Nineteen hours of flight can land you in a very different season. I was on an end-of-semester trip in California, dumping photos of myself in the family group chat, chasing sunny waves with a goofy smile. Then I was on a subway train from Chengdu Tianfu International Airport to Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital. I had already grown used to, even a little fond of, Chengdu’s smoggy skies. But when I stepped out into winter on 28 December 2023, I was hoping to see beyond my next few steps.

For three days after mama’s big surgery – or ‘transabdominal cytoreductive surgery’, as I would later learn to pronounce, making photocopies of the operative report – she was lying flat on her hospital bed. To even stir a muscle on her face was too much pain. But we chatted away anyway, like we always did, only this time there was only my voice.

‘Mami, what season are you? I’ll give you options, one by one. When you hear the correct answer, tell me by wrinkling your nose.’

I must have sounded proud and pleased to have invented a new language for us. A body language.

She must have tried to wrinkle her nose; I saw her nostrils flare a little. Mama seemed just as excited about the game as I was. She stared at me with her effortlessly big eyes for a good while, as if she couldn’t wait for me to give her options.

‘Okay, maybe instead of wrinkling your nose, you blink your eyes twice.’

She closed her eyes, opened them, then did it all over again. Blink. Blink.

‘Are you summer?’

She remained still, and I watched the drip chamber keeping time.

‘Are you autumn?’

In the corner of the ward, baba was dozing off in our designated chair. A chair that had been turned into a clothes hanger, a bedside table, and – whenever a nurse’s footsteps drew near – a makeshift storage, so we wouldn’t get scolded again for cluttering the windowsill with all that paraphernalia hauled along ‘just in case’. For baba, though, the chair had remained a chair, a place to snuggle in among Leslie Cheung’s old CDs, a stackable lunch box half-filled with chicken soup, a few extra pillowcases, and the Japanese textbook I had left open. Since the orderly began sweeping the floor and another morning arrived, baba had been at mama’s bedside. Only when she managed to briefly fall asleep would he run up and down the buildings, propelling one determined foot before the other. On his way to chase signatures, prescriptions, a sliver of the doctors’ attention, baba swung his arms up and down. Going for more steps, more hopes. Between when I spoke and was about to speak again, I heard him snore a little louder.

‘Are you winter?’

Across the windowpane, the sky was a fish-belly white. I didn’t like this option, though I felt that I had to give it, so I moved on without waiting for an answer.

‘Are you spring?’

She immediately closed her eyes, opened them, then did it all over again. Blink. Blink. This moment she had been waiting for.

‘Okay! So you’re spring! Now’s my turn. What season am I?’

I saw something in her eye twinkle. Was this the moment where she thought, Piggy’s still such a little kid, as I would later read in the hospital diary she was keeping?

‘Am I spring?’

Catching a slight movement of her head which I translated as a nod, I continued:

‘Oh! So, I’m spring too?’

I didn’t know that this would move her head left to right, then right to left; so much effort involved, the most I’d seen since the surgery. I got a little confused:

‘You mean we’re both spring?’

Then I heard her try to utter what sounded like no, no, no, reaching for breath. I sensed something in my chest begin to tighten as her brows knotted together. I worried about the postoperative wound on her belly, how much it was hurting, if her pink abdominal binder that had tender flowers on it was still in place. I couldn’t help myself from stealing a nervous glance at the digits on the bedside pulse oximeters.

‘I see, I see, I’m not spring!’

And that made her rest.

‘Am I summer?’

Yes, she responded, moving her head up and down, this time without the previous urgency with which she’d denied my claim of spring. Yes, summer, she let me know by moving her head up and down. I’d like to think I saw a smile on her face, although it was still impossible to stir a muscle. Yes, I heard her body speak to me. All the while, her eyes were closed. I can’t tell how much of it was because she was just too tired from our conversation, and how much was her relief, happy that I finally understood what I was to her.

It helped that I had just got back from my Universal Studios trip in California, so I had many things to tell her, full of unimportant details I could still recall, the odd bits that I knew would send a hearty giggle up her throat. I told her many things. Mama blinked her eyes, this new way of hers to let me know she was listening. When I walked around her bed with my arms and legs straight like Megatron’s, I saw the left corner of her lip make a small upward climb, and I heard the laughter ring out in a wrinkle near her right eye.

I was eager to fill in the gap of sounds between us. But sometimes, even blink blink became too much for her to keep up. When the oxygen tube fell out of place, or her eyes, curiously wandering all four corners of the room, began to lose focus, I’d learned to rest my hand over hers. It was my way of telling her that I was listening too. Feeling her hand, small and soft beneath my fingers, which couldn’t decide what would be more soothing for the little red swelling where the peripheral IV lines entered her body – to circle gently around it, or to leave it untouched – I remembered another time when our hands were touching.

It was two years ago when mama flew all the way from home to the States to spend the school break with me. I was still a high school student then; we visited a bunch of colleges. New England summer was just as humid as Chengdu’s, but more generous in affording a cool breeze in the shade. And trees were many. Mama would be walking by my side and naturally reaching out her hand to hold my hand, finding an opportune moment to slip her fingers through mine, so that I’d suddenly find them interlaced. As much as I took pride in having whispered secrets to mama – cuddling under the same blanket, in the intimate late-night-ness of our hotel room, illuminated by faint streetlights – I wasn’t used to this body language in the open summer light. My sweaty hands, which had always made me feel embarrassed, I was happy to have this time. Saying how my hand was so sticky that I needed to wipe it against the side of my shirt, or pointing for her to look at the storefront of a cafe that promised delicious cakes and cozy chats, I’d pull my hand away from her hand. I never found out if she had seen through my tricks. Was this too part of her summer – me, and us holding hands together?

It is the last day of February, once more. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my coat, the first coat I bought without mama on the side as my fashion consultant, and start walking up College Hill. Mama was once here, too, in a summertime. Tall branches, having bloomed snowy-white against the wind, stand lean and bare in the afternoon light. In the hand now balling up for a little extra warmth, is it the tender of her palm that’s touching my fingertips?

I had imagined today many times, since February 29 became mama’s day of leaving. I had been afraid of looking for a twenty-ninth day and not finding one. But then I remember mama, you looking for a day to come home and finding many – didn’t you say you’re spring? There will be many days of spring. You close your eyes, open them, then do it all over again. Yes, you say, and you’ll be here, fingers interlaced with mine. This time, I won’t let go, walking into the seasons, through many more. Blink. Blink.

In loving memory of 曾继红 Bonita Jihong Zeng (19 October 1972 – 29 February 2024), her big voice in songs and jiggles, and every morning.

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I don’t approach my writing as an effort to transcribe history. I set out to honour the lives lost amid war and revolution, and to speak to the lives transformed in the aftermath. My first concern is that the novel, a work of fiction, must be utterly believable. It is a contained world, finite and intimate, populated by characters who must live and breathe on the page. I want you to care about that world and the people who inhabit it.

That’s describing it with a writerly eye, looking back. But when I sat down to write In the Shadow of the Banyan, it was the loss and pain I endured as a child that came to the forefront. The challenge was to render the experience as faithfully as I remembered it. At some point, as a writer, you forget that you’re describing suffering. You feel it. You relive it.

Your writing carries the weight of personal and collective memory, yet it also participates in shaping a public memorial to Cambodia’s history. As memory is not always linear – it circles, refracts, distorts – how do you navigate the complexity of remembering as an intimate act and memorialising as a public one?

I think the two go hand in hand. Memorialising allows us to mark the stark and brutal truth of acts committed – unambiguously. Remembering in its most private form allows us to see the complexity of truth, and to seek our own understanding of something that might otherwise seem fixed and definitive.

