Teaching Creative Writing in Asia 2021006916, 9780367621148, 9781003133018

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Teaching Creative Writing in Asia

This book examines the dynamic landscape of creative educations in Asia, exploring the intersection of post-​ coloniality, translation, and creative educations in one of the world’s most relevant testing grounds for STEM versus STEAM educational debates. Several essays attend to one of today’s most pressing issues in Creative Writing education, and education generally: the convergence of the former educational revolution of Creative Writing in the Anglophone world with a defining aspect of the 21st century—​the shift from monolingual to multilingual writers and learners. The essays look at examples from across Asia with specific experience from India, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Each of the 14 writer-​professor contributors has taught Creative Writing substantially in Asia, often creating and directing the first university Creative Writing programmes there. This book will be of interest to anyone following global trends within creative writing and those with an interest in education and multilingualism in Asia. Darryl Whetter is the author of four books of fiction and two poetry collections, including the 2020 climate-​crisis novel Our Sands. After working as a writing professor at various universities in his native Canada, he was the inaugural director of the first full Creative Writing master’s programme in Singapore.

Teaching Creative Writing in Asia Edited by Darryl Whetter

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Darryl Whetter; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Darryl Whetter to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Whetter, Darryl, 1971– editor. Title: Creative writing in Asia / edited by Darryl Whetter. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in creative writing | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021006916 | ISBN 9780367621148 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003133018 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English language–Rhetoric–Study and teaching (Higher)–Asia. | Creative writing–Study and teaching (Higher)–Asia. | Creative writing (Higher education)–Asia. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PE1405.A75 C74 2021 | DDC 808/.04207105–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006916 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​62114-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​62133-​9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​13301-​8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003133018 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

For the teachers who opened the world to us, for us, then with us, and the students who followed.

“If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.” —​Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Contents

List of contributors 

xi

Introduction: a luxury any government can afford—​ English-​language Creative Writing pedagogies in 21st-​century Asia 

1

DA R RY L W H E T TE R

PART 1

The language … 

15

1 “Speak Good Singlish”: an ang moh directs Singapore’s first Creative Writing master’s degree, not quite in Singlish 17 DA R RY L W H E T TE R

2 Compromised tongues: that “wrong” language for the Creative Writing we teach in Asia 

45

XU XI 許素細

3 Charisma versus amnesia: the rise of Creative Writing in English India 

56

SA I K AT M AJ U MDAR

4 The new Creative Writing classroom of India: the client-​student, structures of privilege, and the spectre of privatisation 

70

N A N D I N I D H AR

5 Reframing the field: genre and the rising 21st-​century multilingual writer  PAG E R I C H A R DS

84

x Contents

6 Self-​translation from China: aspects of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language 

102

FA N DA I A N D L IN G L I

7 Radical translation: teaching poetry writing in Hong Kong 

116

JAMES SHEA

PART 2

… and the landscape 

129

8 Another English: Filipinos write back 

131

J O S E DA L I SAY JR.

9 The problem of memoir in the Philippines: a possible solution 

146

RO B I N H E ML E Y

10 Teaching Creative Writing in Taiwan: or, taking the worry out of the word “creative” 

157

RO B E RT A N TH O N Y SIE GE L

11 The non-​fiction selfie 

163

B A R R I E S H E RWO O D

12 Writing dance: mentoring the writing of dance artists across the Asia-​Pacific 

174

S TE P H A N I E B URRIDGE

13 Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies: first-​person plural and writing/​teaching against offence 

188

S R E E D H E V I IYE R

Index 

207

Contributors

Stephanie Burridge is a Series Editor for Routledge Celebrating Dance in Asia and the Pacific. She has edited ten Routledge anthologies about performance, education, and creativity. She is the Co-​chair of the World Dance Alliance Asia Pacific Research and Documentation network. She was Artistic Director of Canberra Dance Theatre (1978–​2001). Fan Dai writes in both Chinese and English. She has four collections of essays in Chinese, and a novel, Butterfly Lovers, in English. Her work in English has appeared in Drunken Boat and Asia Literary Review. She is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Center for Creative Writing of the School Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-​sen University in Guangzhou, where she teaches one of the few creative writing courses in English as a second language in China. She was a 2012–​2013 Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Jose Dalisay Jr. has authored more than 30 books. Six of those books have garnered National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle. In 1998, he was named to the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Centennial Honors List as one of the 100 most accomplished Filipino artists of the past century. Among his numerous books are Oldtimer and Other Stories (Asphodel, 1984; University of the Philippines Press, 2003), Selected Stories (University of the Philippines Press, 2005), and The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction (University of the Philippines Press, 2006). He served as Executive Editor of the ten-​volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (Manila: Asia Publishing/​ Reader’s Digest Asia, 1998). He has won 16 Palanca Awards in five genres. For winning at least five First Prize awards, he was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 2000. He has also garnered five Cultural Center of the Philippines awards for playwriting and FAMAS, URIAN, Star, and Catholic Mass Media awards and citations for his screenplays. In 2005, he received the Premio Cervara di Roma in Italy for extensively promoting Philippine literature overseas. In 2007, his second novel, Soledad’s Sister, was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in Hong Kong.

xii Contributors   He has been a writing resident at Hawthornden Castle and Bellagio. He has held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair at the Ateneo de Manila University; and the Jose Joya, Jorge Bocobo, and Elpidio Quirino professorial chairs at University of the Philippines, Diliman. Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor in the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at O.P. Jindal Global University outside Delhi, India. She has published on writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Dionne Brand, and Amitav Ghosh, focusing on issues such as memory, trauma, and the emergence of a 21st-​century critical retrospective realism in postcolonial novels. She is also a practising poet and the author of a full-​length collection titled Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (Agape Editions). Additionally, she is the author of the chapbook Occupying My Tongue, as part of the project FIVE—​a collaborative chapbook project by five Indian poets, and spearheaded by two literary journals, Aainanagar and Vayavya. With degrees from University of Calcutta (Presidency College), Jadavpur University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Texas at Austin, she has extensive teaching experience both in the US and India. As a lecturer, she has taught graduate and undergraduate classes on the postcolonial historical novel, food literature, the culture of domesticity in postcolonial and US ethnic novels, and theories of the everyday. Robin Hemley is Director and Polk Professor in Residence of the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University (LIU), where he directs their MFA in Creative Writing. He is a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The Chicago Tribune, and three Pushcart Prizes in both fiction and non-​fiction. He joins LIU from Yale-​National University of Singapore, where he directed the Writing Program. He previously directed the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa for nine years. He is the author of 12 books of non-​fiction and fiction and is the founder of NonfictioNOW, the world’s leading international conference in non-​fiction. Sreedhevi Iyer has lived in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia, where she currently teaches fiction writing at RMIT. Her writing has been published in several countries, including the US, UK, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Sweden, and Italy. Jungle without Water and Other Stories is her first book published in Australia. The Southeast Asian edition was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize 2017. She was writer-​in-​ residence at Lingnan University of Liberal Arts in Hong Kong. Her most recent book is the 2020 novel The Tiniest House of Time. Ling Li is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Sun Yat-​sen University in the School of Foreign Languages. Her research focuses on the practice and pedagogy of Creative Writing in English as a second/​foreign language in the Chinese context, bilingual creativity, and World Englishes.

Contributors  xiii Saikat Majumdar is Head of the Department, Creative Writing, and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He has taught at Stanford University and was named a Fellow at the Humanities Centre at Wellesley College. He is the author of three novels, most recently, The Scent of God (Simon & Schuster India, 2019), one of Times of India’s 20 Most Talked About Indian Books of 2019, and one of National Herald’s 10 Best Books from 2019. Other novels include Silverfish (HarperCollins India, 2007), and the widely acclaimed The Firebird (Hachette India/​ Permanent Press, NY, 2015), a finalist for the Atta-​Galatta/​Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize and the Mumbai Film Festival Word-​ to-​Screen Market, and featured in The Telegraph’s Best Books of 2015. He is the author of a book on liberal arts education, College: Pathways of Possibility (Bloomsbury, 2018), a book of literary criticism, Prose of the World (Columbia University Press and Orient Blackswan), and has co-​edited a collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019). Page Richards is Chair of Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of Hong Kong. She graduated with honours from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics, from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in literature and poetry, and with a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Boston University. She has also studied at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Boston and has contributed to theatre, script development, and film production in Hollywood. She grew up on stage, performing and directing theatre and vaudeville productions in the US and Europe. She received a national Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities in the US, the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Faculty of Arts at HKU, a Vermont Studio Writer’s Fellowship for her poems and translations, among many other international awards. James Shea (MFA, University of Iowa; BA summa cum laude, Loyola University Chicago) is the author of The Lost Novel (Fence Books, 2014), Star in the Eye (Fence Books, 2008; 2017), and the chapbook Air and Water Show (Convulsive Editions, 2013). The Lost Novel was named as a “Book of 2015” by The Volta, and Star in the Eye was selected for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. His translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry have appeared in Circumference, Gin’yu, The Image Hunter (2016), and The Iowa Review. Formerly an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, he received a Fulbright Scholar Grant for Hong Kong, where he taught for the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing from 2013 to 2014. He has also taught for the University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago’s MFA Program in Poetry, DePaul University, and as a poet-​in-​residence

xiv Contributors in the Chicago public schools, where he received The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to serving as the Associate Director of the International Writers’ Workshop, he is the Poetry Reviews Editor for the Hong Kong Review of Books and an advisor to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Barrie Sherwood is Assistant Professor of English in the School of Humanities, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He studied at Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, Concordia University, and the Université de Montreal before completing his Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia in 2010. His first novel, The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa (DC Books), was published in 2000, and his second, Escape from Amsterdam (Granta, UK; St Martin’s Press, US), in 2007. His next book, The Angel Tiger and Other Stories, was released by Singapore’s Epigram Books in 2019. His fiction and non-​fiction have appeared in various journals, including Stand, Asia Literary Review, Istanbul Review, Lighthouse, Writing in Education, TEXT, Matrix, Townsend, and QLRS. His latest novel is forthcoming with Penguin Random House. Robert Anthony Siegel is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington (US). He is the author of the memoir Criminals and two novels, All the Money in the World and All Will Be Revealed. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, and The Paris Review, among other venues. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan and a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan. Other awards include O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. He is a contributing editor at The Harvard Review. Darryl Whetter was the inaugural director of the first Creative Writing master’s degree in Singapore, in a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London, at LASALLE College of the Arts. He is the author of four books of fiction and two poetry collections. His climate-​crisis novel Our Sands was released with Penguin Random House in 2020. His other novels include the bicycle odyssey The Push & the Pull and the multi-​generational smuggling epic Keeping Things Whole. In his native Canada, he regularly reviewed books on national CBC Radio and in all of Canada’s major Anglophone newspapers, especially The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and The Toronto Star. His essays on contemporary literature and Creative Writing pedagogy have been published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, the National Poetry Foundation (US), Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, etc. Xu Xi (許素細) is the author of 14 books, including five novels, seven collections of short fiction and essays, and one memoir. Most recent titles include This Fish Is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019) from the University

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Contributors  xv of Nebraska Press “American Lives” series; Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (2018) by Signal 8 Press; the memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), as part of Penguin’s Hong Kong series for the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English.

Introduction: A luxury any government can afford English-​language Creative Writing pedagogies in 21st-​century Asia Darryl Whetter

It is both torturous and fitting that this collection of teaching essays by professors of Creative Writing (CW) in Asia, with our more than 66 books of fiction, poetry, and creative non-​ fiction, lives by such a boring title. Chronologically and, I contend, developmentally, each of us 13 writing professors was first a reader, then a writer, then that increasingly common figure, the writer-​professor. As should already be clear, we are also either from or have taught CW substantially in Asia, and in English. With Chad Harbach’s 2014 MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction as one of the recent precursor and parallel books to this one, it is fitting to cite, and amend, one of Keith Gessen’s essays there on what is now not so much the “intersection” as the inseparability of the contemporary creative writer and the university: “Practically no writer exists now who does not intersect at some point with the university system—​this is unquestionably the chief sociological fact of modern American literature” (176). The earliest recent book that both prompts and requires this one, no writing professor needs to be reminded is Mark McGurl’s 2009 The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing from Harvard University Press. Canada, too, has an anthology devoted to Gessen’s university writer in Rishma Dunlop et al.’s Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field. However invaluable those three very different books are, with Harbach and Dunlop et al. as writer field generals and McGurl the parade-​general scholar, each contributes to a growing body of scholarship and advice on CW pedagogy yet is focussed on (monolingual) North America. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings’ new The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy transcends the North American and monolingual focus of the other three, with our contributors James Shea, Fan Dai, and Ling Li in both, but is more of a globe-​trotting anthology rather than one fixated on a single (and relevant) continent. This new CW study, like the Moore and Meekings, does Ezra Pound proud by “making it new” by doing more than just re-​examining yet another facet of the programme jewels of Iowa or East Anglia (where our contributors have both studied and taught). DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-1

2  Darryl Whetter Instead, Teaching Creative Writing in Asia turns to the vanguard, to the teaching laboratory that is simultaneously novel, unique, and expanding—​ the English-​language university writing classroom or programme in thriving, multilingual Asia. I risk misplacing focus on the complexities of this study of CW educations in India, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Singapore, not to mention embarrassing my international colleagues from Indonesia, Australia, India, China, the US, Canada, and the Philippines, by quoting Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. While Apple’s Steve Jobs might have even liked ice hockey, which I do not, we both recognise the transferrable wisdom of this line from what many regard to be hockey’s greatest player ever. As reported by Forbes, in a “Leadership Strategy” column no less, the 90-​ second memorial video Apple posted to its site one year after Jobs’s death included, As black and white photos of Jobs filled the screen, viewers hear him delivering some of his most inspiring quotes. Among them: “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple.” (Gallo) In fact, of all the video and audio of Jobs Apple had at hand, they chose to open their memorial video of just 90 seconds with his recitation of Gretzky’s line about prescience (“Steve”). The Forbes author, Carmine Gallo, a “communications coach for the world’s most admired brands,” lists a few of Jobs’s inspirational quotes as curated by Apple but does not recount the short video’s close. PCMag India lets us know more fully how Apple commemorated the visionary Jobs, clarifying that the October 2012 “Remembering Steve” video concludes with audio of him saying, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing” (Albanesius). CW is one rare growth area in those heart-​singing Humanities, as the stats and graphs in the Harbach and McGurl volumes show. Counting American CW programmes in 2014, Harbach contrasts, “79 degree-​granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today [2014] there are 1,269!” (12). McGurl presents that same growth in American CW programmes as a bar graph revealing the rarest of trends in arts education: exponential growth (25). David Fenza, the former and long-​serving executive director of the predominantly American Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) used to have an article on the influential AWP’s website called “A Brief History of AWP” which describes university writing programmes as “the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen” (qtd. in Whetter 248). Similarly, in Canada, the number of CW master’s programmes doubled in the 2000s (Whetter 244–​45).

Introduction  3 Accurately, and in part marking this global Anglophone trend of increasing enrolment in university CW programmes, one of our Indian contributors, Dr. Nandini Dhar, from O.P. Jindal Global University, quotes American writer-​professor Lynn Freed on how CW is often, formerly in the West but, now, increasingly in Asia, “the cash cow of many humanities departments” (69). McGurl contrasts the rapid growth of graduate CW enrolment with the minimal recent growth of graduate English degrees in America: in 2003–​04 there was a total of 591 US institutions offering either an MA (428) or a PhD (143) in English literature. In 1991–​92 that number had been 549. This represents an increase of 7 percent, as compared to a 39 percent increase in the number of creative writing programs over the same period. (414) Asia currently shows a new growth of interest in creative educations in general and CW in particular and with what is both a global distinction in CW education and part of its changing character in the two foundational CW educational landscapes and markets and laboratories, the US and the UK. As the chapters from Nandini Dhar, Saikat Majumdar, James Shea, Professor Jose Dalisay Jr., as well as Fan Dai and Ling Li directly address, many Asian students of CW study and write it in an English that is a second or even third language. My own chapter, as well as those of Sreedhevi Iyer, Xu Xi, Nandini Dhar, Saikat Majumdar, and Professor Dalisay Jr., also aligns the CW pedagogical landscape with the second major evolution in the original Anglo-​American pedagogical revolution of students writing their own fiction, poetry, drama, and creative non-​fiction rather than more passively writing about that of canonical authors. The second stage of the CW revolution, this anthology shows, comprises the inclusion of code-​switching, third-​culture student writers for whom English is a language of learning and expression, not their sole language, aligning the contemporary Asian CW student with Latinx students in the US and global third-​culture learners (cf. Sáez; Niaz). This work in the English language and English-​ language educational systems invariably carries a kind of foundational DNA from Anglo-​ American traditions while also extending, subverting, and rewriting those traditions: the empire is writing back again. As will be made clear here, English-​ language CW educations in Asia are edging into the CW programme growth previously enjoyed by officially monolingual Anglophone countries like the US, the UK, and Australia (Whetter 247) as well as “my” English–​French bilingual Canada (Whetter 244–​45). On at least four of the six inhabited continents, writing students are, like the speaker in Derek Walcott’s postcolonial cri de cœur poem “A Far Cry from Africa,” increasingly choosing between ancestral communities and “the English tongue I love.” As we approach (or have already passed) the point at which the

4  Darryl Whetter number of non-​native speakers doubles the number of people who speak English as a mother tongue, and when English-​language tertiary educations are available in far more countries than when Walcott viewed the world at the start of the 1960s, the university discipline of CW provides a fascinating examination of both globalisation and education. Creative educations in general appear to be on the rise in Asia. I was the inaugural programme leader of the first full CW master’s degree in Singapore, at LASALLE College of the Arts, from 2016 until 2020. During that time, enrolment at LASALLE increased every year, and we were exclusively an art school; no MBA programmes or Engineering schools drove up enrolment there. Writing 15 years ago, Daniel Pink anticipated Singapore’s rise in creative educations in Asia: “In Asia, the sum total of design schools in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore thirty-​five years ago [1970] was … zero. Today [2005], the three countries have more than twenty-​three design schools among them” (74). At some of the non-​Asian universities with Asian campuses, CW is offered if indeed not central to those branch-​plant offerings, from the University of Nottingham in Malaysia’s campus (“University”) to Monash University’s Writing undergraduate minor in Malaysia (“Monash”) to RMIT’s Hanoi City campus in Vietnam (“RMIT”). While CW educations are undeniably popular and relevant in (i) Anglophone countries and, increasingly, (ii) Asia, Europe provides a crucial contrast, with little CW tertiary education in languages other than English. Depending on the generosity of one’s accounting, Spain counts just 1 or 1.5 master’s programmes in CW for a population of more than 46.5 million. Meanwhile, Canada offers 13 master’s CW programmes in English for an Anglophone population of roughly 26 million (Whetter 244–​ 45). Javier Sagarna, director of Spain’s Escuela de Escritores and president of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes, tells me that Spain’s Escuela de Escritores has been teaching Spanish-​speaking writers for more than a decade. On one hand, the programming at Escuela de Escritores is “the only master’s course of Creative Writing in Spain” but “having failed several times to approach different Spanish universities, we have also tried to make an agreement for validation and support of our master course with some British universities” (Escuela; Sagarna). France is only now in the 21st century experiencing the acceleration of CW postgraduate programmes that is now 60 years old in the US. A scroll through the “Institutional Members” at the “European Association of Creative Writing Programs” shows predominantly UK universities (fairly enough) and, somehow, even Canada’s pioneering programme from the University of British Columbia (“Members”). In just four years directing the CW MA in Singapore, admittedly one where the degrees were conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London, we attracted three Europeans, from France, the UK, and Finland, to a brand-​new programme. As Jukka Tyrkkö, Professor of English at Sweden’s Linnaeus University, explains, one of the few CW master’s degrees in Sweden is taught in English. This coupling of CW pedagogy and the English language

Introduction  5 is also true in Denmark, where the South Gate School of Creative Writing offers its CW BFA in English (“Southgate”; “South Gate”; Kline). To recap, the acceleration of CW programme offerings at Asian colleges and universities provides both a welcome new version of the educational revolutions that were/​are a CW degree, including what McGurl recognises as “insatiable student demand—​that simultaneously progressive and consumerist value” (94), but also provides a unique and more contemporary intensification of those revolutions with its simultaneously appropriate and uneasy bedfellow of the English language. Several of the chapters here, including those of Fan Dai and Ling Li, James Shea, Nandini Dhar, Saikat Majumdar, Professor Robin Hemley, Professor Jose Dalisay Jr., and Xu Xi, address the complexities of teaching CW when the language of artistic creation is either not the student’s mother tongue or is one of many. My own chapter fixates on the Singaporean dialect of Singlish, including its creative political resistance. Where McGurl captures the Phase One revolution between CW and the general “scientism” of tertiary education, CW in Asia must grapple with that plus the cascading subjectivities of English as a second or third language. McGurl taxonomises: With its penchant for specialized vocabularies and familiarity with the less-​travelled regions of the library, literary scholarship is at least partly in sync with the scientism of its wider institutional environment, the research university. Creative writing, by contrast, might seem to have no ties at all to the pursuit of positive knowledge. It is, rather, an experiment—​but more accurately, an exercise—​in subjectivity. (405) In Asia, these “experiments … in subjectivity” meet various complexities, including translation and the fascinating issue of “self-​translation” raised by Shea, Dalisay Jr., Dai and Li, as well as ESL learning, culture clashes (see the chapters from RMIT’s Dr. Sreedhevi Iyer and Professor Robin Hemley, former Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa). Dr. Barrie Sherwood and I write of and from a Singapore which Reporters without Borders ranks 158th out of 180 countries for press freedom, with freedom of press rankings in their “very bad” category, below merely “bad” countries like Afghanistan (122), Russia (149), and Democratic Republic of Congo (150) in the “very bad” category along with Iraq (162), Somalia (163), and Libya (164) before the “very bad” scale bottoms out at North Korea (180) (Reporters).

“Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford” In 1968, as the inaugural Prime Minister of a Singapore that had been its own independent republic for just three years, Lee Kuan Yew memorably told a university audience, “Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford” (Bartlett).

6  Darryl Whetter Indeed, that famously anti-​arts line is Mr. Lee’s sole contribution to the 2012 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. However, as recounted widely in media reports and in the documentary play Rant and Rave II, by Singapore’s Chong Tze Chien, when a late-​life stroke left Lee’s wife Kwa Geok Choo unable to read to herself, he would recite her poetry nightly (Rant; cf. “Love”). Lee is hardly the first person, let alone the first politician, to change his views after 35 years (let alone 35 years of rising prosperity for the country he led). This extreme contrast between a public dismissal of arts spending and a private appreciation for the arts raises the possibility that his contentious 1968 dismissal of public arts investment was calculated to appeal to voters and stakeholders, that Lee aligned himself to a political narrative of the moment rather than authoring one (a parsimonious one) himself. Many of the Asian universities profiled here, from Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and India, are certainly now investing in the arts, although presumably not through spy agencies like America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The centrality of the writing programme at the University of Iowa, few people realise, stems in part from substantial funding that programme received from, according to Eric Bennett’s chapter in MFA vs NYC, “the Asia Foundation (another channel for CIA money) and the State Department as the years went by” (53). Bennett goes on to argue that during this same time that Asian leaders like Lee were choosing not to invest in the arts, the CIA supported the famed Iowa programme (where contributors Robert Siegel, James Shea, and Professor Robin Hemley all earned their MFAs, and the latter directed the Nonfiction programme from 2004 to 2013) with the premise that the individual writer was a superb symbol of freedom. Increasingly, that freedom in Asia is housed, coached, and enabled in university writing programmes designed, in part, to mitigate the artistic freedom Annie Dillard’s writing guide, The Writing Life, can find so daunting: Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. (11) If nothing else, as these essays show, the multiplying English-​language CW programmes in Asia provide the learning writer new transactions, and reservoirs, of care. Multinational, multi-​ genre writer Xu Xi mines her 15-​ plus years of teaching CW throughout Asia, including directing Asia’s first low-​residency

Introduction  7 CW MFA, in a programme the university ultimately regarded as a luxury it did not want to afford (Scutts), to worry if post-​coloniality and the politics of globalisation do not make it downright “amoral” to teach CW in English in Asia. Dr. Page Richards, our third (along with Xu Xi and myself) inaugural director of an English-​language Asian CW master’s programme (and a former student of Walcott’s) contextualises the contemporary writing workshop within the economic tradition of guilds to examine our role in, among other things, the production and management of both value and reputation within literary and pedagogical circles. More intimately, Robert Sigel recounts his year as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Taiwan, with students completely new to CW breaking through an educational system that, until his class, revolved around factual memorisation. Fellow contributors Fan Dai and James Shea similarly draw on their experiences as Fulbright scholars. Several chapters, including James Shea’s, of Hong Kong, and Fan Dai and Ling Li’s from mainland China, as well as Nandini Dhar’s from India and Professor Jose Dalisay Jr.’s from the Philippines, examine the complexities of translation, including their fascinating conception of writing as “self-​ translation” and their attention, via, Braj Kachru, to “bilingual creativity.” Shea also recognises, and reckons with, the deepening impact of artificial intelligence (AI)-​ driven translations and the necessity of CW professors adapting to new measures of language learning, especially what I call “prosthetic fluency” (i.e., the use of translation apps). Another contributor from India, Professor Saikat Majumdar, Professor of English and Head of the Department of Creative Writing at Ashoka University, uncovers another Asian iteration of recurring challenges within the discipline of CW, namely its hatred by so many English professors and departments. Majumdar is multiply right, and no doubt sad, to point out that, as our switch-​hitting fiction/​non-​fiction contributors like Xi, Hemley, Dhar, Shea, Siegel, Dhar, Dr. Barrie Sherwood, Dr. Sreedhevi Iyer, Richards, myself, and Dalisay Jr. know experientially, literary criticism is (i) so clearly a genre of writing and one which (ii) often more readily or easily teaches its students the meta-​lesson that genres exist and enable (a point Richards quotes Walcott in making). With our mix of public (Sherwood, Siegel, Dalisay Jr., Shea, Richards, Dai and Li, and Iyer) and private universities (Hemley, myself, Dhar, and Majumdar), Majumdar’s incisive chapter illuminates the global turf war to house if not own CW programmes. The most recent survey from the American and truly massive AWP finds “74%” of American university CW programmes “report that their program(s) are housed as part of an English Department, while 6% … are in a stand-​alone program that reports to an English Department” (5). Additionally, they state, Programs in public institutions are more likely to be part of an English Department (80%) than those in a private institution (69%), while

8  Darryl Whetter programs in private institutions are more likely to be stand-​ alone programs (18%) or in another setting (13%). (Association 5) As CW expands in Asia, it is, unfortunately, meeting some of the animosity its predecessor programmes in the US, the UK, and Canada (Whetter, Bolster) have already found between English departments run by literary scholars and writing programmes run by literary producers. In his one memoir, Experience, English writer Martin Amis parses literary envy: When you write about a painter, you do not produce a sketch. When you write about a composer, you do not reach for your violin. And even when a poet is under consideration, the reviewer or profilist does not … produce a poem. But when you write about a novelist, an exponent of prose narrative, then you write a prose narrative. And was that the extent of your hopes for your prose …? Valued reader, it is not for me to say this is envy. It is for you to say that this is envy. And envy never comes to the ball dressed as Envy. It comes dressed as something else: Ascetism, High Standards, Common Sense. (6) Majumdar doubles down on his whistle-​blowing and truth-​telling (those requirements of a writer) in lamenting that although he designed his school’s BA minor in CW, he privately worries that undergraduates are simply too young and/​or underdeveloped for an undergraduate CW major to succeed. Here, he echoes David Foster Wallace’s (posthumous) contribution to MFA vs NYC, his worry about the university CW “disease”: in terms of rigor, demand, intellectual and emotional requirement, a lot of Creative Writing Programs are an unfunny joke. Few require of applicants any significant preparation in history, literature, criticism, composition, foreign languages, art or philosophy. (79) That said, like Shea, Sherwood, and Siegel, Majumdar is extremely glad for the crucial intellectual and artistic opportunities provided by a CW programme’s insistence on revision. Spiritually, if not actually, his chapter endorses my Singaporean teaching with this passage from Ann Patchett’s great writing essay “The Getaway Car”: This is where M.F.A. programs are most valuable: you can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than you can their successes … You may not always grasp what you need to do in order to make your own work better, but if you pay attention you’ll figure out what you need to avoid. (35)

Introduction  9 These brilliant essays, with their combined learning experience stretching from decades into centuries, offer plenty of advice on what to avoid and, even better, what to include, in writing and the teaching of it. RMIT lecturer Dr. Sreedhevi Iyer attends to another key fact of life in Asia—​the collectivity derived from population density if not history or culture. Writing of her time teaching CW in Hong Kong (our fifth contributor with experience there), Iyer rightly notes how implausibly unique it is to regard attention to the collective consciousness as a necessity when critiquing, writing, and coaching Asian CW. Also in and from India, Dr. Nandini Dhar is similarly brave and honest enough to discuss how much CW involves “privilege” (usually economic) and “aspiration” (social, cultural, personal, and artistic). With her own education and past teaching in the US, she also invokes that cousin in the revolutions of writing within the academy, the massive American discipline of Composition. While English departments, including those where I have taught, claim that the student writing essays on Hamlet, Moby Dick or Middlemarch will acquire a superb education in writing, the massive American discipline of Composition essentially relaxes the focus on the content of student essays, encouraging, its proponents argue, that the expository student writer learn to walk before, intellectually at least, she learns to run. Notably, and as Nandini observes, Composition classes around the world are more likely than Literature classes to employ some of the crossover techniques of CW, especially peer review but also revision. As she, Shea, Xi, Siegel, Dalisay Jr., and Dai and Li argue, these crossover lessons, techniques, and concerns will prove increasingly relevant should CW become a portion of learning English as an additional language. Along with Xi, Siegel, Iyer, myself, Richards, and Majumdar, Dhar dares to wonder to what degree the proliferation of English-​language CW programmes in Asia might not constitute a new yet seemingly student-​empowering version of the colonising “mask” Gauri Viswanathan exposes. In the 25th anniversary edition of Masks of Conquest, Viswanathan echoes his indicting thesis that the very discipline of English literary study is inherently colonising: Humanistic ideas became powerful elements in the predominant belief in a social hierarchy that it was the duty of the ruler and the aristocracy to maintain and in which every man had his place, high or low. From its inception, classical literary education in England has been closely associated with practical functions serving the state. (xviii) Like my own chapter and those of Shea, Iyer, Richards, Dalisay Jr., Dai and Li, as well as her countryman Majumdar, Dhar worries about what global CW teaching trends risk costing the vernacular and local. No introduction full of postcolonial and other anxieties would be complete without recognising a key fact of postcolonial writing observed here by Dr. Barrie Sherwood, namely that, as with students in postcolonial Canada,

10  Darryl Whetter Singaporean student writers are loathe to set their fiction in Singapore. Like Siegel, Sherwood also recognises that millennial writers who have grown up with social media are often more profound and/​or emotionally courageous with their early creative non-​fiction than in their fiction. A global citizen who has lived in Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, Japan, and Singapore, Sherwood assigns Alice Munro stories alongside those from other masters from around the world, from Tayeb Salih to John Barth to Ha Jin to Mishima Yukio to Githa Hariharan. It is Munro’s post-​New-​Yorker, pre-​Nobel Prize for Literature career, though, that provides postcolonial writers the world over a great example of a writer’s local content risking dilution by worried publishers. Munro’s 1974 story collection Who Do You Think You Are? was a perfect title for a Canada then finding its own voice as a literary culture, while both US and UK publishers rejected the title (MacKendrick 29). Where my own article will make comparisons between Singlish, Singapore’s dialect of English, and the Acadian dialect of French spoken in the Canadian Maritimes and in pockets of Louisiana, Munro’s classically postcolonial question “Who do you think you are?” is one of the few taunts and tests which translates directly from the rural Anglophone communities of Munro’s fiction into rural, Acadian French: “Qui est ce que tu crois que t’es?” or, in a language as phonetic as Singlish, Quisse tu croques t’es? Professor Hemley’s own book on transnationalism, the 2020 Borderline Citizen, cites Acadian author Françoise Enguehard who describes l’Acadie as “an imaginary country that you make up in your heart every day. Not a nationhood of geography and frontiers but of genealogy and common purpose. By being that way, you understand everything that’s wrong with nationalism” (10). With nearly 30% of the population of the Singapore where Sherwood teaches and Hemley wrote Borderline Citizen being temporary guest labourers, as I recently was, Sherwood’s attention to rootlessness in postcolonial fiction is multiply apt (“Population”). Similarly, Professor Jose Dalisay Jr. situates the multi-​decade tradition of tertiary CW education in the Philippines alongside that country’s ongoing diaspora in which 10% of Filipinos and Filipinas live abroad. Uniquely, he describes the enviable situation of students from a writing programme at University A in the Philippines being able to attend, often for free or even on stipend, intensive workshops offered by University B as well as combining current students and community learners in same programme. In Dalisay Jr.’s Philippines, accelerating the trends observed by McGurl in the US, CW programmes are often now more popular than degrees in Literature. Also writing of the Philippines, Professor Robin Hemley transposes his decades of examination of creative non-​fiction, including his experience directing the Nonfiction programme at Iowa, to the complexities, and rewards, of publishing memoir in the Philippines, a country, too, with multiple languages and the recurrent Asian obsession with “saving face.” His chapter reminds me of the single most relevant lesson I learned about Asian writing in my four years there. At a packed Singapore Writers Festival panel

Introduction  11 with Malaysian writer Tash Aw, French author Édouard Louis, and our own Xu Xi, fittingly titled “Emotional Truths: Memoirs versus Fiction,” the recurrent Man Booker Prize nominee Tash Aw said that “the single biggest challenge in Asian writing is not racism, or post-​colonialism or translation, or distribution; it’s us, worrying what our mothers will think about what we write.” As hinted at above with the post-​coloniality of Munro’s fiction, my own chapter fixates on Singlish, the nationally unique but globally relevant dialect of English. In it, I quote Zadie Smith’s unforgettable description of code-​switching, that staple for the Asian CW student, as “being alive twice” (133). The following 13 chapters by writer-​professors in the vanguard of creative and CW educations in Asia are, I trust you will see, alive so many, many times. —​Professor Darryl Whetter, January 2021, St. Mary’s Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada

Works cited Albanesius, Chloe. “Apple, Tim Cook Pay Tribute to Steve Jobs.” PCMag India, 5 Oct. 2012, https://​in.pcmag.com/​consumer-​electronics/​80662/​apple-​tim-cookpay-​tribute-​to-​steve-​jobs. Amis, Martin. Experience. Knopf, 2000. Association of Writers & Writing Programs. AWP 2015 Survey of Creative Writing Programs. AWP Professional Standards Committee/​ Whorton Marketing & Research, 2016. Aw, Tash, et al. Panel Discussion: “Emotional Truths: Memoirs versus Fiction.” Singapore Writers Festival, 12 Nov. 2017. The Arts House. Bartlett, John, and Geoffrey O’Brien. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Kindle ed., 18th ed. Little, Brown, 2014. Bennett, Eric. “The Pyramid Scheme.” MFA vs NYC: the Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach, n+1, 2014, pp. 51–​72. Bolster, Stephanie. “One of These Things Is not Like the Others: The Writer in the English Department.” Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field, edited by Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, and Priscila Uppal, Dundurn Press, pp. 230–​42. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. HarperCollins, 2009. Dunlop, Rishma, et al., editors. Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field. Dundurn Press, 2018. Escuela de Escritores. “Profesores: Javier Sagarna.” N.d., https://​escueladeescritores. com/​profesores/​javier-​sagarna/​. Freed, Lynn. “Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag.” Harper’s Magazine, July 2005, pp. 65–​72. Gallo, Carmine. “Apple’s Unique Website Tribute to Steve Jobs.” Forbes.Com, 5 Oct. 2012, Leadership Strategy, www.forbes.com/​sites/​carminegallo/​2012/​10/​05/​ apples-​unique-​website-​tribute-​to-​steve-​jobs/​?sh=2c0edd9f205c. Harbach, Chad, editor. MFA vs NYC: the Two Cultures of American Fiction. n+1, 2014.

12  Darryl Whetter Hemley, Robin. Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood. U Nebraska P, 2020. Kline, Leanne Mary. “Re: English as Main Language of Instruction?” Received by Darryl Whetter, 1 Feb. 2021. MacKendrick, Louis K., editor. Probable Fictions. Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. ECW Press, 1983. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard U P, 2009. “Members.” European Association of Creative Writing Programmes. 2021, https://​ eacwp.org/​members/​. Moore, Marshall, and Sam Meekings, editors. The Place and the Writer. International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy. Bloomsbury, 2021. Monash University. “Writing.” July 2020. Group of Eight, Australia, www.monash. edu.my/​sass/​future/​undergraduate/​undergraduate-​degrees/​bachelor-​of-​arts-​and-​ social-​sciences/​writing. Niaz, Nadia. Evolving Multilingualisms in Poetry: Third Culture as a Window on Multilingual Poetic Praxis. 2011. U of Melbourne, Doctoral dissertation. Patchett, Ann. “The Getaway Car.” This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, HarperCollins, 2014, pp. 15–​42. Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-​ Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead, 2005. “Population and Population Structure: Statistics on Singapore’s Population Are Compiled by the Singapore Department of Statistics.” Department of Statistics, Singapore, 24 Sept. 2020. Singapore Government Agency, www.singstat.gov. sg/​find-​data/​search-​by-​theme/​population/​population-​and-​population-​structure/​ latest-​ d ata?fbclid=IwAR0VXvh8FZwGOtvfjf867gztypHfRkUhZ0Wtgm_​ E51sU9mb82zfj5o-​b9wM#Population-​and-​Population-​Structure_​de8d18b46bf 146c5a8b21dff75809ea8_​footnote. “Rant and Rave II.” By Chong Tze Chien, directed by Chong Tze Chien, performance by Jean Ng, Serene Chen, Chong Gua Kee, The Finger Players, 6 Nov. 2016, School of the Arts, Studio Theatre, Singapore. Reporters without Borders. “Index Details: Data of Press Freedom Ranking 2020.” N.d., https://​rsf.org/​en/​ranking_​table. RMIT University. “Edward Wade.” 2021, www.rmit.edu.vn/​contact-​us/​staff-​profiles/​ w/​edward-​wade. Sáez, Elena. “Generation MFA: Neoliberalism and the Shifting Cultural Capital of US Latinx Writers.” Latino Studies, vol. 16, 7 Sept. 2018, pp. 361–​83. SpringerLink, https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​s41276-​018-​0134-​y. Sagarna, Javier. “Re: Colleague of Maura Dooley’s.” Received by Darryl Whetter, 8 Jan. 2019. Scutts, Joanna. “Hong Kong MFA Program Closes.” Poets & Writers, Sept./​Oct. 2015, posted 19 Aug. 2015, www.pw.org/​content/​hong_​kong_​mfa_​program_​ closes. Smith, Zadie. “Speaking in Tongues.” Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays. Hamish Hamilton, 2009, pp. 132–48. South Gate School of Creative Writing. “Home.” 2021. South Gate School, https://​ southgateschool.dk/​. “South Gate Society.” European Association of Creative Writing Programs. 2021, http://​eacwp.org/​members/​the-​south-​gate-​society/​.

Introduction  13 “Steve Jobs Memorial.” YouTube, uploaded by NonStopTv.Info, 5 Oct. 2012, www. youtube.com/​watch?v=LXqrOkyAIEw. “The Love of His Life.” Today Online, 23 Mar. 2015. Mediacorp, www.todayonline. com/​rememberinglky/​love-​his-​life-​0. Tyrkkö, Jukka. “Re: Singaporean(/​Canadian) CW Programme Leader Queries Your MA/​MFA Offerings.” Received by Darryl Whetter, 6 Jan. 2019. University of Nottingham. “English with Creative Writing BA (Hons).” University of Nottingham, Malaysia. N.d., www.nottingham.edu.my/​Study/​Undergraduate-​ courses/​English/​English-​with-​Creative-​Writing-​BA-​Hons.aspx. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 25th Anniversary Edition, Columbia U P, 2014. Walcott, Derek. “A Far Cry from Africa.” Poets.org, N.d., https://​poets.org/​poem/​ far-​cry-​africa. Academy of American Poets. Wallace, David Foster. “The Fictional Future.” MFA vs NYC: the Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach, n+1, 2014, pp. 73–​80. Whetter, Darryl. “Can’t Lit: What Canadian English Departments Could (but Won’t) Learn from the Creative Writing Programs They Host.” Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field, edited by Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, and Priscila Uppal, Dundurn Press, pp. 243–​59.

Part 1

The language …

1  “Speak Good Singlish” An ang moh directs Singapore’s first Creative Writing master’s degree, not quite in Singlish Darryl Whetter

Singlish cannot last time Fittingly, and perhaps ruinously, in 2016, when I moved from the Atlantic coast of my native Canada to Singapore to direct the first full Creative Writing (CW) master’s programme there, I continued to teach that narrative literature fundamentally involves, in the words of William Faulkner’s 1949 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, “the human heart in conflict with itself” (Faulkner). Not only was I quoting a dead white American male to first one year and then ultimately four of master’s CW students, the majority of them Southeast Asian, and women, from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India (among other nations), I was quoting a dead, white, prize-​winning male writer from the American south. An ang moh (i.e., a Caucasian) male quoting Faulkner in the first lecture of my graduate fiction writing workshop was, of course I did recognise, exactly what Junot Díaz laments in his New Yorker essay “MFA vs. POC” as “the standard problem of MFA programs. That shit was too white.”1 Before I even opened my mouth, the first text in the room was, we all knew, the colour of my (privileged) skin. When I did speak, I doubled-​down and created another Faulknerian conflict: could I teach writing and direct a new graduate writing programme in a country where I did not quite speak the language? English got can, only now can I write, Singlish cannot last time. How could I teach these nimble, code-​switching, multilingual writers when I could not crack their code? Legally, Singapore has four official languages (Republic of Singapore). The “Official Languages and National Language” section (7) of the 1965 Republic of Singapore Independence Act, states “(1) Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English shall be the 4 official languages in Singapore. (2) The national language shall be the Malay language” (Republic of Singapore). As the deepening use of Singlish (Singaporean English) in 21st-​ century Singaporean literature (SingLit) and my four recent years directing the first full CW master’s programme in Singapore reveal, for writers, languages of DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-2

18  Darryl Whetter the street, trade, humour, and the body often override the language of legislation. This 1965 legislation declaring Malay as “the national language” of Singapore, a linguistic first among equals, makes sense after a history lesson but is far less comprehensible when walking around actual Singapore. Singapore’s independence from the UK occurred first within the Federation of Malaysia, “comprising Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak and North Borneo” (“Singapore”). With that federation serving as a way station to full sovereignty and independence before a mutual divorce between Singapore and Malaysia in the summer of 1965 “after less than 23 months” in a postcolonial federation, Singapore quickly became what Singaporean writer Eugene Ong (one of my master’s students there), calls “an accidental country.” At the annual convocation ceremonies, I was required to attend (having been a conscientious objector to attending any of my own convocations or those at the four different Canadian universities where I had previously taught CW for 16 years), I would dutifully stand as those around me sang the national anthem, “Majulah Singapura,” in Malay, in an event hall demographically emblematic of its country (“National Anthem”). With a government that includes an entry for “race” on its obligatory National Registration Identity Card (“Full”; Rocha 97), that fastidious government’s 2019 figures regard 76% of citizens as being of Chinese descent and just 15% of Malay and 7.5% of Indian heritage (“What”).2 With the kind of verbal indelibility so common to different aspects of CW—​from the vocal fingerprint of a character’s dialogue to the implied consciousness of an inflected narrator—​history and legislation may make Malay first among equals with Singapore’s four official languages (Wee, “When” 286), but daily life finds more common use of Chinese dialects in the crowds of one of the world’s best transit systems in a country with the world’s third-​highest population density (“List”). As Singapore is such a blended country, both officially and unofficially, the real linguistic gap I would find in the master’s writing workshops in fiction and creative non-​fiction that I taught, and those in poetry and dramatic writing that I managed and in which I co-​graded, was not between or among Singapore’s other three official languages and English but between its truly ubiquitous language, Singlish, and, as detailed below, a government so hostile to Singlish that it has fined students for speaking it in schools (Prime Minister’s). More personally troubling, there was also the obvious gap between the undeniably creative language of Singlish and the fact that myself and the then largely imported temporary foreign workers who taught in and directed the dynamic country’s three nascent university CW programmes, we ang mohs, could not speak Singlish. At one of the numerous literary events I would attend monthly, a panel reading by young writers at the wonderfully engaged SingLit Station, one of the writers, only by chance not from the CW programme I directed, lamented that he had wanted to write a poetry collection in Singlish for his capstone undergraduate thesis but his professors “didn’t speak Singlish, so there went that idea.” Gulp.

“Speak Good Singlish”  19 Our collective postcolonial anxiety can rest assured that the recent situation from the 2016–​2017 academic year has already evolved, with one of the three major Singaporean tertiary CW programmes (MA CW LASALLE College of the Arts; substantial undergraduate CW courses at the Yale-​ National University of Singapore [NUS]; BA Minor in CW and MA and PhD English with CW theses at Nanyang Technological University [NTU]) already shifting to hire Singaporean talent. In the 2020–​2021 academic year, Balli Kaur Jaswal completed her PhD at NTU and now teaches across the unique island-​city-​state at Yale-​NUS (Jaswal). Additionally, and not, as I trust will be made clear, so unlike the ways in which Singlish is both a national language and a global phenomenon, one of us few tertiary CW faculty in Singapore reveals that citizenship can in ways be as dynamic as a language. Boey Kim Cheng, Associate Professor at NTU, teaches CW at a Singaporean university as, legally, an Australian, despite his being born in Singapore and formerly being a Singaporean citizen. In one of the many ironies explored here, Boey left Singapore in part to pursue a creative PhD at the University of Macquarie. His subsequent teaching at Australia’s University of Newcastle from 2003 to 2016 was great preparation for him to do so again at NTU back in his native country. However, with Singapore not allowing dual citizenship, Boey now teaches in Singapore (legally) as an Australian (Lee, “Boey”; Boey, “Re: Confirmation”). That intersection of emotional, psychological, and intellectual duality but the legal singularity of holding just one passport is captured in his essay “Passport, Please.” He writes first of his (colonial) Singaporean father’s British passport, and of his being the same age as the Republic of Singapore, both of them in a “mid-​life crisis” (Boey, “Passport”). Renouncing his Singaporean passport is To cross a real border, a kind of Rubicon that will alter the idea of who I am. Once the passport is surrendered and destroyed, there is no going back, as the letter from the Immigration Department of Singapore warns … Place of birth: Singapore. Citizenship: Australian. (Boey, “Passport”) I was multiply grateful to find Boey’s “Passport, Please,” especially when an early programme review with my master’s students invited the inclusion of more Asian examples. Gulp again. As “Passport, Please” (if not Boey’s life) asks, though, do not all writers think of ourselves first as citizens of Literature? To the Singaporean students, I left a year ago, I hope my novels and poetry collections had been my true passport. To quote Salman Rushdie’s famous celebration of postcolonial hybridity, his appreciation for what is “gained” in translation, not just what is lost, far more than vanity and hope assure me that Singapore’s recent and already-​changing cultural infrastructure of predominantly Westerners and a Western-​educated CW faculty teaching its first generations of domestically educated CW graduates in fact deepen and extend so many of the CW

20  Darryl Whetter advantages of Singlish (Rushdie 17). The numerous literary advantages of Singlish use detailed further below, especially code-​switching, audience engagement, utility, the levelling of authority, and humour, all find the contemporary Singaporean tertiary student of CW even more prepared to, in poet Marianne Moore’s phrase, unearth “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

“Emotionally Acceptable” mother tongues In The Huffington Post, Singaporean food critic K.F. Seetoh offers this sample of Singlish as advice on how to secure a seat at one of the busy Singaporean hawker centres (food courts with no chain franchises, usually open to the external air) which UNESCO has just recognised as “markers of Singapore as a multicultural city-​state” (“Hawker”). In mid-​December 2020, Singapore’s hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, “a first for Singapore,” according to the national Mediacorp (Chew). To secure a seat at what UNESCO recognises as “community dining rooms” (“Hawker”), Seetoh fittingly uses Singlish to advise: You must wait one. Don’t anyhow anyhow buy food then look for seat hor. Sure don’t have one la. Anden, food cold liao. You see who wan to finis already, then bluff bluff lidat wait next to table, smile smile pretend a bit, then, chiong in when they leave. Then one fella go chope the table and the other buy food la. If you alone only, then put tissue paper pack on chair, like the fella there, and people know this one chope already, so you can go buy food...line up long long also no problem one. To modify Braj Kachru’s “three circle” model of World Englishes, I here define Singlish concentrically by moving out from Seeoth’s hypothetical example to Singaporean poet, graphic novelist, and literary critic Gwee Lui Si’s passionate (and government-​resented) defence of Singlish in a 2016 op-​ ed for the New York Times: our wacky, singsong creole … Singlish is a patchwork patois of Singapore’s state languages—​English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil—​as well as Hokkien, Cantonese, Bengali and a few other tongues. Its syntax is drawn partly from Chinese, partly from South Asian languages. Lionel Wee, a Singaporean linguist at the NUS, is one of the world’s leading experts on Singlish, and his 2018 Cambridge University Press book The Singlish Controversy: Language, Culture and Identity in a Globalizing World is arguably the culmination of his decades of Singlish research. In it, one of Wee’s primary definitions there, like Sui’s, highlights the varied parentage of Singlish:

“Speak Good Singlish”  21 Singlish is known to show a high degree of influence from other local languages, particularly Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil … [and] it is characterized by, among other features, a lack of inflectional morphology …, productive use of reduplication … and discourse particles …, and lexical items borrowed from Malay and various Chinese dialects. (ch. 1) While examples from 21st-​ century SingLit will tie this discussion back to contemporary CW pedagogy there, examples like the food blogger’s are a crucial reminder that Singlish is (often) the language of daily public interaction, the language for ordering lunch or giving directions in a taxi. Crucially, however, Wee clarifies that Singlish should not be confused and conflated with “broken English”: “from a scholarly perspective, it makes no sense to conflate the ungrammatical with the colloquial” (Introduction). In Language Problems & Language Planning, Huang Hoon Chng (another linguist at NUS) braids examples into her definition: Singlish has been defined as a colloquial form of Singaporean English, characterized by a mixture of local expressions (such as catch no ball = failed to understand), code mixing/​switching (e.g. My English very chor = My English is very crude/​vulgar), discourse particles (the most famous being lah), reduplication (e.g. Don’t pray pray = be serious) and direct translations from languages such as Hokkien and Malay (e.g. You see me no up, from Mandarin ni kan wo bu qi, meaning You look down on me). (Chng 47) Wee reflects both the past and present of Singlish in his focus on it in a hyper-​globalised world, citing, for example: the Oxford English Dictionary has included more than five hundred Singapore English words and phrases in its 2016 update … Words like blur “slow in understanding,” ang moh “a light-​skinned person, especially of Western origin,” sotong “squid or cuttlefish” and shiok “cool, delicious, superb” are now official entries in the OED. This has led The Independent to point out that these words “can now be officially be used [sic] in an English sentence … [making] ‘That ang mo is blur like sotong’ a perfect English sentence.” (ch. 1) That kind of fusion and playfulness is ideal for the creative writer. The very definition of a bottom-​up social movement, Singlish nonetheless exists in Singapore where the government even tries to control word choice and expression. The single most Singlish-​intensive book I have found is Cheryl

22  Darryl Whetter Lu-​Lien Tan’s hilarious, relevant, and indicting novel Sarong Party Girls. Its opening Author’s Note is a valentine to Singlish: This book is written in Singlish, which is the patois that most Singaporeans speak to one another. It’s a tossed salad of the different languages and Chinese dialects that the country’s multi-​ethnic population speaks—​English, Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien, Teochew and more. It’s packed with attitude and humor and often is deliciously vulgar. Despite its allure, it has been the target of the Singapore government’s “Speak Good English” campaign in the past. Fortunately Singlish has turned out to be like a weed—​it lives on. Singlish lives on, Tan implies and relates, despite not only government speeches (from the highest offices) and their fines for students speaking Singlish but also a committed government campaign to eradicate it (Prime Minister’s). At no less of an occasion than the National Day Rally Speech (of 1999), Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, in a section on “Upgrading English in Schools,” proudly listed fining students who speak Singlish as an accomplishment: “Schools already organise many programmes and activities to encourage the use of proper English. They have Speak English Campaigns, they fine pupils caught speaking Singlish” (Prime Minister’s; emphasis added). With the tenacity of Singlish, an ungoverned, heterogeneous, multicultural, bottom-​up language that succeeds despite a government campaign to eradicate it, Wee rightly regards Singlish to be a fascinating linguistic laboratory for the world: Singlish can provide insights into the discourses of identity and ethnicity in a globalizing world, with implications for issues such as the possible emergence of a post-​national identity, the commodification of language and the impact of “superdiversity” (Vertovec, 2006; 2007) on language policy. (Introduction) While a few other Asian nations, including Indian and the Philippines, examined in this anthology, also have English as an official language (Kiprop), the Singapore government stands unique for both embracing English yet trying to eradicate its home-​grown variant, Singlish. Arguably no other nation, not even Turkey, with Kemal Atatürk, has as much of a founding father as Singapore’s inaugural and very long-​ running Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew;3 Wee’s Singlish Controversy locates the Singaporean government’s dismissal of Singlish with its undisputed paterfamilias (Wee, chs. 1 and 2). In a trip abroad, Lee found what he regarded to be an unwelcome parallel to another postcolonial English, publicly noting: I was in Jamaica in 1975. Most Jamaicans are descended from West Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves. They learned, first Spanish,

“Speak Good Singlish”  23 then English from their slave masters. Yet, apart from those at the top of their society, they spoke not English, but Jamaican Creole, which I could not understand. It hit me like a sledgehammer: despite learning English in school, they were back to pidgin Creole once out of school. (qtd. in Wee, ch. 1) Wee continues, “Here, Lee presents his inability as a foreign visitor to understand Jamaican Creole as sufficient reason to indict the language” (ch. 1). By 1999, Lee would, in no less serious a venue than his official National Day public speech, publicly denounce Singlish as “a handicap we must not wish on Singaporeans” (Speech). As Wee notes, “later that same month, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong suggested that ‘we should ensure that the next generation does not speak Singlish’ ” (ch. 2). The government’s attempt to “ensure” the next generation was not “handicapped” by (their own) “corruption” of English, the Singaporean government then launched the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM), a public (and publicly funded) campaign to discourage if not eradicate Singlish (and one in which the linguist Wee was an advisor) (Wee, Preface). According to “A Singapore Government Agency Website,” “The Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) was launched on 29 April 2000 by then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong to ‘encourage Singaporeans to speak grammatically correct English that is universally understood’ ” (Sim). Originally, this 21st-​century attempt by a government to script the dialogue and rewrite the prose of its citizens included, on their website, the definition of Singlish as “English corrupted by Singaporeans” (Chng 46). The government’s anti-​Singlish attitude and policies are exemplified with its treatment of the trailer for Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo’s 2006 film Singapore Dreaming. According to Wee, Singapore Dreaming was the first Singaporean film to win the Montblanc New Screenwriters Award at the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival; it also won the Best Asian/​ Middle-​ Eastern Film Award at the 20th Tokyo International Film Festival. Somewhat ironically, the promotional trailer for Singapore Dreaming was banned from local free-​to-​air television by the government due to what was deemed its excessive use of Singlish and Chinese dialects. (ch. 5) Goh and Wen are, not accidentally, the editors of The Coxford Singlish Dictionary (Wee, ch. 5), and their film was, according to them, appreciated specifically for the vibrancy of Singlish. When we were travelling around the world to promote our award-​ winning feature film, Singapore Dreaming, we found that audiences were fascinated by the Singlish dialogue. There were questions about it at every single screening. In Taiwan, for example, youths in the audience

24  Darryl Whetter began repeating some of the Singlish lines and expressed envy that we Singaporeans had such a developed vernacular English of our own. In Spain and America, audiences said they were surprised by how much they could relate to the intermingling of languages. After the screening of the film on American TV, an American viewer posted this message on the station’s discussion board: “Singapore Dreaming showed me how the mixture of cultures on this small island have resulted in the most imaginative language/​dialect: Singlish!” (qtd. in Wee, ch. 5) In a textbook example of bottom-​ up versus top-​ down culture, the Singaporean government had at times placed a “ban of Singlish in local media,” and Singaporean television interviewers were instructed that they “should not use Singlish” (Wee, ch. 2). Where the multi-​genre master’s writing students whom I taught would revel in the code-​switching, layering, irony, and humour of Singlish, their (admittedly postcolonial) government had been running hot and cold with English earlier than the 2000 campaign to eradicate it. On 21 September 1984, at the Singapore Conference Hall, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew opened his government’s Speak Mandarin Campaign by appreciating the commercial and professional opportunities of Singaporeans speaking English while simultaneously regarding it as “emotionally unacceptable” and “crippling”: One abiding reason why we have to persist in bilingualism is that English will not be emotionally acceptable as our mother tongue. To have no emotionally acceptable language as our mother tongue is to be emotionally crippled. We shall doubt ourselves. We shall be less self-​ confident. Mandarin is emotionally acceptable as our mother tongue. (Lee 4) Notably, the anti-​Singlish government is, like any decent writing student, explicitly aware of the emotional nuances of language.4 While social-​ emotional intelligence was acknowledged, however directly, by a government still unwilling to appreciate its globally unique dialect of English, and one willing at times to ban Singlish from the air waves and other media, some government utterances have at least recognised the marketing or commercial value of Singlish (Wee, ch. 3). According to Wee: the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) actually describes Singlish as Singaporeans’ “own brand of English” … They present Singlish as a variety of English that tourists might indeed find “quaint.” The STB even adds that the mixed nature of Singlish is “not surprising” given Singapore’s multiracial background. This statement treats Singlish as a

“Speak Good Singlish”  25 socio-​linguistically natural phenomenon arising from the ethno-​linguistically heterogeneous character of Singapore society—​which is of course the very same argument that supporters of Singlish have been making when they assert Singlish’s value as an expression of the Singapore identity! (ch. 2) As the ensuing examples from 21st-​century SingLit that includes Singlish and the robust skillsets of Singapore’s new CW students demonstrate, Singlish-​inflected SingLit is far from a “gone case” (or “lost cause”), to quote the “Singlish Primer” section of Sui’s New York Times pro-​Singlish op-​ed example of Singlish. “This One Chope Already”: (more) linguistic aspects of Singlish In addition to the linguistic aspects of Singlish noted above by Wee, Chng, and Sui, its movement from an oral language to print provides many advantages to the contemporary writer, writing professor, and writing student. First and foremost, Singlish is bottom-​up; this self-​regulation is democratising, inviting all comers. While Goh and Woo’s Coxford Singlish Dictionary is undeniably popular, having sold, according to Sui’s New York Times op-​ed, more than “30,000 copies” (by 2016), Siaw Ling Loa clarifies that “there is no available de-​facto Singlish dictionary” (Sui, “Do You”; Ling Loa et al. 238). This linguistic freedom from the authorities of both any one definitive dictionary and far more rare, the kind of language governing body like France’s l’Académie française, which issues state-​sanctioned translations for new global words like “clickbait” and “podcast” (“Clickbait”), marks some of the ways in which Singlish is a creative frontier. Spiaking Singlish, Sui’s book-​length analysis of Singlish, further locates its creativity in the transposition from Singlish as an oral language to a written then literary one: All this work to move Singlish from an oral to a textual or even literary form may end up looking too zhng [upgraded]. Or maybe—​just maybe—​it can help potong [cut in line or steal a romantic partner] a way to a lagi tok kong Singlish [make it more difficult]? (Sui, Spiaking 15; translations added) In another example of how open and inviting Sui and other Singaporean writers find Singlish, he writes: As Singlish is a rojak [mixture] shared among different linguistic communities, we are always learning how it is being used and transformed. Nobawdy spiaks all of Singlish in the same way nobawdy spiaks all of England one. (Sui, Spiaking 13; translations added)

26  Darryl Whetter The (North-​American) French dialect of Acadian provides an interesting comparison for a bottom-​up, predominantly or previously oral language with no single definitive dictionary and a fusion of geographic concentration (primarily the Canadian Maritimes) but also diversity (with strong connections to the Cajun [from Acadian] French of Louisiana). Oral speakers learn to say a word for sawdust that can invite different explanations for speakers just 45 kilometres apart. In Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Randy Bourque, a carpentry instructor at the Nova Scotia Community College campus there, tells me that the Acadian word for “sawdust” is “sang scie” for “blood of the saw.” Forty-​five kilometres “upshore,” retired engineer Robert Thériault insisted that the Acadian word for sawdust he had learned orally was “saut-​scie” for “leap/​jump of the saw.” In an oral language, the pronunciation of similar words succeeds first and then invites etymological theorising later. CW students can, and should, revel in this kind of freedom. Aiyoh, this one confirms power steam lah: Singlish in contemporary SingLit The Singaporean theatre company The Necessary Stage has been in the vanguard of including Singlish in SingLit, although of course, that has included a challenged reception from both audiences and the government. Alvin Tan, the founder and, now, artistic director for more than 30 years (“TNS Team”), states: Our exposure to the diverse linguistic registers employed in Literature had inspired us [him and Haresh Sharma] to explore language as identity for the then newly emerging contemporary theatre scene in Singapore in the early 1990s. Singlish was received with uncomfortable laughter by Singaporean audience members, who were used to Received Pronunciation when watching a play. They exclaimed: But that’s not acting. That’s how we speak in our daily lives. Our Resident Playwright, Haresh Sharma, continued employing Singlish, where appropriate, in scenes where characters were in traumatic or sad situations that did not warrant laughter. This turned out to be effective training to get more audience members acclimatised to accepting our very own vernacular on stage. The struggle to get Singlish accepted continued way into the late 90s and even after year 2000 as the Singapore government had demonised Singlish as disadvantageous to being understood internationally especially when one should be aspiring to cut good business deals. At the same time, the use of dialect and Singlish were discouraged with emerging language policies undermining familial relationships between grandparents and grandchildren as effective communication became more impossible.

“Speak Good Singlish”  27 One of the paradoxes with the Singaporean government’s reaction to Singlish is the fact that opposition to it made the use of Singlish in SingLit revolutionary; how can what is natural be revolutionary? “Like Being Alive Twice”: code-​switching and Singlish in SingLit The Necessary Stage’s dual challenges with a lingering postcolonial reverence are also caught in Kirstin Chen’s 2018 novel Soy Sauce for Beginners. The narrator, Gretchen Lin, states: Over half a century removed from British colonial rule, our nation’s lingering fascination with the West manifested itself in larger-​than-​life billboards of Caucasian and Eurasian models, in local newscasters’ approximations of the Queen’s English, in whole airplanes filled with students heading to universities abroad. (183) Sharma tells Wee that the Necessary Stage “still receives expressions of concern from teachers and students regarding the use of Singlish in some of his plays; they worry about the effect that it might have on students’ English” (ch. 5). As with Singaporean filmmakers Goh and Woo two decades later, the global acceptance of the work by Necessary Stage helped assure Tan and Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma that Singlish may be a local dialect, but code-​switching and language blending are universally interesting (if not occurring). Wee describes, “The positive reaction overseas was greatly encouraging for Alvin Tan, who is quoted as saying, ‘It’s very reassuring for us because we know how Singlish is condemned at home. It confirms how we felt, that this is a treasure’ ” (ch. 5). By 2007, according to Wee, the government that once (i) fined students for speaking Singlish in schools and (ii) boasted about doing so in national speeches, grew to include Sharma’s play Off Centre (developed at The Necessary Stage) in the GCE “O” and “N” level [national] literature syllabus. It was in fact the first Singapore play to be offered as a school literature text. Thus, despite the initial apprehensions of the government authorities, the play has since been accepted as a landmark in Singapore’s theatre history. (ch. 5) In the novel Foreign Bodies, Singapore Literature Prize winner Hwee Hwee Tan has an early scene which presents and unpacks Singlish. The first-​ person narrator is: grovelling on Andy’s behalf, soothing things over in the Singlish lingo that only natives could do—​Ai-​ya, sorry about my friend lah. He’s ang mo … he came from this small ulu ulu town in England, very sau-​ku ….

28  Darryl Whetter I explained to Andy that though people like me and Eugene could speak perfect English, we reserved our “proper” English for foreigners, job interviews and English oral exams. With friends or family, we always used Singlish. (7–​8) Indeed this code-​ switching (which Wee defines more technically as “diglossia”) is one of the hallmarks of Singlish and part of the writing lessons and even what I call the “meta-​lessons” taught in a decent tertiary CW programme (Wee, Introduction). Attend enough medical appointments, I have advised writing students on two continents, and you will eventually meet the doctor who purposefully drops the medical lexicon when referring to certain body parts and the messier bodily functions. This tailoring of voice to context and audience has always been part of how Singaporeans learn language. In fact, the Singaporean government’s own response to Sui’s New York Times op-​ed was one of their own which, however testily, explicitly acknowledged the code-​switching endemic to Singlish: “Not everyone has a PhD in English Literature like Mr Gwee, who can code-​switch effortlessly” (Chang). The best definition of code-​switching I have read remains Zadie Smith’s, from her essay “Speaking in Tongues.” Speaking of the educational quest that moved her from the “big, colorful, working-​class sea” of Willesden to the “smaller, posher … and almost univocal” “pond” of Cambridge (133), she confides: It never occurred to me that I was leaving Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice. (133) As irony, metaphor, and literary ambiguity (à la William Empson) know, writing students must indeed be free to “be alive twice.” The same government that was hostile towards Singlish around the turn of the millennium had earlier, in its founding, sought something impossible in any language: the functionality of English without any of its character. Wee notes, “But the [founding] emphasis on English also led the government to worry that exposure to the language [English] would lead Singaporeans to become increasingly ‘Westernized’, ‘decadent’ or ‘morally corrupt’ ” (ch. 1). English was largely intended to import scientific knowledge (Wee, “When” 287) and to be a “neutral” “lingua franca for international and inter-​ethnic communication” (Wee, “When” 290). Where English in Singapore may have

“Speak Good Singlish”  29 been intended as a neutral and global language, Singlish, I argue here, is engaged and indissolubly local rather than neutral and global. A textbook example of Singlish (if textbooks are not antithetical to Singlish) is the local word gahmen, for “government,” which SinglishDictionary. com understandably lists as simply a shortening of three syllables down to two (“gahmen”). As soon as I heard my third Singaporean “taxi uncle” use gahmen instead of “government,” I tried to assure my students (at Singapore’s premiere art college in a long list of two) that our fiction workshop welcomed both. In a great cultural find, Wee notes that regional airline Jetstar uses some Singlish during in-​flight announcements. However, he claims that they use Singlish for duty-​ free shopping announcements while safety announcements are in a more standard English (Introduction). Singaporean and Asian CW students are acutely aware of how context controls diction. With the formal innovativeness too rare in Western Anglophone short fiction, Ann Ang’s 2012 story collection Bang My Car doubles-​down on Singlish code-​switching, structuring her story “Imaginary Geographies of the Singapore Heartland” as (i) an academic paper which (ii) juxtaposes the formal language of scholarship with (iii) interviews with older Singaporeans. The story opens: “Abstract: This paper aims at piecing together a tapestry of ground-​ level interpretations” and that mimicking, fictional abstract concludes: “The larger intention of this study is to coalesce noticeable trends out of these fragments and to explore if modern living for the average person in Singapore is defined by postmodern notions of hyperspace and liminality” (A. Ang 59). The polyvocal story presents what A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English calls a “heartlander,” an anonymous interview subject, “23,” who regularly returns to an old neighbourhood to eat. The same fictional academic author who can speak of “postmodern liminality” code-​ switches overtly in the interview transcript with the heartlander, saying “last time” instead of “in the past”: “What was it like, last time?” (A. Ang 60). The story both presents and decodes the heartlander’s response, allowing him to state directly “I only eat here what” (A. Ang 60) before analysing that response with the diction of humanities scholarship: Subject 23’s reluctance to speak may be interpreted as a symptom of collective amnesia in the heartlands. Memory is not a necessity and the significance of place is reduced to its function—​“I only eat here what,” declares the subject. (A. Ang 62) Ang’s unnamed fictional scholar code-​switches on multiple levels, speaking Singlish to an interview test subject and then, within the diegesis, analysing his comments in an analysis to which presumably few Singaporeans would object; the 2012 story collection sold enough to warrant a second

30  Darryl Whetter printing in 2016 (A. Ang). Extra-​diegetically, that analysis also coaches non-​ Singaporeans in how to read Singlish (or at least the Singlish of the story if not the book). Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners also foregrounds another aesthetic intersection between Singlish and the Singaporean writer or writing student, E.K. Brown’s concept of “character gradation.”5 Early on in this novel of a Singaporean-​American coming home to Singapore, Chen’s Gretchen recognises the options for self-​definition in Singlish: He spoke with an American accent—​typical rich kid who’d grown up in private, international schools. To be fair, I was often mistaken for a native Californian, but I also spoke fluent Singlish, and thought of my accents like different hats, or maybe wigs, to be donned depending on occasion and mood. (10) What a creative paradise for a developing writer (and those fully developed). From my fiction workshop in 2018 through a part-​time thesis I had the great privilege to supervise until the end of 2020, MA candidate (now holder) Valerie Ang wrote the most amazing historical novel, Hostis, set in the Punic Wars, B.C.E. Those events may be removed by millennia and continents away from contemporary Singapore, yet Ang notes: My stories may be far removed from any Singaporean context, but I still find that my own linguistic background influences the way I use language to characterise the historical figures in my novel. For example, when among family, my Punic characters speak an informal dialect that consists of loanwords and grammar from all the tongues that make up their diasporic heritage. This private language emphasises their closeness and kinship with one another, at the same time as it sets them apart from foreign listeners who find their speech near-​indecipherable—​ an experience that will perhaps be familiar to fellow Singlish speakers. (V. Ang) Again, the fact that Singaporean writers have two vocal registers available provides them key opportunities which any instructor, foreign or local, must meet. Finding the right vocal register for character, fictional world, theme, story, etc., is in ways an activity many Singaporean students (including mine) have/​ had been doing all their verbal lives. Tan’s Foreign Bodies claims, Singlish sounds like “broken” English—​to foreign ears it can sound unintelligible, uneducated, even crude. However, we didn’t speak “broken” English because we lacked the ability to speak the Queen’s English; we spoke Singlish, because with all its contortions of grammar

“Speak Good Singlish”  31 and pronunciation, its new and localized vocabulary, Singlish expressed our thoughts in a way that the formal, perfectly enunciated, anal BBC World Service English never could. Besides, who wants to talk like some O level textbook, instead of using our own language, our home language, the language of our souls? (8) Notably, despite Tan having won the Singapore Literature Prize for her second novel, Foreign Bodies appears to lack a Singaporean publisher, remaining available in its UK Michael Joseph and American Washington Square (Scribner) editions (Lee, “Tan”). Books Kinokuniya, certainly the biggest book chain in Singapore during my living there from August 2016 until May 2020, does not carry Foreign Bodies at all. Books Actually, the City Lights of Singapore (as both the indie Singaporean bookstore and housing its own vibrant publishing wing, Math Paper Press), sells, as of February 2020, only the imported UK Michael Joseph edition (for $49 SGD, twice the cost of many other novels there) (“Foreign”). Like the plays of The Necessary Stage and the films of The Coxford Singlish Dictionary authors Goh and Woo, Singlish-​inflected SingLit like that by Chen, A. Ang, and Tan appears more welcome abroad than domestically. Indeed, one of the first novels published to make heavy use of Singlish, Ming Cher’s Spider Boys, was originally published by Penguin New Zealand (“Spider”). As Xu Xi points out elsewhere in this volume, Spider Boys is now available in a reprinted edition from Singapore’s Epigram Books, but that reprint has, as the publisher’s Web sales copy states, “been re-​edited to not only retain the flavour of colloquial Singapore English in the dialogues, but also improve the accessibility of the novel for all readers by rendering the narrative into grammatical Standard English” (“Spider”). Global literary recognition, including, I hoped for four years, that of this admiring ang moh, has, I argue, been a factor in Singlish’s “weed”-​like tenacity noted by Cheryl Tan, the survival despite a government that does not want Singlish. Singlish’s perpetual, restless code-​switching aligns it (and the work of its writers) with fascinating global issues of community, identity, and belonging comparable to those faced by African-​American and Latinx communities in America. For her contribution to Language in Our Time, Salikoko Mufwene observes some of the excessive “whiteness” Diaz laments in American CW MFA programmes: It is true that socioeconomic stratification has imposed a system in which command of either standard or White middle-​ class English has become a requirement for success in the professional world. However, developing proficiency in these norms need not be at the cost of abandoning one’s vernacular for all communicative functions. Vernaculars have their own social identity functions; and many speakers

32  Darryl Whetter are not ready, and certainly not eager, to renounce that social-​indexical role of their vernacular. (260) Similarly, Hwee Hwee Tan, quoted in Wee’s The Singlish Controversy, clarifies, “Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port” (qtd. in Wee, ch. 2). Part of the vocal fingerprint of Singlish may recall “unglamorous” labour history, but (and so) the many songs of Singlish are often hilarious. Singlish and comedy in SingLit The democratic aspects of Singlish include its numerous invitations to comedy. In the 2010 anthology English in Singapore: Modernity and Management, Anthea Gupta explicitly ties Singapore’s slow admission of Singlish into SingLit to humour: by the 1990s, school textbooks knowingly incorporated local cultural terms, and there was a generally confident, tolerant, and empowering approach to Singapore English. Books and websites celebrating the local non-​standard dialect, Singlish, appeared. In writing, Singlish was confidently used in informal communication and in creative writing, especially in dialogue and humour. (58; emphasis added) The introduction to the first edition of The Coxford Singlish Dictionary also highlights its opportunities for comic wordplay: “Contrary to popular belief, it [Singlish] is not merely badly spoken English, akin to pidgin. There is a conscious art in Singlish—​a level of ingenious and humorous wordplay that is equalled only perhaps by Cockney rhyming slang” (qtd. in Wee, ch. 4). In a video produced by a writing centre in the UK, not Singapore, Singaporean poet Alvin Pang praises the comic opportunities in Singlish before reciting his poem “Candles” (National Centre for Writing). Pang defines Singlish as the sort of Singaporean street English vernacular that we use a lot in Singapore. It’s a mix of English with Malay, Chinese and other Asian influences. It’s the language you speak in the market. You might speak it at home. It’s a very intimate, familiar, snappy, irreverent language. That’s why I feel it’s very close to my heart. (National Centre for Writing) Coxford Singlish editors Goh and Woo state,

“Speak Good Singlish”  33 The beauty of Singlish lies in deliberate wordplay, so speakers should approach it with an irreverent sense of humour. Do not be afraid of mixing and matching words and phrases. Some of the most classic Singlish terms are an amalgam of different languages … Also, feel free to bend the rules of proper English grammar by turning nouns into verbs or adjectives or vice versa. (xix) Pang’s poem “Candles” renders the dialogue of two boys, impoverished brothers, one of whom has stolen candles from the church so that he might have light for reading and studying. The thieving brother states, “i bring all the way home you ask me to bring back for what? /​anyway tonight good friday church got so many candles they /​where got notice nine less?” (Pang 42). Pang’s humour here comes in part from the utility observed by Hwee Hwee Tan. Singlish is a language devoted, in part, to getting the job done (including the communicative job). This utility combines with most Singlish speakers being bi-​or multilingual to create a rich opportunity for puns and irony. A female Ann Ang character recounts her mother’s romantic advice: “Like my mother say: you so long no boyfriend, must just try, must expose yourself” (A. Ang 22; emphasis added). The simultaneity and transcendence of multiple vocal/​cultural registers so regularly manifest in Singlish may find no greater concentration than in Cheryl Lu-​Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls, the novel a March 2017 article in the Straits Times lists as the bestselling Singaporean novel of the 21st century: “Cheryl Tan Lu-​Lien’s debut novel has spent 28 weeks on the Straits Times bestseller list for adult fiction, the longest for a Singaporean author since 2000” (Ho and Wong). Notably, a quartet of recent, internationally published novels by Singaporean women writers have plenty in common but one major difference. Each of Cheryl Lu-​Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls (2016), Hwee Hwee Tan’s Foreign Bodies (1997), Sharlene Teo’s Ponti (2019), and Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners (2018) features a first-​ person female narrator, and each author has spent plenty of time outside of Singapore. Cheryl Tan has lived in the States since she was 18 (C. Tan, “Bio”). Hwee Hwee Tan has lived and studied in the Netherlands, the UK, and the US (Lee, “Tan”). Chen’s own undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature and CW were pursued in the US, and she now teaches CW at the University of San Francisco (Chen, “Bio”). Sharlene Teo earned her undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees in the UK, where she now teaches (“Dr Sharlene”). Of these four, contemporary, and successful novels written in the first person by Singaporean women who live abroad, only Tan’s Sarong Party Girls is narrated in Singlish. Despite the contentious hype for some Singlish in the film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel Crazy Rich Asians, aside from the occasional aiyoh or lah, even Kwan’s Singaporean characters do not speak Singlish to each other in the novel.

34  Darryl Whetter With its international success, binational author, and narration in Singlish, Cheryl Tan’s Sarong Party Girls is a superb novel for this study. Blessedly, I was able to bring Ms. Tan into the CW master’s programme I directed at Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts as a week-​long Artist-​in-​Residence in 2017, our programme’s first semester. In her masterclass about writing SPG, C. Tan described how her early drafts of the novel included footnotes which explained the Singlish terms (as Kwan does in Crazy Rich Asians). However, with each subsequent draft, C. Tan tried to cut the footnotes in half, not by cutting the Singlish in half but by making each usage independently clear and/​or teaching the reader Singlish as the novel progresses (C. Tan, “On Writing”). Infused with bi-​or multilingualism, Singlish, as exposed and explored by Sarong Party Girls, is ripe for comic irony. The narrator Jazzy rationalises a one-​night stand on the grounds that: sometimes I even learn a new technique, different ways of teasing that can get ang mohs even more steam. Kind of like that old government “Productivity” song they taught us in primary school. “Good, better, best—​never let it rest. Till your good is better, and your better best!” (204) This entire chapter could be devoted to humour in Singlish-​inflected SingLit, with these above-​mentioned aspects of multiple languages multiplying the different registers available to irony, to the inventiveness of an ungoverned language, to the rebelliousness of working in what Pang calls a “snappy” dialect that is rebellious for being discouraged by authorities, etc. When asked to what degree writing fiction in Singlish was a kind of homecoming for C. Tan, a Singaporean writer living abroad in the States, she states: To me, A Tiger in the Kitchen was the first true homecoming. It was a powerful nostalgia and yearning for my Singaporean grandmothers’ food that inspired me to write the Wall Street Journal essay that then got turned into that book, and being able to return to Singapore for a year, off and on, to write that book really brought this prodigal daughter home spiritually. SPG organically grew out of my time researching Tiger there. I have always loved Singlish and have regretted not seeing it more or being able to speak it more in the United States, where I have lived for over 20 years now. So the novel did feel like a celebration of a language I treasure, a love letter of sorts, to write this in Singlish. Regarding whether Singlish helped pull me over into fiction, I suppose one could say that since I could never write a newspaper or magazine story in Singlish, being able to write in Singlish gave me the symbolic freedom of doing something new and fresh that I’d never done before. (Tan, “Re: 3 Qs”)

“Speak Good Singlish”  35 “You Got Think”: thinking in Singlish (in SingLit) Singlish’s emphasis on efficacy also provides the writer and writing student several key literary opportunities. Sui emphasises that “Singlish is nimble, practical and dynamic” (Sui, “Do”). We see some of this nimble utility in the varied use of the verb got in Singlish. In A. Ang’s title story, notice how “got” actually intrudes on literal sense: “Your car also got hit mine” (3). Outside of Singapore, the sentence is more clear without the got: “Your car also hit mine.” Similarly, a ghost character of A. Ang’s adds texture, but not, arguably, sense, when he says, “Even after his funeral, for two weeks he come back every night to dry plate. right, Gor? I got see” (12; emphasis added). So often, we writing professors are the redundancy police, yet, as discussed further below, Singlish is so, as Sui says, “nimble,” that it can even welcome redundancy. Repetition, crucially, is also not the only function of the Singlish got. For another A. Ang character, a salesperson, “got” is a synonym for is: “behind me got a magazine seller” (A. Ang 21). In the opening of “Fair Is Fair,” a story of mental unease, got could also be a version of “to have”: “but everywhere on the table got dirty tissue” (A. Ang 29). Ultimately, a two-​ page spread in that story counts five uses of got, from “I got vote for PAP” (I voted for the PAP) to, in the next line, something like “is happening/​ occurring”: “My son and my daughter-​in-​law look at me as if got another Tsunami, or SARS outbreak or the stock market crash again” (A. Ang 32). As the family continues to bicker about how people should be voting in a national election, the fourth of five gots in close proximity is overtly the language of private thought: “Stupid, right? you vote because you got think” (A. Ang 33). Here, A. Ang’s got well exemplifies the “free indirect style” celebrated in James Wood’s How Fiction Works: “A novelist’s omniscience soon enough becomes a kind of secret sharing; this is called ‘free indirect style,’ a term novelists have lots of different nicknames for—​‘close third person,’ or ‘going into character’ ” (8). Wood’s “going into character” recalls another meta-​lesson for the CW student, one as central to writing as Goh’s “wordplay”—​empathy. When Singlish borrows words from other languages, it can go into another mindset to get those words. Canada’s official English–​French bilingualism introduces Anglophones like myself to the different phrasing, and possibly world view of, for example, a language that uses the same verb (aimer) for “I like you” and “I love you.” Initially, Anglophones often find the French phrase for “I miss you,” tu me manques, puzzling, what with its making you not I the subject. When someone explains that tu me manques can translate as “you are missing from me,” minds (if not hearts) can swell. In Singlish, Sui notes that “prata,” the term for “the South Indian pancake made by flipping dough on a hot plate, another favorite Singaporean dish,” is, consequently, used in Singlish when politicians (etc.) “flip-​flop on policy matters” (Sui, “Do You”). In A. Ang’s “What He Want To Say, which Is Right To Say,” the female narrator describes trying to solicit insurance customers in a busy

36  Darryl Whetter MRT (subway) station, of how crowds avoid her: “They see me, then siam their eyes down” (A. Ang 21). Singlishdictionary.com defines “siam” as a Hokkien verb meaning “Avoid, get out of the way of” (“siam”).6 Empathy and also intimacy are readily at hand for the Singlish writer (including those in CW programmes). According to Singapore’s National Library Board, Cyril Wong is “a two-​ time winner of the Singapore Literature Prize (2006; joint winner for 2016) for English poetry.” While (justly!) celebrated for his poetry, Wong also publishes collections of fiction, including, in 2014, Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me. The stories are not narrated in Singlish but include some Singlish dialogue. In “Nobody Loves You Right Now,” Joyce, a psychic, tells the narrator, “You different lah. Everybody different” (Wong, Ten, “Nobody”). Wong describes this Singlish dialogue as a piece of dialogue that is easily translated into any (grammatically-​ structured) language, despite the Singlish “lah” or the absence of the verb “is.” And yet I had to use Singlish in the dialogue because the character was a Singaporean who spoke colloquially. It was a matter of realism and psychological authenticity. (“Re: Singlish”) Writing students can find various manifestations of authenticity in Singlish. Crucially, Singlish is valuable to all writing students, not just those in Singapore, for its repurposing, even within English. Consider, for example, A. Ang’s use of somemore as something like (and an opposite to) no less: “One day my wife come home saw two teenager at the staircase smoking. In school uniform somemore—​then they go inside the house” (52). Chng is right to recognise that Singapore should cultivate, not diminish, its use of Singlish in part for the chance to remain a stakeholder in English usage and innovation: In [Braj] Kachru’s three-​circle model of description (1982), Singapore is considered a norm-​developing outer circle country. If SGEM succeeds in weeding out Singlish, Singapore will regress from being norm-​ developing to being norm-​dependent. In linguistic terms, then, the drive for national progress (i.e. international intelligibility) to make Singapore a viable player in the global network actually may result in its increased dependency on external norms. (Chng 57) A. Ang includes one story of devilish advocacy, the aptly titled “Everybody Uses English.” There, an older Singaporean teacher of English laments that a younger generation of teacher uses Singlish. His celebration of English in Singapore is the classic argument of postcolonial hybridity: “We became international before we were national. We are used to perceiving our identity

“Speak Good Singlish”  37 as hyphenated, with the hyphen representing not a bridging of differences but an excuse to belong to neither half” (17–​18). Sui, however, celebrates the domestic success of Singlish, regardless of whether the OED includes “blur” and “shiok”: “Enough of the colonial mindset. The fact that Singlish continues to thrive against all odds is its own validation” (qtd. in Wee, ch. 4). SingLit, and teaching the next generation of those who write it, is a superb way for Singapore to increase its move towards Kachru’s inner circle of influence. Another way in which Singlish transcends the normal writing challenges of repetition is in the Singlish use of repeating a word (Wee’s “productive use of reduplication”) and/​or adding got as a modifier for emphasis. Often, repeating a word in Singlish stands in for adverbial modifiers like very. C. Tan’s Jazzy advises, “[I]‌f you wear a tight tight dress or short short skirt, these ang mohs will still steam over you” (1). As some of these points overlap, another example of repetition in SPG also includes the incorporation of the Malay word “rubbah:” “I used to think getting an ang moh husband was quite easy to do. I mean—​hello, we girls are always out there, meeting ang mohs, letting them buy drinks for us, dance dance rubba rubba a bit” (2). Wee confirms that “rubbah” is the Malay verb “to rub” (ch. 4). Notice how the repetition also helps teach the word to non-​Singlish learners. That inculcation is further emblematic of how inviting Singlish is. In the words of Sui: “everyone who speaks it [Singlish] shapes it” (“Do You”). This co-​authorship is refreshing for Singaporean writing students given how exclusive authorship tends to (or even must) be in graded CW programmes. Singlish is relentlessly innovative and adaptable, inviting creative risk-​ taking. In Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners, an American woman visiting Singapore responds to Singlish: Her first week on the job, she called me long-​distance to marvel at the way the locals spoke, how their English took on a tonal, chant-​like quality that confused her more than if they were speaking a different language altogether. Singlish, Singapore’s unofficial national tongue, combines a singular accent with an idiosyncratic syntax and the blithe incorporation of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil slang words. Frankie said it was as if the entire region conversed in opera libretti in place of regular speech, and given her talent for impressions, she was soon speaking Singlish herself. (56) The “blitheness” Chen posits in Singlish echoes one of the defining features of creativity in Sir Ken Robinsons’s TED talk (still the most viewed TED talk ever) on how children “grow out of creativity” not into it: What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of

38  Darryl Whetter being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original—​if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. (Robinson; emphasis added) The Singaporean government’s 21st-​century SGEM has, finally, partially relaxed its zeal and at the same time as Singapore’s tertiary CW education programmes continue with robust enrolment. During my time at LASALLE College of the Arts, the MA CW programme I directed had the highest enrolment of comparable MA programmes for each of my four years in a row, including their formerly flagship programmes like MA Asian Art Histories and MA Fine Arts. I say “comparable programs” as LASALLE’s MA Art Therapy is, unlike the six other MA programmes, a two-​year programme, not just one-​and-​a-​half years and, more significantly, a professional programme that licences one to work as an art therapist. Across town at NTU, influential Singaporean writers like, as noted above, Balli Kaur Jaswal have completed the PhD with a creative thesis. After completing his earlier CW degrees at two of the most influential programmes on the planet, Columbia, in New York, and East Anglia in the UK, multi-​genre writer Ng Yi-​Sheng has remained in Singapore for his doctorate with a CW dissertation at NTU (Singh; “Current Students”). SingLit is also healthy, with the pre-​COVID annual Singapore Writers Festival drawing its largest crowd ever (27,000) in 2018 (Ho, “Drop”). Jaswal’s novel Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is a Reese Witherspoon Hello Sunshine Book Club pick (Bussel). Around 2018, Singaporean fiction writer Amanda Lee Koe was represented by the esteemed Wylie Agency, who sold her thesis novel before she had even graduated from her own CW MFA (Koe; “Client”). As a committee member on the Singaporean government’s SGEM, NUS linguist Lionel Wee is a reliable source in multiple ways when he states that SGEM launched in 2000 in part due to the popularity of a “locally produced sitcom … Phua Chu Kang” in which “the central character and his wife speak Singlish unabashedly” (ch. 2). Huang Hoon Chng’s article “ ‘You See Me No Up:’ Is Singlish a Problem?” claims that in its day Phua Chu Kang was “Singapore’s most popular English-​language television sitcom” (45). That popularity, both Wee and Chng suggest, was in part due to “PCK” speaking Singlish. On what is essentially the biggest political speech of the year in Singapore, the Prime Minister’s National Day Rally speech, in a section of the speech

“Speak Good Singlish”  39 named after the title character Phua Chu Kang, Singapore’s second Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, lamented to the nation that: One of the problems M[inistry] O[f]‌E[ducation] has getting students to speak standard English is that the students often hear Singlish being spoken around them, including on TV. So they learn wrong ways of speaking … The students may think that it is acceptable and even fashionable to speak like Phua Chu Kang. He is on national TV and a likeable, ordinary person … So in trying to imitate life, Phua Chu Kang has made the teaching of proper English more difficult. (Goh) Imagine being the writers of Phua Chu Kang and hearing your Prime Minister continue, I asked TCS [Television Corporation of Singapore] why Phua Chu Kang’s English is so poor. They told me that Phua Chu Kang started off speaking quite good English, but as time passed he forgot what he learnt in school, and his English went from bad to worse. (Goh) The Prime Minister helpfully proposed his own solution to PCK’s “wrong way of speaking”: I therefore asked TCS to try persuading Phua Chu Kang to attend NTUC’s BEST classes, to improve his English. TCS replied that they have spoken to Phua Chu Kang, and he has agreed to enrol himself for the next BEST programme, starting in a month’s time. (Goh) National University of Singapore linguist Chng Huang Hoon claims, “The television station … took PM Goh’s remarks seriously and subsequent episodes saw the miraculous, if gradual transformation of Phua Chu Kang into a ‘better’ English speaker, who makes occasional Singlish ‘mistakes’ in his speech” (48). She continues, the assistant vice-​president of the local TV station who is most directly responsible for creating this hit comedy as saying that it is a great idea to have “PCK sound like PCK without resorting to Singlish” and she promises that PCK “will still be recognizable after his linguistic make-​over.” (49) Singlish, I trust this chapter has made clear, is the opposite of a “mistake.” With CW degree programmes now flourishing in Singapore and

40  Darryl Whetter Singlish resounding in Singapore’s streets and its literature, PCK is ready for a writing workshop, not a remedial English class.

Notes 1 For my review-​essay of Chad Harbach’s MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, see the Routledge journal New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 105–​ 10. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14790726.2014.977798. Taylor & Francis Online. 2 As this article regularly invokes characteristics of Singaporean governance, it is worth noting that the subtitle of the 2019 Web article published by the Singaporean government directly on a Singaporean government Web site is: “The racial proportions have remained stable, and in line with the Government’s commitment to keep them stable” (“What”). 3 Mr. Lee Kuan Yew served as Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, continuing in that role from 1959 to 1990 and then remained in government as a senior cabinet minister from 1990 until 2011 (“Mr Lee”). 4 While a discussion of other national government’s might require a consideration of how monolithically to consider a government of changing parties and leaders, compounding the aforementioned fact that Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, served for more than 30 years with the fact that throughout its entire independent history, Singapore has only ever elected one party to government. The Hindustan Times reports, “the People’s Action Party, which has always won at least 93% of parliamentary seats since Singapore became an independent nation in 1965” (“Singapore’s PAP”). 5 Brown’s concept of character gradation is reanimated in Douglas Glover’s The Enamoured Knight. 6 Of the numerous writings on empathy and fiction, Keith Oatley’s 2011 Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction is valuable for his switch-​hitting role as both psychologist and novelist.

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“Speak Good Singlish”  41 Chang, Li Lin. “The Reality Behind Singlish.” New York Times, 23 May 2016. Op-​ ed, www.nytimes.com/​2016/​05/​23/​opinion/​the-​reality-​behind-​singlish.html. Chen, Kirstin. “Bio.” Kirstin Chen. 2021, http://​kirstinchen.com/​about/​. —​—​—​. Soy Sauce for Beginners. Little A, 2018. Cher, Ming. Spider Boys. Penguin New Zealand, 1995. —​—​—​. Spider Boys. 1995. Epigram, 2012. Chew, Hui Min. “Singapore Hawker Culture Listed as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Channel News Asia, 16 Dec. 2020. Mediacorp, www. channelnewsasia.com/​ n ews/​ s ingapore/​ s ingapore-​ h awker-​ c ulture-​ u nescointangible-​cultural-​heritage-​13784522. Chng, Huang Hoon. “ ‘You See Me No Up.’ Is Singlish a Problem?” Language Problems & Language Planning, vol. 27, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 45–​62. doi:10.1075/​ lplp.27.1.04hoo. ResearchGate. “Clickbait and Podcasts: France Frowns on English Words.” BBC News, 26 May 2020, www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​europe-​52806469. “Client List.” The Wylie Agency, n.d., www.wylieagency.com/​clients.html. “Current Students: Our Students (PhD).” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: School of Humanities. 26 Sept. 2020, https://​soh.ntu.edu.sg/​ Programmes/​Graduate/​CurrentStudents/​Pages/​Our-​Students-​(PhD).aspx. Díaz, Junot. “MFA vs. POC.” The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2014. Page-​Turner, www. newyorker.com/​books/​page-​turner/​mfa-​vs-​poc. Condé Nast. “Dr Sharlene Teo.” U of Kent: School of English. 12 Oct. 2020, www.kent.ac.uk/​english/​people/​3449/​www.kent.ac.uk/​english/​people/​3449/​teo-​sharlene. Faulkner, William. “Banquet Speech.” Nobelprize.org. 2011, www.nobelprize.org/​ prizes/​literature/​1949/​faulkner/​speech/​. Nobel Media AB. “Foreign Bodies.” Books Actually. 2021, www.booksactuallyshop.com/​products/​ foreign-​bodies?_​pos=1&_​sid=f67ef65de&_​ss=r. “Full Name Example.” Sing Pass: Singapore Personal Access. 22 Nov. 2020, www. singpass.gov.sg/​singpass/​common/​showfullname. “Gahmen.” A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English. n.d., www. singlishdictionary.com. Glover, Douglas. The Enamoured Knight. Dalkey Archive, 2005. Goh, Chok Tong. National Day Rally Address by Prime Minister, on 22 August 1999: First-​ World Economy, World-​ Class Home. Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts. Document Number: 1999082202. Singapore Government Agency, www.nas.gov.sg/​archivesonline/​speeches/​record-​details/​ 773bbd69-​115d-​11e3-​83d5-​0050568939ad. Goh, Colin and Y. Y. Woo. The Coxford Singlish Dictionary. 2nd ed., Angsana, 2009. Gupta, Anthea. “Singapore Standard English Revisited.” English in Singapore: Modernity and Management, edited by Lisa Lim et al. Hong Kong U P, 2010, pp. 57–​90. “Hawker Culture in Singapore, Community Dining and Culinary Practices in a Multicultural Urban Context.” UNESCO: Intangible Cultural Heritage. n.d. Inscription: 15.COM 8.b.6, https://​ich.unesco.org/​en/​RL/​hawker-​culture-​in-​ singapore-​community-​dining-​and-​culinary-​practices-​in-​a-​multicultural-​urban-​ context-​01568. “Heartlander.” A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English. n.d., www. singlishdictionary.com.

42  Darryl Whetter Ho,Olivia.“Drop inAttendance at Leaner SingaporeWriters Festival but More Participants at Year-​Round Events.” Straits Times, 3 Dec. 2019. Singapore Press Holdings, www.straitstimes.com/​lifestyle/​arts/​drop-​in-​attendance-​at-​leaner-​singapore-​ writers-​festival-​but-​more-​participants-​at-​year. Ho,Olivia and CaraWong.“Novel Sarong Party Girls Sets New Record on Local Bestseller List.” Straits Times, 20 Mar. 2017. Singapore Press Holdings, www.straitstimes. com/​lifestyle/​arts/​sporean-​book-​makes-​history-​on-​local-​bestseller-​list. Jaswal, Balli Kaur. “Re: Finished your PhD?” Received by Darryl Whetter, 22 Nov. 2020. Kiprop, Victor. “English Speaking Countries in Asia.” WorldAtlas, 12 Dec. 2018, www.worldatlas.com/​articles/​english-​speaking-​countries-​in-​asia.html. Koe, Amanda Lee. Interview by Emily Ding. Electric Lit, 10 July 2019, https://​ electricliterature.com/​imagining-​the-​secret-​lives-​of-​old-​movie-​stars/​. Kwan, Kevin. Crazy Rich Asians. Doubleday Canada, 2013. Lee, Gracie. “Boey Kim Cheng.” Singapore Infopedia. n.d. National Library Board/​A Singapore Government Agency Website, https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​infopedia/​ articles/​SIP_​1000_​2007-​10-​18.html. —​—​—​. “Cyril Wong.” Singapore Infopedia, 31 July 2017. National Library Board/​A Singapore Government Agency Website, https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​infopedia/​ articles/​SIP_​1014_​2009-​02-​13.html. —​—​—​. “Dave Chua.” Singapore Infopedia. n.d. National Library Board/​A Singapore Government Agency Website, https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​infopedia/​articles/​SIP_​ 1017_​2007-​10-​18.html. —​—​—​. “Tan Hwee Hwee.” Singapore Infopedia. n.d. National Library Board/​A Singapore Government Agency Website, https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​infopedia/​ articles/​SIP_​1245_​2007-​10-​18.html. Lee, Kuan Yew. Speech by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew at the Opening of the Speak Mandarin Campaign on Friday, 21 Sept. [19]84, at the Singapore Conference Hall. Ministry of Culture. Document Number: lky19840921a. Singapore Government Agency, www.nas.gov.sg/​archivesonline/​speeches/​record-​details/​ 74226f71-​115d-​11e3-​83d5-​0050568939ad. Ling Loa, Siaw et al. “A Multilingual Semi-​Supervised Approach in Deriving Singlish Sentic Patterns for Polarity Detection.” Knowledge-​Based Systems, vol. 105, 2016, pp. 236–​47. Elsevier, http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1016/​j.knosys.2016.04.024. “List of Countries by Population Density.” StatisticsTimes.com. 20 Apr. 2020, http://​ statisticstimes.com/​demographics/​countries-​by-​population-​density.php. Moore, Marianne. “Poetry.” Poets.org. n.d. Academy of American Poets, https://​ poets.org/​poem/​poetry. “Mr Lee Kuan Yew.” Prime Minister’s Office Singapore. 2 Oct. 2018. Singapore Government Agency, www.pmo.gov.sg/​Past-​Prime-​Ministers/​Mr-​LEE-​Kuan-​Yew. Mufwene, Salikoko. “Ebonics and Standard English in the Classroom: Some Issues. Language in Our Time: Bilingual Education and Official English, Ebonics and Standard English, Immigration and the Unz Initiative, edited by James E. Alatis and Ai-​Hui Tan. Georgetown U P, 2001, pp. 253–​61. “National Anthem.” National Heritage Board. 15 Oct. 2020. Singapore Government Agency, www.nhb.gov.sg/​what-​we-​do/​our-​work/​community-​engagement/​education/​resources/​national-​symbols/​national-​anthem. National Centre for Writing. “Alvin Pang—​Candles.” YouTube, 22 June 2012, www. youtube.com/​watch?v=iyWEdu3I-​5A&feature=emb_​logo.

“Speak Good Singlish”  43 Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011. Ong, Eugene Yu-​Ping. Focusing Grain: Flash Fiction and Short Stories. 2020. LASALLE College of the Arts, MA thesis. Pang, Alvin. When the Barbarians Arrive. Arc, 2012. Prime Minister’s National Day Rally Speech, 1999: First-​World Economy, World-​ Class Home. Media Division, Ministry of Information and the Arts, Singapore, 22 Aug. 1999. Document Number: 1999082202. www.nas.gov.sg/​archivesonline/​ data/​pdfdoc/​1999082202.htm. Republic of Singapore. “Republic of Singapore Independence Act, 7: Official Languages and National Language.” Singapore Government Agency, 1965. Singapore Statutes Online Plus, https://​sso.agc.gov.sg/​Act/​RSIA1965?ValidDate =19870330&ProvIds=pr7-​. Robinson, Sir Ken. “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. Feb. 2006, www.ted.com/​talks/​sir_​ken_​robinson_​do_​schools_​kill_​creativity/​tran script?language=en. Rocha, Zarine. “Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing ‘Mixed Race’ in Singapore.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 95–​131. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays & Criticisms 1981–​ 1991. Granta, 1991. Seetoh, K. F. “Not So Shiok!” Huff Post Travel. 6 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/​ entry/​not-​so-​shiok_​b_​3204933?_​guc_​consent_​skip=1610893756. “Siam.” A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English, www.singlishdictionary. com. Sim, Cheryl. “Speak Good English Movement.” Singapore Infopedia. 4 Mar. 2015. National Library Board, Singapore Government Agency, https://​eresources.nlb. gov.sg/​infopedia/​articles/​SIP_​575_​2004-​12-​23.html. “Singapore’s PAP Retains Power but Has Weakest Showing Ever.” Hindustan Times, 11 July 2020. Bloomberg, https://​columbiacollege-​ca.libguides.com/​mla/​ newspapers#newspaper_​website. “Singapore Separates from Malaysia and Becomes Independent: 9th August 1965.” History SG. National Library Board [Singapore], https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​ history/​events/​dc1efe7a-​8159-​40b2-​9244-​cdb078755013#11. Singh, Sheena Kumari. “Ng Yi-​Sheng.” Singapore Infopedia. n.d. National Library Board/​A Singapore Government Agency Website, https://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​ infopedia/​articles/​SIP_​1619_​2009-​12-​21.html. Smith, Zadie. “Speaking in Tongues.” Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays. Hamish Hamilton, 2009. Speech by Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew at the Tanjong Pagar 34th National Day Celebration. Media Division, Ministry of Information and the Arts, Singapore, 14 Aug. 1999, www.nas.gov.sg/​archivesonline/​data/​pdfdoc/​1999081404.htm. “Spider Boys.” Epigram Books, n.d., https://​epigrambookshop.sg/​products/​ spider-​boys. Sui, Gwee Li. “Do You Speak Singlish?” New York Times, 13 May 2016. Op-​ed, www.nytimes.com/​2016/​05/​14/​opinion/​do-​you-​speak-​singlish.html. —​—​—​. Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate. Marshall Cavendish, 2018. Tan, Alvin. “Re: Singlish.” Received by Darryl Whetter, 20 Jan. 2021.

