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The title is from this fascinating
article from the NewYorker, which gave me much food for (rambling) thoughts about words and reality, libraries and the Internet, memories and memorials.
In it, the writer attacks the myth that what’s online stays online forever. Instead, she says, the Internet is intrinsically ephemeral. Unlike books, the Internet cannot be catalogued because it lacks the dimension of time; online, it’s always today. Academic and legal footnotes and references to books and documents (those painstaking page numbers, edition, publish date) have been replaced by web links. But what happens when those links no longer exist? The evidence disappears, the original source vanishes; anything could be true.
Anyone who says we no longer need libraries because ‘it’s all online’ should read this article. It isn’t all online. Some of it might have been, yesterday, but that’s no guarantee that it will be today. Or it might look like what was there yesterday is still there today, but in fact it could have been completely rewritten since yesterday, and you’d never know.
Funnily enough, I spent most of yesterday hunting for an online article about some Russian legislation, adopted in October last year, that retroactively legalises pro-Russian authorities in Crimea from February 2014 when Crimea, according to Russian law, was legally part of Ukraine. From a legal point of view, Russia rewrote history with that bit of legislation.
The article, as far as I can see, is no longer on the Internet. It disappeared, and history is rewritten.
I know, history is always rewritten, that’s what history is; a constant interrogation of the evidence from yesterday, viewed through the inescapable prism of today. But what if the evidence from yesterday no longer exists? What if it’s been written over, or just disappeared?
Two years ago I visited the museum of political history in St Petersburg. It used to be called the museum of the revolution (there you go, history rewritten). It’s full of fascinating exhibits, but the one that struck me most was a catalogue of exhibits that weren’t there.
It was a fat, handwritten ledger, open on a page listing all the documents and artefacts relating to Trotsky which had been removed in the late 1920s, when Trotsky was ‘rewritten’ as an enemy of the people. The museum staff had got rid of the historical evidence, yet they had kept a carefully catalogued record of the evidence that no longer existed. I really wonder why they did that. Despite orders to rewrite the past did they too believe, like the Internet librarians, that ‘our job is memory’?
Is that really what a library is – a repository of memory? As someone who uses libraries all the time as a reader and as a writer (just got my PLR statement, hurrah!) I started to wonder, do we write books, fact and fiction, because at least part of our job is memory?
Libraries are repositories of facts and interpretations of facts to make versions of history, but they are also a storehouse for imaginary worlds and other people’s memories. We write things down so as not to forget them. We record them and we transform them through language, through fancy, through characters, into (in the best books) something unforgettable.
Do we write (do we read) to remember, or to be remembered?
This is my last post for ABBA, for the moment anyway. Its been a privilege to contribute alongside such wonderful fellow writers, and a huge thank you to the administrators who keep it running. If you’re interested, you can follow my blog, updated mostly about Ukraine and Crimea affairs these days. Thanks for reading!
They can’t put on plays in the evening in Donetsk, because of the curfew. They have had to hang a sign on the theatre entrance saying ‘Please don’t bring weapons with you’ – but not everyone obeys. The stage is not just their calling anymore; it is literally home. The actors are living in the playhouse, because their houses have been destroyed by shelling or are on the frontline.
One recent Sunday afternoon they performed Chekhov. The sound of shelling roared from the suburbs, but inside the theatre a string quartet played Bach to the pre-performance crowd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me down to lie in green pastures… A frock-coated actor shepherded his flock into the darkened auditorium, leaving behind all the troubles and dread for two brief hours, two magical hours made of lighting and costume and make-believe – and words, words, Chekhov’s wry, witty, warmly humane war of words. That, to set against the real war outside.
Afterwards in the dressing rooms, where actors live now with their children in a world of mirrors and make-up, where jars of home-made gherkins jostle with tubes of facepaint, we drank to peace. And to art, to theatre and literature and music, all those hopelessly fragile, endlessly enduring things.
www.lilyhyde.com
(Due to unforeseen circumstances, Lily was unable to post this month. So I've re-posted something she wrote in July. I've done this because I found this a very moving and resonant piece, and I'm glad to be able to give it another airing. Sue Purkiss)
This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow.
They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either.
I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains.
The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it.
There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway.
Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string.
This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to.
This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries.
That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.
She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently.
You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do?
