 All right, let's give these ladies a round of applause. I'm going to introduce them momentarily. I don't know about you, but I'm excited. I've read all of these books. These are all, I mean, I'll read a little bit of their bios in a minute, but these are all award-winning women, but more importantly, they're really, I think what it is, is they're intelligent. Their work is moving, it's relevant. And I hope that we learn something today. We're going to have a conversation with them. Is that OK? You guys aren't really talkative. You guys are something else. I must be in England. This is not Trinidad. This can't be right. We're going to have a conversation with them. Is that OK? OK, we're linemen. We're linemen now. OK. Yeah? So they're all going to read for five minutes because I want to give you a little taste of their books. I have their books here. By the way, by show of hands, who's bought their books? So I want to show you what we have. So I had to, how do you say this one? The diagram is the five points of this. Something. Who's got this book here? Who's got this one? All right, you need to get this book. This is a world-winning book here. Who's got Shame on Me? Who's got that? OK, OK, I see the rest of you. All right, who's got this one? The Fortune Men. I wish I wrote this. I wish I wrote this. All right, so look, I'm going to give you a chance. We're going to get to know them. You're going to realize, man, I should get this book and then you're going to go buy the books, right? OK, cool. All right, here we go. So, to my left, we have Nadifa. She, a book was Is the Fortune Men. We're going to get into that momentarily. I want you to think of like five minutes of reading that you could probably do at the end. You want to go at the end? You can go at the end. All right, we'll give you that. All right, cool. We got over there in the middle, Tessa. And Shame on Me, that's your book. Amazing. Indeed. Yeah, it's like a mirror. I want to actually give you all like a cocktail because you move in a different way. Your book is kind of like smooth. Your book is like a mirror. It makes you see yourself. Sometimes when you take a cocktail, you suddenly realize this is the meaning of life. Your book is kind of like that. And then your book is kind of like, you know, when you meet Yoda and you realize he gives you like metaphors and wisdoms and science. It's kind of like that. And that is your book right here. You're going to give us five minutes. I want to actually start with you, but I want to, first of all, read what a boundary is. Because I think what all of your works do in a different way is they make us realize our existence as black bodies, our existence in the world, our existence within our spirit self. But let's just figure out what a boundary is. A boundary is a real or imagined line that marks the edge or the limit of something. This is what their work does. It makes us aware of the boundary. It makes us pass through the boundary. It makes us see the other side of the boundary. All right, so I want to take a quote from your book because I think it's kind of, and I marked it today. I hope I remember it, right? Oh, like, it goes, this is the line. I've kind of chopped it up, but it goes, what is I but always to have been there? But to always to have been here. Doesn't that mark the boundary? What is I to have always been there but to always have been here? I think what their work does is make us look. So while we're talking, while we're discussing, while we're maybe laughing or crying, I want to know what boundaries you're going through in your mind. Is that okay? Make sense? I'm trying to build a context. You just, you're just looking at me. I'm a bit nervous. All right, so let's start with the poet. Let's start with a poet. Okay. Are you ready? I am. So I was actually planning to read perhaps from my forthcoming book, which is not poetry. You want to read that? Although some stories do behave like poems, but since you did the, what is I boundary? I'll read from here. I'll just read a couple of pages from the disgraphist. I say, disgraphist. I think diagram. Diagram, whatever feels good to you. So this book is dedicated to the impossible citizens of the sick world. Is it not enough to enter ending oneself in the harbing road and the fires in us blot the coasts that reject us? And we sugar the desert we screamed frantic for fullness. If fragile, if symbols, if nothingness, at first a doubt escalating our verbings. If still ourselves a thing to become, past wavering interests in peace given only for spilling. Recall that face, which is no face, a craved choice. Eureka in someone's drawn God, I and the next could praise now. If I were not set ablaze enough. If that morning I hadn't the thirst to lean into the world with an ear to a mouth begging for the happened thing for something disguised. What could prove this dust is freshly mouthed. Not some cyclic newly vaporized empire settling its faithless wages. Eyes masses, these bent backs. Enough. Moenimale, manile, that never-ending suku. C'est sa nous, this is it. Our dead land, raw as the last bomb, leaves our storied hand. Qui tenu la? Which mother te mangeish? Look, we, a conversation, be pointing ceaselessly homeward. Whose earth is left without a means to unwant us in place? Why we sing back anyway, the chaotic corners of mind after wretched mind. Who is left after the dissenteries, after the cities and the ruining magic we no longer believe? A dusk we no longer need. What is I? But to always have been there. I've asked it. What is I? I in an own place. Thank you. So, I wanna ask this of all of you, but particularly with your work, there's something you do with boundaries, but you're looking at the interior self and you're doing something with the language where you are stressing the lyric and you're also doing something in which you take our mind into the surreal world. Is this something you do intentionally? Is it, you know, there's something about you. It's almost like you're almost like a, you're inventing language almost to an extent. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does. It is intentional because I don't, poetry is not tolerant of the kind of falseness or the falsity that says, oh, I just sort of happened into, you know, poetry puts pressure on, you know, our being as matter in the world, but it just happens to do that with the voice, with music, with language. And so one has to be extremely intentional. And the reason that I put such intent into the remaking, as you say, is because that is the world I found. It's a world that needs remaking. It's a world that needs us to plot our investment in something called the future, right? And not to be over-determinate about it. You know, it's a kind of invitation. And so the breaking of language on the page and the sort of molding something back together is an invitation to trust the reader, to risk ourselves, right? And to sort of make that gesture to what, you know, something better than what we found. You hear that? The breaking of language. You hear it? You hear what I'm saying? Geez, I'll tell you. All right, so in the same way, I want to kind of pass to you, Tessa. Like, you know, I read your book. I scrambled through it on Monday. And I think as a society as, or I mean, I'm going to generalize here, as black bodies, it's easy to, or just as human beings, we can easily avoid shame. What gave you the courage or, well, better still, the integrity to question that, particularly as a memoir? It would be easier just to do it conceptually, but why as a memoir? Why was that necessary? Yeah, thank you. First of all, I have to apologize for my very weak voice. I just got my voice back yesterday after a week of a cold and it really was a cold. Remember those? They actually really exist. And, but yes, so if I get croaky, that's why. You know, the shame of this book and of the body is it's about the shame of slavery and denture, but it's also the shame of, you know, Kinesi's talking about remaking things. It's also the shame that we still actually live in the structure that caused those things to happen. In other words, the central metaphor for the book is the plantation and that we still, in my views, are still living on the plantation. That hierarchy that took place that was resulted in my body is a hierarchy that still exists. And so I love the breaking of the language because, you know, the language is also a boundary, you know, so breaking it and reconstructing it and structures that need to be reconstructed, that's what the shame in this book is about as well. Yeah, could we, do you have something you could share with us? I do. It might be six minutes rather than five, if that's okay. We got Rob, she only gave us two minutes. I know, I'm gonna take one of her minutes. You are more than willing to take six. Thank you. This book is actually, the subtitle of the book is an Anatomy of Race and Belonging. So the one that's on your books there, it's not right, don't think about, think of anatomy when you read memoir. But it's structured around an experiment, an anatomy of the body, my body in particular. And it's kind of writing back against race science of the 17th century, which was the kind of thing that helped to make the slavery and indenture possible. So it's structured in parts like an experiment. So it's hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and finding. So I'm gonna read from hypothesis in a tiny bit from experiment. A young Chinese woman, so young, nearly still a girl, runs through a field of sugarcane. Her cotton shift is torn, her hair wild, there is fear on her face, my grandmother. She's escaping something terrible. Her legs are scraped by sharp stalks. Blood is dripping from her knee. I imagine her eyes are streaming with tears. She is running because in her countryside village in Demirara, British Guyana, she has just been raped by her uncle. I imagine my Indian ancestor as a strong woman, perhaps originally from Ud, modern Uttar Pradesh, who could squat easily, hunched over green, sword-like leaves sprouting from emerging stalks. She is exhausted, pulling weeds out of unfamiliar soil in British Guyana. Thin, fragile from the 112-day journey by ship, she is lucky to have survived on a daily ration of beef or pork, suet, a biscuit, a few raisins. My Arawak ancestor is in a dugout quarry on the Bora Bora River that runs through the Iwakrama forest. She paddles past a giant otter sunning itself on a tree stump. My Portuguese ancestor, perhaps from Madeira, arrives among the first free immigrants to the colony in 1835. In her small Hessean sack, she has hidden 20 delicate squares of lace that she stitched while watching her father haul his fishing nets from the sea. There's a rumor about my French ancestor, but she will never confirm for anyone in the colony that her father had a chalice and a silver ring with a hexagon pattern, the star of David, hidden in his suitcase when he arrived from France. My African great-great-grandmother is lost amongst trees that don't know her name, don't speak her language. Trees that have erased her, she can't find the path that will take her to the clearing. She is getting weak. I reach out to take her by the hand. My Scottish great-great-great-grandmother takes her last breath in East Lothian and the book she has been reading falls across her chest. She never knows about the brown women with their hands in the soil. Experiment. Eight years old, I'm sitting near the back of the room in the grade three classroom of my suburban Toronto elementary school. My desk is close to the window and I'm easily distracted by the birds, one particular bird that preens itself on a branch, its feathers shuddering up and down. I'm not paying much attention to what the teacher is saying. We've been reading a book out loud together and I haven't been asked to read. I feel off the hook set free to dream. A few minutes into daydreaming, I feel a change of tone in the teacher's voice and the class goes quiet. I snap out of my reverie. There's a question in the air. I look around at my classmates who are looking at each other in search of an answer. Anyone know what that word means, the teacher says? Oh, I think. I better pay attention because there's a new word and I would need to know it. Does anyone know what Negro means? Good question, I think. What does that mean? I continue to look around at my classmates to see if anyone is gonna come up with the answer or even a guess. The teacher seems anxious. This word has weight. Kenneth Percy puts up his hand. The teacher invites him to speak. Yeah, Tessa, he says, as he points towards me at the back of the room. Everyone in