'Poetry is the only place that I feel human.' An interview with Kurdish poet Bejan Matur

This interview can be found in the new issue of Wasafiri Journal of International Literature. 

Bejan Matur’s poetry is put down as if engraved rather than written. Her ideas are expressed with a carved simplicity, a resonant depth, formal control and an imagistic mastery which is at once varied and disciplined. What she writes about, however, is shocking in its jagged violence and unresolved grief. Matur was born in Maraş in Turkey and writes mainly in Turkish. She is of Kurdish-Alevi heritage and her experience has been one of injustice, discrimination, silencing, denial and erasure. She witnessed the massacre of Alevis in her hometown during her childhood and was tortured in prison during her university years. Her law degree remained unused as she lost faith in established forms of language, argument and authority to gain justice and convey the truth. In the aftermath of torture, she turned to literature.

Matur’s poetry is a declamatory reclamation of history, identity and land which, while it may be emotionally rooted in her past, reads as universal. She could have been writing a thousand years ago; she could be predicting the aftermath of wars to come, a thousand years from now. Her poems evoke felled civilisations, buried truths and broken links. Her narrators wander through a ravaged society in which the very stones are soaked with mourning because of man’s inhumanity and violence. Rubble and earth reverberate with grief, pain and longing. Nature absorbs what really happened but cannot speak it back.

Matur is a prolific and award winning poet whose work is gaining a strong English-speaking readership thanks to two volumes produced by Arc Publications. In The Temple of a Patient God (2004) contains an extensive selection of work from her first four collections: Winds Howl Through the Mansions (1996); God Must Not See My Letters (1999); Sons Reared By The Moon (2002); and In His Desert (2002). The poems have been translated by Ruth Christie, who also translated Matur’s most recent complete collection, How Abraham Abandoned Me (Arc Publications, 2012), along with translator Selçuk Berilgen.

Most recently the Poetry Translation Centre in London have produced the pamphlet If This is a Lament (2017), which contains a career-wide selection of Matur’s poetry in new translations by Jen Hadfield and Canan Marasligil. In this project the image of the razed homeland abounds: it is depicted as a place that never was; a charred forest; a cold, dead heart full of black stones. The landscape is alive, a repository for human suffering in which “almond trees and stones…recognised me” but cannot speak what they know. Nonetheless, nature can give comfort as well as reflect human pain. In the poem Glacier, “White light from the depth of the glacier/ floods into my skin.” Other people, however, provide less comfort. Even love is a morbid union, a joined march towards death where “together, our hearts decay.”

Matur’s cynicism comes not from iconoclastic contempt but from the devastation of cultural betrayal. Formal religion is nothing more than a justification for political and cultural abuses; a temple is “just a place”, she writes in the poem In The Temple of a Patient God. Ritual has lost its ability to safeguard against annihilation, so ceremonial robes are mere “roots swaying on the hanger”, symbols of death rather than protection, “wan shrouds sweeping.”

Words, appearances, the official version of events and voices of authority are not to be believed. But in the absence of those, what is there? “What words can we use to speak of pain,/ in what language can we ask to be forgiven?” asks Matur in Growing Up in Two Dreams. We feel the bitter irony of her writing in the language of her oppressor, following Ataturk’s excision of words of Persian, Arabic and Kurdish origin from the official Turkish lexicon.  Truth eludes language but the truth, let alone justice, is so slow in coming that there is no vindication when it does break the surface; truth is a “last gift” grasped “too late” by accident “when I looked back” and it represents only “harm”, Matur writes in I Know the Unspoken.

Despite Matur’s own lack of faith in language to convey the truth, the reader is struck loud and clear by her work’s ringing beauty, effigy-like strength and stillness, its eloquently expressed pain and its haunting quality of permanence, timelessness and universality. I meet her in London in the summer of 2017, during a busy week of readings and talks about If This is a Lament.

What were you like as a little girl?

I grew up in a Mediterranean climate, in the cotton fields, with all these oak trees around us, in a very large tribal family, with five sisters and two brothers. My father’s a farmer, he used to grow cotton, It was a very picturesque, beautiful scene and there was this feeling of beauty, of paradise. This was shattered and collapsed by the tragic events that happened to Kurds and Alevis, all these [military] operations I witnessed, this massacre [at Maraş] which happened when I was ten.

I was very different from my siblings and the villagers felt sorry for me, a little girl who was always carrying big, heavy books, sitting in the shadow if the oak tree, reading Tolstoy and Zola and Hugo. In my mind I was like the characters from the novels, while the others were living in a simple, pure, archaic world where life was real, strong and very earthy. I was writing poetry when I was very young and even then it wasn’t what I call “pink poetry”. It was very rebellious.

When I was a child, we had a big house, a family house. The women were cooking and doing their daily things and I was always on the terrace reading my book. When my mum called me to come and cook, my father always protected me. He said, “Don’t call Bejan, don’t bother her, she’s reading.” He always protected me and I always feel his eyes, his gaze on my shoulder. He was supportive to all my sisters and he sent us all to good schools – but I continued my education after that. It’s important, in that kind of society, when you have support from a father.

How did you come to be tortured? And how did that lead to you becoming a poet?

