The Music Effect (or when Nadeem Aslam was on my radio show)

Previously published in The Herald magazine. 

Nadeem Aslam wants me to listen to a Bulgarian folk song performed by an all female Bulgarian vocal choir called Les Mystere des Voix Bulgares. It’s called Svatba or The Wedding and it’s from an album originally released in 1975 that took a Swiss ethnomusicologist fifteen years to compile and produce. The track is intense, overwhelming almost and the women seem to be keeping time with rhythms more similar to Eastern music. It’s almost like an aural version of Aslam’s latest book, The Blind Man’s Garden - both are evocative and emotionally haunting. 

‘I like art which is quite intense.’ explains Aslam, talking to me in the CityFM89 studios where we are pulling up his playlist. ‘And here we have a track which is all about the human voice, which is all about the female voice…there is a difference.’ There are both male and female voices on the list he has picked, which is incredibly diverse - obscure at times, just surprising at others. Aslam is in Karachi for the 4th Karachi Literature Festival, where he spoke with Kamila Shamsie about his latest novel. During that session, I am acutely aware of the rows of ladies behind me who gush at Aslam’s every simple, dignified and honest word - there seems to be a great deal of immediate affection for him as a person, as much as there is respect for his work. I tell him it’s rare to meet someone so present, so open and so willing to give himself away to a large audience of complete strangers, as vulnerable as it would make the most outgoing person feel. He admits, ‘I don’t know how to pretend, you see. If you ask me a question I will try and answer it as honestly as possible, as honestly as I can. So if someone asks you a question that is connected to something deep inside you, like what is your relationship to Pakistan, you end up having to tell the truth. And then there are consequences when you tell the truth and then you suddenly realise that you’re almost in tears talking about this land - that you were part of once and you’ve gone away from and now you’ve been given it back.’ 

Being in Pakistan is clearly important to Aslam, who has been a part of both the Karachi and Lahore Literature Festivals this year. In Karachi, it was clear that readers had waited a long time to meet him in person - there were a number of occasions when it seemed like a tiny, concentrated mob had descended on him, wanting signed books and personal conversations. For a man known to spend a great deal of time in isolation, writing, Aslam was very polite to them all, at the festival and later, in conversation. ‘It’s been my first big contact with readers in Pakistan and its been really quite overwhelming.’ he explains, ‘I keep saying, writers spend a lot of time on their own. In a normal person’s job if they make a mistake or they do well, by the end of the day, their boss will let them know. By the end of the week, by the end of the month at least, they will know that something had gone wrong or they had done well. With writers, you can spend years doing this very important thing which is connected to the very core of who you are and yet there is no response and frequently, you actually don’t talk to anyone about what you are doing …so this sounds quite otherworldly, but you think that I actually don’t exist, that the central thing in my life seems to have no echo or ricochet out there. But then when something like this happens, when the book is published and you come to a festival and the reader comes up to you,’ he laughs, ‘and then you suddenly think, Oh God, I exist! They can see me! It is actually delightful.’ 

While I liken Aslam’s prose to the Bulgarian choir, he himself likens it to a very different sound. He quotes a statement made by Robin Guthrie, member of the alt-rock group Cocteau Twins who claimed that ‘a guitar doesn’t sound interesting until it has an effect on it’. Aslam continues, ‘he liked to feed it into a synthesizer - that is what I like to do in prose. I like to have an effect, as it were, in a sentence, I like the riff to have an echo three or four sentences down as it were, and I think that a lot of my sensibility is linked to what the Cocteau Twins did.’ The lead singer of the band, interestingly, was the reclusive soprano vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, who ‘began with words but in the following years she abandoned words altogether and began sort of making sounds.’  It is surprising to me that Aslam connects his prose to the music of Cocteau Twins, since he is a writer who is very aware of his craft, who has clearly thought a great deal about the words he has put to paper and yet here compares himself to a a band fronted by a singer who has abandoned real words in her songs entirely, relying almost on a sort of glossolalia to verbalise emotions. When I tell him this, he’s immediately animated and ready to explain the apparent contradiction. ‘This is interesting,’ he says, ‘language is such a private thing. I always say language is the skin on my thoughts and that I seriously couldn’t explain to you why I use one word as opposed to the other one. John Banville said about Nabokov that he didn’t write in English, he wrote in a private, secret language that was mysteriously comprehensible to English speaking people and I think to some level that is true of every writer - that the language is a private thing but you’re trying to communicate it and that it where the tension comes in, that I want to do my thing but I also want to communicate.’ 

Perhaps all music breaks apart barriers, I suggest. Aslam agrees, ‘this is very interesting that you say that, that music breaks apart those barriers, that we ultimately end up collecting emotionally…it’s a visceral connection.’ A little later he says, ‘I think with anything in life - that is true of friendship, that is true of love, that is true of all feelings - that you can kid yourself, you can fool yourself into thinking what I have at the moment is fine, this is love, this isn’t perfect but it’s fine … but when the real thing happens, when real love happens, when real friendship happens it comes at you like a fist in the stomach. Nobody has to convince you.’ 

Aslam’s very solitary writing process has been talked about in many places, and it is no surprise to find out that he has always worked in isolation. When I ask him about it, he laughs and tells me the same process has worked well for him so far. ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it…but the problem is people do think it is broke that you need to get out there.’ Aslam explained to his audience at the KLF that even when he could not afford to live as a full time writer, he would work intensely, doing any job he could in order to save money and then write just as intensely for the next six weeks, cut off from the pressures of employment and life outside of his novel. While his family were emotionally supportive of his decision to drop out of university and write, the financial strain was constant at the start, and Aslam is candid about what it took to earn the time to write. He didn’t grow up in an affluent, well connected background; he didn’t even grow up in a major city. ‘We mustn’t romanticise it too much,’ he says, ‘but until I was in my late 20s and early 30s I didn’t know how to use a subway in London…I was in the provinces, I was in the marginal places as it were, I wasn’t in the centre, I wasn’t in London or New York or Karachi, I wasn’t in the big cities. I didn’t know how to use the tube or the subway, but I knew what a sun was. I knew what a friend was. Does that make sense?’ he asks me, gaunt, earnest, honest. ‘I was learning. My education was happening at a much more emotional and you used the word visceral earlier - at that level. I wasn’t very sophisticated in a way, but in a way I was being educated …the ground work of my emotional years over there in the margins is very important.’  And it has served Aslam well - his books are heavy with mood and resounding with layered emotion that he clearly feels on every level. He’s clearly worked hard to achieve what he has. ‘I never wanted to be a writer,’ he smiles, ‘but I always wanted to write’.