The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Freedom, play and magic Creative writers are not great joiners they sometimes kick against what is expected. They prefer to be seen to be outside the club or playhouse, even if they are life subscribers. As Groucho Marx would not join any club that would have him as a member, so the attitude of creative writers standing apart (even if it is a pose) rubs off on others, on all of us. Creative writing and freedom of expression One of the most striking aspects of a creative writing workshop is that opinions are voiced with freedom. Sometimes, students in those workshops find it hard to get used to this freedom because, in their past, those opinions have either not been sought, or they have been ignored, or they have been shamed as foolish. Yet inexperience can be inadvertently wiser at times than experience. It carries fewer preconceptions. Language belongs to every human. It lives by evolution, by being played with and by being hit at fresh angles. However, creative writing’s capacity for the creation of illusion-as-truth, and the precision of its language, makes it doubly dangerous to authorities whose power depends on the formulation of illusions, and the debasement and twisting of language. Standing apart makes you even more vulnerable to assault. Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient and sterile – Sinclair Lewis. The word sterility here is precise it connives with the dead hand of authority. One of the gut instincts of government is control seize the language and you control not only speech but also its contexts, the terms on which discussion is based, and the permissions and prohibitions of speech. Look at the manner in which war is presented by politicians and the media. Observe the terms for atrocity and killing tamed to acronyms and newspeak. War takes place ‘in theatre soldiers are taken out, dropped, as if killing a person was the action of ushers removing a theatregoer from the playhouse. Force-feeding illegal prisoners of war is introducing internal nutrition to detainees as if they were wilful children. The poet CD. Wright comments, If you do not use language you are used by it. If you do not recognize the terms peacekeeper missile and preemptive strike as oxymorons, your hole has already been dug Such language places what is described at several removes it does not change the intolerable actuality. It tampers quite deliberately with our reaction to it, attempts to neutralise it. It infantilises us in our complicity or passivity, and this is the intention and design to deter or deflect our humane objections by dampening our emotional responses. Writers are the antennae for language, Creative writing in the world 49 designers of speech, and you, as new writers, should similarly be alert to languages abuse and debasement. Political regimes, even regimes whose ideologies oppose each other, have found cause to target creative writers and intellectuals, to bend them to the will of their ideologies, to use writers as apologists or celebrants of dogma. Should writers prove uncooperative, they are, at best, humiliated publicly, exiled, marginalised, and silenced, say, by banning publication. At worst, they are murdered. As PEN, the international writers union, reveals, there are many writers in prison, or under threat, throughout the world because of their writing. What George Orwell argued in Politics and the English Language seems to replay for every generation: When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching alive human being but some kind of dummy . . . his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. . . . And this reduced state of consciousness . . . is at any rate favourable to political conformity. (NE2: 2468) Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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