The Hostile Environment as Greek Tragedy (with Kamila Shamsie)

um well it's a really a great pleasure and privilege to be able to introduce you all to KLA shami uh KLA sham is the author of eight novels as well as a non-fiction book and a book for children she's been nominated for pretty much every literary award going including the man Booker the Welter Scott the Costa and the women's prize which she won in 2018 for home fire um it's a novel that features very prominently in the open University's ma in English literature um and I think uh we might have actually the author of that unit here today which is uh wonderful um it's also home fire that we'll be focusing on in today's seminar on the hostile environment as Greek tragedy so a very warm welcome Cara I'm going to be handing over to carela initially um who's going to be talking on the topic of hostile environment is Greek tragedy and then I'll ask some questions and we'll at the end open up to questions from you so do note down any questions that come to you as we're talking so without further Ado KLA I'm going to hand over to you thank you thank you very much Emma um and to all of you who are here and particularly anyone involved in teaching home fire and it does um really just Delight me so much whenever I hear that's happening um I thought I would speak a little about um how this novel came to be and really how it it does in many ways come out of the hostile environment um whenever I tell the story of how I came to write home fire I started in August 2014 um but I think I want to actually start it much earlier as I talk to you um I'm going to start it around 77 um London I wasn't living in London in at that time I didn't move here until 2007 but I was in and out of London quite a lot um I'd already had several books published here and I think I started quite early on thinking of it as a place where I might one day live um which meant I was very aware as I was moving from Pakistan to here with occasional bouts in America I was very aware of a rapidly changing discourse around migrants first and second generation and particularly around Muslims um the term hostile environment itself didn't come to be coined until much later but I was very aware of it um from an early point and I remember I was here when 77 happened when when the London T bombings happened and I remember going onto Google to look up specifically the phrase British terrorist and the reason I was looking it up was because I was very aware that that phrase wasn't used in talking about the suicide bombers um and the London Tube attacks and as my Googling sort of basically confirmed what I had thought was that the phrasing used to describe the men the terrorists who had committed um those acts was very interesting in what it revealed about Britain's own discomfort with its Muslim citizens um so the phrases they that we used to describe them was sometimes quite often Muslim terrorists occasionally British Muslim terrorists um at one point it was even this may have been the daily mail it may not have been um British passport holders as so there's something different between being a British Citizen and being a British British passport holder um British born was often um brought up as well and it seemed to me there was a real anxiety and around this time as well and again I would come in and out and every time I sort of left the country and I came back a few months later it struck me the way this discourse had really flourished about this question of what is britishness there seemed a need to identify this rather amorphous thing and whenever there's a need to identify something you know it's because there's a desire to exclude to say there is a definition that is not just about which passport do you carry there's something else that is um that there's an anxiety around and it is an anxiety of exclusion and inclusion um and there were the question of can you be both British and Muslim at the same time was weirdly to me a question that was actually a subject of serious de debate as though britishness required one set of values and muslimness required another and these two could couldn't be reconciled um so that was one kind of conversation that I was very aware of um and I was aware of that before I ever came to live here but it wasn't that long after 2007 I moved to Britain I moved here under um a Visa category that existed at the time which was writers artists and composers um most people now don't know this existed it was really a rather lovely category which sort of acknowledged that if you were a writer artist or composer you had something of value that Britain might quite like um and therefore it was a root in you didn't have to be a Booker prize winning or Nobel prizewinning writer artist composer all you needed to do was show that you had you know a career in this line um that you were earning some kind of living from it and that would have been enough to get you into the country um and to eventually get a passport I came in under that category not long after I heard that there were plans to change visa rules um and someone said you must you should go and talk to an immigration lawyer about it because it might be relevant to your case I went to see an immigration lawyer who said oh yes there are new there are changes coming around around things are being moved to a point-based system um but there there's no way they'll be able to fit writers artists and composers and our understanding is there's a whole category um of you know sort of current um well the whole bunch of Visa current Visa categories that will simply remain as they are don't worry nothing to do with you so I didn't worry about it I read all this stuff about a points-based system but I felt assured that the immigration lawyers I'd spoken to were correct when they said it's not relevant to you and so some time went by and and it was coming up to the time that I needed to reapply to extend the category to extend the Visa and I went online to the home office Department this was before they were called ukba um and found to my great dismay that the category I was in didn't exist anymore and the wording there simply said that I had to find another category I could move into or else leave the country when my Visa ran out um I had been in in Britain for about a year and a half at the time um it's not that I didn't have anywhere else to go to I could go back to Pakistan um I wasn't