Tahmima Anam Talking Books

as actress Sian Blake says that he killed her and their two children --

EastEnders. Those are the morning papers.

Welcome to Talking Books. For years, the Hay Festival has been one of the

most vibrant book festivals in the world, offering a chance to listen

to some of the finest writers. But there are also world leaders, Nobel

Prize winners, and stars from the world of entertainment. I'm

delighted to introduce you to the writer Tahmima Anam.

APPLAUSE Thank you very much. Thank you. Our

guest today, Tahmima Anam, has a new book, The Bones Of Grace, where in

the previous two books, Tahmima Anam was preoccupied with the birth of a

nation and the way it was poised between that birth and a complex,

perhaps problematic future. This book, The Bones Of Grace, is the

story of one of that nation's daughters as she struggles to find

meaning in her life. If you look at the Golden age and the two books for

this, the weight of history is felt. The Bones Of Grace brings this

tragedy right up to date. Why did you want to write a book

specifically about your country's history, the mother country's

history, this trilogy? I grew up outside of Bangladesh. My dad used

to work for the United Nations. We moved all over the world. I grew up

on these stories about this war he had been in. I found it both

fascinating as a story but also something that I wish I had been

part of. Being part of that war made them so sure of who they were. Their

moral absurdities were very clear. This is where we come from, this is

where we belong. There were cutting me all over the world and I did not

belong in that way. -- karting. Writing these books was a way of

carving a piece of history in my own way. The central protagonist, it

struck me reading The Bones Of Grace, this is a book about someone

in a no man's Lane. A psychological gnomon's land. She doesn't know

where she belongs. Above all, she's caught between two great loves. A

passionate love for the man she has met abroad, and the love that comes

with duty, which we know about in our part of the world that comes

with the person you are supposed to marry. Could you talk about that,

being caught between those two places? And also if you might just

read something from The Bones Of Grace that Illustrator. --

illustrate that. She calls herself and in between species because she

feels she is kind of neither here nor there. That is partly because

she doesn't know her parents and also because she feels these

different loyalties to different places. That confusion and

ambivalence is encapsulated in her confusion about who to love. As we

parted, Elijah, right in front of my husband, do you know what I was

thinking? Not that I would regret the moment I left my apartment, the

way I trashed everything that had passed between us in the last weeks.

But abandoning you without even a proper goodbye. Not the bland

expression I gave you is the last image of my face. Not the way I

allowed Rashida to circle my waist with his aunt. None of that. As we

descended the stairs, I was thinking if only he had arrived a few hours

later, I could have spared him the side of gazing at you as if I had

just been born and everything could have gone back to the way it was,

and I would have had nothing to explain, no story to tell, no guilt

weighing me down back stones around the ankles. Everything did not

change enough, Elijah. Not enough for me to have the courage to tell

the truth in the moment that the truth demanded. Not enough for me to

stand by and leave behind all of the unanswered questions of my life. I

wanted desperately to be the person who would upend everything and trust

myself into the unknown at the future was not the only thing that

was unknown to me. Because I was already on board, I could not cut

the thread that held me in place. Not yet. -- unmoored. Isn't that it

will? APPLAUSE

-- beautiful. Fantastic. So this woman caught between these two

loves, there are also other people caught between two places. And this

while. -- whale. You will have to expand this. There is a whale called

Diana. The great thing about being a writer is you can take all of the

quirky things that are interesting to you and put them in books. If you

try hard enough, you can weave them into make it as if they were meant

to be there. I became fascinated with the story of this whale. Wales

is a cc involved from land mammals that looked a bit like dogs --

actually evolves. About 50 million years ago, they went into the sea.

There was an in between species, called the walking whale, which both

walked and swam. Although there were mammals they behaved like

amphibians. She is obsessed with this mammal, with this whale. She

goes on a dig to try to find it. She relates to this species because she

feels like she is also caught in between, and read the novel, as she

is looking for the bones of the whale, and trying and failing to

find it, it is just a kind of image for her looking to find herself in

the fossils of this creature that walked and swam at the same time. It

is much more than professional curiosity. It is also a way for her

to not answer the question she really wants to us, which is who and

I? Instead of running her own origins, she is trying to find the

origins of the whale. It is a displacement for her. In the book,

she has fallen in love with this man and has to leave him. She goes on

the dig for various reasons. It doesn't go well and she finds

herself back home, in the family home in Dakar. She doesn't fit in.

