 Good evening and welcome to tonight's discussion of writing truth and justice with Philippe Sands and Claudia Rankine led by Fatima Buto. I'm Molly Rosenberg, I'm director of the Royal Society of Literature and it's my pleasure to open the penultimate Literature Matters RSL 200 event of this year, celebrating 200 years of the Royal Society of Literature. This series brings together some of the world's best known writers and thinkers for unique explorations of the impact of writing on their lives. We're very pleased to be sharing this evening with our co-host, the British Library, who we partner with for the majority of our events and while we aren't able to be together at the British Library in person or sadly anywhere else, everyone watching can send questions for Philippe, Claudia and Fatima online. You can do this at the bottom of your screen so if you scroll down now you'll see that there's a box for you to write into and we'll get through as many of your questions at the end of the conversation as we can. At the top of the screen you'll also see that there's a button for the British Library's online bookshop where you can buy our speaker's latest books so please make sure to do that before, during and after the conversation. We feel so lucky this evening to have Fatima Buto guiding and contributing to this unique discussion of how literature and justice, writing and law come together. Fatima was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction including songs of blood and sword, the story of her father's life and assassination. Most recently her works include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage on globalization and pop culture, new kings of the world. Fatima, thank you so much. Thank you Molly and thank you to everyone who's joining us today. Thank you for choosing to spend your time listening to these incredible writers. I am very happy to be joined by Claudia Rankin who is a poet essayist and playwright, a MacArthur Fellow and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University. In 2005 she was awarded the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement by the Academy of American Poets and also Philippe Sands QC, a professor of law at University College London and a practicing barrister at Matrix Chambers. The Rat Line was published in April 2020 and you might have heard it in its podcast form before then. Philippe is president of English Pan and a member of the board of the Hay Festival and we're here to discuss literature, truth and justice and I wanted to begin with something that I think ties our work and certainly our passions together and to put a question to both of you. When I was working on Songs of Blood and Sword which is the book Molly referenced the story of my father's life and his murder. Many years ago it came out 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time researching, interviewing people and trying to uncover things that were quite easily covered and I thought again and again of something Bill and Kundera said. He said the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting and though our fields and our books cover different stories and periods and places I think that issue, the question of memory and forgetting in people and power is central to what we have spent many years thinking about and writing about and so what I wanted to ask you Claudia is that your writings cover landscapes of injustice or the absence of justice and those landscapes are as varied as airports or airplanes, colleges, our own homes or scenes of that absence, friendships, America, the body politic of America, tennis courts and Philippe you've traversed a very personal family history as well as the tragedy of the Holocaust and its reverberations across the world not just in Europe and so what I wanted to ask both of you and maybe we can start with you Claudia is how your attention as a writer was first focused on these issues of visibility, memory, justice, injustice and then after you Philippe was there even a choice not to direct your attention as a writer to this issue of justice. Claudia. Thanks. That's a great question that you know I a lot of my attention to these issues actually came through thinking about Shela, thinking about the word of the work of Claude Landsman and poets like Paul Salon and the question of how do you keep reality on an even playing field you know not that everybody's going to think the same or react the same but how do we keep it so that we are all living in the same reality relying on the same history relying on the same facts and with the recent book justice the question really sort of came to a head when we had a president who was very actively putting out an alternate reality in terms of fake facts, fake news, fake science and so I was interested in constructing a text that in its structure offered access to facts and history even as we were working from a personal subjective point of view in the act of diagramming conversations that I had in all of those places that you mentioned. Philippe. Well I mean like Claudia and it is so incredibly nice to be doing this program with you Claudia I have multiple lives like you Claudia I'm in the classroom and I have one life in the classroom and then I have another life in the courtroom and in a sense the combination in the English world of the classroom and the courtroom operated to in a sense extinguish my voice and for the first 50 years of my life I did not write I wrote a lot I've always loved writing but I never wrote about myself and that changed in 2010 because of an invitation I was given to deliver a lecture in the Ukraine in the city called Lviv on the work that I do in the field of crimes against humanity and genocide and I accepted the to give the lecture because my grandfather happened to have been born in that city and he'd never talked about it to me he lived until 97 I knew him very well he's very close to him and my brother and I grew up in a sort of grand parental house of silences as many people do as I now know on both sides of the story and that trip to Lviv, Lemberg, Lviv somehow opened something and I came back and I suggested to my then editor at Penguin maybe doing a book about that and in fact it was bought first by Alfred Knopf and I was put into the hands of an extraordinary editor Vicki Wilson Victoria Wilson and she spent five years teasing out of me the capacity to do that which judges