Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and commentator; first Muslim woman shortlisted for the Booker Prize; witnessed and commented on the Egyptian revolution.
On the island
Eight records
Ragayen (We're Coming Back)Favourite
Well, since we're talking about the revolution, I thought that we would have a track from Iskinderilla. Now they're a group of young people, they are all amateurs. and they came together, I think, a couple of years before the Revolution. I've loved their music, and I remember sitting in a very small theatre. They were almost illegal, really, because they sang protest songs. And I remember sitting in a small theatre and thinking, Now this music really needs to be outside in the street, and will the day ever come when I will hear it outside in the street? And the day did come, and when the revolution happened they were out there in Tahrir
Well, the music that accompanied my very young ears was really my father's music that he played at home, and he had this really esoteric taste, and he particularly went for the songs of a a giant um Egyptian composer, Abdel Wahib. And so this is a track from um Abdel Wahib, Emtaz Zamen, When Will Time Permit, my pretty one, and I sit with you on the banks of the Nile.
when you're thirteen, you know, that time for your friends and your own activities. So yeah, I just completely uh missed my life. I missed my school and my friends and the larger family and my dad actually, to do him credit, he he bought me a tiny little tape recorder called a Phonotrix and so I would record things from the television onto it and then have them to play in a horrible crackly quality. But again, it was it was tremendously important. And of course the song that started a whole new area of consciousness going in every one of us and that I couldn't stop playing was The Beatles and She Loves You.
Bassoon Concerto in B-Flat Major, K. 191
Stepan Turnovsky, Vienna Mozart Academy, Johannes Wildner
I was studying for my own PhD. at Lancaster University and I had a little cottage out in the countryside and uh For a long stretch I was actually really, really unhappy and really isolated. and I discovered Mozart's bassoon concerto, and there was something about that sort of swell of music in it that was so romantic and so hopeful. And I think I must have just, um I played this record constantly for about a year and it uh it saw me through.
Having forced my parents to come back from England and having dropped back into my old and beloved life. Um there was the summer of'sixty six was the last summer really of that life. I was sixteen and this was in the summer Abdel Halim Hafiz, who was like the big heart throb singer of everybody. With hindsight, of course, the following summer was'sixty seven. It was the summer when all of life was put on hold because of the war,'sixty seven, and when it came back it was altered radically. And so summer of'sixty six Beach at Alexandria, and Abdel Hayim Hanfer's singing So.
I think the next track really is a track from uh What feels like years spent in cars driving my kids around, either driving them to and from school, or driving them to activities or to friends' houses, or occasionally packing them into the car and driving off to France. And I asked them what would be the track that that most represented that time for them, and they said, um, well, you always played Hotel California, so let's uh let's do that.
Well, I've just mentioned Palestine as a big consumer of my time and my heart. And so I'm going to choose a classic of Arabic music. It's Feyruz. And this is the song that she sang for Jerusalem and that really was the soundtrack that was Running through me. The first time I went there at the end of two thousand.
Well, I can't end without having something from Um Kosum. Um Kosum, the great Egyptian diva. As a child you really dislike it, and it represents sort of oldness and stodginess and stuff that goes on forever and boringness. And then one day, probably in your late teens, you turn around and you find yourself humming something, you find yourself recognizing a tune and you realize that she has provided the soundtrack for your life. and that you really love that music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:00When you arrive back in Cairo now, when your feet touch Egyptian soil, what do you feel?
Um, well, my feet have been touching Egyptian soil so often in the last year and a half that really I've um I've even stopped registering the changes. I wake up in the morning and I'm not quite sure where I am until I'm completely uh [alert].
Presenter asks
1:36Was there almost tangibly a moment [on January 28th last year] when you thought something important was happening here?
I got back on the twenty seventh in the evening, but everything was quiet, it was like the country was drawing a breath. And the next day, on the twenty eighth, that's when it all completely broke wide open and there was a moment when we we're at the mouth of Tahrir and um ahead of us in Tahrir there was the smoke and the gunfire. and just thousands and thousands of people and every once in a while there would be a surge of a few metres forward as your friends who were being killed at the front um gained you those three meters and your job as the masses was to sort of move forward and hold the three meters. And that was, I suppose, when it really, really did sink in that this was a battle for the country and that we were all part of it and I was there.
Presenter asks
5:29How optimistic do you feel about Egypt's future right now?
The keepsakes
The book
Ian Hamilton
When he was writing it, he would read me the chapters as they were finished, and I thought it was amazing, but I also thought that I wasn't really taking it all in, and that one day I would go back to it and read it, and I've never done that, and so that would be an opportunity to do that.
The luxury
blank paper and coloured biros
I only work things out when I write them down and I think that the one way to make the island bearable will be to use it, to treat it as a luxury, to have all the time to sit down and work things out and write them down.
I still believe that optimism is a duty. I think that the fight that we have on our hands is bigger and will take longer than we had perhaps thought. But then maybe if you know just quite hard a time you're letting yourself in for, then you you don't start. You know, maybe you do need that sort of slightly wide eyed optimism to begin with. I definitely believe that the country is not going to sit back and is it's just not going to give up until it feels that it is on the path to really a country that is run in the interests of the vast majority of Egyptian.
Presenter asks
6:23How difficult was that [interpreting and commentating on the Revolution for the rest of the world]?
Um do you know, at first it almost felt a little bit unfair that you were not being allowed to simply live the moment and participate in it. And then it kind of just clicks that each one of us has a job. … And everyone had to do what they could do. And my job was this business of interpreting and contextualizing and articulating and representing. But in The Revolution you you can't but be a participant. I mean there's no position other than that and you wouldn't want a position other than that.
Presenter asks
8:56You dream in Arabic but you write in English. Why do you think that happens?
I write in English because of the accident of uh where I first learned to read. We came to England in um fifty five. I was four years old and my mother was doing a PhD in English literature and my father and I accompanied her. And I lost my Arabic … I learned to read very quickly and I learned in English and then I was surrounded really by her library as I was growing up and it was it was a brilliant library with sort of all of English and all of world literature and translation. And it was just easier to carry on reading it, really, than to branch out into Arabic. … and therefore I think that my literary language was formed. Um in English.
Presenter asks
30:21How personally do these [political and cultural upheavals] feel themselves to be woven through your life?
Totally. I mean apart from odd moments I can hardly understand when people, you know, nicely and kindly want to know how you personally are doing as opposed to you publicly are doing. You know, there isn't, really. uh me personally, separate from what what's happening.
“And that was, I suppose, when it really, really did sink in that this was a battle for the country and that we were all part of it and I was there.”
“I still believe that optimism is a duty. I think that the fight that we have on our hands is bigger and will take longer than we had perhaps thought. But then maybe if you know just quite hard a time you're letting yourself in for, then you you don't start.”
“I think that if we have a a tug at all, it is that that I kind of want to be more their mother and less the person I am and they push me into being um into being me more.”
“to write a novel I have to give myself over to it completely. And the work that I have been doing, whether on the Palestinian issue or with the Egyptian Revolution, have meant that I can't clear that space from which the novel would come.”