Who says literary festivals can’t be dramatic? Via the New York Times:
Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival [the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday] 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. . . .
Ms. Shriver criticized as runaway political correctness efforts to ban references to ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation from Halloween celebrations, or to prevent artists from drawing on ethnic sources for their work. Ms. Shriver, the author of 13 novels, who is best known for her 2003 book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” was especially critical of efforts to stop novelists from cultural appropriation. She deplored critics of authors like Chris Cleave, an Englishman, for presuming to write from the point of view of a Nigerian girl in his best-selling book “Little Bee.”
Ms. Shriver noted that she had been criticized for using in “The Mandibles” the character of a black woman with Alzheimer’s disease, who is kept on a leash by her homeless white husband. And she defended her right to depict members of minority groups in any situation, if it served her artistic purposes.
“Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina,” she said.
Put another way: Australia’s literary-fiction establishment is upset that a fiction writer defended . . . writing fiction.
On the hierarchy of nonsense, this is at the level of too-stupid-to-survive — but if the alternative is that only Slovakian hairdressers can write about the Slovakian-hairdresser experience, then I won’t mourn this particular establishment’s passing. As I wrote a while back, it “colonization” is an omnipresent danger only if you reduce all imaginative art to autobiography:
[If] all art is predicated on personal history, a white male in Minneapolis should not write about an Afro-Cuban lesbian in Havana; doing so steals from Afro-Cuban, Havanan lesbians their stories. But the whole point of imagination is that it is borderless. No one “owns” the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience. If imaginatively portraying that experience from a Starbucks in the Twin Cities is what your art demands, you can do that. That’s the magic of imagination.
And it’s led to some darn good art. (N.B. Shakespeare was not a Moorish general.) But liberal politics is a totalizing enterprise, so it’s little surprise that the Brisbane Writers Festival and other haute-couture types are now more concerned with affirming “correct” politics than making good art. And the silliness of much of our “serious” literary culture is on display in the work they produce.
P.S. Included in the Times’ write-up is this scene, which is both instructive and pretty entertaining:
After her Brisbane speech, Ms. Shriver was accosted by a festival participant in the hallway of the State Library of Queensland, who shouted, “How dare you come to my country and offend our minorities?” The author said that the woman had clearly not actually heard her speech, which made no mention of Australian minorities.