizol, then all the way to Goa and the wonderful thing Goa because Goa is also considered a periphery by the center. So we were all in agreements that we don't want to accept ourselves as marginalized because it's so unhealthy. And you go to all the so-called margins and you will hear this same argument that they don't feel themselves marginalized. They never want to see themselves as marginalized. And we in Naglain should never, never see ourselves as marginalized either. My next sentence, please don't misunderstand it in literature. In literature, it's highly dangerous to accept the idea of a center and margins. As I said before, it works fine for political geography, but we are not under that. And we don't have a problem that they have centers and margins in political geography, but let us not make the mistake of adapting or integrating it into the field of literature. Why? Because when we start to acknowledge the presence of a center, what happens is we give authority away to the center. And then we give it the authority to define us. See, it's really, really dangerous. I'm not just saying some pretty words or some current words, but the center gets the authority to define us. It gets the authority to make decisions about our writing. And I say this from, I speak from experience. And then it gets the audacity, the temerity to put expectations on us, how we should be writing, what we should write, even the content, it starts to control the content. So I'll give some examples about that. This is so dangerous for our cultural survival and the threat of homogenization of the Northeast. It's very real. And then if we continue to believe in a center, we will lose our quintessential selves and we will lose those elements that make us unique, make us original. And then another danger is that it takes power over the writing of our histories, especially the writing of our political histories. And it decides what can be written, what cannot be written. And Aizol has experienced that. So let's remember, even from a political angle, the center is a creation that is only interested in protecting itself. I'm being very radical, but this is the truth. It's a creation that's only interested in protecting itself and not about, it's not about us at all. So yeah, I want to go on from there and then I want to also add that there will always be inequality, injustice in the acknowledgement of a center and inevitably it's margins and then it's very insidious. So the insidiousness of the culture or having a center, sorry, the insidiousness of the culture of having a center could lead to de-legitimization of our stories, de-legitimization of our stories. And then at worst, it could lead to de-legitimization of our existences as ethnic entities. So let's be aware of all that. And then, yes, I talk about re-centering the center, re-centering the center. And this is basically about choice. You make a choice to re-center yourself. Then you make a decision to reject the definitions that others have given you about yourself. I'll give you two examples here. As Dr. Huesa has mentioned, the first images that we had of ourselves were from the colonial gaze, the colonial officers, the writings, the official writings, and also the anthropological books written on us. If you take time and read through, you can just make a list of how many times we are called barbaric, how many times we're called savage and all these derogatory terms. And then we who read it at first grew up thinking, okay, I'm educated, but my ancestors were barbaric. My forefathers were savage. You know, we grew up with that mentality. So because we accepted that definition given of us by others, then the other is this magazine that all of you are familiar with, North East Sun, North East Sun, right. That has given a definition about the North East, which is accepted wherever that magazine is read. And I'm so angry with it because it sells violence, it sells conflict and sensationalizes the North East. And it always picks on something happening somewhere a bomb blast or, but you know the level of violence we have here is so low actually, so that when something happens, it is news. Other places, it's happening all the time. It's no longer news, but we're created as these groups of people who are always in conflict. These groups of people who thrive on violence because our forefathers were headhunters. See, look at the way it's designed. So we can think about alternatives and an alternative is that is about the recentering of the center and then you take charge. Don't let others take charge over you, over your destiny. You make the decision to see value in what you have because when others define you, they devalue you. In the past, we've been devalued so much. So I always use this phrase being naga centric, being naga centric as opposed to being Euro centric. And when I say naga centric, don't feel that communities that are not naga exclude that. No, is anyone born in Nagaland? I had this wonderful student when I was teaching at university in Nagaland and he was originally from Bihar, but born and brought up here. So he said, when he went away to study in Delhi, he came back saying, ma'am, they're not like us. And you know what that means, they're not like us. He couldn't fit in because he was a naga in his heart. So let's make it very inclusive. It's anyone who thinks of Nagaland as home. Don't allow others to devalue. Don't allow others to define you. And what you do is you recall all the positive things that visitors say about us. And I think 90% of visitors to the Northeast, they like it, they love it, they return. And then they have so many positive things to say about us, right? Except for the ones who get drunk and fight with somebody. Most of the time we hear positive things, let's take those things and then add to that. Add to that the things we know about ourselves that are good because that is our real value. And that is where our center should be. So if we need a center, remember we are the center. We are the center. We are where our center actually is. And we should take pride in it and we should take care of it. So re-centering the center is not allowing others to dictate to us. We've been dictated to for so long. Our literature has been dictated to say, oh, it's such a young literature, but actually we have a very old literature. Let's remember that. We've crossed from oral to written and we're still in the transition page, page, phase, sorry. So because we're still in the transition phase and our written literature is not as much in volume as others. It doesn't mean that we didn't have literature before written