Since graduating from university, I have struggled to find a literary community that shares the same ideals as me and has the same tastes. In 2008 I founded a young writer's group, comprising of me, two other girls, a boy (who would later become my boyfriend) and a couple of other guys here and there. It started off promisingly, had good moments like this one time we went to a poetry event that had no poetry at all but just music (there was a band in particular that I liked where a girl was playing a musical saw!), there were bad times (when we met up with a girl who brought a sheet of verbal diarrhoea for us to read, but I had nothing to say other than 'err, that was good'). It lasted a maximum of eight months - it ended at the Notting Hill carnival due to a mixture of my inability to relate to the new members of the group. And I do tend to lose my focus and interest pretty quickly, oops.
I started writing a play about a Richard and Judy show in a parallel universe where Judy elopes to Minnesota with Bob Dylan and Richard becomes a travelling guru with his wolf-man, chimpanzee-voiced genius hermaphrodite lover Ezekiel Methuselah. So, I naturally thought to myself, 'I have potential to be a playwright'. So I enrolled onto a script-writing course in Stratford and guess what? The teacher was a deeply insecure middle-aged woman who basically rubbished my ideas and told another girl (who was really confident and ambitious) to stop being so insecure. She was like a witch. And I couldn't bear to be criticised without the constructive part.
In July of this year, I attended a local writer's meeting at a library, it was okay at first, I enjoyed narrating from the point of view of a potato and a pea (one of our writing tasks). But when it came to writing a story there and then about a row between a bus conductor and an Elvis impersonator, I thought to myself 'this is so shit'. Needless to say, I didn't go back.
Next, I enrolled myself onto a short story writing course at the Mary Ward centre. After one class I was bored stiff. Our first homework was to read a story by a writer called Flannery O'Connor. Who?? I know! I mean, here I was trying to be experimental by writing surreal stories about hermaphrodites, rockstar dogs named Herbert and an alternative version of a fairytale, trying to put myself in the same league as people like Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk, J.D Salinger and Haruki Murakami and there was the teacher, trying to turn us into painfully-bland, middle-england writers like Flannery effing O'Connor - the kind of writers who have a trendy picture on their book cover of a fashionable, generic-looking scene rather than a striking and bold painting by a painter from the 1890s or something equally beautiful.
I don't want people to put me in boxes dammit! I'm a person, trying to get to grips with my desire to write and as if I didn't already have enough demons within me separating my mind into different streams, I then have to deal with the market out there putting labels on people like me.
I'm a woman, I'm poor, I'm an ethnic. The bookshops out there, the bestseller lists and newspaper reviews all seem to shout at me the same thing Albert said to Celie in the Colour Purple; "You're black, you're poor, you're ugly, you're a woman, you're nothing at all!" Screw him (on Celie's behalf) and screw them (on my behalf)
My problem isn't just that I'm a ethnic, working-class woman trying to write as good (if not, better) than the men and to be respected by a white audience, but that my identity isn't very solid and I can't write with conviction and can't market myself with confidence.
Despite all these obstacles in my way, I'm not going to give up. I'll write and strive till the day I die.
And on a mildly related note - don't ever (ever!) enter into a relationship with a fellow writer, if you're a woman. For the man, it's fine, he'll find a way to come out the stronger one of the two, he'll even suck you dry and treat you as his muse (by the way, in the old days a muse was usually a prostitute or working class) under the pretence of loving you, and perhaps he does love you genuinely, but not in the way that you need. Being a female writer and sharing your life with a male writer is just about the worst thing you could do to your writing career. He'll find you ever so fascinating, wild and crazy, he'll suck all the blood out of you like a vampire, feed his own lifeless, pale, bourgeois art with your authentic, exotic nature and turn his art into something quite exquisite. But don't let him do that!
He may have stolen my artistic identity, but I have the power to innovate and create a new one out of near-nothing. If it wasn't for him, I'd be standing on the shoulders of giants instead of starting out right at the bottom.
And once again, I have succeeded in generalising the whole of menfolk by the actions of one man, apologies. But the fact is, women like me need a practical, worldly man like a policeman or engineer or something - someone who will find me fascinating but can't steal from me because he is secure in his own identity to never steal from a partner. I still believe in love, just not with a writer. I really feel for Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath and Zelda Fitzgerald who have been overshadowed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ted Hughes and F.Scott Fitzgerald respectively. I wouldn't want to be on the dark side of the moon when I deserved to be on the lit side just as much as him.
Oh the politics of it all!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment