It now gives me great pleasure to hand over to our two cherries for the evening.
We will introduce them first to you at the end of the table is also in Norwich,
who is a senior lecturer in comparative and English literature at King's College, London, Tessio.
And so he works on African literature with a particular specialism in Rwanda.
And beside her is Marcia Hutchinson, our very own Marcia,
who is doing the Master's in the World Literature in English here at Oxford
and who has a particular interest in Caribbean and South African literature.
So head over to emotion to introduce. Thank you so much.
Thank you all again for coming. And we have the great pleasure of the Women-Owned Bundeena Brister, the acclaimed writer and author,
poet, editor and also my lecturer at Brunel for two years and creative writing,
which was a very surreal experience when in my second year we were actually reading The Emperor's Babe on the English side of my course.
And then I got to speak on the occasion about what was going on on that side of it.
So I would like to thank you for joining us tonight, said. And just a little bit your own comfort about the structure of this evening.
We're just going to ask you for your first reading and maybe a little bit about why you chose that reading and myself.
And so we will ask you a few questions, move on to the audience, and then finally back your extract and readings.
OK, Shortridge, it's great. Yes. So it's great to be here.
Thank you very much for inviting me, Alex.
So I'm going to read obviously from the entries, but this is the original cover, which is very closely and very nice.
But then they got a bit cheapskates and got rid of the gold.
It's always interesting doing a reading or giving a reading to people who have really read the book.
I don't have to introduce anything. So I'm reading from the start of the book because that seems to make sense.
And I'll just read some of the beginning sections.
As you know, it's written in the voice of Zuleika, and I try to capture something of her character, as I read IMO, a mass amount.
Who do you love? Who do you love? When the man you married goes off for months on end, quelling rebellions at the frontiers or playing Hot Shots?
Editor in Rome, his flashy villa on the Palatine Hill, home to another woman, I hear one who was born him offspring.
My days are spent roaming. This house is vast mosaic walls full of the scenes on Olympus for my husband loves melodrama.
They say his mistress is an actress, a flaxen fraulein type from Germania superior whom everyone envied me in the and the grease ball in the back of a
shop in Grace Church Street who got hitched to a Roman nobleman whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on a barge,
no burnished throne, no proof of beeton gold, but packed with vomiting brats and cows, releasing warm turds onto their bare feet, thus perfumed.
They made it to Londinium on a donkey with only a thin purse and a factory.
Here, in the drizzle of this Wild West town, Dad wandered the streets looking for work.
But there was no room at the inn. So he set up shop on the kerb and sold sweet cakes which were made.
He's told me this story a million times now.
He owns several shops, selling everything from vino to shoes, vegies to tools, and he employs all sorts to work in them.
A Syrian Tunisian Jew, Persian hopefuls just off the olive barge from Gaul and in fact, anyone who work for Pebble's.
When Feliks came after me, that was in ecstasy, father in law to Lusia.
So really as Feliks, no less. I was spotted at the bars of Cheapside, just budding, and my fate was sealed by a man thrice my age and thrice my girth.
Oh, that's sweet. Eleven. Even then I thought I was getting past it.
Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman [INAUDIBLE] called Clarissa for decorum classes, learns how to talk, eat and fart.
How to get my Amoo amass a match right.
And ditch my second generation plebe Kriol Zuleika Acceptor est Zuleika's Della Khatar est Zuleika Belardi Goody two shoes essed.
But I dreamt of creating mosaics of remaking my town with bright stones and glass.
But no non-com is not allowed show.
Feliks brings me presents when he deigns to come west.
I've had Chinese silk, a marble figurine from turkey, gold earrings shaped like dolphins and I have the deepest fondness for my husband of course,
sort of though he spills over me like dough and I'm tempted to call Cock Midnighters to come trim his side so that he fits me.
Then it's puff and chow, baby. Solitude, judo, solitude, solitude.
Oh, Londinium tourguide unofficial.
One minute it's hopscotch in bare feet. Next year for Fotopoulos in Sudan in case you're pink.
In case your pink stockings get dirty, no one prepared me for marriage,
me and Albir were the wild girls of Londinium sought to discover the secrets of its hidden hearts,
still too young to withhold more than we revealed to join this merry cast of actors.
