As creatives, we bear the unique responsibility of reflecting on the times in which we live using our artwork, challenging oppressive systems while immersing audiences in worlds they would otherwise never know existed. For fiction writers this becomes even more imperative. Renowned author Lauren Francis-Sharma virtually met with The Amistad journal members on March 17, 2025 and discussed what it means to be a novelist writing in the political sphere.

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Francis-Sharma has authored three novels; her recent book Casualties of Truth (2025) explores the historical reverberations and permanent consequences of apartheid in a fractured South Africa. The daughter of two Trinidadian immigrants, Francis-Sharma’s literature is not only an exploration and celebration of heritage but also an interrogation into how cultural identity shapes us individually. This is woven throughout her storytelling.  During the interview, she expressed how the personal is political, especially in times of uncertainty and in the face of unprecedented challenges. Her message of community and how we must revel in its joys while practicing the solidarity that accompanies it has become all too important. 

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Francis-Sharma encouraged us to never believe that our characters are too small to evoke strong emotions. The following is an excerpt of that interview. 

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Amistad Editors:  What advice would you give to us as we’re trying to write stories and different types of narratives while trying to navigate personal experience as well as these broader historical and political themes that might be more contentious or painful to retell?  

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Francis-Sharma:  Inside our narratives, inside our lives are all these political, social conversations that are naturally going to come up and all it is at the end is sort of fine tuning. And frankly, what happens often is that your readers see it even before you do. Your readers begin to realize what you’re doing on the page is a lot more than what you even intended when you first began to write. So trust your instinct, trust the story and really trust that you have something to say about even the “smallest” most insignificant lives because, for me, my grandmother was a domestic and she worked cleaning hospitals for 40 years. This was not a life that you thought anybody should be writing a story about and yet people write me even now 12, 13 years later saying, ‘Thank you for this. I understand my grandmother better, I understand my mother better.’ 

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Amistad Editors:  How long did it take you to find a supportive literary community? 

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Francis-Sharma: I’m going to say that I‘m still building. I’m 14 years into this and I’m still building my writing community and I think it’s going to continue that way. I think I’m never going to be over…I really think me doing it the way I did, I’m still seeking and still building and it's particularly challenging because as you continue to publish, the more you’ll have to find people who are in the same place you are.  

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Amistad Editors:  In fiction, when you’re writing a narrative that is personal to you and spiritually connected to you, you want to say so much. How do you know what to focus on and what to leave out? 

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Francis-Sharma:  You can take it so far with yourself but at some point, you have to let your narrative go and let your character take over. Usually, that’s where the fiction part turns. In fiction, you’re often trying to say to yourself as you’re writing, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen to my character? I have to turn up the heat for my character, constantly. If you’re someone who avoids confrontation, it’s really uncomfortable to turn up the heat on your character because you actually want to protect your character, you want to sort to help them out.  

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But it’s in turning up the heat that the character becomes different from you, and you get the tension. And you want to build the tension because, very often, it’s changing the narrative from your own story in just that one very important way and that one very important turn. Then you’ll see that, all of a sudden, it opens up. Then the character becomes totally different from you.