When people ask me this, I always give a little smile. Because it’s obvious in Turkey, it’s political: if you are a Kurdish Alevi, of course you’re put in prison. During my university time I was always asking questions because of this oppression and inequality. We weren’t treated as equal citizens as Kurds, as Alevis. It was a basic human rights problem: they treated Kurds like second class people. We were in a group with other Alevis, we were talking, so they detained us. And in the end, after a year, they couldn’t produce any proof [of wrongdoing] so they let us out.

I was tortured in detention during that year. I was locked in a very dark cell, darkness all around me for more than twenty days. This darkness was like mercury, very concrete, very strong. I had no light, I couldn’t see anything, I was trying to not lose my connection with my being. Then I found a strong feeling dragging me in a kind of shamanic ritual. I was trying to say something without words; it was a kind of humming. After a while I found words like diamonds in the darkness. They were shining like stars and I found them, but I didn’t have a pen and notebook so I couldn’t make notes. I wish I could have.

Writing poetry wasn’t in my control. It was the only way that I could heal. I couldn’t stop it. When I heard it, I had to write it. My early poems are darker, stronger. My latest ones still have a sense of sorrow, but they are not heavy.

You write your poetry in Turkish. How do you feel about that?

I have only my second language, Turkish, to write in. I was born Kurdish, I spoke Kurdish with my family, with my mother – I still speak in Kurdish with her. My first shock was when I started primary school, because I had to leave my mother’s language at home. I was forced to learn Turkish because the education system was in Turkish.

When people say my Turkish poetry sounds so beautiful and so soft, it makes me feel sorrow because my Turkish contains my Kurdish. I am writing in a different way compared to other Turkish poets and writers, because I have another layer of understanding, I come from a different world, I have a story to tell about the things I witnessed since I was a child and the things I read about in the history of my people. All these tragedies bring a feeling of elegy for me, which is what makes it different.

Turkish is the language I was tortured in – the police were speaking to me in Turkish. Some people say my poetry is revenge, artistic revenge, taking Turkish and using it back against them. ‘They’ try to ruin your being, they try to shatter your existence, paralyse you through torture, through killing, through oppression. And to tell them NO, I do exist, I am here, I won’t have you to ruin my being, because hatred is very destructive. In my writing I always try to keep the bitterness away. Poetry for me was a kind of tool by which I healed my soul and spirit, it was a kind of consolation or therapy.

I have begun writing more poetry in Kurdish, which for me is a language of music. It’s like lullabies. Language is not about grammar or vocabulary; your mother tongue is the music you remember from your early childhood. The sound of wind, the sound of your mum calling you when you’re playing somewhere, the sound of the river stream passing by your house – all this is language. Now I feel in my mind that these sounds are coming to me in Kurdish.

Do you see your work as political?

I don’t use any political terminology or political slogans. Nonetheless, my poetry is very political, because being political is about changing people’s viewpoint, showing them a different way of seeing things. When my poetry first came out, the first Turkish readers were shocked, surprised, because my viewpoint was not familiar to them. I was trying to show them that they have to recognise that we are here, we have a voice, we are people, we are  human, we deserve respect, we deserve understanding. When I go to my village or to Kurdistan or all these Alevi societies, the moment they see me they start telling their stories because they don’t have access to representation, they have no opportunity to speak about themselves. It’s a kind of responsibility I feel towards my people.

What is your process?

I don’t have a strategy to write, it just comes. Usually I hear the sound when I walk, it’s a real shamanic ritual for me. Then there are two different stages. The first is not in my control, it’s just a very strong inspiration that comes to me as a kind of music. If I have a notebook I make notes, but then I leave it, because I want to create a space, a distance between myself and my first emotions. Poetry is not just about the raw emotions, it’s more deep and philosophical. The second part is a very disciplined editing part. Editing, for me, is like making a sculpture. My first notes are like a piece of marble, then I bring it to my atelier, then I carve it. I don’t add, I carve until I reach the concrete essence of the poetry. It’s there, I know the shape, I know the sound, it’s waiting for me. And I throw away all the emotional stuff. I am very perfectionist about the things I published.

Your poetry has a mysticism and spiritual resonancet. Do you see yourself as religious?

I’m not a believer, I don’t believe in religion and I don’t believe in God. But I use all these allusions because it’s a cultural thing for me. The environment I grew up in has these references. I just give them new meanings; it’s a personal ontology, a personal mythology. The way I use God is very equal: I criticise him, I ask questions. That’s very Alevi, it’s in my blood.

You tackle huge cultural, political and historical themes in your work. Do you think poetry can make a difference?

Before, I thought that politics could change the world. I took a break from poetry [after her fourth collection] and did journalism for eight years. I went on TV as a commentator and my newspaper columns were very effective. They were shaking the country. But I came to hate all these ready political slogans and clichés. During my time doing all this activism, I saw that there are minor and major politics, and that activism is about minor politics. Major politics is about [bigger things like] natural resources, the arms trade and macro economics. And when everything is corrupt, on all sides, it all becomes a game. I wanted to go deeper, to return to literature and defend human rights through literature. Poetry is everywhere, in political speeches, in social media. Poetry is the essence of all that. Writing a tweet in 140 characters, having to summarise your feelings in that space, that’s poetry, and people are always looking for it. Poetry is the only place that I feel human.

