Do you know this Robert Lowell verse?

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war — until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

Do you know the line in the PEN Charter that says, ‘PEN DECLARES FOR A FREE PRESS AND OPPOSES ARBITRARY CENSORSHIP IN TIME OF PEACE?’

‘IN TIME OF PEACE’ – for whom? What does peace mean? Does it mean stockpiling atomic weapons, leased from our lethal unreliable partners in crime? Does it mean the military industrial status quo? Does it mean proxy wars in more countries than I could list? Does it mean the continuation of a forever war of exploitation, inequality, regime change, that seeks at all costs to preserve the supremacy of one way of life over any other? In this time of corruption, surveillance, torture, immigration raids, detention, and weaponised borders, need we clarify again and again that our peace rests on bloody foundations, that the geopolitical logic of our civilisation long ago relied on a criminal – if not pathological – abandonment of principles of peace?

To sit in our lecture halls and meeting rooms and call this a time of peace when atrocious crimes against civilians are at such a scale that experts warn of ‘no such thing as humanitarian law’, a ‘critical breaking point for humanity’ – when does acceptance calcify into collusion?

When Voltaire said ‘civilisation does not diminish barbarism, it perfects it,’ could he have imagined the bombastic depth and range of contemporary barbarism, as perfectly unthinkable as the utopian alternatives, perfectly unnavigable, just as my propositions in this speech are perfectly, absurdly, bombastically romantic; is that my soldier/journalist/politician/neighbour just laughing his arse off?

First and foremost, don’t we urgently need a reclamation of the word ‘Peace’ from the genocidaires and criminals who misuse it, just as they misuse ‘Defence’, ‘Security’, ‘Order’? What do we do when language itself has been rendered meaningless?

Speaking of meaningless, speaking of barbarism, speaking of monotonous sublime: this is the golden era of peace-washing, this is the gilded, blood-spattered circus era of Trump’s Foundation of PEACE, where an assortment of felons and war criminals build fantasy developments on the unburied bodies of slaughtered civilians, the newly AI glitching iteration of a centuries-old oil and mineral-hungry colonial barbarism. Is there nothing new under the capital sun? Isn’t shutting USAID the ultimate act of violence? Won’t it kill more people than a thousand nuclear bombs could? Is it seven or eight countries that Trump, self-proclaimed ender of wars, has bombed since I started writing this speech? How many Tomahawk missiles each at a cost of three million dollars have America and Israel dropped on Iran and Lebanon since I started writing this speech? How many murdered, displaced, traumatised? To what end?

Is Pete Hegseth just the twenty-first century unhinged iteration of the psychopathic crusader-baron of the Middle Ages? Apocalyptic faux-Christianity wedded to colonial exploitation wedded to pure blood sport, video game TikTokified, erectile, industrial, wargame insanity wedded to industrial, and economic, and racial supremacy, with or without the permission or approval of the ruling hegemony, but acting ever so steadily and committedly, ever so doggedly, in its interests? Hasn’t it only ever sown chaos, hasn’t it only ever wreaked havoc? So why are we acting surprised?

Is pacifism a dangerous idea? Aren’t there countless instances in human history where non-violent policies or protests prolong conflict or sacrifice the vulnerable or gullible, or create dangerous martyrs, and therefore cause more deaths? Isn’t the logic of perpetual harm a sublime manifestation and evolutionary control mechanism of human nature? Is the proof not in the pudding, on and off the page? Am I sounding a little bit Churchillian? Churchill? Shall we play the evergreen social media game of ‘Was he a hero or a genocidal maniac?’ again and again, both and both, neither and nonsense, until we are calcified into immobile yelling machines while a handful of men in suits do it all over again?

Why am I writing this speech in questions? Have you read that book, The Interrogative Mood? Did you find it hard work? Did you find it somehow more alluring or fit for purpose than the social realist narrative modes we are more used to in a time of rampant existential crises? Am I so uncomfortable with the idea of a novelist being given a platform, being given any kind of authority or invitation to speak, to hold forth, to have opinion, that I am hiding behind this gimmick? Am I writing this speech in questions to find some kind of formal device that adequately sidesteps the speechifying lectern-easy novelist pontificating tone I find so hard to reconcile with the crisis – not only in my field, but in literacy, in the community, in the body politic? Do you mind if I stray from a rhetorical path more often than find it?

What about starting with a tone of peace? We know what it can’t be, don’t we? It can’t be the howling, braying debased hollering of the Westminster chamber; it can’t be the bought complicit mimicry of the newsmen; it cannot be the toxicity and propaganda of the tabloids; it cannot be the elite, exclusionary language of the academy. So, doesn’t it have to be a radically decentred sound? Doesn’t it have to be closer to communal improvised music than to discourse?

Am I inviting ridicule from the imaginary critic in my head and my real critics on the other side of the political collapse in order to flagellate? Am I desperately seeking a mode of honest, bewildered utterance because the sheer toxicity of the moment has defeated me? What Pankaj Mishra calls a worldwide ressentiment, the swarm of mass disillusionment…  where do my peaceful feelings sit between collective impotent overwhelm and fantasies of violent revenge? And anyway, don’t you hate novelists opining? But don’t you love it when a novelist gives enough of a shit to stick their neck out? How to be both? Whether to be either?

Is this an apology? A humbling? Am I arguing against myself for want of an easier adversary than the savagely counterproductive online word storm?

Am I being deliberately, obstreperously, cowardly, anti-newsworthy? Did you hear about the left-wing British novelist who has called for peace? What is he, seven? Shall we all lay down our arms and read translated novellas? What good will that do?

Am I squandering the opportunity to make a point by issuing an ambient rallying call? Do I want to perform a certain vulnerability, bewilderment, formal collapse, insecurity, uncertainty, because I am so allergic to the alternatives? Am I tone-sick? Am I alone? Are we not lost?

Am I even a pacifist, really? Did I feel peaceful towards the settlers in Masafer Yatta as they came across the stolen hill to harass, intimidate, assault, burn, and plunder? Do I just want the unfairnesses, injustices, and technological imbalances removed? Do I believe in a fair fight? What’s it got to do with me?

Should literature stop feigning interest, mind its own bloody business? Does it need to keep itself separate, delayed, retroactive, abstracted? Should it proclaim its unearned and unfair advantage and slink off?

What would a literary opposition to violence even sound like? A poem? An improvised dulcimer drone? A manifesto? A workshop in a school? A strike? A delegation to our enemies? The sound of a human fist on a reinforced plastic shield?

Am I afraid to say what I think because of the climate we are in whereby truth and error, fact and fiction, report and mindless retort are all in the same whiplashed churn of comment and opinion, and I can’t bear the noise, and I can’t bear the madness, and I would rather address my questions to the dead than the living. And isn’t that just being a reader – let alone being a writer? And if I pose a question to 2025 that Hannah Arendt posed to 1935, am I simply hiding in the imaginary space, the imagined dignity, of what she called the vita contemplativa, paying lip service to an old intellectual hierarchy — is that it? Am I asking these questions because I am extinct, we are extinct, the reign of the written word is over, nobody reads, the political action is elsewhere, it is beyond the word? But do I mourn that? Are we resigned to this? Are we fighting? Do we need to find our teeth? What strange currency am I turning around in the grip of my queasy, corrupted, sickened English tongue when I even utter the word peace in an apocalyptic moment for so many — is the question one of a complete and utter failure of solidarity? And isn’t that the first question for a writer: who are we standing with, marching for, pledging allegiance to?

Is it ludicrous to ask?

Why have ideas of peace become fringe, laughable, when discredited bigotries and socioeconomic fallacies are peddled as the norm? Is it the scale of the financial imperative, the entanglement of profit and violence, that has wormed its way into our homes, our routines, our addictions, our spirits, and to acknowledge it as vulgar, pointless, immature would require too painful a reconfiguration? Is it too costly an experiment to entertain rebuilding a system along non-violent lines, cherishing the lives of others as we cherish our own, as writers do in our fictions all the time? Why is something that makes basic sense so roundly discredited? Is it the sheer weight of 14,000 wars on our collective conscience? Is this line of questioning naive, immature, oh god, Dad, am I a woke?

Are we so po-faced, strapped into our death cult, that we cannot see the joke is on us?

Milan Kundera said, ‘Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate, only the most naive of questions are truly serious,’ so is the global community of writers a relentless question machine demanding no answers? Might we re-child our ideas of solidarity, of community, of survival – weren’t all utopias deemed childish compared to the big, grown-up work of bombing the fuck out of stuff, and Hurting People? Just because we are centuries deep into a violent way of doing business with the planet and one another, does it mean we cannot brainstorm some alternatives?

Am I seeking refuge in the simplicity of these ideals because of the atmosphere of the present, where every opinion is immediately contaminated by its associate opinions, or debunked by an automated counterfactual, or stored as evidence against future opinion by the frantically self-regenerating but unregulated industry of accusation and riposte?

Is this why the Times called me a hippy? Wasn’t I flattered really? In amongst the ads for 4x4s and Murdoch-sieved, middle English, welly boot populism, wasn’t it nice to be caught raging, weeping, and praising trees? Is any rational mind and functioning human heart not absolutely devastated? Shouldn’t we all be screaming? What spectacular sedative have we taken?

Aren’t you frightened? Of the coming weather? Of the state? Of yourself? Of pain? Of death from above? Of losing your loved ones, your home? No? Because we are the creators of those events, rarely the recipients. But would you allow me a second, in a public place, with witnesses, to say I am grieving, I am mourning for people I have never met, for babies I never rocked to sleep but love, dearly, desperately love, and if this opens me up to ridicule, please, sir, may I have some more? Please colonel, headmaster, vice chancellor, CEO, please can we have a politics of vulnerability? Can all emperors take off all new clothes? Am I calling for the triumph of earnestness over irony? Isn’t that a position almost uniquely ripe for ridicule in this climate, as Zack Polanski is discovering, but isn’t the braying mockery of the corrupted centre music to his ears?

Can we test a politics of pure solidarity, of concern? Of transience, change, gestures of kindness, cultures of dialogue, development, impermanence, flesh, not metal? Take off your suits, big egos, famous writers, important guests, award-winning cheeses, and beg for peace: can I beg for a break from the performance of strength? The most powerful man on Earth just shat his pants because not even he can win the war against the ageing body, but as Klaus Theweleit reminds us, he must forcefully subdue ‘any force that threatens to transform him back to the horribly disorganised jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that call itself human,’ use a new title, steal a new country, steal the word ‘peace’, use hair dye, bombast an army, post-truth piss, and artifice — may we be released from the war games men invented because they were so scared of being soft, susceptible, and scared?

Isn’t pacifism one of the only ideas we have left? Isn’t it radical? Might it be revolutionary?

Might there be more jobs for all of us in the peace-industrial complex? Might it be the key to our survival?

As the geriatric generation of tech innovators constantly tell us from their luxury retirement homes, the war we are fighting against the machine of our own making is now unwinnable. There will be no peace in the digital world, so the best we can wish for is stopgaps, security for those that can afford it. Wasn’t the alluring narrative of growth always really a fable of death – out of sight, denied, out of mind – and have we neglected the possibilities of life to such an extent that we are merely scrabbling for palliative techniques, ears blocked to the howls of our host, our kin, our system, our home?

Did you know that global military spending reached a record high of USD 2.7 trillion in 2024? Am I alone in finding that hard to comprehend? Does that not nag at one slightly while one is doing the weekly shop, sending what one can to Sudan, filling in one’s tax return… should we not all be kicking up somewhat of a FUSS ABOUT THIS? Did you know that only 3.5% of that 2.7 trillion would end global hunger? It could be done in the blink of an eye, but God forbid, get a life, dream on, don’t be insane/insane/insane/insane. Am I sounding like a broken record?

Am I risking my reputation as a ‘serious’ novelist by ranting on about the arms trade, standing outside the Elbit factory with a hand-painted sign, writing a fable for kids about dogs and bears fighting – do I give a shit? Should I keep my ideas about peace in the pages of an academic quarterly, for the knowing nods or condescending critiques of half a dozen other depressed leftists? Or should I leave them mildly abstracted, sieved by the literary mode du jour, peeking through the speech of my made-up characters but only terribly subtly? Are we not past subtlety? 100 years from Beckett, drifting around the endgame, yelping into our hand-held prisons – are we not utterly ridiculous?

Is this merely a political stance? Am I not simply showcasing my ideological bias, so allergic to nationalistic, militaristic, supremacist propaganda that I have gone away with the fairies?

Am I really so opposed to violence?

Do I want peace with racist patriots standing outside hotels housing migrants, swearing at children? Do I want peace with British men going to Calais and pouring detergent into refugees’ drinking water, calling themselves migrant hunters, or do I want to be part of a war against these men with the weaponry of law, reason, information, compassion, common sense?

How can we even formulate, let alone enact, a non-violent response to such uncompromising and relentless hatred – linguistic and actual? How might we reach the usually male actors within a violent system and release them from the briar of their pain, rage, and hunger for power, or has that ship sailed, is this a question for the children? And who am I to speak to someone who has been patronised, belittled, and cheated, and judge them for the inherent violence of the responses they feel are legitimate, urgent, and necessary won’t that make things worse?

We’re in a strange place, aren’t we? Activists seeking to disrupt the war machine, locked up without trial, on hunger strike, Quakers and nurses and retired doctors and children’s book authors and England’s greatest living poet, the ex-professor of poetry at Oxford being locked up for protesting a genocide — isn’t this an urgent crisis for anyone who writes, who reads? When any one of us can feasibly be arrested for writing the words ‘I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION’, and our publishers can be charged under terrorism laws for selling our works, then surely the question of what writers do, and what words we use, and who decides what is true or not, what is a blank piece of paper, and what is an act of terror, is profoundly urgent? Have all these words – terrorist, protest, peace, genocide, law – been so emptied of meaning that we need some kind of emergency redefinition? Hal Foster asked: ‘What comes after farce in a post- truth and post-shame society, how to belittle a leader who cannot be embarrassed? What is the left to do when the right appropriates its cultural strategies?’

What comes after law, what comes after lawlessness?

What comes after never again?

What comes after the body of a distant other’s child? The body of our child? They are one and the same, so why are we pretending otherwise?

Why are the two groups most consistently wedded to pacifism veterans of war and writers? Veterans, because they have seen and know; writers because they have read books, wherein the horrors of war are laid bare and the correctness of the alternatives elucidated time and time again – but how laughable it seems to the men of industry to welcome veterans or writers to their busy, bloody feasting table, or am I being ridiculously simplistic?

As Richard Jackson asks, ‘How many military failures does it take to convince us that violence is actually a very poor tool of politics, and one that is highly unlikely to actually make things better?’ War is good for business, but is business all there is? Can the resolution to find alternatives to symbolic and actual violence only ever be a fantasy under capitalism? Is that the sound of someone at The Telegraph’s eyes rolling? Do I care? Didn’t they host the press conference where Suella Braverman said it was her DREAM to see migrants put on flights to Rwanda? Is she allowed a bombastic, sick, illegal, unrealistic dream? Are we only allowed to dream of profit, victory, security, defence? We all know these words mean death for someone else, don’t we? Shall we all just run headlong into extinction, beeping our horns, and revving our engines, and flinging anything that troubles us into prison? Out of sight, out of mind?

This is a problem of imagination, isn’t it?

Are we not all constantly hammering out the shape and depth and terms of our engagement, are we not all asking ourselves these questions privately? Can we not ask them together outside of violent binaries and crude oppositional politics? Am I asking these questions because I am defeated, disillusioned, disgusted? Are these questions the painful, performative cover-up for my misanthropic, nihilistic, real question which is: it’s over, isn’t it? Do I disagree so profoundly with myself that even to stand here speaking to you sickens me? Does the cultural body need time and time again to diagnose itself poisoned, sickly, dying? Does it need to nurture new growth, does it need rigorous pollarding, and will this not feel like violence?

Isn’t the best thing about PEN the history of its disagreements? Its arguments and inconsistencies and attempts to cross borders, to check we meant what we said when we gathered here last time?

Isn’t the Charter’s innate value as a template for disagreement? Didn’t HG Wells resign because of PEN’s bureaucratic inefficiency in supporting refugees? Didn’t Vargas Llosa resign because Jennifer Clement supported jailed Catalans? Isn’t this the organisational tree coppicing itself, growing strangely, naturally, through all its inconsistencies and discomforts?

Might PEN broker a peace between warring factions in our industry, in our culture, be the table at which fighting parties meet? Might it help insist that we keep fidgeting and squirming inside the definitions and terms we have inherited?

Should members of PEN ask awkward questions? In PEN’s own words, solidarity with Ukraine was ‘nonstop’, so why has it been partial or hesitant elsewhere? The protests last year at PEN America initiated a fundamental reckoning, didn’t they? Have we had double standards? Have we been biased? Have we been jeopardised, compromised, hijacked – isn’t that the point?

Is there a specifically English malaise when it comes to the sharp end of politics because this illusory peace gifted us the unearned and polluted advantage of stability from which to pontificate, judge, condemn, like the soft power world police, fattened by our own mirage of moral authority? ‘Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself’? And now, self-excommunicated from the European project, choked by rivers of our own shit – are we simply asleep? Has living in this notional time of peace robbed us of our senses? Shouldn’t PEN membership be booming as writers gather under an internationalist human rights banner? It cannot be apolitical, but could it be post-political? Could it be better than political?

Didn’t peace movements always have writers at the heart of things? Not only to clarify the futility, and document the agony, but also provide analysis, often of the handful of industrialists who truly benefit from conflict, and isn’t our job to show this and show this till we are blue in the face?

And didn’t it always necessarily involve a fight against our industry? Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ – a mighty anti-imperialist and pacifist gesture – was refused for publication because then just as now, aren’t fatuous justifications for war always louder than literature? Aren’t we now, as then, told to calm down, grow up, stop being hysterical? Aren’t the forces of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and racism as potently intertwined as ever? Isn’t the absolute primal psychic reason for violence fear and hatred of the female, and can’t we see this as clearly on a gigantic industrial level as we can in the pages of our newspapers? Who’s afraid of a little psychoanalytical rummaging under our bonnets? Public calls for demilitarisation are met with the same linguistic tropes: ‘naïve’, ‘feeble’, ‘pathetic’, ‘childish’, ‘weak’. The suicidal pact with military spending is so obviously and tragically a patriarchal problem, so must we ask again and again the classic questions: ‘If not now, when?’ ‘Shall there be womanly times, or shall we die?’

When writers correctly and calmly suggested a festival funding model could be found without the support of hedge funds explicitly profiting from fossil fuel and military investment, weren’t we mocked, attacked, ridiculed, weren’t we told we were ruining the lovely, sweet egalitarian fairytale innocence and sweet, wine-sloshing delights of book festivals for everyone? But weren’t we the people who had actually worked the hardest for and with book festivals? And didn’t the festivals have their most successful year ever last year, because, of course, change is possible? Wasn’t that whole spectacle so revealing but also so counterproductive and depressing? Need we be forever locked into these patterns of attack and retort, these tapestries of snark and sneer, isn’t there a more productive approach? Is it so frightening to ask who pays and how they make their money? Aren’t there going to be some difficult conversations to be had? Do we need to smear and slander and resort to culture war insults every time someone has an idea for a cleaner or fairer world?

Left and right have melted into non-existent categories, we all agree: the great decline, the apocalyptic mode, you can’t say anything these days, none of us are free until all of us are free, everything’s broken, told you so, sold you a yes, sold you a no, gotcha, where did all the free speech warriors go? Do you want some whataboutery to go with your wishy-washy satyagraha?

Why is the dying political animal so defensive, can we not have better ideological palliative care?

Who’s afraid of a little transformative thinking?

Who’s afraid of a little anti-war sentiment?

Clive Bell’s pamphlet Peace At Once was confiscated by the Lord Mayor and burned in the streets, did you see? They were burning books in London town?
Do you remember Ernst Toller’s speech to PEN International during the rise of Nazism, do we see they are burning books in Berlin?

Do you remember Bertrand Russell was denied a passport to prevent him giving an anti-war speech at Harvard, when he asked in the shadow of the bomb, ‘Does man have a future?’ Do you remember when Lytton Strachey lost his job at The Spectator for his antiwar statements? Do you remember Sally Rooney could not travel to the UK because of her support for a proscribed organisation?

Is the suited and booted dying animal of the military industrial psychopathology so rattled? Must we invent new laws to lock up our activists, wait twenty years, rewrite history, then erect statues of them? The history of PEN International is a book of evidence; writers frighten power, so writers are exiled, banished, imprisoned, and we are used to seeing this abroad, and we mustn’t be surprised when we see it at home. Aren’t they rattled? Have they got to the judges? Will we defend the juries? They cannot even take questions from the audience, because what comes after lying? Only force? Only censorship and tyranny?

Isn’t this why PEN writers Writers for peace Peace Committee was established? To step forward when the contaminated political entity refuses? In the Balkans, in Russia, in Sierra Leone, in Mali, weren’t we forceful, even if inconsistent, in our solidarity? Didn’t we have the boundless reserve of moral clarity when all else was collapsing? Didn’t we have bodies we could use to cross borders? Should we not at all times be on an anti-authoritarian war footing, as a matter of principle, and on behalf of those who do not have these luxuries?

If there is a huge abyss between the way we see ourselves and the way we actually are, if there is a monstrous thing being done in our name, if we are a tiny cog in a lethal machine – don’t we need to see that reflected back at us in the shared mirror that is culture? If there is a reckoning, doesn’t it have to begin as a linguistic one? In the language of us, them, ours, theirs, owned, taken, owed, stolen, inherited, dependent, from here, from there, if this country needs to shake off an imperial delusion and find itself a proper meaningful, sustainable place in the New World Order then it might need to start with what it sees in the mirror, like the fable of the schooldays of Nigel Farage – does it matter what we did when we were reckless, feckless, privileged, ignorant, hateful younger versions of our reckless, feckless, privileged, ignorant, hateful contemporary selves? Is an apology enough? Might we not accept? Is there any escape from the shattering verdict that the ugly truths revealed are accepted, even celebrated, and we might need to go into exile from those closest to us?

Isn’t there an almost sociopathic gap between how we behave in our domestic spaces, what we value (the safety and health of our children, for example), and what we bestow upon the faraway other through our collective commitments, investments, and behaviours? Isn’t it bizarre? And if it is purely and ultimately a question of economic systems, might we invest even a fraction of what we invest in the machinery of war in the processes and tools of peace? Isn’t the evidence to do so utterly and magnificently overwhelming? How potent is the death drive? Wasn’t Rebecca West absolutely correct when she said, ‘We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are constantly bad artists when we paint ourselves’? Do we need much, much better collective self-portraiture? Should we start with the fragile and damaging fantasies of mastery, control, and progress that leak out of the wounded and confused juggernaut of armed nation-states in their perpetual circus of theft?

If writers and artists are perfectly placed to shape the stories and collective reflections that might allow a change of direction, what’s making us such bad actors? Entrenchment? Laziness? Complicity? Defeatism? Fear?

Is it simply, in Allen Ginsberg’s blend of Jewish and Buddhist answers, a lack of rachmonis? An absence of compassion?

Aren’t writers ideally and almost uniquely well-positioned to do some of the re-engineering required to reframe the question of peace? We go into schools, we teach in prisons, we sit on charity boards, we meet people in bookshops and libraries, we travel to meet writers of different genres and languages – might we be in Vaclav Havel’s formulation ‘architects of some kind of rudimentary moral reconstruction’? Might we be the table, at which many can sit? If Brecht was correct that Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions, are we not guilty of perpetual, scratchy, pointless wars between ourselves? Am I being lofty? Am I being unsophisticated? Am I being romantic?

Are we not handlers of ideas and tone, whether we are historians, novelists, or journalists? Are we not – in sometimes tiny, and in sometimes significantly bankrolled, ghoulishly bigoted, allied to fascist tech overlord ways – engineers of sensibility?

At four minutes to midnight, Nicholas Humphreys wrote, ‘We forget sometimes our own power. What happens when an irresistible force meets a movable object? Why, it moves.’ Shall we move?

Enemies of compassion, decency, justice walk among us, and are mobilising with staggering efficiency – surely, we must do the same? ‘Our age seems entirely unfitted for such a task,’ wrote Simone Weil in 1937, observing murderous absurdities in the economic and political systems of her time, and might we go as Simone did, to where the war is being waged, and put our bodies in the way? Isn’t this why seeing Alice Oswald carried into a police van means more to me than a thousand tweets or Instagram posts, because she has pushed past the stalemate in a precisely poetic way? She has married the force of language with the gesture of the body in space to create meaning, and won’t that gesture last? Won’t it reverberate? Writers have often returned from war and issued warnings about the profoundly human oscillation between savagery and progress, and their warnings have, fatally, gone unheeded, so what is the mechanism by which we offer not a warning in fable form, but an insistence, an urgent intervention, a living proof that this oscillation is unsustainable. How do we nudge this insistence into the mainstream? Writers are exactly who should be on marches, disobeying that which is preposterous or poisonous, shouldn’t they?

Is the path to freedom not always collective action? Doesn’t research show that non-violent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change, and don’t we have access to at least 3.5%?

Isn’t well-organised disruption long overdue? To the claim that writers should get back in their box, isn’t the answer that our box is language, the singular shared box the weaponry? Is it so preposterous to gather our global community together and redesign the force of the written word against the new forms of violence and tyranny that have emerged in this illusory time of peace? Will it be an everyday war of deconstruction, revision, clarification, evidence, detail, nuance, an effort against a saturation of violent discourse, that might work, one word at a time, one gesture at a time, one network or coalition at a time?

Do I feel as Fela Kuti felt about music, that literature must ‘awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act’? If I don’t believe in that, what on earth am I doing?

Do you remember the video of Renée Nicole Good? Isn’t this a forever loop of the last words ‘I’m not mad at you, dude’ of the victim, versus the ‘fucking bitch’ of the armed murderer? State-sanctioned killer versus innocent citizen. And in that exact case, it was Poet versus Weapon, which is precisely where we are at, again and again and again, isn’t it?

May I finish with the purest expression of these ideas that I can possibly find? May I read you from another poem, ‘Green Madrigal (I)’ by Lynette Roberts?

Peace, my stranger is a tree
Growing naturally through all its
Discomforts, trials and emergencies
Of growth.
It is green and resolved
It breathes with anguish
Yet it releases peace, peace of mind
Growth, movement.
It walks this greening sweetness
Throughout all the earth,
Where sky and sun tender its habits
As I would yours.

The post Peace: Max Porter’s 2026 PEN Lecture appeared first on English PEN.

I have wondered a bit about this. And you’re right, there is something there. I think it’s about asking who we are as humans when we are without each other. Asking: Is there a core? What is it? What are we on our own? I was fascinated when I was young with Robinson Crusoe-type stories. I think I’m interested in what we are as singular beings, and how that relates to what we are as social beings.

Unless we’re twins we’re born into a singular life, but we are immediately totally dependent on others. I’ve never put it like this before but, actually, I think what I’m interested in are people’s singular timelines – the singular timeline we live as opposed to how our timelines cross. In On the Calculation of Volume, Tara and Thomas’s whole way of experiencing time is broken; the idea of experiencing a timeline as crossing with another one is broken.

One of the things I realised when I was writing the third book was that one of the things I’m least interested in is how people meet in a world where you position yourself against each other. I was interested in class, rage, age – but not in the way we observe each other as human beings with qualities. You won’t have read this yet, but in book four the characters reflect that another human being is ‘a gift’. That a human being is not someone to be afraid of. I wanted this world: I wanted a world in which human beings weren’t afraid of each other, and in which power relations would piss off.

I’m interested in what that world does for concepts of fear, self-orientation, morality. I’ll come back to that.

I’m also interested in how you describe relationships between the singular self and the social self. As I read the third book, and Tara started encountering others stuck in 18 November, I started conceptualising her as having three selves: before getting stuck, being stuck alone, and being stuck together. And I realised that she hadn’t thought about self 1 being different to self 2 until self 3 came along. It’s such a change. And what prompted that change? Why is it here, in book three, that these other characters walk in, at this moment in the story?

That’s a good question. I thought she was going to meet others earlier. But I decided that she had to understand her own situation better first. In ‘loop stories’ like these, typically there’s a main character who’s an arsehole who has to go through all these things to be a better person and then they can come out of their loop. But I felt that it wasn’t the act of getting out of the loop that was interesting. What was interesting to me was the idea of stripping off what you have around you, of being in the loop.

Tara strips off her life with Thomas in Clairon-sous-Bois; she tries to catch the seasons but loses that too; she loses the feeling that you can decide where you go; everything loses value; she loses her bag and all the bits of identity she was clinging too; she loses the power to do. Again, I haven’t really thought about it like this before, but I think she had to be stripped of all that, and have this kind of neutral human nakedness, before she could meet others.

I felt bereft and naked too when Tara lost her bag. It was one of the most devastating moments of book two, for me.

On that idea of losing ‘the power to do’ – and coming back to fear and self-orientation – I want to go to the latter part of book three, when we meet Olga and Ralf, and learn about Ralf’s obsession with preventing the accidents and harm and pain of 18 November, and working out how to do it every repeating day, for as many people as possible. That’s about trying to regain the power to do; for me, there’s also an interesting tension between an ostensible act of utilitarian selflessness and a deep self-centredness in trying to give one’s own day a lasting purpose, even when you’ll be stuck in it again and again.

Yeah. And a trust in the idea that you’ll make things better rather than ruin things even more. Are we eating up our world or can we avoid doing bad things? And can we actually do ‘good’ things when the good things are cancelled out the next day.

Yeah. And the books are full of all these test-cases for how certain moral or ethical or philosophical codes fall apart when stuck in a day. What does utilitarianism mean, anymore, when stuck in a repeating day? And so my question, to someone deeply interested and studied in philosophy, is: what did writing this book reveal to you about morality?

In the beginning I was just interested in questions of time. It was only quite late on that I became interested in questions of morality. I’ve never felt the duty to throw moral questions into my books, but these became books that started throwing moral questions out. You find the characters wrestling with them, and feel the need to listen to what they’re saying – to them trying to answer the moral and philosophical questions that grow out of the fabric of their world.

It’s naïve, but I didn’t think that the book would end up containing so many questions of that type. I thought of it as a love story. I thought of it as a story about time. But then you send Tara out into the garden to pull a leek out of the earth, and now you have to wrestle with the question – as she does – of whether she is eating her world. That is a question that grew from the fabric. And I think one of the reasons I could stay with this project was because the fabric contained so much philosophy: What is material? How do we treat the material around us? How do we treat beings around us?

That’s a part of why they are wonderful books. They are not a world built to study morality; they are a world built to be a world built.

Yeah. And one thing I hadn’t thought about when I built the world was that the conflict level between the people would be so low. Their conflicts aren’t internal. There’s room for questioning what is right and what is wrong because they aren’t going to demonstrate it against each other. They have disagreements, but they have them without conflict, in a way. Because if you can’t act, what’s the point in having conflict? Ralf can go out and collect information and make plans to save people, and there’s no point in enacting disagreement about that.

I’m going to stick with asking questions about big concepts for now. Your previous book, According to the Law, comprised four clear stories of searching – of obsessive searches. And for me there’s a constant sense of search in On the Calculation of Volume. The characters are constantly searching, and searching for different things: for themselves, for logic, for company, for time, for change, for love. I’m not going to ask you if the act of writing is an act of writing is an act of searching, because I think that’s a bit glib. But do you think the act of reading is an act of searching? (I hope that’s not glib.)

