So it's my great pleasure to welcome our chair for this reading part and meeting the writer of our of our time together,
and that is Kate and then Kate will introduce the Diffa Mahomet.
So Kate is the director of whose interests in Rwanda, and she is a research associate at both Bath Spa and Bristol.
She's an Africanist and she is the very, very lively and Proactiv editor of Africa Words,
which is an amazing blog, sites that I would recommend to everyone. And she has a growing a budding interest in Somalia writing.
And it's that that forges the link that we have here this evening between herself, Kate Haines, and the death of Mohammed.
So you're very welcome. Thank you very much, sir.
Yeah, I'm really delighted to be hosting this conversation with Mohammed as parts of
the great writers inspire him series and get the next movie out would say,
it's really about putting you the views of the novel in conversation with the writer of the book.
But kind of to put that into that conversation in context, I just wanted to introduce and differ very briefly.
If Muhammad was born in Hargeisa in 1981 and Anita Lenzen in 1986,
amines that was initially intended to be temporary but became permanent when civil war broke out and her family was unable to return.
She grew up in South London and she studied history and politics here at the Embassy of Oxford, say in 2013.
And she was selected as one of France's best of young British novelists as a period every decade for the last
30 years and been very prescient in identifying voices with enduring significance within versus fiction.
And in 2014, she was named one of the most promising fiction writers south of the Sahara,
under 40 by Africa 39, a collaboration between the Hay Festival and Nigeria's Rainbow Book Club.
Her first novel, Black Mambazo, which we're going to be talking about now, was published in 2010 by HarperCollins in the UK,
and it was long listed for the Orange Prise shortlisted for The Guardian Facebook.
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?
It's published in 2013 by Simon Schuster in the U.K. And so I just wanted to start
the session by acting as if it's just read to us a little bit from the book.
OK, everyone, thank you for coming here on this lovely day.
I'll read it just a short piece from the very beginning of the novel in Aden in 1935.
The musings call startled out of his dream, and he pulled himself up to look at the sun rising over the cake,
domed mosques, the gingerbread Adine apartments, glowing red chips with white frosting, the black silhouettes of birds looped high in the sky,
circling around the few remaining stars and the pregnant moon.
The black planets of Jamas eyes rolled over the busy industrial steamer points crater, the sandstone old town, its curvaceous,
dun coloured buildings merging into the Shimshon volcanoes, the Mohalla and Walsman districts, white and modern, between the hills and sea.
WoodSmoke, an infant's cries, drifted up as women took a break from preparing breakfast to perform their prayers,
not needing the exhortations of the old in a vulture's less encircled,
the ancient vultures nest encircled the ancient minaret, the broken branches festooned with rubbish,
the nest corrupting the neighbourhood of the stench of carrion.
The attentive, mother fed, rotting morsels to chirping chicks, her muscular wings and hunched and at rest beside her.
Jamas own mother and brother stood by the roof edge softly singing a song and had deep and melodious voice.
She sang before and after work not because she was happy, but because the songs escaped from her mouth,
a young soul roaming outside her body to take the air before it was pulled back into drudgery.
I'm shook the ghosts from her hair and began her morning soliloquy.
Some people don't know how much work goes into feeding their ungrateful guts as some kind of slow down you can idle about without a care in the world.
Head full of trash, only good for running a round of trash will over my dead body.
I don't grind my backbone to dust to sit and watch filthy bottom boys roll around on their backs.
These poems of contempt these days of dissatisfaction greeted Jarmo every morning.
Incredible meandering streams of abuse flowed from his mother's mouth, sweeping the macadam at the factory.
Her son long lost relatives, enemies, men, women, Somalis, Arabs, Indians into a pit of damnation.
Get up, you stupid boy. You think this is your father's house, get up, you fool.
I need to get to work, Jarmo. Continue to loll around on his back playing with his belly button.
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.
Jarmo tried to flee, but his mother dived and attacked him with stinging blows.
Get up. I have to walk two miles to walk to work. And you make a fuss over waking up.
Is that it? She raged. Go then get lost. You good for nothing.
Blamed Aiden for making his mother so angry he wanted to return to Hargeisa, where his father could calm her down with love songs.