That's right. She goes home and it is this great homecoming. Everyone

has been waiting for her. She has this retard she is supposed to

marry. She actually does marry him -- she has this sweetheart she is

supposed to marry. She never really felt at home there, and somehow the

experience of going away and falling in love with some analysis and

coming back next to she can never really belong there any more. --

with someone else. She is symbolic of a board of us. It is so rare for

people to be born and grow up and die in one place. We have these

loyalties to all kinds of other places because of travel, love,

relationships. She is one of those people. She reads her heart behind

in these places whether she goes there to study all be with her

beloved. So she ends up not fitting in when she comes back. She is

deeply disturbed by this. I was interested in that partly because it

is similar to both their histories. People born in Asia or Nepal, I

certainly felt when I went back to Schumacher after 27 years, in my

case, there was a kind of umbilical connection -- alike. But you say for

your protagonist, it doesn't exist -- Sri Lanka. She says she feels a

connection, but it is in the particular experiences. She loves

the smell of paperbacks and the monsoon. She loves lying and the

ceiling fan, or heard their mothers -- or her grandmothers. She does

feel that umbilical connection. But I think that deep sense of belonging

that her parents feel, and they are not only revolutionaries, but a

mother is involved in a trial ringing war criminals to justice

from the Bangladesh revolution. The country is the framework of their

lives. I kind of grew up in that, where everything was about the

country. We are going to go home and be patriots and serve the country.

And that sense of if you were one of the privileged people who get to be

educated and come from a country like that that has that image on the

album cover of the starving child, you have a responsibility to that

place. I think she doesn't feel that kind of moral response ability. In a

sense, she is in the family, but not of the family -- response ability.

That's right. I figured also has to do with class. The people who adopt

her art related. -- are privileged. She knows she must have been adopted

from a poor family. She looks around. She is driving in her

air-conditioned car in the city and books around the streets and things

any of these people could have been my mother. She sees herself in the

faces of others. That is a fundamental aspect of her not

feeling she fits into the elite society into which she has been

adopted. Obviously you are not an orphan, but I wonder how much of her

is actually Tahmima Anam. You were born in Bangladesh, but she moved in

Thailand, New York, Paris. You are now settled here. How much is you? I

was not adopted. But my sister told a lie which was a teenager, she told

all her friends she was adopted, and she convinced everyone. My parents

to this date to know this. They might if they watch this programme.

I will have to pretend it is on at a time when it's not. My sister

convinced everyone. She said I don't look like them and I don't like

them, and somehow, she felt so much like an outsider in our family,

probably that onset of teenage rebellion, she convinced everyone.

That is where I got the idea that you could be completely embedded in

a place and still feel like an outsider. In terms of my own

biography, although I was not adopted, I did grow up outside

Bangladesh and experienced a lot of these ambulances. -- this

ambivalence. This novel feels much more intimate, and sometimes people,

as they first book, I write something loosely autobiographical.

My first it was more the story of my parents or grandparents. Stories are

inherited. This felt more like I was being more open and honest about

some of the conflicts I had had with the kind of history that had been

presented to me. And that I was not really sure what to do with. I love

being in Bangladesh, but in some ways I also feel it is not who I am.

I don't speak the language as well as they should. I was at a book fair

in Bangladesh and this woman came up to me and said, aren't you ashamed?

She was young, about 19 or something. I said, and she said, you

wrote your book in English. I'm too ashamed of yourself? -- aren't you?

You are constantly asked by people to choose, to make a choice. Have

you been confronted by that? I mean, I don't feel as much here that I

have to choose because I live in a cosmopolitan city and it is all

about dualities at all about people having relationships to other places

and that's why I love being a part of that city. But fundamentally when

you don't have some of those markers, like language or a

particular real root in place, you have to be comfortable with a

certain level of discomfort. So where are -- wherever I am I always

wish I was somewhere else and when I get to that place a wish I was

somewhere else. It isn't that I can ever get rid of that, it is that I

have to accept that that's the fundamental condition of my life. I

sort of feel, and it is something maybe people should talk about more,

that in the end you get to a point where you stop trying to choose, or

to fulfil this requirement, and just say, hey, it's a rare inheritance to

be able to say there are two places or perhaps even three places that

are home. Where you feel at home. Sure. And I think that's where she

is trying to get to. It isn't about the questions of her life will

fundamentally be answered, she may never discover who her mother is,

she may never really feel that sense of attachment to a place that her

parents want her to feel. It is that she will somehow be comfortable with

those conflicts and with those ambiguities and that she will be in

control. That she will on that. Say this is who I am, I don't have to

choose. I can embrace the contradictions. You talk about her

parents, freedom fighters, they helped create and with a shout of

East Pakistan. We will get back to The Bones of Grace but the book that

covers that, you call it a golden age. It was brutal. How many people

were killed? There was a genocide. Many. Millions of people. You call

it a golden age. What was that about? I did that because I grew up

listening to the stories about war and then I decided to write a novel,

so I talked to lots of people about what they had done during the war.

