Et In Arcadia Ego

By Catriona Troth

credit: Walter White

The young Sunny Singh had a practical approach when she found no representation of herself in books. She rewrote them! So perhaps it is no surprise to learn that the adult Sunny Singh wrote her third novel, Hotel Arcadia, in part in ‘answer’ to Dante’s Inferno.

Last December, I spent an afternoon in conversation with Sunny Singh, author of Hotel Arcadia. In the course of two hours, we managed to take in Dante’s Inferno, Judeo-Christian theology, the teaching of creative writing, diversity politics, gender politics, and the highs and lows of social media. This is my attempt to distil that conversation down into a few thousand words!

ON THE INSPIRATIONS FOR HOTEL ARCADIA

Hotel Arcadia is the story of a terrorist attack on a luxury hotel. The premise could be the outline for another Die Hard film, but Singh transforms it into something quite different. Instead of focusing on the battle between the terrorists and the soldiers, she homes in on two people who would be bit players in any Hollywood movie. Abhi, the hotel manager, trapped in the operations room, watching events unfold on the closed circuit television screens. And high up in the tower, Sam, a photojournalist spending the last night of her assignment in the hotel.

In my review, I described the book as a duet. But Singh herself has gone further and described it as a love story.

“Back in university I discovered Dante’s Inferno, and I always go back to it. I am fascinated by the story of Paolo and Francesca, the doomed lovers, condemned to circle eternally but never to reach each other. I always told my professor that I wanted to rewrite the story - because I wasn’t so sure that the idea of eternal longing without consummation was such a bad thing.

“Even the architecture of the hotel is based on the nine circles of hell. Abhi’s lover is in the second circle, with Paolo and Francesca, and below Limbo, the preserve of unbaptised children and the virtuous pagans. The lowest level -where the great betrayers are (Judas / Brutus-Cassius / Lucifer) -is where Abhi is found.

“It’s a strange choice, to place him there. I do realise that. For me, Abhi is the moral core of the book, and yet every choice he makes in his life is a betrayal, often of himself. After all, it is possible to argue [as the Gnostics did] that Judas’s act was not a betrayal, but an act of love, the ultimate sacrifice, knowing he will be condemned to hell for what he has done, but that it is necessary to enable everything that follows.”

The name of the hotel, and thus the title of the book, is deliberately chosen. There are many hotels called Paradiso. But Arcadia represents an earlier, pre-Christian idea of an earthly paradise - “Claiming space,” as Singh says, “for two people who wouldn’t be allowed into Paradise.”

But there are echoes, too, of the expression, “Et In Arcadio Ego”: even in Arcadia I am there - ‘I’ being Death. The earthly paradise of this luxury hotel is under attack. More than that, Singh adds:

“Genocides are planned in very nice places like that luxury hotel. These places are not safe.”

Book Trailer for Hotel Arcadia

My immediate association with Hotel Arcadia was the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal in Bombay. But in fact, the inciting incident for Singh goes back much further.

“I was travelling in Peru in 1994 or 95, when the Shining Path planted a bomb in the small hotel where I was staying. The only people killed were the receptionist and bellboy - the very people the Shining Path were supposedly fighting to protect. I was outraged by that. But it was something I needed to park and process. I didn’t have the ability to write about it until at least 2002.

“You know, as members of any society we hand over a monopoly on violence to the state - whether it’s to go to war, or to carry out judicial killings. So it shakes us when an individual takes that power, even if we know that the state is unjust. It seems better for the state to kill than some random person to do so.

“I would never qualify myself as a pacifist. But I have huge concerns about how we perceive violence and the extent to which our reactions are conditioned by who practises it and who is victimised, rather than the act of violence itself. This is why we can accept narratives of ‘the good war,’ ‘the just war’. Our boys are noble. Theirs are evil.

“We have a hierarchy, too, of victims that we sympathise with. Women are valued as victims if they are young and pretty, or if they are mothers of young children. We rarely see women as the ‘great brain’ or the ‘heroic fighter.’ Male heroes are always good husbands and fathers. There is little space for queer heroes.”

ON THEOLOGY AND WESTERN THOUGHT

Singh often challenges - subtly in the book but head-on in conversation - elements of Christian theology that someone from the West might take for granted, or would not even realise are underpinning our ideas.

