Echo Chamber: do we need more diverse voices in literature?

Liverpool’s annual literary festival Writing on the Wall takes over the city this month with events focusing on the Harlem Renaissance, race riots and multicultural England. Our Books editor considers race in literature and diversity in publishing

Feature by Holly Rimmer-Tagoe | 27 Apr 2015

The issue of racial diversity is once more at the forefront of cultural debate: from Lenny Henry’s ongoing campaign to increase the number of black and minority ethnic (BME) workers in the television industry, to the #allwhiteoscars trend that dominated the response to this year’s Oscar nominations. While such debate is more pressing in the TV and film industries, where the absence of diversity is visible and evident, the demand for a wider variety of voices in the book industry seems markedly quieter and is often softly swept under the carpet. After all, isn’t literature all about the universal human experiences of love, strife and loss?

Such a sentiment might be true if the ability to transgress narrative and genre was truly universal. In his modernist-inspired novel-within-a-novel Erasure, Percival Everett’s protagonist, Thelonious Ellison, is dismayed to find his novel in the African American Studies section of the bookstore; the book is actually an obscure adaptation of a Greek tragedy. Everett goes on to comically dismantle the pervasiveness of the ‘ghetto narrative’ when the protagonist’s satirical work My Pafology – where matricide and “fine-ass bitches” meet poor spelling – becomes a runaway bestseller. It is not that narratives about the slave trade or inner-city life shouldn’t exist, but that such stories have largely come to represent the only black experience in literature.

Publishing is a reactionary market; the success of a book quickly leads to hundreds of copycat replicas, many of them making no attempt to disguise their repetitive nature. Publishing is also an industry in flux, with an increasing turn to digital texts and the growth of niche publishers. A 2007 survey by DIPNet (the Diversity in Publishing Network) found that only 3% of workers at director level and 4% of editorial staff in publishing come from a BME background. It is no surprise, then, that a lack of diversity at the boardroom and commissioning level impacts on the literary product. Non-white stories will continue to be marginalised until publishing houses properly reflect Britain’s diverse communities.

‘Black literature’ is a stupidly simplistic term; it suggests that all literature by black writers is somehow the same, that black writers are only capable of writing in a particular style or genre and that all black people have a similar story to tell. In her brilliant TED Talk The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes how, as a child brought up in Nigeria, her first attempts at writing always involved apples, characters with blue eyes and snow – the sun and mangoes of Nigeria were strangely absent – simply because she read British and American children’s books. It was only when Ngozi discovered the African books of Camara Laye and Chinua Achebe that she realised people who looked like her could exist in books and that literature is not confined to a single story to be repeated ad nauseam.

Allowing different stories to be told and a wider variety of voices to be heard is not a simple moral imperative, but an appeal for ingenuity and imagination. Leaping into unfamiliar territory with a character we may, or may not, like is the undertaking we accept every time we pick up a book. The journey is all the better when the protagonist is someone we haven’t met before.

Writing on the Wall, Liverpool, Fri 1 May- Thu 28 May, times and locations vary:

http://writingonthewall.org.uk