Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet and artist, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal, whose work explores freedom, cultural intolerance, and gender politics.
On the island
Eight records
Jazz standard; performed by a session group from Lahore.
Lyrics by Javed Akhtar; from a film about street children.
Charara Charara Maro Chakrochali
Gujarati folk song; sung by the castaway's daughter.
W.H. Auden (poem) and Benjamin Britten (music)
Poem read by Stuart Legg; from the 1936 documentary film.
Sailing By / Shipping ForecastFavourite
Ronald Binge (composer) / Luke Tuddenham (reader)
BBC Radio 4's nightly shipping forecast sequence.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:45Why do you think displacement is a useful thing for a writer?
I think it's quite good for poets not to be too comfortable. Poetry has to live on the dangerous edges of things where you can see life at a slant and where you're really hanging on by your fingernails so that you can write. And poets are great eavesdroppers on the world too, so after hearing things, that's a good way to come to poetry because that's what poetry does as well. It tries to interpret the heartbeat of the world.
Presenter asks
2:11You've described yourself as a Muslim Calvinist hanging by your fingernails. What does that encompass?
Well, really, yes, really what I said was I am a Pakistani Scottish Calvinist Muslim adopted by India and married into Wales. And what I was really saying was don't try to put me in a box, don't try to label me as just one thing, because we're all subtle and nuanced creatures with many possibilities under the skin. What I'm really saying is I'm a cultural mongrel. Accept that.
Presenter asks
2:46As a poet, what do you make of the term 'multiculturalism'?
It's like all those labels. It's come to be an empty word and you have to remake that word. To me it's a case of being outside of labels really, being outside of boxes. I'd want to recognize that poetry takes in every kind of influence, that the family can be, the ancestors in poetry could be not just John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but Fez and Galleb and all of those become family.
The keepsakes
The book
Abraham Ortelius
I'd like it to be an Atlas of all the world … with A to Z's of every city and every village and every country lane and every coastline so that I can make up my own stories in my own theatre of the world.
The luxury
Presenter asks
5:24How much did 1960s Scotland feel like a place that you and your family loved and understood, and that understood and loved you back?
Well, there were lots of different things happening because inside the house was one country and the moment you stepped outside it was another one altogether. But I think that's what you live with and understand and it seems normal. It seems quite natural that there are different cultures and different things going on. In fact, at school, for example, I was the first South Asian girl in the school, but I think it's the girl from Edinburgh who got the most flack. … And we loved Scotland. My father loved Scotland. That was why he was there. He loved the lochs. We used to go out on picnics every Sunday.
Presenter asks
7:04How much freedom were you given as a teenager?
I was given every freedom to be educated, to look for education, to do my drawings and write as much as I wanted to, but I was not meant to go out in the night and socialize and go dancing or anything like that. So a lot of my time in Glasgow was spent at my window looking out over the city and the shining lights and feeling as if all of life was happening somewhere else, somewhere out there, somewhere where I was not.
Presenter asks
13:21Your first marriage – was it more about opening up your world than about the man himself?
I think that's very perceptive. Yes, of course. I was young. I was looking for life. I was looking for doors to open. And of course I fell in love with him. He was on the faculty or at Glasgow University. I was a student. Together we would look at poetry and go to the theatre and talk cinema, and to me those were great things. … After I had taken my final exams and was about to wind up at university, I was at the union one day, the Queen Margaret Union, when there was an announcement on the Tanoi system asking me to come downstairs. And there he was. I didn't know he was going to come. He was there and he said, Will you marry me? And I said no. … Finally I said yes. … By that point I had decided, yes, I'm going to go along with this. And you're young, you want to go out and do things and it's all exciting and to me I said, Yes, I'll be penniless and run away and leave my family behind and it was a decision. Yes, a decision taken in an afternoon.
“I am a Pakistani Scottish Calvinist Muslim adopted by India and married into Wales. … I'm a cultural mongrel. Accept that.”
“I was given every freedom to be educated … but I was not meant to go out in the night and socialize … So a lot of my time in Glasgow was spent at my window looking out over the city and the shining lights and feeling as if all of life was happening somewhere else, somewhere out there, somewhere where I was not.”
“I have no regrets about doing it. I think that everything that happened to me and the way that I grew were all things that needed to happen. But I wish that I could have taken my family with me. I wish that I could have carried them along and that I could have spoken to them.”
“I've never laughed so much in my life as I did when I was with him. We were together seven years, but seventy wouldn't have been enough.”