A New Definition of ‘Local’

Saturday Books has been generously assisted by both publishers and writers in setting up a Local Authors Room. After a year the collection is gaining sufficiency, and is representative of writers across the West Midlands region. But how ‘inclusive’ does that really make us? In Dudley over the past twenty years entirely new communities have appeared. So far only one representative has approached us with writing – in a ‘home’ language – originating from a community’s country of origin. And I guess it will be some time before there is literary culture that is home-grown – written here, about here, ‘local’ but in heritage language rather than English.

Twenty years ago I was a teacher in Qatar, at an International School in central Doha. Life inside a newly-built housing compound though, in a suburb that pushed out into the desert, could be lonely. The feeling was ameliorated however by the mix of Egyptians, Jordanians and Gulf Arabs that I found myself among. There was constant interchange between our houses. The families never seemed to go to bed, even the children, until the very late evening. They were my neighbours. But what was my locality? The city of Doha, for all its easy-going tolerance of the vast array of nations represented there, would never have become my neighbourhood, even after years. For all that I loved the high spirits of its Pakistani and Yemeni taxi-drivers, and the Corniche, and the way a short ferry trip would show a city that seemed to rise from the sea.

I was in my late forties and did not necessarily vibrate to the party habits of the young British teachers at the school. Though I joined them occasionally, at weekends. Nobody was from the West Midlands. They were from Liverpool, Leeds and Leicester. I have no knowledge of these vast communities, other than that gained by single overnight visits. Even so, I shared with these boisterous colleagues an Englishness  that might consist of shared pop-song/tv memories and memories of events such as Hillsborough. They’d have recognised a landscape by Lowry – looming industrial backdrops dwarfing stick-men inhabitants.

The large ‘bookstore’ at the centre was also a stockist of art materials and a tasteful card-and-gift shop too. What novels could be sold was of course limited by censorship; as leave approached and when I looked for material that could be read continuously I plumped for The Rainbow  and Women in Love. I had ready the former twice, the latter once. In the sequence, DH Lawrence does his best to explain modernity to us. There is the continuous draw and influence of the city, and the North Midland landscapes give way to a metropolitan world. Taking the voices of each of the major characters, over the summer I wrote a series of poems where each major character gave expression to their lives. I sent them away to several poetry publications but ‘an unusual project’ was the best that I received in return. Lawrence had been out of favour for years for his gender views. No matter. I had connected with England at a stage in its cultural development, to a dialect like our own here. Living out on the edge of the Arabian peninsula, I had effectively ‘gone local’ with the whole country of my birth.

I used to record evening shows from a Dubai FM station, play it repeatedly, and that way became familiar with Arabic music. The great Iraqi singer Ilham Madfi, the famous Rai musician Khaled Hadj Ibrahim. I read all that neighbours and students lent me. But I always returned to the homeland and its representations. Dickens was at work when my grandparents’ parents were young, his figures travelling by stagecoach, yet all of it recognisably England. I saw how his humour had become the humour of people I now only remember. It was to these books that I repaired every evening, recovering the sense of a country to which I belonged, that the desert daytime had drawn out of me.

Nigeria must have the same hold on those whose origins lie there. Whether the ancestral language is Ibo, Hausa or Yoruba, the 20th Century novelist Chinua Achebe should tower in their lives. The spare prose conjures forth both the mysterious forest and the bustling modern city. Achebe is a ‘local writer’ to those who justly own him. As such, it is the intention of Saturday Books, over the coming years, to represent and promote the poetry and literary fiction pertaining to Dudley’s linguistic communities. The work, in the original language where appropriate, will take its place alongside West Midland writers’ publications. A new notion of locality, the bookshop at its centre.