The LIP: Why did you start ST?

I think that the literary culture in this country has always been very, very complacent and very dominated by certain values. It gives me great pleasure to shake it up. But also I think in the 80s there were certain voices, like gay and lesbian writers, or black writers, which clearly weren’t getting published. It’s less the case now. I don’t think that you can say that it’s a disadvantage any more in terms of getting published to be black – one could argue that it probably helps. But that certainly wasn’t the case twenty years ago.

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

…Many have noticed how the emotional miserliness of Bishop’s poetry – that clenched stoical tone that goes on and on accruing interest with each successive reading – distinguishes her from Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and those other writers whose passion seems rather spent now. But Bishop’s singularity becomes even more pronounced when viewed within the wider context of our culture’s taste for comprehensive effusion, on talk shows, reality TV, in confessional memoirs, and all those widely disseminated activities that take suffering – and its lachrymose declaration – as the guarantor of authenticity. Television provides an ample platform for an apparently inexhaustible pool of individuals who want to cry and get upset in front of a large number of people. Of course, the effect of being so constantly exposed to other people’s unhappiness – recent talking points on The Jerry Springer Show have included ‘I’m a Teen Call Girl’, ‘Our Brother is a Pimp’ and ‘My Step-Father Abused Me’ – is not to cultivate but to retard sympathy. The precariousness of such a tendency hardly needs to be stated: if we lose the capacity to sympathize with others (and coming to recognize that other people exist and have an inner life must be one of the most strenuous imaginative activities out there) then it becomes dangerously easy to be complacent or cruel or to blow up distant countries.

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

Any young freelancer trying to carve their niche may do worse than read accounts of what it was like trying to make ends meet as a journalist in London during the early 1800s. The first recommendation is not, as might be expected, Thackeray’s History of Pendennis but William Hazlitt’s essay On the Want of Money. Hazlitt lived the tedious reality of the hack writer’s straitened circumstances. He vividly describes ‘that uncertain precarious mode of existence’ in which money is either wanting or spent, so familiar to those ‘who write for bread and are paid by the sheet’. Every freelancer knows well that ‘intermediate state of difficulty and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next that we have the good luck to encounter’, that gap so full of ‘anxieties, misgivings, mortifications, meannesses, and deplorable embarrassments of every description’. Such mortifications characterised life on Grub-street for the early modern freelancer.

You can read the full version of this article in The LIP Magazine Media Issue. Order Your Copy Online!

Jess is a girl who is struggling to find her own identity in the hyphenated world in which she lives; half Yoruba and half English, she is torn between two cultures and finds herself occupying a world made up of dichotomies. TillyTilly who is at once a comforting friend and a disruptive demon is the embodiment of Jessamy’s struggle to discover her own identity – ‘My name is Jessamy. I am eight years old… She felt she needed to be saying this so that it would be real.’

Jess’ behaviour at home and school is disruptive, smashing her mother’s computer, cutting pictures out of books in the classroom, breaking the mirror in the bathroom – blamed in an eight year old’s plaintive tones on the mysterious, invisible, TillyTilly, ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t do it!’ The help of a psychologist is employed, though it is TillyTilly who reveals to Jessamy the true roots of her disturbance – the death of her baby twin sister, Fern.

Helen’s prose style is varied and vital. A lively spirit, as energetic as TillyTilly herself, weaves its way through the narrative which manages to recall both the naïveté of childhood, and to capture the uncertainty Jess faces as she firms her grip on reality. Her difficulties are compounded by the apparent contradictions between the tradition of her Nigerian roots and the British society in which she lives – in one world a wooden carving or ibeji must be made to lay to rest the soul of the dead twin, in the other world, sensitive if misguided psychologists probe with questions, ‘I know that things can be real in different ways’, offers Dr McKenzie by way of an explanation. Neither solution makes sense to Jess whose vulnerable childishness underscores the novel with tender pathos, ‘I’m tired and you’re confusing me,’ she responds.

The LIP: Do you consider yourself to be an ‘African novelist’? J.M Coetzee has said some interesting things about assuming such a title – does the African novelist have more responsibilities than the European novelist?

HO: Though I’m clearly influenced by a tradition of writers dealing with African consciousness, I think it’s more likely that I’d be placed on a different rung on the post-colonial writing ladder (if indeed I was going to get placed anywhere…) – basically it’s to do with uncertainties of language – I think and dream in English, and any words that I reach for in describing Nigeria are automatically and inextricably loaded with a sense of foreignness – ‘vibrant’, ‘colourful’, ‘hot’ – it’s so close to cliché that it’s embarrassing, and it almost suggests that I don’t even know what I’m describing anymore. A book coming from someone who thought in, say, Yoruba, would take all those adjectives as a given and either get past them and unravel new descriptions or just get right to whatever point they’re making. It’s that hesitancy and circling around the point that stops me from being qualitatively similar to the African greats like Soyinka, Emecheta, Achebe, Ola Rotimi.

I seem to have begun in a halfway niche that maybe writers like Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, though they handle it better, wouldn’t scoff at. Though social commentary of some form is integral to the dynamic of almost every novel, I don’t think novelists have any responsibilities outside of the honing of their craft; they obviously have responsibilities and concerns as people, but if these come above storytelling, it doesn’t work. ‘Concept’ novels are only interesting up until the point where the concept becomes clear – a major gripe I have with Dostoevsky’s blatant focus on morality and the mechanisms of psychological health in Crime and Punishment is that after Raskolnikov murders the old lady, which fulfils the concept, ‘what if a student entered into the act of murdering an old lady?’, I lose interest and have to struggle to finish. So, mostly I say, ‘If you’re writing about politics or sociology, kindly call it a politics or sociology book and not a novel.’ Arundhati Roy, whom I greatly admire as a writer, has made that distinction and is concentrating on using her writing skill to draw non-fictional attention to issues in India. ‘Concept’ novels really seem to interfere.

The LIP: Has your age been a help or a hindrance in getting published and/or getting people to take your work seriously?

HO: My age did become a somewhat cynical bonus selling point, and with good reason – a crazy number of books are being published every year. Couple this with the fact that readership inevitably decreases when films, plays and video-games are becoming stronger and stronger as industries, and it’s starting to seem like you need some kind of kooky trademark just to keep your head above water. Since there’s nothing else kooky about me, I guess age helped with Alexandra Pringle, my editor at Bloomsbury, who wanted to know what an eighteen year old would have to say. If you’re looking for a new and distinctive writing voice, it must be tempting to try and plumb our generation, who are (if they’re into that sort of thing) growing up with both filmic and literary imaginations in equal effect. In terms of general readership and critics, though, yes, the book is almost guaranteed attention, but people are bound to be more unpleasant about it than gracious. They question quality, (What has she read? How sophisticated is this going to be?) and they are more than likely to get horribly cynical and paint your publishers as monochrome ogres who’ve chained you to your desk and forced you to write like a bitch when you could be getting healthy, real-life material. Someone who interviewed me for a radio show told me that they’d been dreading reading The Icarus Girl because they thought they were going to have to contemplate the musings of a precocious brat. Luckily, they changed their mind a third of the way in, but obviously not everyone coming to the book will.

The LIP: What does multiculturalism mean to you? Jess struggles to get comfortable in a hyphenated world, do you think many ‘half and half’ children (TillyTilly’s words, not mine) feel that same pressure?

HO: Multiculturalism doesn’t really mean anything to me. I guess as a term it means embracing and integrating what was formerly ‘foreign’ into an eclectic framework that can then be identified as national culture, but I think at bottom it is very difficult to truly understand that someone from another culture, who dresses differently, may have a different skin colour and may speak a different language, is the same as you. It’s a big old fallacy.