This interview with Bejan Matur was facilitated by the organisers of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, where Matur performed from If This Is A Lament in summer 2017. Ledbury is the UK’s biggest poetry festival, running annually for ten days in late June or early July. A preview of the 2018 festival can be found at www.poetry-festival.co.uk

On sex, race, migration and asylum

This long interview was initially granted to Asian Culture Vulture magazine and pegged to my book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London, which was the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees in the capital.

What was the moment that made you realise you wanted to write Asylum and Exile?

I realised within one or two meetings with my students, encountering their stories, their passion and their talent, that their words couldn’t go unrecorded. They were the most outgoing, wise, experienced group of people I’d ever met – yet refugees and asylum seekers are vilified in the press and are heard nowhere in debates surrounding these issues. They are silenced and demonised, or pitied and patronised – but every encounter, for me, was wholly life-affirming. These are individual human beings who must be respected and whose words must be heard; I was determined to use my (very limited) power to make that happen. It’s a typical journalist’s habit to make notes on everything all the time, regardless of whether those notes make it anywhere – but this time I really paid attention, memorising everything, writing up my ‘case notes’ at the end of every outreach session I did, then doing a lot of reading around issues of asylum, forced migration and refuge. I began doing outreach work in the top half of 2012 – promoting my previous book, Beyond the Wall, a reportage from Palestine, at the same time. I wrote Asylum and Exile at the very end of 2012, beginning of 2013, when it was still fresh in my memory. But I’ve continued doing outreach work since.

What were your expectations before you started teaching the asylum seekers from your book?

I knew the sessions would be thought-provoking and eye-opening but I didn’t except the effects to go beyond the classroom, or that together we would create something bigger than ourselves – not just the book but the good energy and fellow-feeling. I kept my expectations of myself low: the worst thing you can do is go in assuming that you are going to transform people’s lives, and indeed I didn’t transform my students’ lives. It was they who opened my eyes and made me realise that it’s often the people who are the most overlooked and ignored who have the most to teach others. I thought the sessions would be constructive in a literary sense, but they took on a significance which was far more humane and humanitarian as the weeks went on.

How did your perceptions change once you started teaching? What surprised you the most?

What surprised me was that people kept coming back to my sessions! It seemed to me that I was the one doing all the learning and developing, through listening to them, but that I myself was not contributing to my students’ knowledge in any way. They would share their stories and their writing with me – but these are people who already speak at least 2 languages fluently, and very few needed actual help with their English. The most interesting moments happened in between the writing exercises we did, not during them. I wasn’t surprised that my students had stories to tell about what they’d witnessed or survived both in England and in their home countries, but I was surprised by how politicised the whole group was: in the midst of their own personal experiences there was a very high awareness of the fact that the actions of powerful groups (whether governments, militia, rebels or whoever) led to millions of women, children and men being displaced, threatened, violated, tortured and generally having their lives torn apart, while the rich stayed rich and violent perpetrators acted with impunity, often with the collusion or non-involvement of the international community. All the students I had who were from African countries had a very high awareness and knowledge of the mess that Western European colonial exploiters callously left behind. All shared a cynicism about power-holders and governments and a scepticism about international bodies who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

What is the main message you aim to share with Asylum and Exile? What was your intention? Do you hope this book will bring about measurable change?

Never judge anyone by appearances – you have no idea what people have lived through, survived, escaped, achieved, learnt or striven for. It’s those who are denied a voice who have the most to say about how the world really is and we should be looking and listening out for what they can teach us, not paying attention to well-fed, cossetted, ambition-hungry politicians. My intention with Asylum and Exile was to uncover unheard voices, add nuance and individualisation to the debate on asylum, remind readers that this is not an issue to be discussion but a question of people’s lives and get them to see asylum seekers and refugees as people. I was certain that I didn’t want to write a polemic that tells people what to think. I thought the best way to change the way we approach the negative stereotypes which bedevil all discussions about asylum and refuge was to bring out people’s stories and personalities, in their own words. I don’t know about ‘measurable change’ but frankly things are so stuck that even a tiny bit of change, or nuance, or complexity, would be valuable. 

Where do you think this negative perception of asylum seekers has come from? 

These negative perceptions are not accidental at all but are the result of right-wing isolationist politicians, timid and placatory left wing politicians and a jingositic, xenophobic tabloid media deliberately playing on people’s ignorance, racism, cultural stereotypes, fear of difference and fear of change. It’s a deliberately strategy and it works: it sells papers, it stokes the kind of fear that leads undecided voters to come out in support of whichever party appears to take a firm line. But it’s al illusory. The fact is that asylum/refuge numbers to the UK are relatively low, that England is not ‘full’, the majority of benefits claimants are not ‘foreign’, the majority of UK criminals are not foreign – and asylum seekers and refugees are telling the truth about what they have survived. No rational person on the planet leaves everything they have, their home, their family and friends, their achievements, their roots, their life, to risk everything to attempt to take advantage of a completely foreign country where they know they will be tested, disbelieved and possibly even detained – if they don’t die en route.

At the book launch, Maurice Wren, CEO of the Refugee Council, talked of a system to distinguish genuine asylum seekers from those wanting to abuse to the system. How possible is it to create such a system? 