One can’t replace the other. Historians may estimate the number of lives lost, yet within that seemingly mind-boggling number are intimate losses – a father, a sister. And each single loss is immeasurable. Most readers have not lived through genocide, but many have experienced the death of a loved one. That can be a window into something larger.

To take that image of refraction that you mention, I suppose a memorial in the typical sense is imposing and opaque, whereas I hope my writing acts more like a prism that encapsulates the minute and personal while intimating myriad other lives touched.

Specifically, with time, your first novel has become part of the cultural record of Cambodia’s history. Has seeing it absorbed into that collective memory altered your sense of ‘ownership’ over it?

When I was an aspiring writer, I didn’t have such a book from my own people to turn to. Before I wrote Banyan, I used to feel that the Khmer Rouge experience was one I lived through alone, again and again – that no one could possibly understand what I’d survived.

My experience as a survivor is still uniquely mine, in all its specificity. So, to be honest, it still surprises me to hear another Cambodian say ‘That’s just what happened to me!’

While Banyan has been translated into 20 languages, for many Cambodians it remains inaccessible. For that reason, some of the most gratifying responses I’ve received are from other Cambodians, particularly the younger generations who have inherited the trauma. It’s important to me that the novel speaks not only to those far removed from Cambodia’s history but also to those who live directly in its shadow.

There are other resonances I could never have anticipated. From Iraq to Argentina, Turkey to South Africa, Brazil to the Philippines, readers have described to me how the work speaks to them on a very personal level. These are people seemingly without prior interest in Cambodian history. They write of the loss of family members, the loss of home, the fear of political persecution or upheaval, the destructive power of unchallenged ideology. In a world where the language of political violence is resurgent, where mass atrocities unfold before our eyes in real time, I hope that the story of one girl’s journey will continue to spur reflection about the consequences of our collective choices.

What freedoms – and what responsibilities – does fiction offer when writing about real histories of violence and displacement?

Fiction offers a safe place to view an experience from multiple angles. You can slip into the minds and hearts of however many characters you bring into the story. You can see through their eyes. That’s not only a freedom, though. For me, an author writing about real suffering, it’s a huge responsibility. In this sense, fiction is not magic conjuring up the improbable. It’s a mirror that reflects reality.

In both Banyan and Music, storytelling is used as a means of survival for the characters within. What do you think is the difference between telling a story to survive the moment, and telling it years later to survive the memory? Why is storytelling so critical in times of violence? 

In the moment, when it’s a matter of survival, you tell yourself a story. You create a world to set yourself apart from the impossibility of that nightmare. Afterwards, it is a way of confronting what you have survived and why. It is a reckoning.

Both are acts of hope.

When I write, it’s with the belief that I am not alone, that there are others out there who might want to know my story, who might enter into it with me. I write not out of desperation but out of a sense of urgency, a feeling that this needs to be told and heard. It has become my purpose – even a reason for living.

In Banyan, the voice is that of a child shaped by your own lived experience; in Music, the narrator is more removed from your personal biography. How has your relationship to the ‘self’ in your narratives evolved between these books? What made you interested in writing your second novel with more distance – both in structure and subject – from your own experiences?

Both novels are deeply personal to me. It’s true that Banyan is more autobiographical. There is this child self that I carry within me. I needed to protect that self – who in the novel is Raami – and be faithful to her experience. While Music is not as autobiographical, Suteera draws on much of my own emotional journey. She’s an adult, her feelings and views much more mature and nuanced, so I didn’t feel I needed to protect her in the same way.

Banyan is a story that puts the reader in the act of witnessing. I was very conscious that, to fully grasp the horrors committed, the reader needs to confront the genocide from the perspective of a small child, and to hear her voice.

In Music, the atrocity is already established within the first pages, and the narrative is set in the aftermath. Probing the complexity of how this arose, and probing the relationship of perpetrator and victim, requires some distance – years of reflection. The novel is much more contemplative. The two principal characters, Suteera and the Old Musician, are worlds apart in their perspectives but bound by an interwoven past. I wanted the reader to be equally drawn to both. That called for a different approach to the writing, one that forces the reader to inhabit these dual realities, to feel the colliding force of their memories.

In both Music and Banyan, music and myth shape the narrative as much as memory or history. How do these different elements function differently in the act of storytelling?  How do these non-verbal or non-linear forms allow you to tell truths that might resist more straightforward narration?

Truth itself is not linear – certainly it’s not straightforward. It’s multidimensional. The same truth can appear differently from distinct perspectives. If your intention goes beyond recording dates and events, you need a medium as multifaceted as the truth you’re trying to convey. Fiction needs flexibility, and the fiction that most compels me is acrobatic.

But I wouldn’t say that I chose music or myth to achieve a certain narrative effect. I listen to my characters, and these are just such essential aspects of their emotional worlds.

Within a piece of music, a memory is invoked, an emotion preserved. You think you’ve moved on, then you hear a melody, and everything comes back. For the Old Musician, music is at times the only way to communicate; words have become foreign, even dangerous. Music can also bypass memory. A song can assuage a pain whose origin you can no longer identify, a hurt that remains lodged in your body long after the memory that invoked it has receded.

As for myth, it is a collective creation. I think of memory as finite. It’s personal. Once you’re gone, that memory goes with you. Myth, by contrast, lives beyond you. It allows you to leap across time and geography. It’s shared memory that takes the shape of a tale, told and retold. My own story resides first in my memory, but my daughter can retell it in her voice, and others can pick it up and retell in theirs. And possibly it lives on indefinitely.

Your novels contain as much absence as they do detail: moments withheld, histories only hinted at. What is the value of acknowledging the limits of knowing, especially when writing about trauma? How do you decide what a story should leave unsaid, and what work those silences might do for the reader?

The most devastating thing for me is this: knowledge doesn’t bring back what is lost. You can know the past intimately, but that understanding doesn’t undo the destruction, doesn’t recover the lives buried in those mass graves. A daughter can stare at that monument of skulls, but even if she locates one that belongs to her father it doesn’t undo his death or his suffering.

Knowing is a kind of pain, and you must be certain that you can bear that pain before you go seeking answers. Sometimes the best way to drive home that sense of something between loss and death – that place of not knowing – is to make it feel that it’s just on the periphery of the pages. To describe it would lessen its magnitude and alter its emotional resonance. Little is said between Suteera and the Old Musician, but that does not indicate that they have little to say. Had they intended to voice it all, they would not have found the strength to face each other. In experiences of trauma, often the things unsaid bear the greatest weight.

I’m conscious as well that Music is a more demanding novel, in the way it asks the reader to grapple with this unknowing. It is perhaps easier to mourn loss and to feel the release of survival. But Music dwells on questions that are not so easily resolved, if indeed they are resolvable. Many readers have become accustomed to a quick pace of action and dialogue, and a clear resolution. The clash that happens in Music, by contrast, is of things remembered, fragments on the border of memory, the silence that surrounds the sound.

It’s been more than a decade since In the Shadow of the Banyan was published, and eight years since Music of the Ghosts. In that time, what in your relationship to these books – and to your writerly self – has changed the most? 

Lately, I’ve been feeling that these two books are my other selves. I don’t have this struggle any more between fearing that these memories will be lost versus living with them daily, confronting each other in the battlefield of my mind. I don’t have to carry these experiences in my own body all the time. They have another place to go. When an emotion returns, I can tell myself, ‘Oh, yes, I wrote about that.’ That has brought a lot of comfort. The books are these other selves that understand an important part of me because they too embody what I’ve lived through. They now share the burden of remembering and preserving.