a refugee there was nothing to stop me from living in Pakistan there was no great horror there at all but I had come to britainy thinking it was a place that I was going to be living in and I had started to make a life there um and I loved it I loved my life in Britain I love being a Londoner um it had given me a great feeling of satisfaction the day I got a National Insurance number um and so I did feel rather miserable at the thought of having to leave um it so turned out that it happened that I did find out that there was another category I could move into and I was able to stay but a certain disqual quiet set within me um I didn't feel safe after that I kept think I would sort of routinely every few months I just have this moment of panic what if the rules have changed again and I have to leave and the longer I stayed in the more of a life I created here the greater that feeling of panic was because I really didn't want to leave um and I realized I didn't trust the system I didn't trust it to be fair or Equitable um I thought at any moment a whole new set of rules could come in play and I could once again be faced with a screen saying if you don't fulfill the new rules you're going to have to go um and so it was with an enormous sense of relief that I finally got 5 years down the line indefinitely to remain and a year after that uh citizenship and when I had citizenship I remember my my overwhelming feeling really was a really Bel you know no matter what rules come into play now and how things change I have this I can't be asked to leave it is irrevocable um and then one day I was reading the newspaper and it was 2014 I believe and the news stories were suddenly in a fairly short period of time filled with all these articles about young men it later became women as well but and it wasn't only young but the stories at that point were primarily young men who were leaving Britain to go and join Isis and Theresa May was then the Home Secretary and I read her saying wherever possible we will strip them of citizenship and I thought hang on what's this I had thought once I had citizenship I had it I didn't know it was a thing that could be removed um and so I went around reading more and discovered that actually if like me you were a dual p pport holder or indeed if you were a naturalized citizen with a claim to another passport uh you could in fact have your British citizenship taken away from me uh taken away from you that possibility had always existed but the British government started using it um to a degree that was absolutely unprecedented and kept trying to F to to expand the ways in which it could use it it kept trying to extend Its Right of taking taking away citizenship from its citizens including it turned out those who were born in Britain and had never lived anywhere else or had another home um all this stuff to do with the hostile environment was very deep within me the day I turned up in sometime in September 2014 um to have a meeting with a man called jender Verma who I didn't know at all but who had sent me an email to say I ran thara theater in South London will you come in and have a chat um so I went to have a chat and J said look I really like your novels and I like the way you use dialogue will you write a play for me um I said I have no idea how to write a play he said yeah I thought you might say that so why don't you adapt a play because then someone else has done all the hard work um and he was the one to say you know Greek tragedy having a real moment of Revival something like Antony or the orista in a contemporary Asian or British Asian context might be interesting I knew the orti but for some reason I just didn't pay much attention to it and and I sort of immediately glommed on to antigon and what I thought about Antony was oh God I know I've read it once I have absolutely no memory about what it's about but what I said to him was Antony that's interesting let me think about it um so I went off and literally on the train going home I read the Wikipedia summary of Antony and although I was reading about a play that was more than 2,000 years old I read that in all these things that were already very deep inside me and which I'd been thinking about um which had to do with citizenship and britishness and the hostile environment and Britain's sort of Crisis around um its Muslim citizens all of these things seem to Overlay themselves with absolute Ease on this very very ancient story um until that point I hadn't thought these are things I'm going to write about particularly the the the Isis story which was only beginning to unfold and I was sort of consuming it as a news reader I didn't think I was you know consuming it as the novelist but there was such an immediacy to the way that I thought this ancient story is a story of now it's a story of British Muslims um and Isis and government um and I pretended for a while that I was going to write it as a as a play but I really don't know how to write a play and I was at that point a novelist in search of my next novel and um it just became very clear to me that this was that um that Antony and Isis and the hostile environment were going to be this novel which I didn't for a long time know was going to be called home fire so that's how it all started um Emma if you want to jump in um go off that wonderful thank you cara um so it it's really Apparent from what you've been saying about the way in which the political narrative impacted your own personal story and I just wonder if you could share with us a little bit about in the drafting process of Home Fire how you tried to navigate the personal stories uh with the political uh themes that you might have been exploring I get ask this question a lot and and it's always asked as though there is something to navigate and I've never SE SE what there to navigate because um you know to me and this probably has to do with growing up in Pakistan everyone's lives are always you know to say how do you navigate the person with the political is to me like saying how do you navigate the personal with the emotional I don't understand the question you know it is a very basic fact that you know and I think even people who didn't see it before we saw it in Co didn't we the extent to which we we really live with the illusion that the political is something very separate and it's you know then you come on these moments where you realize actually whether or not