Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015)

This article was first published in 2015.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which is the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in the capital and includes their testimonies alongside my own account. The publisher's page is here and the Amazon UK page is here.

My latest essay on this issue is called Changing Tides and was published by Counterpoint Arts and English PEN. For Books' Sake have already given Asylum and Exile an attentive and very generous 5 star review which can be read here and there has also been some great press in Nose In A Book, a long interview in Asian Culture Vulture, another for The Festival of Ideas and another in The Heroine Collective. I've covered the project in a recent Guardian article headlined I want to give asylum seekers in Britain a chance to tell their own story; two essays for Wasafiri which can be read here and two essays for the Free Word's Briefing Notes series, called Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre and The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain. I've also discussed the issues in my introduction to Big Writing for A Small World (Scribd copy of English PEN publication) and the articles Rape, refusal, denial, detention: refugees dancing at the edge of the world and Asylum: no woman should be missed out. English PEN have written up the debate at one of my events on this issue in a wonderful piece here and The Nation have written an article on my work called 'I came to you for help and you treated me like a prisoner'.

Asylum and Exile follows the publication, in May 2012, of my fourth book Beyond the Wall. An extensive selection of 2012 and 2013 interviews and press can be found here and a March 2014 interview by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore can be found here. 

press release

I see books like Asylum and Exile as evidence of a deep seated refusal to tolerate the divisive politics that extend right across the political divide. Well done for speaking up and bearing witness. We must never stop telling the stories of those we consign to the margins.

Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council

It’s a little book, but in its pages it manages to be wide in scope yet intimate, funny, warm, sad and horrifying. ...Asylum and Exile is a 4 star read, with an additional star because it’s so fundamentally important. 

Jennie Gillions, For Books' Sake

The result of Bidisha’s outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers since 2012, Asylum and Exile goes behind the stereotypes and scare stories to reveal the humanity, tragedy and bravery – and frequently the humour – of the individuals who’ve left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence.

The men and women Bidisha worked with were of all ages from 19 to their late 60s. All had fled war, persecution, extreme poverty and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Some had been in the UK for months, others for more than a decade. All spoke at least two languages. Among them were mathematicians and criminologists, soldiers, students and teachers: the man who had lectured in Persian music at Tehran university and now works in the freezer room of a sandwich factory; the woman who had been a teacher but was asked, when she arrived in England, if she knew how to turn on a light switch; the woman who became a manager in an English company only to be pulled out by police in front of her colleagues and imprisoned, who loves her red dancing shoes above all her other possessions.

In England, with no money, no access to public funds and no papers authorising them to work they labour illegally as cleaners, factory workers, dishwashers, care assistants and in other unstable, unseen, underpaid and gruelling roles. Many have bounced between prison and detention centres. Their London life is one of trying to survive on five pounds a day, of interminable bus journeys across the capital, appointments with legal aid workers and reliance on near strangers to get a foothold on life in the city with little or no support. Despite this, their unerring vivacity, talent and will to survive are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. 

Asylum and Exile comes out at a time when immigration is one of the most passionately debated issues around, with a rise in anti-immigration, anti-asylum rhetoric both in the UK and elsewhere, particularly in western Europe and Australia. Asylum seekers and refugees are being argued over, demonised, scapegoated and disbelieved – or patronised and advocated for in heart-wrenching yet generalised terms – but are almost never given a chance to speak in their own words about their own lives. Bidisha gives space to their testimonies, which are by turns shocking, moving and hilarious. She gained rare access and was met with such trust and frankness that Asylum and Exile stands as a unique document|: an accessible, uplifting and humane book whose stories are as buoyant, noisy, confrontational and diverse as Bidisha’s classroom itself.

Poster greeting arrivals at Praxis

The outreach sessions were co-ordinated by the literary and human rights charity English PEN with the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria and Praxis in Bethnal Green. Asylum and Exile began in the unheated rooms of severely underfunded charities in London. Yet its narratives and characters cross the globe, reflecting the consequences of some of the world’s most violent conflicts and fragile states. Stereotypes and generalisations disintegrate and what emerge are the stoical spirits, vital personalities, inner strength and defiant intelligence of the individuals themselves. The book is not an academic tract or a fierce polemic but a humane account based on personal stories expressed in idiosyncratic voices, not clichés from a newspaper. Asylum and Exile is a tribute to the honesty of raw experience, the power of personal testimony and the ability of the spoken word of truth to transform both the teller and the listener.

UPDATED: Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025)

My 4th book Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine, originally published in 2012, has been been updated and reissued. The original publication was followed by my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, which was based on my outreach work with asylum seekers, detainees and refugees in London (click the thumbnail on the right for more details).

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine has been described as "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" by Andrew Kelly in The Observer. 

