Detail from illustration by Bobby Evans / Telegramme Studio which accompanies ‘Don’t Fall in Love’ by Mohsin Hamid in Granta Betrayal.

To coincide with the release this week of Granta 122: Betrayal, we asked contributors from the issue to offer up their definitions of the word and its implications.

Mohsin Hamid

Betrayal is when someone you love forces you to accept the proposition that life is not the way you most wish it to be, indeed that life never was this way, and that there is nothing – nothing – in your power that can be done to change this. Betrayal is therefore pain. And also education.

The more loved the source, the more sharp the deviation, the more lasting the desire that it be not so, the more potent the betrayal. To be born is to be betrayed by she who birthed you. That said, betrayal isn’t necessarily bad. Often, it’s essential. Sometimes it’s a blessing.

Karen Russell

Judas, Kristen Stewart, Bernie Madoff, Charlie Tuna – there are so many great case studies of betrayal, and yet I find it hard to put words to the dreadful thrill and/or agonizing stab in one’s bellypit that signals to a body: this is treachery. I do think that the best traitors must be experts when it comes to self-deceit. They learn the art at home. Chloroforming whatever internal voices suggest, better not do this, you are reneging on a deal, you are breaking a promise, you are crossing over to a shadowy frontier . . .

And I think that betrayal can often be a profound surprise to the traitor herself.

In my experience, sometimes you only learn the treachery that your heart harbours via action, transgression. So that the sting of betrayal can shock the traitor just as powerfully as the victim. In fact, we are all entering unspoken contracts with each other, all the time, negotiating these delicate, intricate webs of mutual need and expectation, and sometimes the terms of our agreements can only be revealed to us in the moment of the breach – that’s the uncanny thing about betrayal, right? Some heretofore invisible boundary flares neon red. The violation reveals the contract to both the traitor and the betrayed party: you silently vowed x to me, and you failed to deliver it. They trusted me to do y, I trusted myself to do y, and I failed myself, and them. You walk through the spiderweb and discover its existence in that instant.

Jennifer Vanderbes

I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature. That I choose John in Accounting over my husband Simon one drunken night is irrelevant; what I am really choosing is sex over loyalty. If I embezzle funds from my company, I’m tossing aside honesty in favour of greed. Betrayals haunt us (often haunting the betrayer as much as the betrayed) because they show us, in one painful flash, that this magnificent thing called civilization, the moral and collective bedrock on which we build our lives, is entirely flimsy, and that we are, at any moment, just inches from our fanged past.

John Burnside

For the Ancients, public life depended upon veritas – truthfulness in both word and deed – and fides, which is to say: the condition of being trustworthy oneself and, at the same time, having the confidence that one may reasonably trust others, (especially those with financial or political power). To say that these virtues are forgotten now is a sad understatement; ever since the Reagan-Thatcher-Chicago-School junta, they have been derided. We are now betrayed on a daily basis by so many smiling, damned villains that not being cheated is a rare, and slightly worrying experience. Banks, politicians, the legal system, corporations, broadcasters, advertisers, the police, any government-supported watchdog or ‘standards agency’ and even some NGOs – the list of traitors seems endless, while those who corrode what remains of the public good throw million-dollar parties for their friends and political minions. Qui non vetat peccare cum possit, iubet, says Seneca: He who, when he may, forbids not sin, commands it. Which I guess means eternal shame on the cheats, for doing what they do, but shame on us in the meantime, for letting them get away with it.

Janine di Giovanni

The worst betrayal is the one that you commit against yourself. It’s when you realize you did not see something obvious, you could not see, you refused to see, your vision was tainted. It means your instincts – which in my case I rely on to stay alive – betrayed you. There are people I believed in who let me down – I did not feel their betrayal nearly as acutely as I felt the betrayal of my own self – how could I not have known?

When you believe in something profoundly – whether it be a person or a political ideal – and you discover it is not what it seemed to be, not what you thought, the lingering sense of failure is like a black tide. You have been betrayed.

The worst I can think of that happened to me was in Iraq, during the time of Saddam. I made a very good friend, an intellectual. I believed, with all my heart, that he was a good man, that his love of books, his scholarly demeanour, had saved him from the regime. Much later, after the occupation, I found out he was an informant and had participated in the torture of those he had turned in.

I had shared much with this man – mostly fear, living in Saddam times – then I found out he was informing on me. He had befriended me, in fact, simply to inform on me. I did find and meet him afterwards, to ask him why. He shrugged, and said nothing, we had a tentative meal together and talked about mundane things. And I never saw him again, nor was my trust level ever quite the same.

Callan Wink

Maybe it’s a coincidence but, in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word ‘betray’ is directly followed by ‘betroth’. Probably word proximity on a dictionary page means nothing in and of itself, but, in this case, it made me realize that the most devastating betrayals are always precipitated by those that are closest to us. In fact, I think it could be said that it is impossible to be truly betrayed by someone unless you have first loved that person. Without love you could be mislead, deceived, cheated, deluded, all bad things of course, but on the surface level, less soul-crushing than betrayal. Just as the words ‘betray’ and ‘betroth’ are wedded on the dictionary page, so too in life it seems. Love the blushing bride, betrayal the shadowy groom – they walk hand-in-hand down the aisle.

