1 00:00:07,270 --> 00:00:19,060 So it is a great pleasure to to welcome you to our reading series on he is going to introduce it in a moment. 2 00:00:19,060 --> 00:00:29,830 So it's my turn to ask you something I and is professor in English and World Literature here in the English faculty at Oxford. 3 00:00:29,830 --> 00:00:33,640 And she's also a fellow at Boston College. 4 00:00:33,640 --> 00:00:43,000 And she has is working on a fantastic project at the moment about the clinic, the city and the poor, if you like. 5 00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:51,310 The global poor described it very badly, but it's just to give a kind of a sense of the handle that brings these to these two. 6 00:00:51,310 --> 00:01:00,710 Fantastic. So let's give them both. 7 00:01:00,710 --> 00:01:07,670 Thank you so much. It's it's an honour and a pleasure to introduce one of the greatest novelists of our time. 8 00:01:07,670 --> 00:01:09,470 I've been out there for now. 9 00:01:09,470 --> 00:01:21,380 I just read out her multiple award winning works, which are the devil that danced on the Water 2002 and Cirencester Stone's 2006, The Memory of Love, 10 00:01:21,380 --> 00:01:22,700 which she will dwell on, 11 00:01:22,700 --> 00:01:32,810 which was a finalist for the Orange Prise and the Impact Award and won the Commonwealth writers prise the Heidman 2013 The Angel of Mexico City. 12 00:01:32,810 --> 00:01:37,340 This is an e-book she wrote in 2014 for a charity called Worldreader, 13 00:01:37,340 --> 00:01:43,520 and she says 40000 little ones have read this book and a new book coming out next year, 14 00:01:43,520 --> 00:01:47,360 early next year called Happiness, which you'll be very interested to know, 15 00:01:47,360 --> 00:01:52,400 sees the return of the repressed in the form of Atila, you know, from from our novels. 16 00:01:52,400 --> 00:02:02,340 It is back in that in that book. When Fona won the prestigious Wyndham Campbell PRISE in 2014, the citation said, 17 00:02:02,340 --> 00:02:08,880 Aminata Fona writes through and beyond personal experience to speak to the wider world in subtly 18 00:02:08,880 --> 00:02:17,670 constructed narratives that reveal the ongoing aftershocks of living through violence and war. 19 00:02:17,670 --> 00:02:23,880 So we know that memory of love references the carnage of the 1990s civil war in Sierra Leone. 20 00:02:23,880 --> 00:02:31,140 Heidman tells of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing following the Break-Up of the former Yugoslavia. 21 00:02:31,140 --> 00:02:37,830 Ancestor Stones archives support voices and spaces in a decolonising nation. 22 00:02:37,830 --> 00:02:42,720 Somebody must stand guard over the past, says Douro Kalac, 23 00:02:42,720 --> 00:02:51,350 the custodian of a Croatian town called Ghost, with all its echoes of guest, host and ghost. 24 00:02:51,350 --> 00:02:59,160 Sometimes the best way to stand guard over the past, the best way to remember is a world forgetting for now seems to suggest. 25 00:02:59,160 --> 00:03:04,170 Faced with the resounding silence of his patients in the memory of love, 26 00:03:04,170 --> 00:03:10,350 the British psychologist Adrian Lockhart has to learn not to file it away under 27 00:03:10,350 --> 00:03:16,480 the rubric of psychological avoidance in the style of the PTSD diagnosis, 28 00:03:16,480 --> 00:03:25,500 he must learn to read faltering, ambiguous and euphemistic speech, as well as silence as strategies of containment. 29 00:03:25,500 --> 00:03:34,020 In a melancholy space Faunas Heidman reminded me of James Katzir style. 30 00:03:34,020 --> 00:03:39,480 As benumbed and bleak as ancestor, Stones is sumptuous. 31 00:03:39,480 --> 00:03:40,920 The Quest for Truth, 32 00:03:40,920 --> 00:03:51,540 and I'm quoting Forner here from Heidman The desire to examine every inch of our surroundings in a way that went beyond childish curiosity. 33 00:03:51,540 --> 00:04:02,040 So this quest for truth is pitiless. As any reader of the rats in winter seen in the Heidman will testify. 34 00:04:02,040 --> 00:04:13,640 And ancestor stones, phone calls it the African way of seeing the I think what she says, but equally applied to inhabitants of Croatia. 35 00:04:13,640 --> 00:04:23,610 It is a way of seeing patterns and logic and signs and I quote here, invisible, yet visible, apparent to those who belong. 36 00:04:23,610 --> 00:04:32,670 So how politics of third spaces, neither sleep nor wakefulness, neither passed nor the present had no heart, 37 00:04:32,670 --> 00:04:40,350 neither real nor unreal finds trenchant expression in the fugue state and dissociative episodes 38 00:04:40,350 --> 00:04:46,500 she describes in the memory of love or the aesthetics of the liminal state of Rothera, 39 00:04:46,500 --> 00:04:55,350 through which some of her female protagonists, an ancestor stones, survive their short and brutish lives. 40 00:04:55,350 --> 00:05:07,020 I will wrap this up. Two observations that seem to sort of, in a way, not quite be captured in the many reviews her books gets. 41 00:05:07,020 --> 00:05:12,900 One is the more unspeakable the reality, the more forensic and meticulous the process gets. 42 00:05:12,900 --> 00:05:19,620 She's a method writer for Nalan to shoot as part of her research for Heidman and for The Memory of Love. 43 00:05:19,620 --> 00:05:24,960 She spent time at a hospital in Sierra Leone watching amputations. 44 00:05:24,960 --> 00:05:32,070 The book reviews also don't pick up on the preternatural sensitivity to the non-human world, 45 00:05:32,070 --> 00:05:42,180 which is shooting in more ways than one dear elephants and chicken, fish, cockerill, coffee beans and stone. 46 00:05:42,180 --> 00:05:49,560 So you're very welcome. I mean, I want to thank you very much, and I would like to request you to read from your book, 47 00:05:49,560 --> 00:05:54,990 after which I will ask a couple of questions and then open the floor. 48 00:05:54,990 --> 00:06:01,860 Thank you. Thank you very much for being here, especially today of all days. 49 00:06:01,860 --> 00:06:05,760 I thought, what which way will it go where people have had enough of it? 50 00:06:05,760 --> 00:06:16,710 And then I'll decide to come to something else? Or will you be rushing to the polling stations to get your cast, your vote? 51 00:06:16,710 --> 00:06:20,440 I hope you have all voted. 52 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:29,770 All of those of you who are old enough to vote anyway, so, um, let me read a little bit from the memory of love from an early passage. 53 00:06:29,770 --> 00:06:52,200 You've read the book? I think so. Most of you, if not all of you. So you know a little bit about it. 54 00:06:52,200 --> 00:07:01,380 I saw a woman once, the loss of whom I mourned even before I had spoken a single word to her 20th of January 1969, 55 00:07:01,380 --> 00:07:10,020 the Faculty Wives Dinner, we the bachelors gathered together at the bottom of the lawn, a patch of untended weeds. 56 00:07:10,020 --> 00:07:17,220 On the other side of the grass was the reception line. I was listening, or at least making the appearance of it to my companion, 57 00:07:17,220 --> 00:07:23,730 complain about the reallocation of space in the faculty building he had lost out, which was a shame, no doubt. 58 00:07:23,730 --> 00:07:27,710 I looked away towards the arriving guests. 59 00:07:27,710 --> 00:07:37,820 She wore a blue gown, and as she descended the stone steps to the lawn, her fingers lightly at the fabric which clung to her in the heat. 60 00:07:37,820 --> 00:07:45,300 I watched her and I felt a surge of feeling that then nameless emotion. 61 00:07:45,300 --> 00:07:49,980 The first conscious thought I had came moments later, and it struck me like a blow, 62 00:07:49,980 --> 00:07:55,260 the man coming down the stairs, a pace behind her, was her husband. 63 00:07:55,260 --> 00:08:00,090 Within a few yards of the receiving line. I saw him move away, not her husband. 64 00:08:00,090 --> 00:08:08,130 Relief, a cold breath down my spine. And then I saw her reach out her hand and touch him lightly on the sleeve. 65 00:08:08,130 --> 00:08:15,480 And with that light touch made with just the ends of her fingers, she may as well have had the strength of ten men so quickly. 66 00:08:15,480 --> 00:08:21,030 Did he yield and alter his course back towards the long line of people? 67 00:08:21,030 --> 00:08:25,680 I saw how he submitted his will to hers. 68 00:08:25,680 --> 00:08:29,420 I saw her smile and upward kurbanov, her lips faint and sweet. 69 00:08:29,420 --> 00:08:40,720 A smile, he returned gracious in defeat. Seconds have passed since I first laid eyes on her, and I'd already lost her twice. 70 00:08:40,720 --> 00:08:44,300 I excuse myself, placed my glass on the tray of a passing waiter, 71 00:08:44,300 --> 00:08:49,610 moved across the lawn and stood at the end of the receiving line next to the last man. 72 00:08:49,610 --> 00:08:55,760 A fellow I recognised vaguely from the faculty hierarchy, I nodded and he nodded back, barely registering me, 73 00:08:55,760 --> 00:09:03,230 having lapsed long before into the sort of stupor such social obligations are inclined to induce. 74 00:09:03,230 --> 00:09:06,650 I shook one or two hands, muttered greetings. Nobody knew or cared. 75 00:09:06,650 --> 00:09:14,930 Their minds were already turned to thoughts of alcohol and food. And then there she was standing before me, her hand held out, smiling. 76 00:09:14,930 --> 00:09:22,790 I took her hand. I spoke my name. So her smile, a poor man's version of the smile she'd given to her husband. 77 00:09:22,790 --> 00:09:27,560 She moved on and hovered a few yards away while I shook her husband's hand. 78 00:09:27,560 --> 00:09:33,170 Together, they walked across the lawn, his hand once more at her elbow. 79 00:09:33,170 --> 00:09:47,010 My eyes followed them, I realised I had no idea of her name, which had been obliterated in the moment of our meeting by the drumming in my ears. 80 00:09:47,010 --> 00:09:55,110 Thank you very much. This is an extraordinary and it kind of really works very well for my very first question, 81 00:09:55,110 --> 00:10:03,450 which is, as you know, I mean, after this the series that Erica, Erica has so beautifully choreographed is really about readers and readership 82 00:10:03,450 --> 00:10:08,910 and the way in which an author reaches out to their different reading publics. 83 00:10:08,910 --> 00:10:14,910 So my question is for a book like Memory of Love, which has a tremendous appeal to the specialist reader, 84 00:10:14,910 --> 00:10:21,420 you know, especially with its its critique of mental health paradigms, its critique of, you know, 85 00:10:21,420 --> 00:10:30,540 what Nicholas Rose calls the diagnostic creep of neuro anthropology is the romance plot is the story of desire, 86 00:10:30,540 --> 00:10:37,700 the way in which you also use plot, characterisation and language to draw the non-specialist reader in? 87 00:10:37,700 --> 00:10:49,560 Hmm. Well, nothing works like a love story, as you said, even though this, of course, is a love story with less love in it than many have. 88 00:10:49,560 --> 00:11:00,210 But I think when you construct a book, a writer, you construct an overarching arc book is narrative. 89 00:11:00,210 --> 00:11:06,870 And we use narrative in every walk of life, don't we? We use it especially I always think when we're trying to teach children. 90 00:11:06,870 --> 00:11:16,470 We were taught we were taught by stories. So and any psychologist will tell you and anthropologists will tell you the origin of stories is millennia 91 00:11:16,470 --> 00:11:22,710 old and that every culture there's not a single culture in the world where stories aren't told. 92 00:11:22,710 --> 00:11:29,100 So you have to take it. You have to take an arc. And there are two arcs to a book. 93 00:11:29,100 --> 00:11:33,360 One is the action. One is what actually happens in the book. 94 00:11:33,360 --> 00:11:38,310 Right, how you move your characters around and where they actually end up. 95 00:11:38,310 --> 00:11:43,440 And the second arc is the emotional arc of the book. 96 00:11:43,440 --> 00:11:48,070 Right. So books don't always end. 97 00:11:48,070 --> 00:11:56,830 In a dramatic way, sometimes they come to a halt, the action comes to a halt, but what has ended is, is the emotional arc of the book. 98 00:11:56,830 --> 00:12:03,850 So what you do is you create the factual arc and then that also is mirrored in the emotional arc. 99 00:12:03,850 --> 00:12:13,060 And then what happens then as you have other little smaller arcs, which are themes and subplots. 100 00:12:13,060 --> 00:12:19,120 So something Atila and the whole question of PTSD, for example, is clearly a subplot. 101 00:12:19,120 --> 00:12:26,900 It's not the main plot, but here is somewhere where Adrian goes and begins to learn about. 102 00:12:26,900 --> 00:12:37,940 The subject was of his interest and also really begin to learn about the country he is in, which he has, before he went there, failed to do. 103 00:12:37,940 --> 00:12:40,520 I don't know if any of you but ancestor stones. 104 00:12:40,520 --> 00:12:51,980 But Adrian Adrian, actually, he's a character I took from ancestor stones at the point when I decided that at that Elias, 105 00:12:51,980 --> 00:12:58,010 who was really where this whole book began, how did people account for themselves after a war? 106 00:12:58,010 --> 00:13:01,610 I really thought actually he needs to be accounting to somebody, 107 00:13:01,610 --> 00:13:13,310 somebody through whom the reader can see this country and can see and can decide what I believe the story really is. 108 00:13:13,310 --> 00:13:17,840 So what I did is this. He's an outsider. 109 00:13:17,840 --> 00:13:23,120 Now, that's, of course, very useful for readers, for outsiders. But it also means he doesn't know what's happened in this country. 110 00:13:23,120 --> 00:13:29,510 So he's ignorant of the whole truth. He only knows the big picture, but he's ignorant of the details. 111 00:13:29,510 --> 00:13:37,130 And if you come from a tiny country like Sierra Leone where something has happened, there are undercurrents all around. 112 00:13:37,130 --> 00:13:40,590 We know a great deal about who did what. 113 00:13:40,590 --> 00:13:45,320 And the same is true in Croatia. But to the outside, all of this is smoothed over. 114 00:13:45,320 --> 00:13:51,020 No one is talking about the elephant in the room or in fact, the herd standing there. 115 00:13:51,020 --> 00:13:59,540 And that's how societies cope in a civil war. You are left with what happened and you were left with the people who did these things. 116 00:13:59,540 --> 00:14:01,890 So it was important that ageing was an outsider. 117 00:14:01,890 --> 00:14:11,330 Not that not necessarily that he came from a Western country, but that was also another plot part, but that he didn't know crucially. 118 00:14:11,330 --> 00:14:14,750 And what I do is I make my readers walk their walk with Adrian. Right. 119 00:14:14,750 --> 00:14:21,380 You see it through his eyes. And then I create my other characters. 120 00:14:21,380 --> 00:14:32,090 Kai, who came in somewhat later. You know, the book has an elliptical shape, so it starts with Elias and Adrian and then ends up with Kai. 121 00:14:32,090 --> 00:14:38,990 I wanted somebody from within the country to look back at Adrian so that we reverse the gaze. 122 00:14:38,990 --> 00:14:47,750 I reverse the gaze. So many novels, the gaze is one way and historically the canon is usually the gate has only been from one party, 123 00:14:47,750 --> 00:14:54,800 from the person who occupies the centre to the other. But this time actually the centre shifts. 124 00:14:54,800 --> 00:14:58,940 Chi becomes the centre and he looks at Adrien who becomes the other. 125 00:14:58,940 --> 00:15:06,560 So I allow my readers from wherever they are to try to look at this whole story in the round from different perspectives. 126 00:15:06,560 --> 00:15:14,180 Thank you so much. And it's very, very interesting that you brought up Adrian, because I wanted to ask you about Agnes. 127 00:15:14,180 --> 00:15:19,730 You know, it's kind of the conceptual stumbling block of Adrian Adrian's. 128 00:15:19,730 --> 00:15:27,720 Well, he hopes that by and atomising Agnes's fugue state, as he calls it, he will make his name. 129 00:15:27,720 --> 00:15:32,780 You know, I sort of agree derision. Called him a kind of humanitarian conquistadores. 130 00:15:32,780 --> 00:15:37,980 Yeah. Carpetbag. And I kind of wanted to kind of, you know, kind of ask you about that, that, 131 00:15:37,980 --> 00:15:43,370 you know, and this is related not just to the epistemological quest of Adrian, 132 00:15:43,370 --> 00:15:52,460 the British psychologist who starts out uncomprehending and then in the narrative arc, gain some embodied and embedded knowledge of the place. 133 00:15:52,460 --> 00:15:56,450 You know, he falls in love with a local woman, so on and so forth, 134 00:15:56,450 --> 00:16:00,560 but also about the desirous arc of your narrative when you are describing your narrative 135 00:16:00,560 --> 00:16:05,180 in terms of sort of the the dramatic arc and the sort of emotional plot you are, 136 00:16:05,180 --> 00:16:09,620 you are talking about a sort of somewhat and driven plot that you are moving somewhere. 137 00:16:09,620 --> 00:16:13,580 But again, this is a place where you don't move, you stumble. It's about silence. 138 00:16:13,580 --> 00:16:20,900 It's about withholding. And I wanted to ask you really about when a novel is directly opening up that 139 00:16:20,900 --> 00:16:27,080 sort of parallel of the parallax space between talking cure and its own work, 140 00:16:27,080 --> 00:16:31,550 what is the role of someone like someone like Agnes? Because you can't really talk your way out of it. 141 00:16:31,550 --> 00:16:40,520 Agnes is the sort of holder of the silence of the novel that what I had really observed in Sierra Leone and in all situations 142 00:16:40,520 --> 00:16:47,930 where a major incident has occurred or incidents have occurred is that mostly people choose not to talk about it. 143 00:16:47,930 --> 00:16:55,670 And they do so well, actually, let them take a step backwards because the book is so much about silence. 144 00:16:55,670 --> 00:17:01,070 And when I thought about Adrian, I was ancestor stones. 145 00:17:01,070 --> 00:17:10,940 He was actually inspired by a British psychologist I had met who so didn't understand the country that he was very newly arrived. 146 00:17:10,940 --> 00:17:15,680 And he said to me, well, you know, things would be a lot better here. People didn't give away their children. 147 00:17:15,680 --> 00:17:20,690 And I said, who gives away their children? I see people give away their children and I sort of earth you talking about. 148 00:17:20,690 --> 00:17:25,400 And I read to say, my goodness, he's talking about the system of wardship. Whereby. 149 00:17:25,400 --> 00:17:31,580 From some parts of the family, particularly, very often poorer relations will go and live with a wealthier relation will be sent to school. 150 00:17:31,580 --> 00:17:37,970 I have a ward. She comes and spends the holidays with me, but I'm there and I pray for her to go to school. 151 00:17:37,970 --> 00:17:46,740 And she has it been periods moved into my family house to either for her education or because her her she is a single mother. 152 00:17:46,740 --> 00:17:52,880 Her mother's needs some space. But the idea that we gave our children away is quite extraordinary. 153 00:17:52,880 --> 00:17:55,260 And I also couldn't understand why he couldn't see the parallel. 154 00:17:55,260 --> 00:17:59,900 And if you've been any Victorian literature, you know that the system of wardship existed in Britain as well. 155 00:17:59,900 --> 00:18:05,960 It's not new to to this country. And so I was struck both by the condemnatory tone he used, 156 00:18:05,960 --> 00:18:14,300 but also how culturally tone deaf he was to this country and and lacking in any kind of humility. 157 00:18:14,300 --> 00:18:22,160 So I did base Adriaan on him. And I have a friend who's a psychologist and he's also mixed. 158 00:18:22,160 --> 00:18:25,610 He's Dutch and Sierra Leonean. I said to him, just talk to him one day. 159 00:18:25,610 --> 00:18:32,150 And I said, you know, I've got this idea about the translation of psychotherapy to this country. 160 00:18:32,150 --> 00:18:36,440 And I said, I know that I think it would work. 161 00:18:36,440 --> 00:18:42,050 What I was thinking was this. There's three kinds of silence in Sierra Leone. 162 00:18:42,050 --> 00:18:51,620 And probably in many cases, the same would be true, the first sinensis is that the people are actually quite culturally comfortable in silence. 163 00:18:51,620 --> 00:18:59,060 So when my aunties come travel down six hours from up country to visit me when I'm there, 164 00:18:59,060 --> 00:19:04,310 they stay for a whole day, whole afternoon sitting on the veranda and they will be there. 165 00:19:04,310 --> 00:19:14,190 And there is and as there exists in Europe, this conversation is not a skill, you know. 166 00:19:14,190 --> 00:19:20,810 In Europe, what you find is if people if a room goes silent, someone feels the need to fill the space. 167 00:19:20,810 --> 00:19:29,690 Right. If you're talking to somebody else and one of those moments occur, people actually say somebody walked over my grave or something. 168 00:19:29,690 --> 00:19:32,240 But it's a skill that small talk this this does that. 169 00:19:32,240 --> 00:19:38,030 You know, we go to cocktail parties, we learn children and talk to hold up their part of the conversation. 170 00:19:38,030 --> 00:19:42,320 What actually and say that I must be completely comfortable in silence if my six 171 00:19:42,320 --> 00:19:46,580 aunties are sitting on the veranda and the conversation love conversation logs, 172 00:19:46,580 --> 00:19:50,390 you know, they'll sit there quite happily drinking that tea and then they'll just begin again. 173 00:19:50,390 --> 00:19:53,930 So how are you right now? 174 00:19:53,930 --> 00:19:59,390 I was one second one, of course, is the silence of oppression. 175 00:19:59,390 --> 00:20:07,730 The country had been under 25 years of dictatorship, so people had learnt silence to speak was dangerous. 176 00:20:07,730 --> 00:20:15,470 And the third silence is the silence of trauma. People who have been traumatised do not wish to revisit their experiences typically. 177 00:20:15,470 --> 00:20:19,790 So when I asked my friend, the psychologist, how is this? How would it play out? 178 00:20:19,790 --> 00:20:28,250 He said, Well, you're related. You're quite right. If the psychotherapist and psychotherapist do silent all the time to draw people out, 179 00:20:28,250 --> 00:20:32,840 he said if they go silent, so will the patient just wait politely. 180 00:20:32,840 --> 00:20:36,950 And then there's also a completely different doctor patient relationship where, 181 00:20:36,950 --> 00:20:41,550 you know, the patient is waiting for the doctor to tell them what to do next. 182 00:20:41,550 --> 00:20:48,980 He said he had great doubts about it. So I really thought about that silence and how it could play out in the book. 183 00:20:48,980 --> 00:20:57,590 And how AIG was going to figure out which silence it is he is listening to isn't quite what we're not hearing. 184 00:20:57,590 --> 00:21:02,450 But the other thing is that there was food in particular when I wrote Ancestor 185 00:21:02,450 --> 00:21:06,050 Stones and I spent a lot of time in the villages with our village in particular, 186 00:21:06,050 --> 00:21:09,980 where people were willing to help because I was a to answer all my questions, 187 00:21:09,980 --> 00:21:16,970 I noticed how very often people, women in particular, simply stepped out of their lives. 188 00:21:16,970 --> 00:21:23,180 Right. They would just go walkabout. I go for a few days or few weeks. 189 00:21:23,180 --> 00:21:32,300 They would just go. And I saw it as a stress relief. It must in some way be a way that they coped with stress and nobody found it extraordinary. 190 00:21:32,300 --> 00:21:38,330 And so I had a character and an ancestor stones, the mother of one of the main characters who does that? 191 00:21:38,330 --> 00:21:45,290 She actually she does lose her mind, but she had her initial coping mechanism is to step out of it. 192 00:21:45,290 --> 00:21:53,200 And then I happened to be reading dozens of books on psychology and I came across this. 193 00:21:53,200 --> 00:22:03,010 Condition called Fugue and Fugue happens to be in the last 20 years, being heavily discredited as something that doesn't exist. 194 00:22:03,010 --> 00:22:07,990 And if you read the book, you know, because Adrian explores it and that is all accurate. 195 00:22:07,990 --> 00:22:17,260 Psychology came out of the wars and it was at some points dismissed that these men, these soldiers who were who were going walkabout, 196 00:22:17,260 --> 00:22:22,360 who were leaving in a dissociative dissociative state and claiming not to know where they were or 197 00:22:22,360 --> 00:22:27,370 who they were were actually just shirkers who didn't want to be in the military and do their duty. 198 00:22:27,370 --> 00:22:34,030 And then there were other psychologists who fought very hard to say, actually, it does exist and it really is a state it as a dissociative state. 199 00:22:34,030 --> 00:22:40,780 So I thought what? Actually, I believe the latter, because I've seen something very like that in Sierra Leone. 200 00:22:40,780 --> 00:22:50,590 And so I constructed the character of Agnes in order to embody that very, very deep silence at the centre of that of the culture. 