There’s a certain comfort in knowing that these stories now live with others as well. I’m also grateful to the translators who’ve devoted their attention and skill to my work. I can only imagine that a translator writing in Japanese, German, Polish, Russian or Czech is influenced by the language of war and revolution in their own societies, and I’m curious how that shapes their telling.

The post Knowing Is a Kind of Pain: An Interview with Vaddey Ratner appeared first on English PEN.

The cloudy day fortifies me with fresh energy to keep walking down from the intersection of Haile Street to the ring road, the wide street bustling with students, workers and street vendors who, like me, walk as if nothing awaits them. Forward! More metres to go, Bushra, I tell myself, staring at faces and places while my ears and the clamour insist another world of sound belongs to me, a parallel world of rackets. Then comes the sound of a sharp nail scraping inside my head, below my skull, rising with every step. But my feet take me, in one of their few moments of recklessness, toward Coffee Corner.

From afar, my eyes spot what used to be the entrance – or so I imagine from where I stand, separated by a street and the traffic, frustrated drivers honking their horns at pedestrians. I continue along the pavement, then finally stop at the end of South Ring Road. I watch the cars emerging from many streets: left from Haddah Street, which runs transversely; or from above Haddah Street; from al-Hadiqa Street; or from Algiers Street, lined with malls and large commercial concerns. This area was, once upon a time, the commercial heart of Sana’a. In the neighbourhoods branching off from these two streets stand the villas of the capital’s old money, with their high, flower-draped walls obscuring the view of those walking by. The pampered dogs you sometimes encounter on the pavements, and the enchanting tranquillity you feel, compel you to observe that the velvety life of times past has now vanished, not knowing what has become of its owners.

Standing at the end of South Ring Road – at the intersection with Algiers Street, where there is a large roundabout crowded with cars coming from all directions – I see on my right the building of the General Secretariat of the General People’s Congress, the former ruling party, whose façade was burned several times during the war years; a façade now festooned with Houthi flags and pictures of its fighters, while the Congress’s banner has been moved to the back, in comical mockery of the bloody conflicts and successive disasters that have befallen this country. To the left of the General Secretariat, on the opposite street, is Coffee Corner. You could once see, above its black iron door, a circular garland of flowers and a small sign with a picture of a cup of coffee that you would love to sip slowly. The front gate of the café, the young guard who wore a smart black suit, the life that thrived here: all have disappeared. I approach the café, passing by a flower nursery where Sadiq and I used to buy potted flowers and roses in the early years of our marriage, before the war. The nursery is still there, resisting the harshness of life, but as I look around at the place, at the façade and at my memories, I know that the war has done a lot of damage, not only to people but also to places, walls and buildings; to the appearance and identity of the city, the beauty that distinguished Sana’a; to its famous cafés, which were frequented by visitors from other cities; and to its social spaces for interaction, entertainment and contemplation. The cafés have become ruins, victims of widespread destruction, destruction that you can smell and touch, that you can relive with your own eyes as you sift through your memories. But can writing encapsulate the destruction of places, or document that sad blindness that has folded away beautiful memories and the flow of life, walling them in a permanent prison of darkness? My eyes have grown used to sudden changes in life, to the ugliness of the past, to landmarks being destroyed.

In the past, there was a front gate here overlooking Algiers Street, which you could see from afar, and which the tides of people flowing from the streets and alleys would rush to in the morning, evening or scorching afternoon. There would stand a cheerful guard, a young dark-skinned man who would greet you with a broad smile as he searched your bag, often with lukewarm enthusiasm, frowning if he saw something you tried to sneak into the café. As you walked through the door, you would encounter a half-metre-wide courtyard paved with small stones, after which you would be captivated by the café, the people and the place, the calm familiarity of it all. On the right and left sides, tables and chairs shaded by colourful umbrellas were arranged in geometric patterns that added charm to the place. Nearby sat small islands planted with flowers, roses, and grasses. Right in the middle stood a building constructed from old bricks, with marble steps leading you inside. You would see the coffee machines on a long black marble counter, various drinks lined up behind it. Your eyes would then trail the workers in their black uniforms and white napkins with the café’s logo emblazoned on them as they flitted around like bees. The aroma of coffee would flood your nostrils and transport you to older, happier times.

The side rooms spread throughout the building, their elegant décor reflecting the richness of that lost era. You would be amazed by the softness of the red sofas, which beckoned one to relax and contemplate. On the wall hung a Sana’ani sitara that would leave you impressed by its historical authenticity, its blue centre and red edges that hadn’t faded in spite of the vicissitudes of time. The end of the building’s staircase opened onto the back courtyard, where you would see the large iron gate through which would drive luxury cars dropping off or picking up the girls and boys of the upper class. To the right of that gate stood a small, independent building with a glass façade – the café’s library, its shelves lined with Arabic and foreign books, works in translation as well as novels by Yemeni authors. On the wall, a lavish painting by a Sudanese artist hung for sale; the paintings changed every week. In the library, you would be greeted by a young intellectual asking you what book you desired to read while you caught sight of another comfortable red sofa, a reader perched behind it, a book in his hand. The warmth of the place and the smell of books and coffee would transport you to happiness and peace.

In that bygone era, time would slip away from you; as you grew older you would leave the café library and spill into the back yard, where you would meet a man in his forties lovingly watering the flowers, shifting the watering can from one place to another. You would see the tables and chairs where young men and women used to congregate, people whose fate is now a question mark in the harsh light of war.

This was an epicentre of Sana’a’s pre-war cultural and political life. It now seems so distant, as if separated from us by a chasm several light-years wide; separated from the life that bustled in the café, in its spacious garden adorned with flowers and trimmed roses, where you could take in the vivid sky as you sat in your comfortable chair, behind a table for writing and meeting friends, while a bright umbrella sheltered you. Or, when the sky clouded over and it rained, where you would race to find a seat inside the café, and sat therein would be poets and journalists from across the capital, busy, hunched over their laptops, writing or reading. Over there, in his favourite corner, was journalist Jamal Jubran furiously typing away on his laptop. The writer Ahmed Qasim Damaj, with his slender stature and warm smile, would arrive every evening, his courteous son and young intellectuals in tow, and they’d take their places behind the large table. Foreign journalists and writers – French, American, everything – who clearly loved Sana’a would ask about the architecture of the Old City.

You would catch a glimpse of the journalist Tanya Holm, who moved to Sana’a and lived there for many years before the war. Or the director Khadija Al-Salamy, who had come from Paris, busy with ideas for a new film. Her warmth and affection radiated through this space. And there they invariably were, the men conducting business deals, in tune with the faint strains of a Bob Marley song playing in the background.

Here, in this café with its diverse clientele, you would be engulfed by the full spectrum of social classes and lifestyles that would be swept away by the coming flood of war. Here, in this café, at the table near the stairs and the flowers, I used to sit and write, watching the passers-by and friends who are now scattered across the world.

I open my eyes to now, to the concrete walls that have taken up more than half of the café, the void that has sucked away the familiar faces, friends and chatter. I notice an armed young man entering through the back door that has remained open since the front door has closed, followed by a man with a protruding belly, looking around anxiously. I think of another meaning for the ruin we are living in. I rest my head on the seat in the small concrete maze and smile at Sadiq, then I contemplate the worker’s half-heartedness as he places two cups of coffee on the table for us while we wait for our friends. The silence that envelops the place in the afternoon heat, as war rages on, pulls me inward, pulls me to travel back in time, to the war’s beginning.

