Wasafiri at Large: Name Trails in Aotearoa New Zealand

By Wasafiri Editor on May 27, 2023 in Articles, Editors-at-Large, Wasafiri at Large

Wasafiri at Large: Name Trails in Aotearoa New Zealand

By Wasafiri Editor on May 27, 2023 in

Wasafiri works with Editors at Large across South East Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Middle East. Each Editor at Large during their tenure writes a piece reflecting on an aspect of their literary locality. Here, Anna Knox brings us with her on a trail run round Waimapihi Reserve, on a journey through (re)naming, and histories of place and publishing, in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington is a small wind-blown city, surrounded by bush-clad hills, on the curled-up toe of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island coast. Recently, while running on the trails in these hills near my house, I passed a bright new sign announcing – almost apologising for – a name change: Polhill Reserve had officially become Waimapihi Reserve. It’s just a few letters on a wooden board, on a piece of council-administered land in a country so pipsqueak it regularly gets missed off of world maps. But it is also a short story, of sorts, about a lot more, including what is happening in our literature at the moment.

Baker Polhill was a Scottish colonial immigrant to these islands best known in the 1840s for cutting down trees from the ancient native forest, on the steep hills of what is now the reserve, to sell as firewood. Before it was a reserve, Waimapihi was a tree-bare, gorse-filled dumping ground. Before that, it was university land slated for a sports field and ‘explosives’ research. Before that, a rifle range, and farmland. Before colonisation, before the gorse and the sheep and the weatherboard house that I live in, it was the home of Ngāti Haumia/Taranaki, Ngāti Ruanui and Te Ātiawa iwi, mana whenua (people of authority over the land) of Te Whanganui-a-Tara; food and flax were grown and gathered in these hills for the inhabitants of Te Aro Pā, the area’s fortified village; people fished and bathed in the streams; the bush was lush with birdsong. And before that, before humans, it was red-blooming rata forest dense with tall stands of kahikatea, pukatea, and rimu. For the Polynesians who first settled here, Waimaphi, the new name of the reserve, was the name of the catchment area and the stream at whose mouth the pā was located. Wai means water in te reo Māori, the Māori language. Mapihi was a female chieftain of Ngāi Tara and Ngāti Mamoe descent who, it is said, used to bathe in a pool in the upper reaches of the stream. Hence, the waters of Mapihi.

I go running in the reserve most weekends. I am always listening to something when I run; music, books, a friend’s conversation, and when I take my earbuds out, or there’s a lull in the conversation, the sound of the birds is everywhere — kākā squabbling and shrieking, tūī clicking and warbling, toutouwai and hihi bleeping electrically, the riroriro song rising and falling, pīwakawaka fanning the air. I am also often thinking about writing while I run, and often writing something in my head (like this essay) while concentrating on the roots, the mud, the stones, the gorse, the mountain bikers, the walkers, and their dogs. My running in the reserve is therefore a very hybrid experience, a cacophony of sounds and narratives. This is also true, I think, of our literature. As a small, predominantly English-speaking, colonised island, we swim in outside influence; most obviously the global currents of English literature that surround us; there are so many voices and canons, past and present, that imprint our writing. But onshore, there’s an increasingly distinct canon, one with its own recognisable patterns.

In the written English-language tradition, these patterns largely began as a colonial longing for other shores, for ‘home’ (usually the British Isles). This evolved into a vigorous effort to define New Zealand in opposition to that — to claim this, here, now as ‘home’. And through writers such as Charles Brasch, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, and Janet Frame, the outline of a ‘New Zealand literature’ emerged and continued to evolve. But there was little or no Māori literature in this tradition; no sign of the pūrākau and histories that had existed here as oral literature for centuries. Witi Ihimaera, author of The Whale Rider, and the first Māori writer to be published in English in New Zealand, talks about reading a collection of ‘New Zealand short stories’ assigned at school in the 1950s. Māori characters appeared in only one story, written by a Pākehā, and they came off badly. He threw the book out the window and was caned for damaging state property—and determined to write himself and Māori into the ‘Whiteness of the page’. By 1985, when Māori writer Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize with The Bone People, ‘New Zealand literature’ had begun to look very different.

Since then, the literary landscape has continued to reestablish its indigenous roots, and otherwise diversify. In 2020, for example, there was a twenty four percent increase over a year in publications in te reo Māori, the Māori language–– a trend that continues. In 2022, Kāwai, an historical novel set in pre-colonial times and detailing pre-colonial tribal life in depth (it is written by an academic historian), was the best-selling book of New Zealand fiction onshore, and was one of four books short-listed for this year’s most prestigious literary prize, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, at the Ockham New Zealand book awards, while the poetry shortlistees were exclusively women of colour. Last year, the Acorn prize was won by Whiti Hereaka, for Kurangaituku, a retelling of the Māori pūrākau, or myth, of Hatupatu and the birdwoman, written not from the perspective of the hero, but the monster. The book, published by HUIA, has two covers and can be read in either direction. It has no beginning, middle, or end. Time is a continuum, as it is in te ao Māori, the Māori world.

The book awards are, of course, only a small part of what makes up ‘New Zealand literature’–a concept that is constantly changing and being redefined and which is as varied as the writers that make it. But for the pūrākau to have surfaced on the ‘White page’ – to borrow Ihimaera’s term – in English, in print, at those awards, and to also be redefining what that very page looks like, is a game-changer.

Like the renaming of Polhill, though, this is not a simple narrative of triumphant reclamation – beginning, middle, end – but one with far messier human complexities. I am wary of essentialising here (or anywhere), so bear with me as I take an alternative route through this question of what our literature looks like at the moment.

The establishment of the reserve, and its renaming, is a long, multi-threading yarn. In brief, here is its short story.

Less than thirty years ago, the reserve was largely a tree-less, bird-less, gorse-infested dumping ground. Volunteers cared for a small section (the original ‘Waimapihi’ area) and undertook plantings, but it was a group of mountain-bikers carving trails through the land who triggered a wider change, carving out a series of ‘illegal’ tracks which attracted recreational use and a (literally) grass-roots community conservation project. Several years later, in 2009, the city council approached the mountain bikers/trail builders to create the reserve’s first official trail, which was named Transient– and the reserve was legitimised. The trail builders’ vision was to build a network that created better access to wild places for city-dwellers. With better access, it was also easier to plant more trees to accompany those now flourishing. As the trees grew up – the invasive gorse protecting them from the wind and providing a rich soil bed – native birds from the nearby Zealandia sanctuary began to return, along with others like blackbirds, thrush, and sparrows. Traplines were laid through the regenerating bush in an effort to eradicate the invasive stoats, weasels, possums, and rats which prey on the native birds who – having lived for millennia without predators – nest habitually low to the ground. The trails connected several suburbs to the city, and increasing numbers of bikers, walkers, runners, and commuters used them. Out of this group, more volunteers started to contribute, increasing the richness of the habitat, and the number of users. And so the story, and the regeneration, and the community, continues, part of a wider urban regeneration project now so successful that there is a plan to release kiwi here as part of the Capital Kiwi project. Only a small number of New Zealanders in the past century have ever seen or heard their namesake in the wild, but soon the bird may be part of my weekly running circuit.

There’s not a parallel with New Zealand literature here exactly, but sometimes when I think about the story of Waimapihi, I’m cognisant of some synapses – the move to restore native flora and fauna, not so as to wind back the clock and erase the recent past, or to return to a purer more ancient past, but to allow what can only flourish here, what would otherwise not exist, to define the environment. (Although there is in fact a group who want to return the habitat to exactly how it was ‘pre-1840’, including native species that didn’t grow here at that time). I’m also conscious of how brief of a moment the present is, and how much of the multi-faceted past, and future, is in it – the story is always drawing from somewhere else.

This is, of course, by and large a Pākehā story of the reserve’s recent history.

The stories of tangata whenua, people of the land, are here too — not for me to tell, but you catch their echoes everywhere. Tāne Mahuta holds the place. Tāwhirimatea gusts through it. Mapihi bathes in the stream. The pīwakawaka tells over and over how his laugh gave Māui away in the demigod’s bid to defeat mortality by crawling into the vulva of Hine-nui-te-pō and was instead crushed to death between her thighs.

And other stories–– of how the original inhabitants of these islands and their descendants have been disenfranchised of land and language, how the fabric of the land and the stories that hold it together have been torn apart by the violences of colonisalism.

The name change from Polhill to Waimapihi is a tiny attempt at a stitch in all this – to acknowledge loss, and more importantly, presence – but the enthusiasm for it is loud. When the vote to change the name from Polhill to Waimapihi was put to the city council, the result was unanimous.

Renaming has been a constant in Aotearoa over the past decades – of government departments, roads, buildings, schools, publications, radio stations, the country itself – and it hasn’t been universally accepted. But by and large, New Zealanders seem to welcome it, and adapt, even if a few complain about the ‘Māorification’ of New Zealand – which is a baffling concept. One name-change worth mentioning here was at my place of work – a university press which, over the past three decades, under the keen eye and ear of Fergus Barrowman, has significantly shaped New Zealand literature and how we think about it. The press is probably best known internationally for publishing Booker-prize-winner Eleanor Catton’s work, along with that of several other critically acclaimed writers including Barbara Summers, Elizabeth Knox, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan, Catherine Chidgey, Ashleigh Young, Hera Lindsay Bird, and Tayi Tibble, to name a few. In 2022, just before I started working as an editor there, the press, formerly Victoria University Press (VUP), became Te Herenga Waka University Press (THWUP). Te Herenga Waka means ‘the mooring place of canoes’ (the Pacific Ocean-going sea vessels, rather than the North American ones) and was originally given by Māori teacher and leader Wiremu Parker to the marae (meeting place) which was opened on campus in the 1980s. (It is worth noting here that names are not simply ‘changed’ into te reo Māori, or at least they shouldn’t be. The process is long, involving a lot of kōrerō with the relevant elders and local iwi; a name has to be gifted). Te Herenga Waka became a prominent part of the university branding around 2020, and the press name change followed. Like the renaming of Waimapihi, it was a change with little fanfare or controversy – people were generally very positive.

So – another renaming, another stitch.

But does a tarata bloom by any other name smell as sweet?

While changes of name are about more than language, I think they are also all about language. It may seem a small thing, a slip of the tongue, but the pronunciation changes more than the way we say things; it changes how we think things. These changes to the names we speak, the signposts we read, the stories we tell, the pukapuka we publish, and the presses that publish them, are part of an effort to shape narratives of belonging, differently — to turn them from the rigid beams of an inherited colonial linearity into something more supple and organic. To do better at being. Here. But it’s a constant shifting ground, a constant rewriting, never steady, and it’s anything but simple. We reach for something we don’t know the shape of yet. The moment we are in is one of renaming, returning, recovering, restoration —all of these. But more than anything else, it’s perhaps an interrogation, of who ‘we’ are and who we are becoming, and of who we want to become.

