I don’t get out much. I’ve never been much of a gig-goer (gigger?
Giggist?) so when I do it’s a bit of an adventure for me. On Wednesday night I
was lucky enough to get to a book launch for an anthology of short stories
called ‘Ten-Word Tragedies’ inspired by the lyrics of a song by Frank Turner,
who was there to sing a few songs and sign copies of the book. It was a fun
event, quite a small audience, I bopped a bit, yelled the words (often wrong) to
the songs I knew, and got to meet an artist I admire who signed some of his
work for me.
Anyway, the stories in the anthology are based on the lyrics
of a song called ‘Mittens’, in which the narrator discovers a box of old postcards
where he reads the stories of long-dead strangers and reflects on his own broken
love affair. So far, so break-up song. The twist here is that Turner did actually
have such a box of postcards and when he was approached about the anthology he
sent some of them to the editors who in turn sent them out to the writers for
inspiration for the stories.
Now Turner’s latest project is an album called ‘No Man’s
Land’ on which the tracks are all true stories of historical women, and he’s
getting some grief about it (which you are more than welcome to read if you
want to delve into the cesspool of carefully curated outrage that is Twitter),
because how dare he, a white dude fronting a band made up of other white dudes,
presume to appropriate the stories of marginalised women? How dare he,
especially without having first apologised for writing break-up songs in which hurt
men say Hurtful Things, because of course we all know that everything a writer puts
down on the page is exactly and precisely what they really agree with, and the
only way forward is for everyone to continually apologise to each other for
having written Hurtful Things and abase ourselves until we’re all crawling
around in the mud like worms because then we’ll all be equal, just all in the
shit.
And breathe.
It makes me question my own creative decisions – as it
should – because I wrote a book called The Hollow Tree (no, this isn’t a stealth
promo) about a murdered woman known only as Bella in the Wych Elm. I questioned
at the time, and still do now to an extent, what my position was as a white dude
trying to write the story of a female victim of male violence. Did I have that right?
In the end, the fact that my editor was woman who was not telling me ‘James, you’re
a misogynistic bastard, stop it’ made me think that it was probably okay.
Because it’s about ownership. When you start to make pronouncements
about who has the ‘right’ to tell another person’s story, you’re making a
statement about ownership. You are saying ‘this subject’s story belongs not to
your group, but to our group’, and when you start to talk about people as
things to be owned you’re on very dodgy moral ground. Surely, isn’t the whole
purpose of what we’re trying to do here to stop treating people like objects? Cultural
territory to be fought over?
One of my favourite Frank Turner songs is called ‘Rivers’.
It’s a lovely celebration of the beauty of the English countryside, but I must
confess that I have never once called into question his credentials as a
geographer.
The stories in ‘Ten-Word Tragedies’ are also based on fragments
of the lives of real people, taken from those postcards. I haven’t seen them, I
don’t know what they look like, but presumably there isn’t any information
about who the original owners were. What if one of the white male writers
inadvertently ended up basing his story on a postcard written by a black woman?
Should he have checked? Should a rigorous process of historical research been
undertaken to ascertain, as far as possible, the correct ‘ownership’ of that
story? If you’re going with the idea of ‘owning’ a story, why do any of those
writers have the right to appropriate the fragmentary detail of a real person’s
life?
Here’s why.
My father-in-law died in March and I’ve been doing my best
to support my wife as she has dealt with not just the emotional fallout but
also the mountain of legal and bureaucratic practicalities surrounding his
death. I’ve only read the first story in the anthology so far, but it’s called ‘I
Am Here’, by Michael Marshall Smith, and it’s about a woman dealing with not
just the emotional fallout but also the mountain of legal and bureaucratic practicalities
surrounding the death of her mother. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s beautiful
and haunting, and it’s gone straight to the heart of a grief which has touched
my family closely. If anybody had said ‘No, Mr Marshall Smith, you may not
write that story for it does not belong to you’, then it wouldn’t exist, and that
small piece of haunting beauty would not be in my world, and my world would be
the lesser for it.
I understand the imperative to give marginalised people
their voices, but at the end of the day a world with fewer stories in it cannot
be a good thing.
(Honestly, I had nothing to do with this project, but it's really good!)