the class turns to face me. I freeze, my mind goes blank, and all that is going on in my body is a low fizz like a misfiring electric circuit. As I now realize, my teacher tries to rescue me from something she herself sees as a slur, a word that is fine in a book, but not in a person. Oh no, not Tessa, she says, to comfort me in all who might worry about who's in their, what's in their midst. The other kids continue to stare at me. Doing her job as the class's moral compass, she thinks fast, no, Tessa's something else. The misfiring electric circuit spews shock through my cheeks, my arms, and my legs, which begin to shake. What are you, Tessa? What am I? I have no idea what she's asking. I feel as if I failed a major test, I should have been paying attention, I should know how to answer this. You know, people are certain things, she says, still trying to help, but wounding me deeper and deeper with every second, she allows the class's eyes to remain on me. Things like, say, Mexican, she waits, but I have nothing. Brazilian, Filipino, she carries on offering possibilities she sees in my face, but in that moment, I hear only words that describe all the things that everyone else in the room isn't. She waits, the circuit hums, and it becomes so unbearable that I fold my arms on the desk and put my head onto them. I go away deep inside myself. I don't remember where I go for how long, but when I look up again, everyone in the class has gone to recess and the teacher is wiping the board. She doesn't try to speak to me as I get up from my desk and leave the room. Heavier now, saddled with something corrosive. There, with my head in my arms, I learned that I could disappear, I could become invisible. I wondered why the teacher had not asked anyone else in the class the question, why my best friend didn't have to answer it. I kept these questions and my invisibility to myself. I understood without being able to articulate it that language had the power to change me completely with the utterance of one word. I had known what black was, our extended family and friends were an array of shades and I had known where I was from, but that wasn't what I had been asked. Negro was a word like species, a scientific word that clever people knew, but I didn't. I began to pay attention to the power of words. In being asked what I was and realizing I didn't know, I set off to find out. I believe it was the moment I became a writer. I think part of the wisdom of your book is that you, through a narrative, show the lunacy of race. I think that's what you do. It's interesting, so I'm just gonna call you the poet, the Muemoisress, just for context, just to make it easy. So the poet kind of took us on an internal world. The Muemoisress kind of took us on the outward self. They spoke about how we're made to disappear into society. I'm now gonna take you to the novelist. And what I admire about your work particularly is the vastness of scale of the world that you create for this central character. Oftentimes, as black bodies, our narratives are very small as you were talking about those, this kind of disappearance. I'm just amazed at, like, this could be a film, this could be a series, this could be a serious epic. How did you, before you read something, how did you create that world? Because it's so vast, it's a world that I could relate to on so many different levels. In what ways? You know, the Arabic world, Mu, I've lived in it. It's something that's commonplace to me. A lot of times when it's seen here, it's a threat, but a lot of my friends are in that world and it just felt familiar. When you go through that sense of loss when you're in, where is it, no, in Wales, that sense of how you have to navigate a city, do I carry a weapon, do I not carry a weapon? How do I approach people? I was literally talking to my friend Roger today and he was saying, I realized that when I, because I'm in this body, he's calling his Trinidadian body, because I'm in this body, there's a way I assume that people are friendly because we are a friendly people. But then when people are not friendly to you and they treat you in a way that you are beneath, it is, even though you get used to it, it is always a shock. And what you realize about this central character is ultimately they're loving, they want to love their wife, they want to love their children, they want to love their, his friend, his name, Berlin, that's right, yeah. But the world keeps showing him ways to hate him and he prays to God, you know, all these things. So I'll just, you took me across the world or to places I could, I would say they're the same, but I could understand, does that make sense? No, for sure it does. And I think that I didn't have to fabricate that, just by recognizing the reality of Mahmood Mutan's life. He died in his mid-20s, but already he had lived this fast life on this fast canvas and many men of his generation, immigrant men in particular, I say men because the women were less likely to leave their homes at that point from the part of the world that I'm from. They all, you know, nowadays you see them and they're these tiny men with like the anoraks, you know, walking from one small locality to another, but they've lived fast lives. So I was just trying to recognize that and think of it as they were explorers, you know, they were encountering things for the first time with very little background information. They didn't know where England was, they didn't care. They just keep walking until they found something that interested them and would hold them for a certain amount of time. Wow, can we hear a bit of the magic? Sure, so this is from Mahmood's first time as a stoker. So he worked in the engine rooms of steamships in the 1940s, 50s, as my father did and it was a terrible job, dangerous job, in the bowels of the ship, in amongst ridiculous amounts of heat and labor, but it was also an exciting thing for him. It wasn't until Mahmood's third voyage when his muscles were little hillocks atop his fine bones that he made his way into the bowels of the ship where the real men worked. Still not furnace material, he'd been put to work in the coal bunkers as a trimmer, shuttling coal to the boilers where stokers almost limp with exhaustion, threw it into the flames. The coal bunkers were pitch black and illuminated with just a