RUDE
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I had the good fortune earlier this week to be visited here in Rome by an ex-student who was brought up in Nigeria and has been working on a novel set there. I’ve only read the beginning of the book and have been unable to read more. (At the moment I can’t read much because I haven’t figured out how to scroll down though documents without the help of Isabella.) Anyhow, when the student had written a considerable amount of the book, she decided to show it not to an editor, friend, publisher or agent, but to a so-called ‘sensitivity reader’. She was concerned about whether her work would be politically correct or considered offensive to some or other reader; she was worrying about whether the book would even get past an agent, let alone to a publisher. This is a trend I’ve noticed with other students and also with editors at publishing houses: whether their work will be condemned for sexism, racism, cultural appropriation and so on. This is the contemporary anxiety for young writers today.
Some people are turned on and excited by the power of controlling others’ speech and freedoms. There is an element of the left which is bursting with aggressive self-righteousness and is puritanical and self-defeating. The writers I prefer, the ones I grew up with, are the wild ones, the demented ones, the rude ones who don’t give a damn. I can give some names and will present a mere handful: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Plath, Rhys, Celine, Burroughs, Miller, Baldwin. I could add many more and it would be a list of some of our greatest and most admired writers. They are artists who write without fear or inhibition; writers who may or may not be offensive to someone or other, writers who have been condemned or even prosecuted for their work. Think of what the great Salman Rushdie has been through in the name of free speech. The fatwah, in February 1989, was the first time I was aware that there could be real-life consequences for attacking tyrannous institutions and regimes. After the fatwah I know there were writers who were afraid to speak freely about the politicised version of Islam, or even about Muslims in general.
It has to be part of the writer’s job to be offensive, to blaspheme, to outrage and even to insult. I believe Kafka says in one of his notebooks that, ‘Art should be an axe to smash the sea frozen inside us’. Art should not be safe or complacent; it should frighten, alarm and make us want to throw the book across the room. I don’t want to live in an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves for fear of offending someone or other. It is the work of great writers to turn the world upside down, to present opinions which go against the prevailing trends. It is not our job to please but to challenge, to make us think differently about our bodies, our sexuality, politics and normativity.
Would these writers have passed the test today when it comes to political correctness? What would a ‘sensitivity reader’ have made of the work of D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs? One of the things I’ve noticed about my students is that they are already inhibited. A student of mine wrote a good thriller from the point of view of a promiscuous American lesbian and was thoroughly criticised by his tutor for even thinking from this angle. How could he imagine for a moment that he was American, let alone a lesbian? The writer then got himself into a terrible tangle about who can write what and from which perspective. He re-wrote the book and made it much worse having been made to believe he was committing a literary crime by entering the mind of someone other than himself.
When I began my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, I was determined to write the book with as much disinhibition and freedom as possible. I would make it as dirty and funny as I felt my mind to be. I wouldn’t hold back or hesitate to say anything I truly felt. It wasn’t my job to deliberately shock but to tell the story in the most candid way.
Before this I can recall working on the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in the early eighties with my friend the director Stephen Frears. Stephen is not keen on script development but his note to me when I began the rewrites was to make it ‘dirtier, outrageous and more shocking’. I felt liberated by his remarks and this script was the first thing I felt I had written in my own voice, something that was truly my own. I wonder with these early works of mine – My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Black Album and Intimacy – what a ‘sensitivity reader’ would have made of them and what butchery would have gone on; whether I would even have a career now. I’m relieved not to be a young writer today working in this atmosphere of self-consciousness and trepidation, this North Korea of the mind. The Buddha is full of racial insults and lewd, politically incorrect language, it being written from the point of view of a dirty minded seventeen-year-old mixed-race kid.
My youngest son, who is twenty-four, tells me of what an environment of apprehension and reserve he lives in when it comes to speaking and creativity. We should not forget that the insult can be an indication of friendship and admiration; that we call one another cunts and arseholes out of fondness rather than cruelty.