44  Darryl Whetter Tan, Cheryl Lu-​Lien. “Bio.” Cheryl Lu-​Lien Tan. 2021, http://​cheryllulientan.com/​ bio/​. —​—​—​. Sarong Party Girls. William Morrow-​HarperCollins, 2016. —​—​—​. “On Writing Sarong Party Girls.” MA Creative Writing. LASALLE College of the Arts, 19 Jan. 2017, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Masterclass. —​—​—​. “Re: 3 Qs Fasterly?” Received by Darryl Whetter, 30 Jan. 2021. Tan, Hwee Hwee. Foreign Bodies. Washington Square/​Simon & Schuster, 1997. Teo, Sharlene. Ponti. Simon & Schuster, 2019. Thériault, Robert. Personal interview. 13 July 2020. “TNS Team.” The Necessary Stage: About Us. 2021, www.necessary.org/​about-​us/​ tns-​team. Wee, Lionel. The Singlish Controversy: Language, Culture and Identity in a Globalizing World. Kindle ed., Cambridge U P, 2018. —​—​—​. “When English Is not a Mother Tongue: Linguistic Ownership and the Eurasian Community in Singapore.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 23, no. 4, 2002, pp. 282–​95, 29 Mar. 2010. Taylor & Francis Online, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01434630208666470. “What Are the Racial Proportions among Singapore Citizens?” Gov.SG, 10 Dec. 2019, www.gov.sg/​article/​what-​are-​the-​racial-​proportions-​among-​singapore-​ citizens?fbclid=IwAR3y1zqdrkd41Y8picFXDiXBH2pOEn0fu8JqmyzXlGpoD D9cBdOLuirn5Jw. Whetter, Darryl. “You Say You Want a Well-​Paid Revolution: On Chad Harbach’s MFA vs NYC.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 105–​10. Taylor & Francis Online, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14790726.2014.977798. Wong, Cyril. “Re: Singlish E-​Interview Questions.” Received by Darryl Whetter, 15 Oct. 2020. —​—​—​. Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories. Kindle ed., Math Paper Press, 2014. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

2  Compromised tongues That “wrong” language for the Creative Writing we teach in Asia Xu Xi 許素細

Should we be teaching Creative Writing (CW) in English in Asia? Twenty years ago, this was a revolutionary, even exciting notion. The MFA in Creative Writing, as a terminal degree, originated in the US and did not exist in Asia and was slower to gain institutional popularity in other Anglophone countries. In Canada, for example, the University of British Columbia offered that country’s sole CW MFA throughout the 20th century. Those who held a CW MFA and had published books could compete for a limited number of teaching jobs at MFA programmes, although far more jobs were available to teach Creative Writing in non-​degree programmes or to BA or MA students. In this chapter, the focus will be on teaching advanced CW students in Asia, in particular for the MFA in English-​language CW, a degree which is perhaps even more compromised than merely teaching in the “wrong” tongue. Already, the shushing begins: hold your tongue, woman, why kill the goose and its oh-​ so-​ very golden egg? By questioning this rather lucrative thing we do, are we not compromising our very existence as English-​ language writers in Asia who are employed by universities to teach Creative Writing? Is it not madness to expose our profession to such “risk, danger, or discredit” such that it might “damage our reputations,” the very definitions of “compromised” according to the OED (“Compromised,” def. A.c)? After all, English departments at universities the world over have every reason to teach in the English language, and that includes various forms of writing—​ academic, critical, research, report, expository, professional communications, et cetera. Easy enough to slot “creative writing” in there as an offshoot to the study of English language and literature. Perhaps this is reasonable, even acceptable, when applied to language learning, where an assignment to write, say, a poem or short story or personal essay, becomes a way to improve mastery of that language. However, can the same be said for the MFA, a degree taught by professional writers to train aspiring practitioners in the art of writing, as the MFA in other fine arts do, whether in music, painting, and other visual arts, dance, and more? If the MFA is intended to produce practitioners of the literary arts, for whom language is their primary tool, then shouldn’t we DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-3

46  Xu Xi 許素細 ensure that the language be of the highest literary quality possible? Students from Asia who apply to MFA programmes in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada are expected to demonstrate a high command of English in addition to offering evidence of literary talent in their applications. Once they graduate, they are also expected to be conversant in modern and contemporary English literature. In Asia, where English is the lingua franca of business, diplomacy, science, pop culture, the Internet, and especially international education for the well-​heeled elite, why should it also not be the language of its literature as well? And therein lies the problem. Just what “literature” are we teaching our students to write in Asia, in English? Should we really only teach English-​ first-​language locals and expatriates in Asia, whether those born and raised there, or who, for work, family, or other reasons, find themselves domiciled there? Just what kind of “creative writing” can we really teach anyone in or from Asia to write, in English, when the mother tongue of the majority of the region’s people is anything but English? An English writer from a British post-​colony is often bilingual or, if her first or most literate language—​the so-​called native or mother tongue—​ happens to be English, then she is at the very least bicultural. The problem is the prefix “bi,” because rarely is a colonial upbringing so easily split in two. It would in fact be more accurate to describe the complicated literary expression of postcolonial writers as a transnational or transcultural one, or, in some unfortunate cases, a deracinated one that “whitens” the language, culture, and world of their stories. Here is one whitening example by a publisher that gives us pause: in 1995, the Singaporean writer Ming Cher published Spider Boys, a novel about street urchins in Singapore who train fighting spiders. It was written in colloquial Singapore English or Singlish. Its reception was mixed. The originality and courage of such a narrative voice was praised, yet it was also criticised for presenting Singapore English in what some considered a negative light. By 2016, the novel was out of print until Epigram Books in Singapore reissued it, but only after it was “reedited to not only retain the flavour of colloquial Singapore English in the dialogues, but also improve the accessibility of the novel for all readers by rendering the narrative into grammatical Standard English” (“Spider”). Is this an acceptable compromise? To keep the local flavour of the English language in dialogue but to insist on Standard English for the narrative? Is the purpose of literature to be “accessible” if the very art form relies on the creative use of language to articulate the human condition? Would English literature be more “accessible” without novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Irvine Welsh’s bestselling Trainspotting or Anna Burns’s Milk man, winner of the 2018 Booker Prize? Notably, these are Irish and Scottish authors whose work embodies the linguistic and cultural complexities of their respective nations vis-​à-​vis England.

Compromised tongues  47 This issue of language and dialect is at the heart of the politics of what literature is, can be, or is supposed to be. Dialect is a loaded nomenclature as well as a problematic linguistic concept in many languages; Cantonese remains a controversial example in Chinese, considered by some a language while others insist it is a dialect (Diment). Given recent political problems in Hong Kong, the debate has political underpinnings (Cheng and Tang). A contemporary Italian literary phenomenon is instructive: Elena Ferrante’s worldwide bestselling four-​volume Neapolitan Novels, about two “frenemy” girls from Naples, was written in modern, standard “proper” Italian, but the author insistently notes in the text whenever a character speaks in dialect vs. standard Italian. Of this distinction, critic Nina Porzucki says, “What language a character speaks and how they speak it says everything about who a character is and who they want to become.” In the HBO 32-​part series adaptation, director Saverio Costanzo addressed the problem by casting local actors who speak in Neapolitan, but added Italian subtitles so that “viewers can fool themselves into thinking they could really do without” further highlighting the primacy and importance of dialect to the world of the novel (Davidson). Ironically, the film accomplished what the novels did not, which was to use actual dialect in the text. “A nation needs a language,” says Italian literature professor Olivia Santovetti in her interview with Porzucki about Ferrante’s work (Porzucki). Arguably, a nation needs a literature as well, and we who teach advanced Creative Writing in Asia are presumably instructing the future Ferrante, Burns, Welsh, or Joyce of Asia. When Ming Cher wrote Spider Boys, he was a pioneering postcolonial writer who dared to use Singlish for a literary work. It was also before the explosion of English-​language Creative Writing courses that are now far more common in Asia, and well before cyberspace became a “media,” replacing Gutenberg’s printing press that once made books accessible to a larger readership than the elite few. Publication today is as easy as posting one’s emotive outpourings online as “creative writing,” alongside the language of emoticons. “Globalization,” writes Adam Kirsch, is another word for the imperialism of the English language—​whose dominion may very well survive the hegemony of the United States, just as Latin survived the fall of Rome. Its effect is to make writers of all other languages feel provincial. (ch. 1) Kirsch also cites Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura who, in her 2008 essay “The Fall of Language in the Age of English,” notes: “the elevation of the English language carries with it, almost accidentally, the elevation of English literature” (qtd. in Kirsch, ch. 8). It is this accidental elevation we find troubling, because too many aspiring writers in Asia will read white

48  Xu Xi 許素細 American and British authors but will not as readily read Asian authors who write in English or their native tongues, even when works are available in translation. We consider it a blessing if they read beyond a whitened literature to some of the hyphenated Asian authors who are British or American such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, John Okada, or others who live in or have migrated to the West, such as Amitav Ghosh, Tash Aw, Ha Jin, to name just a very few. However, unless an author is a phenomenal international bestseller, or has won one of the major literary prizes, their works will not come to the attention of even those who claim they wish to be practitioners of the literary arts. In fact, it’s often not surprising to find that aspiring writers in Asia have read Western expatriate authors writing in Asia, but not writers from their own countries. One colleague complains of his Asian students writing stories set in a suburban America with white characters named Dick and Jane in imitation of English fiction they’ve read. Since the US has by far the greatest number of literary journals in print and online, these aspiring writers who undoubtedly wish to be published one day are perhaps not entirely wrong. However, fiction about American suburbia is hardly “global,” and certainly not Asian writing, the very opposite in fact, yet the influence and dominance of the US publishing world are undeniable. In recent years, the phenomenon of a kind of “global literature” in English, but also in translation, has been subject to some negative criticism. The translator and literary critic Tim Parks argues that “there is a growing sense that for an author to be considered ‘great,’ he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon,” and that “thanks to the size and power of the US market … more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having ‘failed’ if they do not reach an international audience.” Similarly, the writer and critic Pankaj Mishra writes: Literature today seems to emerge from an apolitical and borderless cosmopolis. Even the mildly adversarial idea of the “postcolonial” that emerged in the 1980s, when authors from Britain’s former colonial possessions appeared to be “writing back” to the imperial centre, has been blunted. Not so very long ago, perhaps as little as half a century or so, the very idea of teaching English Creative Writing was an oddity in Asia. Teaching the English language was what mattered, and perhaps English literature of Britain and the US. However, as English departments in US universities saw dwindling numbers of students elect English as a major, demand rose for Creative Writing classes, as opposed to traditional literature classes. In Asia, the teaching of English Creative Writing thus also emerged as a part of the curriculum in English departments where ESL or EFL (English as a second or foreign language) and English literature were taught. On some level, it does not matter if such output does not rise to the artistic level

Compromised tongues  49 of “literature” if the point is simply to improve students’ English-​language writing and reading ability. It can be effective to use poetic forms to teach Creative Writing, as the structure provides students a basis to experiment with language. Notably, at the MFA programme I directed for an Asian university, despite a significantly smaller enrolment of poets compared to prose writers (fewer than 10%), the poetry graduates were the ones who succeeded far more readily in publishing and some even won awards for their published poetry collections. This might explain the preference for teaching poetry in English Creative Writing in Asia, over prose, as the forms and length of poems, and the greater number of publishing outlets can contribute to better outcomes. Also, it is possible to be creative and playful linguistically in poetry across languages in ways that would be much harder to write in longer prose works. The greater challenge, linguistically, is in teaching advanced writers of non-​fiction and, more especially, fiction writers in Asia. MFA programmes generally attract the greatest number of applicants in fiction, but this is the most competitive genre for publishing. Yet the very fact of this anthology, which covers the teaching of all genres and not just poetry, is testament to a broader educational demand. Should we assist our students’ future publishing prospects by teaching them to write a standard English and globally acceptable stories of, say, “fragrant harbours” that will find readership more readily in England or the US, perhaps with a white protagonist from American suburbia? Or do we complicate their writerly paths by insisting they delve deeply into their linguistic and cultural psyches to write as creatively as possible about the Asia they really know, suffused with what in linguistics is known as “code-​switching” between languages, but which could also be applied to nationalities, cultures, and identities? After all, anyone from Asia writing in English, which may or may not be their first language, is likely complicated by one or more languages and cultures. The term “fragrant harbour” is instructive: this is both a resoundingly loud clang of a cliché for the city of Hong Kong (its Chinese name 香港 has been so translated ad nauseum) as well as the title of a 2002 novel by the British author John Lanchester about the city. Lanchester formerly lived there and arguably should have known better than to adopt such a hackneyed name for his novel, but that did not prevent the book from receiving so-​called international attention. Should we teach our Hong Kong Chinese students to translate what for them is a dead metaphor that remains exotic to the West, or direct their gaze instead to novels in translation such as Xi Xi’s My City or Dung Kai-​cheung’s Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City, both of which are leaps of the imagination into much more layered and complex stories of a city that is far, far more than just a former British colony for global consumption? More troubling than Lanchester’s book is expatriate “helicopter” writing such as the novel Kowloon Tong by American writer Paul Theroux, published at the time of the city’s return to China. Theroux came, stayed just long enough and disappeared, and Kowloon Tong, the real

50  Xu Xi 許素細 neighbourhood in the city, bears little resemblance to the one in the novel. Yet these two books rank as “acclaimed” examples of global English literature about a major Asian city. The other question worth posing is how we teach writers in Asia to express the translingual and transcultural reality of their worlds. While there is no problem infusing English with European languages, it appears a greater challenge for publishers to infuse Chinese or Korean characters into English or even the various forms of World Englishes such as Singlish. As well, many teachers of English in Asia are from the US, the UK, or other “inner circle” World Englishes countries, a defining model proposed by linguistics scholar Braj Kachru in 1982 to map the spread of English worldwide, where English is the native language and mother tongue of most of its inhabitants. These teachers may or may not know the Asian languages or literatures of the countries they come to teach in, as that is not necessarily a requirement for language teaching. But in teaching Creative Writing, are we not compromising our students’ growth if we remain as profoundly ignorant of local languages and literatures? Is this not especially true if students aspire to write “globally” in order to publish more easily in New York or London? Should we be teaching them to whiten their language and sanitise local culture into easily “acceptable” experiences? A joke among Asian writers who are conversant with and rooted in our respective languages, cultures, histories, and literatures is that if we could, we would excise pagodas, dim sum, frangipanis, sushi, palm trees, curry, and gongs out of our literary imaginations, along with inscrutability, slanted eyes and submissive femininity. Instead, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian or Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, both novels in translation from Korean and German, respectively (since Tawada writes in both Japanese and German), are closer to how we understand our transnational realities. After more than 20 years teaching Creative Writing MFA students in the US and Asia, my own journey as a transnational writer from Asia has come full circle. In the late 1970s, as a young, aspiring novelist from Hong Kong who wrote in English about my birth city, I was told I needed to get out of there and go west in order to become a “real” writer. The few local publishers were mainly interested in language textbooks, and the editorial reader for fiction of one publisher did not believe a young local woman could possibly have sufficient experience to write about politics or sex, especially the transgressive interracial sex that my early stories featured. This was a profound eureka moment in my quest to become a writer as it was obvious just how wrongheaded that reader was. Paying homage to Huck Finn (and probably Monkey as well), I lit out and went first to London and later New York, armed with my novel manuscript, Proximity, about the impending handover of my city to China in 1997 at which time, or so the storyline went, an independence movement would begin to take root. London and New York editors in the 1980s were hospitable, even kind, but no one found Proximity, with its political outlook and transgressively

Compromised tongues  51 intercultural sex among ordinary people, a compelling enough story to make an offer. Hong Kong was James Clavell’s Noble House, a thriller about underworld Chinese triads and money in a British colony. For sex, there already was Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong. This latter novel, published in 1957, about a Western man who falls in love with a Chinese hooker, remains in print and has had its share of fan fiction; it contains much less sex than many who have not read it (but choose to criticise it) might imagine. Conversely, Han Suyin’s Hong Kong novel A Many Splendored Thing, published in 1952, about a Eurasian doctor from Shanghai who has an affair with a married Western journalist has long been out of print. It is loosely autobiographical and its political and sexual content surpasses the two above-​mentioned titles by Western authors for nuance and complexity. The reading list of transnational literature of Hong Kong for my current students in an International MFA programme includes both Mason’s and Han Suyin’s books, even though Suzie Wong is by now almost as clichéd as Fragrant Harbour. Lanchester’s novel is also on my reading list, despite its clichéd depiction of the contemporary city, because the historical section is relevant as a colonial story. What I highlight, though, are works by Hong Kong English and Chinese writers, the latter have only more recently received “international” attention via translation. In particular, writers who are bi-​or trilingual, as many from Hong Kong are, cannot ignore the politics, culture, and sex that is interracial, transgendered, transcultural, trans-​ religious, trans-​Sinocist, or otherwise if they wish to write from and of this contemporary Chinese city that today clashes with Beijing over its identity, culture, and especially its desire for a form of independence, if not outright secession from China. As a Hong Kong belonger myself, I am not exactly overjoyed that the unpublished novel of my youth would prove so prescient; however, as a writing teacher, I know that getting under the skin of who we really are is what makes for good literature. Both Lu Xun and Mark Twain would likely agree. This curious compromise of writing in the “wrong” tongue has been my authorial odyssey. The frustration of tangling with an Anglo-​American publishing industry that presumed to know what good fiction about Asia must be informed the way my own pedagogy evolved. Teaching advanced Creative Writing in Asia to the international student mix that enrolled in the courses and programmes I taught was an uneasy balance of demanding “good” literary English that is also innovative and true to its origins for creative work that aims to rank with the best in world literature. The MFA in Creative Writing is rooted, for better or worse, in Americana (my own degree is from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Hence its bias in favour of the Anglo-​American canon; a prejudice about what excellent fiction is; the narrative pattern of a rising action-​climax-​epiphany-​denouement that is the Western narrative structure. As one of my Chinese students from Beijing recently noted about the English short story, she could not understand why a protagonist must undergo a “change” since people do not fundamentally

52  Xu Xi 許素細 change. This is one of the most basic writing craft issues taught to students in fiction workshops. Her observation arises, in part, from the nature of Chinese short fiction, which does not always demand what the typical American story demands in order to be considered “good” fiction. Another eureka moment occurred when I co-​edited an anthology of Hong Kong writing in English for the University of Hong Kong Press, City Voices, which was released in 2003. The anthology was an attempt to assemble examples of published work that comprised literature in the city’s minority language, English. I asked one Hong Kong Chinese writer, whose quirky essays were selected for inclusion, which English writers influenced her. It startled me when she named European, Asian, and South American writers whose translated works she had read in English. She had travelled extensively, was fluent in both English and Chinese, and used to be a Chinese-​ language journalist. What she considered “English literature” was simply works read in English, regardless of what the original language might be. I pondered her response for a long time and, in reviewing my own library shelves, realised that my reading history leaned towards world literature in translation as well as literature in multiple Englishes in addition to work by American and British writers. Her response recalled my white American MFA classmate back in the early 1980s who become a very successful author and Creative Writing teacher in the US, and who today describes himself as an “Americanist.” In grad school, he was one of the first in our cohort to publish fiction and early on won important awards. What surprised me back then was when he said he had never read a single 19th-​century English novel, because I knew he was exceedingly well-​read in modern and contemporary American fiction. Here are two English writers whose understanding of what “literature” comprises comes from two polar ends of a difficult-​to-​define spectrum. You might expect an American writer to want to write “Americanist fiction,” but what about writers in Asia? The Hong Kong Chinese writer wrote about Greenland as well as local family culture. It seems to me we need to rethink what we consider “English” as well as “literature” in order to teach Creative Writing well in Asia and, more important, morally well. Let’s be honest: there is something amoral about teaching English Creative Writing in Asia. For one thing it is often disconnected from both the literatures and languages of Asia. My 15-​plus years of teaching advanced Creative Writing in Asia were in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, the Philippines, and Singapore and included a postgraduate diploma programme, a national writers programme, workshops for literary forums and universities, a writing centre for a major English-​language newspaper, and, at City University of Hong Kong, directing Asia’s first low-​residency MFA programme, one that lasted five years until the university closed the programme, controversially (Scutts). However, the programme allowed me to employ an international faculty with Asian literary credentials, regardless of their ethnicities, countries of origins or residence, or nationalities. My main

Compromised tongues  53 criteria were that faculty be real practitioners. In other words, these were first and foremost writers with good publishing records in their genres—​all had published books of literary work—​and, if possible, had Creative Writing teaching experience as well, ideally at the advanced/​MFA level or, if not, at any level in Asia. The programme adhered closely to the hallmarks and academic standards for the MFA set forth by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the world’s largest association of writing programmes and is considered the Modern Language Association of Creative Writing. It also allowed me to rethink the reading curriculum, which comprised an ambitious recommended list of Asian literatures in English and translation, supplemented by modern and contemporary World and Anglo-​American literatures. It was less important for my fiction students to immerse themselves in Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, or Raymond Carver, all de rigeur at MFA programmes in the US, although it was suggested they familiarise themselves with these giants of American fiction. Instead the focus was for them to discover transcultural and translingual literary traditions that spoke to who they really are. As for their English, I encouraged bi-​or multilingual code-​switching in their work, as well as creative translation from Asian languages to enhance their English and to select from whichever circle of World Englishes to write in that made the most sense for their work. Students who lived and spoke various Englishes should and could write beyond the borders of one standard, so-​called correct English in an attempt to articulate a viable English for their work, one that reflected their transnational and transcultural reality. That programme was established a decade ago, in 2010, and since then, I have been encouraged by the increased attention, albeit still too slow, by the English publishing world towards translated work. Likewise, not every book by an Asian writer published in the West today needs to be an immigrant narrative, one that is already too familiar and that, more significantly, denies the reality of any other transnational or transcultural reality that many writers from Asia embody. In a 2020 interview, World English editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Dr. Danica Salazar notes that among Filipinos, there is a unique way of speaking English which is “something that should be embraced” (“Philippine”). She also points out that having lived in the UK for seven years, “nobody’s ever told me, ‘I don’t understand you.’ And I speak with a totally Philippine English accent” (“Philippine”). The fact that the OED now includes an array of World Englishes words points to the evolution of English into a more global language. This shift in what constitutes “correct” or “proper” English is something we who teach English Creative Writing in Asia need to absorb into our curriculum. The other evolution our teaching needs to recognise is the importance of the bi-​and multilingual reality of our students in Asia. That more Asian writers are fluent in English than writers from World Englishes inner-​circle countries are fluent in Asian languages is no surprise. Although English ranks third in terms of the number of native speakers (379 million as of

54  Xu Xi 許素細 2019) (Lane), it ranks first as the most spoken language globally (over 1.2 billion) (“What”). On the Internet, English is the most widely used language (over 1.105 billion) (“Internet”). In 2018, I helped an American college of the arts establish a new, low-​ residency International MFA that was the first in the world to offer literary translation along with fiction and non-​fiction as a Creative Writing major. The programme’s focus is prose and the goal is to train advanced writing students from international backgrounds in a rigorous curriculum that recognises the centrality of bi-​and multilingual perspectives in creative work. Students are assigned world and transnational literature and exposed to the practice of the three major genres offered—​fiction, non-​fiction and prose literary translation, regardless of their major. While this programme is international, rather than primarily for Asia, its curricular approach is relevant to the challenge of teaching English Creative Writing in Asia. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, if we are to get beyond the problem of this compromised tongue our students in and from Asia are writing in, we must raise expectations and recognise that our students can and should be trained to see themselves as viable contributors to World Literature in English. To achieve this, we must move beyond language learning or the study of primarily Anglo-​American literatures as the spaces for Creative Writing, especially at the advanced level. It is equally as important to demand the discipline be taught by real practitioners with published work, as opposed to literature academics with PhDs or those who have an advanced degree in Creative Writing with minimal or no publication records except in academic work, as does continue to occur in Asia. The point of creative writing is to break rules, disrupt the comfort zones of language, society, culture in order to create art. Art can only emerge if serious practitioners demand more of themselves than simply to produce a story or poem in what is regarded merely as “good enough” English or work in imitation of an English-​ language tradition that does not reflect their own languages, cultures, or histories. We need our students to push English to new heights if we are serious about what we teach, and expect our students to produce work that can and will rank with the best in the world’s literatures.

Works cited Cheng, Siu-​Pong, and Sze-​Wing Tang. “Languagehood of Cantonese: A Renewed Front in an Old Debate.” Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 3, 2014, pp. 389–​98. ResearchGate, doi:10.4236/​ojml.2014.43032. “Compromised, Adj (c).” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford U P, 2020, www-​oed-​ com.proxy.usainteanne.ca:2443/​view/​Entry/​37905?rskey=bKr96k&result=2&is Advanced=false#eid. Accessed 10 Aug. 2020. Davidson, Justin. “The Hidden Meaning behind My Brilliant Friend’s Neapolitan Dialect.” Vulture, 3 Dec. 2018, www.vulture.com/​2018/​12/​my-​brilliant-​friend-​ hbo-​neapolitan-​dialect.html.

Compromised tongues  55 Diment, Maria. “Language as a Tool of Political Power: The Threat of Cantonese Extinction.” ALTA Language Services, 20 Sept. 2018, altalang.com/​ beyond-​ words/​cantonese-​extinction-​threat/​. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020. “Internet World Users by Language.” Internet World Stats, 30 Apr. 2019. Miniwatts Marketing Group, internetworldstats.com/​stats7.htm. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020. Kirsch, Adam. “World Literature and Its Discontents.” The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century. e-​book, Columbia Global Reports, 2016. Lane, James. “The 10 Most Spoken Languages in the World.” Babbel Magazine, 6 Sept. 2019, www.babbel.com/​en/​magazine/​the-​10-​most-​spoken-​languagesin-​the-​world. Mishra, Pankaj. “The Case Against the Global Novel.” Financial Times, 27 Sept. 2013, www.ft.com/​intl/​cms/​s/​2/​6e00ad86-​26a2-​11e3-​9dc0-​00144feab7de. html. Parks, Tim. “The Dull New Global Novel.” NYR Daily, The New York Review of Books, 9 Feb. 2010, nybooks.com/​daily/​2010/​02/​09/​the-​dull-​new-​global-​novel/​. “Philippine English Is Legitimate, Says Oxford English Dictionary Editor.” ABS-​ CBN, 20 Aug. 2020, https://​news.abs-​cbn.com/​life/​08/​20/​20/​philippine-​english-​ is-​legitimate-​says-​oxford-​english-​dictionary-​editor. Accessed 20 Aug. 2020. Porzucki, Nina. “Language vs. Dialect, or Why We’re Obsessed with Elena Ferrante.” The World in Words, 11 Apr. 2017, www.pri.org/​stories/​2017-​04-​07/​ elena-​ferrante-​language-​versus-​dialect. Scutts, Joanna. “Hong Kong MFA Program Closes.” Poets & Writers, Sept./​Oct. 2015, posted 19 Aug. 2015, www.pw.org/​content/​hong_​kong_​mfa_​program_​ closes. “Spider Boys.” Epigram Books, 2020, https://​epigrambookshop.sg/​products/​spider-​ boys. Accessed 8 Aug. 2020. “What Are the Top 200 Most Spoken Languages?” Ethnologue: Languages of the World. SIL International, Ethnologue.com/​guides/​ethnologue200. Accessed 10 Aug. 2020.

3  Charisma versus amnesia  he rise of Creative Writing T in English India Saikat Majumdar

Editing a collection of modern Indian literature at the turn of the 21st century, Amit Chaudhuri had critiqued a certain tradition of thought that quickly jumped to exclude Indian writing from traditions of the rational and the real. Ascribing such realism exclusively to the Western Enlightenment, this ghettoising mode of thought relegates Indian writing merely to the realm of the overblown, lush, and spontaneous. Almost as a natural consequence, critical reflections on creative practice are too easily traced to a tradition of Enlightenment Modernity from which non-​Western cultures are quickly excluded. Such an act of self-​exclusion is practised by the Nigerian novelist-​ turned-​cruise-​lecturer, Emmanuel Egudu, in J.M. Coetzee’s fictional sketch, “The Novel in Africa,” when he claims in his lecture that the printed novel is an alien form in Africa, whose people celebrate more spontaneous and performative forms of art such as oral storytelling. Depicted as disingenuous within Coetzee’s narrative, this claim illustrates how simple binaries about Western and non-​Western cultures are easily instrumentalised by many for a wide range of benefits. A conscious commitment to writerly craft is very much understood to be the marker of an artistic conscience inherited from the interiority and self-​preoccupation of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—​often honed to perfection under Formalist and New Critical attention to the craft of writing. Next to this carefully honed tradition of excellence, certain claims might seem easy to make. That creativity in India—​driven by the performative urge, as Egudu claims in the African context—​is spontaneous, that its practitioners do not pause to make critical reflections on its methods and processes; neither is criticism as entrenched or as significant a practice as the deeply reflexive tradition embedded in European thought since the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The kind of influence wielded by Creative Writing programmes on the literary landscape as that outlined by Mark McGurl in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing would, therefore, seem not only infrastructurally impossible but ideologically incompatible to literary culture in India. As we will DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-4

Charisma versus amnesia  57 see, however, there is a lot more to the story (and stories) of Creative Writing in India, and to the original cliché about artistic production, which, like all clichés, has some truth but is also very limited. Be that as it may, Creative Writing as a programme of pedagogy, either at the university or outside, has been rare in India. English arrives at Indian universities easily, as the prized programme in the Humanities, driven by a host of right and wrong reasons—​with the full force of colonial hangover and neoliberal capital, as a bankable track of upward mobility—​even the language of money and power. Not very compatible to the arts, is it? But Creative Writing does not follow naturally, lacking institutional precedent in India, and the consequent solidity of academic and professional prestige. A number of renowned writers, both in English and the indigenous vernaculars, have taught in the literature departments of Indian universities. A few come into mind right away: Firaq Gorakhpuri (Hindi and Urdu), Harivansh Rai Bachhan (Hindi), and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (English) at the English department at the University of Allahabad, Shankha Ghosh and Nabanita Dev Sen (both Bengali) at the Department of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University, P. Lal (English) at the English department of St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta University. But all these writers taught literature, as the teaching of Creative Writing as an academic discipline was practically unknown during their time. Even today, barring the odd Creative Writing course offered in a few universities, it is hard to find Creative Writing as an academic discipline in Indian universities, in any language. Perhaps the best-​known recent attempt of sustained Creative Writing instruction here is the series of workshops run by the University of East Anglia in India since 2013, popularly known as the UEA-​India workshops. They are organised by Amit Chaudhuri, who is a Professor of Contemporary Literature at UEA, where he teaches every autumn semester. As part of the initiative of UEA’s presence in India, Chaudhuri conducts an eight-​ day Creative Writing workshop, usually taught by Chaudhuri and one guest writer—​which has included Adam Foulds, Ian Jack, Anjali Joseph, Kirsty Gunn, and several others. They are conducted once, and sometimes twice a year, and admit students on a competitive basis, based on their writing sample, personal statements, and letters of recommendation. Over ten of these workshops have been conducted so far, and their alumni now include several figures already well known in their fields, such as the novelist Abdullah Khan, the editor Sayantan Ghosh, and the journalist Dipanjan Sinha. The UEA-​India workshops are, in fact, currently considered to be the most prominent route for new Indian writers to get published on visible professional platforms. Beginning in 2020, the UEA-​India workshops have moved to Ashoka University in the suburb of Delhi, where Chaudhuri is now Professor of Creative Writing, teaching a course every Spring, and where I also teach. Now renamed the Ashoka-​ UEA Creative Writing Workshops, this programme is the best university-​initiated Creative Writing programme that is

58  Saikat Majumdar open to a wider community—​in this instance, to anyone from any part of the world who is able to meet its admission requirements. It is perhaps not coincidental that the first university-​run, degree-​granting Creative Writing programme in India would be instituted at Ashoka, a university that seeks to adapt the American model of liberal arts education to the Indian landscape. Even at Ashoka University, where we established this BA Minor in Creative Writing (later also to include an interdisciplinary BA in English and Creative Writing and an MA in English with a Creative Writing Track), this happened almost as something of an accidental afterthought. The founders of Ashoka University were sensitive to the pedagogic need for writing instruction—​if only of the academic kind—​and it was in connection to this need that the founding faculty included Aruni Kashyap, a bilingual writer and translator, in Assamese and English (who later left to join the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Georgia). And after a semester as a visiting professor, I joined on a permanent basis, as professor of English and Creative Writing. Along with the two of us, there was Janice Pariat, another fiction writer, at that time a preceptor in writing for the Young India Fellowship (later to join the Creative Writing Department), a one-​year postgraduate diploma programme in liberal arts. The three of us put together the plan of a BA Minor in Creative Writing. I love the idea of Creative Writing as an undergraduate minor, but I have to say that I do not think it should be a major. I’ve seen American institutions with a BFA in Creative Writing, and it always struck me as a bit of a fluff major. Should a young person, a teenager, decide that they want to be a full-​ time writer, to the exclusion of everything else early on in life? What are you going to write about if you lack a life outside of writing? Making writing the degree of your prime focus in college risks those occlusions and opportunity costs. I would much rather see students study Literature, Economics, Biology, Computers, History, and a variety of academic subjects to bring a world view to their fiction or poetry, rather than commit to the navel-​gazing of an already-​professionalising writer. If there is a time for such a navel-​ gazing—​and there will be, as what is writing without egoism?—​it comes later in life when the writer has gathered enough of the world along the path of life and study. Like the rest of the programmes at Ashoka, we had to live with the irony of a programme in English-​language writing in a country of a wide range of indigenous vernaculars. But English always ends up being the bridge language amidst India’s challenging diversity, at least for the bourgeoisie. But two things need to be noted here. First, the vernacular life of English in India. We have always imagined this to be the life force of our Creative Writing Department. Our inspiration does not come merely from MFA programmes in the US—​ our English writing derives much life from the speech, dialect, and literature of the local vernaculars, often carrying their shadow in the syntax. Whether it is Assamese, Bengali, or Khasi, as with the founding faculty, or Hindi,

Charisma versus amnesia  59 Gujarati, Kashmiri, or Urdu—​as through synergy with the English department, which, to all intents and purposes, is really a department of comparative literature. When we were asked to select an external reviewer, we chose Vivek Shanbhag (later to join as a visiting professor), noted Kannada writer, who has only recently attracted the English-​ language spotlight through the English translation of his remarkable novella, Ghachar Ghochar. The medium of work in this programme was English, but our spirit was spread across the multiple indigenous vernaculars of India. The vernacular life of English took a deeper hold on our department when we made translation part of the programme and began to accept works of translation as theses. The Bangla-​English translator Arunava Sinha joined the faculty as an associate professor of practice, and Rita Kothari, professor of English and well-​known translator of Gujarati literature into English, was available close by. The second issue takes us right back to the question of critical awareness of creative practice. Creative Writing Programmes thrive across the US, and so does their bitter animosity with departments of literature, often housed in the same building. Owing their life to the legacy of Paul Engle at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Creative Writing programmes prospered through the second half of the 20th century, but a range of forces (the deconstructive and cultural studies turn in literature departments key among them) created a vast gulf between the so-​called scholars and practitioners—​the English and the Creative Writing professoriate, to the creation of much animosity and mutual dismissal between them. The poet-​critics of the New Critical generation seemed a world apart in this era when the creative practice and scholarly thought about literature seemed locked in mutual hostility or, at best, indifference. I experienced this first-​hand during my own American MFA: the glorification of a certain minimalist tradition in fiction inherited from Ernest Hemmingway via Raymond Carver seemed to go with a natural suspicion of anything that remotely looked or sounded like intellectualism. There were exceptions to this divorce of craft and thought, but on the whole, this was the general pattern of the mutual relation between departments of literature and creative writing. It became clear from the beginning that this was a conflict we would be able to avoid. My arrival as the chair of the department of Creative Writing also coincided with my appointment as a professor with a joint appointment—​in English and Creative Writing, and I think the credit for the mutual affinity between the two departments goes to, well, both of them. What we have at Ashoka is what one might call a public-​facing English department, where all the senior faculty, with significant publications of academic scholarships, have more recently turned to publishing trade or crossover books, alongside articles in the mainstream media. Most members of the Creative Writing Department have, along with their publications in poetry, fiction, and personal or narrative non-​fiction, a significant record of publications in criticism, which range from academic scholarship to editorial

60  Saikat Majumdar and curatorial work, and more personal essays on their craft or the literary landscape around. Sumana Roy, who joined the department in 2019, was already one of the most visible critical and curatorial voices in the Indian-​English literary landscape through her essays, reviews, and editorial work when she published her first full-​length book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-​fiction on plant life, soon followed by a novel, a collection of short stories, and a book of poems. Her critical and curatorial work is some of the most serious that we have in contemporary Anglophone India, charting a writerly awareness of a literary tradition that makes the modern Indian writer. Amit Chaudhuri, established as a leading writer in multiple genres—​ poetry, fiction, non-​ fiction, and criticism, joined the department in 2020, making this awareness central to the department. Apart from his critically acclaimed novels and poetry, Chaudhuri is also the author of a book on deconstruction and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and a wide range of essays on literature, art, and music, several of them collected into volumes, including the influential 2008 collection, Clearing a Space. Chaudhuri is also the editor of an important anthology, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (titled, in the US, The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, due to a change of publisher). Taken together, Chaudhuri has been a sharp voice of polemic, not just through his own fiction but also through his criticism, of certain dominant traditions of Indian-​English writing that have ranged from a fetishisation of the spectacular public sphere of history to disguised forms of what he has called “market activism.” To counter which, he has initiated a series of symposia titled “Literary Activism,” now hosted at Ashoka University. I, too, have been happy at this intersection of the “Creative and the Critical,” to borrow the title of the course Chaudhuri teaches at Ashoka. Apart from my novels, my academic monograph, Prose of the World, has dealt with English as a language of world literature, and my recently published collection, co-​edited with Aarthi Vadde from Duke, The Critic as Amateur, reflects the interest in the idiosyncratic—​indeed, the playful stamp of the amateur—​in literary criticism that unites me with the rest of this multilingual, interdisciplinary department. Janice Pariat, our fellow fiction writer, writes regular newspaper columns on art and literature, and Arunava Sinha, though best known for his translations from Bangla, also performs an important curatorial function through his role as the consulting editor for literature for the popular online news portal, Scroll.in. Altogether, this is a department which often sees the work of the intellectual as inseparable from that of the artistic and, occasionally, vice versa. Criticism, I feel, is just another genre of literary writing—​the way prose, poetry, and drama make up different genres. I would like to think that most of my colleagues here are in agreement. The friendship between the “creative” and the “critical” that defines both the English and the Creative Writing departments at Ashoka might suggest

Charisma versus amnesia  61 that our curriculum would be heavy on critical reading, more the MA model than the MFA. In reality, we went quite the other way. For our BA Minor, our model was the studio-​driven writing programme, where the primary venue of learning is the workshop, advanced courses where the only texts used are those produced by the student-​participants. Students read each other’s work, comment, and critique, and their editing skills are honed at least as much as their writing ability. Editing someone else’s work, I have always maintained, helps one as a writer, to realise what is and what is not working with your own work, even as the editorial work provides immediate help to the writer whose work you are editing. To complete a Minor in Creative Writing, students at Ashoka need to take six courses of four credits each, adding up to a total of 24 credits. The gateway course is the Introduction to Creative Writing, a course with a range of structured writing assignments that focus on multiple genres of prose and verse. This is followed by one course in Craft of Writing, which focuses on a single genre of writing—​be it poetry, fiction, translation, or the essay—​and mixes a series of structured assignments with peer review. In between, they need to take one class that is expected to focus on the intellectual study of literature or the process of writing as opposed to creative practice. This requirement can be fulfilled either by taking the gateway course for the English major, Forms of Literature—​which offers a glimpse into the diversity of literary forms ranging from classical epics to the modern short story—​ or by taking one of the various critical thinking seminars offered by the Creative Writing Faculty, topics for which have ranged from Literary Journalism to The Flaneur in Literature. The most advanced form of coursework comes in the Workshops, of which students have to take two. Focusing on a single genre—​so far, we have offered Fiction, Poetry, Prose, and Translation—​the workshop is expected to be the least structured and the most free-​flowing of classes, using, in most cases, the student-​generated writing as the only texts for discussion and group review. Of course, these are only the general principles behind the courses. The actual experiences of the courses vary, depending on the choices and the methods followed by the instructor. In my introductory classes, for instance, I start with a simple question: What do you need to be a good writer? After gathering their responses, I usually offer two: A: An interesting relationship with life. Not an interesting life. All life is interesting. Never go anywhere looking for a “subject.” Art is where you are. Always. What matters is not the life you have; what matters is how you look at it. B: The other thing one needs is an interesting relationship with language, a relationship that offers a paradoxical mix of the alien and the familiar. Because that is what art is—​the warmth of the familiar cut across by the cold hand of the alien.

62  Saikat Majumdar So what can we achieve in a university Creative Writing studio in a continent where there are few others and a country where there are almost none? A Creative Writing studio creates a space for writers to come together. It pushes writing to go from the therapeutic to the affective. Therapeutic: that journal entry where you vent your anger, romance, frustration, love, disgust. Affective: the piece of writing that successfully evokes all these emotions in the reader, where writing goes from being about you to being directed to the reader. And how does writing open up and become welcoming like that? By turning writers into readers and back to writers again. That is the workshop experience at the heart of the writing studio. Writing is a lonely affair—​far more so than any of the performing arts, be it the ballet or the garage band. For a writer, a communal space can be lifesaving. This is why the Creative Writing Minor at Ashoka foregrounds the studio approach, with the writing workshop at its core. The capstone project for the Minor is a thesis, a minimum of 25,000 words in prose or 10,000 words in verse, which students write with the supervision of a faculty member. For the Interdisciplinary BA in English and Creative Writing, the thesis needs to be preceded by a 3000-​word critical introduction—​not an academic article, but a writer’s reflection on their craft and process. We expect students to complete a full draft of their thesis by mid-​January preceding May when they plan to graduate. In their last semester, the Spring, they take a mandatory Publishing Seminar, taught by an editor or a publisher rather than a writer, where they workshop their thesis to the final stage of submission even as they work with their individual faculty supervisors. Our Publishing Seminar is usually taught by Arpita Das, the founder and chief of Yoda Press, one of the more daring and experimental independent publishing houses in India. Das joins us every Spring as a visiting professor to teach this course, and she invites a series of leading editors and publishers to run individual sessions and provide feedback on the theses in-​progress. The idea behind the Publishing Seminar was to have the students’ theses, by this point near-​complete, read by publishing professionals rather than by practising writers, with whom they have worked so far. Though the point of this approach was accessing a different model of feedback, our location in the Delhi-​National Capital Region already places is in close proximity with the subcontinental hub of media and publishing, which, combined with the connections of the faculty, has already led to book contracts for a couple of our students—​in both instances for translations they have done from Indian languages. In the end, this is a Minor, that—​in the tradition of Minors in a liberal arts college—​extends to the entire range of the university. A good many—​ say around 80%—​of the Creative Writing Minors are English Majors. But the rest, including some of our most striking writers, come from all over, be it Economics, Psychology, Computer Science, History. I have seen talented

Charisma versus amnesia  63 mathematicians and physicists write speculative fiction and minimalist poetry that catches attention; an Economics major from Kenya writes unforgettable stories set in a Nairobi ghetto where the Bible and soccer-​betting fight for attention. A History major completes an ambitious thesis of translation from a contemporary Bangla writer, and a Computer Science major does the same from Hindi. We cannot deny we have a special relation with the English department, but we celebrate the diversity that is the Liberal Arts at Ashoka, from the most subjective strain of the Humanities to the objectivity of the natural sciences. There is diversity, too, in the writing, though its stripes are more limited. After all, these are all writers from a limited age group, 18–​21, and they do not have a lifetime of experience to draw from. Children’s literature and Young-​Adult writing still dominate their reading experience, the memories of those books fresh and special, infecting their writing in particular ways. The other large influence is—​surprise!—​digital media, particularly, films and Web-​series streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Those series draw them to alternative realities—​shows that mix the real and the virtual intelligently, such as Black Mirror, are a huge hit—​and often to forms of dystopia. Besides, the parties of college kids with a certain amount of privilege look the same the world over: the haze of pot and music, some stronger stuff, making out in corners and hallways, live Instagramming of weird moments, walls around, the interior strangely similar be it California or Gurgaon. The good writers turn anything into good stuff; they remind us that the subject does not really matter, and yet I find myself asking our writing students to look away from their screens sometimes, to stare out of the window instead. Most of them live in some of the greatest repositories of stories and experiences—​bustling, crowded Indian cities. Staying walled in, glued to their screens, they miss out on much! But there are many other stories, of other kinds. The vernacular ones stand out. Some come from spaces outside the modern metropolis, the satellite towns, and suburbs, which are already a huge force in popular Indian-​English fiction and Bollywood films. Others embody what we call the vernacular life of English. A writer from Bangladesh writes poems and stories in English that feel translated from Bangla, because, as he later tells me—​that is how he shapes them in his head. I encourage him to write in Bangla, and a year later, he tells me that he has almost finished a novel in that language. My thesis student from Kenya tells me that he is more comfortable writing in Gikuyu than in English. A huge fan of his intense, densely populated, conflict-​ridden stories from Nairobi, I am struck by his claim—​ thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, who had once wondered over the fuss people made over his English writing, as his work in Russian was infinitely better! I see a few gendered patterns. Science and speculative fiction are more popular with the men, though occasionally women write such fiction too. And then there is family to save the day for all. Family is still a troubling web for these fresh post-​teens—​labyrinths of love, power, and struggle.

64  Saikat Majumdar “You can’t go wrong with family,” I tell them. “Family anywhere, really, but the Indian family? That’s the stuff of epics!” The intense reality of your emotions, the shock of your love and hate, if not the quotidian flamboyance of the stories tucked within. Campus stories recur as well. New loves, new hates, new beliefs, and disbeliefs. The poets and the translators on the faculty doubtless have other student archives to share. “We go to school, or are made to go,” writes Mark McGurl, “to become richer versions of ourselves, however that might be defined. This doubleness is readily apparent in the educational endeavor called creative writing” (18). While this pursuit of personal growth has easily translated into the proliferation of Creative Writing programmes in the US, it has not led to a similar popularity in Indian universities, barely existing outside of one or two new universities such as Ashoka and Ambedkar—​a public university in Delhi which offers a two-​year Masters in Literary Arts. But the rarity of Indian university-​run Creative Writing programmes is more than matched by the sharp rise of a wide range of Creative Writing courses and workshops in urban communities outside the campus. I have been drawn into the lives of many of these, and there are several others I have heard much about. Just a couple of months after I moved back to India from the US, in 2016, relocating to Ashoka from Stanford, I got to meet a popular and influential Facebook group, Write and Beyond, which runs a series of meetings and workshops on reading and writing, both online and in-​person in the Delhi-​ Gurgaon area. I was invited by Kiranjeet Chaturvedi, the coordinator of the group, to conduct a reading from one of my novels, to be followed by a creative writing workshop for the group. That initiated my association with the group, and through events and other forms of collaborations, I came to get a sense of what a creative writing community might look like outside the university. In this instance—​and I imagine this would be true of many community-​ driven creative writing groups—​ the participants came from a wide variety of age groups, but most of them are much older than the average college student. After a stretch of working with 18-​to 21-​year olds, it was an invigorating experience reading the work of real adults who were, however, relatively new to writing. People ranged from their thirties to their fifties, and perhaps beyond, and in the case of this particular group, most of them were women, busy women who balanced careers with family responsibilities, and still took out time to write. Particularly through my work with the publication of a collection of stories by members of this group, Escape Velocity—​again, all of them written by women—​I saw a world entirely different from the youthful, often virtual and speculative world that dominated the writing of college students. These stories were diverse in the regional cultures they represented, but what united them was a sense of quotidian life, a lingering love for it, sometimes in the context of family and sometimes against the backdrop of a profession—​sometimes from a

Charisma versus amnesia  65 remote rural area but more often from metropolitan cities and their affluent suburbs. But there was a commitment to, and a muted love for, the banality of everyday life that I felt comes with living a little, with experience—​and perhaps, importantly, from experiencing life as a woman. It was, for me, the best way I could have been introduced to a creative writing community outside the university. Subsequently, I have had the experience of holding sessions for various creative writing communities outside the university. Regular venues include high schools across India, where I have conducted workshops as part of the university’s outreach programme. Beyond academia, these have included events for publishers, at literary festivals, and writing groups in different cities. I usually give a brief talk on the idea of creative writing, its history, the writing process, and its various components, to be followed by one or more (depending on the time available) writing prompts. Then I give the participants some time to write, concluding with a session where they share their work with the group, which offers feedback. I usually come away from these workshops truly struck and enlivened, not just by the diversity of the participants—​which have ranged from people in their seventies to a young couple who brought their small child along—​but more importantly, by the texture of the writing, the daring confessional quality, the willingness to experiment and air sensitive political views, moving dialogue and dreamlike longing and aspiration—​and much, much else, far more than that to which I can do justice here. And between them, I feel, they have given me a real glimpse of the diversity that is India—​the India that is Anglophone sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, sometimes aspirationally, with the robust shadow of the indigenous vernaculars close behind. There are other well-​known programmes, many of them run by practising writers. Anita’s Attic is a creative writing and mentorship programme, run by the novelist Anita Nair in association with Penguin Random House India. Since its inception in 2015, this programme has mentored 87 writers from a wide range of backgrounds, working in multiple genres: crime, fantasy, and literary fiction, as well as children’s fiction, writing on health and well-​being, and screenwriting. It also has had significant alumni success, with many of them publishing professionally, and winning residencies in India and abroad. Each cohort takes courses once a week, spread over 12 weeks, and includes sessions by visiting writers, publishers, and agents. There is also “Bangalore’s World-​Famous Semi-​Deluxe Writing Program,” started by Anjum Hasan, Eshwar Sundaresan, and Zac O’ Yeah in 2017. “We were not going to take ourselves or this whole business of selling creative writing too seriously,” writes Hasan, “hence the attempt at a tongue-​ in-​cheek name.” It was initially planned as a weekend course over a couple of months each year. In addition to the founders, visiting writers conduct sessions on fields such as narrative journalism, children’s literature, and translation. The goal is to expose the participants to a wide variety of genres so that they get a clearer sense of what really interests them.