She was like a rag doll who'd lost its stuffing, spiky brown hair cut short because of NYTs.
Everyone said she was either anorexic or had worms.
But OUSA Alba was so busy chasing the Dolce Vita that she just burnt everything she ate before it turned to fat.
She dragged me out on dangerous escapades. We were partners in crime, banditos, renegades, she said.
There was more to life than playing with friggin dolls, like causing trouble and discovering what grown ups did in private without getting caught.
We were going to steal from the rich, give to the poor,
keep 75 percent for ourselves and live in one of their mansions with a thousand slaves feeding us cakes all day, every day.
But until such time, her dad owned the butchers next door.
But one mind couldn't care less what I did.
His precious Catullus got the abacus and wax. I got the sewing kit and tweezers.
He was even bought a ponytail for his curly little head, so it fitted in at school with all those trendy Roman kids.
Bless his sockless feet and Magin. Some days we told the tenements of Aldersgate he trailed behind like a giant sloth, his big,
muddy eyes on the sleepyheads, just like his father's, and plead with us to slow down.
I tell him to futuro off your little runt, leaving him behind as we raced towards the slums,
swarming with immigrants, freed slaves and factory workers, usual suspects.
We play knock-down, ginge, throw stones, break windows, then Leggat down an alley out of sight,
arrive home breathless and itching with flea bites and Jega foot, what with the alfresco sewerage running between paving stones.
Now in my neighbourhood, some evenings were spiced trout fried on stall's fresh out of the Thames.
You could eat er or run home for supper in the backyard.
Dad called an atrium that's of the rush hour.
Traffic allowed carts clogged up the main drag to the forum up and unloading produce from up country or abroad.
Sometimes I'd hear a solitary flute through an open window and stop.
Breathing later, we'd sneak out for the vicarious thrill of the carnal experience like two tons,
we'd prowl the darkened alleys, our noses sniffing out the devastating odour of sex, peeping through candlelit shutters.
We were amazed that the adult need to strip off and stick things in each other.
Men and women, women and women, men and men, multiples of all sorts.
Groaning in pain. Absolutely fascinating. And then we encountered death.
Lukan, Africanness, the Baker, Fenchurch. I was the daughter he never had.
He said that his eyes spelt wife gave us fresh bread dipped in honey.
Our thanks to raid his store one night finds his great black rigour mortis self in a cloud of flour to burn bonds for cheeks.
Too much yeast in his bowels emptied on the floor. That stopped our missions for a while.
Some nights we go to the river, sit on the beach,
look out towards the Marshall Islands of Sjöberg and beyond the jungle that was Rattana, teeming with spirits and untamed humans.
We try to imagine the world beyond the city, that country a lifetime away.
That Mom called home and dad called prison the city of Roma, which everyone went on about as if it was her bloody mirabilis.
We talk about the off duty soldiers who loitered in our town everywhere.
They were everywhere, watching for lumps on our chests to see of our hips grew away from our waists,
always picking me out, looking at me in the market.
Is our little aubergine ready? No, I'm not just thinking.
Perves eyed growls skedaddling hotfoot out of their reach.
Sometimes we tear grunting on the beach and imagine some illicit extramarital action was in progress.
We'd call out in our deepest gruffness voices Hey Polizia and Rock with laughter because we'd
interrupted the flipping goitres we'd hear them tripping over themselves as they scuffled off.
And then everything changed. I got engaged. I wasn't allowed out no more.
I had to act ladylike. And Albar said it wouldn't be the same once I've been elevated.
And I'll read, I think. Just one more, I think it's probably seven minutes, is it?
Yeah, so yeah. So I'll just read one more. It's called the betrothal page 22.
His pupils are soaked in desire, floats in a crisp January sky, show no mercy.
Even as mine plead innocence. A small gold link to my heart lies in the damp crevice of his supplicant palm spiders crawl up his forearm.
I am level with his beige linen abdomen, black leather girdle slung low.
The Egyptians, he proclaims, discover the most delicate nerve on the finger and glorious the only one,
indeed, with a direct line to our greatest gift, the human heart.