201 00:22:50,590 --> 00:22:53,650 And, you know, novels grow as you write them. 202 00:22:53,650 --> 00:22:59,830 I mean, I wish I know if I could speak as elegantly about a proposed novel as I can about what I've written, 203 00:22:59,830 --> 00:23:03,880 it all gets worked out on the page and in my head. And of course, it took three years. 204 00:23:03,880 --> 00:23:07,330 But, you know, the more that I thought about Agnes, the more I created that character, 205 00:23:07,330 --> 00:23:14,320 the more I saw that she did embody this state and that she could be the vehicle through which Ajayan finally 206 00:23:14,320 --> 00:23:22,660 opens his eyes and begins to look at the country and stop expecting the country to explain itself to him, 207 00:23:22,660 --> 00:23:32,290 but start to actually imagine I mean, I think she's a very powerful in a way where a lot spokesperson is not the right word, 208 00:23:32,290 --> 00:23:35,440 but a symbol of the elected ness of your novel. 209 00:23:35,440 --> 00:23:48,930 You know that they like the different kinds of elected witnesses that the novel engages in, saying that even when you engage with even when you. 210 00:23:48,930 --> 00:23:52,740 Narrate an impossible or an enduring situation. 211 00:23:52,740 --> 00:23:59,460 You don't have to resolve it, you know, that's a very, very exhausting sort of energy insight to come out of that book, 212 00:23:59,460 --> 00:24:06,240 which I think kind of likens it with the with the more complicated temporality of psychoanalysis. 213 00:24:06,240 --> 00:24:15,870 Well, I think, you know, I think that those of us who have grown up mainly in the West are very used to the idea that things have a solution. 214 00:24:15,870 --> 00:24:23,100 That's going to be an answer. I mean, even if I was a journalist for 10 years, every time we did a story, 215 00:24:23,100 --> 00:24:29,040 somebody wanted either the answer or somebody to blame, I had to have some sort of conclusion. 216 00:24:29,040 --> 00:24:34,350 Now, in a country where there's been particularly a civil conflict where you're living with, 217 00:24:34,350 --> 00:24:38,640 you know, you're still together, sometimes there isn't a solution, right? 218 00:24:38,640 --> 00:24:42,960 You can't back off half the country. Sometimes that isn't a solution. 219 00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:48,360 Sometimes people adapt to live with what they have. They must adapt to live with what they have. 220 00:24:48,360 --> 00:24:56,190 And that is what Agnes has done. She's had to adapt to live with what she has, as has everybody, as has a guy who is suffering. 221 00:24:56,190 --> 00:25:01,650 He's he has a he is a better coping strategy and more resilience than Agnes and Agnes. 222 00:25:01,650 --> 00:25:11,910 His story is so particularly awful. But everybody in that country is figuring out how to move on and how to get forward, go forward. 223 00:25:11,910 --> 00:25:17,690 And that's what Agnes is doing and that's what she is doing. And that's what everybody is doing in their own way. 224 00:25:17,690 --> 00:25:25,070 My last question has to do with with with kind of, you know, in a way that the narrative function that a character like Agnes serves, 225 00:25:25,070 --> 00:25:32,510 which is to be discussed, be this sort of custodian of silence, be the symbol of elected muteness. 226 00:25:32,510 --> 00:25:39,080 A lot of I want to say simple reviewers have compared your style, said you have a masculine style. 227 00:25:39,080 --> 00:25:45,320 And I was kind of saying to mean before we came here that she actually writes and answers the Stones, 228 00:25:45,320 --> 00:25:51,720 that this withholding, this guarding of stories is a woman's work, to quote her exact words. 229 00:25:51,720 --> 00:25:56,480 It's women's work discarding of stories. So I want to kind of, you know, 230 00:25:56,480 --> 00:26:06,020 open up the floor with that question that do you what is the role of gender in the way in which your style and substance sort of come together? 231 00:26:06,020 --> 00:26:10,040 And I have no idea. I mean, I have no idea. 232 00:26:10,040 --> 00:26:18,030 I find the obsession with gender just so frustrating. I you know. 233 00:26:18,030 --> 00:26:22,530 The thing is, I mean, first of all, I don't really buy huge differences in gender. 234 00:26:22,530 --> 00:26:27,600 I think actually people are not that different from each other. That is my particular position. 235 00:26:27,600 --> 00:26:40,860 And I think that there are what are you for me, the most about being a woman? 236 00:26:40,860 --> 00:26:49,080 That the condition that I think about most is one of the experience of being a woman as 237 00:26:49,080 --> 00:26:55,980 opposed to something that is embedded in me from birth so women have so much less freedom. 238 00:26:55,980 --> 00:27:03,150 For example, I've often when people have said to me, you know, you write these male characters, how come you have so many characters, male characters? 239 00:27:03,150 --> 00:27:10,230 I have quipped that, well, I don't have to worry about how to get them home safely at the end of the chapter that, you know, 240 00:27:10,230 --> 00:27:15,420 men have a freedom in the world which women don't have and women have got very conditioned to it, very used to it. 241 00:27:15,420 --> 00:27:22,500 And we look out for each other, but we actually forget to what extent it drives our choices, our patterns of thinking. 242 00:27:22,500 --> 00:27:29,070 The way in which we view the world is very different from the way in which men view the world, because on the whole, 243 00:27:29,070 --> 00:27:36,760 those men don't most men don't have to take into account personal safety at every single moment of every single day. 244 00:27:36,760 --> 00:27:42,840 So when I when I write a man, I just think, well, what would it be like if I didn't have to think about that? 245 00:27:42,840 --> 00:27:49,890 How would it be if I could just do this or just do that? So and I think the same thing in cultural terms. 246 00:27:49,890 --> 00:27:56,850 I think how how our patterns of thinking influenced by where you find yourself, 247 00:27:56,850 --> 00:28:01,260 where you find yourself in a family, in a society and in a geographical setting. 248 00:28:01,260 --> 00:28:11,430 So when I created the character of draconic who is a hunter in Croatia, 249 00:28:11,430 --> 00:28:19,650 he is very much his character was very much informed by the landscape he finds himself in, by the place he finds himself in. 250 00:28:19,650 --> 00:28:28,930 So I really try and think of it like that. When people say my style of writing is masculine, I think they probably mean I don't write domestic novels. 251 00:28:28,930 --> 00:28:37,260 I think that might be one thing. They mean I don't write domestic novels. I pick large canvases. 252 00:28:37,260 --> 00:28:44,250 So it's not you know, it's a sort of backhanded compliment. And the second thing is, of course, I'm writing in the male voice a lot. 253 00:28:44,250 --> 00:28:49,920 So I listen, you know, and I inhabit the male world and I write in the first person a great deal, 254 00:28:49,920 --> 00:28:54,330 or if I don't write in the first person, I write in a very close third person. 255 00:28:54,330 --> 00:29:04,080 So it may be I'm going to take the compliment that I've created male voices that sound credible to male reviewers. 256 00:29:04,080 --> 00:29:10,650 But I don't think that in essence, books are either masculine or feminine writers. 257 00:29:10,650 --> 00:29:17,970 Imagine that's exactly what we do. That is the whole purpose of being a writer is to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. 258 00:29:17,970 --> 00:29:23,400 And if I didn't want to do that, I would stick to non-fiction and you would all read non-fiction. 259 00:29:23,400 --> 00:29:33,740 So I think that's a very interesting point to entry point for other questions from the floor. 260 00:29:33,740 --> 00:29:40,070 Mind you, I was very pleased to hear that Atila is going to be making a comeback. 261 00:29:40,070 --> 00:29:42,920 Year a character that I was probably most interested in. 262 00:29:42,920 --> 00:29:49,100 So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what it was about this figure of Atila that made you want to bring him back. 263 00:29:49,100 --> 00:29:53,000 I know that. I hear that Adrian is also a revenant from another. 264 00:29:53,000 --> 00:29:59,270 If you could maybe talk a little bit more about how characters work across your books in your is not a deliberate thing. 