Dalia Al-Dujaili: “When you’re placeless, nature can fill the void”

Before our iden­ti­ties were con­fined to tick box­es on D&I forms and car­tog­ra­phy bor­ders, we were all peo­ple of the earth. Humans and the land were one; tied up in folk songs, the qui­et know­ing of what blooms when, of the husk in the air before it rained. The land wasn’t just a place where we lived – it was who we were.

But things are dif­fer­ent now. Colo­nial lega­cies, the hunger to con­trol the wild, the slow era­sure of mem­o­ry and lan­guages. The land is wound­ed. But some­how, nature keeps reach­ing out. The shade of an oak tree on a hot day. Cool­ing off in the ocean, bare feet squelch­ing in the sand. No code-switch­ing, no con­fu­sion, no con­di­tion­al love – you can just be. This is a feel­ing that Dalia Al-Dujaili found her­self drawn to her whole life.

Born to Iraqi par­ents and raised on British soil, Dalia’s rela­tion­ship with iden­ti­ty and home is a frag­ment­ed one – a feel­ing shared by many sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion immi­grants who yearn to feel at home. It’s part­ly this expe­ri­ence that led Dalia to become a sto­ry­teller, with an inter­est in telling sto­ries about com­mu­ni­ties in the mar­gins. For the author, home is the land. Whether it be the scent mem­o­ry of earthy clay and jas­mine, or the sto­ries and scrip­tures about the Iraqi date palm, nature has always been a place where she can belong.

Her debut book, Baby­lon, Albion, is an explo­ration of that iden­ti­ty. Through a mix­ture of poet­ry, as well as deep dives into ancient mythol­o­gy and reli­gious scrip­ture, she takes us on a jour­ney through her life as she nav­i­gates her British upbring­ing and Iraqi her­itage. It sets out to answer why she feels so at home in the nat­ur­al world, and how nature can be a heal­ing force in times of dis­par­i­ty, for all of us. We spoke to Dalia from her bloom­ing gar­den in Sur­rey, where she sat shad­ed under a mature flow­er­ing tree – a fit­ting back­drop for our conversation.

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What sparked the idea for the book? 

The book was moti­vat­ed by my entire expe­ri­ence of being who I am, grow­ing up where I’ve grown up, and hav­ing a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of iden­ti­ties. I wrote it because I want­ed to explore that ques­tion for myself: ​“What is my iden­ti­ty?” and why I feel such a draw to the nat­ur­al world. One expe­ri­ence that inspired me to start writ­ing the book was with a group called The Vision­ar­ies, which is run by a won­der­ful guy called Max Girardeau. He took young lead­ers camp­ing in the Lake Dis­trict, and it was one of the most heal­ing and inspir­ing things I’ve ever done in my life. After I came back from that trip, I had a lot of thoughts, feel­ings and emo­tions, and I just felt like writ­ing it all down. So I start­ed writ­ing. Baby­lon, Albion actu­al­ly start­ed as a pho­to col­lage. I’m a very visu­al per­son. I’m a writer at heart, but I’m also an edi­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy, visu­al cul­ture and art. The cov­er of the book was one of the first col­lages that I made. It was an oak tree and a palm tree. I cut them in half and stitched them togeth­er, and then I start­ed mak­ing all these dig­i­tal col­lages out of images. I would look at the images and just let the words come to me. Poems I’ve read, poems that I’ve grown up with, hymns, prayers, art. It was quite a spir­i­tu­al process at first.

The book draws on a lot of themes that tie nature in with your life. What does nature mean to you?

It’s my life. I think nature is God, in the sense that nature cre­ates every­thing, and nature is life. In terms of nature and how it relates to my iden­ti­ty as a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion immi­grant, it’s the ques­tion this book is ask­ing, one that I don’t real­ly have an answer to. As a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion immi­grant, to put it plain­ly, I feel like the nat­ur­al world is the most pure place that I can relate to because I am a place­less per­son. Most dias­po­ra feel that way, in the sense that they don’t call a sin­gle place home. When you are place­less, I feel like nature can fill that void for you. And because nature and land is uni­ver­sal, it’s a shared home. I feel a sense of deep belong­ing when I’m out in nature, espe­cial­ly in the UK. I feel most at home when I’m walk­ing out­side, whether it be in the park, or under a tree. I’m look­ing at a tree right now, and I feel so much more deeply con­nect­ed to this tree here in Britain than I do to any sense of the British flag or the Nation­al Anthem, or sto­ries that we got told about colo­nial­ism. I didn’t grow up in Iraq, so I find it quite hard to relate to nation­al­is­tic ideas and sym­bols and nar­ra­tives, but I feel super con­nect­ed to sand and palm trees and the rivers and songs and myths about them. So yeah, nature is a home, I think, for all of us.

