Borders and Airports with guest Nasser Hussain

For those who may be uninitiated in the world of cricket, there is another Nasser Hussain out there who is not known for either cake-baking or poetry. 

Order your very own copy of SKY WRI TEI NGS here, from your local independent bookshop, or directly from Coach House Press, where you can also download the Global Airport Code Map.

Literally no one wants to read about the REF (the UK’s Research Excellence Framework), but should you wish to disprove us, our apologies and commiserations.

For more on airport codes, including the Canadian propensity to begin them with a Y, see this piece by Adrian Nowakowski.

Check out Christopher Schaberg’s Airportness: The Nature of Flight, Christian Bök’s Eunoia, and his Xenotext.

The Ambassador Bridge looks like this. Maybe one day it will have a musical of its own.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…

Gillian Roberts: … and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Hello, everybody, and welcome. This is our very last episode of season two. Season two, as you'll remember, of course, is our season of keywords. And we are picking up on one line of conversation from last month's episode. This episode, we’re going to be thinking about borders and airports. We have with us an amazing special guest who Gillian is going to introduce.

Gillian Roberts: Our very special guest today is Nasser Hussain, who is a Senior Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University. His first poetry collection, entitled Boldface, was published in 2014. He published SKY WRI TEI NGS in 2018, Love Language in 2023, and The Point is coming out in a few months' time. He also writes critical material. Nasser's research interests include contemporary poetry and poetics, embodiment and performance, autobiography, conceptual writing, and the ethics of appropriation. He has even been known, with some pressure from yours truly, to write about borders. Fun fact: Nasser is very talented in the field of cake baking, which I've been privileged to witness, but not so much in the field of cricket. Welcome, Nasser.

Nasser Hussain: Hi.

Gillian Roberts: Thanks for joining us.

Nasser Hussain: Oh man, what a pleasure.

Gillian Roberts: It's great to have you for a roundup of season two. So I'll just get started with some questions. Your own life has involved lots of border crossings. How do you think these border crossings have impacted on your relationship to language, to place, to poetics? I wrote this question and then realized it's massive. So apologies!

Zalfa Feghali: That's an eight-in-one question. So Nasser, do whatever you need to do to break that apart.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, it's a big question. It's a big question. It's a good question. My first instinct when I saw that was, to wonder if I have crossed multiple borders or if I've crossed, like, one border a lot. Right?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, that is included in multiple border crossings.

Nasser Hussain: Right. You know, so I do frequently cross the border. I don't know that I cross many borders, which is a shade of difference there. But then at the same time…

Gillian Roberts: This is what happens when you ask a poet a question.

Nasser Hussain: Oh man, well, we've just gotten started.

Zalfa Feghali: I was going to say, though, that no border is ever the same. Even the same border is different every time you cross it.

Nasser Hussain: You know what? That is exactly what my partner told me this morning. Is it the same border twice? But I also can sort of think of myself as kind of the physical embodiment of border crossings. I'm the result of my biological family who left Pakistan at different points in, you know, in their lives, emigrated to England, and then from England to Canada. And I'm kind of one of the outputs of that set of migrations.

Gillian Roberts: You're their submission to REF, basically.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. You know, and then maybe an impact case study unto myself. Gosh, are we talking to an in-group of academics here? That's awesome.

Gillian Roberts: We will clarify for those outside of the UK HE orbit in the show notes.

Nasser Hussain: That's a real in-joke there, speaking of borders. But yeah, I think as I was saying, like sort of the results of those border crossings, and you end up with me, who is displaced in certain ways and placed in other ways. I'm like monolingual in English with a pretty specific Canadian, if not North American accent, which places me in lots of ways. and displaces me in lots of other ways. Because now since leaving Canada and coming to the UK for the last 23, almost 24 years now, and being unable to shake my relationship to language and speech does kind of mark me out in the context of West Yorkshire, where I live, which is great. You know, it's fine. And I'm lucky enough to be able to move around in the space without too much trouble, but it definitely has an impact on my sense of how placed I am. Yeah. That's one of the three language place in poetics. I can speak to that, that, that there's a kind of place that I am in, but then am not in at the same time.

Gillian Roberts: I'm going to get a bit academic supervisory on you and say, what specifically do you mean?

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. Well, I'm sure Gillian, you may be familiar with this, but you know, every time you meet someone new in certain parts of the UK, you get the question. I'd love to test it. What is the question?