It was always at daybreak that Jarmo craved his father. All his memories were sharper in the morning light,
his father's laughter and songs around the campfire, the soft, long fingered hands enveloping his own.
Jarmo couldn't be sure if these were real memories or just dreams seeping into his waking life.
But he cherished these fragile images, hoping that they would not disappear from him like his father had.
John, I remember traversing the desert on strong shoulders, peering down in the world like a prince,
but already his father's face was lost to him, hidden behind stubborn clouds.
Thank you. Thank you.
And one of the things you've been doing in the previous hour is kind of sharing passages
which were particularly memorable to us about the victims and and it been great to read.
That doesn't mean that the kind of long fingered hands of the father really, really kind of stayed with me as I did.
And so this conversation is concerned about exploring the relationship between leaders and writers.
And and so I wanted to start by asking you whether you have a particular reader in mind when you
write and and how you work to address that reader if you do kind of through your writing process?
I don't think I do. I think that I'm basically writing for myself and working out things for myself and my father's story,
which is this is very closely based on not 100 percent, but very closely what's so fascinating to me and so strange and so revealing
of lots of things that really I was talking to myself and it was such a long,
drawn out process of writing it late at night on my own,
stopping and starting and really apart from collaborating with my father and talking to him about his own life.
It was a very private activity and I didn't expect to publish it.
I didn't intend to publish it until probably two or three years into the process. So I wasn't thinking about a public audience.
And actually, when it was published, it felt very jarring for both me and my father,
where suddenly a private activity between us was seen as public property and his life story felt like public property as well.
So despite him always saying that he should have a book written about him because his life's been so interesting,
when that actually did happen, it felt strange to him. And I managed to persuade him to do just one event with me.
And it was with the Anglo Somali society, which he was part of for a long time, and I'm part of as well.
And it was only in that kind of familiar, intimate environment that he could talk about the book as being part of his own life.
And so kind of thinking of your kind of father as a reader of the book was weather places where your
kind of choice of language felt shaped by thinking of him reading probably not not the language,
but probably the content. What do I choose to include and what do I choose to take out?
So I started off as a very straight biography of him and it was only meant to be a few pages long.
So just really an account of the highlights of his early life, really.
And it just grew and grew and grew. And it was my first creative writing experience, I think, completely.
So I was also working at what I wanted to do with it.
So very quickly, I realised that it wasn't satisfying just to write as a short and brief account of his life.
I loved learning about Aiden. Aiden in the early 20th century was still so unchanged from how it had been for thousands of years.
Very magical. And my father being in the months that allowed me to kind of explore and have fun with that.
And every every other place that he went, I learnt more about and enjoyed.
And, you know, I've always loved fiction, but I also used to read a lot of travel fiction.
So the idea of kind of travelling through books was something that was very normal to me.
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.
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
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.
And I mean, obviously, you've talked about it being a kind of personal, I think.
But I guess in relation to because, you know, you've obviously published a second novel.
You working on that? How would you say you did writing and then just changed?
The way I viewed it has changed. So this one was almost a polemic, I think.
And there was. There were so many parallels, so I was writing in the 2000s where people were talking about Iraq,
they were talking about an American empire, a new American empire, respectable figures.
We're talking about these sorts of things. And you had the images from Abu Ghraib and there was such huge parallels between
what my father had experienced in the 30s and 40s and what was happening then.
And I think you can't help but take in that environment that you're working in and it affects
the way you shape your writing and what you're writing about and how you're writing about it.
So I think that now the book I'm working on is very similar in some respects to black men.
But boy, it's about the same community of men, of sailors living in the UK in the 1940s and 50s from Somalia.
And it's based on a man that my father knew. But it's it's also very different in the sense that because he's not my father,
there's this distance between us that I can I can see him in a more objective
way and not this is I'm not Agrio for the guy I'm working about right now.
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.
So I'm an ally of his. I think there's nothing there's no other way you can be.
But at the same time, I can be more objective. So I do think that there is a change that I'm talking about injustice.
I'm talking about differences in power, of violence, but I'm doing it in a different way to how I did it here.
And I can kind of questions up to the room, I need know people have got questions they want to ask you about.
I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the kind of publishing process.
And obviously you talked about it being quite a shock for the book to be kind of out in the world.
