Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.
the human mind is prone to catastrophizing when left unoccupied. And that’s why it’s important to always have a little Blorbo to rotate in your head. It acts as a protective charm of sorts to redirect your imagination away from harmful spirals
thoughts without Blorbo: oh my god I was so cringe in seventh grade why did I do that
thoughts with Blorbo: I haven’t considered the interactions with bleebus; I must rectify this immediately
Darcy’s introduction in Pride and Prejudice is really ‘what if you had just had the worst month of your life because your ex-bestie tried to lover boy scam your baby sister out of her share of your dad’s life insurance and your friend dragged you to a shitty party in a dive bar in the neighbourhood where he’d just signed a short term lease, and you decided to let your bad mood show because you were never going to see any of the assholes in this stupid shitty bar EVER again. And your friend ended up making out with a girl he’d just met there while you were stuck talking to her sister who was less cute and then her mother appeared and started trying to matchmake and started saying how if she was twenty years younger she’d clime you like a redwood and ooooh is that a black Amex, guess the next round is on you hahhahahahaha, while her other sister (how many fucking sisters does she have?!) flashed an obviously fake ID at the bar and ordered six vodka-diet red bulls and no one in her family except the less-cute sister even tried to stop her. And you went home and consoled yourself that you would never see any of these people again but then you met them over and over again because they live next door and your friend and the cute sister keep meeting up to make out but not actually date and then. You fall in love with the less-cute sister because it turns out she’s really witty and charismatic but she already knows and remembers and resents the fact that on a day when you were in a shitty mood you called her mid out loud in a dive bar.’
Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text
SUMANA ROY
In the essays my students write, I have begun to notice a common pattern. They are structured almost like Aesop’s fables. A moral seems necessary at the end — a kind of wrapping up, whichever way one chooses to look at it, like a prayer of gratitude after a meal, or an antacid tablet to aid the digestive process. Occasionally, I notice this in their poems as well, how the concluding lines must justify the existence of the lines preceding them. I have begun calling it “moralitis.” Without a text’s display of morality, we seem to be at a loss about how to justify its existence.
I offer these summaries as an outsider. I wasn’t born in America or England, and I wasn’t a participant in, or even a contemporary observer of, Anglophone literature departments. I am a postcolonial citizen reading the white world reading.
I notice what has been well-documented: How the creation of “area studies,” its support coming from espionage funds of the American government, led to the incorporation of literatures from these unknown cultures into white literature departments. I use “white” in the most matter-of-fact, self-evident way, without anger. That was what it was, a crowd of white writers, primarily male, squatting on syllabi for decades. They had written about things that struck their fancy: elephants, women, mountains, wars, a cup of tea, a day in the life of an unremarkable person. The syllabus-makers had legitimized their wandering. It was all right, the white writer could write about anything.
The expectation of the nonwhite writers was different. They were to be tour guides to their cultures, burdened with satisfying the intellectual curiosity of the white world. As Amit Chaudhuri wrote in his essay “I Am Ramu,” published in n+1, “The important European novelist makes innovations in the form; the important Indian novelist writes about India. This is a generalization, and not one that I believe. But it represents an unexpressed attitude that governs some of the ways we think of literature today. … The American writer has succeeded the European writer. The rest of us write of where we come from.”
In India — where I now teach in the English and creative-writing department at Ashoka University, about 45 kilometers from the capital city of New Delhi — what began with Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth performing their roles as researchers for this new reader soon turned into a habit. Rushdie had tried to bring the linguistic energy of a whole culture into his representation of the Indian nation; Ghosh a Stephen Greenblatt-influenced understanding of history into the historical novel; Seth a sentimental appraisal of an India that had now disappeared. They were ambassadors of the Indian nation, often thought to be “representing” India just as artists and performers represented it in Festival of India programs abroad.
This wasn’t, of course, what Seth and Ghosh and Rushdie had set out to do; it was just how their work had been appropriated by this new and foreign readership. At the same time, any writer — or any text — that did not fulfill the purpose of national ambassador risked being ignored or rejected by the academics — whether in India or abroad — who were designing courses about postcolonial Indian literature.
The consequences of this are far-reaching. I looked at a sampling of English-literature question papers in Indian universities, primarily in the country’s provinces, where an American understanding of Indian writing has been imported without any skepticism or unease — this despite professors teaching courses on power and imperialism. Courses have titles like “Indian Writing in English,” “Postcolonial Literature,” “Indian Literature in Translation,” “Commonwealth Literature.” The questions asked of the students are revealing. “Analyze Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as a critique of the nation-state”; “Write a note on Velutha as a Dalit character in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”; “Discuss Things Fall Apart as a postcolonial novel.”
