Abstract
Since the 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham and the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, British Muslims have been subjected to increased levels of suspicion and hostility. In particular, the spotlight has shone on working-class South Asian Muslim communities in the north of England, which have been accused of “self-segregation” and constructed as alienated from and posing a threat to “Britishness”. Racial divisions and tensions have been problematically blamed on the “failure” of multiculturalism; commentators from the left and right of the political spectrum have claimed multiculturalist practice and policies have encouraged too much diversity, thereby obstructing integration, while social factors such as poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, and “white flight” have been obscured or at best downplayed.1 As news stories of young British Muslim men joining extremist organizations at home or abroad continue to circulate, the communities’ male youth remain particularly susceptible to Islamophobic stereotyping and profiling. In this interview, performance poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad discusses the ways his work engages with this fraught political context. Our conversation begins by considering his experience of growing up in a racially divided northern English town in the 1980s and 1990s, before turning to the impact of the events of 2001 on his life and art. We discuss the role art can play in politics, and the part faith can play in art, before focusing on specific representations in his plays of young British Muslims held at Guantánamo Bay, divided working-class communities in the north of England, and young men — both Muslim and white — drawn to different kinds of extremism. Finally, we explore the racial and social exclusions of the creative arts, and the reception of Mohammad’s work.
Keywords
Avaes Mohammad was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1978. While both his parents are Kutchi, originating from North-West India, his father was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and his mother in Mombasa, Kenya. He began writing poetry in the wake of the 2001 race riots in the north of England and the terrorist attacks of September 11, and has since performed his work across the UK as well as internationally. His poem “Bhopal” (2004), commissioned by Radio 4 and winner of an Amnesty International Media Award, is a powerful critical response to the 1984 industrial disaster that exposed over 50,000 people to poisonous gases in Bhopal, India. 2 “Clash” (2010) deconstructs the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric which framed dominant responses to the 9/11 attacks, while “I’ll Explain What I Can” (2012) explores questions of identity among young British Pakistanis through a compelling portrayal of Eid celebrations on the streets of Manchester. Mohammad is also the author of nine plays to date, which range from In God We Trust (2005), a depiction of three British Muslims imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay; to Shadow Companion (2008), an examination of a friendship between two girls from warring communities in a northern English town; to the pair of plays Hurling Rubble at the Sun and Hurling Rubble at the Moon (2015), which respectively depict the experiences of a young British Muslim terrorist and a young white right-wing extremist. He is associate artist with Red Ladder Theatre Company, Fellow of the Muslim Institute, and trustee of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. 3
Much of Mohammad’s work focuses on Asian Muslim working-class communities in the north of England, which have been the object of scrutiny and vilification in public and political discourses especially since the events of 2001. His experience of growing up in and belonging to such a community drives his creative work. Described by the Guardian as one of Britain’s young Muslim artists who are “changing the narrative” (Adams, 2015: n.p.), his poetry and plays are committed to challenging the misunderstanding and prejudice that shape representations of Islam and its working-class British adherents, and to bringing together divided communities by exposing and exploring what they in fact share. Combining influences from a range of cultures, his art fuses the spiritual with the political, and breaks down the boundary between the local and the global. With his compassionate focus on the disenfranchised inhabitants of multicultural Britain and his ability to disturb conventional visions of them, Mohammad is an important artist of and for our times.
This interview was conducted in Central London on 14 December 2015.
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Let me begin by asking you about your route into writing. You were studying for a doctorate in chemistry when you started to write poetry. What made you change direction?