Gillian Roberts: The question I've had is what part of the States are you from?

Nasser Hussain: Yes. Which is a variation on like, where are you from?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Zalfa, what is your version, by the way?

Zalfa Feghali: It depends on what accent comes out of my mouth that day. 

Gillian Roberts: Okay. 

Zalfa Feghali: And because it can skew one way or the other, depending on who I've been spending time with.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: And a lot of the time, if I sound a little bit mid-Atlantic, which I sometimes can, people ask me where in Canada.

Nasser Hussain: Right.

Zalfa Feghali: And I go, oh, I'm not from Canada. And they go, oh, well, because if you're from Canada, they don't like being asked about the US. So that's why we asked that. And I said, well, I'm not from there either. And then everybody gets very discombobulated, and I just leave them there with mystery. That's nice.

Gillian Roberts: That would be brilliant. We can't evidence this in terms of data, but if you in fact had had what part of Canada you're from more than I had or Nasser had, actually, that would be brilliant.

Zalfa Feghali: I think it's unlikely because I just make sure that people don't ask me questions. I try not to speak to anyone at all. 

Nasser Hussain: So the unexamined life is definitely worth living.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, definitely. 

Nasser Hussain: I know no one asks the question to make somebody feel uncomfortable, but it's a consistent reminder that I'm not supposed to be here. You know, the secondary question is often like, what are you doing here? Which is, you know, again, in terms of language, and we're still talking about language in a way, that question's anodyne in lots of ways, you know, well, yeah, what are you doing? Right? What's your job? What's your occupation? You know, but it very closely seems to hook into an idea of like, why are you here?

Gillian Roberts: What is the purpose of your visit?

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. Also that, you know, what are you doing here? You don't belong here. There can be a kind of aggressive undertone at points to that line of questioning.

Gillian Roberts: Do you get a bit of an incredulous response sometimes, like when you say you're from Canada, do they go, oh my god, what are you doing here? Run away!

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, that's another kind of intonation on that, where it's like, why would you even bother coming here, right? So why are you here?

Gillian Roberts: I'm just curious whether you ever reply, oh, like, I was born here.

Nasser Hussain: Oh, yeah. And that depends, you know, sometimes I'm like, well, you know, I was born in the UK, but I lived in Canada all my life. Or, you know, why are you here? And I'll say, you know, because of the climate, which it's, you know, it's much funnier when I do that in January than, say, June 2026.

Gillian Roberts: Because of the lack of air conditioning. That's why I decided to come back to the UK.

Nasser Hussain: Right. And people often have questions about how English I am or how Canadian I am or how Pakistani I am. And I think my particular set of circumstances puts me in no particular place anymore. My relationship to place is a bit more porous than it used to be. I think before I moved to the UK, I was pretty sure I was Canadian. I've lived in the UK for about as long as I did in Canada. So yeah, there are subtle shifts that happen depending on the day and what my relationship to place often is, which is fun. Like I wouldn't trade it.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, a lot of that resonates with me as well.

Nasser Hussain: And then to poetics, as I was thinking about this question, it led me to Derrida, I think kind of ultimately.

Gillian Roberts: Naturally.

Nasser Hussain: Or some poor understanding of Derrida or post-structuralism. you know, can I use a boundary and a border in a kind of largely interchangeable way, right? They're related concepts, they overlap a lot, but there's this little difference, différance between the two. And then I think about the kinds of poetry that I'm interested in. I'll give credit to Christian Bök for the phrase “limit cases.” So for your listenership, books like, Eunoia, or the Xenotext by Christian Bök are examples of a limit case in poetry where you push it to a point where it seems the restrictions are almost impossible, and what's a boundary and what's a border and what's a limit. And I think in my work, The Point is a new example where I'm trying to push towards a kind of boundary or limit what's possible using only exclamation points.

Gillian Roberts: So awesome.

Nasser Hussain: And so too in SKY WRI TEI NGS, which was kind of the first limit case. And I didn't even get close to the limit, but there are thousands and thousands more sky poems that could be written. But writing with IATA airport codes, either as discrete words or syllables, is a kind of limit. And probably for this podcast, a really interesting one, given the geographical conceit that's embedded in the airport codes themselves. So thinking about borders and the ways in which limits and boundaries and borders help us both define a thing but also open up these slippages and the nuances of différance is beneficial in lots of ways. You know, the border as a part of an ordering function that distinguishes us. You know, I really like a border sometimes, like the Canadian border between Canada and her southern neighbour is a really useful border, you know, in certain political climates, right?

