SUNDAY LISTENING

The first was the writer, Vikram Seth. Dad called out to me to come listen. Seth was being interviewed but in between conversation he was picking out tracks of music, and not books. The combination was so much more illuminating and I was hooked. Then came the dancer, Akram Khan, and then the doctor, Atul Gawande... you might think this a particularly Indian immigrant selection, but those were the voices I remember. They spoke to me and drew me in. Now my Sundays are Desert Island Disc days. And oftentimes the discs weave into my weekdays, into the threads of my own narrative. Today, for example, is a John Agard day, moving from Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' through Bob Dylan's 'Shelter from the Storm' towards the Calypsonian Lord Invader's 'You Don't Need Glasses To See'. And through it all his thoughts on poetry, on being the only Afro-Guyanese Queen's Gold Medal Winner for Poetry, on being part of the GCSE syllabus, on his teachers, his daughters, on being a 'joker' as a young boy...

I stopped listening to, or rather seeking out music, some years ago. Too much of my past is caught up in music and peace of mind is often a choice between memory and silence. I credit these brief interludes with strangers who become anything but in the hour in which they share a loose web of geography, history, parentage or parenting, grief, loss, enormous successes, imprisonment, exile. I have my favourites even though the list keeps growing. The archives are a well of treasure. Dip in! Whose eight tracks would you like to hear while discovering their life story? I love...

Aung San Suu Kyi, the only guest who didn't come into the studio for obvious reasons - something about Kirsty Young being in Myanmar, sharing a moment in exile with the Burmese freedom fighter, makes the entire programme magical...

Alice Walker, one of my earliest literary and poetic heroes, the one who set my voice on its path to claiming a fully formed womanist self...

Dr David Nott, vascular and war surgeon, who made me cry because he cried...

Bryan Stevenson, a human rights lawyer focusing on the brutal percentages of incarcerated black men in the so-called United States...

Poets, activists, philanthropists like Bill Gates (whose choice of wife is really what inspires me about him!), Sigrid Rausing, journalists Alex Crawford and Christiane Amanpour, musicians, physicists... in a world where media is desperately trying to colonise our minds and make us afraid of each other, Desert Island Discs provides a counter-narrative, casting us towards one another rather than isolating us. I find the gift of the Bible at the end an interesting moment - yes, occasionally a Sikh will choose the Guru Granth Sahib or a Muslim will choose the Quran, but no one really resists this aspect of the programme. What does it say about the programme that in a determinedly atheist society, a Holy Book is one all castaways are cast away with?

Have some music while you're here... this is South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba with 'Pata Pata' ('Touch Touch' in Xhosa) and if this doesn't get you dancing with a smile on your face this rainy day, nothing will! Turn that volume up and let's dance!

WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? MISS WINEHOUSE?

Sometimes I am compelled to watch a movie. I will make a concerted effort to trek to the arts picture house, buy a ticket and immerse. Last week, I witnessed Amy - a documentary by Asif Kapadia on the singer Amy Winehouse, whose music ought to have made her an enduring legend, but whose descent into drugs and alcohol annihilated body and soul. After an hour and a half, I wondered when the movie would end. When the credits rolled, I realised I hadn't once been moved. I walked out of the theatre and into crowds, into shops. Twice I was asked about my day and I shared my thoughts on the film. I think Amy would have hated the film. She would be humiliated by this remembrance of the very worst of her laid bare for our delectation. It was ghostly voyeurism. 

Later that night, still unable to shake the fog of depression, I began another documentary, this time on Netflix, one that has had no fanfare or billboard trumpeting. Amy has been advertised everywhere, has 97% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, will no doubt earn nominations and awards - this quiet little film streaming only on Netflix was about a gifted black woman. Nina Simone. Critical and public interest in the story of a black woman vs the story of a white woman in the music industry, then and now, is virtually unchanged. Evidence: the recent Taylor Swift/ Nicki Minaj twitter debacle.