66  Saikat Majumdar They have completed three rounds of the “semi-​ deluxe” programme successfully, though only a couple of students from each cohort of around 30 seem to have gone on to pursue writing seriously. The desire to write, Hasan points out, is ubiquitous these days—​people hope to articulate their uniqueness in a world of overwhelming sameness. “I like the idea of the creative writing classroom allowing space for people to express their individuality,” she says, “or perhaps just their loneliness, even if it’s not going to make writers of them all.” Bangalore being a major IT hub in the country, many of the participants of this workshop are IT professionals. “There is,” Hasan says, “the stereotype of the soulless engineer, but often writing by engineers does reflect a sense of estrangement—​not quite feeling at home in their routine jobs and trying to revive the creativity they might have once nursed dreams of.” The other thing that comes to surface, rather alarmingly, is how poorly read people are these days, including those aspiring to write. Since reading must be a requirement in any writing workshop, this brings to the surface the sad reality of more and more Indians moving away from literature as a means to engage with life. Another series of workshops gaining increasing popularity is conducted by the Bound Writing Retreats, who usually conduct their events in Goa. They were set up in 2018 by Tara Khandelwal, a graduate of Barnard College and the Columbia Publishing Course. According to Michelle D’Costa, one of Bound’s coordinators, they conducted their first application-​based writing retreat in Goa in March 2018. It was initially hard to find support, but a number of writers, including Chandrahas Choudhury, Ratika Kapur, and Amitabha Bagchi, came on board as instructors. Since then, a number of other writers have joined: Rheea Mukherjee, Aditi Rao, Prayaag Akbar, Tashan Mehta, and others. They also offer classes online, in a number of genres: screenwriting, creative writing for children, blogging, fiction, poetry, meditative writing, and more, and plan to introduce additional genres. In addition to workshops, Bound also offers editorial, mentoring, and promotional services to writers. They also release a popular podcast, “Books and Beyond with Bound.” The idea, according to D’Costa, is to help aspiring writers in every possible way, from honing their craft to finding ways of making an income through writing. Alumni from Bound have been published by major publishers, have appeared in literary magazines, have gone on to do MFAs, and have won prizes and fellowships. Once Creative Writing is institutionalised in any venue—​be it the university or in a community workshop—​it is hard to separate from a narrative of professionalisation and even a certain trajectory of upward mobility. This comes with a negative aura of its own. In the context of the rise of university Creative Writing programmes in the US, McGurl argues that to the degree that it would end up linking the profession of authorship with classrooms and committees and degree-​credentialing and the like,

Charisma versus amnesia  67 creative writing cannot help pointing toward the unglamorous institutional practicalities of literary life in the postwar U.S. and beyond. (3) This conflict may refer to the old debate about spontaneity and cultivation in literature, or it may refer to any number of disputes, but in the end, it all comes to a certain suspicion of the professionalisation or even academisation of the artistic process. One feature of the rise of creative writing culture that manages to stay outside the suspicion of professional instrumentalisation is the Writing Residency. Creating a short-​term community of writers—​usually in an idyllic, non-​urban location—​and supporting them with uninterrupted time to write and exchange work, has been one of the most innovative and refreshing components of a culture that has become increasingly attentive to the process of writing as an activity that needs significant space and conscious support. The best-​known Writers’ Residence in India is offered by Sangam House, set up by Arshia Sattar and D.W. Gibson. Inspired by Art Omi in New York’s Hudson Valley—​ previously directed by Gibson—​ Sangam House brings together writers from different cultures and languages, reserving about half the space for Indian writers, working in various Indian languages, while the rest come from outside the country, working in different languages of the world. In an essay written for Scroll, Gibson points out that they invite about 15 writers to stay at Sangam House, with most coming for four weeks, sharing the experience with three or four writers at a time. Sangam House does not own property; instead, as Gibson says, they “are nomadic, partnering with other arts organisations that have facilities to share.” They spent two years in Puducherry with the theatre company Adi Shakti, subsequently moving to the village of Hessaraghatta, outside of Bengaluru, where they shared a campus with the dancers of Nrityagram. In 2018, they moved to Bengaluru, where they are hosted in The Jamun, a guesthouse that dedicates itself to supporting the arts. “The nomadic model,” writes Gibson, “suits us for practical and creative reasons: we have a limited budget with an all-​volunteer staff, so buying property is out of the question, but we also value what our collaborating partners bring to the Sangam House experience.” It adds to their repertoire of experience: “We get to crash dress rehearsals and share the dinner table with world class actors and dancers and directors and artists of various expressions.” Over the years, Sangam House has become a coveted destination for writers, including several in the early stage of their careers. In a country where there are hardly any long-​term fellowships for writers at work, either at universities or at other institutions, these short-​term gatherings offer meaningful support to writers, if of a spiritual and symbolic variety, more than the kind of material or infrastructural support that long-​term fellowships

68  Saikat Majumdar or grants can offer. But the former is important too, and anybody who has embarked on the many uncertainties of a writing life knows well, every little bit of encouragement counts, all the more when it comes with the warm company of fellow travellers on their uncertain path. Trends such as these point to new patterns in the formation of a national and international community of writers with conscious attention to craft and process. The rise of a culture of “creative writing” in India doubtless brings along its own caveats—​an excessive preoccupation with the professional, even mercenary aspects of the writing life, the “industrialization” of the pursuit, as it were. And yet the development of conscious attention to writing as a craft, and a communal gathering over its process, can only be a good thing. I will conclude this survey with a personal observation: too often I have felt that there is no dearth of talent in the arts in India—​but the arts tend to lack systems that can harness learning and experience for people. Like most things in India, the arts, too, run on individual talent and charisma—​but we rarely have the means through which a larger cross-​section of aspirants can benefit from the talent and experience of individual practitioners. A cursory comparison with popular Bollywood and Hollywood films, or even the American and the Indian productions on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, says much: there are some brilliant and beautiful Indian productions on these platforms, and yet outside of these few striking ones, often in the rest the standards of production, be it acting, screenplay, or cinematography, are appallingly poor, unlike even the uninspiring American productions, where these elements rarely fall below a certain level of polish. We see a similar pattern in print and online journalism—​the presence of brave and talented journalists in India, apparently, do nothing to consolidate a larger system of excellence or professional structure. It is as if in spite of excellent individual practitioners, we suffer from a pattern of amnesia, unable to absorb larger, learnable skills, even if the magic of the purely personal talent must remain ineluctable to systems. A curiously comparable problem exists with music training in India, where unlike the Western seminaries that are potentially open to all, schools of Indian music exists overwhelmingly across family traditions, where one has to somehow become an “insider” to get the best training, be it by blood or devoted discipleship, in the ancient tradition of guru-​kula. Literature, in its modern, printed form, is arguably the most abstract of all the arts, using the non-​sensory form of language as its medium. It is also, I feel, the most intellectual, appealing directly to a certain consciousness rather than through any of the physical senses, as music, painting, or cinema do. Given its bookish or textual nature, literature comes to occupy the intersection of the arts and academia with the greatest ease, coming to life as the most academic of all the arts and, conversely, the most artistic of all academic subjects. In India, where the study of English possesses a cultural, social, and even economic capital that it has now more or less lost in Anglo-​American universities, the rise of a pedagogic culture around Creative

Charisma versus amnesia  69 Writing offers a new communal consciousness to an artistic practice that has become significant to the nation and its global diaspora.

Works cited Chaturvedi, Kiranjeet, editor. Escape Velocity: A Collection of Short Stories from the Write and Beyond Workshops 2018. Write & Beyond, 2018. Chaudhuri, Amit. “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English.” The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, Picador, 2001, pp. xxiii–​xxxi. Coetzee, J. M. “The Novel in Africa.” Elizabeth Costello. Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 35–​58. Gibson, D. W. “Why Writers’ Residencies in General—​ and Sangam House in Particular—​May Go On Despite Covid-​19.” Scroll, 5 June 2020, https://​scroll. in/ ​article/ ​963828/​why-​ writers-​residencies-​in-​general- ​ and- ​sangam- ​ house- ​in-​ particular-​may-​go-​on-​despite-​covid-​19. Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. Columbia U P, 2013. Majumdar, Saikat, and Aarthi Vadde, editors. The Critic as Amateur. Bloomsbury, 2019. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard U P, 2009.

4  The new Creative Writing classroom of India The client-​student, structures of privilege, and the spectre of privatisation Nandini Dhar

Introduction I teach at a private, liberal arts university located in a small town near New Delhi, the national capital of India. My school does not have a separate programme in Creative Writing (CW), which means we do not grant degrees in CW as such, not unlike most university campuses in India. I teach primarily literature and occasionally gender studies. Although my school does not have a formal CW programme, we are encouraged to develop CW courses. Quite a few of my colleagues are active creative writers and not all of them are based in the literature department—​some are even lawyers. Most of the faculty who are active writers do not have a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in CW but are aware of the pedagogical methods developed by CW programmes abroad, have varying levels of informal training in CW themselves, and actively engage with the ideas of a creative pedagogy in the classroom. In other words, the campus I work at embodies a transitory moment in the nation’s history of institutional engagement with the discipline of CW. This moment of transition means that we instructors often experiment with pedagogical forms in our classrooms and reflect on how received pedagogical forms in CW translate into the specific classroom contexts of India. By exploring a few crucial moments of my own experiences of teaching CW in Indian contexts, I will describe how the very idea of “creative writing” poses a challenge for the Indian classroom. While I do not have a degree in CW, I did take quite a few writing workshops during my tenure as a graduate student in Comparative Literature in the US, both in a university setting, where I shared spaces with colleagues undertaking MFAs, as well as in specialised “community” workshops. I have published and continue to publish poetry and fiction in national and international literary journals. While I acknowledge the necessity of teaching CW inside formal classroom spaces, I also believe the initially American model of workshopping cannot be exported wholesale into Indian or subcontinental DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-5

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  71 classrooms or literary scenarios. Because my campus does not offer specialised degrees in CW, the literature courses that I teach, in order to compensate, almost always contain a “creative” component. Students are required to turn in “creative” responses to the literary texts that we analyse in class, along with more conventional analytical papers. These texts can take the form of a group of poems, personal essays, and/​or short fiction. The work students produce is then workshopped in class, following the more traditional methods of workshopping. Based on the feedback they receive, students have to turn in a revised version of their original draft. Adding a creative writing component to a course not devoted exclusively to writing and workshopping provides key learning opportunities. Students learn to see the creative production of texts as a form of knowledge production, situated within a larger continuum of critical analyses of texts, mini-​ ethnographies, and research papers. The debate between the “creative” and “critical” impulse endemic to American campuses, including those observed by Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, is not expressed in the same way in the Indian classroom (as fellow contributor Saikat Majumdar acknowledges) (Majumdar, “Can”). Rather, the “creative” and the “critical” are viewed as inextricably intertwined, often bleeding into each other’s premises. CW becomes a significant element in the students’ interdisciplinary, liberal education. There is of course an inherent irony here. In the US, the space of the discipline of CW remains precarious within the universities, in spite of the former’s relatively long association with the latter. In India, on the other hand, the history of CW inside the university classroom is far more recent. Yet CW in India is rarely called upon to defend its place within the ivory tower. The reason why CW does not have to defend its place yet within the Indian universities might be attributed to the different ways in which literature functions vis-​à-​vis the two nations’ respective public cultures, a topic beyond the scope of this particular essay.

Possibilities and limitations Personally, I have used creative writing assignments both in literature and gender studies classrooms. Examples of these include writing “imitations” of seminal short stories such as Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Langston Hughes’s “Cora Unashamed,” writing sonnets, and ethnographic stories based on interviews with domestic workers in the Delhi-​NCR region. Because the creative component is integrated into the structure of the rest of the class, not all of the students walk into the classroom with creative aspirations. Consequently, there are often anxieties around the creative production of a text. “Professor, I have never written a story before,” is a common refrain right before the submission date of their first creative assignment. Yet when the creative process is broken down—​often through analyses of the materials on hand—​the students do produce inventively. Pedagogical methods used in

72  Nandini Dhar creative writing and composition classrooms in the US—​peer reviews, workshopping, one-​on-​one meetings with instructors, revisions—​help students to improve their drafts. Most students feel a genuine sense of creative empowerment at the end of the process. In fact, quite a few of my students, who did not enter the class with any tangible creative aspirations, have taken up creative writing seriously, and a couple of them are preparing to apply for MFAs in CW. Interestingly, those degrees are almost always located outside India, in First World nations, such as the UK and the US. The introduction of a creative writing component in non-​ creative classrooms plays a genuinely democratising role, making students more aware of their own voices. The assignments transform them from passive recipients of texts written by others into active producers of texts themselves, granting them a narrative agency they had not imagined could be part of a college degree. This creative empowerment is especially significant for the vast majority of our students who have graduated from high schools in India, where the primary emphasis is on competitive memorisation. In my classroom, creative assignments train students in “self-​expression,” and creative problem-​solving, transforming them from passive recipients into creative and critical subjects. Yet if there are some students whose lack of creative aspiration is a pedagogical challenge, there are others who bring specific forms of creative aspirations into the classroom. Indeed, in almost all of the private, liberal arts campuses like ours, there is an increasing demand for creative writing classes. In the absence of a well-​defined programme or major in CW, this interest is often satisfied by offering internships to students at the Jaipur Literature Festival or other equally prominent literary gatherings. As a result, students with such creative aspirations also bring into the classroom a certain familiarity with a performative, celebrity-​driven literary culture, one of the significant offshoots of the post-​liberalisation, literary marketplace of India. The flip side of this familiarity with the culture of corporatised, performative literary culture is the fact that many of our students come from privileged homes, in terms of class and economic status. This is not unexpected, given that I teach at one of the most expensive private liberal arts schools in the country. Since institutions such as ours do not implement the caste-​based reservations typical of public institutions, where, for example, since 1982, 15% of admissions are reserved for scheduled castes (SC) and 7.5% for scheduled tribes (ST), our classrooms tend to be more homogeneous in terms of the caste identities of our students. This paradoxical combination of financial elitism with caste heterogeneity raises important questions about the interrelationship of social exclusion, education, and institutionalised creativity as such. While there are a few Muslim students who come from affluent homes, our classrooms are also overwhelmingly Hindu. In other words, I teach in a predominantly Hindu, upper-​class, upper-​ caste student body, a demographic which has been the historical fulcrum of

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  73 Indian Anglophone literature, from R.K. Narayan to Anita Desai to Amit Chaudhuri, and also embodies the very definition of a normative citizenry in modern India. Consequently, the CW classrooms in private universities such as ours both reinforce and reproduce certain forms of social dominance and exclusion prevalent throughout Indian society and its literary cultures. It is precisely this dynamic of exclusion and dominance that allows my students to feel at home at the Jaipur Literature Festival and dream of their own inclusion within its spaces as celebrity authors themselves. There is an eerie correspondence between the default class/​caste culture that our students bring with them into the classroom and the ease with which they aspire to join celebrity-​driven, corporatised literary cultures, performances, and institutions. Needless to say, the default world that my students reproduce in their texts is the world of the casteised Indian, Hindu elite. Whereas writers and critics as diverse as Junot Díaz, Viet Nguyen, Namrata Poddar, and Rachelle Cruz have pointed out that the default whiteness of the American creative writing workshop has led to a specific kind of aesthetics and pedagogy, there is a concomitant moment here which invites comparison. Although one must also point out that caste and class are not the only forms of exclusion at work in the Indian creative writing classroom. One of the foundational exclusions of this latter is the exclusion of the vernacular. Our classes are taught almost exclusively in English, and students produce their work in English, although, for most of them, English is their second or third language. Even when Indian/​subcontinental languages make inroads into our creative writing classroom, they do so primarily through English translations. In a multilingual nation where variegated vernacular literary marketplaces form primary modes of literary expression and consumption for most of the country’s population, there is an obvious lopsidedness in this classroom English-​centrism. This lopsidedness demands that scholars, writers, and literary historians document the pedagogies—​institutional and otherwise—​through which writers are produced and trained in vernacular languages. In fact, literatures continue to be produced in India without the pedagogical intervention of CW workshops and classrooms. It is also a fact that, by and large, the histories of India’s modern literatures are histories of MFA-​lessness. Given our contemporary moment, this lopsidedness is also a story about caste, class, and global aspirations post-​liberalisation. For most of our students, English is the language of transnational aspiration. CW in English and Anglophone literary productions, for them, become important sites of neoliberal self-​fashioning, a site of cultural capital which can be purchased in the same way that education as a whole has become one of the most expensive commodities within India after liberalisation, especially at private universities like mine. It is no accident that the new CW classroom has flourished most significantly in India’s new private universities. The snapshot accompanying writer-​scholar Majumdar’s three-​part

74  Nandini Dhar exposé on creative writing in India is one of the “new” privatised classrooms located in one of the most prominent private liberal arts universities in India, namely Ashoka University (Majumdar, “How”). It is located in the same small town just outside of New Delhi where I work. The sanitised, air-​ conditioned, upscale classroom, with its roster of affluent students, is built on multiple spectres—​the spectre of the derelict classrooms of the public universities, as well as the spectre of the multitudes of students locked out of an increasingly commodified and privatised education system.1 Yet, it is precisely about that privatised education system which becomes the primary home of the pedagogical experimentations in university CW courses, and their many exclusions, that Majumdar’s essay maintains a crucial silence. These anxieties of privilege are endemic to CW. In the US, as writer and half-​ reluctant CW professor Lynn Freed puts it, CW programmes have become, “the cash cow[s]‌of many humanities departments” (69). In “Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag,” Freed admits to being one such critical double agent, lamenting teaching CW classes while happily cashing her pay cheques. Coincidentally, part of Freed’s teaching was in Texas, with an office right beside the visiting Indian novelist R.K. Narayan (66). There is a literary history that awaits to be written here, one that would explicate the footprints of the CW courses in 20th-​century Anglophone Indian literature. A good place to start would be Narayan’s short novel, The Vendor of Sweets (1967), where Mali, the son of a humble, Gandhian sweetmeat seller, comes back from the US, after getting a degree in CW, and dreams of opening a factory with the aid of a “novel-​writing machine.” Freed’s stint with Narayan as a neighbour was the start of what was then a decade of tertiary university CW teaching that eventually saw her promoted through the ranks, from a nomadic lecturer, taking semester-​long gigs around the US, to half-​time faculty in a low-​residency programme to, eventually becoming a permanent faculty, who would also teach MFA graduate students. “The only students I have ever taught who were more ambitious than MFA students,” she confesses, “were domestic servants in South Africa” (67). The new CW classrooms in India are also irrevocably implicated within a larger structure of the financialisation of education, which invariably limits the pedagogical work that can be done inside such classroom spaces. Updating Díaz, Nguyen, and Poddar, we can worry that both whiteness and aspiration seem inseparable from the DNA of the university writing workshop. At the same time, there is a deeper continuity at work here. If CW as a formal discipline is a recent arrival in India’s geography of higher education, its earlier genesis needs to be located within the workshops offered by the British Council and other similar private bodies. These compulsively Anglophone workshops, an obvious legacy of British colonialism in India, mandated certain forms of caste, class, and educational privilege from their students. They were almost exclusively concentrated in the metropolitan Indian cities, thereby exacerbating the geographical inequalities of a majority rural nation. There are striking continuities from the epoch of colonialism

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  75 to that of post-​liberalisation. What distinguishes “creative writing” from the larger fields of “literary production,” “literary creativity,” and “literature” in India is that the former is essentially Anglophone, aspirational, and expressive of a narrow range of identities and concerns, which every instructor of the discipline should remember. This aspirational nature of creative writing becomes especially evident in the increasing number of private workshops now offered in India throughout the year, both online and face-​to-​face, by writers with varying degrees of fame and publishing credits. On the one hand, such courses compensate for the absence of formal Creative Writing classes and degrees in Indian institutions of higher education. On the other hand, they are often expensive and frequented more or less by the same demographic of students who attend private universities, albeit a bit older. These students often bring a specific version of Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” into these workshops. While they have a genuine desire for self-​expression through writing, this is often coupled with the desire for the performative status of celebrity writerdom. The published book is often seen as a form of mysterious cultural capital which contributes to the writer’s image-​building and self-​fashioning. The workshop is seen as a means enabling the writer to purchase services which lead to the acquisition of that coveted cultural-​ authorial capital. Consider this blog post by Ritika Tiwari, a freelance content writer: I decided to look for creative writing courses in India. I was initially more inclined towards classroom courses since those would help me get our of the house more (I work from home) and they would also allow me to network with other writers. What is remarkable about this post is the absolute absence of anxiety about what is to be written and how it is to be written. Neither “content” nor “craft” seem to be the operative categories the aspiring writer is wrestling with. Instead, there is a quest for a writerly community and the expectation that the workshop would provide such. Such expectations are also implicated within the diffused corporatism typical of Anglophone literary culture in India and become most evident in the blogger’s use of the word “network.” The workshop is viewed as the starting point of a marketised literary community, wherein students are consumer-​clients and the instructors are service providers.

The student as client: pedagogical challenges The post-​ liberalisation, neoliberal, hyper-​ commodified classroom where students function primarily as consumer-​clients poses a number of challenges for instructors. For one thing, the pedagogical quotidian of this classroom shies away from challenging students to depart from their aesthetic and

76  Nandini Dhar political comfort zones. Feedback is supposed to be “positive” and “encouraging.” In the context of creative writing pedagogy, this requirement for praise generates a number of thorny problems. Feedback in a creative writing workshop as such tends to be about an objective “craft” which supposedly lacks any politics or ideology. While remaining by and large unarticulated, this default notion of an “objective,” “apolitical” craft has been the foundational assumption that has guided Creative writing Workshops in the US. Notwithstanding the overwhelming whiteness and masculinity of the Creative Writing workshop in America which has come across much discussion in the recent years, my own practice, whether it is as a writer, curator/​editor, or teacher, is inherently bound up with the understanding that craft is unavoidably political and possesses its own social history (Annas and Peseroff; Bishop; Haake). In my own creative writing classes—​overwhelmingly homogeneous in terms of the class, caste, and religious identities—​a mere “fixing” of the narratives students produce, as it is often done in the American workshops, therefore, would reproduce the same problems that the overwhelming whiteness of the American Creative Writing classroom does. What students need, then, is a rudimentary training in sociological analysis, rooted in self-​critical examination of the raw materials they bring into the classroom. What I am committed to as an instructor of Creative Writing, therefore, is a form of what many commentators have termed the “social turn” in creative writing (Brown) and requires, first of all, an open engagement with our own structures of privilege. Classroom sessions are often centred around discussions of the specific forms of privilege (or lack thereof) that particular groups of students bring into the classroom, and the kinds of narratives that can be thus produced. As an instructor, this requires that I push against the idea of the student-​as-​client inside the classroom space and aim towards a process which is inherently interdisciplinary. Below, I enclose the transcript of an introductory lecture that I gave to my students prior to asking them to write a food poem. While I fine-​tune aspects of this basic lecture every term, depending upon the particularities of specific cohorts of students, the basic blueprint remains the same. This particular lecture, titled “Food and Social Power: Or, What a Deliberate Attention to Food Can Reveal to Us as Writers,” was delivered right after India’s nationwide COVID-​19 lockdown: A story is making rounds today on the social media. In Uttar Pradesh, a mother of five, who happens to be a daily wage labourer, threw her children into the nearby Ganga, because she could not feed them. The UP police, administration, and the mainstream news outlets, are keen to prove that it wasn’t because of the famine-​like conditions that the mother has thrown her children into the river, but because she is “mentally unsound” and had a fight with her husband. There is an interesting omission here. None of the sources point out the possible reasons that

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  77 might have caused the mother to be “mentally unsound” or to have a fight with her husband. But scarcity of food can well be a reason for either of those two things. Whatever the reason for this particular mother’s Sethe2-​like behaviour, what looms large in the background is the fact that India, right now, stands face to face with an acute food crisis. So far, more than 300 people have died from the coronavirus, whereas more than 200 have died from starvation. However, chronic famine-​like conditions aren’t exclusive to the lockdown in India. To live in India is to be haunted by the shadow of perpetual famine-​like conditions for the majority. For a poet (or anyone interested in representations), the lockdown has become a disturbing source of the contradictory and conflicting ways in which food is represented by the media. On the one hand, social media is agog with pictures of innovative quarantine cooking. Lots of channels and individual food influencers are sharing recipes, advising their audience on how to practice creative cooking during the time of a global lockdown. On the other hand, there are equal numbers of news reports, photographs and videos of poor people—​migrant workers, daily wage labourers, domestic workers—​starving, lining up for inadequate rations, being subject to police violence for being out in the streets to acquire food for their children. In fact, a worker has been killed in Tamilnadu when he left home to get milk for his child. There have also been cases of worker deaths and suicides, and starvation has been cited as one of the reasons for such deaths. Ironically, one of the workers from Northeastern India who committed suicide after being kicked out of his job and place of residence, happened to be a restaurant worker. What I am trying to point out is that to engage with food as a cultural worker is to be struck by two opposing realities—​the realities of eating and the realities of non-​eating. Food is culture, of course. But the statement that “food is culture” is also a cliché, given that we live in an era of proliferation of food media. Given the ways food is an essential element of our culture, the spectre of non-​eating is never too far from the reality of the celebration of a delicious meal. Often the spectre of the non-​eating is embedded within the cuisine. For example, a close look through Bengali cuisine would reveal that considerable elements of Bengali foodways developed in response to conditions of famine. A dish like “khoshar tarkari” (cooked vegetable skin) brings the memories of long famines into our contemporary middle-​ class kitchens, especially the Bengal Famine of 1943, when nothing—​not even the outer layers of the vegetables—​could be thrown away. Anything even remotely edible was cooked into something. Food items thus carry specific narratives. They are testament to the immense creativity of the kitchen workers on whom the responsibility of making something edible out of nothing falls. Often, such kitchen workers are women and servants.

78  Nandini Dhar In very specific ways, then, food and its cultural ramifications are inextricably connected to two social ways of being—​gender and class. To push the observation further, food is inextricably related to forms of social power. Who gets to eat and when, who gets to eat and where, who eats and who serves, are only a few of the questions that can guide us to begin to think about the complicated ways in which food and power are related. Of course, when we speak about food politics in India, two issues cannot be avoided by any means. The interrelated issues of caste and religion have acquired immensely complicated dimensions in the nation’s redefinition of nationalism through food politics. The notion of purity, as it operates within an upper-​caste, Hindu world, is also inextricably connected to culinary norms. Such culinary norms constitute food cooked in a specific way, of course. But such culinary norms also survive on exclusions—​of both people and food items. What cannot be eaten. And who cannot be eaten with. Of course, such exclusions are not homogenous. There are Hindu upper-​caste groups throughout the sub-​continent who eat meat, whereas in North India the very notion of caste purity is often maintained through a rigorous vegetarianism. Yet what remains the same is the idea of the exclusion of people from Hindu, upper-​caste practices of cooking and eating. Who are the people who are excluded? Dalits, Muslims, and very often, depending upon the specific community, women. Menstruating women. Widows. The woman who has remained unmarried for too long. The female sex-​worker. Of course, one can point out that dietary exclusions are not special to Hindus as such. Most religions, globally, have culinary exclusions of some sort or the other. Personally, I keep going back to the question of Hindu culinary exclusions, precisely because as an upper-​caste, Hindu atheist, I feel it is my political responsibility to do so during an epoch when one’s preferred choice of meat can be the cause of one’s being lynched. Even the most cursory look through the instances of beef-​ induced lynchings in India prove there is a kind of culinary fascism that has long formed the focal point of the dominant Hindutva politics in India. And, there is a social sanction for this culinary fascism. Most upper caste Hindu homes would still not employ Dalit cooks. A quick informal survey of most public cafeterias, including our cushy workplaces and higher institutions of education, would show Dalits are not hired as cooks. If they work in kitchens, they are the cleaning staff. Yet this policy is never named. There is thus a collusion between the private and public norms of culinary purity in our social lives. This should lead us to think of the ways restaurants and public eateries have played an extremely important role in debunking the norms of culinary exclusion in India. Public eateries, after all, demand that

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  79 Hindus and Muslims, the upper, middle and the lower castes, all dine together in close physical proximity. To be sure, a deeper survey of such institutions might reveal interesting details about how caste and religion sneak in through the backdoor, without being named as such. Obviously, such exclusions are almost always compatible with the dominant upper-​caste, Hindutva politics, which aims to keep the caste and religious status quo intact. On the other hand, restaurants can also enable a separation of the public and the private. A beef-​eater who dines at a Muslim restaurant every weekend might never bring beef or any other meat into their home-​space. The fact that they have become a meat-​eater might be concealed carefully from their vegetarian family. This is why food is something we should not take for granted. Both writers and poets have brought unprecedented, complex ways of looking at issues which are both “small” and “big.” Looking at foodways and specific food objects, while keeping in mind the larger politics of class, caste, gender and religion, often leads us as writers to observe social and cultural conflicts. And conflicts, as well as our perceptions of them, are often what inspire us to write. As our supplementary readings will show, paying attention to food puts pressure on our perceptions of literary and cultural forms. How do we, as poets, engage with the multiple forms that food writing assumes? How can such forms of engagement engender new poetic forms? Can such poetic forms also force us to see, write and interpret social categories such as class, caste, gender and religion in different ways? In other words, can paying attention to food defamiliarise our perceived ways of writing through received poetic forms, while demanding that we keep on reinventing those forms themselves? I have quoted the lecture at length to show that the text, for most practitioners of serious social science, might appear as rudimentary. This is because its goal is not to turn students into sociologists or anthropologists of food as such but to make them aware of the fact that a food poem (or a food fiction), when the writer is aware of the complex cultural dimensions and social histories that food embodies within itself, can be a complex textual artefact in its own right. It also allows students to think of specific food items as multilayered cultural texts themselves, and tracing such complexities can enable writers to move towards uncharted realities. Meditations on how such realities are fashioned culturally, historically, and socially, and the critical reflection and analysis of such, can aid writers in the creation of their own narratives and artistic products. In the process, I have also made my own location clear—​both structural and ideological—​thus inviting the students to reflect upon where they come from and where they want to go. This lecture is accompanied by an assignment asking students to write at least 500 words on two questions: Narrate two food-​related memories—​one, where you felt the power of food to discipline human beings, and where you

80  Nandini Dhar were at the receiving end of power. And, two, where you felt marginalised because of your food choices/​politics. Such questions have two imperatives built into them. The first asks students to see that social power is ubiquitous and universal. Elites are raised to think like elites and behave like elites, a process wherein, as food scholars have shown, culinary practices play an enormously important role. Quite predictably, students often discuss how they were taught as children to eat in certain ways, how their bodies were disciplined when in front of food, and how they were rewarded or penalised when they followed or failed to stick to such restrictions. Examples included, among others, performing ritual prayers before beginning a meal, learning to hold a fork, and being asked to leave the table because of burping in the middle of a family meal. The second question asks students to reflect on their own privileges and identities as culinary subjects. Will they ever be excluded from a meal because of their caste or religious identity? Will they ever be excluded from stepping into a kitchen because of their caste and religious identities? Will they ever be prevented from entering a restaurant because they look like they can’t pay the bill? If not, how would their food memories—​ and food stories—​ differ from those who were? What these questions do, is to divide the otherwise abstract process of critical thinking into manageable, concrete fragments for students who are aspiring to be writers. In terms of classroom logistics, these questions perform a dual function. On the one hand, they are meant to enable students to do some free-​writing, a methodological tapping into the cultural and mnemonic resources which make them who they are. These also happen to be the narratives students are already bringing into the classrooms. Through such exercises, students learn that the material that they bring into the classroom need to be both respected and critiqued at the same time—​and that this is precisely one of the many things that creative writers do. Such free writing exercises also prepare the students to step into the process of penning poems by reducing the intimidation factor of writing, demonstrating in the process that the same raw material can be used for multi-​genre explorations. In some ways, this is a pedagogic enactment of the well-​known adage “write what you know.” Yet asking students to write what they know is not the same thing as creating a hothouse environment of unproblematised romantic nostalgia inside the classroom. What they are being asked to do, then, in my classrooms, is to throw a critical gaze on the sociocultural realities that form their identities. In doing so, the students are also being asked to excavate the stories that form the limits of their self-​knowability, by looking critically into what they know, why they know, and how they know, thus pushing the limits of the very adage “write what you know.” By introducing the questions of power into the classroom, student-​writers are given permission to explore the violence in the events and practices that constitute their world. Consequently, students are encouraged to deconstruct

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  81 the upper-​class, upper-​caste, Hindu social worlds they call their own and to interrogate in their writing the inherent everyday violence that makes up that world. While taking up such endeavours in the classroom, I often draw inspiration from critical race and critical caste scholars, who insist that attempts to understand social categories of dominance such as “caste,” “class,” “race,” and “gender” are not to be confined to specific marginalised identities. The insistent creative-​aesthetic documentation of the upper-​caste, upper-​class world can also provide important archives to understand the complexities of caste, class, and its intersections in India’s everyday social life. As one can imagine, there is a fair amount of student resistance to such discussions. My students, who come overwhelmingly from upper-​caste families that are ideologically and politically conservative, endorse a caste-​blind approach to life. In addition, the institution’s absence of any viable policy of caste-​based reservation tends to reinforce the students’ caste-​blind way of looking at the world, which they believe stands for greater egalitarianism. That said, my students are comparatively more aware of class and the violence of poverty. Although, they take for granted their own class privilege, and often interpret poverty through a lens of sentimentality rather than social justice. There is also a common strain of anti-​Muslim communal feelings among them, which can range from the scale of a defensive animosity to open aggression. In such a privilege-​protecting context, their reactions can range from “innocent” questions—​ why do I need to learn about caste in a poetry workshop—​ to more self-​ confident ones—​ I came to this class to learn how to be a writer, not to talk about politics. I interpret such moments as instances where the student asserts her client-​self, albeit through a language of depoliticised caste-​ neutrality, which also operates as a thinly veiled default upper-​caste, upper-​class, Hindu-​dominant identity. It is these moments of potential conflict between me (the instructor) and the students which generate the most productive moments of teaching. As an instructor, I respond by showing them how we are all already implicated within caste/​ class worlds as human beings, and therefore, as writers, and because of that implication, our poems, stories, and essays are implicated in them as well. For example, I point to the overwhelming absence of Dalit students in our classrooms, which often translates into an absence of Dalit voices and perceptions about what we are learning and discussing. Through a discussion of such absences, I direct students to the fact that policies of caste-​based reservations are meant to correct precisely such absences, and disengaging from such a policy within an institution’s life can create irreparable damages in that institution’s ability to produce knowledge and art. In order to further continue the discussion, I often introduce my students to two texts—​the poem “Beef” by the contemporary Dalit poet Chandramohan Sathyanathan and a song by the Marathi Dalit-​revolutionary singer-​songwriter Sheetal Shathe. Whereas earlier lectures and assignments

82  Nandini Dhar encourage students to deconstruct the world they know, these texts do exactly the opposite. They introduce students to worlds that they scarcely know at all. It is through these texts that they begin to attempt to defamiliarise the worlds they do know. Because all our social worlds, after all, exist in a dialectical relationship to each other and are forever bound by relationships of mutual dominance, subordination, and resistance. Such texts, then, also introduce students to worlds, communities, and individuals who remain excluded from the world of the privatised, creative writing classroom and thus accomplish the crucial work of teaching them that literary-​artistic production in India is a variegated and diverse phenomenon and often occurs in spaces and sites that exist beyond the institutionalised, privatised spaces of the creative writing classrooms and workshops they are attending.

Conclusion What I am demonstrating here is a strategic pedagogy designed for institutional structures which are deeply commodified and thus reproduce specific forms of cultural exclusion and social homogenisation. These strategies are geared towards a specific student body present in my classes and writing workshops, as well as the inequalities and exclusions inherent in such. They should not, by any means, be read as strategies which can be universally applied to Creative Writing workshops in India. Neither can they replace the larger task of democratising the institutional spaces of Creative Writing in India and elsewhere. For that to happen, much more fundamental, institutional transformations need to happen. While it is beyond the capacity of any individual teacher and/​ or writer to bring about such structural changes, it is incumbent on all of us, as a community of writer-​teachers, to reflect on the complexities of a hyper-​commodified, exclusionary, Creative Writing classroom in a nation like India, where only an overwhelming few can afford to enter and thereby acquire cultural-​creative capital of the elite private universities. In other words, taking into account the social and political bases of the majority of the Creative Writing workshops in India will challenge Mark McGurl’s “program era” of Creative Writing even before it fully arrives in India.

Notes 1 A crucial exception here is the MA in Literary Arts at Ambedkar University in New Delhi. Describing itself as “pioneer” in creative pedagogy in India, the programme, nevertheless, is not cheap, with a tuition fee of about 2100 INR per semester. The genesis and the pedagogical experiments undertaken at Ambedkar University need to be thoroughly studied and researched. However, that study remains beyond the scope of this particular essay. 2 Sethe is the protagonist of African-​American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

The new Creative Writing classroom of India  83

Works cited Annas, Pamela, and Joyce Peseroff. “A Feminist Approach to Creative Writing.” Creative Writing Pedagogies for Twenty-​First Century, edited by Alexandra Peary and Tom C. Hunley, Southern Illinois U P, 2015, pp. 78–​101. Bishop, Wendy. Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. Calendar Islands, 1998. Brown, Kara Mae. “The Text Is in the Context: Calling for a Social Turn in Creative Writing Pedagogy.” The Wisconsin English Journal, vol. 59, no. 1–​2, 2017. Cruz, Rachelle. “We Need New Metaphors: Reimagining Power in the Creative Writing Classroom.” Poets and Writers, 12 Aug. 2020, www.pw.org/​content/​we_​ need_​new_​metaphors_​reimagining_​power_​in_​the_​creative_​writing_​workshop. Díaz, Junot. “MFA vs. POC.” The New Yorker, 30 Apr. 2014, www.newyorker.com/​ books/​page-​turner/​mfa-​vs-​poc. Freed, Lynn. “Doing Time: My Years in the Creative Writing Gulag.” Harper’s Magazine, July 2005, pp. 65–​72. Haake, Katherine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies. National Council Teachers of English, 2000. Harper, Graeme, and Jeri Kroll. Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, 2008. Majumdar, Saikat. “Can Creative Writing Be Taught in Universities? Is It Not in Conflict with Academic Rigor?” Scroll, 14 Nov. 2020, https://​scroll.in/​article/​ 971693/​can-​creative-​writing-​be-​taught-​in-​universities-​is-​it-​not-​in-​conflict-​with-​ academic-​rigour. —​—​—​. “How to Build a Creative Writing Programme as Part of Academic Courses at an Indian University.” Scroll, 6 Sept. 2020, https://​scroll.in/​article/​972281/​ how-​to-​build-​a-​creative-​writing-​programme-​as-​part-​of-​academic-​courses-​at-​an-​ indian-​university. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard U P, 2009. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile.” The New York Times, 26 Apr. 2017, www.nytimes.com/​2017/​04/​26/​ books/​review/​viet-​thanh-​nguyen-​writers-​workshops.html. Poddar, Namrata. “Return to the MFA: A Call for Systemic Change in the Literary Arts.” Poets and Writers, 12 Aug. 2020, www.pw.org/​content/​return_​to_​the_​mfa_​ a_​call_​for_​systemic_​change_​in_​the_​literary_​arts. Sathyanathan, Chandramohan. “Beef.” Quesadilla and Other Adventures: Food Poems, edited by Somrita Urni, Hawakal, 2019, p. 54. Shathe, Sheetal. “Sheetal Sathe-​Kabir Kala Manch Sings for Mothers of India (English Subtitles).” YouTube, Kractivism, 12 May 2012, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=_​-​ BrhyzK8jo&ab_​channel=KamayaniBaliMahabal. Tiwari, Ritika. “10 Best Creative Writing Courses in India.” WriteFreelance.In. May 2020. Update, https://​writefreelance.in/​best-​creative-​writing-​courses-​in-​india/​.

5  Reframing the field Genre and the rising 21st-​century multilingual writer Page Richards

The debate about whether or not creative writing can be “taught” has a rich history regarding English-​language writing and is key to considering what we may mean by the rise of creative writing in Asian or other non-​ Anglo-​ American social and cultural contexts. This chapter on steering key historical directions in Creative Writing as a university discipline can offer only snapshots, each of which could easily make a full chapter. Yet, linked on a chain, including personal teaching and learning experiences, these glimpses explore entry points on a groundswell of multilingual creative writers in Asia seeking to explore their work in postgraduate academic programmes: largely, MFA and MA programmes, which historically have pivoted towards monolingual, and in particular, English-​language history and practice. While tertiary degree programmes in Asia, undergraduate and postgraduate, are responding to the call, the demands and needs of multilingual writers in the region are themselves challenging and recontextualising the framework of studies and expectations in the field of Creative Writing, worldwide. What we may associate in the US, for example, or the UK or Australia, with the modern and institutional rise of Creative Writing in English as a university discipline is frequently tied to the rise of MFA and MA programmes in Creative Writing. Further, the curriculum of the proliferating master’s degree in Creative Writing, globally, continues to be widely benchmarked against the renowned Writers’ Workshop, founded at the University of Iowa. Five years ago, Cecelia Capuzzi Simon writes of this notable expansion, Explosive is the word routinely used to describe the growth of M.F.A. programs in creative writing. Iowa was the first, established in 1936. By 1994, there were 64. By last year, that number had more than tripled, to 229 (and another 152 M.A. programs in creative writing), according to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Between 3,000 and 4,000 students a year graduate with the degree; this year, about 20,000 applications were sent out.

DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-6

Reframing the field  85 Yet, this expansion is anchored in an important backstory. Breaking the ice of academic protocol in 1922, the University of Iowa had already begun to admit creative work in the arts for advanced degrees. In 1936, the Writers’ Workshop at Iowa, as we now speak of it, coalesced into gatherings of writers, one in fiction and the other in poetry (“History”). As a brief history of the Writers’ Workshop on their website also makes clear, an uneasy fit between creative studies and the academy remained at root, and in play. Mirroring ongoing and contemporary questions of whether or not creative writing should be housed at the academy, or taught at all, and to ever-​increasing numbers, a title from The Guardian sums it up: “Can You Teach Creative Writing?” Janet Murray emphatically poses the question in her essay, paying homage to the Iowa Workshop, while at the same time querying its “clamour” and legacy: “But, 40 years on and amid all this clamour to master the art, how well do universities teach creative writing? Can anyone actually teach it at all?” The range of responses in the essay reveals tightness, through downright scepticism. Sidestepping the need for a classroom, David Baddiel writes, “Ultimately, I think the only way to learn is by reading other writers,” and Will Self’s response echoes, in full spirit: “You need to autodidact.” In a brief survey, including the writer-​to-​writer model, we hear nods to adding a measure of experience; still, the emphasis on a writer’s own “talent” and potential for self-​exploration, or even lifelong self-​ therapy, can carry the day. M.R. Hall explains, “While you can learn technique, no one can create a voice for you. You either have something to say or you don’t. All the decent writers I know are troubled souls: that’s why they write—​as lifelong therapy.” Anna Davis shifts the focus of potentially “teaching” craft to a sightline of professional mentoring, with an eye on publishing: We are also bringing our experience of the publishing scene and what is working in today’s marketplace. I think a lot of students want this kind of practical approach, but a lot of courses focus on pretty prose and lose the bigger picture. (Murray) On this take of the “big picture,” publishing and the marketplace get top billing. And we hear, underscored once more, an uneasy history and relationship between creative writing and the academy. Where creative writing is pedagogically marginalised in relation to the construct of shaping individual talent, a physical and institutional “home” in which to coalesce the teaching of it can come under further fire. Such a chain reaction is already anchored and revealed in the history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; literal distance and academic entitlement are negotiated: “For decades, Workshop classes were held in temporary, quonset-​ style army barracks near the Iowa River, where the Iowa Memorial Union stands today” (“History”).

86  Page Richards The migration of the programme’s location is clear, at first positioned at the literal periphery of campus, heading physically and politically towards a shared home with English and Philosophy, and marking just one of the incremental revaluations: “In 1966, the program was moved to the English-​ Philosophy Building, and moved yet again in 1997 to its current administrative home, the Dey House, an historic, Victorian-​era home adapted for reuse as an academic building” (“History”). Finally, under cumulative experience and expansion, the ever adapting yet also increasingly influential programme establishes new agency, and another home; we see that “[i]‌n 2006, the program expanded again, in the newly-​built Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives, a new addition to the Dey House that features a library and reading room, classrooms, and faculty offices” (“History”). The globally successful Iowa model still carries earmarks of this politics of migration and marginalisation. Scepticism towards co-​habitation of creative studies with critical studies often plays out inside departmental and university grounds. To embed the work of the individual and artistic talent into a research institution has long had both critics and defenders, and sometimes a blurry mix of both. Even in the second decade of the millennium, Helen Vendler writes of this conundrum. One step ahead of querying what exactly of merit can be taught in MFA Creative Writing programmes, Vendler crosses an initial threshold: can the research institution be asked to serve and admit the creative writer or the artist, side by side with the “future doctors and scientists and lawyers and businessmen”? Her answer is yes. It is also obliquely conditional to the artist’s education being constituted, again, by a lion’s share of individual agency, choosing among courses and majors predominantly situated in critical or professional studies. Harvard University’s undergraduate curriculum and campus can serve as “harbor,” she writes, where the artist or writer can, selectively, root and grow: “We are eager to harbor the next Homer, the next Kant, or the next Dickenson. There is no reason why we shouldn’t expect such a student to spend his or her university years with us.” Identifying the individual artist as a frequently reflective, introverted, and potentially less academically motivated than the average student admitted to Harvard, she asks, in a rhetorical affirmative, “Can we preach a doctrine of vocation in lieu of the doctrine of competitiveness and worldly achievement?” This far-​seeing imperative not to segregate, so to speak, notionally constructs the “artistic talent” drawing individually and at will from the academic “harbor.” If a harbour, it is also a legacy rooted in the tertiary mission and paradigm of undergraduate research and pedagogy, where the infrastructure of “teaching” such an artistic individual, for better or for worse, may be open and ambient, or, if aimed straight at the target in graduate studies, as Louis Menand will critique, potentially a misfire. In Menand’s essay, “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?” for example, we hear the MFA “instructor” of Creative Writing embedded inside a research institution and, at that edge of reason, inside a potential

Reframing the field  87 feedback loop of mediocrity, disillusionment, and commodification. As Menand elaborates, standard MFA operating procedure requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—​a person with an academic degree in creative writing—​or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught. (emphasis added) Here, a focus by Vendler (on whether the undergraduate academic institution can well serve as harbour to the individual creative writer), and a focus by Menand (on whether MFA graduate studies runs the risk of perpetuating its own commodification)—​this braided focus carries forward a long modern English perspective of the “author” in the making. In what literary studies often calls the “long eighteenth century,” we already see at work early “professional” authors cast by conservatives, and by those supported by wealthy or aristocratic patrons, as “debasers of literature” (Griffen); yet, on that same potential for commercial self-​authorisation, we also recognise a powerful propensity to institutionalise the self-​constructed. Or, as Michael Levenson succinctly puts it, “the desire … to make the independent individual the ground of value.”1 In liturgical and ideological contrast, however, lies an underbelly that Iowa’s Workshop to a degree already historically taps and channels: namely, apprenticeships in the craft guilds of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance patronage.2 The Nobel prize-​winning poet, and one of my mentors in creative writing, Derek Walcott, put a finger on the long reach of history when he writes, If you were a medieval apprentice, you’d have to learn to do something. Then you become your own painter or your own artist. It’s not just that there are rules, but the real excitement of apprenticeship is in enjoying the rules. When asked, if he still saw himself on this model of a medieval as “apprentice,” he adds, “I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship” (83). Yet, what medieval craft guilds lined up, the medievalist Derek Pearsall noted in my class, were teachings of the liturgical and the secular, adding, wryly, “always in the right order, of course.” While profit, production of dramas, and regional control played out in craft guilds in England, so, too, as Gary Richardson states plainly, “craft guilds pursued pious goals” until the Reformation (140). On this early shuffle with its increasingly blurry lines of mastery, liturgy, pedagogy, vocation, class, and career, we recognise an important mirror image to ongoing debates

88  Page Richards like those captured in the title of Chad Harbach’s relevant anthology (and his own essay in it) MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. Where craft guilds, negotiating craft apprenticeship and liturgical footing, migrate increasingly after the Reformation into economic centres of manufacturing and government, a mirroring model at Iowa begins at the edges of the academy and academic accreditation, moving towards the institutional centre, in growing spikes of student applications, enrolment, and revenue. Murray, for instance, reminds us about not just the US but the UK, too, as the 20th became the 21st century, on a clear expansion of the Iowa model, inclusive of the MA degree in Creative Writing, The last decade has seen a huge expansion in creative writing courses. More than 90 British universities now offer a range of postgraduate degrees, and around 10,000 short creative writing courses or classes are on offer in the UK each year. With long-​range hearing, we listen, while the scepticism surrounding marketplace and mission, profit and “mastery,” again irrupts. If apprenticeships in the Middle Ages may fall at risk of sacrificing liturgical aims on local power-​plays, as Pearsall reminds us, so, too (and all the more in a secularised era eschewing trust in bodies or “canons” of knowledge for growing peer review), profit-​yielding models for those that “clamour to master the art” of creative writing potentially can fall prey to lowest common denominators in identifying what is at stake to teach in the first instance (Murray). The paradigmatic Iowa workshop of apprenticeship in creative writing, thus, carries this less well-​known and key legacy of self-​conflict. It also leans institutionally, as the medieval apprenticeship model leaned into liturgy and vocation, into a mission of intergenerational transfer of knowledge, increasingly hard of course to codify in modern, secularised, and heterogeneous revaluations of field specialisation. Further, a consumer-​ driven demand for individual recognition and card-​carrying accreditation for the creative writer continues to rise, globally. Just so, the sheer politics of personality and power, as Menand deftly sketches, equally stands at the ready, on a collection of individual hires, however excellent each writer, to pick up on such momentum and speed in (re)construction of the “author”; his focus, then, makes clear the tautological limitations in the classroom of the self-​ perpetuation and activation of an idea, the idea of the contemporary author, representing itself and ongoing deformations as text. We now become attuned to the post-​Reformation model, where the coveted and small-​group workshop, to a degree resituates what we already recognise from early England and Europe. We recognise what constitutes the historical see-​saw of body politic between at first a liturgical and, later, the perceived individual responsibility for framing or inviting the field or discipline of creative writing to study, institutionally, in English-​language contexts. On this fulcrum and on incremental transitioning from Catholic to Protestant infrastructures of

Reframing the field  89 perspective and agency, we see history shift its weight institutionally from a politics and responsibility of what to study, increasingly in the age of the individual, into a politics and rhetoric of what to teach. This wider spectrum keys us in to revisit Walcott’s “something,” which he attempted to name in this historical update of apprenticeship to workshop—​zeroing in, as he did, for the contemporary “apprentice,” on the word “rules.” In class, he selectively drew from legacies of liturgical, craft-​ centred and lifelong “teachings,” linking with ideas of intergenerational teaching and “mastery,” ideas, he knew too, long under scrutiny for their traditional and patriarchal politics of exclusion. Still, finding entrenched resistance in the circle of our American chairs in workshop towards any studying any such “rules,” he warmly railed against us, our hypocrisy of radical individualism, and a reflex of repudiation, all of which could put the modern maker at risk, whether in the classroom or elsewhere. With Walcott, we recognise the clear anachronisms, anchored on feudal models of hierarchy, imploding in contemporary popular, and populist, expansions of meritocracy for building an “updated” guild. Thus, we readily pick up on the whole of Walcott’s testing grounds, his choice of self-​consciously provocative diction, whether in words or stance, deliberately glancing off leftover and feudal undercurrents of the apprenticeship. We hear and overhear, too, the risks, from both directions: (self)identifying as a potential “master,” from the perspective of economic or liturgical positions of power, or that of the “self-​constructed” individual in contemporary workshop.3 Menand’s essay, in tune with this politics of simmering narcissism and hypocrisy, sharpens the image on the lowest common denominator of self-​ordained or self-​deceived mastery; at the limit, no one is teaching, or even leading, only loosely (and badly) shepherding the individual writer, including, with one last look at the mirror, potentially themselves. An interrogative gaze of studying craft, then, is finely split into a symmetrical redundancy for teaching it. The net effect, as Menand echoes for many, suggests a returning scepticism that creative writing, fastened to its liturgical change of axis in European history, from something to study to something to promulgate, can be institutionally and historically interrogated. On teaching or studying the art of creative writing, resolutely or provocatively, Menand and Walcott, Vendler and Self, on different cuts, cast light on a common historical current in English-​ language writing, when, in effect, they focus and put pressure on the construct or figure of the solitary artist; the individual creative writer, that is, can land at a distance from fellow scholars, or become uneasily embedded within campus among fellow writers, at risk of exile at “home,” or, respectively, mediocrity of class at “work.” On this long-​standing English legacy of shaping individual agency, we equally spot, narratively, the proverbial uphill climb of the individual “protagonist”: here, the artist or writer at the periphery of Harvard, Iowa or any programme, the academy itself migrating towards centre, and even

90  Page Richards pedagogy itself. We hear an obstacle-​ laden journey echoed in the very figure of the artist that Vendler continues, ahead of her time, to support as both ineffable and indispensable, if often ill-​fitted to worldly and academic grooves: the artist, she says, who “must follow a rather lonely and highly individual path.” Such recurring preoccupation on the isolated and individual artist, as such, must, of course, provoke questions of whether something can be taught or learned. Rhetorically, how can this “solitary” artist and writer be “taught”? The figure is positioned with the apprentice-​ancestor all the more in ongoing margins of “learning,” geographically in Quonset-​ style army barracks at Iowa, or liminally in undergraduate admissions, or even embodied in the satiric figurement of an enlightened MFA auto-​didact, if able, barely, to escape the potential grip of mediocrity inside an oxymoronic politics of decentred “leadership,” itself migrating into an economic centre of perhaps no more than “pretty prose” in an updated writers’ guild. For the contemporary world of creative writing in English, then, an academic jargon of “teaching and learning” paradoxically touches a hairline-​ split politics of deep division, a legacy among many legacies of medieval and Protestant infighting, roiling inside the academy, reverberating outside it. As the academic stock of (an ever-​shrinking authorial) “master/​teacher” figure rises—​to teach what?—​alongside the modern creative writer’s self-​ determination—​to study what?—​the individual writer’s “craft,” that “something” to learn or to teach grows ever more enigmatic. Yet, when we dig once more into this historical hair-​line split of learning and teaching moulded around the English-​language rise of the individual, we identify how the programme die is cast. If we look to skeletal remains of apprenticeship inside the modern workshop, which Walcott ached to rattle once again, aware of political quagmires, we discover that the “rules” he so-​ named, and urged, paradoxically, upon the individual writer, as worldwide actor in honing craft, transmogrify into something else having little to do with the individual, in a word, genre. On an updated global and historical situatedness of an abiding English-​language construct of (making or serving) the individual creative writer, we come upon the contexts (and inheritances) of legacy of language laid bare for every creative writer. It is upon such a wider material berth of language and history that we layer prosody or point of view, or other craft elements, inseparable from any individual writer’s internal revisions, not to mention wider understandings and choices among local cultural legacies, ritual, and history. We discover better, that is, through historical “births” and ongoing evolutions of genre how to balance, for instance, the English-​language historical construct of the individual, just so (and the concomitant acts and pacts of individual craft-​choice associated with it) with comparative and historical accountability across competing models of “knowledge” or “self-​knowledge,” which every creative writer, and all the more every multilingual writer, of plural legacies of instrument, is born to renegotiate, if given the opportunity.