Gillian Roberts: And certain political times.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. Perhaps the one we're living in right now. And that's really beneficial. Because it helps me orient myself and I might suggest most Canadians in relation to something that is different.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: That may overlap a lot, but isn't quite the same. So what part of Canada or what part of America are you from? Speaks to that kind of difference and sameness.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: So sometimes it's really great to have a border and sometimes it's, you know, not so great to have a border. So they delineate, I guess that's kind of a rambling answer, but that sense of differences and overlap is really kind of deeply embedded in the way that I think about the language and thus the poetry.

Gillian Roberts: So I'm curious, and we'll talk more about SKY WRI TEI NGS and the codes, but how much did you think about airports before you thought about airport codes and poetry?

Nasser Hussain: Oh man, like, I mean, this is deep Canadiana stuff here, but the airport that I would visit most often is Lester B. Pearson in Toronto. And the other end of that flight in the UK would be Manchester. And the three-letter code for Manchester, which is on your baggage tags and all over the airport and the departure boards, et cetera, et cetera: M-A-N stands for Manchester. And there's a kind of, I don't know, cozy and appropriate sense of abbreviation to “Man” for Manchester. Great. Everything makes sense. And then of course you fly to Toronto where the airport code is, and I can pause here, Zalfa. I know Gillian knows the answer, but Zalfa… 

Zalfa Feghali: Is it YYZ? 

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, it is. It's YYZ, which makes… 

Gillian Roberts: Except we call it YYZ, but yeah.

Nasser Hussain: Yes, very good. 

Zalfa Feghali: Sorry, wrong border side.

Nasser Hussain: But YYZ makes absolutely no sense to me.

Gillian Roberts: Do you know what Victoria's is?

Nasser Hussain: I know that Vancouver's YVR; that comes close. You know, you can see, you can almost see Vancouver in VR, but the Y still kind of throws me.

Gillian Roberts: Victoria is YYJ.

Nasser Hussain: YYJ. Nonsense, right? That alone, I think rankled for a long time, even before I left Canada, I was like, these just don't seem to cohere. I mean, Ottawa, and for this project, Canada is largely blank from it, except Y-O-W, YOW is Ottawa. So there's a couple of Canadian airports in here.

Gillian Roberts: I've seen Canadians, like, who aren't writing poems based on airport codes, you know, they'll put things on social media, and they'll refer to places where they are or are going to by airport codes. 

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: Is that just an us thing? Does everyone do that?

Zalfa Feghali: I do that. 

Gillian Roberts: Do you? OK, great.

Zalfa Feghali: My calendars, they're full of airport and train station codes. But we can talk about train stations another time. And they are a little bit more sensible.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, but like, here I am in YEG and blah blah blah blah blah.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, it probably encodes a lot, right? It would imply that you flew there.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: Or that you orient yourself via these simplistic coordinates. So that would already give somebody on social media a clue as to how and why you got there. And that certainly would shape your experience in a doubly coded way, which I think is great. It's a bit of a flex, I suppose, but you know, that's a matter of taste if you're into that kind of thing. And then there was that moment in 2016 when I sat at Manchester Airport and saw all the baggage tags and their departure codes. And the question emerged in my head when I thought, well, I wonder how many of these things actually make little words. Because of course MAN is not Manchester, it's “man.” And that moment where I could like detach the code from its instrumental function kind of lit up the departure board in a brand new way for me. So I saw LAX instead of L-A-X.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: And then I was like, oh, there's two. 

Gillian Roberts: Got two words! 

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. And I can go “lax man.” And that's almost a sentence. You know, it probably technically is, right? And then the sport began. And just answering that question alone took quite a bit of time of combing through all of the aiports in the IATA database and trying to sort them in some way or another.

Gillian Roberts: Was that the beginning? Did you just go through them all and kind of categorize them?

Nasser Hussain: Yep, that was it.

Gillian Roberts: Did you have a spreadsheet?

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, there is a spreadsheet. 

Gillian Roberts: Nice!

