Great Writers Inspire at Home: Nadifa Mohamed on travelling, home and belonging in Black Mamba Boy

so it's my great pleasure to welcome our chair for this reading part of meeting the writer of our time together and that is Kate Haines and then Kate will introduce it so Kate is the director of Hooser Press in Rwanda and she is research associate at both Bath Spa and crystal she's an African estancia lively and proactive editor of Africa words which is an amazing blog site that I would recommend to everyone and she has a growing of budding interest in Somali writing and it's that that's for just the link that we have here this evening between herself Kate Haines and the deeps of Mohammed so you very welcome [Applause] thank you very much so yeah I'm really delighted to be as part of the great writers inspire a team series and yeah the next so it's really about putting you the readers of the novel in conversation with them you leave that effort at the writer of the book but kind of to put that in that conversation in context we wanted to introduce India very briefly and Muhammad was born in her gala in 1981 a news to London in 1986 I mean that was initially intended to be temporary but became permanent when civil will break out and her family was unable to return and she grew up in South London and she studied in history of politics here at the University of Oxford so in 2013 and she was selected as one of Grant says best of young British novelists and a list that has appeared every decade for the last 30 years and been very prescient in identifying voices and with enduring significance within British fiction and in 2014 she was named one of the most promising right to the south of the Sahara under 40 by Africa 39 a collaboration between her hey festival in Nigeria's rainbow but plus her first novel that mammoth loin which we're going to be talking about now I was published in 2010 by HarperCollins in the UK and it was longlisted for the orange prize shortlisted for the Guardian press before the join will avail and we surprised the Dylan Thomas Prize the pen open book award and won the metal plastic or wood and her second novel the author of muscles was published in 2013 by Simon & Schuster in Cannes so I just wanted to start this session by asking and is eager to just read to us a little bit from black man oh boy okay hi everyone thank you for coming here on this lovely day I'll read it's just a short piece from the very beginning of the novel in Aidan in 1935 the Museum's call startled charmer out of his dream and he pulled himself up to look at the Sun rising over the Cape domed mosques the gingerbread add any apartments glowing at their tips with white frosting the black silhouettes of birds looped high in the inky sky circling around the few remaining stars in the pregnant moon the black planets of dramas eyes roamed over Eden the busy industrial steam appointed crater the sandstone old town its curvaceous tan colored buildings merging into the shim sham volcanoes the Mahalo a shake will cement districts white and modern between the hills and sea would smoke and infants cries drifted up as women took a break from preparing breakfast to perform our own prayers not needing the expectations of the old news in a vultures nest encircled the ancient men Voltas last encircled the ancient minaret the broken branches festooned with rubbish the nests corrupting the neighbourhood of the stench of carrion the attentive mother fed rotting morsels to her cherubim chicks her muscular wings and hunched at rest beside her dramas own mother and burro stood by the roof edge softly singing a song in her deep and melodious voice she sang before and after work not because she was happy but because the songs escaped from her mouth her young soul roaming outside her body to take the air before it was pulled back into drudgery Umberto shook the ghosts from her hair and began her morning soliloquy some people don't know how much work goes into feeding their ungrateful guts I think there's some kind of soul down you can idle about without a care in the world head full of trash only good for running a round of trash well over my dead body I don't grind my backbone to dust to sit and watch filthy bottom boys roll around on their backs these poems of contempt these cubbies of dissatisfaction greeted Sharma every morning incredible meandering streams of abuse flowed from his mother's mouth sweeping the macadam at the factory her son long-lost relatives enemies men women Somalis Arabs Indians into a pit of damnation get up you stupid boy you think this is your father's house get up you fool I need to get to work JAMA continued to roll around on his back playing with his belly button stop it you dirty boy you make a hole in it and butter slipped off one of her broken leather sandals and marched over to him JAMA tried to flee but his mother dived and attacked him with stinging blows get up I have to walk two miles to walk to work and you make a fuss over waking up is that it she raged go then get lost you good-for-nothing Jana blamed aden for making his mother so angry he wanted to return to her gay sir where his father could calm her down with love songs it was always at daybreak that Jarmo craved his father all his memories were sharper in the clean morning light his father's laughter in songs around the campfire the soft long-fingered hands enveloping his own jamot couldn't be sure if these were real memories or just dreams seeping into his waking life but he cherished these fragile images hoping that they would not disappear from him like his father had jamot remembered traversing the desert on strong shoulders peering down in the world like a prince but already as Father's face was lost to him hidden behind stubborn clouds thank you that and yeah one of the things we've been doing in the previous hour is kind of sharing passages which were particularly memorable two words about the beckons and and yeah it's a bit great to hear you read that this will mean that though the kind of long-fingered hands of