My last visit to Coffee Corner was in April 2015, in the first year of the war. Air raids were the soundtrack of the skies above Sana’a. Cars stretched out as far as the eye could see, loaded with bags and furniture – a scene of displacement unprecedented in the city’s history. There was no electricity in the city, no electricity in the house. Sadiq and I were at Coffee Corner, settled on seats that are no longer there, and I began to write an article while the journalists and writers around us discussed their predictions for the course of the war, before most of them left for the capitals of the diaspora. At that time, life was but a little flickering flame about to go out.

What does war do to places and memories? In the fullness of time, it undermines, chips at, folds away this brief and fleeting history of Coffee Corner, a history that ultimately belongs to me, that is not an accurate documentary record of the transformations of the place. Did I mention that in the second year of the war, part of the façade of the café was destroyed after a coalition airstrike on the Popular Congress Party building opposite the café? Then, that in another month of the same year, I believe, shrapnel from a missile cut short the life of a young worker in the café’s library? Then, when fighting broke out between combatants in December 2017, that part of the café itself was destroyed? That another war destroyed what remained of life here in the cafés and coffee shops, as the new authorities closed them under the pretext of tackling gender mixing. Bustling hives including Café Ofelia, Moon Café and Bin Wa Qshar Café. These authorities expelled people from a space barely large enough to drink a cup of coffee to the battlefronts, or to their homes, to suffocate them behind wall after wall of prohibition, separation and sectarianism? What war does to places and memories!

The post Coffee Corner appeared first on English PEN.

There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell for years. It is a story that is not mine to tell. It is my friend’s story and only she has the right to tell it. Still, I grapple with the urge to write it from my vantage point. I have written countless iterations before, each one taking me further, helping me to articulate what it is that I want to say, and why I want to say it. This is not my story. But within the story of my friend becoming a widow, there is my story too. About who I was and who I became, a before and an after.

My version begins several years before the inciting incident, when we met in university. We were in a meeting and the facilitator asked us to introduce ourselves by sharing one unique thing about us. I don’t remember what I said about myself. ‘I love to read’ was how I used to introduce myself back then. I kept it safe and predictable, the wallflower that I was, still am. My friend raised her arm high and spread her fingers apart. ‘I can do this,’ she said, bending the third phalanx of each finger while keeping the rest of her hand and fingers straight. I had looked down at my own hands and tried to replicate what she was doing, but I couldn’t. My fingers could only bend in the normal way. We became friends easily. We discovered that we both loved to write and commented devotedly on each other’s blog posts. We passed notes to each other in MSA meetings. We took painting classes together.

Most summers, my friend would travel to Egypt with her family. While she was away, I would write emo lyrics on her Facebook wall, quoting Macy Gray: ‘My world crumbles when you are not here.’ Another year, after reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I wrote her a poem titled ‘There Is an Asmaa-shaped Hole in the Universe.’ That hole grew wider when she came back from holiday one year and revealed that she had met someone. She returned to Egypt that winter to get married.

I called my friend on the day of her wedding. Her sister snapped a picture of her while she was talking to me. That image of her in her pearl-white wedding dress, sitting on a garden chair, her joy palpable, even in that grainy image, is one of my favourites. A year later, she returned to Canada with her husband, her belly swollen. I visited her in the hospital the day their daughter was born. Her husband greeted us in the lobby, his face exploding with joy.

The following summer, the current Egyptian president overthrew the democratically elected government, and protests in response to the coup were met with gunfire. My friend, her husband, and their daughter had gone back for a visit. Before they left, before there was a hint of the impending violence, they were considering staying in Egypt for good. I met my friend and her daughter before their trip at a coffee shop called Yellow Cup Café. Yellow ceramic mugs hung from hooks above the food counter. Even the walls were painted yellow. When her husband came to pick them up, I told him, ‘Bring her back, please.’ Perhaps I should have said, ‘Please come back, both of you.’

The Rabaa Massacre happens. I spend all eight hours at work that day scrolling through news websites and articles, scouring Facebook for pictures and videos. ‘The bloodiest massacre of protestors in modern history,’ the headlines proclaim. I remember leaving work, walking to the subway station with a feeling of impending doom. I couldn’t fathom how people were going about their day, as if nothing had happened, while I couldn’t unsee the dead bodies lined up next to each other in a mosque, enormous blocks of ice on their chests, faces caked with dry blood; couldn’t unhear the gun shots, the sound of grenades bursting, the screams of women ringing through the air.

On 16 August 2013, I went to jummah. That morning, I had received an email from my friend, a reply to my message pleading with her to come back, saying that Egypt was becoming too dangerous, especially for her husband, who had a beard of the kind that made him a target. ‘Can Amr shave his beard?’ I had written to my friend, ‘So he doesn’t stand out?’ Her reply was not reassuring. ‘He went to the protests today, but it’s a very large one so hopefully it won’t be targeted by the police.’ About the beard, she said, ‘I asked him, and he won’t. And I respect that. Insha’Allah the protest is peaceful and nothing happens.’

I waited in the mosque for my husband after praying. He had left his bag and phone with me, so I scrolled through his Facebook feed – my phone was old and clunky and didn’t have any social media apps. I paused to read a post from an Imam in the UK, someone who knew my friend. His words felt like a whack to my throat. He must have mistaken her for someone else, I told myself. It can’t be her. I fumbled through my husband’s bag and took out his tablet. I tried to log into my Facebook account, but my fingers were shaking and wouldn’t land on the right letters.

‘Are you okay? Your face is pale.’ I heard my husband’s voice near me somewhere.

‘Asmaa. I need to check something. Her husband.’ My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. My husband took the tablet from me and typed in my password. I scrolled hurriedly through my feed, and for a sliver of a moment I felt relief. Nothing indicated that anything had happened.

And then that moment was gone. I saw a post from my friend’s sister: ‘My sister is a widow. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.’ I don’t remember anything from that moment except my hand flying to my mouth, trying to contain a sob. It erupted anyway, pushed itself out through the gaps between my fingers, burst out from the corners of my mouth.

I called my friend that evening. I don’t recall who answered the phone at her in-laws’ home, or how I introduced myself. Such details have been lost from my memory.

“Assalaamu alaikum?” My friend answered, her voice weary.

I immediately felt guilt. She didn’t want to hear from me. I had called too soon. I was treading callously on her pain.

“Wa alaikum assalaam. It’s me, Hajera.”

“Hajera. Hajera.”

No one snapped a picture of my friend that day while she was talking to me. But I know now that images aren’t the strongest reminder of memory. Voices are, the way a name is stretched and elongated, as if it were something to hold on to, but falling just out of reach.

My best friend’s husband was shot and killed at a protest in Egypt, two years after they got married. My friend became a widow and her nine-month-old daughter an orphan. I don’t have the right to tell this story because it isn’t mine. But can there be another story here, nestled quietly within a larger one? Or maybe a story that’s entirely different, fighting for its own space, its right to exist. Like a series of concentric circles fighting to stay whole, resisting collapse into a black hole. I have been wrestling with these questions over the years.

After my friend returned to Canada, I didn’t know how else to be a friend other than to do what friends do: be there. I took the subway all the way to her parent’s house, where she was staying, and spent the day with her and her daughter. We would go for walks in the neighbourhood, bundled in our winter coats. We made lunch together – sometimes elaborate meals like salmon steaks and rice, other times simple ones like cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. I read books to her daughter. She laughed as I said her favourite lines repeatedly, hoping that the sound of laughter could once again become familiar to us. I kept showing up at my friend’s house. I didn’t know if my presence was helping, but I knew the alternative of not seeing her was unfathomable; the last words I had said to her husband wouldn’t stop echoing in my mind.

