1 00:00:07,390 --> 00:00:17,440 So it's my great pleasure to welcome our chair for this reading part and meeting the writer of our of our time together, 2 00:00:17,440 --> 00:00:23,680 and that is Kate and then Kate will introduce the Diffa Mahomet. 3 00:00:23,680 --> 00:00:35,050 So Kate is the director of whose interests in Rwanda, and she is a research associate at both Bath Spa and Bristol. 4 00:00:35,050 --> 00:00:42,070 She's an Africanist and she is the very, very lively and Proactiv editor of Africa Words, 5 00:00:42,070 --> 00:00:51,460 which is an amazing blog, sites that I would recommend to everyone. And she has a growing a budding interest in Somalia writing. 6 00:00:51,460 --> 00:00:58,660 And it's that that forges the link that we have here this evening between herself, Kate Haines, and the death of Mohammed. 7 00:00:58,660 --> 00:01:05,870 So you're very welcome. Thank you very much, sir. 8 00:01:05,870 --> 00:01:10,370 Yeah, I'm really delighted to be hosting this conversation with Mohammed as parts of 9 00:01:10,370 --> 00:01:16,790 the great writers inspire him series and get the next movie out would say, 10 00:01:16,790 --> 00:01:23,870 it's really about putting you the views of the novel in conversation with the writer of the book. 11 00:01:23,870 --> 00:01:29,540 But kind of to put that into that conversation in context, I just wanted to introduce and differ very briefly. 12 00:01:29,540 --> 00:01:35,030 If Muhammad was born in Hargeisa in 1981 and Anita Lenzen in 1986, 13 00:01:35,030 --> 00:01:41,900 amines that was initially intended to be temporary but became permanent when civil war broke out and her family was unable to return. 14 00:01:41,900 --> 00:01:49,340 She grew up in South London and she studied history and politics here at the Embassy of Oxford, say in 2013. 15 00:01:49,340 --> 00:01:56,030 And she was selected as one of France's best of young British novelists as a period every decade for the last 16 00:01:56,030 --> 00:02:02,090 30 years and been very prescient in identifying voices with enduring significance within versus fiction. 17 00:02:02,090 --> 00:02:06,530 And in 2014, she was named one of the most promising fiction writers south of the Sahara, 18 00:02:06,530 --> 00:02:13,100 under 40 by Africa 39, a collaboration between the Hay Festival and Nigeria's Rainbow Book Club. 19 00:02:13,100 --> 00:02:20,420 Her first novel, Black Mambazo, which we're going to be talking about now, was published in 2010 by HarperCollins in the UK, 20 00:02:20,420 --> 00:02:24,220 and it was long listed for the Orange Prise shortlisted for The Guardian Facebook. 21 00:02:24,220 --> 00:02:34,280 Would the John Lennon peace prise Dylan Thomas prise the Pen Open Book Award and won the school board and has a member of the literature muscles? 22 00:02:34,280 --> 00:02:40,400 It's published in 2013 by Simon Schuster in the U.K. And so I just wanted to start 23 00:02:40,400 --> 00:02:44,670 the session by acting as if it's just read to us a little bit from the book. 24 00:02:44,670 --> 00:02:51,870 OK, everyone, thank you for coming here on this lovely day. 25 00:02:51,870 --> 00:03:01,520 I'll read it just a short piece from the very beginning of the novel in Aden in 1935. 26 00:03:01,520 --> 00:03:08,210 The musings call startled out of his dream, and he pulled himself up to look at the sun rising over the cake, 27 00:03:08,210 --> 00:03:18,560 domed mosques, the gingerbread Adine apartments, glowing red chips with white frosting, the black silhouettes of birds looped high in the sky, 28 00:03:18,560 --> 00:03:22,970 circling around the few remaining stars and the pregnant moon. 29 00:03:22,970 --> 00:03:32,390 The black planets of Jamas eyes rolled over the busy industrial steamer points crater, the sandstone old town, its curvaceous, 30 00:03:32,390 --> 00:03:42,430 dun coloured buildings merging into the Shimshon volcanoes, the Mohalla and Walsman districts, white and modern, between the hills and sea. 31 00:03:42,430 --> 00:03:49,720 WoodSmoke, an infant's cries, drifted up as women took a break from preparing breakfast to perform their prayers, 32 00:03:49,720 --> 00:03:56,500 not needing the exhortations of the old in a vulture's less encircled, 33 00:03:56,500 --> 00:04:03,820 the ancient vultures nest encircled the ancient minaret, the broken branches festooned with rubbish, 34 00:04:03,820 --> 00:04:07,890 the nest corrupting the neighbourhood of the stench of carrion. 35 00:04:07,890 --> 00:04:15,700 The attentive, mother fed, rotting morsels to chirping chicks, her muscular wings and hunched and at rest beside her. 36 00:04:15,700 --> 00:04:22,990 Jamas own mother and brother stood by the roof edge softly singing a song and had deep and melodious voice. 37 00:04:22,990 --> 00:04:29,860 She sang before and after work not because she was happy, but because the songs escaped from her mouth, 38 00:04:29,860 --> 00:04:36,940 a young soul roaming outside her body to take the air before it was pulled back into drudgery. 39 00:04:36,940 --> 00:04:41,320 I'm shook the ghosts from her hair and began her morning soliloquy. 40 00:04:41,320 --> 00:04:48,760 Some people don't know how much work goes into feeding their ungrateful guts as some kind of slow down you can idle about without a care in the world. 41 00:04:48,760 --> 00:04:53,980 Head full of trash, only good for running a round of trash will over my dead body. 42 00:04:53,980 --> 00:05:00,340 I don't grind my backbone to dust to sit and watch filthy bottom boys roll around on their backs. 43 00:05:00,340 --> 00:05:06,670 These poems of contempt these days of dissatisfaction greeted Jarmo every morning. 44 00:05:06,670 --> 00:05:12,580 Incredible meandering streams of abuse flowed from his mother's mouth, sweeping the macadam at the factory. 45 00:05:12,580 --> 00:05:20,470 Her son long lost relatives, enemies, men, women, Somalis, Arabs, Indians into a pit of damnation. 46 00:05:20,470 --> 00:05:24,520 Get up, you stupid boy. You think this is your father's house, get up, you fool. 47 00:05:24,520 --> 00:05:30,850 I need to get to work, Jarmo. Continue to loll around on his back playing with his belly button. 48 00:05:30,850 --> 00:05:38,380 Stop it, you dirty boy. You make a hole in it and borrow slipped off one of her broken leather sandals and marched over to him. 49 00:05:38,380 --> 00:05:42,280 Jarmo tried to flee, but his mother dived and attacked him with stinging blows. 50 00:05:42,280 --> 00:05:46,510 Get up. I have to walk two miles to walk to work. And you make a fuss over waking up. 51 00:05:46,510 --> 00:05:51,740 Is that it? She raged. Go then get lost. You good for nothing. 52 00:05:51,740 --> 00:06:00,460 Blamed Aiden for making his mother so angry he wanted to return to Hargeisa, where his father could calm her down with love songs. 53 00:06:00,460 --> 00:06:07,900 It was always at daybreak that Jarmo craved his father. All his memories were sharper in the morning light, 54 00:06:07,900 --> 00:06:15,490 his father's laughter and songs around the campfire, the soft, long fingered hands enveloping his own. 55 00:06:15,490 --> 00:06:20,620 Jarmo couldn't be sure if these were real memories or just dreams seeping into his waking life. 56 00:06:20,620 --> 00:06:27,220 But he cherished these fragile images, hoping that they would not disappear from him like his father had. 57 00:06:27,220 --> 00:06:33,020 John, I remember traversing the desert on strong shoulders, peering down in the world like a prince, 58 00:06:33,020 --> 00:06:39,730 but already his father's face was lost to him, hidden behind stubborn clouds. 59 00:06:39,730 --> 00:06:46,800 Thank you. Thank you. 60 00:06:46,800 --> 00:06:50,850 And one of the things you've been doing in the previous hour is kind of sharing passages 61 00:06:50,850 --> 00:06:56,100 which were particularly memorable to us about the victims and and it been great to read. 62 00:06:56,100 --> 00:07:01,920 That doesn't mean that the kind of long fingered hands of the father really, really kind of stayed with me as I did. 63 00:07:01,920 --> 00:07:12,120 And so this conversation is concerned about exploring the relationship between leaders and writers. 