the father really really kind of stayed with me as an idea so this conversation is it's concerned about exploring the relationship between leaders and and writers and and so I wanted to start by asking whether you have a particular reader in mind when you write them and and how you work to address that reader if you do kind of through your writing process I don't think I do I think that I'm basically writing for myself and working out things for myself and my father's story which is this is very closely based on not 100% but very closely I'm so fascinated to me and so strange and so revealing of lots of things that really I was talking to myself and it was such a long drawn-out process of writing it late at night on my own stopping and starting and really apart from collaborating with my father and talking to him about his own life it was a very private activity and I didn't expect to publish it I didn't intend to publish it until probably two three years into the process so I wasn't thinking about a public audience and actually when it was published it felt very jarring for both me and my father where suddenly private activity between us was seen as public property and his life story felt like public property as well so despite him always saying that he he should have a book written about him because his life's been so interesting when that actually did happen it felt strange to him and I managed to persuade him to do just one event with me and it was with the angle of smiley society which was part of for a long time and I'm a part of as well and it was only in that kind of familiar intimate environment that he could talk about the book as being part of his own life and so kind of thinking of you have your kind of father as a reader of the book where was where the places where your kind of choice of language felt shapes by thinking of him reading not the language but probably the content what do I choose to include and what do I choose to take out so it started off as a very straight biography of him and it was only meant to be a few pages long so just really an account of the highlights of his early life really and it just grew and grew and grew and there was my first creative writing experience I think completely yep so I was also working at what I wanted to do with it so very quickly I realized that it wasn't satisfying just to write as a short and brief account of his life I loved learning about Aidan you know Aidan in the early 20th century was still so unchanged from how it had been for thousands of years very magical and my father being in the months that allowed me to kind of explore and have fun with that and that every every other place that he went I learn more about and enjoyed and you know I've always loved fiction but I also used to meet a lot of travel fiction so the idea of kind of traveling through books was something that was very normal to me so well the more I learned about places the more I wanted to put in the book about places for the reader whoever that might be yes in the end and I think one of this one of the things this project is particularly exploring is this the kind of relationship between kind of writing as an active communicational or I guess writing more as a kind of writing to create a work of art kind of a craft process and I mean I've Eve talked about it being a kind of personal I think but I guess in relation to it because you know you've obviously published a second novel you're working on that you know how would you say you'd be writing in just changed yeah the way I viewed it has changed so this one was almost the polemic I think and there was there was so many parallels so I was writing in in the 2000s where people were talking about Iraq they were talking about an American Empire and new American Empire respectable figures were talking about these sorts of things and we had the images from Abu Ghraib and there was such huge parallels between what my father had experienced in the 30s and 40s and what was happening then and I think you can't help but to take in that environment that you're working in and it affects the way you shape your writing and what you're writing about and how you're writing about it so I think that now the book I'm working on is very similar in some respects the black man my boy it's about the same community of men of sailors living in the UK in the 1940s and 50s from Somalia and it's based on a man that my father knew but it's it's also very different in the sense that because he's not my father there's this distance between us that I can I can see him in a more objective way I'm not this isn't I'm not agree oath for the guy I'm working about what right now I'm I'm a friend or I'm you know I'm an ally in some respects that he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice he was executed for a murder he didn't commit so I'm an ally of his I think there's nothing there's no other way you can be but at the same time I can be more objective so I do think that there is a change that I'm talking about in justice I'm talking about differences in power of violence but I'm doing it in a different way to how I did it here and before I even a kind of questions up to the room and I need lots of people have got questions they want to ask you about I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the kind of publishing process and obviously you kind of talked a bit about you know it being quite a shock for the book to be kind of out in the world and I just wondered if there were particular things about the way that you represented as a writer or the book was were represented kind of through the publishing process or through a publicity and media that either particularly delighted you or that equally particularly irritated you my first concern was the editing process that was my big concern because because it had been so private for so long and because it was about my father there was some parameters that I wasn't willing to go beyond but in both with my UK editor and my US editor they did respect that and the