single movable lamp. The floor roiled and pitched with the Atlantic waves and the trimmer staggered about as the coal slipped beneath their feet. On that ship there, there had been a fire in the bunker, but not any normal blaze. There were no flames to see or smoke to smell, just a heat so intense from deep within the black heap that it forced the bulge in the steel bulkhead. The old Yemeni trimmer, Nasir, who could taste the quality of coal by biting into it, said it happened sometimes when too much new coal was powered on top of old or when the bunker was sitting idle too long. He spoke of coal as if it was a fond but volatile friend. His bow legs blackened up to his baggy shorts. Yalla, yalla, no way to put out the fire but to burn it, he shouted, shoving Mahmood out of the way to rush through with his sharp lipped willbarrow. They were joined on some watches by a Welshman who sang so deeply that Mahmood felt his voice in his ribs. At other times, a pair of identical Somali twins from Barbarra, Raghay and Robli swung their shovels beside him. Those days when the three Somalis were entombed and fell into the same hypnotic rhythm, the bunker felt almost like a mystical space. Their shovels plunging and flying up to the same beat. Old work songs from the desert pulling their horse voices together in low monotonous tones, sweat, the pain, the heat, exercising every last thought from their minds and makeshift czar at the bottom of the sea. He would clamber into his bunk in a 10-man cabin choked with cigarette smoke and stale sweat, feeling as if he had been battered with hammers, his eyes wincing from the brightness of the light but he fell asleep, still elated, his pulse in tune with the thump of the motors. Yalla, yalla, no way to put out the fire, but to burn it. Those were words to live by. All right, so I don't know about you, but I'm lucky because I got to have the books sent to me as PDFs, but I'm buying, I had your book already, I'm buying your two books and if you guys aren't joining me, you're not serious about writing. I just want to put it out there. But I want to ask you now, now we're going to have a conversation. I'm just going to be the catalyst. We just really kind of want to hear you. Is that cool with you guys? I'm really interested. I mean, we speak language, we use language, you're all from different parts of the world. Is it St. Lucia, Guyana, Somalia? And I want to know, when did language, not just enter your life, because it's always there in our life, we're born into language, but when did you decide to take it on as something that you would forge in your life and can you tell us a little bit about that story? Well, however you want to begin or however big or small you want to be about it. I think I did say that here, actually. You know, that in that moment of not understanding, I had to, that was my quest. And then the book is very much about language as the thing that separates us and language and the possibility of language in terms of poetry, that kind of resistance to that separation that, can you see I was talking about? You know, that also there's healing in the language as well as separation and rupture and offence and all of those things. We have to be very careful about language and the language. Say a bit more about there's a healing in language. Tell a little bit more about that. Well, you know, if there are new, if there, I'll go back to what I said about the new structures that we need to think about making. You know, we are writers and we can imagine whole worlds where the laws of physics do not exist. You know, certainly we could reimagine a new way of living in this way that we have right now because it's not working. You know, it's really dead, it's really gone. We're killing, lots of us are killing things. And so I think there's potential and hope in language if I'm to use that word hope very carefully, very carefully. Thank you, Tiff. I grew up bilingual at home speaking Somali and in the outside world speaking English. My father spoke something like five or six different languages. My mother's never really wanted to learn English. So language has been this complicated thing to wrangle with throughout my life. And with this novel in particular, I think with every work, you try and set yourself a particular challenge. And in this one, I wanted to tackle dialogue and language and the politics of that. You smashed it. Thank you. Thank you. So Mahmood is someone who speaks broken English, whatever that means, but he also speaks Arabic, Swahili, Somali, Hindi. So he's not, there's an impression in Britain in particular that if you speak broken English, that you're less intelligent, that you're somehow inferior. But Mahmood is not inferior in any way and that's not part of his self impression. But in this context, especially in the trial, and I wanted to use the actual words from the case file in the novel, because there you have this man who can make himself very well understood in English. But he's doing strange things in the court case. He's being belligerent sometimes. He's being sarcastic, which, you know, as someone who's grown up in this country, you know that's a bad idea. But he's also trying to make sense of this English that's very different from the English of a working class multiracial world that he's part of. It's a barrister's English and upper class English. And that's what's being used as a weapon against him. He's trying to navigate that language and I think that's still very commonplace now. You know, there are these different Englishes that work beside each other. Never mind the other languages that we bring with us from the places that we're connected to. You know, I'm glad you brought it up, but that chapter about the court case, oh, the way it's written, fantastic. You really get a sense that you're there. I don't know, in fact that's something I want to jump to you again about, you know, how you came into language. But one of the things I'm impressed with all your books is the forms that you chose in which to tell the books. Because you all chose different forms, but it was so relevant. And I just want to know how you arrived at that. But before we jump into that, how did language occur to you? Because you use language in a very, very... You're like a mad scientist. That's true. I'll take that. A