Between borders
Renee Liang speaks to Xue Yiwei, Sharlene Teo and Carlos Franz ahead of next month’s Auckland Writers’ Festival
With the tagline “Open Book”, this year’s Auckland Writers’ Festival opens the door to the most diverse programme yet. There are plenty of distinguished older white writers and very watchable they are too, but this year’s line-up has moved ahead and captured the zeitgeist. Writers such as Chinese Canadian emigre Xue Yiwei, young Singaporean novelist Sharlene Teo, Chilean writer Carlos Franz and polymath Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o speak of difference and what it is like to stand on the borders of a rapidly changing world.
Traditionally, literature is a measure of nationhood. Young writers aspire to the “Great New Zealand Novel”; colonial-era writers tended to frame their observations to please their audiences; our “canonical” literature is often challenged when we seek to reframe the NZ narrative.
But how relevant is literature in a world where borders have melted, our notions of nationhood have altered and political ideologies spread like epidemics?
Traversing as they do the boundaries between imagination and reality, languages and cultures, writers are perhaps uniquely qualified to offer answers. They are the border dwellers, comfortable or perhaps just used to the discomfort of traversing fault lines in our identity.
“Borders have played an extraordinary role in my literary career,” says Xue Yiwei. “I grew up during the Cultural Revolution in which Chinese traditional culture was all but destroyed. The early education of my generation was conditioned by Marxism . . . we were basically shaped by Western leftist ideology.”
Aside from the ideological, Xue has moved between other borders; disciplinary (he is a computer engineer as well as one of the most recognised writers in China) and geographic.
“Soon after the Tiananmen massacre, being aware that . . . fundamental change in China [was] approaching, I moved to Shenzhen, the socalled Special Economic Zone, a border city,” he says.
“This move provided me with a vantage point to view Chinese society of the 1990s, which is in fact the prototype of today’s China. And in 2002, I moved to Canada, a key move without which I would have never [become] a writer.”
Xue’s 1989 brave debut novel, Desertion, about an amateur philosopher’s efforts to quit his government job, is about the conflict born of crossing borders.
That all New Zealanders can trace a migrant heritage draws us to writers such as Xue. Many of us work, live or play with migrants. Does having migrant heritage predispose to being a writer?
Carlos Franz, one of the foremost contemporary Latin American writers, says he’s descended from immigrants who traversed half the world to find a new land.
“Among my great-grandparents, one was a Swiss man and . . . a Norwegian man . . . my Chilean parents were living — temporarily — in Switzerland when I was born. Then we moved to Argentina and then to Chile. When I arrived there I was 11 years old and felt uprooted.
“Supposedly Chile was my fatherland but I felt myself foreign. At the same time, I knew I had no other place to call ‘my country’.”
Feelings of uncertainty about the right to call our country our own will resonate with many and it’s a topic Kiwi writers have often tackled. Franz says that experience of foreignness is fundamental to his literary vocation.
“At an early age I decided that my ‘mother tongue’ would be my true land . . . narrative and poetry suppressed the borders between nations and cultures. Literature provided me with an imaginary but nonetheless supportive ‘family’ of authors and characters that alleviated my displacement trauma.”
Conversely, millennial Sharlene Teo finds questions about borders odd.
A Singaporean who moved to the UK to pursue creative writing, she says borders drive her writing as much as cars and windows do.
“If I hadn’t moved between cultures and disciplines, I’d still be a writer, just a different one. I’d have different fascinations and influences, and the vocabulary I use to articulate my ideas would be slightly different too.”
Her debut novel Ponti — the winner of a major UK writing award while still unfinished and the subject of a seven-way bidding war between publishers — has a dense, lush vocabulary, bringing a steamy 2003 Singapore to life.
Teo wrote it in the very non-tropical London, commenting in a recent Guardian interview, “I guess my imagination works more when there’s gaps to fill in, so there’s that psychic and geographic distance between your imagination of the place and how it actually is.”
So what of language?
Many novels are translated from English into other languages; recently there’s been a flow the other way but NZ has been slow to recognise this trend. An informal survey of works that have been translated from Te Reo into other languages threw up just a few non-fiction titles, mostly for the domestic market.
Books originally written in another language may be just the thing to make sense of an increasingly borderless world — and draw more readers.
Xue is one whose work has benefited from the wider audience. His short-story collection
Shenzheners, written in Chinese about migrant life in Canada, brought him greater recognition in his adopted country after it was translated.
Dr Bethune’s Children, which was refused publication in China, was first published in English translation.
Franz is part of the canon of Spanish language writers but was discovered by English readers only after his novel The Absent Sea (El Desierto) — a devastating study of free will and power in an era where sexual violence is too often in the headlines — was translated.
In an era where ratings drive content and we look at ourselves in ever-decreasing circles, what can books offer? One word: resistance. Writers are the conscience of society; their ideas subversive, in whatever period of history. In this time of fake news and cookie-cutter reality TV, perhaps their refusal to conform is their greatest gift.
Xue was censured; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a passionate social justice advocate, was imprisoned for criticising the Kenyan government in a play. While imprisoned, Thiong’o, who had won awards for the power of his writing in English, decided to abandon his colonial language in favour of Gikuyu, his mother tongue.
His refusal to back down resulted in death threats and exile in the West, which backfired by strengthening his voice and enlarging his audience.
“We should be able to connect to our base . . . and then connect to the world from our base. Our own bodies, our own languages, our own hair,” he told the Guardian.
In Birth of a Dream Weaver, the third in his autobiographical series, we see a young writer emerge after grappling with the conflict of being gifted a Western education while also bearing witness to the inequalities caused by Western occupation. For those unfamiliar with African colonial history, it’s a powerful yet fragile testament.
Meanwhile, Franz has built a body of work based on an unflinching observation of power and corruption.
“If it is true that politics and literature cannot be separated, then literature is my form of political action or, to put it more precisely, by writing, I exercise my inalienable right to protest in a sphere where there is no place for compromise.”
Such writers show literature still has a role to play in society.
“Stories hold up a mirror or an imprint of society at any given point of time, more honestly and empathetically than the news can fully encapsulate,” says Teo.
Xue is blunter: “Literature . . . teaches us how to live. Without literature, no matter how much
. . . social media, life is barren and boring.”
‘‘ If I hadn’t moved between cultures and disciplines, I’d still be a writer, just a different one. Sharlene Teo