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  • I Did Not Make That Decision Out of Bravery

    I Did Not Make That Decision Out of Bravery

    Awet Fissehaye responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissionsseries, writers have been given an open platform to write an essay in response to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.

    ~

    I am sitting in the Art Room at the London Library, facing a big, oblique, off-white glass window. It is the same colour as this Word document, currently blank beyond this sentence, which I plan to fill with words that say something about why and how I ended up in the UK. I am 5,700 kilometres away from my country, Eritrea – or, rather, it is 5,700 kilometres, with no countries you must enter in between, if you fly. It is 8,100 kilometres if you drive, in which case you pass through twelve nations. Or, if you walk, and then get a boat, and then travel by whatever means you can, it is some other distance, some other number of countries.

    I must start like this – oblique, like the window in front of me – because arriving in a foreign land comes at the expense of leaving one’s homeland, and telling the story of that journey means revisiting and reliving its experiences, and, sometimes, these experiences are miserable. So it is hard to for me to go straight into my story of leaving home, of escaping the restrictions of Eritrea, not once, but twice.

    ~

    Through reading books in English, and then studying English literature, I’d become familiar with and, to a great extent, fond of the UK.

    During my teenage years, I’d ask older friends to borrow books from the university library for me – we didn’t have any at school. I cannot claim that I fully grasped what I was reading, and I still can’t, but it helped me familiarise myself with some British writers and their works. They – the Romantic poets, the Victorian novelists, the twentieth-century greats – allured me to the idyllic countryside, and unreservedly allowed me into the socio-political underbellies of the cities and towns.

    In 2002, I joined the English department at the University of Asmara, Eritrea. To my delight, some of the books I’d been reading for fun were included in the course. My then professors, Rathinder N. Bhattacharji and Tej N. Dhar, for whom I have everlasting admiration for their deep-rooted love of literature, reinforced my understanding of writing, unlocking its meaning, essence, sublimity. The more I read Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Owen, Orwell and others, the more I connected to the literary consciousness of Britain. But coming and staying in the UK was not an option for me.

    ~

    I contemplated leaving Eritrea many times between early 2003 and mid-2006, with the wake of the government’s 2001 crackdown on the media growing rather than subsiding. It nagged away at me, this idea, as I became less and less able to tolerate a state in which citizens were denied basic human freedoms, and where those who challenged this could be thrown into one of several hundred secret prisons. For poets and writers like me, it was, and still is, impossible to write, to project one’s views freely in any form of expression in Eritrea. Artists and journalists there face a bitter choice: becoming a propagandist for the government, or fleeing the country with unstained integrity. I went with the second option.

    My then girlfriend of four solid years, Salem, and I agreed that I should leave first, despite initially planning to flee together. We promised each other we would meet again and have a future together. On 7 June 2006, along with my friends Tam and Meron, I set out for Ethiopia, leaving Salem, my family, and my friends behind. We left at night, to avoid being seen by Eritrean soldiers, who would either capture or kill us. After travelling on foot for several hours, we had lost our direction. When the sun rose in the morning, we found ourselves back where we’d started.

    The following night, we again departed. There were a few difficult encounters with hyenas, but they were less dangerous than the soldiers. In the early morning, we arrived in Tigray. A few days later, UNHCR authorities drove us to an isolated refugee camp in Western Tigray. It wasn’t safe: Eritrean secret services had managed to kidnap people from inside. And so Tam and I left for Sudan, while Meron decided to go to Addis Ababa.

    We reached Khartoum penniless. The Sudanese security forces had robbed us along the way.

    ~

    We lived in Khartoum for a year, planning a safe route to Europe. We liked the city and its people, just not the endless exploitation and abuse from the police, and the fear of being deported to Eritrea. Then, in early October 2007, Salem messaged me. Her parents were pressuring her to marry someone else. I called her, and she said that she was devastated – that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t left without her. And so, despite the complexities of getting out of Eritrea, the decision to return was straightforward.

    I met Salem at her workplace the morning I arrived back in Asmara. But I didn’t get the reception I was expecting. I was heartbroken, but still hopeful that she would come to realise I had returned to fulfil my promise to live in love.

    I stayed in Asmara for three weeks. Then, on 9 November, at 11pm, on Harnet Avenue in the centre of the city, towards the end of my friend’s wedding ceremony, four armed government security men appeared and handcuffed me. Harnet, by the way, means ‘liberty’.

    They drove me to Adi Abeto, a notorious prison a few kilometres from the capital. In the morning, they beat me, dragging me along the floor, spitting on my face, pointing a gun at my temple. They asked me why I was back in Eritrea., and I answered pleadingly that I had returned to be with my girlfriend. With my hands and legs tied tightly, they tortured me all day. At 5pm, they moved me to Mai Serwa, a prison that’s no less notorious. I was locked in a shipping container with two others who had already been there for some time.

    During the torture sessions in Mai Serwa, the interrogators read from my diaries. Salem and her mother were arrested for several days, simply for being mentioned in the notebooks. My friend, Tesfalem, was detained for a week – for the same reason, and for trying to discover my whereabouts after the arrest. The interrogators read aloud select passages from my journals that criticised the government. I was told to repent. When I asked them why they wanted me to repent for sins I hadn’t committed, intensified flogging and kicking followed. The torture left me with an enduring injury to my back, which I have suffered with ever since.

    On New Year’s Eve 2007, I was again relocated, to Wia, an underground prison with unbearable heat and inhumane conditions, also known as ‘the Oven’. The number of people confined there fluctuated between 150 and 250. The space was too small to accommodate either figure. We were allowed just one ten-minute break a day, heavily guarded, to relieve ourselves outside. It was the only moment in which we had the chance to connect with the world outside (apart from the occasional visits to our cells from snakes, and the constant residence of rats).

    Once, during my daily break, one of Wordsworth’s poems, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, came to me as I heard a local woman singing in the fields. I echoed a phrase my poetry professor had said in class: ‘How beautiful! This is poetry, my dear!’ This momentary sense of connection reminded me of the power of literature, of its transcendence. The poem stayed with me for months. I would repeat it, in my heart, and then out loud to my fellow inmates.

    ~

    I was released in January 2009. I rejoined my family and friends, but the hope of rekindling the relationship with Salem had moved out of reach.

    By 2013, I had got a job opportunity as a stringer for VOA, covering Eritrea. To get licenced, I had to submit my credentials to the Ministry of Information. To the Eritrean government, ‘Credentials’ means submissiveness. Three directors-general and two subordinates asked if I was ready to present a good image of the government to the world. I replied that I would abide by VOA’s tenets: accuracy, balance, comprehensiveness, and objectivity. They were unhappy with that answer.

    So, in October 2014, I again left Eritrea for Sudan. In Khartoum, I received intense medical treatment for my back injury. After seven months, I was ready to go to Europe, via the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

    I did not make that decision out of bravery. I did not take that decision lightly. I made it in desperation. I decided to throw myself into 9,200,000 square kilometres of desert and 2,510,000 square kilometres of water. I knew relatives and friends who had died, beheaded in the desert or drowned in the Sea. I had heard enough tragic stories of lives cut short in desperate journeys towards safety. I knew I had no guarantee that my fate would be different, that I would safely reach a destination. Because, who gives much thought to a destination when imminent danger looms at the origin? Because, a quick escape is more important than a safe arrival for a desperate refugee.

    ~

    On 5 June 2015, we boarded a lorry and set off for the Sahara. At first, there were 56 of us; we joined another three lorries en route, and the number grew to around 200. Our Sudanese smugglers handed us over to their Libyan counterparts at the border, who beat us with whatever was in their hands and rushed us to board Land Cruiser pickups, packing the vehicles with twice the number of people they could safely accommodate. For those of us hanging on the edges of the truck beds, three quarters of our bodies were outside their walls. People would fall out, and we would bang the roof of the cab, and the smugglers would reluctantly stop to collect the fallers. Then, they told us stop letting them know. When a 5-year-old boy became extremely sick, and we had no option but to do so, the driver shouted back in Arabic, ‘Khaliyu Yemut’ – ‘Leave him to die’. The convoy stopped just three times after that, at three burial sites: a warning not to get sick or fall.

    I’d had no doubt it was going to be a godless journey. No one had promised us a promised land. No Moses was mandated to lead us in the desert, or divide the Mediterranean waters in two. I hadn’t expected a smooth journey, because the smugglers we relied on to lead us to safety were just the modern pharaohs from whom we were running, but wearing different guises. I hadn’t any illusion that our thirst would be quenched in the desert, or our hunger sated in the sea that had fed on the corpses of our brothers and sisters.

    Hundreds of thousands of people and animals have set their feet on the Sahara over the centuries. But the desert never fails to hide the traces of routes travelled. Footprints, hoofprints, pawprints left behind by the striding limbs of creatures disappear on the vast dunes. The desert is incredibly good at keeping its secrets. These days, I watch – and enjoy – David Attenborough’s spectacular documentaries on the Sahara from the comfort of my home. And then I remember being in the desert, famished, dehydrated, starved, weak and humiliated, and the Sahara becomes what it is to refugees: pitiless nature’s punishing instrument.

    After a day and a night, we reached Ajdabiya, the first stop on the smuggling route to Tripoli. We were locked in a small room for two days, with no access to food or toilets. We were told that asking for either would bring our lives to an end. So we waited in patience.

    We were finally boarded onto Isuzu pickups and started the next leg of the journey, to Bani Waled, which we reached after a week. It should have been a quicker trip, but we had to take a long route around the IS-controlled area. We stayed in Bani Walid for five days, while the smugglers arranged for two trucks to be loaded with bricks, and for us to be hidden between them. Then, the moment we entered Tripoli, a militia group stopped the vehicles and found us inside.

    ~

    They kept us for four and a half months. We were locked inside a compound where, deprived of food, water, hygiene and medicine, disease thrived. I was infected with scabies. I remember vigorously scratching, rubbing, and squeezing my privates to alleviate the excruciating itch. The relief never lasted, yielding to broken skin and pain when urinating.

    The group sold us to an Eritrean smuggler, who boarded 350 of us – Eritreans and Somalis – onto a small, unseaworthy boat. It was built to carry 150 people and, to save space, we were denied life jackets. After only a few hours at sea, smoke began billowing from below. Those suffocating in the hull strove to reach the upper deck, but found it crowded with women, children and the infirm. Chaos reigned when the engine stopped and water started to leak in. But two defiant comrades managed to fix the engine, and we continued sailing into international waters. There, a Spanish warship rescued us.

    ~

    In January 2016, I arrived in the UK on the back of a lorry, dishevelled, wearing layers of dirty clothes, my shoes caked in thick French mud. Exhausted and hungry, I went to a McDonald’s in Cannock, armed with six one-euro coins. When the cashier said that they didn’t accept euros, a woman who overheard came forward and bought me food and drink, and gave me three one-pound coins. A taxi driver named Abdu gave me a ten-pound note and bought me a train ticket to Birmingham. At Birmingham New Street, I approached two Eritrean women. Hoping to get to London, and see Tam in for the first time in eight years, I asked them to help me use the ticket machine. They looked at me – at my dishevelled appearance, and my muddy shoes, and my dirty clothes – and asked me if I had just arrived. I said yes.

    They hugged me. They told me how glad they were that I had arrived safely. Dehab, whose train was to leave in a few minutes, gave me a twenty-pound note and left. Elsa took me to Primark and bought me clothes that cost sixty pounds. Instead of going to London, I was advised to seek asylum in Birmingham, and so I did. Tesfit Yohannes, another friend, offered me a warm reception in his house for nearly a month.

    Later, in February, I travelled to London and reunited with Tam. I visited Westminster Bridge in honour of Wordsworth’s famous sonnet, one of my favourite poems from university classes, curious to see if being at the actual spot could offer the splendid view of London’s natural beauty that the Romantic poet promised.