and my colleagues in the university had said for decades don't talk about yourself no one's interested in that and so it was a struggle and the writing took many drafts four book length drafts over five and a half years guided by Vicki and bit by bit she pulled out what I had excluded and enabled me to put myself in my own writing something that I've not done before and that is what opened the ability for me to engage not just with the issue of memory but the issue of identity I wrote East West Street because I wanted to know who my grandfather was and I wanted to know who my grandfather was because I felt if I knew who he might be I would better know myself. So Philippe is that I mean because I was reading the right line and I was wandering throughout you're in this incredible position which is that you are a barrister you can pursue real justice or whatever real justice is you can you can pursue it in a way that many of us can't so what does writing afford you that the law doesn't is it that that search for for the self and and the identities that were shrouded in silence or is there more? Well that that was definitely a part of it but what has begun to happen in a very curious way and I think I need to act to control it is that the two worlds have become my two lives my two worlds have become porous and one informs the other so my writing style even though I'm dealing with horrendous facts that arouse great passions around the world actually because the issues I focus on the relationship between the individual and the group crimes against humanity is about the individual genocide is about the group and these two international crimes sit in very uncomfortable togetherness and in opening those doors I've been forced to confront in my writing very personal issues about my own family but now I find myself curious I noticed this for the first time last December when I had the quasi surreal experience of sitting about 2.5 meters from An Sang Sushi Nobel laureate who was opposite me in a case at the international court I was arguing for the Gambia that a genocide was occurring in relation to the Rohingya community and she was defending her country Myanmar and I found that as I was addressing the court I was seeing myself increasingly as a storyteller engaging with a very able person An Sang Sushi a very eloquent speaker not presenting I have to say a very nice argument and adopting some of the techniques I put into my writing because I've come to understand at a place like the International Court of Justice it's not just one judge or three judges you have 15 judges sitting from 15 different countries backgrounds cultures ideologies philosophies the whole of the human race so to speak is present on that bench and they will all hear my words and An Sang Sushi's words in different ways with the baggage each of us brings and that I've learned in my writing and so I think there's a porousness now to my life which may not be a good thing. Claudia I suspect that since just out just us has come out people have said to you again and again that it's incredibly timely of course coming after the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest and of course the American elections but but readers of your work know that these are issues you've been writing about always rereading Citizen recently you you write about Trayvon Martin you you have an in memoriam section of all these young men whose names have been brought to the streets all over the world not just in America this summer and I was wondering if you could tell those of us who are here tonight where the title comes from and why you chose it how you chose it. Well first I want to say to believe this the idea that the law isn't a kind of storytelling is I you know I think I think that often people come forward with these ideas that there is this thing of objective being in the world and there isn't I mean I think I think that history the law all of it has always been about storytelling and privileging one narrative over another and then classifying that narrative as indefensible truth and so I would say that they're not actually as separate as maybe you posit them to be. In terms of the title of Just Us you know it came from two different sources initially I was thinking about the fact and it is the reality that in the United States you have people who do not speak to each other that we are so politically divided our commitments are so us and them to use that term that you literally have white people who do not interact with people of color who make it a political position not to do that a personal position not to do that and so segregation as it was put forward by white supremacy is now a sort of determining factor in the lives of everyone and so I was really interested in what it meant to talk between all of us and to sit down as we are just people and we have these issues and we need to address them. Once I decided on the title I was talking to a friend of mine who is a visual artist Alexandra Bell and she does these counter narratives where she rewrites the New York Times covers that's one of her projects to show the implicit bias of whiteness inside the titling of these stories and sometimes the writing of these stories as journalists and then she reproduces them and puts them out in the world as art and so she said oh did you take the title from Richard Pryor and that reminded me I went back to the Richard Pryor joke where he says you go down to the courthouse looking for justice and what you find is justice and I love the slipperiness of that justice because it could be what you find is that justice is only for white people justice or what you find is that the only people down in the courthouse being arrested are black people and so the movement in that justice was what made the Richard Pryor the epitaph to the book epigraph to the book and and you've spoken about this since the book has come out but it's not in just us the story of Amy Cooper yes and Christian Cooper in Christian Cooper yes and and this strange mirroring the way in which she wasn't she spoke a certain language she presented herself a certain way and yet replicated will you will you talk a tiny bit about that if you're not super bored of repeating it oh no no no and it's actually actually um believe you must know about that the um the Amy Cooper performance um he is a white woman corporate woman educated she works in corporate America and