“It may seem a strange thing for an Indian, non Christian woman. But I grew up attending Catholic schools - so I have a deeply embedded Christian education. There are so many things I can intellectually understand but don’t culturally get. The idea of not being able to be saved - or that the intention of the act is not taken into account - is alien.

“Europe has this idea that its intellectual class is now completely secular. ‘Those crazy people over there follow religion and we don’t.’ So we don’t question the extent to which that long Christian tradition impacts us. As John Gray pointed out [Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions 2004], even the idea of progress as linear is essentially a religious concept! American exceptionalism has grown out of the Calvinist idea of predestination, of a favoured people. Success becomes a sign of your virtue.

“Just because the language has been secularised, it does not mean those ideas are not still there. They impact the way we deal with the world, the way we deal with politics. And we ignore that at our peril.”

ON LOSING A NOTEBOOK AND GAINING A NOVEL

Hotel Arcadia is a story that might never have been written. Before she even began writing it, Singh lost a crucial notebook.

“That was hilarious,” she says (with the gloss of hindsight.) “I started working on the novel as I was trying to finish my PhD. I was taking copious notes and I had gotten so lost in them that I couldn’t write. I had everything. I had philosophy. I had architectural plans. It was comforting but also overwhelming.

“Then one night I lost it on the Tube at Earl’s Court. The bottom of my stomach fell away. I was hyperventilating, completely devastated for about two hours. Then I went to sleep. And when I woke up, the book just took off in a mad rush. I wrote the first draft of the novel in about four and a half weeks, while I was still teaching. I had to tell my class, ‘If I’m not making sense, stop me'.

“I think a lot of it had to do with getting locked into a conceptual space. I bring a lot of philosophical, theoretical ideas to my work, and at some point I have to put all that on the back burner and just tell the story. I think because of the way it happened, I managed to bring in all my key ideas, but they were delivered with a light hand, instead of being hammered home. It was a very strange process and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. But it worked.

“There is always a morning. And things look different in the morning.”

ON TRANSLATORS AS EDITORS

Another unusual aspect to the development of Hotel Arcadia was the role of Singh’s Dutch translator in the editing process.

“So many publishing houses don’t have the same editing role as they did thirty years ago. Most books don’t receive that close look from someone with authority.

“In the case of Hotel Arcadia, the Dutch decided to bring out a translation at the same time as the English edition. Dutch is a more restrictive language than English (Most languages, I find, are more restrictive than English, which is why I write in English.)

“I had a very diligent translator, who was sending me long lists of notes, picking up issues like ‘if it’s three hours later, is it still dark?’. She came from a different story-telling tradition, and she needed clear answers on time and place. An English editor, I think, would have let it pass. Willing suspension of disbelief would have carried us through.

“That whole process changed the book quite drastically, made it far clearer and tighter.”

ON TEACHING CREATIVE WRITING

As well as being a novelist, Sunny Singh teaches creative writing at the London Metropolitan University, to a very diverse student group - and she has strong ideas about how appropriate the classic creative writing curriculum is for such students.

“Creative writing courses are based on the idea of ‘finding your voice’. But if you have been told over and over again, by books and by media, that your stories aren’t important, your history isn’t important, and ‘hey, the Empire was great, what are you complaining about?’ - how do you even begin to find your voice?

“I’ve had a global mix of students in my class sometimes realising, ‘we always write stories with white people in them (and not ourselves).’ So we spend a lot of time working on gender and race.

“In that situation, there is an automatic tendency to look towards American authors, which ignores Black British writers and Commonwealth writers. But that’s where most of my students have their roots. They have certain overlaps with the Americans, but also different backgrounds and histories and senses of self.

“Focusing on American writers allows white British people to wash their hands of their own history. Remove Caribbean writing, say, and you are wiping out a legacy of slavery and imperialism and the Windrush generation.

“Lloyd Shepherd [author of The English Monster], is the only explicitly post-colonial white British writer I know, who writes a critique of the self-glorified narrative that ‘Britain abolished slavery.’”

ON PRIVILEGE

I ask Singh about the strong pressure, coming especially out of the US, to examine ‘white privilege.’

“There are layers and layers of privilege. Race is only one axis. There are multiple others: gender, sexuality, geopolitical. If you are a northern, white working class man, you have a larger set of possible texts to relate to, but not by much. We need to understand both own privilege and our lack of it.

“We do an exercise in my class based on Peggy Macintosh’s ‘Invisible Knapsack’. What that reveals is, yes, we’re all British, we’re all in this classroom, but we are not all equal. Unless you can see that, you are not going to be able to write it. But the moment you break it down, you create a space where it’s okay to tell the story.

