ONE: What is the background to Joseph’s Box? How long did you spend writing it?

SH: I got the idea around 2000, and started doing research, then started physically writing it in the early part of 2002 when I received a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, and blasted through it before I ran out of money. I left it to work on Psychoraag, until I had more time. I wrote the second two thirds between 2006 to 2007. I don’t how long it took, if you were to add it up to a fulltime equivalent, I think it would be probably about 18 months.

ONE: You received a lot of positive reviews for Psychoraag. How would you compare it to the reception which Joseph’s Box has received?

SH: I try to do something different with everything I write, I would hate to limit myself to one specific type of voice, and one type of style, and it stretches my abilities, which I enjoy. Some reviewers really loved it, felt it might alter the way someone looked at the world. The problem is that some people who have invested considerable ideological energy into promoting a specific type of work, do not necessarily like one written in quite another style. There was one review by Simon Kovesi, whom I really respect, I used his book on Kelman when I was in Washington DC, but it seemed clear that he really didn’t like Joseph’s Box. I think he liked Psychoraag, although as far as I am aware, he didn’t say so in public at the time it was published. I think he thought it (Joseph’s Box) wasn’t working-class enough, whereas ironically that was one of the reasons that Psychoraag was marginalised. Yet, frankly, I almost predicted 

these responses. 

ONE: Did you predict the perhaps somewhat lazy comparisons to Magical Realism? 

SH: Of course. I guess people have to find ways of defining something in relation to something else with which people might be familiar, so you know, you can’t really complain about a societal cohort that might be regarded as an easy target.  

ONE: How would reconcile your position as a doctor and a scientist, with the many allusions to spirituality which permeate your fiction in both form and content?

SH: It’s a dynamic of counterpoint. I think I would have been a writer anyway but your profession does shape you, and of course, it’s excellent research into humanity. It’s that kind of counterpoint between the earthiness of someone vomiting or coughing things up, as Archie does in the novel, and the all these ethereal and spiritual notions. This kind of dissonance, this creative tension, anchors your writing. It prevents me from going off into pure abstraction. There’s also a cognitive dissonance between objectivity and empathy. 

ONE: You’ve talked previously, at length, about how the power structures in publishing, the arts and the media are dominated predominantly by individuals who are, almost without exception, from the south of England and products of the Oxbridge educational system. You spoke about certain ‘safe’ ethnic minority writers who unlike you, are themselves products of an elite educational institution and don’t tend to rock the boat too much, in respect of formal experimentation, and tend to choose subjects that fit well with the liberal bourgeois elite’s own conception about the multi-cultural society in which we live.

SH: I don’t know, this has become my hobby-horse, hasn’t it? Other people, who are far more influential than me, people who ought to talk about it, don’t tend to. Some people seem to be reluctant to expose themselves in that way, and risk the opprobrium of whatever power structure with which they require to remain in alliance to continue to earn a living as a writer. Obviously, art will reflect the society from which it emerges - class, history, geographical position, economic power and race: all these things have an impact. It’s actually a very small circle, publishing in the UK. No matter how broadminded these people are, or think they are, nonetheless the central discourses are happening constantly between them – think of the London-based newspapers you read - and a lot of us effectively and in spite of possible appearances to the contrary and the modulations of state arts agencies which are not yet completely attuned seraphically to the golden throne - are shut out. With regards to ethnic minority writers, I think a lot of old imperial notions still exist. I sense that mainstream commissioning editors look for exoticism, and it is common knowledge that this is how it works, and it also helps if you went to Oxford or Cambridge and write in a certain mannered way.

ONE: Ethnic minority writers, such as Zadie Smith, who also come from that milieu display an adherence to the prevalent naturalistic paradigm. They write in a fairly conventional way. 

Do you think this somehow explains why people tend to uncomfortable with your work?

SH: I wonder. Sarfraz Manzoor, the Guardian journalist, wrote something, and of course this is a generalisation, but generalisations are such because they apply generally. He basically said (I paraphrase): “White artists are allowed to be artists, the rest of us are only allowed to be authentic.” 