fear that I had that they might want to tone it down wasn't the case I think the u.s. if there was one scene which we can talk about later which my u.s. editor did want to trim back and we we worked out a kind of happy medium with it but in the UK I felt there was actually quite a lot of freedom I could say what I want and how I wanted to you know in whatever way I wanted and it was just more a question of shaping the story the biggest change that happened was in my first manuscript chalmers mother survives she's with him for a lot longer and it was my editors suggestion that to break from real life and have the mother died very early on so the focus is just on drama as a young boy in this environment and that took some convincing partly because I knew that my father wouldn't like it because it wasn't the truth and it felt very strange killing off your grandmother so I didn't want to do that but she was right she was right and when I did that suddenly other things started to fall into place it became we kind of need a sharper story and the other things around publishing we talked briefly just about the cover and I think you writers don't normally get much say when it comes to covers you're showing it and you ask to give some feedback but it's not it's not really within your control is it it's very much it's a consensus within the publishing company so it's very orange in the UK as you can see and it's very kind of African fictiony it's not I think kind of I think that they had an idea about making it as accessible as possible and I think that was right and I think people picked it up that might not have if it had seemed you know in a different way a different style of book so I think it worked it worked and this is the American cover which I really like and it's of a young boy jumping with illustrated angel wings and I like this this is playful it does have the dust and a bit of orange but it's a bit more playful but I have noticed that this is easy to find in every bookshop which I think every writer is it's not happy it's not unhappy with that other respects I think that whole pigeonholing I guess of what what makes an African writer an African writer I'm of African descent I think there's no doubt about that I'm Somali but there's I think maybe this idea that even though I grew up in the UK that you're still you're still very different and I think that's that's a misapprehension of it so it is it's weird and I think I'm in a particularly weird position because I often do things to the British Council so I travel with the British Council and there you're an African writer be also a British writer so you're often asked about your identity and something which you don't you don't think about you don't think about do I feel British today - I feel african today - I feel Somali today it's just part of you every day you know I experience in life and you perceive things through all of those lenses but you go to a country and suddenly it's kind of like well do you feel British and that I think was a bit of a struggle I just want as a question about language of the book because like is that you you are a British writer and especially for me like for who for those readers who's like language is not the first language is not English but then when I read the book actually do you insert a lot of I don't know how to categorize Arabic and also Somali work words and and you know maybe an academic setting for a long time usually we italicize or the French or German words and so my experience of reading that this book is like there are lots of this foreign words that I was not sure whether they are English what I'm supposed to know as a student or it's just it's just part of the vocabulary borrowed from you know the setting you were dealing with yeah so I I wanted when you were writing it were you aware about you know the choice of vocabulary yes it was an active decision and it was an active decision to not have a glossary because I've always read books that are from different languages whether that's you know books by Indian authors by South American authors and I was also I always had the impression that I understood I would get from the context and the feeling what the word meant and if I really wanted to especially know what the internet you could find out very easily but the more the more I've published and the more I've spoken to readers I realized that people often don't know what the word meant and that is actually quite alienating because the meaning I was trying to get across then is lost because the meaning I thought was clear it's not clear so that's something I'm thinking about for the book I'm working on right now because again it's got lots of languages in it and then it's got slang as well English slang Jamaican slang so it's a real kind of part of buried influences and I don't want the reader to be lost but I also don't want to lose that texture and this was normal life you know a Somali guy who can speak Hindi who can speak Arabic who can you know chat and use cockney cockney slang or criminal slang whatever it might be that's just the reality so I think kind of in an academic setting you'd have footnotes and you know it'd be very very clear but you can't I don't want to do that in a in a fiction and no Junot Diaz is someone I love and he does in in Oscar wow he does have footnotes and lots and lots of Spanish terms and that's it's one approach but I don't thats the one I want to take with the novel I'm working on now and I don't think it's a bad thing for the reader to be alienated sometimes I think when I read novels that I set in places I've never been but yet it is somehow to smooth and to to Weston or to familiar I don't know what the word is then I think there's something there's something missing there it should it should feel a little bit alienating when you're reading about culture you don't know about so one of the we chose kind of episodes out of the novel look with it sort of were very memorable and one of them that I that I chose was about when jamma is going