- #Good short stories to write cultural anaylisis on how to
- #Good short stories to write cultural anaylisis on free
Lionel Shriver’s speech was crass and unhelpful she turned an important creative question into “whites versus chippy minorities”. In my case, they would all be Scottish/Sierra Leonian women, who would be required to travel to each other’s countries (presumably Scotland and Sierra Leone), fall in love with each other, betray each other, befriend each other and occasionally shoot each other.
Books would have to be peopled with characters exactly like the author. To suggest that a writer cannot depict characters unlike themself is patently absurd.
#Good short stories to write cultural anaylisis on free
‘Every writer is free to write about what they want, but that does not mean the work cannot be critiqued’ … Aminatta Forna Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story.
That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. In fact, if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. I don’t know what went on in Hobbs’s mind when he wrote it but I feel fairly confident it wasn’t: “How dare anyone dispute my right to write this?” But the point about the book is that it’s wonderfully and sensitively written it has no interest in peddling stereotypes, or making great claims about the place in which it’s located there is no whiff of arrogance or entitlement. If anyone tried to dispute Hobbs’s right to have written that book (and I should say, every Pakistani I know who has read it has expressed only admiration), I would be the first in line to defend him, and it. It’s set entirely in the north of Pakistan – and is beautiful and true (a better word than “authentic”). One of the novels I love is Peter Hobbs’s In the Orchard, the Swallows.
#Good short stories to write cultural anaylisis on how to
To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say.Kamila Shamsie, Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for DIAGEO You will, at least, hear some new stories. You might hear something you haven’t heard before. Put down that burden and pull up a chair. It may even feel like a weight off your shoulders. Accept that some things are not for you, and others are not about you. The solution is simple, my fearful friends. The panicked tone of the accusations of censorship leads me to suspect that what is being asserted has little to do with artistic freedom per se, and everything to do with a bitter fight to retain normative status, and the privileges that flow from it. It does not seem like a particular infringement of liberty to pass through the world without being its owner, unless someone else is continually asserting property rights over the ground beneath your feet.
They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them. They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know. For the deviant others, who came in by the kitchen door, it has always been expected, even demanded. I’m being silenced! My freedom is being abridged! Norm is unaccustomed to humility because he has grown up as master of the house. Yet it appears that for some, the call to listen before speaking, to refrain from asserting immediate authority, is so unfamiliar that it feels outrageous. For those who have never experienced the luxury of normativity, the warm and fuzzy feeling of being the world’s default setting, humility in the face of otherness seems like a minimal demand. Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an act of ethical urgency. I don’t believe any subject matter should a priori be off limits to anyone, or that harm necessarily flows from the kind of ventriloquism that all novelists perform. Should the artist go forth boldly, without fear? Of course, but he or she should also tread with humility.
It is true that the politics of offence are used to shut down dissident voices of all kinds, frequently in minority communities, and the understanding of culture as a type of property to which ownership can be definitively assigned is, at the very least, problematic. ‘Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities is an act of ethical urgency’ … Hari Kunzru Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian