Welcome back, Alison. Sounds like a terrific journey.
I just wanted to add that although he was born in Barbados, Austin
Clarke is a Canadian citizen, so we tend to think of him as a Canadian
writer (we have a lot of such born elsewhere, just as Australia does).
Doug
On 26-Jul-05, at 10:38 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> 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, enterprise… 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
> “clear
> moral judgment” of “right and wrong” in literature, claiming it was
> “impossible” 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
> “PC”. On
> the other hand, I was confronted by Barbardos novelist Austin Clarke’s
> 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 weren’t 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 wasn’t 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 “between”
> 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 can’t 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 (“there is no French rock music,” a Mauritian friend once
> said to
> me, “because French doesn’t have words like ‘splash’.”) 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 “music of the self”,
> 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
> “selling out” 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
> “nation language”, by considering it merely a dialect of English.
> Clarke’s
> 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
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
I give up these words easily, they are easy
to give up, like changing currency before
a border: the cursive line between mountain
and sky, say, as perfect a mismatch as any
made in heaven.
Méira Cook
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