um within a you know a very high powered position and she's walking her dog and a black man um she's walking her dog in the ramble where a lot of people go for bird watching and dogs are not supposed to run free you're supposed to keep your dog on the leash so Christian Cooper just you know random having the same last name approaches her and says can you put your dog on the leash and she says no and then she tells him that um she's going to call the police and tell them that he's he's um attacking her and and Christian Cooper videotapes this and puts it online and what is stunning about it is it happens in the same 24 hour period of the killing of George Floyd so anybody who who doesn't understand what it means for um black people and especially black men to interact with a biased police force and how quickly that can escalate into the death of that unarmed person saw it play out right after the interaction between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper and so it's the one but after it happened I had white friends call me up and say you know so she's racist but should she had lost her job and those conversations um were stunning to me because you know I I never um I never cease to be surprised for some reason um of liberal whites um constant justification around the racist behavior of other white people and so they they kept saying you know it's a bit much it turns out she actually made another phone call that only came out recently that said that she claimed that he had actually attacked her and then she walked that back because there was no you know obviously no evidence to any of it being true I mean can I just to come in just to be very clear Claudia and Fatima I don't posit a distinction today between writing in a literary sense and arguing a case in court I did posit it and what I've come to learn is exactly as you put it Claudia but I want to say something else just on this issue of us and them because um we are now all increasingly focused on this in different ways but of course there is nothing new about it every single one of the cases that I do the stories that I get involved in that happen to be dreadful acts of mistreatment and discrimination and mass murder across the globe it's always about us and them whether it's in Northern Ireland I remember going doing a case in Northern Ireland and having a conversation it was a very interesting case it was about a they discovered gold in a small place in Northern Ireland and the hill in which the gold was possibly located belonged to a group of Protestant families and of course the opponents of the for environmental consequences all happened to be Catholic and so I found myself sort of in the midst of this tremendous and heated debate and I learned in that context and this was 20 years ago I didn't realize this that the Catholic community in the Protestant community can tell each other apart just by looking at each other okay and and I'm like really and of course my experience in the 20 years since has been this goes on all over the place former Yugoslavia, Crads and Serbs, Serbs and Bosnians, Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis it's not only a white and black thing it's it you know in in Jewish communities in Lvov in the 1920s they all treat different aspects of the same religious community so to speak in different ways and sometimes in appalling ways and this in a sense this issue of them and us is really what has begun to drive me in my writing I stumbled across after I went to give that lecture in the Ukraine on the origins of these two crimes crimes against humanity which is about the protection of individuals and its proponent Cambridge professor called Hirsch Lauterbach who actually was from the city of Lvov had the thesis that we need fundamental rights for all human beings on the basis of the fact that they are human beings irrespective of their nationality their religion their race their and that was really the origins of modern human rights law but it was opposed by a contemporary of Lauterbach called Raphael Lemkin who invented at exactly the same time the concept of genocide he said no no no that's all wrong it's all well and good to go to the universal approach where all human beings and women to protect each other but Lemkin's thesis was people actually get mistreated because of their characteristics race ethnicity religion nationality whatever it may be and so we need to put the emphasis in the law on the protection of human beings because they're a member of a group to which Lauterbach's response correctly I think was if you set this in stone you will reproduce the very conditions you seek to prevent that the concept of genocide actually gives rise to the very thing and so the law and this is the story that I tell has in effect by setting in stone this element that focuses on nationality and race and other factors that go away from the universal he is human she is human they are human has set us on this path that you have written about so beautifully but it's a universal path I don't know of a society community that I've worked in around the world and I've worked in so many countries where this issue does not arise in different ways but it's variations on a theme and that's what I think is so worrisome about what is happening now in the United States because of the divisions become greater and greater and they do seem to be becoming great greater that leads inevitably in the world I occupy always to the same place which is a terrible place you know I I I agree with you in theory we could we can track it across time that you have people creating a difference and then attacking the other depending on who's in power but I think anti-blackness as it's um as it comes out of colonialism is unique in that there is no way that I can escape it no matter where I am whether I'm here or in Britain or in France or you know I as a person with black skin immediately bring on the the the imaginative assumptions that are inherent in in white people in whiteness in the construction of whiteness and that brings with it certain legal consequences and certain lethal consequences for me as a person in the world and in the United States we we um we literally black people literally have spent um 400 years just trying to get the law to acknowledge that um that built into its laws are the the um the structures that have subrogated me from from slavery till now so I think that's