I think I always had a desire to write poetry. I was raised with qawwali and ghazal at home, which are South Asian musical forms whose lyrics come from works of poetry and are then incorporated into music. 4 They’re not song lyrics as these are understood in Western culture. In the Western tradition you’ve got poetry and you’ve got song lyrics, whereas in qawwali you have poetry that is introduced into music. So for me to have music as my introduction to poetry was natural, and as I grew older the form of music that I fell in love with was reggae. I found there to be a real synergy between South Asian poetry and reggae because of the rhythm structure, and also because both were unafraid to talk about love, and they were unafraid to talk about divinity, and they were unafraid to talk about politics, and sometimes you could find all three in one poem or song. So there was a resonance between the poetry I was used to hearing at home, and the reggae I discovered on the streets. 5
At university, through raving, I got into emceeing and I decided that I wanted to be an emcee. Then 9/11 happened and, just prior to 9/11, the riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham. That is when I wrote my first political emcee piece. I knew that this wasn’t for music, so I’d emcee it without music at poetry gigs. My work, which was initially just a bit of fun and a passion, suddenly became more meaningful. When faced with the demonization of their entire community for an act committed by a few individuals, and the nonsensical response in Afghanistan at the cost of so many lives, the question a lot of young British Muslim men had was: “What do I do about it?” That’s a very natural question, which is, I feel, at the crux of this phenomenon of young Muslim radicals in Britain. Some people come to misguided answers. For me, I discovered that I had this talent and so that was what I was going to do about it. I was going to write poetry.
I’d like to take you back in time to your experience of growing up as an Asian in Blackburn in the 1980s and 1990s, before the 2001 race riots and 9/11. What was your experience of this? I’m also interested in your memories and experience of another watershed event: the Rushdie affair of 1988–1989. Did that have an impact on your sense of identity and your political formation?
Blackburn, where I was born and raised, is one of the most divided towns in England — and that’s not an anecdote, it’s a statistic. South Asian communities, mainly Muslim, live apart from white communities. My primary school was predominantly white, so I had white friends there and white teachers, but outside school I didn’t know any white people. My high school was almost all Asian. Our community lived in an area of around two square miles. There were around seven mosques; and every corner shop sold curry essentials, and every grocer’s was halal. People spoke Gujarati and Punjabi and Urdu; English wasn’t often heard on our streets, except among the kids — and as kids, we mixed English in with our native languages. We lived as a South Asian community, probably more South Asian than some communities in South Asia itself. The community was relatively timid in the first generation, my parents’ generation. It didn’t want aggravation or conflict. It sought to replicate what it knew and stick together because there was an immediate threat. Although we lived in this pocket of security, to the north of us there was a white working-class area, and people from that area would have to walk through our area to get to the town centre. We’d suffer abuse, our toys would get stolen, there was graffiti about the National Front, and sometimes it would get violent. I didn’t even know what the National Front was but I remember that the letters “NF” were everywhere along our streets, and the words “Paki Get Out”. 6 It took me a while to even realize what that meant.
When the Rushdie affair happened I was only a child, I must have been 9 or 10. I remember hearing that someone had insulted the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) in a book. I remember my father talking about it with his friends, and suddenly it was something that everybody was talking about — and then there were the demonstrations, and the riots, and the book burnings. Our community in Blackburn was a big part of the protests. W. H. Smith was petrol bombed, and there were effigies of Salman Rushdie burnt. It was a really harsh time, a really edgy time; the air was electric. The first generation were prepared to handle racism, an affront to their culture and their way of life, but they could not fathom an affront to their faith. That was where the line was drawn. Their sentiment seemed to be: “We know we’re in this country, we know we have to make compromises and allowances, and be the object of ridicule, and we’ll allow all of that … but not this.” For Muslims — and for all people of faith — faith is not something you wear part-time; it’s something that defines your person.
In that sense the Rushdie affair can be seen as a turning point, because it was a moment when the Muslim South Asian community in Britain found a voice of protest, while majoritarian Britain, including the liberal left, failed to understand this voice of protest which wasn’t compatible with a secular anti-racism. 7 Hence, negative representations of the British Muslim community proliferated. Do you think that perceiving 9/11 as a turning point is problematic because these tensions, and hostility towards Muslims, pre-dated those events?
I think it’s generational. I think the first generation had their moment with Salman Rushdie. For my generation, Salman Rushdie happened when we were kids, so we felt like that was their war in a way. Most of us actually grew up having a great time. We found our way. We were British. We didn’t have to face that question of how much of ourselves we should give up — because we were never going to give up any of ourselves. As soon as someone called us “Paki”, we retorted straight away, whereas our parents wouldn’t have done that. We never questioned our right to this country and this culture, and so it was an enormous betrayal when we were othered after 9/11. That’s certainly how I felt, betrayed — made to see a difference in myself that I hadn’t really seen before.