A big part of this interrogation is writing about the past – or writing over the past, or writing out of the past – and while this is perhaps something all literature necessarily does, it is a dominant concern in Aotearoa New Zealand literature at the moment, from fiction through poetry through academic writing through non-fiction.

But while many authors write about the past to interrogate (or escape) the present, there is occasionally a writer whose work manages to do this in the here and now. Poet Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Auanui/Ngāti Porou), whose first collection was named one of the New Yorker’s best books in 2022, is such a writer (she is also the publicist at THWUP; Awe’re a very small country), one whose language and thinking is so immediately woven to the moment, and all the past and future caught up in it – personal, political, national, and actual mythologies all colliding – that every phrase is sinewed with meaning. Her work is immersive, rather than reflective, and intensely subjective, so much so that it tells a bigger story than her own. She’s a writer capable of creating her own mythology, one both deeply personal, and recognisably national.

Visionary like my ancestors I / saw a sky of whales / a pale people / like my
ancestors I / inhaled the bible / swallowed the rifle / like an 8-inch cock /
whateva

she writes in the opening poem of her second collection, Rangikura. The poem is called ‘Tohunga’ which means ‘chosen expert/priest/healer’.

And in a poem called ‘Mahuika’ (goddess of fire), she writes:

. . . I’m

Hine-nui-te-pō.ⁱThe kind of girl who knows
that the real vandalism
happens in the ripeness of daylight, tagged in

white man’s law
and wāhine blood.

So I shrugged fuck it
and learnt to love the dark
where you can either
shine or disappear.

Wear a tacky plastic tiara
4 a heru in my hair.

i. Goddess of Death

Today the bush in Waimapihi has grown tall and dense, full of native flora and birds, indigenous and otherwise. Kōrua (indigenous freshwater crayfish) scratch in the streambeds, while tūna (eels) bury their bellies in the muddy bottoms. It is a true haven and I’m grateful, every time I run, or even look out the window, for everything, human and otherwise, that has helped to create it. It’s a place with a long, long story – cut down, grazed on, dumped on, illegally built on, fought over, argued for, cared for. It’s not a wild space though. It’s a human space. The flora and fauna thrive and die alongside the bikers, runners and walkers, tree-planters, trappers, and bird-lovers who protect and destroy it, under the tall towers and staves of strings of the power lines and pylons that also pass through. And it’s work to keep it flourishing. The possums find their way back to the trees. The rats evade the traps. The invasive species keep returning, pushing up the broken glass from the earth. Pull the tradescantia back, you might find an abandoned fridge, a car tyre, the ghost of a farmer, a rifle-shooter, a wahine bathing in the water.

Anna Knox is an editor at Te Herenga Waka University Press and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has lived and worked in Finland, Saudi Arabia, the UK and US, and now, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she was born.

Title photo by Anna Knox.

You may also enjoy Editor at Large William Tham’s reflection, Reinventing the Book in Malaysia.

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Three Sisters by Susie Thornberry

By Wasafiri Editor on May 23, 2023 in Fiction

Three Sisters by Susie Thornberry

By Wasafiri Editor on May 23, 2023 in

Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays, and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe – in all their diversity and complexity. In this emotive work of fiction, Susie Thornberry offers a poignant, shrewd portrait of loss and sisterhood.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. You can read the full terms and conditions and submit here.

‘Maybe all that a family is, is the shape of its silence.’ – Kei Miller

The three sisters share two backwards seats to suburbia. Versions of the same seats that Zahra (32), Mani (30), and London (28) were jammed onto for birthday trips to the SegaDome or Madame Tussaud’s as children.

Today, they had waited to catch the same train from different stops. It will be the thirty sixth Wednesday dinner with their mother since their father died and they could do without it. At Blackfriars, Farringdon, and St Pancras, each sister had flared their nostrils at the idea of the journey. A collective stress tic on three different platforms across the city. One overlooking the river, one at ground level, and one underground on platform B.

On the train around them, people are crammed close, swapping air and the smell of the working day now imprinted in their clothes. A commuter rests her Tate Modern tote bag on the side of London’s head.

‘Mani, Mani, do you like my new hat?’

She shifts her head so the bag fits more snugly and gurns. Mani cracks up, but the commuter is oblivious, reading the Evening Standard, and, next to her sisters, Zahra is focused into editing Mani’s application for a selective yoga course next May.

All three sisters are tall with dark hair and shades of light brown skin that shift with who’s been on holiday, who’s taken up running again, and whose current office is in a basement. Their similarities startle strangers but the things they see of themselves – London’s soft jaw, Mani’s blackheads, Zahra’s thinner hair – when they look at what could have been with a recombination of genes weighs heavy on them. The cooking and reshuffling of these genes in the same house, school, twenty minute journey up town, but against different lives mean that London is an activist, trying to save the world; Zahra is an assistant professor, trying to change the narrative on crustacea; and Mani is retraining, Mani is trying harder than them all.

They dawdle up the hill to their childhood home. A clutter of history of who is better at maths, job applications, and baking Victoria Sponge cake; and who wore the same skirt to a school disco first; and who ate the whole box of sweets their father bought; and who held whose hair back over the toilet; and who cut whose hair out of spite because of Laura next door; and who answers when you need them to.

Mani stops to buy flowers, London wants gin, and Zahra is happy to have the excuse to hang back outside the shop for a moment alone. It’s cold. She puffs her cheeks in and out, and holds her breath hothousing inside her mouth. She waits for her sisters to leave the shop, slaps her cheeks and lets it out in one long breath like a fire-breathing dragon. The hot air shoots out and fogs damp around them.

‘You’re so disgusting,’ says Mani. ‘I can’t believe you’re my role model.’ But London is laughing so, by blood majority, it was a funny thing to do.

Their mother (61) pulls them into the house, with thanks for the flowers and one kiss for the group, wearing a fuchsia pink jumper and lipstick to match. ‘Your father’s not here,’ she says.

The sisters don’t respond. It’s been like this every week since their father died. They don’t look at one another, hoping that if they ignore it, they can keep ignoring it. Three sets of nostrils flare. Every week they talk separately to therapists who are reluctant to give opinions or advice or options, and instead ask questions to try to pull a thread that none of the sisters feel exists within them. What is there is the relation to each other and a hole where they should know what to do and whether they are failing their mother or encouraging her or judging her too much.

Zahra heads up to the bathroom while Mani and London follow their mum into the living room. The room, like the house, is full of their parents’ life. Things they loved individually pile up into a thronged aesthetic the house can barely contain. Dark wood furniture, miniature buses, ceramic Donald Ducks, cream doilies, sugared almonds tied in a peach mesh puff from a distant relative’s wedding in Leeds eight years ago. Above the door frame there are three clocks with red labels, and the names of their parents’ significant places. London 19.32 – Amritsar 00.02 – Birmingham 19.33.

This is the room where the sisters learned to grieve together for four grandparents; for Pig the gerbil; and for Princess Diana whose televised funeral they watched eating ham and lemon pickle sandwiches while their mother shook her head that it was a shame, a life lost too soon. The whole town watched. Their friends from school, their families. The world watched with subtitles or different commentators. Somehow it felt better because everyone had lost someone. The local Safeway had to tie more pages into the condolence book with black ribbon until they gave in and finally put out a new one and then another two days later.

Diana had died six days before London’s sixth birthday. London felt that she and the princess were connected in some way by the number six. Maybe this was the first moment that London felt linked to everyone else in the way that made her now want to save the world when her friends wanted to save their money for a three week holiday to Mexico. Zahra and Mani still sometimes called their anti-monarchist sister ‘Princess’ even though they had all felt sad at the time because school thought famous people were an easy way to teach about death and the sisters’ second generation Indian parents had a relationship with the monarchy that the sisters think is part of the problem.

The intimate knowledge of every nook of the living room’s jumble holds the sisters together, but in the back part of the room there is a gap. Mani and London spot it at the same time. Where the round chestnut dining table for six people should be, there is a small folding rubberwood picnic table with a bright blue top. It is big enough for one plate, a knife, fork, spoon and glass, which are all pre-set.

They look again for the chestnut table that their father had bought, with the sisters tucked beside him, at auction but there is only the folding table.

The two of them look away. Mani messages the group.

Mani: Mum’s lost her mind.

Zahra: Why?

Zahra: Don’t say that. I’ll be down in two seconds.

London: She has, to be fair.

Mani: Yup. Wait and see.

Zahra comes in, sits on the sofa, and follows her sisters’ eyes to the sad little table.

Zahra: Did you wait for me to come down to say anything?

Her sisters nod.

Zahra: Fuck you.

‘Mum, where’s the table?’ Zahra says.

‘There.’ She points across the room at the folding table.

‘The other table. You know I mean the other one.’

‘I didn’t need it.’

‘We don’t need a dinner table?’

‘What does it have to do with you? You hardly ever visit.’

‘We come every Wednesday!’

‘London comes from Peckham,’ Mani says.

‘Peckham isn’t far,’ London says.

‘That’s true. Peckham is far. Thank you, London. But we still don’t need a big table without you.’

The ‘we’ stops the sisters’ questions. ‘Okay, Mama,’ Mani says. She moves behind, unties her mum’s hair and begins to replait it. She soothes with her fingers and hopes that each knot she hits will jar her mum into reality.

London looks down and messages her housemate.

London: Drink later?

London: I might need it.

Zahra looks down, allows herself a moment to visualise – a breath in for three and out for three – and messages her partner in their Filth chat.

Zahra: Later, I want you to use me and tell me what a good girl I’ve been.

Sam: You’re being very demanding.

Sam: What makes you think you deserve it?

She gets a message in their usual chat seconds later.

Sam: Are you okay? Hope it’s not too horrible there.

The sisters’ mother brings out rotis in a tea towel and keema with peas, and touches her husband’s forehead in their wedding photograph. This is the same Wednesday dinner they ate watching Star Trek reruns eighteen years ago. It’s Mani tired from karate and London tired from how boring karate was. It’s Zahra spacey from sitting in the car reading teen horror and looking out for strangers trying to break into their brown Volvo. Today’s Wednesday mince is made from soy composite for vegan London’s sake and their father isn’t here to complain that it tastes like mushrooms.

‘Let’s sit on the sofa,’ their mother says.

‘Before you replace it with a deckchair?’

Their mother hands out the rotis dripping with hot butter. She smiles at them individually and then as a pack. ‘Your dad loves these,’ she says, waving one.

And to herself, ‘Such a shame.’