64 00:07:12,120 --> 00:07:19,080 And and so I wanted to start by asking you whether you have a particular reader in mind when you 65 00:07:19,080 --> 00:07:25,170 write and and how you work to address that reader if you do kind of through your writing process? 66 00:07:25,170 --> 00:07:33,510 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, 67 00:07:33,510 --> 00:07:42,270 which is this is very closely based on not 100 percent, but very closely what's so fascinating to me and so strange and so revealing 68 00:07:42,270 --> 00:07:47,760 of lots of things that really I was talking to myself and it was such a long, 69 00:07:47,760 --> 00:07:51,240 drawn out process of writing it late at night on my own, 70 00:07:51,240 --> 00:07:58,590 stopping and starting and really apart from collaborating with my father and talking to him about his own life. 71 00:07:58,590 --> 00:08:02,610 It was a very private activity and I didn't expect to publish it. 72 00:08:02,610 --> 00:08:09,060 I didn't intend to publish it until probably two or three years into the process. So I wasn't thinking about a public audience. 73 00:08:09,060 --> 00:08:14,700 And actually, when it was published, it felt very jarring for both me and my father, 74 00:08:14,700 --> 00:08:22,110 where suddenly a private activity between us was seen as public property and his life story felt like public property as well. 75 00:08:22,110 --> 00:08:28,950 So despite him always saying that he should have a book written about him because his life's been so interesting, 76 00:08:28,950 --> 00:08:35,700 when that actually did happen, it felt strange to him. And I managed to persuade him to do just one event with me. 77 00:08:35,700 --> 00:08:40,680 And it was with the Anglo Somali society, which he was part of for a long time, and I'm part of as well. 78 00:08:40,680 --> 00:08:50,440 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. 79 00:08:50,440 --> 00:08:56,860 And so kind of thinking of your kind of father as a reader of the book was weather places where your 80 00:08:56,860 --> 00:09:02,800 kind of choice of language felt shaped by thinking of him reading probably not not the language, 81 00:09:02,800 --> 00:09:08,920 but probably the content. What do I choose to include and what do I choose to take out? 82 00:09:08,920 --> 00:09:15,040 So I started off as a very straight biography of him and it was only meant to be a few pages long. 83 00:09:15,040 --> 00:09:19,700 So just really an account of the highlights of his early life, really. 84 00:09:19,700 --> 00:09:27,940 And it just grew and grew and grew. And it was my first creative writing experience, I think, completely. 85 00:09:27,940 --> 00:09:31,360 So I was also working at what I wanted to do with it. 86 00:09:31,360 --> 00:09:40,270 So very quickly, I realised that it wasn't satisfying just to write as a short and brief account of his life. 87 00:09:40,270 --> 00:09:48,020 I loved learning about Aiden. Aiden in the early 20th century was still so unchanged from how it had been for thousands of years. 88 00:09:48,020 --> 00:09:54,070 Very magical. And my father being in the months that allowed me to kind of explore and have fun with that. 89 00:09:54,070 --> 00:09:58,150 And every every other place that he went, I learnt more about and enjoyed. 90 00:09:58,150 --> 00:10:01,930 And, you know, I've always loved fiction, but I also used to read a lot of travel fiction. 91 00:10:01,930 --> 00:10:08,050 So the idea of kind of travelling through books was something that was very normal to me. 92 00:10:08,050 --> 00:10:17,080 So the more I learnt about places, the more I wanted to put it in the book about places for the reader, whoever that might be in the end. 93 00:10:17,080 --> 00:10:24,640 Yeah. And and I think one of the one of the things this project is particularly exploring is this the kind of relationship between kind 94 00:10:24,640 --> 00:10:34,450 of writing as an act of communication or I guess writing more as a kind of like writing to create a work of art kind of crafts. 95 00:10:34,450 --> 00:10:39,760 And I mean, obviously, you've talked about it being a kind of personal, I think. 96 00:10:39,760 --> 00:10:43,180 But I guess in relation to because, you know, you've obviously published a second novel. 97 00:10:43,180 --> 00:10:47,830 You working on that? How would you say you did writing and then just changed? 98 00:10:47,830 --> 00:10:53,740 The way I viewed it has changed. So this one was almost a polemic, I think. 99 00:10:53,740 --> 00:11:03,550 And there was. There were so many parallels, so I was writing in the 2000s where people were talking about Iraq, 100 00:11:03,550 --> 00:11:07,660 they were talking about an American empire, a new American empire, respectable figures. 101 00:11:07,660 --> 00:11:14,410 We're talking about these sorts of things. And you had the images from Abu Ghraib and there was such huge parallels between 102 00:11:14,410 --> 00:11:19,450 what my father had experienced in the 30s and 40s and what was happening then. 103 00:11:19,450 --> 00:11:25,510 And I think you can't help but take in that environment that you're working in and it affects 104 00:11:25,510 --> 00:11:30,340 the way you shape your writing and what you're writing about and how you're writing about it. 105 00:11:30,340 --> 00:11:39,610 So I think that now the book I'm working on is very similar in some respects to black men. 106 00:11:39,610 --> 00:11:46,540 But boy, it's about the same community of men, of sailors living in the UK in the 1940s and 50s from Somalia. 107 00:11:46,540 --> 00:11:53,110 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, 108 00:11:53,110 --> 00:11:56,800 there's this distance between us that I can I can see him in a more objective 109 00:11:56,800 --> 00:12:00,900 way and not this is I'm not Agrio for the guy I'm working about right now. 110 00:12:00,900 --> 00:12:09,370 And I'm a friend or an ally in some respects, like he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice who was executed for a murder he didn't commit. 111 00:12:09,370 --> 00:12:13,330 So I'm an ally of his. I think there's nothing there's no other way you can be. 112 00:12:13,330 --> 00:12:23,680 But at the same time, I can be more objective. So I do think that there is a change that I'm talking about injustice. 113 00:12:23,680 --> 00:12:34,680 I'm talking about differences in power, of violence, but I'm doing it in a different way to how I did it here. 114 00:12:34,680 --> 00:12:40,260 And I can kind of questions up to the room, I need know people have got questions they want to ask you about. 115 00:12:40,260 --> 00:12:44,670 I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the kind of publishing process. 116 00:12:44,670 --> 00:12:51,600 And obviously you talked about it being quite a shock for the book to be kind of out in the world. 117 00:12:51,600 --> 00:12:56,220 And I just wondered if there were particular things about the way that you 118 00:12:56,220 --> 00:12:59,670 represented as the writer of the book was represented kind of through the publishing 119 00:12:59,670 --> 00:13:03,630 process or through publicity and media that either particularly delighted you or 120 00:13:03,630 --> 00:13:10,080 that the equally particularly irritating my first concern was the editing process. 121 00:13:10,080 --> 00:13:16,380 That was my big concern because because it had been so private for so long and because it was about my father, 122 00:13:16,380 --> 00:13:25,080 there was some parameters that I wasn't willing to go beyond. But in both with my editor and my US editor, they did respect that. 123 00:13:25,080 --> 00:13:30,240 And the fear that I had that they might want to tone it down wasn't the case. 124 00:13:30,240 --> 00:13:38,400 I think the US that there was one scene which we can talk about later, which my US editor did want to trim back. 125 00:13:38,400 --> 00:13:44,850 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. 