the way it's played out a little bit differently than say in Northern Ireland where you're talking about religious differences I mean you know people in Northern Ireland if they move into another um city they don't have the same um you know the Irish came to the United States it became white people um white people who then turned their ire against black people and joined whiteness as part of the umbrella of persecution that white people have to negotiate I completely respect that and but I have a an inner resistance because of the experiences I've observed not only here personally but in relation to cases that I've been involved that every community that believes itself to be a victim community considers it to be unique and it is unique I remember I did an event when East West Street came out at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and after the conversation there was a series of questions and the lady an elderly lady said to me um Mr Sands Mr Sands I noticed you didn't say the Holocaust is the worst thing that ever happened ever which I don't say ever I never say that because I don't in fact believe it to be the case because I believe that everyone's horror is a uniquely horrible horror and I said to her well you know I try to avoid this plain sheet herself had been in a camp I understood that and I wanted to be very respectful but I said you know I go around the world and I come across many stories and I see terrible things that have happened and you know when I worked in the Rwanda context frankly they want the crime to which they have been subjected to not a war crime not a crime they wanted to be the crime of crimes they wanted to be genocide because they believe that what happened to them and for them when I talk to them it is the worst thing that has ever happened the same with the Yazidi the same with the Rohingya and she turned around without skipping a beat and she said yeah yeah yeah but but those guys they were just killed with machetes we were put into ovens and you know how do you answer that on the one hand you want to be deeply respectful to someone who's been through the most horrendous thing one could imagine on the other hand we know that the horror goes around the world if you are Rohingya in Myanmar what you're living through is uniquely horrible and it has been for centuries and so so I think I'm I think for me everyone is unique of these stories yeah but I'm not talking about being unique in in the sense that you're thinking about it I'm thinking about it in the ways in which colonialism and post-colonialism has affected European and American cultures and so consequently the impact on black people black and brown people have continued in ways I'm not you know I'm not interested in victim comparison I mean victims are victims and but I will say that to use the former example that what happened in Ireland as devastating as it was if you take both parties out of Ireland and bring them to the United States they then have different circumstances and can go under and become part of them under the umbrella of whiteness I cannot change that status if I leave here and move to London I cannot change that status if I leave here and move to Paris so that's that's what I'm saying that it's a condition that has to do with a post-colonial history that has has you know allowed black people to remain subject to white power in a way that has been devastating over time and of course sorry sorry sorry no I just wanted to jump in to to to ask a question that maybe we'll take this further but the US House of Congress every year is it every year I think will set aside money that it gives to survivors of the Holocaust who are now living in America and I believe the last last year was five million dollars but it's the same house that refuses to discuss reparations that won't even table a conversation on reparations and I just wondered Claudia if you if you might speak to that and and I'm reminded also of something in just us when you talk about the 2008 Democratic primary and and this must have been uncomfortable um especially given the time we're in now but but you you write about Hillary Clinton refusing to bow out of the 2008 Democratic primary even when it was clear that she was not going to win and she says we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 and it's it's um it just struck me as as a kind of horror of language that continues and will continue whether you have a trunk or you don't have a trunk is there something there maybe that you want to respond to or well that's that um I think continues the line of this discussion that it it's not something that is um anti-blackness it's not something that is located in a specific moment it has a long history and the history is embedded in the um construction of white people so that when Hillary says something like that she really Hillary Clinton she is she is um relying on the fact that we understand that black people are under attack that um um former president Obama um was was targeted um you know it wasn't a careless reference it was a specific one and um and so it's that that I'm referring to that that long history that is sheared across and there are many examples you can you find examples in Japan you find them examples in Britain I you know I've just been watching Steve McQueen's um small axe which is phenomenal and and what and I'm so grateful for it because I've been in London so many times when people say there's no racism here in the way that exists in the United States I might know your post-colonial country the racism is here because white people are here there is no racism without white people there is no racism without the construction of white of whiteness that is um dependent on the subjugation of blackness and and it it is bred into people the moment they're born Philip I wonder if we can we can move to to something unusual that presents itself in your writing the question of who's justice um who has the right to tell the story of justice and injustice and it's something that you you deal with in all your writing I mean just the rat line your most recent book um you are engaged in a journey with a man whose quest for justice is well very violently opposed to your own very diametrically opposed can you speak about the challenges that that you face as a writer how you negotiate that well that's been very difficult that's my 10 year relationship with a man called