Ogden Nash on Uncle Ed

As a child, I wrote nonsense poetry: the writers I most wanted to be then were Ogden Nash, Edward Lear and Hillaire Belloc. Here is one of my favourite poems from that happy period.

A Caution to Hillbilly Singers, Harpists, Harpoonists, Channel-Swimmers, and People First in Line for World Series Tickets

Fame was a claim of Uncle Ed’s,


Simply because he had three heads,


Which, if he’d only had a third of,


I think he would never have been heard of.

(Hee!)

On the first Faber Academy course in Geneva

I was dreading the Faber Academy because I had no idea whether what I had to say about writing would be interesting or relevant, but I need not have worried. The last four days have been inspiring and humbling. The course attracted a group of interested and engaged participants, more than half flew in from outside Geneva. In the beautiful space of the Société de Lecture in the Old Town, in a book-lined room with exquisite furniture, we talked about writing other lives, writing across language, culture and race, writing across class. We all agreed that the key ingredients in "writing other" were imagination and compassion. We examined the texts of writers who had managed this particularly well, among them Kazuo Ishiguro, Vladimir Nabokov, Aboubaker Diop and Mavis Gallant ... and because I believe that we learn from failure as well as from success, we examined the work of a number of writers, many of them contemporary writers, whose texts could have been great had they not been content to rely on stereotypes.

We did a lot of critiquing ... I particularly enjoyed listening to the writers read their own words and feeling the wealth of experience in that small space. I had suggested the writer Christopher Hope as a co-tutor, and if I do say so myself, he was an inspired choice. I am not sure I know any living writer who has written so wonderfully, and so lovingly, about such a wide range and variety of people, he has written about pretty much anyone who has been caught up in his voracious appetite for stories.

You have heard me talk before about how much I love people and how much I love getting to know people beyond the dreariness of small talk, how much I treasure the connections I make in my life. I don't know whether all ten participants will go on to publish their work, but I can tell you that I came away feeling that I had made connections with good people, really good people, who wanted to write, not for glory and immediate gratification, but because they thought writing would help them better understand the world and their place in it. In the last four days, I understood the pleasure of teaching and reaching out to people whose minds are open and eager for knowledge and experience. Thanks to the Geneva 10, my world expanded.

The Orwell Prize long list is out ... and "Easterly" is on it!

On Saturday night, on my flight from Zimbabwe, I read George Orwell's Decline of the English Murder and found myself vowing that when I grew up, I would write essays like Orwell. Then what do you know - I received an email last night to say that Easterly was on the long list for the Orwell Prize. The Prize was set up to pay tribute to those writers who, in the words of George Orwell, "make political writing into an art". I am really pleased to be included, especially as the long list includes four writers I like and admire, and whose books I loved last year: Brian Chikwava's Harare North, Michela Wrong's It's Our Turn to Eat, Michael Peel's A Swamp Full of Dollars and Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty? For the full long list of 18 books, see this link. The Orwell Prize, in addition to honouring books, also recognises journalists and bloggers.

Can white writers write in the voices of people who are not white?

A few years ago, at a writers' workshop, I read a story by a white South African writer. It was written in the voice of a Zimbabwean "Matabele" laborer and was all about his young daughter dying of AIDS and him working hard while being an illegal immigrant. All believable things to happen to a Zimbabwean man in South Africa except that this man sounded like no Zimbabwean man ever born.

His language was a strange kind of garbled broken English, which was meant to convey that he was an uneducated laborer. It was written in the first person, and that was where I had a major problem with it. As I said in my criticism of the story, this was not dialogue, this was a first person narrator telling us his story, and what every reader and writer knows is that the conceit behind the first person narrator is that he or she is telling you their thoughts directly. So if you are going to have someone give you a garbled narrative in the first person, you had better have a damn good reason (insanity, split personality, unreliable narrator etc) because no one is illiterate in their own language or in their own thoughts. Why was this man thinking in broken English, instead of thinking fluently in his own language, Ndebele? The writer could then have conveyed his thoughts in English, as though it were Ndebele, leading to a flowing narrative. I also pointed out that he would be Ndebele, and not Matabele, considering after all, that this was a story set in urban South Africa in 2007 and not an account of the conquest of Mashonaland and Matabeleland from 1890-1896 as told by Frederick Courteney Selous, aka The White Whirlwind and the model for Allan Quartermain. (!)

