Water Clocks and Robots is published by Oxford University Press.

It was during a meeting with a former deputy head teacher at Elsley Primary School when the discussion came up about creating a workshop around the Islamic Golden Age and Al-Jazari was one of the many scientists that I mentioned in our discussions. The Deputy Head teacher was keen on me sharing my research on his life work and so when OUP made a call out for submission proposals, I sent them a one on the Founder of Robotics – Al-Jazari.

They supported me by commissioning me to write it. I was new to the publishing world and didn’t realise how long it took that I completely forgot about it to the point where I didn’t think it would ever be published. My catastrophising nature took hold and although I would share that I had sent a proposal I dismissed the publishing part of.

So I was incredibly surprised to find it finally being out in the world and in the hands of primary school children. My copies have arrived too! I’m absolutely bowled over the fact that I can share my love of my own Iraqi heritage with young people and hope I get to do more of this again and again.

There is a lot to catch up on this site but the first is to say, last month I celebrated being a winning finalist for the 2024 Undiscovered Voices Anthology. My autistic character Wazeerah Ameerah featured in the anthology! Hoorah. This is such a major milestone and it’s wonderful to share the news with so many talented writers.

You can read my opening pages and meet all the winners here: https://www.undiscoveredvoices.com/?page_id=1106

It is important to understand the unique needs of autistic migrants or those of us from migrant backgrounds, as we often face unique challenges when navigating a new culture. To better understand the autistic immigrant experience, consider these factors:

1) language barriers,

2) the need for appropriate support services,

3) the stress of adapting to a new environment.

Conversely, to all this consider the unique strengths that autistic immigrants may bring to their new communities, such as their resilience and resourcefulness. By understanding and supporting autistic immigrants, we can create a more inclusive and supportive society.

Speaking from my own experience, I came from Baghdad to London via Amman, Jordan, with my mother and brother (who was a cutesie 11-month-old). I was 4 years old. By reflecting on my childhood it was clear that I was autistic.

The travel from one country to another is a trauma in itself. Shutting down was, and even is, a regular occurrence. During lessons I learned to block as much sensory information apart from the teacher’s. After one session of arabic school the teacher even fed back to my mum that I was such a good student always focused as if I was ‘swallowing’ the board. A term making ore sense in the arabic language than the translated English.

At home, I used games to understand and process the migration experience, without realising that I was doing this. My toys became families who would travel from country to country (room to room). They would have a government in charge that issued visas and passports. Currency was fully flowing in this little world of mine that I shared with my younger brother. We called it Ma Barbie and Cindy (this was how I spelt it in my head) game. Renting out homes to each toy who moved into an estate – a two-tiered coffee table!

Eventually I grew out of the doll games but always learned on using some form of gaming to adapt to new experiences. Every time I moved from one stage of life e.g. schools, homes, I would have to learn to adapt AGAIN. My personal items were very important to me. It was the worst thing in the world when I lost notebooks, magazines and drawings. They just went missing. Even after so many decades I’m still upset that I never found the notebook with the list of all the films I had watched. I had rated them too.

Eventually I learned to journal my daily life and create tools that would help me deal with emotions and certain situations.

One of the key factors of autism in females is the masking and the adapting to environments and social settings. We can see this as a skill in itself, although exhausting at times. Needless to say, there is a lot to learn from autistic experiences.

I’ve been meaning to put this together in one file and here it is. Feel free to download at the bottom of the page.

A little late to announce but this year I became officially published! I am proud to be a chapter author in a new and well-needed book titled Learning from Autistic Teachers – How to be a Neurodiversity-Inclusive School.

My chapter is about training as an autistic teacher. That’s Chapter 8, if you’re wondering. It was really a pleasure being part of this. And last month I was invited to give an online talk for Scottish Autism as part of the launch. A video of that might available soon.

For more details about the book and the project itself please head directly to the Autistic School Staff Project website here: https://autisticschoolstaffproject.com/edited-book/

There is a link that takes you to the Amazon store if you also want to get your hands on a copy.

