From China Miéville's bullishness about the novel to Ma Thida's struggles against censorship, 20 keynote speeches over the course of the last year made for a fascinating conversation about the state of literature today
The Edinburgh World Writers' conference had its final blast in Melbourne last week, where Aboriginal writer Tony Birch made the case for a post-national literature, recalling the life-changing impact Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave had on him as a 15-year-old on his way home after he was expelled from school.
"No book left the impression on me that Kes did. I was convinced it had travelled the globe to find me. From the first pages, when Billy wakes in the early morning in his damp, crowded room and is teased and abused by his brother, I felt more than empathy for him. I was sure I was Billy."
Birch's is the final keynote address of the 20 we've run since the conference began at last year's Edinburgh international book festival. In his opening address, China Miéville described the novel as "tenacious as a cockroach" – and a year later he saw no sign that the cockroach was losing its grip. So what has this year-long global talking shop, from 14 festivals around the world, revealed?
The discussions were structured as a series of questions, based on those raised at the original Edinburgh writers' conference, in 1962. Speakers had a choice of five themes: censorship, style v content, the future of the novel, whether or not fiction should be political and if there was such a thing as a national literature. At the Edinburgh opening, writers challenged the relevance of these questions to fiction in the 21st century. What emerged during the year was how differently the host cultures prioritised the questions.
In Berlin, the German writer Georg Klein considered the future of the novel, concluding: "If I am not deceiving myself, then in recent decades a certain pressure of expectation has very much diminished. The novel no longer has to provide the guiding thread linking a historically tamed past with a critically comprehended present, a string of knots by which one is then supposed to feel one's way forward into the already looming future." So far, so post postmodern.
Two South African writers – one white and one black – swooped on the politics of literature. "In South Africa, with its history of colonialism and apartheid, each creative work makes a political point," wrote the Afrikaner poet and essayist Antjie Krog. "Whether focusing on injustice or universal loneliness, here, one makes a political point. One is either part of what former Nobel prize committee member Horace Engdahl calls 'the great dialogue of literature about the improvement of humanity', or suggesting that one doesn't particularly care for it."
The academic Njabulo S Ndebele, meanwhile, picked away at the knotty issue of what "political" meant in the new South Africa. Under apartheid the role of literature in South Africa was clear – it was a weapon of struggle – but after 18 years of democracy, "we are more likely to see literature that 'politicises' by deepening of awareness".
In Lisbon, the bestselling Portuguese writer José Rodrigues dos Santos made a similar point, while facetiously invoking Agatha Christie's Poirot, writing: "Can Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – a simple, albeit interesting, crime investigation – somehow be a political novel? The book does present us with a political message, though probably not even its author is aware of it. And that message is simple: thou shalt not kill. How more political can a message get? Thou shalt not kill is a political order given by the highest ruler of them all, God Almighty himself. It is a sheer political message, created for social management."
In Canada and Belgium, questions of national identity were pressing for writers from minorities. In Toronto, the novelist Miriam Toews mused on the fact that her Mennonite identity was more interesting to the world than her Canadian one. That identification carried with it expectations, which became clear when she chose to set her sixth novel, Irma Voth, among a Mennonite community in Mexico. "I've come to realise that what these Mennonites, both conservative and secular, want from me is my piety. Not just loyalty to the community, but allegiance to whatever transcendent authority unifies the community," she said.
As an immigrant, the Belgian-Moroccan writer Rachida Lamrabet found himself on the outside of just such a cultural consensus, which revealed itself at the level of a single word. He had recently declined an invitation to the funeral of a word, when the city of Ghent had decided to bury the word allochtoon. "Allochtoon", he explained, "is from Greek origin and means 'someone who came from elsewhere', in opposite to the word autochtoon, which is used to indicate the Flemish people and means 'pure, came from the land'. In this society, there is a semantic division on the grounds of ethnic origin: you either are an allochtoon, from the outside, or an autochtoon, from the land."
The issues played out on the ground as well. Marina Salandy-Brown, director of Trinidad's Bocas festival, told the Guardian books podcast that recognition from the international writing community had been strategically important to a three-year-old festival that was still finding its feet financially and intellectually. The question "Is there a national literature?" had particular resonance in a region that spanned 1,000 miles, boasted two living Nobel laureates, but had very different island cultures, she said.
In China, the Scottish travel writer Sophie Cook found her speech had mysteriously disappeared from the podium after she caused an uproar by quoting from the imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo's June Fourth Elegies, about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. That small drama chimed dolefully with Burmese writer Ma Thida's passionate account, at the Cooler Lumpur festival, of her struggle against censorship, which landed her in jail for five years.
For Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh international book festival, one of the high points was Congo's Brazzaville festival. "I was particularly impressed with just how engaged the writing community in sub-Saharan Africa is, not only with the Francophone world but with the Anglophone world, too. There's an extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge of literary issues and an amazingly powerful belief in the importance of literature to help them understand the changing nature of post-colonial Africa."
You can read the full speeches on the World Writers' conference website.
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