And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it.
www.lilyhyde.com
A couple of weeks ago I was at the Lviv Publisher’s Forum, talking about the Ukrainian translation of my novel Dream Land. This annual forum in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv fills libraries, universities, coffee houses and theatres with a bewildering array of readings, discussions, concerts and lectures. Highlights for me were an all-night poetry slam, a Crimean Tatar-Ukrainian jazz fusion performance, meeting Lviv publishers Stary Lev, and a session with authors Oksana Zabuzhko from Ukraine and Katerina Tuckova from the Czech Republic held in a fabulous, faded Baroque theatre than could have been a Hammer horror film set.
In-between, there was time to wander the cobbled streets with their glorious central-European architecture. Over the last hundred years Lviv has changed its name four times as it has belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. It’s seen its fair share of 20th century horrors, and has a largely undeserved reputation for extreme nationalism. In fact, it feels like a city that is confident and at ease with its identity: consciously cultured; literary; tolerant; polyglot; central-European.
This is a sign I noticed on a Lviv trolleybus window. Printed by the nationalist political party Svoboda, it is instructions in public transport etiquette: how to buy a ticket, ask the driver to stop and so on in polite, correct Ukrainian. “This may be a case when the term ‘grammar Nazi’ isn’t exactly an exaggeration,” a non-Ukrainian friend commented when he saw it.
It made me think about the line between being proud of one’s language and heritage, and wanting to impose it on those from other heritages. Much of the publisher’s forum was about cultural exchange and translation, a celebration of how literature can bridge national divides. But this year, for the first time in 23 years, Russian publishers were not invited to attend.
The decision roused much furious debate and anxious soul-searching in literary circles. Russian and Russian-language books, publishers and bookshops have dominated the Ukrainian literary market for 23 years. A recent spate of openly anti-Ukrainian literature from mainstream Russian publishers undoubtedly influenced the forum decision. But when does pride and protectionism become chauvinism and censorship? Does wanting to protect one’s own language, and encouraging people to speak it correctly and beautifully, make someone a ‘Nazi’?
Other people’s lives are our business, as writers.
Tamsyn Murray wrote a lovely and important post a few days ago, about how vital empathy is for writers, readers, and the world. I agree with her entirely. When we stop imagining, and stop trying to understand the way other people (and cats!) think and feel and live, we start wars.
Here are some photographs I’ve come across in the last few months, from other people’s lives. A doorway to imagination, to empathy. What are the stories behind these pictures? Who and what did these people love, hate, fear, desire?
I know some of the stories. Others, I’ll never know. But if all of us can imagine, and do our best to empathise, maybe some of these stories will never be repeated.
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| Crimean Tatar girls in national costume, Crimea, 1930s |
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| Ukrainian village women in national costume, central Ukraine, 1950s |
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| Crimean Tatars in exile. Those who managed to take a sewing machine with them when they were deported from Crimea could make a living. Uzbekistan, 1950s |
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Photos retrieved by rescue workers from a bombed residential building in Nikolayevka, East Ukraine. Nearly two months later, no one has collected them from the grass outside
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This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow.
They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either.
I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains.
The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it.
There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway.
Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string.
This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to.
This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries.
That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.
She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently.
You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do?
And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it.
www.lilyhyde.com
This quote, from Russian Menshevik Lydia Dan, is one of the epigraphs to my work in progress (one of them), a novel about Russian and Ukrainian revolutionaries.
Lydia Dan, a nice girl from a nice upper middle class family of Russian Jewish intellectuals, ended up touring Moscow factories agitating for workers rights among people she had barely a common language with, staying the night with prostitutes to avoid being picked up by the secret police, marrying not just one but two revolutionaries, losing her child, choosing the wrong side (Trotsky’s Mensheviks over Lenin’s Bolsheviks), and living long enough to see a revolution she dedicated her life to, turn distinctly sour and bitter.
“As people we were much more out of books than out of real life,” Dan says, in an extended interview with Leopold Haimson published in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries. She means that in her young days, she and her fellow idealists who sat up or walked the streets all night discussing the revolution to come, had seen nothing of ‘real life’. They got their world view from reading Marx and Chernyshevsky and Gorky; the first time Dan actually met a real-life prostitute all she could think about were scenes she had read in Maupassant. They were so busy theorizing about the revolution, and inhabiting its weird, underground, anti-social existence of ideas, that they did not know how to hold down a job, pay a bill, mend a coat, look after a baby…
For me, writing about such people a century later, the quote has a second meaning. Dan and her fellow revolutionaries seem to me like characters out of books: utterly recognisable in their loves and hates and idiocies and heroics, but larger than life, more vivid and interesting, coming from a complete and absorbing world that exists safely between the pages. In other words, fictional.