And so with this ring, I thee betroth Zuleika cherished daughter of our man from Nubia and Lamani.
He takes my limp hand, fills the trembling gold and withdraws ever so, ever so, ever so slowly to applause.
But I flick my hand down so that Cupid's cute little handywork tinkles on the ground amidst gasps my eyes lock is in then and smile.
He has just made of my greatest gift an exile.
That's wonderful. Thank you very much. I wonder if he did the other reading, I think, as well, because the tone changes completely, doesn't it?
Suddenly becomes much more sombre and atmospheric. So I you know, this is a series about the experience of reading.
And there's a couple of questions that we're asking to all of the writers that that we're talking to across the series.
And the first one which you wanted to pose to you is do you have a reader in mind when you write?
Not really. I really try not to have a reader in mind because I find then that I'm writing for a
particular readership and I think that can be very restrictive and limit my imagination.
And since I was thought to censor myself many, many years ago in my 20s, I attended a creative writing workshop.
And really it's the only one I ever attended and only went two or three times.
And I found that outside of the workshop I was writing for the people in the workshop,
and I just thought that there was something very wrong about it and was a feminist group.
And I felt that I had to be right on, as we said in those days, and that I had to be politically correct, although I think we use that term then.
And ever since then, I have an aversion to writing for particular audiences.
That said, I'm very aware that I'm writing. I'm writing for people to read, I'm writing for readership.
I try not to narrowly define who that readership might be.
I know that in this country it is middle aged women of a certain age who will read books more than anybody else.
Statistically, that's the case. So I am aware of that. But when I'm writing, I try to be true to the story I'm telling in the characters.
So I'm really thinking about structural things that are character. I'm thinking about drama.
I'm thinking about variety. I'm thinking about, you know, having depth to the work, but also being entertaining and engaging the reader.
I'm thinking about all those things I'm thinking about to a certain extent, accessibility.
So this book, some people might not find accessible, but even when I throw latinum,
it's usually self-explanatory and it's quite experimental in some ways.
Linguistically, I play around with ideas and so on. But hopefully.
Well, I know I know that people who don't read poetry, no matter who you know, aren't necessarily interested in history.
I know that people can read this book from, you know, from start to finish and engage with it and find it accessible.
But I'm not I haven't compromised what I'm writing. But at the same time, it's accessible.
It's in my mind. So that's one of the things that's in my mind that I don't want to alienate the reader,
the reader picking up on the issue of accessibility and sort of all the linguistic innovation
there that sort of renders the book real and and touchable for us as contemporary readers.
How do you imagine the reader can place themselves in relation to Zuleika?
Because usually with the first person narrative, well, often with the first person narrative, we think her way into her point of view.
But there are certain things here that kind of really I find difficult to get into.
And I think other people might disagree with me. So that'll be really interesting to me once that.
But places where I just and one of places with the fact that she's so very young and fact she's 11 when she's forced into this marriage.
And that was an almost an experience that I felt would be almost unethical for me to empathise with too much because it's so extreme.
It's something that's very hard to imagine now. So where are you thinking of the reader?
I think about the reader witnessing her being inside.
Well, like I say, I'm not really thinking I'm trying not to think about the reader or thinking about the character.
So so I like writing in first person. First person allows me to inhabit the character as a writer.
So I find that when I'm writing in the first person, the character comes alive as I write the character for me.
And I'm hoping that the reader I think my work is quite I think you I can either get into my work or you don't
get into my work because especially when I'm writing in the first place and the characters are very strong.
So she's a very strong character and a very strong voice.
So you either make a decision to go with that voice or you can be possibly repelled by it and say, oh, no, it's too much.
This I like past tense, omniscient narrator, you know, regularly written prose.
I don't want to read poetry. I don't want to get in first person. And this voice is so dissimilar to me that I don't want to engage with it.
But I think if you do decide to engage with it because it's written in the first person and because I wanted her to sound very contemporary,
even though it's very historical. So you'd have noticed the book sort of anachronisms, and that emerged naturally.
But it was my way of making her feel like a very contemporary character.
And hopefully, once you engage with that, you you are then inside her.