Zahra yelps and drops her roti, butter side down, on the carpet. ‘Such a shame.’ The incantation of death on her mother’s lips. Not quite a recognition that it was a life lost too soon, but a move in that direction. The two sisters look at Zahra, the eldest, the famously unfazed, and a crack appears.

The crack in the order of things grows as they watch Zahra’s first public tears since. In some way it’s a relief. In some way it is a relief not to be sitting at the auctioned table in the same place they have all sat looking at his empty chair for the past thirty five dinners. Them in their usual seats trying to be the same without him. It is not clear what is their own grief and what is all of their grief. Zahra sobs. London stares at the Birmingham clock. Mani’s eyes are on their mother who is tearing a roti like a letter she has read and wants no one else to see. A pile of ripped confetti forms next to the mince. Their mother seems to be in a different room; one where she needs to be alone but she wants the sisters on call. Here, the sisters have lost a name together: dad; daddy; your father. And a truth about him that they can only get closer to when they argue and dispute and add. He liked these rotis but did he love the corn ones more? The sight of parathas stuffed with spiced aloo on the now disappeared table once made him walk his balls straight into the back of a chair and howl for five minutes while everyone’s food got cold. Ten, fifteen years ago. Perhaps. Maybe those parathas were his favourite? Zahra sobs. They all threaten to fall down the crack, but not if one can take the turn to stay up and play the role they’ve been assigned. It is a story. A story. A family is just a story.

‘What?’

They all jolt at London’s fart. The force behind it, summoned to pull them out, sounds like solid matter hitting solid. A slapped hand on a table or on a cheek.

‘London!’

The sisters laugh.

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Nope.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Nothing.’

She farts again. ‘You really need to sort out this creaky sofa.’

Their mother slaps her on the arm. ‘London, you will soil yourself and it won’t be funny.’

‘Soil! If you shit yourself, London, it will be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘You’ll have to wear a pair of mum’s massive pants all the way back to Peckham.’

‘Fuck off, Mani. Peckham’s not far.’

‘Eff off Mani, my pants aren’t big. That’s a very old-fashioned view of older women. And I’m not old fashioned about the things you get up to.’

Zahra sits at the sad little table on top of the memory of the only thing her father had a hand in that’s now gone. Maybe it’s a fuck-you little table. To life, to him for leaving, to the sisters for leaving home in the first place and for pushing her now, for not seeing what she is beyond them and him. Traitors to their own values.

On the other side of the wall, Mani and London are scraping torn roti into the bin and boxing up leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

‘Do you think Mum knows Dad’s dead?’

‘She knows.’

‘She said he was out again. She’s talking about how much he loves things. Present tense. Man, maybe this is the time we need to get help.’

Mani’s jaw tightens. ‘She knows. She knows. She knows. She knows. She knows.’

It is a threat: leave it.

Zahra appears around the kitchen door. ‘Twenty eight years and you don’t know you can hear everything in this house? Mum’s upstairs but she can hear you,’ she says. ‘She replaced the family dining table with a tray table for one. Yes, she fucking knows.’

She pushes her sisters out the door and back into the living room carrying the guilt of making their mum a problem. Loudly. Their mother joins them in a circle on the carpet holding a Double Decker chocolate bar. Mani smiles, and they all shift closer together, sitting cross-legged so that their bare toes touch the toes of the person next to them. The sisters watch their mother cut the chocolate bar into four equal pieces and put a share in each of their hands. She keeps her own piece in her lap on some kitchen roll.

‘This is the last one he gave me.’

Their parents had met on a bus at Hackney Town Hall when they had both just moved to London from Birmingham. It took a new city to introduce them. For thirty three years after that, he bought her a Double Decker bar every Friday. Their ‘handsome life’ was built on double deckers, he would say. Every childhood Friday, he bought the girls sour sweets that made them dribble and wipe it on each other, cones of popcorn, caramel filled cartoon characters, but the Double Deckers were for his wife only.

Now they all sit holding the last piece of him. Their mother closes her eyes and bites the tiniest corner. London thinks of giving her share back – her mum needs it more – and then crams it in her mouth in one bite; Mani gnaws the chocolate from around the edges; and Zahra bites one quarter with mathematical precision.

Nobody speaks. They press their feet tightly against each other. Holding one another and the story together until Mani gets up to go to the bathroom.

‘Why are you taking your bag?’

‘I’ve been flushing your blood clots since you were seventeen. You don’t have to hide it. You can just take a tampon.’

‘I started my period when I was fifteen.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Do you still care about that?’

London regrets bringing it up. Mani does still care about the years of waiting and pretending her body was ready to bleed when people were already fucking and her younger sister had periods. Now she has to care about the unbearable pain every month and what it means for the future. She ignores her sisters and takes her bag out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. On the way up she rummages through the coats on the rack by the front door. Her father’s charity shop rain mac is three jackets deep under a navy duffle and a hideous beige pea coat. She pulls a Double Decker bar from her bag, puts it in the mac’s left pocket and smiles. It will be one more for her mum to find when she is ready to move his things from next to the entrance. A taste of him that is hers alone or a sacred scrap that she’ll keep in the fridge for ten years past its sell by date.

As Mani walks away up the stairs, she hears London.

‘Mum, you need a pedicure by the way, my toes got exfoliated from rubbing against yours.’

Mani feels the stairs creak in the places they have creaked for years.

Susie Thornberry is a writer, producer, and artistic director. Her creative work has been presented with Battersea Arts Centre, WOMAD, BBC Radio 6 Music, and many others. She is working on a collection of funny and unsettling short stories about the lengths people go to hide from disaster, even as it unfolds.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Title photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

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Papaya by Jimin Kang

By Wasafiri Editor on May 20, 2023 in Fiction

Papaya by Jimin Kang

By Wasafiri Editor on May 20, 2023 in

Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays, and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe – in all their diversity and complexity. Set against the deceptively simple backdrop of a university party, Jimin Kang’s engrossing short story comments on racist microaggressions and the unspoken social contract with humour, acumen, and a well-aimed plate of fruit.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. You can read the full terms and conditions and submit here.

I find it entirely justified what I did, to tell you the truth. Mary disagreed. She asked me to leave her party without asking why I had thrown the papaya at Joe, leaving wet, sticky entrails of orange fruit muddying her brand-new carpet. When I looked around the room, everyone’s faces were as blank as plates. It isn’t that I don’t believe what I did was inappropriate, just that the entire affair was less about Joe and more about something deeper that everyone in the room had touched. But as I had on many occasions that day, I found that my mouth would not cooperate with the churning vat of my thoughts, and so I left the party without so much as looking back.

What happened was that the papayas were on clearance at Sainsbury’s that day, so I had bought the rest of the crate and brought them to Mary’s. Mary was hosting a housewarming party, and her new home was just across the road from the store. By the time I arrived, three other guests had been standing in the kitchen, none of whom I recognised except for a boy who looked vaguely familiar in the way many men do in Oxford: tall and curly-blond with a grey knitted vest. The boy raised his blond eyebrows when he saw me, and whether the expression was one of recognition or surprise I couldn’t tell. But before I could ask, I saw that one of my papayas was leaking and juice was dripping out from a small hole in my plastic bag.

It occurred to me then that he was raising his eyebrows not because of me, but the bag.

‘Whatcha bring?’ the boy said as I hauled the bags onto the counter. The boy — an American, I gathered from his accent — grabbed a handful of napkins and threw them on the kitchen floor, where I noticed that he had kept his shoes on. Mine were by the front door, where I had asked Mary if I should take them off, and she had said that I could do whatever I liked. Because Mary had her shoes off, I had taken mine off as well, but when I noticed the boy’s shoes and the papaya juice on the floor, I wished that I’d chosen differently.

They were papayas from Sainsbury’s, I said.

‘The things you can get there these days!’ The boy laughed knowingly, and I took note of the fact that he spoke as if he’d been in England for a while.

On the counter, where Mary had been cutting limes for lime soda, I pushed aside the little green wedges to make room for the first papaya, which I cut lengthwise down the centre around the circumference of the fruit. Then I took hold of the shell in both hands and gently teased apart the two halves such that the black gummy seeds wouldn’t scatter everywhere along Mary’s new kitchen counter. The papaya was a larger-than-average fruit, and because of its ripeness it smelled thick and cloying and monstruous. The fact of it taking up so much space embarrassed me a little, to be honest. I hadn’t known Mary for very long. I’d met her at a life-drawing class in Jericho, where she had sat motionless on a chair for several hours as our model. She had invited me and several others to her upcoming housewarming during the cocktails after class. I hadn’t expected her to follow up with me, but she did a few days later via WhatsApp with a line of smiley-face emojis and Hey, nice to meet you the other day! I’m looking forward to catching up at my party, Tuna. Then, immediately after, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!!!! Yuna*** I meant Yuna — a crying-face emoji — stupid autocorrect.

That night, I had clicked on the circular icon containing her face, which was heart-shaped and near-perfectly symmetrical. She had rich, dark hair that fell around her shoulders, arched eyebrows, and lips that had been coloured a deep red, the same colour as the collar of her dress. I found her both beautiful and sophisticated, which meant that, before the party, I spent more hours than usual debating what to bring to the event. For a while, all I could think of was food: fruit, umma said, in Korea people brought fruit. In England, bottles of wine. Candles, maybe. A dessert. I realised that my friendship demographic — broke DPhils scraping by on Tesco meal deals — precluded me from any need to impress, so I decided to go the Korean way and buy whatever looked good at the store. What looked good that day happened to be papayas, papayas that were also on sale, but because they were on sale my conscience dictated that I buy at least more than enough. And this is how I ended up at Mary’s party cutting four large papayas beside blond-haired and grey-vested Joe, who told me his name and asked if I was a student at the university.

When I affirmed his hypothesis, his face brightened. ‘Studying what?’ he asked, and his eyes lightened up even more when I told him I studied American confessional poets, mainly Plath. Joe confirmed that he was, indeed, from America — Wisconsin, if you must know — then he asked why I would study American literature in England when I could’ve gotten better funding in America. But as if realizing I could technically ask him the same question in return, he quickly digressed, asking, ‘So what’s your connection to the US of A?’

You must understand that the way he said it — US of A — reminded me of something I’d read on a dating app once, a bio belonging to an American in England, who had punctuated the end of his self-aggrandizing description with an American flag. I took a screenshot and returned to it whenever I was bored from reading or feeling slightly depressed about teaching. On most occasions I found the confidence hilarious, but on the odd night when I would be up late picking through my camera roll for something to send to a friend, I would scroll past the screenshot and feel this hollowness where self-satisfaction had previously reigned.

