In April 2011 I was a panellist at a London
Book Fair event on racial diversity in publishing, chaired by Shreela Ghosh,
the former director of the Free Word Centre and current Director of Arts in
South Asia for the British Council. The audience was very international, as
befits a major publishing event (though not as major as Frankfurt in October),
but 99% white. Still, by their presence in the large hall, they had shown their
interest and concern about this issue. The panel was all non-white and made up of
literary scouts, journalists, novelists, arts leaders, literary magazine
editors and commentators. All of us described that moment when, feeling
successful in our individual careers and thinking that things must be taking a
turn for the better, we looked around a high profile event we were
participating in and realised that we were the only non-white people in the
room.
What emerged from the discussion was not a
catalogue of outright racist incidents, insults or openly discriminatory and
prejudicial events. It was more a question of types and stereotypes, of
individual industry success stories like those of the major US publisher Sonny Mehta against a
general backdrop of homogeneity in terms of race, class and educational
background. At the same time, however, there has been a rise in acclaim for truly global
authorial voices from Arundhati Roy to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kerry Young to
Chibundu Onuzo, Ruth Ozeki to Xialuo Guo, Nadifa Mohamed to Chika Unigwe, Yiyun
Li to NoViolet Bulawayo. The 2013 Man Booker Prize shortlist was hailed for its
diversity and variety and said to be the best in the prize’s history. From this
year forward, the rules of this defining English-language prize have been widened in order to be as
inclusive as possible. I am a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation and have written in full support of this widening here.
Resistance against this inclusiveness and
globalisation has come from some unexpected quarters, and has been amazingly
transparent. I was shocked when, after the announcement of the 2013 Man Booker Prize
shortlist and the new eligibility guidelines, Philip Hensher wrote
a Guardian article isolating the three non-white women on the list, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki and NoViolet Bulawayo, and systematically, casually and gratuitously
trashed them. He later picked
another non-white woman, Xialuo Guo, who commented at the Jaipur festival
this year that the worshipping of the English language (and, specifically,
American literature) should not dominate the world literary scene. Hensher
wrote, personally, nastily and incorrectly, “by the conventional standards
of the English-language novel, Xiaolu Guo's work in English is poor” and that “it
would take some nerve... if she were implying that what is needed is an entire
change of critical standards in order to recognise her own work as a
masterpiece.” He added, creepily and threateningly, “I saw Guo in the green
room, looking jolly pleased with herself.”
At the same time there is a much broader cultural
trend happening not only across literature but also theatre, television and film, of non-white talent achieving a certain level of success before colliding
with the racial bar, hitting the glass ceiling, sliding off it and leaving the
UK to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in America. This has been most
obviously apparent if we look at the careers of TV and film performers like
Idris Elba, Archie Panjabi, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Yet it’s also happening behind the scenes. The
internationally acclaimed film-maker Pratibha Parmar, whose latest work, the
documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, has been winning awards at film
festivals all over the world, has also relocated to America, where her career
has exploded. Several weeks ago the British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, now the artistic director of Baltimore’s Centre Stage theatre, gave an excellent interview in the Guardian, in which he spelled out the process of steady loss
of faith and pointed out how much talent the UK had let go of because of it. I
Tweeted him that day, “I too am
contemplating leaving the UK permanently. #glassceiling.” I added, “This is not
about failing but about flatlining, despite all one’s talent, shrewdness,
strength and application.”
I stand by those words and by the article I wrote a few years ago about hitting the glass ceiling. I am excellent at my job. Either I am offered a regular post, with a title, with a role, in an institution, with a contract, with a salary, commensurate with my expertise and experience, within the next 18 months, or I am permanently leaving the UK to join any society that is looking forward and outwards, not inwards and backwards.
After 21 years of
an enjoyable and diverse freelance career, many small opportunities, a lot of
working for free and a lot of running around town being delighted and
delightful, there comes a time when you have to sit down, do the
maths and do some counting. Who is getting the big jobs, the permanent jobs,
and what are they being paid? Am I running as hard as I can, just to stay in
the same place? Why am I the only woman/non-white person/both on the panel? Why
did Mumsnet ask me so warmly and kindly to join their bloggers network, then
produce Blogfest events in 2012 and 2013, each of which featured more than 50
writers, journalists, presenters, commentators, critics, experts and bloggers, of both sexes, which were 100% white both years? Do they think non-white people can’t write,
speak or think? Look at the recent lineup - it just beggars belief.