Were the race riots as significant as 9/11 for you?
Yes, absolutely. On 11 September 2001, we mourned with everybody else in the world. What we got upset about was the immediate othering and demonization of the community of people to which we belong. That began with the riots. On Newsnight and in national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, there was talk about these guys in the north who hadn’t integrated, who were living in isolated ghettos, who were a threat from within. It was the betrayal that was offensive because this was our country, we were born and raised here, so for the media to point the finger at us, that made us look like fools to ourselves. We knew — because we were there — that all we were doing was defending our streets from the BNP and other elements of the far right which had orchestrated these demonstrations specifically to provoke us. 8 To be demonized for that was an affront both to our belonging in this country, and to any sense of justice.
In your poem “I’ll Explain What I Can”, these words follow the question of why the “minority Englishman wears the flag of a country he’s never known”. The poem can be read as an attempt to explain why young British men of Pakistani heritage drape themselves in the Pakistani flag, a phenomenon most famously evoked by the Tebbit Test. 9 So, the title of this poem and the explanatory form it takes suggest you feel a responsibility to give voice to the community that you come from and that you depict — working class, northern, Asian, Muslim. Do you feel such a sense of responsibility?
When I was celebrating Eid in Manchester and seeing other Muslim men drape themselves in Pakistani flags, I wasn’t thinking: “What an interesting community to write about, or represent.” These were my people. These are people I shared an upbringing with. I think that ultimately you write what you know and this is what I know. This is all I know. This is what I am and it’s informed my worldview. So, when I see a young man from Blackburn arrested for trying to go to Syria, I know he will have grown up on the streets that I grew up on, perhaps gone to the schools I went to, had the experiences and thoughts that I had, been subject to the same peer pressure, got frustrated by the same things. That’s not just another story for me, that’s somebody who I feel an intimacy with. The people who I love are of that demographic, they are my friends and my family. When people from that demographic aren’t represented and need representation, there is an element of reponsibility, I suppose. But responsibility makes it sound burdensome. It’s actually love. I do it because I love them. It’s also an instinct and it’s a need; it’s a need that comes from loyalty and kinship to say, “Not only are you misunderstanding my community, but you’re actually missing so much beauty”, and to share that beauty.
Much of your work engages explicitly with political events and issues. Do you feel that art has an important role to play in politics, a capacity to intervene in debates about multiculturalism, extremism, terrorism?
My inspirational traditions — South Asian poetry, both Sufi and secular, and reggae — have a history of using art for political purpose, to reflect on and challenge the status quo, so putting art and politics together is very natural to me. Some people have an aversion to the idea of “political art” because they expect it to be “preachy”, but it’s not. For it to be art, it needs to be emotionally evocative. What I’m trying to do as an artist is manipulate attitudes and feelings within the audience. I want to put the audience in the protagonist’s shoes, and let them walk in those shoes and feel what that protagonist feels. That’s the challenge for the artist, to show the audience that a situation is not black and white, so that they can empathize with other communities. I think in a world that’s defined by its multiculturalism, by our differences, this becomes all the more necessary — for us to be able to walk in each other’s shoes. And that’s obviously got political resonance.
You mentioned that Sufism is one of your influences, and some of your poems — for example, “Only You” and “Dust” — seem to gesture towards the spiritual dimension of Islam. Religious belief and art are often seen as uncomfortable bedfellows. Religion has been portrayed as the enemy of art or freedom of expression, especially when members of a religious community take offence at creative work such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or, more recently, the cartoons in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. 10 What role does faith play in your own art?