These last few months in Ukraine, I’ve met the contemporary reincarnation of Dan and her fellow revolutionaries. They are here in all their guises: the ones who make bombs and pick up guns, the ones who write heartfelt tracts or disseminate poisonously attractive lies, the ones who look after the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who spy and betray, the ones who are ready to die for ‘the people’ and the ones who kill, rob and torture people in the name of making a profit.
Again and again, I keep coming across characters who are straight from 1917.
It’s all amazing, amazing material for my novel, of course. But I realise that maybe I am more like Dan than I thought. My ideas for that novel came more out of reading than from experience: I thought those revolutionaries were safely between the pages.
It is terrifying to realise that the people who are tearing a country I love to pieces, or trying desperately to hold it together, are in fact, much more out of real life than out of books.
Dream Land - A novel about the Crimean Tatars' deportation and return to Crimea
In a shabby, tree-shaded playground on the outskirts of Simferopol, Crimea, two three-year-old boys are playing on a see-saw.
“Ukraine!” shouts Sayid, as his side of the see-saw goes up.
“Russia!” shouts Sergey, as Sayid comes down and Sergey’s side goes up.
“Ukraine!”
“Russia!”
It’s a cute scene, and the mums in the playground are laughing. The two boys live in the same block of flats, and have known each other since they were born. For them, these names of countries are just another game, like the different-coloured flags they’ve both waved sitting on their dads’ shoulders at opposing demonstrations; like the plastic guns they point at each other.
But when Sayid shouts “Ukraine!” and “Down with Putin!” on the bus into town, his mum hushes him up hurriedly, because who knows how people will react, in this town that used to be part of Ukraine two months ago until armed men appeared everywhere and it apparently became part of Russia. She doesn’t want to expose her son to hostile attention. And whatever she thinks about current events, she doesn’t want to teach her child to hate.
But all over Ukraine and Crimea, children are listening to their parents talk about politics and conflict and this side versus that side. They are learning to shout slogans and wave flags. If this society is not very, very careful, they will learn how to hate.
What has this got to do with children’s books? Everything. This last few months in Ukraine and Russia have shown the incredible power of words to persuade people to hate each other. The words come from the media and enter conversation in every home where children pick them up and imitate them, because that’s what children do.
But there has to be another side. Children’s authors have a incredible opportunity to use words and images to challenge stereotypes and encourage empathy and understanding in children like Sergey and Sayid. In children everywhere, because if the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems far away, Sunday’s Euro-parliament elections show that xenophobic and homophobic attitudes are gaining popularity a lot closer to home.
It’s a scary responsibility for authors, but a very positive one too.
Here’s another cute scene: my Ukrainian friend’s daughter Sonya, five, watched a well-known Russian cartoon called Morozko recently. She loves writing, and decided to write the main characters a letter.
She puts the letter in a envelope and asks “Where do they live?”
“In Russia.”
A long pause, while Sonya thinks. “Where the bad people live?”
My friend tries to explain that no, of course not; not all people in Russia are bad… But Sonya’s letter does not get sent.
That little story is a children’s book in itself. Maybe Sonya or Sonya’s mum will write it. In the book I hope the letter would be sent; maybe first we would see how sad Morozko and his friends are not to get their letter after all…
Meanwhile, tired of the see-saw, Sergey and Sayid in Simferopol go off in search of a new game, hand-in-hand – for now.
I’m not sure how to begin describing the IZOLYATSIA literature festival in Donetsk, which I participated in last week. Over three days in a former factory making isolation materials, now a fantastic arts and cultural centre, writers and philosophers from all over Ukraine met to discuss the topic ‘Language and Violence’ with residents of Donbas (the name of this region of East Ukraine).
It felt isolated in some ways: as the Russian and Ukrainian media shouted more shrilly than ever about terrorism and fascism and civil war, as tortured bodies were found in nearby rivers and journalists were kidnapped - there we were, surrounded by abandoned industry and works of art, talking and reading and arguing.
But the location and the subject of our discussions goes to the heart of what is happening in Ukraine. Years of abandoned industry and no jobs have driven people to desperation. And language is literally shaping their world now, as an information war drives them to take up arms over whether they speak Russian or Ukrainian, whether they live in Russia or Ukraine or an independent republic, whether their actions make them heroes or terrorists, patriots or separatists.
It was a strange, wonderful, inspiring, occasionally surreal event. One of the more surreal moments was the reason I was there, to launch in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking heartland the Ukrainian translation of my book, Dream Land.