    ~

    Arriving in the UK was not a panacea. The hardships and torture remained engraved in my mind. These things do not fade quickly from memory: human bodies being used to put out cigarettes, heads being cleaved with spades or AK-47 muzzles, threads of maggots dropping from neglected wounds. Every time I heard fireworks, I panicked, and the scarred, mottled skin around my groin constantly reminded me of the pain I had endured. All the while, Eritreans’ asylum claims were in collective limbo, because of the Home Office’s use of a profoundly flawed Danish report suggesting that Eritrean asylum seekers could safely return to the country. Eventually, the political motive was reversed when the tribunals found in favour of the Eritreans.

    Now, six and half years after I was granted refugee status in the UK, it pains me to see refugees who have recently crossed the channel, hoping to have found light at the end of the tunnel, being threatened with ‘removal to their home country or a safe third country’. For most refugees, these two options are not, in fact, options. Eritreans cannot return home. And Rwanda, the UK’s ally in this scheme, has repeatedly failed to be a safe third country for Eritrean migrants deported from Israel, who found themselves dropped into the hands of smugglers and into slavery.  

    Suella Braverman’s ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’ with ‘stopping the boats’ and deportingasylum seekers to Rwanda scares me more than Katie Hopkins’s 2015 article, about wanting to use gunships to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Hopkins’s xenophobia was straightforward. It came from a private citizen. But the Home Secretary’s anti-migrant sentiments are slightly subtler, more insidious. And, coming from a person holding ministerial power, much more dangerous.

    ~

    The etymology of ‘oblique’ is unclear; it’s moved across too many languages, too many regions. We know it comes from the Latin ‘oblīquus’, but we’re not sure exactly what that word’s history is. Most people think it comes from a Proto-Indo-European word, which had a meaning that meant something like ‘to move’.

    There are 1.3 kilometres between the London Library and the Home Office. Or 2.4 kilometres if you drive, or 1.8 kilometres if you walk. You do not have to take a boat. I hope this story can find its way there.

    Awet Fissehaye is a poet, writer, and lyricist born and raised in Eritrea. A lover of English literature and a firm believer in the power of words, he started to write poetry at an early age before studying English at the University of Asmara-Eritrea. He was the first recipient of the National Poetry Prize for Students in 2000. In 2007, he was arrested by Eritrean government security forces, tortured, and kept in inhumane conditions for 14 months. In 2014, Awet left Eritrea for Sudan before continuing toward Europe through the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Awet is an Honorary Member of English PEN and in 2022 he became Executive Director of PEN Eritrea in Exile. He has lived in exile in the UK since 2016.

  • Changing Tides

    Changing Tides

    Bidisha Mamata responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissions series, writers have been given an open platform to write an essay in response to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.

    ~

    I began doing outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees eleven years ago, visiting charities across London to give writing, critical-thinking and performance workshops. These were set up in partnership with English PEN, which then, as now, did the important work of connecting the world of literature and its creative writers with vital issues around human rights, social justice, liberty, and freedom from violence. In under-resourced, unheated rooms, fuelled by PJ Tips and photocopied printouts of plays and poetry, we remade the world as we wished to see it: equal, diverse, collaborative, considerate.

    The work was eye-opening and lifechanging for me. It led to my fifth book – Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices – and to greater depth and new dimensions in my human rights work and political analysis. Here were people from all over the world – Iran, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Congo, more – gathered in one of the most multicultural capitals in the world, not gibbering with misery but full of determination, resourcefulness, humour and hope. It always jarred when I went from these laughter-filled workshops with people who’d survived torture, to a publishing party or art opening attended by exclusionary, po-faced characters who took themselves way too seriously.

    For my students, I wonder if this kind of outreach work was quite so transformative or positive. Gatherings like ours were certainly creative, enjoyable and safe – a respite from the grind of trying to regularise status, establish an existence with some structure and dignity, build a life, gain some rights and a foothold in an asylum system designed to drive people to despair and force them to drop out, to psychologically torture them. The workshops were a rare space free from cruelty, punishment or judgement. But have we changed the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees for the better? Have attitudes improved? Policies? Headlines? No, they are all worse. The political environment is so much bleaker. Xenophobic, insular, rebarbative notions of national identity have been normalised; a backlash against multiculturalism has thrived; anti-democratic, jingoistic, authoritarian dictatorships have risen globally; mainstream political discourse has been polluted by ideas which were once seen as the preserve of the racist far right. Trump and Brexit are the least of it – it’s happening all over the world.

    I have also become wary of the bourgeois creative economy that has sprung up around the refugee crisis and its humanitarian emergency – the endless do-gooding artistic works (movies! graphic novels! albums! live interactive theatre!) that focus on trauma narratives, giving a voice to the voiceless (a phrase I am certainly guilty of using) and otherwise enabling an entire class of privileged and ambitious arts, cultural, media and political players and dilettantes to make their careers off the backs of other people’s suffering. There is so often deep patronage, power-play and a sense of superiority and smugness at its heart.

    I remember speaking at a human rights conference a few years ago, just before the pandemic. The organisers were very careful to counsel speakers not to use aggressive phrases (like ‘hammer home the message’) because they might be triggering for people who had survived violence. But there were no survivors, asylum seekers or refugees in the audience; there were only local charity workers. The sessions in which these white charity workers talked about their courses for refugees – art therapy, cookery, yoga and massage – were packed. But the session I chaired, entitled ‘Educating Our Allies’, was nearly empty. The session was billed as ‘a conversation challenging the one-dimensional and often victimising representations of refugees and asylum seekers […] aimed at examining power and privilege and how they play out in the humanitarian and charity sectors […]  about teaching allies (the audience) how to be better in our approaches’.

    What a joke. For that one session, the delegates, 95% of whom were white, all, as one, got up and went to the café, to make the young non-white woman working there make and serve them coffee. They thought they knew it all about how to be good allies, so they vacated the room despite the four non-white experts on the stage. They were comfortable seeing refugees and asylum seekers as abject victims, nameless and faceless sufferers, craven and grateful recipients, pets to be fed, but they could not sit for just forty minutes, listen respectfully to, humbly hear and learn from, refugees, asylum seekers or indeed any of the non-white people on the panel. That said it all.

    The overt, go-home racism of the right, or the belittling, patronising, self-regarding racism of those who see themselves as liberals: what a choice for the twenty-first century. I can say from experience that micro-aggressions – a depressing euphemism for the casual and obvious disrespect, dismissal, insults, ignorance, negative and demeaning assumptions, degrading stereotypes and bad treatment meted out to non-white people – have increased a millionfold since 2016. Now, they occur daily. It is all just the same racial profiling, singling out and targeting, only in a liberal, progressive guise – like a ‘nice’ rendering of a Home Office interview. There are constant racially targeted questions and biases in interactions with strangers in a workplace setting, and there’s the seemingly universal requirement for people of colour to talk to white interlocutors and audiences about – only about – race, identity, diversity, heritage, homeland and belonging. The underlying drive is always to let you know that you are different, of lower value, alien, other, worse; that you are not the norm and will never belong. Or that you are a fascinating, exotic novelty, a trinket from a magical place, a source of scintillating detail to make white people feel richly cosmopolitan and spice up their lives.

    But for all own my moments of discomfort, refugees and asylum seekers are represented, talked about and treated with outright sadism and inhumanity. This has become so much the norm that, post-pandemic, it no longer dominates the headlines, instead occupying marginal news reports about ‘small boats’ and ‘migrant crossings’, euphemisms which elide the terror, danger, urgency and desperation of such journeys and any questions about why human beings would be driven to undertake them.  

    From the dysfunctional, fear-driven vantage point of 2023, 2012 feels at once very recent and a lifetime ago. But the factors that force people to leave their homes are unchanged from all the centuries past: poverty, war, post-war fragility, a lack of opportunity, persecution, the threat of violence, no future fit for a human being. In other words, reasons that would prompt any person to leave one place and go somewhere else. Those reasons have been joined now by climate change, by invasions and the long tails of flawed invasions, failed uprisings, factional fighting and societal breakdown. The endless churn of human suffering will produce refugees in perpetuity, and yet the reaction to this sadly universal and timeless dynamic is one of hostility, disgust and cruelty, especially when the refugees are not white. When your government is shamelessly touting sending refugees to Rwanda, or piling them up in shipping containers and empty office blocks, you’ve lost all sense of normal human decency – but so has anyone, any party or newspaper, which fails to challenge you. The old multi-polar political spectrum, with its economic and social lefts, rights and centre, is being warped by a toxic magnet in which all debates, all arguments, all methods, all values are being pulled to the far right. The old fringes are the centre; the old centre is gone.

    In many ways, that early period of my work with refugees, from 2012 until 2015, at least contained the possibility that things might change and issues were at least up for discussion. People could be of two minds about complex issues and there was a chance that things might get better.

    It was Theresa May who coined the term ‘hostile environment’ in her role as Home Secretary, a chilling clue as to what was to come: a deliberate strategy of state-endorsed sadistic deterrence taken on with full fervour by not one but two further Home Secretaries. (Hello Suella, hello Priti. So embarrassing, these racist women of colour doing the colonial masters’ jobs for them, thinking that kicking down onto whoever’s beneath them might protect them from the racism of their own white peers, instead of realising that they’re just being used and will be discarded when the job is done and Make Britain White Again is put into play.) But during that period, moving away from the headlines and Parliament, there were also dozens of civil society groups, charities, grassroots organisations and local enterprises that did not feel as Theresa May did. The debate around asylum and exile, flight and forced migration, safety and haven contained nuance, detail, and fact. Public discourse had not yet descended into the vicious, counterfactual, sloganeering mess that it is now – one which repels reasonable commentators altogether. ‘Debate’ back and forth, and get interrupted and shouted down by a basic racist on GB News, or even one of the respected channels? Why would anyone do that to themselves?

    We are in danger of a hopelessness – a numb fatalism – setting in, because almost nobody is standing up for refugees and asylum seekers openly in the mainstream of politics, the media, public life and civil society. Where are those bold, accepted, reasonable voices speaking up together, above the grassroots level? Where are the big beasts, the no-nonsense decent figures? Surely they are not too cowed, too frightened by the actual, literal, torch-bearing Nazis to stick up for what is right? There is a failure of normal human consideration and empathy, of basic decency and recognition. What is everyone waiting for? We could change things in small ways for the better, right now, just by speaking and behaving differently towards others. Is everything and everyone – at every point on the political scale – waiting numbly to get to crisis point and total social breakdown before we start to rebuild? I don’t want to wait for some scorched-earth, tabula rasa, final cataclysm before we begin to entertain the possibility that we can – we must – create a kinder world.

    Bidisha Mamata is a broadcaster, journalist and presenter specialising in political analysis, international relations and human rights. She writes for the Observer and the Guardian and works for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN, Channel 5 and Sky News. Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (2015), is based on her outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres and her latest publication is called The Future of Serious Art (2020). As an artist she creates films and stills. Her first short film, ‘An Impossible Poison’ (2017), was selected for multiple international film festivals and her next film series, Aurora, ran from 2020–2023.

    Photo credit: Suki Dhanda

  • There’s No Such Thing as an “Illegal Refugee”: A Conversation with Gulwali Passarlay

    There’s No Such Thing as an “Illegal Refugee”: A Conversation with Gulwali Passarlay

    Gulwali Passarlay responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissions series, writers have been given an open platform to respond to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.

    ~

    I won’t start by asking about your journey to the UK – partly because you’ve written and spoken about it at such length and so compellingly elsewhere, but also because that story can’t be shrunk into this little space; no story of refuge and displacement can. I want instead to ask: how far away, now, do you feel from that journey?

    I appreciate you not wanting to start with my story, because people always want to start with my story – and it becomes frustrating, boring. Somehow, I’ve become a public speaker – a storyteller – and so I tell the story of my journey, particularly in schools, because I want the debate about migration to be humanised. But what I really like doing is having a conversation around my story, as we’re doing now.