ONE: Do you consider yourself as leading the way in some respects, in breaking out of this classification as an ethnic minority writer, because you experiment with new forms, etc.? 

SH: Absolutely. I behave as if it is a level playing field, even though I know it isn’t, but when I write I forget about all that. I bring to mind a hypothetical reader who isn’t just another version of me. I just hope my work won’t be critiqued solely on the basis of my ethnicity. For example, David Mitchell also writes ‘experimental prose’.

ONE: I don’t think there’s a comparison. David Mitchell’s only tangible accomplishment was to dumb down Italo Calvino for the ‘Richard and Judy’ reader. 

SH: Calvino’s fantastic. 

ONE: Do you see your work as an act of defiance, written as it is in this rich Scottish/Asian Scots demotic, against what James Kelman defines as the linguistic colonisation of the Scottish literary form and literary culture in general?

SH: I don’t think that my basic impulses are such that I consciously think of those things immediately. I interest myself in something, and it takes possession of me. I think unconsciously these factors are always present. But because it is unconscious, by definition, I’m not completely aware of it. When I wrote Psychoraag, and the stories which preceded it, I drew on the writings of Kelman and others to achieve a type of sonic immersion. I don’t think that I have the admirable commitment that Kelman has, I think that he is very switched on and politically aware and I agree with most of what he says in this area. Just because I don’t want to be confined to one particular voice, it doesn’t mean I don’t agree with him politically, linguistically and more generally as well. I prefer to adhere to the narrative demands of a particular character in a specific world - otherwise, in some ways, you may confine yourself to a ghetto, and let’s face it, I’m already kind of in one.

ONE: When asked about his views on the French Nouveau Roman, and in particular, his views on the tendency for critics to create canons and schools of thought, Nabokov remarked that, ‘The French New Novel does not exist, apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole’. What are your views on the existence of a literary canon? 

SH: I always say to people that I don’t have a canon, except one that fires metal balls through the fabric of orthodox complacency! Or else that I have, in a very Borgesian way, a potentially infinite canon. 

ONE: A canon as extensive as the Library of Babel?

SH: Everything I’ve ever read, seen or listened to is always with me. There is a whole world of books out there just waiting to be translated, books which exist outside of post-colonial Anglophone literature. 

ONE: Is there anything that you’re working on at the moment?

SH: To be honest with you, at the moment I’m working at my job, and I don’t have time to do anything creative. If there’s no chance for me to write, then I don’t even want to have ideas, because it frustrates me. 

ONE: Kirsty Gunn said an interesting thing when we interviewed her the other day, she said that, “It’s necessary to infiltrate the seats of power, because there’s no point in standing outside the gate with a pitchfork.” 

SH: The problem is that one’s life doesn’t make it as easy as it sounds. Ideally, one would be in London, because that’s where decisions are made. It also depends on the way you write. For someone like me, someone who writes in this weird esoteric way, I don’t think it would do any good. I would have to go back in time, become twenty years old, and try again from the beginning. I’m not sure. I don’t know what kind of style she writes in. She is right, but it is easier said than done. What you need, ideally, is someone on the inside, someone very powerful - but how would you go about getting this? My current energetic publisher, Two Ravens Press, actually hired someone to try and infiltrate London and she found that she was facing a complete brick wall; apart from Boyd Tonkin of The Independent, none of them were interested. 

ONE: It seems that they have a vested interest in perpetuating the current modes of creativity, the same kinds of writers, who come from similar educational and economic backgrounds, peppered with the occasional exotic narrative from the working classes or from safe ethnic minorities. 

ONE: It’s frustrating, of course, because you begin to think: what qualifies them to be the arbiters of our cultural output? The Gatekeepers of literary decency?

SH: Absolutely. Of what is and is not acceptable. But there are various different groupings, some of them are fairly conservative, with a small ‘C’, and then you have the groups that like ‘avant-garde’ work but only when it’s done by certain people. The discussion tends to occur between these two groups. The rest of us don’t seem to get a look in. We and our work don’t exist. When someone does infiltrate these groups, they seem so afraid of losing their positions, which seem so tenuous; they will never bite the hand that feeds them.