Welcome to this great writers inspired summer event,
which is going to be a reading and conversation with our two authors segment of it and Quartier Nuland,
how this is going to work is we're going to start off with a reading by both writers and then we're going to open up to Q&A.
The discussions talking. Um, the theme really is writing and reading identity, who we are in the world,
what it is to to read or to listen to literature and feel ourselves placed or not placed or how we
engage with with literature and how it how it might illuminate our sense of ourselves in the world.
Um, so anyway, we're going to we're going to have a discussion.
Please feel free to ask lots of questions. This is very interactive, after which we will close with another reading by both writers.
So let me not. Take up the stage too much longer.
I'm going to introduce our first to say, and he's quoting Union.
He describes himself and his Twitter profile as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and literary procrastinator.
He's the critically acclaimed author of many novels from his first discolour,
published in 1997 to Society within 1999, Snakeskin 2002 and most recently, the Gospel.
According to Cain, in 2013, cutting short stories have appeared in various anthologies, including The Time Out Book of London,
Short Stories and his own collections as well, such as Music for the Of Key and The Book of Blues.
He's also a writer of plays, including The Far Side, Beautiful Black and to the Sky Quartette.
You're very welcome. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.
It's really good to be here. I think it's quite an active project for me.
Probably summer, too,
but I think a lot of my work is to do with actually trying to give a voice to people who find themselves underrepresented or not represented at all.
This piece I'm going to read was done out of a project called City of Stories, which worked Spread the Word Literary Project,
and we replaced four writers were placed in residencies in different libraries.
My one was White Chapel Library, and we went to stay there for a week basically and cover stories.
And then at the end of the week,
he would write a story based on what the people have told you or what you'd found out when you walked around the area.
You know, various different means. You're supposed to write a story.
But I found myself so inspired by everything I heard every day that I ended up writing a story for every day that I was there,
because it's the flash fiction story, not a whole short story. So you have to write 1000 words.
So I wrote a story basically every day I'd meet with someone or I'd go and do something.
I come back a story and then meet someone else. And I didn't like that.
So I ended up with four stories and they chose one and they put it in the pamphlet.
And we're judging a competition now of flash fiction stories by people who are running workshops in the area.
And we're going to publish a pamphlet of those stories, including our stories, my story and actually our four writers.
This story, this was a guide, I suppose.
So he was just so inspiring. It was on the last day and he told me so many things.
He was a photographer in the area of bricklaying and stuff. He'd been taking pictures of people, I think, since the 80s up until now.
So he had a real stockpile of all these things and how quickly that changed over the years.
And he told me two particular stories, which I've got to do both of those.
And so this is in two parts. I read one for this reason, and then I read the other one for the last three and the first one got to give.
Mr. Powell only loves two things gambling and smoking, so when Mom yells, he's on the phone, I don't respect very much.
The passageway is dark and cool. The handset lies where mom left it sideways on the little mango wood table like a sleeping animal
inside a grown alive would be sent between the embassy or to put a permutation on at the bookies.
I've been missing with my Nikon for most of the morning, only I can't make it work.
All I want is to be left alone in my bedroom with the dull gleam of its workings. But I'm the youngest and Mr. Paola's got no family here.
So that's it as far as my parents are concerned. Underlain Terry Jones barks loud, saying these juicy oranges are six for a pound.
That never sounds right to me. I pick up the handset and don't say a thing to the chief.
I'm pissed he hasn't asked my brother a boy. Mr Powell says he can hear me breathe down the line.
Hi, Mr. Powell and Tony rolling my eyes come now.
He says his English isn't all that and everything he says is like an order.
Come right now. All right, Mr Powell. I'll be there in ten minutes.
I say it's better not to argue I don't waste my time. I put on my windshield and my neck and around my neck like a medallion had I'm
leaving and slammed the door outside proper cold spitting rain in English,
great crowds. I should wear a warm jacket. I need to go back inside.
I think it isn't worth it to go over with. Given Savage a wave.
I'm off. Lanes where busy families ducking into shops, women dressed completely,
completely inappropriately for the nasty weather and saris and no winter coats, my brother calls them fresh.
He's looking in fresh eggs. He says, don't even know they're in the real world whenever he starts his crapp ignoring.
I don't like that kind of talk wasn't so long ago. All parents, when you hear to some of them.
Look, Mr. Powell, for instance, I haven't seen the West End and he's been in London from the early 60s.
It's an accident. Some of us were born in this city. I feel more at home and I get all excited about.
Mr. Powers in a right, good mood, a small man with a force of white stubble, eyes blue with age,
normally frowns his way through life like something's rotting under his nose. Today, he pulls me inside with a green, pushing me into the living room.
The flat got that hope for a fragrance of musty old man, an open can of host and pillow stands on the wobbly coffee table.
Next to it, there's one of those big envelopes the paper round kids push for you to do when he says, grinning big win.
We want Mr. Power the pools. I say to love the dogs. I don't know how he does it.
Every day he's down at Willie Hill looking up at the screens with a pencil scrunched in one hand.
How he understands. I'll never know. Mr. Powell can't read the papers.
He still reads horses just fine. Millions, he says.
Lips Pull-Back jackpot, million pound. I understand and the heart, since I pick up the envelope,
it's brightly coloured with balloons and firework explosions and bubble lettering that says Littlewoods jackpot, one million pounds, I turn it over.
There's a free postage in Newport. Hasn't even been opened. Uh, Mr. Powell, you've not won.
Nothing is ever in it. They say you could win a million. If you play the pools and send this off, you have to make a bet.
The look on his face will make milk sour. I want to take his photo, I just don't.
There he snatches the envelope from me when he says I win.
He's hesitant, not prepared to let the dream die because some wannabe English brat, you think, Mr. Palace and trust me, you haven't won yet,
but you might,
Mr. Powell ever he snatches the weeping kind of peels away and would snatch me to you if I wasn't bigger than him by a foot and a quarter.
He goes out and comes back jugging, depicts telephone cable to Ucore brother.
He says, I rub my head, take it and lift the handset to my ear.
Rafi comes by minutes later, sweaty and peed off first.
He's back with me, then I tell him he stiffens when he takes the envelope from Mr. Powell.
He does his best to keep a straight face and he can't hide it. He tries to explain without looking at me.
Even in his grin strangles the words, I'm a guerrilla faces behind the back, scratching my armpits and pushing my tongue behind my lower lip.
When the old man curses in Bengali turning around to point at me, I stop and wait.
In my eyes, not so hard. Laughters, blows from my brain like a burst water main that gets me to.
And we both know what comes next. We juts out to a torrent of half hearted slaps and creative abuse.
The door slams, although we hear him shout as he climbs the stairs back to his first full flat.
We breathe hard, pulling ourselves together. Don't tell that, Rafi says, his eyes watery and red.
Even some stupid accountant still grinning. We giggle quietly.
He's rubbing his head, whispering, Oh, my day's over and over.
Something about the way he's standing makes me lift the camera until he's framed.
Focus quickly and snap. Automatically, I win, Don, we stare at each other, mouths open.
It was he says, I think there's a moment of pure wonder and it does.
Thank you. Thanks.
Go to. Our second or third this afternoon, she's a fiction writer and the lawyer first novel is out of it,
published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year.
It's been translated into Arabic, Italian and French. Some is also published.
Many short stories with Granta was a theory, an international panel at odds, and it's twice in the finals for the Short Story PRISE.
She regularly writes journalistic and review pieces for various outlets from The Guardian to The Targets Prada and GQ in India.
She's the author of the Innocent Award nominated Radio Daybreaks, which was produced by the BBC in 2014.
So cue. Hello, everyone, thank you for coming, can you hear me?
I'm going to read in the two section sections for the for the reading.
I'm going to split one short story and two. So I'll leave you with a little bit of suspense in the middle.
It's a short story I started writing about when I first started writing.
I started out with short stories and a lot of them were based in the West Bank or in Beirut or Egypt.
And this one came out of a massacre of Palestinians in a town called Jenin in 2002,
which was particularly shocking for us at the time watching it and sort of,
you know, I was living through me and writing about it was one way of processing it.
I was living a very different life. I was in Bahrain. I was basically a sort of corporate housewife.
And you'd be witnessing or experiencing things I used to be more connected to
when I had a more activist existence in my 20s when I lived in East London,
but and Cairo in the West Bank before that. But I was now extracted from it and I was just watching it on the screen.
So I tried to find a story, a way to experience it and to take other people into that.
Not very pleasant, I'm afraid, world. It's called last assignment.
Janine, if asked when I knew the direction events were going to take, I would say I never knew.
I say that to myself. Now, there are some directions that are not imaginable.
He said our lives may be entirely restricted, but that our imaginations are free, he said of stars.
He believed orbits were necessary for freedom without orbit's choice will become oppressive.
You can't just spin it, said I'd said. Watch me, he'd replied, his face circling mine.
Upclose imagination is not limitless. It mainly takes us to good, safe places.
I didn't anticipate his departure or his loss.
Even at the point in time where he grabbed my arm and the undercarriage was upon us.
There was disbelief or hope, if you prefer.
Once had reached the edge of the camp, the realisation as to quite how screwed up everything was to come to me, an inarticulate, visceral way.
It has started pounding through me. Once there, it became clear that I could go no further.
I had called him from an alleyway and by doing so I pulled him into the mass I threw myself into before my call.
He'd been safe and he could have stayed that way.
The alleyway was a dead end, about a metre wide, with iron doors on either side that were bolted from the inside at three different heights.
I tried everything with those doors, but the inanimate inhabitants behind them stayed mute.
If they had responded, I wouldn't have called him. I knew he was in the area.
I had ways of knowing where he was.
In the seven and a half weeks before that evening, I'd started to dial his number more times than I care to admit to.
But in that alleyway I'd gone through with it. I'd called him, he answered.
We spoke after I called the sense of having [INAUDIBLE] up my life and now being about to do the same with him swelled
so huge in me that I felt that it the feeling of [INAUDIBLE] up in us alone would burst down the size of the alleyway,
the feeling not the enemy. You understand a logical way to think when the enemy has for so long been the feeling.
It was a recent development to be able to see the hills where I stood.
The buildings opposite were freshly demolished, providing me with an alley framed vista of the rocks that were absorbing the sun,
a shift in a veil of dust caught on the hills, and everything about the view said For this, for this land, we fight and die forever.
It flaunted its Bluey Green Earth, its pinki orange sky, and the line between the two swam as the crushed colours spread between each other.
Here, said the land, presenting me with yet another scandalously beautiful evening about to fall dark.
It is transients that gives rise to beauty, not the object itself.
The ownership of the thing is irrelevant. This, at least, is what I've been trying to persuade myself in recent months.
But even a thought like this made me want him, for he place views into context, turned ideas into philosophies.
I wanted him. I wanted him. I wanted him always. It spiralled in my head like a snail shell of childish handwriting.
I want you back now. Come back to me and so on and so forth.
It was tedious and below me, but it insisted on calling into my ear whenever I was still.
So I kept myself busy. That's what my friends told me to do when they were tired of me calling late at night.
It is common, I understand, when dumped to dwell on your possible errors and personal flaws.
I try to accept this, but it was hard. I was bombarded with self mockery when driving work and conducting a conversation waiting to pass through the
turnstile at Kalandia checkpoint at once at the memory of involuntarily passing wind during the sexual act.
Find myself hitting myself on the forehead and my on my forehead in shame.
Mallik, the woman in front of me, said, Aren't you used to the weight?
Although this self-abuse was a. Actual torment. It was nothing compared to the thoughts of how good it had been.
The memory of his arm behind my waist, pulling me down onto a mat alone could floor me for what felt like weeks.
I started to shrivel as though drawn inwardly, my skin pulled tight over awkward bones.
The mere sight of the words kiss me scrawled over walls.
Political graffiti could cause me to spend an afternoon behind my bed with my nails embedded into my scalp.
I have no memory of eating during that period.
I do recall picking the skin of some chickpeas my mother had left out in preparation for some rough, but I don't remember actually consuming them.
Why the [INAUDIBLE] was I in Jenin on that day? At that time, I would ask that to I could answer that it was my job to go to places like that.
This is the answer. If I were to want to portray that the forces were greater than me, but it would not be an honest response.
The truthful answer is I had wanted that situation, its desperation, its extremity.
I understood it. It spoke to me that attack, that Jenin attack was the first of its kind, the worst of its kind.
Its viciousness was stunning even to us. Now such events are more common.
But at the time that onslaught conveyed such a hurt that I felt I was alone in being able to comprehend it.
Yes, yes. It was all about him. I thought I thought that horror diving into that external horror could turn off my internal one on the phone.
I'd given him directions. I'm across the road from where the small mosque and the garage with the green tiles were.
Khaled said. Were he were are confirmed then my battery had gone.
I called him, he answered. We spoke and then I stood.
I even smoked. This was unorthodox for me. Hatem, the other field worker, had left his cigarettes in my bag.
I'm not standing in the alleyway kind of a smoker. It should be understood.
I sit when I smoke with a coffee or a glass of wine and I always make sure that the ashtray is clean before I light up.
I had hoped smoking might distract me from the tanks and bulldozers moaning and slipping in the valley below,
but I could think only of drones and of night vision as I made a little orange
star in front of my face with a cigarette of the field worker who got away.
I shall stop to. So so, you know, OK, I think we're going to open it up to any questions if you also have questions for each other.
Please feel free. If you could just put your hand up and I'll bring you a microphone.
This is being recorded for our Web site. It's been.
Thanks very much for the readings. I have loads of questions, but I'll just start low key.
I was interested that in both of the pieces that you both read, um, there was imagery of call, of calling, of orphaning,
and that worked as a kind of device to push the stories along and then to to create a, I don't know, a narrative undertow.
Um, and and then I was also struck some are just towards the end of your reading,
you you said you used the phrase it should be understood by your narrator said that it should be understood.
Um, so my question is, um, you know, any way you approach this is fine.
It's really it's a really big question is how you as writers appeal to the reader when you're writing, you know, when you say it should be understood.
Presumably your narrator is addressing some one.
Um, so, yeah, when when you're writing, when you're creating those flash fictions or,
you know, that that that that moment in Jenene, how are you reaching out to to the reader?
Do you have an imagined audience when you. When you write.
I try not to imagine an audience as much or if I do imagine an audience, I imagine an audience that's kind of similar to myself.
I'm very interested in the idea of not writing for an outsider's gaze.
So I try to write from the inside, I don't really want to particularly appeal to people.
Actually, outside of the world, in a sense,
because I think that sometimes leads to having to act as a kind of translator and that sometimes compromises the work,
not not always, that there's there's a bit of a tradition or history of compromise work in a sense.
And some of that is produced really good work.
It's not to say that the work is good, but for me, sometimes it's also good to talk from an insider's perspective.
And so my my imaginary audience does tend to say, OK.
This is someone who understands I'm not going to explain, I'm going to take the time to explain,
I'm going to assume a level of of understanding that's already there.
And I think sometimes that gives you a bit more of a direct,
in a sense for me as a writer anyway, and it means it gives you a slightly different flavour.
So, yeah, that's how I view. Yeah, I think I find it very difficult.
I mean, I started off with talking about like on the Palestinian issue,
you something happens and you feel that it's not being depicted correctly in the media.
You feel there's a massive misrepresentation. If you could readjust that misrepresentation, these horrific incidences might be curtailed somehow.
You have that that that myth maybe increasingly.
I think it's becoming that sort of paradigm, which is the same when you work as a human rights worker,
you're going to report on something that's going to be a response. Pressure is going to be applied and the situation is going to improve.
And I think there is, because that was my background.
That's sometimes been a factor in the way that I write, particularly at the time I started writing that.
But you might start with an a motive, but it can change over the course that you're writing the piece.
It can become very personal. The characters become more alive to you.
She when she says it should be understood.
I was thinking of her more justifying to herself because actually it's more about her personal what the thing that she did.
She called somebody and she use the phone. She used somebody.
And how can she how can she resolve that within itself?
And that became a more interesting question to me than what particular facts of the Jenene events are conveyed to any reader.
This book, this story went on, right? I mean, I couldn't get it published.
It took a long time. I kept redraughting it coming backwards and forwards to it.
And it took about ten years. It just came out a couple of months ago with an anthology.
But on this issue of who the reader is, I was recently I just quote one other writer,
but which I find quite interesting is within my canon, which is the Arabic people of Arab origin writing in English.
There's now become a sort of there are a couple of generations of them.
And there was one writer who's really very unknown now called Soraya Antonia's, who was born in Palestine, and she wrote about exactly this issue.
But in 2000, talking about writing about in the 80s. So obviously hasn't gone away.
But she was saying that as Palestinians, somebody people like myself who've had English language educations, we get this.
We suffer from a kind of internal exile.
You know, your your actually being educated to a point where you're not connected with the language or the place of origin.
And she made this point about how Palestinians were trying to be like a sort of Abba Eban,
who was like an Israeli delegate at the UN who had this Oxford educated English.
And the idea that if you could speak it like that, if you could present yourself in this very sort of,
you know, respectable way that your voice would carry far more than, you know, etc.
So she said something and she says it seemed useful rather than a betrayal to become proficient in the language of the two powers,
most directly for the Palestine tragedy,
most directly responsible for the Palestine tragedy, and all my later English but not French writer writing seemed to inform the West today.
I think this was rather coloniser reaction, implying, as it did,
that Westerners were inherently godlike impartiality and their injustice was born of misinformation.
It might have been more useful had we all been obliged to do military service.
It's quite a radical statement, you know, but it does. You do sometimes think, well, what am I what am I as a writer?
What or who? Who. But then the other thing that she deals with, which I've also felt is your writing for your own small group,
doesn't matter how big it is or whether it's, you know, you know,
or a sort of like Palestinians who are dispersed all over the world or Arabs who've gone through that or any kind of migrant experience.
I once gave a reading in the States and somebody came up and said,
I just really associated with your work because I've moved from town to town within the state.
So, you know, she's totally, you know, waspish American.
But it's so you always find different groups that you can appeal to and you can provide some sort of comfort
in a way through through writing or or known intelligence about how to deal with different situations,
which are very common to you, not the dominant narrative, but your little grouping.
And that I find, you know, maybe is something. But each work is sort of where you are at what you know, you might have a muse, I suppose, as well.
This is the idea of the you know, the post-colonial exotic, you know, um,
grandmother talks about and and that's pervasive that we all have to deal with that as writers who are not writing,
in a sense, from our place of origin. And then that's depending on where there is, you know, how far back you want to go and stuff.
So there is that. But I for me, it's just I don't get.
All that, what does that mean, and I can be thinking about that and I end up thinking about those things more
than I think about the writing and and being a conduit and it coming through me.
So I try not to get even though I like reading that stuff,
I try not to get too cerebral about the point of contact with my fingers and the keyboard, you know, like forget that stuff when I'm writing.
And I think but I do think as an artist, as someone who's trying to get this across,
I think if you can be obviously if you can be really, really specific, then you're hoping to be universal in the way that you were talking about and
you're hoping to be able to be able to connect with people in terms of gender,
in terms of class, in terms of all these different other things, which are the threads that connects us and bind us and stuff.
But in the first instance, I do agree with that statement. I think that's really true.
That's true of a lot of African diaspora writing copy and writing is that there was this thing going on.
I have a very strange thing because I was born here.
Yes, sir. And I was one of the early generations, you know, considered third generation.
Some people say first generation who was born here. So it's a completely unique experience in that sense, you know.
And so what other language would I don't you know, then there is this other kind of slipstream side stream,
English space, British space that I tend to have it.
And I think if I can be true about that, then that will be OK. And that that's how I express who I am, who we are.
Can I ask a quick follow up question? Um, I have a lot of what you said was was really, really interesting and lots of different things to pick up on.
But but one is this this association for your writing and place?
Because, you know, even though writing may not have, if you like,
a practical function in the world, it is the case that communities over time, nations have.
Were nominated or elected a writer to sort of stand for them, will speak for them,
I mean, the obvious connexion of Shakespeare and and Britain or England.
And I wondered what you would do with the question in the light of the remarks earlier,
what you would do with the question of do you see yourself as speaking for a certain place
or sort of having to evoke a certain place in your work or implying a certain place?
I mean, you know, your flash fiction there she was about London and and some of you were talk about Janine.
So you were speaking for while you were speaking about those places, but were you speaking for those places?
Um, um, it's it's a.
I think when you're writing it, that that question as to whether you're writing for that place is not so I mean,
it probably ties into that initial thing that I was saying about having a sort of human rights approach.
So maybe that come in at some point, you know,
trying to communicate out and write about a place I felt was in need of being depicted at the time and my Bahrein existence,
for example, or are more or other worlds that I could have written about.
The question I think becomes more interesting later on when you actually start getting a public a little bit of a public persona as a writer,
what platforms will you sit on? Will you not sit on?
What will you comment on? How much is it within your remit or not within you?
Because I have you know, by even my legal work is a lot of it.
So in Palestine, it's like I sometimes get to being quite, quite complex.
And so the decisions that you'll take about I think I'm qualified to speak on this subject as a lawyer,
but no, I won't speak on a perhaps an activist front on this issue, which I just don't know enough about.
I mean, some writers have a much more embracing. You know, they want to be the spokesperson.
And it's very easy for that to happen in this country where there are so few people from particular parts of the world who have, you know,
so few seem to be articulate voices that writers are used often to be, you know, explain as out of places now,
because I for various reasons, I cannot be as connected to Palestine as I would like to be.
I feel that it's often it's not my place to be talking about the current situation,
that there are much better academics in universities than me as a writer.
There are people who are more Palestinian than I am in terms of having greater connexions.
And then I sort of step down or step out or push somebody else forward.
I mean, that's that's a different question. But how how I you know, I don't see that.
I don't think many Palestinians would from the West Bank and in Gaza would probably see me as being a very Palestinian writer.
I write in English, you know, they well, they might want to disassociate me.
They might think I'm too privileged, I don't know, but or my mother's English.
That might be there are a whole different reasons why they might not want me to be representative of them.
And I mean, I have you have to be sensitive to that.
And I think it's made me perhaps over research when I do write on that subject just out of sensitivity for not seeming like I'm,
you know, taking on other people's stories or or pulling myself out of something that I'm perhaps not.
Yeah, not enough. Yeah. Totally agree with you because the place is really strong to me as a writer.
I've always written about a particular place, a particular area of London, which is West London.
Up until now I lived in West London until I was 30 and I started writing when I was twenty three.
So Summer, my beginning stuff was just about that very small, like Shepherd's Bush Library, a place I lived there my whole life.
So. So that's what I knew. That was my stomping grounds, that was my patch and stuff.
And then I moved out, I moved to Brixton and then I moved to East London for a long time.
When I was in Brixton, I was still writing about West London, you know, and I was known for that.
And then just lately it started to shift. And just lately I've been like, OK,
I'm going to start writing about places I've been to and I've travelled abroad to stuff and to write about East London,
a few stories in East London and things are starting to move.
But what's interesting about that is, yes, you get published, you just get known for it.
And even though I'm from there, I was born there and I'm very much a part of it.
I feel very much a part of that community is my one true community.
Even though I'm in East London, I'm impressed and I like it and I get along. That's the place people like.
I even act differently when they see me there because I've grown up around there.
You still get disconnected by your privilege and my privileges that I was published.
And so I became slightly different from everybody else who was still there.
Then I became even more privileged, although you could question that by moving to Fosgate, you know, and not being part of that community.
So then Grenfell happens, right. I've written about West London all the time.
That community, those people write about that working class experience and Grenfell happens.
And then I feel a little bit like exactly what you said.
I can't speak on behalf of those people in that way because I'm ten years now disconnected from that.
I haven't lived there, haven't been around. Things have changed so fast that I don't know some people.
I went to a village, which is where they were doing some of the collection,
the story and stuff, because I know the people that walk in and I know a number of.
People who are stuck in the boxes and organising and all and the guy who's running the whole place, I grew up with him, he played drums at my wedding.
I walked in and there's a kid, he's about 18 or 19, and he's looking at me like this and he's watching me up and down.
And I suddenly thought, yeah, so I left. Ten years ago, you would have been up, I don't know, maybe like six, seven, eight, nine at the time.
You don't know me to you. I'm not part of the community. I only when he saw me talking to certain people and he was like, oh, OK.
He knows people, he knows people. OK, I leave and he starts looking at me like that.
So there was like that because it's got really quiet.
You know, there's a lot of stuff going on politics wise with that space and the stories and the fact that people have claimed that space and stuff.
And he was looking at me, I was looking for the toilet, but he was look at me like,
what is this guy doing walking up and down, looking like he wants something, know?
I mean, I don't know you and I'm from the community. So is that that that disconnect.
So I've been very careful, careful not to be talking to people.
People have asked me to do this, but never. And I've been very much no need to talk to this person.
No, that person should go on the radio and stuff. Um, I suppose I'm really got a point to that.
It's just that that's that's the experience in a sense.
And you tend to as much as you are, it's very dangerous.
I suppose what I'm trying to say to start thinking that I am speaking for a community, I'm being a spokesperson from community in that way.
And part of that is the publishing experience. And you have to do green in a sense.
You do have to accept that and you have to play your role a little bit and know when to step back.
But I've never I've also on top of that, never really felt like I wanted to be the one to say, I'm the West Wing.
I'm right. It's all about me. And I know because there's so many versions of and there's so many different
communities and it's very difficult to speak with one voice about that place.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And it's quite interesting how our experiences I mean, our life experiences of you, you're very grounded, you know, relatively you're very London.
And I've had such a you know, I've moved so many times. It's like quite I've always hunger to have that connexion to a particular environment.
You know, even if it was ten years ago, I have never really had that. I've always been sort of floating on the surface is a place as I feel.
But the I think in terms of this issue of like how people feel about you speaking out for them, I think I was overly sensitive to it.
I actually think that when I went to Gaza in 2012 with Paul first, I didn't feel that there was a resentment.
I didn't feel there was suspicion. I felt that people were actually very grateful that Gaza was being put on a literary map.
And I think that I think I'd been perhaps overly overly holding myself back from perhaps
being more than perhaps people were grateful because they saw the stance that you took.
Perhaps if you'd taken a different stance a bit more or less, then then they would say,
because I'm just not I don't think is that I think people respond because of the way that you carry yourself.
And I've seen that again from the Grenfell thing, certain people who push themselves into the limelight,
resentment, bill, and they can be from the area born and bred and do that.
And people will still be like, what were you trying to get out of it?
And other people who played more of a back role, people say, OK, yeah, I like the way that you've carried yourself when you do these things.
And that's very important, I think.
Yeah, I found very interesting what both you said about being part of a community or also being questioned for your position as an author.
And I was wondering if this may be a kind of clash between authors on the one hand and then the publishing
industry and the publishing industry trying to find spokespeople or trying to find authors that they can you know,
that they can form a speaking in a certain way or that represent certain things.
Yeah, well, I can I I think that it's really interesting that because I do think there's a slight movement away from it,
but I do when I'm feeling hypocritical and annoyed with publishing.
You do feel sometimes that your being that the interest in your writing, if it's about a world,
one of the worlds that we write about, it's kind of to be given that you're meant to be giving a sort of authentic voice account.
You know, you're meant to be it's like being some kind of journalist extra, you know what I'm like.
But with, you know, in a kind of more aesthetically pleasing way that there wouldn't be a reason for somebody to read your book,
to learn something about themselves. They're trying to learn about, you know, something new and new geography, a new situation.
And to an extent, you have to kind of it's very difficult, particularly with her first book.
It's so difficult to get published, very difficult to push back on that and say, I'm not being positioned like this, not, you know, to, um,
to to present your book differently or in a more nuanced way,
because they have certain buzzwords that they they know work and work with the bookseller and work on other levels.
So, um, a bit. But not I mean, I think there's a growing sensitivity in and what's also very uh, in the last couple of years,
I think several writers with known sort of Anglo-Saxon names who've written novels which have been very successful,
which have nothing to do with their place of origin, you know,
and that's quite and then sort of breaking through as writers who can deal with any subject matter.
But it still is a little bit tougher than if you're you're dealing with some form of community.
I don't know.
I mean, I think from my perspective, I'm talking about, you know, African, British writing or black British writing, whatever you want to call it.
I think I think is quite limited, actually.
I think we haven't managed to find that scope and range, which speaks to the fluidity of who we are as a community.