In According to the Law, the characters have such singular projects that they can’t let anyone else in. They’re one-way roads. If you were to try and imagine those four people meeting, it wouldn’t work. I think what ended up as According to the Law was probably my first attempt at writing On the Calculation of Volume – I’d already had the idea for it by then.

I think Tara is more open to interaction than the four people in According to the Law. She’s not linear in her search; she’s completely circular. In book four, there’s more searching, more attempts at meeting and interaction. And in book five they go all in, searching in whatever way they want – all types of search, all types of knowledge.

But the searching isn’t in the narrative. They don’t go on a narrative search, so to speak. How can I put it? Hmm. This is difficult to explain. I think the big question behind all this is knowledge. Are we searching for it? Or are we modelling and manipulating it? For instance, what we do to time when we tell a story; for instance, what we do to space when we are painting. We are modelling – but there’s an element of searching, because we wouldn’t want to be there if there weren’t an element of search. It’s not searching towards something, but searching around something.

Modelling is a lovely way to put it: modelling space, modelling time, modelling knowledge, and how that has to be an act ‘around’ rather than an act ‘towards’. One of the clever things the series does, by recapitulating itself into a repeated day, is refusing to be linear. There’s a wonderful moment when Tara, feeling at her most untethered, says ‘perhaps we are music after all’ and then, 19 days later, ‘But if we are music, it is unpredictable music, made up of improvisations and strange pitches and unexpected noises’ and then ‘My days are porous. I follow no pattern’ and then ‘Now and then I sit at the table by the window to write, but my language overflows. There is no healing to be found in sentences.’ I think that captures what you’re saying, maybe: we are operating through words, sounds, time, space, in some kind of search, but it isn’t towards a singularity, and feels much more out at sea.

That’s a very good way of putting it. It’s more being out at sea than moving along a road. Tara calls it a container. I think she sees time like that – something she can dip herself into every day.

But the older the characters get, the more they have to let time in more; they have to let in something linear, something progressive, something searched towards. She doesn’t really do that until book three, until she meets Henry, and they have their discussions about history, and what happens when you lose your future, and their disagreement about history and herstory.

That feels like then moment in which, from an act of disagreement about history and herstory, the act of dipping into the container becomes a more patterned and intentional thing.

OK, I’m going to stop with the conceptual and come into the text a bit more. I won’t ask too much about ‘craft’, because I know that can become wearisome. But I would like to ask a bit about the logic of the world of On the Calculation of Volume. Were there moments in which you found yourself tied up in knots in writing the logic? There are some lovely passages where Tara, but also Henry and Ralf and Olga, decide that it doesn’t really matter if we can’t work out the logic of, for instance, how long something has to stay under a pillow before it won’t disappear when the day restarts – and that’s a lovely act of reminding the reader that we mustn’t worry too much about the logic, mustn’t get bogged down in it. But did you get bogged down in it?

And another question about this: are there rules that govern the world that you know about, having created it, but that you didn’t write into the books, and that we as readers will therefore never know?

There were some elements I wanted from the very beginning – for instance, that Tara ages we go. And there were elements I had to understand – do things disappear if she uses them? But I knew I wanted to have a non-mechanical world; or, I didn’t want the machinery to creak. It’s that notion that the idea has to be dissolved in the work as sugar dissolves in a glass of water.

For me, there had to be something sensual in it, something which let the machinery grow into the fabric of the story. And I think that’s one of the reasons it has taken me so long to write it: I had it moving round in my head for such a long time. I felt the way that it worked more than I thought it out. And I had to follow the things that I wanted to be in the world, and see how that would solve other questions that emerged. I let Tara and Thomas explore the rules for me: the scene with the fried eggs, for instance, with the frying pan disappearing – that was my way of setting up the rules without setting up the rules. Letting them find out what the rules were. Or, what happens to all the rubbish? Would the bin be overflowing? I had to have a little exit: some things just disappear.

I always sent Tara out to explore, rather than setting the rules. So I feel like I’ve explored them more than made them.

Which is, I’d say, dissolving the sugar in the glass of water.

Yes, that was my way of doing it. And also there is something about the people and their conscience that bears on the world. For instance, Tara has a jumper that disappears after a long time – but also she didn’t really need it. They find that a used phone is easier to keep alive than a new one. And so there must be something human that is seeping into materials. I didn’t think of myself of having an animistic worldview, but I can see in my language that I must. I mean, I sometimes talk about materials as if they have agency. I have worldviews in this book that I don’t have in real life. Or maybe I do, and I don’t want to admit it. I don’t know.

Which is also an effect – or maybe a gift – of letting your characters out into a world you’ve built without governing those rules. Feeling and finding instead.

And actually this is typical me: I tried to refute your suggestion that there is a search, and now I have admitted it. Of course there is a search. Every time there is a problem with the loop, I let them go out and search for me.

Are you writing book six now, or are you about to start book seven?

About to start book seven.

Do you know how it ends?

Yeah.

Do you want to know?

No. Hmm – no.

Haha.

But I want to know if you knew it when you started writing book one.

The ending came with the idea; I haven’t thought about the end as separated from the idea. It was there long before I started writing. There are elements that have come along the way, of course. And let’s see if I’m right about the end. But I think it’s not so likely that it will be very different to what I think it will be. I’ve written several versions of the last pages.

I wanted to ask because we were talking again about searching. Because maybe knowing the end of a loop story at its start short-circuits that search, in some way – or lets you search not for the thing at the end, but the bits on the edge of the road.

A lot of funny bits at the edge of the road have grown into the story.

On things which ended up included versus things which ended up on the cutting-room floor (and this is my last craft question, I promise): the days are numbered, literally, throughout the series, and I want to ask if there are days that you wrote, but which you decided the reader doesn’t need to hear about? Say, as I randomly open the book, between day 1,445 and day 1,531, which appear together here on the page.

I don’t have whole days that I took out. But there are tonnes of elements and ideas that I took out, and tonnes that I didn’t think were going to be there which are. The bag theft wasn’t part of the original plan; that came when Tara came to Düsseldorf, and I realised it would happen.

Very early in the project, I wrote down all the numbered days in a grid. I printed out sheets of them – piles of them, with nothing written on the ‘empty’ days. I knew the feeling of the length of the story, in this way.

I think it’s important for Tara to have space to leave us out – she might experience things she doesn’t want to tell us about. Maybe she’s been much more panicked than she’s let on in day 121; maybe she’s doing things she wants to keep private. I’d like to leave that to her, in a way.

There are a few things that I’m not telling the reader till later on – but that’s because she doesn’t know them yet. She’s not holding those days as important because she doesn’t yet know to. So there’s a bit of cheating from all sides.

It seems like you and Tara have a very equitable relationship.

Haha – well I had to listen to her a lot. Partly because she’s a different generation to me. I had to give her a lot of space and try to pull my own personality out of her world. I even had to write a book about my own life and past, to give her some space. I was ready to really give On the Calculation of Volume a go – it was maybe 2006 or 2007 – and had written quite a bit. But I had to write this other book about my family history going back to 1690 in order to give Tara some space.

Something I then realised, later, was that my life started coming out in other characters instead of Tara.

I’ll keep with how different people come in and out of stories and their texts. Books one and two are by different translators to book three. Could you talk about working with Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, having worked with Barbara J. Haveland – what have those collaborations been like? What does the accumulation of voices mean in terms of what we’ve just been discussing? What have the moments of difference been?

It’s all been very interesting and very smooth. I’ve worked with Barbara for a long time – we knew each other from According to the Law, which she translated. But we hadn’t ever met, and didn’t until after she’d translated book one of On the Calculation of Volume. That was brilliant: Barbara was kind of more Tara Selter than I was. Of course, Tara has never written anything in Danish, which is also interesting in terms of translation. Barbara was ready to retire, but she agreed on giving it a go. She started the project during Covid, and so she’s said that she also felt there was something in it about her life at home at the time.

And then Sophia and Jennifer came in just at the moment that Tara meets other people – and starts to mimic Olga’s way of talking, absorbing some of her language. And these two younger translators come in at the same time Tara’s voice changes. It’s as if they fell from heaven somehow.

I’ve been so lucky to have translators who, you know, accept my weirdnesses. For instance, in English, you wouldn’t really say ‘there is no healing to be found in sentences’ – you’d say something like ‘there’s no healing in words’ – but I wanted ‘sentences’, and they were so willing to make that sort of thing work.

Sentences are very different to words – and that line stayed with me.

Well sentences have time in them in a way words don’t. And there’s something healing about time, for Tara. And everyone accepted that and said, OK, we’ll fight for your darlings, we won’t kill them.

I have very little interest in what’s lost in translation but great interest in what’s gained in translation. And that’s a good example.

What’s gained in translation is when you’re trying to get the two languages to breed something in some way, rather than cutting something from one or the other. There’s a tendency to normalise what’s weird – weird as it’s translated, or weird in the original language. And I think there should be freedom for the translators to bring something into the new language, to be willing to play.

Play is interesting. I often think of translations more as cousins to the original than siblings – and I suppose you have more fun with your cousins because they’re not your siblings.

That’s a good image.

Maybe translation is an act of trying to find a good metaphor for the act of translation and never finding the right one.

I also sometimes think that when you translate your language comes and messes up what you’re trying to say. So maybe language is the uncle that comes in and ruins everything, and translations are the cousins who then arrive and save the party.

I remember being an au pair in Paris when I was 17 and having this feeling that the new language – the other language – was the space of being incompetent. And then someone who could speak across the languages would save the situation, and show how this new language was your friend, not your enemy. And when my writing is translated I have that feeling: sometimes, a sentence arrives in translation and it’s so much better than the one you wrote originally.

I’ll keep asking other people I interview about which family members they associate with acts of translation.

As we were speaking before we started this interview, about your involvement with PEN in the 90s, and as we’ve spoken about both the idea and the writing of this series having developed over such a long period of time, I’ve been thinking about what reflections on the changes in European publishing your experience with this project can reveal. I’m thinking about the gap between your starting writing them and my reading them, about how these ideas that are enthralling readers now are the ideas of the past. Maybe there’s something about how sustaining a literary idea can be? Maybe there’s something about how the oscillations and vacillations and fascinations of publishing go in loops? Could you speak into that?

I think letting myself be in doubt for a long time without having to decide if the idea was right or wrong was necessary for the books. But I do think there were times in the last few decades where they wouldn’t have fit into the landscape, in some way. Or where they would have had to be a little different in order for me to feel right about them.

There’s been this increasing feeling of ease for me in the years leading up to publishing, of feeling more comfortable with putting it out into the world. It’s as if there’s something of the fabric that it fell out of in the 80s – my life in different part of Europe in the 80s – that works today. I mean we had a ‘no future’ generation in the 80s, the punk generation, etc., and I feel some of that means something today. An increasing awareness of climate crisis, an increasing awareness of people across the globe, an increasing questioning what Europe really is. So there are elements that are similar between the time the idea came and the time the book came – which I find rather fascinating.

But Tara Selter doesn’t fit into a generation. If I had to write Tara as her generation now, I’d be in trouble. If I had to write her as a millennial, I couldn’t. And so we had to let some years go.

So I feel more that there’s something repetitive in different periods of time than there is a continuity. I don’t feel like I had something lasting, but rather that something that was ready to harvest at certain times and not at others. There have been wrong times for the book. After the despair of the 80s, the feeling of the 90s and early 00s that everything was hunky-dory – which it wasn’t, and which I was rather angry about at the time – meant that wasn’t the right time.

And I don’t think the fabric of all those times created the fabric of the books. But they seeped in.

Gosh, this is difficult – it’s so difficult to try and explain something that has lasted 40 years.

That’s about the impossibility of that question – for which I’m very sorry – but also, I think, about the richness of how, simultaneously, the world inflects or inflicts on a 40-year project, yet that 40-year project is, and can exist, other than through those inflections and inflictions.

Yeah – and I mean you really have to find the right moment for it. In the end I didn’t worry that much about sending it out into the world because I didn’t really think anyone would read it. My biggest worry was whether I should print 500 copies or 600 copies. Maybe I never think of readers, in that respect – but more whether a book can be written in a given world. At one point I thought about putting the whole story back into the 80s, because it didn’t work in the 00s or 10s. But then it worked in the 20s, with its smartphones and the credit cards.

But I can’t explain why.

But thank god you can’t. I remember a writer saying to me that they couldn’t explain the ‘why’ of their novel – and thank god, because if they could they’d have written an essay rather than a novel.

Yes. And in an essay there wouldn’t be all these messy roads.

We’re back to searching and roads. And I’ll come to the end of the road with a final question: if you woke up tomorrow, and it was today, and you had this interview in your diary, how many times would you keep turning up before you abandoned it.

Oh wow. Hmm. Quite a few days – but I’d start interviewing you. I think you’d be bored before I was.

But then, would you know that it was happening? Would you be stuck in the loop too? Or would you be outside it?

You see you are interviewing me already. I’ll tell you what I’d rather be: I’d rather also be stuck in the day too. And maybe that’s a horrible, toxic takeaway I have from reading these books, but I’m in some way more distraught for the billions of characters not living in that loop than I am for the few who are. So, I think, in this question, I’d rather be waking up and finding we were both stuck doing this interview every day.

It would be fun, because if we both knew we were stuck then we’d start searching for others straightaway. Because then why would it just be us?

Yes, I think we’d be on our way to Düsseldorf now.

We’d keep this Zoom link, and put up posters with the link printed on it, and say that everyone else stuck in today should join us.

The post Dissolving Sugar in Water: A Long Conversation with Solvej Balle appeared first on English PEN.

Words carry weight because of the way you use them; how you place them in a sentence, how you pick one over the other, how you refuse to explain them. It gives everything away. It reveals you, the speaker. And when you have access to only one language – a language that fundamentally doesn’t recognise you, that doesn’t have words for what you are trying to say – you must have the courage to bend it like clay.

My parents met in college in Kerala, where they were studying to become medical imaging technologists, and soon after they graduated they got married and found jobs in Saudi Arabia. I was born and spent most of my childhood there. We lived in a small desert town that no one had heard of and where my parents worked at the main hospital. They quickly learned how to be quiet and blend in, like lizards in the desert.

I went to the only international school that happened to teach an Indian curriculum. There were kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. My Grade Two class spoke nine different languages at home – none of them Arabic – so it helped that the official language of the school was English. I had a teacher who taught me how to fall in love with the English language. She taught me to pay attention to the words. I came home every afternoon with new ones on my tongue and tried them out in sentences. My parents, bewildered, bought dictionary after dictionary to satiate my curiosity. Ours was a small school, and most of our classrooms were in a portable trailer. We had a library that doubled as the computer room. I read every book in there at least twice. Wherever I went – in our close-knit Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Sri-Lankan-Filipino community – I found books to read, and people would lend them to me, no questions asked. The book I read the most was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The novel is set in Cornwall, England. There was nothing I had in common with the characters in this book, and yet I felt at home reading it. It was a source of comfort. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t see myself in that story, or any other story I had read until then.

When I was eight, I tried to write a novel. All the characters in the novel had light skin and blue eyes. I didn’t have the imagination then to understand that I had subconsciously accepted that I was not at the centre – that I was, in my own life, at the edge, or even invisible, and was fine with it. I wrote essays and stories for my school magazine, but I wasn’t in any of them and, until years later, I didn’t think anything of it.

