Kamila Shamsie, Bjoernson Lecturer 2017

Theme: You could’t make this up

Since last year, we’ve been living in a new age. The post-Brexit age. The post-truth age. The age of Trump. The age of the rise of the far-right. There was one world before 2016 and another world after it. These are the kinds of lines I’ve heard in the last year alongside the inevitable: you couldn’t make it up.

I have to say that as a writer of fiction, I take ‘you couldn’t make it up’ as a professional insult. Of course there are certain parts of reality that you probably couldn’t get away with making up in fiction - did David Bowie AND Prince AND George Michael AND Princess Leia AND John Berger all have to die within this tumultuous year? Isn't that carrying the portends of doom a little too far?

But let’s go back to: you couldn’t make it up. What is implied by that line? It isn’t really an insult aimed at writers. Rather, it’s an in expression of incredulity. ‘Can this really be happening?’ is the sentiment buried within it. Buried further within that is this admission: we didn’t know this was going to happen; we didn’t know this is the world we’ve been living in.

We didn’t know this is the world we’ve been living in.

I don’t know how this line echoes with a doctor or a banker or a musician or a bus conductor or a visa official or a nightclub bouncer. I do know that for a novelist the echo sounds like failure. It is our business to know the world we’ve been living in simply because it is our business to observe, to witness.

One of the most observant writers of the world that I know is the Pakistani-British novelist Nadeem Aslam. Recently, I heard him speak at a festival about his latest novel The Golden Legend and about the world we live in, and the world we’ve been living in. He talked about someone close to him - another British-Pakistani - who works in a bank and sometimes has to turn down certain

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customer requests in accordance with bank regulations - say, for a loan. She said when she does so - and if the customer is white, and particularly is the customer is a white man - she starts to count ‘1…2…3…’ - counting the seconds until he comes out with a phrase of racist abuse. This is not the reality of the last year, it’s been the reality of her whole working life. Aslam finished telling this story and said, ‘when people say, in reference to the last year or so, now the gloves are off - my response is, the gloves have always been off. Now the mask is coming off too. What’s changed is how blatant people feel they can now be. That’s all.’

A few days before the Brexit vote I was in a room with other writers and I said I thought the ‘Leave’ vote might well win. The polls said otherwise, but I thought there was a 50-50 chance that it could go either way. Everyone else in the room told me it wouldn’t happen. Was it a coincidence - I think it probably wasn’t - that i was the only person in the room who had entered the country as a migrant in the preceding decade, and had viewed with great personal investment not only the right-wing tabloids’ relentless campaign against migrants but also the shifting laws on immigration and citizenship - and in doing that I had witnessed Britain shrinking into itself.

I entered the UK as temporary resident in 2007 on a visa for Writers, Artists and Composers. Soon afterwards, I was talking to a British man who asked me why I wanted to live in the UK. Somewhat, but not wholly, facetiously I replied, ‘Because it has a visa for writers, artists and composers. Who wouldn’t want to come and live in a country like that?’ And he looked delighted and said, ‘I didn’t know there was such a visa. I wish we knew things like that. It makes me feel very good about this country.’ Fast forward five years to when I’m eligible to apply for permanent residence. There is no longer a Writers, Artists and Composers visas. The visa system for non-EU migrants has been overhauled to limit the categories of people who can be allowed in, and within those categories the goalposts keep moving - essentially this means in cases such as mine that you have to reach a higher and higher income threshold in order to qualify to arrive, to stay, to become a citizen. If you’re an upcoming composer who can just about get by on your income from music you were once allowed into the UK - now, the government doesn’t care what your work is. What they

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care about is how much you earn. Your value to the nation is measured in pounds and pennies. It isn’t just about writers, artists and composers. A whole swathe of routes to citizenship are closed down in 2008. Some of us are able to switch into another category; many of us are not. In my case, I’m only able to manage because I’ve sold a novel at the right moment and it makes my bank balance look sufficiently robust to switch into another category - that new category was abolished in 2015, further choking the entry system.

There are certain routes to citizenship though, which you assume - which I assumed - would remain unaffected.

