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Ep. 8. Tawseef Khan, Determination
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In this episode, we read a passage (p. 55 of the hardback) from Tawseef Khan's novel Determination (2024). Buy the book from a local independent bookshop or Bookshop.org.
Tawseef Khan is a qualified immigration solicitor and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Liverpool, where he examined the fairness of the British asylum system. He is also a graduate of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia, where he received the Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary. His fiction has appeared in Lighthouse and Test Signal: a Northern anthology; his non-fiction in the New York Times, The Face and Hyphen. His debut non-fiction book Muslim, Actually was published by Atlantic in 2021 and his novel Determination was published in 2024. He lives in Manchester.
Find the transcript and more about the show on Substack. Follow the show on Instagram.
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to Books Up Close Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd, a writer and academic, and on this show I talk to other writers about their work and their practice. We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, looking at a particular passage or a whole poem, and talk about its meanings, resonances and the technicalities of language.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors, or anyone interested in how texts get made.
Guest Introduction: Torsi Khan
00:00:30
Speaker
In this episode, I talk to Torsi Khan about his novel Determination.
00:00:35
Speaker
We look at a passage from page 55 of the hardback, but if you don't have that, you can go to the substack and find that extract there and read along with us.
00:00:47
Speaker
Apologies for the audio on this episode. It's not the best, but hope you will stick with us. Torsif is an immigration solicitor and writer based in Manchester. His fiction has appeared in The Lighthouse and Test Signal, a northern anthology.
00:01:01
Speaker
His debut non-fiction book, Muslim, actually was published by Atlantic in 2021, and his novel Determination was published in 2024. Well, welcome, Torsif. Thanks so much for joining us.
00:01:14
Speaker
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Great.
The Role of Close Reading in Writing
00:01:17
Speaker
So the opening question I'm asking everyone is like, what are your thoughts, feelings about close reading as like a practice, as an endeavor?
00:01:24
Speaker
And also, how does it feel to be close reading your own work? o Well, I think close reading is really important, right? Especially in the editorial process, you want to figure out how to get closer to your intentions as a writer and how to achieve the effect that you want to to get with ah with a piece of writing, with particular section of a story or a paragraph or two.
00:01:49
Speaker
i think that um there is no such thing as a throwaway line or a throwaway sentence. in a story, if it doesn't serve you, if it doesn't doesn't serve the story or the character in some way, then it's a missed opportunity.
00:02:03
Speaker
So I think that definitely when I'm close reading or when I'm editing, I'm really trying to pay attention to the effect that each sentence is having, not only for for rhythm, because I think that like for me, rhythm and the key of a piece of work is the point of entry.
00:02:19
Speaker
And it's the thing that I probably stress out about the most. But I think that, yeah, once you once you get into that, then i'm I'm looking at, yeah, what is the effect of it? What am I trying to achieve? Is it successful? And I think that, yeah, I enjoy close reading my own work. I think being close read in any way, even if it's by yourself, is a really lovely thing.
00:02:37
Speaker
So I enjoy talking about my work because I put so much work in it. I put so much effort into it. And also it's just really validating to see and to hear how how other people interpret it. And I think that's the other thing about close reading is that so much of how we write, so much of the writing process is informed by other people's close reading of your work.
00:02:57
Speaker
So I'm sure you're familiar with the Sheila Hetty essay, which I really believe in. like So much of writing is done with in conjunction with other people, in conjunction with your you know your reading friends, your second readers.
00:03:09
Speaker
And they are the ones who identify the themes or the ideas or the images that you're playing with that might repeat throughout a piece of work that you might not have um noticed yourself because you're so into the granular part of it and even in the process of like this book being out i think some of the most privileged moments of it have been where somebody has done a close reading of it so there was somebody who came to an event I did in Durham with Andrew McMillan, and they afterwards wrote up a whole blog about our two novels and paid a lot of attention to it, compared it to Joan Austen's Persuasion, which was really, really cool.
00:03:47
Speaker
And I loved reading that purely because it just made me feel really good and really clever. So yeah, close reading is good, it's fun.