I moved to a boarding school in Kerala when I was thirteen, and a few years after, I got my hands on this book everyone kept talking about which had won the Booker Prize in 1997. The author – this curly-haired beautiful woman – was all over the news because people outside India said that she was brilliant. She also kept getting into legal trouble in India for the words that she used. That book was The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I had never read anything so beautiful before, and yet I was enraged by it. This book, unlike anything I had read until then, was about my people. The characters looked and sounded like us – my parents, my friends, their parents, extended family. Their concerns, their humour, their hope and hopelessness were familiar. I felt exposed, like the safety of being at the fringes had disappeared. There was nowhere to hide in three-hundred-something pages. Surely, that couldn’t be safe, right? Literature was no longer something I read from the sidelines. I was inside it. I put it away, and read Rebecca again, looking for comfort. But it didn’t feel the same anymore.

Following the publication of The God of Small Things, an English historian told Arundhati Roy during a radio show in London that the very fact that she writes in English is a tribute to British Imperialism. He meant it as high praise, because he had loved her work. But the thing is, if you read The God of Small Things, even though it was written in English, it feels like it wasn’t. It feels like it was written in a version of Malayalam, or in something more than language. Something that captured the essence of a people so effectively that the language becomes irrelevant. The English historian probably felt the way I felt when I read Rebecca – in awe of something you cannot see yourself in – but unlike me, he was not comfortable or familiar with that feeling. It only makes sense that he felt compelled to give the credit for the brilliance of Roy to British Imperialism.

Roy does not explain things that require explaining to the average English reader. She writes about Ayemenam like it is the centre of the world, like its people are the only people who matter. When she uses words that are specific to the place, to the people, she doesn’t explain them or apologise for them or put them in italics. She leaves them out there in the open, for everyone to judge and question and not understand. One reviewer of The God of Small Things on Goodreads gave it a scathing one-star review and said that it was just meaningless gibberish. They were so enraged at being forced to read about a community that didn’t include them, and instead of trying to understand it, they declared their hate for it. Roy is not ashamed of not being understood. She stands there, right at the centre, with a delicious, humble confidence, and says what she has to say. She uses the English language to decentralise itself. I think this is what Toni Morrison meant when she said ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’

My great-grandmother lived with us for a couple of years during my late teens. She had, by then, started to succumb to old age. Her bladder had lost control, she needed support to walk, and she couldn’t hear very well. My mother had her move in with us to give her whatever dignity we could, but people treated her as something worthless. During that time, I found out that she had been a writer in her youth. A writer! I had known her all my life, and no one had ever mentioned this before. She wrote in Malayalam, which meant that, for me, her work was not accessible. I asked her to teach me the language. I could speak the language fluently, but the written word was foreign to me. The 56 letters of the alphabet – 15 vowels and 42 consonants – tortured me. The loops and circles and curves, and the subtle differences in sounds they caused remained unapproachable. Every day, I read with her for half an hour – loudly, so that she could hear. She was patient with the many mistakes I made. I got better – I could soon read billboards and destination signs on buses and, with difficulty, newspaper headlines. She died not long after, standing, holding onto a dresser. My mother said that she died peacefully, knowing that she had done something worthy in the last days of her life.

I lost the language soon after that.

I wonder what kind of a writer my great-grandmother was. I wonder if she wrote as if she, her people, our people, were at the centre of it. I wonder if she had written all the things she wanted to, without inhibition.

When I first started writing seriously, I had already been in North America for almost a decade. Unlike my parents in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t need to camouflage myself to be safe. But I was, at first, apologetic for taking up space on the page, as if what I was writing about was too much, too little, too heavy, too silly, too trivial, too everything. But I was consumed by the desire to say exactly what I wanted to say. I turned to fiction, where I felt I could write from the centre of my life. What if I could give words to this strange, unmoored sense of belonging – of belonging nowhere and also anywhere? What if I could give the reader what they didn’t know they wanted?

On the page, unlike in the real world – or, worse, on social media – there is space for the nuances of who I really am. On the page, I feel safe to first present the box I was placed in, and then to shatter it, to be anywhere but in the box.

After my short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, came out, I got to travel to many literary festivals and talk about the book. I had dreamed of this for years. At many of those festivals, I had the indelible joy of people coming up to me to express how much they had loved my book. Some of them would go on to tell me about the one time they went to India in the 1970s or 1980s and educate me about a city or a practice or a custom they had encountered. They meant well, of course. They simply couldn’t see themselves in my stories and had to find a way to forge a connection. And instead of getting offended, I thought, maybe I got this right. Maybe I managed to create something good and specific – that I made someone who didn’t find themselves in it not only keep reading but come up to me and try to claim a part of it. Surely that should mean something?

A reader who read a story in the book about a group of young South Indian girls learning Carnatic music at a Hindu temple in California asked me why there were no white people in the story. She seemed bewildered, offended even. I said it was because it was my story, and I wanted to place these scrawny little brown girls smack at the centre, as if no one else mattered. I said that I did it, because I wanted to do it. I said that I learned it from Arundhati Roy. I only said one of those things out loud, but I am a writer, and here, on the page, I have more courage.

The post There Is Never One English appeared first on English PEN.

When I can’t sleep at night, I reach for the phone on my nightstand and type Craigslist into my browser. I am always instantly comforted by the white and soft grey background with all lower-case sans serif text, in a professionally hued deep azure blue that sings of the internet of the early 2000s. There is something reassuring about a vessel that remains the same as its content shifts, even if it is just an online classified website. My gaze drags over the options for where my midnight thought spiral could take me – I could buy a used sauna for one, I could take someone from New Mexico up on a housing swap, I could quit my job in favour of a gig at the Canadian National Exhibition. Yet, I always come back to the top of the home page. Under the first subheading, ‘community’, is what I am looking for: ‘missed connections’.

Missed Connections is a board where people can anonymously describe an encounter with someone of interest; someone who slipped by before they could grab their contact information, or, oftentimes, even catch their name. It is an echo chamber for ships passing in the night. An archive of ephemera. If I had to craft an archetypical post, based on the hundreds that I have read over the years, it would sound something like:

Dark, shoulder-length hair. Glasses. Red jacket.

You passed by me in the Shoppers Drug Mart at Yonge and Dundas and asked if I knew if ibuprofen could be safely given to dogs. I said no and you laughed. I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since.

If you see this, respond with what kind of hat I was wearing.

My fascination with Missed Connections isn’t because I’m waiting for a response on a post about someone I passed on a sidewalk, or because I’m hoping for the flattering moment that I’ll read a post and think Wait, is that coffee shop encounter describing me? I read them because it feels like I’m bearing witness to the very human urge to try and figure out how to write into silence. How to archive a void.

Many writers, especially writers from racialised backgrounds, work from fragmented histories, a product of the active and violent erasure, dispersal, and censoring by imperial and colonial forces of the necessary voices. In an attempt to address this wound, I have found that there can be an impulse to try and break apart this silence and rebuild the historical records that we deserve. But perhaps within Missed Connections is a lesson in how we can instead make language from silence. A language that is material.

I seek to write about this archetype because the sexualisation, the dehumanisation, and the tokenisation of the quadroon echo into the present day, into my life.

I’m in the middle of working on a collection about the archetype of the ‘quadroon’ – a word used to describe women of one-quarter African heritage who lived in the American South in the late 1700s and early 1800s. These women haunt the archive. By that, I mean only their outlines are present in the imprint of time, be it through history books or government records or popular culture. What fills those outlines is dependent on who is writing the journal entry, the census form, the novel. At times, the ‘quadroon’ is the meek, submissive concubine sold by her mother to be the second wife to a married white man. Other times, she is the bold seductress whose greed drives her to track down white men as if for sport. At times, she is undeniably Black. At times, so white that she is the lowest hurtle to a eugenicist’s utopia.

I seek to write about this archetype because the sexualisation, the dehumanisation, and the tokenisation of the quadroon echo into the present day, into my life. And yet, when I try to reach back towards this echo, into the cave of history from which it reverberates, I come up empty handed. I have tried to comb through the archives for the voices of women who were categorised as ‘quadroons’, but their voices are missing, as were the voices of all Black women at this point in history, as are the voices of all who threaten the falsities of the archives by the simple fact of their living. I have tried to use the descriptions of ‘quadroon’ women that exist in the archives to deduce how these women may have lived their lives and felt in the process, which only produced a flat replication of stereotypes. I have tried to invent, assume, deduce. But the space remains, taunting me.

But the task is as un-abandonable as it is insurmountable. I am finding with every artefact I encounter that the call of these women is only amplified by their absence. Perhaps this is what I feel compelled to capture. Not to reify their silence, but to testify to the necessity of remembering them. To witness. It is fitting that in the Christian etymology of the word, it is a translation of the Greek martys, or martyr. To witness is to place truth over self. To break apart language as a way of letting the dead in, as you lay awake, unable to sleep.

Here is where, as of late, I have been turning to Missed Connections for guidance. I recently noticed something about the vast majority of posts on the classified board – here is a simultaneous refusal to let a fleeting connection go undocumented and an acceptance that it is not up to the writer of the post to bridge the gap between missing and found. It is up to the reader.

Into the archive of Craigslist goes an outline of sorts, the few facts that we have – a red scarf, the setting of a grocery store. What comes next is internal; how did a smile from a stranger affect the speaker, how did it move them? Finally, there is an invitation, the desired person is asked to reach out from the void. There is an unstated assumption: the odds of the person who asked you about ibuprofen seeing your post on Craigslist has to be something like the odds of throwing a pea into a shot glass a hundred yards away. They are not going to see it. And yet, the impulse to invite a connection out of silence is followed.

This is not to say that I am taking Missed Connections as a blueprint when writing into the wound of silence. I have encountered plenty of posts that have disturbed me deeply by their misogynistic and racist characterisations of the connections that have been missed. I am not moved by these posts, and in fact, find it disturbing that these posts at times so closely evoke through their racist caricatures the journal entries I have encountered in my research.

I am most moved by the posts that are sparse – the ones that make me feel through fifteen words just how touching a half second can be. These posts are not denying the existence of the Missed in Missed Connections. They are also not letting the Connection go unspoken. They are acknowledging that the person on the other side of that shared gaze is there, in the world, and can fill out, around, between the fifteen words in the post for themselves.

I have come to resist my urge to find or create or invent the voices of women categorised by a racist term and instead lean into the imprint that the silencing of them has left upon me. I am still refusing the historical silence that has been imposed upon them, but it is not my place to try and speak their words into existence. I am calling, inviting, conjuring them into my own corner of the archive.

In an interview about her book-length poem, Zong!, M. Nourbese Philip says, ‘The silence is linked to what we can never tell, what we don’t know. That’s not something that sits well with Western approaches to knowledge capacity, where we feel that we have to find out everything we need to know.’ Leaning into the unknowing feels unnatural, especially as someone whose only language is English, who has only ever lived in the United States and Canada. The impulse to answer and complete is not easily undone. In fact, in this project of witnessing, this is a part of myself I am martyring. Laying to rest the desire to track down these missing persons, I am able to let these persons be reframed. Just because they are missing from view does not mean they lived lives as ephemera. They are full people, not outlines, and sitting with space and silence in my writing is one way to counteract the dehumanisation of the archive.

As I write this, I do not know how you will fill in the spaces around my words. Perhaps we’ve crossed paths in a grocery store or breathed some of the same molecules flung across an ocean. Perhaps we’ve seen one another as spectral glimpses at the edges of a paragraph or as phantom shadows beneath letters on a page. If so, here’s my invitation.

The post Missing Persons and Missed Connections appeared first on English PEN.

Consider my parents’ first date, sharing
what they have in common: a history of being possessed

My parents’ first date shows up in my poem ‘Ancestry.com Has Nothing on Me’. It’s vague on the details, although I considered painting a more robust scene: a little cha chaan teng in Hong Kong where they shared milk tea and egg tarts, or perhaps a stop by a street vendor selling chai and samosas in India.

The truth is, I don’t know what my parents did on their first date, or even what country it was in. What I do know: my father’s family spent much – or perhaps, all – of his childhood in India, my mother grew up in Hong Kong, and somehow their paths crossed before they moved overseas to start a family in Canada. Both my parents knew the taste of samosas and jalebi, of rice and lap cheong, of chilli chicken and Hakka noodles. They shared these foods with me during my childhood in Vancouver, where I grew up in-between cultures, constantly trying my best to fit in. What they didn’t share were the details that surrounded their childhoods, how they met, their migration to Canada, and the toll it took on them.

I first came across the term ‘shadow histories’ in Jenny Banh’s essay ‘Chinese Restaurant Kids Speak about Labor, Lifeways, and Legacies’. Banh refers to a ‘shadow history’ of her family’s time in Southeast Asia that ‘would never be discussed’. Banh writes:

here is a lot of silence and misdirection in [my mother’s] statements to me. Dare I say resistance? She withholds many things from me, and I have to guess or imagine what she means. I think my family history consists of many imaginaries within and between the generations. Maybe within me as well…

Though this was my first time encountering the term “shadow history,” I immediately understood what Banh meant. A shadow history is an unspoken past that lurks in the background, often entangled in trauma, always actively haunting, yet never discussed or confronted head on. This was familiar to me in my lived experience with my family. Like Banh, I also had ‘a silent and evasive family,’ and I, too, learned ‘to not ask questions or talk too much.’

As a writer, I write to understand myself, to process experiences and emotions, and to connect with others. Like many aspiring writers, I was taught the adage ‘write what you know’. It’s sound advice that often produces interesting writing from different lived realities. While writing my poetry collection Familial Hungers, however, I found myself returning to what I didn’t know – aspects of my family’s past that had grown entangled into my life. How and where, exactly, did my parents meet? What were their childhoods like? What buried memories do they carry every day? Over time, my relationships with my family origins have amassed fractures resulting in ongoing breaks in communication. As such, I found myself unable to ask about details from my family’s history.

How, then, do you write about what you don’t know?

As it turns out, writing what you don’t know is made up of research, speculation, and imagination. I wrestled with the incomplete – and possibly inaccurate – facts presented in my poem. Research provided context to some of my questions – Hong Kong was a British colony, then occupied by the Japanese, then a British colony again, before finally becoming a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. There was, in fact, a sizeable Chinese community in India, specifically in Kolkata. India was an official British colony from 1858–1947. The Sino-Indian war occurred in 1962. I also had bits and pieces I remembered from my childhood: my mother had a British passport, her father was a sailor who would bring home gifts, she once talked about her family needing to escape India to go back to Hong Kong; my father had a ‘difficult’ childhood. These memories allowed me to begin questioning and speculating: Did my father spend his entire childhood in India? Did his family stay during and after the Sino-Indian war? How did my mother meet my father if she was living in Hong Kong? Did my mother also spend time in India? Could I make up a fake first date for them in my poem? Was it disingenuous to do so?

I found myself attempting to fill in the blanks of what I knew about my family history. Memory is famously unreliable, and my memories of what my mother did share with me in my childhood might be wildly inaccurate. What is the difference between truth and accuracy? How much do the details matter? My parents may never have even had a traditional first date, not the way I ask readers to imagine it in my poem. I ask the reader to imagine a whole host of probabilities whose details I myself don’t know: what it might have been like for my grandmother living through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the subsequent British re-establishment; the realities of being Chinese in India during the Sino-Indian War; my parents’ emigration and their sense of unbelonging in Canada. These imaginaries float between fact and speculation, uncorroborated stories pieced together from bits and pieces that approximate and become a personal history. They’re held together with research, memory, and imagination. What I initially considered controversial – imagination – serves its purpose in revealing an emotional truth. The poem, then, is an imagined family history that may or may not be accurate, studded with interruptions from the history of British colonisation and its lasting effects.

That said, I still worry about the accuracy of details, what my family might think when or if they read my poem, whether they might get caught up in the inaccuracy of the details, whether the emotional truth I am presenting rings true for them in the way it does for me. Whether that same truth will still resonate with me years down the line. As I worry, it occurs to me there are multiple definitions of worry: there is the commonly understood meaning of worry as related to anxiety, but there is also the way worry is used as a verb to describe repeatedly touching or disturbing something. A dog might worry at a bone, or a child might worry the edges of a blanket while falling asleep. While I write, I worry about the impacts of my imagined details while also worrying at the details – changing the location of a first date from a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong to a street vendor in India to something else entirely until the scene feels right. Maybe this worry is part and parcel of writing what I don’t know: doing my best to present an emotional truth while holding onto uncertainty, worrying the details, contemplating their fuzzy edges, and hoping what emerges rings true.