126 00:13:44,850 --> 00:13:54,060 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. 127 00:13:54,060 --> 00:14:00,720 The biggest change that happened was in my first manuscript, Thomas mother survives. 128 00:14:00,720 --> 00:14:09,610 She's with him for a lot longer. And it was my editor's suggestion that to break from real life and have the mother die very early on. 129 00:14:09,610 --> 00:14:13,710 So the focus is just on drama as a young boy in this environment. 130 00:14:13,710 --> 00:14:19,170 And that took some convincing, partly because I knew that my father wouldn't like it because it wasn't the truth. 131 00:14:19,170 --> 00:14:25,200 And it felt very strange killing off your grandmother. So I didn't want to do that. 132 00:14:25,200 --> 00:14:31,320 But she was right. She was right. And what I did that suddenly other things started to fall into place. 133 00:14:31,320 --> 00:14:42,030 It became a kind of neater, sharper story. And the other things around publishing, we talked briefly just about the cover. 134 00:14:42,030 --> 00:14:47,430 And I think you writers don't normally get much say when it comes to the covers you're showing it. 135 00:14:47,430 --> 00:14:50,880 You asked to give us some feedback, but it's not it's not really within your control. 136 00:14:50,880 --> 00:14:57,300 It's very much a it's a consensus within the publishing company. 137 00:14:57,300 --> 00:15:03,630 So it's very orange in the UK, as you can see. And it's very kind of African fiction. 138 00:15:03,630 --> 00:15:12,800 Um, it's not, I think, kind of. I think that they had an idea about making it as accessible as possible, 139 00:15:12,800 --> 00:15:16,460 and I think that was right and I think people picked it up that might not have if it had seemed, 140 00:15:16,460 --> 00:15:20,660 you know, in a different way, a different style of book. 141 00:15:20,660 --> 00:15:24,680 So I think it worked. It worked. 142 00:15:24,680 --> 00:15:32,120 And this is the American cover, which I really like. And it's of a young boy jumping with illustrated angel wings. 143 00:15:32,120 --> 00:15:41,690 And I like this is playful. It does have the dust and the bit of orange, but it's a bit more playful. 144 00:15:41,690 --> 00:15:52,550 But I have noticed that this is easy to find in every bookshop, which I think every writer is not is not unhappy with that and other respects. 145 00:15:52,550 --> 00:15:59,390 I think that whole pigeonholing, I guess, of what makes an African writer, an African writer of African descent. 146 00:15:59,390 --> 00:16:01,070 I think there's no doubt about that. 147 00:16:01,070 --> 00:16:13,910 I'm Somali, but there's I think maybe this idea that even though I grew up in the U.K., that you're still you're still very different. 148 00:16:13,910 --> 00:16:19,130 And I think that's that's a misapprehension of it. So it's weird. 149 00:16:19,130 --> 00:16:24,920 And I think I'm in a particularly weird position because I often do things with the British Council. So I travel with the British Council. 150 00:16:24,920 --> 00:16:32,930 And you're an African right to be also British writer. So you are often asked about your identity and something which you don't you don't think about. 151 00:16:32,930 --> 00:16:36,440 You don't think about. Do I feel British today? Do I feel African today? Do I feel Somali? 152 00:16:36,440 --> 00:16:43,910 Today is just part of your everyday, you know, experience in life and you perceive things through all of those lenses, 153 00:16:43,910 --> 00:16:48,980 but you go to a country and suddenly it's kind of like, well, do you feel British? 154 00:16:48,980 --> 00:17:03,230 And that, I think, was a bit of a struggle. I will now open up for questions. 155 00:17:03,230 --> 00:17:11,750 Yeah. I'm just one other question about the language of the book, because, like you said, 156 00:17:11,750 --> 00:17:20,540 you are a British writer and especially for me and for whom for those readers whose language is not the first language is not English. 157 00:17:20,540 --> 00:17:28,040 But then when I read the book, actually, that you insert a lot of I don't know how to categorise Arabic and also Somali words, 158 00:17:28,040 --> 00:17:37,910 various languages and and, you know, being in the academic setting for a long time, usually we italicise the French or German words. 159 00:17:37,910 --> 00:17:45,080 And so my experience of reading this book is like there are a lot of these foreign words that I was not sure whether they are 160 00:17:45,080 --> 00:17:51,680 English words that I'm supposed to know as an Austrian student or it's just it's just part of the vocabulary borrowed from, 161 00:17:51,680 --> 00:17:55,830 you know, the setting. You were linguists. Yes. So I wondered when you were writing it. 162 00:17:55,830 --> 00:18:00,170 Were you aware about, you know, the choice of vocabulary? Yes. 163 00:18:00,170 --> 00:18:04,160 Yes. It was an act of decision and it was an act of decision to not have a glossary, 164 00:18:04,160 --> 00:18:13,940 because I've always read books that are from different languages, whether that's, you know, books by Indian authors, by South American authors. 165 00:18:13,940 --> 00:18:19,670 And it was also I always had the impression that I understood I would get from 166 00:18:19,670 --> 00:18:24,530 the context and the feeling what the word meant and if I really wanted to, 167 00:18:24,530 --> 00:18:28,190 especially now with the Internet, you can find out very easily. 168 00:18:28,190 --> 00:18:37,160 But the more the more I publish than the more I've spoken to readers, I realised that people often don't know what the word meant. 169 00:18:37,160 --> 00:18:40,580 And it's actually quite alienating because the meaning I was trying to get 170 00:18:40,580 --> 00:18:45,830 across that is is lost because the meaning I thought was clear is not clear. 171 00:18:45,830 --> 00:18:48,740 So that's something I'm thinking about for the book I'm working on right now, 172 00:18:48,740 --> 00:18:53,390 because, again, it's got lots of languages in it and then it's got slang as well. 173 00:18:53,390 --> 00:19:00,170 English slang, Jamaican slang. So it's a real kind of pot of varied influences. 174 00:19:00,170 --> 00:19:03,450 And I don't want the reader to be lost, but I also don't want to lose that texture. 175 00:19:03,450 --> 00:19:09,590 And this was a normal life, you know, Somali guy who can speak Hindi, who can speak Arabic, 176 00:19:09,590 --> 00:19:16,280 who can, you know, chat and use Cockney Cockney slang or criminal slang, whatever it might be. 177 00:19:16,280 --> 00:19:24,440 That's just the reality. So I think kind of in an academic setting, you'd have footnotes and, you know, it would be very, very clear. 178 00:19:24,440 --> 00:19:27,020 But you can't I don't want to do that in a in a fiction. 179 00:19:27,020 --> 00:19:35,510 And no, Junot Diaz is someone I love and he does in an Oscar while he does have footnotes and lots and lots of Spanish terms. 180 00:19:35,510 --> 00:19:38,990 And that's it's one approach. 181 00:19:38,990 --> 00:19:42,650 But I don't think that's the one I want to take with the novel I'm working on now. 182 00:19:42,650 --> 00:19:47,300 And I don't think it's a bad thing for the reader to be alienated sometimes. 183 00:19:47,300 --> 00:19:57,470 I think when I read novels that are set in places I've never been, but yet it's somehow too smooth and to to Western or too familiar, 184 00:19:57,470 --> 00:20:02,870 I don't know what the word is then I think there's something missing there. 185 00:20:02,870 --> 00:20:16,880 It should it should feel a little bit alienating when you're reading about culture you don't know about. 186 00:20:16,880 --> 00:20:24,800 So one of the we chose kind of episodes out of the novel that sort of very memorable and one 187 00:20:24,800 --> 00:20:31,210 of them that I chose was about when Jamma is having to carry the carcases for the butcher. 