horse vector who is the son of the Nazi governor who is responsible for the killing of my grandfather's entire family um and I came to know him in 2011 I was introduced to him and and I like him actually at a personal level he's not a holocaust denier he's not an anti-semi he knows his father was deeply involved but his position is simple my dad was never he was indicted but he was never caught he escaped he died and he died an innocent man therefore he is an innocent man and I'm allowed to treat him as an innocent man and of course that's a complex narrative because there's one part of my being that of course someone who's not sentenced to convicted is innocent and entirely be treated as an innocent but of course it's more complex than that the circumstances of his escapes and I think what I've learned maybe from being in the courtroom is to treat everyone that I come across with an open mind and with courtesy and I mean I read in Just Us I love the way you enter into conversations Claudia with people that you meet I do the same thing I love just bumping into people on the street and starting a conversation your cab driver or you know someone that I meet in a shop like and you get talking and basically nothing is ever what it seems that's what you sort of learn in life and but right now I think what you're you're getting at Fatima is I'm facing a particular challenge and and I'd be interested to talk about it here with Claudia I alluded to you Claudia in an email that I sent which is one of the cases that I don't know I would say I mean you know frankly Britain is I'm married to an American to a New Yorker so I spend as much time in the States as here and I I don't recognize an account which says that somehow America is more racist than Britain it's just not what I see it's I think it's just done differently but it's there and of course a lot of the laws that you write about which I'm fascinated about the laws that you know prioritise and emphasise and privilege whiteness who drafted them the Brits drafted them you know the Brits of the Masters of this kind of stuff and one of the cases that I'm dealing with and I've been dealing with it for 10 years concerns a community descendants of slaves who are known as Chegosians they lived on a place called Chegos which some people knows Diego Garcia and a group of other islands and for 10 years I've been working with them and the government of Mauritius to try to rest back recognition that Chegos which was detached by Britain from Mauritius when it granted Mauritius independence actually belongs to Mauritius and actually the Chegosians the 2000 all of whom are black and who were thrown off their islands between 68 and 73 and most of whom are still alive want to go back should be able to go back and I've come to know in the course of this work an extraordinary lady who I've befriended the lady called Lisby Elyse who turned out to be our star witness in the case at the International Court of Justice she made a two and a half minute video presentation which in the eyes of most people who were in the courtroom that day entirely transformed the case she's in two and a half minutes she described what happened to her in the spring of 1973 it was extraordinary she had to do it by video because she can neither read nor write and she wanted to be comfortable in telling her story and not have the anxiety she came to the hay and right now I'm writing a series of lectures and a book which tells the story of decolonization from 45 to 2020 but also tells her story and of course you'll see straight away Claudia this presents me as I'm very open to the issues of appropriation and deeply respectful of her story how do I a white north London guy work with her a lady I've come to know well who wants her story told to as broad an audience as is possible because that is more likely to make the British and the American governments finally to allow her to go home where she can end her life where she started her life what is my role in the telling of that story how do I tell that story how do I respect her it is her story it's not my story although momentarily it was my story when she became a witness in a case that I was doing and I'm currently engaged in a multitude of conversations with a multitude of people who have totally different attitudes to the question of how someone like me narrates that story and that is raising the question that Fatima has asked for me what is my role in telling a story that belongs to someone else it cropped up in east west street what was my role in telling my mother's story my mother who was a child refugee and who was a hidden child that posed enormous numbers of complexities as a writer for a broad audience what was my right to tell a story that opened up issues that could potentially cause her great pain or great happiness I agonize over these issues and have done in all of the things that I've written primarily because I want to be respectful of all of the people that I'm engaging with and it's I'm finding it very difficult This is a real question. Roger do you want to respond? I was thinking about something that comes up again and again in Just Us and maybe this leads back to what Philippe is saying. There is a privilege in narration there is a privilege in storytelling in setting the topic and it's something that comes up again and again in Just Us as a kind of wound when you talk about privilege and I'm just wondering if you can speak a bit more about that and why it is that people understand privilege just to be about money but when you're writing about privilege white privilege you're talking about being able to move freely in one's life in any life in the world can you speak a little bit more about that? Sure I will speak to that but I was interested in the actual question that Philippe asked because you know the word that I detest most that is going around everywhere now in the United States is the word ally the white people are the allies of black people and I feel that it's almost like a wrong turn to go down the road of ally because what really should be happening Philippe is what you're doing that you are working alongside someone to present an issue that is hers but not hers only and that the two of you together and given your and this is where your question Fatima comes in given your privileges of access and your privileges of having determined an audience based on your previous endeavors