The Joy of Walking Through Walls
Closing Keynote, Asmara-Addis Literary Festival - In Exile
Brussels, 31 May 2022
We belong here. Wherever we came from, whatever we believe, we belong here. By train or rain or pain or by the skin of our teeth we come to belong here. To this gathering, to this conversation, to this place and this life. This giving and sipping at straws, our doubt and its magnificence, our courage and its silences—all that drives us to seek more of the world. We are the world. We are enough and more than enough: in our exquisite specificities, our impurities and jagged edges that are in truth part of our heritage and heroism, an unclaimed abundance of experience and knowledge and imagination.
We came, called by the Arch-Wizard Sulaiman and his magical team, to hear one another speak and sing and move in the world as if it were ours. It is ours. We came here to reach across the boundaries of time, space, prejudice, language, law, bodies, to share intimacies. To be touched; to be nourished by the surprise of touch; to be held by a different sense of connection. And for these gifts, I thank you. For baring ourselves so generously to one another, over the past few days, I thank you.
Because it is not in our hardened certainties that we find growth but in our vulnerabilities, our soft bellies and blind spots. To learn, we must let our guard down a little. To leave orbit we must lower our planetary shields.
I am thinking of what Nguyen shared yesterday, about censorship and finding a different place from which to speak fully. I think of her courage in making that journey. But it is not a matter of the stereotypical liberal West vs the draconian East or deprived South. Literature has always been about what we keep in and what we keep out. It has a custodial function, and this operates through mechanisms that support it: not just regulatory laws but genres, canons, gatekeepers, publishers, funding, readerships, translation or its lack, fandom, patronage, political agendas, imperial curricula, courtesy, taste—these are evident everywhere. Today books are still being banned or removed from libraries and schools, and texts held back from circulation, because they are seen to be unsuitable, or unsellable, or blasphemous, or offensive, perhaps too Russian. And then you have social media coming up to fill that thirst to speak, to share and to be heard, but bringing with it other forms of shouting and silence.
It is not about better or worse: what we have is a spectrum of differently negotiated freedoms, something that came up in conversation with Jay Bernard. We are surrounded by walls (both external and internalised) that keep us safe by keeping us apart from what may harm or confuse us, including one another.
Of course as mortal creatures we long to be comfortable and secure, to be accepted, to be seen as part of a tribe. In return, we are asked to respect these walls by those who erect them or those who fear them. And so we play the games we are given to play, as best as we can. We come to think of being coy as cleverness, as protective camouflage. As membership. All these shoulds that corral us.
When I was just starting out as a writer in the 1990s, I had little idea about these freedoms, these negotiations, the various walls, visible or invisible, that keep us in check. I didn’t know what the rules of the game were. And that was my great blessing, because it meant I started out doing what I wanted to do.
To be subtle one has to understand the codes of conduct one then labours to skirt around. To beat about the bush, you need to recognise the bush.
Because I didn’t know there were protocols and social norms and what a person like me was supposed to be, either at home or away from it, I was able to do things that I might have felt inhibited from doing, as others have been. I did not know what could not be done. Everything felt new and challenging, but nothing felt impossible.
Mine was not a philosophy of resistance or breakthroughs, but of wayfaring and exploration. Because I didn’t know about the walls, I ended up walking through them, on my way to where I was going. Because I did not centre the walls, I did not know that I was supposed to be in the margins, to stay in my lane. You could say being socially clueless, tactless and awkward as a young person turned out to be my most useful superpower.
I realise now, decades later, that I have become much more circumspect, more subtle, and have shed some of that raw innovation and boldness of the early years, as I became known as a “serious” writer. But I am learning to look past the trappings of success that after a time become walls of their own, and to rediscover the core of play, of process, of possibility, that is at the heart of what we do as writers. As human beings. And as the previous panel reminds us, becoming a dinosaur can also free us from giving a damn.
We spoke about seriousness in yesterday’s panel, and I have been thinking again about the beauty of folly. Of following the weight of our desire to where it will take us. What in some philosophies is known as beginner’s mind.
What would it mean to look at the world through an amateur’s eyes? There is going to be anxiety, certainly, as well as false starts, even perhaps shame. Let’s not pretend that walking through walls is going to be painless. But there is also a profound freedom, wonder, and dare I say it, joy—the amateur’s exuberant pleasure in the act itself, in unreserved immersion and unconstrained engagement, without expectation of recognition or reward. “Amateur” derives of course from the Latin for “lover”. An amateur is someone who does something out of love. And from acts of love come the future.
This precious festival is one such act of love and I cannot wait to see what will come of it in due course. Thank you for having me be part of it.
I commend you, my fellow amateurs, into the wild unknown of tomorrow, unsubtly free. May you walk through any walls in your way as if they were but rain. And may you have a good journey home to your deepest loves.