Years later, a mutual friend suggested in passing that none of us were truly there for our friend after her husband was killed. Something unfamiliar unleashed from my body. I knew this person was projecting, that it had nothing to do with me or my relationship with my friend, but I couldn’t contain the anger in my chest. My worst fears had risen to the surface – that everything I did was worth nothing. That I failed my best friend. The feeling revisits me now. Am I failing her again by writing this story?

I am now forty, and have known my friend for more than two decades. She is still one of my closest friends. The story of what happened to her belongs to her, I know that. What I also know is that without her presence in my life, without the story of what happened to her, there is a different me. I don’t want to claim my friend’s story. But I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t encountered such a heavy grief at that time in my life. If I didn’t teach myself to sit with its silence, to stay in its uncertainty.

This feels like a safe and predictable way in which to end this essay. It allows me to remain a wallflower, to claim that this is my friend’s story and to centre her, even as I talk about myself and my experience of her tragedy. But there is something gnawing at me that keeps getting harder to ignore. My writing this essay defies my claim of being a wallflower. It puts me at the centre, and being the centre of attention has always made me want to crawl out of my skin and disappear. Which then begs the question of why I’ve felt so compelled to tell this story.

The truth is that my friend’s story is my story too because it changed both our lives. Before self-publishing her memoir, my friend asked me if I could read it and give her some feedback. She mentioned me in the acknowledgments, thanking me for the inspiration for the idea for the book in the first place. She went on to publish two picture books, and to establish a publishing company that is now in its tenth year. What began as a writer-friend sharing thoughts transformed into me becoming an editor. If I work backwards, I wouldn’t be an editor and a creative writing teacher today if my friend hadn’t established her publishing company, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to sit with the question of whether my friend would have started her publishing company if her husband hadn’t been killed.

Who am I hiding from? I ask myself. Writers do this all the time though, don’t they? Take from what inspires them, build stories out of it. I have done this in my fiction too. But I have only taken from my own experiences, heavily changing any recognisable events and character details. The handful of times that I have written nonfiction, the stories have always been mine, a transformative healing announcing the end of the essay.

There is no healing in writing this. Only discomfort. Still, I will show it to my friend before it gets published. I know she will not object to any of its contents. She will tell me that it is very much my story to tell. We will shed tears over WhatsApp messages, reminiscing about the past, how little we knew about ourselves, how young we were. But I will still be uncomfortable. I will still cringe when I see this piece published. My fingers will tremble before I hit post on Instagram where I announce that I have a new publication.

And yet, I am choosing to write this, and agreeing to have it published. Maybe because even after trying for all these years to escape the reach of this story, it still comes back to haunt me. It’s the one essay that is sitting in my nonfiction folder, waiting to see the light of day. Maybe because, when all is said and done, we cannot escape the fact that the lives of our friends are also intertwined with ours. That a friend losing a loved one isn’t like losing a loved one myself, but it is like losing something. It’s losing the friendship you had built and not knowing how things will look moving forwards, how things will irrevocably change. I remember how hesitant I was in the days after my friend returned to Canada. I would email her instead of texting. I would say things like ‘Please don’t feel like you have to reply.’ I felt like an intruder. I’ve been seeing more commentary lately about the grief of losing friends, and how no one talks about what it feels like when friendships end. I felt it back then – the fear of losing my friend to her grief; the fear that my presence would just be a reminder of her old life.

Maybe I keep coming back to this story because I need myself to know something. That I did a hard thing by standing by my friend, offering whatever support I could. That her grief is a part of our friendship and inseparable from who I am now. Is that worth writing about? Is it worth the possibility that I will encounter readers who think less of me as a writer for writing a story that isn’t mine? I don’t know. No matter how many times I circle back to the question of why I’m writing this essay, the answer gets more muddled, and new questions arise, until all of it collapses into itself, and the black hole implodes.

The post This Is Not My Story to Tell 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.

Beth Pickens made her way to me through my computer screen on an end-of-summer afternoon – the kind where the sun is becoming italicised in the sky and you notice that the days are getting shorter again. I was attending a weekly series of writing workshops run by Sophie Robinson, and this week’s was about death and writing.

Pickens, an art advisor based in the USA, talked about how she helped artists through periods of creative block that often stemmed from fears common to all writers, one of which is death.

I was always acutely aware that I avoided setting pen to paper when it came to big ideas. Some sort of deep insecurity about the possible outcomes of my art becoming real. I say ‘acutely’, because, as we often do, I put a firmly sealed lid on these fears, never to be heard from again.

We were given a list of seven common fears surrounding death and asked to note down which resonated with us the most. I jotted them down on a notebook page whose margins brimmed with hand-drawn flowers and semi-realistic eyes:

1. I’m afraid to die because all my ambitions, my plans, my projects would come to an end.
2. I’m afraid to die because I would no longer be able to have any experiences.

I’m afraid to die because I would no longer be able to have any experiences.

Yikes. Not something I wanted to continue thinking about. Thanks, Beth, but I’d rather continue to procrastinate starting or finishing any of my projects. The lid went back on.

A year and half later, I’d quit my job and started an MA in directing. Work had made me stagnant; I barely had the energy to write, arriving home from two-hour commutes on cramped, narrow trains and falling asleep almost immediately. This was going to be my opportunity to spark that inner creative electricity again, taking those previous writing projects a step further by turning them into films.

My months studying culminated in a film about my family history, exploring themes of migration and identity. As a writer, I’m used to working solo on creative projects. In film, the process is entirely different.

Initially, I was bubbling with ideas. My Pinterest board and notebooks swarmed with images: Narcissister’s colourful and cluttered sculpture of her dead mother’s belongings, David Syke Tatler’s bright and playfully accessorised sock puppets, Edith Di Monda’s cool and mysterious house hats. Trying to bring my ideas to life, I got to work on making a replica of Young & Marten, an old hardware store that used to stand in Stratford. Primary colour paints, cardboard, and some string. My partner would sit at my desk, trying to concentrate on her big nine-to-five responsibilities, whilst I would keep interrupting from the floor to ask if she thought the cardboard building fit well around my face.

Once I began painting, the fun began to disappear.  Splendid yellows and grumpy blues gradually turned my prop into a block of cartoon cheese. What had been a solid and coherent idea in my mind turned into something confused, unsure of itself. I didn’t have any time to fix it.

To my surprise, showcasing the pre-vis went fairly well. The audience giggled at my blue and white polka-dot sock puppet; its brown wool hair crazy like mine. They responded well to the stories told by my parents about their childhoods and where we’d all come from. It should have filled me with confidence and pride, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was off. The bubbling ideas were boiling over the brim and dissipating.

When I was 15, my nanny passed away from cancer. She’d had it twice before, once before I was born and once when I was 14. The third time it was terminal. My father remembers her as a strong woman who had endured hardship, not only surviving it but living on to become what I remember of her. Encouraging me to have as much sugar as possible at breakfast time; playing cards with her and her friends, gambling in gummy packets; wearing the ponchos, hats and scarves she knitted for me in the biting English winters.

I’m now down to only one living grandparent; both of my mums’ parents had died before I was born. The three losses began to feel more significant as I grew older: I’d lost the opportunity to find out more about my great and great-great grandparents, about these particular paths of my ancestry. My grandmother was from Chakwal and my grandfather was from Amritsar. We don’t know how they met, what their lives were like before they came to England, or the choices made by our ancestors that  led to the existences of my cousins and I, all born and raised in London.

1. I’m afraid to create because all my ambitions, my plans, and my projects will come to an end when I die.
2. I’m afraid to create because I will no longer be able to have any experiences when I die.
3. I’m afraid to create because everything before me that has died lives in me now, and I must do it justice.