Maurice was talking about the myth that the asylum system likes to create around itself: the myth is that Britain has always been a welcoming and tolerant place, and the asylum system is simply there to weed out genuine claimants from abusers. That is what those within the system, the assessment boards, the Home Office and the border agencies tell themselves. The reality is that asylum seekers (and indeed all survivors of violence and persecution) tell the truth and the system, far from being a discerning one, is a cruel and disbelieving one in which the policy is to be openly sceptical of any claim as asylum seeker makes, to persecute them and treat them as though they are lying. 

As someone who works within the media industry; an industry that often creates the negative stereotypes surrounding asylum and immigration, do you feel a sense of conflict within yourself? If so, how do you try to resolve it? 

My ‘end’ of the industry isn’t the end which vilifies asylum seekers: we have the gutter press or the tabloid press to thank for that. Funnily enough, though, I am just as frustrated by seemingly sympathetic reports in broadsheets, which relay the numbers of asylum seekers who are trying to reach a safe port in a boat which sinks, or a lorry convoy which is raided by police… the victims in these cases are spoken about with great pathos, but are still not portrayed as individuals with names, lives and particular stories of their own. The solution to this is specific, accurate, long-form reporting and an emphasis on humanising and individualising the people involved, so that they seem less mythic and more real. The media doesn’t always do this very well, usually because of time constraints and issues of access; but charities do it incredibly well. For example the charity Women For Refugee Women has produced several testimony projects and performance works based on the reality of being an asylum seeker or refugee. In terms of traditional media I really appreciate everything The Guardian has done to investigate the abusive culture that exists within detention centres – in particular the sexual abuse of women detained at Yarl’s Wood. The newspaper’s investigation is an example of sustained, specific and compassionate reporting which is constructive and committed without being patronising.

What do you hope to see in terms of the issue of asylum in the General Elections this year [the interview was done in 2015]?

I’m extremely disturbed by the debate which has developed around these issues. First there has been a dangerous elision of asylum and refuge with all types of migration and immigration, with Islamophobia and fear of terrorism thrown into the mix, with a hefty does of head-scratching about ‘whether or not multiculturalism really works or is a good thing, at the end of the day.’ It bothers me to see England becoming more insular, more sceptical, more right-leaning and yet more culturally ignorant and happier to peddle ever more outrageous and bigoted clichés. UKIP have been incredibly good at harvesting all of that ignorance, bias and fear and instead of condemning UKIP, the Tories are trying to take advantage of some of that fear and use it to gain votes of their own, implying that immigration is ‘indeed’ something to be concerned about and attempting to quell their voters’ (groundless) fears. Meanwhile not one single mainstream politician on the left has stood up to counter any of the myths and tell the truth. Why? There’s no career traction in the issue, no money and no votes, and it’ll take a long time for the general populace to really take in and beginning believing the truth rather than the lie. 

We now have former migrants criticising and vilifying newer immigrants and asylum seekers – as someone who has come from a migrant family, what are your thoughts on this? 

I do know what you mean: as long as people have been migrating (that is, as long as there have been people on this planet) there has been a quite understandable tendency to want to assimilate in a new place, to ingratiate and to imitate. There is also a kind of pride – or should we say ego – that comes from having successfully survived a migration and settlement in a new place: a cruel tendency to say, ‘Well, it was hard for me when I first came here, I had to fight for everything, I had to fight for acceptance. So why should it be easy for you? You people have to prove yourselves, just as we did.’ There’s the well-known phenomenon of successful migrants tending to vote Tory – the party least amenable to true multiculturalism – for economic reasons and also because the conservative Darwinian dog-eat-dog, rise up on your own, fight for what you have mentality tallies with their own experience trying to make it. You could say it was also a trauma response, in a way: there’s a tendency for those who have suffered to replicate hostile contexts, beliefs, environments, values and also an unconscious desire to ringfence and aggressively ‘defend’ whatever you have achieved in the last one or two generations; there’s a sense of precarity and tenuous position that comes from being a migrant which leads people to (subconsciously) fear newer arrivals, as if what they’ve gained may be taken away at any moment. It also shows a lack of humanity, I’d say. Tribal behaviour of any kind bothers me and I am always disgusted when people are friends only with their own kind, without any interest in or compassion for anyone who seems or looks or is different. It bothers me when white people do it and it bothers me when non-white people do it.

Asylum and Exile tells the stories of the asylum seekers – what are your hopes for them to share to their own stories? How possible is it for them to do this at the moment? 

While my students certainly spoke freely with each other and with the caseworkers and charities that helped them, I feel that the conversation should be happening at a far wider level: it should be happening in public life. That means the media, public events, panels, the written and published work. Asylum seekers’ stories give us a true picture of what Britain is really like – but to get to that true picture, ironically and depressingly, you already need to be on the inside, to have a platform which attracts people who are willing to listen. As soon as I was into my classes and meeting all the wonderful people I realised that what they had to say didn’t stop with me, I could pass on the humour, humanity, wisdom and pain. A young woman at a university seminar I spoke at in London asked me (nicely) what right I had to write this book, and she was absolutely right. I have no moral right, beyond the desire and ability, the worldly power and the permission of my students – but nothing has given me the authority to do so and I don’t particularly want to be a bleeding-heart heroine or spokesperson for people who are well able to speak for themselves. Of course it’s unfair that I get to bring out this book and be certain of it getting at least some degree of coverage; that’s why I’ve tried to stick to talking about the issue rather than giving celebrity style ‘lifestyle’ interviews. In terms of talking themselves, while I had several very forthcoming students, not many would really want to sit in front of an audience of strangers and rehash their experiences for other people to coo and sigh over. Many of my students were consumed simply by the necessity of surviving and getting on with daily life. Attending book events – even writing books at home in comfort – is something that the privileged do. 

