Culture

Still live from the Cairo book fair

January 25, 2009
article header image

As yesterday's posting from warm (ish), dusty (very) Cairo concluded, I was promising further details of an emerging theme: a certain parochialism among the British reading, writing and publishing classes. Since then, two anecdotes have come to my aid in spelling out what this means.

First, from the author Jamal Mahjoub. London-born to an English mother and Sudanese father, he grew up in England and Sudan and is most recently the author of Travelling with Djinns (2003) and The Drift Latitudes (2006). He recounted his experience when Travelling with Djinns was initially rejected by a certain London publishing house. Although Jamal was already the author of four well-regarded novels, all written in English and published in Britain, an editor there explained to him that, unfortunately, she already had four authors on her list with exotic names, and she hoped he understood that she couldn't really go to her sales and marketing department and ask them to put their money behind a fifth author with a name like "Jamal Mahjoub." The book was subsequently published by Chatto, and all was well. The real sticking point of the story for Jamal, though, was not so much its absurdity as the fact that this editor assumed that he would be sympathetic towards her decision, and would agree that it was only logical and reasonable: this was just the way the book world works, and that was that.

Something, of course, is rotten in the state of a literary world where motives like this are seen as the height of reasonableness. And it's something Jamal related to larger shifts in the book industry over the last few decades: its move from being a cottage industry to a multinational one, run along more-or-less unfettered commercial lines, complete with the expectation of profit margins equal to those of any other commodities industry. This, in turn, means large amounts of money is paid to (and is made by) a small number of writers and brands, while those outside that category ceasing to exist as "logical" business propositions, or only exist subject to the stringent exigencies of the marketplace.

Before I get too carried away, my second anecdote comes the very opposite place in publishing: poetry, and the realm of bien-pensant readers. After a lively panel session on the state of contemporary British poetry (robust, despite what you might read elsewhere, was the general verdict), I was chatting to the poet Paul Farley - most recently the author of Tramp in Flames (2006) and a past winner of the Forward Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award - about the differences between discussing poetry in front of a British audience and in front of the very mixed Arabic audience he had just been addressing. As part of his answer he told me about a time, a few years ago, when he and a number of other "young British poets" were speaking at the LRB cafe in Bloomsbury. During the discussion, a female member of the audience stood up and began to lambast them in not-to-be-silenced tones, denouncing them for the fact that they were all English, white and middle class. Paul, whose background is in any case working class, found this both incomprehensible, unhelpful and extremely irritating; because (as well as being untrue) it replaced a discussion of poetry with a factional debate about the rights and wrongs of certain abstract themes. By contrast, the Cairo discussion he had just completed was much more directly and simply about poetry's place in the world: does it matter; what can and should poets be doing and saying; which poets and poems are most-liked and most valuable? It was refreshing, he said, to talk directly about writing in a context which, although charged intensely with politics (there was a minute's silence for the "1300 martyrs of Gaza" before the evening poetry reading), had no interest in paying lip-service to ideas like legitimacy or diversity. It was all about what, exactly, was said and meant, and how this might be a force for change or understanding.

So what do the rejection of a novel and heckling at a poetry reading have in common? In both cases, I felt the shared theme was a covert narrowness to what we like to think of as the liberal, multicultural values of the UK literary scene, and indeed the mainstream of global English-language literature. The initial post-colonial battles for literary legitimacy were fought, and won, a few decades ago by authors like Salman Rushdie; diversity and internationalism have been embraced, and now from the comfort of London one can variously set about running a profitable global industry and debating grand, politically-correct themes without, actually, needing to pay attention in either case to the specifics of what is being written. And this means that a vital debate about exactly what is being said, and can and should be said, in novels and poetry is being stifled by the consensus that - between the reality of commercial imperatives and the already-won battle of political correctness - there's really nothing much more to be said.

This, in turn, is why it's so useful for authors as well as publishers and punters to come to a place like Cairo and talk about books. As Jamal put it, "intellectually speaing, literature has lost ground; the outside wrote in, but the inside did not respond." And a response from the inside will only be worth having if it's individual rather than thematic or tokenistic: if it's about genuine readings of other authors and cultures and languages; and if it's not so wrapped up in internal squabbles that it forgets there's an entire world out there, wanting not a slanging match but a free exchange of ideas.