ORDER THE UPDATED BEYOND THE WALL: WRITING A PATH THROUGH PALESTINE HERE

In spring 2011 I was invited to tour the West Bank as a guest of Palfest. I knew about the ‘issue’ from casual news watching, despite a longstanding professional involvement in international relations, political analysis, cultural diplomacy and human rights. I am not Muslim and have no Muslim heritage, no Palestinian heritage and no Arab or Middle Eastern heritage. I am not an activist.

I went on the tour and wrote down what I observed, nothing more or less, and these observations became Beyond the Wall. It’s a short, accessible narrative non-fiction piece about ordinary people and daily life, originally published by Seagull Books in 2012. Full details of the original publication, with links to further essays and reviews and a list of events from that time, can be read directly below.

In the book, I focused on character and conversation, setting and community, resilience and survival, atmosphere and daily existence, with the aim of writing something which any reader could engage with.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Over the last twenty three months I haven’t mentioned Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine in any context. I dislike it when individuals push themselves to the front on a human rights ticket during an emergency. I've seen peers speak persuasively about ethics onstage while being egotistical or abusive offstage and witnessed terrible human beings put their signatures to the petitions and statements of the day, just to look good.

In late 2024 I asked Seagull if I could write a new foreword for Beyond The Wall. They kindly agreed and the essay is as current as we could make it while allowing for production time. It clearly expresses my feelings.

I will not be taking up any media slots to comment on this when there are so many direct reports and testimonies already. I’d like to thank Naveen Kishore and Bishan Samadder at Seagull and all at Palfest.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Photo of me taken in the West Bank, spring 2011, by poet Nathalie Handal

ORIGINAL 'BEYOND THE WALL' LAUNCH TEXT FROM 2012: 

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women, and another which I did for Time Out Beijing. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, Time Out Bejing, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, an interview in Ideas Tap, a long interview in The Asian Writer, Variety, a long interview in The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" (The Observer), seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

Inside: the power of books in prisons

This is in response to justice secretary Chris Grayling's ban on books and other items being sent to prisoners. This article has also been picked up, here, by the human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty. For more details on Grayling's measures click here and also here and to sign a petition protesting them please click here. The writer Leah Thorn, who has a decade's experience doing close outreach work in prisons, has granted me an incredibly informative, moving and trenchant interview about prison reform, inequality, incarceration and prison culture here.

I do outreach work in prisons and also in detention centres and I have seen first hand how powerful and important books are to prisoners. Book are vital, not only in providing enrichment for inmates but as a way of connecting with others to talk through, challenge, inspire and provoke debate in a rewarding and constructive way. In all the institutions I have visited, book groups, reading groups and writing groups exert a strong pull on prisoners, who show themselves again and again to be dedicated, committed, passionate and insightful in their work and in their dealings with me and with each other.

A literary culture creates the space for civilised, meaningful relating, for social development, for questioning and self-questioning, learning, self-improvement: all the things a truly constructive prison system should represent. I have seen virtually silent prisoners linger around the edges of a group and then, through a few comments and some close reading, gain confidence, develop their skills and showcase their talent. The books are not just a source of education but also of entertainment of the most enriching and deepening kind. They are, in fact, an essential tool in tackling the poor levels of literacy and the accompanying frustration, low self-expectation, daily obstacles, narrowed opportunities and the intractable economic and social deprivation and desperately limited horizons which contribute to an environment in which petty but repetitively (almost compulsively) committed crimes are almost an inevitability. I am not talking about 'being soft' on rapists, child abusers, batterers, thug murderers, predators and woman-killers but about lifting up and liberating that great miserable body of the prison population: neighbourhood burglars, car thieves, petty hustlers, smalltime crooks, scrappers and scufflers, drug pushers who are addicts, teenage or early twenties wannabe gangsters, holders or passers-off of stolen goods. For these types, prison can be an opportunity either to become grossly influenced by malign individuals even further down the road to moral and economic corruption - or to gain some skills, judgement, backbone (as opposed to bravado) and promise, which can be taken out into the world upon release. Reading skills can contribute to ensuring that, in time, released prisoners might build a stronger and better life for themselves than they had before their sentence, not because of an increase in something nebulous and romantic like dignity but because literacy skills are vital to worldly progress.

As with all teaching, through the collective experience of reading and talking about reading, the prisoners I have worked with have taught me much more than I could teach them or they could teach themselves without the structure and focus of a book to anchor them. Certainly, we all learned a thousand times more in a couple of hours spent together daily than we would have during whole afternoons spent on the landings [where the cells are] watching daytime TV.

Furthermore I have been told directly by women prisoners with initially low literacy skills how fundamental reading has been to them. One woman told me, "My mum didn't know how to read or write, I didn't know how to read or write, that was just the way it was. So I taught myself in prison."

There is a further point, and it is gendered. I am extremely alarmed by the cruelty and punitive malice of Grayling's proposals for women prisoners with children and the suggestion that children cannot send their mothers parcels.