And I just wondered if there were particular things about the way that you
represented as the writer of the book was represented kind of through the publishing
process or through publicity and media that either particularly delighted you or
that the equally particularly irritating my first concern was the editing process.
That was my big concern because because it had been so private for so long and because it was about my father,
there was some parameters that I wasn't willing to go beyond. But in both with my editor and my US editor, they did respect that.
And the fear that I had that they might want to tone it down wasn't the case.
I think the US that there was one scene which we can talk about later, which my US editor did want to trim back.
And we we worked out a kind of happy medium with it. But in the UK, I felt there was actually quite a lot of freedom.
I could say what I want and how I wanted to, you know, in whatever way I wanted. And it was just more a question of shaping the story.
The biggest change that happened was in my first manuscript, Thomas mother survives.
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.
So the focus is just on drama as a young boy in this environment.
And that took some convincing, partly because I knew that my father wouldn't like it because it wasn't the truth.
And it felt very strange killing off your grandmother. So I didn't want to do that.
But she was right. She was right. And what I did that suddenly other things started to fall into place.
It became a kind of neater, sharper story. And the other things around publishing, we talked briefly just about the cover.
And I think you writers don't normally get much say when it comes to the covers you're showing it.
You asked to give us some feedback, but it's not it's not really within your control.
It's very much a it's a consensus within the publishing company.
So it's very orange in the UK, as you can see. And it's very kind of African fiction.
Um, it's not, I think, kind of. I think that they had an idea about making it as accessible as possible,
and I think that was right and I think people picked it up that might not have if it had seemed,
you know, in a different way, a different style of book.
So I think it worked. It worked.
And this is the American cover, which I really like. And it's of a young boy jumping with illustrated angel wings.
And I like this is playful. It does have the dust and the bit of orange, but it's a bit more playful.
But I have noticed that this is easy to find in every bookshop, which I think every writer is not is not unhappy with that and other respects.
I think that whole pigeonholing, I guess, of what makes an African writer, an African writer of African descent.
I think there's no doubt about that.
I'm Somali, but there's I think maybe this idea that even though I grew up in the U.K., that you're still you're still very different.
And I think that's that's a misapprehension of it. So it's weird.
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.
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.
You don't think about. Do I feel British today? Do I feel African today? Do I feel Somali?
Today is just part of your everyday, you know, experience in life and you perceive things through all of those lenses,
but you go to a country and suddenly it's kind of like, well, do you feel British?
And that, I think, was a bit of a struggle. I will now open up for questions.
Yeah. I'm just one other question about the language of the book, because, like you said,
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.
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,
various languages and and, you know, being in the academic setting for a long time, usually we italicise the French or German words.
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
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,
you know, the setting. You were linguists. Yes. So I wondered when you were writing it.
Were you aware about, you know, the choice of vocabulary? Yes.
Yes. It was an act of decision and it was an act of decision to not have a glossary,
because I've always read books that are from different languages, whether that's, you know, books by Indian authors, by South American authors.
And it was also I always had the impression that I understood I would get from
the context and the feeling what the word meant and if I really wanted to,
especially now with the Internet, you can find out very easily.
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.
And it's actually quite alienating because the meaning I was trying to get
across that is is lost because the meaning I thought was clear is not clear.
So that's something I'm thinking about for the book I'm working on right now,
because, again, it's got lots of languages in it and then it's got slang as well.
English slang, Jamaican slang. So it's a real kind of pot of varied influences.
And I don't want the reader to be lost, but I also don't want to lose that texture.
And this was a normal life, you know, Somali guy who can speak Hindi, who can speak Arabic,
who can, you know, chat and use Cockney Cockney slang or criminal slang, whatever it might be.
That's just the reality. So I think kind of in an academic setting, you'd have footnotes and, you know, it would be very, very clear.
But you can't I don't want to do that in a in a fiction.
And no, Junot Diaz is someone I love and he does in an Oscar while he does have footnotes and lots and lots of Spanish terms.
And that's it's one approach.
But I don't think that's the one I want to take with the novel I'm working on now.
And I don't think it's a bad thing for the reader to be alienated sometimes.
I think when I read novels that are set in places I've never been, but yet it's somehow too smooth and to to Western or too familiar,
I don't know what the word is then I think there's something missing there.
It should it should feel a little bit alienating when you're reading about culture you don't know about.
So one of the we chose kind of episodes out of the novel that sort of very memorable and one
of them that I chose was about when Jamma is having to carry the carcases for the butcher.
Yes. Stinks artisans and all the blood strollin he can't even wash.
Yeah. And which was great. Really great fun writing it.
Yeah. And so one of the questions I wanted to ask was, yeah, there's so much energy in that scene and it's very memorable and it's very physical.
And whether your father what I felt when I was reading is that I can imagine him telling you about it.
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,
because he was so vivid in his own description and so proud of himself at the same
time that he was this tiny boy carrying this huge camel carcases on his shoulders.
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.
So, yeah, I think that and the idea of waking up at dawn, all of these little boys creeping out of the city,
the town to settle and to work, and even that horrible job is something to be competed over.
And it's almost like, you know, a prise. And it's the very beginnings of the physical labour of being a man,
of being a colonial man in that environment that he's just getting the first taste of because he did have jobs in aid.
And as well, he used to collect tennis balls on courts and things like that.
And sometimes, you know very things for one place to another. But this was the first real physical job I think he had.
So, yeah, and there's quite a few scenes. Where is his energy?
I think that's there. He was a great speaker and the great he loved language.
He was someone that kind of was always, always had a dictionary nearby in multiple languages and never lost that desire to learn more about language.
Yeah, I think, yeah. Just moving on from from Eleanor's question, but still on this amazing energy in the story, how did you.
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,
meandering stories from your father onto the page,
whether you you know, whether you use memory a lot or notebooks or just sort of whether you left it to him.
Yeah, there's that sort of question. Yeah. Um, they actually weren't so meandering.
And I think because he'd been saying for a long time that his story was worth telling and worth writing,
but in a way he had shaped it in his own mind because I my first intention was to write down everything that he had told me.
And I think I did get quite close to that. So it kind of into meandering. And so some things are probably simplified.
And, you know, you put lots of slightly different days into one day or there's some of that going on.
But most of it is, is how he told me the very first part of the process.
And actually it happened by accident. I started recording him or interviewing him while I was still at university here.
And I studied a mixture of kind of mediaeval British history and international relations by Byzantium and the early Islamic empires and things.
It was very, very different to anything from my own background.
And I think I love history and I love all global history.
But there was something I needed to work out within my own background, my own roots, because Somalia had collapsed by that stage.
And the only information you could find about it was very negative.
And I felt very, very isolated, I think probably alienated well, being here from my roots, whatever that might mean.
So I interviewed him and that was just a one off. And then how did it happen?
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,
Mahmoud Maton, who was a Somali sailor that he knew who was executed in Cardiff in 1950 to.
And I was intending to make a film of him soon after I left university, so to research Mahameed story.
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.
It was medium height, you know, very cursory details.
And very quickly it became about him and about his own life and how remarkable it was.
And I said, okay, let me record this just just for family's sake.
And my first niece had been born recently at that time, so I wanted to record it for her.
So I got my empty recorder and just put a microphone in front of him and he kind of organise the information and he went back, back, back.
So he started before he was born to his own parents, where they were born and their own situations.
And he, through family stories, oral history,
he knew that he thought that one of our ancestors had fought in these big battles between the Somalis and Abyssinians in the fifteen hundreds.
So it was very in-depth history because Somali Somali life is arranged around these clans.
And, you know, your client is your your ancestry, your grandfather's.
And so as well as their name, maybe a tiny bit of their life or their stories might be passed down along with that.
So he started at that level and then moved to his birth and then he stopped when he was about in his early 20s.
So he thought that was the interesting part of his life.
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.
So he did we did that in English with me, asking him questions and kind of pushing him for more details or whatever.
But he also did it by himself in Somali, just recording himself on tapes.
And that was something he wanted to do. But I also have those tapes. So I had that base knowledge.
And to be honest, that was that was it. I think that was what I needed for the book.
But then all the time we we spoke about his life story.
I would ask him specific details about things. We'd go over old maps together.
We went to the Imperial War Museum together to look at old newsreels from where he lived in Eritrea and Tuscany and around those western lowlands.
We went to Cardiff together to the Butan Arts and History Centre, which has got a large Somali history archive there as well.