Fundamental to this question are the differences between worldviews. But these differences do not mean that they’re incompatible. In the secular, post-Enlightenment worldview, the centre of being is the self, and art is almost a reflection of how much the self can experience and understand the world that’s around him or her. The self is at the centre, and the world experienced is separate. In the Islamic worldview, God’s at the centre of everything. For the Muslim artist, the world which you’re trying to explore is, like you, a reflection of God; and by trying to explore it and understand it, you come closer to understanding God. Faith and art are actually one and the same because by creating you’re emulating the creator, and by doing that you’re getting closer to understanding the creator. So there are two different paradigms, and I can understand how they look at each other and feel a bit confused, because they’re looking from different vantage points. There’s no conflict at all between art and faith from an Islamic perspective, or from other religious perspectives.
At least two of your plays, Hurling Rubble at the Sun and In God We Trust, feature lengthy prayer scenes. I’m interested in the significance of these prayer scenes and about their reception by non-Muslim audiences, who might feel distanced, even alienated, by their inability to understand the Arabic and the gestures of prayer.
I actually wanted the prayer scenes in In God We Trust and Hurling Rubble at the Sun to be longer than they were in the production version of the plays. In both cases, the directors objected. I wanted to share the prayer in its entirety to demonstrate the beauty and intimacy of the act of worship. I didn’t like the division I grew up with. I wanted to be able to share more of myself with my white friends at school, for example. Prayer is as intimate and beautiful as anything I’m allowed to show. The act of separating yourself from everything around you and standing naked before God is, for a Muslim, the most intimate and revealing thing that you do. To be able to share that with a white audience is to give everything to them, and to remove that division I grew up with. It’s a huge gesture of sharing. Theatre’s that magic space where you are able to experience other people’s experiences as a group. Already it’s meditative, already it’s a sort of communal prayer. Putting actual prayer in accentuates this. To me it feels made for theatre.
In Hurling Rubble at the Sun, the protagonist, T, prays with his mum for the last time, and, if he’s anything like me, he’s probably rarely prayed with her before, because it’s a very personal event, so intimate that it makes you feel vulnerable, almost shy. He isn’t able to give his mum the long hug and kiss that he wants to because she doesn’t understand that this is the last time she’s going to see him before he kills himself. 11 So, he prays with her. In this sense, the prayer has a very significant narrative purpose. I wouldn’t want to compromise its length. In God We Trust, Hamza, who’s a Sufi Muslim, represents everything that I consider to be beautiful and giving of the Islamic faith, while Sarfraz represents the misguidedness of those British Muslim youth who choose a radical path. And their prayer demonstrates this. Hamza’s prayer is beautiful and fluid, and Sarfraz’s is short and staccato and rigid, military almost.
In God We Trust features three British Muslims wrongly imprisoned in a military detention camp redolent of Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay. 12 As you say, the different men observe very different kinds of Islam. Can you explain your motivation in writing that play?
It was very soon after the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was established that Peshawar Productions, led at the time by a man called Sazzadur Rahman, approached me and asked me to write a play about it. I felt as though I didn’t need to write about the transgressions of American imperialism because I felt they were obvious. So I thought, let’s look at this in a different way. Hundreds of years ago Muslims were occupying spaces and buildings like the Alhambra, like the Taj Mahal, like the great universities of North Africa and Baghdad, and now they’re occupying spaces like Guantánamo Bay. I wanted to look at it from a Muslim perspective, to ask what had happened to the Muslim community — because I felt that that was the more interesting story. So that led me on a journey of research and discovery, an incredible journey to try to answer that question for myself.
I had three characters that for me epitomized the state of the Muslim nation. One of them was Hamza. I had read a lot of Amnesty International reports and other material that documented the stories of people who were imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, and I discovered that many of them felt they were there on no charge whatsoever. There was a taxi driver who dropped somebody off at a checkpoint in Iraq. That person never came back, so his family said to the taxi driver, “You were the last person who saw him. Could you go to the check point and find out what happened to him?” So he went and asked what had happened to his passenger, and for that he was arrested and taken to Guantánamo Bay. Hamza is an innocent guy, based on the taxi driver, and of the Sufi Muslim tradition. Sarfraz is based on the guys from Tipton, England. They went to a wedding in Punjab and, being young Asian lads having fun in their teenage years, they thought for some crazy reason — and this is probably something my friends would have suggested when I was younger — “There’s a war going on over there, let’s go along and see.” They were wearing Tommy Hilfiger baseball caps, with the irony completely lost on the American soldiers who picked them up and took them to Guantánamo Bay. 13 At the beginning of the play, Sarfraz is completely areligious, he doesn’t identify as a Muslim, he has no Islamic knowledge, no interest. He’s too busy being a dude.