    Your question is a very good one. It’s been over fifteen years since I came to the UK. Sometimes, I’m very attached to that journey; sometimes, if feels very far away. When I hear tragedies in the news – of people drowned in the Channel, or the Mediterranean – they are very personal to me. They are very close. And so, reading about others’ journeys, mine cannot leave me.

    I wrote a book about my story (it’s 120,000 words and, as you say, you can’t condense that into a minute or two) which was published eight years ago. I wish it weren’t relevant anymore. But things are getting worse. At the moment, one of the things I’m doing is working with Afghans staying in temporary accommodation in the UK who are waiting for their claims to be heard. I try to provide assurance and encouragement. But I am frustrated and I am angry.

    I was scrolling through your Twitter feed, and what you say about the news cycle being so recurring and intimate to you is reflected there; it’s like scrolling around, rather than down.

    It’s incredibly frustrating. What happened to me fifteen years ago is happening now, but it’s even worse. When I came, I was criminalised and penalised and treated as a suspect, because of a culture of disbelief and hostility. But now it’s not culture, it is law: it’s the law of the land to criminalise.

    Yesterday, I saw a friend who lives in Leicester, who came to the UK with me in 2007. We travelled from Rome to Paris together. He made it to the UK, and as soon as he arrived, he was age-disputed and put in a detention centre, ready to be deported to Afghanistan. Lawyers and doctors intervened and proved that he was 15, and he was instead fostered. But when he turned 18, his leave to remain was refused. For eight years we fought his case. And then, in 2016, he was forcibly removed to Kabul. His life, all that opportunity – wasted. He couldn’t live in Afghanistan, and so he did it all again, ending up in Greece. There was still no life for him there; no opportunity to work, and his wife wasn’t permitted to join him. Then, in 2021, as Kabul was falling, he realised that the UK was evacuating people and he thought, You know, I have a chance here. Because the UK has done a lot wrong to me. And now is the time they make the wrongs right and provide some justice. He made it to the UK. But rather than getting justice, he was imprisoned for twelve months for “illegal entry”. He’s now on probation. The idea of probation is that you don’t commit a crime again – what crime would he commit? What crime has he committed?

    There’s no such thing as an “illegal refugee”. The Refugee Convention and international humanitarian laws are very clear: you should not penalise people based on how they enter. And yes, though I’m talking to you now, if I had arrived this year, the way I did in 2007, I wouldn’t be: I would be “a criminal”.

    The Nationality and Borders Act – and the proposed Illegal Migration Bill – create a two-tiered system: if you come via irregular means, you are a criminal; if you come via resettlement schemes, you are a good immigrant. I am so pleased that there are routes and schemes that mean Ukrainians and Hongkongers can be resettled in the UK. But that’s not available to others – to my friend, to those whose journeys are like mine. I met my MP on Refugee Day last year. I was outside Parliament, protesting the Act. I know that he has a copy of my book; he bought it, and I signed it for him. I asked him, ‘Why did you vote for this Bill?’ and he said ‘This is what the people in the constituency want. This will solve the problem’. I replied: ‘Look, in five years, Ukrainians will be in the exact same situation as other refugees. We’ll be having the same conversation, and the situation will be even worse. People will be in limbo. We will have detention centres full of asylum seekers, prisons full of asylum seekers, military bases full of asylum seekers. There will still be no solution, let alone a humane solution’.

    We normally get around 30,000 asylum applications a year. France get 100,000, and Germany 170,000. I listened to the German Ambassador speaking recently, and he said ‘We process more asylum claims in a month than the UK does in a year’. The idea that people should stay in France is absurd; it’s not how the international protection system works. There’s nothing in the law that says refugees should stay in the “first safe country”, and yet the vast majority do – Afghans in Pakistan and Iran; Somalis in Kenya. The attitude the UK policy and its narrative have is one of exceptionalism – of excluding the UK from international duties. Last year, about 250,000 Hongkongers came as “guests” to the UK, and around the same number of Ukrainians. But those 30,000 asylum applications? Those are “the swarm”, “the invasion”.

    I heard the Minister of State for Immigration say the reason we’re not processing asylum claims more quickly is because it would give the impression that more people should come. (People sometimes even tell me that I shouldn’t share my story, because it is a story of ‘success’, and it will encourage more people to come. In 2016 I went to Calais and met refugees and told them to keep hope, not to feel powerless, and the BBC reported that I was encouraging people to risk crossing the Channel and come to the UK.) So keeping people in limbo is the way to go, they think. That’s why 170,000 people are in backlog, why we have 100,000 people staying in hotels at a cost of £5m: because the government wants us to be angry that our taxpayer money is being spent like this; instead of being angry with the government and its incompetent systems, its austerity and its policies, to be angry with the refugees.

    You mentioned earlier your friend being age-disputed, and you’ve spoken elsewhere about your experience of this – of the dehumanising immediate effect of it, and the pernicious resultant effect: you were 13, but flatly told instead you were 16; at the time, refugees were not afforded the legal rights of children, including the rights to education and to care, if they were 16 or older. The proposed Illegal Migration Bill strips the rights of unaccompanied minors even further. Could you talk about your response to that?

    This is fundamentally about the presumption that asylum seekers are lying. And it’s, as you say, politically influenced, by the rights that minors currently have to be afforded. But the intentions of the Illegal Migration Bill go further: the government don’t want to give the impression that they’re soft, because giving rights to unaccompanied minors would, supposedly, encourage more to come. It’s about giving no room for speculation about who might get “better treatment”. It’s heart-breaking. They want to make it harder for families, for children, for women. We talk about opposing the Taliban for not respecting women’s rights or children’s rights, and yet we do this?

    I’ll tell you a short story. I helped a friend – a young man from Afghanistan – with his age dispute. He was living in Newham. He was happy: he was playing cricket, he was registered with a doctor, he was living with a nice foster family. Then the Home Office sent him a letter saying that he looked over 25, and so the social services needed to carry out an age assessment. I read the text of that assessment; it was terrible, inadequate. It said he was over 18, and so he was stripped of his rights, sent to Whitfield and then to Middlesborough. This was right at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was stranded in Denmark. I managed to stay in contact with him, and he told me he had lost all hope – that he wanted to run away, or commit suicide. I said ‘No, don’t do anything stupid. Wait for me to come’. I finally managed to see him in person six months later. He had lost so much weight that I could hug him with one arm. I called Newham and said this was a safeguarding issue. They said, ‘Oh, we don’t know him. He’s not in our area’. I said ‘Well you must know him. You kicked him out. You didn’t want him to be your problem’. They said that he’d have only had a right to appeal the age assessment within three months. This was during the lockdowns: he had no idea what he had to do, and had been cut off from advice. We fought it, and fought it, and he had a proper assessment which found that he was, even after all this time, only 15. Only then was he finally given a new foster placement, and put into school. And he’s doing so well, now. But there are so many people in his situation, who don’t know what to do, or how to challenge the injustice. With the new Bill, things will only get worse.

    As you talk about that injustice, and that process, I think of a phrase from a piece you wrote in the Guardian years ago. There, you say that you felt the immigration officials you encountered were ‘worse than the smugglers’, who ‘had been heartless, but […] hadn’t tried to change [your] identity’. It’s such an arresting sentence. Current policies are ostensibly about targeting smugglers, giving greater powers to immigration officials in an effort to achieve this. But data shows us that these policies fail to reduce trafficking. What are your thoughts on that?

    That’s a really good point. If I was a smuggler right now, I’d be very happy with the way the UK government is doing things. For the last few years, we’ve been getting 30,000 asylum applications. When the government started discussing the Rwanda plan and the Nationality and Borders Bill, that went up to 45,000. Now, as they discuss even more inhumane policies, it has risen to 65,000. These policies don’t – won’t – stop smuggling; they just make it more dangerous. Before too long, we’ll start seeing boats travelling even greater distances – they’ll be launched from Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium. Because, however much the government tries to override international law and convention, if you arrive on a boat, and no one finds out, the authorities will have no evidence of you not arriving through “safe and legal routes”. All these policies do is put people in greater danger in the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The only way we can get smugglers out of businesses is to provide safer routes, humanitarian corridors; to make it easier for people to come here and claim asylum and, then, with a proper system, to deal with those claims accordingly.

    As long as there aren’t safe, humane routes for migration, smugglers will thrive, because people will still need to migrate, and will do so through whatever channels they can. And traffickers will thrive, too. Smuggling and trafficking are two different things. The smugglers didn’t come to me, you know. I went to them.

    My final question is about stories and writing. You write stories, you tell them. How important are they – writing them, reading them, telling them, hearing them, sharing them – in working for justice and change?

    There are countries where books and stories are banned, where people are not able to read or write what they want to read and write. In Afghanistan, right now, I would not be able to express my views; in the UK, I’m able to. And that is invaluable. Because stories change people’s minds.

    My book has given me the chance to visit twenty countries. It has given me the chance to speak to you. I always encourage asylum seekers to read and write – not least because it’s the best way to learn English. But also because stories humanise. You are only hostile to refugees if you haven’t met one, spoken to one, heard their stories, read their stories. And I can guarantee you that, however on the right you are, if you read stories like mine, or those of my fellow refugees, they will, to some degree, change your views. You might not say so openly, but they will change you. Stories challenge you in a non-threatening way; they challenge your bias, they make you open-minded.

    This proposed legislation is dangerous. And it flies against our moral duty. We need a system based on human rights, based on compassion, based on the rule of law, based on humanitarian values. The government is scapegoating refugees for its failures, and there are things we can do individually and collectively to challenge that. We have the facts and figures, but they are not sufficient; the challenge needs to be about emotion, and stories, and lives. Otherwise, my friend, who is living with his tag and waiting for the government to make its decision, will, wrongly, be called a criminal. Perhaps he will be the first person on the plane to Rwanda.

    Gulwali Passarlay is an author, advocate, humanitarian and spokesperson for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK and Europe. He arrived in the UK in 2007, after being forced to leave Afghanistan at the age of 12. He is a member of the Afghan Refugee Expert Network in Europe (ARENE), and author of the bestselling memoir The Lightless Sky.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • It’s More Complicated Than That…

    It’s More Complicated Than That…

    Dina Nayeri responds to the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is part of a collaboration between English PEN and Counterpoints Arts in response to the UK government’s proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. For this PEN Transmissions series, writers have been given an open platform to write an essay in response to the Bill. Counterpoints Arts coordinate Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. The theme for Refugee Week 2023, taking place 19–25 June, is Compassion.

    ~

    Often at turbulent times I wonder, am I being too simple? At university I loved philosophy and literature. I loved moral dilemmas – the difficult calculus between two imperfect outcomes. Ultimately, I liked making choices, rather than stumbling into them. But my business and law friends would say the world is much too complex for idealism: full of uncomfortable trade-offs, urgent side-tracks, costly surprises, and shortages of time, money, and information. And they were partly right. To have impact, I grew convinced, one must be mired in the practical. Roll up your sleeves, dig deep, identify every logistical hurdle. So, I bought a black suit and studied economics and business for the next decade. But nowadays I think: is it right for our leaders to be so neck-deep in sticky trade-offs that no one is thinking about the larger picture at all, the universal human ideals on which we built our societies?

    I believe that most people don’t wade into serious debate because they trust others (whom they mistake for smarter) to tell them what to think. They feel unequipped to tackle the complexities, embarrassed about asking big, obvious questions.

    But I like big, obvious questions, and this isn’t an essay about the complexities.