It is easy to enjoy your daily life so much, and be swayed by people being nice to your face, that you lose sight of the reality of who is being given the opportunities,
respect, representation, remuneration, payment, platform and permanence, and
who is used casually, tokenistically, without tenure, without assurances, paid
a token amount, kept at the margins and strung along insincerely without gaining any
traction.
It bothered all of us on the publishing
panel that the globalisation among creators and audiences, voices and debates,
was not reflected within British publishing itself. We advocated the
mainstreaming of real diversity within publishing as an industry, so that the future body of professionals from agents and editors to publishers and PRs would look a lot more varied than the large audience we saw before us and comprise individuals of promise and passion from all backgrounds, not just those who
attended elite universities, had the family funds to sustain unpaid internships
or the social connections to gain casual appointments to the industry.
When we returned to the question of non-white authors’ narratives, a story emerged of fixed set-ups, stereotypes,
expectations and assumptions. We all knew what the cliché narratives were:
forbidden love among the lotus blossoms at monsoon time; how I became a terrorist; how I almost
became a terrorist but not quite; my arranged marriage wasn’t all that bad;
seduced and betrayed in a veil; I’m British and my parents don’t understand me;
people of different classes fall in love; I was a geisha/concubine in the
Forbidden City/floating world/jade palace and it wasn’t that bad at all; I was a
geisha and it was very bad; I want to do this but my parents want me to do
that; people of different religions fall in love; British multiculturalism is a
tricky thing but still really interesting; look at all the different kinds of
people you can get in London; I’m British and I don’t quite feel at home here, there or anywhere; I’m British and I’m really learning to appreciate my
parents’ heritage; moving across hemispheres is hard and weird; non-white
people take drugs too; brown cities are just as exciting as white cities; I was
kidnapped as a child and forced to see a foreign city from the bottom up;
foreign food is a metaphor for family, heritage, life, love and everything.
The panel also discussed the issue of
tokenism, of the maintenance of the appearance of diversity by having a stock
amount of ‘international’ writers producing established and clichéd narratives
for essentially bigoted audiences who wanted their prejudices, ignorance and stereotypes confirmed rather than
destroyed. “I was working as a literary scout and I found an amazing novelist
who happened to be from Antigua,” said one panellist. “I
mentioned them to an editor at a publishing house, who said, ‘Oh, sorry, we
already have one of those.'” I remember having brunch in 2011 with a highly
impressive, vivacious, cool editor at a major publishing house. We were getting
on like a house of fire and suddenly she burst out, “I love you! You tick so
many boxes!”
In a must-read article about whether
the Western publishing industry is institutionally racist, PP Wong, editor
in chief of Banana Writers,
describes a South Pacific Asian writer being rejected by a major publishing house despite
impressing the editors there, because “the novel does not seem to fit into the
genre of our current Asian authors”, as if race is a genre in itself and all
writers of that race/genre must obey its racial/generic rules. The gaucheness, stereotyping and casual, unthinking racism of the editor’s comment makes me cringe. PP Wong
adds in her report,
According to Creative Skillset ... just 4% of people in the publishing industry in England and Wales are Black/Asian/Minority/Ethnic.
Some commentators are also wary of the triumphalist celebration
of British authorial diversity as being insincere, trend led and transient. The
Guardian recently featured a nuanced essay by novelist Bernardine Evaristo, one
of Britain’s finest and most distinctive voices, whose most recent novel Mr
Loverman was one of the strongest fiction publications of 2013. The title of the essay
was Why
Is It Still Rare To See A Black British Woman With Literary Influence?
Evaristo pointed out that while a few years ago there was a strong move towards
a celebration of politicised, race-aware work by Zadie Smith, Diane Evans,
Andrea Levy, Monica Ali and others, this had now been replaced by “polite
acceptance”, despite exceptional and successful women like children’s laureate Malorie Blackman, author of the stunning speculative series Noughts and Crosses. And –
as an aside – while every other Young Adult literary hit from The Hunger Games
to Twilight to I Am Number Four to The Spiderwick Chronicles to The Dark is Rising to Divergent to Ender's Game to the Inkspell books to
Beautiful Creatures to Mortal Instruments to the Bone Season series has been put into development
with major film studios, the completely mixed cast of Noughts and Crosses still
awaits its screen life. Meanwhile, even a cursory look at the books pages of
The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and the London Men’s Review of Men’s Books shows that despite one or two respectful mentions,
the general demographic of representation is still extremely homogeneous.