And so I was very much aware when I was first published that I would have to write a certain type of story in order to get published.
And what was lucky at that time was that I knew how to do that.
I'd been put up in that environment. So I was writing about council estates, I was writing about working class living,
and I was writing about kids slang and do all sorts of sorts of criminal acts.
I knew about that. So I'd grown up in that environment. So when I saw that there were books being published about that, I was like a bit like,
OK, well, finally people will be interested in that type of story.
So I told that type of story. I got published.
Then when I started trying to be like, OK, well, now I want to talk about the wider community and talk about bigger things.
I'm going to say that not everybody goes through that experience. It was more difficult to be published and stuff.
And because I wasn't talking so much about identity or hybridity or any of those things, then all my stuff is less about a struggle with identity,
because that's not my experience, my students of being part of a very strong community.
So I'd always come from that perspective of knowing who you are really.
And that was less palatable. But also, I I'm really interested in these different types of experiences, mixing up genres, writing speculative fiction,
still from a working class perspective, writing about people who just live their lives and don't, you know, go through all of these struggles.
You know, just more writing about just everyday experience that I did know is that that became less palatable.
And now we're in a particular time where I think it was it was 2015, 2016, 2015,
where they realised that there had only been one black British male writer published in the entire year,
you know, just one and a baby sorry writer, which was really, really alarming.
You know, we were like, wow, that's just I mean, that's an actual fact.
No one could dispute that. And so, yeah, that's how narrow.
And he was writing about the stuff that I've been writing about 20 years ago.
He was writing about, um, I was called Mama Can't. No.
And it is about his real life experiences are coming from a street background and criminality stuff and him getting himself out of that life.
It was the same narrative I've been saying before. So, yeah, very few black roots.
I think. I guess this is slightly a follow up question to that almost is how did how do you how does it change your approach when for faculty,
when you've almost got given a brief,
you know, the public has actually said we've got this this work and there's going to be this this collection and you're almost given a space,
your you know, your your you spend the week in the library, which is also an interesting space in itself,
because it does kind of mediate that kind of private experience of reading with being in a very kind of public space as well.
How did having that brief and kind of change,
if it did your approach and also maybe even how your responsibility to the people's stories that you tell?
Sure. That's a good question.
It didn't I don't think it changed my approach to my responsibility because I always have that sense of responsibility anyway.
I've always been a little bit worried about how I depict people and trying to make sure that depict people in the right way.
So I always I step forward in my writing with a real sense of trepidation.
I read about that and I'm very careful. And so so it didn't change my approach.
If I think what I think if it did, it made me a slightly more guarded because this was uncharted territory.
This was islanded you know, this is a different community. This was the Bengali community.
And I think I was I was slightly wary and I was slightly more cautious.
So, you know, I just took my time a little bit more.
But I think the process and everything was very pretty much the same, you know, and and like I said, I try not to overthink things as well.
I like, OK, I'm going to stop yourself from doing things.
So even even Mr. Powell, I kind of like, you know, I think, OK, I've got to be careful with him.
You know, he can become a bit precarious.
The character, you know, you become could become a parody, you know, very easily if I'm not careful with him.
So I try to just try and treat him with respect, even though I was having a bit of a laugh and at the same time or with him, I should say.
But I think know I think for the most part, I just did what I know I can do.
And this is the thing I think by this stage of my career, I feel like I'm quite grounded in the process.
What I can do this I've done this type of thing lots of times before.
And even when I wrote my first novel, that's what I was doing.
I was going into the community and and we examine the man, interestingly enough, given what I said earlier, from a slightly outsider's perspective.
So even when I'm doing the research stuff, even when I was writing about the countless dates and all that stuff, I didn't act like I knew everything.
I had to go and read research, everyone interview people, talk to people, try and get their stories and stuff.
So I still acted like there was a lot that I don't know.
And I think as a writer, if you come from that position, this is all the stuff I don't know or even I know nothing,
you know, and you just really look at it, then that makes your fiction really fresh.
So sometimes it's like I said that I mean about I don't write with an outsider's perspective,
but then when I'm doing the research and stuff, I actually feel like I'm trying to feel like I'm an outsider in a sense.
And then, interestingly enough, you become an outsider by that approach.
You become an observer more than an actual active person who's participating in all the stuff that's going to do.
Yeah. If that makes any sense. Yeah, it's confusing to us, too, I mean.
Um, I just wanted to know, what's your motive to write, you write to start a certain movement or do you just write for the love of writing?
I love writing, really has to be, because it's it can feel like a bit of a thankless task.
I mean, it's become it's I mean, it's it really has to be something that excites me now.
I mean, it takes so long for me to get something to a point where I'm happy with it.
And I think if I have a really good day writing, there's nothing like it.
If I can create a world that interests me and has gone off in little directions that I didn't expect when I started writing it.
And the thing I want to read by the time I go to bed is the thing that I read started writing that day,
then I really I love that and I love that a lot more than I do the rest of the job,
which is a lot of a lot of sort of trying to get it placed and build up a, you know, a following of some kind.
You know, I think that it's a shame that I but some but with any work, I think it's you don't have to have a huge audience to it.
If a work has made you feel very satisfied with it and if you can give it to someone,
even just one other person, it can resonate with in a fresh way, that is also really significant.
So I think it's finding a true resonance with yourself and with one one reader, whoever they may be, wherever they're from, wherever they read it.
It's just that, you know, that connexion. And I think also what what I love about writing, which is where I think that this whole discussion,
however well meaning meaning is about cultural appropriation, you know, the taking of stories and that some things are off bounds.
I find that a real shame because I think one of the things I love about writing is the fact that
I can help inhibit anybody's life if I can feel them intensely and I enough whatever gender,
whatever age, whatever background, if I'm if I'm close enough and by getting close enough,
it might mean that you can't do it very well unless you read huge amounts and submerge yourself in a place and have a lot
of friends in that place or whatever it is to cross that boundary so that you can write that story in a compelling way.
But I would find it very sad if we could only write about people who are very close to us,
and particularly because I'm from a mixed background and I've moved so many times, I just don't know quite where my group would be.
You think of that? I mean, because there's been the recent debate, which is quite considerable, Brisbane and in Brisbane.
I mean, I think that was a very insensitive way to go about that.
I say, yeah, that's what I think. And I think it was also it came.
It came, you know, in Australia.
But it is talk at Brisbane Writers Festival where she she was very mocking, very unpopular people being upset about cultural appropriation.
I think what that did was negate that actual privilege.
That definitely does exist in terms of telling the story. But also it didn't take into account that I don't know.
I mean, I've heard of one person who's really, really against people writing stories about cultures who are not there.
And I've never actually met those people because I think most writers are of the mind that if you do the research,
you do it well and you're open to criticism, as it would be with any other character you write, then then it's going to be a good thing.
Right? So no one's actually saying you can't write about other cultures.
You know, I mean, some of my favourite writers, Richard Price, who wrote the book Clockers, you know,
is that like a white New Yorker who's writing about, you know, black kids in the projects in America and very successfully?
You know, I love his work. I think he's brilliant. I mean, I could go on and make loads of examples and stuff.
So when it's done well and it's done,
where you take into consideration the amount of research going to have to do to inhabit a space that you were just talking about, then it's fine.
