WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LIONEL
It's a pity Lionel Shriver's opening address at last week's Brisbane Writers Festival is not on the festival website, because many of us who were not there would love to judge her sombrero-accessorised performance for ourselves. All we got for days was the heat thrown off by Shriver's deliberately provocative decision to buck her brief to speak on "community and belonging" and instead talk about "fiction and identity politics", warning that the invitation to "a renowned iconoclast" was "like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose". The author of 13 novels including We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Mandibles defended the right of writers to create characters of ethnic, cultural or sexual identities other than their own. "Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina," she said.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Brisbane writer, walked out in anger and wrote an emotional piece for The Guardian last Saturday, describing Shriver's talk as "a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of 'others', simply because it is useful for one's story" and "a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension". The festival director, Julie Beveridge, responded quickly by setting up a right-of-reply forum that evening with Abdel-Magied and Korean-American author Suki Kim.
But Beveridge did not publish Shriver's speech and said: "Lionel Shriver, by her own admission, did not speak to her brief. The views expressed during her address were hers alone." This seems odd, as no writer would express approved opinions, and least of all Shriver, whose talk at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas this month was titled "Break a Rule a Day". Debate on social media quickly exploded into predictable demands for Shriver to be banned from Australia and some angry dismissals of Abdel-Magied's concerns. The story went international in The New York Times and on the BBC. The Guardian published Shriver's speech on Tuesday, which may not capture her tone but enables us to see more nuance in her words. She shows no empathy with those offended by "appropriation" but after reading the piece many writers agreed that they must be free to write about anything, and even free to offend. Of course there's a responsibility in writing to aim for the truth – or "a truth" – and there's a need for diversity of voices and viewpoints. I look forward in the most respectful way to reading a novel by Abdel-Magied, the talented author of a memoir, Yassmin's Story.
Meanwhile, she and Shriver will both be at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, and although they are not programmed together the discussion is sure to continue. There's a session on October 30, In Their Skin, where Annabel Smith, Louise Doughty, Azri Zakkiyah, Amanda Lee Koe and Arnold Zable will talk about writing characters whose lives are "vastly different from their own". Closer to home, the NSW Writers' Centre has an event on Thursday, September 22, Who's Writing Who? with Sheila Pham, Michelle Cahill, Julie Koh, Ramon Loyola and Sara Saleh "delving into the ethical conundrums and personal frustrations of writing about and for multicultural Australia".