Hamza, on the other hand, has a strand to his faith. It’s such a humbling experience to hear Shaker Aamer, the guy who’s just been released, talk about Guantánamo Bay. 14 That he’s able to smile and stand upright after what he’s been through for 14 years is a real testament to the power that his faith has afforded him. I spoke with people who had been in Guantánamo Bay and their families as part of my research, and it was the power of their faith that got them through, unanimously. So in the play, Sarfraz has the worst time, he’s the one who’s going mad. When he’s beaten into submission by the guards, the angry faith he eventually chooses is a response to desperation, pain, and anger. Initially the play was going to be about these two guys in adjoining cells at the two ends of the spectrum, but I thought actually what I’m missing here are the majority of Muslims I’ve known. They don’t identify as Sufi and are not particularly spiritual, but neither are they particularly political and they’re certainly not radical. Tariq is the “everyman”, the guy who goes to the mosque every day and has a laugh with his mates over burgers after prayer. He became the funniest character in there, foul-mouthed, uncouth, but also representative of the Muslims who are unseen and yet suffering. While we talk about Bashar al-Assad and Isis, the unseen Syrians are the ones who are getting it. And while we talked about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the unseen Iraqis were the ones getting it. And again, while we talk about Charlie Hebdo and the Paris attacks, the unseen Muslims in Paris are the ones getting it.
It seems to me that a lot of your work is concerned with place. I’m thinking particularly of the lack of ownership of place on the part of working-class northerners — whether they’re Asian, or black, or white — and the battle over the marginalized spaces they inhabit. For example, in your play Shadow Companion, the white community encroach upon the area inhabited by refugees, and the two young girls from the warring communities, Ruby and Asra, seek refuge from these hostilities by going to the hills. Place, or the lack of it, also seems to be at the heart of the poem “I’ll Explain What I Can”, with its refrain of “The streets are ours, the streets are ours”. 15 Could you comment on the significance of place in your work?
One of our favourite pastimes when I was a teenager was driving around in my mate’s car. We never knew where we were going, we were just driving around, maybe in a bit of a loop, just to be seen to be doing something. My running joke was that it made us seem like we were going places. And it wasn’t just us, it was what everybody did, everybody got in cars and drove around without going anywhere, just for the sake of driving. It was because we didn’t have much space, so these cars were our spaces, they were the places we occupied. Even then we wouldn’t drive into the white areas, or into the countryside. We’d stick within our own areas, in narrow winding streets, clogged with traffic and congestion. So it became felt, in a visceral way, the limited extent of the space that we were allowed and allowed ourselves. And there was the inward recoiling of the first generation of the Asian community, who have huddled so tightly that they’re almost living on top of each other — just for a sense of security and comfort and knownness — and denied themselves the expanse that surrounds them. One of my favourite things to do in Blackburn is to go walking in the countryside, because it’s beautiful and it’s open, and there’s so much space. But you never see Asians of my parents’ generation, and you hardly ever see Asians of my generation, walking there, even though there’s so much space. It’s because they don’t feel entitled to that space, and that is a fact. They don’t feel entitled to that much space in this country, and they don’t feel entitled to the best bits of this country. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is evident in my work.
In Hurling Rubble at the Sun and Hurling Rubble at the Moon you get inside the heads of T, a Muslim terrorist loosely based on the Tavistock Square bus bomber, and Skef, a white far-right extremist. Both are vulnerable young men drawn to “grand narratives”, of “Islamic” radicalism on the one hand, and far-right politics on the other hand. You humanize these characters when such people are so often constructed as lacking in humanity. Could you say something about what you were trying to achieve?
