an interview with Sadakat Kadri

The Dream of Justice: Sarah O’Reilly talks to Sadakat Kadri  

'Every lawyer,' wrote Flaubert in Madame Bovary, 'carries inside him the wreckage of a poet.' It's a bon mot that may go some way to explaining why so many have chosen to turn their hand to writing. Sadakat Kadri, a barrister by profession, is one of these hybrids and his latest book, The Trial, combines a lawyer's delight in argument and exposition with the writer's sense of the fantastical and absurd.

Its title is a nod to Franz Kafka, that most clinical and incisive observer of the human condition, whom Kadri first began reading in Prague in the late 1980s. He had found himself in the city largely by accident.

The path to Prague began in November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the 40-year Cold War between East and West. Kadri had been listening to the rumblings in eastern Europe throughout the summer from the US where he was studying for a master's degree at Harvard Law School, and as scenes of East Germans streaming across the border were broadcast around the world, he decided that it was time to get a piece of the European action.

'I'd always wondered,' he recalls of his decision to travel to Berlin, 'why people who'd been around in 1968 hadn't gone to Paris. It struck me as so obvious that that was the thing to do if you were young. I remember walking across Waterloo Bridge and thinking to myself that this was the 1968 for my generation.'

Not yet ready to settle down to a life of bespoke suits and regimented working hours for which his study of the law had prepared him, he signed on, borrowed a couple of hundred quid from his father and hot-footed it to Berlin, where he headed straight for the department store KaDeWe to buy a hammer and chisel. The purchase turned out to be largely symbolic: 'When I came to the wall I was surrounded by huge guys with sledgehammers,' Kadri remembers. 'It was desperately cold and I got myself a tiny bit of dust.  I felt pathetic.'            


Despite this somewhat underwhelming start, Kadri's revolutionary zeal remained undiminished. Across the border in Czechoslovakia, anti-communist demonstrations were sweeping the country, and he reached Prague on the same day that the communist government ceded power to reformers. He stayed for two more weeks of the 'velvet revolution', and left as dissident playwright Václav Havel was elected interim president, two days before New Year's Eve 1989.

It was a new dawn for the country, and Kadri remembers his visit as 'the most extraordinary time. There were demonstrations every day, and I met dozens of people. It was exhilarating.' Back in London a few weeks later, he wasn't clear about what he wanted to do next, but knew for sure that he wasn't ready to trade in the hammer and chisel for a wig and gown. Instead he got in touch with the publishers Cadogan and wrote a piece for them about his experiences in Prague. On the strength of it he was commissioned to write a guide to the city and he went back in March 1990, supplementing his income with the occasional piece of journalism, and reading Kafka when he wasn't scribbling.

In 1991 he embarked upon a second updated edition of the guide. Its altered content reflected the rapid resurgence that the city was undergoing: 'the first edition was very historical, but in the second I could talk about the bars, clubs and pubs that had appeared; things that had never existed there before'. Over the next couple of years, this former backwater would become one of the trendiest tourist destinations in Europe.

But Kadri didn't stick around to see it develop. In 1993 he returned to London and began working at Doughty Street Chambers, a common law firm that specialised in civil liberties and human rights. Its liberal politics appealed to his own – but the move 'was a real shock to the system – I had to wear a suit for the first time in my life, and it was my first proper job'.

Sartorial constraints aside, it turned out to be an incredibly rewarding period. He travelled to Malawi with Geoffrey Robertson to assist in the prosecution of Hastings Banda, founding president and former dictator of Malawi. Banda’s enormous ego once led him to ban the Simon and Garfunkel song 'Cecilia' (during a rocky period with his mistress Cecilia Kadzamira) and his conservatism meant that his country had to wait until the 1990s to get television. But Robertson and Kadri were pursuing him for behaviour far more sombre, if no less whimsical: the imprisonment, torture and murder of four political opponents.

Kadri also worked on death row cases in the Caribbean, benefiting all the while from his 'hugely inspirational' colleagues at chambers. 'My former concern, that I was exchanging the great party scene I'd experienced in Prague for a pinstripe suit, turned out to be unfounded. It was an eye-opening time and even though there was a lot of humdrum stuff to get through, day-to-day criminal defence meant that I was always thinking about the issues that I would explore in this book: scapegoating, and naming and blaming.'