By contrast, in the same departments, William Blake was being studied as “a precursor to the Romantics,” W.B. Yeats as “the last Romantic,” John Donne as “a metaphysical poet,” Virginia Woolf as “a stream-of-consciousness novelist,” and so on. If the contrast in the pedagogical approaches to the “third world” literatures and Euro-American literatures is still not evident, one can just jog down to the early British literature paper, and then to the Renaissance.
Postcolonial texts seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: They either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography. Ideally, they do both at once, often in the manner of a Live Aid concert. The genre chosen for such illustrative purposes is most often the Indian English novel and, occasionally, the Indian novel in English translation..
While academics often see themselves as correcting the oversights of mainstream publishing, in this case, the two have colluded, even if unconsciously. Just as Indian professors feel a responsibility to assign “representative” texts, so within Indian English publishing, editors and publishers — beneficiaries of various kinds of privilege — have felt a moral responsibility to present and represent those they considered left out of their understanding of literature. That category included the Dalit, the Adivasi tribes, occasionally women. To publish these “unknown” and “unheard stories” — phrases that attend many of the blurbs of books about these cultures and people — is their version of affirmative action, almost akin to wearing hand-loom textiles to register their support for the poor weaver.
This enterprise has had consequences besides the intended ones. The “Adivasi” and “Dalit” writers these publishers championed became just that to the reading public: one picked up a book by such a writer to become a better person. Juries giving prizes followed the same path: By giving a literary prize to someone they had identified as a subaltern, they were in fact trying to give the prize to the community the writer came from. This is the neoliberal’s version of the subaltern-studies project.
I have heard from some of these writers about their dissatisfaction in being read as Dalit writers alone. Manoranjan Byapari, for instance, tells me that, although he has benefited from the largess of intent, he and others want to be read as writers, like upper-class and upper-caste writers are — not given attention solely because of their status as disadvantaged. It is not difficult to see that this was a mimicry of what had happened in the West: the Indian writers’ responsibility to represent their nation had metamorphosed, here, into “marginalized” writers’ responsibility to represent their “local culture.”
Like the soldier fighting for the country, these writers are seen as fighting for their culture. (This attitude also explains why translation, a field ignored for decades, has suddenly become a moral mission — we must bring the “underrepresented” into the range of vision, even if it is only the range of vision of the English-reading world.) Meanwhile, choosing what books to read becomes itself a moralistic enterprise, a form of atonement. One must read postcolonial literatures to pay the guilt tax. It is a reading toll that the student of the white-literature syllabus is not asked to pay.
But the proliferation of readers who seem to have become addicted to paying this tax has created a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course. For one thing, the postcolonial-literature syllabus continues to remain parasitic on the novel — it is as if our histories could only be held in the form of the novel, usually a fat novel, its girth approximately proportionate to the size of the country. The poem and the essay have been rendered minor forms here. Fragmentary and whimsical in nature, personal and private in style, they offer no assistance in the information-supplying service that the postcolonial syllabus is expected to perform. The few poets who are studied, if at all, have been given a place on the syllabus for their founding-father status. Unlike the novel, where new work is regularly called for duty on the syllabus, contemporary poetry (say, Indian English poetry) might be imagined to have gone extinct.
The same question should be asked of the postcolonial syllabus. While the moralizing mission might appear admirable, these courses ignore all literature that does not fit its agenda. What else explains the utter absence of comic novels in the postcolonial course? How else to explain why Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels, particularly Aranyak, are not taught? Or why Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, with their life-loving energy, do not find a place here? Or why stories and novellas about provincial life, such as we find in the magical writing of R.K. Narayan, have not yet been included? Literature about the moment, about the everyday, is rejected: Comedy, laughter, pleasure — the postcolonial subject must not be seen partaking of these contraband things. The syllabus often reminds me of what our hostel matron used to say: Don’t smile and show your teeth when praying.
Here is the space where the syllabus remains to be decolonized — not through substitution, but addition. A course on British modernism will include a novel or two about a day in the life of a white man or woman, such as we find in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. But a young Indian student’s life on a day in July — masturbating, thinking of becoming a “famous poet,” walking around London with his uncle, eating at a restaurant and fighting with him, as we find in Amit Chaudhuri’s comic novel Odysseus Abroad — is judged too self-indulgent for a postcolonial course, even as it is not hard to see that this life in the novel, if anything, is the postcolonial subject’s condition.
What I am seeking is for the postcolonial-literature reading list to be liberated from its current status as “minor literature.” I do not use this term like Deleuze does, but rather to describe the sense within English-literature departments that these are to be studied as Ur-manifestos and histories of repression and suffering, and that all other kinds of writing are to suffer the same fate as banned literature: to remain ignored and unread. A course on Modernism, for instance, should include writing and art from non-Western cultures, where books exist side by side, related by temperament, aesthetic, or form, and not because of a United Nations idea of representation.