The LIP: Where is Africa now?

HO: Africa is in a place where, alongside the urgent need for humanitarian aid to be found in Africa as a continent, people are beginning to recognise the immense talent that’s emerging from that intensely prideful, unembarrassed place.

The prose is frequently clumpy, without nuance and, sometimes, simply inaccurate. The reference throughout to Hannah’s father as a meaningful ‘Daddy’ is risibly clumsy, as is the exchange between flaccid ‘Mother’ and rock-hard daughter which runs: ‘I read everything I can about Liberia […] I just read a novel by Graham Greene that was pretty depressing, to tell the truth’[…] ‘That’s Sierra Leone, Mother. And a long time ago.’

Russell is more effective in the swift, elegant narratives of escalating violence that occur late on in the book. The portentous tone, which does posit glimpses of exciting futures to be worked towards, finds in its simple causal statements an exhalation. Hannah’s final berating self-evaluation is a crucial and surprising re-positioning which, because of the modesty of her farm life in Keene Valley (from where the narrative is relayed to us in the present tense), does not feel tacked-on. It is an interesting manoeuvre because it appears to refuse the validity of telling the story just told. It results in a kind of flat non-feeling akin to the inertia that is felt watching the events of September 11 that are referenced. It is the virtue of semi-fictional representation, and a particular asset of this book, that a character can enlighten us of terrible facts, making us simultaneously aware of the sickly nature of the parading of untethered reactions, and of the underlying affiliations and structures to which we adhere.

Purple Hibiscus begins with the line, ‘Things started to fall apart at home,’ a possible allusion to Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, pointing to the change and disorder that have characterised Nigeria’s troubled past. As the novel begins, Kambili struggles to know her own mind, let alone speak it. When she and her brother go to stay with her cousin and Aunty Ifeoma, a lecturer at a university campus, they experience first-hand the anger and confusion felt by Nigeria’s youth, and watch as their aunt is forced to leave for America. While Chimamanda explores the wider issues of faith, tradition and politics – relating the rituals of both Christian and traditional Igbo beliefs, the death of Kambili’s estranged grandfather, and the student riots at the university – she also memorably evokes the very personal experience of growing up.

Chimamanda’s characters are well drawn, and there is a subtle and reserved quality to the first-person narration; a quiet tension that drives the reader on, showing Kambili’s powerlessness at the violence she experiences. The purple hibiscuses that grow in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden – an ‘experimental’ strain, ‘rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom’ – become the book’s central metaphor as Kambili develops into her own voice, blossoming amid the freedom her aunt allows her. The questions that define Kambili’s character – when to speak and when to remain silent, when to act and when to prevent action – are ones with which all of the characters struggle, both in the intimate circumstances of everyday family life and in the wider world.

Nominated for the 2004 Booker Prize, Purple Hibiscus is an impressive debut which Chimamanda wrote when she was just twenty-five. It is a compelling story that handles powerful subject matter with skill and sensitivity, but which also owes some of its best passages to descriptions of the small moments that make up everyday life. It is her attention to detail in etching daily minutiae such as the preparation of food, tending a garden or listening to music, that so effectively complements her more dramatic and thought-provoking observations.

October 6th, 2000 was the day that regime finally came to an end. One usually pessimistic columnist wrote: ‘That which I have been dreaming about for years has happened: everything, literally, everything is possible in Serbia! We have won!’ Just nine months previously a survey ranked Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, the twelfth worst city in the world, a cultural no-man’s-land. ‘This was a city’, writes Matthew Collin, ‘which had almost lost its heart, and was fast losing its mind.’

