Change in Nigeria 05/07/2011
A friend invited me yesterday to a symposium on the role of education in transforming Nigeria, hosted by the Association of Nigerian Students at Coventry University http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/international/Lifeatcoventry/StudentSocieties/Pages/Nigeriansociety.aspx Among the dignitaries was a former senior member of the Nigerian government, Mallam Nasiru El'rufai. When in government he had earned himself a formidable reputation as an ouspoken critic of corruption in Nigeria, and had overseen the rebuilding of the new capital. He was certainly a fine speaker, with a formidable intellect. It was quite an insight for me to hear these people speaking openly about the problems of Nigeria and how education could (but currently does not) effectively address them. Only a tiny majority of people in Nigeria, it seems, receive an education abroad and very little of that is state sponsored. The skills of educated Nigerians are sucked back into the traditional structures of nepotism and "kleptomania", as one speaker put it. The Nigerian students at Coventry University were anxious that their talents and the vast sums of money spent on their education should not go to waste. But they knew, I think, that it can make little difference when the political establishment is primarily interested in resisting change and maintaining the priviledges of the wealthy few. One of the problems, it seems to me, is that there is effectively no middle class, so there are a number of educated Nigerians with poor prospects of education or hope of enterprise. Billions of petro-dollars go missing every year, mostly into private hands: almost none of it filters down to the poor. The Niger Delta is reputedly filthy, and Nigeria is alleged to be the biggest single producer of greenhouse gasses in the world. We have seen this situation before. Wherever there are large numbers of people educated and looking for fulfillment of promises that are denied to them, civil unrest can follow. The audience heard of tales, clearly familiar to them, of people with advanced degrees in engineering working as low paid clerks in banks because that was all the work they could get. 52% of graduates in Nigeria remain without work 5 years after graduation. The atmosphere of the event was thus one of great energy and ambition mixed with a little anger and some bewilderment as to how to go forward. Students can be a powerful force for change, as was seen, for example, in France in 1968 and the USA in the 1970s. But it seemed unclear to me whether there was a strong enough focus to the students' demands, or enough students for it to matter. The event ended the way that all conferences and syposia do, with warm promises and nice exhortations to go forward and bring about change. From what I saw there is clearly a desire for change in Nigeria, and it seems to me that if it is going to come from anywhere - unless it be through civil war and unrest - it will come from these young people. Whether they have the power to achieve this from within the governance of the country is another matter. 1 Comment Crown of Thorns - What is Coming 03/20/2011
 Christ looks out of this picture at something of which I, the viewer, am unaware. At this point in the story he has suffered torture, and is expecting to suffer more. Those who would hurt him will find more ways to degrade him in pain. Those who were with him have abandoned him. He is alone. I heard a play on radio recently, called Black Roses about the murder of a young woman who was kicked to death in a public park. I told a friend about the play and sent her a recording of it. She told me then that two of her nephews aged eighteen and twenty one had recently been murdered in separate incidents, and that her fifteen year old niece had been raped in another. I met a woman once whose adult son had been walking in a park when he was attacked by a group of youths. One tried to gouge out his eye, leaving him blind. He had on him a wallet with money and cards, and a new mobile phone. They didn't take any of those. That wasn't what they wanted. Most of us hear of these things as stories. Events that have happened to someone else. We look for motives, explanations that help us make sense of what we fear, to reassure us that we can understand these events and thus control them. Even when the only motive we can attribute to them is the simple desire to seek satisfaction in another's pain, that in itself is something. It has a name we can share. None of that is what Christ sees as he looks out of the picture. Whatever it is has no name, but to him is so real it is palpable. At this point, he wears the crown of thorns lightly. What he is looking at is altogether in a different league. The Not (quite) Dead 03/19/2011
Simon Armitage wrote a book of poems called The Not Dead, which is about the traumas suffered by soldiers on return to civvy street. He drew upon interviews with former soldiers. It takes a certain kind of confidence to put words into real people's mouths. The Not Dead is a wonderful book. I had a job a couple of years ago to research the mental health of older men in prison - older being 50+. I interviewed 121 men, aged from 50 to 78. Each interview lasted at least an hour, unless they didn't want to cooperate. My first questions were, How much do you worry? and What sort of things worry about? I would just sit back and listen to it all come out. Among the men were quite a few former soldiers with PTSD, and some described a little of their experience to me. I've interviewed rapists, paedophiles, murderers, drug dealers. Many were sad little men, who probably had always been lonely and frightened. Usually fear is somewhere behind an act of violence. It was a strange and somewhat disturbing experience to get close to these guys in prison, if only on one occasion and for a limited period of time. Because I wasn't part of the security system and I wasn't there to judge them, or to inquire about why they were there, they opened up quite freely, and I don't think many of them lied to me. Why would they? I was there to ask about their feelings, probably something that hadn't happened to them very often. Only after I interviewed them did I find out what they were in for and for how long. Most were serving long sentences and a lot had come in to prison for the first time in old age. 