In Blackburn, there were cases of young Asian Muslim men arrested on terror charges, and there were cases of young white men who were part of the English Defence League or the British National Party. The communities were so divided and knew so little about each other that the myths and the lies could easily perpetuate. Also, both were devoid of opportunity — not just economic opportunity, but opportunities of self-development, self-esteem, self-growth. This was paralleled in these communities, and I wanted to show this reflection or mirroring. I also felt that 14 years after 9/11 we weren’t any nearer to understanding these people, and in terms of policy and debate we were further away than ever. This is partly because we’ve failed to acknowledge that we need to understand them and humanize them. I don’t think there’s been enough effort to understand why young men have been drawn towards radicalism, except to blame religion, problematically. And there’s been little effort to understand why people are drawn to far-right politics. They are just labelled as stupid and violent thugs. And that is inhumane and unfair to their grievances. I really wanted to be able to show these people as people — not just the extremist characters but the others, too: I wanted to humanize T’s mum, this middle-aged woman, wearing salwar kameez and hijab, who was forced to relinquish her power and position for the privilege of being an abusive man’s homemaker. 16 Actually she’s a feisty, strong, vicious, sensual woman — a full character.
As you suggest, T and Skef’s extremist positions are rooted in their disenfranchisement and their subordination. Even Skef’s father, Dean, who is not a likeable character, mentions Thatcher and her closure of the industries in the north, so you get a glimpse of his suffering. It seems to me that class is at the centre of both these plays and of your work more generally. Is this the case?
I think so. I was able to write Hurling Rubble at the Moon because I felt an affinity to white, working-class people. I understand what it’s like to be of that class. I was raised in that class. To feel stifled by that poverty of opportunity, to feel an unfairness, and to feel a resentment and an anger, to feel the need to express some worth, even if it’s through animalistic, rage-filled violence because at least that’s … doing something with your life: I understand that. Even if I don’t agree with it, I do understand. Yes, I do think class is a big part of my work.
Masculinity, or emasculation, also appears central to the plays. Dean and Skef seem to be acting out a hyper-masculinity to compensate for their poverty and disenfranchisement.
Yes, for their inability to achieve. I never considered Dean, the father in Hurling Rubble at the Moon, to be racist. Part of the reason he’s construed as such is because of the acting and direction of the character. 17 For me he was typical of men who were drawn to the football hooligan culture of the 1980s and 1990s, which, depending on the club you were associated with, wasn’t necessarily a racist culture. It was formed of young, working-class men who didn’t feel they could achieve anything. So every Saturday they fought, and became worthy in their own eyes and in each other’s eyes of some kind of a status in society. This gave them some sort of self-fulfilment and self-esteem which nobody else was affording them. Dean, the way I imagine him, and the way I hope I’ve written him, is of that world. Some of the people who marched through Oldham, Bradford, and Burnley in 2001 were from the extreme right, Combat 18, and so on; some of them were from the BNP; and some of them were just football hooligans reminiscing. They’ll kick anyone’s head in; they’re not racist. So emasculation is at the core of Hurling Rubble at the Moon. Dean goes on to emasculate his son, who then has to prove himself to his father and so moves further to the right. Emasculation grows more extreme with each generation.
In Hurling Rubble at the Sun there’s an element of emasculation also. But it’s more complicated. As a Muslim, you’re born into a global community, and you inherit a language in which it’s quite normal to call an old woman in a country thousands of miles away who you’ve never met your mother or your sister. That’s common vernacular: our brothers in Bosnia are dying; our sisters in Chechnya are being raped; our mothers in Palestine are being thrown out of their homes. When you’re fed that as a young man, and you’re already feeling emasculated because you’re suffering from a lack of opportunity, and you’re trying to figure out your identity between this country and the culture your parents inhabit, and you don’t yet know the opportunities that are available to you in the world, you feel a grievance. The idea that you need to be able to do something for your mother in Palestine and your sister in Chechnya and your brother in Bosnia is powerful. I was fortunate enough to have the right guidance and to discover a talent which enabled me to do something for my brothers and my sisters in the Muslim community and beyond. Because I take that attitude beyond the parameters of the Muslim world. I’m able to do something through my writing, and other people are able to do something through political engagement or education. But some people feel like they don’t have access to those worlds, and that violence is the only thing they do have access to. It’s not a quantum leap; it’s a short step. Once you walk in those shoes, you can feel what a short step it is. But you need to walk in those shoes. And that goes back to your question about the role of art, perhaps.
