It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster.
It’s like entering another country, listening in to the BBC’s World Service, and such a relief to escape for a while the interminable chattering about what’s going to happen in Westminster. On the half-hourly news bulletins, the Eurozone, elections in the Philippines, a mass grave in Serbia take the lead, while our very own British muddle almost disappears. On The Strand this week, the daily arts programme, Harriet Gilbert introduced us to the new Writer in Residence at Bush House, the World Service’s centre of operations in the heart of London. Hamid Ismailov is a refugee from Uzbekistan, who fled from Tashkent more than a decade ago because his writings were banned there and he was living in fear of arrest and imprisonment. He’s now head of the Central Asian service at Bush House by day, and a poet and novelist by night. His works are still banned in his homeland. When The Railway was first translated into English in 2006, it was described as a poet’s novel, teeming with characters and fuelled by ‘toska’, a word impossible to translate, suggesting both the deep melancholy of life on the Steppes, blasted by savage winds and bitter power struggles, and its antidote in the bright colours and fatalistic humour of its music and literature.
Ismailov is proudly following in the tradition of other writers at the World Service, such as George Orwell, once banished from the microphone because his voice was ‘too squeaky’ after the injuries to his throat he suffered while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Ismailov will be writing a weekly blog (bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldservice/writerinresidence) designed to challenge us all into finding our ‘creativity’ amid the busyness of the day. ‘You get a tickling in the hands and the heart,’ he says, ‘which requires you to write down something.’ He wants us all to recognise this ‘tickling’ and to translate it into words on the page. ‘I don’t want to be a tutor, but to interact and engage as equal to equal.’ Maybe we can start a collective novel, he suggests, from the five continents — writing to understand rather than understanding to write.
Listening to Ismailov is an education in the power of words and language, forged by the experience of living in a police state, where everything you say, let alone write down, has to be so carefully measured; something we in the unfettered world can only imagine. Harriet Gilbert’s other guest on Monday was Les Murray, the Australian poet, who reminded us cryptically of another truth about language, ‘Words are a poor man’s riches. They don’t cost much and you can have a hell of a lot of them.’ He gave us one of his favourites: petrichor — the smell of rain on dry ground. He also told us how the word was coined by a group of Australian scientists who discovered that, when rain falls and washes the surface debris of leaves and rotted matter into streams, it tells the fish to start reproducing. So much meaning in just three syllables.
Elsewhere on the programme in the last few days we have heard from artists in Japan and Vietnam, writers in Palestine and Ghana and film-makers in India and Sri Lanka. Who needs to book a ticket on a strike-bound plane? Harriet Gilbert talked to Raja Shehadeh about the Palestine Literary Festival which took 30 authors from around the world on a roadshow through occupied Palestine. The writers, says Shehadeh, were there on sufferance, only by permission of the Israeli government. One of them was trapped in a turnstile at a border crossing and kept waiting for five minutes until the Israeli guard decided to release her. In Nablus, one of the best preserved of Islamic cities but now under occupation, they observed how many of the houses are now cracked and crumbling, which they recognised as a vivid metaphor. ‘This was a text,’ says Shehadeh, ‘which we were all struggling to decipher, like reading a great novel.’
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