“Funny how it’s often the straight white male who mocks the idea of safe spaces - because they’ve never needed one.

“In the American debate, the biggest elephant in the room is how much geopolitical power they have. How much their views are being exported and how much they are shutting down others, like African and Caribbean voices, when they are talking about race. That’s also privilege talking.”

ON HEROIC WRITERS

On her blog recently, Singh quoted Tony Morrison: “We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.” I asked her what that meant to her.

She cites a series to graduates of her BA programme, including Matilda Ibini (playwright who won the 2015 Alfred Fagon Audience Award for her play Muscavado, set in a sugar plantation in Barbados in 1808); Warson Shire, whose refugee poem, 'Home' was quoted nightly by Benedict Cumberbatch at the end of his performance of Hamlet; Roxanna Donald who wrote a powerful play, Spike, on sexual consent; the children’s writer Lil Chase.

“We don’t have to agree with each other. We don’t have to be friends. But we are all writing consciously and ethically.”

ON ERASURE

Singh has written about her own feeling of ‘erasure’ when she went from India to the US - which put me in mind of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s well known TED talk, ‘The Danger of the Single Story,’ in which she talks of not realising, as a child, that stories didn’t have to be about white people.

“I grew up in India. I read books in Hindi. So unlike Adichie, the idea that women like me didn’t appear in stories never occurred to me. When I started reading books in English as a child, it would annoy me if there were no people like me in them. So I would rewrite them.

“When I was 11, we moved to Pakistan. That was my first exposure to being a ‘minority’. The idea that one part of your identity - your religion, or your nationality or your colour - could become the most important part was a real shock. But at least we shared a similar language. We watched the same Bollywood films. We looked similar. All those things helped negotiate being part of a non-visible minority.

“I think what the US did was to show me that there was a completely different point of identity, where a visible minority can be deliberately erased. Where we inhabit a liminal space. That sticks out to me as a real culture shock.

“At the same time, I am aware of certain literary tropes that diaspora writers have. That sense of ‘over there is bad; over here is good.’ Like the ending of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane - ‘you can be anything you want.’ Really? As a brown woman in Britain? Are you bullshitting me?

“I can’t write about India as Adichie does about Nigeria or Hosseini does about Afghanistan, because in some ways I feel as much a foreigner in India as I do here. But I can write about in between spaces very well!”

ON PROMOTING DIVERSITY

Before the backlash against the ‘lilywhite’ Oscars, came the backlash against the all-white list of authors for World Book Night 2016. How did Singh feel about the Twitter campaigns (first #diverseauthorday and #diversedecember, then #readdiverse2016) aimed at promoting more diverse authors? Was there a risk that these were just another case of ‘hashtag tokenism’?

“There seems to be no winning card. If you speak up, then it’s hashtag tokenism. If you don’t speak up, then you can be ignored.

“The BAME market is worth £3bn a year, and it’s a market that’s not being catered for. So of course BAME readers are going to go online. Of course they are going to buy self-published authors. Because you are not tapping that market at all. You are not even touching them.

“Prize committees say publishers aren’t putting writers of colour forward. Publishers blame the agents. Agents say authors aren’t submitting to them. I look at my agent, who has an extraordinary list, but works twice as hard as anyone else trying to place them. So don’t tell me that the authors aren’t there. In the end it comes down to ‘you are not telling the stories we want to hear.' The ones that will allow us to re-inscribe our stereotypes - Indian women who have arranged marriages; African women who end up raped or killed and so on.

“If I refuse to write those narratives, I’m in trouble. If I write those novels, I am still in trouble, because there is still only going to be one ‘Indian’ book per year, or one ‘Asian woman in Britain’ book per year per publisher. If I don’t critique, I’m in trouble, because I’m not speaking up and it’s my fault. If I critique, then I’m angry and I’m not playing ball, and it’s still my fault. So my logic is it’s too bad. I have readers. I am not in the self-publishing world, but I am doing most of the publicity for my book.

“My first two books were not published in Britain at all. They were either ‘too Indian’ or ‘not Indian enough,’ depending who you talked to. They were published in English in other countries. They were published in multiple other languages (French/Italian/Spanish). But they have never been published in Britain.