You know, but I think Lionel Shriver in that conversation would say something slightly different, know.
And and also it has to go both ways as well.
I think I think if you want to be able to do that and we should be able to do that, too.
So I think she handled it badly with a lot of what she said.
I mean, yeah, I agree with you on that.
But I think where it goes wrong sometimes is that if you when so if you have when you have a white writer dealing with a subject and black white,
you're dealing with a subject and it it's going to be.
When the publishing industry or the marketing or whatever is going to make sure that the writer from a white background is just going to sell better,
it's going to be marketed better, it's going to be put forward for prises, I think then.
But it's not really the writers themselves necessarily that falls, you know,
but so it's a shame if you clamp down on what they're able to deal with because it's hard enough to write as it isn't,
rather than deal with the whole that the other the other reasons why it might not get ahead.
But I'm interested in this idea of clamping down on where that will come from and who's doing it,
because we certainly don't have the power to clamp down on anybody.
So it's just, you know, the fingers being pointed and you guys are clamping down on us that way.
I don't know anyone. It's more I think it's more.
But that wouldn't be coming from the people of colour who because we don't have any kind of power control in the States or in the UK or anywhere,
you know, that that's coming from something else. And maybe it's more to do with the perception.
And maybe if there was a dialogue about this,
then we could maybe clear up that misconception that that's actually happening, I think, or that's even what people want.
I just like I said, I haven't met anyone who thinks that that's a valid thing is a right to be advocating that people advocate the complete opposite.
When I've had conversations with people, particularly writers of colour they like,
I don't believe in censorship of any kind because that one could say, oh, my right to be able to write things.
So, you know, even if we don't like it, even if it's, you know, what's his name, Milo.
I mean, I don't like it as much as I find his views abhorrent.
I wouldn't say that that book shouldn't be published. It's just like, OK, so what are you doing to correct the balance then?
OK, who else? We probably shouldn't have an alternate point of view and then that then things would be a bit more fair.
This is when it's like this and we say it's like this.
Democracy is freedom of speech. And actually, you know, you're privileging once one version of freedom of speech of another.
This is mostly for. I wondered if you could say something about how sort of London has shaped your kind of literary aesthetic,
so kind of apart from sort of the themes and subjects,
but also whether you think London have shape your writing in a kind of formal sense in any kind of way.
And the reason why I'm asking that question is because I've been looking at, um, a lot into the early writing of the Caribbean artist movement.
And a lot of the early meetings was about, you know, what is the West Indian aesthetic?
And therefore, I'm wondering as like a first generation or black British writer or African diaspora writer, if you're sort of thought about sort of.
Yeah, how. Yeah, kind of what what what the London aesthetic is or what kind of first generation black British is that might be.
Wow, that's a very interesting and difficult question.
Yeah, I did. I started off by examining those guys as well.
So, you know, I was looking at Bill Gilroy and Sam seven and come out briefly and, you know, and you saw he was a favourite of mine.
I, I mean, you know, all those guys who were doing that stuff.
I started off by trying to write a kind of Windrush novel, and I was researching it for a while.
I was my first novel I was working on. And then I encountered Lonely Londoner's, which is in my area where I grew up in.
And I was writing about and I read Lonely Londoners. And I was like, well, I can't do this now.
I'm trying to do that in the mid 90s. And he was actually there.
And this is the story that my granddad is telling me. All these things that he said happened. This guy's already written.
He's done it. That was like, you know, back to the drawing board, you know, seven chapters in that scrap, the whole novel.
But then I started thinking to myself, OK, what could I write?
What could I talk about? And that's how I came about. The scholars I know this I know all this stuff and I know this.
We're talking. I know that. And it's almost like is the direct descendant of lowly Londoners.
This is where we are now. This is the the grandchildren of those guys who came over.
This is what their brain looks like. This is what their Britishness. That's right.
So that's what I was I was doing.
But I was really hesitant to think about it in terms of creating an aesthetic for all the reasons I spoke about earlier,
about not wanting to be a spokesperson and stuff. And there's going to be so many different ways.
So I believe that someone like, say, Heleno Yemi, although her perspective is completely different from mine, is completely valid as well.
You know, it has to be. Right. So if we talk about it, can we talk about anaesthetic and stuff?
It has to be a plural. One has to go in so many different directions.
And and for everyone there in London, you know, eight million people or something like that, there's going to be many different aesthetics.
And that's and only then when we've reached that point can we then zoom out maybe and look at it as a whole and say,
so this is the kind of things to do in.
One of the unfortunate things about what we were just talking about is that you never get to that point because
everything's dictated by a quite singular way of seeing the world and a singular voice and stuff like that.
And we don't get to read those multiple narratives.
So that's another reason why I get so upset and passionate about it, because I want to see that I want to be able to read it.
Hey, this is what we're doing. These are the directions that we're going in. This is the tradition that we have and we come from.
And it and it's interesting. I know I'm just rambling a little bit,
but it's interesting just because as much as I feel that I have that Caribbean aesthetic is it is that there is that one aesthetic as well.
There's that London very Working-Class aesthetic that I also feel a part of and I feel I owe a lot to that.
You know, it's like, you know, the urban Welsh, you owe a lot to that.
You know,
like I believe that my book couldn't have been published if Urban hadn't gone before me and done what he did in terms of just the class thing.
I mean, and being on housing estates, even if it was all the way in Edinburgh. So also then.
Yeah, these different kind of multiple cities in that sense as well.
It's it's really fast. New questions really for us.
And I could never answer if you can believe that it's so big.
But I mean, where I see myself is kind of like at this point in time is building something I'm borrowing somewhere,
but not quite sure where it's going to end up.
And I have to be open to all forms of influence and and all forms of directions, you know, so I've just got to try stuff out and experiment.
And one thing that's really good is that those guys are a bit long, but those guys who went before, they were very clearly defined.
And what that tells me then by that clear definition is what I don't have to do because they've written it for me.
I have to say those things. You know, my my duty is to say something new to them.
They would want me to say something.
You know, the few people I meet, like come out and people like that, they're very much like to go off and do your thing.
You know, you just go and be, you know, that's all that's that'll be great for us.
So that's really free. As a writer, do you have something similar in that way from.
Um, well, I think you're probably I mean, that's why I got so excited about finding this article, sort of about I write in English.
And I think also for me, when I first in the late 90s, I found a book written by Hananel Share, a paperback which was a novel and it was setting.
Kuwait, which is where a grown up and if anywhere is completely off the literary map,
at the time it was Kuwait, I mean, I was constantly having to explain this place where I lived.
And it and it just to me, it was sort of very growing number of writers who live between languages that I think I hook on to.
But no, not I mean, I think I've just I didn't feel that I belong to.
Particular aesthetic, I don't see it really in that way, but it's strange because the Caribbean experience is of that experience.
It's actually it's like a kind of formalisation in the sense of that experience because of the whole slavery history stuff.
It meant that that was maybe hundreds of years ago that was imposed on people, you know.
So it's a strange one.
And I think that you what you're talking about is actually so much it's the descriptor people who are kind of neither of one place nor another or,
you know, fully,
I think that those that that kind of writing and I think I was very curious and I found it very hard to find writing about the modern Middle East,
like contemporary world, like people not who are there, who were just living urban lives, which weren't that different from Europe.