This is in addition to the extreme misogynistic discrimination perpetrated
against women writers by the editors of major books pages, many of whom are
themselves women.
I marvel at the
countless insults which have been used over the years to justify the trashing,
ignoring, undermining, exclusion and marginalisation of our work not only as
authors in all genres, disciplines, styles and approaches but also as critics,
reviewers and contributors.
The insults used to
justify cultural discrimination against us often contradict each other. We are
slandered as shy, unambitious, narrow, nebulous, generic, unoriginal, too
mainstream to be exciting or too niche to be broadly interesting. If we excel
at romance, it is because we are pathetically limited by masochistic and unoriginal
gender cliches. If we excel at history, it is because we are daftly sentimental.
If we excel at science, it is only because we are exceptional, unlike the
majority of women. If we excel at fiction, it is because fiction is easier to
magic up at the kitchen table in our pretty little heads than the hard,
confronting truths of non-fiction. If we sell a lot of copies it's because we flog undemanding trash to other women just as stupid as us. If we don't sell much it's because we don't have what it takes. If we excel at non-fiction it is because we
lack the imagination, genius and creative spark necessary for fiction.
Obviously that's all
bunk. Where women are undermined and excluded, misogyny and man-worshipping are the reasons. All the
slanders thrown into women writers' faces are lies propelled by malice.
To ignore us is to ignore half the population, the half that sees beyond
surface appearances, experiences the truth and dares to speak it. And it
is women writers of colour who are able to cut through, describe and express
the intricacies of the world we live in, because we exist at the intersection
of the sexism and racism which have (in part) produced the power structures
that dominate and destroy that world. We suffer it and are subject to it, even as we
observe it. These things are the source both of our pain and our insight.
Despite flashpoints
like the 2013 Man Booker shortlist and the trendiness of the multi-culti moment,
overall trends still work against us: prospective works will be subject to narrow
and stereotyped judgements; the people championing our work within the industry
if it does get taken on will be operating in a virtually all-white environment; when it enters the market the Western cultural tendency will be to favour familiar Orientalist,
exoticised, sexist narratives about suffering, oppression and dislocation; and
as women (let alone women of colour) we have far less chance than male writers
of receiving reviews, interviews, coverage or invitations to major book festivals
to discuss our work. Although one book of ours might be published, the chance
to create a career, build a lifelong body of work which is acknowledged, made part of the canon, taken seriously by the broader culture and incorporated
into established literary history is far less than male and white peers.
It is for all these reasons that Bernardine Evaristo and I, along with Bonnie Greer, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and
others patronise the S I Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by black
and Asian women writers in the UK.
The prize is
awarded every two years. The first award was made in October 2012 to Minoli Salgado for A Little Dust on the Eyes, and presented the Ilkley
Literature Festival. Every year, three prize winners receive £2,000, £750 and
£250 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, as well as support through Peepal Tree Press's
Inscribe programme for writer development. The first prize entry receives
serious consideration for publication by Peepal Tree Press.
I was lucky to be granted an exclusive
interview by writer and arts project co-ordinator Irenosen Okojie, the S
I Leeds Literary Prize advocate, who told me more.
What inspired the formation of the prize?
There’s a big disparity between what we see
reflected on the shelves and the wonderful diverse voices that are out there. The
prize aims to address that imbalance somewhat and to provide a platform for
marginalized voices that are largely ignored. Walk into your local bookshop and
it’s glaring. It’s as if female writers of colour are invisible bar a few
exceptions. As for the amount of black and Asian male writers published these days,
the situation is even more dire. This is an issue at every level in publishing.
There are also very few black and Asian professionals working within the
industry which has an impact in terms of who the gatekeepers are. Who gets to
decide what voices should be heard and which stories are worth publishing? I
know of only two black literary agents, Elise Dillsworth and Susan Yearwood and
five independent publishers that publish inclusively; Peepal Tree Press,
Valerie Brandes of Jacaranda Books, Bobby Nayyar (Equip and Limehouse),
Rosemarie Hudson (HopeRoad Publishing) and Smash & Grab. If we have more
diversity within the infrastructure, that might filter through to work that
gets commissioned. A national prize like the SI Leeds Literary Prize is about
celebrating the voices of black and Asian women.