Literature in the postcolonial syllabus should surprise the student, not just confirm and illustrate “theories.” This, too, should be part of the decolonizing-the-syllabus mission: to dismantle the binary between postcolonial writers as content writers and Western writers as experimenters with form. Only then can we begin to address the “moralitis” of my students, which, although it might seem at first harmless, or even praiseworthy, turns out to entail a troubling indifference to pleasure and beauty, to ananda (joy and delight), which is often the backbone of India’s modern literatures.
Hi Balls, I was reading your essay post and I am interested by how you’re making fun of the AI generated story winning the literary prize and calling it nonsensical and pointing out meaningless sentences. I remember a few months ago you were calling some fans “losers” for making callout posts and blocklist for AI fic writers discovered on ao3? Is this a contradiction of your own opinion or did your stance change and you now agree that AI users should be named and shamed?
tldr: you are literally making my point for me.
I genuinely don't know how to say this without sounding patronising but, respectfully, the ‘explanation’ for why I hold both opinions at once—ie that the only thing more ridicuous than a clearly AI generated story winning the fucking Commonwealth Short Story Prize of all things is people’s reactions to the scandal, and that “fans” witchunting and harassing fellow fans over perceived AI usage on Ao3 need to get a fucking grip and sit on the naughty step for a while—can be easily sussed out if you spent some time thinking about it instead of trying to catch people out or whatever the fuck this is.
when it comes to, idk man, an AI generated Stucky coffee shop AU being posted on Ao3, there is no ‘injustice’ happening, no matter how emotively you frame it. because there are no stakes whatsoever: respectfully, please understand that the judging panel of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, ie one of the world’s most famous awards for short fiction that has launched the literary careers of multiple authors across the world, and the editorial board of Granta, one of the most prestigious Anglophone literary magazines, are not logging on to Ao3 and typing in Jungkook/Jimin Omegaverse Spitroasting (include tag: Breeding Kink) in search of the next Salman Rushdie (and I am saying this as someone who wrote queer theory piss fic).
the Commonwealth Prize case is not interesting to me because AI bad and human writing good. the interesting aspect is what the judges' failure to notice this story tells us about how writing gets evaluated by the institutions that hold power over which stories are told, and how. the harm is not "an AI wrote this” lmao it is "an institution responsible for certifying literary value demonstrated that its evaluation criteria for a specific writing tradition are so underspecified that they can be satisfied by outright pattern-matching." and this is actually exactly the point i am making about why it’s so fucking irritating to see losers (a term i stand by) publicising lists of fanfics and authors they have decided are ai generated.
anyway. being published on Ao3 is not exactly a marker of quality. anyone can publish on Ao3. i could photocopy a picture of my asshole, superimpose Fëanor’s face on it, claim it’s a representation of him in the Eternal Darkness, and then post it on Ao3 tomorrow. if the argument is that AI writing is ‘low quality slop that doesn’t belong in the archive’, then does that mean everything on Ao3 that is humanly written a ‘high quality’ literary masterpiece? does it mean that only works fitting a certain criteria, such as *checks notes* only three emdashes a page, ‘deserves’ to be published on Ao3?
with all due respect, no. just because someone wrote something does not mean the thing is (again I am speaking in terms of literary ‘quality’ as judged by competitions and tradpub etc rather than whether or not it appeals to people) worthy of commendation. also don’t even try with the ‘but the environmental/social impact of AI means people i decide have used AI MUST be harassed on tumblr’. are you weighing the moral positionality of every author you kudos? what if your all time favourite porno was written by someone who owns a real fur coat? what scale of morality are you using here, and why is the moral worth of another human being contingent upon what you think counts as AI or not AI?
anyway. when you post a fic on Ao3, you are participating in a community, not nominating your fic for the Booker Prize. and this is why fanfic is so diverse and fun and varied in style and form and all that. because most things appeal to someone or the other out there, even if your fic is just a description of Aragorn unbuckling his belt when someone asks him to choose between washing his hair or shitting in his hands and clapping. the whole point of it is that it is fun and not ruled by literary prize criteria. hence, even if someone did write an AI generated fic and posted it on Ao3, they are not exactly seeking a prestigious certification of literary capability and neither is Ao3 or its reader offering that. there is no institution here claiming authority to certify quality, no structural gatekeeping function, no literary tradition being characterised as imitable machinery by the people in power. Ao3 is an archive site. it operates outside literary legitimation because it does not claim to legitimise anything.
which leads to my next point:
bro why do you CARE 😭
like if I came across that shitting in his hands and clapping fic, I would just say ‘ew’ and scroll. If I came across a story I suspect to be AI generated, I would do the same thing. I have done this on countless occasions. I would not come onto another website and talk about how Author X should be beaten with hammers for her poop fic. or make a canva graphic of Author Y’s mdash usage? why would I do that when I could just use the time to find a fic I enjoy and read that instead?