The post Shadow Histories: Writing What You Don’t Know appeared first on English PEN.

It resembles a border crossing rather than a regular control point. A large, semi-secluded zone has been erected from concrete blocks and barbed wire. Within this zone, there are tracks like those you encounter at border crossings. They have even labelled them: Track 1-Cabin, Track 2-Cabin, Track 3-Cabin, Track 4-Cabin. At the entrance to the zone, female and male police officers first carry out a body search. Then our identity cards are collected for a criminal and administrative record check through GBT, the General Information Gathering System. Fifteen minutes later, our identity cards are returned and we enter the zone, pass through the tracks and the concrete blocks, and finally exit. It is at this precise point that I notice a fabric banner hanging across the entrance to the city: ‘Şırnak is a Turkish province.’

I begin to walk uphill towards the city centre. Soon, I meet up with a friend, a local. We pass through demolished neighbourhoods. Şırnak is a city I know very well, but I cannot see a single street, park or building I recognise. A while later, there is only emptiness left around me – a flat emptiness that at its very end meets the grey sky. I am walking in emptiness. Then I ask my friend, ‘What about the marketplace? Where is the marketplace?’ ‘This vacant spot, here, this is it,’ she responds. ‘This is exactly where the marketplace was.’ I am horrified. I collapse onto a rock on the ground. The tears I have managed to hold back since the morning begin to flow. ‘Gone! Gone!’ I cry. “Şırnak is gone!’

Şırnak was only one of many Kurdish cities destroyed during the curfews and clashes of 2015 and 2016. The city has – or perhaps I should say had – twelve neighbourhoods, of which eight were completely destroyed. Şırnak, as we once knew it, was no more. The same can be said for Sur, Nusaybin, Yüksekova, Cizre and Silopi. Ancient Kurdish towns and cities, centuries, even millennia old, destroyed within the space of a few months. We were no more.

This was not only a physical destruction. After August 2015, Kurds, as a people, were erased from many fields of social life in Turkey – from local administrations and civil society to culture and arts. The Kurdish issue suddenly became ‘an issue of terrorism.’ We, writers and human rights defenders who made known the rights violations taking place in the area, were ‘supporters of terrorism.’ Kurdish politicians and activists were ‘members of a terrorist organisation.’ We had gone back 40 years. Kurds no longer existed; instead, there were people who, when they walked on snow, made the sound ‘kart-kurt.’ There was no Kurdish issue; there was a terrorism issue. A place called Kurdistan had never existed. Not only mainstream media, but many others, from publishing houses to art galleries and theatres, began to censor Kurds and work related to the Kurdish issue. Suddenly, they acted as if a people that form a quarter of Turkey’s population – 20 million people, 20 million citizens – had disappeared. As if they had been cast into a dark well. Life went on, as if the curfews didn’t exist, as if there was no destruction and violence in the Kurdish provinces, as if fires weren’t raging across Kurdish land, as if people weren’t dying every day.

Once upon a time, when the Kurds did exist

Of course, this was not our first ‘disappearance.’ According to the ups and downs of the state’s Kurdish policy over the past century, we have sometimes existed, and sometimes we haven’t.

In the late 80s and in the 90s, we did not exist. One of the first sentences we heard from our teachers at school was ‘There are no Kurds, they are all simply mountain Turks.’ And we, too, after all, wanted to be ‘Turkish and happy’ as our Oath proclaimed, mandatorily read out and repeated every single day at schools across the country before lessons started.

Thus, Kenan Evren, the general who came to power with the 12 September 1980 military coup d’état and was President throughout my childhood years, declared from our single-channel TVs: ‘There is no such thing as a Kurd. This word is in actual fact a concept that derives from the sounds of “kart, kurt” which our people in the southeast make when they walk across the snow on the ground.’ We were children then, and we listened to the sounds we made as we walked on snow, and we tried our best not to make those ‘kart, kurt’ sounds. Tansu Çiller, a Prime Minister in the 90s, confirmed our non-existence, and often said on TV ‘There are no Kurds, there are terrorists.’

In any case, all along, we ‘terrorists’ were being physically destroyed. Our homes and neighbourhoods were emptying rapidly. Young Kurds were taking to the mountains in large numbers, and every day our number was on the decline. Some of us died in murders committed by ‘unknown assailants.’

After a lengthy period for us in limbo, Erdoğan, who came to power in the early 2000s, acknowledged our existence and called us his ‘Kurdish brothers and sisters.’ We were surprised: out of the blue, we existed again. The official Kurdish TV channel TRT Şeş was launched with a grand ceremony, departments of Kurdish language were opened at universities, and we regained the banned village and street names that had been changed in the 90s. Turks and Kurds together, we danced the halay, accompanied by Kurdish music. Hadn’t we been brothers and sisters for centuries, after all?

That brotherhood and sisterhood didn’t last long. When the peace process abruptly ended in July 2015, the time of non-existence began for us once again. Erdoğan began by announcing that ‘There is no Kurdish issue,’ adding ‘It would be discrimination to use the phrase “Kurdish issue”.’ Eventually he, too, ended up declaring, ‘There is no Kurdish issue, there is a terrorism issue.’

The war waged by kayyıms on Kurdish language and culture

Once the state decides you do not exist, it naturally has certain implications for your life in all its aspects.

On the morning of 11 September 2016, on the eve of a religious holiday, a new word entered our vocabulary: kayyım. Kurdish mayors were sent to prison, and the appointment of the first kayyıms – essentially unelected government officials replacing elected officials, – began. On 11 September 2016, kayyıms were appointed to two provincial municipalities and 25 district municipalities, and within a matter of a few months, kayyıms were in charge of 95 of the 102 municipalities won by representatives of the Kurdish movement in local elections.

Once the kayyıms were appointed, they set about destroying all that belonged to the Kurds. They began by demolishing symbols and monuments of Kurdish culture and history. From Orhan Doğan to Ehmedê Xanî, from Roboski to Uğur Kaymaz, all the sculptures and monuments in the region associated with Kurdish culture, or which referred to massacres committed by the state, were demolished. Then it was time, once again, to change the names of our main streets and side streets. All Kurdish names, including those given to parks, were replaced with Turkish names. Women’s centres were closed, cultural centres were closed, all that we were proud of in our cities was destroyed in a few months. Theatres, multilingual nurseries, libraries, music academies – all institutions that sought to keep Kurdish culture alive – were shut down. At the local elections held on 31 March 2019, the Peoples’ Democratic Party HDP once again won 69 municipalities, including three metropolitan municipalities. A few months later, kayyıms were appointed in Kurdish provinces and the newly elected mayors were sent to prison. The votes of millions of Kurds were ignored. Those kayyıms are still in office today.

This non-existence is reflected in our language, in our land, in everything about the Kurds. A piece of land, Kurdistan as a geographical territory, was made to disappear, just like the Kurds. The word Kurdistan, used in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) without causing any controversy during the peace process, was banned once the process was shelved. When the word was used, it was not taken down in parliamentary minutes and instead recorded as ‘X’. Members of parliament who used the word faced disciplinary investigations. Erdoğan, who in his speeches during the peace process had acknowledged the ‘existence of Kurdistan,’ now did not hold back from regularly telling Kurds who criticised him to ‘clear off to Kurdistan.’ In March 2019, in a speech he made in Gündoğan, he addressed HDP Co-chairperson Sezai Temelli with the words, ‘There is no Kurdistan here. If you are so desperate, there’s one in the north of Iraq. Clear off there.’

The situation is no different in parliament. Right after the end of the peace process, in November 2015, Leyla Zana’s speech in parliament was X’d. Since that day, no Kurdish has been allowed into parliamentary minutes. The mother tongue of at least 20 million citizens has become a language that gets X’d in the parliament that is supposed to represent those citizens.

From the days in the 40s, when Musa Anter was beaten up for whistling in Kurdish, we have arrived at the present day, when Dicle University students are jailed and prosecuted for precisely the same offence. From the 90s, when the great singer Ahmet Kaya was physically attacked for stating at a music awards ceremony that he planned to record a song in Kurdish, we arrive at the present day, when wedding-hall singers are detained for singing in Kurdish. In the last decade, Kurdish-language schools, Kurdish-language newspapers and magazines, Kurdish-language nurseries and Kurdish-language institutes at universities have all been closed. It is the 1940s all over again.

The people of this ‘unknown language’ have no value in public policies and public services either, of course. Today, the Ministry of Health publishes its brochures in six languages besides Turkish to provide better services. Those languages are French, Arabic, English, Russian, German and Persian. No services are provided in the language of its Kurdish citizens that form at least a quarter of the country’s population. In a similar manner, the Women’s Emergency Support App (KADES) of the General Directorate of Security provides services in six languages but not Kurdish. This is how the directorate introduces its KADES app on their official web site: ‘In six languages, only a single click away, in support of women.’ Even in an application aimed at protecting the safety of and preventing violence against women, there is no Kurdish, the mother tongue of citizens that form around a quarter of this country’s population.

We Kurds have not existed in the brochures of the Ministry of Health, in the announcements made on aeroplanes, in services provided at court houses. But it goes beyond that: we seem not to exist at all. Our language does not exist, our culture does not exist, our songs do not exist, our holidays do not exist, our elected officials do not exist. We Kurds don’t even exist in that single click offered by the app of the General Directorate of Security. And to be frank, it is painful to know all this.

Now, in the last few months, a new process has begun between the state and the PKK. The state calls it the process ‘Turkey without terror,’ while we Kurds prefer to call it the ‘peace process.’ Following the PKK’s decision to lay down arms and dissolve itself, we Kurds expect the state to take steps towards democratisation and, most significantly, the recognition of our existence, language and culture, with protection provided through constitutional guarantee. To be frank, we are tired, after a century of struggle between existence and non-existence. But we wish, at least, to leave our children a future where they won’t have to struggle to prove that they exist.

Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

Despite the policies of non-existence that have continued for the past 100 years, the fact is: we do not suddenly disappear when the state claims we do not exist. When our language is banned, we try other ways to keep it alive. When our political parties are closed, we open new ones, and choose new names for them, with acronyms formed of new combinations of letters. When our songs are banned, we whistle them. When our holidays are banned, we light our traditional Newroz fires within the safety of our gardens, or a secluded corner of our neighbourhoods. When our culture is prohibited, we become dengbejs, folk singers who keep alive Kurdish stories old and new, and we transmit our culture from one generation to the next through kilams, our songs that tell our stories. When our homes are burned down, when our villages are forcibly evacuated, we stubbornly and persistently – and sometimes despite knowing that our homes may be razed to the ground over and over again – return to our villages, and rebuild. When our trees and forests are burned, we feed the roots that remain, water them, strive to make them grow again. When our towns are levelled to the ground, we weave back their texture from scratch, knot by knot. It takes years, it takes decades, sometimes even a century. But we do not give up on ourselves, our language, our culture, our roots.

Although the Kurdish policy of the state has varied over the past century, in a sense, there has been continuity on the Kurdish side. In the face of all these policies of oppression and intimidation, Kurds continue to sing their songs, celebrate Newroz, dance the halay and speak their languages. Although there have been various challenges that have forced them to withdraw and regroup, the Kurdish people have never forsaken their identity, language and culture. The type of struggle may vary, but their demands do not. Those demands have been there for a century. The Kurdish people won’t step back from their demands, because without the fulfilment of those demands life will not be worth living.

It doesn’t matter within which country’s borders they live. The story of the Kurds has remained unchanged for the past century. This is a story that has been kneaded with blood, persecution, pain and struggle. A century-long denial continues. Yet neither the Kurdish issue nor the Kurds disappear simply by saying ‘they don’t exist.’

For Kurds, this is a matter of existence.

Let me end this piece with a phrase often used by Kurds:

Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

They say ‘you don’t exist’. We say, ‘we exist!’

This phrase is, I guess, the summary of the past century for us Kurds.

The post Kurdishness: A Matter of Existence and Non-Existence appeared first on English PEN.

It feels like we’re entering an epoch of apocalypses, but so few of us have the energy left to do anything about it. How do you combat engineered moral apathy on such a scale? From which wells can we draw to ignite our collective creative energies? How can we hope to weather what comes?

I don’t know, nor do I think the answer is simple. But as the days and weeks lap into one another, a constant that has helped dispel some of my hopelessness and remind me of art as something other than escape has been Hip-Hop. What we know today as Hip-hop was birthed from a creolised synthesis of different diasporic cultures mixing in the heart of the Bronx, conceived as an expressive tool to give voice to the creativity, love, and anger of the residents of one of New York’s most impoverished boroughs. Hip-hop emerged from the harshest of conditions to consecrate itself as a precious platform for stories of love and histories of rebellion.

Genres analogous to Hip-hop have always been present in my life, with Reggae, Dub, Jazz, and Soul featuring as background music to memories of weekends cleaning the house or family dinners around the table. I see my love for Hip-Hop as a natural evolution from the habitus that was being built around me. The first Hip-hop album I remember hearing was College Dropout by Kanye West in 2005. My older brothers were able to sneak the CD away from my Dad when he wasn’t looking, and in our bedrooms we’d huddle around a busted CD player and listen to a young man from Chicago wax lyrical about his troubled life and hunger for ambition. I didn’t quite understand what I was hearing at the time, yet there I was, a 5-year-old walking around the house rapping “I’ve been working this grave-shift And I ain’t made shit/ I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly”. What I knew at the time about the perils of retail labour and low wages was next to nil, but there was something both fantastical and familiar about the worlds contained within those records. It was only when I got older that I began to fully grasp the financial struggles that coloured my early years, making me feel things at the time that I couldn’t explain. Perhaps that’s why I felt an affinity to the music; it was offering words and insights to help me better situate my own experience in histories and systems so much bigger than me.

From Blues to Gospel to Negro Spirituals, Hip-Hop follows in a long line of Black musical traditions which oppressed peoples have used  to envision alterities and fantasise better futures. The throughline between the music I grew up with and the music of my parents is that it was always more than artistic expression, it was a portal into a Black interiority that contained love, misery, and plans for escape and salvation. Hip-Hop is just one of the newer sonic iterations of what Black people across the diaspora have done since surviving their abduction from Africa and the harrowing middle passage.

Although the Kanye of today is a gross and tragic shell of his former self, I think the essence of Hip-Hop can most aptly be captured in that one bar of his in Gorgeous:‘Is Hip-Hop just a euphemism for a new religion? / The soul music of the slaves that the youth was missing.’ For me, there is something integral in this short verse – in how it connects Hip-Hop’s ties to the past and illustrates the link between the music of people who were grappling with their own apocalypses – and the music of today. It would be remiss to ignore the context of chattel slavery that made the sonics of enslaved people so urgent and complex; there are, of course, stark differences between the liberties we find ourselves afforded in relation to those before us. But the world in which we find ourselves comes with its own challenges. So when faced with forces seemingly beyond our control, looking back to when a group of people suffered an apocalyptic event can provide perspective to look at the tools they used to help them survive. The music of our past – and by extension art – has been used to communicate and contain powerful messages, evoking ideas of hope, while also having hidden messages codified in them to aid in escape and community building. Those same mechanics were not lost in time but trickled down and manifested themselves in the melodies and rhymes of some of my favourite MCs. From Mos Def’s ‘Umi Says’ to Noname’s ‘Rainforest’, to Denzel Curry’s ‘Walkin’ – Hip-Hop’s more radical essence has somewhat endured.