    As I write this, the UK is debating the proposed ‘Illegal Migration Bill’. Anyone who arrives in the UK by a route deemed illegal, including those crossing the Channel in a small boat, will have their claim deemed inadmissible. They will be returned to their country or to a ‘safe third country’. They will be banned from ever claiming UK asylum. They will be denied access to the UK’s modern slavery protections. They will be shut out of the asylum system – no matter what forced them into that boat. And, since one cannot claim asylum unless physically present in the UK, and since the UK is an island, then no person in danger can flee into the UK planning to claim asylum. They must be recognised a refugee before arriving, have family or a sponsor in the UK, or be from specific countries that are part of existing UK resettlement schemes, such as Ukraine or Hong Kong.

    To my simple mind, this means that the UK has closed access to asylum: you can no longer arrive in the country by the means you deem safest for you (as the Refugee Convention intended), tell your story, and beg refuge from a compassionate government. And it means that the UK can bar asylum seekers in ways that countries bordering places of conflict can’t – which means that those countries, who are poorer than the UK, must take on a disproportionate share of the displaced.

    I think about the 1951 Refugee Convention. Do I properly understand it? I know that, in this agreement, the UK committed to protecting the rights of those seeking asylum, to housing and educating them, to providing them opportunities to work, and to honouring the principle of non-refoulement (not sending people back into danger). In the Refugee Convention, the UK promised this:

    Refugees unlawfully in the country of refuge

    The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry of presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened, . . . enter or are present in the territory without authorisation, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence.

    I interpret those words first as: There is no ‘illegal entry’ if a refugee immediately claims asylum. They are not to be denied refuge as a penalty for their path.

    Then I try to read this through the lens of a hostile UK politician, someone whose only goal is to keep people out. I close my eyes and imagine Suella Braverman’s laughter as she poses in front of facilities in Kigali being built to house deported asylum seekers. I open my eyes and I read again.

    Ah, now I see where they found their loophole. The phrase ‘come directly’. This must mean that the promise is limited to the first country on whose soil the displaced set foot – probably a fair allocation of newcomers in 1951, when you could stow away on ships and enter a coastal country before facing its immigration officers. Not so fair in 2023, when you can’t get on a plane without a passport, and your only escape is into a bordering country.

    Nowadays, strict adherence to ‘directly’, protects the faraway countries.

    I wonder if, at the gathering of the signers of the Refugee Convention, the countries situated farther from the atrocities were quietly scheming about that loophole. Did they plan one day to use it to offload their responsibility onto others? I don’t think they were; I don’t think they did. In the previous decade, refugees had fled Hitler’s atrocities from all over Europe. No one was untouched by war, and no one was protected by that word ‘directly’.

    Then I think about fairness.

    Is it fair for an island nation to shirk its share of the responsibility? What if that island nation is one of the rich ones? What if that island nation has a long history of imperialist consumption: invading, and taking, and enslaving, and pillaging, enriching generations of its children through the chaos it has left across its so-called commonwealth (I think of the origins of ‘commonwealth’: the wellbeing of many).

    I keep reading the 1951 Refugee Convention and I think about that bedrock principle, nonrefoulement – not sending people back into danger – and how the technical definition of refugee has been used to do precisely that: send people back into danger. A ‘refugee’, according to the Convention, is someone who has ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. Written in the wake of the Holocaust, what could the framers of this document have meant by ‘membership in a particular social group’? Humanitarian lawyers argue that they meant to write a phrase that covered all future threats to life and safety. They didn’t know what horrors the world would face next, and so they created a category that covered everything else (‘social group’ being the broadest term one could come up with in a legal document). But the lawyers for strident gatekeepers have made all kinds of arguments, in the US and across Europe, to limit the definition of ‘social group’. It can’t include women. It can’t include abused women, it can’t include families, and so forth.

    Fortunes have been wasted on arguing such legal details, so that governments can say ‘Yes, we believe you are in danger but not in the right kind of danger. So refoulement doesn’t apply here. Your death is on you, not on us’. And yet, one wonders, has anyone considered what the authors of the Refugee Convention meant to promise? Or their fear after the genocide that Europe had just endured? That’s too simplistic, the lawyers argue, and so they keep parsing the language, with the hope of expelling one more abused mother.

    Often at this point, my simple mind goes to Rawls’s notion of the ‘original position’. It’s a thought exercise so rooted in the imagination that it’s silly to argue over its impossibility – it’s a fantasy. Imagine, Rawls asks, that you could create the systems and structures of the world, and allocate all its resources, before you knew which body you’d be born into. What kind of a world would you create? 

    I’d look at the statistics and think, I’ll probably be a wage-earning labourer my whole life. I’ll probably live in Asia. I’ll be poor, struggling with income insecurity, food insecurity. At some point in my life, I might be displaced.

    Knowing this, I would tax the rich heavily on income and capital gains (leaving enough to give talented people incentive to strive – though I believe they would anyway. Still, my original position society wouldn’t be fully socialist). I’d take inherited wealth above a certain threshold (leaving the rich a few houses, a few boats – nothing grotesque: you can’t own an island or ten planes) and use it to end world hunger. I’d allow asylum seekers to work. I’d make borders easier to cross. If you’re about to scoff about resources and economic externalities and how this plan might affect the middle class, remember that, in the original position, nobody is middle class or British or highly educated or unusually talented. In this thought exercise, we look to the median to guess our situation. In the original position, we are all (most likely) a bicycle messenger or a farmer in rural Asia. Half the world lives on five or six dollars a day, and so there’s a 50% chance of earning below even that.

    From the original position, I would see clearly that the hands greedily dipping into the communal pot belong to the rich, not to refugees. That the wealthy are consuming my labour, while goading me to fight for that privilege with those in more wretched positions: Look, they say, the refugees are taking your jobs.

    But we don’t think about original positions much outside our philosophy classrooms or children’s books. Because it’s too simple. Because, after all, our leaders aren’t in the original position. They have interests: elections to win, friends to enrich, wealth to protect. They want to be seen as the strongmen who stopped the boats.

    Will denying access to modern slavery protections (a cruel phrase to have to write) deter refugees from boarding boats? Does a father pushing a dinghy into freezing water at night-time, his tattered trainers sinking into wet sand, think about the merits of his future case?

    I close my eyes and imagine a person climbing into a small boat. I place my hand on their beating heart and try to find entry into their mind. I try to forget the aggregate – an individual is more easily imagined. I conjure the refugees I’ve met: the mother who ran from a vengeful brother, a moral police officer obsessed with killing her; or the young woman running from the smuggler who wanted to break her, to possess her forever. Both were chased by frightening, resourceful men. I imagine a mother running with a child on her back. Maybe she hears of a charity in London, or a cousin in Colchester. Maybe a friend phones a church in Brighton, and that pastor’s kind voice gives her courage. Not every choice is calculated. Maybe she speaks English and knows she can navigate life better here. Maybe the smuggler is nipping at her heels, and she runs out of breath and throws herself into any vehicle heading far away.

    No one crosses dangerous waters in a flimsy boat because that’s a reasonable option. The boat is always the last – only – choice. Everyone on board a packed dinghy has been forced onto it. No law will keep burning feet from leaping away. When death is behind you, you run, jump, swim. You don’t think of the rules and regulations, the legal difficulties that await on safe shores. Only the safe shores.

    But this is rhetoric, unworkable idealism. The details, the logistics, the resources and definitions – these matter far more, we’re told. Maybe so. 

    Two memories return from my school days.

    The first is from business school. At lunch, a friend studying law told me a useful tactic she’d learned: if you have more resources than your opponent, the best way to win is to outlast them. Use up their resources. Drown them in paperwork. Waste their legal time, so that their lawyers don’t have enough of it to craft a good strategy. You can win a debate that way, too: just throw so much detail at your opponent that they’ll get confused. Too busy fighting each individual point, they’ll forget the larger argument. Distract and win.

    The second memory is from my third-grade maths class, just before my family fled from Iran, and we became refugees. I sat my wooden desk trying to work out a fraction, struggling to visualise 27⁄108. My teacher knelt beside me and whispered into my ear: in order to understand a problem, you must first simplify.

    Dina Nayeri is the author of Who Gets Believed? When the Truth isn’t Enough.

    Photo credit: Anna Leader

  • Exils

    Exils

    To close our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Scholastique Mukasonga writes a personal experience of exile as a Rwandan Tutsi

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Across June, PEN Transmissions, in collaboration with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, is publishing a series of essays on the theme of exile. This series speaks to Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, currently housed at the Museum. English PEN’s event series for the exhibition has been postponed due to COVID-19, and these essays – from writers in the events programme, or with books in the library – touch on issues that will be discussed at the rescheduled events.

    ~

    Translated by Melanie Mauthner

    I was three years old when I first experienced exile.

    It was 1959. The first pogroms against the Tutsi erupted that year; many massacres later, they would lead to the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994. If I close my eyes, I can see those images again unfurling as if they were fast-forwarding in a film.

    I am in a field. My mother is bending over her hoe and I am scampering behind her. Suddenly, there’s a hum rumbling and rising from the hills. Smoke plumes curl above neat waves of banana groves. My mother grabs me. We climb the hill to the track along the ridge. There’s a crowd in a panic, calling out, jostling and shouting; children crying; cows bellowing. My mother is searching for my brothers and sisters. And, in the distance, those screams that I don’t want to hear…

    Our house should be by the track. I can see a large hut on fire. I don’t want to believe it’s our house burning. I can hear crackling flames and calves lowing in the cowshed. I close my eyes, or maybe it is Maman covering my face with some of her wrapper.

    I won’t be sleeping at home tonight.

    I feel these tears of exile are still rolling down my cheeks, the same cheeks I had as a child.

    The first place I was exiled to was the mission in Mugombwa where the Tutsi found refuge. In my book Inyenzi or Cockroaches, I described that stay as something of a strange holiday.

    Obviously, I had no idea what a holiday might be. But it was very strange: my brothers and sisters weren’t going to school anymore; all the children played together in the square by the mission church; and I was eating something I’d never eaten before – rice. I wasn’t old enough to worry about might happen. I slept next to Maman. I kept the small milk pot that never left me. Maman managed to salvage what was considered our family treasure: a metal cooking pot that Papa had bought from a hawker who apparently came from Zanzibar, which we gave the pompous name of Isafuriya ndende – the marmite with the long neck.

    But it all ends abruptly one evening, at dusk. There are trucks ablaze with shining headlights, soldiers and white people shoving and urging us to climb in: Hurry, quick, get in! I lose Maman, my brothers and my sisters. My little pot slips out of my hands, rolling under the feet of people being pushed into the lorries. I’m crying – completely alone and lost forever. I feel these tears of exile are still rolling down my cheeks, the same cheeks I had as a child.

    Tutsi families were piled into trucks that drove all through the night over rough earthen roads. At dawn, they were set down in Nyamata, that dismal far-flung spot that, from then on, would be their place of banishment.

    For thirty-four years, after they were resettled in villages surrounding Nyamata on the border with Burundi, these ‘internal refugees’ were taunted, persecuted and massacred, again and again. All the people deported there in 1960, and their children, were massacred in 1994.

    Yes, thank you, fear, you who were the Tutsi of Nyamata’s most loyal companion, their shadow, never abandoning them, even in the depths of night.

    The fact that I can conjure up, here, in a few words, all the people who were assassinated is because, in 1994, I was no longer living in Rwanda. I don’t know why, but I was among the few rare Tutsi pupils who managed to get into secondary school. A strict quota limited their number: ten per cent. In 1973, I was at college in Butare, in my second year, training to be a social worker. That was the year that determined my life’s path; I dare not say its destiny.

    In 1973, Grégoire Kayibanda’s government believed they could address the Rwandan people’s general discontent by means of an old scapegoating tactic. They targeted those rare Tutsi who were still employed in teaching and the civil service, and they targeted the ten per cent quota pupils. Girls’ schools were not spared.

    It happened one afternoon – was it during a maths class? A classmate suddenly opened the door: Mukasonga, Mukasonga, hurry, quick! she cried. In the school corridors, I heard a large crash and yelling. I didn’t stop to think. We knew it was the boys from the nearby lycée,who were throwing themselves into hunting Tutsi. Our Hutu classmates acted as guides and encouraged them.