Balancing Careers: Solicitor and Writer
00:03:53
Speaker
I want to ask you about how you started writing or think about writing alongside your other career, which is huge, right?
00:04:02
Speaker
It's all right. It's big. i it It takes a lot of time. Well, you know, I've always wanted to write. So even when I wasn't writing, I knew that it there was going to be a moment where it happened. It was just something that was delayed.
00:04:15
Speaker
And I felt that I felt two things. One, that I didn't have the time and opportunity because I was trying to become a lawyer. And that was... sort of the sum focus of my life at the time.
00:04:26
Speaker
But I think the other aspect of it was that I wanted to have something to say. And i believed at the time, don't necessarily believe it as much now, that I needed a certain amount of life experience in order to write something that felt suitably momentous and important, right? Because at the time I felt that books, if they were going to be written, if I was going to write them, needed to be important.
00:04:49
Speaker
So I was always going to, it was just a case of when the window of opportunity came. And in a way, I've been writing since I was a child. So I always tell the story of when I was like 10 or 11, I would watch episodes of the Power Rangers or whatever was on at the time. And I would like write story treatments of them.
00:05:06
Speaker
And obviously, I didn't know what I was doing, but they are the first short stories I wrote. I guess there is this desire to put things down to paper and to see how they read and feel. And that was something that I was doing unconsciously.
00:05:19
Speaker
And then when i I had the idea for Determination when I was 23, but I didn't start writing it until I was 29 when I finished my PhD. And I think in a way, the PhD is also like a big part of my ah writing trajectory.
00:05:33
Speaker
but My friend always says, like, the PhD is your first book. ah so Because I haven't gone into academia, it's not an actual first book. It's just, you know, something that I have in my cupboard somewhere.
00:05:44
Speaker
But it still taught me how to start a process and see it through in terms of putting things on a page, working with them and getting them to a point where you feel like, oh, I can let go of
Character Focus in 'Determination'
00:05:55
Speaker
this now.
00:05:55
Speaker
So I would say that that was my my writing trajectory. Yeah, a PhD is an enormous piece of writing work. So like, yeah, anyone that does a PhD, you are a writer because you have to write a lot of words and construct a whole beginning to end, right?
00:06:09
Speaker
And this book does follow ah lawyer and we kind we're kind of in that world. But the passage we can look at today is kind of maybe a little bit different. We're kind of focalized in a particular character here. Is there anything you want to tell us before you start reading this passage? and Is there anything we need to know, say if someone hasn't read the book?
00:06:25
Speaker
i don't I think it it speaks for itself, but I think that maybe framing it in in a way, I should maybe frame the book. And so the novel is is a novel, but there there are these moments where we ah pan out into other people's lives.
00:06:40
Speaker
So not the life of the solicitor, Jamila, but into her clients' lives, into her staff members' lives. And we we get what essentially was written as a short story based around them. And so this is the first one that we get in the book.
00:06:54
Speaker
It's about a woman called Nazish who is a queer asylum seeker from Pakistan. And she's come to the firm for help with an appeal. And I think the section that we're about to go over and think about is it's like a hinge in in the story or a turning point in the story, I would say.
00:07:13
Speaker
And it's towards us understanding a bit more about this person's life or experiences and the context in which the story is taking place.
00:07:24
Speaker
we're We're encountering someone who is quite difficult and is quite like a reluctant narrator of their own story. And so this gives us an understanding of why. And I think it also opens them up a little bit.
00:07:37
Speaker
So we get to understand the characters' vulnerabilities a little bit more. So yeah, would say that that's the framing of what we're going to read. Thank you so much. Yeah, if you want to read it, be fantastic.
00:07:50
Speaker
In the detention centre, it wasn't freedom of movement that Nazish had missed, but air, breezes, sunlight flickering along her skin, the powdery scent of violets in the park.
00:08:02
Speaker
When the enforcement officers grabbed her, she felt like she had stopped breathing. When they drove her to London, she held her breath the entire way. Some of the other women in the van wailed to themselves.
00:08:13
Speaker
Some were trapped in an intoxicated stupor. Some bartered with their gods. Nazish closed her eyes and waited for it to end. People entered the continent like this, hiding in lorries, squeezing themselves behind wheels.