188 00:20:31,210 --> 00:20:35,390 Yes. Stinks artisans and all the blood strollin he can't even wash. 189 00:20:35,390 --> 00:20:40,670 Yeah. And which was great. Really great fun writing it. 190 00:20:40,670 --> 00:20:47,750 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. 191 00:20:47,750 --> 00:20:54,650 And whether your father what I felt when I was reading is that I can imagine him telling you about it. 192 00:20:54,650 --> 00:20:59,990 Do you think the energy came from him? Yeah, absolutely. I think it did. And I think that that's probably why it became that kind of scene, 193 00:20:59,990 --> 00:21:04,130 because he was so vivid in his own description and so proud of himself at the same 194 00:21:04,130 --> 00:21:09,200 time that he was this tiny boy carrying this huge camel carcases on his shoulders. 195 00:21:09,200 --> 00:21:14,510 And it's such a it's almost like a metaphor, isn't it, the weight that he's carrying, the burden that he's carrying. 196 00:21:14,510 --> 00:21:20,660 So, yeah, I think that and the idea of waking up at dawn, all of these little boys creeping out of the city, 197 00:21:20,660 --> 00:21:26,270 the town to settle and to work, and even that horrible job is something to be competed over. 198 00:21:26,270 --> 00:21:34,790 And it's almost like, you know, a prise. And it's the very beginnings of the physical labour of being a man, 199 00:21:34,790 --> 00:21:41,750 of being a colonial man in that environment that he's just getting the first taste of because he did have jobs in aid. 200 00:21:41,750 --> 00:21:45,800 And as well, he used to collect tennis balls on courts and things like that. 201 00:21:45,800 --> 00:21:51,410 And sometimes, you know very things for one place to another. But this was the first real physical job I think he had. 202 00:21:51,410 --> 00:21:55,910 So, yeah, and there's quite a few scenes. Where is his energy? 203 00:21:55,910 --> 00:22:01,700 I think that's there. He was a great speaker and the great he loved language. 204 00:22:01,700 --> 00:22:10,520 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. 205 00:22:10,520 --> 00:22:30,610 Yeah, I think, yeah. Just moving on from from Eleanor's question, but still on this amazing energy in the story, how did you. 206 00:22:30,610 --> 00:22:40,810 I didn'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, 207 00:22:40,810 --> 00:22:45,970 meandering stories from your father onto the page, 208 00:22:45,970 --> 00:22:54,640 whether you you know, whether you use memory a lot or notebooks or just sort of whether you left it to him. 209 00:22:54,640 --> 00:23:00,190 Yeah, there's that sort of question. Yeah. Um, they actually weren't so meandering. 210 00:23:00,190 --> 00:23:05,650 And I think because he'd been saying for a long time that his story was worth telling and worth writing, 211 00:23:05,650 --> 00:23:15,460 but in a way he had shaped it in his own mind because I my first intention was to write down everything that he had told me. 212 00:23:15,460 --> 00:23:21,310 And I think I did get quite close to that. So it kind of into meandering. And so some things are probably simplified. 213 00:23:21,310 --> 00:23:28,240 And, you know, you put lots of slightly different days into one day or there's some of that going on. 214 00:23:28,240 --> 00:23:33,910 But most of it is, is how he told me the very first part of the process. 215 00:23:33,910 --> 00:23:40,750 And actually it happened by accident. I started recording him or interviewing him while I was still at university here. 216 00:23:40,750 --> 00:23:50,560 And I studied a mixture of kind of mediaeval British history and international relations by Byzantium and the early Islamic empires and things. 217 00:23:50,560 --> 00:23:54,310 It was very, very different to anything from my own background. 218 00:23:54,310 --> 00:23:57,850 And I think I love history and I love all global history. 219 00:23:57,850 --> 00:24:04,810 But there was something I needed to work out within my own background, my own roots, because Somalia had collapsed by that stage. 220 00:24:04,810 --> 00:24:08,800 And the only information you could find about it was very negative. 221 00:24:08,800 --> 00:24:16,420 And I felt very, very isolated, I think probably alienated well, being here from my roots, whatever that might mean. 222 00:24:16,420 --> 00:24:21,460 So I interviewed him and that was just a one off. And then how did it happen? 223 00:24:21,460 --> 00:24:33,380 I actually started interviewing probably, um. I was interviewing him about a film I wanted to make about the guy I'm now working on for a book, 224 00:24:33,380 --> 00:24:39,680 Mahmoud Maton, who was a Somali sailor that he knew who was executed in Cardiff in 1950 to. 225 00:24:39,680 --> 00:24:47,540 And I was intending to make a film of him soon after I left university, so to research Mahameed story. 226 00:24:47,540 --> 00:24:52,890 I sat down with my father to find out what he knew of him. And so he told me a little, he said is normal. 227 00:24:52,890 --> 00:24:58,340 It was medium height, you know, very cursory details. 228 00:24:58,340 --> 00:25:05,330 And very quickly it became about him and about his own life and how remarkable it was. 229 00:25:05,330 --> 00:25:08,570 And I said, okay, let me record this just just for family's sake. 230 00:25:08,570 --> 00:25:14,720 And my first niece had been born recently at that time, so I wanted to record it for her. 231 00:25:14,720 --> 00:25:26,090 So I got my empty recorder and just put a microphone in front of him and he kind of organise the information and he went back, back, back. 232 00:25:26,090 --> 00:25:31,730 So he started before he was born to his own parents, where they were born and their own situations. 233 00:25:31,730 --> 00:25:34,820 And he, through family stories, oral history, 234 00:25:34,820 --> 00:25:43,070 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. 235 00:25:43,070 --> 00:25:49,130 So it was very in-depth history because Somali Somali life is arranged around these clans. 236 00:25:49,130 --> 00:25:52,700 And, you know, your client is your your ancestry, your grandfather's. 237 00:25:52,700 --> 00:26:00,170 And so as well as their name, maybe a tiny bit of their life or their stories might be passed down along with that. 238 00:26:00,170 --> 00:26:09,650 So he started at that level and then moved to his birth and then he stopped when he was about in his early 20s. 239 00:26:09,650 --> 00:26:12,770 So he thought that was the interesting part of his life. 240 00:26:12,770 --> 00:26:21,200 And maybe if he'd 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. 241 00:26:21,200 --> 00:26:28,580 So he did we did that in English with me, asking him questions and kind of pushing him for more details or whatever. 242 00:26:28,580 --> 00:26:33,710 But he also did it by himself in Somali, just recording himself on tapes. 243 00:26:33,710 --> 00:26:39,260 And that was something he wanted to do. But I also have those tapes. So I had that base knowledge. 244 00:26:39,260 --> 00:26:44,120 And to be honest, that was that was it. I think that was what I needed for the book. 245 00:26:44,120 --> 00:26:48,080 But then all the time we we spoke about his life story. 246 00:26:48,080 --> 00:26:53,030 I would ask him specific details about things. We'd go over old maps together. 247 00:26:53,030 --> 00:27:02,630 We went to the Imperial War Museum together to look at old newsreels from where he lived in Eritrea and Tuscany and around those western lowlands. 248 00:27:02,630 --> 00:27:10,130 We went to Cardiff together to the Butan Arts and History Centre, which has got a large Somali history archive there as well. 249 00:27:10,130 --> 00:27:15,620 So it was very collaborative. And he was the person who, you know what, I was starting to lose faith and everything. 250 00:27:15,620 --> 00:27:23,990 And I applied to do a PGC to become a teacher. And at the very last minute, I decided to just finish this book and then see what happened. 