265 00:29:59,270 --> 00:30:05,720 But when you create a character as a writer, even if it's a character that has a very small part in your mind, 266 00:30:05,720 --> 00:30:09,650 you know the whole backstory, but you know how they got to where they are. 267 00:30:09,650 --> 00:30:17,520 It doesn't it doesn't come into the book. But you know it all. And Atila. 268 00:30:17,520 --> 00:30:24,400 Actually, I'm sort of more or less forgotten about him until I was at a discussion like this, 269 00:30:24,400 --> 00:30:27,450 so we really love me for it also to speak to people who've read the book, 270 00:30:27,450 --> 00:30:33,360 because then we begin, you know, that's the first time we understand what our readers are making of it and not making of it. 271 00:30:33,360 --> 00:30:39,840 And somebody it was in bars and the book was the Big Bath Festival read. 272 00:30:39,840 --> 00:30:44,340 And so I was sitting with an audience of hundreds of people, over 400 people, all of whom read the book. 273 00:30:44,340 --> 00:30:51,150 And one person put up their hand and they asked a question about it and they said, you know, that awful man. 274 00:30:51,150 --> 00:30:56,490 But I mean, first of all, I didn't think he was awful anyway. 275 00:30:56,490 --> 00:31:00,780 I thought he was just blunt and straight talking. 276 00:31:00,780 --> 00:31:07,680 But the other thing I said, would you don't know what's happened to him? Thought you have no idea. 277 00:31:07,680 --> 00:31:11,970 And, you know, I really started thinking about it and he won't go away. 278 00:31:11,970 --> 00:31:16,830 And I do describe my characters. 279 00:31:16,830 --> 00:31:22,610 They're very real to me. The characters are very real. And I. 280 00:31:22,610 --> 00:31:29,090 I often say that they travel with me in the car, the back of the car chattering away, 281 00:31:29,090 --> 00:31:33,470 I do a lot of my writing in my head and my husband really hates me to drive. 282 00:31:33,470 --> 00:31:36,360 It's done for a perfectly good driver, but he just really likes to drive. 283 00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:40,310 They find you drive because I sit in the passenger seat writing books in my head 284 00:31:40,310 --> 00:31:48,410 and they are they're these characters and I'm thinking about them all the time. And they follow me around and some of them just don't like you. 285 00:31:48,410 --> 00:31:53,390 Making stuff like hocus is a bit more intellectual, but, you know, some of them don't let you go. 286 00:31:53,390 --> 00:32:00,830 And, you know, the more I thought about that, the way that that person had read it, then I wrote a short story. 287 00:32:00,830 --> 00:32:08,270 What I do sometimes I write short, I try characters out, I give them a little walk, and I try to tell them that in a short story, 288 00:32:08,270 --> 00:32:14,750 which I wrote for the BBC, and it was shortlisted for a national short story book award. 289 00:32:14,750 --> 00:32:20,240 And I thought, I like him and he's working. And then I wrote another short story which had Otterloo in it as well. 290 00:32:20,240 --> 00:32:24,290 And I thought he's working even better now, really beginning to understand this man. 291 00:32:24,290 --> 00:32:33,920 And then I decided that I a the idea just grew and grew until I came out in the book called Happiness, 292 00:32:33,920 --> 00:32:37,310 which happily I have just handed in two weeks ago. 293 00:32:37,310 --> 00:32:42,050 I handed in the final edits and it will come out in March next year. 294 00:32:42,050 --> 00:32:43,520 And he is the main character. 295 00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:55,550 And this time I reversed the flow so that Atila comes to Britain to have a look at, yeah, we are all doing on the mental health front. 296 00:32:55,550 --> 00:33:03,200 So I said I know I was fine with that, but yeah, 297 00:33:03,200 --> 00:33:09,260 I tried them out and I work with them a bit and see whether I think I can live with this person just three years. 298 00:33:09,260 --> 00:33:12,590 And I really felt that I could live with terror for three years. 299 00:33:12,590 --> 00:33:21,620 I really like the dryness and the way that he saw the world and that kind of the way he just says it, you know what as see as he sees it. 300 00:33:21,620 --> 00:33:26,900 So, I mean, you definitely give him the best lines. He's the one who debunks the 99 percent PTSD. 301 00:33:26,900 --> 00:33:30,950 And also that line you call it disorder, my friend. We call it life. 302 00:33:30,950 --> 00:33:31,400 Yeah. 303 00:33:31,400 --> 00:33:39,830 So interestingly, I mean, it really was inspired by a real person, but I must say, before we will run away and say it is a real person, he's not. 304 00:33:39,830 --> 00:33:50,360 He's inspired. He was inspired by a real person. And I spent two weeks in a mental institute in Sierra Leone and the head psychiatrist 305 00:33:50,360 --> 00:33:55,850 there who's acknowledged in the back of the book and who's read the book and ah, 306 00:33:55,850 --> 00:34:04,610 and he was like that, you know, he was able to see the world cross-cultural from different perspectives. 307 00:34:04,610 --> 00:34:05,810 And he was very much like that. 308 00:34:05,810 --> 00:34:10,820 And he thought that the West, if he thought that he said that the West thinks they have all the answers and they don't. 309 00:34:10,820 --> 00:34:16,730 And, you know, sometimes that's another reality which a Western has had to take into account. 310 00:34:16,730 --> 00:34:24,110 So he in fact, if I hadn't met him, that whole sections but would not have existed. 311 00:34:24,110 --> 00:34:29,750 Somebody just said I was at that time in the medical hospital watching operations. 312 00:34:29,750 --> 00:34:35,990 And somebody just said to me, you know, who's really interesting here? Why don't you talk to the chief psychiatrist at the mental institute? 313 00:34:35,990 --> 00:34:43,520 So I went there and he had this very combative manner and he went, come in, come in, ask what you want, go where you want. 314 00:34:43,520 --> 00:34:51,230 And he just let me be in this mental hospital, which isn't quite dangerous people without any safeguards, I say. 315 00:34:51,230 --> 00:34:58,280 And so I just spent a lot of time there wandering around, talking to patients, talking to staff. 316 00:34:58,280 --> 00:35:01,730 I spent a lot of time with a Cuban psychiatrist who was working there, and he too, 317 00:35:01,730 --> 00:35:10,460 had some very interesting insights in this whole international cross-cultural exploration of psychology. 318 00:35:10,460 --> 00:35:14,030 And so I really learnt a great deal about it. 319 00:35:14,030 --> 00:35:21,920 And it became that part of the book. And an interesting, interesting thing happened that that particular section, the you call it a disorder. 320 00:35:21,920 --> 00:35:30,770 We call it life, interestingly. And it went into the quotes that whatever it is, 99 percent of the population are suffering from PTSD, 321 00:35:30,770 --> 00:35:35,450 which was written in an NGO report, was genuinely written in an injury report. 322 00:35:35,450 --> 00:35:40,730 And I have found my audiences and readers have a completely different response to it. 323 00:35:40,730 --> 00:35:52,940 Typically were often, not typically, often the non to see it exactly the way I intended it, which is he's saying, come on, all right. 324 00:35:52,940 --> 00:36:01,640 But very often the Westerners take it very literally that 99 percent of the country is suffering from PTSD. 325 00:36:01,640 --> 00:36:06,230 And so it became and that was something that I hadn't anticipated. 326 00:36:06,230 --> 00:36:09,830 I you know, you just hope people will read it the way you wrote in the way you intended it. 327 00:36:09,830 --> 00:36:19,760 But here was this point where, you know, readers were taking it very differently and they were reading a book, writing a book. 328 00:36:19,760 --> 00:36:24,730 It's a symbiotic experience. Once I've written that people bring their own lives to it, their own ideas to it, 329 00:36:24,730 --> 00:36:27,160 and they and they make of it what they will, and I'm completely fine with that. 330 00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:34,830 But I was absolutely fascinated that this was a turning point of difference between two different groups of people. 