that will help in the ultimate project the the sort of blind idea that appropriation happens just in the telling is I think wrongheaded I think that it's the questions are really for the collaborators themselves why are we doing this why have we come together to do this and and what why do we need to do this and when it moves out of a kind you know appropriation is is is questionable and has always been questionable when it's privilege and access towards economic gain and that's where we've seen you know in the music industry in many other industries where people have been worried about appropriation because people have taken a thing presented it and then they have gotten all of the the the economic whatever associated with it but when it's towards creating a more justice then it's a collaboration that of two people who are working alongside with different access points one access to the actual event and one access to other mechanisms that allow that event to be known and heard and addressed so I you know I think that it might be not particularly a useful use of your time to be worried about this question if you've answered the other questions that the as in terms of what is the the point of this and how does she appear in the making of the thing and how collaborative you know you cannot privilege the fact that some of us have been educated to to know how to to to read and write over the experiences of other people and how they have come to know what they know and and that has to be part of what is equalized in the making of the thing in in just us the one of the things I learned was around this idea of privilege being a static term you know every time I got into conversation with white men and talked about white privilege I ended up down a road about economic privilege I had these white men saying to me you have more privilege than I do you make more money than I do you have a job at Yale I wish I had what you had and and I and and then I realized that I needed to stop using that term because it was allowing them to hide behind economic privilege versus how whiteness is allowed to move in this world and and and that is separate from what they own and and how much money they make and so I started using the term white living which meant that they had access to to mobility to the ability to move around to walk down the street without surveillance to go into a store without being followed to and and I know this because my husband is white and I can see how we are treated on a day-to-day basis we lid I literally have stepped behind him as he has walked into a place and have the door close for me that's how and this is just ordinary living we were pulled over in by the police and the question the policeman had for my husband is how do you know her how do you know her like what is she doing in your car and then just recently I I set the alarm off on my house by accident I left the the alarm was on and I went to walk the dog and so it went off and I just pulled the door shut when I came back there police all over our house around the exterior of our house and I say to him you know oops you know it was my fault and I we have to put in a code to get in the house so I put in the code I go in the house we have to put in a code to turn off the alarm I put in the code to turn off the alarm and my husband sees on his phone that the alarm is going off so he's driven home and I'm like you know shooting the shit with the policeman and joking about having stuff on my mind when I was walking the dog and we're doing fine and my husband jumps out of his car comes approaches us and the policeman like a child who has been caught in the cookie jar turns to him and says she said she lives here before he says anything she says she lives here and we're talking about this happened in the last six months no the last before covid so in the um in the fall before covid started so more like the last year um so you know I I I think that idea of privilege being recognizing that that has as a white person a white man especially you have an ability to have natural access to certain things that she doesn't and and and I think the text needs to make that apparent in all honesty like full disclosure it's already been done it's already done in the first draft and uh and and I think you I think in response to Fatima's question listening to you with huge amounts of empathy it has to be addressed very openly and that's what's of interest to me because in my world that is not addressed openly so let's let's go back to the courtroom let's go back to the international court of justice where I do most of my cases every single lead counsel every case for decades has been a white male basically without exception okay and in that world that I occupy no one's having this conversation it's just beginning to be had because of the writings of a small number of people but it it goes on in exactly the same way you know when we did the the video of Madame Elise we had an extraordinary debate we actually spent hours and hours and hours and hours on it you would understand I hope and I think we filmed her and then she tells her story for two and a half minutes and then she gets very very angry and she gets very upset and she weeps and so the lawyers sitting around with this video well on the one hand we must be fully respectful of it's her story and her weeping is part of her story but on the other hand some of the judges won't like frankly seeing a weeping black lady in a video it'll make them feel very uncomfortable we had that whole debate in the end of course we left it as it was we didn't change anything but but you're in a space in a courtroom like that where the readers of the judges and they are obviously hugely important because they take decisions beyond ordinary readers that can hugely affect people's lives and you want the best possible outcome and so we go through these discussions but I think it comes back to Fatima's first question to me and the relationship between the world of legal practice and the world of writing and it's now for me so fascinating the disconnect between those two worlds in this sense here we are having that conversation openly I think fairly honestly I think very frankly that doesn't happen in my other world and I want it to happen and it comes back to Fatima's question I'm going to make it happen how I make it happen is more complex because I need I know you don't want to call