Under the guise of fiction
Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks.
Yikes! What did she say? Was it a Trump-style rant against everyone she could think of? Holocaust denial? A claim that vaccines cause autism?
The event, the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday, also hurriedly organized counterprogramming, billed as a “right of reply” for critics of Ms. Shriver, whose speech had belittled the movement against cultural appropriation. They scheduled the rebuttal opposite a session Saturday afternoon in which Ms. Shriver was promoting her new novel, “The Mandibles.”
Oh. She belittled the movement against cultural appropriation. And for that the festival publicly disavowed her remarks. That’s what sounds so familiar – that rush to disavow, to throw under the bus and then drive the bus back and forth over the body a few times…and over what should be a reasonable disagreement.
In the middle of Ms. Shriver’s speech on Thursday night, an Australian writer of Sudanese and Egyptian origin, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, got up and walked out, making live posts on Twitter about her dismay at what she described as “a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.”
“I have never walked out of a speech,” Ms. Abdel-Magied wrote in a post published on Medium.com and Guardian.com. But Ms. Shriver’s, she added, “became a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.”
But fiction is about the experiences of others. That’s what it does. The result can be obnoxious, it can be incompetent, or it can be brilliant – but it’s not just an Obvious Truth that it should never ever be attempted. I do get why people object to it – it’s the same sort of reason as my reason for loathing James Joyce’s version of the female mind in the last chapter of Ulysses: he hasn’t a clue, yet critics called that chapter the best depiction of the female mind ever yadda yadda. That kind of thing can be infuriating and damaging. But that doesn’t mean it’s Holy Writ that no one is allowed to do it, or that people should be punished for defending it.
The festival’s director, the poet Julie Beveridge, responded to the outrage by organizing the “right of reply” session, inviting as speakers Ms. Abdel-Magied, as well as the Korean-American author Suki Kim, whose best-selling book “Without You, There Is No Us,” was based on her six months working undercover as an English teacher in North Korea.
Ms. Kim complained that books by white male writers on North Korea were better received in some quarters than books like her own. Adam Johnson’s “The Orphan Master’s Son” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013, though Mr. Johnson did not speak Korean and had spent only three days in North Korea, Ms. Kim said. She attributed that acclaim at least partly to racism from institutions dominated by white men.
“The reality is that those from marginalized groups, even today, do not get the luxury of defining their own place in a norm that is profoundly white, straight and, often, patriarchal,” Ms. Abdel-Magied said in her criticism of Ms. Shriver.
There’s a lot of truth in that. (I don’t think it’s wholly true, because it’s easy to think of counter-examples.) But there’s also a danger in ruling out all forms of “appropriation,” such as walling people off from each other into stifling little enclaves.
Ms. Beveridge wrote on the festival’s website, after links to Ms. Shriver’s speech were taken down, “As a festival of writers and thinkers, we take seriously the role we play in providing a platform for meaningful exchange and debate.”
They take seriously the role they play in providing a platform for meaningful exchange and debate, so that’s why they took links to Shriver’s speech down. Hmmmm.
Links to the rebuttal remained in place. Beveridge didn’t respond to the Times’s questions.
Shriver described the festival’s response as “not very professional,” and, at a later appearance at the festival, said she was disturbed by how many of those on the political left had become what she described as censorious and totalitarian in their treatment of artists with whom they disagreed.
Yeah. Again: familiar. All too familiar.
Do they ever think about the audience?
I mean, I know that a book I read about a female detective in Botswana written by a Scottish man is not going to be as realistic as one written by, say, an actual woman in Botswana. But if the women in the stories seem much more like real women I know than most female characters written by men, I believe he respects his material. It’s clear he’s done research on the economic and cultural realities. So I learn a little about Botswana (not taking it as the authoritative version of every aspect of the culture) and I *get interested*. Once I’m interested, I might pick up a book by an actual author from Botswana, because I’ve got some sense of the country and want to learn more.
That is to say, at a pretty normal level of curiosity one would expect in a person who does much reading, the appropriation done by one author who has a reputation can actually pave the way for obscure, authentic writers to market their books.
If white authors only wrote about white people, they would be criticised for that too. Some of the most tedious books I’ve read have been by white middle class authors writing about people like themselves.
This reminds me of the double bind we are seeing with feminism. Feminism has been criticised for only caring about the experiences of white middle class women but when a white woman tries to talk about matters relating to others, particularly ethnic minorities, she is told to shut up because she can’t possibly understand it and called a “white feminist” as a term of abuse. No wonder a lot of women decide to stick to what they know.
I’m English. I don’t give these people permission to appropriate my language.
Debate over.
Myrhinne – I have encountered that myself. I wrote one play in which I was yelled at because my characters were “all white” (though when Cleopatra became white, I have no clue). I have another play in which I have black characters; I am told I shouldn’t do that, because cultural appropriation.
Strangely, though, I have rarely seen male playwrights given the same absolute diversity/no diversity lectures. So the take-away message is apparently that white women shouldn’t write plays.
Actually, Cleopatra was always white, or at least white-ish. Her dynasty was left behind by Alexander the Great after he conquered Egypt. Her ancestors were Greek, and she was significant as being the first of the Ptolemies to bother to read and speak Egyptian. I’ve read that there is ONE relative several generations before her who’s Greekness is uncertain. So she just might have had an Egyptian or Nubian/Sudanese progenitor.
I really liked The Orphan Master’s Son.
Was I not supposed to?
@Arthur
The English imposed their language on many peoples without those peoples’ permission.
John, I’ve read several historians that have made a good case that Cleopatra actually wasn’t white. And most historians I’ve asked about that seem to think she wasn’t white. Since I’m not a historian myself, I can only go by that.
So you can fuck right off, Ovid.