“Why can’t we talk about Hotel Arcadia as a terrorism book? Why does the fact that I am a woman change how it is received - not by the reader but by literary festivals. Why am I not being asked to talk about politics? Why must I talk about women’s issues, or diversity issues? Why can’t I talk about literature and terrorism and politics and all the things the book is about?

“It comes back to institutions making deliberate choices. I don’t think it is inappropriate to ask big companies to pay their staff a decent wage. I don’t think it is inappropriate to expect them to hire, deliberately, a wider range of people. But they choose not to do it.

“The publishing industry thinks they can have a little conference every now and again, and we’ll have the same people saying the same things, and then we’ll have done our job and we can park it and go back to doing what we always do. So at least #DiverseDecember, and so on, is getting people talking about the books and the writers. A bit of rattling the cage isn’t going to hurt.”

ON SOCIAL MEDIA

I first encountered Singh on Twitter, where she has a strong presence. Does that mean she sees social media as something positive, at least in part?

“I see it mostly as positive, especially Twitter. I have made so many friends there, both online and in real life. I have yet to meet anyone from Twitter who isn’t exactly how they seemed online. It’s so immediate; it lends itself to a sort of intimacy. You know someone’s politics - but you also know if they are a dog person or a cat person.

“For example, during the time in Tahrir Square, I followed one woman who was very vocal, very passionate, very political. Around two in the morning, I had insomnia. I was on Twitter. There was a lot going on, so they were constantly updating. She suddenly said, ‘I do realise this sounds frivolous, but I need to get my eyebrows done!’

“We have had every last breath of men over the centuries. But we haven’t heard the voice of women like this before. Women talking about themselves. The quotidian. It hasn’t been recorded before. The image is always filtered, and Twitter takes those filters off.

“On the other hand, as a writer, for the first time, I have the ability of the gatekeepers and reach out directly to the reader. And that is quite special. I had one Twitter follower who invited me to his book club - which meant Skype chatting between Seattle and London. The idea that you can do that is extraordinary!

“So yes, I’m a bit of a Twitter evangelist.”

She did, however, have an interesting experience once with changing her avatar on Twitter.

“One of the exercises I get my students to do is to have first a male character and then a female

character walk into a crowded pub, to describe their body language as they walk to the bar and order a drink.

“You always assume that Twitter and 'real life' will be different. But that is not the case. As a woman on Twitter, I get a certain amount of drive-by sniping - the equivalent of cat calls. Men who insult you or mansplain or tell you to shut up or say something quite sexual. No different to walking down the street. To me that is a structural issue. It’s about keeping women in their place, about saying public spaces are for men.

“Then I happened to change my avatar. I had been diving in Egypt, and there was a photo I really like that I decided to use. And because I had a mask on, you could no longer see whether I was a man or a woman. (Underwater is apparently not a female space - don’t ask me!) And the drive-by sniping stopped. No mansplaining. No ‘shut up you don’t know what you are talking about.’ Male journalists that I had followed for a long time started reaching out to me. Suddenly my opinions had weight, because I was underwater with a mask on!

“To me, that was quite telling. Gender still matters.”


Sunny Singh is an author and journalist. She also teaches creative writing at London Metropolitan University. She was born in India, and has lived in Pakistan, Spain, South Africa, Latin America and the US.

Diversity Pt 1: Come on guys: you've had 200 years of misrepresenting us!

By Catriona Troth

Following the publication this May of a new report on diversity in publishing, commissioned by

Spread the Word, diversity in publishing is once again a hot topic. The report, Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place, paints a bleak and depressing picture. It shows that the profound changes the publishing industry has undergone in the past ten years has resulted in an industry that is less, not more, diverse.

Inevitably, and despite what are no doubt some good intentions, lack of diversity in the industry means lack of diversity in books. And in our increasingly multi-ethnic societies, that is damaging.

Middle-class, straight, white, able-bodied children and adults see their lives and experiences reflected back at them wherever they look, in books, films and television. Others - whether indigenous, BAME, LGBT, with a disability - must search a lot harder to find any images they can identify with - and when they find them, they are often distorted, stereotypical, or filtered through a narrow mainstream idea of what constitutes ‘authenticity.’

So this month, I am talking to two people, one from either side of the Atlantic, who are both campaigning passionately for greater diversity in literature and publishing:

Here I talk to Debbie Reese, who runs the widely respected blog ‘American Indians in Children’s Literature’ 

In Part 2, I talk to Farhana Shaikh, MD of Dahlia Publishing, based in Leicester, which champions diverse and regional writing in the UK.