them that but I need some allies because I'm one person in a group you know of not huge numbers but how one changes the conversation I think and that's where writing changes things so the judges get in touch with them they say oh I read your your book they don't think of it as a law book anymore it's more like literature or stuff and and it's okay to write about those things in literature so long as you don't write about it in the law books it's it's really a fascinating discourse I don't know Philippe if if you know this but I was doing a bit of research and Claudia correct me if I've gotten this wrong before we head to questions but when you were writing Just Us you you employed a therapist and a fact checker and a lawyer is that right to read through was it the whole book or was it the the section about the play fair view fair view the entire book each piece went first to a psychiatrist who um who we met and we discussed why I might have thought the things I thought and why the person I my interlocutor would have perhaps had the the the feelings and made the statements that they made that informed the first second draft of the piece because she would have read the first draft once I got that we written I then sent it to the fact checker and the fact checker is a fact checker for mostly for lawyers but because he knows my work he took this on as a side project and he and I went through and looked at the the legal and historical documents behind the statements that were made and he was able to pull forward legal documents that I wouldn't have had access to because he knows the process so then that happened and some of that information was either integrated in the text itself or in the notes section and then a lawyer went through the entire book and she she gave me some really useful advice in terms of more relevant cases to to go to versus sort of the historical ones that I knew um and once all of that work was done I then took the essay and I gave it back to the person I had the original conversation with and I said okay this is my understanding of what went on between us if there's anything that you feel is incorrect let me know and if you would like to write a response to what I have written I will print that response alongside um what I have written without changing a word of what you write and so that was for each essay that was the process that was engaged and we've got questions coming in now um so I'm gonna put you I think it's to anyone who wishes to answer it it's a question from Sarah who says a lot of what you've been discussing is about language about naming injustice do you feel that language and qualification alienate us from the truth I don't know if anyone has anything to say on that well I want to go back to something that Claudia said earlier on a certain point in our conversation I mean I've been doing what I do now for long enough that I don't believe that there is such a thing as objective justice or objective truth you know we've all seen films incredible films like Run Lola Run where the same moment is filmed from three different perspectives it's a modern making of Rashmond and you sit in a court or you draft a single page Claudia maybe you've been through the same experience and you could write the page from the eyes or perspective of a different participant in a process and the story looks completely different but each story is true and each story changes also because the only thing we haven't talked about is the place of memory in all of this and how memory is created and how memory functions as we tell our stories and I've quite become partial to the work that was explained to me of neuroscientists explained to me by the American writer Siri Hustved on how we remember things when we remember things and I please forgive me Siri if you're watching for my dreadful paraphrase but we don't actually remember what happened 20 years ago we remember the last time we remembered it and over those 20 years each time the act of remembering takes place and the act of memorialization occurs and a new memory is created next time you remember the last time you memorialized it and that's very apparent to me when I deal with witnesses in court because you can spend time with people and ask them what happened what they saw what was she wearing what was he wearing what did he do next did he raise his arm and of course the story evolves each time there is no absolute and when judges give a judgment as we all know and I'm here totally agreeing with Claudia they tell a story and they use words to tell that story and the words become the carrier of a truth the Nuremberg judgment which I spent so much time on is it the truth no it's a truth it's a truth written by four judges spending a few days together crafting a narrative from the material that was put before them which they happen to remember and which suited their own ideologies and backgrounds in particular perspective so words transmit messages and they contain multiple truths and multiple justices and injustices that's the beauty of words they're so malleable and open-ended and they mean different things to different people that's why we love them Claudia the next question is for you it comes from June and it's a question about form June asks in citizen the changing pace as you move between prose poem and image and essay pushes the reader to new interactions with the text as they read how does the form of writing impact the kind of truth that is communicated well I think that it's really a question about what my commitment is in terms of a writer and so the question might be referring to say is your commitment to truth my commitment really is to the process of knowing which is not about truth per se and this is where I do agree with you Philip I mean among many other places but in this particular question I when I'm putting together a book like Citizen or Just Us or Don't Let Me Be Lonely I'm really interested in the places where I can open up the text so that the reader can go in there and move around and that means that they take the bits that I have given them and they associate from maybe an image or a fact or an anecdote that I'm retelling the conversation I had and they bring it to their own database of knowledge and see what it does for them see how it opens out into their database of experience and whether or not it impacts them or not you know people say do you write for white people or