if, like i said above, writing a fic and posting it is not a declaration of literary prowess or assumed quality and is simply the act of engaging with a community, then AI generated fics are, as much as you hate to see it that way, doing the same thing. the ‘writers’ are engaging with the community with their AI fic. and sure, this way of engagement may be dishonest and what not, but clearly some people enjoy them and have made them popular or whatever, in which case that is a back and forth engagement. is the argument here that a couple of these fics have gotten a lot of comments or whatever? are we pretending that kudos and comments are now the measure of a fic’s quality, instead of reflecting whatever the primary audience in that fandom prefers to read?
there is no prize denoting literary worth that is handed out by kudos or comments or being posted on Ao3, this is just someone reading something and going yeah, I like this. are you going to go hound everyone who commented ‘great fic’ on every single fic where Naruto “gets pegged—not with a plug but a finger—a quiet, thrumming evocation of the Sexy Jutsu on the tapestry of his pubes, floating on the grammar of his balls”??? this is a person in a community saying I enjoyed this; the lit prize is an institution exercising cultural authority in a way that dictates, to paraphrase Roy, which stories are told, by whom, and how. Ao3 is not doing that. Ao3 is doing the opposite of that. Ao3 says “the person into Aragorn shitting into his hands and clapping” can post whatever they want.
and like. again. what are you getting out of this? what is the end goal? to harass some twelve year old for writing and posting OCfic using ChatGPT? this shit is always framed through the lens of pedagogical care and “accountability” but what it actually is is just a pure flame war lol. what is the educational value of slagging off someone to the entire internet over a zero stakes situation with no payoff? what does such an action garner you aside from the chance to chest-thump about your own virtue?
and most importantly, what if you’re wrong?
and this is the point of all points lol, the one that overshadows all the others i’ve made so far: the fact that what I am saying in my commonwealth prize writeup isn’t a contradiction of me thinking people should not be conducting public witch hunts over fanfic, it actually proves the point i am making! because if these people, who are in terms of writing qualifications and academic background, ostensibly at the topmost layer of the literary world, who have read much much more in their fields than you or I, have, for free, offered us a box of popcorn and an enjoyable demonstration of a reading practice lazy enough to award a prestigious prize to an AI generated story, then what makes YOU so confident that your decision and subsequent public witchhunt is justified, that your eye for ‘real’ literature and hallmarks of LLM generated writing, aside from really puerile shit like ‘goody proctor used an emdash’, is somehow better, is somehow good enough to harass people over?
idk man. in my book, a bunch of knowitall chucklefucks harassing people in their own community based entirely on vibes and a sprinkle of ship wars (yeah you mfs think you’re slick don’t you 😭😭😭), leads to a far more toxic community than a handful of young or inexperienced writers using LLMs and what not.
what you are doing is encouraging a paranoid reading practice in your own community, the community you partake in for fun! and like… man this is the thing that actually gets me, the thing that ties all of this together so bleakly: the paranoid reading practice this attitude is spreading in fan communities, the gleefulness of the witch-hunt, the "I have identified the tells" confidence… this is, structurally speaking, the same operation as what the prize judges used, just pointed in the opposite direction.
the judges had a model of what Caribbean literary fiction is supposed to look like and matched the text against it without actually reading it closely or engaging with it. AI-vigilantes on Ao3 have a model of what AI writing is supposed to look like and they're matching texts against that without actually reading them either. both of you are reading for the shape of a thing rather than the thing itself. both of you are outsourcing any actual encounter with the text to a paranoid checklist. and both your guns, subsequently, will misfire with potentially horrible consequences.
and I think the reason I find it worth saying all of this in one breath, the Commonwealth Prize, the judges, Granta uploading the story to some AI to ask about its AIness, the reactionary discourse, and yes, the AO3 witch hunts too, is that ALL of these are varying results of the same root problem, which is that we have collectively gotten very bad at tolerating the uncertainty and discomfort that actual literary engagement requires.
actual reading requires you to accept not-knowing, to at least attempt to stay in the room with a story that isn't immediately yielding to what you are demanding from it instead of deciding that something you do not understand on first skim does not deserve categorisation as ‘real’, requires you to ask "is this doing something I can't yet follow" before you ask "is this doing nothing???”.
it’s an uncomfortable place to be and I understand why people reach for the checklist instead, whether the checklist is emdash counting or "this sounds like the thing I know” or “people from X ship always use AI”. but the cost of the checklist, the cost of this paranoid, mechanical, securitised and surveilled reading practice, is that you stop encountering writing on its own terms entirely. and at that point you're not reading, are you? you're just confirming what you already thought, and some poor writer somewhere, who might have made every decision in every sentence and could account for all of it, is getting caught in the net of your refusal to engage with uncertainty.