00:08:28
Speaker
She had considered herself better, superior for arriving through illegal channels. But once captured, she understood that she was the same. The detention centre had a dining room, day room, gym, library and laundry.
00:08:44
Speaker
The bedrooms were freshly painted, brightly lit, decorated with cheerful curtains and beach furniture. An idea of airiness, but ultimately synthetic.
00:08:55
Speaker
Nazish still didn't breathe, not for the three weeks that she was inside, sharing a room with a Congolese woman who had threatened to knife her by day and who had screamed for her mother at night.
00:09:07
Speaker
The indignities of that time wouldn't leave Nazish for as long as she lived. She had plugged her period blood with tissue paper, beaten potatoes and chicken nuggets and other processed storage that left her unable to use the bathroom.
00:09:20
Speaker
Shivered in the cold with nothing to shield her but her grandmother's shawl and the clothes on her back. And not until she sat on the train that returned her to Manchester, not until she made an appointment to see Shah and Coast Listers, had she dared to hold air in her lungs again.
00:09:35
Speaker
Thank you so much. I think it's important to get back that whole section. I know it's a little bit longer, but ah I feel you get the entire movement of her thought in this part.
Narrative Techniques and Themes
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah. So like, I had a few selections from the novel that I sent you and and they were each standing out to me in different ways for different kinds of themes that I thought the book was kind of staging.
00:09:56
Speaker
And this one, what I was really interested in when you first do that focalization thing, like when we jumped to another character, I was like, Ooh, What's happening? Where are we going? Right? Because we're so used to being in that, what even though it's all third person, right? Like it's still heavily focused to that one character. We're following her and her trajectory.
00:10:13
Speaker
And suddenly we move focus and I think there's something thematic happening there in the book right that like she is not an isolated unit as she is taught to be by her father right the one that holds everything up the one that has all the information but actually her life is way more porous than even she knows it to be right that other people are constantly kind of coming in and that's part of her job as a solicitor and I think so those kind of scene shifts almost are really interesting I'm wondering first of all Is there a reason why you didn't move them to first person? Is there something about the third person focalize?
00:10:49
Speaker
Like I've got thoughts, but why the focalized third person, not first person for these?
00:10:55
Speaker
I think the first thing is about reader experience, right? So I think one of the events I did for the book, the person interviewing me described them as these interventions as like a series of shocks that take place in the novel that force us to reckon with somebody else's perspective or the ah scale of what we're dealing with when we talk about the asylum system or the immigration system.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so thinking about the shocks and the impacts on a reader, I wanted those to feel ah seamless as possible, as easy as possible for a reader to take.
00:11:29
Speaker
And I felt that shifting from first person to third and then back was maybe one too many shifts in the process of the book. So I think that that was maybe one of the big parts.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I felt that it was also just easier for us to connect with the character and and what was going on, their interiority. And also, the I think so much of the book is about what we what we reveal and what we choose to hold back. And it's about the power dynamics and the question of autonomy within the system. How do you have a sense of self whilst being subjected to the system?
00:12:07
Speaker
And so I felt that like be having the the stories and the in the third person was... the best way to navigate the tensions between the two because I think that there will be so much more that um a person was withhold in the first person that we might not get access to so it plays with it enables me to play with yeah questions of access and how much is revealed would say yeah and kind of proximity because I think this whole passage is really
00:12:38
Speaker
interesting rhetorically you do a couple of things with like repetition and like almost listing that I find quite interesting and then this real grounding in the body and and the breath and and the physicality because we start with like in the detention center it wasn't freedom of movement the air dash we're really getting into grammar on this podcast by the way that that dash which almost kind of opens that out, right? Like we literally get the air and then we get dash, breezes, sunlight flickering across the skin, the powdery scent of violets in the park. And I can't help but hear sibilance throughout that line, the breezes, the sunlight, the skin, the scent, the violets, right? it's such like a soft It's such a soft line before when the enforcement officers grabbed her, like a real contrast between like the moment of freedom and the moment of like detainment or containment.