    It’s fear that saved me, fear that let me flee and run down the corridors as fast as I could, leap over the barbed-wire fence without getting scratched, and hide in a eucalyptus copse until night fell. Yes, thank you, fear, you who were the Tutsi of Nyamata’s most loyal companion, their shadow, never abandoning them, even in the depths of night.

    I finally got home by hiding in the boot of a Hutu politician’s car. That’s when my parents took the decision that my brother André and I – we had both been able to study, and discover that another world existed beyond Rwanda – would have to follow the road into exile in neighbouring Burundi.

    Nor can the shore where the exiled will at long last land ever be the promised land.

    Did my parents have a premonition? Some of us, at least, needed to survive, if only to preserve the memory of those who knew they would not be spared from extermination. I would remember them from then on.

    Could humans be defined as banished-beings? Some religious texts would seem to suggest so. And human banishment lies at the heart of the biblical myth: it is God who chases Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. And it is that same divinity who orders Abraham thus: Leave your land, your family and your father’s house for the land that I will show you. It is during their exile in Egypt that the Hebrews come together as a people.

    For migrants, refugees, the displaced and the deported, exodus – whether chosen or under duress – certainly does not result from divine will, nor wrath, deciding upon their fate as individuals or peoples; rather, it is the chaotic convulsions of history: war, persecution, famine and economic crises, natural disasters, drought and inexorable climate change. Nor can the shore where the exiled will at long last land ever be the promised land: gnawed by nostalgia, they will remain strangers there for a long while, and even if they do manage to integrate and build a new life, will they like Ulysses, who did return to Ithaca, sigh: What use is the wealthiest dwelling among strangers when you’re far from home?

    A beautiful word once described the welcome given to a stranger who knocks on your door, a word bound to shame those who build walls and put up barbed wire around – chacun chez soi, chacun pour soi, everyone where they belong, everyone for themselves. This word was Hospitality. Is it utopian, an illusion? Once upon a time, in societies we used to call primitive or archaic, the host was a sacred being. No one asked, Where do you come from, where are you going, why are you on the road, and how long do you intend to stay? At last, the stranger could be adopted as a member of the family. Did this tradition of hospitality ever exist? Or is it just a myth? At least, it was an ideal.

    My mother, Stéfania, who, like my whole family, was condemned to a life in exile, always kept two spare mats ready for the unexpected traveller who might seek shelter. May each of us always have a small mat, with which to welcome a stranger.

    Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahmadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the 2013 Océans France Ô prize, and the 2013 French Voices Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary award.

    Melanie Mauthner‘s translation of Scholatique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile was awarded the French Voices Grand Prize 2013. After she received a Hawthornden Fellowship to translate Mukasonga’s short stories, some of these appeared in the New Yorker, the New England Review, the Stinging Fly and the White Review.

    Created as a ‘space to sit and read and be’, library of exile is an installation at the British Museum by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, housing more than 2,000 books in translation, written by exiled authors.

  • Remembering Partition

    Remembering Partition

    For our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Kavita Puri writes on partition, memory and exile.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Across June, PEN Transmissions, in collaboration with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, is publishing a series of essays on the theme of exile. This series speaks to Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, currently housed at the Museum. English PEN’s event series for the exhibition has been postponed due to COVID-19, and these essays – from writers in the events programme, or with books in the library – touch on issues that will be discussed at the rescheduled events.

    ~

    There is a jam jar that sits on a shelf in a study in a suburb of North London. It contains stones. They are the colour of earth; smooth and round. Raj Daswani takes them out and holds them in the palms of his hands. He brings them to his lips and kisses them. ‘I keep these stones’, he says, ‘to feel connected to my soil’.

    Soil, earth, land – Raj means Karachi. He feels a profound connection to it, yet he hasn’t lived there since September 1947.

    Raj, then thirteen, was one of the many millions of people who were part of the largest migration ever to occur outside war and famine: the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in August 1947. Fearing being a minority in a new land, Hindus and Sikhs went to India, and many Muslims to Pakistan. An estimated 12 million people left land that generations of their family had lived on for a new country. It was accompanied by horrific violence as people of the “other” religion turned against one another. All sides were victims and perpetrators.

    Karachi, in Sindh Province, became part of Pakistan. Raj’s family were Hindu. They didn’t want to leave, but felt it was no longer safe for them. Their Muslim neighbours all came out on the day they left, in tears. They begged the Daswanis not to go, saying they would protect them. Raj’s parents felt there was no choice. They left by boat for India. The only items they were allowed to take from that life were a large tin of wheat flour and ghee.

    Raj arrived in Bombay, now Mumbai, never having spoken Hindi. His mother-tongue was Sindhi. He lived in an old British military barracks with many hundreds of other Sindhis, where they slept in a large room with hanging bed sheets as walls to divide families. There was one toilet between five hundred people. Things improved, eventually, in the refugee camp and Raj ended up staying there for twelve years. India never welcomed him he says, and it certainly never felt like home. He then came to Britain, where he has lived for many decades with his wife Geeta. He has four children and grandchildren. He still speaks Sindhi to them.

    Yet, after all these years, it is Karachi that feels like home. ‘This is not my soil, England or Bombay or India’, he says. Raj has been back to visit Pakistan three times. The first time he arrived in Karachi, he took dust from the earth, and put it to his forehead, and said ‘Mother, I have come home’. On his final visit, he wrote a poem. The first verse reads:

    In the end have realised this.

    In exile or forced to leave you

    Imagine the agony suffered by me

    Our flesh and blood, our kith and kin

    Suffering, in the name of religion

    I’ve spoken to many people who lived through the tumultuous events of partition and subsequently came to Britain – who lived through a dual migration. Many had been forced to flee – first as refugees around 1947 – and later chose to migrate to Britain, their former colonial ruler. Yet the deep connection to the land of their birth has remained, despite the decades.

    For the generation who lived through 1947, they do not think of borders, division, partition. Of course they recall the horror and bloodshed when the subcontinent was divided. But they remember another time, too, before that. A time when people of different religions largely got along, and could live side by side, in places like Lahore, Amritsar and Karachi. That is now relegated to the history books. One man, who grew up in West Punjab in a mixed village in British India, told me that, when his Sikh aunt died, her best friend, a Muslim, became a wet-nurse for her baby. What could be more intimate?

    That visceral attachment to the land long-left – where your parents were born, and your grandparents too – largely exists in memories. Unlike Raj, many never went back. Those I spoke to now say they want to return, before they die, to see their family home, or a tree they played in as a child; to find out if the best friend they left in a hurry, without goodbyes, is still alive. And if they cannot go in life, they want the journey made to have their ashes scattered where they were born. Officially, they do not belong in that so-called “enemy” country, but that is not how they see it. Bureaucrats may draw borders and politicians create new national narratives, but they cannot erase that generation’s stories and history. That generation does not forget.

    ~

    Iftakhr Ahmed was seventeen when he travelled from Delhi to Lahore. It was no longer safe for him to be a Muslim in India. ‘India is mine too’, he says emphatically. He can recall the smells of his childhood in the streets of Gangoh, where he played with best friends who were Hindu. His mother is still buried in India’s earth, as are his grandparents. But will future generations feel that way too about the land left behind?

    So many partition memories are shrouded in silence and have not been knowingly passed on. Those that came to post-war Britain were getting on with life in a new country where they faced hostility. Looking back on the past was an indulgence they did not have. There is an institutional silence in Britain, not only to partition, but also empire. It’s not taught widely in schools; there are no museums to it, or memorials to those that died as the British left India; for so long, there wasn’t the public space to talk about those times; and so many partition memories are bound up in dishonour and shame that they are easier not to discuss. The next generations, born here, may not have known much about the Indian subcontinent (or even have any knowledge of partition), and may not have asked.  

    Veena is a retired GP now living in the Scottish Borders. She always believed her family were from India. It wasn’t until she found essays and poems written by her recently deceased mother that she learnt her family were originally from Pakistan. She wants to go back there and stand on the earth that generations of her family are from. Her parents’ escape story was so traumatic that they couldn’t share their family history while alive. But Veena could always feel the trauma – she just did not know what it was.

    Anindya is third generation. His family moved from East to West Bengal. He says that, though partition may not always have been spoken of directly, it was always there. His grandparents had first-hand trauma of having to leave; they had the memories of the house, the place they left. But his parents had an inherited trauma: ‘I don’t think they got over the memory of the suffering that their parents had to go through’. Anindya’s parents had, however, a connection to their desh, the place they were from – even though it was only part of the family’s mythology,. Anindya, too, says that this sense has carried on to him: ‘I am very conscious … of the importance of roots, of the importance of feeling that you belong somewhere that you have a place that you can call your home’. He admits that, over time, if he has children and grandchildren, there may be a diminished attachment to East Bengal – ‘But the longer the attachment survives’, he says, ‘the better’.

    ~

    It is not just an attachment to a place that can persist through the generations, but also the sense that the place you thought of as permanent – your desh, your home – can be taken away. If it happened to family members in living memory, perhaps it could take place again. It’s compounded when your family uproot twice – first as refugees and then in migration to Britain, where your tie to the land is fragile. The imaginary suitcase at the top of the wardrobe is always there, just in case you have to move once more.   

    The consequences of political decisions taken so long ago are threaded through families long after, muddling notions of belonging. Home can be the place you are originally from, but to which you can never return. Can be the place you moved to on the Indian subcontinent. Can be the place to which you chose to migrate.

    As long as people remember the time before 1947 – and tell their stories and pass them on – then they exist too, in all their complexity. Yes, terrible things happened in the name of religion in the fight over land. But so too was there love, friendships, shared culture and language, a history on the very land on which the border was later drawn. Though that generation have now long fled, ties remain deep. So next time you ask someone with South Asian heritage where they are from, and you note a hesitation before they answer, get the long response. It may be an extraordinary story of migration across countries and continents.

    Kavita Puri is author of Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (Bloomsbury). She works in BBC Current Affairs and is an award-winning TV executive producer and radio broadcaster. Her landmark three-part series Partition Voices for BBC Radio 4 won the Royal Historical Society’s Radio and Podcast Award and its overall Public History Prize. Her critically acclaimed Radio 4 series, Three Pounds in My Pocket, charts the social history of British South Asians from the post-war years. She is currently making the third series. She worked for many years at Newsnight and studied Law at Cambridge University.

    Created as a ‘space to sit and read and be’, library of exile is an installation at the British Museum by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, housing more than 2,000 books in translation, written by exiled authors.

  • Exile, One Step Beyond

    Exile, One Step Beyond

    For our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Selma Dabbagh writes on Palestine, desire, place and the future.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Across June, PEN Transmissions, in collaboration with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, is publishing a series of essays on the theme of exile. This series speaks to Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, currently housed at the Museum. English PEN’s event series for the exhibition has been postponed due to COVID-19, and these essays – from writers in the events programme, or with books in the library – touch on issues that will be discussed at the rescheduled events.

    ~

    I grew up between places, many of which were non-places – construction sites in deserts, flyovers made from twisted wire and concrete blocks, pot-holed tracks and wide highways strewn with crushed American cars, some erected on plinths as a warning. There were five-star hotels, and malls with gilt fountains, abayas and mink stoles. Freshly made states where interactions between strangers were purely commercial in nature. I wobbled down the aisles of planes as a toddler, lived out of a suitcase for many years, boarded at six form colleges as a teenager, visited grandparents in an English town on the south coast dedicated to retirees. I’ve regularly visited a house bought in 1975 by my parents in a Chiltern valley, where I know no one except them to this day.