What drew you to a career in writing at such a young age?

Passion! I was always interested in everything, inquisitive, friendly, passionate, political, not shy: pretty much the typical personality type to be a journalist. I was enraged by the sexism and racism I saw in front of my face all day, every day, but at the same time excited by the galleries, the gigs, the design, the books, the artistic world around me. I always knew I wanted to be in journalism: I remember telling people when I was 13, and by 14 I was a journalist and having the time of my life. It’s a true cliché that you should do what you love and also do what comes naturally, what feels easy and right and joyful. I’m lucky too in that journalism is also a fun career: it’s sociable, it’s outward-looking. When I write non-fiction I feel confident that I am influencing the debate in some small way, whether I’m writing about gender or Palestine or asylum. With fiction, I’m much more circumspect. 

You had your first book published at 18; what do you think were the advantages of starting at such an early age? 

To this day, I am ambivalent about cutting my first book deal at 16 and having the novel, Seahorses, come out at 18, followed at 21 by the second novel, Too Fast To Live. Probably because I’m ambivalent about doing fiction in general: I’m not someone who loves novels above all else or advocates for novel-writing in the way I advocate for journalism. I sometimes see novels as part of the entertainment industry. But generally speaking I’m proud of what I’ve dones since I was 14, despite its ups and its many downs and long periods of freelance panic and nothingness – those weeks which bring zero opportunities and no emails. Nightmare. One thing that I’ll say in favour of early success is that it gives you a head start and enables you to ride out the dud years that happen in a freelance career without losing too much traction. I’m lucky in that Seahorses was reviewed very well and sold well, but I was so immature at the time and I regret no longer being with the best agent in the business, Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown, and with a big publisher like HarperCollins. I never quite got back up to that level again, nor did I fulfil my promise, although I have gone on to forge a very fulfilling broadcasting career, which is where my passions and capabilities lie. Still, I do feel some pride in having survived for 22 years in the media and publishing worlds, which have transformed so much and come under such pressure from various changes. I think just surviving is something in itself. However, there’s so much I still want to achieve – not just career wise but life wise – that I don’t think my previous accomplishments count for anything. It’s been a very hard few years, from 2009 onwards, for reasons both professional and personal, so I’m actually in a phase of self-questioning and reinvention and wanting to step back from the fray for a good few years.

There is the constant debate about migrants, no matter what generation, feeling a split sense of identity between the country they live in and the country they are originally from. What are your thoughts on this? How do you deal with this conflict if there is one? 

I actually think it’s a cliché that all second generation people feel some kind of split or conflict or rootlessness or whatever it is. I don’t feel that. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with not feeling 100% at home in a place; few people, of any kind, do. And those that do tend to be insular, parochial, solipsistic, ignorant bores. I can’t think of anything worse than a pathetic Little Englander who thinks England is the best place on earth – with no deep knowledge of any other place – and that famous saying, that anyone who’s tired of London must be tired of life, just struck me as the most insular, ignorant, arrogant claim in the world. I feel completely at home in all places. I feel like an international, which is what I am, not just for reason of racial heritage but also reasons of privilege, class and entitlement, which one should not be disingenuous about. I used to go to India nearly every summer as a kid, stopped when I was 14 because my career had begun and I was crazy in love with it, went back in 2013 and completely, utterly loved it. In terms of the energy, warmth, dynamism, contradiction, rate of change and female solidarity, it was a total buzz – far more so than England, which actually feels incredibly flat these days. I think the real forward drive is to be found in China, India, parts of Latin America, parts of Africa, not Western Europe. After being in India and China I now look at England with a far more critical eye than I did: I see it moving away from the rest of the world, suspicious of foreigners, socially stagnant, heavily mired in misogyny, porn culture and rape culture…. so like all migrants I plan to go onwards, somewhere. 

How was it entering the career at such a young age and also as an Asian girl? Do you think you had a different experience? 

It was, frankly, a thrill beginning a career at 14 and it was a lucky experience for me because I was a novelty and therefore not a threat. I knew then and still know that many of the places I work for are endemically casually sexist and virtually all-white (although the arts and style magazines I worked for were slightly better on this score than the more traditional newspapers and broadcasting outlets) but I was heavily protected, especially during the many years when my career was happening in tandem with school and university: a circle of friends, all style journalists, who were 10 years older than me and who showed me the ropes (and also showed me a really good time), the fact that I did my reviewing at writing work from outside the offices of the places I worked for; the fact that I cut my first book so early into my career, which gave me a lot of power or leverage within my career. I was always gender- and race-political: how could one not be? But these senses have sharpened even more as time went on: every few years there is a new, young, fresh name who is celebrated within journalism, but only a few are let through in every round. The general representation doesn’t change and as we get older, I see women (and in particular women and men of colour) being sidelined or plateauing more and more. Make no mistake, we live in a white male patriarchy. Every so often, a few people who don’t fit the mould are allowed in and tolerated, but never in numbers which would change the scene. We get only so far before hitting the ceiling, being replaced and then having to back off and find another way to survive. 

What are your thoughts on the number of British Asians authors in the industry currently? Do you feel they are represented fairly? And more specifically, British Asian women? 