331 00:36:34,830 --> 00:36:45,670 There's a question that you said earlier that in some cases people wouldn't. 332 00:36:45,670 --> 00:36:53,080 I can hear you anyway, OK, that people who have suffered trauma may not want to revisit their past experiences. 333 00:36:53,080 --> 00:36:57,890 And and of course, there are passages in the book which are very graphic. 334 00:36:57,890 --> 00:37:03,370 These is story. There is CAIS memory of what happened on the bridge. 335 00:37:03,370 --> 00:37:12,730 And I wonder what, um, when people in Sierra Leone have gone through similar experiences and read the book, um, what what does it do to them? 336 00:37:12,730 --> 00:37:14,920 Have you had a chance to to discuss. 337 00:37:14,920 --> 00:37:26,200 Well, a good number of people, well intentioned people who were going to buy the book for friends in Sierra Leone. 338 00:37:26,200 --> 00:37:33,020 And I thought I'm not sure they necessarily want to read this now. 339 00:37:33,020 --> 00:37:40,630 But I mean, I wrote it for all Australians, but I didn't write you know, I wrote it with a longer view. 340 00:37:40,630 --> 00:37:45,530 I wrote it as an act of witness. 341 00:37:45,530 --> 00:37:53,450 But people in Sierra Leone have read it and, you know, and I've had a very good response from it there about it there, 342 00:37:53,450 --> 00:37:59,350 but what I noticed when I went to Sierra Leone and just after the war, 343 00:37:59,350 --> 00:38:05,450 I went in 2000 when the war was still ongoing and I was researching the the devil that dance on the water. 344 00:38:05,450 --> 00:38:10,680 And then I started teaching at the British Council, teaching creative writing at the British Council. 345 00:38:10,680 --> 00:38:16,800 And I would run a week or two week course every time I was there. And. 346 00:38:16,800 --> 00:38:24,000 The first thing I noticed was that my students come to the class and I would assume you see before all of this, 347 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:29,490 before I did all this thinking, I would assume what they would do was talk and write about their experiences of war. 348 00:38:29,490 --> 00:38:35,610 My first class, I thought we're going to do. And that's why the British Council wanted me to do it, because I thought it was going to be this kind of. 349 00:38:35,610 --> 00:38:39,300 Well, you know, not I mean, I don't believe that writing is therapy. Don't get me wrong. 350 00:38:39,300 --> 00:38:40,560 I really don't think that. 351 00:38:40,560 --> 00:38:51,210 But I do think that artists own the responsibility for holding that, paying for a culture when a culture can't talk about something, 352 00:38:51,210 --> 00:38:56,640 the space in which to do it is the is the artist's right is the dramatists in particular in Sierra Leone, 353 00:38:56,640 --> 00:39:03,090 the dramatist, the novelists, the poets, the short story writers and pamphleteers, the fine artists. 354 00:39:03,090 --> 00:39:13,350 I do think that is a central purpose of art, is to hold on to and examine and explore what individuals may be too pained to do. 355 00:39:13,350 --> 00:39:18,250 But what I noticed with my students, I thought they were going to write about their experiences. 356 00:39:18,250 --> 00:39:21,680 You know what they all wrote to a one. 357 00:39:21,680 --> 00:39:29,390 Love stories all wrote love stories, some of them were funny and, you know, they were beautiful, but they all love stories. 358 00:39:29,390 --> 00:39:34,820 And the minute they all started reading it and we were going through them, I thought, how could I have been so dumb? 359 00:39:34,820 --> 00:39:40,040 Right. Of course, they want to think about something else cause they want to travel somewhere else. 360 00:39:40,040 --> 00:39:44,330 Of course, they don't want to mine that pain or we're not ready to mine that pain yet. 361 00:39:44,330 --> 00:39:49,790 So that's really what made me think about the sign and to think about which is the silence isn't always wrong. 362 00:39:49,790 --> 00:39:55,490 It's about actually if you've been through something, you don't necessarily want to revisit it and be pressed on it. 363 00:39:55,490 --> 00:39:59,190 Or you may want more time in which to do that or another way in which to do that. 364 00:39:59,190 --> 00:40:04,670 And so my my beautiful students really showed it to me very elegantly in one short workshop 365 00:40:04,670 --> 00:40:09,720 is actually we want to return to the land of love and we want to think about love, 366 00:40:09,720 --> 00:40:22,730 so. I wondered just following up from that, whether you did consider calling it a memory of pain? 367 00:40:22,730 --> 00:40:30,030 Well, I mean, that metaphor, of course, comes from the. 368 00:40:30,030 --> 00:40:37,870 You know, would you call it ghost pain and phantom phantom pain? 369 00:40:37,870 --> 00:40:45,580 No, I didn't think of cutting it every not. I mean, sometimes titles come up for me very early on and sometimes they take forever. 370 00:40:45,580 --> 00:40:49,940 And the title for this one, once I'd written that passage and I thought, this is the memory of love. 371 00:40:49,940 --> 00:40:57,460 And the reason is because of my students, because what people actually very often dwell on is what is beautiful, not what is painful. 372 00:40:57,460 --> 00:40:59,080 I mean, they also dwell on pain. 373 00:40:59,080 --> 00:41:11,920 But what I wanted this book to evoke is the idea that there was a beauty in this country and there is a beauty in this country and it is not based on 374 00:41:11,920 --> 00:41:17,770 those of us or those of you who don't necessarily own base interpretations 375 00:41:17,770 --> 00:41:23,200 of that country on the time that it was in the news because there was a war. 376 00:41:23,200 --> 00:41:27,730 And it was so shocking to me at that time to end it all through the war. 377 00:41:27,730 --> 00:41:31,630 And I was mostly here. 378 00:41:31,630 --> 00:41:42,640 And I knew my country very well to talk to my British friends who just thought the whole place was one long, miserable hellhole. 379 00:41:42,640 --> 00:41:51,730 And so what I do in the book is I have people constantly talk about before, before and then and then there's the silence about the war. 380 00:41:51,730 --> 00:41:56,710 And then there's after. But before was a place of beauty and after an injury. 381 00:41:56,710 --> 00:42:06,770 And of course, I all the pain and then after becomes this place of rebuilding. 382 00:42:06,770 --> 00:42:13,100 Ed. This is more of a comment and a question, 383 00:42:13,100 --> 00:42:20,570 but I suppose I'm I'm curious about to what extent this was part of that that 384 00:42:20,570 --> 00:42:24,410 embodying or living inside the characters that you were talking about earlier. 385 00:42:24,410 --> 00:42:27,380 When you're talking about writing these male characters, 386 00:42:27,380 --> 00:42:38,750 what I read admired was how you slowed the pace down on everyday comings and goings and how you made that interesting. 387 00:42:38,750 --> 00:42:47,900 So, for example, the many, many times that Adrian or I come into the flat, open the fridge, have a beard, take out another beer, hand each other, 388 00:42:47,900 --> 00:42:59,210 you know, making food is kind of very, very good at throwing meals together from where you're little and you're having a shower when it's hot. 389 00:42:59,210 --> 00:43:07,700 Observing the bird out on the on the telephone line, I think it was just that is, you know, 390 00:43:07,700 --> 00:43:16,850 aside from the very big themes we talk about fugu and and war and conflict, those moments stay stay with me. 391 00:43:16,850 --> 00:43:24,230 And I wonder whether it did have to do with how you inhabited those characters spaces. 392 00:43:24,230 --> 00:43:33,020 I think it does, because, you know, every single character I entered their lives for, I became a surgeon and became a psychiatrist over the next book. 393 00:43:33,020 --> 00:43:39,410 I thought, that is so exhausting. And so that's why we've got a handyman. 394 00:43:39,410 --> 00:43:47,840 Well, I'm not sure I can carry on researching in depth and living all these lives, but. 395 00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:54,020 I suppose two things. I mean, the book is written in the present tense, whole sections are written in the present tense, 396 00:43:54,020 --> 00:44:02,990 and when a writer comes to choose a tense, they we think very hard about what the purpose of that tense is. 397 00:44:02,990 --> 00:44:05,750 And people say the present tense is very fashionable. Yes. 398 00:44:05,750 --> 00:44:14,180 You know, after the 60s became incredibly fashionable, before that, there were very few books written in the present tense. 