SWF: The weekend



I suppose I have to admit I had a great time at the Writers' Festival, and that my initial negative take on the program turned out to be ill-founded. Mind you, I didn't go to the olive oil tasting. But there was a list as long as my arm that I wish I could have gone to -- the main instance being that I didn't get to a single Children's or YA event.

Before I talk about events as such, I should mention the exhibitions/slide shows:

• Sarah Rhodes had a series of photographs of Australian artists on the wall of the Heritage Pier -- if you missed them you can see them on her website. I love the one of Dorothy Napagnardi.

• There was a slide show of Juno Gemes's photos of writers. She's the official photographer-in-residence of the Festival.

• MTC Cronin had an intriguing installation: three of her poems on pillars alongside goldfish bowls containing objects that resonated with the poems, plus three paintings on easels. I believe there was a talk as well, but I missed that. This was presented by the Red Room Company, and they're planning three more such installations around Sydney over coming months.

• Poets Paint Words was a slide show based on an event at the Newcastle Art Gallery last year, where a number of poets read works inspired by or otherwise relevant to paintings in the gallery's collection. The paintings and poems in the slides were from last year's event, and it didn't work brilliantly when I saw it, because the slides for most of the poems clicked over well before I had time to read them. On the Gallery's web site, however, they can be read at leisure. Bob Adamson and Brett Whiteley make a great pair.

In the sessions proper, I had a bit of a Muslim day, starting with the wonderfully urbane Mohammed Hanif talking about A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Asked what led hi to write it, he explained that like all first novelists, he wrote it because he was bored in his day job. He explained, further, that like all first novelists, he wanted to write an autobiographical love story, but as his life had been very dull he had to find something else. First novels also have to have a mystery and a party, he said. He was almost as wonderful as the book. I asked my only audience question, and was very brief: I asked him if I was right in sensing that beneath the humour it was an angry novel. He said that, like all first novelists, he was too busy working out how to write each paragraph, figuring out what was going to happen next, and working out how to make everything work to have feelings like anger, but he went on, graciously, to say that if a reader found anger in the book it came from the repressed anger of the times it was set in. Or words to that effect. Probably his most interesting remark, though was in response to a question about how his book was received in Pakistan, given its homosexual content: he explained to us well meaning ignoramuses (my description, no his) that Pakistan is a very complex place, with a thriving civil society as well as the fundamentalism and tribalism that makes the headlines. In some parts of the countries, girl bands attract large, enthusiastic audiences; in others, women have been killed for singing in public.

And rushing across the road to our next session, we were the 101st and 102nd in line for Irfan Yusuf in Conversation, so failed to make it into the room, which was licensed for 100 people only. This wasn't a total disaster: we sat in the sun beside the water and listened to the conversation in considerable comfort. We did miss the visual element: Yusuf's interlocutor Sudil Banami introduced him as a political heavyweight, and to judge from he laughter he made a show of taking the remark as a reference to his bulk; there was a bit of chat about flesh coloured headsets, and only when I saw these beige headsets in later sessions did I realise that a visual joke was being made by these two quite dark men. Yusuf was funny and smart and emphatic about the need for everyone to recognise the diversity of Australia's Muslim community. We bought his memoir, Once Were Radicals, which opens with thanks for George W Bush for inventing the comedy-god term Islamofascist.

Then onward ever onward for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation with Ramona Koval. We were right up in the gods. An interesting part of Chimamanda's talk was to inform us that Nigeria too has a functioning civil society. In response to one question, she reassured us that the US is also quite civil: that she doesn't expect to be stoned when her new book is released there next month.

In the late afternoon, we listened to Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro discuss their book about Martin Bryant, Born or Bred, raising and failing to lay to rest the ethics, and indeed legalities of using as source material a manuscript they had been given as part of aborted ghost-writing negotiations. An interesting session all the same. One of those that leave you glad of what you've just learned but not necessarily wanting to read the book.

At night, the charmingly enthusiastic Annette Shun Wah compered International Voices, where we were read to by Philipp Meyer (who read in that US-literary trance-like manner that very quickly lulled this reader to sleep), Tash Aw (who woke me up again, reading from A Map of the Invisible World), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (whom someone should tell not to read the same passage twice on the same day), Cees Nooteboom (a lugubrious older Dutchman who was charm personified) and Mohammed Hanif (whoread a very funny passage which ended on a ringing note of that repressed rage he says he wasn't aware of during the writing). How sweet it was to be read to for an hour and a half by such company.

Today was gloom and doom day: George (The Next 100 Years) Friedman painted a picture of a very grim future in which the climate change challenge will be met but US based capitalism will continue to gouge us all, and wars cold and hot will continue to plague us (He didn't mention plagues); Emmanuel (War Child) Jal sang and danced and recited verse about his life as a boy soldier and the joy of his survival; Mark (The Philosopher and the Wolf) Rowlands managed to be opaque and philosophically grim about the 11 years he spent living with his pet wolf Brennan (sp?). The last competes with the Germaine Greer evening for the nadir of my Festival. My companion walked out with 10 minutes to spare. I stayed, for reasons I don't understand, but then I was glad I did, because the meant Professor Greer's hold on the prize was secure. Seeking to clarify a point he'd been making about hope as not an altogether good thing, Mark Rowlands told us of an occasion when Brennan was a puppy trying to get a pit bull named Rugger to play with him. Rugger pushed Brennan to the ground and clamped his jaws around his neck. Where another puppy might have yelped desperately, Brennan uttered a sonorous growl, and Rowlands thought to himself: 'That is exactly the sound I would like to make when I know that all hope is gone and I am doomed.'

We chatted to friends, filled in our evaluations, listened wistfully for a few seconds to the outside loudspeakered version of a conversation about Creating a Participation Society, and were home in time to walk the dog for whom all hope has long been gone, and who growls peremptorily at an puppy who seeks her out.

Posted: Sun - May 24, 2009 at 11:32 PM           |

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