Sym­bols of resis­tance and nation­al pride for dias­po­ra com­mu­ni­ties are often tied up with nature. Why do you think that is? 

I had a real­ly amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Lay­la Feghali, who I quote a lot through­out the book. She’s writ­ten an incred­i­ble book called The Land in our Bones, where she calls plants her ​‘plantces­tors’. They are our plant ances­tors, and essen­tial­ly, if we fol­low Layla’s line of think­ing, plants are sym­bols of resis­tance, because plants are our ances­tors and are the ori­gin of all of our found­ing myths, our folk­lore and our his­to­ry. Plants are the root – par­don the pun – of our iden­ti­ty. In my book, I talk about the date and the date palm a lot. This is how Iraqis iden­ti­fy them­selves, because the palm tree is so core to how the land shapes us. That’s why I want­ed to open the chap­ter of the book with the oak and the date palm. I learned a lot from Lay­la and her book and her work. She does incred­i­ble work. There are so many bril­liant, tal­ent­ed, equipped guides in this space that are more knowl­edge­able than me. I love Layla’s way of thinking.

Nav­i­gat­ing a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion iden­ti­ty is a com­pli­cat­ed thing, and it can be dif­fi­cult to teth­er down this idea of belong­ing. What sort of lessons can we learn from the nat­ur­al world when it comes to our identity?

If we look at the nat­ur­al world, we find that we are try­ing to fight nature by try­ing to fit our­selves into the mould that a colo­nial world has cre­at­ed and forced on us. And iden­ti­ty is not that sim­ple, and nei­ther is nature. There’s a great quote in the intro­duc­tion to the book, Liv­ing Moun­tain by Nan Shep­herd, which describes the moun­tain: ​“Thrilled by the alter­i­ty of the Cairn­gorm gran­ite, by a moun­tain-world which ​‘does noth­ing, absolute­ly noth­ing, but be itself’.” There’s no point in try­ing to imag­ine a moun­tain want­i­ng to iden­ti­fy as a hill. It’s a moun­tain. And there’s noth­ing you can do about that. You can’t shape-shift it and force it into some­thing that it’s sim­ply not. It’s beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful in the way that it is. Like the moun­tain, my iden­ti­ty is beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful just the way it is. I don’t need to go either this way or that way. I can just be who I am in my wholeness.

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In the book, you explore the fact that peo­ple intel­lec­tu­alise nature. One of the quotes that stood out to me was ​‘the more we under­stand, the more we seem to lose’. 

This is an idea that’s tak­en a lot of inspi­ra­tion from oth­er peo­ple, which is impor­tant to state. They are ideas that everyone’s had before me, but I’ve accu­mu­lat­ed them in one place from my per­spec­tive. When I’m talk­ing about con­ser­va­tion and ecol­o­gy, that’s not me pro­tect­ing nature. I am pro­tect­ing myself, because with­out the wild­flow­ers and the bees, I die along with my kin. As a dias­po­ra, we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the same rela­tion­ship with British land and British coun­try­side com­pared to Eng­lish peo­ple who have been here for gen­er­a­tions. I’m look­ing at loads of plants right now. I can’t name a sin­gle one of them. I think maybe that’s rose­mary because it looks like rose­mary. I need to go and smell it to check. But I don’t know what any of these plants are. You don’t need to know any­thing about nature to respect it, to love it, to care for it, to be a stew­ard of the plan­et. You don’t need to under­stand things from an intel­lec­tu­al or sci­en­tif­ic point of view to feel deeply con­nect­ed to it. I’m a big advo­cate of enhanc­ing our sci­en­tif­ic ven­tures, but the more sci­ence we apply, I feel like we end up putting out a lot of the human con­nec­tion to the nat­ur­al world.