Reframing the field  91 Thus, in brief summary, to discover (1) in contexts of peer review, a potential foil for the teaching of creative writing and (2) in historical models of perpetuated mastery, an encompassing foil for studying it already is to discover an intransigent demand for exploration of genres, legacies of emotional expectation. Tied to language and history, genres and their study supersede the figure, or disfigurement, of both the perpetually marginalised individual student-​writer and the outmoded shepherd. What a rising awareness of the history of genre in creative writing repositions is the need to query ongoing emotional frameworks of legacies and futures of languages, and indeed, this is what the comparative study of multilingual creative writing, including that which I both do and teach as the Creative Writing Chair at the University of Hong Kong, especially, foregrounds, questioning as it must what constitutes, for example, to put it bluntly, a “story” or “poem” or “play” in the first instance, in any language and given culture of expectations? To study genre and history for any creative writer in the English language, just for example, is to ensure the pursuit of comparative frames of emotional expectation that genres, across languages, stage for the act of inviting a reader of that selected language into a text. For example, from this perspective, let us regard, say, questions and diction of fiction in Creative Writing. We can only open the door, of course, but we can begin, for instance, with the diction in English-​language creative writing of the “moved character.” Here is Rust Hills: Let us call the character to whom the events of the story have consequences the “moved” character. In a novel, of course, there may be several moved characters, but in the short story this is usually just one character on whom matters focus. He is moved in the sense that at the end of the story he is not in exactly the same emotional place as he was at the beginning. Things have changed for him or he has been changed (the same thing, really). (12) Just as we know how much depends upon gaze in William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” so, too, we hear in this short exposition by Hills a remarkable compressed series of emotional assumptions, and historically built expectations, that English-​language fiction depends upon. We see cooked into narrative liturgical history what constitutes in English a focus of a fictional story, an individual and “moved” character, and, related, what constitutes the emotional core of fiction in English-​language history, namely, change, or what is often called the moved character’s “transformation” or “climax,” as the author “constructs his sequence of events,” John Gardner writes classically, “leading to the climax” (60). Genres are historical frameworks by which readers are invited into emotional expectation. Genres, as David Fishelov writes, “are transmitted through history” (10). They offer pattern and legacy of language, region,

92  Page Richards religion, and sociocultural developments. As Fishelov adds, genres “shape how writers produce and readers respond to, literary works” (10). The framework of a genre is born of and invites emotional response through rooted and recognisable regional history and ritual.4 In English-​language fiction, for example, we immediately recognise the compression of emotional assumptions in Hills’s summary unfolding from liturgical roots, running from biblical experiences of conversion and transformation to ever more specifically Protestant histories, burgeoning on a focus of the individual’s responsibility and negotiation the social world, “responsible,” as Sacvan Bercovitch writes, shorn of the intermediary and Catholic priest, “to God only” (151). Thus, in this exposition of what constitutes (what Hills even calls) the “naturalness” of such expectations for “successful fiction,” we see built into these same assumptions a focus on the (upward progress of) an individual negotiating social conditions and challenges towards the celestial kingdom, emblemising the ultimate moment of achievement and “change” (Hills 12). Hills of course has much company. John L’Heureux writes, “A story is about a single moment in a character’s life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same” (qtd. in Burroway and Weinberg 126). Or Nancy Huddleston Packer puts it this way about the same focus on the moved character: “the consequences of the story come from the character who determines events” (qtd. in Burroway and Weinberg 127). The “naturalness” of a focus on the upward climb and challenges, or a more close focus, still, on the individual’s acts of agency towards an irrevocable change or transformation, after which nothing is the same, can engender enormous appeal, and intellectual risk, on proliferating versions for profit.5 In countless one-​off workshops that we encounter, from Los Angeles to New York, not to mention courses at the graduate level, or privatised programmes and retreats, students in English-​language creative writing often find themselves studying exclusively Aristotelian modelling, stripped of context and with programme jargon, such as the “laws” of the three Cs: character, conflict, and catharsis (of which there are innumerable variations, such as the three Rs: resolve, rising action, and resolution), after which the moved character, in her/​his “transformation,” can never return or is forever changed. And this model, often introduced as a “standard” of the field in genres of drama and fiction, carries worldwide, including Anglophone contexts of creative writing here in Asia. The famous Gustav Freytag diagram, upward tilting, offers a now famous visual, ubiquitous and consistently referenced, here, for example, by Joe Bunting, on one of many such touchpoints: Gustav Freytag originally formulated Freytag’s Pyramid in his 1863 book Freytag’s Technique of the Drama, and over the last more than 150 years, it has become one of the most commonly taught dramatic structures in the world, finding its way into thousands of classrooms and writing workshops. (Bunting, “Writing”)

Reframing the field  93 A “triangle shape containing five dramatic elements positions an introduction and denouement at the front and back end of the three-​part cause-​ and-​effect relations of the ‘moved’ character, comprising: introduction, rising movement, climax, falling movement, and denouement or catastrophe” (Bunting, “Freytag’s”).6 This legacy of emotional expectations in genre for fiction in English, borne widely from early Catholic journeying towards salvation and Protestant layering of individual negotiation of the social world, tautologically offers emotional resonance of pattern for any reader or writer steeped in the innumerable stories of transformation, and often metabolised, starting in infancy. I steal a moment, here, towards what will appear “natural” in the English-​language legacy, only to belabour self-​consciously the point of the seeming self-​evident statement of the “natural.” For example, “moved” characters of change, even in miniature, people English-​language creative writing in children’s books. In Bread and Jam for Frances, the opening of a series by Russell Hoban (who also publishes adult fiction), a young comic badger discovers herself “stuck” on bread and jam, only to transform her eating habits, expanding not only her palate, but her openness to life and change, with the challenges and help of her parents and friends, like Albert. Margery Williams’s the Velveteen Rabbit, finally, finds himself loved to death, where death transmogrifies both his own journey and that of the Boy into spiritual release of irrevocable change, after which neither is ever the same: “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again.” In a revisited Odyssey, Richard Adams’s band of rabbits are spearheaded by the leader, Hazel, who undertakes a geographical and spiritual journey, whereby we hear a biblical conversation, and the transformation of his name, to Hazel-​rah. It goes without saying, this narrative of three Cs and three Rs is familiar territory from the get-​go to readers in English-​language legacies. This glimpse of long-​developed and early-​built emotional frameworks cracks open the power for English-​language readers and writers that liturgical invitation and expectation can offer. They equally cast light on an often limited emotional traction outside of biblical legacy. An undergraduate student in a class at the University of Hong Kong, for example, sets the stage. One afternoon, a young woman, fluent in Cantonese, Putonghua, and English, regularly reading in English and Chinese, let out a sudden sigh of relief. She had just been studying in our class such historical links between biblical undercurrents and the ever and ongoing emotional fascination in Western and English-​language fiction with the individual and moved character, following a historical trajectory of transformation, embedded into narrative invitation. After reading our assigned short story in class, in which a young male adult ultimately renegotiates his balance and over-​dependency on his mother, moving towards independence and irreversible maturity, the student exclaimed, “I just feel so relieved.” She added, “Now, I understand. I have always perfectly understood this kind of story, but I have never felt very much.”

94  Page Richards A postgraduate student, Wilson Chik, a writer in English and Chinese, who has studied for the MFA at HKU under my direction, echoes this sensibility. He puts a finger on a kind of invitation that can constitute one alternative emotional framework of “story,” drawn from his research on the stories of Sanskrit, Chinese, Buddhism, multilingual writing, and the renowned writer Xi. It is “the absence of a visible subject” instead, he said, that moves him emotionally in her work. A centreless story, “compounding subject and object,” he explains, offers an emotional current. And that current is situated on a through line of landscape, staging not a moved character but what he calls self-​consciously, in plural, “a people” as interconnected landscape, who do not change but undulate interconnected on a wave of melancholy. He points, for instance, to Xi Xi’s famous story “The Floating City.” Islands, like individuals, he says of Xi Xi’s story, are not scanned emotionally as separate irruptions upon a horizon. Instead, they are already woven and interconnected, as underneath the sea. Later, he writes about Xi Xi’s work, What is left out of the western frame is the “looming” of islands which already serves to connect and extend a horizon already beyond heroic intrusions, intrusions that only provisionally suture individuated “islands of self” from a spectacle of disruption in the name of power and appropriation. Later, like the student who was eager suddenly to explore her own creative framework on new weaves of emotional expectation in multilingual contexts, after studying the history of genre and creative writing in English and in Chinese, Chik offers an anecdote of a comparable experience from a fellow writer in Hong Kong: In English fiction, with a legacy of development tied to a progressive pilgrimage, time is predominantly sequential, marking moments of linear transformation, contrasted with a time that will run out to, say, “timeless” time, that is, eternity, where God is, so to speak. Hong Kong writer Kuffy Ko shares his choice to write his memoir through English legacy, while negotiating in cooperation with his Chinese histories a conundrum of English past tense: “This chapter,” he writes, “is about when my mother met and lost my father. When I was writing this chapter in past tense, I had the feeling that I was telling a story of a story. Using past tense, I felt that I was a reporter, or I have simply stolen my mother’s story.” Ko’s struggle and discomfort point to the loss of intimacy, an imported set of x-​axis distance, in the telling of the story by using the past tense in English. Ko adds, “Theoretically, I should use verb forms (e.g., simple past tense and past perfect tenses mainly) which can express the meaning of the past, like “my mother had met my father in Hang Zhou.” However, I feel that once it was written in these past tenses I would lose the intimacy and simultaneity of time frames. It too

Reframing the field  95 is “westernised.” I become like a Hollywood director shooting a Kung-​ fu movie. To investigate genre for multilingual creative writing, not to mention of course monolingual writing, is already not to make assumptions we must identify. First, we must sharpen the focal power of a historical microscope, pointing at the web of crucial socio-​historical and culturally specific contexts that frame the expectations of genre for any creative writer engaging the instrument and legacies of the languages streaming their legacies of structure, genre, and history. And when we focus on genre, in particular, we start already to move gently away from questions of whether or not creative writing can be taught (or studied), in relation to the state of the individual, but to take apart and to take up lifelong challenges of material legacy of invitation into a text, comparable to what physicists calls the hard problem of consciousness,7 that is, how we study and learn enough in our field to recognise the vastness of the field we are inhabiting and the range we need to embrace even to ask relevant questions. As Morten Overgaard summarises in interdisciplinary research relevant to new approaches demanded in our times for the field and history of creative writing, “Consciousness remains one of the biggest scientific challenges among all disciplines as the most fundamental questions are not simply unanswered—​it is still highly unclear how one should even begin to answer them” (3). We are, here, just at the very tip of this iceberg in creative writing on the study of genre, a history and infrastructure of human attachment, essential for any new work of writing, itself, to last over time. For the multilingual writer, especially, on cross-​and often non-​intersecting cultural currents of what constitutes, for example, perspective, memory, or emotional centres of attention, a comparative history is foundational for study, keyed to the multicultural questions of invitation and expectation, which genres coalesce over time as legacy, flexible, and regenerative. Here, we are looking backwards in time precisely to frame new choices at play for the futures for any writer, especially a multilingual writer in Asia playing historical instruments and joining legacies of expectation in languages, such as Chinese and English, that largely do not share, for instance, a common ground on the Indo-​European landscape. Increasingly, a creative writer needs to study, and acquire knowledge over time, to recognise the blueprints of invitation in a legacy of instrument that any language constitutes, including, here, for instance, English-​language legacy. In brief, the comparative study of genre for creative writing reanimates emotional questions for framing subtle decisions of craft, by never neglecting foundational concerns, such as: Why are English-​language readers of narrative deeply drawn in the first instance to the individual, then, to obstacles, and ultimately to the potential for individual change, or transformation? What makes the moved individual moving to English-​language readers? What assumptions do we make when we attribute such emotional attachment to the generic “story”? What moves

96  Page Richards writers from other histories of genre instead, if not the moved and individual character? How can a multilingual creative writer stage a bridge and redirect expectations of genre alternative perspectives of constitutes a story, or any generic expectation? In other words, part of the key to recognising the “rise of creative writing” in Hong Kong, Asia, and, more widely, non-​Anglo-​American contexts, as English Creative Writing programmes proliferate in Asian universities, is already to recognise the titular diction of “rising” as already angled into an English-​writing geometry of the binary, a culturally specific entry point of literary history and framework of emotional expectations. The frame, and the limitation, of using “rising” for creative writing stages at best subconscious and, in any case, a politics of echoing rising action in liturgical English narrative. Thus, for creative writing to “rise” in Asia is, first, not to make assumptions at the start about what constitutes how any of us is emotionally rooted and therefore moved in a story. The “hard problem,” then, for creative writing, is constituted by updating our questions, for instance, about the extraordinary flexibility of genres, to emotionally engage, refigure, and emotionally negotiate on multiple, weaving expectations, if shored against the hard studies of history and sociocultural patterns of emotional attachment that reproduce and survive, like a species over time inside very specific environments. Creative writers in increasingly multilingual contexts of the 21st century, which is to say all of us, must recognise and encounter with growing knowledge the evolving emotional frames of expectations, inside a fluidity of sociopolitical frameworks. What do we mean by genres or histories of genre that do not forcibly pigeonhole or distort for the purposes of taxonomies? If we no longer, at least, take for granted that long-​form narrative in English must “naturally” be constituted by a focus on the “moved character” (or several), but see how, where, and when that invitation initially arises in time, across history, then creative writers can acquire greater agency of choice to blend and reimagine from within their joining streams of generic and language legacies. Emerging creative writers who choose to include English among their many options of staging can re-​explore the liturgical forbearer Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress (emotionally and literally) heading on an “upwards” trajectory of binary axis, progressing on a linear curvature, between options of hell and heaven, towards a goal or social negotiation of transformation and the celestial kingdom—​ and thereby, with precision, query that invitation for ongoing reinvention in relation to their own instruments and legacies of expectation for their original work. At an institutional level, for example, it is too often the limited contexts of English-​language expectations of genre, and served almost exclusively on Anglo-​American grounds, that serve as the very centrepieces not just of instruction but of admissions in the first instance for entering students in the MFA, and other creative writing programmes. Conventions of genre of English-​language constructions, towards production of a “primary text”

Reframing the field  97 predominate, named in bandwidths such as fiction, drama, poetry, creative non-​fiction, and more. Yet, for creative writing not to rise but instead to create a built environment of multilingual writing means to forego the assumptions of narrative or lyric as a point literally of (generic) admission or (programme) admissions. It means, more broadly, to suspend assumptions of transferable emotional frameworks of expectations, short of major differences of legacy and instrument; instead, it is key to derive the many historical legacies and emotional routes of infrastructure.8 This is the start of a focus on the historical environments and plural languages of legacy and choice for the multilingual creative writer round the world. With that, we move further into the future: that is, inviting the 21st-​ century multilingual writer to turn the table on both the “business” and the art of creative writing. In our contemporary era of artificial intelligence, fluid identity, and scientific re-​readings of human consciousness, for example, new global understandings of creativity, character, and identity equally need to keep pace and to lead. We find, indeed, no luxury of time or resources to perpetuate outdated models of framing the field, but instead a necessity and responsibility to reinvigorate the foundations of study and support in multilingual creative writing and creative industries, worldwide. It is therefore important to investigate the fluidity of genres and contrasting historical expectations for the multilingual creative writer in Asia. Non-​monolingual writers, as well as monolingual writers, rarely have the opportunity to study and explore, from the historical lens and comparative perspectives, religious, economic, and scientific forces, etc., such as those in 17th-​and 18th-​century England that can give shape to a topos of genre in fiction in English, for example, commonly and too often reflexively asked to serve across bandwidths unanchored in such matrices and constructs of individual and environment, vast as this challenge may be. The relative and comparative choices essential to the multilingual writer on generic histories and cultural histories of expectation, to frame demanding and informed decisions of history and craft, are key to a new era of writers and writings. Such raised awareness is also essential to the rapidly evolving construct of the individual in the humanities and the sciences worldwide, on recontextualised invitations and questions of legacy, genre, sentience, and history to what can constitute the experience and “telling” of a life, even to ourselves.

Notes 1 Michael Levenson remains one of the best, in analyses of this “consciousness” running into the canonical modern era, 1908–​ 1922: “Within this configuration of individualizing tendencies, one further element demands notice: the self-​ celebrating independence of the middle-​ class at mid-​ century.” Analysing Samuel Smiles’s work, Self-​Help, Levenson adds, emphatically, that “to rely on external sanction, guidance, authority is to be reduced to abject dependence.” See A Geneology of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–​1922. Cambridge U P, 1986, p. 15.

98  Page Richards 2 Medieval craft guilds of weavers, painters, bookbinders, or bakers, for instance, were associated with religious and technically experienced “masters,” or “guildmasters,” guiding a group of (often paying) apprentices, usually adolescent boys, in which mentorship and accomplishment registered increments both of eternal salvation and institutional power. So, too, did the “journeyman” often fall between the cracks. As Gary Richardson writes, Without reputations, craftsmen could not sell their wares to consumers who did not know them. With reputations, craftsmen could distribute their wares through chains of merchants to anonymous consumers in distant markets. All guilds of craftsmen manipulated labor markets, particularly when large numbers of artisans fell into the status between master and apprentice. Master craftsmen were guild members who owned their own shops. Apprentices were adolescents in training under long-​term contracts. Journeymen fell between those well-​defined roles. (144) Thus, setting the stage of a still familiar query, of the wider balancing act between profit and piety, Richardson asks: First, why did craft guilds combine occupational and religious endeavors? The alternative would have been guilds that performed single tasks. One guild might have trained apprentices. Another guild might have financed a chantry. The two would not interact. Second, what were the consequences of that combination? In the real world, craft guilds pursued multifaceted agendas. (140) For further readings on craft guilds, and the ongoing research on their contributions to technical innovation, see Stephan R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Pre-​Industrial Europe,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 58, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 684–​713; for studies tipped towards politics and the local administrations, in craft guilds, compared with training of the “artisans” (pp. 30–​31) see, for instance, “The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns,” Past and Present, no. 121, Nov. 1988, pp. 29–​48; and for a perspective on presentation and representation in piety, artistic endeavour, and sociopolitical contexts at York and Chester, for example, seen through the lens of masculinity, see the following: Christina Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture, New York: Palgrave, 2007. 3 Seminal works like The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-​Colonial Literature, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 2nd edition, 14 June 2002) investigate complex forces that challenge the hegemony and, in particular, here, Eurocentric literature and language, foregrounding the many-​tiered risks, among others, to self-​identify; Walcott, in a search pre-​ language, seeks the grounds of what he calls “darkness and history,” awakening non-​individually and “beyond mimicry” (15) to “what the twilight says.” See What the Twilight Says, New York: FSG, 1998. 4 We are walking a huge field, with a few touchstones, here, to guide. Going back to the Greeks, L.A. Swift writes that “by attempting to understand the features that

Reframing the field  99 characterize individual genres, we stand to gain insight into the occasions that marked significant moments in the ritual life.” See The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric, Oxford U P, 2010, p. 7. And drawing on the lyric genre, for example, Swift writes that it “embodies a particular set of norms and cultural expectations which derive from the social and ritual functions that the genres fulfilled” (35). Ralph Cohen echoes the local and historical contexts of valuation in genre, when he says that “genre concepts in theory and practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons.” See “History and Genre,” New Literary History, vol. 17, no. 2, Interpretation and Culture, Winter, 1986, p. 204. Addressing the literary and historical reasons for genre, he adds that “genres possessed social purposes in a community” and are rooted in time and place, where the “functions of markers or traits become the base for value distinctions as well as for artistic distinctions and interrelations” (206). And Jonathan Culler, in dialogue with Cohen, reminds us that generic categories are fluid, ever updating our historical expectations, allowing us to reanalyse what Cohen has fingered, namely, “our procedures for acquiring and accumulating knowledge.” See Jonathan Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” New Literary History, vol. 40, 2009, p. 883; Culler emphasises the pact of emotional expectation, when he writes that generic categories frame both reading and writing—​writers write in relation to other texts and textual traditions, both conscious and unconsciously, imitating, misreading, and rejecting, and readers approach works differently according to how they concede them, even if those expectations are going to be disappointed. (881) 5 See, for example, “Why the Profusion of Courses in India Will Not Over-​ Professionalise the Practice of Creative Writing.” The graduate creative writing programme, fellow contributor Saikat Majumdar writes, “is far from being popular in Indian universities, barely existing outside of one or two new universities such as Ashoka and Ambedkar—​a public university in Delhi which offers a two-​year Masters in Literary Arts.” He continues, “But the rarity of university-​ run creative writing programmes is more than matched by the sharp rise of a wide range of creative writing courses and workshops in urban communities outside the campus.” We see a breakdown of opportunities on the spectrum: author-​ taught courses, the model of the retreat, and the residency, for example. Flagging once more the risks of proliferation with professionalism and “industrialization” of creative writing, Majumdar counters with the need for such “taught” programmes, where, largely, “the standards of production, be it acting, screenplay, or cinematography, things are appallingly poor.” While this “rise of a pedagogic culture around creative writing offers a new communal consciousness to an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly significant to the nation and its global diaspora,” it also predominantly takes place on abbreviated touchpoints of the North American model and English language. We recognise the proverbial “writing process” drawn from “standards” that may be said to flank if not constitute those of the academic field of English “creative writing,” codified outside the academy in shorthand, appreciably to sustain artistically, yet leaking the emotional cry away from mimicry: a diverse India “that is Anglophone sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, sometimes aspirationally, with the robust shadow of the indigenous vernaculars close behind” (Majumdar).

100  Page Richards 6 For one of the innumerable references that creative writers can instantly access, see, for example, The Write Practice, https://​thewritepractice.com/​freytags-​pyramid/​ 7 Famously coined by David Chalmers in 1995, the “hard problem” of consciousness addresses the still open-​ended relationship of first-​person experience and sentience to (the soft problems of) computational and neural processes of the brain. Comparably, while we know that elements of craft, such as prosody in poetry, or foreshadowing in narrative, can be introduced, from one writer to another individual writer, whether on the page or in person, the hard problem of craft, that is, what exactly can or should be taught in the nebulous, larger and harder regions of material and historical agency, constituting legacies of expectations that every writer is born into, remain, ideally, the crux of scholars’ and writers’ and my own attention, here, to the MFA and other institutional programmes, worldwide. 8 In a study of genre and lyric, Scott Brewster insightfully looks at works on genre more widely by Andrew Welsh, Gérard Genette, Paul Hernandi, René Wellek, and Philip Hobsbaum, just to name a few, and focuses on the sociocultural acts of historic origin, such as performance for lyric, that situate genre and text, the role of genre, for instance, in a “historical moment … and its intersection with other forms of cultural representation” (11).

Works cited Adams, Richard. Watership Down. 1972. Penguin Books, 2015. Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Pilgrims and Puritans and the Myth of the Promised Land.” The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, edited by Paul Heike, Transcript Verlag, 2014, pp. 137–​96. Brewster, Scott. Lyric. Routledge, 2009. Bunting, Joe. “Freytag’s Pyramid: Definition, Examples, and How to Use This Dramatic Structure in Your Writing.” The Write Practice, 22 Oct. 2020, thewritepractice.com/​freytags-​pyramid/​. —​—​—​. “Writing Workshop: Can a Workshop Help You Become a Better Writer?” The Write Practice, 16 Jan. 2020, thewritepractice.com/​writing-​workshop/​. Burroway, Janet, and Susan Weinberg, editors. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 6th ed., Longman, 2003. Chik, Wilson. “Establishing Geographies: Revisited Sightlines.” The Multilingual Imagination, Contemporary Texts of Hong Kong. U of Hong Kong, 4 Oct. 2019. —​—​—​. Personal interview. 19 June 2020. Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage, 1983. Griffen, Dustin. “The Rise of the Professional Author?” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695–​1830, edited by Michael Suarez, S. J., & Michael Turner, Cambridge U P, 2009, pp. 132–​45. Harbach, Chad. MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. n+1, 2014. Hills, Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Houghton Mifflin, 1977. “History.” Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Writers’ Workshop, www. writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/​about/​about-​workshop/​history. Hoban, Russell. Bread and Jam for Frances. 1964. HarperCollins, 2015. Levenson, Michael. A Geneology of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–​1922. Cambridge U P, 1986.

Reframing the field  101 Majumdar, Saikat. “Why the Profusion of Courses in India Will Not over-​ Professionalise the Practice of Creative Writing.” Scroll.in, 13 Sept. 2020, scroll.in/​article/​972904/​why-​the-​profusion-​of-​courses-​in-​india-​will-​not-​over-​ professionalise-​the-​practice-​of-​creative-​writing. Menand, Louis. “Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?” 1 June 2009, The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2009/​06/​08/​show-​or-​tell. Murray, Janet. “Can You Teach Creative Writing?” The Guardian, 10 May 2011, www.theguardian.com/​education/​2011/​may/​10/​creative-​writing-​courses. Overgaard, Morten. “The Status and Future of Consciousness Research.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, 10 October 2017, Frontiers, doi:https://​doi.org/​10.3389/​ fpsyg.2017.01719. Richardson, Gary. “Craft Guilds and Christianity in Late-​ Medieval England: A Rational-​Choice Analysis.” Rationality and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 2005, pp. 139–​ 89. Sage Publications, doi:10.1177/​1043463105051631. Simon, Cecelia Capuzzi. “Why Writers Love to Hate the M.F.A.” The New York Times, 9 Apr. 2015, www.nytimes.com/​2015/​04/​12/​education/​edlife/​12edl-​ 12mfa.html. Vendler, Helen. “Writers and Artists at Harvard.” Harvard Magazine, Nov.–​Dec. 2012, harvardmagazine.com/​2012/​11/​writers-​and-​artists-​at-​harvard. Walcott, Derek. Conversations with Derek Walcott. U P Mississippi, 1996. Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit. George H. Doran, 1922.

6  Self-​translation from China Aspects of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language Fan Dai and Ling Li

Introduction Creative Writing programmes/​ courses in tertiary education in China sprouted in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2009, Fudan University offered the first MFA programme in Creative Writing in Chinese. In the same year, Shanghai University set up the first Center for Creative Writing in Chinese (Dai, “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese”). By the year 2013, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Zhejiang University, Renmin University of China, Peking University, Suzhou University, etc., have introduced various Creative Writing programmes in Chinese (Dai and Li). Meanwhile, Creative Writing programmes in English as a foreign language were introduced to tertiary education as part of the reforms in English teaching in recent years (Dai, “English-​Language”; Dai, “English-​Language Creative”). In 2006, Renmin University of China offered the country’s first Creative Writing course in English, followed by Sun Yat-​sen University in the year 2009 and China University of Petroleum in 2014. A few other universities such as Sichuan University, Wuhan University, and Xiamen University (Dai, “English-​Language”; Dai, “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese”; Dai and Li) also offered courses in creative writing at some point in the curriculum, though most of the teachers did not receive systematic training in the field. Having been run for more than ten years, the Creative Writing course for English majors at Sun Yat-​sen University—​where author Fan Dai teaches and author Ling Li is working on her doctorate—​is the most rigorous for Creative Writing in a foreign language among Chinese institutions of higher learning. It has been promoting Creative Writing in English as a foreign language “in the areas of teaching, research, outreach and international collaboration” (Dai and Li). In addition to a pedagogy with “close reading components of works by established writers and writers at different stages of writing, workshops, critical summaries of workshops and assignments, assessment, revisions, and creative activities” (Dai, “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese” 258), there are extracurricular activities beyond the traditional classroom such as book club events, the National DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-7

Self-translation from China  103 Creative Writing Competition in English, the Sun Yat-​sen University Writers’ Residency and international collaborations with various universities in Australia (Dai and Li). In the meantime, that at Sun Yat-​sen is the only programme in mainland China where students at undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD levels may choose to use creative work and a critical essay to complete their degree theses (Dai and Li, “Academic”). The above work provides first-​hand materials on the aspects of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language that are specific to the Chinese context. This chapter will elaborate on these aspects, which include the treatment of culturally loaded expressions, the relationship between creative writing in English and translation, the status/​role of Chinese English/​ Chinglish, and rhetorical devices that enrich a story through creativity coupled with Chinese culture.

The teaching and research of Creative Writing in English in China Previous teaching and research (e.g., Disney; Hanauer) on creative writing in English as a foreign/​second language (hereafter EFL/​ESL) mainly focuses on how EFL/​ESL creative writing helps student writers in self-​exploration and self-​expression, thus finding their own voices and gaining a sense of identity in second-​language learning. In China, Dai has been carrying out the same pedagogical experiment as a response to the reform of English teaching in Sun Yat-​sen University (Dai, “English-​Language Creative Writing by Chinese”; Dai, “English-​Language Creative Writing in Mainland”; Dai “Writing”; Dai, “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese”). Through presenting students’ creative non-​fiction (CNF) work and their reflection on the course, Dai shows how she integrates the honing of narrative techniques with language learning, enhancing “students’ self-​expression” (Dai, “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese” 250), and demonstrates that EFL creative writing enables students to explore emotional life through the writing of their personal experience, and achieve better “self-​understanding and personal development in general” (Dai, “English-​ Language Creative Writing in Mainland” 546). Dai and Jeri Kroll make cross-​ cultural comparative studies between the Creative Writing courses in Sun Yat-​ sen University, China, and Flinders University, Australia, exploring the difference between “student backgrounds, pedagogical strategies, course structures” (Kroll and Dai, “Cultural” 1), as well as the “criteria of selecting reading materials” (Kroll and Dai, “Reading” 82) to explore the ethical challenges faced by students and teachers of Creative Writing in different cultures. Another highlight of research on EFL creative writing is “bilingual creativity” proposed by Braj Kachru (1986), which has led to a plethora of studies on how bilingual creativity has been developed in various local contexts in the past two decades (see Disney). One case in point is Gang Sui,

104  Fan Dai and Ling Li who focuses on EFL poetry writing workshops in the Chinese context and showcases how bilingual creativity is made possible for second-​language learners through the process of “recontextualization,” “recreation,” and “reintegration”(Sui 41–​44). Dai and Wei Zheng propose that creative writing in a foreign language is a type of “self-​translation,” in which “the original text is not written, but exists liminally in the mind of the author” (659). They point out that the key issue in such self-​translation is how to translate the culturally loaded content of one culture into forms of expression comprehensible to audiences from other cultures. Kachru holds that “the bilingual’s creativity introduces a nativized thought-​process which does not conform to the recognized canons of discourse types, text design, stylistic conventions, and traditional thematic range of the English language” (160), and that the text “may show culture-​ specific identity both at the surface and the underlying levels” (161). This chapter hopes to further explore creativity in writing by examining various cultural elements reflected in EFL creative writing and discuss how the treatment of these elements contribute to English teaching.

Chinese-​specific features in Creative Writing in English The following discussion on Chinese-​specific features will be based on the teaching of the last ten years of teaching Creative Writing at Sun Yat-​sen University. These features cover the range of certain aspects of the workshop, the content of the creative work, the treatment of Chinese cultural elements, a discussion on self-​translation as well as the relationship between Creative Writing and translation, language issues for writing in English as a foreign language, and creativity that enriches the story with Chinese elements. The healing aspect of the workshop The workshop is the pillar of the teaching of Creative Writing in the Sun Yat-​sen programme. As is practised elsewhere, the focus is on the discussion of the crafting of the given work by an individual student. Although counselling has never been officially listed on the teaching agenda, the students’ behaviour in the classroom at Sun Yat-​sen University regularly turns to this direction in almost every semester, especially with CNF assignments. It usually involves the crying of the student whose work is being discussed, the cause never being the critical comment on the crafting but the content discussed. The contents that had caused emotional reaction include personal ordeals that the writers had never shared with others before, lies that had made the writers feel guilty, acts that the writers eventually realised to be hurtful to others, etc. While the discussion of such issues is not usually the responsibility of the Creative Writing teacher in the tradition in English-​speaking

Self-translation from China  105 countries, a teacher in the Chinese institution of higher learning is more likely than not to address the issue on the spot. It is important to point out that there have not been serious cases, such as domestic abuse, that led to serious psychological symptoms; in severe cases, professional help would of course be recommended to the student writer. The Creative Writing workshop at Sun Yat-​sen University has seen positive effect as a result of the discussion of emotional issues in students’ work. One example involved a CNF workshop on a piece by a student who wrote about a high school period, during which a female classmate expressed interest in him, and he reacted by telling her off with a stern expression, saying that such thoughts shouldn’t be on her mind and they should focus on studying. Such a stern attitude came from the common attitude among the older generations that having a relationship is too distracting for ambitious high school students. Traditional parents tend to warn their teenage children to stay away from puppy love (which they consider to be undesirable). The above writer had been under such a traditional influence. His response represented the attitude of a fair number of his peers. Given the cultural background, the teacher spent some time on the fact that any teenager may feel attracted to an individual and feeling like that is nothing to feel bad about or to be against. It followed that saying those words to the girl would have been very hurtful to her. Then the teacher shared a personal experience of having hurt someone in a similar situation and found out more than a decade later that the young man’s self-​esteem suffered very badly, leaving him, he felt, with a passive attitude towards everything in life. With this regretful experience, which could no longer be reversed, the teacher suggested that an apology would do a lot in undoing the damage to the girl. Over a reflection class at the end of the semester, the student said that he had sought out the girl and made an apology, and the two had become friends. Surprisingly, three other students came forward to say that they had apologised to someone who they may well have hurt in similar situations. They all said that had they not shared their writing in the workshop, they might never come to realise that they had done something very immature. Another example of how Creative Writing involves social-​ emotional intelligence and empathy involved the topic of bullying a primary school classmate who was either developmentally delayed or physically challenged. It was through the workshop discussion that many students came to see the situation from the perspective of the victim rather than from their younger selves who had found fun in making life difficult for the victim. Students used about ten minutes of the workshop to share their new understanding of such phenomenon and their participation in such wrongdoing of bullying the disadvantaged and underprivileged. Consequently, the workshop’s aspect of discussing a shared experience in the students’ younger days became evidence of the students’ personal growth, which is an opportunity not found in a regular course at a university.

106  Fan Dai and Ling Li Such clear emotional development is also rewarding on the teacher’s part, given the important prerequisite that his/​her expertise in Creative Writing, life experience, and related knowledge that could guide the discussion to the right direction. The contents of creative work It is generally considered that human concerns are rather universal. Therefore, whatever has been written in the Chinese classroom is very much related to the general themes in any world literature. However, there have also been themes that are Chinese specific. One theme that stands out is parents hitting children. The following is one such example: My mom approached me and held me up like holding a bag upside-​down. She spanked my ass again and again, like a professional boxer beating the punching bag. She spanked so heavily that I wailed like a pig that was going to the slaughter house. After the “battle,” my bottom was swollen and hurt, just like a hamburger baking in the stove. This is a scene in which a mother punished her son when he was in his early teenaged years. Such physical punishment is not uncommon in the Chinese setting. In fact, there is a Chinese saying to the effect that beating is one way to show affection, scolding is one way to express love. Whenever students write about such family violence, the teacher takes the opportunity to encourage reflection on the issue, as the majority of the students would have been subject to it. It is also taken as an opportunity to show students that it is unfair for the obviously stronger person to hit a younger and weaker person. Another theme worthy of attention is education, which is considered to be crucial for a person’s development in China. Therefore, students have written stories in which they have been made to study very hard, revealing a perspective on education not commonly perceived in Western cultures. The following is an example of the intensity of competition in high school: “Students from number one to fifteen, come to my office. Right now!” Having thrown down his words, Mr. Mediterranean disappeared from the back door. But his words had successfully caused an uproar in our class, for every time he ended his order with “Right now.” It meant that he was very, very, very angry. One would need a bit of background to understand the above extract. The most important goal for a high school student in China is to excel so as to score high in the National College Entrance Examinations (NCEE), in

Self-translation from China  107 order to be admitted to one of the top universities and then secure good job opportunities. Therefore, good performance in high school is considered to be an important indicator of competition. In the above story, students are numbered according to their ranking in regular exams. In the circumstance of this university student’s non-​ fiction about her/​ his recent high school experiences, Mr. Mediterranean, the Math teacher, is very upset about the relatively poor performances of his class. He calls the top 15 students to his office about the case, as they would be the ones who were likely to outperform the top students in other classes. The teacher, too, is in competition among the Math teachers. He is given the mean nickname of Mr. Mediterranean, an indication of how annoying the students find him. The meaning of the nickname will be discussed in the section “Creative Writing as self-​translation.” This extract reveals that the pressure for doing well at school lies not only on the students but also the teachers. Inevitably, when students write about their high school life, they refer to it as “battle” more than anything else. As in the case of the aspect of parental violence, the teacher in the Creative Writing course would take the opportunity to contrast the different scene in high school in other countries. The two themes illustrated in this section are ones that require attention on the tertiary Creative Writing lecturer’s part in that students should be aware that international readers would need some background information to better understand the demanding Chinese education scene. It follows that students would need to incorporate the necessary elaboration of the given situation by taking advantage of relevant writing techniques. This would be where literary creativity, and its instruction, would come in. Depending on the context, the writer can resort to an immediate explanation following a nickname or term or phenomenon, or a dialogue, or a footnote that would fit into the narrative without making the narrative voice overpowering. The use of culturally loaded expressions One distinct aspect of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language, both in China and beyond, is that the writer needs to be aware that they write for international readers. More often than not, students fail to take this global village into consideration. The following kind of student writing is not uncommon: “I imitated the child star singing ‘Xin Nian Hao’ to get a red packet.” For one thing, “Xin Nian Hao,” a greeting for Happy New Year, is a strange expression in the extract, while “red packet,” an envelope that contains lucky money given to children for good fortune in the coming year, may not be widely known in other cultures. So when the writer sings the song, it is meant to please those who would potentially give them a red packet, a fun thing to do for the occasion.

108  Fan Dai and Ling Li Another example of cultural bridges being required includes “my grandma took me to a so-​called ‘Die-​Da’ doctor.” Here “Die-​Da” is the Pinyin for “fall” and “hit.” Their combination refers to the pain caused by falling and other external forces, indicating, here, a trip to a chiropractic doctor. Like “Xin Nian Hao” and “red packet,” “Die-​ Da” needs an explanation on the writer’s part. While the use of Chinese-​specific elements could add flavour to the story, if they are not explained properly, they could be more puzzling than effective for readers from other cultures. The following is another example: I reach for the phone, and dialed her number, slowly and uneasy. “Do not answer the phone, do not answer the phone, please.” I pray silently again and again, with lively “Gong Hey Fat Choy” melody echoing though the other side of phone. The phone is through. This is a scene related to the NCEE discussed in the previous section, “The contents of creative work.” The “I” in the story had been made by her cousin to find out the score of the NCEE for her, as the cousin herself did not have the nerve to face a possible low score. The score, as “I” finds out, is not high enough for a good university, so “I” is nervous for calling to disclose the bad news. “I” hits the “Gong Hey Fat Choy” melody in order to get through to the cousin. “Gong Hey Fat Choy” is frequently used as a New Year’s wish for good luck and for making a fortune. In this particular case, “Gong Hey Fat Choy” adds a touch of irony to the situation in which failing the NCEE will mean little chance of making a fortune in the future. This example would work very well with readers who know the expression. For those who are strangers to it, however, the narrator can give a bit of an explanation, though such elaboration may take away the subtlety of the message. Irony can be an elusive dialect. Another student example reveals the challenges of writing to a possibly international audience from a China that many factors may make unknown to outsiders: After so many years, my mother’s resounding “Fantong” still echoes in my mind. That beautiful word Fantong, which equates to “rice bucket,” is so nicely pronounced and so vividly refers to a riceholic. In this case, the writer was aware of the strangeness of “Fantong” for the international reader, so she added an explanation of its meaning being “rice bucket.” Strictly speaking, this makes the narrator’s voice more intrusive than before, which becomes a bit of an interruption. This would be a good time to assure the student about the value of attempting to make a cultural interpretation, as well as encouraging her in thinking of a better way to incorporate the narrator’s voice.