I was critical of this story, perhaps, in hindsight, too critical, because the writer unfortunately took from this the idea, which she wrote about afterwards in the SA PEN magazine, that I had said to her that white people could not write in the voices of black people. Far from that, in fact, I gave her and the group an example of a novel I was then reading, Master Pip by Lloyd Jones, which had some cloying qualities but showed incredible gifts of mimicry, empathy and imagination as it was written by a middle-aged white man in the voice of a young black girl. There are many, many examples I can think of where writers have written successfully across race, and across culture, and across gender.

This will be the subject of the Faber Academy course that I am teaching at the end of the week with the wonderful Christopher Hope: how to successfully write about "the other" in a way that does not embarrass you or others!!! A number of white South African writers, particularly those of the female persuasion, like to write in the voices of black servants. I have some theories about the popularity of this perspective, I suspect it partly arises from the fact that the black servant is the only point of contact that too many whites have with blacks, but that's another subject for another post another day. A recent example I read was by the winner of last year's SA PEN competition, who said at the reception for the award that "the voice of Adam (the servant narrator) came and insisted to be heard". Now, I always feel all wriggly and uncomfortable when writers talk about "voices insisting to be heard" as though these creations of their imaginations are something external to themselves, I feel like I do when I encounter men who give their male members names and personalities, but that, I hasten to add, is my prejudice. I did not dislike this story, but it read to me like a story written by a white woman in the voice of a black character. Incidentally, the story that came second, A Visit to Dr Mamba, was a more successful exercise in writing black while white.

The conclusion I am reaching, and I am reaching it now, fear not, is that it takes great gifts of imagination and compassion to write across cultures and race. Not everyone is equal to the task. A talented British writer of my acquaintance once wrote an awful story about a Zimbabwean man. She invented a Shona name, and, as I pointed out to her, this was completely unnecessary because many Zimbabweans have English names:)

There is a happy ending to the writing workshop story: the South African writer subsequently revised her story and wrote it from the point of view of the laborer's white female employer. In the end, it was a very good story indeed, told with kindness and written well. What this says is that sometimes, it is better to stick to a voice you are comfortable with to tell the story of another, instead of trying to assume that any writer can use any voice to tell any story. The story was still about the laborer, but seen through the eyes of another who made him a more believable character.

So yes, white writers can write in any voice of their choosing, but if it is not very good, it simply won't work.

Now here comes a massive generalisation: the reason a number of white writers are able to get away with stuff that is cringeworthily embarrassingly horribly ghastly is that they tend to write for other white people who nod and smile and oohh and aahh at the bravery and audacity of it all, and so when they are criticised by non-white people they get all huffy and say "I have the right to write in any voice I want". Well, quite, except that this is a red herring: the criticism is not about your "right" to write a story, but about the godawfulness of said story. If it is really horrible or bad, it is just horrible or bad and no screams of censorship censorship censorship can save you. It's like Dan Brown responding to criticism about his implausible plots by saying he has the right to write about the Catholic Church ... well, dude, yes, you do, but it does not make your books particularly believable:)

I am delighted to point you to two excellent blogs if you wish to consider this topic further. Sara Crowley's A Salted blog, and the deeply funny Khuzali Manickavel, at whose feet I worship because she is all Indiany and deep and spiritual with lots of wavy arms playing lots of seductive pipes while a million cobras sway on their one legs. Ha!

I will post further about the Faber Academy at the weekend.

Lucian Msamati and Chipo Chung read from "An Elegy for Easterly"

No one, and I mean no one, does radio like the BBC. Hands down! I came home from Zimbabwe to find floods of emails from Radio 4 listeners who loved the afternoon readings from An Elegy for Easterly last week. As I wote here a few weeks ago, Lucian Msamati and Chipo Chung did the honours, and what a job they did. They did absolute marvels with the many voices in the three stories. I am so pleased and happy, and very, very proud. I also loved the little touches, like the late great Simon Chimbetu closing out The Mupandawana Dancing Champion. Also, at the end of Our Man in Geneva, you catch a little bit of my favourite Tennyson poem as a kid: Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred. Forward the Light Brigade, Charge for the guns he said!.:)

If you missed them, you can listen to the stories here:

Lucian Msamati reads The Mupandawana Dancing Champion.