Recently there was an article in the Guardian about the lack of diversity in British publishing, “How Do We Stop UK Publishing Being So Posh and White?” (Guardian, 2015). It was provoked by the absence of any black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) writers on the 2016 World Book Night list. Do you think your work circumvents some of the exclusions of the British publishing industry because it’s written for performance? Are performance spaces, for poetry as well as for plays, less exclusive and elitist than the publishing industry? 18 Are they more likely to accommodate representations of the communities you write about, which are marginalized in literary fiction?
I feel that a lot of the cultural institutions, including theatre, suffer — and I do mean suffer — from an overrepresentation of posh, white males. I wouldn’t say that theatre is much better than publishing. It does feel as though there’s more work for minorities in theatre, but that’s partly because there are certain dedicated minority spaces within the British theatre world. There are Asian companies, such as Kali Theatre, which are well regarded and can get good theatre spaces and media attention. 19 I don’t think there are British Asian publishers which are so well regarded or get the equivalent media attention. 20 So perhaps it’s not quite so bad for theatre. I think performance poetry is less exclusive than publishing, partly because there are so many platforms for it and partly because it’s still being defined — but also, importantly, because it has its roots in diversity. The torch bearers of the performance poetry tradition in this country — people like Jean “Binta” Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson — brought that tradition from abroad, from Jamaica, from the Caribbean. So it’s always been something for immigrants, it’s always had an immigrant resonance. And it resonates with the English working-class folk tradition, with people like performance poet John Cooper Clarke, who are also torch bearers. Both are folk traditions.
Is it when you try to get poetry into print that you come up against barriers of race and class?
Yes. And barriers of style. My poetry is often considered too rhyming to be considered page poetry. I don’t know how to answer that. I accept and acknowledge and support the fact that it’s for performance, that the experience of hearing me read it is different from the experience of you reading it.
When you write a play or a poem, do you have an audience in mind? Are you aiming for a diverse audience, and do members of the communities you portray come to watch your work being performed?
Initially, I wanted my work to speak to the mainstream, those who weren’t understanding the community I was raised in. That really is, in my head, who I am writing it for. They’re the people I’m antagonizing with my work. Some of my work is quite antagonistic: the poems “Bhopal”, “I’ll Explain What I Can”, “Clash”. But yes, people from my community and others do enjoy and appreciate and support my work for a variety of reasons. The style of my poetry is unashamedly influenced by dub poetry so I think it has a resonance for those from within that tradition. There’s an Urdu poet called Hilal Fareed. He hears my work and tells me it is Urdu poetry in English because it’s an evocation of images again and again and then an expansion of those images again and again, and that’s what Urdu poetry is. I understand that because I believe I think like an Urdu poet, and see like an Urdu poet, but my form is English performance poetry.
How has your work been received?
Hurling Rubble at the Sun was an interesting example. The Times gave it four stars, while some internet reviews gave it two or three. Some of the reviewers were expecting to see a reason why young Muslim men kill themselves. That’s what I gave them, except my reason didn’t chime with what they expected. Mine involved a lost young man who is desperately trying to do something that he feels is of worth. One reviewer wrote that they didn’t believe the protagonist could have killed himself because he wasn’t religious enough. 21 And that was exactly my point: they’re not doing it because they’re religious. The level of prejudice is so high in society. That’s why I want to write these plays, but then it’s also the beast I’ve got to contend with once I’ve written them and people react. It’s a double-edged sword. I think I’ve just got to accept that if I’m going to make work that sits on the faultline of opinion, then I’m going to divide opinions.
Do you worry that your work might cause offence? I’m thinking about the various literary works that have offended some members of minority communities over the last few decades: obviously Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, but also Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti as an example of a play that’s triggered protest. 22 Do you feel a sense of responsibility not to cause offence to the communities you represent? Or does the artist have the right to write what they like?