Let me pause now to tell you a story, a piece of fiction but one set in the real world and subject to its rules and its regulations:

Jill Curtis loved to travel, but if you asked her what her very favourite part of travelling was she would scrunch up her face, look a little embarrassed and say ‘coming home.’ She wouldn’t want you to think she believed that her patch of the world along the south east coast of England was the greatest place in the world. She was not a woman given to such grand proclamations. But the word ‘home’ had a pleasing weight to it, tethering her in the universe. ‘Home’ was the white cliffs and the pebbled beach and her little flat near - but not too near - her mother, who was ageing now and slowing down in ways that brought a certain sadness to the edges of Jill’s life and made her wonder what the word ‘family’ would mean to her in another five or ten or fifteen years when her mother was gone (her father had died suddenly when Jill was at university). This is not to say Jill Curtis was a woman who was discontented with her life. She worked as a vet’s assistant, had a large circle of friends, sang in a local choir, walked on the cliffs in all weather and all seasons, sometimes with company, sometimes on her own. She was a woman who you’d see striding along windswept paths and know that she was content in solitude, so long as she didn’t have too much of it.

Who can say why exactly she chose one day to take up a long-standing offer from a university friend returned home to Karachi to come and teach English at a school there. It had been a possibility she’d previously toyed with, and one

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bleak winter’s day when the offer was made on a Skype video call that showed her old friend sitting in a park in shirtsleeves, surrounded by trees thick with leaves and the bright call of sparrows, she said, yes, I’ll come, for a term, at least.

Her first week in Karachi, she met Bilal. He taught at the school, too - mathematics. He came to the women’s staff room to say he’d heard there was a vet here and could she come and have a look at Pythagorous. Is that a cat, she said? No, he said, Pythagorous the Python.

When she got to her feet, undettered, he laughed - a lovely warm laugh - and said, I’m sorry, I was trying to frighten the foreign visitor. He’s a turtle. And then he added, and later she decided this was the moment it became inevitable she would love him, I’m really scared of snakes.

Some people take a long time and some decide right away. Bilal and Jill were the right-away category. It wasn’t a question of ‘if’ or even ‘when’ but ‘where’ with them. Jill said she didn’t want to leave her mother alone; Bilal smiled and said, he’d as happily live by one sea as another, and his parents had four other sons and three daughters-in-law and five daughters to keep them company, so that was all right. There didn’t seem to be any reason to rush any decisions, until Jill missed her period and a marriage happened, very simple and very quick, with Pythagorus in attendance and also two of Bilal’s brothers and one of his sisters. And then she was introduced to Bilal’s parents, which is of course a story in itself but not one we have time for now. But in short, it wasn’t perfect, but it was ok, the impending grandchild became the focus of attention; a young niece - adoring of Bilal - used some clever software to produce pictures of a boy who was part Bilal, part Jill, and that first made everyone laugh, then made the parents demand reconfigurations - Bilal’s hair and Jill’s eyes, no Jill’s eyes and Bilals’ father’s nose, no Jill’s hair and Bilal’s father’s nose and Bilal’s mothers eyes and Bilal’s jaw - and look that was all of them, right there. And this was only a little part of the whole evening, the best part of it, but given how much they had all dreaded it, it felt like a triumph for everyone. A few days later, Bilal said perhaps they should stay in Karachi until the baby was born; Jill, suffering badly through her first trimester, wanted the white cliffs and

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her mother and the NHS. By then the Karachi summer had set in, oppressive and sticky, and Bilal said, yes, Bilal said, whatever you want, my love, my life.

They went to the British High Commission, marriage documents in hand.

I’m sorry, I have to stop there. I’ve only written a little over 750 words about Bilal and Jill but already - this is the way of things - I can’t bear to do to them what the world’s regulations ask of me. What regulations? you might wonder although as this is Norway, you might not wonder. We’ll come to that later.

In 2012 the UK government brought in a law that said UK nationals could only bring a spouse or partner from a non-EEA country into Britain if the UK national was earning more than 18,600 pounds. This amount rises to 22,400 if a non-British child is also involved, and rises by another £2,400 for every additional child. It’s worth mentioning that more than 40% of the UK’s population earns less than 18,600 pounds a year. It’s also worth mentioning that the income of the non-UK partner is irrelevant - he or she may easily cross the income threshold, but it still falls to the UK partner to earn 18,600 pounds if they want to live in the country of their citizenship with their husband or wife, their civil partner, their longterm boyfriend or girlfriend. The government doesn’t care about love, only money. Veterinary care assistants in the UK earn an average of £16,250 a year. Jill worked in a small town, at the start of her career.

You see why I don't want to write this story further.