I believe this over-corrected behaviour has been created by the right to make us lefties and liberals seem foolish and petty with our silly disputes about language and point of view. The work of those of us in political opposition is not to fight amongst ourselves but to create a world in which there is no inequality or structural racism.
Our business is not to provide fuel to the right over minor disagreements but to continue as artists who are brave, bold and push the boundaries of what can be said and thought.
RUDE
A few years ago, I attended a small concert, weeks before COVID made such a thing a temporary impossibility. The performer was well-regarded in English jazz circles, beloved by both audiences and critics, and the recipient of numerous awards. That evening she prefaced a rendition of 'Ol' Man River' – a song from the musical, 'Show Boat', overburdened with the weight of slavery in America's deep south – with an anecdote of the time when she had performed the song in front of a much larger crowd. Beforehand, she had privately wrestled with whether she, as a white woman, even had a right to sing it, or if it would be in poor taste to do so.
I found myself depressed by the notion that someone so gregarious and bold in her performances had contemplated censoring herself. 'Ol' Man River' was penned by Oscar Hammerstein II – a white man who, in the lyrics, eloquently distils the injustice of racial slavery into a great personal sorrow, that is as wide, and as deep, and as interminable as the bends of the Mississippi river, as it flows alongside the cotton plantations.
Just over a decade later, a New York schoolteacher, named Abel Meeropol (the son of Russian Jewish immigrants) wrote a poem, titled 'Bitter Fruit,' that was inspired by the lynchings of black men. The poem was later retitled 'Strange Fruit' and set to music. It was originally performed by Meeropol's wife, Laura Duncan. In 1939, the song was recorded by Billie Holiday and went on to become one of the clarion calls of the civil rights movement.
Hammerstein, to my knowledge, never worked as a slave on a cotton plantation. Meeropol, one assumes, had never been chased by a racist mob who were intent on hanging his body from a poplar tree. It is entirely plausible that, had they created their seminal works in the cultural paradigm of the last decade (2014 seems to have been year zero), they would have been vilified; accused of racism, cultural appropriation, and literary blackface. Attempts would have been made to end their careers and ruin their lives.
And yet, both 'Ol Man River' and 'Strange Fruit' are exercises in empathy – that most positive of human traits – where the writer looks beyond his own experiences and asks 'What if?' and 'What would it be like if I was...?' These questions, when they are answered well, produce art that unites us when there is no other common ground.
Richard C Meyer is a comic book writer and publisher, and a veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He gained notoriety about a decade ago for identifying and articulating the parlous state of the American comic book industry, as its writers and editors waged an ideological war on their own readers, with predictable results. When Meyer attempted to publish his own comics, these same neo-puritans, who had robbed the medium of both its joy and its financial solvency, waged a vicious campaign of libel and threat against him, all the while claiming victimhood. They had his deal with his publisher cancelled. There was a bizarre plan to induce war-related PTSD by attacking him at a comic convention. In full knowledge that Meyer had fathered two mixed-race kids, one of whom was a Muslim, they publicly branded him a nazi and a white supremacist; claims that I still see repeated to this day.
Meyer stood his ground, made a small fortune, and has twice collaborated on comics with Sylvester Stallone. However, it was a close run thing and it could have easily gone the other way. He has often described what he terms as “the twelve psychos on Twitter” as the worst people who have ever lived, adding that, during his military service, he met actual terrorists.
Having watched these individuals gleefully destroy careers and lives, and, on at least one occasion, drive a man to suicide, for no reason other than they derive pleasure from hurting people, and are able to do with impunity, it is hard to disagree with his assessment.
It would be lovely to tell your novelist that she is over-reacting. That she can speak and create freely but that is not the way things are in legacy publishing or the arts in general. Even, if you do find someone who is willing to throw their weight behind your vision, there is the possibility they will buckle under pressure from the mob. I have seen plenty of people in this situation, offer an open-ended apology in the belief that they are dealing with reasonable people and that saying sorry will be the end of it. That is seldom the case.
Fortunately, there are signs of a break in the clouds. A few months ago, the editorial staff at Hobart – a long running literary magazine – resigned en-masse. In a public statement that was unintentionally comedic in its pomposity, they announced they were protesting the publication of an interview conducted by Hobart editor, Elizabeth Ellen, with the Cuban writer, Alex Perez. The outgoing editorial team regarded Perez as harbouring problematic opinions, and therefore as someone who should be sidelined and ignored. Ellen was having none of it. She put together a new editorial team. Hobart is currently as strong as it ever was, and brimming over with fresh resolve. However the threat of cancellation remains too great for some writers. In a recent tweet, Ellen mentioned an unnamed person who had submitted work to Hobart, withdrawing their submission on the advice of their agent.
People like myself, who have nothing to lose, find themselves in an enviable position, creatively speaking. I have in my possession, just over 400 pages of meticulous character and chapter notes that, taken together, form bones of my next novel – the story of a London-based community of African ex-patriots, who are experiencing a crisis of leadership. There are certain tropes that one has come to expect in works of this nature, one of which is entanglement with a racist police force. There is a pivotal incident in the novel that involves the police, however it plays out in a way that would sow the seeds of premature wrinkles in the brows of sensitivity readers, and draw ire from the usual suspects.
In 2023, writing fictional characters of a different race to ones own is taken as sufficient grounds, by a vocal and thin-skinned minority, to level accusations of racism and cultural appropriation. I am neither conscious of my own race when I write, nor would I denigrate my characters, or insult the intelligence of my readers, by solely defining them by their race. They are neither stereotypes, nor are they soulful saints – that most bland and useless of paragons.
I will self-publish the book. It will never grace the desk of a sensibility reader – a fact that I intend to make clear in the copyright blurb. The worst that can happen is a bad review on Good Reads. Well, I like the sting of a slap across the face and the ensuing taste blood in my mouth. It reminds me I'm alive. The last time I held ground on my principles, I ended up sleeping rough in London. It is hard to scare or intimidate someone who has been close to rock bottom and survived.
Dear Hanif,
I’m sorry to hear of your student’s difficulties. It’s always been tough to make a living as a writer, as Gissing’s New Grub Street shows. Women in the 18th and 19th centuries mostly had to publish anonymously or under male pseudonyms. The obstacles to getting a foot in the door change over time; you once wrote that the publishing world was overwhelmingly white and posh when you started out so you turned to fringe theatre. Now, you suggest, the goal posts have moved again.
You wonder whether The Buddha of Suburbia would be published today because it includes racial insults and lewd language. I’ve been teaching The Buddha to American students for thirty years and it’s interesting to see how responses to the novel have altered. When I started teaching, the majority of my students were straight, white, culturally conservative and frequently shocked, particularly by the frank depiction of sex in The Buddha. They thought Jane Austen and Dickens were proper English literature and wondered what you were doing on the course. I used to pair Great Expectations with The Buddha of Suburbia as Pip and Karim’s stories have a lot in common, despite Karim’s irreverent put-down: “Fuck you, Charles Dickens!” The students usually came to appreciate The Buddha after we discussed it in class, which is a testament to the power of your writing and Karim’s engaging voice.
These days many of my students are radicals, people of colour and/or queer: the kind of students who are often vilified as “the woke mob”. They lap up your novel like eager puppies. So if The Buddha were turned down today, I think the problem would most likely come from corporate publishers over cautiously protecting their brand. At a time when novels depicting LGBTQ relationships are at risk of being banned in some US schools, I doubt The Buddha would survive a conservative library purge.
I also wonder whether a sensitivity reader would necessarily butcher The Buddha. Irvine Welsh said that although he was initially hostile to the prospect of a sensitivity reader going through the typescript of his latest novel, which tangentially deals with trans issues, he found the process very useful and positive.
Sensitivity is not synonymous with censorship; nor is it about sanitising the language in a novel or ensuring that characters are “PC”. The job of a good reader is to point out unintentional stereotyping so that writers are free to create characters whose backgrounds may be very different from their own.
I hope your student finds a publisher and a wide readership!