Although these musings would eventually find their way onto the page, for a good few years Kadri's career entangled him in the very system he was probing, thinking about and analysing. Did that necessitate a kind of double-think on the part of the barrister within? If it did, he says, it was a thought process that anyone who performs in the theatrical surroundings of the courtroom would understand: 'When you're presenting a case before a jury you are aware of your every movement, and your every expression: you are incredibly aware that you're on a stage there, you think about it all the time. But that doesn't mean that I would ever jump up and say to a jury, look, this is theatrical, or this is rubbish.

'I was in a similar position when I was writing the book: I was thinking as an outsider about how the trial might be viewed, whilst participating from the inside as well.' Observing the letter of the law, in other words, did not prevent him from interrogating its spirit.

'What I wanted to do in The Trial,' he continues, ‘was to show that this seemingly rational system is founded on great irrationality and that there are passions and emotions being channelled through it all the time. But I also wanted to highlight that there's nothing new about the arguments we're having now about criminal justice. I could have taken dozens more examples than the ones I actually used in the book to illustrate how the past continues through the present.'

When it came to actually writing The Trial, Kadri took flight again, this time crossing the Atlantic to settle in New York City. 'One of the reasons why I stuck myself there,' he explains, 'was because I knew I was not just writing about what the trial was historically, I was also writing about it as a cultural institution and how it operates in society.' He watched a lot of Court TV, and thought about how 'a society is held together by its ideals, why these need to be reiterated, and how the trial is capable of doing that'.

'The fact that a society will say ''hang on, wait a minute, we're not going to punish someone here, we're going to go through the motions'' is quite important,' he argues, 'because it means that that society is not some lunging, vengeful entity; it's one that's sufficiently self-controlled to slow itself down and follow due process. And apart from everything else, as a barrister you recognize from your own experience that you too can be shocked when, at the end of a trial, you discover that someone is innocent …'

At the time of his transatlantic move, Kadri also believed that the relocation would give him a 'bit of peace and quiet in which to write my book'. It was a hope that never materialized. 'For months after September 11th,' he recalls, 'the city was downright funereal. I personally was in tears for weeks.' His own rationality briefly faltered as the collapse of the twin towers triggered a rush of the precisely the emotional response that trials exist to control. 'A week after 9/11 happened I thought, well, if torture is what it takes to prevent another 9/11, then maybe torture is what we should do,' he admits. 'It's only afterwards, when you stop shaking and you stop crying, that you realize that if you're in that mood and you start torturing people, chances are you're torturing the wrong ones … And there are plenty of examples throughout history of the dangers of doing just that.'

Kadri's respect for tradition is, he concedes, 'quite a conservative perspective. But certain things are traditional for a reason, because they've stood the test of time.' Touching upon the current furore over Guantánamo Bay, he is clear about the stand that the law should take: 'It's not for us to say that this stuff is going to happen anyway, so let's just regularize it. I'm not denying that there are people out there who want to blow us up, but the question is whether you deal with the problem by locking people up indefinitely. Personally, I don't think you do.'

Was there anything that surprised him during the course of writing the book? 'Well, one thing that surprised me, although it seems very obvious now, is the dual nature of the trial. When I started writing, I hadn't decided in my head whether it was a good or a bad thing and I didn't consciously recognize there were two aspects to it – that it both holds back state power and validates it. It was only after a while that I realized I hadn't recognized this because I had been asking the wrong question. There wasn't a dichotomy between the two. The trial can be both a good thing and an absolutely wicked thing: what's important is that we recognize its Janus-faced aspect.'            

He was also surprised to discover that only 1 to 5 per cent of cases actually end up in trial anyway. 'When I first realized that I thought, why am I writing this book? But then I realized that this doesn’t mean the trial is unimportant: it actually means that any trial you do see is even more important. It also makes you wonder, why this trial? What's going on behind the closed doors?' And it's this sense of curiosity that ultimately unites Sadakat Kadri's two halves: the combination of the writer's attraction to those events that unfold in the shadows, and the lawyer's wish to interrogate them.