Yet, as is the case with many other counter cultural forms, over time, it has become subsumed in a capitalist model of production that has championed consumerism over struggle, making hyper-visible braggadocio and machismo in some of the genre’s biggest stars of today (think Drake pushing 40 and still rapping about how many women he’s slept with and how much money he has). Despite this, the genre is still very diverse and is more than the sum of its parts, with artists still managing to retain some essence of what made the genre so impactful to me as a child. Some of my first pieces of writing were 16 bars I’d try to frantically write out to rap over random type beats on YouTube, or to have freestyle battles with my brothers and cousins and friends. It was the first form of poetry that made sense to me, when all other forms I encountered in the Western cannon made me see myself in the third person, through the eyes of some European writer I was told I had to respect. Beyond seeing the value of Hip-Hop as an artform born from strife, I don’t have to listen to a song delivering some grandiose political treatise for me to consider it radical. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is arm someone with a framework to regulate and understand themselves when they feel like everything else around them doesn’t make sense. For me, the Hip-Hop album that would do that was Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

I was 15 when I first heard To Pimp a Butterfly and had been following Kendrick’s journey since Section 80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city, but nothing could have prepared me for the beautiful chaos this album delivered. The album wears its influences on it sleeve, with elements of Jazz and Funk all over the album, colliding to illustrate the joy, pain, and contradictions endemic in Black America (and across the diaspora). The album is aspirational in what it attempts to strive towards, namely a reclamation of the humanity Kendrick feels has been stripped away from him and other Black Americans having grown up under carceral logics that negate their self-confidence and modes of expression. The album endeavours to be a wake-up call to love yourself despite the ways the world has hurt you. It was no surprise to me then that when the uprisings of 2020 began, and the air was electrified by a chorus of shouts demanding the deconstruction of systems of oppression, songs like Kendrick Lamar’s Alright were playing at protests.

Alright encapsulates the undulating hope one must have to imagine a world beyond the pain you might be experiencing. The track’s opening lines (also an interpolation of a speech from Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple) demand your attention by focussing on the mortal danger of life under the intersecting systems of racism and poverty, and how these systems make marginalised people combatants in games we never asked to play. As the song continues, it reaches its hook and culminates in the refrain ‘We go’n be alright’. It’s these few lines that you could hear often repeated at different protests, from the time of the songs release up until the uprisings of 2020 and today. The song borrows from the repetitive nature integral in the spirituals of the past in how its mantra-like chants engage audiences in a rhythm you can hold onto that matches your movement as you march along with it. I think songs like ‘Alright’ functionally and thematically hit that same resonance as the music from which they descend: they uplift and inspire us to resist the overbearing assaults on our daily lives and liberties.

Kendrick commented on the song in an interview with NPR some years ago, “Four hundred years ago, as slaves, we prayed and sung joyful songs to keep our heads level-headed with what was going on… Four hundred years later, we still need that music to heal. And I think that Alright is definitely one of those records that makes you feel good no matter what the times are.” While Hip-Hop can encode in its lyrics a belief that things can change, and that there is something better waiting for you beyond the hell you might be experiencing, it can also offer glimpses into much bleaker realities. Realities that assert that our world is beyond saving, that the damage is done, that – to borrow from one of Public Enemy’s lyrics – ‘Armageddon, it been in effect.’

I was 17 when I first heard Kendrick’s next album, and the world was emerging into a different place for me. I was entering my last few years of secondary school and beginning to question what it was I wanted to do with my life. I was lost and perhaps yearning for that same ecstatic feeling I was used to getting when a new Kendrick album came out. So, I pressed play, and then my optimism fell apart.

In DAMN, Kendrick takes a decidedly darker approach, with his machinations taking on dystopic tones. The world reflected in it is steeped in pain, a world Kendrick feels is out of control and out of sync with the hopes and dreams he once had. There doesn’t seem to be a way he believes we can remain like this. There is no tomorrow. These thematic threads appear in songs like FEAR, where he recounts instances of living closely with death, doubt and fear, opening the song with a monotone mantra that sluggishly spills his woes.

Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle
Why God, why God do I gotta bleed?
Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet
Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Earth is no more, won’t you burn this muh’fucka?

It’s easy to see where his cynicism may have sprouted from. In the year before this album’s release, Black Lives Matter, as a movement and protest, gained significant traction in the wake of the brutal executions of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. In conjunction with his growing rise to rap stardom and fans’ expectations of his political responsibility and other personal demons, DAMN culminates in a striking repudiation that the world as we know it can’t be saved.

It’s hard to salvage belief in a world you have become acquainted with through violence, and even harder to think it can be saved. Some Hip-Hop artists recognise this and continue a tradition of earthly rejection used by their ancestors, with folk music and Negro Spirituals possessing thematic similarities in how they can dismiss our material world in search of something else. Those who have abandoned notions of the world’s salvation are not inherently negative or naïve but seek to reemerge from the social relations that bind them into something new.

It’s been eight years since DAMN came out, yet we still find ourselves surrounded by images of death and state violence – continually enduring small daily traumas and sometimes feeling like it will not get better. Death by a thousand cuts. As artists and creatives living in an age in which we are encouraged to dismiss critical analysis as wasteful and see art as pure entertainment and escape, tracing the threads of Hip-Hop, from the past to the present, has helped me to continue seeing art as a weapon capable of arming you with a means to communicate and inspire. Hip-hop has reminded me that this latest iteration of terror only follows in a long line of others that our ancestors have fought in many forms.

In a video on the rap artist MAVI, writer Tosin Balogun discussed hip-hop and its place in times of crisis:

Creating art out of suffering is a haunting, if not a futile endeavour. Deep down, we must know we can’t be saved by colours on a canvas or words on a page. We must know we are chasing a sun that will never set, yet, we are unable to stop. We write and we sing, and we draw and every momentary reprieve from the gaping maw of despair, we attribute to our creativity. The truth is art can’t save the world. Art can only make the world look at itself.

Hip-Hop itself will not save me or you. But I believe art in times of crisis to be the connective tissue that binds us and helps us understand ourselves. I still wake up every day not knowing the exact right way to help things get better. Or I feel disheartened, like I’m not doing enough. The answers to my fears are mine to wrestle with, but the important thing is that I surround myself with things that inspire me to keep going. It is not the song that’s important, but the feeling it’s left me with. It is what I choose to do after I take the headphones off. The apocalypse is here, but it has been with us for some time now, and what lies beyond capitalism is a mystery to me. But what I know for certain is that I don’t want to be dispossessed of my ability to try and imagine something different.

The post Hip-Hop & the Apocalypse appeared first on English PEN.

How many generations does it take for a culture to become native? For the tattoos of names and labels to set in blood, for postures to solidify in bones? By whose volition do the branches of trees become tresses: poets, and dreamers, who claim the language of the stars. The language of this poetry is often luxurious, but the poetry itself is not a luxury. In fact, to truly appreciate it, you’d have to have let every object, everything go, (at least once), as Bulleh Shah or Ghulam Farid, two Panjabi mystics, have said.

I’m addressing the notion of an attachment to one’s native or ethnic culture. A culture itself, in spite of its perceived nativity, was also once born and invented. Is it my perceived nativity of Panjabi folk music that calls me to it? Is it something in the blood and the bones?

Summer 2023 in Manchester. I’m at my friend Ràjveer’s house, and we’re celebrating his dad’s birthday by having a mehfil. I’m standing by a laptop with my friend – Spotify open – and he tells me ‘I’ve got a song for you.’ He selects the Punjabi Mehfil Vol. 1 album, plays Ghulam Ali and Afshan’s ‘Methoon Peeche Kyoon’, which isn’t the actual name of the song. ‘These recordings are a mess’, he tells me. That song becomes my most played song of the year.

How did this happen? Before 2023, my Spotify Wrapped would usually be a United Nations meeting of genres; dominated primarily by US rap. In 2024, four of my top five most-listened-to songs were Panjabi folk songs, and they had an average length of 17 minutes and 58 seconds.

One of my top songs was ‘Janda Hoya Das Na Gaya…’ by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was one of the most popular South Asian musicians, chiefly a proponent of qawwali music, but also of other religious-musical traditions in the region, as well as Panjabi folk music. In the chorus, Nusrat sings:

Janda hoya das na gaya
chitthi keri watan wal paava.
(He left without telling me where he was going
to which homeland should I send my letter?)

Spotify was just one plot in the digital garden I was cultivating. I have a flowing saved folder on Instagram, growing fast and wide, alongside a TikTok bank and YouTube playlists for more unsung varieties. The YouTube algorithm began recommending songs to me with less than 100 views, many of which would then enter my playlists. I brought together Panjabi geets, qawwalis, shabads, bhajans, naats and filmi songs. I found live stage recordings with camera setups, as well as simple recordings of singers out in nature or in their homes. Naturally, each of these expressions have a different flavour. The stage recordings are usually more planned and grandiose, sometimes lasting for over forty minutes. The recordings from folk singers out in nature, while generally much shorter, are the most memorable for me. They have simultaneously the worst and best video quality; the smallest in pixels, but greatest in heart.

In one of my favourite videos, Sain Bodhi Shah sings verses from one of the most popular and culturally significant poems, Heer. Heer was born in the 18th century, written by poet and mystic Waris Shah. The poem breathes Panjabi culture: the ploughed land, the brazen passion, the floaty faced jogis, the juggernaut hearts. The poem is, in an outward sense, a tragic love story between the characters Heer and Ranjha. Waris Shah, in a move atypical of his time, used the colloquial language of the people to write his story; choosing not to write in respected languages which had an existing poetic reputation such as Farsi. Shah’s story presents a female lead character who breathes with agency, who raises her voice as if it is her birthright. The story and its characters remain symbols of courage today, reinvigorating spirituality in people and reminding them of the beauty and dignity in their culture, the crimson love in their blood.

As a child of diaspora, it might be redundant to say I grew up dealing with the echoes of another world; sometimes harnessing them, sometimes drowning them out. Music and poetry are so integral to Panjabi culture, where lifetimes of folk songs and annals of poems are widely bestowed the honour of memorisation. Just the evocation of the first beat of a song or poem will inspire a passionate response from many a Panjabi – a turning and raising of the hand, a glowing smile and a headshake, and any combination of ‘aahaa!’, ‘wah!’, ‘Allah!’, ‘Waheguru!’ and ‘kya baat hai!’.

There’s something in the English terms ‘folk song’ or ‘folk music’ that, to me, evoke the archaic or the unpopular. Until very recently, I would have said there’s a stark contrast in the reality of these terms and music in the Panjabi language – but with the growing popularity of musicians such as Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon, you now might have to specify that you mean ‘the classics’ when you want to tell someone you’re into Panjabi folk music. The likes of Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon have found an international audience which includes non-Panjabi speakers, while the audience of the folk music remains predominantly limited to Panjabi speakers.

Panjabi poems and folk songs can perhaps be characterised by their cutting, undressing honesty – something which, in the past, caused anger to be levelled at writers and singers. Bulleh Shah wrote of delicate and beaming divine connection, yet he criticised the funnels of organised religions that were widely practiced in his time. He writes:

Panj veylay lok, aashiq har veylay
Lok maseethi, aashiq qadma vich.
(Five times, for the people (referring to prayer); the aashiq, all the time.
The people, in the mosque, the aashiq in their footsteps.)

Bulleh Shah challenges the limitation of prayer to a place of worship, suggesting that prayer should be something embodied. The aashiq is one who embodies ishq, a divine, transcendental love, which exists beyond human divisions such as race and religion. Bulleh Shah was chastised in his time for his beliefs by those whose mono-religious edifices could not contain such multiplicity; such horizon-shattering love. His poems have been famously sung by Abida Parveen, who has breathed new life into Bulleh’s poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope to see her perform live one day.

While the mehfil in the summer of 2023 was a defining moment, an earlier, equally important moment took place in 2020. I came across a YouTube channel called The Dream Journey, which records live folk music performances across Pakistan. The most popular videos on the channel feature English subtitles – perfect for modern engagement, or for those of us in the diaspora who might not completely understand their mother tongue,I was already writing at that time and was drawn to writing through a perennial or spiritual lens – one that could, as well as satisfy my metaphysical longing, encompass the two cultures I inhabited.

Na fanaa meri, na baqaa meri
(I can claim neither impermanence nor infinite existence)

These words, written by Kabir Das, were sung on the channel by Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale. The video features a whole qawwal party singing together, which included both the young and the old. As a 20-year-old, the majority of my age mates weren’t interested in traditional music and metaphysical topics like that. I’d sometimes feel internally that I was too young to be thinking about all this so deeply, but seeing children in this video, who in some moments sang louder than the lead vocalists without mics, I felt affirmed.

Still, internally, there lingered a feeling that all of this was too serious, and this was not normal early-20’s-occupation. It could be said that this notion of age and time is a Western one, and to a great degree I feel it is. But truthfully, I also faced the surprise of family and peers, who saw me getting into this music and poetry that was “before my time” and doing so “before” the time I was supposedly ready to. Societally, an association has been made between asceticism and age, as well as age with knowledge and wisdom. But I couldn’t rest with this notion.

One of my top songs on Spotify in 2024 was 38:18 minutes long. I’m trying to think of juxtapositional equivalents to short and long songs: A speedboat ride and an excavation, A TV episode and a film. Most of these longer songs are live recordings, and they feature the additions of audience sounds and musical mistakes, which wouldn’t be found in a studio recording. In a world where commitment and an attention span are often deemed hard to come by, or worse,relics of a bygone era,there’s something radical and humbling about engaging with music in this way. More satiating.

What we choose to dedicate our free time to are things we love and care for, right? I would be remiss not to mention that the spirituality of the music, or its appeal to my sense of diasporic dislocation, were not strong enough to take so much of my time and attention. It’s not just the song, it’s the life it is attached to; of the tears I have given to this music, most have been for love. For romantic, platonic, familial, and humanist love. Baba Farid writes:

Kaga sab tan khaiyo, mera chun chun khaiyo maas
do naina mat khaiyo, mohe piya milan ki aas
(O crow, eat all of my body, chew and chew at my flesh, but don’t eat my two eyes, for I have hope of meeting my beloved.)

Many Panjabi folk songs are about heartbreak and separation, and some of the resolutions in the lyrics are soothing and transcendental (I was just trying to get over my ex! I wasn’t trying to transcend my physical body!)

Tears, also, for a vision of cultural renaissance: the wearing of colours that are seldom worn anymore, the lonely feathers of forgotten, colourful birds. How beautiful to be in their lineage, the mystics, the criminals of conscience; where it is not the equivalence of blood that joins, it’s the equivalence of something else. My friend Ràjveer challenged my idea that for the song to travel, it must live in the bones. ‘If this were true,’ he said, ‘the music would die with people.’ He instead posited the spiritual and metaphysical as a carrier of these songs and stories. If the stirring of this music is afforded only to those who are in the regional lineage of its creators, how humanist is it – how truly transcendental is its love?

Whatever the answer, there’s something in the music that sends jolts of frenzy to my body today, with the faces of an uncanny, reassuring resonance. Jubilant colours can be, will be, worn again, and there’ll always be people of integrity in every generation.

This music should be lived in, then lived out.
Bone should connect to fingertip, blood to your tears.
What will I do with my hands?

Don’t blaspheme the words of poets with their echoes.
Don’t regard the listeners by the words they collected.
Analyse pisiform bones instead.
Observe the echoes of their veins.

The post To Which Homeland Should I Send My Letter? appeared first on English PEN.

RAPHAEL CORMACK: I have two answers to this question. The first one is the simple one. My first book, Midnight in Cairo, was a history of the 1920s and 1930s entertainment industry in Egypt’s capital. As I was doing research for that project, I reasonably frequently came across references to stage hypnotists and spiritualists who appeared on Cairo’s cabaret stages alongside some of the biggest musical stars of that era. I started to ask myself what they were doing on these bills and what audiences made of them. That soon led me towards Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh but it also led me towards many others like them – Dr Salomon Bey the hypnotist, and other fakirs like Rahman Bey and Hamid Bey. It was a whole scene that has now been almost entirely forgotten.