00:13:25
Speaker
And then when they drove her to London, she held her breath. So we've got when the enforcement, when they drove fur. So like already there's some repetition and I'm wondering whether that was very conscious or whether that just came in the voice.
00:13:38
Speaker
I think that when I was writing this, I knew the ah feeling that it would take. And then obviously in the editing, you become aware of what you're doing and you try to turn up the ante a little bit. So then the the repetition becomes very deliberate.
00:13:57
Speaker
You realise that there is a tension between the kind of... the loss of autonomy versus ah freedom, freedom of movement and so on. And then it these two paragraphs become a way to, again, exploit those tensions as much as possible to to turn the dial upon those in as many ways as you can.
00:14:17
Speaker
So then I think that that's what I started to do. I started to think about, okay, how many ways can I ah kind of really think about the way in which air and breath and freedom or the illusion of freedom can can operate in in this space.
00:14:32
Speaker
Like detention centers are very, very big. They look very modern. There is a sense of freedom and luxury and you know privilege within them, but you're still confined. And also what effect does that have on you when it's something to do with something as like natural and as simple as as breath?
00:14:48
Speaker
So there became this sort of rhetorical advice of this rhetorical technique of what does it mean for somebody to hold their breath for three weeks? We know that that's not feasible, but it you know, there is something within that. What does it mean for a person to do that?
00:15:02
Speaker
I think it forces us to reckon with it. Yeah. And I, and I think the, Because we have the when when, the very next sentence, we have some of the other women, some were trapped, some bartered.
00:15:15
Speaker
Right. Again, we get like this as though the repetition at once is is like a reinforcing kind of feeling, right? Like this, the repetition keeps adding more, but it also suggests a kind of endlessness of people in this cycle somehow that the repetition is like the repetition of the individuals too.
00:15:32
Speaker
Like just there's going to be another, going to another, going another. brought into this world that I found, like at a linguistic level, it's quite nice because you get the repetition, but at the same time, it feels kind of claustrophobic as a repetition.
00:15:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that was definitely the intention. And when I was reading it back, that's what I was thinking, that I wanted it to sound as claustrophobic and as oppressive as possible by by listing these things, by sort of like stacking them on top of each other. I'm forcing us to reckon with the weight of this, the weight of not just one person, but the weight of all of these women.
00:16:05
Speaker
the weight of all the ways in which they deal with this moment right the various ways and the ways in which we can all feel different special in some way and yet the system has a way of stripping us of our identities of our markers of difference our privileges and equalize us as just these these bodies you know liable to be confined and detained and done with whatever a way the system chooses to.
00:16:33
Speaker
That was a very deliberate choice to to go there as well. Yeah, you definitely feel that. the Some of the other women, some bartered with their gods, people entered the continent like this.
00:16:44
Speaker
There is an abstraction of like, this is happening to some people who aren't me, but those experiences are reflecting on Nazish particularly as well, right? it's They're all caught in the same mechanism, even amidst their Like people enter the continent like this, squeezing themselves behind wheels. She had considered herself better, superior, but once captured, she understood that she was the same.
00:17:07
Speaker
Like, as you were saying, but at a linguistic level, that line, people entered the continent like this, hiding in lorries, squeezing themselves. Like that's her voice, right? That's like what you'd call free and direct discourse, right? It's not attributed to her, but that's her thought. It's her internal language.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah. And so it's it's playing with, in a way that the book ah does all the way through, again, the the the tension between the individual and the the collective, the mass, the group of people.
00:17:35
Speaker
So even Nazish is understanding that the things that she thinks made her special don't, right? And that is a horrifying thing that she associates with Those who come on, you know, on lorries, tracks behind wheels as different to her. Right. She is a privileged, educated, middle class woman.
00:17:56
Speaker
she She thinks the system will be easy on her, but it isn't. It it strips them all of their humanity and and they're all the same. So she's constantly having to reckon with her place within this.
00:18:06
Speaker
The idea that she is not special within it. The system strips us of all the things that that make us feel special or or important. you know And that's what, let's say, narratives about immigration do as well. right So in a way, she indulges with that indulges in that idea that immigrants are just these other people, like these faceless people.
