Writing as Ammunition

The prize... was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.

Arundhati Roy talks to Tim Adam's today in The Observer, referring to her Booker win and subsequent shift away from fiction to political polemic. Her new collection of essays : Listening to Grasshoppers : Field Notes on Democracy. (Read some of her work here and here.)

Syjuco on Asian Writing

I write against Southeast Asian exoticism and books that italicise Tagalog words or place names ... The Filipino or Asian experience is global. To say that a novel has to be set in Asia to be Asian is completely wrong.

Well exactly!

Winner of last year's Man Asian Literary Prize Miguel Syjuco is interviewed in The Australian [via]. He also suggests that:

Asian writers in general have a duty to expose the "cancers of their society" perhaps to an even greater extent than Western writers.

Go to it chaps!

The Dissident Author

How often does a novelist change the society he lives in?

One who definitely did was Nobel prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn who died on Sunday age 89.

Michael Scammell in the Guardian describes him as :

... a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Between 1968 and 1976, he was a towering figure in the twin worlds of literature and politics, expressing the pain of his long-suffering people and single-handedly challenging the autocratic government of one of the world's two superpowers. ... Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labour camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle that secured for him the role of conscience of the nation.

Michael T. Kaufman in the New York Times writes of the man :

... whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century.

On a personal note, I came to the novels of Solzhenitsyn in a very strange way. My dad and I used to attend mass at a Catholic church some distance away, instead of our own parish church. The reason? An amazing priest called Father O'Mahoney who preached social justice from the pulpit, single-handedly raised the funds that supported Mother Theresa's mission in India, and who was as likely to reach for The Gulag Archipelgo as the Bible in his sermons.

If you are stirred to read this author for yourself do begin with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which isn't a long or difficult read, yet I find it haunts me decades after I first picked it up and still teaches me to take nothing I have for granted.

Author on Hunger Strike

Those poisoned in Bhopal continue to sicken and die, without help, without compassion, without justice, because the politicians in Delhi want to do business with their killers. These canaille* refuse to honour the law, blindfold themselves against justice, and, by their inaction, condemn thousands of the citizens they are sworn to protect to fear, pain, suffering and death.

Indra Sinha, the Booker nominated author of Animal's People, adopts the tactics used by the characters in his novel and with nine other campaigners has begun an indefinite hunger strike in support of victims of the Bhopal disaster in 1984, Lindesay Irvine reports in The Guardian this morning :

The hunger strike comes as a "last resort", designed to force government to fulfil promises over rehabilitation schemes in Bhopal and legal action against Dow.

I wrote about this issue in an earlier post, which should provide a bit of context for those of you who don't remember the disaster and don't know about its aftermath.

More about the campaign and how you can help can be found on the Bhopal.net website.

(* = a new word for me too! It means "pack of dogs".)

Chroniclers of Pain

Zionism has been a phenomenal success. Over little more than half a century, Israel has achieved much - for the Jews. Meanwhile the condition of the Palestinians, who are subject to a brutal occupation and siege, deteriorates by the day, while the rulers of the world do nothing.

Jaqueline Rose in the Guardian looks to the country's fiction in an article called Chroniclers of Pain to see how authors such as Amos Oz, Orly Castel-Bloom, Yizhar, Etgar Keret, Emil Habibi have :

... acted as the nation's conscience, shattering the rhetoric of state.

This sounds so like something that Farish Noor would say, don't you think? :

All nations, as Ernest Renan famously stated, rely on forgetting or historical error (which is why, he adds, progress in historical knowledge can threaten national identity). They rely on stories that have to be forged out of a retreating past, reworking memory as they go.

Fiction can, and should, challenge that rhetoric.

Campaigning Animal

Animal's People (which I reviewed yesterday in in yesterday's Starmag) was one of the two Booker shortlisted titles I enjoyed the most this year. It is a remarkable book written with a much larger agenda than simply to entertain (although it does that admirably).

I remember hearing the TV news about the unbelievable horror of the Bhopal Disaster: it was December 3, 1984, and the world's worst industrial accident when a leak deadly Methyl Isocyanate gas killed approximately 3,800 people, while several thousands more were disabled. The horror of that night is captured by this description on the website of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal:

There was no warning, none of the plant's safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighbourhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets.

But issues drop from the news, the attention span is short. And how much, really can any of us really care about people we don't know and have never met, especially when the news is always moving on to the next disaster (floods, earthquakes, famine, wars) in which thousands die?

For me, as for most of the world, the incident slipped beneath the radar. I do remember vaguely reading an article in Time or Newsweek about corruption and the money not reaching the poorest of the victims, and feeling angry about it all over again. But that was really all. Until Indra Sinha's series of harrowing advertisements began to appear in the British press and some of the personal stories were told (left - click to fully enlarge).

Sinha (below), once voted one of the ten best British copywriters of all time*, gave up his career to concentrate on issues which were of much more importance to him after he was approached to help raise funds for a free clinic for the people of Bhopal.

It is a cause he has remained passionately devoted to ever since and Animal's People, set in Khaufpur (a thinly very disguised Bhopal) draws deeply on the stories of real people he was involved with. Animal himself is based on Sunil Kumar, a Bhopal survivor and Sinha's friend, to whom the novel is dedicated. Sunil died in 2006, aged 34.

Until I read the novel, I had not realised that the effects of the disaster were still being felt today, not only because of the initial injuries suffered by the population, but also because poisons (including agents causing cancer and birth defects) continue to leak from the plant and have and have leached into the water supply.

There is of course the official version of things put out by a multinational corporation (Union Carbide was taken over by Dow Chemical) and the politicians, and then there is the story of the victims themselves who lack a voice because they are poor and largely uneducated. (It's very interesting to read these two pages side by side the Union Carbide Statement and the page from Bhopal.con.)

I hope anyway that this post has made you curious enough to pick up the book, and also to explore the bhopal.net website to find out more about the background to the issue. I have still more, about the book itself, to write.

Of all the articles I read on Sinha, I enjoyed this interview with with Anil Thackery the best.

(*Thought you'd like to know: other copywriters who have made successful novelists include Fay Weldon, Joseph Heller, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie.)

Has Fiction Lost Its Power?

An article that slipped beneath my radar at the time (I must have been shamefully snoozing!), but which I came across this morning (researching other stuff) on author Indra Sinha's website (he, of course, of the current Booker shortlist and on whom I have much more to blog soon).*

Rod Liddle (left) wrote in the Times back in January how contemporary fiction just doesn't hit the spot for him anymore, and it seems to me that the article is very well worth going back to.

... it dawned on me (that) I hadn’t actually finished a novel, any novel, for some considerable time. I couldn’t even remember the name of the last new novel I’d finished. Somehow, fiction had lost its power to enthral or inform.

I immediately assumed that I was to blame, that I had become inured to the form itself and was no longer entranced by the act of immersing myself in someone else’s imagination. But a little later, it occurred to me that, frankly, there wasn’t an awful lot of imagination kicking around in contemporary fiction. It has become so broad, so general, so eager to please, so self-satisfied, so anxious to make itself relevant and attuned to the times, so shamelessly — and again, forgive me, I can think of no better phrase — middlebrow. In other words, exactly like journalism, except with some made-up names. And we have journalists for journalism, don’t we? Literary fiction, it seemed to me, had stopped doing what literary fiction does best: getting beneath the skin of a subject, to the viscera, without even always intending to so do. It had started being like every other form of mass entertainment, aiming wide and broad, hoping to alienate nobody.

Liddle blames the publishing industry for wanting:

... books with a big, thick, broad base and, preferably, an uplifting, aspirational motif ... Dark themes such as suicide are okay only if they’re dealt with in the friendly, accessible prose of a colour-supplement article about interior design or colonic irrigation. Leave out the overexuberant writing, what Steinbeck called the “hoop de doodle”; leave out literary devices that might unsettle the reader. Make it general — anything else we will deem to be a bit too much, self-indulgent.

It's a sure-fire recipe, he insists, for bad literature, and reckons that the truly great writing these days is to be found in the non-fiction section ... or in France where publishers have resisted the great literary dumbing-down of the British and US literary scenes.

If I don't add a comment of my own at the moment, it's because I'm mulling it over. Once the cogitation is done, I will chuck in a thought or two of my own. (A nice blogger get-out!) You of course are bound to be more erudite.

(*Sorry for the horrendous overuse of brackets in this sentence, stylistically unforgivable! :-D)

A Burning Issue

Tossed the question into the air somewhat flippantly the other day, can novelists change the world?

Robert Mcfarlane writing in the Guardian's Science and Nature pages thinks so:

The authoritative bibliography of American and British nuclear literature runs to over 3,000 items: it includes Ian McEwan's oratorio "Or Shall We Die", JG Ballard's The Terminal Beach, Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters, Raymond Briggs's When The Wind Blows, as well as work by Edward Abbey, Ray Bradbury, Upton Sinclair, Neville Shute. This literature did not only annotate the politics of the nuclear debate, it helped to shape it. As well as feeding off that epoch of history, it fed into it.

Can writers now steer world opinion about climate change, surely the biggest challenge currently facing us?

It does not yet, with a few exceptions, exist as art. Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety? ... The question is pressing. For an imaginative repertoire is urgently needed by which the causes and consequences of climate change can be debated, sensed, and communicated.

Fortunately, it looks as if there are several novelists prepared to come to the rescue:

... a fortnight ago, I was part of an unorthodox conference, hosted by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, at which 30 scientists and 30 artists - including McEwan, Philip Pullman, Caryl Churchill and Gretel Ehrlich - were brought together to discuss how art and science might collaborate in fighting climate change.

He adds on a slightly grimmer note:

...it may become hard for writers not to take climate change as their subject.

Stick To Your Novel Writing, Mr. Rushdie

Beware of simplistic answers to the world's ills, Giles Fraser warns Salman Rushdie in the Guardian. He believes that Rushdie the novelist has increasingly been overtaken by his public crusading. He should stick to his original vocation because the novelist is in a unique position to enable us to appreciate different viewpoints.

... these dangerous times require the moral imagination of the novel as much as ever. And this in two specific respects: first, in the capacity of the novel to be more humble than the pamphleteer with regard to ideology; and second, in its capacity to listen to and be affected by moral worlds very different from one's own."

Nicely argued.

Just one problem: do the people who need heart and opinion transplants actually read novels?