'Historical' crimes are better prosecuted now, and victims are more willing to come forward. Invariably these men were in for sex offences, usually against members of their own families. In most cases the abuse had stopped when the victim grew up or moved out. Thereafter these guys had led ordinary law abiding lives. Though the internet has brought a new opportunity for crime, and has provided opportunities for some men and a few women to be abusive alone and from the comfort of their own homes. Some of the oldest prisoners and some who were quite severely disabled had been sentenced for long sentences for downloading child porn. But there was one quadraplegic who was in for murder! There are quite a few guys who stand out in my memory. One in particular was a former trawlerman. He was only about five foot three, and when I met him he was suffering from cancer. When I first went on the wing he came up to me and said, "I've heard about this stuff you're doing. I want to talk to you." Ok, I said. We started the interview, which followed a set of prescribed questions, and after a few minutes he said, I don't want to do this. And he started to tell me a bit about his life and who he thought he was. He told me how he had never hurt his daughters but his two of his wives were a real pain, etc etc. His last wife was all right though. All self-justifying nonsense, but he believed it. He told me about life on the trawlers, on which he had worked since a boy. They were hard men, these trawlermen. He said he'd cut the end of his finger off while at sea, and he went to the skipper, who said, What do you want me to do abot it? Go and get a hot coal and cauterise it. Then get back to work. Which he did. It was a culture of violence and blind stubborn resistence. His records said he had been inside before for violence against women, and for rape more than once. I expect he beat the crap out of his first two wives. He was undoubtedly a manipulative sod, with very little capacity for empathy. He'd be diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder, I'm sure. No question he was dangerous. But he was also, and always had been, vulnerable. He'd led a rough life and had messed it up for himself and most of the people around him. He knew he would die in prison, alone. Bt then he'd always ben alone. His life hadn't come to much, and the more he tried to justify it the more he needed to justify it. A lot of the guys had been badly abused themselves before becoming abusers. One had been inside for 30 years and would never be released. He had Asperger's syndome, which had only recently been diagnosed. His records said that as a child his father would rent him out for sex. He'd come to associate pain with affection, and had not been able to distinguish the two. Which is not to say he should be released. Poor and vulnerable though he was, he and a lot of the guys in prison were dangerous. I wonder if his father got what was coming to him? The current research into neuropsychology suggests that our behaviour is governed by our genes. If that is true, then to what extent is he, or any of us, guilty? Discuss. The value of creative writing courses 02/28/2010
There are a lot of creative writing courses around at the moment, all explicitly or implicitly promising something that it seems to me is never quite specified. A short-cut to success, perhaps. The truth of the matter is that good writing requires dedication and hard work. And certain opportunities and resources. Many failures, little hope of success. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. Leaving aside questions of talent, you have to be willing, as I think Will Self said in the Guardian recently, to submit yourself to long periods of solitary confinement. It’s a lonely job, and if you can't hack that, don't apply. It also involves a peculiar kind of relationship with the world. A distance. Writers should never belong to anything. They should be the grit in the oyster. Difficult. Awkward. Outsiders. In our society, writers are like priests. We don't on the whole believe in organised religion, but we do believe in art, and in particular the word. We also live in a society in which, thanks largely to the internet, everyone can claim attention through the word with the minimum effort. We can all be writers. Result: the triumph of opinion over knowledge. Nobody need submit themselves to the long years of hard work and study needed to master a subject, or to create a work of art. I wonder how many times I have heard fellow creative writing students say, I've not done much writing lately..? I've said it myself. Yet much effort goes into talking about writing, and to chat about this or that opportunity, or just chat. It's lovely, but it’s not the real thing. The thing about a creative writing course is that in a sense it doesn't matter if you succeed or not. What constitutes success is an open question. But it’s not like training to be, say, a nurse or a pilot, or a lorry driver. The job of writing for a living does not require you to hold any qualifications (arguably journalism is an exception, but creative writing courses include none of the emphasis on productivity that journalism courses do). Of course there are some people who come on creative writing courses who do have the stuff that writers are made of, and there are useful things to be gained from the best courses if you are that sort. But these people probably will be writers anyway. Whether what they will write will be as good is a different question. Meanwhile, the courses attract large numbers of hopeful would-be writers who for a while and a fee can tell themselves they are what they want to be. Some will succeed. Most won't. There are no short cuts. Anything more than therapy in writing (and I don’t belittle that) depends on talent, hard work, sacrifice, contacts, and luck. On the will to communicate and on having something to say. Everything else follows from that. Writing well into old age 12/06/2009