But the mind leaps ahead, now that I’ve started to write them into being. I know there are certain things I could do to heighten the drama. I could say Jill has complications in her pregnancy and she and Bilal can’t afford the medical care she needs and the NHS becomes an absolute necessity. I could say Bilal belongs to a persecuted minority and the persecution turns into credible physical threats. I could say Jill’s mother develops an illness and there’s no one but Jill who can give her the emotional support she needs. I could say Karachi is a terrible hostile place for anyone to live, let alone an Englishwoman. But no, I won’t say any of those things, and certainly not the one about Karachi, a city I

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love, where I grew up and return to each year and where my parents and sister and many friends still live.

I’ll say instead just this: the government of Britain has told Jill she must decide between living with the man she loves and living beside the white cliffs and the pebbled sea, down the road from her mother. The government of Britain has said to one of its own, a woman born and raised by those white cliffs: ‘if you’re going to love a foreigner you need to earn a certain amount for us to overlook your failing - otherwise, get out of Britain and go live in a foreign place with him.’

How did this change in the rules happen without all of us taking to the streets in protest? But it did. As I watched it happening, it was perfectly clear it was in response to tabloid fuelled anger about migration numbers and I remember thinking, more than once, ‘but this is impossible. All they can do is choke non-EU migrant numbers; but in doing that, and boasting about it, they’re accepting the claims that Britain has too many migrants . How can they accept that when so much migration is from within the EU, and can’t be stopped? Surely, surely, the politicians should be talking about the benefits of migration.’ No, I didn’t, at that point imagine the possibility of a Brexit vote, let alone think about how it would go. But when the referendum became a certainty, and immigration took centre stage as the issue people were being asked to vote about, I started to have a very bad feeling.

At present, despite Brexit and its uncertainties, any Bilal or Bjorn who lives in Norway doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he’ll be able to go and join his Jill in the UK. The rules around spouses are not connected to the EU but to the EEA, and Brexit shouldn’t change that. But now I have to come to the part that so many of you sitting in the audience are aware of and have been waiting for me to come to. It isn’t just the UK. Norway, too, has an income threshold that any citizen wanting to sponsor a spouse must cross. In fact, Norway is the only country that has a higher income threshold than the UK.

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And I’m sure in Norway, as in the UK, the government never says ‘if you’re going to love a foreigner you have to earn a certain amount to allow us to overlook your failing’ . I’m sure instead they use such phrases as ‘burden on the state’. But let’s be very clear, it is possible to get away with denying someone the right to bring their spouse into their home country only if there is a widely accepted belief that non-EEA citizens are a burden on the state. Never mind that, in the UK at least, study after study reveals this to be false. Migrants are far less likely to use public services than the native-born. Work, not welfare, is what migrants most want from the countries into which they arrive.

But we’ve allowed a very different kind of narrative to take hold about migrants - we’ve allowed the ‘burden on the state’ narrative to take hold - and the consequence is that in countries such as the UK and Norway, love isn’t free, and it isn’t for everyone. If you or your children or your best friends or siblings leave the EEA, please be very careful not to fall in love without first checking with your bank managers.

And actually, perhaps you might want to be careful about coming to Britain. As I said, Brexit doesn’t change the laws about EEA spouses or partners. And it doesn’t seem plausible that Britain will leave the EEA. but then again a couple of years ago it didn’t seem plausible that Britain would leave the EU. The precedents are in place, the laws have been set for linking marriage to certain kinds of foreigners with income levels. As xenophobia rises, as the tabloids turn further against Europe, who knows what might happen, and how those laws might be extended to include all foreigners, EEA or not. But if it happens let no one tell you that ‘you couldn’t make it up’, let no one tell you that now you’re living in a new kind of world, let no one tell you that they didn’t see it coming. It has been coming for a long time - far many of us, it has already come. Your nightmare is our reality. The question isn’t ‘how did this happen’, the question is ‘why weren’t we paying attention when this was acquiring momentum’. For writers, the question is ‘why didn’t we tell these stories earlier and make people feel their injustice?’

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But surely writers should write what they want, and they should be allowed to want whatever feels closest to their heart or their intellect?

The short answer is ‘yes’ and the slightly longer answer is ‘we’ll return to that.’

I’m going to go back first to Nadeem Aslam and his discussion of gloves and masks and the times we live in. In the course of the discussion he said this: ‘When you belong to the margins you know the post-Trump era is the same as the pre-Trump era.’

