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| Between Brexit and the Deep Blue Sea Panel, courtesy Elaine Chiew |
Okay, Brexit. Day
Two. This time from the Irish perspective, entitled Between Brexit and the
Deep Blue Sea: The Irish Perspective on a Divided Europe. The panel of Cat Brogan, Claire Keegan and
Paul McVeigh, as moderated by avuncular host, Neil Murphy, raised many interesting
points to consider. Brogan and McVeigh
are from Northern Ireland, whereas Keegan is from the Republic of Ireland and Brexit
impacts them differently.
Brogan, as an
LBGT person, spoke about her decision to marry her Malay Muslim partner quickly
because the terms of settling in the U.K. post-Brexit might become uncertain. McVeigh
mentioned Northern Ireland being treated as the ;unwanted child of a divorce', 'the
one shunted to the attic,' being treated differently in the Republic because of
‘the accent, and seeing the turning away of the face.’ Keegan went for the jugular – that deep-seated hatred of those different
from you, that plain old xenophobia. The
issue of whether the current soft border will morph into a hard border is just
one of the more tangible political issues surrounding Brexit for Ireland;
geopolitics and history add a further nuanced dimension to the charting of any
political direction for a divided Ireland.
Keegan especially stressed the role of the writer in troubled times: 'to
write as well as he or she can', 'to be able to write as he or she pleases.' As she saw it, the
daily incremental effects of trouble and crises cannot but enter the textual
and writers, as one of the most articulate segments of society, are a powerful
lot. The discussion of how attractive an
Irish passport suddenly became raised complicated questions surrounding
nationality, identity and culture, as well the cherry-picking of rights conferred
by citizenship such as work opportunities and health care.
The panel on The Irrelevance of World Literature opened to
a completely packed room, featuring Iranian poet Sholeh Wolpe, renowned science fiction and fantasy writer Ken Liu and writer/translator Shelly Bryant, as moderated by William Phuan. While their cogently argued ideas aren’t new per se, one of the most fundamental questions concerns nomenclature,
as Wolpe and Liu articulated, even the term 'world literature' belies the logic
of power which had denoted it as ‘other.’
Thus, one of the first tasks at hand is redefining what we mean when we say 'world
literature.' The exercise of dissecting this term reveals underlying systems of power and hegemony. The thorny question
of translation also needs unpacking, because as Ken Liu elegantly argued,
translation isn’t the simple ‘bridging device’, that rough coeval of culture
and language it masks itself as.
Translating another language into English is fraught with all sorts of
hidden inherent biases, blind spots and systems of power that cements what Edward Said, in
his powerful treatise Orientalism,
had argued – the exotification, the domestication, and the reduction of the ‘other’.
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| Irrelevance of World Literature Panel, courtesy Jason Erik Lundberg |
As just one simple example, in his translation of Chinese science fiction The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Liu described encountering resistance to Chinese names – publishers requested that these Chinese names, so difficult to pronounce and remember, be translated as “Ms. Winter”, “Ms. Green Fragrance”, what Liu called an exotification, a “paper Oriental harmlessness” but no less insidious in perpetuating systems of hegemony. One of the most thoughtful points to come out thus far in all the events I’ve attended is Liu’s gentle reminder that writers working in the English language from the periphery ‘occupy a specific position’ that can modify, shape and ‘assault’ how English is used as a language, and as a system of dominant power.
Creative writing workshops is another special offering of
the festival, and I was lucky to be able to get a spot in Claire Keegan’s
masterclass on fiction. As dynamic and ‘no-time-for-bullshit’
as ever (I attended her workshop in London in 2015), Keegan not only
demonstrated the art within the construction of a paragraph, but particularly
(this a teaser freebie, for more you’d have to find an opportunity to attend one of her classes), how fiction is fundamentally 'a temporal art,' and where
you begin your story can be seen as making an incision in time. Joan Silber’s wonderful exegesis on The Art of Time in Fiction comes to
mind where she explores a panoply of temporal techniques in the writer's arsenal. Keegan here hones in on fictional time, which isn’t merely a passing of
time through a sequence of events called plot, but time as perceived through a
character’s eyes, where time and place
are traversed by loss and yearning.
Details: Singapore Writers Festival will run from the 3rd to 12th November at various venues close to the Arts House. Tickets available at the festival.