I have no real connection to America. Well, not more than the average person who grows up with American media, which seems to be most people of a certain social crust wherever you are, Bangkok or Prague or Rio. Uttering the same Americanisms from all the same movies, describing runs in miles but refusing weather conversions while complaining that Fahrenheit is stupid. At least that was the case at the international school I attended in Seoul, but I haven’t lived there for seven years. In England, I receive a stipend in pounds and manage to lose my 30-day Korean SIM card after each brief trip home, which is in part why it isn’t ever worth making a permanent number. Instead, I make do with returning to the third floor of a near-windowless walk-up tenement in the back alleys of Hongdae, where a woman at a desk issues me a temporary SIM card as she does for tourists. But I didn’t mention much of this to Joe, of course. I continued to cut the papayas, one by one, and when I asked Joe whether he was also a student at the university, he said yes, he studied global and imperial history. I was secretly glad to notice he sounded sheepish when he said the word imperial, which was another one of those shocking Britishisms like the ubiquity of the word oriental for everything that denotes Asianness: Oriental Studies, the Orient Café, and beautiful oriental eyes, for which someone had complimented me on the same dating app where I had seen the cringey American. But who was to blame, really? I could have predicted it all along. On that man’s profile was a picture of him standing beneath the red pillars of some famous shrine in Kyoto, which was artfully placed atop a professed love for K-pop, manga, and Train to Busan. An ex once claimed the same film reminded him of me because I looked like the pregnant woman in the movie. She was also the only woman in the movie with any meaningful role, but he had meant it as a compliment, so who was I to complain?

As Joe was explaining to me that he focused on Cambodian military history, Mary came into the kitchen and told us that we should join everyone outside. It was then I realized that she was wearing the same red dress as in her WhatsApp picture, except it was less formal than I thought, with its sweeping hem that swayed widely like the petals of a poppy in the wind. I wondered, as I had before, what she saw in me that was interesting enough to merit an invitation to her party. She was older than me, an administrator at the business school, and she was so effortlessly stunning at that. I didn’t know her too well, only that she admired my drawing and that she had friends — ‘literary types’, she had said — who she wanted me to meet.

Joe and I took the sliced papaya and entered the living room, where by now eight or so people mingled around eating Walkers crisps from colourful IKEA bowls. Save for a girl wearing a t-shirt printed with the Oxford crest, the room felt fairly but ambiguously British: corduroy, suede boots, button-downs, summer dresses with flowers. I looked around and tried to guess which ones were Mary’s ‘literary types’, and noticed that most people were older, in their thirties and early forties at least, and all of them were white. But that last detail didn’t faze me. After seven years, the ethnic breakdown of rooms had become just another observation I made upon entering new spaces, like whether there was free coffee or if it was raining. As I walked in with Joe, several people turned around and gave us soft toothless smiles frozen mid-bite, and an older man wearing a paisley suit said, rather loudly, ‘Ah Joe, you brought your girlfriend!’

I turned to look at Joe. His cheeks were already reddening to the same hue of the fruit I held in my hands. Mostly I was amused, but a sinking pit in my stomach suggested that I was also deeply horrified about what had happened. In my head flashed a montage of scarlet shrine pillars, which cut to a group of long-legged women in sailor suits, something-something-Naruto, and finally, that pregnant woman from Train to Busan, who was the kind of beautiful that could belong to anyone. But before Joe could correct the old man’s mistake, Mary jumped in between us and flashed a wide smile. ‘Those papayas look delicious, Yuna,’ she said, taking the plate from my hands. She laid it at the end of the table, beside the crisps, and I felt the crawling anxiety that everyone in the room was watching our interaction to see what turn it would take. ‘Where did you get them from?’

Sainsbury’s, I said. A quiet chortle went around the room like small fires running along a continuous fuse, which simultaneously served to confirm my anxiety and nullify it. The party quickly resumed, the tension having presumably been broken, and people turned to talk to each other save for myself and Joe, who I expected to speak first although we had been both branded by the presence of the other.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he finally remarked, after a brief silence, ‘and trust me, I’m more embarrassed than you are.’

By this point we were standing alone, just the two of us in the corner of the room, while the rest of the party carried on. I noticed that nobody was reaching for the papaya. I wondered if I should walk up and grab a plate to show people how it was done. The possibility that no-one in the room had tried a papaya before burned in me like electricity, but I tried not to show it. Even thinking it felt petty, like a child’s game, so instead I turned to Joe and asked who the old man was.

‘He’s an old friend of Mary’s,’ he said, still looking away. ‘I house-sat for him while he and his wife went on vacation last year, and my girlfriend at the time came to stay with me.’

There was another brief silence. Then—

‘Sorry, is this awkward?’ He turned to face me.

‘What?’

He sighed.

From across the room, I noticed Mary stopping by the papaya with a plate in her right hand. But instead of loading the fruit onto her plate, she took a half slice before moving on to the cheeses and crackers on the table. At the end of the line, she started chatting with the girl in the Oxford t-shirt. Watching them made me feel like I had somehow left the room and re-entered it in someone else’s body, with someone else’s reason to be present, watching the scene unfold like a cloth without being able to stop its seams from falling apart.

‘Look, I know what it’s like,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve been confused for other Americans before. And all because of what I sound like, apparently.’

After talking with the girl, Mary stood alone, for a moment, at the end of the table. Daintily, she slid the tines of her wooden fork into a papaya slice and lifted it in the direction of her face. But where I had expected the papaya to enter her small, elegant, red-lipped mouth, it went instead to her nose, and I watched as Mary sniffed the fruit once, drew her head back with a furrow between her brows, and again, before she put the fork back onto her plate and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Now I’m not trying to say it’s the exact same thing, of course,’ Joe went on, but his voice entered my left ear and reverberated in a chamber deep in the back of my brain, where thoughts would not register coherently until much later. ‘But people get confused all the time, and it’s mostly in good faith, you know what I mean?’

Mary returned, this time without a plate in her hands but a paper cup. She looked around the room, appraising the party for what it was. Suddenly our eyes locked, her doe-eyes flashing bright, and she swiftly broke into her beautiful business-school-Mary smile, life-drawing-model-Mary smile, and I knew then that she was the type of woman who never had to doubt the power she held. The type of woman who could go her entire life without trying a papaya because no-one exhorted her to be more than what she already was, which was the skin and the country she was born into, and it would always be this way, no matter how many foreigners were invited into her home, or who etched her beautiful face onto their canvases until they got it just right.

How to say it? Seeing that untouched papaya nauseated me. As Joe continued, feeling increasingly sorry for himself, I could see myself as if from the perspective of those standing around me, except there was little to see because I was quite literally gone, dissipated into Mary’s new walls, new kitchen, new carpets covered in old shoes and older feet. It was like getting sucked into a vacuum or flushed down the drain, except on each occasion my hands were wielding the vacuum, my fingers pulling down the plastic cord. What it would mean to be able to slide a peeler down the sides of my body, letting the speckled orange flesh fall, to reveal the pungency of all that I am in a space where I have never been or perhaps never meant to belong.

Do you know what I mean?

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Joe was saying, ‘Would you like something to eat?’

But I wasn’t listening, not really. Instead, I noticed that Queen had begun to play on the sound system. From the kitchen, there was the sound of a cork popping from a bottle of what I presumed to be prosecco. There was laughter. There was unintelligible talk. And then there was Joe walking towards me with a plate full of papaya and two forks, but what did it mean? Was it supposed to be reconciliatory? A triumph I could claim as my own? He slid a fork into a slice of fruit and brought it towards his mouth. He stopped, lifted the fork to his nose, and sniffed as Mary had done. I felt a deep freeze clenching my throat. I looked at the papaya. I sniffed. It reeked.

‘Yuna, I think these are off,’ he quietly said. Then I looked at his face, teeming then with endless apology, and I felt the impossible need to believe that the fault was purely his. I took the plate from his hands. And you already know what happened next.

Jimin Kang is a Seoul-born, Hong Kong-raised, and England-based writer and journalist now studying environmental theory at the University of Oxford. Her work has previously been published in The New York Times, Asymptote, Off Assignment and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, among other outlets. She is also an editor at The Oxonian Review. Find her at jimin-kang.com

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Cover photo by Isaac N.C. on Unsplash

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The Power and Pitfalls of Literary Prizes: A Q&A with Diana Evans

By Wasafiri Editor on May 18, 2023 in Interviews

The Power and Pitfalls of Literary Prizes: A Q&A with Diana Evans

By Wasafiri Editor on May 18, 2023 in Interview

In this exclusive interview, Diana Evans, Chair of the Judges of the 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, talks about the power and pitfalls of prize success, the importance of writing community and history, and offers advice to prize entrants and literary hopefuls of all kinds.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Wasafiri: The literary prize landscape is often changing, from the demise of the Costa Book Awards last year to the announcement of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. What are your thoughts on literary prizes?

In a very crowded book market, they are a valuable way to get books and authors noticed, and do much to help equalise the playing field for traditionally marginalised work. Prizes are shouting their nominee-lists ever louder, giving momentum to a book’s journey and success – but I think it’s important that booksellers continue supporting writers who don’t make it onto those lists, and that the authors themselves maintain their own faith in the intrinsic value of their work. The collective support of editors, publishers, agents, promoters, and bookshops, beyond the prizes, is crucial.

Prizes such as the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and of course, ours, are contributing something unique to the prize landscape by springboarding what are usually writers’ first publications and first taste of success. Our Prize – and Wasafiri – aims to seek and publish the best international contemporary writing, and each year, we get entries from all over the world. Our winners go on to publish their debut works and win further prizes. What, according to you, is the place and purpose for a long-standing prize like the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, which turns fifteen next year?

Prizes like the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize that have a long history can create a body of retrospective work shedding light on literary movements and the trajectories of their authors. As time passes, the stature of a prize increases and thereby its worth in a writer’s career story. Prizes also give writers targets and incentives to help fuel their work, and, once nominated, a community of writers with which to network and find creative support and inspiration. This prize is particularly useful as it combines the worlds of media and academia, and so brings writers into engagement with both spheres simultaneously, highlighting new opportunities for publishing, study, or teaching.

Your own prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, among others, and you were the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. How have these impacted your career as a published author with a public profile?

They’ve had a huge impact on my career in terms of the attention my books have received and the resulting sales. The Women’s Prize especially, with its substantial publicity machine, has brought my work to a much larger readership than it might otherwise have had. As a result, there have been more opportunities for events and readings, a weightier obligation towards the public side of writing, and this has been something to navigate amidst continuing to maintain a necessary focus on the writing itself. It’s very important that the writer stays grounded and prioritises the beautiful work.

What are you most looking forward to reading when it comes to this year’s prize entries? What themes or forms would most stand out to you?