Now this is a line that in many circles would border on the sacrilegious so it’s worth spending a little time talking about it. I’m not in a position to say what Nadeem Aslam meant by it, so I’ll say instead why I’m quoting it here.

When Donald Trump announced his idea for a Muslim Registry while on the campaign trail, decent Americans were horrified. It was unAmerican, unconstitutional, bigoted, divisive, appalling. To which I, and many other Muslims, responded ‘what about NSEER?’ To which practically every American I knew, including those with impeccable progressive credentials said, ‘What about what?’

NSEER - or to give it its full name National Security Entry Exit Registration System - was instituted by George W Bush in 2002. It had different components to it, including the requirement that males over the age of 16 from certain countries who were in the United States legally - on student visas, works visas, tourist visas - had to register in person at an office of the Immigration and Naturalisation Services. Let me clarify - these were people legally in the United States. they weren’t citizens or yet permanent residents, its true, but they had been working and living legally in America. Those who drew an income in America paid their taxes in America. They had broken no laws. They had fulfilled all the criteria of America’s already-rigorous visa system in order to be there. But one morning they were told they had to gather up their documentation, and arrive at an INS office to be fingerprinted and interviewed and undergo ‘special registration’. Failure to do this could, and sometimes did, result in deportation. Here is a list of the 25 countries covered by NSEER:

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Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait.

North Korea is the odd one out there, of course. 24 of the 25 countries were Muslim majority nations. But where was America’s outrage then? It existed in some places - most notably within the American Civil Liberties Union which opposed NSEER from the start, but largely it remained beneath the radar of concerned liberal Americans who were later felled with outrage over Donald Trump’s creation of a Muslim registry. True, Trump talked about extending that to American citizens - but if the outrage truly was about racial profiling and religious discrimination within American - rather than about citizen rights - then NSEER should have been as appalling as the proposed Muslim Registry. Incidently, no known terrorist convictions resulted from NSEER which stayed in place until 2011 - that’s three years into Obama’s term - when is was ‘indefintely suspended’ but not actually dismantled.

According to the Department of Homeland Security the government wanted to keep the regulations intact, hence the suspension rather than dismantling. It was only as late as Dec 2016, in the final days of the Obama administration, with Trump’s Muslim Registry idea drawing people’s attention to the existence of NSEER that the programme was actually dismantled, having been functional during two presidencies, one republican, one democrat. With the establishment of NSEER the gloves came off. America announced then that if you were a Muslim in America then regardless of how law-abiding, how tax-paying, how non-homicidal you might be, you were under suspicion. That was the gloves coming off. It was only when Trump uttered the words Muslim Registry that the mask came off.

This is only one example of the ways in which the pre and post Trump world weren’t really so different from each other from the point of view of those on the margins. Trump says he won’t rule out torture and everyone gasps; but George Bush’s government authorised torture during the War on Terror - they just didn’t call it ‘torture.’ ‘Enhanced interrogation techniques’ was the more

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palatable euphamism. Yes, lots of decent people were horrified by it; but the mass protests and daily actions against the government that are a feature of the Trump administration were thin on the ground.

Another example. Trump has attracted criticism for his plans to build a Wall to keep out Mexicans and for his racist rhetoric against those who cross into America from its southern border, which might lead you to think that before him Presidents were fairly benign in their attitudes towards migrants from Mexico. But according to the American Immigration Council ‘The federal government has, for nearly two decades, been pursuing an enforcement-first approach to immigration control that favors mandatory detention and deportation over the traditional discretion of a judge to consider the unique circumstances of every case. The end result has been a relentless campaign of imprisonment and expulsion aimed at noncitizens — a campaign authorized by Congress and implemented by the executive branch. While this campaign precedes the Obama administration by many years, it has grown immensely during his tenure in the White House.’

Gloves. Masks. Over and over. All around the world. America. Europe. Turkey. India. Pakistan. The Phillipines. All of it is, and should be horrifying. But none of it should be surprising.

Why weren’t more novelists telling these stories? Why haven’t more of us been telling the stories of the directions our countries have been moving in? It’s an interesting business being a dual national writer as I am, belonging to both Pakistan and Britain. I noticed long ago different expectations laid upon writers of both my nations. If you’re from Pakistan, readers in the UK and Europe expect you to write about the politics of your nation. ‘How could you not address it?’ I often hear. But writers in the UK are never asked how they could possibly not address the politics of their nation. If anything, the term ‘the political novel’ is approached with some suspicion in the UK. British writers who I consider fairly political in their writing run a mile from the term, as if they know that to attach themselves to it in the UK would undermine their credibility as writers. ‘Political’ becomes synonymous with ‘polemical’ in the context of

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the UK novel but is merely synonymous with ‘life’ in the context of the Pakistani novel.