[I wrote This in July 2018 and didn’t publish it so first paragraph might not make sense unless you read this past post Fractal Writing. ]

I think I lied when I said I wasn’t entirely sure why I was fascinated by fractals. On reflection, I do have an inkling of an idea why I find them so intriguing. Their visual patterns displaying their mathematical beauty, their power in scalability both in the microscopic sense and into the macroscopic proportions, and the potential to use them as templates, all fascinate and inspire something in me.

Mapping a fractal template into my own behaviour is good fun too as I enjoy exploring this theoretically and it actually helps me make sense of the world and even adapt to it. I’ll explore those ideas in another post.

So again what has all this to do with Fractal Authors? Sounds rather painful, doesn’t it.

Well, early last month, I attended an intense Writers Workshop, curated by Sarah Odedina, and one of the many talented speakers that were invited included Malorie Blackman. My aim, like probably everyone else attending, was to listen, learn and admire.

The aim of learning from a highly successful author is to hope that somehow it rubs off on us. But it doesn’t work like that. Self-similar behaviour is what I was looking out for and what a delight it was to learn that Malorie Blackman has a STEM past and specifically worked as a programmer. She described to us a very specific method, inspired by her own background, of valuing her writing. And I immediately hooked onto it.

It’s very easy to write without valuing our own time but Malorie Blackman taught me a lesson in valuing that writing before starting a project. And yes, each book we aim to write is a project. So the first point is to plan a valuation exercise beforehand.

Simply put: it’s a linear valuation. And I’ve taken liberty to interpret it as follows:

Estimate word count: 10-25k

40 hours per week over 10 weeks = 400 hours

From here you can value your time to the value you sell to a publisher.

This is a very precise business minded approach that runs through every layer of Malorie’s methods.

It allowed her to create multiple projects which she sold to multiple publishers. She didn’t wait for one publisher to get back to her but continued with the selling of new stories. She valued her time on offset. At one point she had 8 editors because her methodical way had no room waiting on the first publisher to decide on her books. This attitude is powerful and something I am certain helps give her the status of not just being a highly acclaimed author but a prolific one too.

 

“If I were you, I’d cut ties with all friendships and start over.” A friend advised me when I broke it to her that I was going to take off my headscarf. It was scandalous and shameful in her eyes. And that was the last time I saw of her, she never contacted me since. Three years later I’m still adjusting to the gossip and ostracising behaviours from small cliques that are part cultural part herd mentality and not all of them are Muslims.

I was nine years old when it became official to wear the headscarf. An event that I looked forward to. A celebration of my maturity and modesty. Regardless of what today’s western culture thinks of it, I have the fondest of memories and love for that time. It was filled with bliss, happiness, and a belonging. Something that I’ve passed on to my daughter who also revels in it and continues to hold the baton.

Yet, three years ago I took it off.

It was a gradual process. I would put it on as I left my home and with it firmly in place, I’d saunter nervously to the train station. It was there that I began to have an almost daily ritual. I’d go into the lady’s toilets and place my cap on the side of the sink and replace my headscarf with a Nike cap and an Adidas hoodie. It probably made as much sense as my mish mash fashion sense.

On one occasion I was running late for a course and became inept at whisking off my headscarf and plonking a cap on for psychological good measure. However, I wasn’t alone, there was a young lady fixing her makeup at the sink beside mine. She had frozen watching my erratic behaviour. From her perspective all she saw was a Muslim woman taking off the headscarf in the bathroom with headphone wires sticking out of a backpack, proceeding to don on a cap and jump out the door quick smart. I remember hearing a clatter of items that she must have dropped as I dashed out. I can guess what it must have looked like. Come to think of it I never saw her on the platform despite the trains being slightly delayed.

But when I took it off something new had happened as I stepped onto a train. Nobody was looking at me with shady eyes or contempt. They were, well, friendly or others would say, civil. And many times I was invisible being part of a commuting crowd. Sounds bleak to many Londoners but to me it was a revelation that I was part of the flow.

