A case for literary contamination
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jane Camens
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Jane Camens' biography and other articles by this writer
What I am now is an interesting deformity. I am not Asian and never will be. Even if I forget it sometimes, no one else does. But I am not what I was before I came here, either. Something in me has changed, or grown.
Karen Connelly, Touch the Dragon
Summer 1998, the year after the handover of Hong Kong, a Chinese translator, Martha Cheung, produced an anthology of translated short stories by Hong Kong writers. In her foreword she wrote that local people did not recognise their home in fictional representations of it. ‘A plethora of images has been imposed and superimposed on Hong Kong – by Western writers as [well as] those from the Mainland.' One author described Hong Kong as the gossiped-about ‘female protagonist in a pulp fiction ... represented, [but with] no voice to tell her own story.' It was time, Martha Cheung declared, for the people of Hong Kong to tell their own stories.
That summer, the British Council flew half a dozen writers to the newly Chinese-administered territory to read to those of us who lived there. They came not only to tell their stories but also to teach creative writing. Among them was former literary editor of The Observer and Independent on Sunday, Blake Morrison. I was writing for the South China Morning Post and asked Morrison what chance writers living in Asia had of finding a publisher in the West, to share their versions of reality with readers beyond their own home.
Morrison saw the direction in which publishing was heading in Britain. ‘I can understand that living here as a writer you'd feel you're living on the margins. But in England now, the margins are the centre. This is where the action is. We feel now in England we can't be so insular and inward-looking.' Writers open doors to other worlds. Or as London literary agent Toby Eady said: ‘Books are a quiet and thoughtful way of sharing an understanding of each other's cultures.' Twenty years ago Eady took a gamble that paid off. He backed an unknown Chinese writer, Jung Chang. Together with a translator, he worked on her manuscript for seven years until an editor at Harper-Collins published it under the title Wild Swans.
‘That editor's courage probably made News Corporation's HarperCollins more money and profit than David Beckham's ghosted biography,' Eady said. He now seeks manuscripts from Asian writers and has found publishers for a stable of Chinese authors whose books have sold well. ‘What they are writing today is exciting, real, and new,' he said.
Until two years ago, Eady was telling writers in China that if they wanted a general readership outside China they would do well to seek publication in Australia and New Zealand. Wild Swans sold nine million copies around the world in thirty-two languages and won the British Book of the Year in 1993 but, according to Eady, ‘It was the Australian response to Jung Chang at the writers festival in Sydney that made HarperCollins wake up.' Until the book sold 200,000 copies in Australia, the publishers did not know what they had.
Eady no longer bothers trying to push new Asian writers to Australian publishing houses. Risk-averse publishers baulk at taking on unknown writers from beyond Australia's borders. Allen & Unwin's Patrick Gallagher said two years ago, ‘I don't think an Australian market would support an Asian fiction list. I don't want to sound negative. Most publishers would probably say they'd be very receptive, but whether it's cost effective is another matter.' He pointed to the difficulties of distribution in Asia. Indeed, as Eady discovered, there is no national distribution in China. Each major city has its own publishers who print and distribute locally. Printing is cheap, distribution is easy – and piracy is endemic.
Eady now takes his authors directly to Picador Asia, which he helped set up. The idea behind Picador Asia was that it would secure world rights and publish simultaneously throughout Asia, the UK, Australia and North America. Pan Macmillan had an Asian sales representative based in Hong Kong for a couple of years before starting the new imprint. Evidently, selling in Asia, and marketing Asian writers internationally, made it worth the financial risk to start a new list.
Australia set the pace, but our publishers are risk-averse and shortsighted, still in colonial shackles to UK publishing houses. At a recent meeting with Random House Australia I was told that the UK office would be more likely than the Australian office to take the initiative and introduce an Asian list. Nikki Christer, now publishing director at Random House Australia said while, as publisher of literary fiction at Pan Macmillan that Australian publishers ‘need to spread our wings and get out there, but I don't know what we can do to make opportunities more available.'
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE PROBLEM lies less with not knowing how to make opportunities available but more with the desire to finance efforts in Asia. Publishers who want to market their authors and brands in Asia need to establish a much deeper presence there. Sending authors to Asia is just one step. Our publishing houses also have to establish brand recognition by getting their books on the shelves, or find other ways to establish relationships with emerging writers in the region, most of whom are ignorant about Australian publishers. Failure to do this amounts to overlooking the world's most populous and increasingly literate market. By 2050, Asia is forcast to account for more than five billion of the world's estimated nine billion people.