I’m hoping to discover new writing that fizzes and leaps on the page, that is interested in its own rhythm and possibilities for image and flight. I like playfulness in writing, and good strong characters, and compelling, intricate psychology. In terms of themes, if the writing is strong enough I can pretty much be absorbed into any subject area, within reason! Theme is not something I look for unless I’m doing research, though I do believe that writing should engage with the world, however symbolically.

What advice would you offer to writers at the start of their careers? How can one deal with being celebrated but also with the inevitable setbacks and rejections?

Expect rejection. When it comes, use it as a galvaniser and reinforcer of intention. At all costs, stick to your own instinct and stay in your writing power. When the world turns towards you in praise, don’t listen too intently. When it turns away from you, continue on your course. Keep writing no matter what. And it’s good to have a long-term masterplan of what you want to achieve.

What three books being published in 2023 are you most looking forward to reading, and why?

Guy Gunaratne’s Mister, Mister – looking forward to more from this brilliant writer.

Louisa Hall’s Reproduction – motherhood, Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein: sounds very interesting.

Khashayar J Khabushani’s I Will Greet the Sun Again – exploring the innards of an Iranian-American family, the subject matter speaks to me.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. To have your work considered by Diana Evans and our judging panel, submit here.

Diana Evans is the author of the novels A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a, which was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Evans also publishes stories, essays and criticism, is associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. www.diana-evans.com

Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

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SILVO by Laurie Bolger

By Wasafiri Editor on May 13, 2023 in New Writing Prize, Poetry

SILVO by Laurie Bolger

By Wasafiri Editor on May 13, 2023 in Poetry

Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays, and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe – in all their diversity and complexity. In this poem, Laurie Bolger draws on the work of Jamaica Kincaid to produce a moving and personal insight disguised within a set of simple instructions.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. You can read the full terms and conditions and submit here.

don’t fidget don’t forget to say thank you don’t forget you’re very lucky

don’t watch too much telly don’t trust no one don’t pick your nose

your eyes will fall out don’t leave marks on the window

don’t wear an oversized t-shirt or leave blood in the bin don’t moan

don’t nag don’t be mutton dressed as lamb don’t show you’re bothered

don’t have a short skirt don’t cry don’t forget to clean the edges of the oven

don’t forget the mould (with a toothbrush is best) don’t forget the spices

gathered like people don’t forget the bush don’t sit around all afternoon

don’t eat too much don’t drink too much don’t run or you’ll be sick

don’t let your bum get too big don’t eat mayonnaise don’t forget to pay

for the carpet don’t neglect top shelfs don’t forget to bleach

don’t complain about the garden wax don’t forget to clean your face

don’t forget to clean your mother’s grave take a break and pick up the dry cleaning

don’t forget to be delicate wear gloves don’t forget to pull the

weeds up don’t forget to cry three times daily get up again everyone’s

struggling

iron the tea towels top up the machine don’t forget to clean from the start

don’t forget the deposit and God forbid they come in and see it like this

alone with the duster it’s therapy don’t forget to put stained whites in the sun

wash your bed sheets weekly turn your mattress vaseline

patent shoes pepper your soil to keep foxes away why would you

pay someone

why would you go anywhere but here

the contents of the cupboard in the middle of the kitchen let dust fall

like fluff drop dead with a duster don’t forget your nice top

then

relieved it’s spotless rub cream into your arms clean teeth ask

for the posh stuff for Christmas don’t forget to hide it on the top shelf with the chocolate

reach for it when no one is watching —

Laurie Bolger is a London-based writer and the founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. Laurie’s work has been widely anthologised and has featured at Glastonbury, TATE and Sky Arts. This year Laurie was shortlisted for The Sylvia Plath Poetry Prize, and she is currently working on new poems celebrating her working-class Irish heritage. Find her at lauriebolger.com

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash

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War and the Writer-Witness by Theodora Danek

By Wasafiri Editor on May 8, 2023 in Articles, Extracts, Reviews

War and the Writer-Witness by Theodora Danek

By Wasafiri Editor on May 8, 2023 in Essay

We’re pleased to share an exclusive extract from ‘”An Act of Politicised Attention”: War and the Writer-Witness’, our review essay from Wasafiri 113. The essay features writing on three texts in translation – What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari, translated by Sawad Hussain; Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky; and Five Days Untold by Badr Ahmad, translated by Christiaan James – where the writers write about war — ‘a war that is not a memory, a war that is not seen from abroad, but war as it is felt daily’.

Read the full article online, or in Wasafiri 113, which is available to purchase via our shop.

In March 2022, my friend developed an obsession with troop movements. Russia had invaded Ukraine, 400 km from our hometown, and the Twitter accounts tracking flight paths and tanks seemed to exert a fascination that I couldn’t understand. We argued. What was the point of following flight trackers, I asked, when refugees were arriving in our town every day, when the specificity of an unfolding catastrophe was so obvious? Why get sucked into the military minutiae of a war that made it feel like a computer game, a quest, a second-rate Hollywood film? My district was packed with Ukrainian cars. Everyone knew someone who’d just gotten out, whose parents had come to stay, or had a friend who had taken a car with a bunch of strangers to get over the border.

The argument was pointless. We’d ultimately chosen similar approaches to engage with the news – the microscopic, the detailed, the specific – as a means to build empathy. Soon we began to share the work of Ukrainian writers and visual artists who documented what was happening in their country – life in a constant state of crisis – and I kept thinking about the importance of the writer-witness. That spring, as the Kremlinologists seemed to go into overdrive and as I listened to historians, political scientists, journalists, and politicians analyse national psychologies and leadership personas, Yevgenia Belorusets, a Ukrainian photographer and writer, published a daily diary of life in Ukraine in Der Spiegel Online (available in English in Greg Nissan’s translation on ISOLARII). For over a month, she chronicled the situation in Kyiv in diary entries accompanied by photographs: dog walkers on the street, the smoke from explosions in the sky, a young woman with flowers, a single soldier at a checkpoint. Life in a city under attack. Later that year, the project would become part of the exhibition This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom at the 59th Venice Biennale. When asked why she was keeping the diary, she told The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman that

[t]here might be some sense of responsibility among people who are working with ideas to preserve a very complex picture of reality at a moment when war has turned everything incredibly awful. (np)

A very complex picture of reality — I was reminded of how Iris Murdoch defined art in ‘The Sublime and the Good’, as ‘the discovery of reality’ (51). Murdoch connected the arts and morals with love. To her, the three were essentially the same: the ‘perception of individuals’, the ‘extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’. The writer-witness’s act of care, in this sense, is their work. A diary, the focus on individual stories, all of these are also elements of what will, in a few months or years, be part of micro-history. Prioritising the individual in art becomes, once again, an act of politicised attention — even more so when these individuals are ignored by the wider world.

It seems impossible that an ongoing war can be ignored, and yet the war in Yemen was cited often following the Russian invasion in Ukraine in spring 2022 as a ‘forgotten’ conflict, an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe that had seemingly disappeared from the public eye of, at least, a European audience. Ukraine, too, had suffered from a ‘forgotten’ conflict, as Eastern Ukraine had been in a state of civil war since the Russian invasion and Russian-backed insurgency in 2014. This conflict, the ongoing disruption of civic life, provides the background for Yevgenia Belorusets’ collection of short stories, Lucky Breaks, which finally arrived in Eugene Ostashevsky’s English translation at the same time as her online diaries, four years after they had first been published in Russian in 2018. The ignored victims of the Yemeni war, on the other hand, are the subject of Bushra al-Maqtari’s and Badr Ahmad’s books, both also written around 2018 and now published in English translation by Sawad Hussain and Christiaan James, respectively.

Beyond chronicling and fictionalising tragedy, the approach these authors take is programmatic and analytical. In her foreword to Lucky Breaks, Belorusets explains that the stories ‘focus on the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies and experiences of everyday life’ (10). Al-Maqtari, too, ends her introduction with a programmatic note. The voices of the victims, she says, are

a finger in the eyes of the murderers and the hunting dogs whom they hide behind. They are a testament to ward against forgetting, against feigning ignorance, against indifference. They are a balm for the souls of all those who have been killed, those whose loved ones have been left behind, left with nothing but memories. (19)

This approach calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s reminder that our concept of history must depart from favouring the winners, the powerful. In On the Concept of History, he wrote

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. (257)

To choose as protagonists and subjects those that are oppressed becomes an act of pushing back against structures of power. There are added elements to reading these books in translation, years after they were first written. They preserve a historical moment in time that is now past, a present that has turned into history — and they are not written with the voyeuristic global reader in mind. There is no overexplaining here, no simplifications. The specificity is the point.

These are three writers, then, who write about war, a war that is not a memory, a war that is not seen from abroad, but war as it is felt daily. Though the form is different – fiction and non-fiction, novel and short story, reportage and invention, sincerity and irony – the focus is the same. What neither al-Maqtari, nor Ahmad, nor Belorusets are particularly concerned with is what happens beyond the sphere of the individual. Politics, diplomacy, strategy — they are largely absent from their pages, even though their indistinct shape and influence are naturally felt throughout. It is the lived experience of individuals that al-Maqtari, Ahmad, and Belorusets are interested in. They remain with their protagonists, with refugees from Eastern Ukraine stranded in Kyiv, or civilians stuck in what al-Maqtari refers to as ‘this giant prison called Yemen’ (16). This can perhaps be understood as a counterpoint to our collective focus on the bigger picture — or perhaps it is simply the remit of art to make the individual felt and visible. In any case, what makes these three books so important is the visceral detail with which they describe the varying effects of war’s pervasive intrusion.

Theodora Danek lives in Vienna. Previously a project manager and managing editor at English PEN, Tilted Axis, and The White Review, she now writes, edits, and solves publishing problems on demand.

Wasafiri 113 remembers author and professor Sara Suleri with touching tributes from Kamila Shamsie, Amina Yaqin, and others. Also featured in the issue are the winners of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the 2022 Essay Prize, interviews with Lorna Goodison, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Sarah Booker, plus our usual range of fiction, life writing, poetry, and reviews.

Photo Credit: Maksym Pozniak-Haraburda on Unsplash

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The Salt in the Air by Haniya Habib

By Wasafiri Editor on May 2, 2023 in Life Writing

The Salt in the Air by Haniya Habib

By Wasafiri Editor on May 2, 2023 in life writing

Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe — in all their diversity and complexity. In Haniya Habib’s evocative piece of life writing, she examines the passing of time both within a person’s life, and within relationships.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. You can read the full terms and conditions and submit here.

The sea is rough today. I can taste the salt in the air. It is what slaps me awake when I return to Pakistan. I made palak gosht for dinner. The flavour turned out great, but I couldn’t get the meat as soft as you do. It made me very frustrated and then very sad. Don’t worry, I still ate it. I know you wouldn’t have wanted it to go to waste. And then, I came down to the beach for a walk and it made me feel less sad.