For me this is not just about British Asians but about taking a really wide-scale view of diversity: all races, all ages, all backgrounds, all shapes and sizes and not just the very readily accepted type of the privileged, straight, entitled white male who doesn’t think about his own (or his friends’ and colleagues’ own) sexual and racial entitlement for one second. We live in a rich and diverse world and it’s shocking to enter into any influence professional institution, whether it be the media or politics or the arts, and see that right the way through, there is a severe lack of any racial diversity whatsoever, added to the fact that there is a gender pay gap, that there is casual sexism, that there are so few women of any colour at the top. This is down to sexism and racism; not the overt kind but a much more deadly, subtle and usually subconscious kind which prefers a white male club to anything else. To this day I am staggered by people’s ignorance and sexual and racial clichés about race and gender: the banal obsession and romanticisation of the Raj era of British colonial exploitation in India; forced and arranged marriages; women’s oppression and victim-hood (which the West harps on without acknowledging that male violence against women is endemic everywhere); the inability to recognise that not all brown people are Muslim. The list goes on and on. We are rarely presented as experts on things which are not related to the clichés I’ve mentioned, and when we are it is in the light of a perceived problem which we have been said to have caused (sexual exploitation, FGM, forced marriage, terrorism). Meanwhile, as I mentioned before there is a real lack of diversity when it comes to power-holding, influence and career achievement behind the scenes: as book editors, theatre directors, film producers, executives, commissioners and so on.

I read an interview with Kamila Shamsie, the novelist, in which she described being part of the brilliant Fifty Shades of Feminism essay collection (which I am also in) – and many of the white Western feminists made pretty racist, smug, arrogant, ignorant allusions to how relatively lucky they felt to be in England/America and not some foreign backward distant culture where (they thought) it was all much worse. The sheer complacency, racial arrogance and cultural ignorance of that stance really gets to me: negatively stereotyping and generalising about areas, cultures, continents spanning thousands of miles. These people usually know nothing of the world beyond their cosy little circle; and people who think of themselves as sexual progressives or liberals are the hardest to get to see the truth. 

For a novelist there is a special category of novel you are supposed to write, and it must conform to Western sexual, racial and class clichés: you must write something about parental oppression, religion and terrorism and radicalisation, about burning widows and child labour, about forbidden love in a mango grove during the monsoon season, about conflicted identity and about women who suffer. Or something about wearing a Muslim veil – how much you love it or hate it – or something with veil in the title! Beyond the Veil? Under the Veil? Sex and the Veil?

What were some of the difficulties you faced as you entered the world of writing as well other broadcast areas such as radio and television?

I was incredibly lucky because my career has developed organically and I never had any struggle getting in, but as with all people facing the double barriers of sexism and racism, I am aware of how tenuous my position is. You are given just one chance to succeed – and if you fluff it, that’s it. I am noticing these barriers more and more as time goes on as I see young men promoted over women with far more expertise, drive and experience and I see that the women and people of colour, including me, have hit some kind of shelf, or wall, or plateau, or glass ceiling. Despite our achievements and our track record, the big commissions and name-making assignments aren’t coming. I also witness casual sexism on a daily basis. In my experience, when I have tried to speak or write about this, giving copious concrete examples, I have simply been blacklisted from the organisations I was alluding to. It bothers me intensely that women and people of colour of both sexes are so heavily under-represented at all levels of the worlds I work in – not just in front of the camera or mic or page but also behind the scenes as editors, producers, directors, executives and decision-makers. We know that black and Asian actors are leaving the UK because roles are not written for them; I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happening with writers, producers, broadcasters, journalists and other talent, especially in those working in the freelance, unstable, creative or media world. Certainly, I’m thinking that way. 

Finally, what’s next for you? Is there another book in the pipeline?

I would be very interested in doing a long stint in a women’s prison. I’ve already done some prison work (since 2012) but would love to commit myself to three years in one place. The same goes for doing more work in detention centres – easily the most frightening places I’ve ever been, and worth exploring (and exposing) for that reason. So I want to expand my humanitarian work, and not just as a reporter.

My other job is in broadcasting so I’d like to do more documentaries with the BBC. They’re always enormous fun and you meet tons of wonderful people in the process. 

China Flash: a collection of my recent articles about contemporary China

The Zaha Hadid-designed Galaxy mall
complex, Chaoyangmen, Beijing, end 2014

• Only condoms can save China from a 'raging epidemic' of sexually transmitted diseases
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women's wit, pain and ambivalence
• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• Dashilar Design Hop: highlights from Beijing Design Week 2014 (Time Out Beijing)
• Being a submissive in Beijing's S&M scene (Time Out Beijing)
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

"Do not believe most of what you read about China, it has already changed."

Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing photographer

China Flash: Only condoms can save China from a "raging epidemic" of syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections

This 'as told to' interview was granted to me by Dr Neil Schmid, Beijing chief of sexual health charity DKT International, and first ran in Time Out Beijing's November edition. The text below is by and (c) Neil Schmid, not me. 

