{"id":19193,"date":"2020-03-17T15:28:10","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T15:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/?p=19193"},"modified":"2020-03-17T16:05:57","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T16:05:57","slug":"interview-khaled-nurul-hakim-first-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/03\/interview-khaled-nurul-hakim-first-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Khaled Nurul Hakim on his ‘absorbing, singular’ first novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your many artistic outputs include screenplays, experimental poetry, and Sufi music. What made you want to write a book, and particularly a novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought my screenplay for the original \u2018Barzakh\u2019 [now the second part of The Book of Naseeb<\/em>]\u00a0was a very good commercial story, but I was aware success in commercial filmmaking is vanishingly small. When the\u00a0 planned low-budget production didn\u2019t happen and my life was heading for a spiritual change that lasted years I had that story in my back pocket like an unclaimed Lottery ticket. I remembered a story from a\u00a0 screenwriting book where the struggling writer was crashing on friend\u2019s floors and contemplating writing the screenplay that would become Dancing With Wolves. He\u2019d got to know Kevin Costner very early in his career and told him about it, and Costner told him on no account should he write a screenplay. Write a book. A book had a much better chance of getting published than a screenplay getting made. And so it proved. The years I put into The Book of Naseeb<\/em> were founded on my faith in Kevin Costner\u2019s advice!<\/p>\n

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How did The Book of Naseeb<\/em> begin life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a novel? Very badly. I realized that my story for \u2018Barzakh\u2019 was barely a novella and I needed more. And I started writing the first part that would become The Book of Naseeb<\/em>. I wanted a commercial novel, but my \u2018experimental\u2019 side was trying to jazz up the narrative. After two years the result was a dog\u2019s dinner which I sent off prematurely. I knew the rejections were the fault of the writing. The first part was originally written in kitchen-sink realist mode that would contrast with the \u2018metaphysical\u2019 Barzakh section. But it was crap. And I would bemoan to myself why I couldn\u2019t write spare, terse prose \u2013 like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch<\/em> and Fight Club<\/em>. And suddenly in the midst of reading Homer I had the thought of introducing the angelic world: it was a later idea. And that gave me my point-of-view, and the voices, and a narrative register, and I wasn\u2019t trying to write like anyone else anymore.<\/p>\n

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How did you create the character of Naseeb? Is he based on anyone?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was part of a small film production company in the 90s that was immersed in the experiences of young contemporary Asians \u2013 beyond racist victimhood. I remember some of the dodgy London characters who fed into our work, and the street language that I didn\u2019t hear in other fiction. And I\u2019ve remembered equally dodgy friends and stories. The writing of the first part of the book took years with many dead ends, and I resented spending so long with this character because I didn\u2019t identify with him. But I came to accept he was more me than I cared to admit.<\/p>\n

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There are many cultural influences in the language of The Book of Naseeb<\/em>, including the Quran, Middle English, and London\/Birmingham street slang. How did you draw on these to create the dialect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had originally wanted to write the whole thing in street language but didn\u2019t feel adequate to it. I was an old Brummie, no longer hip and with-it. But when after two years I realized I had to start from scratch again, starting with the angels, I felt I could afford to spend time immersing myself in the slang \u2013 and it probably took another two years before I felt I wasn\u2019t \u2018pushing\u2019 to make it sound more \u2018street\u2019. The Quran and Brummie slang I grew up with; Middle English I studied years ago: there is a later draft of The Book of Naseeb<\/em> where I tried sections in a form of Middle English \u2013 one year of writing it, which I don\u2019t regret. But I was conscious it was literary suicide. I always had a fancy that the readership who could most easily \u2018get\u2019 the rhythms and world of this book were not literary types but young Bengali and Somali kids from Newham.<\/p>\n

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How do you feel about The Book of Naseeb<\/em>\u2019s imminent publication?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am a man out of time. I have started belatedly to publish past work, and write the work I had previously planned. All the time new work is forcing a passage. I hope The Book of Naseeb<\/em> can do some good in the world. But it\u2019s not mine any more. And I have other books in the wings awaiting publication…<\/p>\n

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Which writers inspire you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dead ones. Dead white modernist writers. Dead Middle-Eastern and Persian poet-sages. Dead classical writers. Direct influences would be A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, In Parenthesis<\/em> by David Jones, Paradise Lost<\/em>, Homer<\/em>. Dead people.<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s your favourite thing to do in your spare time?
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Writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Khaled Nurul Hakim speaks to Kate Wilkinson about angelic worlds, dead writers and how he followed Kevin Costner’s advice to complete The Book of Naseeb<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[299,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19193"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19217,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19193\/revisions\/19217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}