Nasser Hussain: There is a spreadsheet. Yeah, it was a feasibility study for a while where I would just see how many words I could find. And then I started trying to write phrases and sentences. And once I'd gotten to, I think I found around, I don't know, I'd say like somewhere between 1,100 and 1,500 words and/or syllables. So not even all of them are used in my book. But I do have a map that you can download from Coach House Books, which will show you the world with all of the airports that will qualify for the project. embedded or mapped onto their geographical spaces. And I have one here on, you know, A0 paper, and my students will draw new sky poems and connect all these airports year on year. So it's starting to get pretty messy.

Gillian Roberts: That's incredible.

Nasser Hussain: But it's a fun little toy. Yeah, it's a great toy to play with. It's been a while since I've thought about SKY WRI TEI NGS, but I'm very proud of it because it's fun and goofy in a lot of ways, but it also has this kind of, I think, kind of serious claim about language and the earth. Because if you are a non-English pilot, you still have to recognize the Latin alphabet long enough to be able to know where you're going. It's like the English alphabet sets the coordinates in a kind of deeply structural way.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, and presumably, air traffic control folk are communicating in English using these.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. And even above airports, there are waypoints. This is part of the research. So the waypoints are five-letter codes that exist in the sky. Like they're in geosynchronous orbit, as it were.

Gillian Roberts: It's like the sky's version of What Three Words!

Nasser Hussain: Yes. Yes.

Gillian Roberts: What Five Letters?!

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, and these five-letter codes, the only one I know off by heart is the flight path into New Zealand.

Gillian Roberts: Right.

Nasser Hussain: It is apparently Waltz, Ingma, I-N-G-M-A, and then Tilda.

Gillian Roberts: But into New Zealand, that's the wrong country!

Nasser Hussain: I know, I know. It was so funny that “Waltzing Matilda” is a path in the sky. And that I think the word poems, yeah, poems, if I'm remembering correctly, and I'd love a listener to correct me, is a waypoint somewhere over Buffalo in New York, which is kind of a lovely thing for those of you who know, like the poetics programme at Buffalo.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. So like the English language and just the sheer effort to organize her comings and goings on a global scale is conducted through our alphabet.

Gillian Roberts: Hashtag everyday empire.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, it really is, right? But what else can we do? Like the pragmatics of it now are such that it would be really hard to undo that. There might be a way of recalibrating our relationship to that everyday empire. You know, I don't know, like I'm way out of my pocket here, but I wonder if it's all possible to sort of take the good with the bad as it were.

Gillian Roberts: Do you think that when you were writing SKY WRI TEI NGS, part of either the intention or maybe the effect was to sort of like defamiliarize English via the airport codes, you know, making it kind of strange and uncanny?

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, absolutely. And that's another one of those, like, kind of real serious poetry projects that's kind of embedded in a kind of goofy book. But detaching the language, the letters, and the syllables from their instrumental function as airport codes is a lesson in defamiliarizing, detaching language from all kinds of… If you can do it with airports, you can do with everything, right? And we can de-institutionalize the language a little bit and de-instrumentalize it, which I think nowadays passes for familiar. De-familiarizing language and de-institutionalizing language might almost become the same thing. If I'm being really pessimistic about the state of language in our times, right? But what's a poet if they're not out there making it reappear, refreshing the language. This is Victor Shklovsky. This is imagist stuff. I often hesitate to mention Ezra Pound, but it's not a bad call: you got to make it new. There's no more deadening force to language than the institutional. So low stakes. Yeah. Now you can look at an airport departure board and have some fun, right? If I've done my job, you'll be picking up the little words.

Gillian Roberts: That's a good point because we have an eight-hour wait this summer in YVR, so maybe the resident 12-year-old and I can spend some time.

Nasser Hussain: You know, it could be a little game, you know?

Gillian Roberts: It could be, because it's a lot of time to fill. Well, I wanted to ask if you would mind reading one of the poems in SKY WRI TEI NGS, just so our listeners unfamiliar with the book can get a tangible sense of what you were doing.

Nasser Hussain: Oh, wow. Yeah, I'd love to. I mean, there's a bunch in here, like ‘THE CAT     THE HAT’ [sic], which is quite a long poem. Part of the fun of this book is I can just describe them and people might get it. So the cat, the hat. is an erasure poem in which I took the Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss and deleted every word that wasn't an airport code. 

Gillian Roberts: Fab. 

Nasser Hussain: So you end up with lines like: 

The sun did not was too wet sat the All wet day

sat sat And ‘How had’ Too wet out And too sat 

the did all.