You know, like the rather than concentrating on the difference,
the the similarity in terms of set up the non exotic but having huge strains on them
in terms of I don't know that the the way that their families were spread apart,
the number of languages they were dealing with, issues to do with, I don't know, visas or war or conflict or, you know, just your normal lives.
But the situation is it's it was hinting at some of the issues that had come up in my life.
I mean, like, you know, like Kuwait being invaded or my father being kicked out of Kuwait, out of Palestine and and different sort of upheavals.
That was commonplace for my family, you know. Yeah, I think that's how you normalise it and you get to go on.
You adapt and you find a new place. And and then I think and some of the sort of just mental fallout from that as well, really interests me.
But. I know that that's great, I'm.
I'm so sorry to kind of call this discussion to an end, because I'm sure they could be lots more questions.
In fact, I see half a question, but I think maybe we should.
Going to tell the really big question, just as you were talking, both of you, just in the last few moments,
I kept thinking of that that essay that Salman Rushdie wrote a long time ago now about imaginary
homelands and how writing is a way of of bringing the shards of memory back together.
Actually, I think war could actually also has a when you talk about the broken heirloom.
So, yeah, just just in closing, a question about where writing puts your homeland or your memory or your community back together,
it might be that actually what you've been saying is that you are onto another thing entirely, but this story beautifully.
I'll I'll go with that that I can do.
And I just feel like what you're saying and what you're saying actually gives us
this kind of like root or pathway to something that hasn't yet been defined.
And it's less about putting something back together as it is about creating something like really new.
And what's interesting for me is this. I have all these I've never stopped for a story.
I never thought because of this experience, it just means I'm always thinking there's all this stuff that hasn't been copied yet.
There's all these people that have not spoken about it. And it just makes it a really enriching time to existing and to write about.
That's the great thing in the discussion that we have.
So. So, yeah, this is not a continuation of the relationship between these three guys,
Mr. Powell and the two boys that he knows from around the Brick Lane area.
And it's called for it's called Mr. Powles Retreat.
Many years later, Mr. Powell sits on the kerb of White Chapel Road, his legs wide open and his hands limp between them staring into the gutter.
Rafiq's in. First, he pulls at my shoulder. I hardly recognise him.
Then I do. We go over crouching beside him.
He's muttering or singing something. I can't hear his train as a woman in black split at the front like an open mouth.
His suit, which was always neat, is torn. The left sleeve and his white shirt is black, with grime billowing in the breeze of passing traffic.
We speak to him and each other in Bengali. I'm not sure he recognises us anymore, as there's nothing in his eyes.
But he talks back in return, saying something about retreating. We don't know what he means by that.
Rafie suggests we lift him. He's the oldest and I'm used to doing what he says.
So I shrug and say, sure, we tell him what we're about to do, make good on our promise.
He's like all bones and cotton. It feels as though he hasn't had a good meal for months.
He leans on us all the way to his home, gives us the keys, and we let him in going upstairs.
He stops and stiffens pulling against us as if he wants to go back on the street.
We resist him and it's a tug of war until Rafi opens his flat.
This thing's terrible old rubbish, mouldy food, unwashed old man, Mr. Powell gives up there,
and it's almost like the smells the date since we left him the rest of the way and deposit him on the sofa.
Rafi turns on the spot looking at the wall. Jesus, he said, which is unusual for my brother.
He doesn't take his names in vain even when they're not ours. I'm keeping an eye on Mr. Powell in case he makes another break for it.
So first, I don't see where he's looking when Rafie doesn't speak again.
I Clocker is the second thing he's done in as many minutes. I check on him, too, and see why Mr. Powell didn't bring much from Bangladesh.
But the thing I remember is the photo of his mom hanging above the electric fireplace is pretty big.
And it was actually me who helped him to frame it when we found the print amongst these things,
just just after I really got into photography myself, it's one of those old sepia tinted ones.
It must have cost the bomber at the time. She's in an unseen chair, looking into the camera, wearing a sari with her head covered.
And it must have been taken when he was young, because I have to say, she looks beautiful.
I don't know if it's the colour enhancement or the way she always was because our eyes are bright, hazel and a really nice shape.
They don't look alike at all, apart from something in the twist of her mouth.
But Mr. Powell smiling, but Mrs. Powell smiling, and Mr. Powell hardly does that type of thing.
That's how it used to look anyway, has done for years only now half of the photo and Mrs. Powell with it have faded in some inky black kind of fog,
obscures the left side of the face and everything else on that side with it.
Mr. Powell rocks on the sofa, retreating, he says, pointing at his mom or retreating, asked what happened.
But that's all, Mr. Powell says, retreating, retreating. His English has got better since we were kids.
It's a shame to see him arrested. Mr. Powell, we knew way back when.
Rafi makes that whistling whistle noise you used to say someone's cuckoo acronym that isn't
fair and they have to take a closer look at the photo and the smaller ones lining the mantle.
These landscape colour snapshots like you used to get from the pharmacy, old school, grinning kids and upright family.
A young girl caught mid cartwheel, kicking village dust. Set each one obscured by that fog fade in blackness, like Polaroids in reverse,
instead of developing these pictures of dissolving retracted into a misty, unreadable past, which Mr. Powers I see in my face or retreating.
He shuffles out of the room so slow we don't stop him, the sound of rummaging comes from a back room.
When he returns, Mr. Powell is holding them in sheets of crumpled paper.
He gives them all to me, the yellow line, them filled with scrawl in handwriting, the deep blue light sailor's tatties.
Also, it seems when I look closer, I see the writings also fading,
leaving half words and blank lines exactly as they were before they'd been screwed on.
I look at Rafi, he gets. Sure, he says exactly, Mr. Powell screeches, laughing, as if it's all a big joke.
We sit on the sofa in a row, me, Mr. Powell and Rafi,
we spread the colour photos on the coffee table together with the letters, trying to work out what's going on.
Mr. Palestine, the Bangali, it started happening recently.
He says first he couldn't remember. He couldn't say whether he had a grown up niece or a nephew.
Then he couldn't remember his mother's name. Then the house he was born in, the village he grew up in, or the country he left to come to England.
All of it had faded and retreated from him. When they disappeared, it began happening to the things he brought over from Bangladesh to.
Rapping looks at me, I look at. To be honest, we don't know what to say.
My brother rotates Mr. Paola's left hand.
I take his right, he begins to cry, his shoulders shaking with emotion, tears collected in the crevices of his face.
All we can do is gently rub his nose, different fingers. We lie and tell him everything's OK.
OK. All right, I just finished the second half of the show, so thank you so.
OK, so I've left my character in in Janine waiting in an alleyway, so we'll take it from there.
I couldn't have stayed at the last witness's house. I'd made my excuses,
lies about people and transport and left by which time the streets were empty and
the only cars remaining in the streets were those that had already been shelled.
That level of that level of fear is like being in a pressurised container is the only way to describe it.
A vacuum is created that winds you. And then the ladies release balance is restored.
You're able to breathe again. And then I feel winded once more.
What I had not expected, though,
was the sense of elation that runs alongside the fear in a prattling endorphin bolstad rush perhaps to do with an oxygen manipulation.
The bulldozers and tanks comforted each other in the valley below.
We're going up there soon, but we shouldn't worry. There are so many of us and we're together with all the world behind us and ahead of them.
Behind me were bodies in the corners of rooms curled over themselves in front of televisions, soft awaiting bodies and collapsible concrete cubes.
Maybe we had a lone gunman possibly to OK, a handful.
Some guys who knew how to booby trap tiles, a couple of fellows who had dab hands with incendiary devices, a god ours against yours.
OK, on the phone, he said, you know, they're planning to attack again tonight as though I didn't know anything that I had to leave that last house.
I couldn't have stayed there, not with those ghosts. They were sucking up all the air.
Amjed, you've got to believe me on this one. The little [INAUDIBLE] have been seeking me out for weeks.
I hope they would come tiptoeing across the stone floor in the half light of morning,
but that when the first girl had come, I thought she might be bringing me messages from him.
But that was not their purpose. They were polite children who used to use speech with care.
Look on t about first ghost girl had said, twirling in the air, pointing at the part of her head that was no longer there.
Look on t half of it is gone. The soldiers blew it away. The girls have be more enthusiastic than normal in that last house, pulling up my trousers,
wanting me to talk to them, peering up at me from under my questionnaire.
They chatted irrepressibly abound of translucent, despairing monkeys on speed.
A field worker is essentially a form filler in a flak jacket.
My organisation doesn't support the wearing of flak jackets, although our funders agree, argue that we should support this protective attire.
My organisation's position is that the wearing of military style outfits places a distance between us and the witnesses that we interview.
I subscribe to my organisation's position and I do not wear a flak jacket.
Everyone said I was good at my job. I was thorough and conscientious.
Where my skills were lacking was in putting myself and therefore so my witnesses at ease.
I admit I was a little hung up about being a middle class Theresa might.
My bare head was also offensive to many families I visited and on principle I
would never cover it up as a result of the of these barriers to communication.
As a workshop trainers put it, I frequently adopted an imperious front with my witnesses.
I expected them to serve me coffee, to turn on their fans, to offer me their best chair, not to interrupt my questions or to challenge my worth.
At the same time, I felt humbled and useless in their presence. I was frequently possessed by the thought that they knew details of my failed
sexual relationships and that they therefore understood why I was an unmarried,
childless woman in my mid thirties to stop them pitying me.
I boss them around. It was better at least to be hated.
At the last witness house,
I had blocked out Question six without even thinking where the children were born before they were shot at us or mahasen that scene,
the whole incident from the downstairs window. The question had the effect of making the family look towards the door.
As an oddly dressed stranger who just walked in, one of Hassan's sons stepped in to disperse the white noise that my questioner created.
As my mother explained to you over the telephone,
the soldiers were telling the children to pull down the wall that had been damaged to move the bricks.
And the children were crying because they were scared of the guns that were being pointed at them.
I see. I said scrape scribbling in my form.
Although the information didn't fit, the box had a little ghost girl not being at my feet, showing me her scratched and bloody palms.
I may well have started interviewing, winding up the interview by then.
I was a terrible smell of death in that room. If you don't know what death smells like, I can explain.
It's like lumps of rancid urban snot in your nostrils. It's not the kind of thing that can be dislodged by tissue or change of scene.
Once you smell it, it will always be with you. It may abate before it comes back, but it will always be there.
It could recur in the most expensive restaurant in Geneva. Ms.
Hassan's family have been trying to counter it with bleach, air fresheners and disinfectant.
The toxically cleanse surfaces of the room was still wet.
The air was trying to pass itself off as lily of the valley. But all we could smell was death.
They were trying to pick up the bricks and carry them, but the children were small and they were panting.
They couldn't get enough breath, said Omar Hassan, her shoulders moving up and down, her chest contracting like a dog sweating on its side in the sun.
Yes, the sun continued. They were breathing like that, and the soldiers were aiming their guns at them, watching them run up and down,
carrying the bricks and stones, telling them they would be shot if they didn't do it.
But Omar Hassan was staring at a spot on the wall above the veneer sideboard with a decorated tree on it.
Son watched her revisit a scene that was being recalled and replayed for my benefit.
But they shot them anyway, she concluded with a shrug. Well, the U.N. give us an extra bag of sugar.
If our answers are sufficiently precise on Hassan son, it's not exactly for the United Nations, but we're hoping to document evidence of war crimes.
I've started. And that was enough of this adoption of that. After that, I couldn't stop them.
The names of the children overwhelm me. I was writing in a partner exasperated by the forms, lack of ambition, who is whose brother,
which girl it was in the red skirt trying to help her three year old in the blue.
There was no stopping it, and I scribbled and scratched until way past the hour.
I'd set myself as the absolutely latest time to leave while the ghost children Odali
now stepped up and presented themselves as though I was their teacher or God forbid,
their only mother. He came. He was coming. He had come to get me out of there.
The sound of a car travelling too fast over a bumpy surface, the screeching of tires audible over drones, helicopters and tanks.
That was the sound of him coming to get me out of there. He came. He came. He came.
Who left you? He shouted, chucking stuff. A child's drawing a first aid kit.
A camera lens of the passenger seat. Hatem, his wife was in Labour should never have left you here.
Never. He was holding the steering wheel in a melodramatically fierce way.
I could see the slabs of a blue van that ran on either side of his middle knuckle.
It was him in the shirt had worn that evening in Ramallah when he tritle the gardenias, stroking his fingers round and around until I pulled it from.
And stuck it in his hair, but he was too shy to place in mine, but you're OK?
He asked. You look OK, quiet. It was quiet.
That last line of finances. I just messed up my exit strategy, that's all.
Certainly did that. He was looking upwards through dirt smeared windscreen as he said this because it
was clear that one of the helicopters was taking the same path as he accelerated,
launching us against the rubble strewn roads, grating at them with the bare pope's stomach of his feet.
That way, I said, although in truth I didn't really know. In darkness, the town had transformed itself again.
It was more whole now, more resolute. The human diggers had gone, the men, the women, the children who'd crawled rubble with spades and hands.
Either side of us were tombs of brick wire and mattresses. The remaining houses were expressionless in the dock.
Shut it up and shut up. Sprayed and scrawled with army graffiti that they didn't agree with.
He was trying to drive fast, but the roads weren't allowing him to be kept hitting things and being thrown by them.
I heard you were in the area. I even then I was not considering what it was that was about to happen to us.
We may be safer on foot, he said, but he didn't break or give me a chance to get out.
Tanks, helicopters could be heard even amongst the above the streams and skids of the car.
The head of the helicopter. I still had to know more than anything. I had to know what happened to her.
To who? He shouted, loud, angry, like a father. The helicopter was hovering right over us,
thwacking away as though the sky was made of tire rubber to the bride your mother found to replace your unsuitable girlfriend.
I was screaming. His face turned up to the hovering weapon. A slam of brakes.
Get out. We can get out. OK, ok. I look forward to get my bag, my bag pulling out the door with the other hand.
He grabbed my arm, made my face. Look at him, look at him. His eyes hold steady.
But talking, talking like I see him now she was a mistake.
OK, the whole thing. She was a big mistake. Now get out. Get out.
It was at that point that the shelling began. Thank you.