So it was very collaborative. And he was the person who, you know what, I was starting to lose faith and everything.
And I applied to do a PGC to become a teacher. And at the very last minute, I decided to just finish this book and then see what happened.
And he was always very supportive. He always thought it was a worthwhile thing to do.
And it's partly because, again, of his passion for language and for words,
and he saw being the writer as being a dignified profession like not many people do, but he did.
So that was the process. We were just discussing earlier that there are certain scenes in your book which are very graphic in its detail of violence.
I overheard I as a reader, I'm not really terribly bothered by scenes of violence,
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,
uh, do you want to put your reader or do you have something else that he's thinking about?
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.
So that is that's one of the things that's actually not from my father's experience,
but the two boys that it's based on, a boys that my father was reunited with.
He knew them in Aden and then they were reunited in Karen.
So that part's true. But the violence inflicted on children that came from, I think, my own.
You know, when you're writing a book, all of these things bubble to the surface.
And when I was going through the old records and Sylvia Pankhurst is actually she
she wrote this incredible book about human rights abuses in colonial East Africa,
in Italy, in East Africa in the 1930s. And she compiled story after story of torture, murder, rape, the rest of it.
And then it's also you have these trophy images that the Italians took themselves and have passed on.
My mother was aware of them, and she she's much younger than that.
So she she was aware of Italian soldiers asking Somali men and presumably Eritrean men as well to lie down.
If there's a waterway to cross it, they would cross it on their backs. And I saw images of heads piled up.
You know, this is very graphic. It's very graphic material. There's no way of getting around that.
And I think it was a combination of seeing those images and reading about that in the 1930s and 40s.
Seeing those images later on of Abu Ghraib. And then something which I thought, you know, it was in my mind, I hadn't I wasn't aware of it.
I thought I kind of had disappeared from my mind.
But while I was writing, I remembered something which had really got under my skin when I was 15 years old.
And it was seeing images from Operation Restore Hope in Somalia.
And there were quite a few accounts of human rights is such a vague term.
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.
So Belgian troops, Canadian troops, American troops, various troops tortured and killed young Somali boys and girls and men and adults.
And there was one image that I can still see in my mind right now.
Of Canadian paratroopers in a town called Belad Wayne, which is between Somalia and Ethiopia on the border, and he was 16 years old.
His name was Shilan. So I actually even before that happened, I'd name the character after him.
I don't know why. So even before I got to that scene, I was thinking about him.
I must have been otherwise I would have named the character Chillum.
So the last moments of his life, there were pictures taken of it and the incredibly graphic and terrifying because the men,
the Canadian soldiers are smiling. You know, these these are not men ashamed of what they're doing.
They're very proud. And his cries could be heard within the camp. So God knows how many dozens of people had.
And there was a there is a fantastic book by Schubin Razzak about this whole case because it
was discovered and prosecuted and one of the men received a very short prison sentence for it.
So it was massive, almost like a biblical act of violence that I had I had seen as a young person and I think I'd got under my skin.
So it was that image that was there, not words.
So I guess I was trying to turn that image into words and I might edit my American editor was very much kind of show,
don't tell, you know, there's other ways of doing it. But I think almost in a political sense, I didn't want to do that.
We always look away. We always look away. And this was an opportunity for me and for the reader to not look away.
We use a lot of jargon, I think, to distance ourselves from exactly what we're talking about.
And sometimes you have to strip that jargon away.
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,
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.
Yes. Like, sorry, the example was like, what is it?
The hyaenas. Yeah. And the camels on the fact that the hyaenas eat the smugglers when they are not paying attention.
Yes. That again is one of my father's favourite things to talk about as he got older.
Actually, much later on after I finished the book,
he started having these dreams and in his dreams he would jump out of bed because he would be back in Eritrea,
in the desert on camel backs with the hyaenas following him.
So he always talked about hyaenas, but had created a massive impression on him.
I guess if any kind of terrifying animal was following you, you'd have an impression. I've never I've never had that.
I've never experienced that. But there's something magical about walking through this pale desert just with moonlight.
And you know that if you fall, you're dead. Last week saying if you fall, you're dead.
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.
And I think that that purity, that moment of realisation that your life is fragile but beautiful and you're alive,
it was something that in many parts of his life, it feels you can feel the intensity of that.