Within the first five minutes of Liz Garbus' What Happened, Miss Simone I was in tears. Nina responds to the question: 'What is free to you?' 'What does freedom mean to me? I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear. If I could have that for half of my life. I mean, really. No fear. Like a new way of seeing.' When I was in N2 all those many months of 2009, imprisoned in my hospital cell on feeding tubes, cannulas in my jugular, I came across this quote and wrote about it on my blog. Nina's music and lyrics have formed a constant thread in my life from the first year of this disease taking hold of me, because Nina writes about freedom.

She wasn't free. She was young, gifted and black during the most violent times. She wrote about the horror of the bombing of four black children in a church in Birmingham, Alabama in Mississippi Goddam, the lynchings of black men in Strange Fruit, and had a mental breakdown eventually because how could she dissociate from feeling anger for her people, and yet making the kind of music white people would buy? Nobody loves an angry black woman even if her anger is poetic justice. Everybody loves a damaged white woman: Marilyn Monroe, Vivian Leigh, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse. Simone was damaged too, of course. A manic depressive with a violence in her that was ultimately contained by a prescription drug that slurred her speech and chemically altered her personality. The price of fame for a dream that wasn't hers. Her dream? To be a classical pianist. First black female classical pianist. 

Meanwhile the chemo dripped into me yesterday. In the last hour, a woman on my right had a fit of bone bruising coughing. I hadn't heard anything like it in a while. So of course I turned to her. The cause of her severe lung destroying bronchial trouble? The same drug sliding into my veins. Be careful, she warned me. Stay vigilant. Pass me some of that No Fear, Nina. I need it, as I've always done. 

THE ART OF ASKING (Book Review)

I have just returned from a week in the Algarve, Portugal - I am slightly woozy with exhaustion and the particular effects of intense sun on a lupus body. I feel parched and floaty at the same time; also satisfied and enriched with love and learning. It was a family holiday. Our first grown-up sibling holiday, with four children. It was hectic. And as with all the best holidays, I had a book to retire with, to curl inside, every night.

The Art of Asking is relevant to all of us, artists and non-artists (if any of us are non-artists, which I suspect we aren't - everyone makes art and beauty somehow, in some way) because we are all afraid of rejection, of being turned down, or most poignantly, because we simply don't know or can't imagine what we can ask for. We want, but we don't know how to ask for it, whom to ask, where to look for help. In my life, dependent as I am on so many people for love and support, worrying about how I will finance myself in some future universe where I am alone and hoping The Books will manifest themselves, I am learning to ask. To be unafraid. To Take The Donuts. Palmer tells us of the recent literary anecdote that has 'rocked' the lovers of Henry David Thoreau - the magic of Walden has been dimmed for some because of the discovery that Thoreau was not quite as alone and self-sufficient as his book implies. On Sundays, his mother and sister brought him a  basket of freshly baked goods, including doughnuts. He took the donuts (American word, American spelling).

Take the Donuts, Palmer pleads with her readers. Take the help. Ask for the help. And then watch the dots connect themselves in your life. Watch the net of loyalty, trust, compassion, understanding, love, tighten. We need each other. Especially when we think we don't. Especially when we are writers, and the expectation of our imaginary audience is that The Book will simply write itself while we are on an island, locked away in a shed or disconnected from the pulse of human chaos. Artists need help: food, shelter, money, hugs, perspective, inspiration, friends. Asking for help is part of the art. Offering the help is part of the art. One cannot exist without the other.

I love this book, but if it's not your thing, here is the book condensed into a thirteen minute TED talk that rightfully went viral...

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Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

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G IS FOR GRIEF, H IS FOR HAWK

'Good grief.'
Is there such a thing?
Grief rhymes with thief.
That much is true.

I am always grieving.

Something has always been stolen
is stolen
will be stolen
soon.

You thought it was about love
but it is always grief that wins.
Grief who writes the books
waiting just under the skin
for a little pin prick
a little release
and then the slow unending bleed.


© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

I am reading Helen Macdonald's 'H is for Hawk' and it feels like a culmination, a coming home. Macdonald is a falconer who decided to train a goshawk after her father died. She uses words I have to look up like 'palimpsest' and 'annealed' and shares a world of wildness and rapture and wings. I've never read anything like it.

Every day I want to write, and I can't. At least, I cover no significant ground. A poem here, a diary or journal entry there, an email, a letter… but none of those hours one needs to devote to finish a BOOK. You know, those things that look like blocks, but come apart on one side. Who said that?* Someone with a snide sense of humour, and a remonstration to those who don't read the way writers do. Obsessively, compulsively. Like the pages are a nest you are building to live in, forever.
Except, sometimes, you don't have forever. Because you have advanced glaucoma and a metaphoric wolf snarling or muttering at you all the day long hours. At night I relax. Maybe the wolf is tired of all that snarling and curls up, close beside me but so still I can pretend I am alone.

Just before my birthday, a friend of mine died. She wasn't someone I saw very much because she had cancer and although we were both in and out of the same hospital, a lupus and a cancer patient share only a language of needles, sickness, wit and the long shadow of death and grief. We rarely share wards or infusion bays. Sometimes we do, like when Clive James sat opposite me and we shared Marian Keyes' Guinness cake, but mostly cancer has its own world. And lupus squeezes in here and there between leukaemia and rheumatoid arthritis. There have been so many deaths in our family over the past six years, including, most recently, my aunt Gerda, and so I think my grief over my friend's death was really a sense of exhaustion with all of the deaths, the private ones and the public ones on the news. We are bombarded, are we not?

A few months before my friend Selene Mills died, we met for tea at the local deli and she gave me a pelargonium. For weeks afterwards, I'd been meaning to write to her and tell her I couldn't bear to throw the petals away because they were so beautiful. She worked for the Cambridge Early Music group and the music at her funeral, chosen by her, left me wishing I could read music, play music, so I could have truly understood her. I am so envious of all of you who play instruments! But what I can do is appreciate music and extraordinary literature and the slow perfect growing of a plant potted by loving hands and a generous heart. And that must be enough for now.

*F. Scott Fitzgerald now that I've looked it up...

SWING

The movement a golf player makes with his/her club to hit the ball. A golf swing is made up of a series of complex mechanical body movements. A perfect golf swing is regarded as the "holy grail" of the sport, and there are many approaches as to how to achieve "perfection" - Wikipedia

On a rainy day in September, the last of the summer colours bleach away. It has been quite a difficult summer and after many hospital admissions I am more than a trifle worn out. But this past week, one bright burst of energy appeared in the form of my younger brother. He spent the week infusing us with his usual brand of good humoured, careless love in between bouts of giving me golf lessons. He didn't entirely despise my first attempts so I am hopeful I shan't embarrass myself in front of The Nephew who no doubt, at 18 months, is already perfecting the art of swing.  

The Brother accompanied me to hospital a few days ago, ducking out only when the Needle Lady came by, all smiles and jokes. (The Needle Lady that is, not The Brother... she really was the chirpiest phlebotomist I have ever met! Unnerving, but nice!). And then, with a hug and admonitions to visit him soon, in his part of the world, he was gone. Tomorrow I have eye surgery - unless the surgeon decides against it... and today I am as dull as the grey stone sky. Recently, I watched choirmaster Gareth Malone gather together a disparate group of surgeons and therapists to create a perfect harmony - I found the programme fascinating. The thought that someday, in an alternate universe perhaps, I could be sung to by NHS staff, cheers me no end! NHS trust hospitals work "as a series of little villages" with very little communication, if any, between consultants and kitchen porters, so to witness the coming together of the complex combination of individuals that make up my own hospital experience, was a thrill. The full appreciation of the unique talents of all members of staff is something I learned from my father who was loved by medics and technicians from all departments. Humour, gentleness and a song on the lips of my surgeon - is that too much to ask for? 

"Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down... in the most delightful way!" 

Now that's my idea of 'swing'!