In the early days my heart would pound. It turned out that taking off what was my comfort wrap that I’d been accustomed to for 30 years was indeed a big deal. My internal psychology was changing. My view of myself was changing. It’s tiresome to worry about being the object of fear and hate for many decades. And for once I wasn’t fighting it.

So why did I take it off? It was during the acid attacks in 2017 that my mum sent me a WhatsApp message about another incident. Although women in headscarves weren’t targeted, that didn’t’ stop me from giving a good distance to every parked car with its window down. And I believe that was the line I drew in myself. Enough of feeling fear.

I remembered after the 7/7 bombings and 9/11 attacks how the public would spit at me and shout abuses and it was that that came back to haunt me. One incident I was walking with my family in the local park. My little boy was on a trike and my husband was straddling behind waiting for my daughter to catch up. As I turned into a path there was a young lad of maybe nine or ten who picked up his bat and looked menacingly at me holding it threateningly. My six-foot-three husband came into view and the boy subtly put the bat down and moved along. The sinking feeling I had when I first saw him was horrible. I didn’t say anything because at this point I was used to it. As a young girl I remember crossing the road only to hear another young boy shout in my face ‘that’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’ I think I learned from a young age to internalise this sort of hate.

When I was in my twenties I had a small business and held business meetings in coffee shops. I held one of the meetings in a shopping centre when a young boy spat down from the 3^rd floor of the Exchange in Ilford. We had to move to a new area. That’s what I would do: adjust to the hate.

Of course, they weren’t all young boys, they were older men and women too. Some were as overt about it as the young boys but others were more discriminatory and sinister behind the gossip scenes.

It’s hard to write this without feeling anything. Because it makes me angry for being so passive. So when I travelled to Syria and Iran I loved it. I was surrounded by people who were not hostile towards me anymore. I won’t go into the politics here, but it was a feeling of settlement in my heart. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Living in Iran and teaching there was very contrary to the experience that Westerners would like us to believe of the state. I had never felt so safe travelling at night on my own as a woman in Qom, Iran. I can’t say the same for other areas but Qom is a Holy city and had a certain spiritual calmness that I’ll treasure and love.

This is sounding like a propaganda piece because in the UK anything positive said about Iran is seen as propaganda unfortunately, in any case it’s something I’ll never forget when I returned to the UK in 2016. Something in me had changed. I wanted to feel like I belonged again. So when I received that WhatsApp message from my mother in 2017, I made a decision to never feel fear again.

I took off the headscarf and finally felt that societal belonging again. For a little while.

The act of taking off the headscarf may have felt like an offense to some dear friends, but many others were kind and non-judgemental. For those few that disconnected with me entirely made it clear that their bonds of friendship were as flimsy as the fabric their scarves were cut from.

How do you write when you feel so emotional and full of pain? How do you write when your birth country is used as a playground for weapons testing and propagated with lies and hate? How do you write when you are surrounded by a society that only thinks of you as someone not to be dealt with directly because it’s too ‘sensitive’ so they ignore you instead. Because that’s the polite thing to do. How do you start to pull yourself together from the anger that wells within you and you know you must bite your tongue at all times because saying anything will be deemed ‘wrong’, misconstrued, and even confirm the bias that you are a trouble maker. You’re not towing the line, not keeping status quo…not conforming. Conform damn it! That’s what you do, don’t you? Well that’s what I have done all my life.

So I now look around and wonder if I really am so helpless. I mean what can I do, really? Nothing? Just focus on my work, head down and continue plodding on. Is that it? That’s what our parents did after all. But as I think back, they did more than that, they did protest, they did help their families back home. They worked hard to make new families and build their own peace after facing war.

The harsh events in Iraq remind me that the world needs to connect with the land and not through terror bombs and missiles. But stories that see us as human because that’s the fickle world we live in. Being a human being isn’t enough. They need to see you, to hear you, to read you. That’s the tip of the anger released ….but I’m no longer staying quiet.

Let us begin our stories…

 

Summer 1996 London/Amsterdam

We had just arrived back from our crazy three-week family reunion trip in Jordan when my father decided it was time to take a holiday from our holiday. Since this was the year we were issued our very own passports for the first time since arriving in London in 1982, it was a sort of celebration for him, I guess.