A presentation of a British book translated into Ukrainian, about the Crimean Tatar campaign to regain their homeland of Crimea which has just become Russian-occupied territory; held in a city once called Yuzovka after Welshman John Hughes who founded it – now Donetsk, epicentre of an armed protest movement to declare an independent people’s republic and secede from Ukraine, while just over the border Russian troops are amassing perhaps to invade, as they have taken over Crimea…
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| Dream Land in Ukrainian and English - with journalist Konstantin Doroshenko and IZOLYATSIA director Paco de Blas |
At the moment I’m in Crimea: occupied Ukrainian territory/annexed state/proud and permanent part of Russia (delete as your politics deem appropriate).
I’m witnessing Crimea become more and more polarised, closer to breakdown, as everything – food, money, language, family, friends, conscience – is informed by politics. Even children’s stories – perhaps stories first of all. Even fairytales.
Russian fairytales, someone told me today, are characterised by heroes who never do anything to help themselves. It’s all done for them. The stove they lie on gets up and carries them off to fame and fortune, and they win by virtue of being lazy.
I’ve heard this before, and to a certain extent, in some tales, it’s true. As someone who’s quite lazy herself, maybe it’s one reason I’m very fond of Russian fairytales
And that’s the Russian character, this person went on to say. Always expecting something for nothing, unable to act or think for themselves, just thinking they’re entitled. Like all the Russians in Crimea who voted to become part of Russia last week, because they think they’ll get something for nothing, they think they’re entitled to higher pensions and better salaries without putting in any effort, they think they’re entitled to Crimea. Just like in 1944. Just like in 1783…
There is so much propaganda on all sides of this conflict now, no one can begin to see clearly anymore. Even fairytales are press-ganged into the service of politics. So in Crimea now we have the stupid Ukrainians of fairytales, the cunning dishonest Tatars, the lazy entitled Russians… all beginning to hate each other.
I’m fascinated by the universality of fairytales, the way the same paradigms crop up in stories from Central America to the Middle East to Siberia. Desite the cultural differences they represent, I think they grew out of parallel imagination, from common human experience. Fairytales can cross borders and languages and bring people together.
Or they can be used to drive people further and further apart.
Last week, for anyone who knows or cares about Ukraine, was one where reality outstripped most scary stories or fairytales.
Any story that was being told, of a choice between the European Union and Russia; of ultra-nationalists versus a democratically elected government; of a gradual exchange of power from president to parliament; of things reverting to normal once all the homeless bums realised they couldn’t live in protest tents forever and went back to whatever gutter they’d crawled from – whatever the story was, however coherent and persuasive the narrative, it was utterly overtaken by events.
Who could make up police snipers shooting down unarmed protesters with live ammunition? Or charter flights of the wealthy and well-connected with their suitcases of cash queuing nose to tail to take off for Russia or the West? That the tanks and soldiers allegedly heading to Kiev would never arrive? That the president would sign an agreement to hold early elections and then disappear? That next day his country residence would be open to the public to wander around and gawp at his ostentatious and thoroughly kitsch display of stolen wealth?
Truth stranger and more fantastic than any fiction. I’ve been making stories out of Ukraine for several years, both as a journalist and as a fiction writer. This last week I’ve just stared in horror, astonishment, awe, sadness, cautious hope. I could never have guessed what would happen, let alone made all this up.
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| Barricades in central Kiev (photo by Max Bibik) |
In the face of all the confusion and upheaval, people continue to make up stories. It’s what makes us human. One Ukrainian city greeted riot police returning from Kiev as heroes; another made them walk down a ‘parade of shame’. The Russian press narrative is that the interim government is made of bandits and extremists; the West’s story is that it’s a triumph for democracy. Many protestors in Ukraine call it a sell-out.
The proposed new prime minister has his own story: “this is the government of political suiciders! So welcome to hell.”History will make its own story out of these events. We don’t know yet who will write that version. Who will evaluate it, embellish it, censor it, cross out and rewrite it, turn it into poetry, a children’s story, a romance, a tragedy – a happy ending…?
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| Memorial for those killed (photo by Max Bibik) |
There’s only one book to get me through the present icy weather, and that’s Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.
There something to be said for escapist books full of sunshine and palm trees and cocktails for cold times. But I find burying myself in the blizzards and hardship endured by the indomitable Ingalls family in their 1880s Dakota frontier town both puts our present disastrous weather into perspective and does that most comforting thing – makes it into a childhood story.
I’ve been a huge fan of the Little House on the Prairie books since I was about seven and my aunt gave me the first one – I promptly wrote her a letter asking if she could give me the next six forthwith. I loved rebellious Laura, the sense of independence and adventure, and also all the practical and at the same time (to me) exotic details, about how to build a log house or collect maple syrup or trap gophers (I still don’t really know what a gopher is; as a child I somehow got the idea that it was a sort of big furry spider). I loved the close-knit family, Pa’s fiddle music, their poor but deliriously happy Christmases.
So rereading The Long Winter is a nostalgic trip back into the comfort of childhood, when all I did was sit curled up with a book, living other people’s adventures in my head and dreaming up my own. I’m still struck by the adventurousness, and by the reassuringly calm heroics of Ma and Pa Ingalls keeping the family together. I’m more appalled by the hardship now; and suspect that in truth they survived seven months of awful claustrophobia and boredom on top of hunger and weakness and cold with a lot more than just one temper tantrum from Laura... And I find the story of Almanzo’s brave trip into a blizzard to find corn to feed the starving townspeople (when in fact he has a load of his own corn squirreled away in town that he’s saving to plant in spring) a lot more morally interesting as an adult.
In the years since, I’ve read many more winter books, and lived through quite a few seven-month Ukrainian winters of my own. Now, even while I’m commiserating with my poor parents up in the north-west, I’m worrying about Ukrainian and Russian friends stuck with record snow-drifts this year. But The Long Winter is still my paradigm of wintry hardship endured and overcome.
(Although if we really have a whole month of this coming up, I may have to turn to The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of Scott’s last trip to the Antarctic. Several hours thawing out a sleeping bag just enough to actually be able to get inside it, every night, for weeks... Now that puts our weather into perspective.)
What books are getting you through the cold?
www.lilyhyde.com
Recently I’ve been attending play readings for a small theatre company, where actors together with the director and producer read through plays to judge if they might be suitable for production.
Since most of the actors are coming to the plays ‘blind’, feeling their way into the roles as they go along without any idea how their character or the story will turn out, they are a bit like novel readers turning the pages to see what happens next. It’s really interesting – and awe-inspiring – to see how they manage to inhabit their parts with no preparation whatsoever.
What really strikes me, though, is the attitude of actor, director and producer alike to the text. It is one of appropriation. They are all thinking: what can I do with this? How can I bring it to life? Can I make it rewarding for me to engage with, and for an audience to watch?
The script is treated as a dynamic thing, a map from which the theatre company will create their own journey. The director tells me her first action when she’s interested in a play is to cross out all the stage directions. She and the actors look at the words of the script, of course, but just as much they look at the gaps between the words, and explore how they can fill them.
Can and should readers apply the same process to novels? These days everything is supposed to be participatory, and so novels come with author interviews, notes for book groups and lesson plans. Readers engage with the text through personal contact with the writer, through reviewing, writing fanfiction, dressing up as the characters…
Ever since Roland Barthes, we have known that the author is dead, and that every written story is created anew in the mind of every reader. But I sometimes feel that while we as writers are supposed to be engaging with our readers more than ever, opportunities for those readers to really interact with a text are often being limited.
How many of you writers out there have been told to remove words that readers might not know, spell out every step of the plot, simplify your sentences, explain in exhaustive detail your characters’ motives and internal thoughts? I know that the editorial or publishing motive behind this is to make books accessible to a wide audience, and reading in general terms more participatory. That’s an important motive. But I feel that by not demanding real input from our readers, we also deny them any power, and half the enjoyment.
I love books that make me do the work of an actor or a director. It’s a question of trust. Every playwright must start from a position of trust, that actors and directors are able and willing to take the words and make them into something – running the risk of course that the ensuing production will be awful, but isn’t risk inherent in any meaningful relationship? As a reader I want to be trusted to fill in gaps between the words, take the implications and run with them, guess, infer, appropriate: bring the story to life. As a novelist I want to trust my readers the same way.
The word ‘work’ makes this sound pretty unappealing (see Nicola Morgan’s recent post on ‘readaxation’ for contrast). But everyone really has a lot of fun at those play readings. Even the simplest, least demanding book requires work from the reader, to transform black-and-white symbols on a page into places, situations, people and ideas in the imagination. That work of transformation is the magic of reading. It’s how a book becomes a part of you.
It’s a truism that the more you put into something, the more you get out. From a reader’s point of view, I think its a truism worth repeating. What do you think, writers and readers?
The first I knew was when I got an e-mail from someone called Leila. She wrote that she had translated my novel, Dream Land, and wanted to publish it.
