Or back in beyond, depending on one's relationship to the Antipodes.  I have
had the most marvellous time basically mainlining poetry over the past six
weeks, as well as a fascinating interlude in Norwich at a symposium at the
University of East Anglia.  They asked me to write a journalistic report on
it, which I did, and paste below for anyone here interested (with apologies
to the sensitive for the tabloid air).  I expect most of you have caught up
with the doings in Cork at Soundeye and perhaps also the Cambridge Poetry
Summit, which just happened to be on while I was in Cambridge, and so could
attend.  Fantastic events, especially for me, since I've been so poetry
starved for the past year or so.

Hope all is well with all of you.  I'll be a listowner again once Randolph
wakes up and makes me one.  Meanwhile, greetings!

All the best

Alison

Like many of the writers who turned up to the University of East Anglia last
month for the New Writing Worlds Symposium, my initial response had been a
(rather pleased) feeling of bafflement.  What was this event? Did we have to
wear togas? Why did they ask me? Most of all, what was it all for?

It turned out that we were taking part in a superior kind of laboratory
experiment. What happens when 40 writers from around the world are put in
the same room for three days and asked to talk to each other?

Cynics might expect blood on the floor.  Writers are, after all, rumoured to
have gigantic and fragile egos, and to shut 40 of them in the same room for
hours on end could be a foolhardy, not to say perilous, enterpriseŠ But
sadly for the bloodthirsty, the symposium had a remarkably fraternal
atmosphere.  Our conversations were marked by a sense of mutual courtesy, a
curiosity and a willingness to listen; most of all by a recognition that, as
writers, we had a fundamental passion in common.

This is not to gloss over some interesting moments of frisson, where
polarities intransigently revealed themselves, most obviously around the
Israel/Palestine axis. But there were also differences that transcended
nationality. For example, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua demanded ³clear
moral judgment² of ³right and wrong² in literature, claiming it was
³impossible² to find in contemporary texts. This caused squirms of
discomfort among the younger writers in the room, including myself, whose
ideas of morality might be precisely located in those areas ­ ideologies of
otherness, feminist practice, and so on ­ which Yehoshua labelled ³PC². On
the other hand, I was confronted by Barbardos novelist Austin Clarke¹s
enthusiastic endorsement of the banning of The Merchant of Venice in Canada.

The weekend was full of these kinds of contradictions and unexpected
connections. We weren¹t being asked to perform for a public; apart from a
few interested observers, nobody was watching.  This event was, supposedly,
for the benefit of the writers themselves. Speaking entirely egocentrically,
it was a luxury: three days of fascinating conversation, with food laid on.

Such a frankly idealistic event is novel enough.  But to make things even
more interesting, we were a diverse bunch, linguistically, culturally and
generationally.  The symposium included writers of all ages from a dizzying
variety of places ­ India, Nigeria, Thailand, Bulgaria, Estonia, Canada,
Egypt, the Caribbean, the list went on and on ­ so that in some ways, as
someone joked, it was a little like the UN.

In a strange way, I wasn¹t untypical of the writers gathered there.  I am an
Australian writer and resident, although I am not a naturalised Australian
citizen.  Like many Australians, a nation of immigrants, my provenance has
always been a little confused: I am a British citizen, born in South Africa,
briefly resident in England and then an immigrant to Australia when I was
seven years old.  The result is that I feel very much ³between² cultures,
neither English nor Australian. This is a very contemporary biography ­ one
of the striking things about the past century has been the vast movements of
people across the world, for economic betterment, or because of the ravages
of war.  But although the geographical distances I travelled as a child were
enormous, I never made the migration out of my own language.

I can¹t imagine losing my language.  Since I was little, I have thanked the
gods for allowing me to be born speaking English. I love its Anglo-Saxon
harshness (³there is no French rock music,² a Mauritian friend once said to
me, ³because French doesn¹t have words like Œsplash¹.²)  I love how that
harshness can metamorphosise into a lush sensuality. I love that English is
a bastard language, absorbent and transformational, flexible and tough. It
is my language, the language of my childhood and my history and my poetry,
and perhaps the only place ­ if language can be a place, which for writers
it surely is ­ where I might be said to feel at home.

At the symposium, there were writers whose biographies of deracination made
my personal experience of cultural shock ­ which is significant enough to me
to have commandeered a good deal of my own writing ­ seem trivial stuff.
Choman Hardi, for example, was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, but her family was
forced to flee to Iran when she was one month old.  After a childhood of
lost homes ­ leaving behind the furniture, as she says in one of her poems ­
she has lived in England since 1993. Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet,
was exiled in Cairo from his birthplace in Ramallah for three decades.   Eva
Hoffman grew up in Cracow before she moved to the US.  She spoke movingly of
how losing her native tongue was like losing the ³music of the self², those
embedded and embodied memories which come with our early acquisitions of
language. 

All of us, native speakers or not, had varying relationships to the English
language. Some, like Eva Hoffman, Choman Hardi, Kapka Kassabova and George
Szirtes, write in English, a language which is not their first tongue.
Others, like the Mexican novelist Ignacio Padilla or the Croatian writer
Dubravka Ugresic, exist in translation. Almost all the non-English speaking
writers spoke of the necessity for a writer to exist in English if he or she
is to gain an international readership. As the poet Hasso Krull pointed out,
in a country like Estonia, a nation of only 1.3 million people, this
necessity is especially urgent.

But to write in English is not necessarily to orient oneself towards the
English-speaking world.  The Nigerian poet Ogaga Ifowodo said that he writes
in English because he considers his first audience Nigerians, and English is
the only language that all the different language groups there have in
common: if he wrote in his first language, he would be understood by only a
small proportion of his people. Amit Chaudhuri spoke of the tensions
inherent in writing in English in India, where to do so can be seen as
³selling out² to the Western world. This perception, he said, confuses the
creative and necessary estrangement of the act of writing with the
fetishisation of exoticism.

Austin Clarke spoke of English as a colonising language, of how it had
marginalised his native tongue, which the poet Kamu Brathwaite has termed
³nation language², by considering it merely a dialect of English. Clarke¹s
project is to, as it were, recolonise English, to reinvent it so it speaks
his own tongue. French novelist Phillipe Vasset pointed out how English has
internationalised itself in business speak, the dialect of emails and
conferences and computer manuals, and suggested that rather than deploring
this, writers might be able to exploit it.
 
There was so much more, and it will take me weeks to absorb its impact. What
became increasingly clear ­ apart from the frustration that attends on the
necessary truncation, for reasons of time, of a hundred fascinating
conversations ­ was that there are no simple truths anywhere.  And that
perhaps the finest irony of Empire is that English no longer belongs to the
English.

Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com