to carry the carcasses for that for the butcher and yeah he stinks artists and his and all the blood stolen he can't even wash yeah and which was great a really great fun writing that yeah and so one of the questions I wanted to ask was yeah there's so much energy in that scene and it's very memorable and it's very physical and whether your father but you what I felt when I was reading is that you I can imagine him telling you about it do you think the energy in absolutely I think it did I think that that's probably why it became that kind of scene because he was so vivid in his own description and so proud of himself at the same time that he was this tiny boy carrying these huge camel carcasses on his shoulders and it's such a it's almost like a metaphor isn't it the weight that he is carrying the burden that he's carrying so yeah I think that and yeah the idea of waking up at dawn all of these little boys creeping out of the city the town to settle and to work and even that horrible job is something to be competed over and it's almost like you know a surprise and it's the very beginnings of the physical labor of being a man of being a colonial man in that environment that he's just getting the first taste itself because he did have jobs in Eden as well he used to collect tennis balls on courts and things like that and sometimes you know fairy things from one place to another but this was the first real physical job I think he had so yeah and there's quite a few scenes where it was his energy I think that's there he was a great speaker and agreed he loved language he was someone that kind of was always always had a dictionary nearby in multiple languages and never lost that desire to learn more about language yeah I think just moving on from from Eleanor's question but still on this amazing energy in in in in the story how did you I don't really have a specific question I just wondered if you could talk a bit about how it was to transfer what must have been these long meandering stories from your father onto the page whether you you know whether you use memory a lot or notebooks or just sort of whether you were the person him yeah there's that sort of question yeah they actually weren't so meandering and I think because he'd been saying for a long time that his story was worth telling and worth writing but in a way he had shaped it in his own mind because I my first attention was just to write down everything that he had told me and I think I did get quite close to that so it kind of been too meandering and so some things are probably simplified and you know you put lots of slightly different days into one day or there's some of that going on but most of it is is how he told me the very first part of the process and actually it happened by accident started recording him or interviewing him while I was still at university here and I studied it makes for a kind of medieval British history and international relations by his antium and the early Islamic empires and things so it was very very different to anything from my own background and I think I love history and I love all global history but there was something I needed to work out within my own background my own roots because Somali had collapsed by that stage and the only information you could find about it was very negative and I felt very about very isolated I think probably alienated while being here from my roots whatever that might mean so I interviewed him and that was just the one off and then how did it happen I actually started interviewing properly I was interviewing him about a film I wanted to make about the guy I'm now working on for a book Mahmoud Martin who was a Somali sailor that he knew who was executed in Cardiff in 1952 and I was intending to make a film of him soon after I left University so to research Mohammed story I sat down with my father to find out what he knew of him and so he told me literally said he's normal he's it was medium height you know very cursory details and very quickly it became about him and about his own life and how remarkable it was and I said okay well let me record this just just for family's sake and my first niece had been born recently at that time so I wanted to record it for her so I got my MD recorder and just put a microphone in front of him and he kind of organized the information and he went back back back so he started before he was born to his own parents where they were born in their own situations and he through family stories oral history he knew that he thought that one of our ancestors had fought in these big battles between the Somalis and Abyssinians in the fifteen hundreds so it was a very in-depth history because Somali Somali life is arranged around these you know your client is your your ancestry your grandfather's and so as well as their name and maybe a tiny bit of their life or their stories might be passed down along with that so he started at that level and then moved to his birth and then he stopped when he was about in his early twenties so he thought that was the interesting part of his life and maybe if he had carried on I don't know what the book would have looked like then but he was very adamant that after that his life became boring so he did we did that in English with me asking him questions and kind of pushing him for more details or whatever but he also did it by himself in Somali just recording himself on tapes and that was something he wanted to do but I also have those tapes so I had that base knowledge and to be honest that was that was it I think that was what I needed for the book but then all the time we we spoke about his life story I would ask him specific details about things we'd go over old maps together we went to the Imperial War Museum together to look at old newsreels from where he lived in Eritrea and Chesson a and around those western lowlands we went to Cardiff together to the Butte Town Arts & History Center which has got a large Somali history archive there as well so it was very collaborative and he was the person