it all is just so fucking tragic man. like the intellectual honesty of going "I didn't understand this and I wonder why that is" seems to have been replaced by the comfortable "I didn't understand this and therefore it is bad/fake/not worth my time.” and what do you lose here? what is actively being destroyed? the possibility of a real, genuine encounter, the moment of encounter that reading fundamentally is, the experience of a text doing something to you that you weren't expecting it to do, that you didn't have a framework for and had to build one as you read. that experience requires vulnerability and an admission that your existing framework might be insufficient or at the very least not throwing your toys out of the pram the minute you find in a piece of writing something you consider morally wrong.
and yeah maybe you’re right lol. maybe i should be naming and shaming. so here you go: fuck a fanwriting culture that has entirely given up on the idea that reading is something a person can be wrong about in ways that should provoke curiosity, even if the result of that curiosity is just ‘tbh yeah this is bad writing’. but alas, apparently we have decided that it's more important to be confident about what you're reading than to actually read it and find out.
anyway these are my thoughts, and iirc @allthingswhumpyandangsty had some excellent thoughts on the matter too but i am too sleepie to find linkie.
I think this was the very good post by allthingswhumpyandangsty re why all of us should be minding our own damn business over our suspicions re whether or not a fic is AI written.
I’ve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole ‘AI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prize’ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinions™️ about the matter, because it’s hit on some thoughts I’ve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction… and thoughts I’ve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says ‘probably, but guess we’ll never know!’ (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO 😭)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panel’s language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AI’s ‘thought’ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose ‘in general’, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as ‘florid’ and ‘overwrought’, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ‘trim the fat culture’ (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if “this kind of writing” is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slop”.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like it’s my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a ‘this is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeter’ way, it is difficult to interpret in a ‘there is nothing under this sentence’ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the world’s biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isn’t to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: it’s evaluative language that doesn’t touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms don’t require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with ‘world literature’, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really don’t like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I don’t intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and i’ve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie i’m just trying to say that this post isn’t just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something i’ve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i don’t think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the ‘i have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prize’ atm…
anyway the reason I’m so brainrotted about this is because this exact literary-cultural problem was one of the things that led me to structure my longfic, Prayers to Broken Stone, in the way I did. the fic itself is totally irrelevant here so you’re not missing anything if you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the Silmarillion, I’m just referring to how the first quarter of that fic deliberately contains every single postcolonial miserycore cliché that appeals to a literary-prize, Western Anglophone, and diasporic audience’s ideas of what ‘Global South’ world-literatures should look like (and ngl I feel like I probably went too hard on this because so far I know at least 5 ppl familiar with the genre who justifiably almost dropped the fic before the mic drop because of the beginning being Like That… sorry guys. i will probably do it again 😭).
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ‘lowbrow’ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (see—writings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
the reason i mention the fic here is that objectively speaking, those first few chapters, the ‘series of clichés’ ones, are the ‘clearest’ part of the story when it came to writing it. those chapters were written to directly evoke the vague shape of ‘prizewinning postcolonial giants’ of South Asian literature, both the brilliant and incisive writers and the floggers of diaspora-gaze miserycore, providing a series of aesthetic signals to those texts: the joint-family ‘madhouse’, the separated twins, the daddy-issues-as-father-of-the-nation-issues, the family-as-country, the dried rivers, the symbolic heirloom bangle, the utopian pre-imperial regional historiography, the diasporic returnee, the rotting house, the familial disconnect. Roy, Rushdie, Mistry, Lahiri, Desai, Seth, Ghosh, rinse and repeat.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isn’t some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: they’re so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of ‘global south’ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they haven’t seen before and immediately going ‘damn, look at this jungle. can’t navigate it but i’m sure it’s great, ok bye’ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and there’s a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isn’t some ambient mystery or marker of ‘serious’ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ‘difficulty’ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on ‘world literature’.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think he’s so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and like… what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of “authenticity”. and in the case of ‘Global South literature’, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
not to use my favourite cliché, but this specific scandal having played out in the way it did pretty much evidences how these two things, the upper echelons of the global literary prize circuit judging panels and generative AI, are less ‘warring factions’ and more ‘two frat bros fisting each other while saying no homo bro’, ie comorbid counterparts.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?”, and “why the fuck are we doing that???”