It is perhaps received wisdom that new writers of fiction over the age of about 40 don't have a hope of publication, at least by the major houses . This belief seems to be supported by the total absence of any major prize for a writer under that age and often much younger than that. There are no publishers specialising in the works of older writers, at least by new older writers. Middle or old age is only a virtue on the blurb on the cover if the author has been publishing for ages and has a string of awards to his / her name. If this is true then I suspect at the root of it is good old fashioned ageism. The publishing industry, like the rest of the media, seems obsessed with youth. In a more charitable mood I would like to believe it is because publishers and agents like to invest in long term relationships with their authors whom they hope to nurture to a point where they will bring a decent return. A writer in his or her sixties may not live long enough to see that return. My charitable mood isn't very charitable and doesn't last very long. I suspect the received wisdom is that a writer who hasn't made a serious commitment before the age when most people have settled down to a mortgage and a steady job isn't ever going to be much good. Perhaps it has something to do with what Muriel Gray described as Rural Teacher Syndrome in her address before the announcement of the Organge Prize in 2007. It seems she complained of the mediocrity of most of the novels that were submitted. Most of them, she said, were barely disguised autobiographies about falied marriages, lost babies and / or dead-end careers. She mourned the "inability to translate one's own experience into something larger, stronger and frankly more interesting than the life which produced it." While I applaud the need for novels that transcend the author's own experience, her views seem to beg a number of questions. Is this particular kind of mediocrity confined only to female writers? Or do male authors have their own types of ordinariness? Blood on the board room floor? If it is as hard to get published as some people claim, why are these things produced at all? Getting back to my theme of older writers and the discrimination they face, I wonder if there might be a tendency for people who start writing later in life (after marriage children and careers perhaps) to look back on and somehow try to make amends or understand what the hell went wrong through the act of writing fiction. If - and it seems to me a big if - older writers are indeed so inclined then they will indeed contribute to their own obscurity relative to their younger counterparts. I doubt that is a sufficient explanation, but it may be true at least in part. The rest I suspect may be ageism. I for one refuse to accept the ageist stereotype that all that is left in old age is history and regret. Succesful Unsuccessful Writing 11/25/2009
I came across the following Q & A on the website for Narrative Magazine It starts with a question directed to Robert Olen Butler, who seems to be a well known American writer (at least in America). You can read the article here. The question asked by a young poet, Lauren Bidden, who responds to Butler's suggestion that writers should write “absolute dreck,” “god-awful novels,” “dreadful short stories” every day." as part of the learning process. An author should not be afraid of "certain failure." But, she says, if writing is a painful process "that requires that we touch the rawest parts of our memory, sense, and emotion", how can we overcome the inevitable sense of failure that follows from the creation of an unsuccesful work? More exactly, "When does one revise, and when does one move on?" Butler's reply echoes Beckett's exhortation, "Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." He says that as a novice he wrote many novels, plays, stories, all of which deserved never to be published. "I’m not speaking of craft and technique. Much of the work was not bad technically. But there was something terribly wrong with my process, as an aspiring artist. I was writing from my head. I was writing from ideas. I was willing the work into being. I was failing to let my work generate itself from my unconscious, from the place where I dream. I relied on the relatively minor technical successes to deceive myself about the overall quality of what I was doing artistically. When at last I came to understand that I was basically looking in the wrong place in myself for my stories and novels, I finally started to write—and publish—the work that articulates my deepest sense of the human condition." As for when to revise and when to move on, he says, somewhat cryptically, that "when you truly know it’s coming from your deepest white-hot center, from the place where you dream, then revise with a passion", otherwise put it aside. How do you know? Well, he says that as a teacher there are some "pretty clear ways of doing that." but doesn't specify what they are or how an inexperienced author is supposed to know without the help of such a teacher. For all that I go with Bob Butler's advice to try not to be afraid of failure (hard though it is to follow) I am disappointed by the way he resorts to a kind of mystical mush to explain how the process of critical self-evaluation works. I accept that the process may not be entirely 'visible' but that does not mean we have to abandon all efforts to undertstand rationally what works and what doesn't, and why. Neither should we seek formulae to explain when a piece works or not. Head and heart have to learn to work together. It is an iterative process. DID they do it? 11/24/2009