The second answer is more complicated. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can see the 1920s and 1930s as global decades or, at the very least, write the Middle East into the standard histories of the period. That is something I was trying to do by writing about the entertainment scene in Egypt, which was globally connected. I saw an opportunity to do this with the occult too. If you read anything about the early twentieth century, it doesn’t take long before you come across some manifestation of the occult, whether it’s theosophy, spiritualism, hypnotism or another mysterious art. Not only was it very popular, it seems to me to capture something of the spirit of the age: irrationality, hope, post-traumatic anxiety, and curiosity. Again, I saw a chance here in the characters of people like Dr Dahesh to write the Middle East back into the story of the interwar period.

Neither of them were strictly speaking doctors, in the conventional sense of the word. But they used that title with all seriousness, and used spectacle and mysterious methods to convince a large section of their public that they had superpowers. Why do you feel that, 100 years ago, as you feel now, people in fear of drastic historical changes and the arrival of a new unpredictable era wanted strong men in politics and men who claimed supra-scientific or supernatural powers in private?

There is an uncomfortable connection between these holy men and the strongmen dictators of the period. When I started this book, I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the occult and I still do (to an extent). I was drawn to its desire to create a new world, its rejection of the corruptions of the material world, and also, to be totally honest, its fun and charismatic characters. But the more I researched the harder it was to ignore the links to various kinds of fascism. These links were rarely direct (neither Tahra Bey nor Dr Dahesh were fascists – nor were they really involved in any kind of politics at all). Still, the indirect connections were very strong. Not only were there similarities between the way that these holy men held their followers in their sway and the way that the strong men like Hitler and Mussolini inspired such devotion, but also the rejection of bourgeois rationalism and the appeal to a great new world coming were eerily alike. Something about the occult seems fundamentally non-egalitarian, despite its frequent claims to promote the equality of all humanity. As Anna Della Subin has said, talking about the same period, ‘occultism, the realm of hidden, elite mysteries, seemed to contradict the spirit of democracy.’ If one person or a small group of people can claim special access to the world beyond the veil, a hierarchy necessarily emerges. It’s only a few steps away from dictatorship.

Tahra Bey: an Armenian pretending to be an Egyptian Fakir in Paris and the maternal cousin of Charles Aznavour. Is this how a refugee one century ago found a way to fame and success in the West?

Tahra Bey’s Armenian-ness is clearly a key part of his story. For those who have not read the book, Tahra Bey came to Europe in the mid-1920s, claiming to be an ‘Egyptian fakir’ and performing various miraculous feats which baffled the scientific establishment. He could seemingly control his body with the power of his mind, changing his heart rate at will, piercing his flesh without feeling pain, and putting his body into a death-like state during which he would be buried alive in front of a live audience. All of these things astounded audiences, who were also were drawn by his exotic garb (flowing white robes and headdress) and his claims to be a fakir descended from a long line of fakirs. These stories, though, were all false. He was an Armenian from Istanbul, born Krikor Kalfayan.

As I was writing this book (and partly helped by the discussion after a talk I gave on the subject at the Moon Station in Athens) it became clearer and clearer to me that Tahra Bey’s identity as an Armenian refugee was crucial to understanding his persona. In Europe at the time Armenians faced both discrimination and suspicion. I interpret his construction of the mysterious Eastern persona as an attempt to style himself as an exotic and interesting outsider, rather than a suspect refugee as many Armenians in Europe were seen. Likewise, his whole act – his imperviousness to pain, his conquest of death – could pretty easily be read as a response to the traumas of the Armenian genocide. Although Tahra Bey himself does not seem to have personally witnessed violence, he would undoubtedly have heard stories and many of his relatives would have perished in the 1910s.

I think the period you chose is an extraordinary period of history, and I find it fascinating you chose to explore it through Dr Tahra Bey: ‘Tahra Bey born in Istanbul . . . travelled across Europe out of the ruins of the Eastern Mediterranean until he reached France as a refugee in 1925. In Paris, advertising himself as an “Egyptian fakir” from a long line of mystics, his ability to manipulate his physical body in inexplicable ways using the power of his mind made him a summer sensation. . . . Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit, Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.’

Do you feel that there was something that the East possessed which audiences in the West craved, and which Tahra Bey delivered for them in the character of a Fakir? What was it? 

What we learn from Tahra Bey is that people in the West were obsessed with the idea that they could be saved by Eastern philosophies but that they really only wanted a simulacrum of the East not its reality. The craze for Eastern wisdom in the 1920s was not informed by true curiosity about the long traditions of mysticism from across Asia and North Africa. In fact, many people were often confused as to whether Tahra Bey was Egyptian, Indian, or something else entirely. The embrace of the East was largely just a rejection of the West. It was based on very little knowledge and so many people were fooled by anyone who came along dressed in long robes. A few people did eventually embrace the spiritual traditions of other cultures, including Sufism, and learn about them seriously. But these people were few and far between.

In the case of Dr Dahesh, your second subject, a Palestinian who moved to Beirut after the formation of Israel and used western science as a cloak and justification for his ‘magic’, soon becoming a celebrity in Beiruti high society, do you think that he is in a way a mirror image of Tahra Bey? Instead of dressing in Eastern robes, he wore western suits; instead of talking about Ancient powers and techniques, he claimed ‘Western Science’ as his source of extraordinary power.

Dr Dahesh is the centrepiece of the second part of the book and his story guides that narrative. I use his story to write the Middle East back into the history of the modern occult – not as an exotic, mystical fantasy, but as a real place with real people in it.

Dr Dahesh also fits into the narrative nicely because he first appeared on stage in 1929 doing an act that was clearly inspired by Tahra Bey and his fakirism. Dahesh would pierce his flesh without feeling pain and bury himself alive just as Tahra Bey had done in Paris. However, instead of dressing in long white robes and headdress like an exotic Rudolf Valentino-style Sheikh, he put on the garb of Western modernity. Soon he began to talk of hypnotism and spiritualism instead of fakirism, explaining that this new science could unlock many secrets. He was not the only one, either. Many hypnotist spiritualists were active at the same time, some more famous than Dr Dahesh and some less so.

Unlike these other hypnotist-spiritualists though, Dr Dahesh went on to form his own religious movement. People who were stunned by his miraculous abilities – ranging from materialising large objects out of thin air to reading their minds – were drawn to the complex metaphysical doctrines he espoused and were inspired by his calls to unite all religions under the banner of Daheshism.

One obvious interpretation of all of this would be the one you proposed: that in the ‘East’, ‘Western science’ was playing the same exotic role in the public imagination that Tahra Bey’s mysterious ‘Eastern’ doctrine of fakirism did in Europe; that they are mirror images of each other. There is much to be said for this interpretation, but I would add one more thing to it as well. As I show in my book, these hypnotists were really doing something extremely similar in form and content to the things that Jinn summoners were doing at the same time. In the early twentieth century, traditional practices using the power of the Jinn to access mysteries from the world beyond were still popular. However, they were considered backwards by many bourgeois modernisers in the region, because Jinn summoners were the subject of many high-profile legal cases in the 1930s, accused of charlatanry and fraud. Still, many people would go to them to find answers to their questions – who stole my money? where is my lost ring? should I travel abroad? who will I marry? and so on. Hypnotists – who put their mediums into trances and told audiences to ask them extremely similar questions – unlike Jinn summoners, claimed the power of modernity as well as its prestige.

The Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s was not experiencing the same fears of civilisational collapse as Europe, but it was going through something equally momentous. A combination of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing encroachment of European colonial powers in the region led to a period of uncertainty and instability. Many at the time looked to modern science, which seemed to be delivering all kinds of inexplicable wonders, to fashion a new almost magical existence.

Is interest in magic and the supernatural simply a misguided cure for feelings of fear? Or do you think that people do believe that our paradigms of knowledge are too narrow, making them open to a vision of the world that transcends scientific materialism? Do you whole-heartedly believe they were both full-on charlatans? Or do you think they were also in touch with realms of knowledge to which modern science does not have access?

This is a question that hangs heavily over this entire subject. But it is not an easy one to answer. I have a few different ways of thinking about it, and will lay out a few. Firstly, pretty much the entire history of the world makes it clear that humans are not satisfied with scientific materialism alone. Some people will always seek out the mystical, the spiritual and the sublime, no matter how irrational it may be. That seems to be a pretty ironclad fact of human nature. The question of whether the metaphysical plane is ‘real’ is harder to answer. In some ways, I like to look at mysticism and the occult as one language and scientific materialism as another. They are both ways of interpreting the world. In some cases, they will express the same thing with different words, and, in others, they will have words or phrases that don’t translate into the other language. To speak of a language as ‘true’ or ‘false’ or ‘real’ or ‘fake’ doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it is the same with the materialist and spiritual interpretations of the world.

Things become very difficult when you write a history book about the occult. History is a materialist language. To ask, for instance, whether Dr Dahesh truly accomplished miracles is not a historical question. To ask why people were attracted to his message and what he offered people, however, is a historical question. As is the question of why some people were so opposed to him. So, these are the things I have focused on.

In order to answer the other question, a new genre of writing is needed. I very briefly toyed with the idea of turning this book into a work of fiction but decided that it wouldn’t solve the problems. What we need is something between fiction and non-fiction that can leave the question of logical truth hanging suspended before us. I am not sure what that is.

Before Political Islam turned into a political and militant movement, first used by the West as a weapon against leftist movements in the Middle East during the cold war, and its transformation into a target after 9/11, did Islam have more of a mystical and/or romantic image in the West? Was the idea of the East being a hot bed of terrorism and religious extremism as wide-spread then as it is now – before the establishment of the state of Israel and before the rising of the oil-rich Gulf states?

The idea of the Arab world being a hotbed of extremism goes back to at least the late nineteenth century, though in those days they would have called it ‘fanaticism’. There is a good argument that this view of Islam and Muslims as particularly ‘fanatical’ or extremist was really solidified with the rise of colonialism in the Middle East (opponents to colonial rule were branded ‘fanatical’ or irrational). Today, ‘terrorism’ seems to be a political category rather than something rooted in objective fact – at least, I cannot think of any consistent definition of the term that seems to hold water and corresponds to how it is used.

At the same time there has long been a simultaneous view of the ‘East’ as mystical, exotic and mysterious. The two have gone hand in hand since at least the nineteenth century. The two can make sense together if you say that the West is committed to viewing the East as irrational and illogical; sometimes this takes the form of ‘fanaticism’ or ‘extremism’, sometimes of ‘exotic Eastern mysteries’, but the basic fundamentals are the same.

In fact, I think it’s no coincidence that at exactly the same time as Tahra Bey is becoming a star in Paris, the French colonies in North Africa are being threatened by the revolutionary president of the Republic of the Rif Abdel Krim. As I say in my book:

When a man in ‘Arab’ robes and a headdress appeared in the Parisian press, it was most often in the role of dangerous enemy of France. But Tahra Bey, a mysterious man from the desert in long white robes and with a dark beard, had not come to take their empire; he had come to save their souls. For some, no doubt, he was a conscious or unconscious salve for their colonial anxieties.

What are the illusions the East has about the West – what we could consider the opposite lens to Orientalism? A lens where the ‘other’ looks and sees what it wants to see? And apart from the wonders of modern scientific inventions, how do you feel the eastern view of the West has changed over the last century? 

The question of views of the West in the Middle East through the twentieth century is an extremely complex one, over which debates have raged. There are questions of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and religion lying behind them all. Obviously, too, Eastern views of the West cannot simply be a reverse of Orientalism because that concept is so tied into power as well as simply perception. As Edward Said notes, all cultures to some extent have stereotypical views about other cultures, but what marks Orientalism out as something different is the way that these views are turned into a discourse that implicitly justifies Western rule in the East.

Still, I hope that the characters in my book, particularly Dr Dahesh and the other hypnotists, provide one way to look at this multifaceted question. They demonstrate the growing fascination with the West in the early twentieth-century Arab world and they show how far it spread. But, just as Tahra Bey reveals the ignorance of many in Europe about the realities of the Middle East, so these hypnotists show how people were willing to believe extremely outlandish things if they were presented as miracles of Western science.

I love that you’ve chosen to cover popular culture and strange phenomena in the region such as charlatans and fakirs. Your first book was about women in Cairo’s 1930s nightlife scene, while this book is about two unusual men who have pursued careers as magicians, seers or charlatans. Your interest in the world of entertainment and magic is a great way to show a side of the Middle East to which western readers don’t often have access. Do you feel that you saw a gap in the narratives about the Middle East, and realised while living in Cairo that you wanted to shed a light on that?

My aim has really always been to show the fun parts of Middle Eastern history, in particular popular culture and entertainment. To be honest, this is not primarily out of a desire to change the minds of Western readers about the Middle East, but because those are the stories that interest me. I am drawn to counter-cultures, the demi-monde and the kind of people who do not usually feature in ‘serious’ history. I like to read books about that kind of thing, and I like to write them too. If you’d asked me five years ago, when I started writing this book, I might have said that it might also change some stereotypes about the Middle East and show a different side to the Arab world than pictures in the news. Now, though, I am not sure I feel that way. After the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and the constant dehumanisation of Palestinians there, as well as the total lack of interest shown in the war in Sudan, I don’t really think my books are going to change the minds of people who don’t see Arabs fully as people. I’m not currently optimistic about the power of literature or writing to change minds. The primary audience of my books is (and probably always has been) people in the Arab world, people from the Arab world, or people who know the Arab world.

I have, though, been thinking a lot about comparisons with my previous book, Midnight in Cairo, which focused on female performers as opposed to the holy men of this book. In a lot of ways, the way that male occult performers of the 1920s and 1930s are perceived in polite society is not too dissimilar to the way that the dancers and nightclub singers were seen. In the Middle East, as in Europe, they were often seen as a dangerous threat to society and the nation. Both hypnotise and deceive their viewers, taking their money and leaving them bereft at the end. Of course, the comparisons are not direct. But they open up interesting avenues of inquiry!

Talk to me about the parallels you see between the era you explore – the turn of the twentieth century – and our current turn of the century: the rise of fascism, the proliferation of magical thinking and the business of delusion in the wake of the collapse of another empire and the birth of a new century. 

I also see these parallels to our current age and find them quite difficult to interpret. One of the core arguments of my book is that the occult makes up the avant-garde of the collective psyche. If you are looking to find the anxieties, fears, hopes, or dreams of an age, then the best place to look is with the gurus, holy men, and occultists. In 1920s Europe, people were disenchanted with Western civilisation and were searching for a whole new way to see the world. In the Middle East, they were fascinated by the potentials of modernity, but were worried about its connection to imperial powers whose reach was stretching across the region. Today, in the wellness gurus and the new-age movements of the day which appear to be the analogues of the occult movements of the 1920s and 1930, we see the same thing happening. In my interpretation (though others may have different views) what these groups promise is a way to cope with the anxiety of the world that feels as if it is about to fall apart. I don’t feel we are in a world that has collapsed, but rather one that’s tottering. People are trying to hold fast to what exists, and there are all kinds of people who are trying to convince you that if you buy this product, if you do this course, if you meditate the right way, then everything will be alright. But it won’t.

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It’s a very beautiful question. I haven’t thought much about the objects I’ve had bad conversations with, if you like, but here is one that just came to mind. Many years back, I picked up a World War Two hospital stretcher and converted it into a stool. Within that stool I made a window, and within that window I installed a video camera running a video piece called Don’t Look Back – when video was still an exotic part of our existence. It was a stool that looked steady, but had originated from a stretcher, an object that in many ways isn’t about steadiness. But whenever I revisit it, I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I had left it to speak in its original voice; I wish I had worked with that voice, rather than converting it. I enforced myself too much on that piece. These days, I feel much more at ease at not interfering too much with an object’s voice and form.