China has the highest overall contraceptive prevalence rates in the world: 88 per cent of women of reproductive age (15-49) use contraceptives. But that official figure is highly problematic: it’s unrepresentative of sexual activity across the Chinese populace for the fundamental reason that it excludes unmarried women and all men, married or unmarried. So it’s a highly gendered measurement of what constitutes normative contraceptive use. And in China, that concept forms the basis for the entire family planning policy as well as access to and, crucially, knowledge of all contraceptive methods. The upshot of this situation is that married women bear the brunt of contraceptive responsibility, men don’t, and those outside of married couples -- namely 249 million people -- are largely ignored in terms of sex education and general public discourse on all the contraceptive methods available. I want to address these inequalities and other sexual health concerns first by promoting condom use among youth and by providing both women and men with additional contraceptive options.

At the moment, the Government’s family planning policy favors IUDs [intra-uterine devices] and sterilisation for married women, and these two methods currently amount to roughly 50 per cent and 30 per cent respectively (i.e., a whopping 80 per cent) of all contraceptives used by that group. The legacy of this system is that because all these procedures were, and still are, done in government-controlled clinics, contraceptive choices have been highly limited. Not having a variety of choices means that information about other contraceptives isn’t necessary, and both institutions and parents are thus never obliged to develop the knowledge and concern to communicate different options. Also, hormonal contraceptives such as the pill, implants and injections don’t generally appeal to Chinese women because they often believe that hormones disrupt the body’s balance. An unfortunate result of the lack of short-term contraceptives among younger, unmarried women is that multiple abortions are relatively common and there’s frequent misuse of emergency contraceptives such as the morning after pill. If used excessively, both these methods can affect fertility in the long term. Finally, there a social conservatism that feeds into these larger patterns: you’ll often see adverts for abortion clinics in the Beijing subway, but you would never, ever see an advert for a condom.

Today’s Chinese youth have enormous amounts of freedom, access, and mobility which their parents never had. Enablers range from rapid urbanisation to apps like Momo, billed as ‘the magical tool to get laid’, which were completely unthinkable among their parents’ generation. Where the state was once revolutionary in addressing citizens’ reproductive and sexual health needs, it’s now turned a conservative eye to the new revolutionary changes affecting its population. The negative results are a rapid increase in unwanted pregnancies, abortions and STIs. 50 years ago, syphilis was virtually eliminated from China by government initiatives. Now an epidemic rages, with an average of more than one baby per hour being born with congenital syphilis in China. And unfortunately that’s one out of multiple STIs which are increasingly rampant across the population. As important and useful as IUDs and hormonal contraceptives might be in preventing unwanted pregnancies, they do nothing to stop the ever-growing spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

DKT International runs extensive programmes addressing sexual health in China. Visit their site.  To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.

China Flash: Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in modern China

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing last month.

A Lean In Beijing meeting, image (c) Lean In Beijing

Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s book about how she battled corporate sexism to rise to the top at Facebook, has struck a chord with young, ambitious women in China. “I saw Sandberg’s TED talk in March 2013,” says one of Lean In Beijing’s founding members, Allison Ye. “I was shocked because I had never seen a successful Chinese female leader talk with such openness and honesty about how exactly she got there. It was refreshing. Her message was that we can be responsible for our situation and we can control our lives. It was very positive.”

The talk triggered the formation of Lean in Beijing, which sent a survey [PDF]to more than 500 women, asking about their aspirations, their careers and the challenges they experienced in their lives. It revealed that 90% of respondents had never seen a professional women’s network – and wanted one. “We had 60 to 70 women at our first meeting, and every one had a story to tell. Things they wouldn’t tell to their own friends and families, they would tell to strangers,” says Ye. The Lean In message of female solidarity, boosted by speaker events, high social media connectivity, consciousness raising 'circles' and the open discussion of everyday sexism has proven so popular and necessary that Lean In has spread to several Chinese cities far beyond Beijing. Even within the capital, Lean In members have founded their own offshoots like the Lean In Thinktank led by Yolanda Wang and Maggie Zhang and the six Lean In College mentoring schemes founded by Alicia Lui. The mentoring scheme involves bringing in younger professional women to be mentors to college age students, Lui tells me. “Mentoring is a really great way to work through relationship, career and family pressures. At our last event in May, 150 students showed up and we had 15 mentors, all from different industries and with different interests. After the event, lots more professional women wanted to be a part of the network as mentors.”

We are meeting up at a time when gender inequality is back with a vengeance in China, with ancient stereotypes about femininity, double standards about gender roles, endemic and normalised violence against women, media misrepresentation and longstanding pressures on women meeting new corporate injustices around equal pay, property ownership, female leadership and opportunity, as chronicled in Leta Hong Fincher’s brilliant and vital book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.

Lean In Beijing’s discussions aren’t just about strategising within a corporate context, combating institutional sexism, why prominent Chinese women business leaders stand at less than 5% or why women are paid less than men for the same job. “It’s [also about] the pressure of getting married young, the pressure that’s coming from all directions,” says Ye, “not just the family but the media, the government, society. Every young woman in a family is pressured to get married really young. The message behind it is that a woman cannot be happy by herself, she needs to be someone’s wife, someone’s mother in order to be fulfilled in her purpose in life.” Yolanda Wang agrees: “For a man in China, at the age of 30 you’re meant to have a career, a car, a job. For a woman, the main responsibility is to find someone, to get married. And the pressure on her [to do that] starts at the age of 22 or 23.”