So as a writer, I want to get inside a character like her and tell her story from the inside.
The epilogue at the end of the book is really it was the beginning of the book in a sense, that epilogue.
So, you know, this one of the I think it was the first thing I wrote, and that was me as a writer becoming the character.
So so yeah. So it's about hopefully closing the gap between the reader who wants to engage with this voice and and the character.
So I don't want the character to feel alien removed is historical. It's nearly 2000 years ago.
It's very easy to feel this is so dissimilar to our lives today.
This this has no relevance to to our lives today as women that you just come and go through it.
But I think the sort of anachronistic elements of it helped to make her feel very contemporary.
Yeah, thank you.
I just found that as a reader myself, it was my first time experiencing a version of what I say and the topics that you talk about in the novel.
Foods are really interesting to me, but at the same time, she transcends so many different boundaries.
She's there trying to discover identity, but she's working out her own race and she's moving through these different class systems and everything.
And I was just wondering if you see your work is maybe communicative about perhaps a
political statement or about the absence of this kind of multicultural Brittania,
as it were, or whether you just see it as purely a work of art.
Maybe it's never I never see nothing. Anything ever is, you know, Damien Hirst at the moment, you know,
stealing what I think he's definitely appropriating and, you know, African and Western Nigerian bronze at the moment.
I know going slightly off. But, you know, it's not just a work of art.
It's an iconic African image that if you know about Damien Hirst, his latest artwork,
but he's literally taken and copied and painted the gold and and setting up his artwork.
So, yeah. So I feel that all art is political and very political writer.
So so I did write this book because I read about Africans in Britain in the Roman era, and I thought that was amazing.
Nobody knew about it even today. I would suggest a lot of people don't know about it.
And I wanted to bring that story alive. And so I thought, well, okay, I'm going to do this through a young black woman living in the city.
And the interesting thing about this book is that when I I did notice that you had a quote from something that I'd said.
So I don't know if you've really discussed this, like, I forget what I've written.
But anyway, the book actually came out of a residency at the Museum of London.
At that time. They had Roman ruins recreated in the gallery.
And I walked through and I thought, wouldn't it be great to have a black Roman character?
So so the museum's curators said told me there were no black people in Roman London.
There were no black people in Britain. And, you know, you know, there was no evidence for it.
Therefore, they did not exist. So they were, you know, they archaeologists.
And so they were depicted. They were relying on archaeological evidence. So I said, well, you know, the Roman roads are very good.
Rome was a very multicultural city at that time and people travelled backwards and forwards.
Of course they did. You might not have the evidence, but of course, there were all kinds of people living in Rome, in London.
So so the London I've created Londinium is actually it's not just L.A. that, you know, you heard me talk about the Syrians and the Jews and Persians.
I really wanted it to be multicultural. They they were, you know, very emphatic that I was wrong.
You know, I should do that. But as a writer, you can do what you like. So I created this world in these characters.
And, of course, archaeology has not caught up. So now that the DNA evidence is now telling them from archaeological finds,
I discovered over 100 years ago that there were black people in all over Roman Britain and that London was a multicultural city.
So it was a very political point that I was making. I was saying, you know, this myth about this ridiculous myth,
about this kind of white British history that some people still believe I'm sure is is not true.
It's not, you know, from the 15th and 16th century onwards, you know, that's a very recorded black presence.
But I wanted to go even deeper and look at something that was 2000 years ago, too.
It's sort of completely disrupts this myth of, you know, Roman Britain with Great Britain two thousand years ago being a white society.
So that was my starting point of history.
Might have moved on. When I was writing the book.
I couldn't find any evidence for anti black racism existing then because it had emerged with the slave trade as we know it.
So even though Zuleika is a black girl and people obviously will notice a difference,
because I'm not saying that there were loads of black people in room in London.
She's not really experiencing the kind of racism, as we understand it today saw her.
But she has an identity, which is though, of somebody who does look different and feels different and is a bit of an outsider, but.
She finds herself obviously moving class, so she's she comes from the gutter,
essentially, and now she's she's kind of living a sort of a rich lifestyle.
So all those things are things that I was playing with. And there were things in the book to do with, you know, class and gender and race and so on.
