Canary in the cultural coalmine
IT IS FIVE YEARS SINCE THE 2003 ORANGE-PRIZE WINNING NOVELIST, Lionel Shriver, delivered a speech at the Brisbane Literary Festival in which she argued against the concept of “cultural appropriation”, an expression that in 2016 was only beginning to percolate through to the public. Popstars had been “called out” for putting on Native American headdresses, adopting cornrow hairstyles, or wearing Geisha kit in their videos. In 2015, the University of East Anglia’s student union had banned sombreros from a Freshers’ Fair, claiming that they were “discriminatory or stereotypical imagery” and “culturally indifferent”. So far, so Monty Python. But what would it mean for literature?
It was clear from Shriver’s speech that she’d given the matter some thought. Her talk that day was a passionate defence of the writer’s need for creativity without boundaries, the right to invent any characters they wished — whatever the gender, sexuality or colour. Otherwise she would be reduced, she said, to writing only “from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees …”
Attempts “to persuasively enter the lives of others very different from us may fail,” she admitted. “Most fiction sucks. Most writing sucks. But maybe rather than having our heads taken off, we should get a few points for trying.” In closing, she concluded that writers needed to wear “many literary hats”, and jokingly, perhaps rashly, put on that bugbear of the UEA student-commissars, a sombrero. The