André Aciman

There are two forms of deceptions, one curable, the other not. The first is what we harbour for those who have asked – and offered – and were given every assurance to expect from us: loyalty. Some of us want to be loyal and think that by wanting to be we may already have cleared the path to it. Some of us grow used to being loyal simply by aping the gestures and behaviour of those who have been good to us. But we know better. We also know that we will shed our loyalty if given the opportunity. It is the absence of opportunity that keeps us loyal, not what’s in our hearts. The other form of deception is more pernicious, because it is directed at ourselves: self-deception. Self-deception is inscribed in everything we do, say, promise, justify and uphold. We are not evil – none of us is – but we’ve learned how to lie to ourselves the way some people hide objects and then forget where they’ve hidden them. Against self-deception there is no cure. As soon as we’ve uncovered and neutralized one strain of self-deception than another is ready to take its place. But there is a virtue in self-deception: we may behave loyally without having a single drop of loyalty in our hearts, but if by behaving loyally we think we are rid of deception, well, then by all means, let’s be self-deceived.

Samantha Harvey

We think of betrayal as the point at which one, who is loved and respected, fails the other, who loves and respects. I wonder if it is really only the point at which we realize that we have been asking for something that the other could never give? In other words, that we see we have been believing in false gods.

Colin Robinson

I remember sitting around with a group of friends in a Tribeca bar a number of years ago and someone mentioned how they had just been betrayed by a boyfriend of a couple of months standing who had taken up with someone else. To me, the charge seemed hyperbolic. In my mind betrayal conjures something elemental, attaching only to matters of life and death: Jesus confronting his father on the cross at Calvary, Tony Blair pressing ahead with the invasion of Iraq, Michael Owen signing for Manchester United after he’d left Liverpool FC. I asked the group if anyone else felt they’d been personally betrayed. To my astonishment I was the only one who didn’t. I’ve certainly been treated shoddily, lied to, cheated on. But betrayed? Maybe I’ve been lucky. Perhaps my opinion of myself is so depleted that experience of others’ bad behavior rarely rises above feeling a bit let down. Conceivably, fear that I’m betraying others prevents me from recognizing it as a meaningful category when it happens to me. But the world’s a hard enough place, even without quotidian betrayal, so if I’m in a cocoon on this matter, it’s not one from which I’m bursting to be free.

The Day Etta Died

I was marking a stack of essays
on Frank O’Hara

and each had a Wiki-
paragraph to say

who Genet was, and who
was Billie Holliday

• just as this poem stumbles to its end, predictably
  remembering the cold December night

I slow-danced with Annabelle Gray to ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’
at the Catholic Club Xmas Party,

trees lit with frost outside and cherry-coloured
street lamps round the playground at Our Lady’s,

and here and there, on windows bleared with soot
our blurred reflections, sightless in the glass

yet guiding each other, soundlessly, into the sway
of the future, almost swooning from the close

proximity of skin
and muddled breathing.

John Burnside will also be featured in the forthcoming Britain issue, out on 10 May.

Photo by Adam Levine.

Self-portrait as Amnesiac

I never saw the fauna of this world,
only a stare through headlights, a hurried

lurching from verge to verge
on a woodland road;

and, long ago, those places in the roof
where dust had gathered,

shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty
pomegranates drying in a bowl,

mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats,
the slender, puppet versions of myself

who played here for a while
then moved away.

At times, when I have nothing else to do,
I think of going up into the highest

roof-beam, like the bridegroom in a hymn,
and bringing something down, an ancient

bird mask, or a broken violin,
or something in a cage that’s still alive

until I fetch it out into the light
and watch it go to powder, teeth and eyestitch

crumbling, and the sound it used to make
extinguished, like that shrieking in the woods

that, once, when I was small, and still awake,
uncharmed me from my bed, before it vanished.

John Burnside will also be featured in the forthcoming Britain issue, out on 10 May.

John Burnside made his first contribution to Granta in issue 94: On the Road Again. One of the most prolific writers of his generation, he has, since 1988, published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Asylym Dance, one collection of short stories and eight novels, including Glister. He is the winner of the Whitbread Poetry award (for The Aslym Dance) and has twice been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He talks to Rachael Allen about the presence of nature in his poetry, the role of myth in his latest novel (A Summer of Drowning) and learning to live with a feeling of nothingness.

RA: In your poems, nature and humanity often appear to swap roles. Are you trying to show us the tangled relationship between the two?

