“For the first time in her life, she feels hatred. She hates her mother, who is constantly telling her how much she despises her parents, yet despite everything she still sends the girl to them summer after summer. She hates her grandma and grandpa for their stupid rules. […] She hates their fears of non-existent dangers. […] She has never lied, but because they are all liars – they see themselves in her. She never does anything bad, but because they never admit their own mistakes – she has to shoulder their guilt.”

Are the three women of this story – Yana, her mother Lily, and her grandmother Eva – right to feel hatred, as they at times do, for the people and places around them? And what do you hate?

I don’t know if there is a ‘right’ to hate that must be given. I think hate, along with violence, envy, and other dark expressions of the human psyche, is a natural part of the human experience, an eruption against something we perceive as a violation. Someone hurts me so I hate them. Someone crosses an internal or external boundary I have and it makes me angry. Someone’s possessions or personality or actions make me, on some level, realise my own smallness or deficiency, so I envy them. The place I was born in, or my nation, or my state, or the political regime I live in, limit me in some way – so I rebel against them.

The question for me is whether we choose the light or the dark path when faced with these powerful emotions. I think that’s at the core of every myth, religion, creed we have as humans. Lily, in her behaviour towards her daughter, for example, chooses the dark path – I’ve been hurt so it’s within my right to hurt, you should have seen it coming. Yana, on the contrary, attempts forgiveness. The entire book deals with the choices we make when faced with the worst.

I hate many things. I hate stupidity, small-mindedness, self-importance, self-righteousness. Like all people, I am at the crossroads of light and darkness every day, within and outside myself. I choose carefully and thread lightly.

I want to ask next about fear. Fear – of violence, of change, of ruin; of right here and of over there – is something that both makes the book’s characters stay and makes them go. There’s a scene of horrifying violence in which Yana is playing the piano watched by her abusive father, and two lines from this have stayed so firmly with me: ‘She’ll play the whole night through, as long as it keeps her mother alive,’ and then ‘She is sure that if she stops playing, her father will kill her mother. She curses herself for not having practiced for days.’ The terror and mundanity that are held together here is a tension we feel throughout the book. Could you talk about writing these scenes – the experience of doing so, the importance of doing so, and the idea of the quietness of terror amid the loudness?

It was very important for me not to turn life’s tragedy into ‘trauma porn’, to sell the experiences of my characters cheaply for the sake of entertainment and a teardrop here or there, or an eager, morbid curiosity ‘has this happened to you personally?’

I once watched this wild goose who had a synthetic cord of some sort wrapped around its foot. It had clearly happened a while ago, since the cord had eaten into the flesh (or the flesh had eaten the cord), and its foot was heavily deformed. It was rummaging around the grass with other geese, and it was wading and wobbling, always a bit behind, always clunky in its movements. Yet it had clearly got used to its own condition, and lived with it.

This is real suffering – when an emotional handicap turns into a habit. The worst suffering I’ve seen, and lived through, is becoming so used to one’s own internal screams and forgetting the quiet of a peaceful life, what life even sounded like before. Tragedies thrive when suffering becomes such lived normality. I like that you used the word ‘mundane’, because real suffering is terribly mundane. It’s frightening how much suffering human beings can actually tolerate.

Another moment quite late on, from Yana’s perspective (maybe responding to Eva): ‘What do you miss the most? Nothing. Everything.’ Yana is in the US, recalling her youth in Bulgaria. Perhaps she will soon need to travel there. Could you talk about yearning in Born of Guilt? What does Yana’s time in the US make her feel about home? And as someone who lives between the US and Bulgaria, what do each make you feel about home? And what do you yearn for?