who you know what I was starting to lose faith and everything and I applied to do a PG C to become a teacher and at the very last minute I decided to just finish this book and then see what happened and he was always very supportive he always thought it was a worthwhile thing to do and it's partly because again of his passion for language and for words and he saw being the writer as being a dignified profession like not many people do but he did so that was the process we were just discussing earlier that there are certain scenes in your book which are very graphic in its detail of violence I overheard I Sarita I'm not really terribly put out by scenes of violence but it seems like I was wondering whether you have a certain idea in mind when you're writing these things in graphic detail that do you want to perturb your reader or do you have something else that you're thinking about well acting BC I think it's difficult to say and I'll tell you the genesis I don't know the scene you're talking about it's with Siobhan and the Italian soldiers so that isn't that's one of the things that's actually not from my father's experience but the two boys that it's based on our boys that my father was reunited with he knew them in Eden and then they were reunited in Karen so that part's true but the violence inflicted on Siobhan that came from I think my own you know when you're writing about all of these things bubbled to the surface and when I was going through the old records and Sylvia Pankhurst is actually she wrote this incredible book about human rights abuses in colonial East Africa in Italian East Africa in the 1930s and she compiled a story after story of torture murder rape the rest of it and then it's also you have these trophy images that the Italians took themselves and have passed on my mother was aware of them is she she's much younger than that so she was aware of Italian soldiers asking Somali men and presumably Eritrean men as well to lie down if there's a waterway to cross it they would cross it on their backs and I saw images of heads piled up you know this is very graphic it's very graphic material there's no way of getting around that and I think it was combination of seeing though those images and reading about that in the 1930s and 40s seeing those images later on of Abu Ghraib and then something which I thought you know it was in my mind I hadn't I wasn't aware of it I thought I'd kind of it had disappeared from my mind but while I was writing I remembered something which had really got under my skin when I was 15 years old and it was seeing images from Operation Restore hope in Somalia and there were quite a few accounts of human rights it's such a vague term I don't even like the term human rights abuses if it doesn't it doesn't explain what what we're talking about but we'll call it that so Belgian troops Canadian troops American troops various troops tortured and killed young Somali boys and girls and men and adults and there was one image that I can still see in my mind right now of Canadian paratroopers in a town called Bela Duane which is between Somalia and Ethiopia on the border and he was 16 years old his name's Shimon so I actually even before that happened I blame the character after him I don't know why so yeah even before I've got to that scene I was thinking about him I must have been otherwise I would have named the character Shivan so the last moments of his life there were pictures taken of it and they're incredibly graphic and you know terrifying because the men the Canadian soldiers are smiling you know these and these are not men ashamed of what they're doing they're very proud and his cries could be heard within the camp so God knows how many dozens of people heard and there was a there is a fantastic book by Shirin Razak about this whole case because it was discovered and prosecuted and one of the men received a very short prison sentence for it so it was massive almost like biblical act of violence but I had I had seen as a young person and I think had got under my skin so it was that image that was there not words so I guess I was trying to turn that image into words and I might add it to my American editor was very much kind of show don't tell you know there's other ways of doing it but I think almost in a political sense I didn't want to do that we always look away we always look away and this was an opportunity for me and for the reader to not look away we use a lot of jargon I think to distance ourselves from exactly what we're talking about and sometimes you have to strip that jargon away but from the beats that people chose I got the sense of a general allegory of life in something a message beyond the words thank you I like that actually on the pages you can talk about that as a bit more yes sorry the example was like what is it the hyenas yeah and the camels on and this is the fact that hyenas eat the smugglers when they are not paying attention yes but again it's one of my father's favorite things to talk about as he got older actually much later on after I finished the book he started having these dreams and in his dreams he would jump out of bed because he would be back in Eritrea but in the desert on camel backs with hyenas following him so he always talked about hyenas but it created a massive impression on him I guess if any kind of terrifying Hannibal was following you'd have an impression I've never I've never had that I've never experienced that but it's there's something magical about walking through this pale desert just with moonlight and you know that if you fall you're dead that's what he kept saying if you fall you're dead if you broke a limb you're dead if you're if you're not able to stay on that camel and go to where you need to go your life is over and I think that that purity that moment of realization that your life is fragile but beautiful and you're alive it was something that in many points of his life it feels in if you can feel the intensity of that so in terms of being almost like a metaphor I think yes