The overwhelming majority of women prisoners are 'inside' for non-violent crimes. The process of incarceration is mentally traumatising in itself and additionally has grave real-world consequences. In virtually all the cases that I have seen, women prisoners had been their children's primary carers and guardians, with secondary care provided by grandmothers and other female relatives. With the central source of stability and care removed and in many cases moved far from families' home towns, if female relatives cannot take on the childcare responsibilities then families are broken up, young children are put in care and a new cycle of deprivation, vulnerability, exploitation, damaging instability, lack of opportunity and circumstantial predisposition to offending begins.

We can see from all this that it is often the supposed cure, not the crime, which creates deep and long term trauma and is a key factor in the pressing issue of women prisoners' mental health and self harm. Incarceration for crimes which are more often than not the result of economic deprivation, abuse, inequality and lack of support inflicts mental wounds, drags an entire family even further down socially and creates the ground for yet more crimes to be committed - out of survival, out of necessity and out of pain.

The sense of isolation in a prison is extreme and is made perversely worse by the sheer numbers of other prisoners, guards and civilian staff. The entire non-prison world is referred to by prisoners as Outside, and the prison described numbly as Inside. Incarcerating people in a way that is mentally violent as a means of punishing non-violent crimes does not work and destroys everything, inside and out, mental and physical. There is little stimulation in a prison except for basic skills learning, a few hours of classes per day, helping out as an orderly, working in various prison areas such as the 'servery' [kitchen and canteen] or packing boxes of goods to go between prisons, sitting in front of daytime TV, idle chat and destructive scheming which is usually the result of boredom and depression. In such a context books are a humane necessity, vital for the intellect, for processing and sublimating the emotions, for socialisation, for education and for development - not a form of empty entertainment to be handed out like sweets to those who behave well. It is a fallacy that prison life is cushy, although the routine and the utter predictability and slow demarcation and regimentation of time may be comforting for those whose outside lives feel insecure, emotionally raw or unsafe. Treats, in the form of everything from letters to books to clothes and sachets of perfume or a nice top, are rare and treasured.

Receiving gifts and messages from their children and having something to talk to them about on visits - something like a story from a book - is many women prisoners' lifeline, their only source of sustained warmth and hope from the outside world. A chat about a book, gifted to a prisoner by her child, may be the only thing which makes a prison visit less frightening for that child. The prisoners pay this token of love and kindness back at Christmas time when they record stories on CDs for their children to listen to.

I hope that Grayling changes his mind and seeks more effective, more humane, less petty and less malicious ways of reforming the prison system.


For more on my prison work see this report by the Prisoners' Education Trust, this from English PEN, this also from English PEN and Rape, Refusal, Destitution, Denial on my outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees, many of whom had experienced detention and imprisonment.

Tracing the inkline of beauty and history: Delhi Old And New by Kavita Iyengar

• Delhi Old and New by Kavita Iyengar is available on Amazon here.
• Time Out Delhi have covered Delhi Old and New here

I've just discovered a new, absolutely beautiful artist's tribute to Delhi, one of India's most historic, complex, vibrant and inspiring cities. Kavita Iyengar's Delhi: Old and New is a stunning edition of original, fiercely observed and intricately traced images of the city, at once delicate and utterly fresh. Iyengar's images give the reader a strong visual tour of Delhi, yet are themselves so crisp and classy that the book feels timeless, lifted out of the daily bustle of cosmopolitan life. It does so by focusing on representing multiple Delhis through the centuries, via those architectural and cityscaped parts that still remain, from ancient temples to mosques, forts, palaces, colonial buildings (thanks, chaps) and the "New New Delhi" of post-Independence India. In Delhi, Old and New the vast weight of history is here made both accessible and inexpressibly gorgeous.

Full cover spread - click to enlarge

This is a book for everyone who loves art, or loves India, or both. And for those who want more of the exquisite works, here's a privileged look:

All images by Kavita Iyengar

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

Updated 25th October 2013

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, Ideas Tap, The Asian Writer, Variety, The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Publishers' blurb as follows:

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century, seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life.

Beyond The Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is based on my first visit to the West Bank as a reporter in 2011. A short film by Murat Gokmen, summarising the effects of the trip on some of the participants including Anne Chisholm, Ghada Karmi, Ursula Owen and me can be viewed here. I was not a Middle East activist or specialist and went with the intention of reporting exactly what I saw, as it happened. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

Excerpt:

It is only now, about halfway into the trip, that I think about the strategy of occupation. How do you subjugate a people? By nihilism, chaos and anarchy in the name of control. You do it by sabotaging their certainty, by toying capriciously with their presumptions, by continually tilting the playing field, moving the goalposts, reversing decisions, twisting definitions, warping parameters. You control where people can and can’t go, then change the rules arbitrarily so that they cannot make plans or have any stable expectations. You give a permit to one person but deny one to another person who’s in exactly the same circumstances, so that people cannot deduce, conjecture or extrapolate based on an individual’s experience. You make them feel that their house is not their home and can be violated, occupied, demolished or taken at any time, so they cannot fully relax even in their own beds. You isolate them and put a wall where their view used to be. You instigate a faux ‘system’ of permits, which is deliberately obscure and can be changed at any time. You shout at them in a language that is not their own and which they do not understand. You monitor them. When they travel you put your hands all over their possessions. You arrest and question anyone for any reason at any time, or threaten to, so they are always in fear of it. You are armed. You intimidate their children. You change the appearance of their cities and ensure that the new, alien elements—the walls, roads, settlements, sides of walkways, gates, tanks, surveillance towers, concrete blocks—are much bigger than them or on higher ground so that they feel diminished and watched. You make everything ugly so that seeing is painful.

Their consolation is that if they die, the euphemism ‘martyr’ will conceal the ignominy.

Further launch events related to Palestine, the Middle East, war reporting, international reportage and international affairs include the below. A full and updated list of appearances can be found here. 

• [Friday 4th May, 4.30pm, The Globe Theatre, London. I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled Theatre under Occupation: What Does Shakespeare Have to Say to the Palestinians? following the Ramallah-based Ashtar theatre company's staging of Richard II in Arabic.]
• [Saturday 19th May, 2pm, Watershed, Bristol. I will be in conversation with novelist Selma Dabbagh as part of Bristol's Festival of Ideas, in an event called Palestine Now. Click here for details.]
• [Wednesday 30th May 2012, 7pm, Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Liverpool, as part of the city's Writing on the Wall festival. I will be in conversation with novelist Ahdaf Soueif about the Middle East revolutions. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 9th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye. I will be interviewing war reporter Janine di Giovanni. Further event details here.]
• [Sunday 10th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival. I will be interviewing Ahdaf Soueif about Cairo and the Arab Spring. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 7th July 2012, 5.30pm, Southbank Centre, London. I will be chairing a discussion on The Art of War (Reportage), with BBC war reporter Frances Harrison, journalist Oliver Bullough and Caine prize winning writer Michela Wrong. For event details click here.]
• [Monday 9th July 2012, 5.30pm, Bluecoat, Liverpool. I will be giving a solo reading and talk on the effects of the military occupation in Palestine as part of the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival. For event details click here.]
• [Friday 17th August 2012, 4pm, Edinburgh International Book Festival. I will be chairing a panel discussion on international war reportage with Ed Vulliamy and Janine di Giovanni.]
• [Tuesday 9th October 2012, 5.30pm, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London. I will be curating and chairing a panel event called Palestine Now: Writers Respond as part of the university's autumn series of lectures on the contemporary Middle East. Further details here. My speakers will be Rachel Shabi, Naomi Foyle, Miranda Pennell and Selma Dabbagh.] 

• [Sunday 11th November 2012, 6.30pm, The Map cafe, Kentish Town, London. I will be discussing Palestine with the writer and academic Ghada Karmi.]

• [Friday 16th November and Saturday 17th November 2012. Location and speaker details confidential. I am speaking at a leaders' conference about art, culture, politics and the role of the media amongst Arab Spring states.]  

• [Sunday 18th November 2012, Leighton House, London, 3pm. I will be in conversation with British Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh as part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Nour festival of North African Arts. Event details here.]

• [Friday 7th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 8pm. I will be opening the Bristol Palestine Film Festival and chairing a Q&A with speakers including film directors Ken Loach and Leila Sansour after a screening of the film 5 Broken Cameras. Details here.]

• [Saturday 8th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 6pm. I will be speaking and reading at an event called Writing A Path Through Palestine alongside writers Selma Dabbagh and Guy Mannes-Abbott. Details here.]
   

Springtime of the women: a season of amazing talent in spoken word, literature, art, film, theatre and more.

For Books' Sake publish their first fiction anthology; Eve Ensler brings Thandie Newton, Neneh Cherry, Meera Syal and Rosario Dawson to the Lyric Theatre on 26th March; the Human Rights Watch film festival launches with a stunning programme of topical international films 21st-30th March; and a look ahead to Electra Productions hitting Tate Modern with Her Noise, their 3 day celebration of avant-garde women artists' genius at the beginning of May.

1.     For Books’ Sake celebrate smart fiction by smart women with their first anthology, Short Stack, Wednesday 28^th March 2012

In moments of deep despair at the cultural femicide all around, occasionally an amazing heroine shines a light. And sometimes a load of heroines shine a load of lights and throw a party for all their friends. For Books’ Sake is the legendary online magazine dedicated to promoting and celebrating writing by women, in the face of the widespread ignoring and dismissal of women’s work by literary editors, jury panels, TV and radio editors and commissioners and literary event producers of both sexes. The site is brilliantly written, insightful, influential and powerful. Book-lovers and lady likers will emerge from a plunge into For Books’ Sake with a handful of new reading and writing recommendations, a head full of new ideas and a refreshed sense of women’s genius. Get behind this amazing group of women: For Books’ Sake should be a paper magazine, a cultural festival, a TV and radio network, a prize scheme and a full-on touring roadshow with  a free big-bonus raffle and tombola.