I yearn for the States when I am in Bulgaria and vice versa; I feel more Bulgarian/European when I am in America, and more American when I am in Europe. I like the American expanse, the endless road, the people and places I end up meeting and seeing, the ‘bread of bitterness’ she feeds its people, her extremes, her genius… And I love the Bulgarian rootedness, the feeling of being close to the Earth, the mythical quality of its countryside where time pools and stagnates, a sense of practicality which often turns into backwardness but is really preservation instinct, you can’t fool Bulgarians into believing anything other than their own legends and fairytales, oh, and picking cherries and apricots straight from the tree…

There’s clearly a lot of yearning in what I just said, and a lot of yearning in my writing where I selfishly preserve all these tropisms in order not to lose them forever. But I think there is also a collective yearning, a yearning towards a world that’s slowly slipping through our fingers; I think Yana embodies a lot of this – a sense that time (and space) has broken irreparably, that some people and places remain beyond this break while others advance forwards with incredible speed. I’m not sure this is unique to our times; I think as people we have always yearned for what was. But it feels like there is an unprecedented acceleration now. And a sense we’ve missed the Golden Age of our world, that all the examples we were told to follow lead nowhere.

Staying with the US, another line from Yana: ‘These are the two Americas: one of resort-style happiness, […] And the other, of creditors.’ This is a book also about migration and refuge. From migrant workers Lily encounters in Germany, to Eva and her mother’s refuge in Bulgaria (and a startlingly observed moment in which Eva repeats to Yana her acquired discomfort at refugees in Bulgaria), to Yana’s own experience of migration and work in the US. What do you think these different experiences of migration reveal? And is this book, in a way, part of the wider tradition of novels that explore the sometimes desperately dark and sometimes stunningly light experience of migrant work?

To me, the migrant experience isn’t something singular or unique or exotic or something that happens to certain groups of people or to ‘others’, and I hope the novel shows it more as a collective experience rather than a singular topic. Migration and movement are an inherent part of the human experience; we’ve never been static and we’ve never been homogenous. The three protagonists are a small example of this.

Eva’s story is one of an internal, ideologically forced migration, resulting from the late industrial spurt of Eastern European socialism which severed the connection between people and their land. Bulgaria has always been a very agricultural country, and to this day people have deep connection with gardening. Almost everyone owns a plot of land somewhere or grows vegetables on their balcony. Yet it’s a disappearing art, for many reasons, lots of them political. The story of the preceding generation is similar – one of war, flight, and redrawn borders, when one morning someone just wakes up in a different country.

Lily’s story is one of Westward economic migration, typical of the more difficult years in the recent history of Eastern Europe, but just as typical of the modern history of Europe as a whole. In the United States, you’d often have Americans point out their descent – Polish, Irish, French, etc. These are all the descendants of economic migrants, workers, people who were uprooted or decided to transplant themselves into a different soil for one reason or another. This is the story of the Latinx migrants in the United States today. As we see in the story – which is, in fact, close to real life in this instance – the very people who see them as dangerous are the people who employ them, because profit is the obvious reality of our world while xenophobia is just one of its political tools.

Finally, I see Yana’s story as that of a generation of global wanderers, the generation of the Work & Travel ‘brigades’, low-cost international flights, studying and wandering culturally abroad. This has also happened in the past, of course, but it was an experience reserved for the well-off and educated; now it’s a trend, a treat, an expectation.

And, of course, then there’s also always the larger picture: migrants fleeing war, persecution, poverty, famine, climate change (to come, certainly). If we trace our own family tree, we’ll certainly find migration and displacement of one kind or another. And more to come, unfortunately, or such is my belief at least.

One such observation of migrant work is in an amazing – though horrifying – scene in which Lily is working out what to do about a clearly exploited migrant worker who appears at the hospital she’s working in. I want to talk about this scene in the frame of language and translation. Here, we have Croatian not being translated as we read Angela and your English translation of Lily’s Bulgarian and German (the latter written in your original in, I presume, Bulgarian). It’s so cleverly rendered. I want to ask you about the role translation plays in your work at large, and about how you and Angela worked together on the English translation of this book specifically. Could you speak a little about that?

Yes, I am interested in the polyphony of language and am also a bit of a linguistic mess, having split myself between so many languages. In Bulgarian, Yana’s Bulgarian has deliberate English ‘structure’ to it in places, resulting from her being a part of a global generation that thinks and speaks in English (often the English of Hollywood, advertisement, McDonalds, and now memes, YouTube, etc.) I’ve always been curious about how English ‘modifies’ the languages it touches, and vice versa; I sometimes get an angry comment from an outraged purist demanding the publisher get it together and hire a better editor. These and other quirks are obviously impossible to render in English, but we came up with solutions, such as the neat description of the northwest Bulgarian dialect. There were places where we adapted and we had some great discussions with Aisling Brennan, the book’s editor at Faber, which really helped the book blossom in English.