the procedure you're pursued you're pursued by different dangers and you're you're constantly trying to keep yourself together keep yourself in movement and I think being who he was being young being a black man in a colonial environment those hyenas were buried and but Proust that Poquette progress you're making physically spatially was also something but you couldn't you couldn't stop you had to keep moving and it's something that Toni Morrison writes about in beloved where one of the male characters he says that if you stop you'll be chained I'm paraphrasing and it's not in the exact phrase but that's basically the gist of what he's saying that if you stop moving then your life is over and it's something that you know one of my favorite authors Claude Lakai also writes about you know he writes about Marseille being this kind of melting pot of African and black sailors you know from all over the world fleeing lynchings fleeing this fleeing that and then recreating themselves but they're still in movement no one is there forever they come and go they run off with a woman you know they jump on a train without a ticket there's just this this flux this constant flux that goes throughout the whole life and this is a question that follows on a little bit from what ellika was asking I was struck from the past that you read about the the act of memory especially when the little boy remembers his father's black hair and how how he missed him and from what you've been saying about how your father told you many of the stories it's partly based on memory yet it doesn't seem as though it is so how do you get around that apart from putting everything into the prison so it doesn't feel like it's a memory not feels lately it feels as though it's in them in the very minute that you're reading it yeah well that's a great thing to hear thank you yeah how do you I think the process of writing so you're hearing it I'm hearing my father's memories but when you write it becomes something else so it's not his own memory anymore and it did feel I've described it before as a transfusion of memory and it is but then when it enters your own system you you turn it into something else I couldn't there were one of the things that I found difficult with his his version of his life was that it was very lonely and very he had no friends he had no thoughts he had no desires it's kind of like the simple simple simple life of just urgent needs and I can't understand that even now I still don't understand how once you've met those very very urgent needs what does your brain do then my mind is always kind of going backwards going forwards thinking about this you know it's so it's so unless Tinh in so many different things that I can't put myself and this is one of the things I think that having a different life to my father means that this is I can't describe this is a completely authentic account because I can't do that he he believed that he could live for 30 days without water I don't believe that he believed that he witnessed or believed at least that a man turned into a hyena you know these are think these are places that I can't really go but I I all I can do is trying to imagine myself into them and then I think when you're doing that you're bringing in all of the things that you've read all of the films that you've watched all of the music that you've listened to it becomes a much more sensual and kind of multi-textured thing and that's what I think you need to do to bring it to life you know my own memories coming to it my own emotions you know I think that's one of the saddest scenes in the book for me is actually not the most violent ones this there's one where just before he goes to war in Ethier he's an Ethiopian he's a tea boy in the middle of nowhere in a place that he has no connections no friends and when it rains he goes under a shelter when it stops raining he starts wandering again and it's that really atomized life where no one knows you no one cares about you it's that deep deep loneliness life I'm most upsetting when I think about it leading on from that question of memory one of the things I want to ask you was kind of when in the writing process you you you kind of decided to explicitly frame the novel through a kind of father-daughter relationship as you - yeah opening chapter yes later on later on I think this was literally I think I wrote this book and then I stopped it for awhile I wrote a short story and then went back to the book and those were these were my creative experiments so it wasn't until the end of the novel that I really understood what I was trying to achieve and tried trying to do and there was in hindsight that I realized that this was like a hymn to him this is a way of celebrating and that's why certain things certain choices that other writers might make about making making it more such more objective cooler in description sometimes more reserved about some of the violence I didn't want to do that because this was a very personal and subjective thing and there's a book I can recommend by he's sadly passed away his name's Alma Duke Karuma it's a writer from the Ivory Coast and he wrote a book called waiting for the wild beasts to vote which is similar in some respects it's it's the tale of the rise of power rise to power of an African dictator and it's it's told by a griot who was employed by him so i guess i mcai was kind of employed by my father to do this as well and it's that it's that deep this year I didn't want to make it a journalist it wasn't journalism this was a artistic and also intimate process between me and my father that's one more question I was thinking about the theme of belonging in this story because I think when I read a lot the post-colonial fiction belonging is one of the central themes and I noticed that at the beginning of the story when Gemma just returned to the aunt in okay yeah and they had a conversation about why his father left and then Gemma was confused about why he had to leave because he has a strong sense of this is where we belong