The implication is clear. Politics has sorted itself out in the UK and Europe, has ceased to be a matter of urgency, so writers can retreat from that space into personal stories - the personal, you see, is not the political, so this line of thinking goes. But Jill and Bilal remind us that when we talk about politics in fiction what we’re talking about is the human cost of policies that come clothed in rhetoric such as ‘burden on the state’; when we talk about politics in fiction what we’re talking about is unclothing that rhetoric to reveal that what lies beneath is love and family life and the weight of words such as ‘home’ and ‘together’ and ‘apart’.

Of course writers must write what they , we, want to write. But writers should, must, surely we do, feel the urgency of the world around us. I’m not drawn towards the story of Jill and Bilal because it’s worthy - I’m drawn towards it because it’s a powerful story, and an urgent one. In those places of the world where the misconception has arisen that journalists deal with the urgent questions while writers strive primarily for polished sentences or formal experiments or individualistic naval-gazing, there must be a re-thinking of those positions.

Yes, it’s true that novels and short stories take time and newspaper articles have immediacy. It also true - and this is the main point I hope to have conveyed today - that the trajectories of history start moving in one direction and keep moving along that path for many many years.

Long enough for novelists to step onto that path. The post-Brexit world is the pre-Brexit world. The post-Trump world is the pre-Trump world. When I told Nadeem Aslam I would be using that line of his, he smiled and said ‘wasn’t it you many years ago who said to me, of course those of us from certain countries know that the post 9/11 world is the pre 9/11 world - so what I said was something that, in a way, you’d already said.’

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For writers to shy away from politics because they work within forms that lack ‘immediacy’ is no proper excuse. We are writers. We bear witness to our world. We don’t do it because we are godlike, sitting above the world, and explaining it to those less enlightened to us. We do it because we we are bound up in what Nadine Gordimer referred to as ‘our solitary travail towards meaning’. That is what it comes down to: meaning. What matters in this world, in this life? What is this world, this life? How do we understand it? How can we fail to want to understand it, its power structures, its sorrows, its joys? These questions are abstract but as I ask them they resolve themselves for me into two figures - Bilal and Jill. I look at them, I follow their lives, and it takes me another few steps further along my solitary travail towards meaning.

Think of King Lear on the heath looking at Poor Tom, realising that in all his years of sitting on a throne he never came so close to the impoverished of his realm. ‘Oh, I have taken too little care of this’ he says, and though it seemed he is still in his madness then, the truth is he is for the first time beginning to see clearly. Writers aren’t kings any more than we are gods, but we do choose to whom we extend our imagination, we choose who to look at closely enough that we feel the intimacy of story and character binding us to them. Write what you know, young writers are told. Try changing that to Know more, so you can write more and the entire equation is flipped on its head, the writers’ relationship to the world is flipped on its head. ‘Oh I have taken too little care of this’ is a cry that could go up from many of the world’s novelists.

I have spoken for such a length of time about fiction writers, but it seems a discredit to Bjornson to fixate only on that one genre when he crossed so many boundaries of form himself.

So to end I want to praise the poets. Praise the poets for their ability to marry immediacy with attention to language. Praise the poets for the way they use words to strike at our hearts and articulate what we hold amorphous and tangled inside us. Praise the poets for knowing that it is not crass rhetoric and post-truth claims that most moves what is human inside us. There is something far nobler waiting to be touched, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting to be asked to respond. Praise the poets and remember that poets is a

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broad term that can be used to refer to all writers, all those in service of the word.

Last week, after the unspeakable-but-we-must-speak-about-it bombing in Manchester, there was a vigil in that city for the victims. Thousands were gathered. The poet Tony Walsh aka Longfellow stood up and read a poem called ‘This is the Place’ that he’d written previously, but which - in the way of poems - turned out to be perfectly suited for a moment he couldn’t have imagined when he wrote it. I’m going to end by urging everyone to leave this hall and find a link to Walsh reading the poem (https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/may/23/mancunians-forever-tony-walsh-reads-poem-manchester-vigil-video). It is a reminder of what language can do. And in the audience’s response it is also a reminder that this, too, is the world we’re living in, this world of poetry.

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