question. There's a certain kind of person you encounter in the world that says to you, if you were to get a superpower, what would it be? You know this person, how many of us have had this question thrown at us? Yeah, right? So there's that kind of person who will say, what would your superpower be? And I've always felt so uncomfortable answering that question, not because of a failure to imagine. I will... I love the most fantastical things. Yumi the Hulk and his immense anger and super strength and whatever. But it was just a discomfort with what I saw in the question that wanted me to go a little bit deeper than the surface response that's sort of under the auspices of the comics and the superheroes. And then at one point, someone asked me that question again and immediately what came out of my mouth was, I would want to speak every language on earth. That would be a superpower. I would like to walk into anywhere on the planet, the most remote jungle, the most fantastic city, and simply absorb the language and speak it. And I think I learned very early that language is a power. That language is a doing in the world. We do language, right? As Toni Morrison says. You do language, that's right. And more and more, I often bring up my grandmother, who she was a wonderful storyteller and singer and the folk tales that she would tell my brother and I every night. That is where the kind of testing ground for my love of language and story, that's what it is. But even beyond all of that, when I came to the mature understanding that what we do in the world, how we animate the world in ourselves, language is actually the testing ground for it. You are categorized in language first, you know? And without language, in a certain sense, things don't happen, you know? And so that power, that doing, for me, it keeps me really resolute in the work of making language, making poetry and story. I want to say something. It seems like in all your bodies, actually, I want to ask you a question quickly. So you start with a poem at the beginning of the book. Yeah. Because even though I've sectioned them into the novelist, the poet, the memoirist, that's a very rough way of categorizing you. You play with all forms of language I've noticed within your works. What works inspire you, what informs that? I'm interested to know, because to me, I could I could linear your work and I could make really dope poems out of this. And I probably will, like they said that section with the thing I'm going to be using that. It was it was inspiring. You know, the way that you look at shame, because that's something that poets try to do. They try to go to the inner space, the uncomfortable space beyond us. And then, like I told you, you do something with the lyric. It's some of the people talk about the way you use it's almost like you're rubbing language together or those languages together and seeing what it can bring. So I really want to know, like, how do you how do you play? How does that make sense? How do you play with language? You do play, I think we all play. Yeah, that's the fun thing. This was, you know, considering essentially of it's based on a miscarriage of justice, a real life historical miscarriage of justice. It was a very pleasurable book to write because I did feel like I was playing. I was playing with different languages, different scenes, you know, the section just after the one I read. He's in Brazil for the first time in Rio and he's flirting with a girl in a bar, pushing the boundaries of the world, the Muslim, you know, conservative world that he had been raised in and drifting away from it. Being a young man, you know, it's very different from my own experience in the sense of freedom that came along with that. Even though, you know, it's 1940s as a black man, there was a limited amount of freedom, but he's finding the freedoms that are there for him to take. So it was a really fun book to write. And you're trying to, I always think of writing as like spinning plates. You're spinning lots of different plates at the same time. And in this case, I just was like, I didn't have a limit to the number of plates I was willing to play with. How about you guys? Yeah, I mean, we're all, we all write different forms, you know, and I think that I'm primarily a novelist. So that's, so it's for me to write nonfiction that isn't somehow made up. It's very difficult. So, you know, that first section, the only real person in that section is my grandmother, the other people I had to invent, imagine, because their records are not, are lost, you know, there is no, there are no real people attached to them, but they come from stories in my family. And so that kind of play was important, even though as a piece of nonfiction, and the play of doing an experiment, a dissection on my own body, was also, you know, fun, in a weird way. Mm-hmm, I get that. You know, part of it for me is that I get bored easily. And so I find that I'm always pushing against the boundary of boredom. When I begin something, I get to a point where it has to shift. It has to change, or my attention dissipates, right? And so it is a kind of scoring, the kind of playing. Like music? Yeah, like music. I hear language, and it enters all of my senses as a kind of music, you know, and so I follow that because I'm interested in very difficult things, you know, the things that are difficult and challenging to talk about, to communicate, to think about, that demands a lot. And so I'm always doing that kind of improvisation where I come up against the limit of what I know. And so to move beyond it, I have to sort of trust the material itself, trust the material of language itself. And that occurs to me as a kind of scoring, a kind of music making. That's amazing. All right, so I got loads of questions. I'm really trying to pace myself because I'm getting mad excited. And I do want to see if we can give you a few questions. So if you have one or two questions, we don't have as much time as we thought we did. But if you have some good questions, not essays, questions, if you notice I'm asking questions and shutting up, would like you to do the same. But I've got a few more questions for you guys, ladies. So everyone thinks that writing is really easy because it's like, you write, get shortlisted for the booker. You write, win the Griffith. You write, win the booker's prize. It's like, but there's actually a craft to it. How do you, how did you learn it? How do you improve it for the writers of us in the crowd? Well, you know, I think I teach creative writing and I make my life out of teaching creative writing, but I never took a creative writing course in my life. And I think that I learned through trial and error. I learned through a lot of sort of alone, sad moments of living with characters that I thought no one would ever, ever see or read. So, but reading, you know, reading is the key. So that reading kept me company and kept me knowing that I could do this. You know, and when I finished my first book, and this sounds really arrogant, but when I first my first book, I thought, wow, this is how Michael and Dutch have felt when he finished his first book. And I felt it kind of like, wow, I know what that feels like. And so it's like, it's reading. It was moving. Reading. Reading, yeah. I agree. I think I didn't do a creative writing class or anything like that either. And I just taught myself how to write by reading other books and very widely. So nonfiction, fiction, poetry, whatever. Film, music, all of these, I think, artistic forms of expression can feed into the way you write, the way you envisage things. I kind of always see what I'm writing as a film happening in my head that I'm almost trying to transcribe. I agree that you're also trying to fight boredom because writing can be boring. And sometimes you can lose the, I feel like it takes a lot of time. For me, it's like you're in a space, you're in a mental space. And when you're deep in that, everything is kind of tangible and manageable and you can write without pain. Do you know what I call that? For me, I call it the poetic mind. So there's like the D for the, like who we see here, we're like, oh, you look great, but then there's the D for the writer. And they are not interested in you. You're in a dressing gown. Yeah. You're at home. Yes. You know, you haven't eaten. You're just very... They don't care about what's going on the outside world. They just want to get to it. Yeah. And you have to find a way to get into that space. Yeah. Because it doesn't last for long. And it's easy to be thrown out of it. And for me, it happens in bursts and then you have to stop. And it might stop for months or a year. And then somehow I work myself back into that state. Right. But this book, it wasn't like that. Because it'd been in my mind for so long, years and years and years, and the research happened in a quick burst. So I just sat down and it all came out. Wow. So I think as well with the more books you write, the more you realise that the marinating time, when you're not actively writing, but it's just somehow working in the back of your brain, that's the most important part of the process for me now. Are you talking to someone when you write? No. Do you have a reader, an ideal reader in mind? Like, is there an unspoken someone? It's just myself. It's what I'm interested in. You're the first reader then. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't let anyone else read in the early stages, because I think it takes you off the path that you're on. Mmm. You have to read like no one's, you have to write like no one's going to read apart from you. Not care. Yeah. Almost like not care? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Did you want to say something? No, I mean that totally makes sense. They've said a lot already. Except I did study creative writing. There was always one. Yeah. Tell us more. And I do teach creative writing. But I think all of us innately have a sense of that art of story. It's deep in us. It's our blood and flesh and bones. Because that is how we move through the world. We make story endlessly. You cannot possibly encounter someone else in the world outside of story. There's always something informing that. So we have an innate sense of what that is. In the classroom, what I privilege is, okay, we need an understanding of what is at stake. What are the implications of doing this work called creative writing? All writing is creative. But you know, we have to categorize to help us manage. And to have a genuine kind of curiosity about ideas. Because it's a way that we try and think about ourselves and each other and the world. Just pause. I'm just taking a line out of your book. Which you say that again because it goes like this. Like a clock that bears repeating. Could you say that again, please? Yeah, like a clock that bears repeating. Yes, we just have to have a genuine interest and commitment to curiosity. Because that is where we shatter a lot of the horrible things that we sort of drag through the world. Because the world we've found, and I keep saying the world we found, which is different than the earth. The world is the thing you make. It's a makeable thing. Right? We sort of enter into all of these preset conditions. These preset structures that we have to sort of find ways to destroy. Because a lot of them are destructive in and of themselves. And because we continue to exist in them, as Tessa was saying earlier, they can invisibilize what language is doing. They can invisibilize what these stories are themselves doing. So I think we constantly have to be interested in ideas. And but all the other craft stuff, we have like an innate sense of what that is. Like Bob Marley's early producer had no formal training in music. He'd be like, give me one of them. You know, I'm good at it. And then one of them, boom, boom. Right? So it's, we know, we know the thing. Well, James Brown's drummer didn't know how to read music. He was just like, he could hear it? Yeah. And then he'll play it. Yeah, we know, we know it. Yeah. I didn't ever expect to become a writer. My first novel came out of conversations with my father, and his life story was so interesting that I thought, let me quickly jot it down as a family history. 