TRICK OR TREAT Part 4

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

1

The crowing grew in volume. One of the most virulent  – and intellectually wonky – pieces came from Maxine Beneba Clarke, an Australian-Afro-Caribbean writer who had published books with titles like The Hate Race and Foreign Soil. Stewing from a series of live-tweets from the event the day before – an event Beneba Clarke had not attended – she already knew what she thought of Shriver’s speech. It was “advocating cultural appropriation and publicly sneering at those who ask for consultation and sensitivity in the telling of others’ stories…” In the article for Victoria’s The Saturday Paper, she described spotting Shriver alone in a green room and, with fellow-author Melissa Lucashenko, promptly set about her.

Beneba, by her own admission, was full of righteous fury at the time. “The emotional exhaustion from the past three days of festival conversations with local high school kids about writing race, writing black, collect in my stomach – into a seething bundle of rage. The anger travels up my throat.” Shriver’s appearance does not help to quell the Beneban ire: “cedar-blonde hair scraped back into a severe bun; stern blonde face; blonde neck disappearing into a pale yellow top…”

[“Blonde face…. Blonde neck…” – one feels Beneba Clarke is doing a lot of work here to avoid saying a particular word.]

Suddenly one of them hisses “Racist” at Shriver, though Beneba Clarke can’t remember whether it was her or Lucashenko -  Shriver may be on her own but the other two have morphed into a two-headed angel of vengeance. When Shriver, as expected, bristles and points out that Beneba Clarke didn’t see the speech the day before, they have their answers ready.

“How dare you come here, to this country, and speak about minorities that way!” Beneba Clarke demands. ‘How dare you?’  [Shriver meanwhile claims that Beneba Clark said “our minorities”, proving that she had not heard Shriver’s speech from the day before – she had not mentioned Australia’s  indigenous minorities in it at all].

Beneba Clarke continues: “Shriver’s chin is raised now. Her voice is strict, as if she’s speaking to small children. Though she’s shorter than I am, she somehow still manages to peer condescendingly down the bridge of her nose. ‘When I come to your country. I expect. To be treated. With hospitality… You don’t even know what I said.’”

But Beneba Clarke is unabashed. “’The entire Australian writing community has a fair idea of what you said,’ I scoff. Then softer [an oddly chosen word], in disbelief, almost under my breath. ‘You’re a disgrace.’” [This was possibly very much ‘under’ Beneba’s breath – Shriver denies Beneba said it at all]

An almost non-story then, but one which Beneba Clarke finishes with a dramatic flourish as, Dorothy-like, she confronts her now-shrivelled tormentor: “The monster from the Twitter feed: come to life, but not in the way I imagined. Less commanding… Small now, uncertain and kind of lonelylooking. Chin still raised in righteousness but nevertheless, standing completely on her own.”

“Small now, uncertain and kind of lonelylooking… standing completely on her own.” Beneba’s last line was an unmissable own goal, for Shriver was indeed standing on her own, and in the loneliest of places – out on a limb. It was strange too how in this graphic description of verbally beating someone up behind the bike-sheds, Beneba was somehow in her own mind slaying dragons (‘the monster from the Twitter feed’) and cast in the role of plucky heroine. This piece by Clarke – who in a Ted Talk describes herself as “softened by bruises” – was a textbook example of how to damn yourself out of your own mouth. Lucky Shriver, in a way:  you couldn’t get PR much better than this.

2

And, as Shriver pointed out, Beneba Clarke hadn’t attended the event, only read the Tweets, which Clarke quotes at length in her article. 

“Lionel Shriver suffers from a common disease: white arrogance.”

“Wearing a sombrero while discussing her right to be a bigot.”

“Lionel Shriver’s keynote was cringe-worthy, scary, and sad: because racism just is.”

“Lionel Shriver said some gross things.”

“Lionel Shriver has become toxic.”

And finally, from another Twitter-user: “I just walked out of Lionel Shriver’s opening keynote. Never done that before.”

This last tweet was written by journalist Yasmin Abdel-Magied, whose ‘walk out’ was now to suffer the same self-mythologisation as Beneba Clarke’s hit-and-run. And this was where the storm seemed to crack the sides of the teacup it was raging in.

3

Yasmin Abdel-Magied was a Sudanese born naturalised Australian. With undeniable charm and a kind of bumptious energy, she’d had a controversy of her own a few months previously, denounced in the press and Twitter-stormed after declaring Islam the “most feminist religion” and Sharia Law to be “about mercy and kindness”. Abdel-Magied was no slouch at commanding the limelight, and in a Guardian article she wrote about the Brisbane Festival a few days later, wrenching its beam onto herself. Shaking with moral outrage, she recounted her experience of Shriver’s speech – a “poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension” in which “the stench of privilege hung heavy in the air.” It was like a description of the Nuremberg Rallies.

If, in Abdel-Magied’s mind, Shriver was the Goebbels of Letters, then she herself was literature’s answer to Sophie Scholl, bravely challenging the forces of darkness with her head held high. Here, in a typical passage from the article, she describes her walk-out.  

We were 20 minutes into the speech when I turned to my mother, sitting next to me in the front row.

“Mama, I can’t sit here,” I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. “I cannot legitimise this …”

My mother’s eyes bore into me, urging me to remain calm, to follow social convention. I shook my head, as if to shake off my lingering doubts.

As I stood up, my heart began to race. I could feel the eyes of the hundreds of audience members on my back: questioning, querying, judging.

I turned to face the crowd, lifted up my chin and walked down the main aisle, my pace deliberate. “Look back into the audience,” a friend had texted me moments earlier, “and let them see your face.”

The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against the grey plastic of the flooring, harmonising with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question.

“How is this happening?”

Abdel-Magied’s rhetorical question invited, nonetheless, an obvious answer. It was happening, perhaps, because a tried-and-tested practitioner of fiction felt her creativity threatened by self-created dramas like the above. But Abdel-Magied offered other explanations. Shriver was “mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories”; it was a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.” Abdel-Magied continued in fine form, as she “breathed in deeply, trying to make sense of what I was hearing… I was reminded of my “place” in the world”.

The last phrase forced you to remember that Magied was in 2007 named “Young Australian Muslim of the Year”, in 2010 “Young Queenslander of the Year” and in 2015 “Queensland Young Australian of the Year”. Since August 2016 she had been a presenter of the hit TV show “Australia Wide”, also serving on the Council for Australian-Arab Relations. If Magied was to be reminded of her place in the world, this surely was nothing to complain about.

But complain she did, operatically. It wasn’t okay, she said, for a straight white woman to write about a “queer indigenous man…. because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story?” It wasn’t okay, she said, for someone “with the privilege of education and wealth” to write such a story, as it would be transmitted through their own “skewed and biased lens”.