Interviews

What inspired you to write Pigeon English?
Pigeon English is my response to the epidemic of child-on-child violence, specifically knife crime, which affects many poor, urban areas of Britain, particularly in inner-city London. Every week another teenager is stabbed to death, and this only encourages the view of Britain's children as feral and beyond hope, their lives bleak and blighted by violence. I wanted to address the subjects of child-on-child violence, immigration, and social breakdown in a more intimate way than is depicted in the news media; not to sermonize or romanticize but to present the lives of these characters as they are. I also wanted to show how the diversity of influences and experiences that come as a result of multiculturalism can only enrich us all.
I grew up in a housing project much like the one in the book; my experience of that was as much positive as negative, and I wanted Pigeon English to reflect that. The kids in the book are in one sense victims — of deprivation or crime or a lack of opportunities — but they don't view themselves as victims. They're full of life, vibrant and funny and resilient. In writing from a child's perspective I was able explore my themes without exploiting them. They could form the backdrop for what is at heart a universal story, a coming-of-age tale for modern times. Everyone remembers being eleven — the age of Harri, my narrator — learning the rules of the playground, making friends and enemies, exploring the boundaries of adulthood. Harri doesn't analyze the forces at play in his world, he just gets on with the business of living, and he does this with an exuberance that defies the darkness of the world around him. The book has been described as his love letter to the world, and that's the one thing I want readers to take away from it — it's not a lament of frustrated lives as much as a celebration of life itself.
Why the title?
Pigeon English is a play on the term "pidgin English," pidgin being a simplified hybrid language that develops between groups of people who don't share a common tongue, and that allows them to communicate with each other. In our increasingly globalized world, where economic migration is so widespread and people from different cultural, racial, and religious backgrounds are either obliged to or are choosing to work and live together, it is more important than ever that we find a means to communicate, a glue to bind those diverse elements into an integrated whole. That glue is our shared humanity, and just as Harri is a symbol of that — a recent immigrant from Africa to London who embraces his new home with wide-eyed wonder — so too is the pigeon that visits his balcony. Pigeons are found in every corner of the globe. Wherever people are, they seem to follow; they coexist with us either as pests or as the benign background to our everyday lives, depending on your point of view. The pigeon in the book poses the question: how do we differ and how are we alike? The bearded stranger you pass on the street, the woman who answers your tech support call in an unfamiliar accent: are these people in any way an obstacle to your way of life, or are they simply fellow travelers sharing a common path, a path trod by all of us?
Pigeon English portrays the lives of children from an underprivileged section of society. How do you think a child's environment influences his or her experiences, and to what extent does it shape his or her journey to adulthood?
The children in the book all live in the same inner-city housing project, and so they experience the same problems and deprivations. It is a place of few opportunities, where a lack of investment has left an indelible impact not only on the physical environment but on its inhabitants' sense of self-worth and aspiration. Violence and petty crime are prevalent, and drug abuse and alcoholism are visible, present dangers. Positive adult role models are few and far between. When all a child can see are the traps in his or her way, the path to escape becomes that much harder to negotiate. This feeling of being trapped often plays itself out in negative ways: a child's decision to join a gang, for example, is not only born of a need to feel protected in numbers from the perils of the street but also of a desire for kinship and belonging in the face of common frustrations for which they hold the adult world responsible. But these kinships, these bonds forged in adversity, can also be a positive thing. I've spoken of how resilient and vibrant the children in the book are — almost spitefully so, as if they're collectively giving the finger to the adult world, defying it to take away their spirit if it dares — and this resilience is the springboard from which some of these kids, if given the encouragement and provided the opportunity through education, might just leap clear of their difficult beginnings.
In Harri's young world, violence is pervasive. Was this your experience as a child?
I grew up in an environment much like Harri's, amid many of the same problems. Crime, poverty, and violence were and still are commonplace. But for a kid these things felt more abstract than they do for an adult — they were simply part of the background hum of life and didn't seem to possess the power to impinge on the day-to-day business of being a child. When I was Harri's age I used to choose my route home from school based on how I could best avoid the class bully; but that bully wasn't carrying a knife, and the worst I had to fear should I run into him was a punch in the nose. At that time — I was eleven years old in 1987 — Britain did not have such an entrenched gang problem, and whatever threat of violence there was lacked that extreme edge. There wasn't the sense, as there is now, that every encounter with those dark forces would have life-changing or lethal consequences; violence was still something that could be avoided if you were careful and stuck to the rules. And growing up, I didn't have access to the violent entertainment that today's children are exposed to. There was no Internet and no cell phones with video playback, and my TV viewing was restricted. Now, with the availability of violent content through every media channel, it seems as though that inevitable desensitization has occurred, and society appears to be reaping the seeds it has sown.
Who have you discovered lately?
I've recently discovered Patrick Lane, a Canadian poet whose memoir What The Stones Remember [A Discover selection in 2005—Ed.] is an unflinchingly humane account of his recovery from alcoholism. His novel Red Dog, Red Dog is equally incisive and beautifully written, a portrait of a doomed working class family in 1950s British Columbia. I think he's a modern day Steinbeck. My wife has also recently introduced me to Philip Roth, whom I'd never read before. I loved American Pastoral and will read more.