Chipo Chung reads My Cousin-sister Rambanai.

Lucian Msamati reads Our Man in Geneva Wins a Milllion Euros.

Lucian and Chipo, you rock in a million fantabulous ways. Thank you! I am also grateful to the BBC, particularly to Elizabeth Allard who produced the shows, and who also sent me the pictures above. Thank you all!

The Orange Prize long-list is out!

I love the Orange Prize ... this year's long-list is now out and it is brilliant. I am really pleased for my publisher Faber - two of the most talked about books from last year have made it, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and Lorrie Moore's A Gate At the Stairs. I am also pleased for the only writer I know on that list, Laila Lalami for Secret Son, and for two debutantes, Nadifa Mohamed whose Black Mamba Boy, I discussed a few weeks ago, and Eleanor Catton, honoured for her inventive book, The Rehearsal. I am surprised not to see Samantha Harvey's novel The Wilderness, but expect it will be on the Orange Prize for New Writers short-list which is revealed in April. Also present, the all-conquering Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel ... my money is on Ms Mantel to be the first woman to win both the Booker and the Orange for the same book. Good luck to all, and roll on June.

UPDATE: Thanks you guys for reminding me that the luminous Ms Harvey was on the short-list last year:) And PB, you are right about Evie Wyld ... but despair not, April cometh and with it the new writers list, so there is hope yet!

Who would you rather have waiting for you when you got home tonight, Johnny Depp or OJ Simpson?

I love Extras, Ricky Gervais's follow up to The Office -- it is not as stand-out brilliant as The Office, but the episodes get funnier the more I rewatch them. Here is a classic Extras moment ... Maggie is interested in a dating a black man to whom she might have given the impression that she is racist. Her good buddy Andy helps her to find out if she is indeed a racist. Magic.

In which President Mugabe receives some love in Freetown

I love random signs like the one above, spotted and photographed by my friend Logan Hambrick in Freetown. Thanks Logan!

In which President Mugabe backs David Cameron to be the next British Prime Minister

The Daily Telegraph reports that President Mugabe has given his backing to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, to be the next prime minister of Britain. He says Zimbabwe has always got along with the Tories. More of that trademark rewriting of history here: he forgets, I think, that Rhodesia also got along swimmingly with the Tories, that Tory businessmen made a hobby of sanctions-busting and that files released last year showed Margaret Thatcher's revulsion of him: she wrote on one document, "No -- please do not meet leaders of the 'Patriotic Front'. I have never done business with terrorists until they become Prime Ministers!" Then again, President Mugabe was given a knighthood under the Tories ...

In any event, something tells me that he will be disappointed come May if Cameron wins. Brown and Labour may leave office, but the Tories and Labour are united on Zimbabwe. Here is a better plan. If I were President Mugabe I would invest all that Marange diamond money in the construction of a time machine and go back to 1215 when it all started to go horribly wrong in England. Magna Carta indeed. I would go back and insist that King John refuse to sign the document that so terribly constrained his powers and started the drip drip of power going to the great unwashed. I would take those revolting barons (pun intended ha ha ha) and drown them in wells on their own estates. I would ensure that the monarch ruled supreme over that green and pleasant land so that by the time we get to 2010, no one in England knows what a prime minister or an election is. And that, my friends, is genius.

An open letter to Muammar al-Gaddafi, Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Great Revolution of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya!

My very dearest Muammar,

Brotherly Leader! Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya! King of Kings of Africa! Employer of an All-Female Team of Bodyguards! Owner of a 7.5 per cent share in Juventus Football Club! Wearer of Natty Gold-Braided Costumes and Provider of Employment to a Million Nimble-Fingered Seamstresses! Pitcher of Tents in Central Park! Doer of General Wacky Doings!

Brotherly Leader!

I salute you!