Self-translation from China  109 Besides enriching the story, some Chinese daily expressions can reveal facts and/​or ancestral wisdom. For example, jing di zhi wa (井底之蛙), “the frog at the bottom of a well,” which may have a second part, zhi kan jian wan da de tian, that says it can only see a sky that is the size of a bowl. Without the second part, those who live in the culture would still know the implied meaning. But the international reader is likely to need the narrator’s help. The following is another example of the paradox of a Chinese student needing to write more than her Chinese readers would need (and possibly tolerate) to be read internationally: I never try hard, so I lose someone important in my life. With only 88 pages, this dairy book is too weak to bear a whole year’s memory. 88 (bye bye), a fated number, has it indicated the result of this relationship from the very beginning? The key for decoding the cultural message is the number 8, whose pronunciation is close to that of “bye-​bye” in Mandarin (hence the use of 88). There is also a touch of irony here in that 8 is pronounced similarly to the Chinese character that means “prosper,” which evokes emotion opposite to that of ending a relationship. The narrator does explain the “bye-​bye” aspect of the meaning, but once again the irony is lost to the international reader more often than not. Finally, it is not uncommon for ideas or concepts to be well expressed but still hard to understand. Here is one such case: Folks hold the view that a married daughter is like water splashed on the ground, which means she does not belong the family of origin anymore, while it is typical of sons to stay around and honour their parents all the time. The original Chinese saying goes like jia chu qu de nv er po chu qu de shui, “a married daughter is like water poured out.” This is a feudal idea that still lingers noticeably, especially in rural areas. That is the reason why sons are preferred over daughters, and they are expected to play all the important roles in the family, to inherit property as well as to look after their parents, while daughters are considered to belong to the family that they would marry into. Hence, there is another saying, jia ji sui ji, jia gou sui gou, “if you marry a chicken, you go with the chicken; if you marry a dog, you go with the dog.” Fortunately, there has been a lot of progress in striking a balance between the equal status of men and women these days. The following is an extract that reflects the importance of the NCEE that has been demonstrated in students’ writing in the previous section, “The contents of creative work”:

110  Fan Dai and Ling Li We were fighting for a sacred cause, all the teachers told us, and nothing was permitted to distract us from this glorious pilgrimage. Studying should always be prioritized above all your naïve desires. No fancy ideas. No rebellious actions. No irresponsible relationships. High school kids deserved no freedom of choice until they successfully fulfilled college entrance examination. The NCEE is referred to as “glorious pilgrimage,” while other things were considered to have come out of “naïve desires.” The “irresponsible relationships” are ones which are often referred to as puppy love, as has been discussed in the previous section. The following is another extract from yet another piece on the NCEE, exams arguably more influential, and stressful, than the comparable American Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs): “Cheer up! Look, they have already begun to tear the books!” X exclaimed. “And the paper airplanes! With wishes from strangers! I love it!” This extract comes from the practice that some high school students would tear their textbooks to either use the pages to fold paper planes or to tear them into pieces and throw all into the air, as ways of saying goodbye to their high school life and, more importantly, to wish each other good luck for the exams. This ritual completes the last chapter of high school life. The extracts in this section have all been points of discussion in workshops, in light of incorporating narrative techniques with the interpretation of culturally loaded expressions, in addition to building awareness of cultural differences important for writing in a foreign language. In turn, the result of such teaching will help make a Chinese story or piece of CNF culturally accessible and stimulating. All these challenges with context, culture, and irony make the teaching of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language rewarding and different from writing in one’s mother tongue. In the meantime, it is important for both teachers and students to bear in mind that no matter how hard one tries, there are still expressions whose native meaning cannot be fully conveyed to readers of a different culture. One can only bear this in mind and keep trying one’s best in putting across the meaning closest to the original. Creative Writing as self-​translation As teaching and research evolve, it has become clear that creative writing in a foreign language can largely be considered as self-​translation without the text of the original language (Dai and Zheng). As demonstrated in the previous section, culturally loaded expressions need to be interpreted so that the international reader will have the background necessary to understand

Self-translation from China  111 the story. This means that the writer should be aware of cultural differences and of what needs elaboration. It follows that the interpretation needs to be as organic a part of the story as possible, so the narrative voice would not become too encyclopaedic and interrupt the reading. Our teaching has seen several ways of expressing cultural issues. The following is the most straightforward: at evenings, browsing WeChat and sometimes Weibo, the two major social platforms in China. “Wechat” is now known to some parts of the world, while Weibo, which actually is the Chinese pronunciation of micro-​blog, is hardly known. When the writer interprets them as “the two major social platforms in China,” reading becomes easy for the reader. The course encourages students’ creativity in crafting in such a way that interpreting cultural issues becomes an organic part of the narrative. Some such elements come in the form of figures of speech. One student writes as follows: “Granny had said that I was as long as a chopstick when I was born.” A chopstick is nothing unusual in China, but putting it in a simile to describe an infant’s height makes it original and interesting. It produces a very vivid image as well as serving as a good reminder of the Chinese context. Here is another example of wordplay: “I looked out of the window, gazing at Valentine’s Road along the coastline of Zhuhai, which is as twisted as the relationship of lovers.” An international reader may not know the city of Zhuhai, which borders Macau, and the Valentine’s Road, which is sometimes translated to Lovers’ Boulevard. But from the context, one can figure it out right away, while the relationship of lovers becomes something that informs the reader that Valentine’s Road is rather twisted. The simile has the extra function of giving new information about a place not known to the reader. Similarly, the following extract is another example of a phrase acquiring more meanings, not fewer, when translated: Maybe dad’s love is just like Pu’er. It doesn’t have bright colour from the surface, nor does it have any attractive flavour. It’s just plain. But there’s something behind it, something that you can only taste after you have experienced a lot. Although the international reader may not know Pu’er tea, the passage itself, through the simile, shows what it is like and what the writer’s father’s love is like. While these are successful examples of writers working to make cultural references bridge gaps of language and culture, the “Mr. Mediterranean” mentioned earlier is a case that makes translation very challenging. The

112  Fan Dai and Ling Li Mediterranean Sea is translated as di zhong hai, and its word-​for-​word translation means “sea in the middle of land.” Metaphorically, it has been used to refer to bald-​headed men who typically have a circle of hair around the bald area. In a case that needs this much explanation, a footnote would be a more likely choice, as an explanation in the narrative would mean risking to make the narrative voice too expositional. The above examples demonstrate that Creative Writing in English as a foreign language constantly provides fresh angles to translation and to understanding cultural differences. It is a very important aspect of writing in a foreign language. Language issues and creativity in English as a foreign language There have been studies on non-​standard English such as Chinese English, Chinglish, Singlish, and what not that address issues of learning English as a foreign language. Little study has been done in light of non-​standard English in Creative Writing in English as a foreign language. Students’ texts are good sources for such discussion. Redundancy is a common phenomenon, e.g., “I nearly cried out with my mouth open.” The “with my mouth open” bit can be done away with to make the original sentence concise. Similarly, the following extract can be improved as well: “How to explain this to you?” She paused for a second before continuing. “It means that you are entering puberty.” Obviously, removing “before continuing” does not cause any confusion but brings conciseness to the sentence. There are many such examples as in: “Before the boy can register all this in his head, the man flees away.” Here, “in his head” can be done away with. Redundancy is a common phenomenon in writing in a foreign language (Dahlmeier and Ng). According to Huichao Xue and Rebecca Hwa, redundancies for foreign-​language learners occur frequently, but redundancy is challenging to study because redundancies do not violate grammar, thus it is more of “a stylistic question” (Xue and Hwa 263). It follows that creative writing is a good way to show the learner such redundancy. In comparison, the following extract shows a text with a more natural flow than the above: She must park her car in front of that noodle shop on Dongzheng Road, the road dividing our school into north and south areas. She must dress in her bank uniform, white blue shirt, and black pants, carrying her ash grey handbag. She must have frown at the weather, though she had her umbrella. She must observe the students passing the gate and try to find out whether I was among them. She must leave with disappointment. The student writes about her mother, who is hoping to deliver something to her, but they fail to meet. Knowing her mother well, the student could

Self-translation from China  113 almost see in her mind’s eye what transpires here. Since she wrote about what her mother did based on inference, she should have used the present perfect tense after the auxiliary “must.” The above extract became a good learning opportunity to help the student writer better understand the form of “must + present perfect” and what it means. On the other hand, writing in a foreign language does not hinder creativity. One important arena for verbal creativity is the figure of speech. The following are examples by various students: If you had been dancing in the dark, you were able to walk in the sun. This is by a student summing up her plight of sexual orientation. She continues to write along the same lines: When I finally stood in the stage and made through the whole speech, I brought myself back to life and light. When I raised my head, I saw the spotlight lighting up my world like the sun. The following extracts can inspire the reader’s imagination: He even spoke with that lovely British accent! But his voice! His voice has black tea in it. … the words sliding out of her mouth are like thousand tawdry little beads rolling down a smooth surface. Though he didn’t fully understand the lyrics word by word, it did not prevent them from blossoming between her lips, petal by petal. My brother’s scar on his left eyebrow and my scar on right eyebrow! Such perfect combination! It must be destiny that makes us twins! … gossip absolutely can be the best dessert among girls I am told to enjoy lonely since friends are not twins. Although the word “lonely” needs to be corrected, one still marvels at the creative expression. The above examples showcase a creativity that students would not otherwise have had an opportunity to explore without creative writing. The following is one other extract with figures of speech about preparing for the NCEE: It [the public posting of one’s ranking] not only showed your position in the whole grade, but also decided your mood of the whole month. Everyone crowded ahead of it, looking up to it and discussing feverishly about it. The expressions on their face was even comparable with those in The Last Supper. With the background information in the earlier sections, it is not surprising to see students’ reaction to their ranking which comes after one mock exam

114  Fan Dai and Ling Li after another. Interestingly, the writer resorts to the painting The Last Super to give international readers some idea of how the students looked. The next extract uses alliteration: “Cash or catch, it sounds now more like a happy growing-​up game.” The following shows an intentional misuse of a word: “Mom-​mom, look at that big sister! How cool she looks and how ‘elephant’ her movement is!” I held my breath and seized my mom’s sleeve tightly, afraid to be discovered by the unacquainted big sister not far from my seat. The comment was made by a girl who wanted to use the word “elegant.” Apparently, the original conversation was carried out in Chinese. The writer found “elephant” as the misused Chinese counterpart, a sign of creativity, even accidental, on the student writer’s part. It is obvious, after Fan Dai’s decade as a pioneering Creative Writing lecturer at Sun Yat-​sen University, that writing in a foreign language can bring with it advantages to tell a story better, demonstrating student creativity and tasking her/​him with understanding cultural elements and enriching the imagination of the writer and, ideally, her/​his readers.

Conclusion This chapter has examined different aspects of Creative Writing in English as a foreign language, based on the teaching practice at Sun Yat-​sen University, China. The healing aspect of the workshop, the expressive contents written, the navigation of culturally loaded expressions, the self-​translation aspect of writing in a foreign language, and a creativity that is distinct from most Chinese education are special features of teaching Creative Writing in English in China. The exploration of the above features demonstrates that Creative Writing in English as a foreign language taught in the Chinese context has its own characteristics. Understanding such features is essential for teaching writing and producing good creative work in English. Furthermore, the discussion in this chapter could contribute to further exploration in creative writing in other foreign languages.

Works cited Dahlmeier, Daniel, and Hwee Tou Ng. “Grammatical Error Correction with Alternating Structure Optimization.” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2011, pp. 915–​23, www.aclweb.org/​anthology/​P11-​1092/​. Dai, Fan. “English-​ Language Creative Writing by Chinese University Students.” English Today, vol. 28, no. 3, 2012, pp. 21–​26.

Self-translation from China  115 —​—​—​. “English-​Language Creative Writing in Mainland China.” World Englishes, vol. 29, no. 4, 2010, pp. 546–​56. —​ —​ —​ . “Teaching Creative Writing in English in the Chinese Context.” World Englishes, vol. 34, no. 2, 2015, pp. 247–​59. —​—​—​. “Writing, Sharing and Growing Together: Creative Writing at a Mainland Chinese University.” Creative Writing in the Asia-​Pacific Region, special issue of TEXT, Apr. 2011, www.textjournal.com.au/​speciss/​issue10/​FanDai.pdf. Dai, Fan, and Ling Li. “The Academic Aspects of Creative Writing in English in the Teaching and Research in English as a Foreign Language.” Foreign Languages in China, vol. 16, no. 5, 2019, pp. 85–​94. —​—​—​. “Teaching Creative Writing in a Foreign Language in China.” Ideas and Realities: Creative Writing in Asia Today, special issue of TEXT, Oct. 2017, www. textjournal.com.au/​speciss/​issue47/​Dai&Li.pdf. Dai, Fan, and Wei Zheng. “Self-​Translation and English-​Language Creative Writing in China.” World Englishes, vol. 38, no. 4, 2019, pp. 659–​70. Disney, Dan, editor. Exploring Second Language Creative Writing: Beyond Babel. John Benjamins, 2014. Hanauer, David. “Meaningful Literacy: Writing Poetry in the Language Classroom.” Language Teaching, vol. 45, no. 1, 2011, pp. 105–​15. Cambridge U P, doi:10.1017/​ S0261444810000522. —​—​—​. “Measuring Voice in Poetry Written by Second Language Learners.” Written Communication, vol. 32, no. 1, 2015, pp. 66–​86. Sage Journals, https://​doi.org/​ 10.1177/​0741088314563023. —​—​—​. Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing. John Benjamins, 2010. Kachru, Braj B. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-​ Native Englishes. U of Illinois P, 1986. Kroll, Jeri, and Fan Dai. “Cultural and Ethical Challenges in Teaching Creative Writing: A Comparative Study of Australian and Chinese Classes.” Ethical Imaginations: Referred Conference Papers of the 16th Annual Association of Australasian Writing Programs Conference, 23–​25 Nov. 2011. Edited by Janie Conway-​Herron, Moya Costello, and Lynda Hawryluk, Southern Cross University, Byron Bay, www.aawp.org.au/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2015/​03/​KrollDai. pdf. Kroll, Jeri, and Fan Dai. “Reading as a Writer in Australia and China: Adapting the Workshop.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Taylor & Francis Online, 17 Dec. 2013, pp. 77–​91, https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​14790726.2013.849743. Sui, Gang. “Bilingual Creativity: University-​ Level Poetry Writing Workshops in English in China.” English Today, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 40–​45. Xue, Huichao, and Rebecca Hwa. “Redundancy Detection in ESL Writings.” Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 26–​30 Apr. 2014. Edited by Shuly Wintner, Sharon Goldwater, and Stefan Riezler, Centre for Language Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. doi:10.3115/​v1/​E14-​1.

7  Radical translation Teaching poetry writing in Hong Kong James Shea

Live in Hong Kong long enough and you begin to notice how often people toggle between languages, namely, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, depending on the situation. You might enter a taxi and the driver will start off in Cantonese and then switch to Mandarin, if you are struggling to respond, and the driver may turn finally to English. The reverse is just as possible, depending on how you “present.” This kind of linguistic dexterity occurs in shops, at restaurants, and even in subway announcements and signs—​Chinese and English are both official languages in Hong Kong, and whereas Cantonese is a spoken form of Chinese that most people speak, Mandarin is ever more present in recent years, as Beijing draws Hong Kong closer to the mainland. The implications of this interrelationship between languages for the Creative Writing classroom are that students can use translation methods, including self-​translation strategies, as an integral part of their writing process, one that engages the aural, cultural, and semantic dimensions of language. Over eight years of teaching undergraduate poetry workshops in Hong Kong, instead of treating the English-​language Creative Writing classroom as a site for English-​only instruction, I have tried to find ways to incorporate my students’ knowledge of Chinese. Multilingual instruction extends to my international students on exchange as well, many of whom speak more than one language. The courses I teach are English-​language Creative Writing courses within a bilingual writing programme in which students take half of their courses in Chinese. I have learned to value the moments when I can integrate my students’ fluency in Chinese into their writing of poems, often in the realm of generative writing methods. This interchange between Chinese and English syncs with their everyday experience—​whether eating at a restaurant or being online—​because English is a part of the identity of university students in Hong Kong, many of whom have English nicknames or legal names. One of my students, for instance, whose first name was “Pik Ka” 碧嘉, went by the homophonic nickname of “Bigger.” Cantonese is also full of homophonic loanwords from English, such as bōsí 波士 for “boss,” and it works the other way, too: “dim sum” is the English way to say dímsām 點心.

DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-8

Radical translation  117

Homophonic translation Usually, midway through a semester, I assign my students a homophonic translation activity. I select a poem from a language they do not know, usually the poem “Skytsengelen” (“Guardian Angel”) by Rolf Jacobsen, since aside from the occasional Scandinavian student, the majority of my students have never seen Norwegian. Here’s the first stanza: Jeg er fuglen som banker på vinduet til dig om morgenen og følgesvennen din, han du ikke kan vite, blomstene som lyser for den blinde. (38) I ask students to “translate” the sound of the words into the best approximation of English as they can, which is the conventional approach to homophonic translation, but to add another twist, I allow students to translate words, or the entire poem, into Cantonese first, if they like, and then to translate the Cantonese into English. This option opens up other acoustic and semantic portals, as students experience the switches between sound and meaning across three languages. Students become more aware of the materiality of language and the ways in which music lies at the heart of composing lyric poetry. Cantonese and Mandarin are languages rich in puns, so listening for words that sound like other words comes naturally to my students. Homophonic translation also provides a sense of poetic form, because they have a ready-​made scaffolding for their English poem: the line breaks, line lengths, and stanza breaks in the “source” poem. They may not understand the Norwegian poem, but visually they can begin to get a sense of the shape of a poem. I invite students to read their translations or excerpts aloud, and they take pleasure in comparing their approaches to various lines. Then I share Robert Bly’s translation of Jacobsen’s poem, and we read the poem together to discuss its meanings. Here is the opening stanza according to Bly: I am the bird that flutters against your window in the morning, and your closest friend, whom you can never know, blossoms that light up for the blind. (39) One of the keys to a successful homophonic translation is usually not to linger too long, if at all, on any single word. It is best to move swiftly and find intuitively the closest sound in English to the foreign sounds on the page. An emphasis on quick decisions keeps students from becoming too self-​conscious and slowing, or, in some cases, stopping, in frustration. The purpose is to write something that students may not have otherwise known

118  James Shea they wanted to say or could say. Leading students towards self-​inquiry and new ways of seeing the world lies at the heart of my goals as a teacher, and this exercise is an example of encouraging students to move outside of their normal approaches to writing. I advise the class not to worry about grammar because they can always return later to revise or polish the poem. I first learned of this writing exercise from an interview with John Ashbery, in which he spoke about employing homophonic translation exercises in his writing courses at Bard College, although it goes as far back at least to Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic translations of Catullus. What is notable about homophonic translation for multilingual students is that they are already predisposed to switching between languages, unlike most monolingual students in North America. Rather than a single exercise in a poetry writing workshop, this generative writing method can be deployed at any time for multilingual students—​it can even be applied to one’s own writing as a form of self-​translation. Students can be attentive to both the meaning and the sound of language, as was the case of the Zukofskys and Catullus’s Latin, and it may allow for new registers of meaning if students self-​translate the sounds of words they already know.

Self-​translation In The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-​Translation, Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson note that self-​translation, the practice of an author translating his or her own text into another language, was a hallmark of multilingual writers since antiquity and spanned the European Middle Ages through the Renaissance. As monolingual nation-​states emerged, self-​translation began to wane, aside from the “translative practice of explorers and colonizers encountering Asia and the Americas and translating their European texts for indigenous peoples or, conversely, their travel journals for readers in Europe” (Hokenson and Munson 1). The practice of self-​translation has taken hold again during the postcolonial era, when writers operate in both their native and colonial languages, “not unlike medievals addressing both Latin and vernacular audiences in the dual text” (Hokenson and Munson 1). Hokenson and Munson envision self-​translation as taking place within a “liminal space” in which the self-​translator “escapes the binary categories of text theory and diverges radically from literary norms; here the translator is the author, the translation is an original, the foreign is the domestic, and vice versa” (161). Hong Kong, like many postcolonial settings in Asia where multilingualism is the norm, would seem to be an ideal place in which to experiment with self-​translation methods in the creative writing classroom. Self-​translation affords students a wide degree of creative expression, a feature celebrated by the 18th-​century playwright Carlo Goldoni, who wrote in both Italian and French and self-​translated his works. Goldoni observes,

Radical translation  119 I nevertheless had an advantage in this regard over others: a mere translator would not have dared, even in the face of difficulty, to sidestep the literal sense; but I, as the author of my own work, was able to change words, the better to conform to the taste and customs of my nation. (qtd. in Montini 306) This literary freedom, even in the spirit of “conforming” to one’s nation, derives from the position of the author as the translator. As Anthony Cordingley notes, this freedom rests on two forms of perceived power: the self-​translator’s ethical “right” to change his or her text, and the self-​translator’s knowledge about the original that is “assumed to be superior” to any other translator (356). Without dwelling on the epistemological problems with the stability of self-​knowledge, I posit that this liminal space of relative agency takes on a special dimension in a place like Hong Kong, where political freedoms are under duress. Ezra Pound, perhaps the first self-​styled Creative Writing instructor in English (e.g., his tutoring of Ernest Hemingway and his book of essays ABC of Reading), spoke of the value in self-​translating one’s poetry into another language as “good training,” whereby if the original poem “wobbles” in the new language, then the poem should be rewritten because the meaning of a poem “can not wobble” (sic) in translation (Literary 7). In this sense, self-​translation becomes a means by which to stress-​test one’s poem for clarity. Twentieth-​ century practitioners of self-​ translation include Nobel Prize winners Rabindranath Tagore (1861–​1941), Samuel Beckett (1906–​ 1989), and Joseph Brodsky (1940–​1996) (Cordingley 353). Citing Andrew Lefevere’s view that all translation is rewriting, Susan Bassnett argues that the self-​translations of Nancy Huston, Tagore, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Amelia Rosselli, and Beckett are a rewriting of their original texts: “There is, of course, always some kind of relationship between the two texts, but … that relationship is surely one of creative reworking, an example of a writer choosing to rewrite for a new readership” (Bassnett 24). In the modern Chinese literary tradition, we find writers such as Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–​ 1976), Xiao Qian 蕭乾 (1910–​1999), and Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–​ 1995) (Kwan 116). More recently, the Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü 夏宇 made what we might call a “self-​cut up” of poems from her book Ventriloquy 腹 語術 (1991) by reassembling her Chinese characters to compose new poems published in Rub Ineffable 摩擦.無以名狀 (1995). Hsia Yü also composed a book titled Pink Noise 粉紅色噪音 (2007) by taking random English text from the Internet, translating the text into Chinese with a machine translation programme (called Sherlock), and then tweaking the English text and repeating the process to create the final translation (Lee). My students are already intimate with methods of self-​translation—​they are constantly self-​translating their writing: whether in an English email to an instructor that they draft in Chinese, or a homework assignment that they sketch out first in Chinese. In terms of creative writing, Wei Zheng and

120  James Shea fellow contributor here Fan Dai have even argued that Chinese Creative Writing students self-​translate a Chinese text “that is often unconsciously inchoate, existing in a liminal space, half-​ imagined, but not expressed, not written” (10). When you add the tools of machine translation, such as Google Translate, students are more expert than ever in the art of self-​ translation. I have found myself becoming increasingly accommodating to self-​translation in my poetry writing workshops. Google Translate is a tool my students already use, so by directly engaging its uses and implications, I encourage them to consider its relationship to poetry and the myriad ways of composing a poem. A recent study in Hong Kong found that upper-​ level primary schoolteachers expressed concern about the effect on students’ motivation to study a second language like English, if machine translation tools such as Google Translate were widely employed in teaching (Stapleton and Leung 29). The study’s authors point to the adoption of the calculator over the slide rule (or abacus), thereby allowing statistics courses to cover statistical principles with a deemphasis on formulas and calculations. They note that “teachers may increasingly need to devise strategies, or new specific purposes to encourage students to learn to write in a foreign language in the face of technology that can provide instant, accurate translations” (Stapleton and Leung 29). In this spirit, my incorporation of machine translation in poetry writing workshops, limited and tentative as it may be, is a way to test out the possibilities for acknowledging the ubiquity of machine translation among my students and, rather than ignore it, experiment with ways to adopt the tool with intentionality. Google Translate is based on a “neural network approach” that “takes enormous amounts of human-​ translated text and trains the system, creating a digital representation of the word or phrase and its accompanying context. It then statistically chooses the closest probable match in the target language” (Stapleton and Leung 19). In practice, students can change their original text easily to adjust the translation, and usually, they can select from different word choices in the translation, so there’s a wide degree of decision-​making available, especially given the speed at which the system operates. Using Google Translate in this way, a student becomes an active, discerning participant, that is, a writer, especially when encouraged to rewrite the translation further. As artificial intelligence advances and machine translation becomes more nuanced, I can envision a day when students may adjust the settings of their translation app to generate translations of their Chinese poems with the diction and syntax of Walt Whitman one week and of Emily Dickinson another week. There is no question that such tools should give one pause, but I submit that we cannot predict the ways that we will make art 50 years from now, and it may well be that machine translation becomes a widely accepted compositional tool among writers. I would rather explore the tool together with my students within the criticality of the classroom, rather than pretend they are not already using it.

Radical translation  121 The importance of revision is one of the harder lessons to teach young writers, who often find it difficult to abandon their first drafts, and self-​ translation can be a means by which to nudge students towards the practice of reimagining their work. Ideally, students are intentional about using self-​ translation, by which I mean that they employ self-​translation as a means to rewrite, not simply to mimic, what they’ve written in the original language. Instead of a straightforward, faithful translation, I encourage students to think of self-​translation as a creative act in which they may deviate from their original Chinese poem towards a new poem in English. Remarkable changes begin to unfold: students see that they are not bound to the original version, and suddenly revision becomes integral to writing. Students become empowered to write in either language, sometimes at the same time, as they switch back and forth between two languages. Self-​translation is a promising way to teach writing among multilingual students, because they start to see their language abilities side by side, rather than as one shutting out the other. Typically, secondary school students in Hong Kong are encouraged not to use Chinese in an English writing course, whereas in a tertiary creative writing class like mine, what matters is the quality of their poems and the interplay of thinking and feeling that leads students to arrive at a poem. There is no single way to write, and self-​translation methods coupled with machine translation are another means of composition. In fact, many contemporary poets strive for off-​kilter moments in language and syntax, as if their aim is to sound like their poems went through machine translation. One example is a line from the American poet Peter Gizzi in his poem “A Winding Sheet for Summer:” “A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer’s blade” (68). The line sounds derived from Google Translate and resonates with another language from his book Archeophonics (2016) that appears occupied with digital life. Intentional “translatese” recalls Rebecca Walkowitz’s argument that certain works are “born translated,” in the sense that “translation functions as a thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device” such that translation has become increasingly embedded in works of literature (4). Last year, I allowed my students to openly submit self-​translations of their Chinese poems on the condition that they tried to rewrite their poem in English. One student named Leslie Tam took up my challenge and submitted half a dozen poems during the semester that were self-​translations. Below is one of his later examples, a 27-​line poem called “Fruit Tree:” Ripening tangerines hit the ground gradually You, having a seat, are moistened by yellow paper and white flowers A dancing flammable sword buries a big house impaled by the sandalwood A swelling leg recovers naturally

122  James Shea while you are looking at the names on the cloth A guarding halo falls into the hole inside the eye of a black dog Ash is cleared by a temporary grassy broom “Burn it.” A living dictionary without a copy Residue is dragged out from the field You follow the red canvas and flow up to the top Chimney lights the fire beacon A black dog evacuates Dust extends to the shadow of window He follows the order bowing his head “Chop.” releasing his tangerine skin, “Creak—​” planting another tree A butterfly accompanies us to a banquet Father predicts dogs and cats will be trapped into the chimney Undefined words can be found on the abandoned grave We draft the last family letter The black dog has its vegetarian diet He ducks, smiles, laughs Toes slip on the ritual money (Tam, “Fruit Tree”) The year prior to my course, Tam wrote this poem originally as a 60-​line poem in Chinese about the death of his grandmother. The original poem focused on the disconnection from one’s familial bonds in the wake of loss. My student then self-​translated the poem into English for my course, making substantial changes, such as cutting more than half of the lines, removing some direct references to family (such as “your son” and “your grandson”), and defamiliarising some allusions to Chinese culture, thereby rewriting the poem in English. The poem became even more impressionistic compared to the original Chinese version, and the speaker’s sense of loss and disillusionment more abstracted. The new version in English still conveys a breakdown in family and even in nature itself, but it moves more obliquely between images, resisting a single interpretation. In addition, whereas Chinese does not need to clarify the verb tense, Tam choose to use present tense in English, which makes the images unspool like a montage, arresting in their sudden juxtapositions. Given that self-​translators “nearly always play a double role as authors and translators affiliated to two different and often competing literary systems,” Tam had to take into consideration the differing aesthetic possibilities in the movement from Chinese to English (Castro 11).

Radical translation  123 Tam began by self-​translating the poem in his own words and then he used some translation tools, such as Google Translate and an English–​ Chinese dictionary app, when he did not know particular words. He chose English words based on their meaning first, but if there were more than one option for a word, he would read the poem aloud and make a decision based on sound. In one instance, his original Chinese line was 黑狗即逃, which he first translated as “A black dog evacuates immediately.” He didn’t like the sound of “immediately,” and so he cut the word and changed the line to: “A black dog evacuates.” The Chinese word 逃 “evacuates” is usually translated as “escapes” or “flees,” but the strangeness of “evacuates” and its double meaning of “escapes” and “defecates” adds another register to the poem, evoking a sense of decomposition alongside words like “burn,” “residue,” and “dusk.” In the final line, we find a reference to the Chinese practice of burning “ritual money” (also known as “Joss paper”) upon a family member’s death, yet Tam used “toes” where we would expect to see the English translation as “fingers.” The welcome oddness of Tam’s English made his poem stand out among his peers as especially penetrating and urgent. Tam ultimately regarded his self-​translation as a “new poem,” not as a translation of his original Chinese version (Tam, “Re: Getting”).

Radical translation My term “radical translation” refers to an unconventional translation practice with a history that dates back to Pound’s idiosyncratic translations of Chinese characters by interpreting the radical compounds that make up such logograms. Akin to Pound’s “ideogrammic method,” this writing strategy in the hands of students who know Chinese is less problematic than in Pound’s case; however, as we will see, fluency is a relative term. First, as an example of this method, consider the excerpt below from Pound’s Canto LIII that was written alongside the character 新 (“new”): Tching prayed on the mountain and     wrote MAKE IT NEW     on his bath tub        Day by day make it new     cut underbrush     pile the logs     keep it growing. (Selected 65) The Chinese character for “new” is made up of three radicals that mean, respectively, “to stand” or “to establish” 立, “tree” 木, and “axe” 斤. Pound recombines these key words to invent a story about adding to a wood pile each day to illustrate Emperor Tching’s apparent motto “make it new,” which eventually became the de facto slogan for modernism (North 162).

124  James Shea The practice of writing poems by using translations of radicals found in Chinese characters also appears in the work of various English-​language poets from Singapore, many of whom are multilingual and experiment by moving between English and other languages, such as Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Singlish, etc. One example is the poet Joshua Ip, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014, whose poem “ideograms” is a series of interlocking haiku with one-​word English titles and a corresponding Chinese character (“Joshua”). Here’s an excerpt: fear—​怕 her arms drip at sides facing her stark nemesis who is only white. (24) Chinese characters are made up of radicals that either freight a semantic meaning or relate to the pronunciation of the character. The Chinese character for “fear,” for instance, is composed of two radicals: “heart” 心 (which pertains to the emotion of fear) and “white” 白 (which indicates how to pronounce the character). Ip interprets the first radical visually as a woman with her arms hanging at her side as she looks across at the second radical personified as an enemy “who is only white.” Ip’s poem emerges from his creative readings (or intentional misreadings) of the radical compounds found in Chinese characters, taking the procedure a step further than Pound. Whereas Pound tried to render the actual meaning of radicals, Ip is comfortable moving beyond literal meanings into even more imaginative, playful translations. Chinese dishes are well known for having poetic names, such as “Buddha Jumping Over the Wall” 佛跳牆, a shark-​fin soup said to temp monks to leave their monasteries; “Exquisite Hearts of Jade” 玲瓏玉心, a dish with daikon pieces cut into the shape of hearts with dried scallops stuffed inside; and “Dark Clouds Holding the Moon” 烏雲托月, a soup from Shandong province made with a poached quail egg (moon) surrounded by seaweed (clouds). Inspired by Pound’s translations and these lyrical names for Chinese dishes, I devised a generative writing activity that relies on my students’ knowledge of Chinese. I ask students to bring a dim sum menu to class and to select their favourite dish—​my student Hailey Pang, for instance, chose siu mai 燒賣, steamed dumplings made with shrimp and pork. I told students to breakdown the Chinese characters into their radical compounds and to translate each compound into its English equivalent, so, for example, siu mai is represented by two characters燒 (“to roast” or “to burn”) and 賣 (“to sell”). The character 燒 (siu) includes the radicals for “fire” 火, “land” 土 (repeated three times), and “bald” 兀. This latter radical can be broken down further into the radicals for “person” and “one”; however, my student

Radical translation  125 chose “bald” as the more fruitful choice. The second character賣 (mai) is made of the radicals representing “scholar” 士, “net” or “trap” 罒, and “shellfish” or “money” (archaic) 貝. I defer to my students on how to discern the radicals within the Chinese characters, and sometimes they disagree about how to interpret the radicals, or they are not sure which radicals make up a word. But it does not matter, because the main point is to create an English word bank inspired by the characters. Pound reported that when he had trouble understanding a Chinese character, he would simply guess the meaning by taking a good look at the character and its radicals: “When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from” (qtd. in Kenner, “Inventing” 168). This exercise brings the notion of fluency as a stable category into question, for even though my Hong Kong students are native speakers of Chinese, they sometimes struggle with the nuances of discerning radical compounds. Such interpretations recall Hugh Kenner’s famous question in his biography of Pound: “Is the life of the mind a history of interesting mistakes? … More pertinently: is the surest way to a fructive western idea the misunderstanding of an eastern one?” (230). Can anyone be said to understand one’s own language? The poet, of course, says, thankfully, no. In the case of my multilingual students, they have some control over their misunderstandings; that is, they can entertain an intentional misreading of radicals to defamiliarise Chinese and arrive at something they may not have otherwise thought to say. From the word bank, students compose a poem that may relate to the dish or be a complete departure. Below is Hailey’s poem “The Story of Siu Mai” that illustrates this use of radical compounds: The fire is burning the land One by one, to the third. Round and round Until they all become barren Like a bald man. A scholar was burnt to death When he was picking up Another’s money. Dust to dust, ash to ash (Pang) The “Siu Mai” in the title might be read as the name of the dead scholar, especially for English-​language readers not familiar with Chinese dim sum. The first four lines are drawn from the radicals “fire” and “land,” as the speaker describes a fire raging across the earth and burning it sections at a time. The clever simile of the barren land as looking “like a bald man” arises from a reading of the radical “bald” and anticipates the “scholar” radical in

126  James Shea the second character. This stanza’s imagery also mirrors the meaning of the entire character siu (“to burn”). In the Confucian tradition, a scholar should forgo money in favour of intellectual contemplation. The second stanza implies that the scholar died because of his pursuit of material wealth. The last line returns us to the fire at the beginning of the poem, implying an all-​ encompassing conflagration with biblical implications. In addition to homophonic translation, self-​ translation, and “radical translation,” I also teach various strategies of adaptation by showing students English poems that borrow from Chinese models and vice versa. These adaptations include Charles Wright’s “Portrait of the Artist with Li Po” (a homage to Li Bai that uses an older phonetic spelling of his name and borrows a line from him) and the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi’s poem “Supermarket,” a rewriting of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.” Most interesting, perhaps, is Mark Strand’s poem “The One Song,” that adapts lines from Arthur Waley’s partial translation of a poem called “Three Poems on Feelings” (有感三首) by Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772–​846). Here are the opening stanzas to Strand’s 16-​line poem: I prefer to sit all day like a sack in a chair and to lie all night like a stone in my bed. When food comes I open my mouth. When sleep comes I close my eyes. (116) These lines closely follow the second half of Waley’s translation of an excerpt from Bai Juyi’s poem: Keep off your thoughts from things that are past and done; For thinking of the past wakes regret and pain. Keep off your thoughts from thinking what will happen; To think of the future fills one with dismay. Better by day to sit like a sack in your chair; Better by night to lie a stone in your bed. When food comes, then open your mouth; When sleep comes, then close your eyes. (137) Entitled “Resignation,” Waley’s excerpt is taken from the last section of Bai Juyi’s three-​part poem. Apparently, Waley felt these lines were the most compelling part of the poem, and Strand picked up on their rhythm and

Radical translation  127 imagery to fashion his own version. After discussing a range of possibilities for adaptation—​borrowing a line (Wright), rewriting a poem (Xi Xi), adapting and extending lines (Strand)—​I ask students to select a poem from our anthology, Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing, and write their own adaptation of a poem from the book. The cross-​pollination of English and Chinese poetry has its roots in “one of the neater symmetries of modernism,” as recounted by Eliot Weinberger: the Chinese writer Hu Shih 胡適 (1891–​1962) found some inspiration for China’s national movement to write in vernacular Chinese by way of Ezra Pound’s Imagist manifesto that was itself influenced by classical Chinese poetry (73). My multilingual poetry writing classroom in Hong Kong is yet another extension of this circulatory system of literary exchange between the Chinese and English writing traditions. I also teach Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in order to explore the cultural history behind translations over time. After a discussion of the book, we compose a collective translation of Wang Wei’s famous poem with a one-​syllable English word for each Chinese character. We write the translation on the board and add diacritic marks over the English vowels to match the proper tones in Chinese. I borrowed this idea from the poet and scholar Jonathan Stalling, who proposed “Sinophonic English” or “Yíngēlìshī,” an application of the four tones in Chinese to English syllables to open up new poetic effects in English. This is the cornerstone of his project to explore a “transpacific imaginary wherein a Chinese-​English poetry, poetics, philosophy, and ethics are born in a language that belongs to both Chinese and English speakers, and yet also to neither” (4). Stalling’s proposal for a transpacific poetics posits a bold vision of the potential for multilingual writers to work across languages in innovative ways. Embedded in this notion is the act of translation, and instructors of creative writing in multilingual settings may find fertile ground to incorporate translation strategies in students’ composition process. These methods can enrich a writing workshop by expanding the space for multilingual students to draw upon all sides of their linguistic and cultural identities.

Works cited Bassnett, Susan. “The Self-​ Translator as Rewriter.” Self-​Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, edited by Anthony Cordingley, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 13–​25. Castro, Olga, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page. “Introduction: Self-​ Translating, from Minorisation to Empowerment.” Self-​Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts, edited by Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 1–​22. Cordingley, Anthony. “Self-​Translation.” The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke, Routledge, 2019, pp. 352–​68.

128  James Shea Dai, Fan, and Wei Zheng. “Self-​Translation and English-​language Creative Writing in China.” World Englishes, 2019, pp. 1–​12. Wiley Online Library, doi.org/​10.1111/​ weng.12377. Gizzi, Peter. “A Winding Sheet for Summer.” Archeophonics, Wesleyan U P, 2016. Hokenson, Jan, and Marcella Munson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-​Translation, St. Jerome Publishing, 2007. Ip, Joshua. “ideograms.” Making Love with Scrabble Tiles, Math Paper Press, 2015. Jacobsen, Rolf. “Guardian Angel.” The Roads Have Come to an End Now: Selected and Last Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, Copper Canyon Press, 2001. “Joshua Ip.” Biography, Poetry SG, 2020, www.poetry.sg/​joshua-​ip-​bio. Kenner, Hugh. “Inventing Confucius.” Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, edited by Peter Makin, Oxford U P, 2006, pp. 165–80. —​—​—​. The Pound Era, U of California P, 1973. Kwan, Uganda Sze Pui. “Strategizing Hong Kong Literature in the World: Self-​ Collaborative Translation of Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas.” Century of Chinese Literature in Translation (1919–​2019): English Publication and Reception, edited by Leah Gerber and Lintao Qi, Routledge, 2020, pp. 116–​31. Lee, Tong King. “Cybertext: A Topology of Reading.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 172–​203. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/​stable/​ 26426656. Montini, Chiara. “Self-​Translation.” Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, pp. 306–​08. North, Michael. Novelty: A History of the New. U of Chicago P, 2013. Pang, Hailey Wan Hei. “The Story of Siu Mai.” 27 Apr. 2018. WRIT 3016 Special Topic in Creative Writing: Poetry Writing Workshop, Hong Kong Baptist University, Poem. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New Directions, 1968. —​—​—​. Selected Cantos. New Directions, 1970. Stalling, Jonathan. “Introduction.” Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics, Counterpath, 2011, 1–11. Stapleton, Paul, and Becky Ka Kin Leung. “Assessing the Accuracy and Teachers Impressions of Google Translate: A Study of Primary L2 Writers in Hong Kong.” English for Specific Purposes, vol. 56, 2019, pp. 18–​34. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/​j.esp.2019.07.001. Strand, Mark. “The One Song.” Collected Poems. Knopf, 2014, p. 116. Tam, Leslie Chi Wai. “Fruit Tree.” 17 Apr. 2019. WRIT 3016 Special Topic in Creative Writing: Poetry Writing Workshop, Hong Kong Baptist University, Poem. —​—​—​. “Re: Getting in Touch.” Received by James Shea, 1 Oct. 2020. Waley, Arthur. “Resignation.” Translations from the Chinese, Knopf, 1941. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Columbia U P, 2015. Weinberger, Eliot. “A Few Don’ts for Chinese Poets.” Works on Paper, New Directions, 1986.

Part 2

… and the landscape

8  Another English Filipinos write back Jose Dalisay Jr.

To understand how Creative Writing in English is being taught and learned in the Philippines today, it is important first of all to look back on how English came to be the language of power and privilege—​and some would say of the literary imagination—​in the Philippines. English was not always our language of choice. It was the second of our colonial languages after Spanish, but while the use of Spanish in all forms of communication has largely vanished, English has endured if not become even more pervasive in its usage as one of the Philippines’ official languages. As an archipelago of over 7,000 islands and nearly 200 languages, once occupied by Spain, the US, and Japan, and heavily influenced in trade and culture by China and the Islamic south, the Philippines can be expected to have a long-​running, varied, and vibrant literature. Today, Filipino writers write mainly in English and the national language, also called Filipino, but a lively literature continues to be produced in regional languages such as Iluko, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Bikol. The emergence of the Internet has opened new publishing opportunities for writing in regional languages that had long been sidelined by prohibitive publishing costs and dwindling readerships. Unfortunately, not much has happened by way of literary translation, still an incipient art in the Philippines, so it has been largely left to our literature in English—​a project that began with the American occupation of the Philippines from 1898 to 1941—​to showcase our production to the rest of the world.

(Then) An American colony We were an American colony for the first half of the 20th century. We were America’s first imperial project, its first Vietnam. We were one huge schoolhouse for American values and traditions, and for better or for worse—​we should say both—​we now embody both the best and the worst of American tutelage. A popular summation of our colonial history and its cultural effects is that we spent 300 years in a convent and then 50 years in Hollywood (Hincks; Weedon). DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-9

132  Jose Dalisay Jr. In 1901, an American military transport, the Thomas, arrived with a contingent of several hundred schoolteachers, many of them from the Midwest. These “Thomasites,” as they came to be known, formed the backbone of an extensive public school system patterned after America’s. And with them, they brought a new language, English, which very quickly overtook Spanish and our native languages as the language of privilege—​of government, public instruction, commerce, mass communication, and, inevitably, of a new literary canon. Let me just recall in this respect that until the early 1960s, when I was in grade school, Filipino students in middle-​and upper-​ class schools caught speaking a language other than English were fined. So quickly did we take to English that we did not wait for the Thomasites to learn and to produce literature in the new language. We published our first poems in English in 1905—​a small collection put together by some of the first scholars we sent to study in the US. By 1921, we had produced our first novel in English, Zoilo Galang’s Child of Sorrow; by 1925, the first acknowledged masterpiece of the Filipino short story in English, Paz Marquez Benitez’s “Dead Stars.” By the 1930s, Filipino writers such as Manuel Arguilla, Sinai Hamada, and Jose Garcia Villa were producing poems and stories in English in prodigious amounts, some of them of such a quality that they were published in America itself—​in such leading periodicals as Poetry and Story, and Edward O’Brien’s Best American Short Stories series, most notably Villa’s “Footnote to Youth” (1932). This, to the Filipino writer then, was the pinnacle of achievement: acceptance into the ranks of American literature, the empire writing back. The critical temper of the times was defined in the Anglo-​American tradition. The material itself was still deeply native, but the sensibility that informed it was borrowed, transformed, and only much later re-​indigenised. Dr. Gémino Abad, a poet and critic who has done more than anyone else to survey our poetry in English, reports that During the first forty years or so, the creative struggle was with both the new language, English, and the poet’s subject: that is, the native or Filipino matter, both sense and sensibility, that is to be expressed in and thought through that language. (Abad 327) He adds, however, that It is a little misleading to speak of a literary apprenticeship during those first forty years, because we already had accomplished writers in Spanish, Tagalog, and the other native languages. The apprenticeship was linguistic and cultural, but not in the literary or the poetic art itself. (Abad 328)

Another English  133 While the poetic grammar may have been universal, in the Philippines, as elsewhere, the local vernacular required time to strike a balance between a global language and attempts to publish on opposite sides of the planet. Abad also notes, In the fifties … the American New Criticism began to hold critical sway. Indeed, to the present, its influence is still conspicuous in writers’ workshops, critical reviews, and judgments in literary contests. By the seventies, however, it had become inevitable that, with facility in the language and mastery of poetic form, new ways would be found for forging—​in a double sense, to fashion and to feign—​the work called poem. (327) Part of this nationalisation of Filipino literature included holding a mirror up to the changing political nature as well. Abad describes, As an effect of political activism in the midsixties and the Martial Law regime, it had again become an urgent issue with the poet that his poems connect with the social reality even while he recognized the requirement of formal excellence. (330) The New Critical isolation of “the well wrought urn” could only persist for so long. The late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes charted the canon of the Philippine short story in English, which he saw to have emerged “Athena-​like … born full grown” (xx). Indeed, it can be said that the short story is our most developed literary form.

The Anglo-​American influence I should note that as it did two centuries earlier in the US, the Filipino short story as well as poetry in English emerged and developed on the pages of popular magazines. A typical Sunday magazine of the 1930s contained a short story by a Filipino, an American short story (presumably the model), a poem by, say, John Whittier or Emily Dickinson, and then a poem by a Filipino. By the 1950s, this too-​obvious patterning yielded to entirely local efforts, although the Anglo-​American influence was even more strongly evident with the exposure of a generation of post-​ war Filipino writers to New Criticism in the US, most notably through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Not surprisingly, our colonial experience and the rise of a English-​ speaking elite—​ including the writers themselves—​ led to ruptures in the native fabric and to the alienation of the elite, a condition often mirrored

134  Jose Dalisay Jr. in literature. As Fr. Joseph Galdon, an American Jesuit critic of Philippine literature, observed some 50 years ago: The Filipino is a stranger in his own house. Over and over again, the Filipino is pictured as an outsider, a kind of Asian Meursault, searching for his identity, struggling with alienation of one form or another, plagued by frustration and angst … Much of the fiction of the postwar period in the Philippines is the story of the Filipino as pilgrim, in search of his past. The search and the journey are pervasive symbols … in writers of Philippine fiction … The journey theme centers on three main areas—​cultural identity, the barrio-​city contrast, and the theme of illusion and reality. (7) A more recent visitor, Dr. Gerald Burns, noted another vital strain in our literature: the experience of the exile who returns from a foreign country to help the motherland, only to discover that he or she doesn’t belong here anymore, that foreign-​ learned prescriptions do not easily apply to local problems. This condition, which Burns calls the “repatriate” condition, follows from another familiar figure in our history and literature, the Filipino abroad—​a figure beloved of such writers as Jose Rizal in the 1880s, Carlos Bulosan in the 1930s, Bienvenido Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez in the 1940s and 1950s, and of my generation in the 1980s and 1990s. Global dispersal is especially relevant today, with the Filipino labour diaspora now accounting for a tenth of our 100-​million+ population. Burns notes that “[Repatriates] experience alienation from the community to which they return” (209). They suffer a deep personal defeat, as naïve romantics are bound to meet. This estrangement in a homeland, however, is not a total loss, but a necessary part of a larger process. Burns explains this by quoting Leon María Guerrero, Rizal’s translator, who wrote in the context of our Roman Catholicism that Filipinos do not value failure, or for that matter tragedy, for its own sake, but only insofar as these are submerged into the larger end of sacrifice. “We save our highest homage and deepest love for the Christ-​ like victims whose mission is to consummate by their tragic ‘failure’ the redemption of our nation.” (213)

From Rizal to Murakami By general consensus, our finest literature was written not in English, but in Spanish—​the two novels of Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891). To this day, Filipino novelists in any language labour in the shadow of Rizal’s ambition and achievement. Rizal defined, for a

Another English  135 century after him, the obligatory elements of what might be thought of to be the best of literature by and for Filipinos: a heroic theme involving issues of national significance, a love story underneath, keen social perception, soaring language. Valuable lessons, still, for any writing student. But that consensus might yet change, with a new wave of writing produced by young, brash, and brilliant writers connected less to Rizal than to Haruki Murakami, less to newsprint than to Wattpad; there’s a boom in young adult fiction, in speculative fiction, in gay writing, in graphic novels, in writing that reaches deep into our rich trove of myths and mystic beliefs, into our varied ethnolinguistic traditions. And this is happening not only in English but also in Filipino and our major regional languages. Some Filipino authors—​F. Sionil Jose, Jessica Hagedorn, Gina Apostol, and Miguel Syjuco, among others—​have begun to gain an international readership. Within Southeast Asia, the Philippines has led in the teaching of Creative Writing, with two annual national workshops now running for at least 50 years, and writing programmes from the bachelor’s to the PhD level to be found in several major Philippine universities, including those referenced below. Workshops are also held in regional languages, with support from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. We still have much to do—​I have often emphasised that writing more novels, never our strong suit, will be key to breaking out into the global publishing market, as is more literary translation. But both tradition and individual talent are here aplenty, and it should only be a matter of time before Philippine writing earns its rightful place in the world’s attention.

Creative Writing (CW) in Philippine Universities Philippine literature will only gain global attention if we sustain what has also been a long and distinguished tradition of teaching Creative Writing, probably Southeast Asia’s longest and most formally developed tradition, particularly in English. Many of the country’s university-​based CW programmes offer a range of degrees from the baccalaureate to the doctoral level, covering all genres—​poetry, fiction, drama, and creative non-​fiction. Our tradition of teaching CW in universities, in English, began after the Second World War, when two pioneering writers and teachers associated with Silliman University in Dumaguete City (established by the Presbyterians in 1901), the couple Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, went to the US to take their PhDs in English at the University of Denver and also to attend the famous Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Upon their return to the Philippines and to Silliman, they instituted a formal CW major under the Department of English, Literature, and CW. While it was conducted mostly in English, students who preferred to do creative work in the local languages, Filipino and Binisaya, were allowed to do so. Over the next many decades, the Silliman initiative evolved into a full-​ fledged academic programme offering degrees in CW from the bachelor’s to

136  Jose Dalisay Jr. the master’s and the doctoral level—​the BA, MA/​MFA, and PhD. Silliman would produce many excellent writers, as well as luminaries in theatre and music, but it would be its annual Summer Writers’ Workshop (the Philippine “summer” being generally the period between March and May) that would be its strongest contribution to creative writing in the Philippines in terms of both teaching and literary production. More will be said later about these workshops, but Silliman’s pioneering role in bringing over to the Philippines Iowa-​style workshops steeped in New Criticism is noteworthy. The University of the Philippines (UP)—​a state university system not unlike California’s, spanning eight constituent universities—​was established a few years after Silliman in 1908, and has since nurtured the largest and most influential crop of creative writers in the Philippines, in English, Filipino, and other local languages. The UP produced the core of the country’s intellectual elite under the American colonial administration in the first half of the 20th century, and having been patterned after US universities such as Harvard and Michigan, has always had strong liberal arts and general education foundations. Thus, creative writing before the War was integral to UP’s English language and literature programme (the Department of Filipino and Philippine Languages would not be established until 1966). In the 1980s, CW (then called Imaginative Writing) began to be offered as a degree programme in English on UP’s main campus in Diliman, and as a master’s and doctoral option from the 1990s onward; its Filipino counterpart followed suit not long after, all the way to the PhD. UP’s creative writing programmes have graduated many hundreds if not thousands of students over the decades, as an option among more traditional programmes in language studies, comparative literature, and Anglo-​American literature. It has attracted consistently high enrolments—​a bit of a mystery, considering the reputed lack of economic viability for CW graduates, a matter I will also shortly expound on. A few years after Silliman University launched its writers’ workshop in 1962, the UP National Summer Writers’ Workshop began in 1965, with the difference that it was a bilingual workshop, in English and Filipino. While Silliman was known as a bastion of English, UP had a long tradition of nationalist and radical politics, so especially as the 1960s wore on into the more politically inflamed 1970s, it was important for UP—​and for Philippine literature and creative writing as a whole—​to embrace bilingualism and indeed privilege Filipino as a medium of creative expression over English. UP’s other constituent universities such as UP Mindanao have also offered CW as a subject if not, or not yet, as a degree option at the undergraduate level. In UP Mindanao, it is an area of concentration under the English programme (the degree is BA English-​CW), although efforts are underway to transform it into a BA CW proper. Another major Philippine university with a long and strong history of teaching and producing creative writing is the 400-​year-​old University of

Another English  137 Santo Tomas (UST), established by the Dominican order in 1611, and the country’s if not the region’s most eminent Catholic university, especially under Spanish rule until the American occupation in 1898. It has also accounted for a significant share of the Philippines’ most accomplished writers in English, Filipino, and Spanish. UST’s academic programmes in CW, however, have been fairly recent, starting with its MA programme only around 2000, followed by a bilingual AB programme under the Literature department; a PhD programme, also bilingual, is in the works. The undergraduate CW programme is a popular one, attracting more majors than the Literature degree. UST has also been hosting, for about 20 years now, an annual and bilingual writers’ workshop. Other major universities with CW programmes include De La Salle University (DLSU, established in 1911 by the La Salle Brothers), which offers CW degrees on all three levels, including an MFA, as a track option under the general umbrella of Literature. CW in DLSU is taught bilingually and even multilingually; a Korean CW major was allowed to submit her poems in Korean, with an English translation, while an MFA student writing in Hiligaynon, a regional language, was allowed to do a novel in that language, supervised by a Hiligaynon expert. Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU), founded in 1859 by the Jesuits, has offered a BFA in CW under its Department of Fine Arts since about 2000. While traditionally associated with the English-​ speaking Filipino upper class, Ateneo (and, it must be said, La Salle) have also hosted and produced important writers in Filipino. What emerges from this overview of the Philippines’ academic offerings in CW is a robust and well-​integrated tradition of teaching CW, usually within English or literature programmes. The enrolment numbers seem positive enough for these programmes to be sustainable. Writing in 2021 before the Covid pandemic, DLSU’s Prof. Shirley Lua, for example, reported that In the AB Literature program, the enrollment per batch has an average of 15–​20 students, or even more … For the MFA program, the enrollment per batch has an average of 15–​20. DLSU also offers an MA in Language and Literature. The total enrollment for MA programs has increased to 100 enrollees per year in the last three to five years. A typical requirement for a creative MA thesis or PhD dissertation would be a work of substantial length in the candidate’s chosen genre, prefaced by a comprehensive critical essay that integrates the author’s personal writing experience and poetics with the literary history or traditions to which he or she is presumably contributing. (It must also be noted that the concept of a Master of Fine Arts or MFA, especially as a terminal degree, is relatively new in the Philippines, and is still seen as a 30-​to 36-​credit prelude to an eventual PhD—​compared, for example, to a 48-​credit, terminal-​degree MFA from US universities.)