literature. We had masses of beautiful, wonderful oral literature. So that's what we have. We should always take both into account. Then this thing about marginalization, it makes that mindset makes us, tries to make us feel we're missing out. It tries to make us feel we're missing out from something because we're far from the imagined center, okay? And we are not, no way, because we're not missing out on air pollution for one. We're not missing out on city crime. We're not missing out on stressful living. And we have clean air except maybe in November, December when the dust level rises. Otherwise we have such good, clean air. We have good water. Quema water is so sweet. I can't drink enough of it. I know in democracy, water is also good. The streets are safe for women. Still, our streets are very safe for women. Sikkim, Gangtog, they said, a woman can walk through the town at 2 a.m. in the morning, never get molested. What is that? That is life in the Northeast. That is normal to Gangtog. Then we live in a place where there's respect for people, for fellow humans. So why exchange all that for the opposite of it? Why exchange that for cost bigotry, for food politics, for gender violence? So we don't want to get close to the imagined center. We don't need to. We have it so much better here. Yeah, so I want to also say that we have to stop using the political center as a yardstick against which to measure ourselves. And then we have to relearn to believe in our own worth. Then let's take care of a center, as I said before, and no one else can take care of our center as we can, as you can, as I can. Recentering ourselves is learning to own ourselves again. Own ourselves, own our stories. Here I want to pause and tell you about a student, another student who was in Syaks in Bangalore. He needed to write something about the Angami Festival of Sekrengi. And somebody told him, recommended a book by Anon Naga, I won't say names, but I always call her a cultural thief because she takes away our stuff and publishes them and becomes the expert. See, that is the thing we have to, please, that's a college. I want you to take this up. Cultural theft is going on right and left and something like a body like yours can do a lot to stop it, to educate our people. So this person took away the story of Sekrengi, wrote about it, put it in a book, and this young student was told, that's the best book on Sekrengi. That's the best book on this Angami Festival. So I, luckily he wrote to me and I told him, I'll translate it for you. Don't you ever use that book? Use a book by Anon Naga. And if not, I'm going to translate and I did. I spent two days translating, but I can't, as long as I'm alive, I can't allow him to use stuff written by a cultural thief. Okay, so that is how we take care of our center. That is how we own ourselves and take care of our intellectual property, our cultural property. By insisting that we are the experts, because we are the experts. It's not, I don't say it with pride. You are the experts on Reema and different tribal cultures. You are the experts on your community cultures. And I am the expert, or I try to be the expert in my culture, et cetera. And let's not have an inferiority complex about that, because this is something that we are born into. Yes, and then remember the power politics and the psychological control. There is a play behind the concept of marginalization. And don't be a watered down version of yourself, because if you submit to marginalization, you will become a watered down version. There are groups that want to water you down so that you fit in, but that's really fitting in is not the question at hand. They want to water you down so they can label you. And as a writer, I can also tell you that there's a very irritating trend to label a writer and have been labeled as feminists and eco-feminists and what other East. So at least it's not ISIS, but I'm not happy with that because I'm not, I'm not this one East or another East. We are human beings. Don't allow people to East you. And it's so one-sided, it's so unhealthy. And also there are some researchers who get very angry if I don't write about conflict in other areas, conflict in the North East, but I'm insisting that conflict is just 9%, 8% of what I write about when I write about my history, the history of my people, that's not the main focus. And you're trying to put me in a box, I refuse to be put in a box. And the same thing here for all of us, when as scholars and as also as people, as human beings, don't allow anyone to put you in a box and label you. We're not commodities, we're human beings. So let's not compromise on our identity because it's God given. And when we ask the question, where is our center? I want to tell you this Adivasi story. My Adivasi friend, Sovendra Hansa, has a story that's very similar to Anangami story. And he said, when they're born, they bury their placenta in close to the place of the birth. And then many years after, when they feel homesick, they long for the place where the placenta is buried. And we have exactly the same version, that homesickness is that you feel homesick for the place where your placenta is buried. So that is the designated place that we consider as home. That is your center, home. The place where you feel at home is your center. And it's just really lovely that both the Adivasi and the Nadas shared this story. And all these marginalized people will have stories like that, stories about belonging. It's about belonging. And where we belong, that is our center. So let's not be deceived. If you feel discontented, are you feeling discontented? I would like to ask, and are you feeling marginalized? If you are, then can you recognize that this is coming? The discontent is coming from an external source, an external source. Come back to Adam. God asked, who told you your naked? And Adam had a very flimsy answer because it didn't come from himself. It didn't come internally. It came from an external source. So he was deceived, but let us not be deceived. Let us recognize where our center is. Let us work on some things and work on perceptiveness. Work on self-knowledge and let's grow up. Let's grow up. Let's not keep adopting theories, adopting whatever that somebody somewhere sends down. Let's not put it on. It doesn't suit us, you know? Let's stop comparing ourselves with others and then let's just work on improving ourselves because that's the best gift you can give yourself. And yes, I'll stop from there. Thank you very much again. And I've been invited to the next session, but so long as my battery lasts. So thank you all again.