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth — it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which ‘Oriental™️ opacity/incomprehensibility’ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or “purple”, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. “ewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having ‘successfully’ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the fic’s multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ‘national literatures’, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the reader’s refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animal’s vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
"Nazir’s selection, therefore, is less about him using AI and more about the irony of Euro-American conceptions about the unintelligibility of postcolonial writing. Despite years of literary criticism seeking to undo the idea of the inscrutable Other, here we were. . . . "
There is something worth pausing over here about what AI actually does when it generates prose. Large language models do not invent anything. Trained on vast corpora of existing text, they learn to predict what kinds of sentences tend to follow other kinds of sentences. This means that when an LLM generates “literary” fiction set in the postcolonial Caribbean, it does not reach for originality—it reaches for the most probable version of what such fiction has looked like in the texts it has been trained on. It reproduces the expected atmospheric density, the expected weight of landscape and labor, and the expected imagery of poverty and endurance. The scandal is that the existing formulae for “authentic” postcolonial prose are already so codified that a language model can reproduce them convincingly. In this way, AI does not disrupt literary taste so much as expose its furniture.
Euro-American publishers have a history of misrepresenting colonial and postcolonial writing from the Global South. It is ironic, too, that Granta is the platform that launched Binyavanga Wainaina’s now-famed satirical essay “How to Write About Africa.” The Commonwealth Foundation jury, through their selection, has fallen into the trap of perpetuating tropes of poverty, silenced women, and stubborn survival. Others have pointed out that some of the judges themselves are from the Global South, which would mean it is not a simple story of metropolitan outsiders imposing their expectations. But actually, this would make it something more insidious: a set of aesthetic assumptions so thoroughly institutionalized that they can be reproduced from within.
..... Here, the irresponsibility of the judges meant that, rather than seeing the AI for what it was, the nonsense writing was seen as ingenuity. The structure of the error is identical across seven decades: Incoherence that would disqualify a European writer is reframed as authenticity when it is attached to the right cultural geography. This is what the AI controversy ultimately reveals—not a new problem introduced by technology, but an old one made newly legible. The real question this affair leaves us with is why a particular form of trained, statistical incoherence was so readily legible to its judges as postcolonial seriousness. The answer to that question should unsettle us more than any language model.
re. the race question: i do actually feel some kind of way seeing people comparing this to arundhati roy's prose style in a way that's derogatory to both of them. for one, i don't think arundhati roy is writing in the same register at all. god of small things reads the way it does because either its mimicking the ways in which indian kids have our own sort of way of speaking OR its written in an adult register - and the adult register is a very sophisticated, grown-up voice with very elegant, beautifully constructed sentences. ministry of utmost happiness is not at all in the same vein because again, roy switches between multiple narrative registers and voices in that particular narrative, between maximalism, restraint and even the ungrammatical in capturing the different narratorial voices. it is work that is specific, grounded and thoughtful.
but i do think in making that comparison people are revealing a lot about how they read literature by non-white folks! i remember, distinctly, a guardian review calling ministry of utmost happiness "magical realism" - a label that i think could only have been applied if a) the novel hadn't been read or b) if in reading the novel, the foreignness of the setting and happenings read as "magical" to you (which is INSANE, given the actual substance of the novel). i think there's some of that at work here in the comparisons that i've been seeing float around (i think vuong comparisons are slightly closer in how he favours an overblown and not always sense-filled metaphor, but at the same time i also very much do think some of the backlash against him now has shades of racist glee to it). there is no reason, in my mind, to compare arundhati roy and this genre of writing. if at all, i would have wished people go and read through some of the archives of the commonwealth foundation prize's stories, because i do think those archives themselves offer a sense of exactly what is going on here viz. stories that capture a sense of the "colony" preserved as "colony": foreign, exotic, poor, sweltering in the heat, primitive and raw, whether in a way that is either childlike or sensual. the stories written by the person who judged this particular story are telling in their own right, written in a creolised english that had long fallen out of fashion in western publishing some ten years earlier and yet published in this journal and awarded prizes in the big year of 2022.
there is something crucially to be said there for the ways in which non-white writers writing and publishing in english have to repackage themselves for the gaze of usamerican and uk publishing to gain traction. there is even something to be said for the double consciousness with which anglophone non-white writers have to live with and certainly so much to be said about how these standards are reproduced and internalised thru usamerican and uk publishing gatekeeping. but what i am MOST interested in here is the ways in which WHITE readers will misread non-white writers, belittle them and cut them down and refuse to engage w these structures. in what world can arundhati roy be compared to this story? only if you fit all of this writing into one great big bucket called "postcolonial race stuff" and assume that the tropes and language are interchangeable; if your engagement with both roy AND this story is shallow and derived from skim-reading. the only way in which you can think roy's prose is this kind of purple and nonsensical is if you have failed to even bother reading her properly. do you get what i'm saying? do you get what it feels like to see people making these blithely incorrect comparisons that lump all postcolonial writing into this one big glut of nothing and believe that they've said something clever? do you get what it feels like to see people make these horrifying misreadings? do you know how difficult it is to describe the ways in which white reading strategies can be insanely fucking racist? that self-proclaimed litterateurs are not immune?
okay the thing that i keep trying and failing to say, i think, re. this whole commonwealth thing (sorry! i will be over it soon!) is that like, there is already an assumption when white euramerican readers encounter a work that is about race or about a country in africa, asia or latin america, that it can fit only a few categories:
it is a moral educational fable and lesson about race or colonialism; this can either be heartwarming or tragic
it is a portal into a world of misery that is simultaneously designed to instruct and to affirm the fortunate nature of their own world
it is unreal and magical
it is impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable because it is a portal into the impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable
which really is just two categories: either you are easily knowable entirely through the lens of your country and race, or else you are inscrutable and incomprehensible. you are either a simplistic child, or you are the inscrutable and unknowable [oriental].