With someone else, my pleased but surprised response would have been to refer her straight away to my agent to deal with permissions and fees. But Leila is different.
'Like the heroine of your book, I was born in Samarkand in exile’ she wrote. ‘My childhood was often darkened by shadows, because of the deportation of our people. In 1989 we were able to return to our homeland. I lived through everything that you describe in your book. You’ve managed to perceive and impart the reality… I want to tell you that I’ve translated it into Crimean Tatar. I thought that this novel about our tragic fate should be read by every Crimean Tatar.’
Dream Land is about the ethnic group Leila belongs to: the Crimean Tatars, who inhabited Crimea (now part of Ukraine) until 1944, when the entire nation was forcibly deported. It is estimated that up to 46 percent died on the way to labour camps in Central Asia and the Urals. Those that survived had to rebuild their lives from scratch. They were banned from speaking their own language. They were discriminated against in education, employment, housing. And they were not permitted to return home to Crimea until fifty years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Dream Land is based very closely on the stories people told me; what happened to them before, during, and after the deportation; their sufferings and struggles and dreams. The book is fiction in that I made up most of the characters. But their fictional lives are an amalgam of the many real ones I encountered. I tried to imagine myself into the lives of the Crimean Tatars, to understand how they feel and where they come from, to be as true as possible to what they told me.
I was aware, though, that not only do I myself not speak the Crimean Tatar language, I was writing this book in English, for a British young adult audience who in all likelihood have never heard of the people it is about.
Moreover, I realised that the majority of Crimean Tatar young adults would not be able to read it. I don’t know what percentage speak English well enough to read a novel, but in my experience it is fairly small.
I do know how many Crimean Tatar children are estimated to speak their own language of Crimean Tatar. It is five percent.
Crimean Tatar is recognised by UNESCO as a ‘severely endangered’ language. During their fifty years of exile, the Crimean Tatars fought ceaselessly to keep their identity alive. It is a sad irony that now the central right for which they fought – to live once again in their own country – has been won, something else is being lost. A physical home gained at the cost of a mental home, perhaps.
If only five percent of Tatar children speak their native tongue, is there any point in publishing
Dream Land in Crimean Tatar? I believe so, and want to support the
campaign to keep Crimean Tatar alive. Barbara, a volunteer at the Gasprinskiy Library in Simferopol, writes
here about what the loss of a language means. She sums up:
Their songs would go unsung, their poetry only read by language scholars, the wealth of their literary heritage only known in translated form. As my counterpart at the library, Nadjie Yagya, said to me when I first came to the library: “If a person does not know the language of his ancestors, the spiritual losses are irreplaceable, and he cannot fully understand the culture of his people.”
Leila, and everyone else informed about the situation, agrees that ultimately,
Dream Land should be translated into Russian, to reach not only more Crimean Tatars but also the Ukrainians and Russians who now make up the vast majority of the Crimean population. As Barbara wrote to me:
The longer I live here [in Crimea], the more I am aware of the tremendous discrimination the Crimean Tatars face and the undercurrent of ignorance and prejudice from much of the Russian speaking population. Having a Russian version of Dream Land available to school children would give them another side of a story they perhaps hear in a twisted version.
We’re looking for funding for a small print run of
Хаял Мекяны – the Crimean Tatar title – and then, we hope, for
Земля Мечты, in Russian. But I want to say thank you to Leila, for translating this book. And to Taner, who is translating it into Romanian, so that the Crimean Tatar Diaspora there can share the story with their Romanian neighbours and perhaps through it more understanding and tolerance can be built.
Dream Land is just a novel, and one I had many fears about writing – that I would get it wrong, that I was appropriating a culture and story in a crass act of cultural imperialism. But I’m so excited and humbled by these translations. It feels like the Crimean Tatars are taking the book back and making it into something bigger, and more important, and their own.
www.lilyhyde.com
The e-mails are flying thick and fast. Initially gentle message headers like ‘Prezzie?’ Or ‘Anything you’d like?’ have now evolved into shouty ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR XMAS?’, as we all leave it to the last minute as usual.
What I really want for Christmas is a plot.
I don’t mean the kind you can build a shed and grow cabbages on, although that would be nice too. I mean a plot for my story.
Or rather, not for my story, because if it hasn’t got a plot then it isn’t story yet, is it. It’s a… a situation. A potential. A seed. A torment. A promise.
This… situation (let’s go with that word) I’ve come up with is great. Everyone who knows about it loves it. It’s funny and sad, it’s gothic, it’s inventive, it’s original. I can tell you how marvellous it is without feeling like an arrogant smug git, because however funny and inventive and bla bla bla it may be, without a plot, it’s actually – nothing.
I’ve never had this problem before. All my books so far have started the same way, with a situation, but as it developed in my imagination the plot came too, as intrinsic as bones under the skin, as the trunk growing branches, sprouting leaves. I wouldn’t say that any of my books have tidy plots, because I like loose ends and suggestions of characters and events continuing beyond the book pages. I definitely wouldn’t say plot is one of my strong points as a writer. But I have always had a sense of a framework and a narrative moving things along, giving shape and purpose and sense. Making a story.
Not with this new situation. I can’t make anything happen. It won’t budge, it won’t grow, it won’t turn into a narrative that can be brought to resolution.
How do you kick-start a plot, people? I’ve been visiting vaguely relevant places, going for walks (when I get my best thinking done), collecting snippets of related information, pictures, articles from newspapers. I’ve been being distracted by all the other unrelated things in the newspapers and on my walks; I see the homeless people, the Christmas decorations, the payday loan ads, the sunsets; I read about dead children and how to make trifle and missile strikes. I can’t make sense of any of this. I can’t find a plot or a resolution.
You see what I’m doing here, of course. I’m turning my situationinto a metaphor. I can’t make a story out of life, with all its awfulness and beauty. So why on earth should I be able to force a plot onto a potential book idea, so that it makes sense?
Except that’s what books are for, isn’t it? We need stories to make sense of who we are and what we do and why we do it. We can use them to escape, and we can use them to engage. To justify appalling behaviour, but also to nudge us towards behaving better.
Oh, here’s another e-mail in. ‘LAST CHANCE, OR YOU WON’T GET ANYTHING!!!’ People are getting desperate.
I’ll send this blog post in reply, I guess. Maybe I’ll get a flat-pack shed and a packet of cabbage seeds for Christmas. Maybe I’ll be able to make a plot out of them.
Usually mid-week online discussions among my writing group are about who’s coming to the next meeting, who has something to read, and (most importantly) who’s coming to the pub afterwards.
This week, the flurry of e-mails was about Kensal Rise Library. After more than a year of trying to reason with Brent Council, activists have put together a last ditch proposal to save the library from closure by running it entirely financially independently. They need 70,000 pounds by tomorrow, Friday 7th September, and they have very nearly reached their target. As a group, we’ve decided to donate a good chunk of group funds. Kensal Rise is not quite our local library, but since the one we meet in is also in Brent and is threatened with closure, you could call it an investment.
An investment in community, in learning, in literacy and literature, in enjoyment, in public space and resources, in sharing, in civic participation and pride.
All the things this government, abetted by local councils, is determined to take away from us.
Since I last blogged about Brent libraries, one of the two I wrote about has already been closed. It, like Kensal Rise library, was paid for by the community in taxes and donations, to be held in perpetuity for its free enjoyment. Kensal Rise Library was deemed important enough for Mark Twain to be invited to the opening ceremony. Brent council’s ‘closing ceremony’ took place in the early hours of the morning, with police guarding the council workers who stripped all the books and fittings, so that the school kids who had been defending it for weeks wouldn’t be there. Despicable is the word that comes to mind.
If you can, please support the Save Kensal Rise Library campaign (and if you need a much more eloquent reason why, read Zadie Smith's essay). Kensal Rise is only one of many, but if this proposal succeeds then maybe other councils will think twice about their short-sighted and destructive actions, and realise they must listen to all those communities who are working so fantastically hard to save their libraries. Once they're gone, we will never get them back.
Anyone remember Joseph Kony?
The Ugandan recruiter of child soldiers was one of the most famous people in the Western world for a week or so in March, when the film Kony 2012 went viral. Then Kony was overtaken by Katniss as the name on everyone’s lips.
Kony is a real person; Katniss is fictional. Fame is one thing they have in common. Another is age. Katniss is the heroine of The Hunger Games, first in a trilogy of novels (now a film) for young adults; Kony 2012 was made for school kids. And another is that they have both become linked to social activism.
The narrator of Kony 2012 turned his documentary subject into a children’s story he was telling to his young son. In the process, key facts were left out or glossed over, and the film was heavily criticised for simplifying its subject.
The film-maker’s response (taken from an interview here)was that
We make films that speak the language of kids. We say, "You may live thousands of miles away from these problems in Uganda, but those kids are just like you, and you can do something to help them by getting your government and your self involved."