The coastline has that effect on me, especially when the sea is rough. Today, it was crashing and raging against the beach huts along the shore. I find them amusing, the beach huts that is. Some of them are quite grand with large glass doors and open balconies. But as you walk along the shifting wet sand, you can see large boulders and hunks of concrete scattered along the shore. They are carcasses of man’s buildings, the grand beach huts of yesterday, swallowed by the sea and spat out mercilessly. The salt in the air foams as life decays.

When I return to Pakistan, Dadi returns to the sea. I walk on the beach with her. It is the first time she has been by the sea since 1962. I hold her small hand in mine as the water laps our feet. I feel like the adult in the scenario, holding her steady as she marvels at the horses and camels. But I am ill-prepared for adulthood, ill-prepared for what she says next, that the last time she came here it was with her husband who died while I was away, and a tiffin full of sandwiches. The sea is warm and gentle as it welcomes her back. Dadi stands still in the water and I have an urge to take a picture of our feet, side by side — hers wrinkled and purple with varicose veins, mine smoother but flecked with dry patches. I brought sandwiches, I say instead. It is the wrong thing to say and I know it as soon as the words leave my mouth. I can’t take them back, so I let them hang in the air, mixing with the salt. The water recedes around our feet, skimming over the grooves they have created. When we leave, it will smooth over those grooves as well, leaving no trace of our presence.

I’m always amazed by how easy it is to take things from the sea. I can see children gathering shells in the distance. They are collecting whatever shell-like fragment they can unearth. They don’t think twice about it. Of course, I can only tell you this. Anyone else would accuse me of romanticising. But you, of all people, should know how intrigued I am by the process of taking. When I left the apartment, I left everything behind — my clothes in the closet, my dishes in the sink. I meant no disrespect to you and I do apologise, but you have to understand, I could not take those things with me. If I had, how would you know a part of me had lived there once?

A part of me lives here now, and I hear you from miles away telling me to live. Arms resting on the dining table, you tell me I must. At that moment, you remind me of Dadi who greets me every morning with a simple, ‘Jeete raho’. Keep living. For Dadi, this isn’t just a greeting, but a commandment, a commitment. To live is to love, to love is to live. For years, she loved us by keeping us alive. Each morning, Dadi would conduct a thorough audit of the kitchen. She meticulously counted the eggs, vegetables and rotis brought into the house. In the morning, you could find her small frame hunched over the fridge keeping a running inventory of its contents which she relayed to the rest of us in a daily report. ‘Beta, there were at least a dozen tomatoes here yesterday. I used four to make lunch, but there are only five left’, she would say, clutching the remaining tomatoes to her chest. On other days, it was the yogurt that had mysteriously disappeared or the milk that was being used up too fast. Each report was always laced with urgency, a warning that one day there might be no tomatoes, no milk, no yogurt. Her cooking was urgent too, each dish a product of creating something out of nothing. With each recipe, Dadi took on the task of making more. She diluted yogurt with milk, milk with water, preserving the illusion of plenty. And it worked. We gobbled Dadi’s creations, never fully aware of her sleight of hand. I spent my childhood never having to face a day with no tomatoes, no milk, no yogurt because Dadi knew how much effort it took to keep living.

But when I left, Dadi forgot. She forgot the number of tomatoes in the fridge. She forgot to buy more yogurt, forgot to warn us each day of our precarity. I think she forgot me too which is why whenever she sees me now she tells me to keep living. It is as if my presence has taken her by surprise and she is reminded of a task she left incomplete. The only effort she can muster now is her humble request couched in two simple words. Jeete raho.

I wonder whether you have forgotten me too. A part of me thinks you’ve kept me alive, kept my clothes in the closet, kept my dishes in the sink. The wiser part of me knows you packaged my remains into neat boxes, staged a funeral, buried me long ago. After all, how can I expect you to hold on to me, when Dadi isn’t there to warn you of no more?

III

When I return to Pakistan, I buy a pair of green jhumkay and a grater. The jhumkay I leave in a box, but the grater I use every single day to grate fresh nutmeg into each dish just like you. I remember when you decided that you would only use fresh nutmeg in your cooking. It was a few months into the pandemic. You had been watching cooking videos on repeat and they all agreed that freshly grated nutmeg is superior to the powdered version sold at the supermarket. So, you took two trains to your nearest Asian grocery store, piled a basket full of the fresh stuff and bought a microplane to grate it with. The grater brought you joy and you found a way to use it each time you cooked. A pinch of fresh nutmeg, a tablespoon of ginger, the zest of a whole lemon, grated into whatever was stirring in your pot. It made your cooking less urgent, less ordinary — something you were desperate to be at the time.

Two years later, I am still grating nutmeg into my food. I even sneak some into Dadi’s cooking. I’m not sure if she notices, but if she does she forgets to point it out. It is Amma who takes note of my new obsession. I tell her it’s nothing, just a quirk I picked up in New York, something to grow out of. And I did try, you know, to grow out of you. But what could I do? You’ve changed the way my tongue tastes. It balks at the bitterness of urgency, craves the tingle of the extraordinary. When Amma starts buying fresh nutmeg regularly, I can only feel disappointed.

I can’t blame Amma, of course. She is only doing what she believes is best for me. As Dadi has forgotten, Amma has become exceedingly vigilant. She is afraid that Dadi’s condition is contagious, and so, she wakes us up each morning and makes us remember who we were the night before. On one such morning, I tell her that I was someone who loved the colour green. This is why she makes me buy a pair of green jhumkay, even though I can’t bring myself to wear them because I can’t remember why I loved green. This is also why she buys me fresh nutmeg, why she makes me drink water that she has blown prayers over, and why she sends me messages about the virtues of marriage. The day after I tell Amma I was someone who didn’t care much for marriage, she walks around the house convinced that there is a bad smell festering in the corners. She opens all the windows in my bedroom to air it out. I can’t smell it, but Amma assures me it’s there. ‘You haven’t left your bed all day. Your nose has become numb to it’, she says. Strange, isn’t it? You can steep your body in something until it refuses to recognise, to accept what’s surrounding it. Amma burns incense, lights candles, repeats the ritual for three days, until she is satisfied that she has revived the air from the rot that clung to it.

Sometimes, the air by the sea smells rotten too. Sometimes, when the wind blows from a particular direction, it carries with it something offensive. Except there are no windows to open, no way to air out the air on the seashore. The only thing you can do is steep your body in it until it refuses to recognise, to accept what’s surrounding it. Strange, isn’t it, how numbness becomes our only deliverance.

I am convinced that this is what Amma has done as well. She has not banished the smell that lurks around her. She has simply convinced her body that it no longer exists — her own sleight of hand, her own moment of amnesia. When she found me making palak gosht earlier today, she told me I would make a sweet wife someday.

Your apartment never smelled bad. You made sure it didn’t. Each time you went to the grocery store, you came back with fresh flowers wrapped in clear plastic. “They only cost five dollars,” you said each time, marvelling at how cheap good smells could be. You arranged the flowers in an emptied olive oil bottle where they stayed until they drooped and moulded. ‘They only cost five dollars’, you said each time you threw them away. In those days, you never thought about things passing, because you were always walking to the grocery store and you had all the time in the world.

Once, you brought home a potted spring cactus and placed it in the windowsill next to your grocery store flowers. The cactus flowered soon after, producing small red petals with a faint grassy scent. You spent the next two weeks admiring the way the sun bounced off its leaves during golden hour. You sent Amma a picture taken at the perfect angle. You joked about how you finally had another living thing in your apartment during lockdown. For two weeks, you felt triumphant because you had found a way to make the good smells stay. And then, the flowers withered and so did the plant.

Amma’s sense of smell withered too, victim to a prolonged Covid-19 infection. At first, I thought she was glad to be rid of it and all the festering smells that she despised. But when her nose remained unresponsive for months, Amma grew desperate for it to return. She told me she was worried about turning into Dadi who had forgotten how to smell long ago and now never knew when her food was burning. So, Amma woke up each morning and sniffed bottles of essential oils. She used scented lotions and nasal sprays that promised to revive her olfactory nerves. Each night, before bed, she inhaled through a steamer infused with medicated vapours. It all cost more than five dollars.

When it’s clear that Amma has banished her sense of smell altogether, she decides to borrow mine instead. Each day, I am summoned to the kitchen and asked to identify spices by sticking my nose into the plastic spice jars. At six o’clock every evening, Amma asks me to taste what she is making for dinner and tell her if the seasoning needs to be adjusted. And I must, at all times, keep a vigilant nose out for any bad smells. My nose is not Amma’s nose, however. My nose is your nose, used to grocery store flowers and fresh nutmeg. My nose does not flinch from the rotten smell by the sea, or register the bad air that Amma insists is going to descend around us any second. So, I have to train it to smell the way Amma’s does. It is a violent disciplining that my body resists at each step. Eventually, it learns how to feign Amma’s vigilance. I take long deep breaths as I sniff spice jars, and taste giant pots of pulao. I burn incense and light candles each day. I air out the rooms each evening, until my sleight of hand convinces Amma that my nose is now hers. When Amma wakes me up the next morning, I tell her that the night before I was someone who loved the colour green because it reminded me of the leafy green smell of palak gosht.

When I return to Pakistan, I return to the hospital ward. The last time I was there, I was holding Dadi’s husband’s hand as he breathed his last. This time I am mixing Isocal powder into a glass of water and holding it up to Dadi’s lips as she slowly sips.

Dadi has forgotten how to eat and drink. It was only inevitable, is what her doctors tell us, given everything else that has fallen through the cracks. We must now monitor her water intake and meticulously count her calories. Her meals are supplemented with precise doses of medications, sorted into a pill box by day and time. I heat and reheat her food until it is burning, piping hot, almost impossible to handle, in the hope that she will accept it. But, in between the seconds counting down on the microwave, and the morning, noon and night punctuated by her pill box, time slips through Dadi’s grasp. She is untethered, and it is only then that she remembers. ‘Dostoevsky’, she begins. ‘I read Crime and Punishment when I was young. I read Aldous Huxley too. At night, after my husband had gone to sleep, I switched on a single lamp and read the Reader’s Digest until he woke up and snatched it away from me.’ Dadi says all this propped up against a cushion with an IV drip attached to her wrist. She has a smug smile on her face as if to say, I told you how much effort it took to keep living.