-- this was the beginning of, i think, the fourth or fifth draft of this post, which i have been writing and rewriting for the past week, trying to nail down exactly what i want to say about this whole wretched affair.
the first draft went into a long and winding diversion about the perils of how non-white authors are (mis)read today, no matter how they write. that was not what i wanted to say, but what i had to end up saying in order to justify and clarify what i wanted to say which is that non-white readers get to demand higher standards of style of their writers and interlocutors. i said "get better taste" then clarified all the ways in which i meant to absolve non-white authors of the burden of better taste because i recognised they work in a poisonously white industry.
the second draft went into a long and winding diversion in which i ended up trying to defend jhumpa lahiri's latest short story collection from being misread and cut down to being about "immigration", when in fact these stories are much deeper than review allows them to be.
the third draft required another long diversion, because i observed that the reviewer in the guardian who cut ms lahiri down to a writer who writes merely about immigration in the ways we imagine it - from the global south, characterised by precarity and poverty - was in fact not a white person. it was vital to discuss the problem of double consciousness and the processes by which we come to acquire the tastes of the very institutions that refuse us full personhood. no one knows this better than me, who speaks only english with any reasonable fluency, and grew up reading more english novelists from the 30s - 50s than the average english person appears to.
the fourth draft finally got somewhere that i wanted it to be: that we cannot mistake unintelligible writing filled with beautiful words with difficult writing that articulates difficult thoughts perhaps through not very exciting words, perhaps through the poetic. that deliberate strangeness and defamiliarisation deployed as literary technique is different from a mere statistical combination and shuffling of words done by a machine. that we must insist on our own comprehensibility on our own terms and legibility to the white gaze be damned; but we must not allow them to confuse our illegibility with a flattening incomprehensibility.
however, all of this is really just four different ways of describing a) the processes by which those four misreadings outlined above are enforced on non-white writers whether they like it or not and b) some thoughts on escaping this, or ignoring it, or doing our own thing. the object lesson was: no matter what we do we will be bundled into category 4 if we say anything too uncomfortable, but we must not mistake the difficult for the nonsensical and vice versa simply because white people cannot do this. in other words, what i was really asking us to do was to stop reading like white people.
the other problem with this is that the ode to difficult writing can be misused anyway. witness sam kriss' concern for us: "white people eat this shit up and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like R K Narayan or Sadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write." mind you, sam kriss is not indian and this follows on from a tirade in which he deliberately decontextualises and misreads an arundhati roy quote from god of small things (a quote, if which, taken in context is actually an interesting and effective use of language and repetition to tie across a particular thematic strand across the novel) and where he accuses salman rushdie of writing things to the effect of "she fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of her deceits". needless to say: that's kind of immensely fucking racist. i don't think more close reading is actually going to solve this problem and neither do i think more difficult writing will, because there is always some bozo in the world who is going to insist that it is, in fact, nonsensical.
so what to do?
anyway, i witnessed a very interesting conversation earlier today in which some people we talking about how a particular adaptation of a work had made the work "more racist". in this conversation, an essay by a very thoughtful non-white writer had been deployed as "proof" of how the adaptation had become "more racist". of course a close and thoughtful reading of the essay in question might have suggested that the "more racist" was perhaps something written with a level of anger or bitterness, or perhaps an emotional statement: the bewilderment of encountering something so vilely racist, seeing no one react to it, and trying to make sense of it by grappling at the nearest racist thing and gesturing at it. which in this case, is the actual literal source text. there is no "more racist" in this case, because the source text is essentially mired and dripping in it and the escapes from its racism are slim to none; accidental rather than intentional.
this is interesting to me because it reveals a very different reading strategy than the one deployed above: if non-white writers are read either as moral fables or unreal or as nonsensical, white writers are read as real, as universal statements about the human condition, as stylists; are given reparative readings of every kind. writing by white euramericans, therefore:
is universal and therefore particular: it speaks for all but it does so by speaking in specifics of themes and emotions and experiences
is a work of art, made with a particular style, whose artistic processes can be analysed and studied to yield greater appreciation
draws from the real to tell real stories, even when its magical and fantastical
surpasses and transcends politics, which is to say that nothing can be said about the text by looking at the world from which it comes
comes from a world which is simultaneously both a product of its time (exculpatory) and the vanguard of its time (laudatory) and thus, it cannot be held responsible for any of its views
therefore, there are no racist texts or authors, only accidentally racist ones. therefore, jonathan franzen writes about family, but arundhati roy writes magical realism and unreal people in an incomprehensible indian family. therefore, tim o'brien is writing about the horrors of war, but bao ninh is writing about the misery of vietnam, the country. therefore, tolkien is writing about the horrors of environmental destruction and war, but arundhati roy is writing about the unreal because a muslim character is displaced into living in a graveyard after a literal pogrom. therefore, jilly cooper, heyer, christie and sayers are all products of their time, but [insert woc author of the week getting cancelled here] is a racist, sexist, imperialist etc etc etc. wodehouse, is ofc, innocent of collaboration with the nazis (despite having made actual propaganda for them, tho he claimed he didn't understand what he was doing), but r f kuang is normalising genocide*. on and on it goes ad fucking infinitum.
provocatively, therefore, i would like to invite an experiment: what if we were to switch up modes of reading for the two? what if i was to say that since they're all from england, that therefore pratchett, susanna clarke and tolkien are only ever saying something about england and its miseries, and those miseries concern england's flirtations with eugenics driven aristocratic racism (remember, after all, clarke & pratchett exists downstream of and inherit from tolkien)? what if i was to say that wodehouse is writing magical realism, because surely no one can behave that farcically and surely nothing can shake out so improbably; surely jeeves must be a magical construct of some sort? or perhaps tim o'brien is, in his evocations of war and its aftermaths. what if i was to insist that sylvia plath is incomprehensible, because her language is rich and strange, or that victor hugo is writing incomprehensible word salad because of his digressions. what if, instead, you were to understand that arundhati roy is an artist, that perhaps brandon taylor is more interested in gay life than race, that there is no particular lesson to be learned from the sorrow of war except that war is hell, that perhaps jhumpa lahiri is telling you stories about women in unhappy marriages first, and immigrants second? what if you were to understand salman rushdie's midnight children as a real story about real things? what if you could stop feeling that thrill of glee every time some non-white writer gets taken down? what if you could feel less self-satisfied that the author you were told is important turns out to have been unimportant? what if your first instinct wasn't to insist that either the author or the text is unreal or impossible when encountering a piece of writing by a non-white author that you can't wrap your head around? what if you tried? what if you tried even a little?
*using this as an example to make a specific point, i am deeply uninterested in litigating whether or not wodehouse or rf kuang are guilty or not; i am interested in the reception these respective "misdoings" have received and how they've been narrated to the world
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
We take days (preplanned to have nothing important on) where we are allowed NO WiFi no phones no pc. And we dress as 70s as we're able, go to bookshops, the record shop, then home to watch a vhs, or read, or listen to a cassette. To be fair I have a big analóg collection and an alarm clock and, to be clear, we don't exactly own 70s wardrobes but half the fun is in the creativity. We don't go 'tehe groovy man' but we avoid modern topics. Its fun trying to immerse ourselves as best we can, always adding new details when we get some new tapes from the era or, eventually when we get the money, do some temporary decor. We also went to a roller disco
For the record we aren't entirely beholden to JUST 70s tech, as we are not millionaires, maybe someday when I'm not just a barista, but it has to at least be smartphone-less, wifi-less, and pc-less. We blur over to the 80s on occasion, to me part of historical fashion is recognizing that things overlap!
i’ve just pulled out 44 sapphic books from my bookshelves so i can make a petty point that the whole “there just aren’t any well written sapphic books!” argument is bollocks. i’m making a video of them all, but in the meantime:
sapphic book recs:
- rosewater, liv little
- tipping the velvet, sarah waters
- milk fed, melissa broder
- she who became the sun, shelley parker-chan
- briefly a delicious life, nell stevens
- gentlest of wild things, sarah underwood
- the naked light, bridget collins
- the safe keep, yael van der wouden
- the original, nell stevens
- the tarot reader of versailles, anya bergman
- sargassa,, sophie burnham
- a line you have traced, roisin dunnett
- the lighthouse at the edge of the world, j r dawson
- sunburn, chloe michelle howarth
- ordinary saints, niamh ni mhaoileoin
- lessons in magic and disaster, charlie jane anders
- when devils sing, xan kaur
- accidental darlings, crystal jeans
- heap earth upon it, chloe michelle howarth
- hijab butch blues, lamya h
- that green eyed girl, julie owen moylan
- the devil she knows, alexandria bellefleur
- sweet bitter song, rosie hewlett
- nevada, imogen binnie
- delilah green doesn’t care, ashley herron blake
- iris kelly doesn’t doesn’t date, ashley herron blake