I read world literature almost entirely in translation, mostly in English, unless I can read the original (sometimes I read the original and the translation). Translation is an art of its own calibre. Imagine you’re someone faced with a painting you must render for a different audience, producing the exact same message and the feelings it evokes. But your audience is from another planet, where the light refracts differently, the laws of physics don’t work the same way, and in addition maybe words also smell differently based on the letters that make them up. Oh, and your painting has a chair on it, but the audience has no idea what a chair is, they don’t sit because they’re not built for it, so also you need to figure out how to explain sitting, or musical chairs. Good luck. Each language is its own proper alien world, and translators are interstellar travellers. We’d be lost without them.

I’d like to talk about how family histories recur and enmesh and mangle. The stories of Yana, Lily and Eva reveal the remarkable ways in which they are similar and different to each other – and different when they think they are similar, and vice versa. Are we inseparable from the pain and joys of our parents and grandparents – from their histories and the histories they live in?

I believe we are inseparable from that pain, but I also believe we have a choice as to what to do with it. We’re made of those who come before us, but we’re also a unique combination of the same stuff that they’re made of – even on a biological level, if you want to remain within practical, tangible, scientific limits. Born of, not born like. I believe the same of society at large: there is a culture we inherit, but we also mould it with our actions. Nothing needs to last forever. And almost nothing can.

And a related question, maybe, a little more about your craft. There’s an astonishing quality to the three stories whereby, though we don’t always have too many signposts and though we see the three women at different ages in each of their lives, we always know who we are with and at what part of their life. How did you hold their voices so distinct, even as each of their voices changes as they shift between childhood and adulthood?

I appreciate your words, truly. The real answer would be ‘I don’t know’. The creative process happens as it does, and I try to get out of its way as much as I can. As I ponder your question, I think of traditional Bulgarian polyphonic singing – which Angela excels at – where one voice can come to dominate others or they can recede and create room for it, but also the harmonies can be so powerful that it sounds like one singular, generational, omnipotent voice singing from the depths of the human experience. I find this is true not only of these generational stories, but of all stories in general. And I hope to continue playing with it.

I couldn’t stop noticing all the references to brands in the book. Sometimes brand names in novels localise a setting. But here they are at times so of a place and at others so consciously globalised and international. Could you talk about brands, and why they appear so much? And is it to do with questions about capitalism and communism, anti-capitalism and anti-communism?

Great question, and thank you for noticing. Partly because I love Don DeLillo. But seriously: brands felt unavoidable once I started writing about the world my generation inherited.

I didn’t lean into modernity too much in this first novel, but the seeds are there. I am extremely interested in how the stories we tell – and the way we consume them – have changed over the past twenty years. Even the fact that I use the word consume says something about that.

My generation grew up between worlds. We studied the nineteenth-century national novel at school and read Harry Potter at home, while somewhere CEOs, behavioural scientists and engineers were figuring out how to make cartoons, cigarettes, and eventually the internet more addictive, and how to compete for our attention. We were told that if we studied hard and worked hard we’d be free, while entire industries were being built around capturing and shaping our behaviour, and now the same jobs we prepped for are being wiped by AI in the name of profit – not because it works better.

I’m only 30, but I’ve lived through at least two different worlds: post-communism and late-stage capitalism – systems that often resemble each other more than we’d like to admit; an analogue world and a digital one; a world where my own mind felt private, and one where even my inner life seems to demand performance. Yana asks the question I wrestle with every day: how do we remain fully human between the world we’ve left behind and this brave new one, and how are we a connector bridge between the two?

That’s where the brands come in. Sometimes they root the story in a particular place, but just as often they erase the place altogether. You travel across the world only to discover the same logos, the same shops, the same desires. In the novel, McDonald’s becomes a metaphor for a generation whose idea of freedom was reduced to access to consumer choice.