You are Iraqi but were born and raised in the UK. What helps you feel con­nect­ed to your heritage?

I’m writ­ing the book from the per­spec­tive of some­one who’s lived their whole life in the UK and who’s trav­elled to the Mid­dle East a lot, but nev­er lived there. That’s where, for me, the deep dis­com­fort comes from. The dis­con­nect is that I feel such a con­nec­tion to the land of Iraq. The land lives through my fam­i­ly. And that’s why I cen­tre my moth­er and fam­i­ly a lot in this book, and how they brought the land with them. When I talk about my Mum, she didn’t intend to pack the land in her suit­case when she got on that plane, but she did, because the land does not ask to be a part of us. It already is.

The land lives through my moth­er. I feel like I inher­it­ed that land through my fam­i­ly. I feel deeply con­nect­ed to Iraq, because of my fam­i­ly and what I’ve inher­it­ed from them. When they talk, I see the land come alive in front of my eyes. They talk about stay­ing up on the roof and watch­ing the sun come up and hav­ing to run away from the heat of the day, and the fruit carts that would go through the streets of the city of Dujail and Bagh­dad. This is why I ded­i­cate the book to my mom and dad, who are my liv­ing land­scapes of love and mem­o­ry. I did spend quite some time in Jor­dan, Amman, as a kid. A lot of Iraqi refugees live in Amman, a lot of my fam­i­ly includ­ed. That’s where I would go, because it was nev­er safe to go back to Iraq. I spent a lot of the sum­mers of my child­hood in Amman, and that was the clos­est I could get. The land is kind of sim­i­lar to Iraq, but very dif­fer­ent in a lot of ways. I spent some time there while I was writ­ing, and that was good. It wasn’t even so much about being in a place that looks like Iraq. It was more that I was with fam­i­ly, and that’s what made me feel con­nect­ed to what I was writ­ing about in the book.

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I think it’s inter­est­ing that you talk about the dis­com­fort that comes from feel­ing so con­nect­ed to some­where, yet not kind of know­ing it at all. When writ­ing this book, did it force you to con­front any of those discomforts?

Absolute­ly. Did I over­come them? That’s still an ongo­ing jour­ney. The jour­ney of self-accep­tance, no mat­ter who you are, is uni­ver­sal. You don’t have to be part of a dias­po­ra to feel like you haven’t accept­ed your self-belief. Writ­ing the book did allow me to con­front a lot of dis­com­fort about how dis­tant I am from Iraq, but I’m not resent­ful of that. I’m so thrilled that I got to grow up in the UK. I love being from here. I real­ly love this place. I don’t love the idea of Britain so much, but I love British land. I love the trees here. I love the grass. I love the hills. I love the forests and the lakes and the rivers. I just love British land. I think the most dis­com­fort comes from feel­ing an unavoid­able hole in one­self. I have a yearn­ing that I don’t think I will ever real­ly ful­fill, which is the yearn­ing for the land of my moth­er­land and my father­land. I will nev­er fill that hole, so I have to find a way to make peace with that. And the book is an attempt at that, but it’s not the final answer.

You ded­i­cate the book to your mom and dad, what’s their reac­tion been?

They haven’t read the book yet, but they already love it. Their daugh­ter wrote a book, so for them, they’re like: ​“Our job is done.” I come from a humbly long lin­eage of authors, jour­nal­ists and artists, my grand­moth­er includ­ed. I was going to say that I think they’re real­ly proud of me, but actu­al­ly, I’m real­ly proud of them because of the way they raised me. Every immi­grant or kid of an immi­grant feels this way. Your par­ents left their home and went to some ran­dom place. They set­tled and built a life and made it the best life that they could pos­si­bly have. They made do with what they had, and my par­ents did an incred­i­ble job of what they had. It feels weird to say that you’re proud of your par­ents, but I gen­uine­ly am. I’m so hum­bled by their strengths, their patience and ded­i­ca­tion and their dri­ve, and I will nev­er have that. I’m very proud of the peo­ple that they are and that they became when they trav­elled to this place. They taught me a lot about lov­ing where you’re from, but also lov­ing where you are as well. 

Baby­lon, Albion by Dalia al-Dujaili is pub­lished by Saqi Books.

Zahra Onsori is a free­lance jour­nal­ist. Fol­low her on Insta­gram.

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