15 pages, something that the grandkids could read later on. And it just kept growing and growing and growing. And that was the first experience I had of doing that, of looking for that thing. And it was the freedom, I think, I found in it. I was also trying to work out my own, where do I fit in the world? The world. Who am I? You know, what's going on? Why am I here? What's happened? All of that. So you're trying to answer these big questions. I'm really impressed with the stories, the way that you tell story. I have such a busy life right now. I don't know how I squeezed all your books back in, but I'm really glad that I read them. We have about 15 minutes. I just want to quickly point to the audience and see if they have some questions. And then I might ask a last one, and then we'll end this. But I don't really want to end it. And I'm really glad I got to talk to you. Can we give them a quick round of applause? You might only have time for maybe one or two questions. If you have a question, please form it as a question, not a statement, not an essay, not a diatribe. Does anyone have a question for these beautiful ladies? This one there. Yes. The two, yeah. Take the mic. Ask both of them together, and then we'll see if we can get them to be asked. Does your awareness of the power of language influence how you speak or not speak to different audiences about your work? That's a good question. Great question. I've never been asked that before. Yeah. You don't all have to answer it. One or some of you can answer it, yeah. And then the second question. This is a question for Nadeefah. My Somali students at Goldsmiths adore you and Vosan Shiri's work. But when they write about your work, they link it to Somali folk tales and these incredible mothers that appear in the folk tales that are also very much part of family heritage or old heritage. And I wondered if you were also influenced in the way in which you view the world of your characters by these very fundamental foundational tales that are part of Somali culture. So we've got one for you personally. I don't know if you want to start with that or... No, I'll do that at the end. Do the end, yeah. Let's go to the first question. I love that question. And I think, yes, I do modify the language that I'm communicating to different audiences. I did this event in Toronto with... The interlocutors were 17, 15 and 19, and that was such a joy to actually go out of my academic head and push some of those boundaries for them. But to go out of that and to talk... To try to engage them in these kinds of questions around the body and around race and around belonging because they connected to that so automatically. And so I wanted to... I did change how I talked about it rather than conceptually, quite personally. Yeah, absolutely. That's a terrific question. And I think at any serious rate I would have to do that thing you're talking about. But it's interesting that I'm only thinking about it in the context of an audience as you're asking it right now. So thank you for that. Yes, I do. And it's the thing that I do all of the time. All of the time. Like, if I was having a conversation with Tessa on Adifa earlier on, the register is different. Yeah, the texture of the conversation is very different. So yes, I think one of the things that the context of books and making books and making art from books, what it does is it puts a different kind of pressure on how we communicate the ideas and how we communicate the form and how we communicate ourselves through that as well. So it's happening on all of those levels. And yes, yes, I have to constantly adjust how and why I speak to different audiences. And the way you listen for them, right? Yes, yes. Sorry, just back to the idea of boundary. Because a book can be a boundary that some people can't crack, can't get through. And so it's very important that it doesn't exist as a kind of sacred object. I think it has to be out in the world and it has to be accessible, even if it's not about making it accessible. So it's about the conversations. And do you want to answer your question? Yeah, I'll answer that question very quickly. So yes, I think we probably all do, we have to, depending on the audience and their own background, sometimes you go to a country where it's very different to the places I'm writing about, but they find something that they connect to, whether that's a civil war or religion or whatever it might be. And that allows them an access into the novel that maybe another audience doesn't have. But I think something that you, when you're writing, it's a very private activity. You're talking to yourself really. And then when you're in events like this, in different places, you realize what a public activity it is. And the politics that are just there in your novel now have to be talked about in this different way to people who maybe don't get it at all or could be very hostile. So it is, it's a challenging process sometimes. Thank you for the question about the Somali folk tales. I didn't, I don't think I grew up with that many Somali folk tales. There was one about a witch, there was another one about a Somali queen who had all the men castrated. So there were a few, and they were generally, I think, demonizing women. But the women that I found interesting for my own writing were in my family. So my grandmother, who I'm named after in Adifa, she was this incredible woman, my father's mother, and she took him to Aden where she was working in a coffee factory and kept him alive in very, very difficult circumstances and then moved to Eritrea where she didn't bother learning any of the local languages, just lived her life, married quite a few times, became a fortune teller. So these really interesting women are, I guess I'm kind of orbiting them, but funnily, most of the stories have been about men, but the men made by these women. We're almost at time. I have just one more question, but before I do that, I just want to kind of remind you some of the wisdoms that these women have given us. I mean, I'm a happy, proud black man, but I will say this, our culture is held in our women, and it's clear that our culture has a good future if these are the writers of the future. So please give them a round of applause for being those writers. I'd also say I have a challenge for you all, which is something that you ladies wrote up, which is we only exist because of story. We interact because of story, and I'm interested to know what stories you've gathered today, what stories you will share. I hope that some of those stories will be these books. I'm definitely going to be buying your books, and I want a signed copy from you and a signed copy of your mind. But the last question I want to