That happened because I'm a very political being and it just I just constantly throwing it in there.
So, yeah. OK, thank you very much. Think we're short on time.
OK. Now to the audience if you have any questions.
We were talking earlier about whether it's a feminist novel and the idea of Celenk as a as a character and going back to what you talking about,
the idea of how brutal, how brutal that, you know, you talked about that when you were doing the reading of the of this building might go over her.
And I remember when I read that I want to stretch I like my immediate reaction was
that I want to be safe at the things that are happening to the 11 year old girl.
But at the same time, there's this amazing touch of humour that she's injecting,
that she's making him into this disgusting creature that's on her that felt really empowering.
And we were just talking about as a group like, well, where did we go with it?
Is it is she is she is she objectified?
Is she can we see her as a kind of heroic figure? You know, does she emerge from it?
Is she ridiculed at the end when she's met? Seem silly to perpetrate that kind of thing.
So I just to. Yeah. Is that a feminist.
But I don't know if I thought about that really in terms of this book.
I don't know. I suppose it is perhaps, you know,
because it is looking at somebody who is completely disadvantaged because of their gender in the society that she's growing up in.
But I don't really like writing female characters who are victims.
So she is a victim of circumstance by her person. She just she's not a victim like a person in terms of her personality.
She's triumphant in many ways. So she's she's been dealt a sort of a difficult hand in some ways, but she makes the most of it.
So that's perhaps where the humour comes from in that she does have this sense
of humour and she does have this incredible friendship with Venus and Alba,
which is which supports her and nurtures her, and that's where she gets her sustenance from.
But the thing about writing fiction is I I'm approaching it from the character.
What kind of character? My creating how can I make them as believable as they need to be?
That means they have to be flawed, as we say.
So she is flawed because we see how she treats her servants, for example.
But that makes a human. But it's also I'm also making a commentary on the fact that, you know,
the the the the victim can also be somebody who perpetuates oppression on other people.
We know that, you know, it's this kind of Power 101, isn't it?
So so even though she's she's in a situation that's very difficult for her,
that doesn't mean that she empathises with the people who are even in a worse situation than her.
So is a feminist novel. I don't.
Well, yes, I suppose so, if you want to call it that. Sometimes it feels as if you're kind of limiting something by putting that kind of label on it.
You know, it's feminist postcolonial novel. Is this normal? It's of that novel.
It's definitely a novel about a woman making the most of her life in spite of a difficult situation, a difficult situation.
And also, I feel that Zuleika is, you know, very young girls today in Yemen, you know,
and Saudi Arabia and other countries who are being married off at the age of seven, possibly even younger to big dirty old men.
And, you know, I felt that I was making a commentary on that through the experience that she goes through.
So so, again, that's where the anachronism comes in, because it is not just about making her feel like a lively contemporary character,
but it's also about making commentary on the society that we're living in today
and all kinds of different ways to do anything of a great one to come in on that,
because you're close to an age in some ways to. How did you respond to that when you were reading?
Yeah, I think we had a very similar reaction in the sense that it was incredibly shocking when we first read that.
But I think in a way, it needs to be shocking.
And I think lots of things you can do in like as you were talking about countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia,
when you see news coverage of the atrocities that happen, that it doesn't have the same visceral reaction.
So I think it's definitely made us think about some of those kinds of things in a way that it otherwise wouldn't.
We wouldn't have had that experience. Stephanie, thank you. What do you think your work could have for us to think you for writing this book?
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think she'd be a great stage character or film character.
So there's a really talented young comedian called McNicoll. That's anyone heard of her?
I mean, she's a. Wonderful, and she's got a show on it.
Well, it was on last year called Chewing Gum, and I saw the live show at the National Theatre that she didn't as a one woman show.
And she's a very funny, young, dark skinned, beautiful, very petite black actress.
And I was in a Twitter conversation with her about, you know, her writing the a drama adaptation of this and playing it.
But of course, she's become a big star in Hollywood, which probably is in Hollywood already now.
So, you know, she's not really interested, but. But with the right actor.
Yes, absolutely. And it was optioned to be a film, but a lot of books.