It may be underestimating, not to mention patronising, children to assume they can’t understand some background and context to the world’s problems. But it’s a laudable aim, to encourage young people to be interested in social injustices, empathise with those who are suffering, and desire to change the world for the better. Kony 2012 was intended to get viewers directly involved in a campaign to bring Joseph Kony to justice.
The Hunger Games is fiction, but with its themes of violence as entertainment and entertainment as social control, it also encourages readers to think about what’s wrong with the world now, and what it might become. And activists are trying to harness the popularity of this and similar books to effect real social and political change. Imagine Better is a project getting fans of Harry Potter and Katniss involved in real-world campaigning. It’s not alone; this article gives an excellent overview of the growing phenomenon of fan activism.
As a writer for children and young people, I'm fascinated by this spill-over from fiction into reality. Kony 2012 took fact and turned it into a children’s story. Here the opposite is happening; young literary fans are being asked to take the ideas and ideals contained in the
Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards; Alexandre Dumas pere his non-fiction, fiction and poetry on different coloured paper (rose-pink, blue and yellow respectively). Edith Sitwell lay in a coffin before setting pen to paper; Colette prefaced writing by picking the fleas from her cat. Samuel Coleridge took opium, George Sand smoked cigars. Truman Capote only wrote on the sofa or in bed. John Cheever used to get up and into his only suit and take the lift down to the lobby with everyone else on their way to jobs in the office, then go to the basement, take off his suit again, and sit down in his underwear to write.
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| Colette: looking for fleas (by Jacques Humbert) |
Superstition, habit, fetish, procrastination, ritual, magic, the muse. The Ancient Greeks burnt offerings on altars. Medieval poets had visions and fits. These modern stories (possibly apocryphal: writers make things up) of the lengths authors will go to harness their creativity are grist to the mill we keep turning out the myth of the writer as inspired, idiosyncratic genius.
But do these things really matter to writers, and to those wanting to know how to write, or are they a distraction? Surely what you need is rather more dull: to understand language, make up a story, and have the time and discipline to put that story into language. Do you really need a bizarre daily working habit, a superstition, a lucky charm, a (as people like to call it these days) ‘process’?
I need coffee; I need absinthe. I require music. I insist on silence. Special paper; my favourite pen. Only early mornings. It has to be late nights. It’s interesting that these superstitious rituals of inspiration are also generally means of repression, a way of fencing about the creative moment, defining its limits, at once trammelling and setting free. We dull our nerves with drugs so our neurons may fire, deafen our ears with music so as to hear our inner voice, confine our bodies to bed so our minds may travel far.
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| George Sand, sans cigar (by Eugene Delacroix) |
A friend of mine sums up his prerequisite to creativity in one word: boredom. I understand that. When you’ve gone past utter boredom’s mix of frustration and desperation, and reached the knowledge that there is nothing else to do, nothing else that is good enough; when you’re the blank fog, the empty slate, then it’s almost as though there is no choice
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Oh yes, the best in the series I think. Thanks for the reminder, and now, instead of complaining about the heating breaking down I shall be glad I'm not twisting straw....
I recommend Dr Zhivago and Anna Katerina. There's something about those Russian novels that evokes the extreme coldness of freezing snowy wastes. Or maybe I'm just recalling how Julie Christie and Omar Shariiff looked in the movie..
Odd that you mention Scott's book, I was only thinking of it yesterday and trying to fathom what madness sends men into such extreme conditions.... as my hands turned more and more bloodless from Raynauds disease. I can't begin to imagine the agony of such extreme cold. My hands go white and bloodless just washing a salad in summer!
Oh yes, I love The Long Winter! Though I don't know whether I'd actually read it in cold weather... I'd rather have something warm! Kim?
Thanks for the comments, all. Dianne - I know! They were mad, all those Antarctic adventurers. And so unbelievably ill-equipped.
The trouble with Kim, Katherine, is that it just makes me want to leap on some form of transport RIGHT NOW and run away to the Himalayas..
It's been years since I read it - must go and read it again. I recently read the first Little House book (Big Woods) on a night when a storm was raging, and it seemed as if the nearby trees were going to come crashing down upon me - reading about Laura, in her log cabin under the snow, with the wolves howling, was strangely comforting!
They are comforting books, aren't they. You know that whatever the wolves, blizzards or drunken railroad workers, Ma and Pa will cope...
I borrowed a couple from a friend recently. Re-reading them I was much more aware of the incredible hardships endured than I remember being as a child.
Kath