If you don’t want to spend your solidarity-time glued to a screen, For Books’ Sake have gone one further and released Short Stack, their first fiction anthology, which is being published by Pulp Press at the end of the month, with a party at 7.30pm at the Tamesis Dock on Wednesday 28th March. You can already get the Kindle e-book edition here. If you want your timbers shivered, For Books’ Sake promise that Short Stack will offer “ten twisted tales of heroines hell-bent on vengeance, reanimated corpses, post-apocalyptic sex and much, much more.” I hope that in the future, the “much more” includes science fiction and fantasy anthologies, because I want in.

2. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Wednesday 21^st March – Friday 30^th March 2012.

Just when you were despairing at the gung-ho 3D big studio Cineplex drek on show as spring and summer approach, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to London as part of its global tour, with a series of nineteen intelligent, topical, global, confrontational and eye-opening work, screening at the Curzon Soho, Curzon Mayfair, the ICA and the Ritzy. Visit the main festival site for a full list of screenings and a look at the brilliant line-up of talks and debates happening alongside the films. Most of the screenings are followed by extremely well-programmed panel debates discussing the issues with the director/s, critics, academics, activists and politically and socially engaged artists. If you’re interested in work looking specifically at women’s place in society then take a look at three standout works amidst a generally stunning programme:

Love Crimes of Kabul, Tanaz Eshaghian’s documentary, which follows three young Afghani female prisoners as they go on trial for “moral crimes” which include running away from home to escape abuse and  allegations of adultery. In refusing to fit into society’s norms by their defiant actions, these women come to be seen as threats to the very fabric of society, and their acts of self-determination as illegal.

A still from The Price of Sex

The Price of Sex, directed by Mimi Chakarova, is about young Eastern European women, sex trafficking and abuse. Chakarova’s film is told by the young women who managed to escape and refused to be silenced by shame, fear, and violence. Director Chakarova is an Emmy-nominated photojournalist Mimi Chakarova filmed undercover and gained extraordinary access for this documentary, which won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award, announced at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York in June last year. The screening on Saturday 24 March will be followed by a panel discussion with Mimi Chakarova and Abigail Stepnitz, national coordinator of the Poppy Project, which provides support to women who have been trafficked. It will be moderated by Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch.

Family Portrait in Black and White tells the story of Olga Nenya, who is single-handedly raising 23 foster children in rural Ukraine. Sixteen are the biracial offspring of visiting African students and Ukrainian women, who often see no choice but to abandon their babies. Olga reveals herself to be loving and protective but also narrow-minded and controlling. A product of communist ideology, she favours collective duty over individual freedom, and this paradox gives the children the sense of belonging they ache for, as well as cause for rebellion and distrust.

I support this festival wholeheartedly. All the films aim to “address economic inequality and consequences worldwide” and are organised around four themes: development, environment and the global economy; migrants’ rights and racism; personal testimony and witnessing; and women’s rights. The roster is impressively international, with 15 documentaries and 4 dramas from Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Canary Islands, Ethiopia, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, the Maldives, Pakistan, Palestine, Paraguay, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA. Many of the films will be followed by Q&A sessions with filmmakers, and some by panel discussions with experts and film subjects.

The festival will launch tomorrow, Wednesday, 21 March, at the Curzon Mayfair with a fundraising benefit and reception for Human Rights Watch, featuring Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s  film 5 Broken Cameras. 5 Broken Cameras documents a Palestinian village's struggle against violence and oppression. The wall consumes much of the village’s arable land and allows nearby settlements to extend onto villagers’ fields. A cycle of resistance and retaliation develops between the village and the settlements.  

On Thursday 22 March, the Curzon Soho will host the opening night film, Jon Shenk’s The Island President, which follows former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (who was forced to resign the presidency this February) as he fights to convince the world’s policymakers to do something concrete about climate change. The Maldives is in danger of disappearing below rising sea levels, creating the world’s first cohort of environmental refugees.

The closing night film and reception will be on Friday 30 March at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. It will feature Nadine Labaki’s drama Where Do We Go Now?,  the story  of a group of women determined to protect their isolated, mine-encircled community. With the women united by a common cause, their friendship transcends the religious fault lines that constrict their society. The film will be followed by a discussion with Nadine Labaki.