JB: I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace. I do hope that I come up against the harsh, the bloody, the seemingly cruel in what we think of as nature – including human nature. And I hope I preserve a sense of the mystery of that cruelty. Sometimes it’s a very beautiful cruelty – it’s not cruel, per se, of course, it only seems so to us, because we are attached to our own interests – and, on I think I do take solace in the natural world – though I hope that’s not an easy solace.occasion, a sense of that beauty lifts one above one’s attachments. So that line between ‘the human’ and ‘nature’, the ragged edge of culture, so to speak, is still a source of fascination to me and a challenge. A challenge in the sense that an annunciation is a challenge – it calls us to possibilities that we hadn’t imagined, and perhaps wouldn’t have chosen, in what we think of as an ideal world. Maybe there’s a suspicion, alongside this, that the ideal world is sort of there, if we can only meet it halfway. Poetry is, I think, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of speech that closes down the possibility of such a meeting, an attempt to keep oneself open linguistically and sensually and imaginatively to the world as it is, rather than using it as a movie screen for received ideas and second-rate wishes. Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.

Do you attempt to bring about some kind of environmental awareness in your poetry?

Well, I’m not sure how I feel about this now. When I started writing poetry I had some naïve ideas about it, but that’s changed somewhat – partly because there is so much ‘environmental’ poetry about these days and some of it is marvellous and challenging, but some of it feels a bit New-Labour-Focus-Groupish in its orthodoxy. I still succumb to an old temptation to think poetry can make a specific point - the last very obvious environmental poem I wrote was a bemused gasp of horror at the simplistic view of the pro-wind lobby, so-called ‘greens’ who haven’t given the issue a moment’s real thought (or done much research), with the result that they are merely helping fat cats get (huge to massive) subsidies to erect gigantic commercial turbines that will have no effect on our carbon footprint, but will make a lot of the wrong people even richer, with further disastrous consequences for social justice and the environment. They are being played, in short. Frieda Hughes wrote very eloquently about this recently – but she was wise enough to do so in prose. And I think this is important: poetry sacrifices something when it starts campaigning for the environment, it has to work more subtly on how we imagine ourselves, and we could do with imagining ourselves as fuller, more sensual, more responsive – wilder, in the fullest sense of that term - than we are. If we could become authentically wild in our way of being, then we might save – in a wu wei sense of saving by not needing to save – ‘what’s left of the planet’ (by which, I mean not physical fabric as much as imaginative space).

You have been publishing poetry collections since 1988 and have brought out either a novel or collection just about every year. That’s a pretty prolific output by most standards. How do you manage to produce so much material so regularly?

There’s probably something reflexive in this, but I don’t actually think of myself as prolific. And I have to confess that I find my lack of a writing schedule fairly frustrating. I have a very full-time job and two incredible, captivating and endlessly challenging sons – and I do protest that fitting in the writing I’d like to do (both in terms of ambition and quality) is fairly difficult. That When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam saysmay sound odd, for someone who publishes so often, but the other side of my life is that I never stop thinking about my writing, or almost never. When I worked in the computing industry, I would compose poems at work – I’ve always composed in my head, or ‘on the lips’, as Mandelstam says – rolling the lines around at the back of my head while in business meetings or driving to see clients or whatever. I work in similar ways now – which means I can seem distracted, occasionally lacking in the social graces, or just plain rude at times. I do write a good deal at night – insomnia may well be the defining malaise of my life. But really, I very rarely have the luxury of a writing schedule – in the past I have spent time away on residencies or retreats, and I got huge amounts of actual writing down on paper then. But the thinking, the working out, the imagining – that happens pretty much as and when.

Your new novel mixes myth and legend with what is actually true. What was the inspiration behind the novel?

It all started when I first visited the Arctic Circle, (which I now realise was back in 1996). I was invited to the University of Tromsø to take part in a symposium. As soon as I got there I fell in love with the place – especially with the island of Kvaløya, to which my friend Dag Andersson introduced me on that first trip, and to which I returned several times over the next few years (as well as travelling in Finnmark and northern Finland at various times). During one of those visits, I heard the story of the huldra. She is usually associated with places further south (if you go on the little tourist train at Flåm, you can actually see her – the company pays a local beauty to dance around in a red dress through the summer months, hard by the railway line), but some further research suggested that she was a more or less universal figure. Briefly, she is a troll who appears as a beautiful woman to beguile a young man, drawing him away from his safe world and into danger, usually leading to his death. What interested me about the core story is the detail that, if the young man can look behind her, if he can look past the illusion for a moment, he sees through it – in the Norwegian version, by noticing that this lovely woman has a cow’s tail, and in the Swedish version, by discovering a kind of Sartrean nothingness at her back, and so understanding that there’s a sort of flaw in the fabric of the universe there. This is what caught my attention initially – this sense that the story said something about the illusions that inform our social and sexual lives – and what happens to someone who sees that gap in the fabric of the world and has to accommodate it in order to carry on. For me, this is a central concern, even an obsession: Sartre says ‘nothingness haunts being’ – and I cannot help but feel that living in the wild demands that we learn to live with that nothingness. ■

The Summer of Drowning is published by Jonanthan Cape.