Come on guys: you've had 200 years of misrepresenting us!

Interview with Debbie Reese.

Debbie Reese runs the widely respected blog American Indians in Children’s Literature. A former Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, she is tribally enrolled at Nambe Pueblo in northern New Mexico.

Hi Debbie. Can you start by telling us why you believe it’s important that there should be authentic portrayals of indigenous people in children’s literature?

White children see images of themselves in nearly every book they pick up. It’s their norm. It’s the air they breathe. Native children see stereotypes of themselves in books. They rarely see themselves accurately portrayed. The damage that that does to your existence is significant. Native children drop out of school in alarming numbers.. Native suicide is sky high. Native scholars argue that a factor in the high drop out rate is that children become disengaged in school and that is tied to a lack of accurate representation of Native cultures in text books and literature.

Take an ‘American classic’ like Little House on the Prairie, which contains the phrase, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ - I challenge people to try reading that aloud with a picture of my daughter looking at them. It takes you out of the abstract, into the real, and should make the person uncomfortable and deter them from using it—with any child, Native or not.

How did your blog come about?

When I started graduate school in the 1990s, my goal was to look at family literacy - the interaction between parents and children during story time. But U of Illinois at the time was one of the universities that had an Indian mascot - Chief Illiniwek. I was shocked by depth of ignorance and the lack of awareness of the demeaning nature of stereotypes.

That led me to look explicitly at stereotypical imagery in children’s literature - and there was a lot. I began writing about it on email listservs, but I wanted to engage more efficiently with the wider community about these issues. So in May 2006, I launched American Indians in Children’s Literature, where I try to connect what I see in children’s books with research in history, education, and psychology.

For example, research has shown [Stephanie Fryberg, 2002] how exposure to stereotypical imagery (such as Indian ‘mascots’) has a negative impact, for indigenous students, on measures of self-esteem and self-efficacy (i.e. the belief that you can change the world), while having a positive impact on non-Native students. In other words, they engender feelings of inferiority in one group and superiority in another. Mascots fire you up, yes - but not in a good way!

You are often highly critical of work by non-Native writers. Does that make people uncomfortable?

Yes. Writers are afraid of me. And they should be! I say that not from a mean space. But, come on guys, you’ve had two hundred years of misrepresenting who we are, and our kids are in crisis. I am going to talk about the things you get wrong - even if it is just one phrase in a 300 page book. That one phrase is a drop in a sea of phrases and images that Native kids have to contend with. Fear that paralyses is not good, but fear that inspires writers to do better is good.

Stepping away from misrepresentations, let’s consider topic. When you look at books by contemporary Native writers, they are writing primarily about Native life today, and bringing their experiences and values to that book. In contrast, Non-Native writers are so often writing historical fiction, or retelling traditional stories, which they, erroneously, view as similar to folk and fairy tales rather than stories equivalent to those from other world religions. I, and many Native people, don’t want people to fixate on traditional stories - we want people to know what we are dealing with now! That we’re still here! We have lost so much, but we persevere and thrive. We are fighting so hard to keep what we have. Those are the stories we want people to read.


Trawling Reese’s website highlights some of the traps writers still fall into, often without intending to be racist or derogatory:

• Painting indigenous people existing only ‘long ago and far away.’

• Implicitly equating Native people with animals or mythical creatures: ( ‘A is for Aardvark ... I is for Indian ... M is for Mermaid’)

• Failing to differentiate the rich diversity of Native American culture (e.g. feathered headdresses used as a universal signifier)

• Using loaded or misunderstood words (squaw, brave, papoose, tipi, savage...) Even the use of the word Indian glosses over 500 federally recognised tribes and multiple languages.

• Distortion of history - like rose-tinting the horrific experiences of residential schools. Even superficially sympathetic stories can be patronising, such as when a white person is cast as the hero or rescuer of Native people.

Is it ever possible for a writer not from an indigenous background to write authentically (or at least well) about indigenous people? Should they even try?

Yes, I think it is possible, but at this point in time, I do not encourage it because I want all kids to come to know Native people by way of Native writers. Non-Native writers mean well, but here’s some things to consider.

First of all, caring about Native people is not a condition for getting it right. If you don’t know someone personally, what you hold in your head and heart is more of an abstract than a reality. In the 1990s, illustrator James Ransom was asked why he had not illustrated any books about Native people. His reply was, “because I have not held their babies.” That’s a beautiful metaphor for the relationship of trust you have to have in place before you can do justice to someone’s stories. Once you move from the abstract into the real, you pause to consider what you are going to write or teach.