You forgot how to stay alive once. It happened on a crisp, fall evening in New York, the kind you spend walking over fallen leaves. You walked into a grocery store to buy fresh flowers, found out there were none left, and burst into tears. You walked until you could walk no more, until you reached the riverside, where the air thickens into water and meets the salt streaming down your face. You walked until your legs refused to move and your tears kept you confined to the window in Apartment 3 with a decaying spring cactus. You walked until the extraordinary you were chasing disappeared around the corner and bitter urgency caught up with you. And once you stopped walking, you stopped.

On a crisp, fall evening in New York, you sliced your hand open as you made palak gosht. The blood pooled in the lines of your palm, a sharp red for the sharp green of the spinach you were meant to cook. It was an accident. It was an accident, but several seconds passed before you wrapped a clean scarf around your wound. The doctor at the urgent care stared at you disapprovingly. He was suspicious. The slice of exposed skin was dangerously close to the purple veins on your inner wrist. You were dangerously close to being another kind of problem. In a somber tone, he asked you how you injured yourself a second time and you told him about your grater and palak gosht and fresh nutmeg until he tacked on five stitches and sent you home.

Dadi strokes the scar on my palm as she falls into a fitful, drug-induced sleep. ‘P.G. Wodehouse’, she murmurs. ‘I read P.G. Wodehouse too.’

One night, I have a dream. In my dream, we are all by the sea, Dadi and Amma and I. The sea is rough. You can taste the salt in the air. I am wearing my green jhumkay and watching Dadi and Amma from a distance. They are eating sandwiches and reminiscing about how they did their siblings’ homework when they were young. I cannot hear them but I know what they are talking about. I know the way Amma’s mouth curves when the memory of someone she loves smooths over the vigilant lines on her forehead. I know the exact tooth that sticks out of Dadi’s mouth when she smiles, smugly or otherwise. I know exactly what temperature Dadi wants her sandwich to be and exactly how Amma wants the filling to smell and taste. I know the exact steps they have taken – their footprints are still imprinted in the sand – and if I walk faster than the rough sea, I can retrace those footsteps myself. I can wake up the next day, and tell Amma that the night before, I was her.

But then, the wind blows from a particular direction, carrying with it an offensive smell that Dadi has forgotten, Amma can no longer detect, and I have grown numb to.

Amma and Dadi persist in the distance. And you and I — we keep living.

Haniya Habib was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared previously in Litro and Behenchara Magazine. She currently teaches comparative literature at Habib University in Karachi.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

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The Small h history of Life by Aanchal Malhotra

By Wasafiri Editor on May 1, 2023 in Articles

The Small h history of Life by Aanchal Malhotra

By Wasafiri Editor on May 1, 2023 in Essay

In this exclusive piece, Aanchal Malhotra, Life Writing judge for the 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, looks to her own work on archiving and making alive again the memories and histories of Partition, dwells on her recent foray into fiction following years of writing non-fiction, and puts the life back into life writing.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

I began writing out of necessity.

My only formal training is as a traditional printmaker, but it was in my early twenties, in the midst of a MFA degree in studio art, that I considered writing anything for the first time. Inspired by my grandparents’ histories, I’d spent a few years working on a thesis project exploring objects that refugees chose to carry on their journeys of migration during the Partition of British India in 1947. Amidst unprecedented violence, as Hindus and Sikhs migrated to independent India, and Muslims to Pakistan, they carried, among other things, jewellery, clothing, utensils, weapons, heirlooms, ledgers, family photographs, diaries, letters, refugee certificates, locks, keys, and containers of soil. Traveling across the subcontinent and its diaspora, I took hundreds of photographs of these objects – portals to an unpartitioned past – alongside hours of interview recordings detailing the intangibles of that separation.

These voices, as I quickly realised, had been largely absent in the writing and remembering of Partition history. Belonging to a culture of oral storytelling, they had not been recorded for posterity, or archived, and were rarely considered reliable sources in reconstructing the past. They had receded to silence often due to the lack of vocabulary of trauma, or unwillingness to revisit, and were complicated, even contradictory, layered testimonies. But most importantly, they constructed a human history of Partition – not of numbers, statistics or politics – but of sacrifice and endurance, adaptability and humanity, friendship, patriotism, loyalty, loss, separation, violence, regret, confusion, longing.

The small h history of life.

I spent several years transcribing these stories, and learning how to write with seriousness about a subject that not only defined my ancestors’ pasts, but continued to hold emotional influence over my present. This oral history project, then – written for mine and future generations – became my first book, Remnants of Partition (Hurst, 2019), falling into the broader category of life writing. In many interviews, survivors focused on a landscape directly pertaining to Partition – of migration, violence, refugee camps, rehabilitation. But every now and then, inspired by the object from the past, they revealed tributaries of this central story, deviations from tragedy to the anecdotes of daily life – the walk to school in their childhood, the taste of mangoes or smell of monsoon in their village now across the border, the things they wished they would have carried, the neighbour, lover, friend they left behind. Remnants became not only an archive of Partition, but also of a life before it that now existed only in memory.

The term ‘life writing’ is often traced to Virginia Woolf, who first used it in A Sketch of the Past (1939) to express the difficulty and inadequacy of the traditional biography (She was working on the English artist, scholar, and critic, Roger Fry’s biography at the time, experimenting with structure and style, while ruminating the origins of her own memoir). More formally, Zachary Leader, editor of the anthology, On Life Writing (Oxford University Press, 2015), defines life writing as ‘a generic term used to describe a range of writing about lives or parts of lives. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, dairies, autobiographical fiction and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings, marginalia, nonce writing, lyric poems, scientific and historical writing, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries).’

Despite this expansive definition, I’ve always found the term a bit daunting because I didn’t grow up with it, nor was I formally trained as a writer, so I never encountered it in creative education. Through my work, I’ve come to understand it as a portrait of a particular time and its people. But life writing is not merely the reproduction of life onto the page, it’s also the interpretation and introspection of that life. One of the reason why the genre has come to hold so much weight is primarily because it is an evolving, encompassing and eclectic literary form, accepting of the dynamic boundaries between the self and the other, the individual and collective. Over the past few months, I’ve read The Diary of Asha San, written in 1943 by a seventeen-year old girl in Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, the autobiography of Leonard Woolf, Samrat Choudhury’s The Braided River, a travelogue about the mighty Brahmaputra, ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s collection of imaginary letters to Moise de Camondo, and a book on the prisoners of war after World War 1 drawn from interviews, letters and sound archives. Despite the divergent and wide-ranging themes of these books, they all belong to the genre of ‘life writing’.

In an essay for the Oxford University Press blog, Patrick Hayes writes how the ‘popular dissemination of life-writing has been central to the reimagining of gender roles and the rethinking of sexuality; it has played a part in the claiming and redefining of ethnic or racial identities, and in revising our understanding of what it means to have a disability or an illness.’ The rise in social media platforms has also further diversified forms of self-expression and the notion of modern identity. However, in my work, it is oral history, often realized as one of the central tenets of ‘life writing’, that is used as a tool to reveal a certain truth.

My paternal grandmother, whom I have interviewed extensively over the last ten years, once said that she did not want to discuss her experience of Partition with her children, because she ‘never wanted to burden them with [her] memories . . . wanted the sadness to end with [her], to remain in [her] generation, to never be passed down’. Surprisingly, it was also not a topic she discussed with my grandfather, even though they first met as teenagers in a refugee camp in 1948. When I first asked her about it, she was surprised but eventually offered parts of the past, as if shedding an older layer of skin. Together, over years, we descended the layers of her memory, and now, without my even asking, she returns to the subject from time to time.

One day she shows me her matriculation certificate from the University of Punjab, 1947 session, interrupted by Partition, and tells me to keep these old memories safe. There is an openness to her tone, so I ask a question I’ve been curious about for years –if at Partition there had been oral historians like myself, would it have been beneficial, would talking have made any difference, would it have made her lighter? I realise that my question arises from a contemporary, rather privileged place of wanting to speak to others about how one feels. But still, I am curious. As expected, she dismisses the subject by telling me that as a sixteen-year-old she did not understand loss; that the accumulation and acceptance of loss has taken years to settle into shape. And then she says what I had never before considered. ‘Maybe [the] heart would have become lighter, or maybe it would have become heavier. When someone asks about such deep pain or loss, whatever is buried comes to the surface; it is exhumed. Then it remains on the mind for long after the conversation is over. The person continues to think about it, and it can consume them’.

I wonder out loud if that’s what happens when we speak about Partition, and she confirms it.

There is a complicated and delicate aspect to consider here. What happens to the first generation after memory is recalled? I have to admit that because so many of the interviewees I spoke with often readily agreed to their testimonies being recorded – albeit, on their terms – I assumed that memory was ready to be exhumed. But this comment from my grandmother made me reconsider the assumption. In the last decade of working as an oral historian, I’ve thought often about how difficult it truly is to reveal what has long been unsaid, what the consequences are of telling a story, and the delicacy and responsibility that accompanies this kind of writing.

Purposefully forgetting to remember, consciously remembering to forget.

Sometimes ‘I cannot remember’ has also meant ‘I don’t want to remember’. From the moment that memory finds utterance in concrete language, to when it is recorded and transcribed onto the page, and finally placed alongside other narratives in historical, social, or anthropological context, the essence of original testimony must be respected and retained.

In the epilogue to Remnants, I remember writing how I felt almost ‘uncomfortable holding on to these valuable parts of other people’s lives’, but as I began working on my next project – In the Language of Remembering (HarperCollins India, 2022), an anthology of post-memory vignettes about Partition with descendant generations – I could see clearly how much the earlier work had impacted me. There was a visible transition from biography to autobiography and I found myself embroidered onto each page. While interviewing survivors, I’d been so careful to remain at a distance — they had been the silent generation, and now their voices, their experiences were paramount in piecing together the past. But by empathising and identifying with many of my descendant interviewees, by converting the formal interview into informal conversations, I’d automatically made myself participant in the process. A cover blurb referred to the book as a ‘restrained memoir’, which made me consider how much writing about others really draws from questions about the self.

My last book, The Book of Everlasting Things (HarperCollins India, Flatiron, 2022), was also my first novel. Years of writing oral history had made me an empathetic writer, but I had never before written fiction. So, when the skeleton of a historical novel – spanning World War One and Partition, seen through the eyes of perfumer protagonists – became apparent, I employed the same research methodology I was familiar with — that of life writing. There was comfort in the process, in taking care of fictional characters the same way one would real-life interviewees.

To provide some insight, I am writing this essay from Paris, where I made many trips from 2017-2019 while researching Everlasting Things. I remembering counting the steps from my apartment to the Seine that my protagonist, Samir Vij, takes on his evening walk in 1948. The street he lives on, rue Chaptal, was the street I’d read about in Indian artist Syed Haider Raza’s letters to his brother, Mohsin, in the late 1950s, when he stayed there in a small apartment, working on paintings for the Venice Biennale.