All was Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! and did not not 

one bit. (60)

And it deforms the book. But yeah, it exhausts that. The three letter airport codes, which I thought was a pretty fun joke.

Gillian Roberts: It still feels very Dr. Seuss at the same time. 

Nasser Hussain: And it maintains it, doesn't it? Right? You can almost see the original text through the erasure. I think one of my favorite ones is “THE ARK,” T-H-E A-R-K, which I spell, again, to remind everyone that they're airport codes. And it's one of the ones where I'm almost using only three-letter words, except for a few proper names. And the proper names are the names of the people on the Ark. And that's Noah, his sons, and their wives. So I name all of those people. And you'll see the workaround when it comes, because that was the other thing that this project involved was a lot of workarounds because I want to say something. But the airport codes don't really let you do it. The other final note is T-W-O is not an airport code. So I defaulted, or again, another workaround, I used DOS, the Spanish.

Gillian Roberts: Love it.

Nasser Hussain: And I'll interrupt myself one more time just to say that I know that tuna and fish and eels and goldfish and eels can swim and may not have had a place on the ark, but—

Gillian Roberts: You don't know they'd survive a flood.

Nasser Hussain: It's true. I made the map, so I'm keeping them in:

THE ARK

GET DOS AHI

        DOS KOI

        DOS EEL

        DOS COW AND CUB

                 BEE AND BOA

      YAK AND LEO

      DOE AND DOG

         DOS APE ANT ASP AUK

         DOS BAT RAT CAT CUR AND MOG

EWE AND GNU

GAD FLY AND MAY FLY

RAM NAG AND PET PIG

FAT HOG PUG AND PUP

THE LAM KID AND THE FOX KIT

THE ELK ROC AND YAK

THE SEA SOW AND TAU RUS

(ARF BAA BAY BZZ COO GRR

KAW MEW MOO YIP WAG PAW)

AND GET

ONE NOA

AND HIS EMS ARA

ONE HAM

AND NEL ATA MUK

ONE SHM

AND HIS BAE

ONE JAP ETH

AND ADA TAN ESE

ALL THE DNA AND RNA

GET THE HAY 

FOR THE POO PIT

GET THE AFT WET

DRY THE BOW OAR

ROW THE PEN

YAY! SEE THE TOR?

    ARA RAT. (51-2)

And Ararat—

Zalfa Feghali: Fantastic!

Nasser Hussain: Ararat's the mountain that the Ark lands on. A tor is a word for a hill. I couldn't get Shem's wife, which is Sequelah Tabab. I was unable to form that in the airport codes. So the work around—

Gillian Roberts: I think fair. 

Nasser Hussain:  Yeah. Yeah. So I went for “bae.” And that's kind of emblematic of a lot of the struggle in the book was to— I

Zalfa Feghali: It means I'm in the poem. So I'm fine with that. ‘Cause BEY [homonym for BAE] is Beirut, Gillian, in case you weren’t sure.

Nasser Hussain: Nice. So it was a question of like, sometimes I get so close and find this one piece that I couldn't fit in and I'm like, I have to work a solution for it.

Gillian Roberts: What I really love is how much work your reader has to do as well and piecing stuff together. And it's a bit like learning to read all over again, which is really humbling. But then the added pleasure of recognition, which is really fabulous. Maybe because it's been a few years since I've been teaching a child to read in the middle of a pandemic, but there's such a satisfaction in the “got it” moment as an adult, which is really lovely.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, I think we spend a lot of time thinking we know it all. And I guess that's what the airport gave me most of all, was a space and a place to just notice things, because there's so little to do in any kind of real sense, you know, beyond like, I don't know, rampant consumerism. After that, there's nothing, there's just nothing to do. So you have to like read a book or people watch or enter some kind of waiting lounge of the soul. Right?

Gillian Roberts: Threshold.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. And there is this kind of wonderful, almost Zen quality to time spent in these waiting areas. If you can get past the true boredom, you can kind of get to observe things. And there's a clarity there, which I have certainly carried with me after SKY WRI TEI NGS. So like now my job is to try and notice things. And you can enter that space via the airport lounge, you know, and you don't even have to be in an airport lounge for that to work.

Gillian Roberts: So to what extent are all airports basically the same for you now, or maybe they always were?

