Some wrongs in the world are so great no redress is truly possible, but humanity and justice demand they be acknowledged, looked full in the face.
The Klansman...a truly horrible book, and the good guys go down. I couldn't bear to read it again. The young black woman, raped in a police station...later gunned down. When I read that I was a girl in my early 20's, and I related to her danger on that level.
Here in the 50's a young policeman once got his you know what out, locking my mother in a cell, offering her a guided tour when she went to ask if a lost bracelet had been handed in. She was fine. She laughed at the you know what till it shrank, and threatened to report him to his sergeant. In another world, another time and place, it could easily have become something altogether more horrific. And she of course, would not have dared walk in to ask about a lost bracelet. Now, I couldn't bear to re-read that novel because I'm the mother of two young women; I would be rereading that as a mother needing to protect that girl and being unable to. But the book was an exposition of evil, and how mundane it can be, so I wouldn't want to see that book banned, and it is highly offensive, all round. But it was clear where the writer's sympathies lay.
The Song Before It is Sung, and
Masai Dreaming, by Justin Cartwright. Unbearable. Offensive in the extreme, read that way, to Jewish people, to the Masai, to all humanity, the things that happen, and which, far worse, really did happen. Novel writing, poetry is an shamanic act, about being other than ourselves, finding ourselves in the other and the other in us. I'm busily imagining I am a man. I have written in the first person narrative as a man, and what's more, he's got Irish and Trinidadian ancestry and has never in his life set foot in Ireland or Trinidad. Am I qualified? Will a sensitivity reader blast my effort as offensive? On what basis do I attempt it? This person feels real to me but to
realize him through craft, I need to become invisible. A previous draft was written in the third person. A US publisher expressed disappointment, writing to me that they had wanted to walk in that character's shoes and look out from behind his eyes. They wanted to walk with him, and they felt third person POV didn't cut it.
When the rheumatoid thing got really bad, hobbling round Rouen on a walking stick, my brother once said, Jesus Christ, can't you go any faster than that, you f*cking cripple? And it was really, really physically painful, but this, coming from him, only made me laugh
because of the place those words were coming from
The art of truths comes down to respect. Manners can be taught; respect cannot. Who is qualified to judge the essential human truths in writing? Everyone or no-one.
I'd put those books down too,
@MaryA. Naff, puerile and shitty writing