So in terms of being almost like a metaphor, I think, yes, you're pursued,
you're pursued by different dangers and you're you're you're constantly trying to keep yourself together, keep yourself in movement.
And I think being who he was, being young, being a black man and a colonial environment, those hyaenas were varied and pros.
That progress you were making physically, spatially was also something that you couldn't you couldn't stop.
You had to keep moving.
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.
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.
And it's something that, you know, one of my favourite authors, Claude McKay,
also writes about he writes about Marseilles being this kind of melting pot of African and black sailors,
you know, from all over the world, fleeing lynchings, fleeing this, fleeing that and then recreating themselves.
But there's still a movement. No one is there forever. They come and go.
They run off with a woman. You know, they jump on a train without a ticket.
There's just this this flux, this constant flux that goes throughout the whole life.
And this is a question that follows on a little bit from what L.A. was asking. I was struck from the passage you read about the the act of memory,
especially when the little boy remembers his father's black hair and how how he missed him.
And from what you've been saying about how your father told you many of the stories,
that's partly based on memory, yet it doesn't seem as though it is.
So how do you get around that, apart from putting everything into the present?
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.
Yeah, well, that's a great thing to hear. Thank you. Oh, yeah.
Oh, how did I think the process of writing.
So you're hearing it? I'm hearing my father's memories, but when you write, it becomes something else.
So it's not his own memory anymore. And it did feel like I described it before as a transfusion of memory.
And it is. But then when it enters your own system, you you turn it into something else.
I couldn't there were one of the things that I found difficult was his his version of his life was that it was very lonely and very he had no friends.
He had no thoughts. He had no desires. It's kind of like the simple, simple, simple life, just urgent needs.
And I can't understand that even now. I still don't understand how once you've met those very, very urgent needs, what does your brain do then?
My mind is always kind of going backwards, going forwards, thinking about this.
You know, this is so is so enmeshed in in so many different things that I can't put myself.
And this is one of the things I think that having a different life to my father means that
this is I can't describe this is a completely authentic account because I can't do that.
He he he believed that he could live for 30 days without water.
I don't believe that he believed that he witnessed or believed at least that a man turned into a hyaena.
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.
And then I think when you're doing that, you're bringing in all of the things that you've read, all of the films that you've watched,
all of the music that you've listened to, it becomes a much more sensual and kind of more textured thing.
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.
You know, I think one of the saddest scenes in the book for me is actually not the most violent ones.
This is one where just before he goes to war in Ethiopia, he's an Ethiopian.
He's a tea boy in the middle of nowhere in a place that he has no connexions, no friends.
And when it rains, he goes under a shelter. When it stops raining, he starts wandering again.
And it's that really atomised life where no one knows you, no one cares about you.
It's that deep, deep loneliness that I find most upsetting when I think about it.
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,
you you kind of decided to explicitly frame the novel through a kind of father daughter relationship as you do the opening chapter.
Yes. Later on. Later on. I think this was literally I think I wrote this book and then I stopped it for a while.
I wrote a short story and then went back to the book. And those were these were my creative experiments.
So it wasn't until the end of the novel that I really understood what I was trying to achieve and tried trying to do.
And it was in hindsight that I realised that this was a hymn to him.
This is a way of celebrating. And that's why certain things, certain choices that other writers might make about making making it more more objective,
cooler in descriptions, sometimes more reserved about some of the violence.
I didn't want to do that because this was a very personal and subjective thing.
And there's a book I can recommend by is sadly passed away.
His name was Ahmadu Kuruma, the writer from the Ivory Coast,
and he wrote a book called Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, which is similar in some respects.
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.
So I guess I was kind of employed by my father to do this as well. And it's that deep.
I didn't want to make it a journalist. It wasn't journalism.
This was an artistic and also intimate process between me and my father.
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,
belongings of the central themes, and I noticed it at the beginning of the story when I just returned to the aunt in Hargeisa.
Yeah. And they had a conversation about why his father left.
And then I was confused about why he had to leave, because he has a strong sense of this is where we belong.
Yeah, but then at the end of the story, in the interview, in the actual interview and the drama that your father was asked about,
whether he feels English in that he is totally comfortable saying that because
he grew up knowing he could have grown up in that space and he was English.