The lid had come off, the stifling anxiety overboiling. Spilled, it was undeniable. I had to do something to lift this fear of death and legacy.

In a weeks’ time, I would be visiting my remaining grandparent in the mountains of Galicia, so I decided to take off with my camera and work out the rest once there.

For the first few days, I ran around frantically, camera at my hip, trying to find a way to shift my fear. I searched in the tops of trees, among marsh green leaves changing into terracotta red. I searched in knee-deep bushes growing smaller strawberries and rounder plums than you get in supermarkets back home. I focused my ears, trying to discern the sound of strolling breezes from lolling sea foam in the distance. In the end, I gave in.

‘I’ve got a migraine,’ I told abuelo. He abandoned planting avocado seeds and sent me to my room with old packets of paracetamol. I climbed into bed, the room unnaturally dark for an early afternoon in the summer. My fingers reached out to the bedside table, reflexively searching. They only found a glass of water.

After the migraine had subsided, I texted my partner about how I was feeling. I’d been trying to film constantly since I’d arrived, hoping each day that something would click and the whole film would be done, just as I had envisioned on the plane over. Her response came: ‘I hate that what started out as a project you were really passionate about and loved has become tainted by others’ opinions.’

This, so simple in its care, was kaleidoscopic. I could see, between the haunting shapes and lurid colours, that I was devastated to face the truth of what had ruined this film for me: I was so worried about doing my imaginary ancestors proud, and creating something my imaginary offspring could connect with, something I had never had, that I was struggling to ground my project in the present; I was only ever looking to the looming deaths of my past and future, and the thoughts of people who did not exist in this exact life, in this exact moment.

The next morning, I used everything in my power to stay present, to follow my gut. I found joy and humour and playfulness in my piece that I’d failed to see – or understand – before. In the editing process, I worked hard at experimenting with my resources, again staying present in my choices, following these instincts with which I was becoming more in tune. I found pride and determination and satisfaction. My artist’s gut is still in its infancy. I still find myself fearing death, and the pressure of artistic legacy. Pickens, in Make Your Art No Matter What, talks about creating a death acceptance practice in which you find small ways to accept death every day. By following my instincts, I am staying only in the present, accepting and co-existing with the presence of death of the future and the past. In doing so, I find life and creativity and success.

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I’m wearing the wrong trousers for trespassing – summery and wide-legged, they keep snagging on bricks. It is August 2023, and I’m climbing over a half-collapsed wall of the former Ljubljanska Banka in Mostar, Bosnia. I’m yet to be convinced that going in is a good idea. More than this, I am worrying about whether it’s right. At the top, I turn around to lower myself down to the ground floor where my family are standing. Before I jump down, I catch sight of a woman on the balcony of the apartment behind the building. She doesn’t smile. I feel a chill go through me. The building is not supposed to be accessible to the public; the local council have boarded and fenced up all the entrances, except for this accidental opening around the back.

In theory, I celebrate civil disobedience, but in practice I’m already feeling there’s something fundamentally wrong about our being here at all – not just because of the rules of the present, but because of the burden of the past. This was once a space of militarised violence. Because of its height, the building was occupied by Croat forces and used as a sniper tower during the two sieges of Mostar, the first of which began in April 1992 and the second around a year later. The building’s grand glass façade was shattered, and has now been cleared away as if it never existed. Only concrete remains. Abandoned after the war, it has become a sort of unofficial gallery for street art, graffiti and murals. And it was this we wanted to see.

I’d worked with Remembering Srebrenica the year before I started university. It was likely because of a heavy awareness of human suffering during the Bosnian War that, when I had the chance to visit, I’d expected to find its legacy memorialised everywhere I went. Of course, the idea of memorialising a war is much hazier than I’d assumed it to be, especially where an agreed version of events is still being debated. At the Srebrenica memorial site, I read a 2021 report which describes the ‘opposition to the official recognition or condemnation of the genocide by states, local governments, and institutions’ in the region. The war is over, but the story isn’t.

The traces of conflict are impossible to miss – there are bullet holes in so many buildings in Sarajevo and Mostar, and many testaments to the dead. There’s the fountain in Sarajevo’s Veliki park paying tribute to children killed in the siege, the statue of Ramo Osmanović calling for his son Nermin, the endless white stone gravestones of those who were killed during the war. But I suppose what surprises me is how inconsistent the attempt to make sense of the war’s brutality seems. We’d visited Mostar’s Museum of War and Genocide the day before, and were bewildered to discover how blurrily the conflict’s historical context was presented. It felt like an avoidance of finger-pointing, of accusation. We had watched footage from November 1993 of the destruction of the old Stari Most, Mostar’s Ottoman bridge, as Croat Defence Council soldiers cheered, but later, standing with crowds at the reconstructed bridge, we struggled to track down an acknowledgement of what had happened there. (Online, I find a plaque in Croatian naming and condemning its destruction, but in English, there’s only a stone that reads ‘DON’T FORGET ‘93’, without contextual information.) During our trip, we visit several museums documenting the Bosnian genocide, none of which are state-funded. They are supported by the Dutch government, in atonement for the massacre that Dutch UN forces allowed to happen at Srebrenica. The British government also contributes financially towards the upkeep of these museums – even as it looks directly past the genocides it is endorsing elsewhere in the world. There is a process of memorialising, but it feels like it’s always slightly out of your line of sight.

It is clear to me that this tower can’t be treated like a tourist spot. I’d read several accounts of it where the fact that it was once used to murder people from a safe distance was almost ignored. I didn’t want to barge in somewhere demanding to see the art, disregarding the wishes of the people – perhaps even of the artists ­– and I didn’t want to stir up the ghosts of the crimes that had been committed there. It seemed to me that there was something sacrilegious about it.

I stand there on the ground floor, trying to decide whether it would be better to turn back. Turning, I catch sight of my dad walking past a wall, on which someone has spray-painted the words:

God is Here Don’t Worry Go All way up…!

I am thrown by the idea that someone has predicted exactly my sense of doubt, moved by the fact that they have somehow eased it. I hadn’t expected the building itself to coax me forwards. I hadn’t expected to find something holy here.

I trail after the others, who are already exploring the bottom floor. Standing water expands murals of warped, ghostly faces and makes mirror-images of the words. The first thing that stands out is how multilingual the graffiti is. Some German phrases are printed in block capitals – ‘DEIN TUN DU BIST’; WHAT YOU DO IS WHAT YOU ARE. Even the inscription FCK AFD. Later, I find whole excerpted paragraphs from Homer in English, alongside insults, questions and declarations. If the artists who have taken over this building have an argument to make, it’s not one that has been communally decided. These multilingual voices speak past each other, between each other, around each other.

Where one artist’s work has spread out to cover parts of an older contribution, these voices overlap. It’s a completely different model to the established avenues through which we usually find work in translation. Here, space is as in demand as in a packed magazine. Everyone is after the best spots. But, in this case, there’s no point at which the work is finished. It’s last come first served. For me, this building is a place where established ways of doing things – of making art, of translating, of thinking about the past – are jumbled, exposing their weaknesses, and where the whole question of the value of a consistent, coherent take is thrown into question. In a way, the building is like an anti-gallery. There’s no governing board to steer the direction of its contribution to Bosnian history or culture, and there are a fair share of names scratched into the stone. There’s no single curator, no strategy of inclusion or exclusion. Anything can – and very likely will – be overwritten by anyone.