Other films to look out for include the following. Further details can be found on the London festival's main site:

• Bettina Borgfeld and David Bernet’s documentary Raising Resistance follows the life-and-death struggle of farmers in Paraguay confronted with the ever-expanding production of genetically modified soy, which requires herbicides and decimates nearby crops.
• Documentary Special Flight, in which director Fermand Melgar has gained  extensive access to rejected asylum seekers and illegal migrants in Switzerland’s Frambois detention centre.
• Maggie Peren’s drama Colour of the Ocean tells the story of a father and son, African refugees whose paths collide with those of an altruistic tourist and a Canary Island police officer.
• Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt’s Black Block documents the police violence and arbitrary detention experienced by seven activists who demonstrated at the 2001 Genoa G8 summit. Each person describes brutal treatment by the Italian police that night, and in the days that followed.
• Annie Goldson’s documentary Brother Number One tells New Zealander Rob Hamill’s story about the deaths in 1978 of his brother Kerry Hamill, and his two friends − John Dewhirst of England, and Stuart Glass of Canada - at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. As Rob retraces his brother’s final days, takes the stand as a witness at the Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal, faces the former prison warden Comrade Duch, who gave the final orders for Kerry and thousands of others to be tortured and killed and meets survivors who tell the story of the notorious S-21 prison. 
• Werner Herzog’s  exploration of life on death row, Into The Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, follows the story of Michael Perry, who was executed eight days after filming began,  and Jason Burkett, who were found guilty of three capital murders in Texas, and unravels the crime and trial from separate viewpoints, including the victim’s families and prison staff.
• Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss focuses on 19-year-old Masha and her journey through the Kremlin-created Nashi youth movement. Masha supports Putin’s policies of seeking to rid Russia of what Nashi believes are Russia’s “enemies”: political opposition, investigative journalists, and human rights defenders. But as a journalist herself she starts socialising with colleagues in this circle, and  begins to question Nashi and its leaders.
• In Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy and Daniel Junge’s Oscar-winning documentary Saving Face plastic surgeon Dr Mohammad Jawad travels to Pakistan to treat women who have suffered acid attacks. Among them is Zakia, who goes to court to prosecute her husband for her attack. She becomes the first case tried under a new law in Pakistan that punishes the  attackers with life imprisonment.
• Susan Youssef’s drama Habibi tells the story of young lovers Qays (Kais Nashef) and Layla (Maisa Abd Elhadi) who are university students in the West Bank. Both are forced home to Khan Yunis before they have completed their studies and in this more religious and traditional environment their love story can continue only if they marry. Yet Qays is too poor to convince Layla’s father that he can provide for his beloved daughter. In an act of rebellion Qays paints verses from the classical poem Majnun Layla all over Khan Yunis, which angers Layla’s father and the local self-appointed moral police.

And now for......

3.  A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer: Eve Ensler comes to the  Lyric Theatre on Monday March 26^th 2012.

You will know Eve Ensler as the originator of The Vagina Monologues, V-day founder, tireless international campaigner for women’s human rights, an advocate, a writer, a personality, a heroine and a wit who has used her seemingly infinite energy and success to enable girls and women all over the world in speaking up, shouting out and even taking the stage. A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer is a new performance piece showcased as a collection of one-night performances featuring some of the coolest women performers working today: Rosario Dawson, Eve Ensler herself, Neheh Cherry, Meera Syal, Thandie Newton and more. Memory... is an adaptation of Ensler’s book of the same name. The producers have selected ten monologues to produce a varied and entertaining show expressing how violence against women affects everyone. All proceeds will go to charities dedicated to stopping violence against women and girls including Women for Women International and the Domestic Violence Intervention Project.

In addition to the sharp, shocking, deeply affecting script the Memory... series boasts some incredible art- and acting-world talents as directors: Tate Modern director Chris Dercon; Iwona Blazwick, OBE, director of the Whitechapel Gallery; RADA's Sue Dunderdale and Marcus Warren and Anna Ledwich.

Goldman Sachs Gives altruistic arm (don’t say anything) will be matching all ticket sales with donations, and The Millby Charitable Trust will be tripling this. There are also VIP seats which include the aftershow party with the cast and main players, on sale for £225.

4. Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic performance, talks, symposium and screening at the Tate Modern, 3^rd – 5^th  May 2012. Book tickets here.



Image by artist Jan Herman

 After the high profile mainstream success of Eve Ensler’s global empowerment project, I’ll end with something really intriguing, new (to me), avant-garde and promising to look forward to in May. I’ve been contacted by Electra Productions about Her Noise, a three day event which looks critically at political questions in sound, moving image, performance and cross-disciplinary art. It celebrates women in these fields – in particular, longstanding and veteran talents whose practice or influence is still going strong – given context, analysis and discussion by a thrilling range of additional speakers. I hope very much to see much more of this from Electra: putting women artists right back into the heart of cultural dialogue, acknowledging our creativity and importance, treating us to respectful appraisal and positioning us within a broader critical and art-historical framework. Check out the Facebook page here.

Her Noise includes performances and a talk by Pauline Oliveros, an evening considering the legacy of director Meredith Monk and a day of talks and discussions with contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Nina Power, Tara Rodgers and more. This programme marks the donation of the Her Noise Archive to the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections housed at London College of Communication, and is realised as a collaboration between CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), Electra and Tate.

Full details below:

Artist Talk and Performance by Pauline Oliveros

Thursday 3 May 19.00-21.30, £12 / £9

Pioneering composer, performer and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros celebrates her 80th birthday this year. She gives a solo performance and a talk entitled 'Archiving the Future: The Embodiment Music of Women', followed by a performance of her 1970 score To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation in the Turbine Hall.