Yes. I just wonder how how did this sense of belonging change over the years?
I think that is a big question. It's a big question.
I think there's quite a few things going on. I think the fact that Somalis are nomadic is a big part of it.
So your sense of belonging isn't to land in times of stress, they would go as far north as Eritrea with their livestock and as far south as Uganda.
So that's a huge, huge distance. And so your your belonging isn't to this village.
It's to a network of people. And that network of people is flexible.
And whenever you can find it, you'll find it in fragments in Cape Town, in London, in Helsinki, wherever you might be.
That's that's you'll feel a sense of belonging, because that's that's how society is arranged.
And that doesn't do all of the job. But I think people in my generation, second generation,
are now realising that actually we don't feel that complete sense of belonging in our clan or being Somali.
I think it's a much more like it's a much more disturbed process for us.
We're told that we're not British enough. We're told that we're not Somali enough and not this enough and not that enough.
So I think it's a much more complicated one. But to go back to my father's generation.
So you have the nomadism as a base and then the fact that my father was raised outside of Somalia for most of his life, most of his childhood.
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.
So his sense of Somali ness, I think, was probably a bit eroded by that.
And he when I went to Eritrea for research for the book, people looked like him.
They were dressed like him. They had the same hats. And I could suddenly see the side to him, which for me, that was just my father.
That was his Somali ness. But actually know that was his Eritrea in this. And then he came to Britain in 1947.
And because I'm working on a book around that period of time and I'm amazed that they didn't leave,
it was such an incredibly hostile environment and a complicated environment where, you know, it wasn't it wasn't lynchings generally.
It wasn't that kind of violence, but it was just this feeling that you shouldn't be here.
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.
And I think it became like a tussle. It became a tussle between this host nation and these visitors who were British.
You know, whether they liked it or not, they had British passports. Somaliland was British, so there was no choice in that.
So it was about, you know, marking your your space. And my father lived in Hull when most of the time he was in the UK before we arrived.
And there was a small group of people of his clan.
So he was able to have, you know, that Somali ness within that clan and then mark out a small part of Hull as well as part of his as his home.
And people did that in Cardiff. They did that in East London, in Sheffield.
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.
He spent quite a lot of time in Australia. He spent quite a bit of time in South Africa.
So there wasn't probably a sense that he was forced to live in the UK and that allowed him to think out of all of the places I've been,
I choose this one. And I think me as a younger person, there wasn't that kind of choice.
I feel like I grew up here whether I liked it or not. And that gives you a different understanding of your place.
But he yeah, he loved England. I think he liked it, liked it a lot.
And I did an event in Pune in India as part of the British Council tours, and they were very hostile to the idea of my dad liking England or Britain,
and they thought that I gave them a sense that the whole book must be Orientalist.
And that was their politics, which I generally share.
You know, it's not that different from my politics. Didn't allow them to think that maybe this elderly person who has has fought and fought
and fought for the sense of belonging is now going to sit with it and enjoy it for him.
For them, I think it was still kind of a combat. They were still involved in that combat.
But I don't want to be in my 80s and combating somewhere that's too much.
I'm conscious at seven o'clock and I started a bit late. Does that mean we have time for another couple of questions?
Oh. Did he go back to Bethlehem?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, in real life, in real life.
See this again, this was one of the things where my father didn't tell me he had a girlfriend or wife in Eritrea,
but when he was in Eritrea, he spoke with such fondness and such love that I thought, hold on, he's a young man, completely unsupervised.
Pretty much. You're telling me that he didn't have a romantic relationship? I think he did.
So I created Bethlehem and she's a mixture of all sorts of different things.
You know, a tiny bit of my mum in there as a tiny bit of Dido from the Aeneid.
There's some Dylan Thomas under Milk Wood.
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.
And it took me a while to build up to it and it took me a while to recover from it.
And when I finished, I needed I needed some balm for my own soul, never mind.
So it was it was a kind of reprieve for both of us.
So in real life, I don't know what happened to Bethlehem, his real Bethlehem, I presume she stayed in Eritrea.
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.
But he also yeah, his romantic life was one of the things he didn't want to delve too deeply into that.
Oh, yeah, that's one. That's one of the things I was going to read for allegedly.
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.
