Favourite books

Niccolo Ammaniti – I’m not scared

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never let me go

Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis

Jeffrey Eugenides – The virgin suicides

Kirsty Gunn – The place you return to is home

Anita Desai – Fire on the mountain

Anita Desai – Fasting, Feasting

Arundhati Roy – The god of small things

Kazuo Ishiguro – When we were orphans

Kenneth Grahame – The wind in the willows

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Philippa Pearce – Tom’s Midnight garden

JRR Tolkien- The Hobbit

Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist

Philip K Dick – Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Kazuo Ishiguro – The remains of the day

Philip Pullman – The Northern Lights trilogy

F Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatzby

Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

Ernest Hemingway – The old man and the sea

This place we return to

This pace we return to

with its awkwardly placed

mismatched furniture.

Fresh paint on the walls,

new carpets, new sofas.

 

Windows that still rattle at the back of the house

Cracks in the glass

The past

A darkened interior,

curtains drawn in the middle of the day

and us always in the way

as tensions heighten under electric lights

 

Outside, the smell of jasmine

and lilac in the summer

a tour of my father’s garden

the undisguised pride as he reveals

the products of his nurturing

and we pretend to take an interest

secretly wishing

he could have been as proud of us

twenty seven

The woman with orange nails is sitting beside me

she scowls into the sun

as the man who is my father digs his fingers

into plastic patio tubs, unearthing

fresh fistfuls of coriander

I watch as tiny insects make their way across the brickwork

like specks of red dust: unimportant, insignificant

my mother sighs and I sense a tenderness around her eyes

her mouth does not move

his back does not turn

and I wonder if things can ever change

our faces like masks

cracked and hardened after so many summers

of biting down sadness which its sharp metal taste

Flowers for children

You grew them yourselves

Just as you grew us

 

Except they thrived

in well kept soils

 

And you stood proud

your picture in the paper

 

Parents again

after all these years

 

But soon even they will let you down

and then who will you blame?

 

The petals will drop

one by one

and the heads will bow down in shame

Car park prayer

We were somewhere between Reading and Bristol when my Father stepped out of the car into the midday heat, armed with prayer mat and compass. It was Saturday afternoon in mid-July and the car park was buzzing with DIY enthusiasts and bored teenagers.

From the passenger seat came the click clicking of my brother’s Rubik’s cube. At eight, he was almost exactly a year younger than me. He battled furiously with the colourful cube, determined to show me up by completing more than two sides. To my right, mother sat in silence with her purse on her lap. She and dad weren’t talking again. I sensed her relief as he stepped away from the car and she allowed herself to relax into her own thoughts. Her delicately embroidered scarf wrapped tightly around her head, even in this heat. She had that same tired look of resignation that she had always had for as long as I could remember. That was the effect of having so many children. We were the millstones around her neck, pulling tighter, as we made our demands, than any headscarf.

Sometimes I try to imagine them, my parents, newly married and full of hope. I had seen pictures of them back then. My father in his twenties, wearing a suit and tie. Clean shaven. His neat black hair swept into place with a lick of gel. He had a look of integrity, a quiet confidence as if he could have been a bank manage, or a doctor, not just someone who worked nights at a petrol station. Mother was a lot thinner then and she would smile for her photos. The shy, innocent smile of a village girl newly arrived in a country full of promise.

Now that we were stationery, the heat in the car was unbearable even with the windows down. The air hung still and heavy without so much as a whisper of a breeze. I longed for rain. Cool, invigorating rain. The kind that could make you feel like a new person. It hadn’t rained for a week. The air was filled with spores of dust, floating before my eyes like germs under a microscope, as I looked up at the lack of clouds. The sun burned down, fierce, scattering its rays across the ground, transforming the tarmac into a glittering carpet embroidered with priceless gems of broken glass and bottle tops.

We were on our way to visit relatives, someone scarcely related had just had a babyand that always seemed a good time to visit. I was dressed in my special occasion clothes usually reserved for weddings. Crimson pink with gold embroidery pricking through the thin fabric causing my skin to itch. My ears weighed down with my mother’s earrings. “Some day you’ll have gold earrings of your own”. Mother would wait till we got there before she prayed. No doubt she would blame my father for making her late, secretly jealous at the depth of his devotion.

Meanwhile, my father had found a quiet corner in the shade of the car park. Here he had rolled out his prayer mat after much deliberation concerning the whereabouts of Mecca. Mecca, it turned out, lay in the direction of the burger van. Glistening in the sun as it satisfied its queue of hungry customers.