399 00:44:14,180 --> 00:44:19,190 But actually there are craftsmen reasons behind it. 400 00:44:19,190 --> 00:44:24,680 Right. And I picked the present tense when I won a book to live absolutely. 401 00:44:24,680 --> 00:44:30,200 In the moment. So I wrote the 40000 words first 40000 words several different times. 402 00:44:30,200 --> 00:44:36,920 I changed the tense and I changed the person. 403 00:44:36,920 --> 00:44:42,140 I went, I thought, I'll try it in the first and third and I'll see which. 404 00:44:42,140 --> 00:44:44,810 And I thought again at one point was in the first person, 405 00:44:44,810 --> 00:44:51,230 I switched him to the third person so that the reader could just see a little bit outside Adrian. 406 00:44:51,230 --> 00:44:54,950 They could see Adrian. They weren't entirely locked into his point of view. 407 00:44:54,950 --> 00:44:58,550 And the same with Kai. You had to be able to step away from Kai sometimes. 408 00:44:58,550 --> 00:45:06,550 So think of it like having a camera, a writer, the first person I can go inside the I. 409 00:45:06,550 --> 00:45:16,720 Then, you know, you you write, you can write third person limited, you can write to third person omniscient with the cameras all the way up there. 410 00:45:16,720 --> 00:45:27,130 So was third person limited? What you want is you want your the camera to be sort of here, but you want it to be able to do that. 411 00:45:27,130 --> 00:45:34,420 Right. So you can see doing things you're not. Just so it took me a long time to figure that out. 412 00:45:34,420 --> 00:45:40,750 I mean, probably if I'd done an MFA, it would take me a shorter time. But I had to learn, you know, study creative writing. 413 00:45:40,750 --> 00:45:45,400 So I had to do everything on the page and figure it out myself at the at the coalface. 414 00:45:45,400 --> 00:45:50,950 But that's what I was really aiming for. And so those sections that are written in the present tense take place in the present. 415 00:45:50,950 --> 00:46:02,680 But they also it's because you're inhabiting the moment and you're inhabiting these little moments of life and also inspired by it again. 416 00:46:02,680 --> 00:46:13,720 Friends of mine in Britain who only watch the news images. And when I went to Sierra Leone in 2000 and 2001, 2002, the war officially ended in 2000, 417 00:46:13,720 --> 00:46:18,820 2002, they thought I was running around in a flak jacket the whole time. 418 00:46:18,820 --> 00:46:26,200 I mean, they thought I was going like a war correspondent. And I said, no, you remember people actually live through all of this. 419 00:46:26,200 --> 00:46:30,670 They still get married, they still give birth, they still fall in love. 420 00:46:30,670 --> 00:46:35,170 They still cook. They still go to the fridge. You know, they well, they don't get at the fridge, actually. 421 00:46:35,170 --> 00:46:42,020 So no electricity. But, you know, they still have to deal with the ordinary tasks of life, but they still go through that. 422 00:46:42,020 --> 00:46:45,790 So I wanted to create that reality. And it is it's walking through. 423 00:46:45,790 --> 00:46:57,450 It's being there and it's having Kay and Adrian with these two different levels of of of reality coexisting in the moment. 424 00:46:57,450 --> 00:47:08,550 One last question. Yes, thanks. I wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you went to Sierra Leone in and. 425 00:47:08,550 --> 00:47:13,110 I'm interested in the relationship between the novel and your memoir. 426 00:47:13,110 --> 00:47:22,680 And I guess particularly thinking about, you know, the forensic I mean, I see in your memoir what I would call something like a forensic aesthetic. 427 00:47:22,680 --> 00:47:27,390 I mean, there's the whole issue of truth telling. And I'm interested in the novel. 428 00:47:27,390 --> 00:47:32,160 On the one hand, we have ileus obfuscating the truth. 429 00:47:32,160 --> 00:47:39,690 We have different attempts through different world, through Adrianne's to try to get characters to tell the truth. 430 00:47:39,690 --> 00:47:46,860 Agnes's story is told by several people. So I was I'm interested in. 431 00:47:46,860 --> 00:47:55,740 Yeah, your thoughts about, well, the relationship between these and perhaps how writing the memoir might have. 432 00:47:55,740 --> 00:48:09,420 What difference that writing? Well, I wonder there's a phrase I have tacked on a wall in my office, a quote, and I'm not entirely sure who said it. 433 00:48:09,420 --> 00:48:14,970 I have a sense that it was Nadine Gordimer, but I can't find in any of her work. 434 00:48:14,970 --> 00:48:30,210 And now when I look on the Internet is ascribed to me because I've said it's a very false news and it is non-fiction reveals the lies, 435 00:48:30,210 --> 00:48:33,900 but only metaphore can tell the truth. 436 00:48:33,900 --> 00:48:41,040 So the reason I became a novelist and I became a novelist quite slowly is I started as a journalist. 437 00:48:41,040 --> 00:48:46,440 I wasn't happy with that book. I wrote my memoir because I felt journalism was not doing the right job. 438 00:48:46,440 --> 00:48:52,860 I wrote my memoir and out of that experience and I see the memory of love in the of the dots in the book, 439 00:48:52,860 --> 00:49:05,640 the two hander's of my of my books, out of the expense of writing the dance and the water came my inclination to examine those people, 440 00:49:05,640 --> 00:49:17,250 you know, the lives and unself told narratives of those people who had perhaps not behaved as well as they would have wished to the complicit. 441 00:49:17,250 --> 00:49:22,290 So, you know, I went to Sierra Leone to write The Devil in the Water. 442 00:49:22,290 --> 00:49:31,740 I spoke to loads of people of my parents' generation. And I was very fortunate that the time that I went was the war was still ongoing. 443 00:49:31,740 --> 00:49:36,420 There was still fighting. Freetown was overrun in 1999. 444 00:49:36,420 --> 00:49:44,220 I went back in 2000 and people were absolutely shocked. 445 00:49:44,220 --> 00:49:52,440 I just I often say it was like 9/11 where people were just walking around looking completely dazed. 446 00:49:52,440 --> 00:49:59,580 And they were we were so astonished that this had happened to us because we kept the war in 447 00:49:59,580 --> 00:50:05,340 Liberia going on for ages and we thought that we were different and safe from all of that. 448 00:50:05,340 --> 00:50:07,330 So. 449 00:50:07,330 --> 00:50:17,080 People were very, very willing to open up to me at that point and remarkably candid, even the people who had not behaved as well as they might have. 450 00:50:17,080 --> 00:50:27,310 And then a few years later, they'd all closed down again and they had had time to reform their stories and to what 451 00:50:27,310 --> 00:50:32,800 extent they were doing it deliberately and to what extent they were doing it reflexively. 452 00:50:32,800 --> 00:50:36,520 I wasn't always sure, but they had had time to start telling themselves, 453 00:50:36,520 --> 00:50:41,680 I know a different kind of truth to the truth that they had told me the first time around. 454 00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:47,680 So I became really interested in that. And so, you know, my father was a political prisoner. 455 00:50:47,680 --> 00:50:54,760 I'm extremely proud of him. And I people were often asked me what it was like to lose my father. 456 00:50:54,760 --> 00:51:00,520 Of course, it was awful. But then I think, oh, my goodness. But what if he'd been one of them? 457 00:51:00,520 --> 00:51:06,460 What if he'd been one of the complicit? That would be, to me, so much worse. 458 00:51:06,460 --> 00:51:13,200 And I had a conversation with a friend of mine from Argentina who lived grew up during the dirty war. 459 00:51:13,200 --> 00:51:29,660 And we were talking about our fathers and she told me a story about her father, who was a hugely successful academic, and she said that at some point. 460 00:51:29,660 --> 00:51:38,750 After the dirty war was over, when she was in her 20s and 30s, she began to think to herself, 461 00:51:38,750 --> 00:51:45,500 how come everybody in this country who stood up to what was going on paid a price? 462 00:51:45,500 --> 00:51:56,000 They were imprisoned, they fled into exile, they were killed or, you know, they were they certainly weren't given a promotion anyway. 