251 00:27:23,990 --> 00:27:27,590 And he was always very supportive. He always thought it was a worthwhile thing to do. 252 00:27:27,590 --> 00:27:31,730 And it's partly because, again, of his passion for language and for words, 253 00:27:31,730 --> 00:27:39,200 and he saw being the writer as being a dignified profession like not many people do, but he did. 254 00:27:39,200 --> 00:27:53,100 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. 255 00:27:53,100 --> 00:28:02,250 I overheard I as a reader, I'm not really terribly bothered by scenes of violence, 256 00:28:02,250 --> 00:28:10,090 but it seems like I was wondering whether you have a certain idea in mind when you're writing these scenes in graphic detail that, 257 00:28:10,090 --> 00:28:15,210 uh, do you want to put your reader or do you have something else that he's thinking about? 258 00:28:15,210 --> 00:28:23,400 Well, I think it's difficult to say. And I'll tell you the genesis I know the scene you're talking about is with Shivan and the Italian soldiers. 259 00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:29,280 So that is that's one of the things that's actually not from my father's experience, 260 00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:34,980 but the two boys that it's based on, a boys that my father was reunited with. 261 00:28:34,980 --> 00:28:39,510 He knew them in Aden and then they were reunited in Karen. 262 00:28:39,510 --> 00:28:45,690 So that part's true. But the violence inflicted on children that came from, I think, my own. 263 00:28:45,690 --> 00:28:49,380 You know, when you're writing a book, all of these things bubble to the surface. 264 00:28:49,380 --> 00:28:54,530 And when I was going through the old records and Sylvia Pankhurst is actually she 265 00:28:54,530 --> 00:29:00,120 she wrote this incredible book about human rights abuses in colonial East Africa, 266 00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:08,370 in Italy, in East Africa in the 1930s. And she compiled story after story of torture, murder, rape, the rest of it. 267 00:29:08,370 --> 00:29:14,880 And then it's also you have these trophy images that the Italians took themselves and have passed on. 268 00:29:14,880 --> 00:29:18,420 My mother was aware of them, and she she's much younger than that. 269 00:29:18,420 --> 00:29:27,990 So she she was aware of Italian soldiers asking Somali men and presumably Eritrean men as well to lie down. 270 00:29:27,990 --> 00:29:34,920 If there's a waterway to cross it, they would cross it on their backs. And I saw images of heads piled up. 271 00:29:34,920 --> 00:29:39,690 You know, this is very graphic. It's very graphic material. There's no way of getting around that. 272 00:29:39,690 --> 00:29:46,260 And I think it was a combination of seeing those images and reading about that in the 1930s and 40s. 273 00:29:46,260 --> 00:29:55,980 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. 274 00:29:55,980 --> 00:29:58,680 I thought I kind of had disappeared from my mind. 275 00:29:58,680 --> 00:30:04,080 But while I was writing, I remembered something which had really got under my skin when I was 15 years old. 276 00:30:04,080 --> 00:30:09,090 And it was seeing images from Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. 277 00:30:09,090 --> 00:30:13,890 And there were quite a few accounts of human rights is such a vague term. 278 00:30:13,890 --> 00:30:21,900 I don't even like the term human rights abuses. It doesn't it doesn't explain what we're talking about, but we'll call it that. 279 00:30:21,900 --> 00:30:34,380 So Belgian troops, Canadian troops, American troops, various troops tortured and killed young Somali boys and girls and men and adults. 280 00:30:34,380 --> 00:30:39,030 And there was one image that I can still see in my mind right now. 281 00:30:39,030 --> 00:30:48,600 Of Canadian paratroopers in a town called Belad Wayne, which is between Somalia and Ethiopia on the border, and he was 16 years old. 282 00:30:48,600 --> 00:30:53,850 His name was Shilan. So I actually even before that happened, I'd name the character after him. 283 00:30:53,850 --> 00:30:59,730 I don't know why. So even before I got to that scene, I was thinking about him. 284 00:30:59,730 --> 00:31:03,270 I must have been otherwise I would have named the character Chillum. 285 00:31:03,270 --> 00:31:13,080 So the last moments of his life, there were pictures taken of it and the incredibly graphic and terrifying because the men, 286 00:31:13,080 --> 00:31:18,870 the Canadian soldiers are smiling. You know, these these are not men ashamed of what they're doing. 287 00:31:18,870 --> 00:31:24,060 They're very proud. And his cries could be heard within the camp. So God knows how many dozens of people had. 288 00:31:24,060 --> 00:31:31,470 And there was a there is a fantastic book by Schubin Razzak about this whole case because it 289 00:31:31,470 --> 00:31:38,220 was discovered and prosecuted and one of the men received a very short prison sentence for it. 290 00:31:38,220 --> 00:31:49,770 So it was massive, almost like a biblical act of violence that I had I had seen as a young person and I think I'd got under my skin. 291 00:31:49,770 --> 00:31:53,910 So it was that image that was there, not words. 292 00:31:53,910 --> 00:32:05,520 So I guess I was trying to turn that image into words and I might edit my American editor was very much kind of show, 293 00:32:05,520 --> 00:32:12,780 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. 294 00:32:12,780 --> 00:32:21,030 We always look away. We always look away. And this was an opportunity for me and for the reader to not look away. 295 00:32:21,030 --> 00:32:27,030 We use a lot of jargon, I think, to distance ourselves from exactly what we're talking about. 296 00:32:27,030 --> 00:32:32,520 And sometimes you have to strip that jargon away. 297 00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:44,640 I was wondering, I haven't read the book yet, but from the beats that people chose, I got the sense of a general allegory of life in something, 298 00:32:44,640 --> 00:32:52,050 a message beyond the words that you are that actually on the pages with the words, you can talk about that a little bit more. 299 00:32:52,050 --> 00:32:56,040 Yes. Like, sorry, the example was like, what is it? 300 00:32:56,040 --> 00:33:03,300 The hyaenas. Yeah. And the camels on the fact that the hyaenas eat the smugglers when they are not paying attention. 301 00:33:03,300 --> 00:33:09,870 Yes. That again is one of my father's favourite things to talk about as he got older. 302 00:33:09,870 --> 00:33:12,660 Actually, much later on after I finished the book, 303 00:33:12,660 --> 00:33:19,650 he started having these dreams and in his dreams he would jump out of bed because he would be back in Eritrea, 304 00:33:19,650 --> 00:33:24,540 in the desert on camel backs with the hyaenas following him. 305 00:33:24,540 --> 00:33:29,160 So he always talked about hyaenas, but had created a massive impression on him. 306 00:33:29,160 --> 00:33:34,560 I guess if any kind of terrifying animal was following you, you'd have an impression. I've never I've never had that. 307 00:33:34,560 --> 00:33:40,920 I've never experienced that. But there's something magical about walking through this pale desert just with moonlight. 308 00:33:40,920 --> 00:33:46,200 And you know that if you fall, you're dead. Last week saying if you fall, you're dead. 309 00:33:46,200 --> 00:33:52,920 If you broke your dead, if you're not able to stay on that camel and go to where you need to go, your life is over. 310 00:33:52,920 --> 00:34:02,130 And I think that that purity, that moment of realisation that your life is fragile but beautiful and you're alive, 311 00:34:02,130 --> 00:34:09,480 it was something that in many parts of his life, it feels you can feel the intensity of that. 312 00:34:09,480 --> 00:34:16,290 So in terms of being almost like a metaphor, I think, yes, you're pursued, 313 00:34:16,290 --> 00:34:23,730 you're pursued by different dangers and you're you're you're constantly trying to keep yourself together, keep yourself in movement. 