Brigid Mae Power: “I really felt a huge calling to be in nature once the pandemic started”

Brigid Mae Power (Photo credit: Steve Gullick)

Definitely folk-based, but also leaning towards classical music -even psychedelia-, Head above the water is Brigid Mae Power’s accomplished and ethereal third album, which came out on Fire Records on June 5th.

On this occasion we had a laid-back conversation with Brigid Mae Power.

Definitely folk-based, but also leaning towards classical music -even psychedelia-, Head above the water is your accomplished and ethereal third album. Do you identify yourself as a folk singer and if so, what does it mean to be one nowadays in the UK?

Hmm, not really. I don’t totally identify as a folk singer, but it is something that comes easy to me.

I’m Irish and listened to a lot of traditional Irish music growing up and grew up with a lot of family members singing Irish songs, so it’s in me. But I definitely don’t feel like a straight up folk singer.

I’ve always naturally gravitated towards psychedelic music and art, it really captivated me as a teenager.

So I’m not sure what it means to be a folk singer right now, as I only partially feel like one... There is a great folk scene going on in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England right now, though.

You write lyrics, you compose music, you sing and you are the co-producer of your work. Would you like to elaborate on how this apparently demanding and multifaceted process evolves?

I work very simply. I don’t put myself under any pressure, I like things to evolve when they are ready to. I used to think I was lazy, but now I think I just like to conserve my energy.

I don’t write or play a huge amount, but I will go through phases when I feel like doing so. I usually start off by playing something on the guitar or piano and humming along.

Then I usually have a notebook or lyrics/ writing that I’ve been working on and I see if any of those lyrics fit in with the melodies. 

As far as co-producing, I usually work from the negative, as in, ruling out what I don’t like. I like to start off simple and play the song live and then add anything after if I sense or hear something that I feel is missing. Well, that’s how I do it so far anyway!

“I like the city lights instead/Country trees in the night/Their shadows give me a fright”, you write in the opening track, On a city night. Where and why do you feel more at home? 

Right now I feel more at home in the country, but anyone who knows me well knows that I change my mind constantly. I’m a mover and it’s hard for me to stay still anywhere longer than a few months.

I start craving a city, then I start craving peace and quiet, the sea. I’m a pain in the ass in that regard and don’t feel at home anywhere!

Since this lockdown, though, I have done pretty well at feeling at home wherever I am, I’m trying to feel more like I am a world citizen rather than bound to one place.

“Of that I have plenty”, you acknowledge in reference to vulnerability in your most musically ambitious song of the album, I was named after you. Have you overcome or perhaps used that vulnerability as an incentive to grow as a person and an artist?

Yes, absolutely. I think at the start of the song I’m saying that line almost cynically, and in a way that I’m frustrated with myself, but by the end of the song I’ve realized that that is the super power itself- vulnerability... the all-round healer in my experience!

I have used it in my life definitely, but not always. I have to consciously work at not being defensive and actually being ok with being vulnerable and opening up with someone but not losing my self entirely. A fine balance of vulnerability and power.

In what ways has maternity contributed to the shaping of your songwriting, singing and general approach to life and humankind?

Well, in a very basic way it has made me care a lot less about stupid stuff that I would’ve before, stuff that would’ve gotten in the way of me writing...

I write what is important to me and focus on what is valuable, because I have such limited time to write now that I am a parent. But that actually has been beneficial to me because beforehand I had too much time and procrastinated...

It has led me to myself, at a much quicker pace.

Your music, masterfully epitomized in the mesmerizing title track, possesses a quiet quality reminiscent of much-loved Vashti Bunyan. It feels like a country river incessantly flowing under a drowsy sun. Are you an equally quiet, “sunny” person?

Hmm, yes, I’d say so maybe. People think I am quiet, but then some people think I’m loud. Depends who you’re talking too!

I definitely love the sun and I feel sunnier and happier and a big personality change when I am in the sun. So maybe I am a sunny person in the sun, miserable person in the rain.

Has this quietness been disrupted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic? Is this a period of introspection, redefinition of priorities for you?

I think that this pandemic has really redefined my priorities big time. I really felt such a huge calling to be in nature once it started. Being in lockdown in London just made me want to scream.

I actually flew to Ireland to continue lockdown there at my mum’s, to be near the sea. I really felt very claustrophobic. So yes, it did make me realize I need a lot of space and quiet! I am looking a lot at everything in my life pretty deeply right now.

Assuming that your scheduled concerts proceed as planned, what do you most draw from the interaction with the listeners of your music? Is there a vivid audience of folk aficionados these days?

I feel like my crowd is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s mostly middle aged men who like folk -haha-, maybe after this album it will change. I really feel like the people who come to the shows are very sweet, caring and music lovers.

And finally, which are the first words that come to your mind when you hear about Greece- whether related to art, economy, history or politics?

Hmm, I think of the sun and the so so so so so so so beautiful seas.

I would like to warmly thank Alice Gros from Fire Records for her valuable contribution to the realization of the interview.

Brigid Mae Power’s Head above the water is released by Fire Records.

Leila Aboulela: “I write focusing on what I know rather than on the issues that grab the headlines”

Cairo-born and Aberdeen-based, Leila Aboulela is one of the most distinctive and powerful Muslim voices in contemporary British literature. In conversation with her, on the occasion of the recent publication of her latest collection of short stories, Elsewhere, Home.