So yes, there are questions about capitalism, communism, anti-capitalism and ideology running through the book. But I’m interested in something even broader: what happens when branding, commercialisation, and slogans begin to flatten every part of human experience, including literature itself. Reading and writing require attention, imagination, patience and a tolerance for complexity, and I worry those are becoming scarce. More than AI, I worry about people beginning to think, speak and write like markets expect them to. I worry more about extreme genrefication and advertising, people who can only think and talk about ‘the markets’ and ‘the audiences’, thought and word policing, and ‘workshopping’ one’s writing into a flat ‘digestible’ style, and putting ‘riveting’ on the back of every literary novel far more than I worry about the dull writing LLMs produce – human slop scares me more because it’s harder to notice and it fertilises the soil for AI slop. In that sense, the brands aren’t just references; they’re part of the novel’s vocabulary for talking about how we currently live.

A final emotion, core to the book: guilt. ‘I am made of guilt, just as bread is made of flour.’ Does guilt do more bad that it does good? Is it avoidable? And could I ask you if there’s anything you’re feeling guilty about at the moment?

It’s funny, I only noticed guilt was at the core of the novel when we were discussing the title. I owe this to the book’s editor, Georgi Gospodinov, and his partner, Bilyana Kourtasheva, who is one of Bulgaria’s most distinguished literary scholars. They spotted the sentence and suggested ‘Born of Guilt’ in the singular, and I offered that we use the plural in Bulgarian, as all the characters seem to be wrestling with some form of guilt. I then went back into the draft document, typed ‘guilt’ in, and over a hundred entries of the word or its derivatives came out. To this day I give this as an example of the creative process: some of the choices we make are conscious, others are completely guided by the work itself.

I feel guilty about everything I could have done better but failed to. The people I couldn’t understand or love, the situations I couldn’t resolve, for the solutions I don’t have, for feeling overwhelmed with the world, and so on. It’s classic neuroticism, on one end, on another I think it’s what it means to be human. We only get one life, and we’re destined to live it imperfectly. I think coming to terms with that, particularly in this day and age, is hard. I am not a religious person per se, but I am growing some understanding of forgiveness, and I think a lot of it has to do with acceptance, outside of the frame of institutionalised religion. I think Yana’s journey reflects this a little bit. But that’s for the reader to say.

Interview by Will Forrester.

The post A World That’s Slowly Slipping Through Our Fingers: An Interview with Joanna Elmy appeared first on English PEN.

I’d like to start with a question for you both. In part, this is a book about seeking: seeking truth, seeking revenge, seeking purpose, seeking connection, seeking forgiveness, seeking sisterhood. What else do you both think it seeks? And what do you think it finds?

MICHELLE STEINBECK: Oh thank you! I think Fila, the narrator, also seeks to get to know her mother after her death – an of course impossible endeavour. And she finds that private matters that were hidden in her family because they were seen as ‘shameful’ – like having an illegitimate child, or being sexualised in public as a girl, or her mother working in the sex industry, or even the violent death of her mother – are not so private and singular at all. In that, she finds a lot of what you mention. She also finds resistance. And ghosts and friendships – and quite some action.

JEN CALLEJA: I was thinking throughout the process of translating Favorita that the novel is also ‘about’ seeking to create new ways of exploring the intersection of a variety of injustices through a story while revealing what happens when we make real lives and real events into stories. It does this through its blending of genres, its form and structure, its surreal nature. It’s also what I found so incredible about Michelle’s first novel, My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water, which I also translated; these set pieces which seem so simple and even whimsical, yet get to a deeper and more nuanced truth than straight-up realist fiction.

One way of describing Favorita is as an intergenerational matrilineal story. But it’s one where only one generation still lives – where we have that story told singularly through Fila’s voice, and she has it told collectively by Magdalena and Lavinia and the women who encounter her and them. The epigraphs to the book are by two writers, Goliarda Sapienza and Johanne Lykke Holm, who are deeply interested in death, ghosts, haunting, and their gendering. Could you both talk to me about ghosts?

MS: Writing this book, I was in a similar position as Fila: I wanted to know more about her family history and about the lives of the murdered women. But how could I write about all of it if I knew so little? Could I just imagine, pretend, claim? Would their ghosts haunt me if I wrote such lies – or if I wrote something true but unknowingly? The working subtitle of the novel was ‘a necromancy’; it was what we were doing, my narrator and I, to find out more about the dead women, trying to hear their voices, instead of all the people who talked about them after their death.