It’s an interesting question. I think it’s perfectly valid for an artist to want to represent and serve their community by reflecting the ills of their community to their community — and, inevitably, to everybody else at the same time. It’s legitimate for an artist to try to force their community into thinking: “Actually there’s something wrong here that we’ve got to fix.” So with Behzti, for example, which is a wonderful play, I thought it very brave to talk about rape and represent the rape in the gurdwara, and to demonstrate the hypocrisy in the community and women’s experience of this. I think that Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had every right to do that, but also that the protestors had every right to protest. An artist has a right to write what they want to write, as long as it’s not just for the purpose of antagonizing the community, as long as there’s a perceived benefit. But at the same time, protestors have got every right to protest.
So the voice of protest and the voice of religious offence, as well as the writer’s voice, are legitimate?
Yes, it’s a dialogue, just as if you write a play and get applause, that’s the dialogue between yourself and the audience. In this case, the dialogue involved uproar and protest.
Finally, how has your work changed over the last 14 years, since the events of 2001, which we discussed at the beginning of our conversation?
I don’t read my work chronologically. But I know that I feel now, more than before, that I want to reflect the beauty of the world as well. Recently my work has started to become more spiritual, or spiritually inspired. I’d like my work to be an exploration of that. I’m also really excited about reconnecting with science through poetry. Where the social, political, spiritual, and scientific meet: I think that’s something I’m getting closer to.
Your most recent poem, which you wrote for this special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, is called “Never Thought That”. Please could you say a few words to set the scene for this poem?
“Never Thought That” is my exploration of the personal impact 9/11 and its aftermath had on my sense of self and identity. Perhaps the greatest shock for me was how everything I’d taken for granted suddenly felt so unstable. Associations and identities that previously grounded me now felt amorphous and unsteady, as though the ground itself might give way beneath me. The war and destruction we were seeing on our TV screens perfectly represented this sense of personal attack and loss of interior landscape and structure.
***
Never laid below a willow tree and wished it neem Never under falling chestnuts had I of pistachios dream Never rolled down dampened grassy banks wishing for unending Himalayan expanse Never squelched thigh-high through muddy fields then willed Arabian Seas come wash my knees Instructed by strictures of dry stone walls Brandished by vistas that show For each stone there exists a place its own Each stone sits as one collective form Never stood on bare-backed seaside strips and conjured palms of foreign lilt Never gazed on hills, coyish green, and thought of mountain heights that pierce the feet of heaven But then, I’d never thought that I’d see aeroplanes seek out prey Never knew I’d know how falling dust, once released, could trap a world within decay Never thought that all that stood: concrete, sturdy, solid, known Could twice fall Within moments of each other The first collapse: Brought down by the voice that hummed against my womb That deep cushioning murmur Thick primordial echo
Good. Now they’ll know how it feels.
Without screams of shrieking tones Devoid of wails to deem insane No madness for me to dismiss Never thought that I’d see grief so wreathing it could will tears Know pain so seething it could wish hurt Wounds so bleeding they could will blood The second collapse, almost as ricochet: Forced by those voices that simmered at my walking feet A quietly licking lava Now brazen eruption
Fuckin Arabs! Bound to ’appen sooner or later. Need to sort fuckin’ lot of ’em.
Free from the hum of hushed voices which I could have used to feign ignorance Detached from the soundscape of broken bottles betraying broken men No pretending I hadn’t heard this Never thought that I’d witness reason so foregone it could will absurdity Know a void so deep it would wish oblivion Neglect so decrepit it could beckon ruin But then, I never thought that all that stood: tall, concrete, sturdy, solid, known Could be raised to such vengeful dust Never thought that I could be made, one day, to look upon desert sands And dream a home
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
Those who contributed to this discourse on the “failure” of multiculturalism include then -chair of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips, writer and erstwhile anti-racist campaigner Kenan Malik, and journalist David Goodhart. See Kundnani (2007: 123) and 
: 9, 23, 40, 154–57).