So caring about Native people and our ‘plight’ - a word that makes most of us bristle, because it puts us over in that abstract space - is not enough.

Second, even if you do have that relationship, you have to be very mindful of the research that you do. A lot of writers will go to sources that are written by non-Natives, like the stories that were collected by the Bureau of Ethnology in the 1800s. A lot of children’s authors think these are authoritative sources, but there was a lot of bias in the original recording process. Using them means that you have biased material from the get-go, and then in re-writing the stories for today’s audience, you insert your own bias. Then, likely, you are writing without a Native audience in mind, and that creates its own problems.

Another thing to consider is this. Some authors will spend time on reservations, make friends, write their book, and then ask those people, many of whom are young, to be their beta readers. In the abstract, it sounds good; on the ground - utter failure. In the first place, Native youth are taught to be respectful to adults. This respect inadvertently functions as a barrier to honest feedback. In the second place, those beta readers are not trained to look critically at children’s literature, and to spot subtle and explicit ways in which Native people are misrepresented.

Finally, when it comes to doing research, there are protections in place from research institutions [Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, or 'Common Rule'] which protect vulnerable populations, including indigenous groups. Tribes themselves also have research protocols, which may require that research proposals be agreed to by the tribe, and/or the finished manuscript be reviewed by the tribe before publication. There is a lot of political engagement going on over who has authority over Native stories. We are sovereign nations, and are protective of stories that are our intellectual property.


Is there a danger that, even when they do it well, writers from the dominant culture writing about indigenous communities will drown out authentic indigenous voices?

Yes. People object to my featuring or prioritising Native voices. They accuse me of being discriminatory. But my response is that I am working within a framework that seeks to provide Native youth with models that they can follow - the idea that they can be writers, for instance.

There’s a benefit, too, for youth who are not Native. When you hold up a book by a contemporary Native author and talk about the author and people in the story in the present tense, it immediately pushes against the idea that Indians are all ‘dead and gone and vanished.’ You can place them within a specific Native nation and pull up their nation’s website, which shows that Native people use technology, just like anyone else. Using books by Native writers expands the possibilities for learning in a way you can’t with non-Native writers.

What changes would you most like to see in schools, libraries etc that would enable more authentic indigenous voices to be heard?

I’d like to see schools using books by Native writers. There are way more books by non-Native writers than there are by Native writers, and the majority of what you find in those books is problematic. The content of those books masquerades as ‘knowledge’. Trying to interrupt that body of misinformation is really hard. So I would like to see a lot more activism about that in schools, with teachers using books by Native writers, and walking students through critical analysis of popular books with problematic content.

In short, I’d like to see a lot more education about stereotyping and what that looks like. I’d like to see teachers boldly using critical literacy with those books.

For example, a colleague suggests breaking the class into groups, each of which studies one chapter of a book, analysing the language that is used to describe Native and non-Native characters and comparing it. Breaking it up that way is important. The problem with reading books like Little House on the Prairie from cover-to-cover in order to deconstruct stereotypical images in it, is that children begin to identify and empathise with characters in the book, and that can affect their ability to think critically about point of view and language or content that is biased.


And what about the publishing industry? What changes would you like to see there? Have you observed any positive shifts?

Right now, there is a new emphasis on big and bold steps in terms of diversity. It’s not the first time this has happened, but it’s there, and with the help of social media, I’m optimistic that it will lead to change.

A while back, Native parents in Alaska challenged four supplemental books from McGraw Hill, on the grounds that they misrepresented Native people and Native history. Eventually the books were returned to McGraw Hill, and the parents undertook to write books for the children in those communities to replace them. I wrote about this on my site. A few weeks ago, McGraw Hill wrote to me, asking me to introduce them to some Native writers because they wanted to do better. That is a huge plus.

Because of my blog and my activism, I can introduce emerging writers to editors at publishing houses. One of the books I facilitated in this way was Eric Gansworth’s If I Ever Get Out of Here.


But we need to get a more diverse range of people sitting at the table in publishing houses, making decisions. There is a group called We Need Diverse Books who are promoting this through an internship program that provides grants to students from diverse, underrepresented backgrounds who wish to pursue a career in children’s publishing.