00:18:27
Speaker
And yet she has to reckon with, well, that's also what they think of me. That's also what I've become in this moment. So yeah, it does a lot of that, like thinking about the broader narratives that Nazish finds herself within, even though she's not necessarily conscious of them, at least not on ah on a macro level, but she's aware of like her position in relation to other people, right?
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think with a different narrative voice that would read differently, right? With ah with a more detached, omniscient narrator could easily say like,
00:19:03
Speaker
Nazish had thought herself X, Y, Z, but this is actually the reality of what's going on for people. But instead, because we're confined to that free and direct where it's not entirely attributed to her, we're kind of caught in her mind frame as well, which I think is what is interesting about these other chapters, right? These side chapters where we we are having to like live in her perspective, if not her mind.
00:19:24
Speaker
through through the narration right like we're not looking through her eyes but we are in her way of thinking her language like she sounds she she thinks differently to the other characters that we read Yeah, completely, completely. She has a very singular way of viewing things.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so having access to that, I think Jamila feels privileged to have access to to Nazish's way of viewing the world. And I think that for us is also a privilege because she is so unique in the way that she views the world and the way in which she's able to understand people and phenomena right with with such huge confidence and such a lack of self-doubt so having yeah having access to that having someone who is able to distinguish between the different people in in that space right because they could all just be people who are wailing bartering with gods whatever but she's she's separate ah separate from that she's able to look at them with a sense of yeah separateness to them which i think is really interesting
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah. And then within that second paragraph, you kind of continue this listing idea. A bit with like the detention center had a dining room, day room, gym, library, and laundry. The bedrooms are freshly painted, brightly lit, decorated. Like the listing of the people then kind of merges into the the listing of the stuff right in the, in the center.
00:20:48
Speaker
In that, like the attention to brightly lit, freshly painted kind of links to that listing of the women and the way they're treated, right? Like all kind of just like reduced to objects in a way. They're just descriptive things, right? They're nothing special.
00:21:02
Speaker
And then you change the kind of grammar, like an idea of airiness, but ultimately synthetic. You do a few of these non-fully grammatical sentences, right? Like these fragment sentences, not there was an idea of airiness, but an idea of airiness, but ultimately synthetic.
00:21:18
Speaker
So you get kind of like oh, maybe we're going to get the air again, but actually it's, curtailed instantly that comedy is like, no, no, you're not having. Yeah. well I like that. Maybe I didn't realize I was doing that, but I guess it's a way in which maybe i think and I write that is about cutting ideas down quite quickly.
00:21:35
Speaker
Right. There's like an impatience with the idea. and and a desire to just sort of dispense with it immediately. So I think that like listing the things, listing the objects, it's also about dismissing that idea straight off, this idea that having nice curtains, having access to a gym is automatically going to make this bearable.
00:21:58
Speaker
right And so it was like, well, no, let's not even indulge in that thought because it's not real, right? So I think that that's what that's doing. and I guess i in the beginning, it was something similar, as you say, it's just this like,
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, let's just make the make all of this stuff feel as jagged and as like unreal as possible. Let's not indulge some of these ideas too much. The idea is that people think that you know this is an innocuous space, a space that isn't a space in which the system wields power over people and and has you know the ability to decide their movements and Yeah, and also ah one that has like such a huge mental health impact on people.
00:22:37
Speaker
So that was that was also kind of the purpose of that thing. The tension between this is a space with loads of facilities and yet it messes with people's heads so badly.
00:22:48
Speaker
And Nazish is really like fundamentally changed by it.
Identity and Detention Centers
00:22:53
Speaker
Right. Which is why, like cut at the end, she says that word of like daring. Right. She told me when she leaves that she dared to hold the air in her lungs again. It's just the way that the system confinement can sort of decimate you, decimate even your understanding of what you are entitled to. Right. Am I entitled to even breathe?
00:23:11
Speaker
She only dares to do that when she leaves. Yeah, it really reminds me of like Claudia Rankine's work, right? In in the Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, like the breath is often there in in her the figures that populate those bits of text where like what you take in and what you ah expunge can be toxic in both directions in so many ways. Like she, in those books, she's really thinking about like American racism and the way it permeates the body, right? How it like lives in the body.