I hated it when he made these public displays of his faith, determined to be seen as an upstanding member of the Muslim community. People already thought he was strange with his big white beard like Father Christmas and his refusal to wear Western clothes. If only he was prepared to blend in a bit more I wouldn’t feel so embarrassed when my friends saw him at parents’ evening. “Your dad wers a dress”. “Its not a dress” I tried to explain, but they weren’t prepared to listen.

Just as I was getting really bored, God flew in through the window. I knew it was God instantly because my God-fearing mother panicked. Still it was a good disguiseand if I hadn’t been warned that God was everywhere and took many forms I might never have guessed it was him. Eventually God settled by my side and Mother stopped squirming. I glanced across to see that she was okay but her eyes had clouded over and she had retreated back into her own world. What went on in there I could only guess at. She was a secretive person, my mother, she never trusted anyone long enough to confide in them. My brother was still engrossed in his Rubik’s cube. He ddin’t notice God in his world of coloured squares.

Outside, a middle-aged couple tried not to stare at my father as they pushed their way to their car. Their trolley overloaded with paving slabs and cement. God watched with em as my father knelt down in the dust, moving his lips to the silent words of his prayer. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity, God turned to me. “What’s he doing?” He asked. “Praying, of course” I replied, surprised that God didn’t know a thing like that. He didn’t look convinced. “What for?” He asked. I sighed. God didn’t seem to know half the stuff they gave him credit for. “So that we can all go to Heaven”, I said, somewhat unsure now. Surely God, as the keeper of Heaven, should know this? Otherwise what was the point of my parents praying five times a day? Of my father standing out there in the dust?

A group of noisy teenagers entered the car park from one of the back streets. THey stopped a few yards from our car, laughing. I shrank back in my seat feeling threatened even within the safety of the car. “Look at that old Paki!” one of the boys shouted, “wha’s he tryin a do, fly away on ‘is majic carpet?”. THey all burst into laughter as they walked away, muttering something about “them filthy Pakis”.

Luckily, my father had been too absorbed in his prayer to notice. He took his time finishing before gathering up his prayer mat and heading back towards the car. He didn’t know that God was an atheist. In the front of the car the click clicking sound had stopped. My brother had given up on the Rubik’s cube and sat staring at his hands. “What’s an atheist?” I asked. I turned to God but there was no one there.

This house that holds me

this house that holds me

safe within its walls

there is no pressure to conform

protected in womb-like spaces

contained

all the pieces held in place

surrounded by familiar objects

there is safety

 

but out there I am a stranger

disconnected

everything is a role

a part to play

 

I want to fold the walls around me

to feel something real against my flesh

like the earth that will eventually contain me

cover me

I want to be held

I don’t want to leave this sleepy home

this castle

with its comforting rituals

its distractions

 

but who is this person who types these words

this one so full of secrets

fingers hesitant

thoughts shrouded

 

most cannot understand such doubt

such fear

like the man I cannot face

the one who has the faith I lack

 

too much is lost already

to conditions that weren’t right

so here I am

drinking tea as if I never left

pretending I don’t exist

switching on to switch off

this blankness filled with sound

images

the blood still flows

this fist inside me, my heart

empties, refills

 

I cannot change the rules

the traditions handed down to me

I tried not to see

how strong those roots were

still are

but they are not mine

the past is slipping from my fingers like loose earth

my hands have little left to hold onto

 

breaking the rules did not set me free

 

the clock on the wall ticks away

this life

like the heart I try not to feel

seconds, hours, days

how many years can I lose this way?

trapped in this spiders web of thoughts

 

like seeds planted in shallow soils we did not thrive

as we could have

and I cannot let that go

he’s not like me

his life is full

his hands have so much to hold onto

it would be difficult to look into his eyes

he would see how I’ve failed

and not see why

 

this house that holds me safe

also holds me hostage

all the pieces held in place

seconds, hours, days

 

 

 

 

Childish, Emin and being stuck ….

I first came across Billy Childish 10 years ago when my college tutor handed me a pile of his books which he no longer had a use for. I was doing a project on book cover design and the tutor was being particularly supportive owing to some errors he had made the previous summer. I recognised the distinctive woodcut of the Hangman Press logo and Childish’s own stylised illustrations. I flicked through, read a few of the poems – they were raw and powerful, I was hooked. I liked that his dyslexic spelling  had not been corrected into ‘proper grammar’ by some condescending proof-reader. The words were completely his own.