Randomly my parents booked Amsterdam via ferry. It was the worst voyage of my life. During the day time my brother and I walked around not able to do much and we had no social skills to join any of the activities so we were very bored. During the night time our family had to separate. My mum and I shared with female strangers and my father and brother likewise with random male strangers where one took to going to bed naked, apparently. My mum sniggered when she told me. My father was not amused.

The 10-hour journey was overnight thankfully (the return wasn’t), but I had never been on a ship before and I remember feeling slightly unnerved when I’d try to sleep but instead hear all these squeaky noises of what I imagined rusty screws coming loose. The Oscar winning Titanic movie hadn’t come out yet or I’d probably have fainted at the port.

Once we finally arrived in Amsterdam my parents continued to surprise me by failing to book a place to stay. I grabbed an information pamphlet from somewhere, an information desk from the Ferry, let’s say and suggested we head to the place where they can help us: The Tourist information office at the centre of Amsterdam. That’s where my fuzzy brain imagined it was.

They nodded, thought it a good idea whilst I rolled my eyes still unimpressed with their planning skills. Anyway we ended up in a cosy ground floor two bedroom flat. Once my mum realised that people from the street could quite easily climb through the sash windows and into the living room and murder us, she set up a makeshift security system made up of cutlery positioned ever so delicately upright so that anyone who should dare venture in then they …erm…had to face the clunking of cutlery falling to the ground. We’d, in theory, be alerted. That’s how we spent the nights. Awake.

By day 2 my father realised we had old Iraqi neighbours living in Amsterdam. They used to live next door to my grandfather’s house before Saddam, backed by America, wiped out our Jewish communities in all of Iraq. So my father, the nostalgic that he is called Mr Maurice who invited us out with his wife. They invited us to a restaurant and not any old restaurant but one that was owned by a Christian Iraqi. So this now sounds like a setup for a joke…a Jewish, a Muslim and a Christian walk into a restaurant…

But what stayed with me was how powerful culture was. Not only were they speaking Arabic but they greeted each other the same way with ‘salaams’ and shared the same sentiment to things by saying ‘insha Allah’. And of course there was so much merriment I just sat as the impressionable teenager that I was. This was obviously the highlight of our trip and it was lovely to watch. Even the owner joined in the conversation as these adults were happy reminiscing about an Iraq they hold so dear and remember so well. Memories I couldn’t share but I could watch and enjoy the love that glowed from the faces.

And the conversation continued through the night into the streets of Amsterdam. Including one of those adult streets where dancing women at windows could be seen. I turned to my brother and gave him a concerned look of ‘do you think our parents noticed?’. We looked back at the four adults lost in their innocent world. They hadn’t.

 

[I wrote this piece years ago in a journal, put away for an indefinite period. But I’ve filed it into this writing journey blog today to document my ‘throwaway’ writings and aim to quantify the goal of reaching the million words mark of practice writing before I get good!]

Maureen dashed out of her house grabbing her daily thermos filled with black coffee. She shot out in such a way that passersby thought she was on the last leg of a marathon when their walk looks like a swish swosh of the hips. She didn’t break a sweat though, always rushing about was part of her morning routine. She had a policy to never be late and today she wasn’t walking the talk.

Along the way she caught sight of the milkman. She raised her arm up in a quick salute and a wink. Her gesture mirrored by the kind-faced milkman.

She almost bumped into a passerby, knocking her out. The stranger was not impressed the least bit as she had already witnessed the flirtatious exchange a moment ago.

“Watch it.” The stranger held onto a leash which attached to a Yorkshire Terrier at the other end, yapping at Maureen’s heels.

“So sorry, am in  a rush to get to school,” Maureen defended.

“Oh I see, you’re a teacher are you?”

“Must go – sorry again.” Maureen revealed no more about her post. She didn’t need the lecture. Not today.

Her pace slowed upon reaching a blockade where her path continued. Meant to, but bollards blocked her journey and the sigh read:

Road Closed – Pedestrians use other path.