you can leave your house is a political matter it doesn't only mean that when you can't leave your house it's political but when you can leave your house it is also political you just don't think of it in that way um I remember some years ago talking to a group of of American University students who asked me a similar question and I said it's only that youth right now have the illusion that the political is not very deeply personally entwined with every single thing you do but there will come a day and this was sort of around I think 2004 and I was really just sort of trying to come up with an example that I thought might appeal to a young woman at American University and I said I mean if Row versus Wade is ever overturned you'll stop asking how the political and person come together you know um so so I there there was never anything to navigate really there were there were characters who were leading certain lives and and what was happening at the very day-to-day level with them um was not separate and because they were British Muslims they had always known it was not separate from how they were seen and what they could do and what they felt I suppose there's something that uh people might think of as overtly political in home fire in the sense that there is a politician who's one of the main characters um and I wonder whether that was something that was always going to be the case in this novel or was this something that evolved and that seems uh perhaps something that might need need need navigating in a different way from the way in which the political might also be passal well I mean it was all Antony's fault you know I mean because with antiy the primary characters there are the two sisters there is their brother the traitor and well there is their Uncle who is the ruler and his son um and when I was thinking about how I was going to make a contemporary story I thought well so obviously the person who is passing down the the ruling about the stripping of citizenship I thought well I can't have him be the uncle you can have that in Greek tragedy but you know I'm working within the world of realism so I thought I don't want so but there does have to be someone who takes the figure of who takes on the the role of crayon um you know of the person who can pass down the political role and I thought well I don't want that to be their uncle but I like that idea that in antigon there's some kind of personal connection which makes all feel more fraud um and I thought well maybe he should also be a British Muslim like them um this was I I start think this I mean you know we didn't even have sadik Khan as London mayor let alone sa Javed as Home Secretary so it felt like a bit of a stretch but it didn't feel like too much of a stretch um I thought it could that kind of thing could happen not knowing we were going to be Unleashed you know or we would have Unleashed upon us a series of um Asian home secretaries enacting really racist policies so that's another story that came later um but I knew that that that I would have this figure but again that I what I was most interested with him was the personal story you know which included his personal Ambitions to be prime minister but it was also the personal question of how he felt um about his own muslimness and what he said about it and how he felt about his son becoming involved with this family that was sort of to him the wrong kind of Muslim um so it's always you always do it you always find the personal in because that is where the novel lives and dies is with your characters um and so you you start with sort of the intimate lives and then you see well what else you know comes into the story I I noticed that the epigraph uh comes from shein's translation of Antony uh the ones we love uh enemies of the state and um I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about how you engage enged with antigon maybe different translations adaptations the extent to which it was at the Forefront of your mind throughout the process or not when I started I thought look Antony doesn't need me has been around for a very long time which was wonderful and it's so large and and has such a role in culture that it was very liberating to me that I thought I don't owe antigon anything in terms of getting it right so I thought I'm going to read the play and then I'm going to put it aside and anything in that play which isn't useful to me in writing a 21st century novel I'm just going to throw out the window I was surprised In The End by how little I threw out the window I mean I threw out the second brother you know because he was of no use but I was amazed actually by the the way in which that play really did become the marrow of not just the skeleton but the marrow of the of the novel um it's an extraordinary piece of work really um but also I don't read Greek so I thought well I'll read a few few translations because I knew that you know I know enough about translation to know that different things come up or are obscured in different ones and I thought I'll read a few um and then I'll just put them aside um and so I read some you know God I don't know whichever one I'd had at univers which I pulled out um and then I read the Sheamus Haney which of course had in it you know you can hear the echo of the troubles um but there's also echo of of 9 911 stuff I mean there's one point where anyy has crayon say that line which George Bush said you're either with us or against us um and that but the one that actually was most useful to me in some way was the an Carson um because I was looking for again the human way to get into the character and it's very easy I think a lot of the conversation around the play Antony and the character anony um really like to make it make her into a set of ideas rather than a girl um and it becomes these two sisters antigonis many become contrasting ideas and so Antony becomes Civil Disobedience and becomes you know speaking truth to power and as many becomes compliance and I thought this doesn't seem really very fair to me um and it was as I was reading the Ancon that I really understood where for me the story lay with these two women um and it's very early on and Antony the Two Sisters let me for anyone who's as vague or hazy on Antony as I had been when I had that conversation with jender Verma um the play starts with these two sisters and they've just discovered that their brother who has di just died