Not long after this, during my Saturday afternoon stint at the bookshop - generally spent drinking tea, listening to Classic FM and working my way through the Fiction section - one of the Medway poets began popping in.  Bill was in his 50s, as well as a poet he was a storyteller and artist. He was an intelligent man  but it was the kind of intelligence that can be self-destructive.

We met for coffee. He confided in me about things I  was too young to understand. The complexities of marriage. I went to some of his readings and he introduced me to Billy Childish and a few of the other Medway poets. There was something very insular about the whole scene, they were all from Medway and some of them, it seemed, had no intention of ever leaving (although to be fair, Bill had spent many years travelling the world). Medway infiltrated their work in a way that only those who knew the area could fully appreciate. There was something of the dereliction of Chatham dockyard, the unplumbed murky depths of the river Medway, the junkies hanging round Rochester High Street long after the tourists had gone. What was most apparent in Childish’s work (and those who imitated him), however,  was an unashamed desperation, an admission or celebration of failure.

At the time I met Bill, he and the others were only just forming what has now become known as the Stuckist movement.   Bill explained it to me as a stand against ‘conceptual’ art and a re-establishment of the ’traditional values’ of figurative art. But to me there was no clear distinction between the two . And anyway, what was the point in trying to prevent other artists expressing themselves in whatever way they chose? Surely there was a place for every art form, even the conceptualism of the ‘Saatchi’ generation of Young British Artists like Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Anthony Quinn. The name Stuckists came from a conversation Childish had a few years earlier with his then girlfriend, Tracey Emin, who accused him of being ‘stuck’ because he had no desire to ’move onwards and upwards’ - he didn’t want fame, he didn’t need it the way she did. The Stuckists wrote Saatchi’s lot off as pretentious and claimed that ‘artists who don’t paint aren’t artists’ which is a very limited view of art. Perhaps it was the commercial success of the YBA that they disliked or the fact that the YBA were art-college educated and the majority of Stuckists were ‘self-taught’ – a kind of reverse snobbery?  I couldn’t help feeling that the Medway Poets had cheapened themselves through this exercise in re-branding and become ambassadors of an ill-conceived philosophy.  But then again, looking at the majority of Turner Prize entries year after year, perhaps they did have a point? The last time I had been to see the Turner Prize was in 1999, which coincidentally was the year the Stuckists formed. It was also the year that Tracey Emin exhibited her unmade bed. Coincidence? As well as the bed, Emin displayed pornographic drawings and neon signs with messages such as ‘Every part of me is bleeding’ which my friend and I found hilarious for its melodrama.

   Tracey Emin had attended Maidstone College in the eighties. My friends and I joined in 1995 just as she was at the height of her fame with her ‘Everyone I’ve ever slept with’ tent (which, of course, included former boyfriend Billy Childish).  I still remember being shown around by one of the tutors who proudly pointed out that the block of concrete outside the print-making rooms was left there by Tracy Emin. There was nothing special about it, it was just a block of concrete but it was treated almost like a religious artifact and it seemed it was an official landmark on the tour of the premises.  

 So by the time I left college armed with my Billy Childish books, my friendship with Bill and the concrete legacy of Tracey Emin, I felt a familial warmth for the Medway Poets or Stuckists or whatever they chose to call themselves. It didn’t matter that their readings were badly organised, that their manifestos were not entirely logical, that they were big fish in a small pond.   I valued their humility, their humanity and their willingness to be entirely honest.

What makes Billy Childish one of my personal heroes, aside from his completely personal and painfully confessional writing, is the philosophy behind his work. Despite having a fanbase which has included The White Stripes, Nirvana, Beck, Blur, REM and even Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, he has never felt the pull of fame or the money that goes with it. Material success just does not interest him. As long as he has enough money to reinvest into his next project he’s happy.  In a recent interview to the Guardian he told us

My quest through my work is for God…My hero is Van Gogh, a man who understood the battle was with himself, not the approval of others

I celebrate my limitations, I look for failure….Failure and risk are the places you meet yourself.

In the manifesto on his website he reinforces this when he says

I paint these pictures to come up against my painful limitations

Meeting my limitations I come closer to myself

Coming closer to myself I come closer to God

 

 

 

 

 

 

don’t let it get to you

I’m standing at the sink, washing up and my mother’s in the living room. We’re talking through the doorway. She’s launched into the story of how Syed’s sister in Pakistan is getting married to some guy in London,  that the families had arranged it all about a year ago but no one had mentioned it to us (her, them). I have that sudden awareness that I get more and more these days of not being a part of all that. That village is, thankfully, thousands of miles away yet for them its the only place that really exists.