Are there things I wish I’d picked up? There are many books, from many places, that I simply didn’t have the means to carry all at once. But there is one book that particularly comes to mind: I was in Damascus in 2007, and I saw a very beautiful book in Arabic that had been damaged, broken to pieces and pages torn out, its spine stitched and repaired by many hands and threads. I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t be able to return to Damascus again – that it would be my last visit. If I had picked it up and brought it back with me, it would have been such a forecasting metaphor, telling evidence, and an appropriate object to deal with the present and ongoing situation in Syria from a distance. It would have been a reading of an unforeseen future I wouldn’t have imagined.

That’s a very beautiful answer – thank you. When you do pick up a book – when you select it as something that you will transform and transmute into a piece of visual art – what it is that makes you pick up that book? Is it the materiality, its aesthetic as an artefact? Is it the content of the book, its literature? Is it both?

It depends on what I’m working with. In 2015, I made an installation called Another Day Lost. It was a huge miniature model of a refugee camp: small tents made from book pages and medical boxes, surrounded by burnt matches – one for each day since the start of the Syrian uprising. Every day at 12 noon, I went and burned one more match and added it to the piece – a sort of living sculpture, if you like. I needed tonnes of books, because the installation was in five locations simultaneously. So I went to an Oxfam bookshop and asked them ‘Do you have any books that you just cannot sell?’ They said they did, and they sold them to me for 1p each. Hundreds of them. They still had to be about particular subjects, materiality and categories, though – home, migration, war, language; subjects related to a refugee camp. I took those ideas and found books that related to them in different ways – ‘home’ might have been a book about making cakes, ‘migration’ a book about birds. But the magic – something I didn’t anticipate – came when I spread these former book pages and medical boxes out as miniature tents, and, when you came close to them, you found poetry in accidental marriages between images and words. A flower next to a tank. Those connections were so spontaneous. So there was intention in selecting those books, with diverse readings on home or lack of it but also the accidental magic created by the viewer.

The whole idea of using books came when I was in Cuba. In Havana, people were taking furniture to the beach, breaking it to pieces, and making boats to migrate to Miami – the furniture of the old home being used to make the journey to a dream new one. I was working on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and was drawn to use pieces of found chairs, where you could read the remnants and forms of the furniture. And when I came back from Cuba to Cambridge, I started seeing much more clearly what was available around me. In Cambridge, that was books. And my art pieces started involving and responding to them.

Serendipity seems to run through your work. The serendipity of your experiences, and how they inform your work; the serendipity of how meanings land together; the serendipity of political moments and material conditions shaping how your work is viewed.

Yes, it does. Years ago, I met a wonderful Scottish woman who had a beautiful Encyclopaedia Britannica from her father. She didn’t need it anymore, but didn’t want to throw it away, so she gave it to me. For three years, the volumes sat in my studio; I didn’t know what to do with them. Then, one day, I just sat down and started working with them. Against all this alphabetised knowledge, all this wonderful material, I created my pieces. The series is called One + eleven = two, because between two drawings you see in one volume are eleven that you don’t. That was when I started really using books in my work – I mean, working with their content, but not being restricted by it. Sometimes, I saw a word. Sometimes, an image. Sometimes, maps, or nothing. Serendipity. I spent seven months going through and responding to the forest of words, and occasionally to the illustrations and maps.

Words are forms of practice as well as material for your work. In Urgent Archive, there are names of women written – or maybe drawn – in Arabic on the glass window at the front of Kettle’s Yard. You wrote those names with your non-dominant hand an in reverse – or maybe you drew them. Could you talk a little about names and naming in your work, and about your non-dominant hand?

The moment you asked that question, it took me to a place. A very appropriate place. When I was a little boy, I couldn’t form the first letter of my name. As the letter ‘I’ in English sounds like an ‘eye’, in Arabic ع  also sounds like an ‘eye’. Another serendipity. I came crying to my mother, so disappointed with myself, and she asked me what was wrong. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I cannot write this stupid letter.’ She asked me to show it to her. She was illiterate, but she looked at the letter and held my hand in hers and copied it – once, twice, three times – and then let it go, and I carried on copying it until I could form my ‘eye’. She said to me: ‘Don’t look at it as a letter. Look at it as a drawing.’ And that stuck with me, that very beautiful and generous idea that a letter is a drawing, that a drawing can form a language, that language is made of fragments of drawings. That’s something I’ve held onto when making found poetry – that words are sculptures.

Much later, I started teaching her the alphabet. She wanted to be able to write to my children, my two boys. In one note to them, she drew the alphabet and the numbers. That was a very powerful experience for me – how she was trying to teach them as she was learning. I made some pieces in response into her precious handwriting, including a piece made upside down and with my wrong hand. I was trying to be closer to her by imitating her. It was called Afterimage. And I found that, while my right hand – the adult – was overtrained, my left – the child – was still fresh. In fact, whenever I’m stuck, I go to my left hand. My non-dominant hand is a treasure.

In 2000, when I was asked by a photographer which object I would most like to take into the new millennium, I took weeks to decide. Then, when I invited him to my studio and had nothing in front of me, and he asked what I had chosen, I held my left hand in my right. That was my object that I didn’t want to lose.

When I made that window in Kettle’s Yard, I used it: if I had used my right hand, it would have been pure recording; with my left hand, I could breathe slowly, read the names slowly, and think about the enormity of the loss. The window piece was an extension of a piece exhibited inside the galley called Killed, Detained and Missing, a list of women written on an old pianola role, next to a speaker where I recited these names.

You talk about your right hand being overtrained, and it turns me to a question I want to ask about your training. Or, specifically, about training and place. You’ve talked elsewhere about your study in different practices, and about how those practices aren’t labels but a network of practices coalescing. But what I’m interested in is the relationship between training and geography – about the relationship between form, and the spaces in which those forms entered your practice. Syria, Russia, Cuba, the UK; painting, drawing, writing, theatre design (not in that order). How does space bear on practice?

I come from the volcanic mountains in the south of Syria. So even my journey to Damascus was about a different geology, different accents. And then, in Damascus, I was in a tiny room (nicknamed the Half) in a big city – an old Damascene house, where all my materials as a painter had to fit into that small, low-ceilinged room, but everything around me in Old Damascus was material for painting. In fact, as well as regretting not picking up that book, I regret that in those days I did not look more, see more, excavate that present. I had a very intense four years there, where I started sculpting and re-sculpting my ways of seeing. The mud of Old Damascus became my mud. But I needed to breathe after the intensity of the early 80s, and I left for Baku, and then Saint Petersburg.

That’s where I dived into theatre as a solo performer – and I hadn’t expected, at all, that this was a language I would dive into much later in my life. I found I could convey a feeling without saying a word, and that was very special to me. It shifted my practice – there was more about the relationship between body and space, body and light. Gorbachev was doing his perestroika, and I was doing mine (to myself). Damascus was fine art, Arabic, heat, south; Saint Petersburg was architecture, Russian, freezing cold, north.

And then I came to Cambridge, where everything is so miniature-like. After Saint Petersburg, Cambridge looked like a theatre set, but it was also where I had studio space for the first time. Theatre design was an obvious thing to study in London. But I knew I was not an architect, nor a theatre designer. Having my studio next to the ADC Theatre, and encountering all the old props discarded behind it and using them in my work, is how that space most shifted my practice.

I take my studio for a walk with me wherever I am. I take my eyes with me too. And I pick up objects from a place, not reading at the time what these objects might become, just letting it sit, letting them tease me a bit and teasing them back, then the action of seeing but not seeing the final product, and then finding that the piece is shaped by all these conversations, places and forms. That’s a bit dangerous for an artist known for a particular style, a particular language that people expect of us. But I’ve found that, though I love painting and I am a painter, I don’t mind venturing into unfamiliar mediums, novel places. This risk enriches me, and enriches my articulation of a feeling.

So maybe it’s about the serendipity of how place and time and form encounter each other, but the constancy of your eye amid all those shifting encounters.

I’d like to take this idea of movement and return to the idea of migration you mentioned earlier. Migration has figured in your work for decades. And the figure of the boat has been an ongoing part of this. You’ve spoken elsewhere about how the boat has been, for you, a way to articulate the violence of conflict without centring images of conflict. And I’d like to explore the ethics and aesthetics of the boat a little.

I was at Glastonbury this year, and Banksy’s inflatable boat passed a few feet in front of me in a crowd. By the time I’d left the crowd and got signal on my phone, critics and politicians and voices on social media had all already weighed in with loud (often awful) opinions about it. Because of our polluted political and cultural discourse, the image of the boat has become so contested and fraught – often as a way of avoiding talking about the boat itself. Easier to address an artist’s work about refugee deaths than address refugee deaths themselves, perhaps. As an artist with many famous works involving boats, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for asking this. You see, this is the problem with creation. There are three stages to any creation: pre-creation, the process of creation, and the process of seeing it in hindsight. And they don’t necessarily reveal the same picture. And relationships with the actual and the metaphorical shift, too. Boats have meant different things in my pieces – and different things, of course, to the audiences viewing them.

I made a model of the Bibby Stockholm barge out of sardine tins, called Keep Them at Bay. I was playing with language, with material, with scale to respond to this inhuman solution. Another piece: on the day the Rwanda Bill was agreed, I made a performance called Stop the Bombs, Not the Boats: I took children’s milk bottles, filled them with red ink, and threw them onto a flattened tent so that it was bleeding, and walked with the stained tent to the top of Castle Hill. That piece is about the boat – the metaphor of the boat – even if it doesn’t use the image of the boat. And then there is the 101^st piece for the British Museum’s 100 objects series, Dark Water, Burning World, the little boats made from bicycle mudguards with their burnt matchstick people. And Precarious Passage, one of these boats sailing through a hole burnt in the book A History of the World in 100 Objects. Actually, I happen to have it with me here now [holds up book in left hand, boat in right hand, and places the boat through the hole in the book]. This is both image and metaphor. You see, migration is not a current issue. It is the history of humanity, and the history of life – cells migrate, trees migrate, ideas migrate. For me, this boat is not a scale model. It is a scale metaphor. We are all emigrants from our first home, the womb.

And here’s another piece – Siege Two, which is made from a typewriter, and is dedicated to Marie Colvin, who lost her life in Homs [holds up piece]. If you look [turns piece in the air], it has another shape in the form of a boat. I showed this at the Venice Biennale, in this form – as a sailing, destructed, very fragile boat. I remember being confronted by many questions when I went to the Biennale and saw a real refugee boat that had been rescued. Barca Nostra (‘Our Boat’) by Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. That was not an easy thing. It was so emotional, so suffocating. There isn’t a place for imagination anymore, when reality is surrounding you like this. It took me some time to digest it. I’m having difficulty even thinking about it now. So I suppose I have found that there is a difference between a piece that takes you to something but leaves you to continue making your own journey, and a piece that is in your face, does not let you escape from it, that goes at an aggressive speed, but in our times, I think there is a room and a need for both approaches.

The immediacy of the confrontation – a collapse of image and metaphor into nothing other than that immediacy.

Yes. I think of the carpenter from Lampedusa, Francesco Tuccio, who after 11 October 2013, when 311 people died in the boat that sank there, made crosses for the Eritrean and Somali survivors using wood from the wreck. And then made a sculpture, a large cross, where you can still see the paint on the wood.  The Cross was donated by him to the collection of the British Museum. His was a boat made into a cross; mine was a bicycle mudguard made into a boat. I know I am touching but not answering your question fully. And that’s because this is still an ongoing question for me.

Thank you. It’s such a generous answer. And of course it is ongoing – past, yes, and present, yes, but also ongoing and future. I’d like to end by asking you a question to do with tense and time. It’s something right there in the title of Urgent Archive. There’s a story behind that title (and maybe you can talk about that), but I want to ask specifically about the contradiction in it – of archiving, and its sense of slowness and past and permanence, and of urgency. Is it a viable task to archive the present? To have an ongoing archival practice? Or must this always be a retroactive, retrospective endeavour? I don’t want to pre-empt your answer, but I realise we’ve spoken about how a found object isn’t just a thing of a moment; that it is a thing of the past discovered in the present for use in a future, those timelines always butting up against each other. So, a horrible question: is, as artists, there a moral incumbency of archiving as we go, of archiving the emergency and urgency of the present, or can we leave that, for posterity, to the future, as an act for the future?

Ah – a very lovely question. You know, I only encountered the word ‘oxymoron’ very recently. I’m a work-in-progress too – I don’t shy away from that. I think of the phrase ‘leave to remain’, as I say that.

As you reference, the title of Urgent Archive is about Mansour al-Omari, a human rights journalist who recorded the names of his fellow prisoners using ragged strips of cloth and blood as an ink. But the interest in the word ‘archive’ also comes from my interest in seeds. Because seeds are an archive of themselves – archiving their past, their present, their future. In this tiny universe are three tenses all at once. But now let me go back: the first piece I did in relationship to Syria is called Excavating the Present, and it’s all to do with X-ray images, and how mothers in Syria have to collect the body parts of their children in order to mourn them. You know, in many languages there’s no distinction between past and present. And I wonder if the word ‘archive’ is a Western construction of how to deal with the past. It’s such an elusive word. It sounds out that word ‘ark’ at its start – it has a kind of motion in it, of life in it. And life is not fixed: it has multiple tenses in it. My intention is not the past; it is the present, and how one can construct a past or a future from it.

I’ll give you another example. For one of my pieces, I took Aleppo Citadel, and the destruction of Aleppo before the earthquake, and made it out of Aleppo soap. This is a form that transmits itself throughout time: it shrinks, it is discoloured. It’s an interesting archive.

I’ll tell you one more story, and then I will finish. I planted some wheat outside Kettle’s Yard a while ago. I had planned to go and harvest it and make bread though this piece, and tell the story of the bombing of Aleppo Seed Bank and how, ICARDA having lost control of it in 2016, it managed to retrieve the first accession from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to initiate regeneration and reconstitute the full profile of the collection in Syria. But Syrian wheat and the English weather didn’t work out. It died. And I didn’t want the piece to be about death. So I decided to construct an artist book/ herbarium out of it. I was all prepared and ready to make a performance piece out of this yesterday. But an hour before my arrival, the gardeners unknowingly cleared everything away. I was a little devastated, but I realised there where tiny fragments of the wheat, tiny little remains, from which I wanted to create an archive. These tiny fragments told a story of the whole. I know I’m scratching a tiny mark on the surface of this colossal loss, and that’s what I must do as an artist.

Thank you for these beautiful questions.

Thank you for these beautiful answers, and this beautiful one to end. I’ll tell you what I thought as I sat with the phrase ‘urgent archive’: only when you don’t see life as urgent do you think of archiving as a future act about the past. When you know and see and live emergency, archiving becomes such an obvious emergency act. Timelines capitulate. It isn’t about recording what has gone, isn’t about thinking or rethinking for whom this archive is created: it is simply about a moment, and a moment of preservation. And I think there is something very beautiful about seeing the ways in which artistic practice can be an act of preserving in the present, within which time past, present and future can fall where it may. Sorry – I shouldn’t steal the last word.

OK, I’ll steal it back. You remember your first question about regret? And my answer about that book in Damascus that was so torn to pieces? I see this now: that book was archiving the destruction before it happened. It was sending me a message that I didn’t hear. It was hidden, and was only passing by the market in Old Damascus. This fleeting encounter taught me that one must be present, and almost alert, to sense the hidden. This is why I am trying to make an herbarium out of the fragments of wheat. You see, look at this [holds up a single fragment of a stalk of wheat]. You would just walk past this without noticing it. But though it might sound pretentious, I am going to make a meal from this. A meal for the mind’s eye.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

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