Do you feel the current publishing scene
lags behind what is really happening in terms of what writers are doing?
Yes I do. Publishing is often slow to
change. I remember when the digital explosion first happened. Publishers seemed
sceptical at first but slowly came round, now you have a few of the bigger
houses with digital imprints such as Bloomsbury’s global digital imprint Spark and
Little Brown’s digital imprint Blackfriars. Also, self publishing no longer has
the stigma it once did; many writers are finding ways to get their voices out
there with several being picked up after finding self publishing success. There
are more independent publishing houses cropping up, taking risks mainstream
houses won’t and publishing daring, innovative writing like the brilliant And
Other Stories and Galley Beggar Press. Many writers are taking ownership of
their careers and not just leaving everything to the publishing houses. They’re
on twitter, facebook, making book trailers and maximising digital opportunities.
They’re connecting with other writers internationally and tapping into
opportunities. Equally, publishers could create more accessible pathways for
aspiring authors. The industry seems to mostly care about authors who are
brands. They’re used to doing things in a traditional way. Nobody’s saying they
should get rid of traditional methods entirely but why not explore other ways
of sourcing new writing? Like partnering with any of the writing development
agencies and running a programme or Editors getting out to literary nights such
as the Brixton BookJam which does a great job showcasing a wealth of talent.
Writers are getting out there; they’re at festivals, spoken word nights,
setting up online hubs, finding creative ways of reaching audiences.
Why are prizes important? Aren’t there too
many prizes?
Prizes are important because they profile
books that may otherwise struggle to reach a bigger audience. For example, the
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize highlights some of the brilliant translated
works of fiction many book lovers may be unaware of, unless you’re somebody who
actively seeks translated foreign works. There are several prizes but I don’t
think there are too many and there certainly isn’t one like the SI Leeds
Literary Prize. It’s uniquely positioned and the only one of it’s kind. I’m
sure there’ll be some grumblings that it’s a prize which favours writers of
colour. The reality is, it’s absolutely necessary. If publishing were a level
playing field, there wouldn’t be a need for it. We’re thrilled to be able
create opportunities for writers we engage with through the prize. It’s not
just about giving cash awards but the developmental support they receive.
What are the barriers to women of black and
Asian origin in beginning and maintaining their writing careers?
It’s a complex issue on several levels.
Some editors will say they don’t receive many submissions from black and Asian
women which may or may not be true. From a writer’s perspective, not only is
publishing very difficult to break into but throw in race and it feels like an
even steeper climb. It doesn’t seem like the industry is very receptive bar
some exceptions. Also, there is the risk factor. Certain editors may not
necessarily think about commissioning diversely, they just commission writing
to their taste. Others might do, but they limit the amount of black and Asian
writers because they may see it as a risk. We’re all human beings and good
stories transcend so I think there needs to be some myth busting done at both
ends of the spectrum. There are editors who have commissioned black and Asian
female writers in the past and now. The issue is that it doesn’t happen often
enough and there are authors of colour whose books have sold very well. There’s
also an element of things aligning at the right time; getting the right agent,
the right editor and a publishing house invested in the career of the writer.
How many years has the prize been going and
who were the women winners?
It’s a biannual prize which has been
running since 2012. The first winner was Minoli Salgado for her novel A Little Dust on the Eyes. It’s due out
later this year so people should keep an eye out for it. The prize has stayed
connected to previous short listed writers and is passionate about creating
opportunities for them. We’re also open for submissions for this year’s prize
so I’d really encourage people to submit!
What does the prize aim to achieve for
individual writers?
To build their confidence, to let them know
there’s a space out there for their work, encourage them to keep working on
their craft, to produce opportunities connecting them with audiences, to create
pathways and support networks that take them through the tricky transitions of
realising their publishing dream.
Finally, how would you like the prize to
develop?
I’d like it to continue to grow in terms of
profile and what it does for writers. Maybe have a short story prize as well
and to keep forming strong, strategic partnerships with organizations and
sponsors who are on the same page and keen to see more diversity in publishing.