ask you before we wrap up, and I don't know if you have any questions for the audience, because sometimes you want to know what your audience is thinking, and you can do that, you can hijack the situation. But I know with books, even when you're writing, like you've written both all award-winning books, there's always something you're struggling with, and even when the book does well, you're not sure that you got it right until you're like, oh, I guess I got it right. What were you struggling with inside of the fortune-men? I'm happy with it. I wasn't particularly happy with the previous novels, but this one I felt like, yeah, I did do what I wanted to do, but probably the biggest question around it was the ethics of it. Yes. Because I've written about real people before, but they were in my family, so the parameters were clear. Yes. And it was such an emotional thing that you're navigating your own responses, and my father, he was right there, so I could also work out the parameters with him. But Mahmood, he died tragically 70, now it's 70 years ago. So I had the archive, but the archive was hostile to him. It had made him out to be a killer when he hadn't killed anyone. So it was reliable to a degree, but also something I was writing against. But then, okay, the murder victim's family and getting under someone's skin, which is the fun thing, that's the thing that you're trying to do with a novel, and the place where you're dealing with real trauma, real life trauma in real families who are around, who maybe don't talk about what happened, don't know what happened in great detail, and that's still the challenging thing to work out, what the parameters are. The book was definitely a success, and you definitely handled it well, but I totally understand what you're concerned with. How about yourself, Tessie? I think in a non-fiction, in a memoir, the minute you say I, it's never just I. It's everybody who made that I, and it's everybody who is in your family. It's very much my family's story, so their ethics is the same. The balance between the personal and the political and the literary were the things that I dealt with in terms of how much of myself do I need to give you so that you will go on this journey with me to these political and literary questions. So that part, and I think in the first draft of it, I was quite clinical rather than personal, and my editor says, where's the novelist? She would she disappear to give all that stuff to it? And because my family is implicated in it too, so they all read it before it went out. I guess that'll good. Announcement on this? So I had a central question, which stemmed from a great material disappointment. Sorry. Which sounded a bit like that. Good sound effects, I like it. Yeah, it was that kind of... Why the question, the central question being, how is one able to hold on to an identity called the self? In language, but also in the world, when what we have is, you know, we're dealing with the aftermath of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the world that that has made with its deepened and deepening structures of capitalist rapaciousness and nationalism, who belongs, who doesn't belong, how are you a person? That idea of the human that came out of European Enlightenment at the same time that slavery was happening, was taking shape. It's crazy isn't it? Okay, the deep ironies of living in that world and seeing what it has created and what our need to survive does, that forces us to participate in those things, even when we are deeply opposed to them, that you have to pay the bills, you know, that you need food in the pantry, you know, the gas prices are going up. And so that profound existential disappointment is what I was wrestling with in this book and pulling from all of the sort of categories that is put on the human and that the human is forced to be shaped by. And the question was, what's a better human? Like, how can we be elastic and say, definitely, we don't want this and we won't have it? But testing those ideas in here is another layer of disappointment because of like, okay, I see something, but how do we make it happen out here? Yeah. And so the struggle is always between that because for me, everything comes from the world. And then I sort of take it into that internal kind of investigation and then it's a kind of wish. And there's always a failure. There's always a failure because you end up with more questions than answers. But it's really the profound wish for a new human being and the one that doesn't destroy the planet and call that progress. Bravo. All right. We're just about on time. I just want to say a few things. One is, thank you, ladies. That was, I don't know about you, but I enjoy myself. I want to thank you all. I really hope you'll write more work. Is there other more book coming out? Slowly. Slowly. Always. Always. In May 2023. In May 2023. All right. We're going to hold on to that. All right. Before you go, before you go, we've got one more event, but I do want you to just thanks to the Borges Literature Festival. Please stay in touch with them. Please tweet. Please join their mailing list. They are a beautiful festival. So support that. I just want to thank one Trinidadian particularly because there was something that you said, Tessa, which is how language can be healing. And when I was about 19 years old, I used to go to the weekend arts college and there was a drama teacher called Martina Led. And what she did, for not just me, but for a lot of young black people, well, all people, not just black people there, but particularly a lot of young black people, is that she helped us understand what stories were and how to tell stories through our mouths, through our body, through language. And you're right. What you ladies are doing is healing, but I have to acknowledge that woman there, Martina Led. Please give her a round of applause. All right. So that's my Trini Flex. We are now officially finished for this section. We're going to just let them wrap up. I think we have a party to get ready for. Please buy their books. Please show them love and representation. Please stay in communication with them. These are some of the best writers of our time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was good. Thank you. That was lovely. That was great. Thank you. Thank you.