I recently heard of a case Dissociative Identitity Disorder (DID). This rare and somewhat contested condition is thought to result from experience of extreme stress, in particular childhood sexual abuse. Sufferers are said to have many, sometimes dozens, of personalities and for this reason the condition used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In this instance the victim had been systematically tortured by a group of men for many years since infancy. In my recent research work in prisons, during which I interviewed a number of older prisoners, I met many who were there because they had committed sexual offenses against children. I don't know exactly what they did, except in a few cases, though some of them were serving very long sentences. I know that all of them came across to me as reasonable, often likeable people, who seemed to me like blokes everywhere, who were interested in the welfare of their family and friends, their minor ailments, work, money, football, and so on. Is it possible that some of the men I met had also done, or wanted to do, or watched pictures of people doing the sort of things to others that the men described above did? Did those men also have jobs, families, pets, mortgages, and enjoy a game of football? Alan Bennett wrote a monologue, called Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which concerns an 'ordinary' suburban housewife who murders her husband who has for years been abusing her, not just alone but often in front of and with the help of other men. One of these other men, whom she has never seen, turns out to be the narrator's husband, himself an ordinary man, who is implicated in the story by his habit of whistling softly under his breath, a sound she overheard often while the men took their pleasure of her. I don't think we can say that those who do such things are very different from those who don't. The difference is that they do them. The point is you can't always tell them apart. This book, first published in 1960 and long out of print though still available, is the perfect companion for the bird lover, as useful at the fireside as it is in the field. It is in itself a little work of art. The illustrations are each reproductions of paintings rather than photographs, some in colour but many in black and white. Though they seem a little posed and lack something of the 'high definition clarity we expect now, nevertheless they give an impression of the vitality of each bird that is quite captivating. Though the pictures are wonderful for me it is the text that accompanies the pictures that is so thrilling. Each one presents a short general description followed by a sentence each on haunt, nest, eggs, food and notes. The writing is superb and often poetic. The Goldfinch, for example, is described as having "A high tinkling twitter, reminiscent of Japanese wind-bells. Song, similar and fairy like." Or that of the Chaffinch: " ...a high rollicking cadence ending up with a flourish." Such eloquence is based on long practised observation. In hindsight, the book also offers a fascinating insight into social attitudes towards the natural world. The preface, for example, contains an affectionate recollection of how the author rescued a Guillemot that was covered in oil. It is a description from a time when such things were of less concern than they are now, and marks an early example of ecological activism that perhaps we are too used to reading about. The Foreword is written by Frances, Countess of Warwick, a supporter of the Bird Lovers' League and admirer of "the Misses Benson." Though it is not uncommon now, nor was then, for such books to contain little peons of praise from some distinguished figure, this seems to me to particularly reflect the long standing association in Britain between the aristocracy and their (assumed) natural guardianship of the environment. She acutely observes the then growing interest in animal and bird life from that of "a very small section of the community...whose circumstances enabled them to indulge their inclination..." to something more widespread. It contains an irony that would seem to have been missed, perhaps due to a peculiar sort of myopia that is characteristic of those who pursue certain causes out of sentiment. The Countess notes that the members of the League have each "pledged himself or herself never to keep a bird in a cage..." while at the same time noting that she has "over four hundred in my aviary here...rescued from unsuitable conditions." No doubt they were kept with good intention and were better off than before, but I cannot imagine anyone making such a remark or failing to spot such an irony now. Handy in its size and scope for the task of practical bird-watching, this book is a product of solid field craft that opened the eyes of a generation to the birds around them. It is one of the treasures of British naturalism. Grey Lag 06/28/2009
For a while now I've had the notion to write a novel about a man who is sent to prison for the first time in old age. His crime is 'historical' - it happened thirty years or more before he is sent down. Dialogue in drama and fiction 05/27/2009
For some time I've wondered at the difference between dialogue in drama and in fiction. Though there are parallels I've never been quite sue they are the same. Apart from the obvious differences, such as fiction using 'he said / she said' and so on, and dialogue in drama providing almost all the structure around which action is built, I think there is fundamentally something different about the two forms. |