    I’ve never believed that exile has much to do with me. Being in a state of exile seemed a noble status reserved for philosophical men who wore hats – Dante banished to Ravenna being the prime example. To my mind, exiles grew up in places where their cousins lived on the same street; where they were on first-name terms with the local stall keepers and petty criminals; savoured the seasonal fruits and vegetables; and were savvy with the vernacular. A rupture then came about when these (predominantly) Easterners fled West to sour bedsits to spend their days yearning for the flaky almond pastries found in the wood-panelled cafés of their capitals, the tang of its morning pollution and the innuendo of a compatriot’s joke.

    My mother studied natural science at Newnham College, Cambridge. She had a scholarship and developed a particular interest in fungi. Her mother also was a scholarship student, at University College London, where she studied French and German. She lived with a Jewish family in Berlin for a time in 1933 My English grandfather was an officer in the Royal Marines, and my mother’s upbringing was one of multiple moves and boarding schools where everything was prohibited – more oppressively than any Arab regime was capable of at the time. The legacy of puritanism and the military prevailed on the English side. My great grandmother believed mirrors were wicked. At my grandparents’ house, lunch was served always at 1 pm, even if it was ready at five to, and a lie-in for teenagers was until 8 am. Baths were shallow and not particularly warm. My memories of staying with my English grandparents remain sacrosanct, despite the listlessness felt at the time. It was a caring environment devoid of vocalised emotions.

    My father is from the Ajami district of Jaffa, a city whose population went down from 100,000 to 4,000 within days in 1948 and became, according to Ibtisam Azem’s narrator in The Book of Disappearance, unrecognisable after ‘that year’. My father is more fitted to the category of the exile than I am, for his is a refugee tale. One May morning, when he was a boy of 10, a grenade was thrown at him and the children with whom he was playing. We knew this story as children, but memory can revive like a lamp bulb swinging more vigorously in a crypt. Details come through with age: the French doctor who sewed the wounds badly with shaking hands; the penicillin injections with a needle as thick as a pencil; the hospital windows rattling with the bombing; the family’s failed attempt to get on a boat with the stretcher; the departure on a truck, his dog chasing them for as long as it could.

    The family went on to Nablus, then Damascus, Kuwait, Jordan. From Kuwait, my father insisted on moving to London to study. There he saw a picture of my mother smiling on the top of Ben Nevis in a mutual friend’s photograph album. My parents have been together for nearly 60 years, and my teenage daughter views their relationship as the happiest one she knows (albeit she does not know as much about it as I do). The notion in my psyche that I must bridge distance and difference to create a harmonious romantic form evidently has its roots here.

    Would my life choices have been the same were it not for the story of the boy, the grenade, the truck, the stretcher, the dog? I worked with human rights organisations, went on demonstrations, signed petitions, agitated. I wrote short stories where there were characters who betrayed the revolution or felt the revolution had betrayed them. This led to a novel, Out of It, where the characters were poised between political engagement and opting out, between being geographically in Palestine and far from it, between being off their heads and stone-cold sober.

    As an adult, I was drawn to cities with older identities: the Quartier Arabe of an Alpine city in France; the colonial districts of Cairo; a domed house on the Nablus road in Jerusalem, since taken over by Israeli settlers. In London, I’ve moved from West, to North, to East. I’m now in the North West, in a flat that a friend remarked combines all aspects of my life: the Palestinian, the English, and the gated community living of the Gulf. My books and diaries have moved with me and, in each place, I grow plants, decorate walls, and buy lamps. I have come to know that objects can vanish – through invasion (Kuwait, 1990), being denied re-entry (Palestine, 1992) and upon marital separation (Bahrain, 2009). I try to be Zen about property ownership, but my attachment to my flat is paranoid, obsessive.

    From time to time, I hanker for the next place, the next life. The destination to come is a cushion I embroider around my daily consciousness that will explode into feathers if it were ever to become a reality, only then to be substituted by another ‘elsewhere’ where an imagined life is.

    Attachment theory, developed by the psychiatrist John Bowlby, divides human relationships into categories: the secure, anxious or avoidant. These are determined by upbringing – primarily the consistency of care by a parent or carer – and are said to influence relationship patterns for life. I wonder if Bowlby’s theories can be transferred onto a connection to place? Does a process of repeated disorientation lead to permanent distrust of being settled? Bowlby’s mid-twentieth century ideas are finding new life in self-help books for romantic relationships. And, on that front, flicking through the piles of diaries starting in the 80s , I see another pattern of desire being connected to distance: boys and men in Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Canada, when I was in Kuwait, France or Egypt, at times when airline flights were as out of my budget as private space flight is now, when email connections weren’t invented (or barely existed), when letters got lost and I’d have to spend an hour teaching English in a penthouse by the Nile to cover the cost of a fifteen minute call to Montreal from a Tahrir Square call box.

    There could, however, be no connection at all between my nomadic upbringing and the association of travel with desire. It could be that I just find cultural difference, romantic obstacles, and travel sexy in and of themselves. Catherine Millet, in The Sexual Life of Catherine M, writes that her ‘sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need to escape’, an impulse that occurs again and again in erotica, often in Orientalist depictions of interactions with the ‘other’ (Anaïs Nin being a case-in-point). The idea of movement to new terrains, freeing up inhibitions and enabling the recreation of self, recurs frequently in erotic writing. An impulse to upturn the status quo and create a new world based on an imagined one has propelled me throughout my life, although my personal background and experiences could not be more different from Millet’s.

    I have often placed myself in personal and physical situations that I have thought would make me braver and stronger. Yet I still view myself as cowardly. It could be a sense of masochism – the hard chairs of my puritanical forebearers – or due to the years spent in British prisons by my Palestinian grandfather for acting in line with his conscience. ‘Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain’, Albert Camus said in his Nobel speech: ‘the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression’. He was more of a writer than I am, more of an exile (he even had the hat), but with time I’ve found it possible to pull the microphone towards myself, a female voice from the middle ground between East and West – the mezzaterra,as Ahdaf Soueif calls it – and describe what I know is possible from my own globalised perspective, where the vernacular is absent.

    Last year, I was asked to write a short story for the first collection of Palestinian science fiction – with the exception of the Old Testament, as a friend pointed out. I couldn’t bring myself to articulate what a historian had once advised me to say when asked about the prospects for Palestine, ‘tell them we have no future, only a past’, for what future can we have if not even artists can imagine one? Yet Camus’s demand not to lie about what one knows made it hard to lift writing from a responsibility towards the unconscionable present: the forced expulsions and house demolitions, the walls, land grabs, the siege, bombings, shootings, child detentions, mass incarceration, torture. The imagined future provided a space where anything could be possible. I had an Israeli scientist fall in love with a Palestinian professor in a secular scientific enclave towering out of Gaza in 2048. It wasn’t all utopian, but it cast a light on some of the absurdities of religious nationalisms, in a way that only fiction can.

    I was struck while editing an anthology of writing on love and lust by Arab women, from the pre-Islamic era to the present day, by the forthright way some of the early poets asserted a desire for sexual satisfaction. It could make 21st century readers blush. I also found an academic article that explained how, despite the numerous words to describe various specific sexualities, there was no medieval Arabic word for bisexuality that was considered the ‘as the unmarked, most common form of sexual practice, for heterosexuality, or even for sexuality’. I believe we can imagine futures by looking into unexpected details of the past and develop to our fullest by escaping into what is not familiar to us at all.

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in London. Born in Scotland, she has lived in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, France, Egypt and the West Bank. Her first novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011) set between London, Gaza and the Gulf, was listed as a Guardian Book of the Year and won the Premio Opera prize in Spoleto,  Italy, 2019. Her radio plays have been produced for BBC Radio 4 and WDR in Germany. Her short stories have won or been nominated for various awards and been published by Granta, Comma Press and International PEN. She has also written for film and stage. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Guardian, London Review of Books, GQ and other publications. She is currently editing an anthology ‘We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi Books, forthcoming, 2021). www.selmadabbagh.com

    Photo credit: Francesca Leonardi

    Created as a ‘space to sit and read and be’, library of exile is an installation at the British Museum by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, housing more than 2,000 books in translation, written by exiled authors.

  • How Do I Reconcile these Irreconcilable Things?

    How Do I Reconcile these Irreconcilable Things?

    For our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Taqralik Partridge writes on Scotland, Canada, and language loss

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Across June, PEN Transmissions, in collaboration with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, is publishing a series of essays on the theme of exile. This series speaks to Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, currently housed at the Museum. English PEN’s event series for the exhibition has been postponed due to COVID-19, and these essays – from writers in the events programme, or with books in the library – touch on issues that will be discussed at the rescheduled events.

    ~

    I had hesitated about the expense for another night at a bed and breakfast. Assuming there would be something nearby, I put off booking; and when my last day in Lochinver arrived, I was disappointed. The closest place with any vacancy was two hours away in Gairloch.

    Not that I mind driving. The North Coast 500 is as beautiful a route to travel as they say it is. And the roads, often single-track and veering precariously around steep slopes, demand a kind of alertness that carries a person through fatigue.

    And I have been tired. This is generally not something to admit to, at least publicly – as a writer and artist always looking for more work, I want to be ready to say ‘yes’ to the next thing, and the next.

    This tired is an accumulation of experiences, big and small, that came into fullness around the time my mother died. Among these is a sense of collective grief, held with some of my fellow Inuit and other Indigenous people about the state of a world that has allowed and still allows so much destruction. There is also anticipatory grief about where this destruction will end. And, of course, there is my personal grief for personal things. Others have written eloquently about these things. I will not list all here.

    Here is one kind of accessory to my personal grief: the loss of Scottish Gaelic. It is an accessory because it feels so foreign that I cannot know its size, but it is a loss that my mother felt so keenly that she spent her life looking for its remedy.

    In 2019, artist-producers Emilie Monnet and Patti Shaughnessy led the co-production of Indigenous Contemporary Scene. This was a summer of programming with various festivals and venues in Edinburgh that brought Indigenous artists from Canada to Scotland. The production commissioned research and works by some of these artists to explore histories and connections between Scotland and Indigenous communities in Canada. This brought me to Assynt, where my mother’s parents came from.

    I went with the promise to myself that I would not be disappointed by whatever happened.

    The Scotland of my childhood was postcard-sized pictures of my mother, in the sheen of her youth, sitting atop a low stone wall. It was memorising the colour-codes of tartans, and her highland dance paraphernalia, and all the trinkets she collected on tour with her Scottish dance Tattoo. It was the drone of bagpipes on her old records and a resolute scorn for all things English – paired with an insistence on British over American spellings. We’re Highland Scots, my mother would say, like that could mean anything to her children.

    My grandparents were Gaelic-speaking. A story my mother liked to repeat was that my grandmother had come to Canada on a boat on which she was so sick that when a concerned woman asked her if she spoke English, her only reply was ‘sometimes’.  I like to repeat this story, too. True or not, it brings out a low laugh every time I think about it.

    Like many settlers, in Canada my grandparents only spoke their language with other newcomers of their generation. And so the story goes that my mother only knew a handful of Gaelic words. And so the story goes that her children, like so many other Canadians, are people with Scottish ancestry and no Scottish language. But reclaiming Gaelic has not been at the top of my list of things to do.

    My mother’s narrative was that her family had endured the loss of place and language directly and indirectly at the hands of the English. Her mother was punished in school for speaking Gaelic, and left one kind of poverty in Assynt for another in Vancouver.

    My own narrative is something more complicated. Canada is full of reference to Scottish heritage: street names, awards, libraries, arenas, universities, towns, counties – a whole province. From an Indigenous perspective, these references are no different from other colonial naming and erasure of Indigenous names for places and things. It is a hard proposition for me to think that I could claim any pride in Canada’s Scottish heritage, when I know that the racism prevalent in all corners of Canada goes hand-in-hand with a history that is very much tied up with Scotland and people of Scottish heritage.