as a traitor um that their Uncle the Tyrant has said his body will not be buried that's his punishment even after death his body will not be buried um he'll be left above the ground for the birds to Beck at and the you know dogs to pull apart and he will not have the religious rights either that are necessary to you know uh necessary really for death to happen properly and for you to get into the underworld um and is many says basically paraphrasing um God this is terrible but there's nothing we can do we're girls and our family name is already stained in all kinds of ways um we need to stay out of trouble and her sister Antony says I will bury that body um but then the conversation goes on and as many is saying I don't want you to get into more trouble and Antony says well what do you and by trouble she does mean that she knows that if if Antony goes against the law she will be put to death as well um and Antony says something to the effect of well you've already chosen against me you're not going to help me you're not taking my side so what difference does it make now to you what I do or what happens to me and as many in an Carson's version has four words I'll be so lonely and that's where I saw the story which is here are two sisters who have just undergone devastating loss they both lost both their brothers and Antony is now imagining that the the last thing you can do for someone which is bury them properly that she won't be able to do that and that that beloved body is going to be ripped apart by animals and she says no it is the most human no because it is the most unbearable thing to think of this but her sister's looking at her and thinking if you do what you say you'll do you'll be dead too and then I'll be so lonely and it's about to me in that moment it became about love and grief and I thought now I see the human beings now I can write it so the was really important to me in that that's fascinating I I was thinking as you talking about the form of Greek tragedy and the title of your talk uh the hostile environment as Greek tragedy uh I was just wondering the extent to which you consider your novel home fire um to be a tragedy I think absolutely you know when I was writing it I um I thought I could write it into a different kind of ending um interesting I thought it right all the way up to writing the last page when it just became clear appear to me that there was no other way in which it could go and seem right because the whole situation is Greek tragedy um by which I mean not only the antigon situation um but the situation of what was going on with families at the time with with families who you know were losing people because they were being brainwashed or groomed or whatever was going on with them um and and they went and couldn't come back um and there were these families then left with this loss in horror um in a country that really didn't know how to treat the people who went away as human beings um so when 13 14 15 16 year old girls were going they weren't being treated as minors they were going and getting married to 15y olds were going an immed L marrying men in their 20s and no one was talking about statutory rape no one was talking about grooming no one was talking about brainwashing it was just terrorism um and that was a deep tragedy as well you know so so yeah it it it very much the the tragic form seemed to me the only mode in which you could tell that story or the only mode which I could tell that story yeah and um a a tragedy that continu news off the page um I think maybe now would be a nice time to hear you read a little bit from home fire if you wouldn't mind KLA um I'm going to read just from the beginning and I won't read very much because I know some questions are coming in um but this is the very start all you need to know is it's at hro and the woman in question is a British citizen who's leaving isma was going to miss her flight the ticket wouldn't be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport 3 hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room she had expected the interrogation but not the hours of waiting that would precede it nor that it would feel so humiliating to have the contents of her suitcase inspected she' made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions no Quran no family pictures no books on her areas of academic interest but even so the officer took hold of every item of isma's clothing and ran it between thumb and for fingers not so much searching for hidden pockets as judging the quality of the material finally she reached for the designer labeled down jacket that isma had folded over a chair back when she entered and held it up one hand pinching each shoulder this isn't you she said and isma was sure she didn't mean because it's at least a size too large but rather it's too nice for someone like you I used to work in a dry cleaning shop the woman who brought this in said she didn't want it when we couldn't get rid of the stain she pointed to the grease mark on the pocket does the manager know you took it I was the manager you were the manager of a dry cleaning shop and now you're on your way to a PhD program program in sociology in Amherst Massachusetts yes and how did that happen my siblings and I were orphan just after I finished uni they were 12 years old twins I took the first job I could find now they've grown up I can go back to my life you're going back to your life in Amherst Massachusetts I meant the academic life the woman dropped the jacket into the jumble of clothes and shoes and told isma to wait that had been a while ago the plane would be boarding now isma looked over at the suitcase she'd repacked when the woman left the room and spent the time since worrying if doing that without permission constituted an offense should she empty the clothes out into a halfhazard pile or would that make things even worse she stood up unzipped the suitcase and flipped it open so its contents were visible a man entered the office carrying isma's passport laptop and phone she allowed herself to Hope but he sat down gestured for her to do the same and placed a voice recorder between them do you consider yourself British the man said I am British but do you consider yourself British I lived here all my life she meant there was no other country of which you could feel herself apart but the words came out sounding evasive thank you thank you so much Carla for sharing that