00:23:41
Speaker
And I think that's what this paragraph does. If the first paragraph is a bit more of she's differentiating herself from others or trying to hear the body, all we have is that, right? All we have is her body. She's not describing how she feels.
00:23:56
Speaker
where're We're receiving the registering of what's happening to her on the body, whether it's like the indignities. She had plugged her period of blood, eaten potatoes, at the left, are unable to use the bathroom, shivered in the cold, right? Again, like one, two, three, these like fragment sentences that are just reduce her to like her bodily functions that have been radically altered because of this space.
00:24:19
Speaker
I think there's real, emphasis and power in the fact that those sentences are quite hard and like blunt in that way they don't have even the the niceness of grammar to introduce them right it's just eaten shivered like you don't you don't even get a nice framing Yeah, they're quite blunt and quite primal almost, right? Because this the the detention centre reduces you to that. It reduces you to kind of like just your elemental human traits, the things that you have to do to survive.
00:24:50
Speaker
And I think in those moments also, it was like an opportunity to take it to the place where... Ordinarily, we wouldn't look, right? And ordinarily, I personally wouldn't write in that particular space. So I wouldn't really talk about people's bodily functions, right? i wouldn't I wouldn't write about periods. I wouldn't write about the ability to go to the bathroom. But these are like the very elemental ways in which the system robs you of your dignity, right? And I sort of wanted that paragraph and and this section in particular to be something that readers cannot look away from.
00:25:26
Speaker
So you know the rest of the story and in other parts of the book, there are these beautiful descriptions and there are um there's humour and there's all of these other things. and and And maybe we talk about the system in a much more abstract way. But in this section, there is no turning away from the and sort of like cumulative impact of of something like the detention system on on a person.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I think it forces us to confront how would we we would feel eating just potatoes and chicken no ah nuggets, using tissue paper to plug our periods and so on and so on. You know, being, sharing a room with somebody who's screaming out at night, but that's threatening to kill you. These are things that we cannot necessarily imagine, but it's something that we have to force force ourselves to contend with and contend with not just one.
00:26:12
Speaker
I think that I'm always interested in like not the singular, right? The plurality and the compounding of different experiences altogether. So I think that that's what this section does as well. It's about the cumulative effects of all of this.
00:26:26
Speaker
Right. And and there's a there's a sense that if we were just in her mind, like I felt X or she felt X or was thinking about this, there's a certain kind of explanatory power to that. Whereas actually being rooted firmly in her body means that we have to like feel the the brunt of that ourselves too as as readers. And I thought that was...
00:26:48
Speaker
really strong as a kind of technical choice. they we're We're not having a long paragraph of this is how she felt. That's too easy almost. It's more you have to bear some of what she's going through and you can't look away from that.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah, we feel because maybe she can't or maybe she won't. Right. And ah you know given the story, and you you know it so much of it is about what she is willing to give us and what she refuses to.
00:27:14
Speaker
So I think that, again, I would say unconsciously, even this moment is about her choosing not to give us the the breakdown of that moment. Right. The impact that it has had on her in terms of feelings. What she can do is she can report it.
00:27:30
Speaker
right that these things happened but not the impact and not the feeling not what stays with her it's just you know and I think that's kind of what what makes it we have to do the feeling because she can't or she won't she won't give us that yeah that's strong and then we get another repetition and not until she sat on the train that returned to Manchester back in August not until that rhetorical device, right?
Legal Influence on Narrative Style
00:27:57
Speaker
I can't help but hear the lawyer in some of that rhetoric, right? that the kind of
00:28:01
Speaker
The kind of forms of language of not persuasion, but but really trying to get a reader on one side or or trying to kind of pull someone in The repetitions really feel like you have to pay attention to this, not until she sat on that train, not until she made an appointment, had she dared hold it in her lungs again.