    There is this reality that Scots played a role in colonisation, and this other aspect that Scotland is very much a part of many Inuit communities. In my homeland, Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec, the ties with Scotland are old and recent, happy and unhappy, intended and coincidental. Family names in my home community ring out like a list of Scottish clans. Inuit know and love Scottish fiddle music (played on the accordion), country dancing, and wool tartans. A symbol of my childhood is a Peterhead boat. And today, there are well-loved Scots who have been part of Inuit communities for decades.

    How do I reconcile these irreconcilable things? For me, as a person from two very different cultures that have experienced language-loss or the threat of it, it is curious to consider that people like my mother – who were affected directly or indirectly by the imposition of English – have also been involved in the imposition of English on Indigenous people; including my father’s people – my people.

    Inuit kinship terminologies and understanding of relations are vast networks that keep one grounded in a sense of belonging to family and community – even if there are family or community members with whom we want no relation; there are always others who claim us. Inuktitut terminology for kinship relations is complex, but logical and specific. This way of relating to other Inuit is linked with oral histories about where our parents and ancestors were born and lived; how we relate to others through birth, customary adoption, marriage and naming; and, importantly, how we relate to the land. To be Inuk is not simply to be of an ethnicity, but to be from or to come from people who come from a specific community or region. Even where Inuit are working to reclaim language from the beginning, people still maintain these family and community ties.

    An Inuit sense of family is one that runs through all the rivulets of possibility to discover connections. An everyday occurrence for young Inuit visiting new communities is to have older people they have never met tell them in great detail how they are related. Some would say this was all so that Inuit of the past could maintain genetic diversity in small groups of people, by ensuring that close relatives did not marry. However, this way of thinking about family is about proximity, not distance.

    I might say that the loss of Gaelic in my mother’s family created an irreparable rift that disintegrated the family structure. This is not to say that there was not love or connection. I have known and love(d) several of my mother’s siblings. But in their lifetimes, some cut relations off with others in ways that read like a typical drama of Anglo-Canadian literature. When these breaks occur in Inuit families, other relations fill in the spaces. But in an English-speaking world of individuals, it is possible to have no relatives whatsoever.

    I wrote a performance piece for Indigenous Contemporary Scene, a part of which reads:

    and if she could not give Gaelic to her children

    she could give her resentment of everything English

    so they despised their own tongues

    and refused to speak to one another

    for days, or years, or forever

    In Assynt, I was surprised to find that there is a sense of loss of language and culture, and historical trauma around people being severed from their ancestral homes. Treatments of this Scottish subject-matter abound in film and other media, but I was taken aback by how it seemed to weigh on some people’s minds as relatively recent family history. This weight of loss felt something like the one I know from people from my own community.

    This experience underscored for me that the project of colonisation is to divide people from their connection to the land and to each other. Indigenous languages that have grown up around specific places roll out in names, descriptions, and modes of communication that reflect ways of living with care and respect for the land and waters. This is not a mystical, ‘native’ connection, but a practical knowing of the earth as a living entity with which we all – as human beings – are in relation.

    I do not have a nuanced understanding of Scottish Gaelic and Scottish history. I do however know what role language loss and reclamation play in the life of a community. If people are deprived of their ability to speak, dream, rant, mourn and rejoice in the language of their ancestors, this can be a wound that runs very deep, through many generations. My mother sought to reclaim her language because she wanted a connection with her relations – past and present.

    Assynt is one breathtaking sight after another. In places, the coast looks much like Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homelands including arctic Canada). In others, it is as other-worldly as Iceland. On my last night in the highlands, I stayed in a hotel in Gairloch, right on the blowing sea. I arrived to a large front atrium full of Americans having a good time and being vocal about it.

    The day after, on the road back to Inverness, I popped a tire and, and as luck would have it, the driver of the tow truck volunteered to drive me the whole seventy miles back to the car rental. This meant more than an hour of conversation about Inuit and Inuit art, and Scotland, and Gaelic, and what kind of fish we catch in northern Canada. When I volunteered that I was visiting for research because some of my family was from a small village near Lochinver, he made a point of stopping so I could take pictures.

    Take a look around, he said. This is your heritage. If he was joking, I couldn’t have guessed.

    Taqralik Partridge is a writer and artist originally from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik (Quebec) and now based in Kautokeino, Sápmi (Norway) and Ottawa, Ontario. She was recently appointed director of the Nordic Lab at SAW Gallery in Ottawa. Some of Taqralik’s work is currently on exhibition as part of NIRIN the Biennale of Sydney.

    Created as a ‘space to sit and read and be’, library of exile is an installation at the British Museum by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, housing more than 2,000 books in translation, written by exiled authors.

  • This Library Is Not an Artwork: An Interview with Edmund de Waal

    This Library Is Not an Artwork: An Interview with Edmund de Waal

    To open our series with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Edmund speaks to us about his library of exile

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Over the next five weeks, PEN Transmissions, in collaboration with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, is publishing a series of essays on the theme of exile. This series speaks to Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, currently housed at the Museum. English PEN’s event series for the exhibition has been postponed due to COVID-19, and these essays – from writers in the events programme, or with books in the library – touch on issues that will be discussed at the rescheduled events. Here, to introduce the series, Edmund de Waal speaks to Hannah Trevarthen (English PEN’s Events and Partnerships Manager) about his library of exile.

    ~

    HANNAH TREVARTHEN: Edmund, your library of exile has moved between three locations. It was in Venice (with its connection to the ghetto, and Jewish experience), then in Dresden (which has its own resonances with porcelain, and also with atrocity and reconciliation), and then in London (in a space connected to the King’s Library). What effects has that movement had?

    EDMUND DE WAAL: Something that matters to me, as an artist, is seeing how a work has different resonances in different places. That’s at the heart of what I do: putting something down in different places, and then looking at what happens as it moves. As you say, this library has had three homes, and it has accreted significance in each.

    In Venice, it came out of thinking about the Ghetto as a place of aggregation – a place where languages and cultures were put under huge pressure, and where there was a huge amount of creativity as a consequence. It has a particular resonance with exile, and a particular connection for the Jewish community. And it’s also absolutely about translation.

    Dresden, as you say, not only has a connection to porcelain, but is a place whose destruction continues to resonate. It’s also a place where the book burnings began in the 1930s – where the fragility of libraries was laid bare.

    And London – well, in London, the library is located in an extraordinary place. It’s in a museum of polyphonic nature, where the objects of the world are talking profoundly about the state of exile. It’s in a museum that was created with a library – a museum and a library which are co-inherent. The original British Library is the centre of exilic literature – not least for Marx, and now as a place which is tidal for people from different communities. The people of London speak more languages than the people of any other city. So to have a library which has 90 countries and 60 languages represented gives it a certain strength, I think.

    It’s very special indeed. I want to pick up on the point about translation, something very much at the core of English PEN’s work. A number of the titles PEN has supported are in the library, and that’s been very profound for us. When you were building the library, did you expect to represent so many languages? How did you go about selecting the titles that were included?

    It’s a sort of non-programmatic library. It began with passion, and very much continues with passion. It began when I scanned my shelves and realised that a vast majority of my books were exilic. It began with the books I had. That turned into conversations with writers, in which I asked them who the voices were and what the books were that mattered to them. Then it involved academics and translators and publishers – growing incrementally and naturally. We weren’t crossing countries off a list.

    Then a very powerful thing that happened. On the first night in Venice, we put up a sign asking people to tell us if they thought a book should be in the library. We said we’d find it and buy it and put it in. The moment of transition – from it being my library to being a library – was when someone came up to me in tears and said, ‘You don’t have this book, this community, this language – how can you not have this literature in your library’, to which the answer was, ‘Well, we will now’. It was that synapse of energy, in which it goes from being a curated space to being something owned by other people, that was most significant.

    How have you found that process – giving over an artwork for people to contribute to it? It strikes me that you do your making in isolation, but that your practice then becomes very collaborative. How do you find balancing those ways of working?

    Well, for me, they are absolutely yin and yang. If I didn’t spend time entirely by myself, with clay, there would be no installation. If I didn’t spend time entirely by myself, with a pen and a blank piece of paper, there would be a no book. But putting something into the world – working with people to animate it – is the completely fabulous part. Collaboration is the expanding landscape of creativity. You get so much back. It isn’t a costive thing – a take it or leave it. It’s much more generative. The handing over of this library is the most positive and creative thing I’ve done in my life.

    It’s been a career highlight for me, too, to work with you and the British Museum on this project. It is a project fundamentally about dialogue; about how to start conversations, and how take them beyond the walls of the library and the Museum. The library of exile is a piece that compels you to respond.

    It’s what books do. They don’t stay still; they converse. Literature is a migrant art in itself. And the power of passing on a book into someone else’s hands is palpable. One of the great things about this project is that I’m endlessly being introduced to new writers. The people in the events series, and in this series on PEN Transmissions, are people I’m desperate to listen to. It’s a beautifully generative project.

    And, of course, the library is going to Mosul.

    Yes – there’s something very straightforward about that, actually. It’s about saying what matters: about standing next to people who have been through something so traumatic, and saying that you have heard them and are in solidarity with them. Recognising a community – and their literature and art and history – seems to me a powerful, political and beautiful action.

    Solidarity is hugely important. It’s a funny state, solidarity: it’s about this moment, but also history and future. The history of destroyed libraries and burned books, which is inscribed on the outside of the library of exile, is very important to me. Memory is a powerful, contingent, fissile thing. You keep remembering: it’s not just about the past; these losses are contemporary, and potential, and we should mark them and have solidarity with those who suffer them. Solidarity is the right word: it goes back, it goes forward, but it’s at once completely of the moment.

    I want to ask you about physicality and touch. A book, by appearance, is a single object, but it is an object that contains multitudes. There’s something very special, in your piece, about being encouraged to pick up a book that means something to us and write our names in it – something we’re not used to doing with library books. Was the conception of the library of exile always that people would be able be in dialogue through touch and inscription?

    A very innate thing about being in a library is a strange relationship with time. Your focus goes. You can explore and be led in all kinds of different directions. It’s a very dynamic space in terms of time. It’s also dynamic physically, because all books have very different feelings in your hands.

    To have the opportunity to touch a book, and then find all the names of people who have held this book before you, from different countries and in different languages, struck me as a way of actualising the way in which texts are inhabited by the people who wrote them, but also the people who read them. Of actualising this extraordinary inhabitation, re-inhabitation, invocation and iterative reading of all those readers who precede you. That felt like a profoundly humane way of marking how the presence of books talks to us as human beings.

    This library is not an artwork. I’m fed up with contemporary artists who make libraries where you can’t touch the books – where it’s all about the ‘idea of the book’. This is about the ‘idea of the book’ but – my god! – the best idea of a book is to pick it up and read it.

    I want to finish by asking about psalms. The vitrines in the library are named for psalms – things that are very much in praise. The library of exile feels like a very personal work – for you, in praising clay and writing, and for a wider public, in praising their relationships to books. How important is it, now, that we sing the praises of libraries?

    Psalms are complicated. They have a lot of agony and despair in them, but they also have extraordinary happiness and exaltation in them. Underneath both is a huge amount of exile. That matters to me. As does the fact that they exist in all three Abrahamic traditions.

    Libraries are threatened – they are so threatened. There is never a bad time to stand up publicly for the significance of libraries as an extraordinary private-social space. There’s something quite profoundly political about that. And making a new library – well, that’s cool.

    Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces worldwide, including The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). He was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011 and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. 

    Created as a ‘space to sit and read and be’, library of exile is an installation at the British Museum by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, housing more than 2,000 books in translation, written by exiled authors.

    Interview by Hannah Trevarthen, Events and Partnerships Manager.