I have also learnt that to write across genre means to befriend the intertextuality that will inevitably thread your works, combining often, the many genres of life writing.

When a middle-aged Samir travels from Paris to Grasse to unearth the history of his uncle, Vivek, who fought in the Indian Expeditionary Forces during WW1, he discovers the gravestone inscribed by his uncle’s hands, ‘testament to the fact that [the entombed] would never be separated from his touch, even in death.’ This particular memory of an ancestor writing the name of one who had passed into a wet block of cement was offered to me during an interview in 2014 in Lahore and can also be found in Remnants. I remember exactly which line in the novel about ‘mixing’ into another person when in love was said by which interviewee in real life, or how the sections on perfume were born out of years of shadowing real perfumers – observing how they behaved, composed, existed in a world embraced by smell – or how my own maternal grandmother’s home, which I write about in In the Language of Remembering, became the home of my protagonists in the novel, both burning down in a fire in 1947; or that the landscape of Vivek’s days in battlefields of the Western Front were constructed using the real letters Indian soldiers wrote home — heart-breaking yet often surprising testimonies about fighting a war that did not belong to them.

My writing career, thus far, may have been short, but I’ve realised that I need to draw from life in order to fill my page. I understand that there may be limitations to this methodology — the mediation of experiences, their translation (whether in language or form), even their possible stylisation. But in both fiction or non-fiction, I need to walk the steps, breathe the air, feel the texture of walls and stones; immerse myself in the biographies, journals, travelogues, archives, lists, notes, musings, sound recordings from the past, or be in the presence of one who has lived through the time period, to finally put into language how I feel and what I want to say, regardless of whether the text I am writing is historical or contemporary. It is, for me, simultaneously, a form of excavation and portrayal, observation and reflection, enlarging the ways in which a life can be written about.

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed books, Remnants of Partition and In the Language of Remembering, that explore the human history and generational impact of the 1947 Partition. Her work has won the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award, and been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, Hindu Lit for Life Non Fiction Prize, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. Her newest work is a debut novel titled The Book of Everlasting Things.

Photo Credit: Aashna Malhotra

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

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Q&A with Reimagining Education special issue guest-editor, Angelique Golding

By Wasafiri Editor on April 20, 2023 in Interviews

Q&A with Reimagining Education special issue guest-editor, Angelique Golding

By Wasafiri Editor on April 20, 2023 in Interview

Ahead of our free online event on 25 April – Education: Reimagination, Decolonisation, and Change – we spoke to co-guest-editor Angelique Golding about curating, commissioning, and editing Wasafiri 112: Reimagining Education. Our winter 2022 special issue, Reimagining Education considers what education means within and beyond the classroom, investigating government intervention and the reclamation and exploration of decolonisation, and addressing the forces of change and continuity in Britain today. Golding talks, among other things, about her hopes for the kinds of conversations this issue will provoke.

As you note in your editorial, ‘education’ is a very wide remit, as is what we might imagine (and reimagine) it to be. What topics and which writers were you most excited to explore in your approach to curating this issue, and why?

Angelique Golding: When Nicola [Rollock] asked me to join her and Darren [Chetty] I didn’t have any preconceived ideas coming into this project. In the first instance I was simply excited at the prospect at working with the two of them on such an amazing opportunity. Once I’d settled into the notion, given the remit I felt that it was totally open to interpretation. For me, it was about not being constrained or holding onto fixed notions of education. Undertaking an MA at Goldsmiths really opened my eyes about received knowledge and the educative systems through which it is taught. It was only then that I came to understand that boundaries can be pushed and systems circumnavigated particularly through creative thought or practice. So we approached writers, artists, and academics who were not afraid to think outside the box or say what they think.

I was hoping that our call out would generate responses that differed from the norm but also in ways that would lead us back to a true interpretation of decolonisation. To be honest, I was ready for the concept of decolonisation to be totally debunked. It felt like another interesting and positive prospect that had been over-worked, misinterpreted, and undersold. A little bit like the term ‘intersectionality’ that was coined by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw which has strayed away from its original concept that related specifically to the vulnerable position of black women victims of domestic violence in the socio-legal context of the United States. But its use and description now has become far more elastic just like that of decolonisation. That said, the translation or expansion of a term might just be the normal part of academic debate and progression, so it was very interesting to see the interpretations and responses we received.

Equally, how did that approach evolve and change throughout the process of editing? What ideas emerged — or were altered – that perhaps surprised you?

We provided our contributors with a brief that gave the parameters of the issue we were planning but we were not prescriptive about their responses. We truly wanted to see their ideas. So in that sense I would say there was no evolution or change. Even in the editing process, we didn’t necessarily want to impose our ideas, it was more about ensuring that the piece was factual and well written. It felt like the real decisions were about where to place the pieces in relation to each other. It was important that they spoke to or challenged each other and our contributors did not let us down in that regard. I think what struck me the most was the honesty, passion, and vulnerability of some of the pieces. It felt very refreshing.

As you say in the editorial, Wasafiri has been having conversations around decolonisation and education for nearly forty years, and the magazine’s work has spanned a time of huge change. Was there anything in the magazine’s archives that really resonated with you or influenced you?

Serendipitously, I am currently undertaking a collaborative PhD research project on Wasafiri with Queen Mary University of London and the British Library, who have acquired the magazine’s archive. It is a fascinating project which has revealed how far reaching the magazine is in its scope. I have chosen to focus particularly on Black and Asian British authors and writing so when I came across one of Beryl Gilroy’s original articles in the archive it had considerable meaning for me. People will be aware that her memoir Black Teacher was recently re-released by Faber as, what Bernardine Evaristo in the foreword called, a ‘rediscovered classic by a trailblazing black woman in post-war London’. Beryl Gilroy became the first Black Headteacher in Camden in 1969. Despite the racism she faced, she made a significant impact on teaching methods and I consider her an amazing role model. It was particularly fitting then for me to write a review of her memoir to print in the issue.

This issue is being released in a time of special precarity for the arts in tertiary education, with widespread strikes and threats to staff and infrastructure. What implications do you think this precarity has on the vital continuing work of decolonisation — particularly in the UK?

If decolonisation was considered as more than just another thing to do, but as another tool of learning that was embedded in the curricula, then I doubt that it would fall victim to any precarity. If it was considered as a facet of knowledge, say propositional knowledge, which is often defined as true and distinct from opinion, then I believe that it would be a foundational object necessary for true learning and engagement with traditional canons. Perhaps, then, it couldn’t be subject to the whims of budgets or staff cuts. It wouldn’t be something subject to the auspices of people’s time or agendas or that could be put down or picked up.

What kinds of conversations do you hope this issue will provoke? How do you think readers could work against what Sita Balani termed ‘the West’s enclosure of knowledge’ in her essay ‘Pedagogies of Defiance’ in their intersections with educational systems and roles?

More than anything I hope all the pieces are thought provoking and open up new pathways to conversations about decolonisation and pedagogy which is rooted in historical systems and structures. Sita’s piece queries whether ‘the university’ is fit for purpose. This is a great question and one that must be constantly asked of institutions and concepts like decolonisation. I guess the question for me is what conversations will it provoke for generations to come? Will they pick up the mantle of defiance and continue to question perceived notions of knowledge and sites of knowledge. We can’t keep looking at things like this in the same way because we are constrained by traditional definitions and language. Consequently our solutions won’t necessarily bring about the changes we’d hope for. To borrow a phrase from Audre Lorde, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the masters house’, a point I raised with Inua Ellams in our interview for the issue. We have to start devising and defining our own tools if we are truly to make changes and discard what no longer serves us. It is a heated topic and I hope that our issue adds fuel to that fire!

Finally, what writers or topics that you couldn’t include in the issue would you recommend to readers who are interested in reading further?

I would encourage readers to go seek out Professor Jason Arday who has written some refreshing reflection on racism in the higher education sector. If we had more time and space, we definitely would have sought him out as a contributor. Also Nathaniel Adam Tobias has visceral ideas and writing style that I would have loved for the issue.

While completing a Master’s in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths University, Angelique Golding won a studentship to undertake a Doctoral Award at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with Wasafiri Magazine and the British Library. Her research, completing in 2024, draws on methodologies from postcolonial and global literary studies combined with book and magazine history.

Edited by Darren Chetty, Angelique Golding, and Nicola Rollock, Wasafiri 112: Reimagining Education considers what education means within and beyond the classroom, investigating government intervention and the reclamation and exploration of decolonisation, and addressing the forces of change and continuity in Britain today. Featuring interviews with Inua Ellams, Gary Younge, and Steve Garner; fiction from Durre Shawar and Jade E Bradford; poetry from Salena Godden; life writing from Diane Leedham, and much more, this is an issue not to be missed.

Join us for Education: Reimagination, Decolonisation, and Change, a free online event with contributors for Wasafiri 112: Reimagining Education at 7pm BST on 25 April 2023, via Zoom.

Click below to book your tickets. Tickets are free, but we welcome donations in whatever amount you can afford (suggested donation £6). You can also book with a copy of the magazine for £11 and free postage.

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Jummah by Sanah Ahsan

By Wasafiri Editor on April 14, 2023 in Poetry

Jummah by Sanah Ahsan

By Wasafiri Editor on April 14, 2023 in

Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays, and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe – in all their diversity and complexity. In this poem, Sanah Ahsan brings love, companionship, devotion, and religion shoulder to shoulder.

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. You can read the full terms and conditions and submit here.

after Jericho Brown

although I have not covered my head

nor tucked free-flying hairs

friday comes to me like it did back then

god’s kiss on my forehead tiny

my lover presses

her lips on bare temple

whispers Jummah Mubarak

before playing Omar Hisham’s Surah Al-Kahf

his voice pools around our cave

like the smoke from

the palo santo she circles

we take turns to do wudu

rushing three rounds of rivers

over familiar routes

our water meets

at the bottom

of the plug hole

in a paint-stained sink

with still wet feet

we lay the janamaz horizontal

wide enough to hold us both

shoulder to shoulder

we are two sundered suns

kneeling into the horizon’s holy mouth

Sanah Ahsan is a poet, liberation psychologist, writer, educator and presenter. She won the Outspoken Poetry Performance Prize (2019) and shortlisted for The White Review Poetry Prize (2022); Bridport Poetry Prize (2021). Her non-fiction writing has been featured by The Guardian. Sanah is currently writing her debut poetry collection. Find her at sanahahsan.com

The 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2023. Submit here.

Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash

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Q&A with Reimagining Education special issue guest-editor, Angelique Golding

Q&A with Reimagining Education special issue guest-editor, Angelique Golding

Jummah by Sanah Ahsan

Jummah by Sanah Ahsan