I’m not sure what she’s expecting of me in this conversation. Just to listen and agree no doubt. THe fact that she tried to get me married off to this girl’s brother when I went to Pakistan and the fact that I had a terrible time out there won’t figure in anything she says, its all forgotten now (by her) so its as if it never happened at all. This just makes me more annoyed, and frustrated. So she waffles on and I find myself telling her that none of this has a bearing on my life, the people, the village, etc - none of these people actually mean anything to me. Its not my life, its hers. This makes her angry. Before I know it she’s launched into her old favourite of how my sisters are also from this country and they went with her and got married and now they’re happy (out of her hair, her duty is done). How she ‘allowed’ me to come back from Pakistan without getting married on the understanding that we would find someone here. She ‘allowed me’? What the hell! Suddenly I wish I nenver started this conversation – ~I don’t want to feel my anger, there’s too much of it. I spend most of my life avoiding my own rage, it scares me more than anything – so like a lot of angry people I keep it bottled up, pushed down. But I really can’t let her get away with saying that to me. I remind her that actually this is my life and a marriage between me and another person would in actual fact require my consent. I certainly did not agree to get back here and go through it all again. So then as usual she curses me and tells me its her duty as a muslim to ensure I get married to someone from the right backround and how her and my father are going to have to account for it when they meet their maker. I tell her that she can tell Him I was beyond her control, on account of having my own will and being a seperate person. Blasphemy is then added to my list of crimes. But how can I be blasphemous if I don’t believe in a God?

I tell her I don’t want a husband, I certainly am not going off to live with a stranger and his family in Bristol, or Luton or wherever else our extended family resides. For my mother to then wash her hands off me (duty done) and for them to treat me as they like. And marry into the family? I know the dangers. For me, the worst thing about the Azad Kashmiri Pakistani community is their insistence on keeping it in the family. An article in the Times quoted from a recent report:

while British Pakistanis were responsible for three per cent of all births, they accounted for one in three British children born with genetic illnesses.

This is shocking and deeply saddening. What the hell is the Pakistani community doing to its young people, firstly there is the pressure for them to marry from within their family tree (first, second, cousins or more distant relations) which is hard enough to deal with, then, particularly in the case of first cousin marriage there is the chance of birth defects or severe disablity. Something that could have been avoided had they married elsewhere. Its very much a tribal culture and there is a lot of territorialism. Marrying into the family is partly about keeping wealth in the family but its also about distrust of outsiders. There is a lot of distrust in the Kashmiri community. My mother has more than her fair share – some of this distrust has been passed down to me and my siblings, at times its difficult to shake it off.

 My mother is really irate now. She tells me if I go off and live alone then my brother-in-laws won’t let my sisters see me in case they turn ‘bad’ as well. I tell her if my sisters want to see me they can, and besides I won’t suddenly turn ‘bad’. She says they have to listen to their husbands because they’re husbands are in charge. And I’m gob-smacked. i ask her if she thinks men are more important than women because I know what she will say. After all, she brought us up to be subservient and treat men with respect whether they deserved it or not. She hasn’t stopped, she’s trying to educate but there’s no logic in what she’s saying. She tells me women carry a child in their stomachs (no word for womb in Punjabi) for 9 months and how dare I think I’m as important as a man. But surely Islam promotes equality of the sexes, mother?

We’ve been here before many times. I’ll spend the rest of the night avoiding her and feeling stressed. None of what I’ve said will have been taken on board. I will never quite be able to shake that feeling of unrest in my soul, heart or wherever such things reside. Tomorrow, I’ll come in from work and it will be as if the row never happened. As if she never swore at me and told me I was the worst. but I don’t forget things that easily.

I stop listening, I’ve had too many years of this already – if I stay here to listen I’ll only get depressed thinking about how much this stuff has held me back. This trying to keep us down, lack of encouragement to ever achieve anything from such an early age that some of it has stuck. Activly encouraging us ot to mix with non Pakistanis even though most of the people we’ve known at school, college and work have been non-Pakistanis (after all . I don’t like this feeling of being cheated and the painful awareness that emotional black-mail has couloured my relationship (our relationships) with my mother for so many years

 

 

Between cultures

Between cultures

grey areas exist

you can lose yourself

or find yourself

there are places

without boundaries

unclaimed territory

opportunities

no rules to keep you safe

Who am I?

I am British / Pakistani / Kashmiri / Mirpuri /Asian / English / Southerner / Westerner / Eurpoean  

I am Muslim / atheist / agnostic / spiritualist / undecided / meditator 

“I have no country to fight for, my country is the earth and I am a citizen of the world” – Eugene V Debs