You can’t make it up
IN A WIDELY REPORTED SPEECH on the recent publication of his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, the 2017 Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro expressed his concern over young and emerging writers’ reluctance to create characters who stray beyond their own lived experience or identity. Whilst emphasising the necessity of “decency” in depicting invented experience, Sir Kazuo warned that many writers are now fearful that “an anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery”
Cue rejoicing from those who enjoy waging war on woke. Middle-class white man appropriates voice of black officer in imperialist colonial army? That’s Shakespeare stuffed. Middle-class white man steals the persona of a provincial French housewife? Au revoir, Madame Bovary. Middle-class white cis woman demonises the mental health struggles of a biracial immigrant? Kick Charlotte Brontë back to the attic!
The gleeful enumeration of great literary works whose voices would presently deserve to be cancelled might appear to settle the issue. As Sir Kazuo himself observed, his first novel was written in the persona of a woman, which might now be perceived as “dangerous”. Yet for anyone who cares deeply about fiction, might it not be worth questioning how and why the insistence on a correlation between creator and created came to obtain?
The “ownvoices” movement was originally launched in 2015 as a hashtag by Young Adult author Corinne Duyvis, with the aim of recommending works by writers who drew on their own authentic experiences, that is where the author and their protagonist share a cultural