We also need people in the industry to talk about these issues, openly, in big meetings. For example, there is a book called Curious George Learns the Alphabet, first published in 1963. It has a page: ‘T is for Tomahawk,’ which used to show George dressed up as a stereotypical Indian with a feathered headdress. There has been a change made to the latest edition, so that now the picture is just of the tomahawk. But it was done on the quiet. Nobody talked about why it was being done.

And publishers need to be looking in different places for writers and to understand the issues we care about. There are Native conferences in education, in law, in Native studies generally, and there are Native writers’ conferences, where editors can attend, listen, and learn.

Just get out of your offices and go where those conversations are happening!

Thank you, Debbie.
If this has whetted your appetite, here’s small sample of books from authors highly recommended by Debbie Reese. To find more, why not explore her blog?

Eric Gansworth: If I Ever Get Out of Here (Gansworth is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation)

Cynthia Leitich Smith: Rain Is Not My Indian Name (Smith is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.)

Joseph Bruchac: The Way (Bruchac is of mixed Abenaki, Slovak and English heritage)

Debby Dahl Edwardson: My Name is Not Easy (Edwardson is non-Native, but her husband is Iñupiaq, and the book is based on his and his brothers’ experiences at Alaskan residential schools.)

Look out for more of my reviews of these books on BookMuse in the coming weeks.

Diversity Pt 2: If We Aren't Opening Up Discussion, We're Limiting Ourselves to a Tunnel Vision

By Catriona Troth

In Part 1 of my discussion this month of diversity, I talked to Debbie Reese, who runs the widely respected blog ‘American Indians in Children’s Literature’.

In this second part I talk to Farhana Shaikh, MD of Dahlia Publishing, based in Leicester, which champions diverse and regional writing in the UK.

 To recap, May this year saw the publication of a new report on diversity in publishing, commissioned by
Spread the Word, diversity in publishing is once again a hot topic. The report, Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market Place, paints a bleak and depressing picture. It shows that the profound changes the publishing industry has undergone in the past ten years has resulted in an industry that is less, not more, diverse.


Like Debbie Reese, Farhana Shaikh campaigns. passionately for greater diversity in literature and publishing

If We Aren't Opening Up Discussion, We're Limiting Ourselves to a Tunnel Vision

Interview with Farhana Shaikh

Farhana Shaikh is the founder of Dahlia Publishing, the Asian Writer and Leicester Writes.

Hi, Farhana. Can you tell us a bit about your journey in publishing, and the relationship between these three elements of your work?

My love for books started from a young age, and I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Publishing was my chance to work with books and earn a living (or so I thought at the time!) and so I went off to study Publishing with English at university. I wrote while starting a family, and later decided to start a blog about raising the profile of Asian writers. Most of my work has been an organic process, and I didn't have a set plan when I started out. 

After three years of growing The Asian Writer, I set myself a new challenge to publish regional and diverse writing. I had the publishing background and confidence to dip my toe in the water - and never looked back. This year, I really wanted to focus on local writers and celebrate Leicester writers in particular and that's how I came round to organising an entire festival around new writing. There's definitely a relationship between all my respective work and it's building writing communities and developing new writing.

Writing the Future has highlighted the lack of diversity in the publishing industry in Britain today. How does that impact on opportunities for BME writers?

I think the report was damning in that it highlighted just how terrible the situation - in fact it stated that in terms of a diverse workforce it's worse than it was a decade ago - which is a real eye-opener. The opportunities for BME writers are scarce and we need to do more to build a more diverse workforce to ensure that BME writers aren't outsiders, that is, they aren't seen as different to any other writer and that their work isn't judged by levels of 'authenticity' but on the writing alone.


What role do you feel that Dahlia Publishing (etc) can play in countering this?

Dahlia Publishing counters this in its own small way. We have an open submissions policy and focus on publishing regional and diverse writing - so diversity isn't something we think about or talk about, it's just something we do. We're inclusive and want to attract the best writers and publish the best books. Through Dahlia Publishing and The Asian Writer we've encouraged submissions from new writers and set up competitions to find the best emerging talents. These often give new writers trying to break through a huge confidence boost and set them off on greater paths. We also ran a 12 month-long development scheme for British Asian women to develop their writing last year.

On an industry level, we're signed up to the Equalities Charter and since our inception have helped undergraduates develop publishing skills. For many years I mentored students from Loughborough University - 2nd year BME students - and that presented them with a fantastic opportunity to gain an insight in to the workplace and gain employability skills. More recently, we've had the chance to work with University of Leicester to offer e-placements to their final year students to give them an insight into the small press, and gain valuable hands on experience. 

