A bit of optimism, about Iraq

Well I want to feel optimistic about the US pullout—although I was startled to read that there are now 25% more police and soldiers in Iraq than when it was a police state.

I'm reading the papers while rehearsing an extract of my play-in-progress at the Liverpool Everyman. It's about the first British involvement in Iraq, the birth of the country, and whether it was a viable state. My friend Marina Benjamin, who wrote the definitive and passionate history of the Jews of Iraq, introduced me to a poem by Iraqi nationalist Muhammed Mahdi Al-Jawahiri who certainly seemed to think Iraq might succeed:

I am Iraq, my tongue is her heart,
my blood her Euphrates,
my being from her branches formed

I'd really like to be as optimistic now.

If you’re in Liverpool, come and see twenty minutes of the play so far, on Wednesday night as part of Everyword.

Coping and hoping; stories about climate change

I spent Saturday at Changing Climate Stories, a conference organised by Robert Butler, Caspar Henderson and Greenpeace legend Charlie Kronick. I was there because I've written two plays with strong ecological themes—without really planning to.

When I was little, we only left London to go abroad. All my stories were about Iraq, not here. It was when I got to Cambridge that I started connecting with the landscape, loving the big skies and endless flatness of the Fens, and getting spooked by living in this archipelago with no sense of where the edges were. So I went to Orkney, and I went to Cornwall, and felt, yes, rooted. Wanting to understand more about why why people feel so strongly about landscape led to my play about wolves being reintroduced to Scotland. Then trees started taking over my play Cling To Me Like Ivy. So really the stories have chosen me, not the other way round. It was bracing to take a rigorous look at stories with academics and activists—Abbie Garrington has already blogged about it, as have Robert Butler and Caleb Klaces.

Dan Box began by talking about the surprising resilience of the Carteret Islanders, who are the world’s first climate change refugees and how we don't hear much about resilience when we talk about climate change.

We talked about how it's hard to write about climate change because we know the ending, because fear isn't the best inspiration and because we don't just want to write doom and gloom stories, or to recruit victims. We worried about imposing our climate change narrative on the people who are living it. And we wondered if there was any point in telling stories about climate change at all.

But, as Charlie Kronick said, the early Greenpeace direct actions (and more recently, the Kingsnorth Six's) were almost Dadaist interventions, a kind of street theatre, a kind of art—and were only completed when their stories were told.

We talked about how people don't change through hectoring, polemic or exhortation but through stories, imagination and hope. And how we’ll need all of those things more and more. And Benjamin Morris quoted from After the Deluge, an open "letter to America" written by poet Andrei Codrescu in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. It begins,

There will be a little bit of New Orleans everywhere when our refugees move into your communities. Here are some of the changes:
Your food will get better.

The boldness of this opening blows me away—the way he just assumes the refugees will enrich the places they go to. He promises live music, street theatre, people telling stories, festivals, parades, coffee houses, bars, booming businesses, more jobs and, with a dazzling confidence in stories:

You will experience an overnight growth in self-esteem as our refugee poets and writers will begin to use your city as a source of material.

I had thought I might leave the conference feeling frivolous and pointless, but instead I felt that stories are important. And that a story of people being resilient, coping, hoping, imagining a better future is a story I’d like to tell.

My four-year-old deconstructionist crisis

I’m slightly addicted to finding new words in Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book, The Meaning of Tingo. In Japanese hiza o majieru is to have an intimate talk (literally, to mingle each others’ knees). Sweet. But in Italian, cavoli riscaldati is an attempt to revive a lapsed love affair (literally, reheated cabbage). In Persian, a nakhur is a camel that will not give milk until her nostrils are tickled and a wakhd is a camel that throws out its feet in the manner of an ostrich.

As has been established, I like linguistic diversity. But I haven’t always.

When I was really little I thought Judeo-Arabic was a grownup language and English was a children’s language and that when I got big, I’d suddenly be able to talk both. At school this theory was exploded because the teachers couldn’t speak Arabic. And then I learned the alphabet and, anticipating my reading of Derrida by some years, I had a little deconstructionist crisis. I was asking my mother about her alphabet. Write me an A in Arabic, I was saying. Write me a B. And I realised her alphabet had more letters in than mine. So how could we ever understand each other? And if we had different words for things, which ones were right? Perfect communication would never be possible. Ever.

Now I think it’s worth the misunderstandings, the slippages, for what we gain in different ways of saying things. So my mother might tell me someone’s I’m cutting onions on her heart, while I say they’re rubbing salt in the wound, and, you know, we understand each other fine.

Welsh, Eyak, Judeo-Arabic and biocultural diversity

Isn't it depressing that a young Patagonian woman was denied entry to the UK because immigration officers didn't believe that she was going to Wales to learn Welsh. How joyless, unimaginative and ill-informed those immigration officers must be.

The whole reason Welsh people emigrated to Patagonia in the 1860s was to preserve their language. The story of the eventual Welsh revival is a bright moment in Mark Abley's elegy for the languages we are losing (one every fortnight) in Spoken Here. He tells the story of a parrot who speaks a language that has died out among humans and that its keepers cannot understand, of a brother and sister who are the last surviving speakers of an Aboriginal language but cannot speak it to each other because tribal taboos forbid them to communicate after puberty. Living languages charts the initiatives to save endangered languages—and the extinctions. When Alaskan Chief Marie Smith Jones died in January, her language, Eyak, was lost. As the last native speaker, she would not have been called for years by her real, Eyak, name, Udachkuqax*a'a'ch, which means "a sound that calls people from afar".

I'm glad that academics and campaigners are more inclusive of language, glad we say biocultural diversity now, not just biodiversity. But when I told a friend I hoped to write a play about my own endangered language, Judeo-Arabic, he just asked, "what about the mangrove swamps?"

I've written about reintroducing wolves and saving trees from chainsaws, but I've also written about trying to save the Kurdish languages, and I hope to write about my own. It's part of the battle to stop everything becoming flat and boring and the same. It's about preserving difference and curiosity—which is why it's so shocking that a woman came all the way from Patagonia and faced such pinched, job's-worth indifference to the romance of her quest to learn Welsh.

Yet more puff

is here and here.

Roll up, roll up

And excuse the shameless puffery: tickets have literally just gone on sale for my new play, Cling To Me Like Ivy, at the Birmingham Rep. It's not until February 2010 but, for those who plan ahead...

High altitude cakes

There's a whole section on them in The Joy of Cooking. Thrillingly, the higher you bake, the less baking powder you need (it's also wise to use eggs cold, and underbeat). The Joy of Cooking ascribes this to “a pixie-like variation”—presumably it's because there's more atmospheric pressure. It’s only after 3000 feet that you need to start worrying that your sponges might explode. So I’m all right here in the flatlands but I do quite want to climb a mountain and bake cakes now.