  • A Hideous Kind of Tetris: Eley Williams in Conversation with Peggy Hughes

    A Hideous Kind of Tetris: Eley Williams in Conversation with Peggy Hughes

    As part of our Digital Literary Salon, Eley Williams speaks to Peggy Hughes about dictionaries, constructing characters, and playing literary Tetris.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    PEGGY HUGHES: You’ve said in an interview elsewhere (a Guardian reading group webchat on Attrib.) that short stories are ‘little self-contained moments of chaos or clarity’. I love this image. And also the short story as shot of limoncello metaphor, which reminds me of the time Janice Galloway said a short story was a fine malt, but, like the bottle, you wouldn’t want to drink the whole lot at once, or you would ‘do yourself a mischief!’ Bernard MacLaverty meanwhile, I think it was, said that the story was a dram and the novel a pint:

    How did you come to be writing this pint?

    ELEY WILLIAMS: Quaffable and guzzle-ready, I think that a lot of my short stories are treatments or considerations of suddenness. A narrator’s passing thought, a character’s impulsive reaction; even a short story about a thousand-year-long destruction of a city seems somehow a study in suddenness just by dint of the brevity of its account as dispatched on the page!

    I sketched parts of The Liar’s Dictionary as if they were intended for short stories, but soon realised that what interested me about the subject or characters was their sustained development, and the way that change could occur slowly in a more payed-out way. Short stories about the character might afford glimpses of motivations, tone or consequences, but a novel would allow the reader a good, long, hard stare.

    When tinkering with the first draft, I’d also just finished a PhD about dictionaries and their relationship to fiction and ‘fictitiousness’, concentrating on false entries in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. So I think my mindset was probably more ponderous, and habitually leaning towards drawn-out writing forms rather than zippy, punchy thoughts. The central characters of The Liar’s Dictionary often digress, or blame themselves for digressing, or query their inability to express themselves concisely, or blame themselves for being bored or boring: I think the novel allowed more room to explore this, or exhibit it.

    How was the process different to writing Attrib.?

    With Attrib., most of the stories were written individually and with no expectation that they might be collected together or viewed alongside one another. I think this ‘self-contained’ nature meant that I didn’t have to worry too much about repetition of tone or imagery, and could concentrate on metre of sentences and similar concerns quite quickly and directly – at the time of writing, that is; anxiety around this crept in later, by the ladleful! The short stories’ first drafts were written as feints or explorations: What would happen if I tried to write a short story about someone whose job it is to cook songbirds? for example. With the novel, I realised that things like ‘interesting evocation’ or ‘suggestions of a milieu’ were not going to be quite enough, and that, for the reading to be a satisfying experience, I would have to think a lot more carefully about structure and character arcs. I’m sure for many writers this comes naturally or easily, but I felt a complete amateur. This was refreshing but also exhausting: at one point, I printed off every page of the novel draft, cut it up into paragraphs or lines, and then played a hideous kind of collage or game of Tetris to trial various orders for sections, trying to work out where best they would fit.

    What surprised you?

    I first had the idea for the novel and made some tentative jottings around about 2011: I do not have a great attention span at the best of times, and tend to pluck at drafts or ideas or sentences in fits and starts, even when working on things that are very important to me. As a result, the novel has appeared after many iterations and permutations. I suppose I’m trying to say that I’m surprised that I actually finished it and ‘saw the process through’ without feeling completely overwhelmed or poleaxed with impostor syndrome! I am indebted to my editors and agent for guiding the final novel home, and for trusting it even when it was at (and I was at) the most sprawling or disingenuous. In hindsight, it has been a fun experience to work with ideas about textual capriciousness and unsteadiness while also feeling a little unsteady marshalling a novel together.

    And what was the weather in which it was written (cognizant of the split timeframe of course, I’m interested in what influences, political or social or cultural fed it? I’m thinking here of an interview with Keira Knightley from the Observer last autumn, which I think about on average once a month, in which she said something to the effect of ‘we get the art our times require’ [or was it ‘deserve’?]. I wonder about that a lot)?

    Much of the novel is about communication, and about attempts to feel genuine or authentic with the language that we use, while also admitting we are often in language’s thrall or limited by it. A lot of the novel is about naivety too, and gaffes, and weasel words, as well as credulity or gullibility. The novel was written at a time when I was reading more and more about the ways (often unseen or unaccountable) powers might, wittingly or unwittingly, affect ways of thinking or courses of action. As I was writing about fake entries in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, it was impossible not to consider taxonomies of ““““fake news”””” being scrutinised (or not), regarding current events and in a current discourse, as well as general notions of authority and trustworthiness when it came to reported speech or the written word. Facts seemed increasingly funny, indefinite things. There have also been recent discussions specifically concerned with dictionaries and representation – both lexicographical and in terms of social change – which have felt relevant to my research and which I seek to examine in the novel. For example, in 2013, France’s Larousse dictionary altered its definition of marriage to a union of ‘two persons’ rather than ‘between man and woman’ – this was met with some opposition. In 2019, Merriam-Webster dictionary added the singular pronoun they used to refer to ‘a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary’, or to a person whose gender is unknown or is intentionally not revealed. The relationship readers have had with dictionaries or similar resources, and the cultural notion that dictionaries might be repositories of fixed ‘correct’ facts rather than more fluid, mutable representations, has become very important to me.

    I read in the New Yorker that Hilary Mantel has this method of getting to know a character, in which she imagines a chair and invites the character to come and sit in it; once comfortable, you may ask them questions. ‘She tried this for the first time when she was writing The Giant, O’Brien: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted “Yes!” But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.’

    How was that character development for you, Winceworth and Mallory? I love how we get glimpses of him, his state of mind and his motivations through his false entries.

    I think the characters became more clearly realisable as my research into lexicography developed. Perhaps that is obvious, and sounds a little too ponderous: of course the more I learned about details of their presumed settings, the more clearly defined the characters became to me. But the development and changes were tonal as well as circumstantial. As I learnt about brazenness and idiosyncrasies in real dictionaries, the characters accrued pomposity or giddiness; more mischief. It crept into the writing. Both Mallory and Winceworth feel very constrained by their roles and abilities, and on the whole pretty powerless. As I read more about certain strangenesses in actual dictionaries (for example Chambers’s famous definition of éclair – ‘a cake, long in shape but short in duration’),  or the fact that Kenneth Grahame based his character Ratty from The Wind in the Willows on a real-life editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the characters’ more scurrilous and disobedient elements came to the fore. ‘Dictionaries’ stopped being associated for me with didacticism and precision but rather with creativity, wittiness and partiality.

    Thinking about Mantel’s brilliant ‘giant-in-chair’ summoning, it strikes me that both Winceworth and Mallory try to conjure imagined characteristics for each other in a similar way. Although in the novel their timelines are separated by over 100 years, Mallory imagines what kind of person could be writing the false entries in the dictionary, while Winceworth tries to conceive of someone who might ever come across them. They start with stereotypes then ‘flesh-out’ these caricatures into sketches of flawed and hopeless dweebs, which develop into portraits of nuanced and hopeful dweebs, until finally they both imagine the other as recognisable and rounded individuals. And, in the act of imagining and creating, reveal something about themselves.

    Your phrase ‘a hideous Tetris’ is pleasing and unpleasing! How did that architecture of the book in which their stories entwined come to be and come to land?

    The two narratives jockeyed for room, and for a long time I wasn’t sure if one should take precedence over the other. I trialled both narratives written in the first-person, but it felt like too many people’s thoughts ricocheting inside the text; I trialled both narratives written in the third-person, but it felt too much like a survey of action rather than a delve into a personal experience. There’s even one draft where every paragraph is written in the style of a dictionary, with each section written as a definition of a word! David Leviathan’s The Lover’s Dictionary does this so well.

    The final version, I think, has the balance I wanted: where narrators’ claims for subjectivity or objectivity collapse as their belief in notions of subjectivity or objectivity are tested. The narratives don’t compete for attention, but, I hope, run alongside one another in a shared uncertainty. Uncertainty is a big part of the novel. Just as the characters are unclear what their relationship with words should be, so too the reader is afforded aspects of characters’ reasonings, passing thoughts and breakdowns without privileging one over the other.

    Dictionaries and you: when did this affair begin? Is a dictionary an unreliable narrator?

    The ambition and scope of dictionaries has long been a fascination. Everything in the world often feels messy and incomplete, or incompletable. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But, as a tool and object, dictionaries make the claim that at least some things can be collected together in a certain order, and they can be potted and cultivated in a way that is concise, precise and authoritative.

    Authority is often attractive, sometimes comforting, and generally profoundly weird. The concept of irrefutability is the same. In his novel Gambit, Rex Stout introduces his fictional detective Nero Wolfe to the reader as looming by a fire and ripping sheets of paper from a dictionary, condemning its pages to a sitting-room fire. In the first few pages of Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp ejects a copy of Johnson’s dictionary from the window of her carriage. Dictionaries are, in many ways, completely preposterous and to be handled with suspicion.

    They are also, of course, completely marvellous because they are a way of accessing thought and meaning (even [especially?] if elements of it are obsolete or arcane or misunderstood or misunderstandable or irreverent). There’s an adage ascribed to Jean Cocteau: ‘the greatest masterpiece in the world is only a dictionary out of order.’ I feel uneasy about anyone believing they have absolute authority, but also very tender towards frustrated, human attempts to create an order or definition for anything. Dictionaries seem to represent all of this.  

    I enjoy writers who are playful with the perceived and lampoonable ‘authority’ that dictionaries enjoy as cultural artefacts or products. It gave us Series 3 Blackadder and his ‘Contrafibularities’, a suggested entry for Robbie Coltrane’s Samuel Johnson.  This is in the best tradition of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911) and Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1913). Intended as a part-parody, part-pastiche, the genius of these spoofs and riffs on dictionaries’ authority comes as both a playful dig and clear indictment of those books’ claims to power. There, you get to enjoy the absurd within the systematised, the unabashedly insincere within the sincere.

    A dictionary means that we are prompted to consider the history of the word magpie, the colour of hewn magnussonite and the gift-lists of Magi all with one quick swizz at a column’s inch. Even if dictionaries are not always reliable, they are reliably diverting. The best rattlebag, Wunderkammer or scrapheap imaginable.   

    You have such a playful relationship with words – ‘giddy with the words’ shapes and sounds, their corymbs, their umbels and their panicles’. It feels like they are multi-dimensional things to you, with basements and wings and colour palettes and hearts and soundtracks: please explain what I mean by this?

    Read aloud, you can treat the sounds of words like notes on a stave and noodle around their syllables in a kind of improvisation. Doing that, you’re freed from having to care too much about meaning, or communication: evocation takes precedence, rather than clarity. Words will always have a pace or rhythm to them, which also means some kind of dance is possible. It’s ok to dance uncertainly or haphazardly. And a garbled, giddy idioglossia (or a mixed metaphor) never gave anyone a stubbed toe.

    Your house is aflame and you can save three books. They are:

    • Ali Smith’s The First Person and Other Stories(2008)
    • Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin (1996)
    • Eleanor Morgan’s Gossamer Days (2016).

    Eley Williams lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The Liar’s Dictionary is her debut novel. 

    Peggy Hughes is the Programme Director at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. She is also Chair of Literature Alliance Scotland, Scotland’s membership network for literature, committed to advancing the interests of literature and languages of Scotland at home and abroad. Peggy is also a board member of publishers 404Ink and charity Open Book Reading. She is from Northern Ireland, and before moving to Norwich worked in literature at the University of Dundee, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, the Scottish Poetry Library and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. 

    This series features voices from the 2020 programme of the English PEN Literary Salon at the London Book Fair (LBF). LBF is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. Taking place every spring in the world’s premier publishing and cultural capital, it is a unique opportunity to explore, understand and capitalise on the innovations shaping the publishing world of the future. LBF brings you direct access to customers, content and emerging markets. LBF 2021, the 50th Fair, will take place from 9-11 March 2021, Olympia London. LBF’s London Book and Screen Week will run for the fourth year, with the book fair as the pivotal three-day event within a seven-day programme. For further information, please visit: www.londonbookfair.co.uk.

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