Elsewhere, Home, comprising 13 short stories, most of which were previously published either individually or in your collection Coloured Lights, serves as an ideal introduction to your work on all levels.  Why did you decide to include these stories in a single book?

As Coloured Lights had been out of print for some years, I wanted to bring back the strongest of the stories and combine them with newer ones that I had written more recently. The stories are not presented in the order they had been written. However, the very early stories such as The Ostrich and Coloured Lights are characterized by a sense of acute homesickness and alienation. In a subsequent stage of my writing life, the stories involved fraught interactions between the Sudanese and British characters such as in The Museum, Majed and Something Old, Something New. In the most recent stories, The Circle Line and Pages of Fruit, the characters are citizens of the world, moving comfortably between countries. 

Whereas you’ve written 4 novels, this is just your second collection of short stories. I’ve always tended to consider writing short stories as a more demanding and painstaking process. Do you agree?

One short story can have the same “work”, i.e. technique and skills, as a whole novel. Certainly, a whole collection such as Elsewhere, Home is denser in process, thinking and creativity than any of my novels. When I first started writing, I concentrated on the short story. Then, I started writing novels interrupted by the occasional short story. After my third novel Lyrics Alley, I returned to the short story, as it provides more freedom and more room to experiment.

The novel is a much bigger investment and I tend to be cautious before starting a new one, whereas I can start a short story as soon as I have an idea for one, without much hesitation. 

Despite having been written over the course of almost 20 years, these 13 stories display a remarkable stylistic, thematic and tonal unity and cohesion, highlighting the individual’s need, search and longing for home in an often hostile and contradictory world. Has this issue been one of your major concerns both as a person and as a writer?

Since moving from Sudan to Scotland in my mid-twenties, I’ve been interested in this theme of migration, homesickness and belonging. In 1990, I arrived in Aberdeen with a 4 year-old son and a two-week old baby. My husband worked off-shore on the North Sea oil rigs and I was often left alone to cope in a culture and climate I knew very little about! I was very homesick for Khartoum and it was not easy to make friends. However, this difficult experience was what turned me into the writer I am today. For the first time in my life, I started to write fiction.  

“Perhaps this is the essence of my country, what I miss most. Those everyday miracles, the poise between normality and chaos. The awe and the breathtaking gratitude for simple things. A place where people say, ‘Allah alone is eternal’”, your hero in The Ostrich exclaims. What do you miss the most in contemporary Britain and Scotland?

Everything- the visuals, the people, my sense of belonging. I can’t pinpoint exactly what I am missing! The writing is a way of answering this question.

And how crucial as a spiritual, intellectual and psychological “navigator” your Muslim faith is?

From the beginning of my career I had wanted to write about Islam as a faith and about Muslims who, with varying degrees of success, are engaged with their faith. I wanted to put Islam in English literature. Over the past decade the media interest in Islam has focused on terrorism and the veil; for me, the challenge is to resist explaining, defending or getting pulled into an agenda set by others. I write without looking over my shoulder, focusing on what I intimately know rather than on the issues that grab the headlines.

In times simultaneously characterized by rising islamophobia worldwide and a surge in Islamist fundamentalism, do you feel that your work achieves to shed a different, more profound light on what it means to be a Muslim nowadays, building “bridges” of empathy and mutual understanding?

I do hope so. When I first arrived in Britain and came into contact with the Muslim community, my reaction was one of admiration. I was inspired by how Muslim immigrants in Britain were working so hard to preserve their religion and to pass it on to their children. These were people who were poor, subjected to racism, and marginalized in British society and yet they strived to establish mosques, to make Islamic education available, to acquire Muslim burial grounds etc. 

After September 11 and more recently the radicalization of Muslim youth, there are even more challenges and conflicts facing minorities. My work reflects this world and the conventional (i.e. neither liberal nor fundamentalist) Muslims who exist within it. 

What do you think of the Brexit-in-progress, by the way?

It is disappointing that so many people voted for what is ultimately harmful to their own country. If people don’t know what is best for them or are irrational or easily manipulated in their voting behavior, then this casts doubts on democracy itself.  

Returning to your literary work, what astonishes me the most is the depiction of your characters in all their fragility and contradictions. To what extent do they constitute a fictional reworking of real-life people you’ve met over the years?

They are rarely exact replicas of real-life people though of course they are inspired by real people. Often -but not always- I do know the real person who inspired the character but, at the same time, I treat them as distinctive and separate. My loyalty is always with the needs of the story and its characters rather than a faithful rendering of the real-life people on whom the characters were based upon. Even though my characters are complex and full of contradictions, real people are even more complicated, unpredictable and often difficult to pin down. There has to be an artistic distance between fictional characters and real people. 

If Elsewhere, Home was ever to be adapted for the big screen, I would envision Mike Leigh as its director- and not least because of his trademark warm humanity and humor. Would that make sense to you?

I find it difficult to imagine film adaptations of my work! I think it would be many years before this happens. But who knows, I might be wrong. 

As far as I know, your work is little known in Greece. Would you be interested in reaching out to the Greek readers?

Yes, I would certainly be interested in reaching out to Greek readers. Actually, my first novel The Translator was translated into Greek many years ago. Thank you for this interview.

You may read more about Leila Aboulela and her work in her personal website.

Photo credit: © Copyright Frederique Cifuentes, July 2018.

I would like to warmly thank Elizabeth Briggs, Editor and Marketing Manager at Saqi Books, Telegram and The Westbourne Press, for her valuable contribution to the conduction of the interview with the author.

Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home is published by Saqi Books.