Nasser Hussain: I did a lot of research. I was looking into airports a lot when I was reading this. Chris Schaberg has a number of books about “airportness,” he calls it, which is airportness starts before you get to the airport. It's a state of being that, you know, you pack your bags, you pack all your pockets, like you're already kind of in the airport space at that point, long before you even get to the physical space.

Gillian Roberts: You might even be weighing your luggage.

Nasser Hussain: Right! You know, standing on a scale and having your backpack and getting off and doing some math. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like, and it's, it's four in the morning and all of that is a special kind of state of being for, for Chris Schaberg. And I think we all kind of intuitively can relate, but yeah, I was looking into, like, architecture and layouts and the deep capitalist drive that's embedded in the architecture to keep you moving around, keep you shopping, to extract things from you. So in that sense, yeah, airports are very similar in that, especially the big ones at like, let's say, I don't know, Dubai, you know, there are these kind of gateway spaces in the world. Heathrow will be one of them. Watching Manchester Airport refurbish itself, you know, quite painfully over the last few years. And it will very much, I think, achieve a lot of those goals that airports have to try and do, which is to make money.

Gillian Roberts: Sort of like the high streetification of airports.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, exactly. And it's very interesting because it is a lot of the same products, but I mean, Istanbul Airport is probably one of my favourites for sure, for sheer quirkiness.

Gillian Roberts: Which one, sorry?

Nasser Hussain: The major airport in Istanbul.

Gillian Roberts: Ah, yeah.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, you can feel a deeply Turkish vibe. Just as I'm thinking about airports again, that was a really special one. I think that one's great. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why, but it's probably because it's not as high streeted or it is high streeted, but in its own way.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: It retains a kind of cultural stamp, which I absolutely appreciate.

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa, do you have a favourite airport? 

Zalfa Feghali: No, I have a least favourite airport, but I won't. I won't. Well, will I? I don't think Birmingham Airport's very hospitable.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, they put it all in the train station, man.

Gillian Roberts: I don't know. I have a certain fondness because I can get the train very straightforwardly.

Zalfa Feghali: I have no objection to being able to access the airport. It's just that you get there and it's, I mean, it's barely some seats. It's not that I want to sit around buying anything, but I find it…Nasser you were talking about how borders are disorienting, or places that you can then reorient yourself. Birmingham is neither a place of orientation or disorientation. I just find it to be a place of constant delay. And I can't get anything to eat. And then all I want to do is go back home. But I also find it very difficult to drive, because I do tend to drive there, to return in the car. So I'll get in the car and then try and get back to Leicester. And no matter how many times I do it, I just can't exit the airport. So it's this sort of eternal return of Birmingham.

Nasser Hussain: That does sound bad. That sounds really bad.

Zalfa Feghali: Though I should say I love Birmingham City. It's just the airport.

Nasser Hussain: I mean, my two other favourites are Terracina Brazil, which is T-H-E.

Gillian Roberts: Have you actually been there or do you just like the code?

Nasser Hussain: No, no, no. I have to like, I have to shout out Terracina, Brazil. I've never been, of course, but without Terracina, Brazil and Griffin Sandusky Airport, which I think is in Ohio.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: And that's, that's A-N-D.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, thank goodness for that.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. Like those were clutch moments in putting this book together because without and, and the,

Gillian Roberts: You'd be screwed.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, it would have made it unbelievably difficult. And I don't even know if those airports are around anymore post-COVID. A lot of them shut down. And I was using a lot of like very obscure places, but it really reoriented the globe for me. So like, yeah. Tokyo, Toronto, London, like those don't, LHR is of no value to me, right?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, that's right.

Nasser Hussain: But DOS.

Gillian Roberts: Sick burn though, like LHR, you're of no value.

Nasser Hussain: But Terezinha, Brazil, you know, or Nassau in the Bahamas, I'll let you guess what that was, but it's NAS.

Gillian Roberts: For real? Nice.

Nasser Hussain: So it's, it's fun to find these kinds of little toys running around inside of a database of codes.

Gillian Roberts: So, because we've been speaking about airports both visited and unvisited, we like to ask our guests whether they have a story of a border they have known. So, Nasser, is there a border anecdote that you would like to share with us?

Nasser Hussain: Yeah, sure. I lived in a border town, and it was the beginning of my apprenticeship as a writer. So Windsor, Ontario and the University of Windsor, which is basically in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge, which is a giant span of metal and concrete that connects America to Canada. It's either 50,000 or 5,000 trucks a day and maybe off by a power of 10.