00:28:19
Speaker
That final bit then is your payoff the for the repetition somehow. Yeah. Yeah. And isn't repetition such a great rhetorical device? Right. i I love it in writing and i don't use it a lot, but I but i think there are moments when it it really has a lot of payoff because, again, it forces us, as you say, to pay attention to something.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I think sometimes just the hammering home of particular words or particular images, they help us to really sit with the gravity of of what is happening. And so that repetition of air and airiness and what is real and what is synthetic in all its forms, the idea of breathing in all its forms, and then it's it's repeated out outside of that section, right?
00:29:05
Speaker
That when Nazish then and is asked about her her time in detention, the first thing that she does is she stops breathing, right? And then she has to remind herself to breathe and she sort of counts or, you know she takes a deep breath and sips some water and so on.
00:29:21
Speaker
So there is that that, like, yeah, the air is also the the sort of lingering impact of it. Yeah. And the repetition is forcing us to to pay attention. And I really enjoy that. And I think that you picked a really good bit.
00:29:35
Speaker
I would say, because i was I was wondering what you were going to choose, but it's ah it's a bit that I'm quite proud of. so yeah, because it's easy with a section like this, like it's easy just to take everything that you know about a system and sort of just say it or or weave it through her perspective. But I think, again, as ah as a nonfiction writer and as a lawyer,
00:29:56
Speaker
there is like access to a particular kind of language that can be used in in a fictional setting to to force us to reckon with it in a way that we wouldn't ordinarily in ah and a short story.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the novel does that quite explicitly, right? Like we don't have scenes like in courtrooms or in litigation rooms or in any kind of like, like we're always in the office or in people's home spaces or outside.
00:30:22
Speaker
We're kind of almost refused entry into the kind of the machinations of the legal system. In a sense, we're always kind of hearing secondhand what people did in a room or like how this went or how someone responded. And I really like that choice to be, you know, it could easily be a very simplistic choice.
00:30:38
Speaker
courtroomy, drama-y kind of thing, right? But instead we get all of the other spaces in which discourse happens. Yeah, completely. Because, you know, honestly, I thought the idea of writing like a courtroom drama or a single ah single asylum seeker refugee drama in a sort of Hollywood-esque style, really boring, um and really like, yeah, just not, it didn't excite me at all. And also it wasn't true to the kind of politics that I was trying to express in this book, which are also not just about the politics of like immigrants and immigration, but about like broader questions of solidarity and what it means to be an individual in a community or yeah what whose' whose stories we are made up of.
00:31:23
Speaker
you know and And I think that, again, somebody has told me this, and I agree with it, that so much of the book is about redirection, that so many of the characters don't give us the stories, the scenes that we want.
00:31:35
Speaker
they we We have this assumption that the story is here, it's in A. you know But they're like, no, no, no, come to come with me over here. The story is actually over there, the story that I want to tell you.
00:31:46
Speaker
And I think that Nazeche is the perfect example of someone who who has like complete grasp of her story in a way that she then is able to choose what you're going to know, what she's willing to tell you, and what the story is. right It's not the story we think it is. The story is something else.
Nazish's Narrative Control
00:32:05
Speaker
Like in in this story, in Nazish's bit, it's all about the tussle of like, what does it mean to tell a story? What is the story? What is the idea of the truth? All of that sort of stuff is what she's like asking questions of. So the idea of like,
00:32:20
Speaker
that a character is going to share their trauma with you, you know, and all of that stuff that we we see in fiction, the the trauma plot, she's very much saying, I am not going to give you the trauma plot. You are not going to have access to that.
00:32:33
Speaker
And then there are moments where that that there's a fissure, right, that she she sort of breaks a little bit and she gives us a glimpse of it. And this is one of them, I think. Yeah. That's amazing.
00:32:44
Speaker
I'm going to ask you some general questions to kind of end. You've already told us a little bit about your early writing experiences and Power Rangers. Where are you writing now? do you have a process, a practice, a day and time? Do you have rituals? do you have snacks?
00:32:58
Speaker
Are you in the same time? do you do on a computer? What's your setup?
Torsi's Writing Process
00:33:02
Speaker
I'm really unprecious about writing and the writing process. So I wouldn't say that I have a ah writing process or ah writing ritual or anything like that. Like I can, I have a study, which is where I'm recording from, and I do spend some time writing here, but I think Just because of my personality, I need to be in different spaces and I need to be stimulated by the space that I'm in.
