What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (10th Part)

Ha! And did you think that Zadie Smith was going to let us, readers, off the hook? Cracking analysis this week. For parts 1-9, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Note to readers: a novel is a two-way street

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music.The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason.

The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park. What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought?



The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Living in a Bilingual World', to be published on Thursday 12th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

145,240. That's roughly the number of words I read in any given week. And that total does not include publications whose articles I could not access online in order to work out a more accurate estimate. The New Statesman, The Voice, Prospect, The New Yorker, The Economist, these are but some of the weekly or monthly magazines and newspapers I sometimes pick up from my local WH Smith. I also excluded, on purpose, mind you, Libération and Der Spiegel because my forays onto their websites are fewer now. But if I was to add it all up, the actual number would be close to the 270,000 words mark.

270,000 words. I could write a novel with that many vocables. Actually, I always forget that I did start writing one almost eighteen years ago and my tally so far is forty-seven pages. Forty-eight, I managed to finish another scene just now. But, what do these 270,000 words show? They show loyalty to reading certainly and they display a natural craving for knowledge since the bulk of that weekly score is made up by the two newspapers I buy regularly whilst a third is supplied by the novel I am reading at the time of writing this column, "Tess of the D’Urbervilles".

But above all, what my hundred-thousand-plus-a-week-word-count shows is that some people have been starved of information for so long in their lives that we'll just read for the pleasure of reading. It is almost as if we are making up for lost time, or in my case as a Cuban ex-pat, catching up with that past life that happened without me but which is essential in my understanding of the present and the building of the future in my country of destination. It is an attempt to find my way in the current space and time through the power of words.

Shortly after I arrived in London in November '97, I began to commute to West Hampstead. It was then that I acquainted myself with many British newspapers and magazines. Lying scattered on passengers' seats, these various publications turned out to be the litmus test for my subsequent love affair with the world of columns, features, opinions and comments. All of a sudden the 7:57 overground train from King's Cross to Bedford became my private library.

Parallel to this I developed a thirst for visiting bookshops. Whenever possible I would stroll into one of those old and impressive outlets on Charing Cross Road and stay for hours therein. Nearer my previous workplace there was an equally brilliant store as well.

So, twelve years on, what do these 270,000 words mean? Depth, shallowness, earnestness, facetiousness, hope and despondency are but a few of the messages the combination of these words conveys in the passages where they appear. However there's an over-arching sentiment that to me conjures up the need to sit down on the couch with my mate or my favourite mug steaming with hot coffee or mocha to read a newspaper or a book. It is a feeling akin to flying across a vast savannah. Or the equivalent to the emotion that rises up after the rain has stopped and the air feels like the plucked strings of a violin. These 270,000 words bring with them a peaceful kind of happiness that is contradictorily mixed with a type of sadness. Sadness because once I finish reading an article in a magazine or a passage in a book, my short-lived relationship with the author is over. I can go through the same scene or feature again, I can re-read it several times, but I cannot reprise the feeling of anticipation that overwhelmed me before.

Moreover, these 270,000 words are not all top-quality, highbrow (whatever that means these days) writing. There's plently of dross in the mix. And yet, I love how they arrive, many times unannounced, to mingle and rest in front of my eyes. And what would happen if I was to put them in a blender? What would the result be? If we apply the Keith Johnstone's method as seen in his book 'Impro' and which served as the basis for our very own drama group when I was in university, this would the outcome:

Person A (talking to Person B): You're high in the hills of Andalucia, enjoying the views and a rabbit stew, when...
Person B (responding): When Sadler's Wells director Alastair Spalding commissioned four of his associate choreographers to create danceworks "in the spirit of Diaghilev" to celebrate the centenary of the Ballets Russes, the results were always likely to be diverse...
Person A (nodding vigorously): Just use Velcro.
Person B (looking down): Well, it was a little embarrassing. For 40 years this has become my so-called life, and it's a complicated set of issues – the exploitation and genocide of a species, the duplicity of governments, the destruction of an ocean, the poisoning of consumers...
Person A: ...a wife and children, school fees, bills...
Person B (smiling): Ah, control – yes, it's a seductive delusion. Even so, I can totally understand your reticence.
Person A (looking ahead): We will gain more than we will lose by establishing an identity; my tendency would be to risk being more offensive.

And so on. Absurd? Yes, but so is reading 270,000 words per week. I would love to trade my words in the stock market or change them into real money (£270,000? Yeah, dream on!) to be able to visit as many other countries as possible, learn about as many other cultures as it is humanly feasible. But in the meantime, I will keep them with me. They are mine and they make up what I call my life's narrative.



Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'What Makes a Good Writer?', to be published on Tuesday 10th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

Moolaadé (Review)

An important aspect of global interaction between cultures is that there is, whenever possible, a quid pro quo approach to the exchange. Even if this has not been the case in the economic field oftentimes, at least there is succour in the fact that in many nations different cultures co-exist in almost a peaceful manner, for instance, Malaysia.

But when this trade-off fails, the consequences are disastrous. The reasons for this nonsuccess are multifold but there is one that has always made me scratch my head in total amazement, or should I write, shock: that of human rights and how we view them.

I don't think I am alone in thinking that what happened in Guantanamo during the Bush years was an insult to our human integrity. And the fact that the Obama administration has shown no willingness whatsoever to prosecute those responsible for such cruel acts, is the proverbial salt being rubbed in our collective wound. When in the UK the Metropolitan Police were found guilty of assaulting 'The Big Issue' vendor Ian Tomlinson last April, and causing his death, again the phrase 'human rights' was bandied around.

Why, then, the tepid attitude to female genital mutilation? How come we still refer to it as a 'cultural difference? Where is our outrage to this barbaric practice?

Luckily, we have film-makers like the late Ousmane Sembene to put the record straight. In what became the coda of his excellent body of work, 'Moolaadé', the veteran Senegalese director addressed the issue of FGM and how it affected women. When Collé Gallo Ardo Sy agrees to help a group of four-to-nine-year-olds escape their circumcision ritual and gives them protection (Moolaadé), she sets a series of events in motion, the outcome of which she cannot fathom. But then, Collé is in a better position than many of her co-villagers to assess the damage that will be done to these children. She herself went through the painful process many years ago and she still bears both the physical and mental scars. As a consequence she refuses to have her own daughter circumcised when her time comes, which causes yet more friction between her and the elders. Now, Collé is determined to stick up for these girls and shows her bravery by putting a coloured rope across the entrance to her hut. This is the sign for the Moolaadé and can only be revoked by Collé herself.

In this movie Sembene cleverly uses the analogy of this small village in Burkina Fasso to conduct an X-ray of Africa itself and how practices that have come to be accepted without being properly analysed or discussed are at odds with our modern view of the world. It also helps that his approach is neither gratuitous nor visually violent. Instead we learn of two girls who drown in a nearby river when told they have to go through the ritual. We are shown briefly the small knife used for the circumcisions, we hear off-screen cries. Rather than showing actual gore, Sembene lets us imagine what it's like for girls to go through such criminal procedure. But that his work is thorough and deep there is no doubt.

For starters there's Collé's husband. Although he has more than one wife as it is the custom, he allows them all to have a greater degree of independence than that granted to other spouses. When the elders' council meets to reach an agreement on what to do about Collé, her husband is invited, but he is talked to, rather than consulted. The message is clear, sort out your wife, or deal with the consequences.

Also, the pace of the movie is not as fast as most Western flicks. We are let in on the daily life of a village in Africa and the contrast between how this continent is seen by the first world and by an African film-maker is very stark. No condescension or patronising attitude, Sembene just lets the camera roll. We see women listening to their radios with such fervour that it reminded me of a similar scenario in late 80s Cuba when at 11am most people would be glued to their transistors listening to the famous soap 'El Derecho de Nacer' (The Right to Be Born) on the Cuban-state-censored, Miami-based Radio Marti. We become first-hand witnesses to the banter in which Mercenaire, a travelling trader reputed to be a ladies' man, and the village women indulge. We take front row seats at the ceremony celebrating the arrival from Paris of the son of one of the elders'.

But under this veneer of placidity we encounter a world fraught with tension. And the consequences of this conflict are tragic. Although I was not totally convinced by the ending - thought it a bit over the top -, it did show African women in a different category from the one in which they are usually put. Rather than accepting the elders' decree, Collé rallies a group of women and together they march down to a council meeting to demand that the practice of female genital mutilation stop at once.

According to the World Health Organisation, one of the bodies whose website I checked during my preparations to present the documentary 'Until the Violence Stops' a couple of years ago, FGM 'includes procedures that intentionally alter or injure female genital organs for non-medical reasons.' According to the Human Rights Act 1998, under its 'Right to Life' article, 'Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.'

With 'Moolaadé' Ousmane Sembene seriously questions the validity of ancient traditions in today's Africa and places the sacrosanct right to uphold human life above so-called 'cultural differences'. I strongly recommend this film.

Note: I'm sorry that the trailer has Spanish subtitles, I could not find a better one on youtube. Thanks.



Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music' to be published on Sunday 8th November at 10am (GMT)