314 00:34:23,730 --> 00:34:33,240 And I think being who he was, being young, being a black man and a colonial environment, those hyaenas were varied and pros. 315 00:34:33,240 --> 00:34:40,230 That progress you were making physically, spatially was also something that you couldn't you couldn't stop. 316 00:34:40,230 --> 00:34:41,850 You had to keep moving. 317 00:34:41,850 --> 00:34:51,390 And it's something that Toni Morrison writes about and Beloved, where one of the male characters, he says that if you stop, you'll be chained. 318 00:34:51,390 --> 00:35:01,210 I'm paraphrasing. And it's not the exact phrase, but that's basically the gist of what he's saying, that if you stop moving, then your life is over. 319 00:35:01,210 --> 00:35:04,680 And it's something that, you know, one of my favourite authors, Claude McKay, 320 00:35:04,680 --> 00:35:13,020 also writes about he writes about Marseilles being this kind of melting pot of African and black sailors, 321 00:35:13,020 --> 00:35:18,540 you know, from all over the world, fleeing lynchings, fleeing this, fleeing that and then recreating themselves. 322 00:35:18,540 --> 00:35:23,340 But there's still a movement. No one is there forever. They come and go. 323 00:35:23,340 --> 00:35:27,810 They run off with a woman. You know, they jump on a train without a ticket. 324 00:35:27,810 --> 00:35:40,710 There's just this this flux, this constant flux that goes throughout the whole life. 325 00:35:40,710 --> 00:35:48,960 And this is a question that follows on a little bit from what L.A. was asking. I was struck from the passage you read about the the act of memory, 326 00:35:48,960 --> 00:35:54,900 especially when the little boy remembers his father's black hair and how how he missed him. 327 00:35:54,900 --> 00:35:58,210 And from what you've been saying about how your father told you many of the stories, 328 00:35:58,210 --> 00:36:01,830 that's partly based on memory, yet it doesn't seem as though it is. 329 00:36:01,830 --> 00:36:06,950 So how do you get around that, apart from putting everything into the present? 330 00:36:06,950 --> 00:36:12,590 So it doesn't feel like it's a memory, not feels really it feels as though it's in the very minute that you're reading it. 331 00:36:12,590 --> 00:36:19,040 Yeah, well, that's a great thing to hear. Thank you. Oh, yeah. 332 00:36:19,040 --> 00:36:23,960 Oh, how did I think the process of writing. 333 00:36:23,960 --> 00:36:29,330 So you're hearing it? I'm hearing my father's memories, but when you write, it becomes something else. 334 00:36:29,330 --> 00:36:34,880 So it's not his own memory anymore. And it did feel like I described it before as a transfusion of memory. 335 00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:41,030 And it is. But then when it enters your own system, you you turn it into something else. 336 00:36:41,030 --> 00:36:51,410 I couldn't there were one of the things that I found difficult was his his version of his life was that it was very lonely and very he had no friends. 337 00:36:51,410 --> 00:37:00,440 He had no thoughts. He had no desires. It's kind of like the simple, simple, simple life, just urgent needs. 338 00:37:00,440 --> 00:37:08,150 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? 339 00:37:08,150 --> 00:37:12,080 My mind is always kind of going backwards, going forwards, thinking about this. 340 00:37:12,080 --> 00:37:17,630 You know, this is so is so enmeshed in in so many different things that I can't put myself. 341 00:37:17,630 --> 00:37:21,500 And this is one of the things I think that having a different life to my father means that 342 00:37:21,500 --> 00:37:26,820 this is I can't describe this is a completely authentic account because I can't do that. 343 00:37:26,820 --> 00:37:31,370 He he he believed that he could live for 30 days without water. 344 00:37:31,370 --> 00:37:40,070 I don't believe that he believed that he witnessed or believed at least that a man turned into a hyaena. 345 00:37:40,070 --> 00:37:46,580 You know, these are these are places that I can't really go. But I all I can do is try and imagine myself into them. 346 00:37:46,580 --> 00:37:52,340 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, 347 00:37:52,340 --> 00:37:57,140 all of the music that you've listened to, it becomes a much more sensual and kind of more textured thing. 348 00:37:57,140 --> 00:38:03,650 And that's what I think you need to do to bring it to life. You know, my own memories come into it, my own emotions. 349 00:38:03,650 --> 00:38:08,930 You know, I think one of the saddest scenes in the book for me is actually not the most violent ones. 350 00:38:08,930 --> 00:38:14,840 This is one where just before he goes to war in Ethiopia, he's an Ethiopian. 351 00:38:14,840 --> 00:38:19,880 He's a tea boy in the middle of nowhere in a place that he has no connexions, no friends. 352 00:38:19,880 --> 00:38:25,910 And when it rains, he goes under a shelter. When it stops raining, he starts wandering again. 353 00:38:25,910 --> 00:38:30,800 And it's that really atomised life where no one knows you, no one cares about you. 354 00:38:30,800 --> 00:38:36,080 It's that deep, deep loneliness that I find most upsetting when I think about it. 355 00:38:36,080 --> 00:38:41,090 And leading on from that question of memory, one of the things I wanted to ask you was kind of when in the writing process, 356 00:38:41,090 --> 00:38:47,600 you you kind of decided to explicitly frame the novel through a kind of father daughter relationship as you do the opening chapter. 357 00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:54,690 Yes. Later on. Later on. I think this was literally I think I wrote this book and then I stopped it for a while. 358 00:38:54,690 --> 00:38:59,030 I wrote a short story and then went back to the book. And those were these were my creative experiments. 359 00:38:59,030 --> 00:39:06,560 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. 360 00:39:06,560 --> 00:39:13,100 And it was in hindsight that I realised that this was a hymn to him. 361 00:39:13,100 --> 00:39:22,130 This is a way of celebrating. And that's why certain things, certain choices that other writers might make about making making it more more objective, 362 00:39:22,130 --> 00:39:27,860 cooler in descriptions, sometimes more reserved about some of the violence. 363 00:39:27,860 --> 00:39:33,200 I didn't want to do that because this was a very personal and subjective thing. 364 00:39:33,200 --> 00:39:37,850 And there's a book I can recommend by is sadly passed away. 365 00:39:37,850 --> 00:39:42,050 His name was Ahmadu Kuruma, the writer from the Ivory Coast, 366 00:39:42,050 --> 00:39:49,040 and he wrote a book called Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, which is similar in some respects. 367 00:39:49,040 --> 00:39:58,520 This is the tale of the rise of power, rise to power of an African dictator, and it's told by Agrio who is employed by him. 368 00:39:58,520 --> 00:40:05,240 So I guess I was kind of employed by my father to do this as well. And it's that deep. 369 00:40:05,240 --> 00:40:09,890 I didn't want to make it a journalist. It wasn't journalism. 370 00:40:09,890 --> 00:40:22,340 This was an artistic and also intimate process between me and my father. 371 00:40:22,340 --> 00:40:31,080 There's one more question I was thinking about this theme of belonging in this story, because I think when I read a lot of post-colonial fiction, 372 00:40:31,080 --> 00:40:41,640 belongings of the central themes, and I noticed it at the beginning of the story when I just returned to the aunt in Hargeisa. 373 00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:45,360 Yeah. And they had a conversation about why his father left. 374 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:51,520 And then I was confused about why he had to leave, because he has a strong sense of this is where we belong. 