Yeah, no, no. But that was ages ago. Don't forget, this book came out in 2001. It was a long time ago.
So. So you're saying the book came out in 2001? Yes.
So it's a big relaunch. I think my publisher said something about relaunching its sometimes they relaunch, but it just seems very sorry to.
But I think that it seems like you just that it just does seem.
And so I'm just thinking for the current political moment.
Do you mean because Abraxas does seem so nice.
Yeah. No, but it's I mean, I actually wrote it, I think nearly 20 years ago.
Do you think I said do you think that's interesting?
I thought it was just blown away.
No, no, not at all. I think it was turned into a radio play.
Oh, yes. Yeah, it was. Somebody made it to a one off radio play, you know.
So for now. Yes. On Radio four. Yeah, it was adapted. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. It might be in the archives somewhere else.
Just thinking about the idea of radio and performance and voice.
Um, we were chatting earlier, we were a couple of people noticed the spoke in this image.
You know that's that's part of the power. And I, I just wondered if you had sort of responses to that, whether that was something you really did.
You have her voice in mind when you were when you were writing and the voice the voice emerged, you know, as I was writing.
But my background is in theatre. So, you know, I started off trying to be an actress and I was an actress and I wrote for theatre many moons ago.
So I I think that's a formative element to some of my work.
And I think this one in particular has a strong morality to it.
Yeah. And I read I mean, certainly when I was writing this, as I was writing it,
I was reading it out loud and hearing how it sounded because it is poetry and and then revising it and then reading it and then revising it.
I tell students to do time, read the work aloud. You hear what's working, what isn't working, what's wrong.
You send yourself to sleep with it, then you know you're going to send Jerry to sleep with it.
So yeah. So it was definitely I was almost like performing it as I was writing it.
Can we just get a couple of other voices?
And we were talking earlier about the poetry performance and about that sort of and about the strangeness of that.
Does anyone you want to see who commented on that one to come in or not perhaps think he'd have spoken poetry?
Yeah, I was. So it seemed to be quite a moment in the novel when that happened.
She has that poetry, as I was saying, mad.
I was actually surprised by that because I was expecting her to win the prise.
You know, I was with a crow and she seemed to have something to say.
And then there's a wee bit where it didn't work and everybody got drunk by then.
Just the moment I was I was I was just so sad.
But it was really, really sad. But it didn't mean she just did that.
Well, you know, the Romans, I don't know if they're any historians in the room,
but the Romans did have performance poetry, if you call it that, parties.
And, you know, because a lot of it is based on historical truth.
Yes, she's a classicist. So.
And so they did so, you know, and when I wrote this performance,
poetry was particularly big in the U.K. and there was a really bad performance poetry.
And I was having fun with it. So, like so like his poem is, you know, the River Nile running through my blood, all that stuff.
It's very cliche, you know, and it was actually supposed to be funny.
She doesn't realise that. But but but I was also playing with the idea that, you know, in this sort of 70s and 80s,
black performance poets would write about being Nubians and, you know, and the River Nile and so on.
And she is actually, you know, of Nubian parentage.
So I was playing around with all those kinds of things. One of the poets is a very recognisable British poet.
And, you know, I mean, out there in the world who I was put in there because I wanted to make a point about somebody who who is celebrated as a poet,
is actually a terrible poet, is just expressing anger at that time.
This is going back a bit. And yeah, I, I think I think that's just the beginning of her sort of I mean I felt like it was important.
Yeah.
But I think I think in terms of her development as a character, if you feel sorry for her, that's really good because, you know, because as a writer,
you have to manipulate the reader's emotions, not necessarily thinking about the reader, but, you know, you're taking your reader on the journey.
You're taking your characters on the journey and the fact that she has this big moment in her mind,
but nobody's paying any attention to it and even trade the Jordanian government.
This is ridiculous. Hopefully will give you give you a bigger emotional response to the end when she's killed because you're on her side.
Yet you know that she has many different facets, doesn't she?
So, yeah, picking up on that scene again.
And we have a Scott in the audience who is who is interested, intrigued by it,
but then had some questions about the Scottish voice and that performance.