Originally published in 2001, This Is Serbia Calling is an account of a very different battle for hearts and minds long before the coalition rhetoric. Piecing together testimonies from members of Belgrade’s alternative youth scene, Matthew reveals the city’s rebellious underside that refused to be brainwashed by the government. He focuses on the young journalists of Radio B92, a cult radio station airing news and music aimed at opening the minds of the listeners; Veran Matic, B92’s editor, called it ‘liberation through culture.’ Later, concerned that their supporters were swallowing even their anti-establishment line too readily, B92 employed the slogan ‘Trust no one, not even us.’ In ten years, the station was shut down four times by the government.

If Matthew’s style seems a little sensationalised, his sympathy with his subject is genuine. B92 supported Western values and played outspoken Western music – in 1998 they even won the ‘Free Your Mind’ free speech prize at the MTV awards. When NATO bombed Serbia in 1999, the people felt betrayed. Many of those quoted insist that the military action increased nationalistic fervour and put them in an impossible position. They couldn’t support the regime, but neither could they support the bombing of the city they loved. Radio B92 was shut down for the third time. It was to be off air for four months – its longest absence. ‘The NATO bombing has destroyed us,’ its editor told reporters.

With the impact of yet another Western military ‘intervention’ still being felt, This Is Serbia Calling is more relevant than ever. In the wake of a war in which the media has played a leading role, Matthew’s book bears witness to war’s first casualty: truth. Although he focuses mainly on the manipulation of the Serbian media, he indicates that the Western press, heavily influenced by NATO, the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence, was far from independent in its coverage of that conflict. Television networks such as CNN were altogether more sophisticated; the propaganda was there, but it was more subtle, perhaps ultimately more insidious.

If the book ends on a high note, with the defeat of Slobodan and a dream of the future, the events of the ensuing years lend it a rather different colour. This is a timely reissue: the story of Serbia’s liberation, and underlying it, a moving critique of Western values and the price we pay for them.

Over the course of two and a half years, Arundhati builds a narrative around world events and institutions, discussing 9/11, the outbreak of the Iraq war and numerous other issues. In fact, so much is discussed – from the ubiquitous Michael Moore to call centres in India, that readers may find themselves overwhelmed by her expansive erudition. However, it is by focusing on her native India that she reveals the true nature of globalisation; one of the most memorable and pointed passages is her description of India’s privatisation of its electricity infrastructure to Enron.

At times this is an uneasy book to read. Arundhati’s opinions are dazzlingly forthright, exposing facts about the balance of power in our world that we daily choose to ignore. Her personality and way with words are at once compelling and distracting: the conversational format and her complicity with David, means they pass over some topics more quickly than some readers might like. The contradiction that Indian women must rail against tradition, yet at the same time ‘against the kind of modernity that is being imposed by the global economy,’ is one that she herself seems to embody.

A recommendation from Noam Chomsky and an introduction by Naomi Klein make this prescribed academic reading, but for those wishing to gain an insight into the mind of a gifted writer’s politics this an immensely readable book. Arundhati Roy’s aim is clear, seeking ‘to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to communicate it, to make it real’, and although she offers no real answers to combating the problems she so passionately explores, this is an inspiring book.

Until the early 1990s, black British writing remained marginalised and undernourished while the volume of imported books by black American writers distorted the market. It took one book – Yardie – to trigger change. North London publisher The X Press picked up Victor Headley’s tough UK-Jamaican hood fable in 1992, after it had been rejected by many mainstream publishers. The book’s phenomenal success opened up new relationships in the book trade. X Press publisher Steve Pope recalls the initial enthusiasm of W H Smith, who became the first bookselling chain to introduce special ‘Black Interest’ sections in the early 1990s. As other booksellers followed suit, small presses saw their new literary discoveries snapped up by bigger publishing houses: Alex Wheatle, for example, was bought by 4th Estate (now an imprint of Murdoch-owned HarperCollins) after Black Amber published his debut novel Brixton Rock. The big houses began to adopt more writers from ethnic backgrounds (Asian as well as black – although the growth of Asian writing was less dramatic, and came later), not just as fashionable accessories, but for solid commercial reasons.