And their stories were very tragic. People in their family who had been

killed either army and had seen terrible things, but they also had

the sense of purpose that came out. They were in their teens, born

without a country and then made at country. They always look back on

that time with great nostalgia. I mean, not perfect nostalgia, but

with a sense of... That we really did something and changed the world

and that such a magnetic story. For some people, they look back and even

though it was violence and it was a genocide it was a golden age? Yes,

and they talked about love. So many people told me that they fell in

love during the war because some of the barriers between men and women

kind of broke down at that time. They were allowed to mix more

freely, they were calling each other comrades. So that really felt like a

moment where they were young, they were fighting in war, falling in

the. It felt cold. There are echoes of this golden age, the brutality

and so on, in The Bones of Grace. It is a contemporary book. In

particular there is a trial. It is only a small passage but there is a

trial of somebody. It wasn't clear what he was supposed to have done. I

think he was a collaborator. Is that true of Bangladesh now, that the

past is very much part of the present and people are reminded of

it? Sure. Bat file actually happened, so 44 years after the

birth of Bangladesh the people, the local people, who collaborated with

the Pakistan army to commit genocide and two very publicly supported the

army were brought to trial for the first time. -- That trial actually

happened. The leader of the organisation that was opposed to the

war, that scene is set during his trial. I certainly feel like the war

are still plays a very big part in people's imaginations. This idea

that you can't just forgive and forget the past but you have to

bring people accountable. If you are going to forgive something has to

happen. You have to decide, we will never do this again. We are going to

forever decide that this is a part of our history that we are going to

lay to rest and that hadn't happened until that trail. I want to talk

little bit about the other two books. Especially the second of the

books. It is about the same family and a member of the family turns to

religious extremism, I think that would be fair, and there's a

conflict between a and sister. You said that as much as the West is

afraid of Islam, others are much more frightened. What are they

frightened of? Here in the rich world they are frightened of bombs

going off. What is it people in the Muslim world are frightened of?

Look, there are these little courts in America where they are trying to

pass laws that say Sharia law will never be implemented in Texas or

something. Which is never going to happen. That's just a way of people

addressing their fear. But in Bangladesh we have political parties

that are on the religious right that really wants to bring in religious

law as part of the judicial code. But those people never get voted

into power. They are always a minority. They exist as a minority

but they never get voted into power because that's not what people want.

Although people may be devout, they may have their prejudices against

the outside world, they may have their sense of being part of a

community that is enclosed. But they still hold to their civil rights and

their secular beliefs. So the idea that in a country like mine that you

would have religious law is terrifying to me. And it is much

more terrifying than it should be to somebody who is born and brought up

here because that's never going to happen. And this is a reality,

although very remote, that is possible. So I was just trying to

say that the consequences for a possibly very devout country of

Muslim citizens of having religious law is in fact something that nobody

wants. I mean, not nobody, not the majority of people as in the

democratic process have never voted for. Let's get back to the love

story. That's what this book is about. I merrily. When you write

about the relationship between the two characters, it is soft, caring,

beautiful. When you describe the relationship with Rashid it is about

people getting up and having a fag in the middle of the night. It is

very pedestrian. Were you trying to tell us something about arranged

marriages? You don't think they work? Well, no, I think arranged

marriages do work for a lot of people. I think Tinder is an

arranged marriage. It works for people all over the world in

different forms. What I was trying to say in this love triangle was not

that the Asian relationship was somehow less romantic than the

interracial relationship, it was that the relationship that had been

presented to her as the one that would seem most natural was the one

that felt deeply unnatural. And sometimes it is very contradictory.

We can fall in love with people who have nothing to do with us and they

have nothing in common. And yet she feels this deep connection with

someone. So I wanted him to be as different from her as possible. So

she says that she visits his home and she looks at the pictures on the

wall and she says, well, you can trace your history back generations

and I don't even know who my mother was, and yet I feel that we were

born to be together. It is a very romantic thing, but I couldn't help

it. No, I think it is powerful. That was the message. Maybe it is because

I was a man but I kept thinking, poor Rashid! He is doing an

honourable thing. I thought he was doing his duty. In the best way that

it could, in the best way he was being taught. I am really glad you

feel that way because they wanted you feel that he was honourable. I

did that and they gave him that sense of generosity. He is a good

guide. It isn't like the arranged marriage is with a terrible person.

No, there are other people, men, in that book who behave very badly to

their women, but he isn't one of them. Exactly. So he comes off

looking pretty good. And Zubaida herself is the one who appears to be

the one causing all of the problems and who is committing all of the

betrayals. Sometimes people who read the book said, I didn't like her for

a while. And I say, that's a cave. I didn't like her for a while! --

that's OK. She comes around. We have spoken about identity, belonging,

globalisation. But I would urge you to read this because at the heart of

this book is a love story, a love triangle, if you like, and it's a

very compelling read. Tahmima Anam, thank you very much. Thank you.

Yet again on Friday some of us were dealing

Here are couple of pictures taken by our weather watchers on Friday.