Do you want to ask both of you. Sorry, I was just wondering where you've got this Scottish accent from a mixture of different accents.
It was a pigeon. Scots Latin, isn't it? But did you don't recognise it?
No, I wanted to do it for good. I'm proud to say that I'm not at all.
I don't know. Oh, I just looked it up. And again, Scottish accents.
Yeah. I mean, I got some Scottish I think I've got some Scottish words and I thought, oh, it's definitely Scottish.
Oh, it's just the day of the week.
OK, so we had some interesting conversations about whether it was some kind of mixing with Jamaican patois as well with some kind of,
you know, sort of a crossover between the dreadlocks and the and the Scots that.
Yeah, yeah. You know, the sort of English is a mixture of lots of different languages.
So I was just kind of replicating that in a different way, I think. Is Cockney rhyming slang in there as well.
Americanisms, you know, totally, you know, factually incorrect.
And what I found fun to write. Yeah.
Yeah. I think we have to get moving.
We were talking a little bit about whether the brilliant humour in it and
exacted it cost in terms of the seriousness of your themes and their strength,
your political points, whether it ever got to get packaged in certain ways.
That was frustrating to you, because I thought they to this wedding reception in English first.
But some of them can be quite old fashioned and you had to persuade them, you know,
this is important and this is intellectual and this is and that's easy with that before they
read it that I can't quite believe in their classes for the know enough to do this whole.
And they're convinced that if you say that, you know, do you feel that the human sassiness and was Miski in any way?
I think it is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, isn't it?
And I think one services the other. So you're laughing, but then you're crying.
And I hope that there is a mixture of that in there. And there are some very, very serious moments in there.
But you're saying about the other things, I found it devastating and a really important but really painful.
I tend to find funny things anyway because the challenge is to get to meetings in the first place.
So I work on Toni Morrison and a number of white men who tell me they can't understand a word she's written.
And I'm OK with words, man. Oh, actually, no.
Oh, that's not for me. And do you ever feel frustrated?
Is this what are you meant to what?
You pick up the book in Washington, which is more classic for me, but how many of your colleagues will want to read this?
And they're in reception each time. This is making a serious point about classics.
And I think it's a kind of I think I think that's difficult because a lot of those
justices aren't interested in any kind of think of what we would call reception, which has nothing to do with anything else.
Apart from that, you're about two centuries, two centuries, two millennia, too late for that kind of time.
But I can imagine the sort of comedy might make people take us seriously.
I, I have a strange, different experience because I remember when I picked this up,
a friend gave this to me for my birthday in 2002, so I had it then.
So I kind of always knew about it. And that's kind of tactics I do.
And then all classes I work do that kind of stuff. It's like, I don't know, didn't you know it in Brisbane?
That's the whole point. But it's just the people you want to listen.
It's so damn hard to get you to listen. Yeah. I mean, I'm not particularly bothered about academics not wanting to read it.
I mean, I know that. So it's great when they do.
I love it. It's great and they're teaching a course as writers,
we absolutely love this because it means you're taking what, seriously arts, you know, a wider readership.
You know that to me, that would be the focus, really.
And I think they would probably find it attractive if it's packaged as something that's got a lot of sort of levity in it.
So anyone that hasn't spoken yet has got one final question for us. If not, when we go to the final reading.
Nobody. Thank you, Tom. It's 13 minutes after.
So I'll read the page 228.
Venus winks at lovers games. Songbird surprise was my favourite dish, and I knew it would be his from first sighting,
I had imagined being crushed into the imperial purple robes of Emperor Septimius Severus,
his sword drawn out of its gold and rubies, gathered and plunged into me ruthlessly.
Oh, sweet death. We were together finally, in my opinion, a player in the background as we reclined on sofas,
the low marble table laid out with a little spread served in my floral red,
sameeh and crockery, small songbirds soaked in asparagus sauce with quail's eggs,
dormice cooked in honey and poppyseed salted fish with oyster dressing.
My Lord, milk fed snails just for you for jellyfish, bare cutlets sliced, flamingo tongue marinated, marinated in tumeric and clove oil.
I'm feeling my hunger power cooked courgette spoilt whole Solti's peacocke brains melts in my mouth.