yeah but then at the end of the story in the interview in the actual interview and jam the he throws English ending he's totally comfortable saying that because he grew up knowing he have grown up in that space in if you're English yes I just wonder how how did this sense of longing change yes I think it's a big question it's a big question I think there's quite a few things going on I think the fact that Somalis are nomadic is a big part of it so your sense of belonging isn't to land in times of stress they would go as far north as Eritrea with their livestock and as far south as Uganda so that's a huge huge distance and so your your belonging isn't to this village it's to a network of people and that network of people is flexible and whenever you can find it you'll find it in fragments in Cape Town in London in Helsinki wherever you might be that's that's you'll feel a sense of belonging because that's that's how society is arranged and that doesn't do all of the job and I think people in my generation second generation are now realizing that actually we don't feel that complete sense of belonging in our clan or being Somali I think it's a much more like it's a much more disturbed process for us we're told that we're not British enough that is that we're not Somali enough and not this enough but not that enough so I think it's a much more complicated one but to go back to my father's generation so you have the nomadism as a base and then the fact that my father was raised and outside of Samar for most of his life most of his childhood so he left Somali was very young grew up in Aden speaking Arabic as well as Somali and then lived in Eritrea for a long time so his sense of Somali unless I think was probably a bit eroded by that and he he when I went to Eritrea for research for the book people looked like him they were dressed like him they had the same hats and I could suddenly see the side to him which for me that was just my father that was his Somali mess but actually no that was his Eritrean this and then he came to Britain in 1947 and because I'm working on a book around that period of time and I'm I'm amazed that they didn't leave it was such an incredibly hostile environment and a complicated environment where you know it wasn't it wasn't lynchings generally it wasn't that kind of violence but it was just this feeling that you you shouldn't be here we don't want you here and I would leave I think confronted of that level of a aggression or hostility I would leave but they didn't leave and I think it became like a tussle it became a tussle between this host nation and these visitors who were British you know whether they liked it or not they had British passport Somaliland was British so there was no choice in that so it was about you know marking your your space and my father lived in Hull when he most of the time he was in the UK before we arrived and there was a small group of people of his clan so he was able to have you know that Somali nurse within that clan and then Mark out a small part of Hull as well as part of his as his home and people did that in Cardiff they did that in East East London in Sheffield so it's I think it felt like it was earned and because he was a saying that he travelled everywhere so he could decide he nearly lived in the u.s. he spent quite a lot of time in Australia he spent quite a bit of time in South Africa so there wasn't probably a sense that he was forced to live in the UK and that allowed him to think out of all of the places I've been I choose this one and I think me as a younger person there wasn't that kind of choice I feel like I grew up here whether I liked it or not and that gives you a different understanding of your place but he yeah he loved England I think he liked to look they liked it alone and I did an event in Pune in India as part of the British Council tours and they were very hostile to the idea of my dad liking England or Britain and they thought about but I gave them a sense that the whole book must be Orientalist and that was their politics which I generally share you know it's not that different from my politics it didn't allow them to think that maybe this elderly person who has has fought and fought and fought for this sense of belonging is now going to sit with it and enjoy it for him for them I think it was still a kind of a combat they were still involved in that combat but I don't I don't want to be in my 80s and combating somewhere that's too much I never started a bit late in real life in real life see this again this was one of the things where my father didn't tell me he had a girlfriend or wife in Eritrea but when he was in Eritrea he spoke with it with such fondness and such love that I thought hold on he's a young man completely unobservant Elling me that he didn't have a romantic relationship I think he did so I created Bethlehem and she's a mixture of all sorts of different things you know it's a tiny bit of my mum in there there's a tiny bit of Dido from the Aeneid there's some Dylan Thomas in there under Milk Wood yeah so I had fun with that and that perked up scene I wrote just before that with Shivan and the Italian soldiers that was also very taxing for me to write and it took me a while to build up to it and it took me a while to recover from it and when I finished that I needed I needed some balm for my own soul never mind pyjamas so it was it was a kind of a pre for both of us so in in real life I don't know what happened to Bethlehem who's his real Bethlehem I presume she stayed in Eritrea he married my mum much later on when he returned to her case oh yes yes so she was from okay sir but that was much much later but he also [Music] yeah his romantic life was one of the things he didn't want to delve too deeply in see the scenes I was gonna read for a sneaky question which is um he is just and it's not it's not really a proper question he's just such an and as astonishing I'm stating the obvious he's such an astonishing individual you know and then and there is this thread we were