I started researching and writing this book in a supposedly very haunted place – an old Villa in the woods, where many people reported to have seen or felt the ghost of the murdered woman I was writing about. It was the perfect place to get obsessed. In the daytime I wandered in the woods with my portable typewriter. At night I couldn’t turn off the light.

JC: I thought about the women in my own family constantly while working on Michelle’s book. I thought about my Irish grandmother, my Maltese grandmother, my own mother, all of whom are no longer here. I didn’t really know any of them very well, apart from the fact that they too had difficult lives due to the expectations placed upon them, so translating the book was a way of being with them, alongside them.

I’m not the first translator to say that translation can feel like a seance. There are all these voices and references at play in the text, and then you channel them like a medium – what do you hear, what do you mishear?

About halfway through the book, the form changes and we read fictionalised newspaper reports about the murder of Sisina – who becomes integral to the story – and the subsequent legal proceedings and community fallout that occurs. I thought they would last for a few pages; they last for many, many more. I was so glad that they did.

Michelle – could you talk a little about this section? How far into the writing process did the decision to use this form come to you? And why? And why do we read these 30 articles uninterrupted by narrative voice?

Jen – could you talk a little about translating this section? It’s such a different voice to Fila’s, but it’s at once so in the voice of the book – of Fila reading it, somehow. It feels pitch-perfect both in representing reportage of its era and in implicitly satirising it. Michelle’s afterword talks about source for writing these; were there particular touchstones for you in translating it?

MS: I’m glad you’re glad! It felt like a bold move. I was worried readers would have a hard time sticking with it and would just turn the pages or, worse, stop reading at all and put the book away. I tried to make it shorter too – or rather I planned to. But in the end I needed it all. And I hoped at least some readers would find it as thrilling and revealing as I did.

I wanted a reader to have the same experience I had when I was handed the book about the real case on which Sisina’s is built. The excitement, the cosy shivers, the strange interest in all those details. This true crime feeling: maybe I can solve the case? And then the disgust creeping in, the feeling of a void: why would I be excited about this? What’s wrong with us, that we feel murdered girls are some kind of entertainment? This was a major concern while creating the book: how to write about the violence without reproducing it. I felt I needed to show this reproduction which happens, for example, in the media – and which shockingly hasn’t changed much since then.

By giving Fila and the reader these newspaper articles, I also wanted to open a room for reflection about how society wrongs the victims of femicide and patriarchal violence. Before we come back to Fila’s voice and her commenting.

JC: I think what you say about this section is right. That it still has the style of the book running through it, and that it feels like Fila is still present while you’re reading it. It’s not a complete dropping out of what has come before; if anything, what surrounds it shows the absurdity and surreal nature of the ‘real’ events.

I asked Michelle if the articles were all from the same newspaper because I initially tried to make them seem consistent. But she clarified that they’re from a range of newspapers, so I then had different ‘rules’ where some would sound more tabloid and others more broadsheet (these are obviously UK distinctions, but these are what I could reach for as references – newspapers in different countries have different styles and voices). I didn’t use Michelle’s source as the book is in Italian and I don’t speak Italian!

Jen – you’ve worked with Michelle before. How has that affected your craft?

JC: The first experience of working with Michelle in Rome while she was on a residency there made me rethink – or at least complicate – the reasons why I translate. We became very close through the intensity and vulnerability we were both open to when working on the first book. The translation became this apparatus for becoming close with another person.

I started thinking: a translation might just be the record of a time of collaborating closely with someone and becoming their friend. We subsequently worked together on Favorita for a week in Switzerland, but we’ve also had a holiday together in Paris where we kept talking about working on a translation but ended up just having a nice time together instead. Maybe the translated text is beside the point in one respect – though in other respects, it’s obviously very important!

Michelle – you’ve worked with Jen before. How has that affected your craft?