You look across stuffed dates torn between my teeth.
SAOs udders lark's tongue in gold, garlic spiced with perfumed peacock feathers and peppered rose petals, sweet wine cakes to follow olives with.
Time is on our side, all drawn down with finest African wine.
We were silent, letting oils drip over lips and chins, watching each other lykketoft with acrobatic tongues.
He was solid, like a gladiator, my Libyan, my lover, to be my libidinous warrior, my Belcher, his black eyes following the slope of my shoulders,
my shimmering sarees gown, decollete fastened with sapphire clasp, set in gold,
flattering my shining bazookas, the rise and fall with each excited breath.
He was in Britannia, waging war,
he said would leave when the whole of Caledonia had been taken from Hadrian's Wall to the antonym wall and way up to the North Sea.
His marriage was in possibile. He said his wife had gone from swan to donkey.
He knew Felix well, had often dined with him at his villa in Rome.
News to me, he called me to him, nibbled my neck, his harsh bristles,
scratching my delicate skin, stuck his tongue down my ear, making me squeal, growled.
Are you ready for war? Mylie Janoris, I like you two ways, either take off your crown of laurels,
drop your purple robes to the floor and come to me naked as a man or dress up like a.
Real soldiers wear tunics, Under Armour.
My emperor does without stands before me, metal bands tied with leather straps over a bull's chest iron wings protects shoulders from flying sabres.
I finger your second skin, my lord. Cold, polished, my reflection, cut into strips your tawny trunks, perfumed with juniper oil,
powered with squeezing the damp planks of stallion's dagger gripped for my forging.
Are you ready for war soldier? As Centurion's crested helmet and visa curve of dramatic Rissel Like an EQUASS you roll your head lightly brush my
inner thighs leaving a trail of goosebumps and giggles then trace the tip of your sword down the centre of my torso.
Dare I breathe let your route map a thin red line silver goblet Sjoberg and Divino by my bedside to toast the theatre of war.
Close your eyes you command a freezing blade on my flesh and cheek hand around my neck.
I am your hostage. I am dying. I am dying of your dulcet conquest.
You make my temples drip into my ears, whisper obscenities,
plant blue and purple flowers on my barren landscape here besiege me battery ram my faltered gateway you archer stone
slinger trumpeter give it to me for Toyomi footsore me my actor emperor I hold the pumping cheeks that rule the world.
I do ditch the empire on your back set to me it is crushing my courage.
The weight of a soldier trained to march 30 kilometres a day, marching for centuries over roads made with crushed skulls,
legions forming an impregnable walking tortoiseshell on the battlefield on your back, making the whole world Roman video [INAUDIBLE].
Take off your victory. I am vanquished already. I can't fight you just stab me to death again and again.
Stab me today, soldier. And this is the language of love to.
After you have admitted yourself paid one hundred and fifty nine.
After you've emptied yourself of all the walls, you have thought, after you have shuddered and roared and collapsed on top of me sobbing,
your snores do not reverberate on my spine, nor do you offer me your back cold.
Always you ask who I am. What do you dream?
Charisma. Your head heavy upon my breast to be with you.
I quietly reply to leave a whisper of myself in the world.
My ghost, a magner opera of words. I feel the sweep of your eyelash on my skin.
For my boy slips inside himself again to return to his core, his composure.
And I am left rowing with his legions inside a galley on a barren horizon when the battle is finally over.
And finally, I read the final piece epilogue page two five one that Zuleika it is you will have found to where Zuleika lying in a panel of summer,
your golden couch moved into the atrium to feel your skin for the last time.
I enter quietly from what Lynn calls the pounding bass and horns of the city.
Square miles suspended between two columns.
Your couch faces a pool fed by the aching stone mouth of Medusa.
A cloud chills you in its shadow of passing. Zuleika moratoria est.
Now is the time I glide to where you lie.
Look upon your pink robes, ruched the quality of moused with each tired breath pronounced mould of your face obsidian with light and sweat.
So Tranquillo, in your moment of leaving I slip into your skin.
Our chest stills drains to Chako you have expired.
Zuleika and I will know you from the inside.