noticing this earlier of just sort of pure magic so light I think as a worthy there's a phrase that's used and and it's just this fierce spirit of moving forward having forward moving forward I mean it's it's really brilliantly done I just wondered if it's really a reiteration of my old question whether whether it was something that you added or it was a combination of you and your you know the story that I was trying to get at and that what phrase I think I you guys in the book I call it slip it slithers of light and that was something that I think in slaughterhouse-five Kurt Vonnegut says something similar about two men there and I was like yes this is my father he was it's just pure pure human energy or the gutsiness that involves the the courage and the idea that it can be extinguished so easily and when I went to Eritrea I went to the military cemeteries that they have there for the British and also for the Italians and the Italian cemetery the headstones with names and birth birthday stuff dates of the Italian soldiers but obvious carries it's just that it's just unknown soldier unknown soldier unknown soldier so the idea that he could have so easily have just been one of those people just that unknown soldier but he wasn't and he he he got through it all and he was happy and he was he's one of the few people that I think you know you every day was a like a miracle and was amazing and simple things were pleasurable the TV was pleasurable not having to go anywhere was pleasurable having food in the fridge was pleasurable at all of it and I think that's something that you know my my friends you know we don't have we don't have it's it's more kind of what do we lack you know what what can we face it's much more that mentality and I don't you know it's not come some kind of primeval man or anything like that he was still very political he was still very much in you know reflecting of what it took and it took his mother as well it wasn't just him it took his mother to kind of stoke that fire that was there and say hold on a second you're meant to be someone the spirits have told me the signs have told me the fortune tellers have told me you are meant to be someone you were meant to travel the world and I think all of that kind of fired that spirit up so it'd be great if we get to am finished with you yeah so this is actually from is one of Bethlehem's bits Bethlehem big head was a mule with a t great father and a Kannamma mother Muslim and Christian born in a cowshed a shepherd s in the morning a farmer in the afternoon and a shopgirl in the evening with a head full of dreams and fantasies she would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms and her braids for - a coat only to be beaten - sent back out sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it her black thicket of hair earned her the name big head as she wore it like a crown of thorns pulling at it throughout the day plucking strands from her eyes from her mouth from her food when her sisters jumped her they used her hair as a weapon forcing her head back with it and tracking her across the dirt her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to labora sorry LeBlanc laborious Lee braid it laying it down into manageable rows like their crops before like a rain forest at bursts out of its man-made boundaries and reclaimed its territory she was a true village girl and that she wanted nothing more than to live in the town already 16 she had to wait for her five older sisters to marry before she could escape Jamis face came to her now before she fell asleep he's deep hypnotizing eyes saddened her and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom from her perch on the hills amid the bleating goats Bethlehem could see Charma in his turban planting seeds he was clumsy with his tools and to her amusement he would pour seedlings out of the earth to see how much they had grown he was trying to stare them into life she thought when she bought the groats when she brought the goats back down Bethlehem sidled passed his field you're not doing that very well you know you shouldn't plant them so deep they need to see the Sun through the earth why don't you come and help me then German said stopping to stare as she walked past you wish she squealed before striding away Jam has studied the cycles of her day he loved to watch her make her yearning advance up the hill in the dappled or light she was a spot of red climbing up the gray green horizon her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her at midday she would descend her ramrod straight back holding up that black flag of hair and begin work on her mother's fields he could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed jamot would wait jamot would wait until she was in the shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk and they taught by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner what did you do before coming here she asked once I was Alice curry how stupid he must have been she taunted holding a blade of grass between her fingers in imitation of his cigarette the room light of the lamp made them both braver able to talk about things that bright light or deep darkness would have prohibited jamot old Bethlehem about his parents and she listened with the attention of a sphinx in return to submit their intimacy Bethlehem described to Jarmo how her father kicked her for daydreaming and losing goats how she had never been bought anything her whole life but only given her sister's hand-me-downs not one thing JAMA can you believe that never one thing for me only jamot shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand she let him for a second before pulling away [Applause]

Channel: Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds

Views: 2,905

Rating: 4.7948718 out of 5

Keywords: writers in dialogue, literature, novels, biography, Somaliland, east Africa, British identity, migration, travel, reading

Id: 4yIwdeJJRcw

Length: 54min 11sec (3251 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017