I understand your anger against Switzerland, Brotherly Leader, I understand your displeasure at the Swiss belief that no one is above the law. I am aware, King of Kings of Africa, that the Swiss last year arrested one of your sons, Hannibal, after he and his wife (allegedly) beat up two of their servants. Now, Hannibal has also (allegedly) beaten up his own wife at hotels in London and Paris. His other hobbies, harmless, no doubt in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, but frowned upon in the more uptight societies in which he has practiced them, are attacking Italian policemen with fire extiguishers and driving the wrong way up the Champs-Elyseé in a very fast car and very drunken state. Harmless, Brotherly Leader, perfectly harmless ... so a policeman could have lost an eye or two, a woman might have lost a limb or two in an accident but that's all to the good, the fewer eyes one has, the less one sees of this sinful and depraved world, and the fewer legs one has, the less likely one is to walk and hop and run into sin.

In the Geneva Incident, as you know, both Hannibal and wife were arrested after they (allegedly) went to work on their servants with their fists and other implements. Now, I accept that you believe that your son and his wife are above the law, because they are related to you, Brotherly Leader, and if you are not above the law, then who is? Swiss law, clearly, and French and British and, for that matter, Italian law, cannot possibly apply to relatives of the Brothely Leader who are extensions of the Brotherly Leader himself. So of course, the Infidel had to pay ... You very correctly cancelled flights between Libya and the Infidel, you suspended trade relations, you withdrew more than five billion dollars from Swiss bank accounts, and you prevented two Swiss businessmen from leaving Libya.

These men paid, they paid, Brotherly Leader, they ended up spending more time in jail for "immigration issues" than the two days your two charming relatives suffered for (allegedly) causing grievious bodily harm to their servants. I grant that there was a slight wrinkle in the plan in that Rachid Hamdani, one of the citizens of the Infidel Switzerland, was actually a Muslim as well as being a dual Tunisian citizen, but as the Guide of the First of September Great Revolution, you know all too well, none better, that every war has its casualties. Besides, half a Swiss is better than none.

I also approve heartily, Brotherly Leader, of your plan to divide Switzerland up into three bits to be handed over to the Germans, the Italians and the French. I disagree, though with your planned distribution: instead of giving the German bit to the Germans, the French bit to the French and the Italian bit to the Italians, to really set the cat among the pigeons, Italy should take over the German bit, France should take over the Italian and Germany the French bit. What larks, then, King of Kings of Africa, what larks! And as for the 35 000 or so Swiss citizens who speak Rumantch, well they are all in the canton of Graubünden and can form their own republic.

That proposal was clearly and directly in proportion to the insult suffered by Libya in the two-day arrest of its two nationals. But I have just this week learned that you have declared a jihad against Switzerland. Now, my Islamic scholarship is a little on the rusty side, so I am not entirely sure that you, Brotherly Leader, can actually declare a jihad. And I seem to recall reading that according to the hadith, when asked what kind of jihad is better, the Prophet Muhammad (Blessings be upon His Name!) replied, "A word of truth in front of an oppressive ruler!" I also read somewhere that the Prophet also said "The best mujahid is the one who strives against his own self for Allah, The Mighty and Majestic." Now, you may of course be against this more personal touchy-feely notion of jihad as a spiritual struggle over one's baser nature, a struggle to be the best person one can be in the eyes of Allah, you may consider it an OprahWinfreyCation of Islam, no doubt you favour the blood and thunder type of jihad to be fought against apostates and high way robbbers and the Swiss.

Now Brotherly Leader, before your proceed further on the details of this jihad, its means of execution, its intensity and duration and so on and the rewards to be offered to the mujahideen, may I ask just one, small, teeny tiny question? This is not to derail you in your plans or anything, but I simply have to know ... being King of Kings of Africa, you will appreciate it, I am sure, you will indeed demand, that I ask you this question in my own language. This, Brotherly Leader is my question. Ndiko kwatasvitsana here uku nhai Brotherly Leader vadikani? Or, to put it very succintly, in the language of the Great Satan: Really, now, Muammar? A jihad? Really?

Yours very sincerely,

Petina Gappah

Do please pass my regards to the wives and kids, particularly that dear, rambunctious rascal, Hannibal.

Image: The Times online.