Recently, the journalist (and friend of Lean In Beijing) Roseann Lake co-organised the Leftover Monologues – women’s monologues from all over the world, prompted by a combination of the Chinese women’s movement, Leta Hong Fincher’s work on gender inequality and activist Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. It was the first time many of the Chinese contributors had presented their own stories. “It’s really hard for Chinese people to speak out. They’ll be judged by society as a bad girl, judged by family and friends,” says Maggie Zhang. The Lean In movement in China is radical in itself, for its fostering of open dialogue. The conversation goes far beyond tips on how to negotiate for higher salaries, be less self-critical, manage career progression, handle confrontation or consider a company job versus entrepreneurship - although Lean In Beijing members have discussed all these and more. “The idea is not necessarily limited to work or career, or even family,” says Lui, “it’s more about a close knit, confidential community of women who listen to you, empathise with you and help you.” “Women at big companies are afraid to speak out at meetings,” says Wang, adding, “In the US women sit and talk about their [professional and life] dreams. In China people ask you, ‘Do you have a boyfriend? What does he do?’ Nobody thinks a woman has a dream.” “We asked women how they saw their purpose in life,” says Ye, “and lots of women told us that that was the first time they’d ever asked that question of themselves.”

“Our parents tell us not to get a boyfriend when we’re at college, so we can concentrate completely on our studies,” says Maggie Zhang, “but then, when we turn 25, they pressure us to get a husband.” “I was told, ‘You should never try to be too smart or you won’t find a boyfriend’ by my mother’s friend,” says Lui, “and I was pressured to marry from the age of 26. The family is still considered the centre of everything. I’ve heard, ‘You can’t get a PhD because no-one wants to marry a PhD.’” 

"The other side of the ‘leftover women' story is that we’re moving forward as never before,” says Ye. “Women don’t need a partner to sustain their lifestyles. It’s inevitable that women in China will have more freedom and that this will force change. The post-90s generation is already changing things, they’re really independent. They see that it’s important to have your own thoughts.” Lui chips in, “On one hand China has been one country that’s done the best in equalising everyone to some extent. People’s lives are getting better. But there are problems with the way it’s being done and the consequences. The Chinese haven’t got used to money yet. They want to show off, to show people what they've got. CEOs of companies are in their 20s and 30s. They start a company, they make money. The Chinese mentality-change is one of the fastest in the world, because of the way modern China has started itself up.” “The economy is changing very fast. But society changes slowly,” says Wang. Ye says, “My parents went through the hunger, when they didn’t have enough to eat. That’s why what they want for me is the best: comfort, a husband. When my generation has its kids, it’ll be different.”

While women are regarded as valuable only within the domestic sphere, where their labour can be exploited for free, domestic duties are regarded as demeaning for men to do. “If a man is a stay at home dad, people think he doesn’t have what it takes to go out into the world and support the family. It’s about saving face,” says Zhang. “In Chinese TV shows the man is always rich, tall, successful and the woman is obedient and subservient.”

“There are a lot of social barriers,” Ye agrees when I balk at the idea of individual women changing themselves in order to somehow evade, circumvent, win out against or contend with endemically antiwomen structures, judgements, customs, stereotypes and activities. “We can’t change the outside of society very fast but within our generation and the next we can change the policy-makers of the future. There’s only so much one person can do, but if everyone plays their part you can change a lot.” However, the barriers to equality and liberation are high. “You are discriminated against as a single woman,” says Ye. “Single women are barred from adoption. Sometimes a woman will choose her family over her career. Or she’ll choose her career. But women aren’t allowed to be both.” Yolanda Wang’s company asked one of her female colleagues to sign a piece of paper promising that she wouldn’t get pregnant for two years. “We never hear about men’s work-life balance, only women’s. And you’re judged badly whatever you choose,” she says. Maggie Zhang adds, “We have to educate not only women but also men, who are under huge pressure to be successful.”

Alicia Lui believes that Sheryl Sandberg’s inspiring talk and book have “raised issues which enable us to have more open conversations about [sexism]. Lean In was a catalyst. It said to women, if you really feel you have a need for something you have to raise your hand and ask for it.”

Ye believes the movement is a chance for women to look at their lives afresh: “Before you change anyone’s life you have to change the way they see themselves. We have high rates of employment for women here, but sometimes women are happy with less demanding hours and less pay, because it means they still have time to do all their family duties. I believed all that too – until I was brave enough to say that that was not what I want. Once people see alternatives then they can begin to lean in and change their lives. We want to help women pursue their own definition of success, help them when they’re young and share stories of other women’s lives so they see themselves in these women.”

Lean In Beijing derives its momentum and power from its focus on co-operation between women. “Why do women judge each other?” says Allison Ye. “We don’t have that tradition of women helping women.” “We support each other to take the next step,” says Alicia Lui, “but starting something requires the other side to response. I argued with my mum [who put pressure on me to marry] and now she’s coming to understand my thinking. Each of us has a personal stake in Lean In Beijing because these issues affect us personally.”

Yolanda Wang says, “At my first Lean In Beijing meeting I realised I’m not on my own, I’m not crazy. Women are so honest, so encouraging, they push you to change things. For women it’s very hard to be their real self. Who they are now is who their family wants them to be, who society wants them to be. The cliché was that the only thing between girls was jealousy. But that’s not true. It’s so good to see girls who say to each other, ‘I like you because you’re awesome.’”

For a full list of my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.