Slowly, we begin to head upwards. I hadn’t expected the overwhelming openness. Forget bannisters, railings, or anything else to hold onto. These stairs don’t even have walls. It’s a risk assessor’s nightmare, but there’s something liberating about the false sense of dizziness induced by the sweeping skyline. It’s safe enough, so long as you’re sensible and avoid the edges. I feel like a child riding a bike without stabilisers. But I can’t get too comfortable, because even if there’s no danger now, the awareness of past threat hangs over me. So much of this art is haunting; the mural of shifting faces which spans a corner, warping outwards, and the sly, subtle warning to avoid the exposed lift shafts where someone has spraypainted two arrows, one pointing upwards and one downwards, respectively labelled ‘HEAVEN’ and ‘HELL’. The fall would be fatal. It’s a privilege, of course, to wander through this place in a time of relative safety. I find myself longing to know when exactly each piece of graffiti was done, to help put a context to this strange balance of beauty and of sinister reminders.

To my surprise – despite my feeling of solemnity – so much of the graffiti is out of pocket, even funny. On one wall on a higher floor, in front of a stunning view of a hill which holds the city in its palms, someone has spraypainted ‘RATE THIS PLACE ON TRIP ADVISOR’ and completed it with a line of stars. It makes me laugh at its daringness, its cheekiness, in English, making a demand of us, understanding us as interlopers. While the first bit of graffiti that had encouraged me onwards might have wanted people to visit, the sentiment isn’t necessarily shared by all: these artists won’t let us get too comfortable, and they know who we are. I love this sharpness and humour, which goes on in the face of its own destruction, its anarchic defiance. Here, the past isn’t something to be swept away or standardised or replaced with a nice, coherent, comforting argument about the human capacity to kill or the grand horror of war. In the tower, ruin is met with something utterly and undeniably alive.

From the highest floor, we look down and see my mother and my youngest brother below us in the park, playing on the bridges over the water. Snipers once took aim from the top of this building, and here I am, waving at the tiny forms of the people I love most in the world. Maybe it’s the greenness of the water, or the beautiful mosques and churches tucked behind every street corner, but Mostar feels like a peaceful place today. From this vantage point, I wonder how much of that peace is the sort that survives on silence, or at least relative quietude. The worst traces of the war have been cleared out of sight, but the bruises remain, and if you stray too far from the centre, you find places like this, where the legacy of the war still throws a long shadow. I find many things in this strange tower on the city’s edge, but peace and quiet isn’t one of them. It feels busy, loud with all the voices it contains. It echoes with the laughter and disagreement of artists, teenagers, soldiers and ghosts.

The sniper tower stands tall as a reminder that whether we assemble memorials to a nation’s history or demolish all traces of war and conflict, we are constantly curating a relationship with the past. A messier, more multivalent way of engaging with shared history will continue somewhere out of sight. If we want to see this in action, we must seek it out and make sense of it for ourselves. I suspect that this is really where my initial discomfort was rooted. Entering a space like this can feel like taking the burden of understanding, of a fair and nuanced approach to atrocities, entirely onto your own shoulders. There’s no approved version of events explained neatly on the walls; you might not be armed with a reading list; there’s no state-sanctioned approach that will tell you what to think. I’m not sure that this passive but comfortable engagement with the past on predetermined grounds is the most responsible way to look at history as it stares up at you from beneath the rubble.

I maintain that there’s great value in staying sensitive, to remaining somewhat in awe of a place and its ghosts. But I also think we need to interrogate the feeling that things would be better if someone else could just think their way through the problem of reading the past for us. Sometimes you need to jump the fence and see for yourself. I had worried about disturbing a grave silence here that doesn’t exist the way I had imagined it. Instead, the tower is an open-ended place of countless voices speaking past and to one another, and I’m glad I took the chance to hear them. From the top of that building, a place where the past is so visceral and unsettled, the present looks different to me: equally unmade, equally full of overlaps and disagreement, and yet constantly in danger of being shaped into stories that tell us, comfortingly, that they are complete.

We leave the building; it’s getting late. We stop to play in the park, where we pick ripe figs, climb over the fountains, and take photos of my little brother in front of the incongruous but delightful statue of Bruce Lee. A bridal party drives past as we walk over a roundabout and towards the city centre, honking their horns loudly. The ease of slipping back into every day life here makes me even more aware of the quiet with which a place’s history can recede from memory, conveniently pushed to the parameters again.

Where will this impulse to forget, whether it comes from the people or the state, leave places like the sniper tower? Perhaps it’ll be boarded up again for another decade; perhaps it’ll be demolished; perhaps one day, the history will be put to one side, and it’ll be renovated into upmarket flats, like Berlin Prenzlauer Berg’s Wasserturm, which contained an early concentration camp in 1933. The tower stays in my mind as I first saw it, with my little brother playing in the concrete skeleton of what was once a glass revolving door. All that’s left is a cylindrical structure jutting out onto the street corner: four panels of concrete and four gaps. On three of the panels, a pale blue starry night is painted, with the same phrase written underneath in English, German and a third language. Google Translate tells us it is Bosnian, but an alternative, perhaps more accurate name is BCMS: Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. All of these are one language, divided up to fit today’s national borders. I picture my little brother weaving between them, unaware of what this place has meant and may go on to mean. And I imagine myself, doubtful and curious, standing under its odd canopy, reading the same words in each language: WE ARE ALL LIVING UNDER THE SAME SKY.

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I was thinking about the notion of yenilenme, renewal, a common desire among us modern people. The word renewal strikes me as somewhat insipid, but it nonetheless conjures in my mind’s eye an image of a departing boat. This is a boat that belongs to neither person nor heritance; rather, it is a boat that the seafarer built on their own and for themselves alone. To be renewed, I realised, one must first be unmoored in one’s own metaphorical sea, wherein one can find one’s own myths. Let me do my best to explain this. I’ll show what I mean by shouldering the boat at the end.

If we think, by contrast, of the concept of yenileşme, innovation, we recognise that it lexically encompasses other people. Like invitation, or inclusion, or involvement. In this sense, innovation necessitates others to achieve the new. It might precipitate a new form of interaction with others, or innovative organising and innovative encounters might be how the new is devised. But the concept of renewal is, at least in my opinion, a more singular – even solitary – act. A person giving up on something within themselves, opting to replace it with another approach, another state, another dream or spirituality or attitude. Progressively adopting the new as a means of losing – even mourning – the old. Seeking creativity, this form of solitude surely requires something feminine: the courage to return to the waters upon whose surface the moonlight shines.

In the monotheistic religions of the world, each and every human is understood to be born from dust and returned to dust, born from earth and returned to earth. By contrast, the watery life left to us by polytheistic cultures has been consigned to the psychomythologies of our darkest subconscious. Yet every person who emerges from the amniotic waters of their mother’s womb finds themselves seeking out and returning to those waters with every daydream and reverie, with every act of fantasy and imagination.

Virtually all creation myths posit that water originates the universe – that life comes from water. In fact the very notion of individual descent depends on water. According to Thales, water is what ‘gives birth to all beings.’ In the Vedas, water is called mâtritamâh, mother of mothers. Water’s feminine quality, its description through the fundaments of the maternal, symbolises the creative potential of humankind. And yet the tempestuous waves that one surmounts in pursuit of creativity, chasing after that which is unique and incomparable, are not always so compassionate. At night, for instance, sea monsters emerge. Just as it gives life, water takes life too. It’s trustworthy when still, murderous when stormy. Though it pledges immortality, as in the water of life, it nonetheless churns round us like a deadly whirlpool. Water has the capacity to terrify – with the giant squids and monstrous fish it conjures in our nightmares – even as it beckons – in the form of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens – each of us on a quest for renewal.