MS: I started translating only after I met Jen, so it’s fair (hehe) to say our working together woke my interest in translating. And when I do, I use what I know as her technique: leaving alternatives for particular words in the first versions. It was so interesting and fun to see how she did it with my novels, to witness it being written again and to see those decisions on paper, decisions which otherwise happen in the unseen. After all, writing is deciding. Every single word is a decision. We discussed the nuances between these words, which after the dictionary mean the same thing but are not exactly the same. And by doing so I not only learned many lovely British expressions but I had to think about my choices of words and why I had picked them. Last but not least, I became more aware of writing my characters with the respect they deserve. And that’s thanks to Jen.

To take that further: how do you work together? Or, to put it another way: Jen, in your searingly sharp book Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (whose lines have in ways inflected how I think about my work on English PEN’s translation projects), there is a passage in which (bear with me on the framings here), you recount watching a video of you and Michelle reading translations of each other’s poetry and texts about meeting each other, and where you quote one in which Michelle talks about a dinner together in which you eat pasta with urchins, maybe leeches, after which your narrative voice, Jen, then notes “We call each other Urch and Leech, interchangeably.” So, when it comes to Favorita, who is an urchin and who is a leech?

MS: The pasta was spaghetti ai ricci di mare, sea urchin. Me ordering it was a total impostor move; the waiter even asked ‘Are you sure? Do you know what it is?’ and I said ‘Of course!’ But I’d never tried it, and I really did not like it when it arrived. The poor urchins looked like little blood clots or leeches. Is this a symbol of our reckless way of translating? Ha. In any case, I’d say our friendship grew with us daring each other to eat them. It was Jen who taught me about impostor syndrome. That was enlightening, and helped me to understand and navigate through writing crises. So who is whom? I couldn’t say. They’re the same but different.

JC: I’m glad you enjoyed Fair! I write about this time in Rome with Michelle in a long essay called ‘Miracle’ which was published in the anthology On Relationships (3 of Cups), and in Fair I have Michelle recount the story in her own words, which she self-translates from German into English and which I include verbatim. This is for important reasons.

I recently read out this section from Fair – Michelle self-translating this dinner experience – at a reading and those listening were really moved by it, they laughed and ahhhh’d, so Michelle’s translation worked, it connected with people, even if not in ‘perfect’, ‘literary’ English. My approach as a literary translator into English is to recreate a work of German-language literature into a work of English-language literature as if I’m a storyteller who has travelled from Switzerland where I heard this story and passed it on to others back in the UK. But what about a ‘good enough’ translation, one that gets across the story?

We are interchangeably ‘urch’ and ‘leech’ because it’s more about that shared experience than nicknames per se, but, going back to the first part of your question, it perhaps says something about our way of working, which is breaking the typical author-translator binary to create something that feels very collaborative, even by getting invited to give some feedback while the original of Favorita was still being edited. We’re urch and leech equally.

Michelle – there are moments when images and vistas and places rush to Fila: ‘Candle flames heat my cheeks. Images flicker in the gleaming glow.’ As she follows the strange path that the act of seeking takes her on, she arrives in extraordinary places and sees extraordinary images. So, therefore, do we readers. And the further I went, the more I felt like I was seeing images from previous pages flicker in the glow of reading, too. My question: how did you build the spaces of the novel – the old salami factory, the villa in the forest, the places around them – and the figures and landscapes and hauntings that make them? How ‘real’ are they?

MS: So real! Many people say how dream-like or nightmarish the book is, and I smile and nod, but inside I’m like: but it’s all real. Of course you can’t say that as a writer. Instead I say, nothing is real in writing, it’s all just words, and every word is real too, so everything is real.

To stick to your examples: The former salami factory really – and quite miraculously still – exists; it’s mentioned in the afterword too. It is a beautiful resisting place on the periphery of Rome, with people – many families and children – who built this inhospitable place into their home. A big squat that shields itself from the danger of being cleared out by being a museum. Famous artists have painted the walls. And they do have a moon rocket.

And the villa in the woods, yes, there is a place like that. It’s where this novel started. There was a murder in the late 1940s and the young woman that was killed is still very present. And there is a ghost town nearby with just one woman living there – with many cats. And people are telling wild stories about her.

What other dream-like places are there? The ships, for example – the fascist bathing colonies that look like ships – they’re real too. Or the cellar in the church with the skulls. That’s in Naples; it’s all real. And my Italian grandmother really did have a mortadella-coloured telephone.