375 00:40:51,520 --> 00:40:59,430 Yeah, but then at the end of the story, in the interview, in the actual interview and the drama that your father was asked about, 376 00:40:59,430 --> 00:41:03,060 whether he feels English in that he is totally comfortable saying that because 377 00:41:03,060 --> 00:41:06,620 he grew up knowing he could have grown up in that space and he was English. 378 00:41:06,620 --> 00:41:13,680 Yes. I just wonder how how did this sense of belonging change over the years? 379 00:41:13,680 --> 00:41:18,090 I think that is a big question. It's a big question. 380 00:41:18,090 --> 00:41:22,680 I think there's quite a few things going on. I think the fact that Somalis are nomadic is a big part of it. 381 00:41:22,680 --> 00:41:32,520 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. 382 00:41:32,520 --> 00:41:39,180 So that's a huge, huge distance. And so your your belonging isn't to this village. 383 00:41:39,180 --> 00:41:43,320 It's to a network of people. And that network of people is flexible. 384 00:41:43,320 --> 00:41:51,810 And whenever you can find it, you'll find it in fragments in Cape Town, in London, in Helsinki, wherever you might be. 385 00:41:51,810 --> 00:41:57,970 That's that's you'll feel a sense of belonging, because that's that's how society is arranged. 386 00:41:57,970 --> 00:42:03,030 And that doesn't do all of the job. But I think people in my generation, second generation, 387 00:42:03,030 --> 00:42:09,420 are now realising that actually we don't feel that complete sense of belonging in our clan or being Somali. 388 00:42:09,420 --> 00:42:14,940 I think it's a much more like it's a much more disturbed process for us. 389 00:42:14,940 --> 00:42:19,270 We're told that we're not British enough. We're told that we're not Somali enough and not this enough and not that enough. 390 00:42:19,270 --> 00:42:25,200 So I think it's a much more complicated one. But to go back to my father's generation. 391 00:42:25,200 --> 00:42:35,670 So you have the nomadism as a base and then the fact that my father was raised outside of Somalia for most of his life, most of his childhood. 392 00:42:35,670 --> 00:42:43,080 So he left Somalia when he was very young and grew up in Aden, speaking Arabic as well as Somali, and then lived in Eritrea for a long time. 393 00:42:43,080 --> 00:42:47,070 So his sense of Somali ness, I think, was probably a bit eroded by that. 394 00:42:47,070 --> 00:42:52,950 And he when I went to Eritrea for research for the book, people looked like him. 395 00:42:52,950 --> 00:42:58,680 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. 396 00:42:58,680 --> 00:43:05,430 That was his Somali ness. But actually know that was his Eritrea in this. And then he came to Britain in 1947. 397 00:43:05,430 --> 00:43:12,690 And because I'm working on a book around that period of time and I'm amazed that they didn't leave, 398 00:43:12,690 --> 00:43:20,160 it was such an incredibly hostile environment and a complicated environment where, you know, it wasn't it wasn't lynchings generally. 399 00:43:20,160 --> 00:43:24,450 It wasn't that kind of violence, but it was just this feeling that you shouldn't be here. 400 00:43:24,450 --> 00:43:33,900 We don't want you here. And I would leave, I think, confronted with that level of aggression or hostility, I would leave, but they didn't leave. 401 00:43:33,900 --> 00:43:41,910 And I think it became like a tussle. It became a tussle between this host nation and these visitors who were British. 402 00:43:41,910 --> 00:43:48,540 You know, whether they liked it or not, they had British passports. Somaliland was British, so there was no choice in that. 403 00:43:48,540 --> 00:43:56,730 So it was about, you know, marking your your space. And my father lived in Hull when most of the time he was in the UK before we arrived. 404 00:43:56,730 --> 00:43:59,730 And there was a small group of people of his clan. 405 00:43:59,730 --> 00:44:09,780 So he was able to have, you know, that Somali ness within that clan and then mark out a small part of Hull as well as part of his as his home. 406 00:44:09,780 --> 00:44:15,360 And people did that in Cardiff. They did that in East London, in Sheffield. 407 00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:22,620 So it's I think it felt like it was earned. And because he was a sailor, he travelled everywhere so he could decide he nearly lived in the US. 408 00:44:22,620 --> 00:44:26,310 He spent quite a lot of time in Australia. He spent quite a bit of time in South Africa. 409 00:44:26,310 --> 00:44:33,150 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, 410 00:44:33,150 --> 00:44:38,020 I choose this one. And I think me as a younger person, there wasn't that kind of choice. 411 00:44:38,020 --> 00:44:45,570 I feel like I grew up here whether I liked it or not. And that gives you a different understanding of your place. 412 00:44:45,570 --> 00:44:50,910 But he yeah, he loved England. I think he liked it, liked it a lot. 413 00:44:50,910 --> 00:45:01,920 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, 414 00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:07,950 and they thought that I gave them a sense that the whole book must be Orientalist. 415 00:45:07,950 --> 00:45:11,790 And that was their politics, which I generally share. 416 00:45:11,790 --> 00:45:19,020 You know, it's not that different from my politics. Didn't allow them to think that maybe this elderly person who has has fought and fought 417 00:45:19,020 --> 00:45:24,330 and fought for the sense of belonging is now going to sit with it and enjoy it for him. 418 00:45:24,330 --> 00:45:28,530 For them, I think it was still kind of a combat. They were still involved in that combat. 419 00:45:28,530 --> 00:45:36,750 But I don't want to be in my 80s and combating somewhere that's too much. 420 00:45:36,750 --> 00:45:43,410 I'm conscious at seven o'clock and I started a bit late. Does that mean we have time for another couple of questions? 421 00:45:43,410 --> 00:45:50,920 Oh. Did he go back to Bethlehem? 422 00:45:50,920 --> 00:45:58,360 Yes. Yeah, yeah, in real life, in real life. 423 00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:04,990 See this again, this was one of the things where my father didn't tell me he had a girlfriend or wife in Eritrea, 424 00:46:04,990 --> 00:46:14,800 but when he was in Eritrea, he spoke with such fondness and such love that I thought, hold on, he's a young man, completely unsupervised. 425 00:46:14,800 --> 00:46:19,390 Pretty much. You're telling me that he didn't have a romantic relationship? I think he did. 426 00:46:19,390 --> 00:46:23,560 So I created Bethlehem and she's a mixture of all sorts of different things. 427 00:46:23,560 --> 00:46:30,400 You know, a tiny bit of my mum in there as a tiny bit of Dido from the Aeneid. 428 00:46:30,400 --> 00:46:35,380 There's some Dylan Thomas under Milk Wood. 429 00:46:35,380 --> 00:46:45,130 Yeah. So I had fun with that. But that scene I wrote just before that with children and Italian soldiers, that was also very taxing for me to write. 430 00:46:45,130 --> 00:46:50,740 And it took me a while to build up to it and it took me a while to recover from it. 431 00:46:50,740 --> 00:46:55,220 And when I finished, I needed I needed some balm for my own soul, never mind. 432 00:46:55,220 --> 00:46:58,330 So it was it was a kind of reprieve for both of us. 433 00:46:58,330 --> 00:47:05,140 So in real life, I don't know what happened to Bethlehem, his real Bethlehem, I presume she stayed in Eritrea. 434 00:47:05,140 --> 00:47:17,980 He married my mum much later on when he returned to Hargeisa and she said, yes, yes, she was from Helgason, but that was much, much later. 435 00:47:17,980 --> 00:47:30,850 But he also yeah, his romantic life was one of the things he didn't want to delve too deeply into that. 436 00:47:30,850 --> 00:47:36,070 Oh, yeah, that's one. That's one of the things I was going to read for allegedly. 