He's just such an astonishing I'm stating the obvious.
He's such an astonishing individual, you know, and and there is this thread.
We were noticing this earlier of just sort of pure magic.
So light, I think, is is a worthy is a phrase that's used.
And and there's just this fierce spirit of moving forward, moving forward, moving forward.
I mean, it's it's really brilliantly done. I just wondered if.
It's really a reiteration of my old question, whether whether it was something that you added or it was a combination of you and you,
you know, the sharing that was the essence of his story that I was trying to get at.
And that that phrase, I think I in the book, I call it slick slivers of light.
And that was something that I think in Slaughterhouse five, Kurt Vonnegut said something similar about two men.
Then I said, yes, this is my father.
He was just pure, pure human energy or the gutsiness that involves the courage and the idea that it can be extinguished so easily.
And when I went to Eretria, I went to the military cemeteries that they have there for the British and also for the Italians.
And the Italian cemetery has the headstones with names and birth birthdays, stuff, dates of the Italian soldiers.
But of the ascaris, it's just it's just unknown soldier, unknown soldier, unknown soldier.
So the idea that he could have so easily have just been one of those people, just that unknown soldier, but he wasn't.
And he got through it all and he was happy.
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.
The TV was pleasurable. Not having to go anywhere was pleasurable. Having food in the fridge was pleasurable, all of it.
And I think that's something that, you know, my my friends, you know, we don't have we don't have is more kind of what do we like?
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.
He was still very political. He was still very much, you know, reflecting of what it took.
And it took his mother as well. It wasn't just him.
It took his mother to kind of stoke that fire that was there and say, hold on a second, you're meant to be someone.
The spirits have told me the signs have told me. The fortune tellers have told me you are meant to be someone you meant to travel the world.
And I think all of that kind of fire that spirits up.
So it'd be great if we could finish with you. So this is actually from one of Bethlehem's it's Bethlehem.
Bighead was a mule with a tiger father and a mother, Muslim and Christian, born in the cowshed.
A shepherdess in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon and a shotgun in the evening with a head full of dreams and fantasies.
She would pluck lavender and jasmine and come home with blooms in upbraids but minus a goat,
only to be beaten, sent back out, sent back out into the darkening hills until she had found it.
Her black thicket of hair and her the name bighead.
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.
When her sisters jumped, they used her hair as a weapon, forcing her head back with it and dragging her across the dirt.
Her mother would sometimes put an afternoon aside to laboriously, laboriously braid it, laying it down into manageable rows like their crops before,
like a rain forest that burst out of its manmade boundaries and reclaimed its territory.
She was a true village girl, and she wanted nothing more than to live in the town already 16.
She had to wait four or five older sisters to marry before she could escape.
Jamas face came to her now before she fell asleep, his deep hypnotising eyes saddened her,
and there was something about his lost and lonely bearing that made her want to suffocate him in her bosom.
From her perch on the hills amid the bleating goats, Bethlehem could see Jarmo in his turban planting seeds.
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.
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.
You not doing that very well. You know, you shouldn't plant them so deep. They need to see the sun through the earth.
Why don't you come and help me then? Jarmo said, stopping to stare as she walked past.
If you wish. She she squealed before striding away to study the cycles of her day.
He loved to watch her make her yawning advance up the hill in the dakotah light.
She was a spot of red, climbing up the grey green horizon, her faithful retinue of stinking goats shouting after her.
At midday, she would descend her ramrod straight back, holding up that black flag of hair and begin work on her mother's fields.
He could smell the flowers in her hair long after she had passed. Jamad would wait.
Jamot would wait until she was in a shop in the evenings before going to buy his eggs and milk,
and they took by paraffin lamp while her family ate dinner. What did you do before coming here?
She asked.
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.
The womb light of the lamp made them both braver, able to talk about things that bright light or deep darkness would have prohibited.
Jarmo told Bethlehem about his parents as she listened with the attention of a sphinx.
In return to cement that intimacy, Bethlehem described to Jarmo how her father kicked off a day dreaming and losing goes,
how she had never been bought anything her whole life, but only given her sister's hand.
Me downs. Not one thing, Jarmo. Can you believe that?
Never one thing for me only. John shook his head in sympathy and touched her hand.
She let him for a second before pulling away.