I think I’m right that that no dates appear in the book, but we’re clearly at points somewhere after the Second World War and at points somewhere near today. These times share fascism, femicide and violence (in fact and in discourse and in soul). Authoritarianism always comes early for art, and is always embedded in (and embeds) gendered violence. Two lines from the same page come to me: ‘Even my mother, the loudest of them all, was silenced’ and ‘I’m against violence, but I have a gun.’ I’d like to ask you both a horribly large and pressing question to finish: what can books do in the face of authoritarianism? What does Favorita, and the histories from which it is drawn, tell us about what books can do in the face of authoritarianism?

MS: I don’t know if they can do anything. Or do more than showing what’s happening. And many people don’t want to see, so they read it as fiction and say: this Steinbeck exaggerates terribly; Meloni is a woman, so the Italian far right cannot be misogynist. There were some reviews by male journalists who said things like that. They basically wrote: she can write about feminist stuff, OK, but not about fascism. That’s beyond her limits. Which is funny because it’s been my field of study for many years. And these are men who would distance themselves from fascism but who are not willing to admit or even see that the misogyny that is at the core of the fascist ideology is also embedded deeply in society, and in their thinking and behaviour in writing such a comment. This is exactly what I wanted to show: how the old ideologies still shape the thinking of today.

But there are also male readers who would approach me and tell me how they learned something about patriarchal violence and how they could do things differently, thanks to Favorita. This made me happy.

To be honest, I thought a lot about the men who I met there, in the Tuscan woods, where the novel takes place. Men I had friendly relationships with, who showed me around and talked to me about the case I was so interested in. I was shocked when I found out their political or ideological beliefs. So while writing I had them in mind, as though maybe one day they would read the book and would see everything from this completely different perspective.

Most reactions though came from readers who felt seen. In their permanent vigilance of the threat posed by patriarchal violence. And, to my amazement, many people with similar family backgrounds (second or third-generation Swiss-Italians) told me they felt seen and were reminded of their history. Which is wonderful, because this part of the book shows a private part of me, one I always hid because I was ashamed of it. I felt alone with it; we didn’t even talk about it in the family. And now these people are saying they feel the same! All that – the feeling of connection, of not being alone – is probably of much more value than converting a fascist.

JC: It’s a question I wrestle with all the time as a writer and translator. I think that literature can be part of bearing witness, which is important when bearing witness is being criminalised globally. I think writing experimental, idiosyncratic and deeply political literature, as Michelle does so well, is also important because we’re arguably experiencing a flattening and homogenisation in the arts alongside attempts and calls to depoliticise creativity in the UK and elsewhere. Literature and its devices can make ideas land and be felt viscerally, can connect and empower people experiencing the same events across time and space. James Baldwin said: ‘The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.’ That’s what Michelle’s doing, and what Fila is doing. Just now, while looking up something in Favorita, I found this line. Fila thinks: ‘I’m not seeking an answer; the answer is clear, the answer has happened. Magdalena’s death is the answer to her life. What was the question again?’ Literary translators are also always looking for the question, what is really behind a line, not an easy or immediate answer.

Interview by Will Forrester.

Michelle Steinbeck is a Swiss writer of novels, poetry, plays, columns and reportage. Her works have been translated into several languages. With her debut novel My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water (English translation by Jen Calleja) she toured around the globe, with readings on three continents. The novel was selected as Best Book of Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019 by the reading club at HMP Shotts, and caused a mild scandal in the German literary scene (‘If that’s the new generation – God save us’). Her second novel, Favorita,was shortlisted for the Swiss Book Prize and also translated by Jen Calleja.

Jen Calleja is the author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, the novel Vehicle, and Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode. She has translated over twenty works of German-language literature and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which publishes Maltese literature in English and English translation, including their latest title Before the Rocket by Loranne Vella tr. Kat Storace, which won a PEN Translates Award.

The post Nothing Is Real, Everything Is Real: An Interview with Michelle Steinbeck and Jen Calleja appeared first on English PEN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About to start book seven.

Do you know how it ends?

Yeah.

Do you want to know?

No. Hmm – no.

Haha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a good image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I can’t explain why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I lost the language soon after that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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