It is difficult to argue that Australian readers are not interested in books from or about Asia. Unwin Trust Fellowship holder Hannah Westland noted in her report into the relationship between British and Australian publishers that some of Britain's largest publishing houses use Australia to trial new writing from Asia. Shereen Baig, export sales director for HarperCollins UK, said that the books she chooses to sell to Australia are those appealing to the Australian market with its substantial European and Asian population. These include Irish, Italian ‘and fiction with a particularly international slant, most specifically South-East Asian'. Novels like Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta and The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw were, according to Baig, initially more successful in Australia than in the UK.
Australia's choice of books says something about who we are, what intrigues us, and what we identify with. Australia is increasingly a hybridised, cosmopolitan nation.
My particular interest is cosmopolitan writing – writing that bridges cultures and takes readers into different ways of thinking and being in the world. The reality is that most contemporary Asian writers whose books have sold well internationally have spent considerable time in the West. Some return home with their perceptions altered, finding they can straddle realities. Other excellent Asian writers, successful in their own countries, have never made it into print in the West. The lack of good translators is not the only barrier to local work being picked up internationally. The writers may fail to engage a foreign readership because their references are too unfamiliar – too dense for foreign readers without an explanatory guide. While parochial experience is the basis of all good literature, writers who draw from a well of knowledge beyond the parochial can offer outsiders entry into other worlds from a privileged vantage point.
Princeton philosophy professor, Ghana-born part-English Kwame Anthony Appiah, uses the term ‘contamination' to describe the kind of writing I am talking about. He puts the case strongly for cultural contamination. He appropriates the notion from Roman littérateurs who, in the second century BC, used that term to describe the mode of writing of Publius Terentius Afer, whom scholars today know as Terence. Terence was an African slave born in Carthage and taken to Rome. He wrote witty, elegant plays that incorporated earlier Greek plays. His work is among the few examples left of early Roman comedy.
Salman Rushdie has written about the shifting ground beneath the feet of displaced, culturally hybridised or ‘contaminated' writers, a condition he suggests enables some to find ‘new angles at which to enter reality'. More recently, Mohsin Hamid describes, in his brilliant Man Booker short-listed novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the ‘different way of observing' required when stepping back into his Pakistani homeland.
This sort of double vision also affects Westerners (and Southerners, in the case of Australians and New Zealanders) who become acculturated into Asia. The British writer James Hamilton-Paterson describes how reality becomes labile. In his novel, Ghosts of Manila, he writes of one of his female characters: ‘Manila's effect on her was to blur the fond image she had of her own country ... A part of her began to unravel slightly ... England began to feel shapeless, like an aspirin dropped in water, hazy and commonplace.' Christopher Koch, too, talked of shadow worlds, and used the wayang as a metaphor throughout his Indonesian novel The Year of Living Dangerously.
Some critics say that writers who are not entirely immersed in a parochial world – whose values and world-view are influenced by other realities – produce writing that is somehow inauthentic. Globalisation, they suggest, produces the literary equivalent of Asia Lite – a form of narrative that is virtually guaranteed to be insight-free. The argument was summed up by Akash Kapur in the New York Times: ‘A spectre haunts Indian writing – the spectre of authenticity. In the pages of magazines and journals, at soirées and (sparsely attended) book parties in New Delhi, literature is being judged by a specious metric of cultural and national loyalty. According to this standard, it is in the work of writers who live in India and write in an Indian language (and thus have trouble finding a Western publisher) and not, to quote one critic, in sell-out "export-quality prose" that the country's authentic voice is to be found.'
VS Naipaul, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh – all ‘sell-out' Oxbridgeeducated writers – have been targets of jealousy and scorn among Indian writers, partly because they do not live in India. With cutting derision, Indian writer and journalist Suresh Kohli told the BBC World Service's Arts in Action program that, while authors such as Sir Vidia had raised the profile of Indian literature, they only experimented with the language once they had a firm grasp of the Queen's English. Their writing denied readers the rich variety of Indian literature in vernacular languages which, he said, ‘is much more vibrant, much more active, much more interesting and dynamic as compared to what is being written in English'.
Yet, it is clear to someone on the outside why the work of writers from the Indian diaspora is published internationally: they speak to outsiders in a familiar voice, making references to things we understand while taking us into unfamiliar territory. These authors, like Kiran Desai, winner of the 2006 Man Booker prize, who flip between cultures like mental trapeze artists, catch us in their space between realities, reach out to let us grasp their meaning, and take us for the ride. I question whether any emotionally honest, closely observed narrative can be inauthentic. Perhaps we are talking here about a new authenticity – the authentic globalised world.