In his book Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade examines how water represents spiritual energy. When water flows peacefully and as planned through its intended channel, it can symbolise a life well-lived. Whereas waters that overflow or gush forth, as floods or tsunamis, threaten the stability of land. To dip oneself into water – presuming that one can re-emerge from it – renders the mind and the ego productive; it increases one’s life force, because contact with water brings one into relation with the source of life itself. Likewise, water is shapeless on its own, even as it wears away at what has already taken shape, and gives shape to new forms:

[The Waters] dissolve or abolish the forms of things, they ‘wash away sins,’ and as such are at once purifying and renewing. It is their lot both to precede the Creation and to reabsorb it, incapable as they are of surpassing their own modality – that is, of manifesting themselves in forms. The Waters cannot get beyond the state of the virtual, of seeds and of what is latent. Everything that has form manifests itself above the Waters, by detaching itself from them. On the other hand, as soon as it is separated from the waters and has ceased to be potential (virtual), every form comes under the laws of Time and of Life; every form therefore acquires limitations, participates in the universal becoming, is subject to history, decays away and is finally emptied of substance unless it be renewed by periodic immersions in the Waters, repetitions of the ‘deluge’ with its cosmogenic corollary.

What I mean to say with all of this is that one must set out to sea, no matter how stormy it may be, in order to be renewed. By boat or by caique, setting out to sea so that one can return, in other words, to the cosmic mother. By interesting coincidence, the word caique comes from the word kayġuk, an Old Turkic word derived from the word for ‘return.’ One must navigate uncharted waters, must risk the dissolution, abolition, or purging of all forms, so that one can return from dreams and from reverie, bringing ashore new forms. Whatever new thing we bring back to shore, even if it is simply ourselves renewed, is altogether new until it is defined through other objects and beings.

But first, we must build a boat. We must be the crafters of a simple boat, whether by hollowing out a tree or by tying together reeds as they did in ages past. Our books, our histories, our lives are the specifications for this abstract boat we mean to build. But building the boat: that is the responsibility of us, the seafarers. In ancient Greek they used the words tekhnao – to craft with skill, to produce – tekhnikos – skilled in art or craft – and tekhnites – artist, craftsperson. These words are at the heart of tekne, the Turkish word for boat. To build a boat with technical craftsmanship is not easy. As we build, our hands may bleed, our backs may ache, our skin may burn under the searing sun. And then it is our task to shoulder the boat and carry it to the shore, to float it in the sea. Before the creative mind can carry the seafarer, the seafarer must carry the creative mind: with patience, care and discipline, free of delusions, abiding by the laws of physics.

To tear oneself from land and from language and set out to sea in a boat is no less than to risk dying and being born again in the artistic struggle; it is, moreover, an act of existential defiance against the world.

The waters can assist us in this defiance. There are, as you know, five rivers in the underworld of Hades: Acheron, river of woe; Cocytus, river of wails; Styx; river of dread; Pyriphlegethon, river of flames; and Lethe, river of forgetfulness. But there is one additional river: Mnemosyne, which restores to memory what the Lethe forgets. Artists, astronomers, musicians, poets, tragedists, historians, dancers, scientists: these are the people who, by drinking from the waters of the Mnemosyne, are brought back to life. It is these people who shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.

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There is something quite powerful about this intangible thing called storytelling. Wherever we go, our stories go with us. And the things we hold dear – our culture, identity, and history – are never quite lost.

Jumbies, rolling calves, demons, malevolent spirits, ordinary ghosts; there are many stories that have both terrified and inspired me. But none more so than the folklore I grew up with. And fear is an incredibly powerful storytelling tool. The warnings hiding in prose and proverbs shared between generations by word-of-mouth were the first works of horror I became acquainted with while growing up in the Virgin Islands.

Around 7 or 8, I developed this odd fear of plant seeds. Greater than the nervous anticipation of chanting ‘bloody Mary’ in the mirror three times with my childhood friends, I still sharply recall the dread that filled me when someone in my class would jokingly plant so-called ‘jumbie beads’ in the pockets of my uniform. The story as I remember it went: if one of these small half-red half-black beads made its way into your home, once midnight arrived, a jumbie would come out of the seed and harm you. I would come to learn that the seeds, also known as rosary peas, were quite toxic, and could be fatal when ingested. Especially for children.

In that tale is a warning, one that even children can understand. We feared the spirits that would come from the seeds more than the poison living within it, but the result was all the same. I asked a friend what her experiences were with jumbie beads and she told me she knew people who made them into jewellery to ward off the evil eye. The red-black pattern was less something to fear and more something to revere.

I think this experience is where my interest in folk stories began. This particular lore varies across different Caribbean countries and cultures. Every time it’s told – no matter how differently – a little bit of our shared history and beliefs is told as well.

Mami Wata, or Mama Glo, was another recurring character. I remember telling my parents, who are originally from The Gambia, about research I was doing for a project on Caribbean folklore and the legends of Mami Wata – a mermaid-like being who could bring wealth or misfortune, who was a protector of the waters, who had many mythical characterisations. There was glee on my father’s face when he listened to me relay this story, miles and years away from where he’d first heard it as a child in West Africa. Like him, Mami Wata had travelled. And how exciting it was for me to find that our diaspora was linked not just through the trauma and consequences of chattel slavery but also through the stories our ancestors kept alive in the face of such cruelty. Since moving from Tortola to the UK, I’ve become even more invested in the stories we shared in our younger days.

I am not very good at writing happy stories. That became quite a problem for my secondary school English teacher. She’d had enough of marking my macabre short stories and challenged me to give my characters a different ending. Today, I sometimes still hear her voice in the back of my head as I’m re-writing these old wives’ tales in my own way.

A common trope in folkloric tales is the scorned woman wronged in a past-life and reborn as a vengeful entity. There was a piece I wrote some time ago about Cowfoot Woman, more commonly known as La Diablesse. The original story as I’d known it detailed a woman with long hair in a braid wearing a wide-brimmed hat slanted across her face, revealing only her demure smile. She would walk with a limp and wear a traditional skirt with a wide hoop. Her attractive disguise concealed a sinister demeanour. Behind her long flowing skirt was a hoofed left leg, only revealed to her male victims when she led them astray, never to be seen again.

Many of these stories have hidden meanings. Perhaps this one is warning potentially unfaithful men from meeting a dire end. Perhaps La Diablesse is a femme fatale created to vilify feminine wiles and temptation. But the meaning is up to the telling, and the telling changes in every instance. I changed it such that the Cowfoot Woman, who I so feared as a child, became something of a protector, a lover of women and only a danger to others. Still as beautiful, still as deadly. Through traditional storytelling I found my voice in writing. I could write my horror to represent a shared identity, shared culture, shared customs. More importantly, my old English teacher would no longer need to fear coming across another pointlessly tragic tale.

A month later at Tomas’ funeral, the closing of his casket like a clacking hoof on a dirt road, she cried. As the wind carried the wails of his mother’s grief, the biting sorrow echoed Nita’s own, she realised.

On that night, before she was scared, she was confused, and before she was confused, she was enamoured. La Diablesse’s smile left her as Tomas left his kin – hollow, lonely, and feeling.

Mariam Jallow is a Gambian and Virgin Islander Biochemistry graduate and avid writer. Her experiences in journalism, poetry, storytelling and communications have coexisted with her love for science and research since she began sharing her writing as a child. Currently residing in the U.K., Mariam’s writing ranges from news-style articles to works of fiction incorporating elements from horror and folklore.

Her previous experiences include working to promote equality and diversity among students and staff in university settings, particularly within STEM, and communicating science for public education, empowerment and entertainment. Mariam’s contributions as the Science Editor of UEA’s student newspaper led to winning the Best Science Publication at the 2022 SPA National Awards. Currently, she continues to split her time between science communications, research, and publishing stories.

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