DB: Firstly, congratulations on the publication of your wonderful memoir, THE GO-BETWEEN. Can I start by asking how has, as you see it, Birmingham changed since your time growing up there in 80s/90s to now?

OY: On the surface, I think that the city has become much more dynamic. It’s probably the most diverse city in England, and by 2024, it will have a larger percentage of people of colour than it will white British people.

It’s changed so much, in a way, because, as I’ve grown older, I have come to occupy different spaces. The city certainly, for me, feels smaller. Coming back from London after twenty years , I am struck by what I can only describe as a new dynamism – it feels alive, more connected, more global. I suspect that my leaving the relatively restricted cultural environment of my childhood however has allowed me to see aspects of both my home and the world at large that may well have existed then, but which I had no knowledge of.

The book however is less about the city of my birth, and more about that closed community – a community which, I believe, could have existed almost anywhere. This was a community that took piecemeal from the outside, appropriating and reappropriating aspects of Britishness where it saw fit, fashion and refashioning its own sense of itself, and its sense of the world outside. In many ways, this is true of the migrant experience in general – re-situation within new spaces, the compromises and refusal to compromise, the dialogue with what is a fundamentally alien culture.

The question I wanted most to ask in the book was: how do you create a new life for yourself?

DB: You are second generation Afghan/Pakistani, so grew up as the title suggests between the culture of your immediate religious community and family home, and that of the country in which you were brought up – much like many others from different cultural backgrounds. How, do you think, that figures into your practice today?

OY: No matter the medium, my work is really about marginalised voices and the politics of the periphery. I use a variety of media to urge us to consider what is fundamentally the same urgent question – what does alterity and other-ness actually do and mean to people? How is it people rebuild themselves? What and where is the frontier between the outsider and the mainstream? And, crucially, how is this contested space negotiated?

I would like to think that my work contributes to something much wider than the literal context in which it is produced. Not only the diasporic conversation, but more importantly the bonds that one holds with the identities of one’s past and those one fashions for the future. I, for instance, continue to feel uneasy in some of the privileged spaces my work has taken me. There is something about my past, the person I was then, that will forever find strange the colossal wealth I have found myself surrounded by, the seeming absence of values that were essential to self-understanding in my childhood. The way extended family works in Pakistan, its relationship to religion, for example – these feel non-existent in many of the secular spaces of my adulthood.

I jump, basically, back and forth between the values I was raised with and those that I have come to learn.

DB: Much of the book discusses other-ness, and liminality. You are of course an internationally successful artist, designer and creative – do you still experience these feelings today? How indelibly do you feel like an outsider?

OY: I still feel like an imposter. This, I think, stems from class, but also from culture the I grew up in. You don’t show off, you don’t crave attention. I was taught not to be super confident.

I keep myself grounded by always looking forward, never mediating on what has been done.

DB: The concluding chapters of the book outline your move to London, and how, in a sense, liberating this was for you. The rootlessness of the metropole, the way in which the city can atomise those that live in it, seemed to have a positive effect on you. Can you talk a bit more about what it is London means to you? And how it differs from the Birmingham you left?

OY: Rootlessness is about finding your own space. For me, it’s always been about finding a creative space.

Having such rigid borders and boundaries in my childhood led me to look into finding places where I could be free to express myself. I think, to some extent, this is true of all metropolises – it’s not about getting away, but about find like-minded people. A community of misfits, of dreamers.

It wasn’t so much about getting away, but about finding like-minded people. A community of misfits, of dreamers. That rootlessness, ironically, allowed for me a sense of rootedness – I found myself surrounded by people like me.

For the first time in my life, here were these creative people of different orientations, different ideas, different belief systems. This difference is present in my work and feels like home.

There are ties of blood, which are eternal, strong, valuable, but once one starts building their own identity, you’ve got to feel like you have something to say and having people to say it to is crucial. Large metropolises tend to give you that.

DB: Stephen Fry has called the book ‘one of the great childhood memoirs of our time’. If you could sit down with him, what advice would you give the young Osman Yousefzada?

I’m happy in myself. I wouldn’t want to change anything.