From Iraq to Queens Park – Tales from the Glasshouse

New Writer awardee George Anderson interviews poet Kussay Hussein and writer Sue Reid Sexton on the experience of working together on a recent Scottish PEN project to mark National Refugee Week. 

In Glasgow's Queens Park there is an elegant glasshouse. Southside mothers herd children between koi ponds, cacti rooms and the café, unaware that a remarkable collaboration is taking place in their midst. On a sofa tucked away from the main throng, two writers from very different backgrounds are turning their pens to the subject of war.

Kusay Hussein was introduced to Sue Reid Sexton after he approached the Scottish Book Trust for help. They in turn contacted Scottish PEN who recommended Sue. They live on different sides of Queens Park so the Glasshouse is an ideal place to meet. Each writer's work deals with war - one from experience, the other from imagination.

War generates a lot of journalism, but only fiction really attempts to make sense of it. Stack any newspaper archive alongside All Quiet on the Western Front or the Red Badge of Courage. Fiction will tell you more every time.

Journalism likes to dress itself up with personal testimony of course, but only stories that can be condensed make the grade. The fiction of Kusay Hussein redresses that balance as only fiction can.  So read the following with that limitation in mind. It is the condensed factual version of what happened to him. You need to read his stories to find out how it felt: More difficult, but more important to put into words.

A civil engineer, Kusay worked on big infrastructure projects in Baghdad and Basra, helping rebuilt his devastated country. This meant of course that he worked with and for the Americans and British, and so became a target for armed gangs.

"It doesn't matter if it was a school or hospital for the people. Some see it only as being with the Americans," he says.

Kusay was kidnapped and held for eight months. His wife, Huda, not knowing if he was alive or dead, feared she and the children may be the next targets, so fled the country.

When Kusay eventually arranged payment for the kidnappers and was released, he left for Jordan where he found out his family had sought asylum in the UK. Further travels through Turkey and across Europe finally brought him illegal entry to the UK and reunion with Huda, Hussein (5) and Ali (8).

Finding relative peace, Kusay turned to his writing to come to terms with all that had happened.

"I always find myself in writing," he says. "This is a new life for me. Writing is a new life."

Kusay and Sue are engaged in an unusual process. For one thing, they are recreating stories Kusay had to leave behind in Iraq. He was a soldier in the 1990s and wrote about his experiences in the first Gulf War and of the suffering during the blockade following it.  Those first versions are lost now but he is retrieving the stories from his memory and remaking them with Sue.

But they are also creating new work, with translation on the hoof. Its not that Kusay writes in Arabic and Sue translates it (she doesn't speak Arabic for one thing.) Kusay writes in English that Sue helps him get right.

"There will be bits that just don't make sense to me so we talk through every word," says Sue. "He has a line - "Like an Arabic woman mourning something dear." Now our assumption about mourning in this country would be of something contained and subdued but in the Middle East grief and mourning can involve a great emotional outpouring.  So you realise that every line even when accurately translated can mean something different in each culture. The job we are doing is making sure the western reader gets every nuance of what Kusay is saying. Sometimes we have to explain things very precisely. Things that another Iraqi would get right away but that a Western reader might not understand, or worse yet misunderstand."

"We help each other to find the most appropriate words," says Kusay.

"Even if my English gets good I will keep working with Sue. She is not just a translator. I find she gives me direction."

I tell Kusay it saddens me he has abandoned writing in Arabic, but he is pragmatic about his switch to English. Aside from looking to make a home in the UK, he has a very firm idea of the readership he wants.

"I care about who will read my thoughts. I feel a purpose to tell people in the west about Iraq. In Arabic, nobody would be interested," he says.

Today the pair work on a story based on the murder of one of Kusay's neighbours - killed taking his son to nursery.

Like a good deal of his work, it does not dwell too much on background rights and wrongs, but is concerned with specific realities. What it feels like to live with the constant threat of violence and death.

"The people who kill, they often don't know why they kill," he says.

"Many people were happy when Saddam was gone. But what came after was not so good either."

Sue brings to bear her experience as a professional counsellor. "Iraq as a nation has been traumatised - in a state of shock - for something like 30 years," she says. "Through my counselling work, I know about individuals in shock. In trauma it can be hard to find a state of peace. It impacts on how you react to everything. It seems to me that Iraq as a whole is like that."

Sue's own work explores war and death.

"People don't know what its like to be in a war zone. I wrote about the Clydebank blitz. It is hard when you live a comfortable West of Scotland existence. Working with Kusay has given me that closer connection to how it must feel."

The first of Kusay's stories honed with Sue has been posted online, as part of a series on the theme of "Home" for Refugee Week. He is delighted.

"You need a motive to keep writing, and for me it is all about knowing there is an audience," he says.

Kusay continues to meet with Sue weekly at the glasshouse, to retrieve more of his lost stories, and mint new ones.

Sue remembers when the giant catfish in the glasshouse koi pond was half the size it is now. She has history in the Southside. Kusay Hussein is building one too. He and his family like it here but its not yet clear if the authorities will allow them to stay.

At the moment Kusay's writing is very much rooted in the realities of Iraq over the last couple of decades. But once that is out of his system he is looking ahead to an epic futuristic fantasy - science fiction from an Islamic perspective - outlining the end of the world no less.

Like Sue's take on the blitz - more imagination than personal experience.  I can't help but think he has earned the right to just make some things up now.

George Anderson

Links:

Scottish PEN

Scottish Refugee Council