Raaza Jamshed: a note on What Kept You?

Raaza Jamshed reflects on her debut novel What Kept You? (1 July 2025), a feminist anti-tale that explores survival, metamorphosis, and the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending.

The conception of this novel began with my short story titled Concinnity: Some Awkward Digressions, which posed, in oblique ways, the question of return. What can return look like, not just to a place, or a life interrupted, but to a self? What Kept You? is, in many ways, a series of responses to that question. Each chapter could be read as an answer to a different dimension of what keeps us away, or stands between us and the path home.

I grew up on my grandmother’s stories, some steeped in folklore, others pieced together from black-and-white headlines read aloud at breakfast. Often, these were stories about girls who left home and never returned. Girls whose mothers and grandmothers longed to ask: What kept you? There were other stories too – the slow collapse of the reef in Cairns and blue plumes rising from Pakistan’s largest landfills – that formed a background weather as I wrote this book. The sense of loss was monstrous, cumulative and hovering, beyond containment. It was in the face of this monstrous grief that I found myself returning to a line from Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I wanted a girl in my story to get away. I wanted her to survive, even if that survival looked like wreckage.

But I was also asking: How does someone face the monstrous and not become monstrous herself? What does it take not just to endure, but to return?

This is a coming-of-age novel, but not in the conventional sense; it’s not as a flight into individuation but a return to a self, shaped by inherited multiplicities. And in this novel, that return is not clean; it arrives through rupture. At times, all three selves – what Márquez called the public, the private, and the secret – collapse into one another. This novel is, in many ways, a story told at the mouth of catastrophe, where fairy tales meet headlines, where frogs kissed become dogs, and girls sucked by shadows reappear elsewhere. But it’s also a love song to return, to storytelling as survival, to metamorphosis. If Kafka imagined metamorphosis as a man waking up a bug, I wanted to ask: What does metamorphosis look like for women who change slowly, imperceptibly, under the grind of history, migration, grief?

There is a grandmother at the heart of this novel. Or perhaps a meditation on the denial of death. The difference didn’t matter by the end. What remained was the intimacy of speaking to the dead, a spectral and semantically slippery presence that offered its own language of knowing. I kept returning to the idea of manzil, the act of chanting words until they slip past meaning and land in intuition. I wanted this novel to unfold that way, a story told and retold, arriving somewhere new in the old.

I also carried with me the myth of my foremothers – Kashmiri women who vanished into jungles and returned bearing new language. They did not return to the same world; they remade it in new words. The idea that poetry should not imitate the world but create one, central to Vicente Huidobro’s poetics, felt essential to my understanding of their stories of survival. In writing this book, I’ve tried to do the same: to create a self, braided from exile and return, a concinnity where each fracture carries the shape of the whole.

What can return look like, not just to a place, or a life interrupted, but to a self? What Kept You? is, in many ways, a series of responses to that question.