The arrow pointed to the other side of the road. Sighing, Maureen ran quickly across. This time she had to run. Her bag jangled along her side as she wished she’d grabbed her backpack instead of an over-the-shoulder cheap Gucci knock off. But she made the dash skipping uneven pavement slabs.

There was a bus stop, and she decided even though the school was only two stops away a bus pulling over conveniently gave her the chance of making up some lost ground.

Climbing aboard and rummaging into her purse she binged her contactless card and couldn’t help think how much further she could have gotten on a run. She walked along to the exit doors of the bus and saw someone smiling at her. She politely smiled back to him as he then bowed. Surprised at this old fashioned behavior he couldn’t be much older than her. But you could never tell with men. They always looked younger than they were. Enough! Her stop arrived and she got off but so did that old-fashioned behaving gentleman.

“Hungry?” He asked pulling out an apple.

“What?” This was now even weirder. “No. Thank you.”

“It’s okay – I work at the grocers over there.” He nods to the shop behind her.

Grabbing the apple. “Thanks.” She runs off crunching on the sweet flesh.

As she finally reached the school gates she pulled out a mineral bottle of water and washed down the flavours from her tongue. Sweet and bitter mixed together was not great.

She buzzed security who let her through as she’d forgotten her security card – great – today was going slower than she wanted. And it would go even slower if she had to get a temporary one otherwise she’d have had to coat tail after her colleagues as they went through the barriers and she hated depending on others. Fran spotted her.

“Hello darling – gosh – another one of those days eh?” Fran comes over to her open arms a big hug, and a kiss planted onto Maureen’s cold cheek.

“Yes, I know!” Maureen rolled her eyes.

“It’s okay we’ve got your first class covered.”

“Thank you.” Maureen shook off her jacket and placed it behind the door of the reception office. A small pink clock with the wrong time sat on Fran’s desk. Maureen slid an index finger over the bell atop the clock’s face.

“This wasn’t here before.”

“It’s a gift. Someone came in earlier and said to give it to you. With this.” Fran reached into her top drawer and pulled out a small white envelope. She handed it to Maureen who was now curious and startled at the same time.

“Oh thanks. That’s odd.” She realised that the other receptionists were looking at her. She took the clock and letter somewhere more private: To her office. She walked out to the stairwell where descending to her own cosy nook under the school hall. To others this was a basement where all the new teachers started but to her this was her own little corner of the world. All hers.

She grabbed her lab coat and pulled it on and over her day clothes to get ready for the next session. Her lesson plans were ready on her desk and she placed the white envelope on the dark mahogany desk and looked at the pink clock once more. It was hers – the clock she had lost 10 years ago. She remembered where she lost it now. It all came back to her. As she held on to the envelope and didn’t need to open it. She knew who it was from. The memory was enough to make her mouth curl up int a smile.

[Circa: donkey years ago!]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Observing Amanda Palmer’s (in the video below) reply to Neil Gaiman’s question about her memoir showed me something interesting. She threw her head back cast her eyes upwards, closed them then looked down. This behaviour to me is akin to fishing. The casting of the line upwards (head back- eyes up searching into the pool of memories) as strongly as you can in order to throw it deep and far into the sea/lake to successfully catch a bite.

The act of self-similar behaviour is one aspect of a fractal. But a fractal is about scaling the behaviour beyond the simple level. So that’s something I’ll have to think about further as it isn’t obvious and intuitive from the example I observed.

But for now, it’s interesting that Amanda herself makes a self-similar comparative behaviour in her own past career as a street model. For my personal interest, this use of analysing behaviour is important during communication.

Many times I’m finding that due to the way I analytically approach subjects, people, conversations it is rare to click with everyone and vice versa. It didn’t matter so much before when I was with like-minded STEM people, teachers, scientists, students because they naturally enjoyed analysing and questioning but now that I’m writing and communicating through the art of writing I need to find ways to be eloquent and coherent to be understood at least enough so that my thoughts or point of view is not taken erroneously.

Whilst my writing skill develops I’ll enjoy observing and learning from the experts who have mastered the ability to convey their thoughts in such a way that resonates with the masses.