for black people and the answer always is I write for the people who can read the book and by reading the book I mean how much are you able to enter the process of reading the book not a journey towards any kind of truth but a journey towards thinking the act of thinking um Philip I'm going to pass your question from Derek who's asking if there is a writer who you would say has been the most important to your sense your sense of what literature and writing can do to bring about justice the answer to that question changes every single day um so I'll tell you who the greatest I'll tell you who it is today it's two people because I've spent the weekend reading a marvellous irish poet called even Boland um who has written about colonialism from an irish perspective and I've spent part of the weekend reading she passed away unfortunately recently and um I've just got her last collection and I've been reading that but I went back and read a book that I had not read for 30 years um which has never fallen out of my mind and it touches very much on what we've been talking about it's it was extraordinary 30 years ago and it was as extraordinary now Rian Malan my traitor's heart um a story of young white africans growing up in South Africa leaving going to the United States and then going back and I was thinking about as you were speaking Claudia because I had in my mind some of the extraordinary lines that he has and takes and his situation in South Africa and the parallels with the world you describe injustice right now in the United States amongst other places and there's one line where he describes as he's a teenager and an elderly lady his neighbour comes up to him and complains about her her glasses she thinks she needs to go to the optician and he says to her what what why do you need to go to the opt why do you need new glasses she says because because because with these glasses I think they're not strong enough I can't tell the difference anymore from a distance between white people and black people and it's that sort of a line of this elderly lady just actually feeling she's able to share such a thing with this young man it's an extraordinary searing book um and it's not I'm not like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson that the last person I've spoken to I hope is is the the person who communicates what I like most but I mean the books that I've read stick with me the one writer I I I would say that I keep coming back to because it's partly that same technique that Claudia describes of innocent I think what you're saying Claudia is not imposing on the reader your own passions emotions and conclusions but creating a space through the presentation of what you're doing into which each reader can go and imagine and live and connect in their own way which is what attracts me very much in a writer and the person who does that for me is a an Austrian writer called Stefan Zweig who deals with the most painful and complex issues the book I would say to Derek to run to read for the parallel for our times is is the world of yesterday um by Stefan Zweig published posthumously um two years after he committed suicide uh in 1942 and it describes Europe of the 30s a particular Europe but Europe of the 30s um Claudia the next question is from Lucia who has asked why you put the references on the left side of the text and not at the end of the book in just us I I in creating the structure of the book um I wanted to actively engage the idea of fake facts or fake news um that are current impeach president um kept putting forward when presented with an actual fact and so I created this conversation between the verso and recto pages where the notes were meant to complicate and inform the uh the conversations the recorded conversations and so that was intentional I didn't want them at the back of the book as a source of reference but rather side by side as a kind of um conversation in and of itself between what we think we know and what actually exists in the world um but to go back to um food's question you know the book that I've been thinking about a lot is The Return by Hisham Matar I don't know if you read that book but I I love that book and I love it partly because it isn't about truth it's about it is in many ways about memory and the impossibility of um of getting justice um and and I love in the book the way that at times people will tell him things um to make him feel better you know to out of a generosity out of humanness um of wanting to give him something that they perceive he has lost and how memory becomes a tool in that book that is is used either to deceive or to um or to to impart compassion um and whether it's false memory or created memory or imagined memory um becomes irrelevant at a certain point I think we've reached the end of our evening we managed to end it on my favorite note which is reading recommendations so thank you Claudia thank you Philippe um thank you to everyone who sends in questions and over to you Molly is Molly here I am here I'm thank you so much Claudia, Philippe and Fatima I think I can um I can speak for everyone that in saying that that was kind of the best way that you could possibly start off the final month of one of the worst years of most of our lives so thank you so much um if you want to come to events like these not that any event would ever be like this um but if you want to come to events like these for free please join the Royal Society of Literature membership starts at 40 pounds a year and gives you free access to all the RSL's events our publications and our book groups our final event of this year will be on Monday next week in the broadcast of turn turn turn a conversation between Allie Smith and Marina Warner provides the score to a specially commissioned film by Sarah Wood to explore Allie Smith's luminous quartet of novels completed this year Sarah Wood has asked both writers to choose images and figures from the last months of isolation as winter draws in and we move closer to a new year we all need to explore the revolutionary art and artists who can return the imagination to us light up these dark times and open new possibilities for a way forward the film will be broadcast online next Monday and it will be broadcast one time only tickets are pay what 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that we'll all be able to come together in person soon and until then good night thank you