Interview with Abeer Ameer
Jun. 1st, 2021 08:01 amAbeer Ameer is a dentist, born in Sunderland, who lives in Cardiff. Her first collection of poems, Inhale/Exile, reviewed here , focuses on her family’s Iraqi background and was published by Seren in 2021.
SHEENAGH PUGH: Did you grow up bilingual? If so, what effect do you think it has had on your writing? If not, did you feel you were missing something? (Philip Gross the poet and novelist, who was a colleague of mine at Glamorgan Uni, is half Estonian but his father decided not to teach him the language in case it confused him. He describes himself as having grown up “bilingual in English and silence”).
ABEER AMEER: “Bilingual in English and silence”. Gosh, what a marvellous expression.
I grew up speaking Arabic with the Iraqi dialect, and when I started nursery my parents were told to speak to me in English so I wouldn’t get confused. I then spoke English with an Iraqi accent and now speak Arabic in a Cardiff accent.
( Read more... )