I won’t lie to you, writing this has not been easy. When I first began brainstorming an issue on the state of the industry – as a precursor, a sister issue to our forthcoming fortieth anniversary issue – I couldn’t possibly fathom reading the headlines ‘a chill has been cast over the book world’ in October 2023 (np), at the time of writing this editorial. Pamela Paul, writing for the New York Times, was of course referring to the Frankfurt Book Fair’s decision to disinvite the award-winning Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who was due to be awarded the LiBeraturpreis – a prize for authors from the Global South, awarded by the German literary organisation LitProm – for her novel Minor Detail at a ceremony at the 2023 edition of the world’s largest, arguably most influential, fair and forum for books.
In the weeks before and after this cancellation – an act of censorship challenged by hundreds of industry professionals and writers via an ArabLit open letter – many cultural organisations and individuals were seen to take sides. In a suburb of Paris, the mayor of Choisy-le-Roi called off a performance of And Here I Am, a play written by Hassan Abdulrazzak and developed by The Freedom Theatre (a theatre troupe based in the Jenin refugee camp). In London, the book launch for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall – organised in partnership with the Palestine Festival of Literature, Amnesty International, and Palestine Solidarity Campaign – was stopped stating security concerns. In New York, 92NY, a premier cultural centre, cancelled an event with the Pulitzer-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, a long-time supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, who had signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire amisdt the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Beyond Frankfurt, Paris, London, New York … everywhere, every day, more dissenting voices were silenced and erased, as publishers, editors, and academics were fired from their jobs — for calling out institutional or national complicity and censorship. For tweeting. For signing open letters. For teaching facts. For teaching fiction.
A chill has been cast over this blank page for weeks. This is the state of the industry.
And yet, all around me, cultural curators have also been resigning from their roles as editors, professors, and event organisers — abandoning and publicly shaming institutions who have long been boasting and spouting claims of diversity and inclusivity, free speech and intellectual pluralism, but who are now quick to remain silent or take sides, quick to condone settler colonialism, quick to censor Palestinian voices and truths. For each act of erasure, there are also those boycotting, protesting, fundraising, speaking up, standing up. This, too, is the state of the industry.
Like many others, I have found myself questioning the role and purpose of art and artists. Like many others, I have found myself struggling to find beauty, love, empathy, or compassion in the world beyond the covers of books. Everything has felt stained by war. It’s hard – almost impossible – I have found, to contemplate the state of the industry, when humanity’s collective conscience is at stake. I have had to step back, I have had to let the chill pass and the fog lift. The voices in this issue – featuring a selection of the most prescient and pertinent writers – are alive with the desperate and urgent sound of freedom, with cautionary tales and calls to action. Coming from backgrounds and perspectives multiply marginalised and sidelined by the industry – and world at large – they are soaked with cries for justice, equality, and visibility. In an industry that often throws these words around performatively and carelessly, making hollow promises to meet their capitalist agendas, I’m trying not to use these words lightly. The stories, poems, and essays collected in this issue debunk myths, dispute preconceived notions, smash stereotypes, and confront complacent institutions for their hypocrisy and complicity — all the while fighting for freedom against capitalist, fascist, racist, and sexist models and pressures.
S J Kim and Vedita Cowaloosur, two life writing contributors from Wasafiri 107, our special issue on Crisis/Recovery, return to these pages with powerful and poignant pieces, written in their trademark styles blending the personal with the political. While Cowaloosur bids goodbye to Mauritian Bhojpuri, a language inherited and gifted from her grandmother, now co-opted and twisted by the political presence and pressures of the right-wing party in power in India, Kim writes about whiteness, being a woman of colour in academia, and a complicated homecoming in her essay ‘Life in the UK’:
Starlight Express is a metaphor for UK higher education: white people on roller skates pretending to be trains; more white people in the audience believing they are so. Should you find yourself trapped in a three-hour department meeting, cry out CHOO CHOO. Keep crying until your CHOOs are the loudest in the room. Assert yourself. CHOO with the whole of your heart CHOO.
The poets in the issue, Amara Amaryah, Andrés N. Ordorica, and Yilin Wang, distill diasporic memories and landscapes into their arresting and alive poems. In a way, amidst various departures and arrivals fraught with unbelonging and un-homing, all the writers in the issue are determined to keep crying until their CHOOs are the loudest in the room. Are you listening? Pay attention, for speaking truth to power is not easy, and these harsh truths are often told at great personal and professional costs. The sound of a lost commission here, a lost tenure there, reverberates across the ivory towers of publishing and academia.
Jen Calleja’s satirical and razor-sharp lead feature ‘Custard Pies’, featuring five pastel-coloured pies – ‘one for each heckle I’ve received at a panel discussion about literary translation’ – dwells on the fallacies of an ‘ideal translator’ — including notions of fidelity, mentorship, and who has the right to translate. (Read her companion piece ‘Feedback and Complaints’ on the Wasafiri website.) Our 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize winners in Poetry, Fiction, and Life Writing – Swati Rana, Sharika Nair, and Nasia Sarwar-Skuse – variously explore history and familial and material memory, Partition and present-day India, archives and the ancient land and sea. These pieces are accompanied by a stilling and stirring illustration by Melek Zertal. Karthik Shankar, winner of the 2023 Wasafiri Essay Prize, a significant intervention in queer and trans studies, delves into the ‘anatomies of aesthetics and ideologies that make the feminine-identifying hijra body coherent’ in his impressive and important close reading of Jeet Thayil’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel, Narcopolis. Violence – colonial and of the climate, epistemic and ethnoreligious – is a refrain running through all four prize-winning pieces.
Georgia Lin’s article focuses on Western higher education as a site of oppression for women of colour in the works of Audre Lorde and Jo Hamya, and speaks to S J Kim’s own experience. Meanwhile, Meena Kandasamy’s spiky short poem situates the work of writers of colour within the literary industry — how they are marketed and mined for their trauma: ‘Whiteness – afraid of being besieged – shall/police you at the border, partake of you/within their festival tents. Here, the horrors/of my land; here, the horrors in my life.’ Zeba Talkhani’s review essay furthers such questions of expectation and representation:
This space to focus on self, and not on identity, isn’t always available to writers of colour — especially when our books are still predominantly marketed on where we come from, rather than our craft. We are expected to speak for ‘our’ people and our right to containing contradicting multitudes is washed away by the requirements of performing our identity.
I’ll leave you with Elaine Castillo’s words in her interview with Katie Goh. ‘Hope is very easy to snuff out. It’s labour to continue believing and it’s labour to continue writing into the world.’ I’m continuing writing into the world, unsure what the world will be, unsure of who we will be, when you read this issue of Wasafiri in the spring. For now, I'm doing the best I can to continue to believe that those who labour to speak up will someday, someday have their voices heard.