25th anniversary by Susheila Nasta

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

As Wasafiri celebrates its 25^th year, it’s hard to think back to the early 1980s, to remember a time before the now familiar currency of ‘cultural diversity’ was commonly accepted as part of liberal literary culture. It was a period when many writers who now belong to the international contemporary literary scene weren’t able to get beyond those powerful arbiters of literary taste, who consistently failed to perceive how prescient their writings were in looking forward to the common futures we now inhabit. It is difficult today, too, to imagine a school or university curriculum (whether in Britain or elsewhere) which could fail to acknowledge the enormous contribution that writers such as Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, VS Naipaul and Sam Selvon have made to altering the ways in which we read the contemporary world. It is also unlikely today, as many accolades and literary prizes attest, not to see on such lists the names of many others, such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ben Okri, Jackie Kay, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Andrea Levy and Arundhati Roy who have followed on.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is most often cited as the book that signalled this moment of change in Britain but there were, of course, many others who cleared the ground before him. For me, it was Jean Rhys, an early Caribbean moderist, who was first to grab my attention, taking me on an elliptical diasporic journey that both created relief – as I identified with her sense of displacement and absence as a woman of mixed race – and intellectual excitement, as she forced me to read and think differently. As Rhys was famously to put it in Voyage in the Dark (1934), it was not just a question of alternatives, a ‘difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey’, but, more importantly, the ability to express a ‘difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy’.

Much of course has changed since 1984. The extensive community of writers a magazine like Wasafiri represents are no longer seen as a kind of ‘ethnic shop’, selling exotic wares which tell another story, regardless of the undisputed aesthetic quality of what they write and the contemporaneity of their visions. India was the Market Focus of the London Book Fair this spring and Wasafiri invited (with the British Council) over forty Indian poets, novelists and dramatists to participate in presenting India through ‘fresh eyes’. South Africa is to be the theme next year. But one still wonders how far such welcome initiatives will make an impact. We would be unwise to rest comfortably on the laurels of a liberal multiculturalism spawned by current markets (which are just beginning to catch up with it) and a global literary prize culture. And while all the signs suggest that international writing is now here to stay, we are ever more conscious that the first decade of the new century has also brought with it alarming restrictions on freedom of movement and expression, and who knows where this will lead. In such a climate – when oppressive political regimes and feverish policing of national borders continue to limit audiences as well as opportunities for publication – the commitment to enable open dialogues between writers situated in different local and global neighbourhoods remains as vital as it always has been.

Clearly all writing involves a departure on an intellectual and imaginative journey. If it is successful, it opens doors, expands our minds and enables us to envison things differently. The best literary works – whatever the particular trajectories of the often mixed cultural traditions which inform them – are challenging precisely because they take us to the limits of what can be expressed, in forms which extend understanding and carry us to new vistas where hope and desire would like to reside. If we lose the ability to continue to cross frontiers, confront change, write the stories of the future, we may not only lose our way but also our humanity.

Susheila Nasta, 2009

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25th anniversary by Susheila Nasta