00:33:24
Speaker
So depending on how I feel that particular day or what stage I'm at in writing, the writing has to happen somewhere that's not the study. So it might be that I have to write in a cafe or I have to write in a bookshop or on a train or just that, you know, a lot of the the first two books were written at work.
00:33:39
Speaker
just then and an hour between clients so or something, I would take something apart and put it back together again. And yeah, I just, I feel like those rituals and processes and things are just kind of like they're made too much of, right? And you sometimes you just have to get on with it. So I just get on with it. But also I think that I have like a good ability to, like I could be hyper-focused.
00:34:07
Speaker
So it's just easy for me to like get into a space and just tune everything out. But I would say like, yeah, i need to eat. Eating is good distraction. I need to drink something. Drinking is a good distraction. i need I think in the writing process, I need to be able to talk about stuff with people.
00:34:23
Speaker
So yeah, I like having being able to do that with but my partner or my friends who are writers. i need to constantly think about the way that something is is working. And so often like the writing is not actual like getting words down. It's maybe writing around the thing or thinking around the thing.
00:34:41
Speaker
And I write everything ah by hand first, often several times before i I type it up, just because I think I need to have a sense of a connection to what I'm writing that is not achievable by putting it directly on a computer, right?
00:35:00
Speaker
Because there's something that just that doesn't fall that doesn't make you edit in the same way that you edit when you're writing something by hand, right? So I tend to write stuff by hand a lot. And actually, i think the interesting thing about it is that it's not even a case of just like writing the thing out and then putting it down. Often it's like paragraph by paragraph and trying to get the, like I'm working on something new at the moment. And so the last two days I've been working on like the right opening and just trying to get the,
00:35:26
Speaker
the opening paragraph right, because I think that once that works, then the rest will follow. But I would also say that I don't have a writing process in the sense that there is no one way, right? I've not written a book in in a single way I've not written a short story in a single way. Every every time I do it, it's it's different. And I'm also open to trying things out differently because I'm not wedded to anything you know I've i only written two books so if it works it works if it doesn't work it doesn't work I know that i I'll hopefully get there in in the end but I think that it's important to give yourself like introduce novelty into the process because it creates the opportunity for something else to arise something that you might not have contemplated before
00:36:08
Speaker
No, but also that's like that's what Don DeLiro does, right? He does one paragraph per page and he will like make a new page for the new paragraph and he will get it until that paragraph is crisp and clean and where he wants it, which I love.
00:36:20
Speaker
um The last question is, like do you have any books you want to recommend to
Book Recommendations and Closing Remarks
00:36:24
Speaker
listeners? Anything you're currently reading or an old book or something that's going to come out? Yeah. Well, i'm reading I'm reading two books at the moment. I'm reading a Threat of Violence by Mark O'Connell, which is ah superlative piece of nonfiction. It's really brilliantly written. It's really beautifully written, actually. And I think that it constantly asks questions about the act of writing about a murderer as well um and about people who who have been victims of of somebody else's violence and the ethics of that. So I think that that's really, really interesting.
00:36:55
Speaker
And then I think like the book that I'm really obsessed with, and we've spoken about this, is Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I think it' it's really beautifully written. I think it's probably the best thing that he's written. And just like the the attention to to the sentence, but also the attention to like the small moments in ah in a person's life, the small ideas, the you know as well as the big ideas, the moments that we're living in, and just the way that he's able to spend so much time with those things, that I find really inspiring. So I'm just reading and thinking, like, this is just incredible. Yeah, that's just like up there for me. He's he's so brilliant.
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, that book. killed me don't yeah it's one of those ones where I'm reading i'm like I don't know how you make sentences like this maybe I'll get to talk to Garth at some point um if anyone listening knows him please send him my way would love to talk to him about sentences well thank you so much Torsey for joining us a thrill and a pleasure and everyone should out and buy the book immediately thank you thanks so much for having me Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe that you haven't already, leave a review and share with people you know.
00:38:09
Speaker
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00:38:21
Speaker
You can get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.