New Statesman Scotland - Other voices, other lives
Back in '92, I spent a year as writer in residence at the University of Alberta in Canada. The chair of the writing programme at the time was Greg Hollingshead, a powerful and insightful writer of fiction and the most hospitable of hosts. For both these reasons, it was a pleasure for me to chair his session at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year and later to chinwag about developments in Canadian writing during a stroll along the Solway coast on a still, grey afternoon. There were many parallels for us to draw between modern Scottish literature and what is happening in Canada.
Hollingshead's is one of a whole range of Canadian voices to be heard far from his own shores recently; one of an exciting list that includes Anne Michaels, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Eden Robinson, Shani Mootoo, Rohinton Mistry and Marilyn Bowering. It is interesting to speculate, I suggested, whether we are hearing these voices simply because the well-known names in Canadian writing - Atwood, Davies, Munro, Shields and Ondaatje - have reached such a critical mass that they prompt further interest among publishers and readers, as was the case with Latin American fiction; or whether it has been circumstances within Canadian culture itself that have released these voices.
During my year in Canada, what impressed me most was the vehemence of literary debate. Within the Writers' Union members were arguing fiercely that writers should not "appropriate other voices". White people should not use the voices of natives, men the voices of women, middle-class writers the voices of the working class and so on: all should only write out of their own direct experience. The combative tone of Barbara Gowdy's review of White Buick, a book of short stories Hollingshead published at that time, illustrates the edge there was to the debate: "The fact that he can write just as warmly and authentically in the voice of a woman of colour - and has the guts to do so - is [an] eye-opener." Hollingshead's "defence" was succinct: "Isn't the imagination what it's all supposed to be about?"
Hollingshead says that this scrutiny of content, at the expense of an appreciation of the formal qualities of a work, was determined from the moment Canadian literature entered the academy. Embarrassed by the formal poverty of its early texts, the focus of attention shifted to the uses they might have in a self-conscious claiming of identity. This tendency was compounded by the politicising of universities - and texts - throughout North America in the eighties. In hindsight, Hollingshead sees the impulse that preceded and promoted the debate on appropriation of voice to have been feminism, allied as it was to a desire to give the oppressed the chance to speak - women, gays, minority writers, children.
In its extreme form, the issue of appropriation of voice seemed to be as much about silence, about withholding experience, as it was about giving voice: as one native poet expressed it, "because these are not my stories I have no right to tell them". However, though it raged in extremity and bitterness for some years and caused many writers discomfort and aggravation, Hollingshead feels that "the fashion of the argument" has passed; that it has been won, "in the sense that publishers are open to marginal voices and any white writer would now be extremely wary of appropriating a minority voice, particularly a native one".
As for the present situation, what strikes Hollingshead - and would strike anyone who has followed the course of Canadian writing over the past ten years or so - is the new diversity of voices it contains. Now that the minority voices are taken for granted, publishers and readers can concentrate on the quality of the writing rather than the exotic or voyeuristic qualities of the material. We, as readers of Hollingshead's The Healer or Mistry's A Fine Balance, of Robinson's Traplines or Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, are the beneficiaries of Canadian culture's self-scrutiny. We can respond to these novels without having any awareness of Canada's intense debates; to the same extent as readers outwith Scotland can enjoy the various voices of KeIman, Welsh, McLean or Galloway without knowing the background to the political and cultural debates that freed their voices.
To those, such as Roy Strong, who claim that in the new Scotland we should make a fetish of constantly looking outwards, it is worth saying that a culture can debate with itself without being parochial, and that the art that results - if written with truth by writers of talent - will transcend any barriers.
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