Our WWJ colleague, Dan Holloway, was recently quoted in the Bookseller as saying, "What are [publishers] doing to get in touch with street artists and aspiring rappers, and out into the poorest schools and after school clubs to ensure that those kids whose parent(s) don't have a room of their own, let alone a space for their kid to do homework in, will be inspired, encouraged and enabled to convert the angers and passions and hopes of their experience into the great literature of 10 years' time? Because unless they are actively doing that, any pretence to be really interested in what's new and exciting is like dangling a bit of string over the side of a rowing boat in the Med and saying 'Hey, I'd love to catch a deep sea Humboldt squid." 

Do you agree with that, and what other places would you encourage publishers to be venturing into to find new talent?

Absolutely, I think the way we've been hearing about discussions around diversity in publishing tend to show how publishers aren't getting it and Dan illustrates this perfectly. 

If we aren't opening up discussions with the right people we're limiting ourselves to a tunnel vision of what publishing should look like and what literature is all about. It's strange because people read books because they want to explore new worlds - we need to start looking at ways to opening up doors for those who might not otherwise be represented - auditing the workforce is just the start. 

As for other places - it's not difficult. Diversity is all around us and I don't buy into this notion that diverse communities are 'hard to reach'.

 
Do you think BME writers get trapped into writing about certain subjects, because that is what publishers expect?

I don't know if that's entirely true. I think BME writers have varying experiences of publishers and it's important to recognise that. But, I think what happens is that the early career writer especially might feel swayed to write about a certain subject if they feel that is what sells, or is told to by their agent to write a certain thing. I've heard from writers who have asked me whether they should write about something (even if they don't want to) simply because their agent believes they can sell it. Writers want to be read - and that means some are willing to write what their told or what they believe is expected of them.

You have written about the issue of self-censorship. Can you tell me more about that?

Again - I think this happens when the writers themselves have fixed ideas of what publishing is about
and also in that early career when writers are still trying to find their voice - so they start off avoiding certain subjects, and sticking to a safe few. We need to give writers the right support so they know that they want to write about is important and meaningful. If everyone is always chasing to write something that's 'commercially viable' purely for that benefit then that's a depressing state of affairs. I would hope we can instill the sort of confidence in our writers to write something they truly believe in, that also happens to be commercially viable!


The question of whether writers can - or should ever attempt to - create characters from an ethnic minority they don't belong to is one that raises strong feelings and widely different opinions. Do you believe it is ever possible for white writers to write authentically (or at least well) from the point of view BME characters?

I don't see why not. And yes, it can be done well the other way around too. That's more of a question of the writer's ability to do it well enough so it's believable, than anything else.

Is there a danger that, even when they do it well, writers from the dominant culture writing about BME characters will drown out authentic voices, simply because they have easier access to agents, publishers etc?

When I read Beauty by Raphael Selbourne, I absolutely loved it - and as long as the experiences of BME communities is represented in literature I think that's more important than the question of who is writing it. Also I'm not sure how we qualify the authenticity - if we live in multicultural cities than surely our experiences are shared and therefore overlapping?


What changes would you most like to see in the world of publishing that would enable more diverse voices to be heard?

•  more peer to peer mentoring perhaps between the 'diverse' small presses and the big six.

•  editorial opening specifically for BME candidates

•  diversity training for publishers

•  commitment to publish BME writers 

To end on a positive note - can you point to any highlights in terms of recent good practice, strong BME voices etc?

There's been plenty of debate around diversity which in itself is a good thing. There's more awareness than say last year, with more articles, tweets, reports and events on the subject. This is all a step in the right direction.

Thank you, Farhana.

If this has whetted your appetite, here’s small sample of books from Dahlia Publishing. To find more, why not explore their website?

When Ali Met Honour  by Ruth Ahmed

Bombay Baby by Leela Soma

Finding Takri by Palo Stickland


You could also check these books by great BME authors you may not know. (Links are to my reviews on BookMuse. )

Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

Brenton Brown by Alex Wheatle

Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi

Finding Arun by Marisha Pink

Dear Infidel by Tamim Sadikali.

And if you are interested in creating characters from backgrounds different to your own, then you can read my article on Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward's excellent book Writing the Other in the Triskele Toolbox.