Film and performance: The Voice is a Language

Friday 4 May 19.00, £5

This performance and screening celebrates the legacy of avant-garde pioneer Meredith Monk, featuring work by artists Sophie Macpherson, James Richards, Cara Tolmie and Sue Tompkins and rarely seen films by Monk. The evening is curated by Isla Leaver-Yap.

Symposium: Feminisms and the Sonic

5 May 11.00-17.50, £20 / £14

Exploring and developing emergent feminist discourses in sound and music, this symposium brings together contributions by musicians, artists, academics and writers, including Ute Meta Bauer, Sonia Boyce, Georgina Born, Viv Corringham, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lina Dzuverovic, Catherine Grant, Emma Hedditch, Anne Karpf, Cathy Lane, Anne Hilde Neset, Maggie Nichols, Nina Power, Tara Rodgers, Salomé Voegelin.

I hope this round-up fills your diary, freshens your heart and restores your faith. Enjoy!

The death of Magical Democracy and the rise of A Card From Angela Carter

The novelist Angela Carter, who died twenty years ago at the age of only fifty-one, was a creative genius, a consummate entertainer, an ambitious artist, a highly sophisticated crafter and a great intellect. [UPDATE, as at 10th Feb 2012: I have just been contacted by BBC radio producer Sara Davies, who has produced a documentary about Carter's plays, which is going out on Radio 4 on Thursday 16th February at 11.30am. She writes:

I hadn’t known about the plays till an academic in Bristol told me about them, and I discovered they were all in the BBC archive. I’ve used excerpts from all five, with interviews with various people who were connected with her back then, including Susannah Clapp, Marina Warner and Carmen Callil, and I’ve tracked down the studio manager who worked on the plays who talks about what fun it was putting them together in studio.

I don’t think many people know this side of Angela’s work, and the plays are such a riot!

Please tune in and enjoy Carter's imagination and genius afresh.]

I have long wanted to write a book of accessible essays, one about each of Angela Carter's major fictions, expressing my fannish enthusiasm, which is effusive and profuse. I'd envisaged it coming out this year, fully embossed, emblazoned and engilded, illustrated and illuminating, a Christmas gift for the literate. I’d call it Magical Democracy, after a phrase used in the Carter obituary written by Lorna Sage, another genius who died too young... and who also edited a wonderful book of essays on Carter, called Flesh and the Mirror, which includes contributions from Ali Smith and Marina Warner. 

For now, Angela Carter’s life has been commemorated in a beautiful looking, precisely written, perfectly constructed yet melancholy-making volume, A Card from Angela Carter, written by the renowned theatre critic and biographer Susannah Clapp. The book is hand-sized and gifty, its chiselled sentences and glinting insights giving us a sharp and immediate portrait of an entire life.

This is achieved despite rather than because of its central conceit. Clapp and Carter were close friends for several decades. Carter sent Clapp a series of postcards, which Clapp describes with a crisp humour that far exceeds the interest of the cards themselves, which are reprinted in a drab monochrome and bear brief, sharp, dashed-off messages. So there’s an image of a pot of Texan chilli beef. It’s like a 1970s tea towel illustration, block-printed and painfully indelicate. This is Clapp’s brilliant description:

The picture shows a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke.

On the back – and how I wish Bloomsbury had just turned the card over in the photocopier and given us a glimpse of Carter’s handwriting – the novelist has written,

Carter’s reply to the critics! Texas chilli, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp…preferably through his back passage.

This – Clapp’s description and Carter’s message, both - is pure Carter fiction territory: vehement, salty, violent yet camp, the image of beef and chilli turned to one of gore and guts, nutritive turned into purgative, a recipe for the rectum, the domestic made demonic. But the brevity and sharpness of the message is typical Carter too. She was as much a honer and an architect as she was an impresario or conjurer of literary circus tricks. The stories may happen in the lurid glare of a carnival tent – but the tent’s held up with iron pegs and metal rigging. There is method to the madness, deftness to the dazzle.

It has always bothered me that Carter’s work is often described in terms of stylistic effect, symbolic resonance and folkloric influence rather than mental effort or thematic craft. She is depicted (as Clapp acknowledges) as a literary aerialist exulting in costume, a dazzler magicking up a false yet apposite paradox-world of masquerade and bewitchment, of things pretending to be other things in an infinite hall of mirrors, references refracting off references. It is as though, if one were to smash the mirrors, there would be nothing behind them but stage lights and severed puppet strings. Carter’s fiction is presented by critics as one of high theatricality and loosely picaresque plotting, wild abandon held together with the strands of an unravelling devorée  shawl and a spot of false eyelash glue. The books and their characters seem to survive on sheer guts and willpower.