437 00:47:36,070 --> 00:47:46,900 OK, I just want very specific questions. I have a sneaky question, which is he is just and it's not it's not really a proper question. 438 00:47:46,900 --> 00:47:50,650 He's just such an astonishing I'm stating the obvious. 439 00:47:50,650 --> 00:47:54,160 He's such an astonishing individual, you know, and and there is this thread. 440 00:47:54,160 --> 00:47:57,940 We were noticing this earlier of just sort of pure magic. 441 00:47:57,940 --> 00:48:02,140 So light, I think, is is a worthy is a phrase that's used. 442 00:48:02,140 --> 00:48:10,750 And and there's just this fierce spirit of moving forward, moving forward, moving forward. 443 00:48:10,750 --> 00:48:15,590 I mean, it's it's really brilliantly done. I just wondered if. 444 00:48:15,590 --> 00:48:24,470 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 you, 445 00:48:24,470 --> 00:48:29,420 you know, the sharing that was the essence of his story that I was trying to get at. 446 00:48:29,420 --> 00:48:35,150 And that that phrase, I think I in the book, I call it slick slivers of light. 447 00:48:35,150 --> 00:48:41,850 And that was something that I think in Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut said something similar about two men. 448 00:48:41,850 --> 00:48:43,460 Then I said, yes, this is my father. 449 00:48:43,460 --> 00:48:54,340 He was just pure, pure human energy or the gutsiness that involves the courage and the idea that it can be extinguished so easily. 450 00:48:54,340 --> 00:49:02,210 And when I went to Eretria, I went to the military cemeteries that they have there for the British and also for the Italians. 451 00:49:02,210 --> 00:49:09,380 And the Italian cemetery has the headstones with names and birth birthdays, stuff, dates of the Italian soldiers. 452 00:49:09,380 --> 00:49:14,390 But of the ascaris, it's just it's just unknown soldier, unknown soldier, unknown soldier. 453 00:49:14,390 --> 00:49:22,300 So the idea that he could have so easily have just been one of those people, just that unknown soldier, but he wasn't. 454 00:49:22,300 --> 00:49:24,680 And he got through it all and he was happy. 455 00:49:24,680 --> 00:49:32,210 And he was is one of the few people that I think, you know, every day was like a miracle and was amazing and simple things were pleasurable. 456 00:49:32,210 --> 00:49:38,660 The TV was pleasurable. Not having to go anywhere was pleasurable. Having food in the fridge was pleasurable, all of it. 457 00:49:38,660 --> 00:49:45,980 And I think that's something that, you know, my my friends, you know, we don't have we don't have is more kind of what do we like? 458 00:49:45,980 --> 00:49:53,880 You know, what what can we fix? It's much more that mentality. And I don't know, it's not some kind of primaeval man or anything like that. 459 00:49:53,880 --> 00:50:01,040 He was still very political. He was still very much, you know, reflecting of what it took. 460 00:50:01,040 --> 00:50:04,190 And it took his mother as well. It wasn't just him. 461 00:50:04,190 --> 00:50:09,530 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. 462 00:50:09,530 --> 00:50:16,670 The spirits have told me the signs have told me. The fortune tellers have told me you are meant to be someone you meant to travel the world. 463 00:50:16,670 --> 00:50:23,030 And I think all of that kind of fire that spirits up. 464 00:50:23,030 --> 00:50:33,290 So it'd be great if we could finish with you. So this is actually from one of Bethlehem's it's Bethlehem. 465 00:50:33,290 --> 00:50:40,490 Bighead was a mule with a tiger father and a mother, Muslim and Christian, born in the cowshed. 466 00:50:40,490 --> 00:50:47,780 A shepherdess in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon and a shotgun in the evening with a head full of dreams and fantasies. 467 00:50:47,780 --> 00:50:52,760 She would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms in upbraids but minus a goat, 468 00:50:52,760 --> 00:50:59,270 only to be beaten, sent back out, sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it. 469 00:50:59,270 --> 00:51:01,940 Her black thicket of hair and her the name bighead. 470 00:51:01,940 --> 00:51:09,440 And 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. 471 00:51:09,440 --> 00:51:16,790 When her sisters jumped, they used her hair as a weapon, forcing her head back with it and dragging her across the dirt. 472 00:51:16,790 --> 00:51:26,600 Her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to laboriously, laboriously braid it, laying it down into manageable rows like their crops before, 473 00:51:26,600 --> 00:51:32,300 like a rain forest that burst out of its manmade boundaries and reclaimed its territory. 474 00:51:32,300 --> 00:51:38,780 She was a true village girl, and she wanted nothing more than to live in the town already 16. 475 00:51:38,780 --> 00:51:43,410 She had to wait four or five older sisters to marry before she could escape. 476 00:51:43,410 --> 00:51:49,440 Jamas face came to her now before she fell asleep, his deep hypnotising eyes saddened her, 477 00:51:49,440 --> 00:51:55,590 and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom. 478 00:51:55,590 --> 00:52:02,760 From her perch on the hills amid the bleating goats, Bethlehem could see Jarmo in his turban planting seeds. 479 00:52:02,760 --> 00:52:09,990 He was clumsy with his tools and to her amusement, he would pull seedlings out of the earth to see how much they had grown. 480 00:52:09,990 --> 00:52:19,350 He was trying to stare them into life, she thought. When she bought the groats, when she brought the goats back down, Bethlehem sidled past his field. 481 00:52:19,350 --> 00:52:24,990 You not doing that very well. You know, you shouldn't plant them so deep. They need to see the sun through the earth. 482 00:52:24,990 --> 00:52:28,690 Why don't you come and help me then? Jarmo said, stopping to stare as she walked past. 483 00:52:28,690 --> 00:52:36,150 If you wish. She she squealed before striding away to study the cycles of her day. 484 00:52:36,150 --> 00:52:40,800 He loved to watch her make her yawning advance up the hill in the dakotah light. 485 00:52:40,800 --> 00:52:47,970 She was a spot of red, climbing up the grey green horizon, her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her. 486 00:52:47,970 --> 00:52:56,160 At midday, she would descend her ramrod straight back, holding up that black flag of hair and begin work on her mother's fields. 487 00:52:56,160 --> 00:53:01,290 He could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed. Jamad would wait. 488 00:53:01,290 --> 00:53:07,380 Jamot would wait until she was in a shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk, 489 00:53:07,380 --> 00:53:13,680 and they took by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner. What did you do before coming here? 490 00:53:13,680 --> 00:53:14,140 She asked. 491 00:53:14,140 --> 00:53:24,540 Once I was in the Scutti how stupid you must have been, she taunted, holding a blade of grass between her fingers in imitation of his cigarette. 492 00:53:24,540 --> 00:53:32,280 The womb light of the lamp made them both braver, able to talk about things that bright light or deep darkness would have prohibited. 493 00:53:32,280 --> 00:53:37,960 Jarmo told Bethlehem about his parents as she listened with the attention of a sphinx. 494 00:53:37,960 --> 00:53:46,630 In return to cement that intimacy, Bethlehem described to Jarmo how her father kicked off a day dreaming and losing goes, 495 00:53:46,630 --> 00:53:51,010 how she had never been bought anything her whole life, but only given her sister's hand. 496 00:53:51,010 --> 00:53:55,720 Me downs. Not one thing, Jarmo. Can you believe that? 497 00:53:55,720 --> 00:54:02,230 Never one thing for me only. John shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand. 498 00:54:02,230 --> 00:54:10,688 She let him for a second before pulling away.