Gillian Roberts: We'll put in the show notes.

Nasser Hussain: But, you know, Windsor and Detroit are very closely linked, but also quite distant from one another. You can see the flags, you know, you can see the stars and bars and the buildings across the river.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: And the day I started my Master's degree, the workshop leader told us to go home, get up in the morning and write about whatever's in the news. And I was a good student, so I woke up in the morning, and it was September 11th, 2001.

Gillian Roberts: Expletive is what I was about to say.

Nasser Hussain: And I was listening to the CBC radio and it was Haydn and some tinkling sort of classical music. And then this voice came on and said, “And a plane has just hit the World Trade Center. And now back to the Brahms.” And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And we like just moved into this house.

Gillian Roberts: So are you listening to the CBC?

Nasser Hussain: CBC radio. Yeah. And 3, I think was the classical station or 1? I can't remember. We had just moved in. We hadn't even unpacked the television. I like got it out, put it on a table and plugged it in and turned it on just in time to watch the second plane hit. And it's a border town, and like I'm only 48 hours old in the city at this point. And I had no way of understanding what was about to happen, but they shut the border down.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: Like immediately. And now you've got thousands of 18-wheel trucks. And this artery between these two countries is severed in this moment. And on both sides are people whose only job was to get to the other side. And that was not going to happen. It was a wild time to be in Windsor, Ontario, for sure. And I lived my life next to that border, and I never crossed it. I never once went to America from there, because I didn't have a Canadian passport at that point. I didn't want to risk any weirdness. There were too many stories. I think borders and stories are really interesting because it was just like, “Don't go over there, man. You know, if you look like you do and sound like you sound, that's probably not a place for guys with Muslim names.” And I was like, I'm just going to take the hint.

Gillian Roberts: And we have a recurrence of those stories in the present moment.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. And I think so much of modern life, particularly in terms of travel, has been dictated by that point. Again, we take it all for granted. The idea that you have to take out your toiletries and put them in little plastic baggies, which we're now moving away from again. Right? And I can see people being anxious about, wait, you don't need to see my gels and liquids in a little plastic bag. It's OK. I can just X-ray. 

Gillian Roberts: Can I leave my shoes on? 

Nasser Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Right. My belt, my shoes on. Are we starting to trust each other again? Or has the surveillance gotten better?

Gillian Roberts: I think it's the latter.

Nasser Hussain: Right. But it gives off the feeling that we're kind of more, I don't know, but so much of crossing a border, whatever the case has become, you know, in the American context. I guess it's funny to be old enough to have moments in your own life appear as historically momentous in their own right. So yeah, that was a border I never crossed. Always wanted to, will do someday, but it was fun living in a border town.

Gillian Roberts: That's a really potent example, especially to end the season with a border that you lived on basically and adjacent to without crossing.

Nasser Hussain: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you for sharing that with us.

Nasser Hussain: Well, you're very welcome.

Zalfa Feghali: Can you remember how many days out of just random interest that the border was shut?

Nasser Hussain: Oh, it was a while. I won't say it was weeks.

Zalfa Feghali: And I just looked it up. It's like 5,000 trucks a day. So I'm just thinking of the queue.

Nasser Hussain: It was insane.

Zalfa Feghali: Tens of thousands of trucks just backed up.

Nasser Hussain: Just backed up.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah.

Nasser Hussain: You know, straight through the middle of town. Like there's no like byway that they come to. The Ambassador Bridge: that road runs right through the centre of the city.

Zalfa Feghali: That really throws into sharp relief, I guess, the urgency of that artery. Yeah. 

Nasser Hussain: Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: I recently saw in Nottingham an amateur production of Come From Away, the musical that's about the planes that landed in Gander, Newfoundland. And I'm just wondering, where is the musical for the truckers at the Ambassador Bridge? And Nasser, I think you should write it. And then libretto should be in airport codes.

Nasser Hussain: I don't know. I mean, I want to say challenge accepted, but that might be a bridge too far.

Gillian Roberts: I see what you did there. Very nice. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been great to chat with you.

Nasser Hussain: Oh my goodness. You're absolutely welcome. Zalfa, Gillian, what a pleasure.

Gillian Roberts: The pleasure was all ours.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. Thank you. What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.