This is a false impression, peddled as much by her lovers as her detractors. Angela Carter wrote with an iron fist in a sequined, fringed, marabou-trimmed lamé glove, holding a scalpel quill. She was a consummate artisan as well as an inspired artist, a romantic as well as an intellectual, a sensualist and a stylist. She may have presided over the revels, but she organised them well in advance and made sure the schedule ran to time. That, in life as well as art, is one of the secrets of great creation: one labours meticulously, tightening those symmetries, buffing those commas, to make it look as though one wrote it (and compel readers to consume it) in a single exuberant swoop.

There is a satisfying tension between the baroque fantasy of what happens in Carter’s fiction and the austere precision with which it is planned; between the lavish indulgences of her characters and their speech and the stern control of Carter’s own ideas. Her characters - whether they are the mercurial, curious, stubborn and inquisitive protagonists of her famous collection The Bloody Chamber or the loquacious giant swan-heroine Fevvers in Nights at the Circus - do not merely enact mechanistic reversals of traditional fairytale martyrdom, overturn overdone gender clichés or blather on pointlessly for page after page of earthy ventriloquism. They are fully imagined lovers, fighters, thinkers, adventurers, charismatic beings. They have heart and soul; they are not just strung up in Carter’s sequence of symbolic events. Readers love Carter because Carter is fun to read: a fantasy novelist who writes ripping yarns that make you feel anything is possible.

A Card from Angela Carter restores the idea of Carter as a constructor of tremendous skill as well as a creator of wild genius. The postcards are merely a device to pay tribute, to illuminate, to analyse, to commemorate and to critique. On their few hasty lines, Susannah Clapp has managed (like a Carter character herself) to spin and hang a tight, light and glittering biography, beginning to end, with teaching jaunts, prize-judging and prize-winning, family, career, lifelong love and mortal illness in between. I am not quoting much from the book because I want you to buy it. But I had to put in this wonderful line:

Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth.

Days after having read it I am still wondering how Clapp did it. In barely a hundred pages she has performed an origami trick of stunning expertise, folding an entire life into a half-inch width of book, summarising a life and a body of work, conveying a steely awareness of time’s passing, a sense of history and a complex depiction of Carter’s character and contribution. With her icy, smooth humour and beautiful spare prose, Clapp strips out the tinny taint of campness that surrounds Carter. She does away with the standard critical soundbites – of the macabre, the kitsch, the playful, the carnivalesque, of masquerades and harlequins, dolls and hybrids, fairy lives and horror tales – that obscure Angela Carter under a thick white greasepaint of cliché.

There is not one great mind here, there are two, and both have been undersold. Susannah Clapp’s previous book, With Chatwin, is a superlative personal memorography of the travel writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, whom she was close to. It was praised fulsomely by all the major papers when it came out some years ago. These lines of praise are to be found, rightly, on the back of A Card From Angela Carter. But Clapp has not produced a major full-length work since, despite her tremendous talent and huge fanbase, obvious from her popular theatre reviews for the Observer, her erudite wit as a theatre critic for Night Waves on Radio 3, her pedigree as a co-founder of the London Review of Books (for whom Angela Carter was a longtime writer) and the support and joy which has greeted the publication of  A Card from Angela Carter. It has only been out a week and it’s been covered with great positivity in The Observer (who gave it their Review section cover) and The Guardian, flagged up as a must-buy in ES magazine, reviewed well in The Independent and made a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I want more from Susannah Clapp. I want a big book. Two thousand word reviews and one hundred page books are too meagre for a magnificent mind and a wide wit. Write a satire about a Biba-chic theatre critic, why don’t you? Just keep a diary and change the names at the end.

A Card From Angela Carter has been created with obvious devotion. Its controlled yet luxurious cream, black, gold and red cover was designed by the brilliant Holly Macdonald and the lovely red-inked endpapers were drawn by Carter’s longtime collaborator Corinna Sargood. There is a twist in the plot to do with these endpapers, which I won’t reveal except to say that it brings tears to the eyes and fully establishes this book as a serious eulogy for a dazzling talent too briefly explored…

…and too thinly praised. Carter was always loved by readers, much admired by other writers and reviewed thoroughly and respectfully. She was a prolific journalist whose great insight turned even casual reviews into weighty and important cultural essays with wide relevance. She was adapted very successfully for film (notably by Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves) and was an acclaimed dramatist for radio, as well as working speculatively in theatre. However, none of Carter’s novels had ever been Booker nominated. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published with great fanfare but ignored by that year’s Booker jury, leading directly to the establishment of the Orange Prize, now in its 17^th year.  Clapp writes, “Her early death sent her reputation soaring.” She adds, however, that

[Carter] was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties...

Twenty years after Angela Carter’s death, there is still no major biography of her and no major mainstream critical volume about her work. Could I propose here a small reconsideration of a speculative amateur scholar’s enquiry entitled… Magical Democracy?

Until I complete that magnum opus of trenchant literary criticism and squealing sycophantic hagiography, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp can be purchased everywhere, published by Bloomsbury.