TRICK OR TREAT - Final Part

In which the novelist Lionel Shriver puts on a sombrero, and brings down hell on her head.

1

How much did these things matter? Rather a lot, as it turned out.

In January 2019, Chinese-American author Amelie Zhao had to withdraw a YA fantasy Blood Heir, after getting attacked for its portrait of slavery. Ellen Oh, co-founder of the group ‘We Need Diverse Books’ stuck the knife in in a tweet: “You are not immune to racism just because you are [a person of colour]” and went on, “Racism is systemic, especially anti-blackness.”

The fact that the slave was described as having eyes of a “startling aquamarine colour” and that Zhao intended the reference to be to modern-day human trafficking did not help her one bit. Soon she had internalised the criticism and capitulated: “It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community, particularly those for whom I seek to write and empower. As such, I have decided to ask my publisher not to publish Blood Heir at this time, and they have agreed.”

Publishers usually did ‘agree’ these days. One imagined their ‘agreement’ coming even before the writer had finished speaking.

2

Next to tumble – in an event which offered a little more schadenfreude – was one of Zhao’s chief attackers, the black, gay writer Kosoko Jackson. Jackson, under the hashtag #ownvoices, had been a prominent social justice warrior online, and had spelt out his credo in a series of tweets:

“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women…”

“some things are off limits. I don’t understand why this so god damn hard or fucking complex”

and

“There are millions of ideas. Leave our pain and identities and don’t fucking profit from them. Respect us enough to do that.”

They may have been words he later came to regret.

As has been pointed out, Kosoko Jackson seemed bullet-proof against cancellation – not only in ethnicity and sexual orientation, but also in his day job. Employed as a ‘sensitivity reader’ for the ‘Big Five’ publishers (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster), his job was to vet books ideologically before publication and protect vulnerable readers against cultural insensitivities. It appeared, in retrospect, Jackson should have employed a better one of his own.

“Warning! Debut #ownvoices author @Kosoko Jackson’s A PLACE FOR WOLVES may cause extreme binge reading. Preorder your copy here,” screeched a Tweet from his publisher, though in the event it was a binge most readers had to forego.

The YA novel – a gay love story set against the civil war in the Balkans – was greeted by one reader on Goodreads (a site which, as the years wore on, was to become the crime scene of a suspicious number of literary homicides) rather differently. “I have to be absolutely fucking honest here, everybody,” opened the pithy review. “I’ve never been so disgusted in my life.”

Other readers agreed: “How could you take a beautiful LGBTIQ love story and shit on genocide victims like that?” asked one tweet. Soon Jackson too was offering abject apologies and withdrawing his book. Though there was a distinct tinge of schadenfreude to contemporary accounts of the Jackson-cancelling (he had been one of Amelie Zhao’s assailants the year before), this was good news for nobody – it stoked up a climate of fear and seemed to stymie writers before they started. Things were playing out more or less as Shriver had predicted.

3

Sadder by far was the fate of Carlson Anders-Wee, a poet who in 2018 drew a pitchfork mob by writing a 14-line poem about a homeless person. It made the mistake (as it turned out) of attempting the black vernacular and used – pungently and in context – the word ‘crippled’.

Cue protests online. “I’m trying to understand the voice in this poem,” said Nate Marshall, one African-American poet. “It feels offensive to me and like it’s trafficking inappropriately in Black language but is there something I’m missing?” Another joined him: “Don’t use AAVE [African-American Vernacular English]. Don’t even try it. Know your lane.”

Hieu Minh Nguyen, a fellow-poet Carlson-Wee had tagged in his tweet was even more crushing: “I feel as though tagging me as an ‘editor’ of the poem was an intentional way of showing that a POC co-signed this offensive poem.”

Here is the said “offensive poem”:

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,
say you’re pregnant – nobody gonna lower
themselves to listen for the kick. People
passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee
funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely
to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know
you is. What they don’t know is what opens
a wallet, what stops em from counting
what they drop. If you’re young say younger.
Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.

Perhaps this poem did really offend someone – people, increasingly, were primed to be offended. But it was hard not to remember the words of the author Jennifer Senior: “Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest of purity ultimately become indistinguishable from the quest for power.”

4

Regarding that power, it clearly existed and was on the up. The editors of The Nation quickly published a cringing apology which, as Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times pointed out, was twice as long as the poem itself, and contained certain phrases which were becoming join-the-dots clichés. The poem, they said, contained “disparaging and ableist language… We are sorry for the pain we have caused… we must now earn your trust back… we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors”.

It was Carlson-Wee, though, who was isolated in all this, and he too posted his apology which seemed (though no more justified) a little more sincere: “Treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me,” he tweeted, “and I am profoundly regretful.”

What nobody had mentioned was the poem’s clear compassion and attempt to empathise. The compelled and designated ‘empathy’ of the New Orthodoxy – ‘Know Your Lane but Be An Ally’ – now superseded individual efforts to feel yourself into another’s skin. It was a form of caring unsanctioned by Head Office, and therefore had to be stopped.

These are but a handful of visible cases. The real carnage done to literature by the anti-cultural appropriation campaign was hidden – it lay in the ideas strangled at birth by writers who didn’t want to risk mass-persecution by following their gift where it led them. As the novelist Linda Grant put it, most white novelists now “accept the lesser charge of staying in their safety zone rather than be accused of getting it badly wrong”. (Vural 2016). And Shriver echoed her, pointing out in an interview that “We don’t know how much people in my profession for example are not writing things. Because there’s no record of what you don’t do… There’s no record of what you think but don’t allow yourself to say.”

5

May the surreal fact remain on record. Lionel Shriver had stuck her neck out repeatedly to defend the field of literature and speak up for writers’ creative freedoms. She had been savaged for doing so by her fellow-authors: from envy, malice, herd instinct or because they had, perhaps, moved on from first principles to serve other gods.

Finally, in the interests of free expression, let the last word go to Shriver herself, who in her public appearances looked increasingly  battle-worn.  Speaking on Triggernometry, the long-form YouTube videocast, she said:

The fact that I have ended up spending hour upon hour writing or talking about a concept like cultural appropriation means that in some ways the Left has won. That is… they have managed to colonise my life with their stupid idea… they have controlled the conversation. And I’d rather be having a different conversation.

She finished with a truism to be pondered by all of us, friend or foe, even by those – perhaps especially by those – who would spend their waking hours cavilling on the cultural acceptability of Western kimonos, fruity chicken or white Bantu knots.

In some ways I’m very self-conscious about how much I’ve ended up writing about the constellation of issues that has sprouted up around identity politics because I feel they have contaminated and infested my mind. And I’ll be dead soon, and that’s what I did… Our time is valuable.