Today, established authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal have the branding and resources of big publishing conglomerates to bring their writing to a wider audience. The success of these writers has created new opportunities for publishers and booksellers to support ethnically diverse writing, and the vogue for multicultural literature continues unabated. However, a glance at the UK bestseller lists reveals a different reality. Of the top 100 selling books of 2003 according to Nielsen Bookscan, none are by black or Asian writers. Monica Ali’s Booker-shortlisted Brick Lane, at 179th, was the highest ranked. In March this year, The Bookseller magazine conducted an illuminating survey into cultural diversity in book publishing, which concluded that, even if the industry was eager to change, it had some way to go.

Meanwhile, some feel that the true hotbed of diversity – the literary and cultural fringes – is under threat. In today’s tighter, more centralised book world, competition and sheer over-production are squeezing out variety and risk-taking among publishers and booksellers alike. ‘There isn’t the kind of support there used to be,’ says Steve, claiming that X Press sales have been affected by what he sees as a ‘one size fits all’ ethos in the book trade. Groups and companies that exist on the outskirts in the first place will be hardest hit by any extra financial pressure. While the heavy-hitters hog the limelight, it becomes harder than ever for first-time writers – whatever their background – to find a publisher.

It is probably true that fewer bookshops now devote exclusive space to minority writing than used to be the case in the mid-1990s. Big book selling chains now dominate the trade, and over the last decade booksellers have tended to hand over some of their former autonomy to the control of Head Offices. Dedicated ‘Black Interest’ sections now appear only in designated inner-city branches. Not even Waterstone’s in trafalgar square has one. However, such sections have always provoked mixed reactions: they may be a useful buyers’ tool and they may indeed encourage people to enter bookshops who otherwise wouldn’t, but many argue that they ghettoise minority writing, and that they offer an incoherent, disparate selection. To place ‘Black Crime’ next to ‘Black Erotica’ and ‘Black Social History’ does, after all, seem a bizarre concept. What remains true is that only when writers arrive at a certain level of prestige – Ben Okri, Toni Morrison et al – do they ‘graduate’ into general Fiction A-Z.

Yet we must tread carefully with our zealous cultural fringe theory. Before we rush to damn the bookselling chains, we should remember that it is often the larger stores and those with the higher turnover that can afford to take risks and stock books that they cannot guarantee will sell. While they can never replicate the dedication and range of such specialist stores as New Beacon bookshop in Stroud Green, North London, certain chain branches in areas with high proportions of minority ethnic groups – Ottakar’s in Clapham, South London is one example – do offer larger, well-tended ‘Black Interest’ sections to provide for local custom.

In publishing, as in other areas of our culture, the mainstream today is doing what the fringes struggled so hard to do 15-20 years ago. Authors start small and grow bigger. As their works become commercialised, more widely read – and thus more influential – the more space they occupy in the cultural airwaves. This process must continue, and only by allowing independent publishing room to breathe today will we preserve and promote the creativity and innovation that will forge the mainstream of tomorrow. So read widely, but be selective. Unlike in other retail sectors where manufacturers’ brands dominate, most of us are not influenced by the publisher’s logo in our decision to buy a book. Perhaps we should be. When you pick up a book, check the imprints page at the front: if it doesn’t say ‘subsidiary of’ on it, then chances are this independent firm needs your bucks more than a multinational giant. If a book on a 3 for 2 table catches your eye, just remember that the publisher paid the bookseller to put it there. If we want to prevent publishing from becoming monolithic, notwithstanding the strength and quality of those writers stabled at bigger houses, and instead allow many different publishers the space to cultivate the true breadth of multi-ethnic literary diversity in the UK, we, the consumers, need to go the extra mile.

The author works in Sales & Marketing at Serpent’s Tail, an independent publisher in Finsbury Park, North London

The LIP: What was it like to write fiction after years of journalism and non-fiction?

