‘I’ve never set out to offend people, but I’m not going to pull back from a subject because it has the potential to ruffle feathers’
Lionel Shriver, who lived in Belfast for more than a decade, tells Katie Law about the politics of free speech, how the #MeToo movement has lost its way
Lionel Shriver is used to causing offence. As a novelist, she has always chosen difficult subjects — from an ambivalent mother and her violent teenage son who carries out a highschool massacre in We Need to Talk About Kevin, to morbid obesity (based on Shriver’s own brother) in Big Brother.
She is already anticipating being accused of cultural appropriation in her new collection of short stories, Property, due out next month. Loosely based on themes of territory and conflict, one of the stories features a black character. Shriver’s agent suggested she change the character’s ethnicity to white. Shriver refused.
The issue of cultural appropriation came to a head 18 months ago at the Brisbane Writers Festival, when Shriver gave a speech called Fiction and Identity Politics.
Vehemently opposing the idea that novelists drawing on cultures other than their own constitutes identity theft, she asked: “Are we fiction writers to seek permission to use a character from another race, or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong?”
She might have got away with it had it not been for Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-Egyptian-Australian journalist, who walked out mid-speech and wrote an emotive piece in the Guardian, which described Shriver’s speech as “a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension”.
“So, now, of course, my agent said, ‘After you stuck your neck out on this cultural appropriation nonsense, anything you write is going to be heavily scrutinised. If I submit this story to a magazine and they turn it down, we won’t know whether it’s because you had the gall to include a black character.’”
Crucially, the 60-year-old believes that accusations of cultural appropriation are stifling creativity and imagination. “It introduces a sense of self-consciousness. If you do make a character, say, black, they are going to be scrutinised. They can’t adhere to any stereotype — that’s not so bad, actually — but we don’t need the pressures of identity politics to get rid of stereotypes. We just need good literary criticism and original sensibilities.”
She’s the first to concede she is wilful. “But I’ve never set out to offend people. And I’m not going to pull back from a subject because it has the potential to ruffle feathers.” She imagines there must be other more cautious writers than her — not hard to imagine — who are “self-editing up a storm”.
Is it important to offend? “Yes. Take female genital mutilation,” she says. “If you’re going to stick up for the right of little girls not to have their genitals chopped into bits, you have to risk offending communities where it has been a tradition for generations.
“There have been so many instances of this right not to be offended deriving from Muslim communities, for whom it is profoundly against the law to insult their religion. Combined with the threat of terrorism, everybody is increasingly afraid to give offence, particularly to Islam, and it just seems like asking for trouble.
“This movement is partly being driven by the diversity of Western life. What we’ve been calling minorities — groups of people with very different ways of thinking — are becoming a large part of our society.
“It’s especially a problem with the Muslim failure to integrate, which makes everything incredibly touchy, but is also increasingly leading to a general calcification of the public discourse.”
Shriver, who grew up in a religious household in North Carolina, which “inoculated me against religion for ever”, is not the first to argue that the right to give offence is one of the very foundations of freedom of speech. “We’re moving in the direction of enshrining the right not to be offended, which is the end of liberty and certainly the end of good books,” she says.
A member of the awkward squad from an early age, Shriver famously changed her name from Margaret to Lionel when she was 15. Growing up between two brothers, she wanted to be more like her father than her mother.
“I suppose that, if all those things had been the same but it had been today, my parents might have been concerned that maybe I should become a boy instead of just being a tomboy and I’m glad that that didn’t happen, not because I’m so attached to being female — I’m not,” she says. “I don’t think it matters whether I’m male or female very much, which is one reason I feel distanced from the #MeToo movement.”
She later says that while #MeToo started in “a good place”, there’s become too much “line-blurring between sexual harassment and just poor taste”.
Nor does she feel like “a woman” much of the time. “My sense of self when I’m on my own and not in social situations isn’t gen- dered. What upsets me about our most recent obsession with transsexuality and having to fit yourself on the gender spectrum, is that it’s not the answer to identity — it’s an impediment.
“The spectrum is based on stereotypes and that’s my problem with, say, a young man who decides he feels like he’s really a woman. What does that mean? I don’t feel like a woman — and I am one. Does it mean that you’re soft, nurturing, kind, understanding and empathetic? That you’re not aggressive, strong, forceful, brave and stoic?
“I’m all for women who feel comfortable being aggressive and opinionated, but we don’t have to say that’s being ‘mannish’ ”.
Shriver lives in an ex-council house in Bermondsey with her husband, jazz drummer Jeff Williams. She cycles everywhere and rarely uses public transport except to take the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow. When Borough Press commissioned 11 authors to write short stories for Underground: Tales for London, Shriver writing about the Piccadilly Line was an obvious choice.
In The Piccadilly Predicament, she touches on themes of prejudice and terrorism that will hit a nerve with any of us who have ever looked at a rucksack and wondered.
“Everyone has strong feelings about the Tube and I’m sensitive to that. It made a good short story because it’s contained.” And just maybe because it
will cause offence.
❝ We’re enshrining the right not to be offended, which is the end of liberty