Opinion: Dispute over write and wrong

AUTHOR Lionel Shriver poked a Brisbane Festival with a big stick last week — she’s long gone and we’re still debating her keynote address.

American author Lionel Shriver caused a stir at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

• BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL: American author creates war of words

TWO years ago I was tasked with interviewing American author Lionel (We Need to Talk About Kevin) Shriver on stage in a school hall in Byron Bay.

She was in Australia to promote her novel, Big Brother, and I had been warned about her from all quarters.

Shriver, I was told, was “difficult”. She was scratchy, opinionated, brazen, didn’t suffer fools gladly and spoke her mind with unfiltered impunity.

Yes, she was all that. But she was also considered, intelligent, honest and uproariously funny.

Later, at a bar, she even showed me the little container of chilli flakes she took with her at all times to sprinkle on her single meal per day.

If I think of Lionel Shriver, I remember those chilli flakes.

The international best-selling author apparently tossed a handful of them about last Thursday in her keynote address for the 54th edition of the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I did not hear her speech but word soon got about that it had ruffled more than a few feathers. One online media outlet claimed it had caused a “storm of controversy”.

When I attended the festival on Friday I detected no such storm, and similarly, when I popped into the festival site with my children on Sunday morning, I witnessed nothing but bonhomie. People were there enjoying sessions, sharing ideas over lunch, reading books on the grass at the side of the State Library of Queensland.

Later that afternoon, though, a friend mentioned Shriver, and said people had been offended by her “manner”. Scratchy. Opinionated. Flecked with chilli.

The overarching theme of this year’s festival was connection and belonging. On Thursday night, however, it was suggested Shriver had strayed from the brief.

Festival CEO Julie Beveridge told ABC radio that Shriver opened her speech by posing a fascinating question — do writers have the ability to skate between culture and identity in order to make art? But then the speech took “a right hand turn from there”.

In short, were writers allowed to create fiction that was beyond their immediate experience? Should a white man be allowed to write from the point of view of a Nigerian woman? Should a writer appropriate the viewpoint of, say, a disabled person?

Yes, according to Shriver. “By restricting the right to do that,” she said on local radio before her speech, “the more we make fiction illegal”.

In the audience was the talented writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied. After 20 minutes she’d heard enough and walked out. She later wrote: “Shriver’s real targets were cultural appropriation, identity politics and political correctness. It was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of ‘others’, simply because it is useful for one’s story.

“It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.”

According to Ms Beveridge, a “handful” of others also took offence but no official complaints were received. To Beveridge’s credit, she opened the floor to a one-hour forum on Saturday to continue the discussion Shriver had ignited.

As I said, I was not present to hear the speech, so I’m guilty myself, here and now, of appropriating an experience I did not … well … experience.

But I have no doubt Shriver threw some chilli on the night, and would applaud her right to offer thoughts on the moral and technical mechanics of fiction that others might not agree with. If her “manner” of deliverance was deemed inappropriate to some, well, Lionel Shriver is Lionel Shriver.

I also have no doubt that Abdel-Magied was offended enough to walk out and have to write that, as a woman “who has heard every slur under the sun”, she had no option but to make a “political exit”.

Her action has punted what might have been heard by only a couple of hundred people into a fully-fledged debate on books, writing, identity, belonging and “cultural appropriation”, largely the brief of the festival itself.

As an occasional writer of fiction, would I ever indulge the conceit that I could, say, step into the shoes of an indigenous Australian and imagine anything of their life, the weight of their history, their suffering, and compose a believable work of fiction? No I wouldn’t.

But in my fiction I have put myself in the minds of a young female drug addict, a 100-year-old man, a woman perpetrator of domestic violence, a French cocktail waiter, a mother and a Gold Coast real estate agent.

Was I successful? Perhaps I came close with the real estate agent (with no offence to that noble profession). The bottom line is, should writers be free to follow their imaginations? Absolutely. Should novelists only be permitted to traverse certain landscapes and not others? No.

I’m not even sure that this is what those who have taken offence to Shriver’s speech are suggesting. What fiction does give is a permission to write about human beings, given we’re all one of those. And to do that even remotely successfully requires empathy and decency and compassion.

Without empathy in particular, all fiction is dead.

And writers’ festivals are a squib without ideas that equally enrage and delight. Do we need to talk about Lionel? Shriver is long gone and we’re still debating her keynote address almost a week later, still musing and arguing and getting hot under the collar.

A liberal dose of chilli will do that to any dish.

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