W: Let's start with the title of your novel, Apeirogon. I hope I pronounced that correctly.
CM: Perfect, perfect, you can call it whatever you like.
It's like my name, Colum. You can call 'em whatever you like.
Apeirogon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. I think
it was a startling word when I first stumbled upon it. And what
it really means in relation to the story which is about two men who lose
their daughters, one is Palestinian, one is Israeli and they they travel around
the world sharing the story of what happened to
their daughters in order to harness the power of their grief. And what
apeirogon means in this particular situation is that we're all involved.
We're all complicit in a certain way. We're all touched by it. We're all moved
by it when we're all.. somehow we are part of every story. So that
this whole idea that one story is sort of every story in a way. And we're
intimately connected. And these two men Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan are
part of the apeirogon And so the story spins out in several different
directions and it always comes back to the two girls. Smadar who was 14, or 13
when she died and Abir who was 10 when she died. Smadar died in a suicide
bombing in Jerusalem and Abir died from a rubber bullet in the back of
the head when she was 10 years old. And these two fathers came together and for
years and years now they have been traveling the West Bank, Israel, around
the world. They've been here in England, they've been in Northern Ireland,
they've been to Sweden and to the States trying to tell the story in order to say
you know as I would say in Arabic: khalas - enough! And it's time for us to
to know one another. And if we don't tell our stories then we won't know one another
and if we don't know one another all this fear is going to come tumbling in
upon us. And as Bassam says, he says if we don't know each other above ground the
only place we will know each other is below ground. It was years ago when I met
them and I remember the moment I met them all the oxygen was gone
from the air, that was it. I kind of knew even the moment I
met them that things were never quite gonna be the same for me.
I'd been ten days in Israel and Palestine with a big group; musicians
activists. We're all, you know, tough whatever. We were going around, we'd seen
some stuff. I'd seen Northern Ireland and I thought you know I can get through
all this. And then the second to last night I go into a small room in Beit
Jala. Two men, two ordinary men are sitting there and then they begin to
speak and then I realized these are not ordinary man these are extraordinary
people. And I started to, I suppose like it's a little
embarrassing but I started to weep. It still catches me now when I
think about this, when they started talking and I was there - do you
ever get the feeling that you're looking down on yourself, thinking: stop crying!
You're really making a fool of yourself and that's what I was thinking. And then they
wrote out on these napkins for me afterwards, they wrote
harness the power of your grief. And I thought okay. And I didn't know that I
could ever write about them but always I kept coming back to them. Months and
months later it's like what do you want to write about?
I kind of want to write about that moment when everything sort of changed
for me. So this is a sort of a hybrid novel. These men are real and you know
they'll be going on tour with me in certain places, they'll come to Dublin
for instance and these men are real but also now they're characters. And for them
to allow me the dignity to go in and rewrite some of the things about them,
they were just incredibly generous. You know I kept giving it to them, I
kept going over actually to Israel, to Jerusalem and
Jericho and I would read them sections and say is that all right? And they'd say yeah
yeah yeah that's alright. But I'm not interested, neither are
they, in the absolute, the absoluteness, if that's a word, of facts.
Facts are mercenary things. Facts can be used. They can be soldiers for
whatever sort of truth that you want them to be. Facts and figures. Texture,
emotional texture, heart; that's a completely different thing. And that's
what I was going for. To try to capture the emotions that they
have and continue to have. Not only in relation to their daughters but you know
an ordinary day. The novel's quite simple really. A man wakes up one morning,
drives a motorbike, goes to a monastery in the West Bank, meets his friend,
they both tell their stories, the friend drives home and gets into bed and ...
I won't give away the last image of the book. But you know it's simple and
yet it's not simple. And then within that structure everything occurs. So the big
weird sections about birds flying and how to make bombs and you know
walking through Jerusalem and water and molecules and whatever else.
It's kind of like you try to put a whole world in there in order for us to try
and understand that every story is a world and it could be your neighbor
across the street in Lancashire or London or, you know, Cork or whatever it
happens to be. We have to start looking at one another and realize well we're a
lot more complex than you know our political parties seem to think that we
should be, you know. We're a lot more nuanced.
W: There are a thousand and one chapters to the book, it counts up to 499,
we have two chapters dedicated to each of the men and then a chapter in the
middle, 1001. When did that structure sort of suggest itself to you
and why was it important to write the book in this style because it's almost
like a story that has been sort of exploded and sort of
comes back together as you read it.
CM: Thank you for noticing that and for seeing it seeing it that way.
The structure sort of found me in a way.
I've been talking to my students a lot and I've said okay well you've got to... why
don't you write a novel for the internet age and why don't you write something
about the way our minds work right now and all the the weird shotgun leaps that
we make from one image to the next. And as I began looking at this story and
I'll be frank with you: I was confused. I was really confused and I knew
nothing really about Israel and Palestine. I'd written a lot about
Ireland, Northern Ireland, the peace process. And one of the things that I
wanted to do was to embrace the confusion of it in order to destroy the
confusions. And to tell the reader and tell myself, it's okay to be confused about
this. So the book doesn't labor to tell you this happened then this happened. It's really about
the emotion of what's going on. And there are facts and figures and
all sorts of like things going on. But one of my great days was when my son
who was 19 at the time was reading my book for me, he's 21 now, and he comes
into my office and says I get it now dad. He said I was trying so hard to
understand what was going on in Israel, Palestine. He said now I'm just
confused, I'm so happy to be confused. And then he could read it and get to the
human texture. So you don't become overly conscious. You know when
become so conscious about trying to work things out it brings a sort of
illness to where you happen to be, I think. But if you just allow it to happen
and to wash over you and you enter the story and this is a fairly heartbreaking
story. Two fathers lose their girls. I mean for any parent to lose a child
is an extraordinary thing. In fact so extraordinary that we don't really have
a word in the English language, a noun, a proper noun. We have a widower, we
have an orphan, we have all these things but we don't have a word for a
parent who has lost a child. I think it's
something so shocking that we don't want to put a language on it. And yet an
important thing is, I believe that these men, when you meet them and hopefully when you
meet them in the pages of the book, they are full of the most extraordinary hope.
So in the face of all the available evidence along come these
extraordinary human beings and they say well we still believe. We still believe
in the power of stories. We are bringing our daughters back alive by telling them
and talking about them and and we're also pleading with people
hey, no, let's try to understand one another. And fundamentally
it's a very simple message: I need to know you, you need to know me.