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 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.
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
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