463 00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:05,330 But everybody paid a price. And she looked at her hugely successful father and she just said to me, how can it be so? 464 00:52:05,330 --> 00:52:07,790 How can it be so? 465 00:52:07,790 --> 00:52:18,440 And she is there were a couple of things that had happened in her youth which hinted that even if he hadn't been entirely a collaborator, 466 00:52:18,440 --> 00:52:25,070 he had certainly been complicit and he had looked after himself and to a certain extent, his family. 467 00:52:25,070 --> 00:52:34,040 So I became very interested in that when I spoke to somebody in the same position in Sierra Leone who had behaved rather similarly. 468 00:52:34,040 --> 00:52:36,680 And I knew his daughter. I got to know his daughter very well. 469 00:52:36,680 --> 00:52:45,060 She was a human rights lawyer and she was there when I was interviewing, you know, her parents and. 470 00:52:45,060 --> 00:52:47,610 She came to me and she said, because I got nowhere with them, 471 00:52:47,610 --> 00:52:54,390 they had just completely closed down and she came to me afterwards after we become friends and the years had passed. 472 00:52:54,390 --> 00:52:59,670 And she said, I asked my parents the questions that you had asked them in the interview. 473 00:52:59,670 --> 00:53:04,650 And I said, you know, what did you do? What did you do? Because that was the question I had asked. 474 00:53:04,650 --> 00:53:09,150 And eventually her father had said, well, what could I do? 475 00:53:09,150 --> 00:53:19,440 I had five children. And I said I didn't say actually I thought it was too cool, I thought, but my father would have given you the same answer. 476 00:53:19,440 --> 00:53:27,060 What could I do? Because I had children? So people have their own reasons for doing the things that they do and some of. 477 00:53:27,060 --> 00:53:31,560 So with Elias Cole, he does it for Mamak, right? 478 00:53:31,560 --> 00:53:36,180 In his mind, he does it for Mamak. And I think that's something that we can all understand. 479 00:53:36,180 --> 00:53:42,570 It does it to protect her when the students are arrested or not. 480 00:53:42,570 --> 00:53:50,370 And so I allow the lawyers to be the vehicle by which people would examine their own conscience of what they might or might not do. 481 00:53:50,370 --> 00:53:51,600 And that, I have to say, 482 00:53:51,600 --> 00:54:01,080 has been very much the case with his life as the character of who I am particularly proud because some people love him and some people hate him. 483 00:54:01,080 --> 00:54:09,790 And it's all about where you are. Your moral compass is pointing at that particular time. 484 00:54:09,790 --> 00:54:12,360 I was wondering by way of closing, if you could ask. 485 00:54:12,360 --> 00:54:20,430 I mean, I've had to read from this very powerful work of another sort of brief passage that would be we wanted to end with your words. 486 00:54:20,430 --> 00:54:26,690 I mean, that was I think 27 is what you 37. 487 00:54:26,690 --> 00:54:35,480 Now, I don't have my annotated copy because I do a little edit to make this a bit shorter, but forgive me if I. 488 00:54:35,480 --> 00:54:54,510 Jump a little bit. In this country, there is no dawn, no spring or autumn nature is an abrupt timekeeper about daybreak. 489 00:54:54,510 --> 00:55:00,720 There is nothing in the least ambiguous. It is dark or it is light with barely a sliver in between. 490 00:55:00,720 --> 00:55:09,990 Adrian wakes to the light, the air is heavy and carries the faint odour of mould like a cricket pavilion entered for the first time in the season. 491 00:55:09,990 --> 00:55:13,710 It is always there, stronger in the morning and on some days more than others. 492 00:55:13,710 --> 00:55:19,850 It pervades everything. The bed sheets, towels, his clothes, dust and mould. 493 00:55:19,850 --> 00:55:22,820 Outside his window, somebody is talking in a loud voice. 494 00:55:22,820 --> 00:55:28,670 He has no idea what they are saying for a moment, his mind drifts with a thought to be surrounded by languages. 495 00:55:28,670 --> 00:55:34,430 You don't understand of how it must in some ways be like being deaf. 496 00:55:34,430 --> 00:55:46,300 The deaf children he knew, whose parents sometimes came to see him, became remote, cut off even inside their own family's silent islands. 497 00:55:46,300 --> 00:55:52,810 In the kitchen, Kai Mansaray barefoot, but dressed in the clothes the night before, is opening and closing cupboard doors. 498 00:55:52,810 --> 00:55:56,590 He doesn't turn when Adrian greets him. Hey man, not much here. 499 00:55:56,590 --> 00:56:03,250 Tell me you have coffee, Adrian. Open to covid on the opposite wall and find the tin of instant coffee. 500 00:56:03,250 --> 00:56:08,200 He fills the kettle with water from the plastic bottle and lights the gas ring. 501 00:56:08,200 --> 00:56:13,520 Kai Mansaray watches him. Boiling, sterilises it. 502 00:56:13,520 --> 00:56:17,300 Yes, I know, says Adrian, feeding the others, get these pictures down, 503 00:56:17,300 --> 00:56:22,910 the only two mugs he possesses and prises, the lid of the coffee chain opened at the end of a teaspoon. 504 00:56:22,910 --> 00:56:26,810 How did you find the couch? I hope it was all right. Yeah, yeah, fine. 505 00:56:26,810 --> 00:56:33,230 Fine. I mean, your couch go back a long way. I'm not a big sleeper. Anyhow, I had to check on my patient. 506 00:56:33,230 --> 00:56:41,710 How is she doing? When there's no reply, Agent glances up Chi Mansaray studying the label on the coffee tin, 507 00:56:41,710 --> 00:56:47,690 Adrien can't be sure whether he has heard the question or not. Suddenly, the other man looks up. 508 00:56:47,690 --> 00:56:51,550 I could eat, he announces. I'll make us breakfast. 509 00:56:51,550 --> 00:56:58,720 There's nothing much here you don't say for the first time since they met Chi Mansaray smiles, you relax, 510 00:56:58,720 --> 00:57:04,890 he steps around Adrienn so nimbly, Engine doesn't have time to move out of the way, opens the door of the apartment. 511 00:57:04,890 --> 00:57:09,240 I say, come. He beckons a hospital. Porter hurries over. 512 00:57:09,240 --> 00:57:11,100 Can I hand him a few coins in a short time? 513 00:57:11,100 --> 00:57:19,050 Later, the porter reappears carrying a plastic bag and two freshly baked loaves of bread wrapped in newspaper. 514 00:57:19,050 --> 00:57:26,640 On the kitchen counter, Kai lays down the loaves of bread and unpacks the bag, a tin of powdered milk and other Kraft cheese, 515 00:57:26,640 --> 00:57:34,110 onions, a dozen eggs, a fruit large, open and green with a rich skin, a single line. 516 00:57:34,110 --> 00:57:39,000 Adrian dresses to the sounds of his visiter, preparing breakfast in the kitchen, 517 00:57:39,000 --> 00:57:43,740 efficient sounds that relayer deftness of hand, a certainty of procedure. 518 00:57:43,740 --> 00:57:52,570 Still, he dresses quickly. By the time Adrian reappears, department has been overtaken by the smell of frying onions in the kitchen. 519 00:57:52,570 --> 00:57:57,610 Ky Mansaray breaks eggs with one hand into a Super Bowl. 520 00:57:57,610 --> 00:58:04,540 And whisks them into a froth is made coffee in the teapot and replaced the broken lid with a saucer. 521 00:58:04,540 --> 00:58:09,010 Adrian was two cups and sets, one where the visitor can reach it, then leads back, 522 00:58:09,010 --> 00:58:15,550 leaned back on the counter in the silence, a prickle of self-consciousness touches him. 523 00:58:15,550 --> 00:58:21,130 He shifts from one foot to the other, watching the newcomer move around the kitchen, 524 00:58:21,130 --> 00:58:25,600 his kitchen, as though he were a man entirely alone in his own space. 525 00:58:25,600 --> 00:58:29,990 It is Adrian who feels like the intruder. 526 00:58:29,990 --> 00:58:37,850 He has yet to become used to it, the silences between people in Britain, people came and were sent to see him. 527 00:58:37,850 --> 00:58:45,500 He learnt to examine their silence to see if it was tainted with shame or pain or guilt, coloured with reluctant or tainted with anger. 528 00:58:45,500 --> 00:58:52,850 He himself used silence as a lure, putting his own silence against theirs until they were compelled to fill the void. 529 00:58:52,850 --> 00:58:59,180 Here, those tricks have no place, even with those whom he calls his patients. 530 00:58:59,180 --> 00:59:07,490 If Adrian fall silent, so too do they, waiting patiently and without embarrassment here, 531 00:59:07,490 --> 00:59:15,170 the silences have a different quality, are entirely devoid of expectation. 532 00:59:15,170 --> 00:59:19,573 Thank you very much, Ivan.