Now, Britain has seen those despised people become fellow citizens and has learnt tolerance and discrimination in public dealings with them. In this … - Abdulrazak Gurnah

writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be. Writing is not about one thing, not about this issue or that, or this concern or another, and since its concern is human life in one way or another, sooner or later cruelty and love and weakness become its subject. I believe that writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it. And that way of looking makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked for sources. It is for these reasons that writing has been for me a worthwhile and absorbing part of my life.

When I was here as a very young person, people would not have had any problem about saying to your face certain words that we now consider to be offensive. It was much more pervasive, that sort of attitude. You couldn’t even get on a bus without somehow encountering something that made you recoil...Things appear to have transformed [but] then we have new rules about detention of refugees and asylum-seekers that are so mean they seem to me to be almost criminal. And these are argued for and protected by the government. This doesn’t seem to me to be a big advance to the way earlier people were treated.

Our histories were partial, silent about many cruelties.