Jill Nelson: It was a ball! After so many years as a journalist and writer of non-fiction, being necessarily constrained by the ‘facts’ as best I could uncover them, it was a true pleasure to be able to let my imagination take my words as far out as I wanted to go. In the beginning of writing it I’d get to places in the text and feel ‘stuck.’ Luckily, I had a pal who’d remind me, ‘It’s fiction. Make it up!’

The LIP: The book’s heroines call their brothel a ‘Sisters’ Spa’ and intend it to be exclusively for black women. Is the book aimed broadly at a black, female readership?

JN: I consider my first audience black women and as a black woman I write with sisters foremost in my head. However, I think SH speaks to all women, and I would hope that men too will read the book. I think the book’s for anyone who likes sex, likes to read, and has a sense of humour.

The LIP: Lydia and Acey are clever, feisty, financially independent professionals who give it all up to provide sexual healing for women. Did you want to make a feminist statement?

JN: I wanted to write a fast, funny, smart, good read, with the feminist messages embedded more subtly in the text. It’s about friends coming up with a great idea and navigating their conditioning, society’s expectations and a lot of other bullshit to make it work; it’s about women taking control of their own sexuality; it’s about beating back the sexism, exploitation of women and opportunism of the Church through the character of T. Terry Tiger, and the oppression of capitalist exploitation in the persona of Dick Dixmoor, and winning in the end. And it’s also about women getting in touch with who they are.

The LIP: Microsoft’s online magazine compared Sexual Healing to Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, in that it too proposes a version of sex tourism as a remedy for ‘the desolateness of contemporary Western sexual relations’. What’s your angle on this?

JN: My take is that women’s sexuality is so proscribed, oppressed, and judged in the culture, that we are often left desolate and depressed. This happens both when we try to ‘fit in’ with expectations as well as often when we rebel and, in acting out, enter yet another trap that’s been set by what I call the dying white culture. What I tried to do in SH is not simply flip the script in terms of women controlling their own sexuality and the selling and buying of sex, but also create a new world in which these things could take place and thrive.

The LIP: How did your own observations of American society influence your creation of Dick Dixmoor?

JN: Dick is a character largely based on real events, real people, and my imagination’s take on the rapacious, cut throat nature of American capitalism and the often frightening collision of capitalism and racism, i.e. Dick’s obsession with the ‘black male super-predator’ and his sincere belief that secretly making black men impotent is justified by social conditions. Dick’s character is based on real stuff onto which I piled my own skewed imagination.

The LIP: Do you think that a conflict between organised religion and personal sexual freedoms is something a lot of people are anxious about?

I see organized religions as incredibly oppressive, particularly for women. As a black American woman, it was impossible not to bring the black church in as a character, since in most communities it is among the few long-lived, stable institutions, and has incredible power and influence on people’s lives. And yes, I think many women and men are disturbed by the Church’s hypocrisy when it comes to sexuality, whether it’s the studied indifference to HIV/AIDS, the refusal to acknowledge gay parishioners, or ministers’ exploitation of lonely female parishioners who confuse their minister with their God.

The LIP: Are publishers representing black literary talent well enough?

JN: I really can’t speak for the UK. In the US I’m convinced that white readers by and large don’t read writers who are not also white. I find people of colour read much more widely. Do I think publishers could push readers to read more widely? Yes. But I think they only do it after a writer has, usually through her own hard work, crossed over. Then they figure out it makes good business sense to market all writers to all people.

The LIP: Do you think black interest sections in bookshops are a good thing?

JN: I have mixed feelings. It’s great to be in a black interest section for people who are already interested in work by black writers, but they’re a minority of book buyers. So, it’d be nice to see SH in the ‘New Fiction’ or ‘Fiction’ section in addition to black interest, ya know?

Jill will appear at Ottakar’s in Clapham with Alex Wheatle on 19th October as part of Black History Month in the UK. For further info visit: www.serpentstail.com.