138  Jose Dalisay Jr.

CW workshops and centres or institutes What must be noted about the Philippine experience, however, is that the teaching of creative writing never prospered simply in the classroom. It was accompanied and amplified, almost from the very beginning, by the existence of creative writing workshops and, somewhat later, by the establishment of CW centres or institutes within some universities to oversee these workshops, among other initiatives. These workshops include those of Silliman University (solely in English, starting in 1962); the UP (bilingual, since 1965); the UST (bilingual, since 2000); and at the Ateneo de Manila, the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod, and the Mindanao State University-​Iligan Institute of Technology, among others. Typically, these workshops are open to applicants beyond their host universities, and participants are selected by competition; no fees are collected, and some workshop fellows are even provided with stipends to attend the one-​or two-​week intensive workshops conducted by senior writers. Among these, the UP workshop has the distinction of being a “mid-​ career” workshop, geared for writers who have already published at least one book. The other workshops cater to young writers just beginning or contemplating their careers. To run and manage these workshops, as well as other CW-​ related initiatives, CW centres or institutes have also been set up within major universities, often administratively separate from the faculties or departments in charge of CW programmes. At UP, the Institute of Creative Writing has been in operation since 1978, and apart from running the annual workshop, it publishes the Likhaan Journal (the country’s most prestigious literary journal), gives out a prize for the best first book of the year, maintains an online portal to Philippine literature, and holds seminars for teachers of CW. At UST and DLSU, the Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (1999) and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (1991) perform similar functions. Being focused on practising writers and teachers of CW, these centres have arguably done at least as much for the promotion of creative writing in the Philippines as formal academic programmes. Most importantly, they have reached out beyond classrooms to enable non-​students and professionals with writing talent to bridge the gap between writing and publishing.

English and bilingualism Despite the Filipinos’ century-​long familiarity with English and its pervasiveness in Philippine society, its employment (a word I use consciously) as a literary language has posed some special problems. It remains the perceived language of the upper and middle class, so that—​in a steeply stratified and

Another English  139 class-​conscious society like the Philippines—​its use in creative writing by writers from that elite very often limits the material, mindset, and form of whatever is written to those familiar to that class. See Prof. Hemley’s chapter on how the non-​fiction memoir in the Philippines tends to be written by privileged women, two of several factors which can make memoir in the Philippines more centrifugal than centripetal, reaching out to (and for) distant centres, not within. In other words, with few exceptions, there is a great disjunction between what our writers in English write and the social and economic experience and realities of the poor masses of our people, with the language itself acting as a distancing agent. Few novels or poems in English, if any, are being written about our factory workers, farmers, and fisherfolk. This has encouraged belief in a false dichotomy: that English is for bourgeois concerns, while Filipino and regional languages such as Iluko and Hiligaynon are best suited for more pedestrian matters. Their awareness of this perception has led many contemporary Filipino writers and teachers of writing to go bilingual in their practice (most college-​educated Filipinos will speak and write both Filipino and English, plus a regional language). In our context, monolingual writing programmes seem not only to be aberrations caused by academic turfing but unnatural and arguably counterproductive. There is also a dearth of translation; with very few exceptions, even the most notable works in English or Filipino or the other Philippine languages have not been translated into another language. Given our long immersion as well in New Criticism, and the exposure of our senior mentors to the Anglo-​American tradition, earlier CW classes and workshops in CW in English tended to default to formalist critique, although more socially and historically grounded discussions have become the more recent norm. After decades fixated on the thematic implications of imaginary settings, programmes are now more attentive to the settings out the classroom window (or even the setting of the classroom). Indeed it has even happened that workshop submissions with serious grammatical and stylistic problems that would have automatically excluded them from workshops in an earlier time have been accepted on the strength of their material and their treatment, in the belief that grammar and style can be edited, but that insightful talent can be too precious to lose and needs to be encouraged. Besides the politics of language, the use of English presents some aesthetic challenges as well. Filipino English (or perhaps english with the small “e”) is neither American nor British English, but a variant with its own idioms. Earlier on in the 20th century, especially in schools, writing in straight American English was prescribed, although relatively few achieved this standard. Today, the English of Filipino-​written fiction is much more colloquial and relaxed, admitting of localisms and even the entry of Filipino words. Still, the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is often tested in

140  Jose Dalisay Jr. the realist mode when characters who ordinarily would not be speaking in English are made to do so. Of more significance to the teaching of CW in English to Filipinos is simply the troubling decline of English proficiency among Filipino students over the past several decades. Some of this has been charged to bilingualism and the popularity of “Taglish,” the local mongrelisation of English and Tagalog (the base language of Filipino), but the more likely cause is the deterioration of language skills among teachers themselves—​a profession plagued by low salaries and by the exodus of Education graduates in the Filipino diaspora. This is further rooted in what has been perceived to be a general, generational decline in reading skills—​and in reading, period—​ among younger Filipinos, as a result of many factors: the insufficiency of investment in education, the lack of libraries, and the rise of the Internet and social media, among others. Ian Rosales Casocot, a fictionist who directs the writing programme at Silliman University, observes that The language has been a hindrance in an unusual way. We sometimes get CW students who insist on writing in English, although we feel they may be better off writing either in Filipino or Binisaya, which we don’t discourage. Otherwise, doing the workshops in English has been fine. What is more of a hindrance is the reading habits of students, esp. those before K-​12. Many of them don’t really read, or have not gone beyond romance novels or pulp fiction, so when they encounter literary fiction, or even classics, they’re often in shock. So why do Filipino students persist in writing in English, despite their often self-​acknowledged limitations?

A language of privilege First again is the aspirational aspect, the perceived social and economic premium accorded to English, which is seen to provide access to national and even global networks. This perception, which has held for over a century and was only briefly challenged by the nationalist upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s, has been bolstered by the rise of the Philippines from the late 1990s onwards as one of the world’s leaders in business process outsourcing (BPO), an industry whose call centres are highly dependent on a critical mass of English-​speaking workers. To a nation whose one out of ten citizens works and lives abroad in a massive diaspora, English is also a way out. In the literary field, especially with the lack of translations, writing in English provides a direct line to a global audience or market. It also happens that in some universities, especially those in regions far from Manila such as Silliman University in the Visayas and the UP in

Another English  141 Mindanao, writing in English is the only option available on the curriculum, because of a shortage of teachers in other languages. Jhoanna Lynn Cruz, who teaches Creative Writing at UP Mindanao, notes the adjustments that both students and teachers have had to make: As for English as a medium of instruction and creative writing, our students come to us knowing that, and thus work within that limitation. In very few cases, we have had students who really had difficulty writing in English and we wished we could let those students write in their first language instead. In one case, we did because she would not have been able to graduate if we had insisted on English. So we allowed the collection of poetry in Binisaya with English translations, but the critical preface was in English. But this was an exception. Despite these difficulties and accommodations, teachers still find value in promoting CW among their students—​in English or whatever language—​ as a means of encouraging self-​expression and identity formation. Prof. Cruz, whose students include indigenous people who often find themselves marginalised or discriminated against, relates that: I’ve been with the program since 2007, and I think it has been a true privilege to have been part of these students’ writing journeys. While some of them did not start out with interest or talent, as in the case of other programs, it’s amazing to see how the CW curriculum can make a difference, as evidenced by the student theses. Those that come to the program because of their life material probably benefit the most because they learn how to phrase and craft their material in ways that help them through the process of healing, or awakening to ideology, for instance. One of my Muslim thesis advisees—​who started out in the program lackadaisical and later became a frat boy—​produced a poetry manuscript in which he grappled with his identity as a Moro, fighting for the right to self-​determination. It was fascinating to see the transformation on the page. For me, it is a case like that that makes my teaching CW in Mindanao particularly important. And it is not an isolated case.

A career portal Creative writing has never been a lucrative profession in the Philippines. Despite the presence of many talented and active writers across the generations and of a resurgent publishing industry, creative writing—​with a few individual exceptions—​does not normally provide authors with enough of an income to support themselves and their families. This means that it often serves as a portal or an adjunct to other jobs and careers.

142  Jose Dalisay Jr. This springboard quality is clearly borne out by the responses of students to the query of Ian Casocot at Silliman University, who asked them why they had chosen to take up CW as their major: Student 1: I study Creative Writing because it is the field where I could practice what I am passionate about which is reading and writing. My love for words will always be helpful in this field. This course will also mould me to become a skilled creative writer and hopefully I can use this as a platform to promote my advocacy and eventually help and serve my community. I think this degree will lead me to corporate industry. Content writing is in demand these days, especially in social media, where there are lots of opportunities being offered for content creators. Also, creative writing is really significant in pursuing a Juris Doctor degree, for writing is essential in drafting legal pleadings and legal papers. Student 2: I took up Creative Writing to follow a passion that I’ve had for reading and writing, and hoped to make a career out of it. I know this will help me not only to be a better writer, but also to be a more critical thinker. I plan to pursue Law after my undergraduate studies, so I believe CW will help me get used to writing and even to create connections. But if I can help it, I’d like a career in publishing, which I think Creative Writing, especially the workshops, can help me be ready for. Student 3: At first, I didn’t really know why I decided to study Creative Writing. I still am not entirely sure now. What I do know (and believe) is that I do have the ability to tell stories despite being terrible in grammar. I feel like studying CW will help me improve that ability especially in the field of filmmaking. As for where I think this degree will take me, I have few ideas. Aside from the obvious option which is to be a writer, a CW degree could probably take me to teaching profession, or work in advertising or a magazine or publication company, journalism, entertainment (TV, stage, moviemaking), and law. This dual interest in both writing their own literature while also preparing for adjacent careers is supported by Shirley Lua’s observations of her students at DLSU: Those who want to be creative writers want to write speculative fiction, screenplays, or graphic fiction. There seems to be an increasing interest in writing for film, and perhaps in filmmaking. We have allowed students to do screenwriting and even graphic fiction as their final thesis. For those doing screenwriting and playwriting, it is part of their requirement to have the script tested in the field, say, have a student group adapt their script into a short film or stage their play.

Another English  143 At the MFA level, DLSU’s Literature Department has allowed one exceptional MFA student to do a hybrid creative work—​poetry, script, musical composition, visual art—​as her final thesis output. The student happened to be multi-​talented and constructively ambitious. At UST, Prof. Jack Wigley reports a similar shift to students writing their own literature as providing the in-​depth education in communication formerly associated with a literature degree, where one writes about Anglo-​ American literature: Our CW program at the undergraduate level is now in its third year. There is one section per class in the first, second, and third year and the average number of students per year level is around thirty-​five. They study both in English and Filipino. They can be our future writers, editors, speech writers, publishers, proofreaders, teachers, and media practitioners. As of this time, there are even more students taking up AB Creative Writing than AB Literature. In all of these universities, the enthusiasm for creative writing is clearly there among the students—​tempered, however, by their acknowledgement of the likelihood that few of them will go on to become creative writers for life, and that they can and will use their CW skills to advance in such areas as the law, advertising, publishing, or teaching. Indeed, given the nature of Creative Writing, or any artistic discipline for that matter, it is only logical to accept that CW programmes will inevitably incur a high degree of attrition—​that is, in a class or a workshop of 20 students, one or two will probably be talented and driven enough to move on as writers, while the rest will take career paths where their CW background can prove useful. Filipino teachers of CW are fully aware of these economics and have provided for them in their approach to teaching the subject. For university departments needing to attract new and more enrolees, CW programmes have been actively advertised as the portals they can be. The popular impression that CW classes are “easy” compared to, say, Comparative Literature—​ soon disabused by their first workshops—​no doubt contributes as well to enrolment figures. Aware of these concerns, specifically the employability of our CW graduates at the UP, I designed a course in Professional Writing for our CW majors which, since its inception in 1998, has introduced them to practical skills in news and features writing, scriptwriting, speechwriting, editing, publishing, and graphic design, among others—​topics normally taught in other departments but not in a one-​semester overview, and outside the scope of our workshops in the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and creative non-​fiction.

144  Jose Dalisay Jr. In summary, CW has long been part of a tradition of liberal education in the Philippines, in the context of a society emerging from centuries of colonialism, with a complex and yet evolving sense of nationhood. English—​ perhaps the most enduring and pervasive cultural legacy of our colonial past aside from Christianity—​has for many been their preferred language for creative writing, as it represents social and economic mobility and access to an international audience. However, there is a growing and logical trend towards teaching Creative Writing in a bilingual or multilingual mode. The Philippines has led the Southeast Asian region in the availability and scope of Creative Writing programmes and workshops offered by its major universities and centres and institutes of Creative Writing. This volume’s editor, Prof. Whetter, tells me that Singapore still counts only two partial undergraduate degrees in CW (i.e., not a stand-​alone undergraduate major) and one full CW master’s degree. Despite the poor economic prospects for CW graduates, Creative Writing remains an attractive degree choice for many Filipino students, who see it as both a medium for self-​expression and a portal to other careers in related areas. Teaching CW in English to Filipino students will certainly continue if not in fact grow in the near future, ensuring a constant replenishment of writers for generations to come. The workshop system, deeply embedded in both our academic and extracurricular programmes, will remain its pedagogical backbone. The larger question and challenge will be how the products of this process—​the writers and their works—​will affect Philippine society at large, for which CW and the language in which it is taught and undertaken might need periodic re-​evaluation.

Works cited Abad, Gémino H. “One Hundred Years of Filipino Poetry: An Overview.” World Literature Today, vol. 74, no. 2, 2000, pp. 327–​30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/​stable/​ 40155580. Accessed 6 Jan. 2021. Burns, Gerald. Presenting America, Encountering the Philippines: Fulbright Lectures. U Philippines P, 1992. Casocot, Ian Rosales. “Re: A Brief Survey Re teaching CW in English.” Received by Jose Dalisay, 15 Sept. 2020. Email interview. Cruz, Jhoanna Lynn. “Re: A Brief Survey Re teaching CW in English.” Received by Jose Dalisay, 6 Oct. 2020. Email interview. Galdon, Joseph, editor. Essays on the Philippine Novel in English. Ateneo de Manila U P, 1979. Hincks, Joseph. “A Brief History of U.S.-​Philippine Relations.” Time.com, 26 Oct. 2016. Time USA, https://​time.com/​4543996/​history-​of-​us-​philippine-​relations. Lua, Shirley. “Re: A Brief Survey Re teaching CW in English.” Received by Jose Dalisay, 6 Oct. 2020. Email interview. Weedon, Alan. “The Philippines Is Fronting Up to Its Spanish Heritage, and for Some It’s Paying Off.” ABC News, 9 Aug. 2019. Australian Broadcasting Corporation,

Another English  145 www.abc.net.au/​news/​2019-​08-​10/​inside-​the-​push-​to-​bring-​back-​spanish-​into-​ the-​philippines/​11356590. Whetter, Darryl. “Re: CW Programs in Singapore.” Received by Jose Dalisay, 10 Jan. 2020. Email interview. Wigley, Jack. “Re: A Brief Survey Re teaching CW in English.” Received by Jose Dalisay, 5 Sept. 2020. Email interview. Yabes, Leopoldo, editor. Philippine Short Stories 1925–​1940. U Philippines P, 1975.

9  The problem of memoir in the Philippines A possible solution Robin Hemley

The vast majority of literary memoirs in the Philippines are written by women writing in English who come from the upper classes. Due to the concepts of face and hiya (shame) and the fact that literary circles are small and tsismis (gossip) is widespread in the Philippines, many memoirists are reluctant to publish their works or write with unabashed honesty, two key requirements for good memoirs, and a memoir-​reading culture. While there’s no easy solution to ingrained societal taboos that prevent memoirists in the Philippines from truly sharing their works, I propose that the term “memoir” should be supplanted by “autofiction” in the Philippines, which might seem at first to be merely a semantic and psychological trick to give permission to these memoirists, but in fact, would constitute a means of plausible deniability for writers as well as an acknowledgement of the inherent fictionality of any life writing. I propose using the term “autofiction” in the sense that French writer Catherine Cusset uses it and not in the fashion that North American writers have embraced it. Before I define autofiction, however, I must first examine who the writers of memoir are in the Philippines and who they are not, compared to memoir writers in other major English-​language markets (e.g., the US). While there are many memoirs written by men in the US, women’s memoirs tend to dominate the field (unlike book publishing as a whole, which is still overwhelmingly male dominated). As memoirist Sue William Silverman states, “[t]‌he surge in contemporary memoir writing is very woman-​driven, very feminist” (Budd). The same is true of writers of English in the Philippines, where writer and critic Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo notes the predominance of memoirs written by women and few memoirs written by men. She writes, “Filipino male writers who work in English do not seem to have taken as readily to autobiography or the memoir as Filipino women writers have” (10). She further asserts that she’s aware of only two full-​length autobiographical works by male Filipino authors writing in English (10). When I asked Hidalgo if she knew of any memoirs written in Tagalog, one of the official languages of the Philippines, she could recall only one, by

DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-10

The problem of memoir in the Philippines  147 Gregoria de Jesus, widow of one of the leaders of the Katipunan (the organization that was at the forefront of the Philippine Revolution against Spain), and a hero of our country. It was originally written in Tagalog (what is now Filipino), Mga Tala ng Aking Buhay, written in 1928, and translated by Encarnacio Alzona as Notes on My Life. (“Re: ‘To Remember’ ”) Still, she cautions that there might be other memoirs in Tagalog: “I just haven’t been looking for them.” While there are no statistics available on the dominance of women in the memoir field in the US that I can locate, the anecdotal evidence seems to support the notion that the majority of memoirs in the US are written by women. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Ken Budd states: On Goodreads.com, a list of “Beautiful and Brutally Honest Memoirs” is a collection of memoirs by 39 women. At the HippoCamp Conference on creative non-​fiction in Pennsylvania—​an event held in August that focused largely on memoir—​84 percent of the attendees were female. When I searched Amazon over the summer for “new memoirs,” the first 11 were by women on topics such as forgiveness, survival, and family. One striking difference between writers of memoir in the US and those in the Philippines is the fact that while women worldwide can be viewed historically as marginalised voices, the writers of memoir in the Philippines hail by and large from the upper echelons of society. As Hidalgo points out, “Anyone who writes in English today—​in whatever genre—​probably belongs to the upper or middle classes” (Hidalgo, “E-​mail”). While the lingua franca of Manila is Tagalog, those in the upper class grow up at least as fluent in English. The same elite nature of literature might apply as well in the US, but the literary world of the Philippines is relatively small, and English itself is a marker of class, wealth, and education. The taboo against writing about one’s family, while nearly universal, still seems especially difficult for Filipino writers. In the US, some might consider airing one’s dirty laundry to be bad form, but in my experience, social repercussions are rare. Perhaps the most well-​known example of a writer being stigmatised for what she had written was when Katherine Harrison was widely vilified for writing The Kiss, about her incestuous affair with a father she had not known in childhood. Most such vilification is reserved in the US for writers whose revelations, no matter how shocking to conventional mores, turn out to have been fabricated. When I wrote my memoir Nola in the late 1990s, about my older sister, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and who died of a prescription drug overdose, my mother, a well-​published short story writer, was aghast. She wanted me to fictionalise the material. Indeed, when my memoir was published, one reviewer, who had known my parents,

148  Robin Hemley wrote a dismayed review taking me to task for being such an ungrateful son. My father was already deceased when the book appeared, but my mother became, ultimately, one of its defenders, though perhaps only because she was my mother. Even so, despite the one bad review, no one took me to task personally, and the praise I received from friends, family, and strangers assuaged any lingering bouts of conscience for having divulged family secrets about myself, my sister, and my mother. Quite often, the admonition not to air one’s dirty laundry acts as a means of erasure. A person who kills herself and/​or has psychological problems becomes a skipped-​over chapter in the accepted family narrative. In my family, too, I knew that my grandmother had an older sister named Ann who “died of a broken heart,” whatever that was meant to convey or shield, and I never learned anything besides that about this older sister. Even so, over the past several decades in the US, there have been no shortage of so-​called misery memoirs. If anything, memoirists have strung out so much dirty laundry that they have withstood occasional waves of mockery from critics. Still, in the workshop, I have often been told by students that they would never publish what they have turned in for critique until their parents die. Sue William Silverman began her first memoir, When I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, just two weeks after her parents died (Alger). In teaching memoir writers from the Philippines, as I have done in the low-​residency MFA Writing Programs at City University in Hong Kong and Vermont College of the Fine Arts, I have often sensed another layer of reticence on top of this natural desire to protect the family and spare feelings and recriminations. I would argue that because of the Philippines’ class structure, the literary memoir has been slow to take hold there, despite a long and lively literary tradition that has advanced other genres, and an equally strong and well-​established acceptance of Creative Writing in the academy. A memoirist doesn’t necessarily have to write about the fissures of family life for the family to lose face—​any private disclosure, good or bad, risks the loss of face. As Hidalgo writes, Saving face is a very important part of our culture. “Confessional writing”—​which means baring the dark side of your own and your family’s life (as well as the private side, dark or not) is regarded as an unspeakable transgression. I have a student (an older woman) who submitted a biography of her mother as her thesis for an M.A. in Creative Writing in U.P. [University of the Philippines]. It won a university award as “Best Thesis” but her friends, who were her classmates in a private workshop, which I also handled, were quite disturbed and scandalized. “How could she do this to her mother?” was the general feeling. Another friend who wrote quite frankly about her husband’s infidelities, and her feelings about them, got the same reaction from even strangers. (“E-​mail”)

The problem of memoir in the Philippines  149 While memoir writers everywhere often worry about reactions of family members and friends, the US population is arguably less connected than in the Philippines, which is a geographically smaller country and much more ethnically and culturally homogeneous. This is especially so when we consider that middle and upper classes make up the majority of the population that might pick up a literary work (Hidalgo, “E-​mail”). To those writing memoir, the chances of recriminations for being walang hiya (without shame) seem too great a price to pay for telling one’s story in an unadulterated fashion. As my former Filipina student, Tata Mapa, observes: Externally, we move in small, very closely-​knit social circles, where everyone is somehow connected (it’s like living in a small town—​only Manila is a mega metropolis). And generally speaking, these closely-​knit circles tend to veer toward a rather homogenous and traditional way of thinking (especially when we consider what percentage of the population reads in English). The moment you put your writing out there—​just like in anywhere else in the world—​it’s fair game. Anyone can read or have an opinion on what you write and whom you write about. But in the Philippines, exposing one’s thoughts and experiences for all to read and weigh in on just feels more complicated. (“E-​mail”) I have worked most closely with four women memoirists from the Philippines while teaching in the low-​residency MFA Writing Programs at City University in Hong Kong and Vermont College of the Fine Arts. I spent months exchanging letters with them about their work, much of which was highly publishable. Two of the memoirists were cousins, both from wealthy and prominent families. One was from a wealthy Chinese–​Filipino family, and the other from a family of old money and prestige. All of them wrote to a certain extent about their families, and it was a point of personal frustration, which I largely kept to myself, that they were reluctant, for the most part, to share their intimate stories with a larger audience, though this was completely understandable given the societal constraints in place. One memoirist, whom I shall keep anonymous, shared with me a passage she had written while studying with me from a longer memoir essay she’d written about her grandmother’s cooking: Ama’s gift for cooking made her a local legend, her children would invite friends over and they would gather by the dining area during mealtimes. Ama welcomed everybody, in her eyes a ravenous appetite was a sign of good taste. My uncles would like to believe that Ama singlehandedly contributed to obesity in the city during the 70’s. Ama expertly handled leftovers and was as close to zero waste before the movement even started. No one would dare waste a chicken bone in

150  Robin Hemley her house, she would extract the marrow and boil the bones until they had a jelly like consistency which she would then add to a perpetually simmering crockpot containing her “ten-​year chicken soup.” One occasion called her cooking skills in question. Her assistant, Valentina, was complaining of intense stomach pains and hours later began foaming in the mouth. Valentina was rushed to the hospital but was pronounced dead upon arrival. Blame immediately fell upon the hot chocolate that Ama encouraged Valentina to consume the night before, she believed that it would ease her gas problems. The accusation struck Ama hard, she produced the mug containing the last dregs of Valentina’s cocoa, spooning the contents with her finger. She consumed it in front of my Uncle as a testament to her innocence. In all her years of cooking, nobody had fallen ill on her account. When the autopsy results finally came in, they had discovered that Valentina had undergone an unsafe abortion which was her immediate cause of death. The family driver admitted to having an affair with Valentina but did not know that she was carrying his child, he volunteered to bring her remains to the mountain where her family resided. (Anonymous) For the family, my student explained, this was not only a tragic episode but a shameful one as well, to have someone die who was in their care. This death was considered something that could bring more “bad luck” in Chinese–​Filipino families. This episode happened in the 1970s, but even so, the “conservative die-​hards” in the family would still like to erase the pregnancy and death of Valentina. At the time, the author’s uncles were unmarried and suspicion would fall on them as the potential responsible parties if the story were shared. A not-​uncommon term in the Philippines, “Atsay killer,” refers to employers sleeping with and sometimes impregnating domestic servants, such as Valentina. Finally, the web of social and political connections that always must be considered in the Philippines were at play in this instance as well. Valentina’s brother was a communist guerrilla, and the family was concerned that his New People’s Army comrades might exact revenge on the family. Then-​attorney Rodrigo Duterte helped the family strategise the situation, and Valentina’s body was delivered to the mountains and her family’s care. Mapa agrees that there’s an enormous stigma in the Philippines against anything that could potentially cause shame, what she refers to as the “hiya factor,” which she sees as a “very strong Filipino trait or value” (“E-​mail”). Tsismis, the term for gossip, is practically a national pastime in the Philippines, but tsismis is always about others, Hidalgo points out, not about one’s family. A memoir might easily be seen as handing friends, strangers, and enemies a mountain of tsismis on a platter, as it were. My student who wishes to remain anonymous states that Filipinos are “afraid of gossip,” and that in general, the strong Catholicism of the country makes

The problem of memoir in the Philippines  151 them more conservative. Episodes that might bring shame upon the family not only include tragedies such as Valentina’s death, but also personal stories that involve an expression of sexuality. Mapa, for instance, wrote an essay about the intrusiveness of her aunts, “titas,” in her romantic/​sexual life in an as-​yet-​unpublished memoir essay, “Titas of Manila.” The essay contains Mapa’s hallmark sense of humour and honesty that I have long admired, but she continues to not submit the essay for publication because she is concerned about the way she portrays her titas. Here is an excerpt: “Why are you not married yet?” she repeated, louder this time, and with a meaningful stare in my direction. I looked around to see if she had addressed the question to someone else. But the room was filled with squirming toddlers, married cousins, and even more titas. I stood directly in her path, caught unaware and unarmed, singled out for being single. “Well, I’m still young, tita,” I stammered. “And there’s still a lot I want to do.” There, I thought, I was truthful yet vague, and felt I gave a good enough answer. “But you’re 24—​you shouldn’t wait too long,” she said. “Don’t you want to give your parents their first apo?” As she demanded an answer to this question, two of her six grandchildren suddenly appeared by her side—​as if on cue—​to further illustrate her point. “Do you have a boyfriend now?” “No, tita, not yet,” I replied, as politely as I could muster. And I valiantly held my tongue in an effort to not be rude, just as I had been taught, all the while wondering why my tita seemed to be exempt from these manners. I wouldn’t have minded if she had offered me a chance at a real conversation. A discussion where we could weigh the merits of being married over being single. Instead, she continued with her soliloquy. I pretended to smile while my brain nearly imploded, and a thought bubble formed right above my head. “Why am I not married yet?” it read. “Because I didn’t get knocked up like your daughters!” (Mapa 40) While religion, class, and the concepts of face and shame all conspire to make the writing of memoir more difficult in the Philippines, this is not universally so. Hidalgo notes that some of the most forthcoming memoirists she has taught, Merlie Alunan and Jenny Ortuoste, were born into poorer families. The latter grew up in a subculture of Manila around the Santa Ana racetrack and was herself a jockey for a time. According to Hidalgo, she is the first Filipina memoirist to write openly of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, also a jockey. In To Remember To Remember, Hidalgo writes:

152  Robin Hemley Long after her wedding, Jenny learned from her riding teacher that her best friend “could not stop weeping during the ceremony.” When her class took up the draft of this memoir, I suggested to Jenny that there might be another story here—​a sub-​plot, perhaps. Was her “best friend” perhaps in love with her? A grown man weeping nonstop at his best friend’s wedding is not exactly a common sight. Jenny was surprised. This possibility had not occurred to her. But now other things that might point that way were beginning to occur to her. On the other hand, perhaps his distress was caused by his knowing the man she was marrying better than she herself did. For the husband would turn out to be, not only faithless, but a wife batterer, who once gagged her with duct tape and bound her hands and legs with estriba (“thin leather stirrup straps—​cinching the buckles tighter than he would have for a race”), in effect, treated her “worse than he did horses.” Here is another first in the history of the literary memoir by Filipina writers, the theme of the physically abusive husband. (110) While the other memoirist, Merlie Alunan, from an older generation than Jenny Ortuoste, asked Hidalgo not to use some of the material she had provided about her, Jenny Ortuoste “had no such qualms” (Hidalgo, “E-​mail”). If class is a determining factor in the memoirist’s willingness to divulge difficult life events, the age of the memoirist is increasingly important as well. Several of the memoirists I communicated with about these social changes often falling along generational lines note that the abundance of shared life events on social media is having an effect on younger writers. Hidalgo, herself arguably the most revered Filipina non-​fiction writer alive, takes a dim view of the literary merit of the writers of such posts. She writes, The Millennials are a different breed. Their blogs, and their posts on social media are all autobiographical in nature. And they don’t seem to recognize any such taboos. But much of this writing has no literary merit whatsoever, so I don’t concern myself with them. (Hidalgo, “E-​mail”) Not surprisingly, my anonymous student, herself a Millennial, considers the advent of social media a net positive for Filipinos in their tilt towards full disclosure. She writes: I would go so far as to say that Facebook has helped [make memoir a growing genre in the Philippines]. We love Facebook. People go to great lengths to compose posts, share snippets of their day, write about some miracle that happened. (Anonymous, “E-​mail”)

The problem of memoir in the Philippines  153 Additionally, Mapa and others note that not only younger writers seem to feel less constrained by social mores in divulging the particulars of their lives but also those who live and write abroad. This is the reason she chose to do her MFA abroad, so she could write for a different audience. When she finished her programme in Hong Kong, she felt blocked again in terms of memoir, feeling the same constraints: “I didn’t quite know how to move forward without feeling too exposed” (Anonymous, “E-​mail”). In an effort to move forward, she has recently enrolled in a fiction course, though fiction is “difficult and new to me” (ibid.). A friend of hers has encouraged her to write under a pseudonym, and to try to get published abroad before publishing locally, believing that a global audience will better “get” what she is trying to do (ibid.). The same friend is herself an author of thinly veiled fiction. These are all possible avenues for writers such as Mapa, but I would like to offer another by suggesting that the term autofiction supplant memoir in the Philippines. The literary memoir as we know it in the Anglophone world is more akin to the term “autofiction” as the French use it. To understand this, I must first give a brief overview of the term autofiction, which is itself a troubled and contentious term. Autofiction, a term coined by French novelist and theorist Serge Doubrovsky in reference to his 1977 novel Fils (Neimneh 1), can be initially and broadly defined, “as a label for autobiographical novels and fictionalised autobiographies or memoirs” (Neimneh 1). K.K. Ruthven sees the term as “Doubrovsky’s attempt to replace ‘autobiography’ by ‘autofiction’ in order to recognise the fictive component in every attempt at writing a self” (67). The problem with the term is that it has become its own locus of generic contention. The writer Catherine Cusset, for example, calls herself an “orthodox writer of autofiction” (1) in the following manner: “Fiction of strictly real events or facts … [w]‌hich means: the only fiction in autofiction is the work on language. The facts are real, and the project is to reach a certain truth” (1). Cusset quite explicitly rejects the idea that autofiction includes autobiographical novels and the like. Furthermore, she and Doubrovsky present us with a pact: But the writer of autofiction has a pact with him/​herself, which is not to lie, not to invent just for the sake of fiction, but to be as honest as possible, and to go as far as possible in his/​her quest for truth. Doubrovsky again, in Le Livre Brisé: “It has to be true, total, or don’t write it, if you recount your life, no hide and seek, no fig leaf, expose yourself, heart and body laid bare, or just shut up.” (2) While Cusset’s sense of orthodoxy seems to resemble what the contemporary English-​speaking world defines as memoir (an attempt to go inside an

154  Robin Hemley emotional truth, to lay bare one’s life while acknowledging the fictionalising inherent in any such attempt), she insists that the two are not synonymous. She writes: “Autofiction … is not an equivalent of ‘memoirs.’ A memoir tells the reader what happened. The writing is usually clear, simple, factual, descriptive. An autofiction brings the reader inside what happened” (Cusset 3). The plethora of memoirs that are not “clear, simple, factual” (Cusset 3), strongly suggest that hers is an exceedingly narrow view of the field of memoir. French autofiction of the “orthodox” variety (Cusset 1) and contemporary Anglophone memoir have too many similarities to be considered unrelated, having gained appeal in French and Anglophone societies, respectively, on parallel tracks. Doubrovsky saw autofiction as differing from traditional autobiographies, such as Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau’s famous work on the relative importance of the author. Unlike autobiographies written by grandees, autofiction, according to Doubrovsky, was written by “nobodies” (as he saw himself) (qtd. in Dix 12). This is much the same difference between contemporary Anglophone “memoirs” and the more traditional autobiographies of celebrities and people of historical note. The term “autofiction” is further problematised by the fact that the classification is a contentious one in France and that the term is used differently by American writers. While in France, autofiction is seen as a genre, in America, it is considered a literary technique, or “modus” (Ferreira-​Meyers 41). Hywel Dix states that initially in France, autofiction was afforded “low cultural capital” (9). He suggests this in part might be due to the fact that many of the writers of autofiction in French have been women, and that “this might be one of the reasons why their writing has been historically marginalised and has only recently received critical attention” (Dix 9). In France, autofiction seems to be something that fills the life-​writing vacuum that is occupied in the US and the Philippines by contemporary memoir. Autofiction is a much more recent mode of writing in the US than it is in France, while memoirs written by “nobodies” (as Doubrovsky would see them) have been around for quite some time in the US. As literary critic Marjorie Worthington states as recently as 2018, autofiction “has had a long and somewhat contentious history in French literary circles but is not yet widely known in a U.S. context” (1). As Worthington notes, Anglophone autofiction is a “highly metafictional genre” (3) and both metafiction and Anglophone autofiction have been dominated by men. Perhaps the reason for this, in part, is that the life-​writing vacuum that autofiction fills in France, and which is dominated by women, whose voices globally have historically been marginalised, has already been occupied in the Anglophone world by memoir—​not solely in the US but also in the Philippines and likely elsewhere—​which is likewise dominated by women.

The problem of memoir in the Philippines  155 In a recent email to me, Mapa wondered whether she should simply fictionalise her “Titas of Manila” essay, though I have found that fictionalising does not necessarily lessen the chance that people will recognise themselves in your work—​it simply adds a layer of plausible deniability, to borrow a term from Nixon-​era political machinations. After all, people recognise themselves in fiction all the time, even when the author had no intention of portraying them in the story/​novel. Nonetheless, plausible deniability, in fact, is sometimes all that writers and politicians need. Politics is after all about who controls the narrative and so is memoir writing—​does one cede the narrative to one’s family or create the conditions that allow oneself to claim it herself? A writer could certainly write thinly veiled fictions as Mapa’s friend does, the time-​honoured “roman à clef,” or “autobiographical fiction,” but autofiction, as I employ it, acknowledges inevitable fictionalising while insisting that the gist of the story is an accurate one. Perhaps this might be seen as splitting hairs, but the hardest part of writing a memoir is often what one gives oneself permission to write and release into the world. As my teaching of memoir writers in the Philippines has taught me, this plausible deniability is as much for oneself as for one’s titas.

Works cited Alger, Derek. “Sue William Silverman.” PiF Magazine. No. 177, Feb. 2012. www. pifmagazine.com/​2012/​02/​sue-​william-​silverman/​ Anonymous. “E-​mail Interview.” Conducted by Robin Hemley, 29 Sept. 2020. —​—​—​. Unpublished manuscript. Budd, K. “Does Memoir Belong to Just One Gender?” Chicago Tribune, 12 Nov., 2015, www.chicagotribune.com/​entertainment/​books/​ct-​prj-​write-​like-​a-​woman-​ ken-​budd-​20151112-​story.html. Cusset, Catherine. “The Limits of Autofiction.” Paper presented at the Autofiction: Literature in France Today Conference, New York University, New York City, NY, 2012, www.catherinecusset.co.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2013/​ 02/​THE-​LIMITS-​OF-​AUTOFICTION.pdf. Dix, Hywel. “Introduction.” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp. 1–​23. Ferreira-​ Meyers, Karen. “Does Autofiction Belong to French or Francophone Authors and Readers Only?” Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp. 27–​48. Hemley, Robin. Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness, Graywolf, 1998. Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. “E-​mail Interview.” Conducted by Robin Hemley, 14 Sept. 2020. —​—​—​. “Re: To Remember To Remember.” Received by Robin Hemley, 2 Oct. 2020. —​—​—​. To Remember to Remember: Reflections on the Literary Memoirs of Filipino Women. U Santo Tomas P, 2015. Mapa, Tata. “E-​mail Interview.” Conducted by Robin Hemley, 29 Sept. 2020. —​—​—​. “Titas of Manila.” The Lost Daughters of Manila (unpublished manuscript).

156  Robin Hemley Neimneh, Shadi. “Autofiction and Fictionalisation: J.M. Coetzee’s Novels and Boyhood.” Transnational Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, http://​fhrc.flinders.edu. au/​transnational/​home.html. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge U P, 2001. Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction. U of Nebraska P, 2018.

10  Teaching Creative Writing in Taiwan Or, taking the worry out of the word “creative” Robert Anthony Siegel

In 2012–​2013, I spent the academic year as a visiting Fulbright Senior Scholar at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan, teaching American literature and creative writing in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures—​the first such classes in the history of the institution. The experience was marvellous, and it gave me a vivid lesson in how simultaneously easy and difficult it is for Creative Writing pedagogy to cross cultural borders. That lesson began on the first day. When I found my classroom, the students were already in their chairs, chatting in what I would come to know as a mix of Mandarin and the Taiwanese dialect, Tayu. They were dressed in skinny jeans and hoodies, mostly, despite the intense tropical heat—​heat that made me feel lightheaded and a little unreal, as if moving through a dream. That dreamlike quality was reinforced by the geckos skittering over the ceiling, and the moss growing up one of the walls—​and by the strange little bird that flew in the open door and then couldn’t seem to find its way out. I ignored the bird and began introductions. In slow, careful sentences, the twenty or so students told me about where they came from, what they were studying—​they were all English-​language majors—​and what they liked to read. Harry Potter got a lot of mentions, but so did Taiwanese titles that I could not possibly have known. This was encouraging; I’d wandered into a bookstore in town the day before and come away impressed by the sheer variety of interesting-​seeming titles, both Taiwanese and foreign—​this was clearly a literate island. “Have you ever written a story before?” I asked at the end of each self-​introduction. The answer was always the same. “Oh, no, never!” You know you’ll be writing some fiction in this class, right? The response was invariably a gesture of good-​natured calamity. One young man put a hand over his eyes, another bowed his head and slumped his shoulders in mock despair. “I don’t like making things up,” he said. “Don’t worry, making things up is fun,” I replied. “Yes, but I’m not good at it.”

DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-11

158  Robert Anthony Siegel We were just a half-​hour in, and we had already stumbled on what would become the defining issue of the year. My students were clearly excited to try a different kind of class with a new sort of teacher and to escape the usual round of short expository assignments on bland topics (their summer vacations, their career plans, their favourite sports hero, and so on). But they were nervous too, and most of that nervousness centred on the idea of “making things up.” What would “making things up” require of them? Would they embarrass themselves in front of their friends? Would they get a bad grade? Would they say something so horrible, so wrong, that it would dog them for the rest of their lives? Part of the problem was that Creative Writing was not taught in the Taiwanese secondary education system, and my students had no exposure to making things up, at least in school—​quite the opposite, in fact, since everything in their previous educational experience pulled in the other direction. They were the products of a high school curriculum focused on the memorisation of factual knowledge, with grades determined by written exams with right-​or-​wrong answers. They had spent the last couple of years of high school commuting straight from school to after-​school programmes designed to prepare them for Taiwan’s notoriously competitive college entrance exams. They were, unsurprisingly, fabulous at memorisation: I gave them a series of short quizzes on creative writing terminology (“point of view,” “protagonist,” “plot,” etc.) with the thought that it would facilitate conversation about the stories we were reading in class, and they all got perfect scores. In other words, they saw themselves as people who absorbed information, memorised key facts, and gave the correct answer, and they understood that as the exact opposite of people who made things up: fiction writers. That emphasis on fact and memorisation went hand-​ in-​ hand with a deep-​seated practicality. As foreign-​language majors, my Taiwanese students were, first and foremost, English-​language students, focused on improving their speaking and writing skills with an eye to the value of English in the post-​graduation job market. I can’t overemphasise the pragmatism of their collective world view: in our classroom conversations, they talked about specific industries they hoped to work in, specific companies they wanted to join; a couple were planning to work for family businesses that involved import or export, where their English skills would make them useful. A number of students mentioned matter-​of-​factly that their majors had been chosen for them by their parents; when I asked the class if this happened frequently, there was laughter. Yes, of course, most of us! School was a family decision, made with the family needs in mind; in that sense, it was a practical assignment rather than an expression of individual interest or intellectual curiosity. That pragmatic focus was reflected in the city I encountered beyond the campus gates. Taichung was a place of determined, cheerful, relentless hustle. The streets were lined with small family-​owned shops—​often

Teaching Creative Writing in Taiwan  159 with living quarters right behind, visible through an open door—​and the sidewalks crowded with food stalls and pushcart peddlers. Businesses and restaurants were open late, people walked fast, and they drove like they had just robbed a bank. The vehicle of choice was the motor scooter, and it was invariably piled high in ways that didn’t seem physically possible: with pipes and two-​by-​fours, with live chickens in cages, with machinery, with propane canisters. Nevertheless, my Tunghai students’ discomfort with the idea of making things up caught me flat-​footed on that first day: I was used to my students back in the US, who were comfortable with the idea of themselves as creative—​perhaps too comfortable, even a little complacent. “Don’t worry,” I said, “we have time.” I handed out copies of our first reading assignment, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” I’d chosen it to illustrate the idea of conflict (build a fire or freeze to death), but it wasn’t till class was over and I was walking home through the astounding midday heat that I realised most of them had probably never touched snow. What to do about creative anxiety? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed best not to push too much. Over the next couple of weeks, we stayed away from the writing of fiction and discussed some short stories instead, using the basic craft concepts I was introducing at the beginning of each class. Learning a bit of their educational language, I’d reinforce those craft lessons through short daily quizzes. We managed a perfectly adequate discussion of conflict in “To Build a Fire” (no explanation of snow needed) and then moved on to point of view in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and scene in Brady Udall’s “The Wig.” The students struggled a bit with this new way of reading—​reading with an eye to construction rather than plot or theme. But when we moved on to questions of interpretation—​went on to discuss what the stories meant to them—​they spoke with sensitivity and a surprising emotional openness, sometimes referring to experiences in their own lives. I began to sense possibilities. The Taiwan I was getting to know was frantic about making a buck, sure, but deep down there was something genuinely creative in those efforts. Life seemed to require a lot of improvisation: the noodle maker down the block from the campus gate would dry his noodles on the top of his car. The bricklayer would stack a teetering load of bricks on the back of his scooter, tie them down with rope, and none of them would fall. And meanwhile, at the cafeteria on campus, the sliding glass doors would be thrown open to catch the breeze, and birds would fly into the deep shadowy space and circle overhead—​it was like eating lunch inside a poem. How could anyone fail to be inspired? Now let me jump ahead and tell you how it all turned out. My Taiwanese students showed themselves to be just as open, expressive, curious, playful, and observant as my US students—​and a lot harder working. The only thing standing in the way was their thoroughly unhelpful self-​definition as people who did not make things up. The approach that I settled on was to make

160  Robert Anthony Siegel creative writing feel more like the schoolwork they were used to doing—​to make it feel less obviously creative: I made assignments short, a page or two, and kept them tightly structured, with the sort of step-​by-​step instructions I would not normally have included (“Once you have described the setting, go on to describe your characters …”). Furthermore, I put the idea of composing fiction aside for a while and started us out with non-​fiction, guessing that the students would be more comfortable with telling real stories from their own lives. Our first in-​class assignment was simply to describe our classroom using all five senses; our second was to leave and describe something outside the building: a tree, a lamppost, the sky. Some examples of assignments that followed: • • • • •

Using all five senses, describe the experience of eating your favourite food (sensory detail) Describe somebody important to you (character description) Describe an important conversation with that person (dialogue) Describe a place you love (physical description) Describe the last time you did something fun with a friend (scene)

One unintended benefit was the way these assignments became windows into the lives of my students: the importance of family, particularly parents and grandparents; the value placed on home and hometown; the strength of friendships; the crucial cultural role of food and shared meals. If writing them had been anxiety-​ provoking, that was no longer evident by the time the students read them in class—​quite the opposite: as I listened, I could feel the pleasure they took in sharing them. The concern over doing them “right” had given way to the satisfaction of doing them truly. We managed the pivot to fiction by way of an intermediate step. As the semester was nearing its end, I asked the class to write about themselves ten years in the future. Where were they living in 2022? What kind of work were they doing? Were they married? Did they have a family? This felt like the right kind of Trojan horse: speculative, imaginative, built from wishes and fears, but cloaked in the material of regular life, and therefore less intimidating. It was fun—​it felt a little like teleporting into the future to grab a few selfies—​ and it left just enough time for us to do one last assignment, which I was determined to make out-​and-​out fiction. I wavered on what would be best and finally went with a two-​page monologue in which a character explains why he or she has stolen something that did not belong to her. It didn’t quite fit with the assignment we’d just completed, but it was self-​contained, and my American students usually liked it. I used it frequently to introduce the key role of desire in fiction and how it leads to dramatic conflict. “Stealing?” asked one of the students, writing the assignment down. “It’s fiction,” I said, “so it’s not you, it’s a made-​up person. Imagining a made-​up character doing bad things can be fun, and because it’s not real, there’s no harm to anyone.”

Teaching Creative Writing in Taiwan  161 “But—​” “All you have to do is think about a time when you really wanted something you couldn’t have, and then give that desire to your completely made-​ up character. Here, let’s go around in a circle and collect some examples.” I had a handful of volunteers tell the class about things they remembered wanting really badly at some time in their lives and not getting. The examples were fairly tame, but they made the point. I followed up by saying, “There, now just make up a character who feels so strongly about what she wants that she can’t stop herself from taking it, and let her tell us why. She’s going to confess to us. That’s how fiction works.” There were head nods. The pieces they submitted two days later were a mixed bag: many were quite safe—​generic children stealing candy from wryly amused adults—​but a couple were over-​the-​top wonderful. One involved a woman stealing an ex-​boyfriend’s motor scooter out of revenge and another a dog running off with a roast chicken from a stall in a night market. When the authors read them in class, the other students loved them. It was a delightful moment, a moment of arrival: we were a group of fiction writers, appreciating the freedom of good storytelling. Seven years later, I have gained some perspective on the experience. I am, for example, a little bit mystified by how little I thought about the cultural context in planning my course readings. Earlier in life, I had spent three years as a student in Japan, two of those in graduate school studying comparative literature, and I was most definitely aware of the classroom as a culturally constructed space. But I was also extremely busy before departing the US for Taiwan, and I’d had little time to research the country and its educational system. In the end, I simply did the expedient thing and chose my reading assignments from the big file of stories I used with writing students back at my home institution in North Carolina. I understood those stories as exemplars of the short story form, of course, but I particularly valued them as ways to illustrate specific writing skills (point of view, conflict, scene, etc.). That focus on a given story’s value as craft illustration left me somewhat tone deaf when it came to content. Teaching Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” in 90-​degree heat was not the oddest situation I created for us: I also assigned Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” without knowing anything about Taiwanese attitudes towards premarital sex and abortion (that was a fairly quiet class, as I recall. Let’s just say the story’s famous subtext stayed sub-​). To put it crudely, I had long ago stopped thinking of “Hills” as an abortion story; it was my point-​of-​view story (and sometimes my conflict-​ and-​resolution story). Yes, the stories worked well at times, in spite of themselves: I gave my students Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash while Hitchhiking” without considering what they might know about drug addiction (He seems so lonely, they agreed, getting the story pretty much exactly right). We read Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” a story rooted in the cultural politics of the 1970s Black Power movement, and had a fascinating discussion about

162  Robert Anthony Siegel cultural identity in Taiwan, a multi-​ethnic, multilingual society. But I cannot help wondering if more carefully chosen, culturally aware readings might have created more consistently engaging classroom discussions. Might there have been other, deeper cultural insensitivities hidden within the enterprise? I sometimes wonder. The Creative Writing class is very much a product of the post-​war American educational project, and there is no reason to believe that it is, or should be, instantly transferable to other cultures, particularly non-​Western cultures such as Taiwan. Even though the classes I taught at Tunghai did not use the workshop method that has become emblematic of American Creative Writing pedagogy over the last 50 years, the one I studied in at Iowa and now teach in, they assumed the idea of craft that infuses and supports that method: the belief that fiction writing can be taught as a logical series of skills or techniques, applicable to any subject matter. Those techniques, with their emphasis on the centrality of conflict and the role of point of view in creating character subjectivity, are clearly based on the modern Western novel, from Jane Austen forward. Might my Taiwanese students have been better off learning a different set of skills more natural to their own cultural mode of storytelling, their own inclinations? I cannot know. During my year in Taichung, I became addicted to Taiwanese soap operas, with their wild supernatural happenings, Taoist magic, and twisty karmic chains of revenge and rebirth, and I sometimes wondered if this might be closer to the way Taiwanese students might naturally write fiction, given the chance. But the truth was that my students at Tunghai were ambitious foreign-​language majors, pragmatic young people eager to rise in the world, and only reluctant, self-​conscious fiction writers, not the kind to write about Taoist immortals and shape-​ shifting snake spirits. When I told them what I was watching on TV, they laughed because those were the sort of shows their grandmothers liked. This brings me to my conclusion, a modest defence of the value of my experiment at Tunghai. The benefits for my students were limited perhaps, but nevertheless important: they got to try something new, to stretch their personal boundaries, to test their voices, to familiarise themselves with the unique pleasures and anxieties of creative self-​expression—​the exact same benefits that my American students got back in the States. But they also gained something else in addition: a chance to work on their English-​ language skills in a new and interesting way, outside of the relatively confining boundaries of traditional language instruction. I know from my own experiences with both Japanese and Mandarin that telling a story in an adopted language offers a thrilling way to make that new language a part of you. I hope my Tunghai students felt this power.

11  The non-​fiction selfie Barrie Sherwood

Fairly enough, having my synopsis for this chapter accepted put me in the exact same position vis-​à-​vis my audience as my Creative Writing students are in here at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) (whether they be at the BA, MA, or even sometimes at the PhD level): in order to achieve the aim (publication or a good grade, respectively), what does the audience want to hear? Another paradox concerns my writer’s commitment to, well, the garden of forking paths. Reassuringly, John Fowles advises, “Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan.” My article’s initial synopsis looked, when I was finally pressed to write it, like far too much of a fixed plan: Narrativizing the self has never been so easy nor so fraught as it is today, in the age of social media. Yet a brief list of the ways in which the narrative capacities of the human have been attenuated, altered, or entirely given over in the past twenty years to that host of functions of which the cheapest smartphone is now capable suggests that, though the potential audience is greater, more cosmopolitan, and more far-​ flung, the mastery of narrative required of the narrator has, in most respects, diminished. The Russian Formalists were the first to formulate the idea that the purpose of literature is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to increase the difficulty and length of perception; if this is indeed so, how does the teacher of prose—​both non-​fiction and also fiction—​go about writing a syllabus and creating a classroom environment conducive to the osmosis of this idea? For an ultra-​urbanized Asian studentship that may have been cultured to believe that brevity, ease, and universality of understanding are desirable outcomes of the urges to create and to self-​ promote, how can the inherent difficulty of prose forms be not merely valorized for this audience but made attractive? How can the Creative Writing classroom become not merely an atelier for the polishing of phrasing but the site of new prose-​ generative experiences, the very source material of non-​fiction itself?

DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-12

164  Barrie Sherwood Yikes, what was I thinking? I like those first two sentences, but how in any sustainable way were my classes at NTU—​held in an anodyne room without windows on Monday mornings—​supposed to become the “source material of non-​fiction itself”? My initial urge on rediscovering this synopsis was to pretend that I never wrote it, to take cover behind E.M. Forster—​“All that is prearranged is false” (108)—​and instead give this chapter a title suitable for some easily collated and completely random snapshots of my Creative Writing experiences, from my native Canada to the UK of my doctorate at East Anglia to teaching for eight years here in Singapore. Something like: “Creative Writing in Singapore: A Miscellany.” And in fact, that is the urge I acted upon, until during the writing I realised that my definition of “selfie” had been too narrow and that as a concept, transferred from the iPhone to the pen, it would be useful in explaining something that I did feel compelled to write about: why in my Creative Writing classes here in Singapore there is such an initial disparity between the quality of student fiction and student non-​fiction. Before going on to point out signal differences between the fictional and non-​fictional work, I will make clear my belief that undergraduate students of Creative Writing need to be nurtured. If they are English majors, pursuing any creative study has already been a fight; it is rare for a student in Singapore to tell me that his/​her parents are pleased they have chosen to study Literature instead of Engineering or Law. (If you think this is so axiomatic it need not be iterated … well, as a parent worried about his own children’s futures, I almost agree.) Making art—​in this case, writing a short story, personal essay, or novel—​is not the “tank full of sharks” that John Gardner makes it out to be (35). For him, for me, for a few students (mostly graduates) I have encountered over my eight years here in Singapore, yes, writing can be at times as thrilling as Gardner’s shark tank but not for the undergrad Electrical Engineering major who is taking a Creative Writing course for the credits he/​she needs to finish his/​her degree. Such a student needs to learn to enjoy the writing, first of all by writing with no purpose, no utilitarian function, no aim. Just for fun. Because it will be the first time since childhood—​if then—​that he/​she will have done so. And then, when that play is done, he/​she needs to look at what they have written in that first draft or first two. Sift it like an excavator at an archaeological dig-​site. For what? Fragments of character and conflict. Any arresting images. Any “mytho-​poeic stills” (as John Fowles put it). And then he/​she needs to write some more, revealing the greater pattern to which the fragment belongs, watching as the character evolves, as conflict deepens, as crises multiply, and the whole thing assumes an entertaining shape that we may call—​should we decide to when we’re ready—​a short story or personal essay. The matter of transferrable skills is, by the way, quite decidedly not the elephant in the room. They are everything when barely one per cent of undergraduate students will go on to write a short story or essay beyond the “confines”—​better say “new worlds”!—​of our 14-​week class. This is

The non-fiction selfie  165 even clearer to my colleagues in literature, where a miniscule proportion of students will ever go on to write literary criticism. The essay, the short story, the annotated bibliography, the argumentative essay, the exegesis—​what are they analogous to but jumping jacks and shuttle runs for young athletes whose eventual sport of choice the trainer cannot even guess? But—​to continue this simple analogy—​as a teacher one has to persist in sharing one’s bizarre love of shuttle runs. You teach them to do it as efficiently and elegantly as possible, knowing full well that few, if any, will choose the shuttle run as a discipline itself. In my creative non-​fiction class, I learn a great deal about my students’ educations, families, hopes, fears, and aspirations. A great deal about what it is like to be a child or a teen, Chinese or Tamil or Malay, Christian or Muslim or Hindu. A great deal about Singapore itself. In the fiction class, however, I learn more about the form itself or—​more to the point—​about the student’s conception of what a short story should be. This conception is made most clearly evident by certain tics and tropes, what Gardner calls (with a chapter title, no less) “common errors,” though this is not the term which I use with students (95).1 What follows is a short list of these problematic features I find frequently enough in fiction, but far less often in non-​fiction.

Unfamiliar settings Many fiction students living in or even from Singapore are loathe to set their short stories in Singapore. “Why?” I ask. “You live here. If you’re an authority on one thing—​just one thing—​isn’t it this place?” I impose no rules in Creative Writing classes, but I do make it clear that of the 40 international writers in the reader in my fiction class, most of them set their stories in places they were capable of observing as minutely as anyone else. So Tayib Salih’s story is set in the Sudan. Alice Munro’s in some grim Canadian province in wintertime. Haruki Murakami’s in Tokyo. Amanda Lee Koe’s in Singapore. (Yes, okay, Italo Calvino sets one of his on the moon and the other in a swamp sometime in the Carboniferous period, and Angela Carter sets hers in once upon a time and place, but students are encouraged to cleverly follow these examples only once they understand that the settings are just one feature of a genre that is being packed with TNT.) In contrast, when foreign settings appear in non-​fiction, the narrator is almost invariably a tourist; it’s this lack of authority, honestly related, that makes the settings so convincing.

A cast of one A character alone in a room: surely the scenario with the least possibility for dramatic action. Why does it occur so frequently in short fiction and almost never in non-​fiction? To be clear, the isolated protagonist is not a problem

166  Barrie Sherwood when the scene serves as a frame and we are quickly immersed in the past (the first example that comes to mind is Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, most of which takes place in Africa, with a rich cast of characters, but which is narrated by a man alone in a hut in Scotland) but more frequently fiction with a stranded protagonist becomes a long monologue of conjectures and musings and lament over missed opportunities. Undoubtedly, it is taxing to track the movements and dialogue of more than one character at a time—​ Ernest Hemingway has a cast of only three in “A Clean Well-​Lighted Place” and many say he even got them muddled up—​and writing a story with a cast of one is easier. But the contemporary workshop story involving a single character sitting in isolation may also be the case that erecting a plausible dramatic action with several characters may be less innate a skill for a generation that does a significant amount of socialising alone, via a screen. Were fictions of this type always as common as they seem to be now? My feeling is that this is a perennial problem for a certain non-​confrontational sort of person who turns their hand to writing. The sort of person who eschews violence and high drama. Who wants to believe that angst is sufficient material for fiction. But fiction—​like the theatre and the screen—​relies in great part upon dramatisation. Even in short stories with attenuated plots, stories like Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” and Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” and “Title,” drama persists. Where is the drama coming from when there are no characters interacting with one another? Whatever the reason, the single-​ character, inner-​monologue story is usually a bore, and a simple reminder from Angela Carter often has the desired effect: “One is, after all, in the entertainment business” (Haffenden 82).

The sticks: idyll or nightmare? The term “postmemory” was first used by critic Marianne Hirsch some 30 years ago. She defined the term as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—​to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (1). The term has been in constant use since that first article about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, not only in relation to the Holocaust but also to numerous other communal, historical traumas. From the very first, the polyvalence of the concept was clearly recognised—​and the term’s usage multiplied—​by an international group of writers, critics, and artists. Asia, and in particular Singapore, has had no dearth of its own traumas, but the topic of this section is not how the present generation of young Singaporeans have been affected by their postmemory of the fall of Singapore, the Japanese occupation, nor the race riots in the sixties. Postmemory needs an antonym or, perhaps, a complement. In this generation—​at least as far as I can discern through my interactions with students and young Singaporean writers—​what seems more prevalent than

The non-fiction selfie  167 the postmemory of trauma in a relatively stable period is the postmemory of a rural idyll in the midst of a current, slowly unfolding collective trauma. Singapore was once an island of mangroves, jungle, lychee and nutmeg orchards, colonial estates, and ramshackle villages known as kampungs. In the last century, there were still tigers, giant golden squirrels, sun bears, and elephants to be found on land, and in the sea, sharks, dugongs, swordfish, and sea turtles. Though Singapore’s efforts to preserve its natural habitat are admirable, it is a fact that the wild areas of Singapore have been vastly reduced. If you are from Singapore and you explain to someone that you live on an island in the tropics, it is not a lie, but it is definitely misleading; Singapore is a city-​state, the third most densely populated on the planet, and the average Creative Writing student will go to the beach, a mangrove swamp, or a forest no more than a handful of times each year, if that.2 The consequence evident in beginner’s fiction is this: nature, when it appears, is one of two things: a rural idyll or a fairy-​tale-​like labyrinth full of menace. Contrast this with non-​fiction: nature is very often the scene—​though this too, admittedly, may be slightly clichéd—​ of a character’s simultaneous physical trial and spiritual growth, in the manner somewhat of Petrarch’s “Climbing Mt Ventoux.”

Contradiction in terms and hyperbole These are a common occurrence and a few examples will suffice to exemplify them: “the scent of dew infiltrates my nostrils, the smell of a pungent dullness.” “Silence echoed through the barren streets, rolling along the pavement as a soft gale pushed along.” “The taste of air explodes when he is thrown free of darkness.” “My heart was jack-​hamming in my chest but not an inch of jitters reached my face.” I sometimes think that errors of this kind—​and they are errors when used unknowingly, without a strategy—​are due to sheer exuberance. Students are so happy to find themselves in a Creative Writing class, so liberated, finally, to use whatever language they want, that they forget the matter of logic. Teaching them that these are, in terms of the narrative, mistakes, while still nurturing that exuberance, is the fine line of diplomacy that every teacher of Creative Writing walks. Speaking of exuberance, one can get so used to critiquing student work on a surface level—​picking out all these easily identified problems with phrasing, word choice, inconsistent verb tense, inconsistent point of view, unclear choreography of character movement—​that one sometimes forgets to do what a “real” writer should do: mine it all for content. I have seen how

168  Barrie Sherwood visiting writers at the university—​especially international ones in town for only a semester—​learn from student work, how they glean from it, how a picture of Singapore is composed, one that they will take away with them and perhaps utilise one day, who knows? As a painter may work from a photograph. I have to remind myself that I too am an artist before I am a teacher and that, as the cliché goes, good artists steal. Cultivating this mind frame is not an easy thing to do once you’re in teaching mode, as J.C. Hallman and Andrew Cowan make abundantly clear: Speaking of prisons, did I mention that I teach? That as I was trying to launch a career a writer I was a teacher of undergraduate literature and writing? ... Essential writers may teach only cursorily … but nonessential writers teach undergraduate course like galley slaves, and the problem of course is that to be a teacher, to be shackled deep in the hull of some slave ship institution, is to not be a writer at all. (Hallman 16) Writing for the Open University, Cowan confesses: Creative writing is a course of study. But I think it is a distinct activity from what most teachers of creative writing do when they are not in the institution, when they are at home developing their own poems, their own stories and scripts. And it can’t be done to a syllabus. It’s not programmatic in that way. It’s a bit scarier.

“His Eyebrows Coming Together”: belaboured mechanics of dialogue What follows is an excerpt from a workshop piece I read several years ago, the first words of each sentence from a dialogue that stretched over two pages. Each of the actions described precedes or follows a character’s speech. Rebecca frowns Rebecca’s frown deepens Johan’s eyes savour the surprise on her face Johan looks back with a frown Rebecca gazes from her to Johan She glances from Terrence to Johan, both watching with expectant gazes Johan rolls his eyes Rebecca’s eyes widen. Then she frowns Rebecca purses her lips, looks to Terrence for help Johan purses his lips, his eyebrows coming together He glances at Rebecca Rebecca shoots Johan a wary glance Johan blinks at her, frowning

The non-fiction selfie  169 Johan looks away, mutters under his breath, not unironically Rebecca clears her throat Johan gives a thoughtful shrug Johan glances at her Terrence’s eyebrows rise Johan purses his lips as he looks down Rebecca catches the pinched expression Rebecca notices Johan’s eyes narrow Johan opens his mouth, then thinks better of it Johan purses his lips, his jaw tight Terrence holds his gaze with cold stillness Rebecca clears her throat Rebecca shakes her head Rebecca’s eyes widen. She glances curtly at Johan Johan’s mouth drops open, his jaw clenching Terrence looks at him with steel eyes Johan opens his mouth, then closes it Johan watches her Johan sighs Another sigh. He turns to her, eyebrows together Rebecca narrows her eyes Johan gives a pinched expression Rebecca tilts her head to one side Rebecca looks at Johan with a deep frown on her face Johan flinches a little around the eyelids Rebecca can taste the frustration coming off him. She sighs Rebecca purses her lips Rebecca blinks, thinks of a good response Rebecca looks down on the floor, then back up to Johan Rebecca raises her eyebrows Johan hesitates. He purses his lips, then opens them, swallows Rebecca weighs the idea in the palm of her head Johan nods Johan lets out a sigh Rebecca nods Johan blinks, then slowly nods Rebecca nods back Johan looks down and away Formatted like this, this excessively choreographed student dialogue reads like a poem, something Harry Matthews might have written. It is important to stress here that the writer is not doing anything wrong (apart, perhaps, from “palm of her head”). The actions are plausible. No one can doubt the scene taking place. It is the same moment-​by-​moment authentication—​that careful charting of a character’s experience of the fictional universe—​that

170  Barrie Sherwood Creative Writing classes constantly encourage beginning writers to do. But it does start to thud, and the faces of the characters become those of marionettes, the author tugging on them to crudely signal their thoughts. It is clearly the product of a belief that such close monitoring is what fiction, in particular, does and provides a fresh angle on Terry Eagleton’s premise that fiction “is an ontological category, not in the first place a literary genre” (111).

The afterlife I make no rules that cannot be broken, but perhaps I should make one about the afterlife. At least once a semester someone writes from the point of view of an angel, Satan, or God himself (rarely herself). And the afterworld they inhabit—​both heaven and hell—​is almost invariably given a corporate structure. God is the Boss, and it is the day job of Satan or Death or the Grim Reaper to pluck people from their earthly existence, conduct them to another plane, and introduce them to the afterlife, sometimes with a helpful introductory brochure. That the afterlife does not often feature in non-​fiction is, I hope, self-​evident.

Beginnings Here are the beginnings of some of the short stories submitted for my fiction class, followed by some of the beginnings of essays submitted for my non-​ fiction class. I should make clear that there was no discernable difference in the “quality” (if that is the right word) of the students, meaning that one group was no more gifted nor enthusiastic nor “writerly” than the other. Fiction (or “The Forsaken Pleas of the Damned”) “It was a cool, sunny morning, as the dry air blew through the California countryside.” “Bonjour,” said the girl to the cashier. “The thick, dusty air was full of whispers. Hushed, curious voices and the forsaken pleas of the damned.” “The silence was deafening. Well, not exactly too deafening, if one noticed the persistent ticking of the clock.” “Your paintings are so lifelike, it’s as if the real thing is looking right back at me!” “If anyone were to kiss her now, they would taste the blend of bile and Jack Daniels that lingered on her tongue.” “Her husband fell asleep easily. He found his way into a deep sleep with the same ease she found her way around poached eggs.” “He couldn’t believe it. Was it really her?” “She felt the folded piece of paper burn inside her back pocket.”

The non-fiction selfie  171 “Leah cursed at how forgetful she was as she hurriedly weaved through the sea of deserted tables and chairs.” “I volunteered for this mission because they told me it was a simple gig. After six years of service in the Special Operations Task Force, I needed a break.” “Gregory had tripped over his own feet when he first met his wife at a party his colleague was hosting.” Non-​fiction (or “Blowing It All to Shreds”) “Growing up, my father was often concerned with my wrists.” “Backstage in the Victoria Concert Hall, I am the only tenor in the women’s dressing room.” “I didn’t like the army, it was full of grumpy middle-​aged men and dangerous situations.” “In 2014, I was, unwillingly, a monk for the first two weeks of August.” “The start of February means Ma is in a frenzy to prepare for Chinese New Year.” “For last year’s festival, I drove Gong Gong to Bright Hill Temple.” “I never cry.” “There are moments when I am reading my engineering textbooks and a Greek symbol begins to dance.” “First I learned how to think in a logical manner. Soon after that, I learned how to lie.” “I’ll be turning twenty-​five next year. And my mother will be twice my age.” “Nine months it took to create me, sixteen years to cultivate me, six days to blow it all to shreds.” I should stress that all these examples have not been curated but picked at random from the workshop pieces submitted for classes in the same year. Do I need to point out the fluency, the engagement, the downright quality of the non-​fiction? And the stiltedness and cliché of the fiction? Is there one short-​story opening as promising as: “First I learned how to think in a logical manner. Soon after that, I learned how to lie”? Or as comical as: “In 2014, I was, unwillingly, a monk for the first two weeks of August”? Or as instantly suggestive of a narrative arc as: “I never cry.”? Is there one non-​ fiction opening as clumsy as: “The silence was deafening. Well, not exactly too deafening”? What’s clear is that the fiction is still something going on outside the writer. A foreign art form or discipline, like cookery or ikebana or ballet. One must apply oneself to it. Meet its demands. None of it has been born of the self. Perhaps the allure of being a fiction writer is behind these mistakes. The promise and premise of being someone else. Someone with a different voice, a different register, a different background. Fiction, many assume, is a

172  Barrie Sherwood chance to recreate yourself. As an Author with a capital A. Someone better, more accomplished. Treated with a literary filter. Is an analogy with the smartphone too stretched? In “How Sharing Photos has Entertained Us,” Jess Carter-​Morley notes: The bar for beauty and glamour is high … The clumsy, obvious cross-​ processing of early filters has been sidelined in favour of Photoshop-​lite apps, the most popular of which uses an on-​screen “magic wand” to whiten teeth, sharpen jawlines and erase blemishes … Filtering, once an artistic flourish, has become laser-​focussed on vanity. But the personal essay … the personal essay tolerates no vanity. Creative non-​fiction demands humility, or at the very least, a sincere awareness of one’s own arrogance. So George Orwell makes his uncertainty and weakness a life lesson. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes telling social commentary of her early attempts at fiction. Phillip Lopate somehow makes a positive attribute of picking his nose “comprehensively” when no one (he hopes) is watching. To do likewise on social media? Impossible. The temptation to improve the perception of self is always greater than any guilty imperative to advertise its faults. And so it proves in fiction too, in which the author can present characters who are handsome and tall and brilliant and impulsive, where every gesture is pregnant with meaning, and the setting is always California. To counter this upselling, I have decided that this year my fiction class will begin with a seminar or two on the personal essay. Because all those mistakes of beginner’s fiction are only “mis-​takes,” problems easily solved by going back to the blank page and, instead of asking oneself what fiction should be, writing honestly from personal experience. Writing without filters or fancy backgrounds. Taking a simple selfie in words and proceeding from there, elaborating, adding and subtracting, structuring and restructuring, following the accident, constantly revising the plan, until the end result, though it be marvellous and far-​fetched and populated with strange characters in compromising situations, is so much an expression of one’s identity that the author may say of it what Gustave Flaubert said of his most heartfelt and clinical creation, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The result of any other approach, I fear, is something as formulaic, and ultimately unconvincing, as the synopsis of this essay. It would seem that a chapter in a book titled Teaching Creative Writing in Asia should have done at least something to differentiate Creative Writing in Asia from Creative Writing in the rest of the world, but I will have to leave the differentiation to you. The introspective will be apt to see in this chapter the similarities between my practice and their own; others will pride themselves on the differences. I myself feel that university students in Singapore do not write in fundamentally different ways from those in Canada, Australia, or the UK (countries of which I have some experience in this area). Subject matter may vary, but that is something that is always up

The non-fiction selfie  173 to the writer himself/​herself: probity of style is all that counts in a Creative Writing class, and the strengths of good writing, the weaknesses of poor, are—​as far as I know—​universal.

Notes 1 I would like to think that greater exposure is the cure for what amounts to a narrow view of what short stories are or can be. The reading list in my fiction class is meant to be an antidote; how can there be a normal for the short story when our examples comprise works from authors as diverse in style and origin as Katherine Mansfield, Tayib Salih, Ha Jin, Annie Proulx, John Barth, Mishima Yukio, Italo Calvino, and Gita Hariharan. Certainly, the week we spend on meta-​ fiction is an eye-​opener. What, our short-​stories can look like this? They can have multiple endings? (Margaret Atwood); They can look like a questionnaire? (Jack Matthews); An essay? (Jorge Luis Borges); and A tour guide’s spiel crossed with a fairy tale? (Angela Carter). 2 This urbanisation is, of course, nothing particular to Singapore. This disconnection from nature has been, in my experience, just as common in Hong Kong, Vancouver, Montreal, Fukuoka, Melbourne, Norwich, and York.

Works cited Carter-​ Morley, Jess. “Instagram at 10: How Sharing Photos Has Entertained Us, Upset Us, and Changed Our Sense of Self.” The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2020. Guardian News & Media Limited, www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2020/​ sep/​20/​instagram-​at-​10-​how-​sharing-​photos-​has-​entertained-​us-​upset-​us-​and-​ changed-​our-​sense-​of-​self. Cowan, Andrew. “Thoughts on Creativity” Open Learn. 1 Mar. 2017. Open University, www.open.edu/​openlearn/​history-​the-​arts/​creative-​writing/​thoughtson-​creativity. Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. Yale U P, 2012. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Pelican, 1970. Fowles, John. Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings. Henry Holt, 1998. Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage, 1983. Haffenden, John. “Magical Mannerist: An Interview with Angela Carter.” Literary Review, Nov. 1984. Hallman, J. C. B and Me. Simon and Schuster, 2015. Hirsch, Marianne. “An Interview with Marianne Hirsch.” Columbia University Press, n.d., https://​cup.columbia.edu/​author-​interviews/​hirsch-​generation-postmemory.

12  Writing dance Mentoring the writing of dance artists across the Asia-​Pacific Stephanie Burridge

Introduction Access to cultural sites that were once geographically if not culturally inaccessible, like Yirrkala in north-​eastern Australia, is relatively easy today, enabling researchers to move fluidly in an out of once-​remote communities to work both on short-​term and longitudinal studies of cultures and practices. Reflections on these observations are reported at conferences, in academic journals, and books and this information is subsequently disseminated at all levels of the education system and to professional organisations. In this scenario, the texts that are used to describe the dance are initially interpreted from the original source by the team undertaking the fieldwork. While field notes, film, and Labanotation (movement writing) are accurate records of the event, the practitioners’ perspective can be diminished unless it becomes a consciously privileged part of the investigation. An important focus in my Routledge articles, chapters, and books about dance for the past few decades has been to highlight the artists’ perspective on their work and its cultural and philosophical context. These self-​reflective insights give invaluable information about the impulse, intention, and cultural connections for the dancers and choreographers. Self-​narration is an important opportunity to present the dance artist’s perspective on the preservation and heritage of dance in their region or community as well as issues such as globalisation and the “contemporization” of traditional dances. This chapter will give examples of privileging the dance artist’s voice in writing with reference to publication projects in the Asia-​Pacific region. How did this philosophy of translating bodies, cultures, and their dances begin? In 1996, I completed my doctoral dissertation, titled The Influence of Aboriginal Dance on Choreography in Australia. During the research, I examined an exhaustive number of readings to find any mention of dance. This went back to the accounts, and sometimes drawings of dance, in the nineteenth-​century diaries of settlers from the first expeditions to Australia. Although there were some accounts of rituals and dance, I did not find any complex details of what people actually did with their bodies, the corporeal stories they told, up until Beth Dean and Victor Carell’s account of their DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-13

Writing dance  175 journey through the central desert of Australia and beyond in their 1955 book Dust for the Dancers. After spending time in indigenous communities, I became fascinated with the dancer’s various accounts of their ceremonial dancers including those that they performed for the public. Stephen Page, Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, provides this example of the communal ownership/​spectatorship often found in indigenous Australian dance: When we [Bangarra Dance Theatre] from Australia went back to Yirrkala [a remote indigenous community] last year, we performed on the oval for 600 Arnhem Land people … the boys in the company danced the traditional stick dance. To dance that, we had to get permission from the elder in Dhaliny and be there for four nights camping. The boys had to audition for the old man that owned the dance. And so one night about 10 o’clock they put the car headlights on and Djakapurra woke the boys up. The old man wanted to see them dance. The old man was in a wheelchair, he had tears rolling down his eyes and he spoke in language to Purra who also had tears in his eyes and said, “It’s fine. [The old man] said they can do it. Go let them do it, he said. He said they got the old spirit in them.” (Stock 66) More immediately, I vividly remember the ceremony by the dancers from Raminginning in North East Arnhem Land in 2008 at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, that marked the installation of the Aboriginal Memorial. The 200 ceremonial hollow log coffins commemorated the 200 years that Aboriginal people had died defending their lands against the colonists. The artwork is painted by the 43 artists—​each tree trunk is a dupun or log coffin, which is used in ritual burials to mark the safe transition of the soul of the deceased from this world to the next. The senior artists and dancers accompanied the poles and “sang” them into their new home at the gallery. In the cold of Canberra, the dancers painted their bodies with traditional white clay, played the didgeridoo and clapping sticks, to dance out the stories of the poles—​the crow, the kangaroo, and spiritual beings. A week later I returned to Arnhem Land with them and they proudly showed the video they filmed to others in the community—​there was much laughter as their kin made observations on their performance. The laughter centred on their different interpretations of some of the dances—​they had adapted them to the setting, shortened some of them due the cold weather, and made other adjustments. The notion that elements of ritual are static and not the creative responsibility, at least to some degree, of the participants is the point here. Also, that the story belongs to the custodians. Their voices are integral to the narrative of the ritual and wherever possible should be included in any research of the dance and its pre-​or post-​performance articulation in writing.

176  Stephanie Burridge

Who writes the dance? The body is a powerful means of dialogue that, through embodiment, encapsulates signs and symbols of place and belief. In the Asia-​ Pacific, choreographers utilise this embodiment with diversity, dynamism, and conviction that encompass culturally diverse populations and dance traditions. When such culturally specific iconography, narratives, and dialogues fuse with Western forms, choreographers, either overtly or subliminally, embody these influences to create new forms of expression. The essence is the connection of the embodied self, expressed through movement, relating to the world. When dance artists talk about their work, their language directly relates to the body; not just the physical body but the internalised body, and my location here for this discussion of the intersections of creative writing and dance, and their pedagogies, is Asia. Memories, experiences, and emotions emerge from the embodied self. Visceral and somatic comprehension adds to this ontological critique of dance and descriptors that might be incorporated in the language of “writing the dance.” American philosopher Maxine Sheets-​ Johnstone states, “As one might wonder about the world in words, I am wondering the world directly, in movement” (422), while Indian dancer/​ choreographer/​ activist Chandralekha’s life’s work was the interrogation of the body—​the feminist body, the sexual, political, creative, and resistant body. She states, “My concern is with the body … where does it begin … where does it end?” (2014). Cambodian dancer Hun Pen also expresses her thoughts about dancing in terms of the body and narrative, including her heart, mind, body, blood, and, crucially, the shifting story she tells of herself, to herself, and to audiences: Many people have asked me what makes me continue dancing as a Cambodian classical dancer. Why is the soul of classical dance so important to me? Why does dance mean so much to me? It seems to be a simple question, but it is difficult to answer. The simple answer I would give is, “because I love it and I am passionate about it.” I have been dancing for so long and I know this dance form so well. This dance form has become rooted in my heart and mind. It is alive within my blood. (23–​25) For a dancer like Hun Pen to share that work with others often requires pre-​performance verbalisation. That rehearsal text becomes, I argue, a trace subtext within the eventual, often non-​verbal, performance. In many ways, dancers, including and often especially Asian dancers, write their dances before (and partially as) they perform them. Perhaps the most well-​known dance artist synonymous with describing her art through the use of the term “blood memory” is American pioneer

Writing dance  177 of modern dance Martha Graham, who felt deeply about embodying the psyche through dance. She states: I feel the essence of dance is the expression of man—​the landscape of the soul … … Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination … For all of us, but particularly for a dancer with his intensification of life and his body, there is blood memory that can speak to us. Each of us from our mother and father has received their blood … we carry thousands of years of that blood and its memory. How else to explain those instinctive gestures and thoughts that come to us, with little preparation or expectation. (9–​10) The choreographic process of Graham included the premise that in dance, each movement and phrase comes from “blood memory” with intrinsic meaning and, indeed, many layers of meaning. This theory of meaning underpins dance in cultures throughout the world and is obviously not new; however, it is typically associated with iconic and metaphoric transcreation through mimetic, metapsychotic, and metonymic movement. In the practice of contemporary dance, modernist choreographers have also adopted the concept of the association of movement vocabulary and meaning, initially through Rudolf Laban and the German Expressionists in Europe. However, the term “blood memory” remains associated with Graham. Graham’s movement choirs and mass dance works, although extremely individual, were representative of a political, communal approach to dance. By presenting moral parables, Graham articulated feminist ideals and gave women a political voice in the arts of America; the focus was radically different to what Graham considered the bourgeois interests of classical ballet. Martha Graham’s American Document (1938) and Letter to the World (1940) seek an American identity and a place, specifically for women, in society. Graham’s obsession with the expression of meaning through movement encouraged diverse responses from both audiences and her dancers, several of whom, like Merce Cunningham, found this approach restrictive. Graham was uncompromising and totally dedicated to her art form, calling her dancers “athletes of God” (3) associating the metaphor of “the dance of life” with the human body by which life is made manifest. In this sense, dance is the “blood of life” for Graham. Lifeblood, of course, can be a kind of ink. Graham’s notion of “blood memory” speaks to how dancers can simultaneously write individual and communal stories. The latter is especially true in Asia, where so many dances are cultural, ritualistic, and communal, not just individualistic or interpretive. Another American choreographer associated with the term “blood memory” is Alvin Ailey. His defining work, Revelations, epitomises his search for his roots through dance. Growing up in the south of America, he

178  Stephanie Burridge experienced not only racism, restrictions, and “otherness,” particularly in the world of dance, but also the joys and a rich cultural heritage of community, family, and faith into a narrative both written, at least internally, then performed. The deeply religious work tracks Ailey’s personal memories of blood ties, activities, and the cycle of life imbued with hardship, struggle, and dignity. He says: The first ballets [that I choreographed] were ballets about my black roots. I lived in Texas … until I was 12 … so I have lots of what I call blood memories … So the first ballets that I made when I came to New York were based on those feelings … [As for Revelations,] all of this is a part of my blood memory: my uncles, my family, my mother, all were in these churches … very intense, very personal. (“Alvin”)

Articulating (and/​or writing) dance in the Asia-​Pacific In the Asia-​Pacific, “contextualizing” as well as describing, analysing, and evaluating a dance work might add to our appreciation and understanding of its meaning moving beyond aesthetic enjoyment. Although the globalisation of culture has had a profound impact, regional dance languages in the Asia-​Pacific have not been suppressed. Rather, they have grown in stature with Western choreographers frequently drawing on indigenous influences to create new vocabularies, continuing a tradition of “Orientalism” adopted by, among others, Michel Fokine, Ruth St. Denis, and Maud Allan. How does an identity emerge, including in a dancer’s writing, from such eclecticism in the Asia-​Pacific? The relationship between concept and form in the incorporation of the unique narratives of the storytelling traditions, history, and social issues from traditionally based dance occurs alongside choreographers who explore predominately abstract forms derived from a diversity of movement vocabularies. Choreographers from this diverse region use imagery that is metaphoric, symbolic, and iconic, incorporating their own epistemic and empathetic paths of knowledge. In this amalgam, memory pathways are embodied, codified, constructed and deconstructed, encoded, and decoded into new forms of expression. In these equations (and/​ or translations), the decisions of what to leave in or out are fascinating and create defining features of new dance languages. The context is ultimately the body in place, space, and time, representing both embodied rational and empirical knowledge internalised via multiple memory pathways that ebb and flow as the defining features and function of the dance are played out. When that knowledge is translated verbally, an audience can objectively describe, analyse, assess, and contextualise what they observe; but they can also report on what they feel. Here, personal empathy and epistemic experiences impinge on their reflections and, in a sense, unite them as a performer in the dance.

Writing dance  179 Appropriation, authenticity, and hybridisation Creativity, inspiration, and influence in the context of the present social and political realities should include an understanding and commitment to the rights of the traditional owners of the cultural material. Such a process for an artist involves research, negotiation, knowledge, empathy, and permission where any “traditional” material is used. In an earlier time, for example, among the plethora of works with diverse influences presented by the Ballet Russes, like Fokine’s Le Dieu Bleu (1912), were audiences, or the choreographer, concerned about the Indian authenticity of the movement or the Indian accuracy of the narrative? Commentator’s on these works acknowledge their success was largely due to impresario Serge Diaghilev’s understanding of prevailing audience interests, fashion, and artistic trends. Roger Leong, curator of the 1999 NGA exhibition, From Russia with Love: Costumes for the Ballet Russes, 1909–​1933, notes: The success of the company’s exotic productions can be linked to the Western European fascination with the “Orient” as remote, strange and exciting. Tales of sexual passion, high drama and violent death were set in imaginary locations inspired by Persian, Indian, Central Asian and ancient Egypt cultures. (8) There is a palpable history in performance and other arts that there was much to be enjoyed in “exotic”-​based performances, but current concerns regarding authenticity, cultural protocols, and respect for cultural ownership were not issues. Ramsay Burt considers these shifts in audience tolerance if not taste in-​depth when writing about African-​American performer Josephine Baker: the notion of racial purity [Baker] needs to be placed within its social and political context … it needs to be located within the context of “borrowing” from Black American dance and music by white performers during the last two centuries, and the situation where African American performers for commercial reason, have to imitate white imitations of black performers. (63) Of American dancer Ruth St. Denis, author Joseph H. Mazo notes: St.Denis took what was handy—​a contemporary interest in the exotic, the nation’s delight in spectacle, its enjoyment of sideshow attractions … even its periodic religious revivals … The mind that reveled in mysticism and understood dance as a religious experience also had a remarkable appreciation of popular taste. (83)

180  Stephanie Burridge With regard to English early-​20th-​century dancer Maud Allan, researcher Amy Koritz surmises: While “authentic” Eastern dancing calls attention to the sexualized body of the dancer, making it “ugly,” Allan’s version is “Eastern” but “beautiful.” It both alludes to the sexual and evades it … it represents the spirit of the East, thereby erasing its supposed sensuous physicality and avoiding … the mere provocative posturing of the body. (140–​41) These texts raise questions regarding audience expectations, cultural stereotyping, and identifying particular cultural groups with certain dance genres—​all through the process of contextualisation yet within the dialogue of dancer-​audience, not yet the trialogue of the dancer’s text, dance, and audience reception. Here are some other responses to a cross-​cultural experience for the performed text. For instance, on viewing a traditional Australian Aboriginal dance performed by a group from Arnhem Land, Northern Territory Australia, performing in New York in 1981, dance critic Deborah Jowitt writes: Surrounded by contemporary American art–​ works that we understand—​all having to do with disintegration, with incompleteness, with aborted goals—​ they perform works about wholeness. The dancing, songs, body painting preserve the myths. All seem cryptic. (251) These illustrations reveal some of the complex issues involved in the writing about, and appreciation for, dance while recognising that audience perceptions change when removing the dance from a specific context. Among these transpositions is the acceptance that cultural information can be manipulated to popular taste. For example, a Western sensitivity to Orientalism was more acceptable, certainly in Allan’s time, in “polite circles,” than its authentic counterpart. All of these examples refer to aesthetics and how such works, to some degree, maybe appreciated. Words such as “wholeness,” “beauty,” and “appreciation of popular taste” may go some way towards critiquing such work. As a Western dance reviewer/​writer in Singapore, I am confronted with these issues on many occasions when writing about companies crossing the East/​West cultural divide. Added to this, I am writing for an Asian audience who are culturally informed about some of the predominant dance genres and training that they are viewing. An expanded vocabulary to cover the complexity of dance genres and philosophies is needed; for instance, the classical Indian forms of Kathak, Odissi, and Bharatanatyam; Thai Khon dance; the Chinese meditative forms of tai chi and qigong; and Indonesian martial arts like pancak silat. These forms not only underpin the training and

Writing dance  181 choreography of dance companies and performances in the Asia-​Pacific but embody rich connections to history, philosophy, and religion. Lin Hwai-​min, the founding artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taiwan, redefined dance training for the company dancers by observing: In the West, ballet dancers elevate, just like Gothic church attempts to reach the heavens. The Forbidden City in Beijing is very tall, but the emphasis is on its wide spread. Similarly, tai chi practitioners move horizontally in circular movements … I reasoned ... why don’t we train ourselves in the disciplines created, developed and passed on by people with shorter legs. (xi) Singapore choreographer Raka Maitra incorporates the classical Indian dance form of Odissi in her work. I reviewed Pavalli in Stillness, writing: Infinitesimal shifts in weight initiated changes in direction in a fluid motion that deconstructed the stately poses of the sculptural heritage of Odissi that was inspired by ancient Hindu statues. Longer sections highlighted a shoulder movement, a spiral twist or a chin in profile while the dancers remained firmly rooted to the ground, knees bent, in the traditional triangular tribhang (tri-​bent) stance. (Burridge, “Pavalli”) These are specific references to forms of movement that are non-​Western, namely tai chi and Odissi. Tai chi is widely used as inspiration by Western choreographers—​a difference in the context of the choreography mentioned is the intrinsic relevance to the cultures that it stems from. The home or source culture is this raison d’être for the work, and that culture remains a palimpsest written beneath transposed, translated, and/​or transliterated choreographies. Recall Bangarra, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance company mentioned earlier. The company is based in Sydney, and most of the dancers grew up in urban centres; however, they feel the responsibilities of “ownership” to their heritage and follow the protocols of seeking permission to show any traditional material in the public domain. As the company moves from these traditional sites and contexts for their choreography into the public domain of a wider non-​indigenous audience, they understand that there will be different interpretations of the images, movement, and storytelling presented. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhaba argues that the space of hybridity offers the most profound challenge to colonialism when the postcolonial world valorises mixing of spaces for ambiguity rather than for authenticity or truth (113). Clearing spaces for multiple voices that may have been previously silenced by dominant ideologies entails destabilising hegemonic thinking and enabling alternative voices to influence discourse (113). As a

182  Stephanie Burridge dancer, choreographer, and dance scholar and educator, I encourage all to recognise the margins and centres of their own discourse and narratives. Cultural continuity and preservation through the passing on of culture—​ particularly ephemera such as dance, as it somatically translates verbal texts—​is the focus here. This field includes not only the study and documentation of ritual and dance occurring in a traditional domain but also the exploration of empirical and culturally specific gesture. For instance, to begin to understand the complexity of meaning in Aboriginal dance the iconic, stylistic, descriptive, mimetic, and metonymic aspects of depiction and the associated intentions of transformation, metamorphic, metempsychosis representations must be considered—​this high degree of embodiment, and embodied meaning, crosses multiple memory strands. Elliot Eisner makes a point about meaning-​making in the context of Western education systems: Humans are meaning-​making creatures … some meanings are “readable” and expressible through literal language; still others demand other forms through which meaning can be represented and shared. The arts provide a spectrum of such forms—​we call visual arts, music, dance, theatre. (230) In such “meaning making,” a creator works within their own embodiment via “trigger points” that are aroused by a combination of the above memory fields. Within these fields of memory, how are trigger points stimulated, nurtured, and emancipated to become an overt form of expression? What is involved in such creative choices? This question is fundamental to education and the development of creative and critical thinking. The emphasis of an interdisciplinary approach to arts education, as with the self-​narration of dancers, provides the opportunity to free the outcome of creative sessions to involve layered responses.

Mentoring the voices (and texts) of dance artists across Asia The scope of my writing about dance throughout the Asia-​Pacific, including the ten anthologies I have edited or co-​edited with Routledge, has been to include the embodied experiences of the dance artists who are from the countries they write about. They share multiple perspectives and insights from their roles as performing artists, choreographers, producers, teaching artists, performance script authors, critics, curators, researchers, and university faculty. Articulating dance practice has become increasingly important for choreographers, dance makers, and performers. In part, many undertake dance degrees within an academy that requires a linguistic text over and above the performance of studio work. Defining terms that enable

Writing dance  183 non-​dancers to engage with a performance, and funding bodies to support it, requires words that evoke the concept, inspiration, and intention of a dance. If the artists are able to voice their thoughts in publications that are disseminated to a wide audience, the divides between the researcher and performer, academic scholar, and creator might be bridged.

The language of dance Metaphors and imagery—​those keys to so many genres of creative writing—​ are incorporated frequently in dance pedagogy, choreography, performance, criticism, and reviews. Dance is often based on externalising the internal through translating (embodying) imagery and then externalising it. Lin Hwai-​Min, the artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, eloquently connects the breath of the dancers with the brushstrokes of calligraphy to enable the reader to imagine harmony and movement. In writing a preview article for Arts Equator on the company I noted: Cursive《行草》and Pine Smoke《松烟》… not only extol the elegance of line as the dancers echo the movement of delicate brushstrokes and marks on paper; they juxtapose this within the emptiness of the spaces in between. Space becomes an equal catalyst for what is added and what is left behind in a rich transposition from paper to movement. (Burridge, “Cloud”) Where Cloud Gate dancers literally study writing (calligraphy) to better unlock their dance, many dance artists engage in a more figurative writing of their stories with their bodies. Dancers have a heightened sense of the body and many speak poetically about their work, creating magical images and words that allow us access to their creativity, process, and philosophy of their practice. Writing these narratives, stories, and images provides an invaluable addition to the works we can view in the theatre or on digital platforms. Umesh Shetty from Malaysia offers another example of writing the poetics of dance. Dance is an expression of the soul through the mind and body. It is important for dancer/​choreographer to be able to express his feelings through dance—​to bare one’s soul through the choreography so that it resonates with the audience. (265)

Special features of a dancer’s self-​narration For artists working with tradition, re-​creating an original work as accurately as possible is a concern. When filling in missing gaps, care and consideration are taken to the period when the dance is made, identifying its historical and

184  Stephanie Burridge cultural contexts throughout. Attention to detail of the costumes, music, and production elements to evoke the traditions and context of the original work is crucial, and many contemporary Asian dancers seek to have this accurately documented in any writing about their dance. Many errors occur in translation and misinterpretation of the context. Embodying, experiencing, sensing, constructing, creating, feeling, enjoying are part of the dancer’s vocabulary when speaking about their dance. An observer, or researcher, aims to be objective—​ to disembody, review, deconstruct, critique, analyse, theorise, and explain. Incorporation of cultural and collective memories is vital to restaging dance. The personal philosophy of the dancers also emerges and can be invaluable to examining contemporary trajectories. Below are two accounts of working with tradition. Koy Sina speaks of the delight in immersing herself in tradition when she enters the dance studio in Phnom Phen: There is a door, a magic door—​it is the place for blessings. It is the back door of a large rehearsal hall at the Royal University of Fine Arts. At the top of the roof of the hall, there are birds flying about and nesting there. Every morning the female dance students in their uniform of a blue skirt and white shirt, went into a room and the door closed behind the last one. After a while, they came out of the rooms in their kbin and tight blouse—​the costume for classical dance rehearsal. (168) Trained in Indian classical dance, Anita Ratnam has performed throughout the world and is widely published. As a self-​proclaimed “cultural activist,” she is an advocate for contemporary Indian dance and has created a style known as Neo-​Bharatanatyam. Acknowledging the complexity of the onus of tradition in a contemporary world, she states: Inheriting an art that has now become a cultural product for global consumption in post modern India has supreme challenges for a restless woman. My dance journey has contained more avatars than a James Cameron movie. Ecstatic, foolish, gruesome, awkward, magical, embarrassing, and downright fabulous. (238)

Conclusion This chapter has drawn on examples of dance narrative writing from the Asian region where I have worked with over 300 dance artists over 20 years and advocated a philosophy of mentoring artists in their writing such that their embodied “texts” are transposed and translated into creative writing (first for themselves and then for an audience). The Asia-​Pacific region is rich with multiple identities and unique creative paths that contemporary dance

Writing dance  185 choreographers are negotiating in partnership with existing, and revisited, traditions. What is interesting about the current generation of artists is their ability to work with tradition, to rebuild, invent, and make unique dance statements about their experiences—​they create from personal stories utilising training in both Eastern and Western choreography and performance on stage. It is exciting to read their statements and philosophies about their work from their own perspective. The spontaneity of the artist’s voice should be valued along with an appreciation for borderless contexts, interdisciplinary, collective, and collaborative ways of working, where multiple voices contribute equally to the narrative of the research. The lens of writing about dance might involve a convergence of the artist’s perspective, the artefact, theoretical framing, and discourses both creative and critical. While there is an increasing number of academic publications encompassing the artist’s voice, the outlook is diminished somewhat by education systems that continue to devalue dance and dancers. Presenter of the most popular TED talk ever (“Most”), Sir Ken Robinson wrote the foreword to my most recent Routledge anthology, lamenting: There are reasons why dance is so low on the food chain in many school systems. Some are to do with the origins of mass education in industrialism, which favoured disciplines that seemed most relevant to the economy. To the utilitarian, dance may seem pointless. Others are to do with the influence of universities on the academic culture of schools. The low status of dance is derived in part from the high status of conventional academic work, which associates intelligence mainly with verbal and mathematical reasoning. (xvi) My work strives to level verbal and kinaesthetic intelligence, for creators, and audiences alike.

Works cited Ailey, Alvin, choreographer. Revelations. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 31 Jan. 1960, Kaufman Concert Hall, 92nd Street YM-​YWHM. “Alvin Ailey: An In-​Depth Look.” Found Movement Group. 3 July 2020, http://​ foundmovementgroup.com/​ n ewsletters-​ a rticles/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 7 / ​ 3 / ​ a lvin- ​ a iley- ​ a nin-​depth-​look. Bhaba, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Burridge, Stephanie. “Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan: Between East and West, Heaven and Earth.” 8 Apr. 2018, artsequator.com, https://​artsequator.com/​cloud-​ gate-​dance-​theatre-​esplanade/​. —​—​—​. The Influence of Aboriginal Dance on Choreography in Australia. 1996. London Contemporary Dance School/​U of Kent, PhD dissertation. —​—​—​. “Pavalli in Time.” Straits Times, 21 Apr. 2017. Singapore Press Holdings, www.straitstimes.com/​lifestyle/​arts/​ground-​breaking-​dance-​work.

186  Stephanie Burridge Burt, Ramsay. Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race,” and Nation in Early Modern Dance. Routledge, 1998. Carell, Victor, and Beth Dean. Dust for the Dancers. Ure Smith, 1955. Chandralekha, choreographer. YouTube, Sharira—​Chandralekha’s Explorations in Dance, uploaded 5 Apr. 2019. Producer & Commissioning Editor—​ Rajiv Mehrotra, PSBT India, 2014, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=vyXh_​5dT0zw. Eisner, Elliot W. The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Yale U P, 2002. Fokine, Michel, choreographer. Le Dieu bleu. Ballets Russes, 13 May 1912, Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Graham, Martha, choreographer. American Document, 6 Aug. 1938, Vermont State Armory, Bennington, Vermont. —​—​—​. Blood Memory. Doubleday, 1991. —​—​—​, choreographer. Letter to the World (1940), 11 Aug. 1940, Bennington College Theater, Bennington, Vermont. Hun, Pen. “I Am a Cambodian Dancer.” Beyond the Apsara: Celebrating Dance in Cambodia, edited by Stephanie Burridge and Fred Frumberg, Routledge, 2010, pp. 14–​25. Jowitt, Deborah. The Dance in Mind: Profiles and Reviews 1976–​ 83. David R. Godine Publisher, 1985. Koritz, Amy. “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s The Vision of Salome.” Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane Desmond, Duke U, 1997, pp. 133–​52. Koy, Sina. “Artist Interviews and Biographies.” Beyond the Apsara: Celebrating Dance in Cambodia, edited by Stephanie Burridge and Fred Frumberg, Routledge, 2010, pp. 166–​70. Leong, Roger. “Introduction.” From Russia with Love: Costumes from the Ballet Russe 1909–​1933, edited by Susan Hall, National Gallery of Australia Publications, 1999, pp. 6–​23. Lin, Hwai-​min. “Foreword.” Identity and Diversity: Celebrating Dance in Taiwan, edited by Yunyu Wang and Stephanie Burridge, Routledge, 2012, pp. xi–​xiii. —​—​—​. choreographer. Cursive 1《行草》 《行草》Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, 2001, National Theater, Taipei, Taiwan. —​—​—​. choreographer. Pine Smoke《松烟》 《松烟》Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, 30 Aug. 2003, National Theater, Taipei, Taiwan. Maitra, Raka, choreographer. Pavalli in Time, CHOWK Dance Productions, 21 Apr. 2017, Esplanade Theatre. Mazo, Joseph H. Prime Movers, the Makers of Modern Dance in America. Princeton Book Company, 1977. “The Most Popular Talks of All Time.” TED, n.d., www.ted.com/​playlists/​171/​the_​ most_​popular_​talks_​of_​all. Ratnam, Anita. “Artist Interviews and Biographies.” Traversing Tradition: Celebrating Dance in India, edited by Urmimala Sarka Munsi, and Stephanie Burridge, Routledge, 2010, pp. 238–​41. Robinson, Ken. “Foreword.” Dance Education around the World: Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change, edited by Charlotte Svendler Nielsen and Stephanie Burridge, Routledge, 2015, pp. xv–​xvii. Sheets-​Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement: Advances in Consciousness Research. John Benjamin, 2011.

Writing dance  187 Shetty, Umesh. “Artist Interviews and Biographies” Sharing Identities: Celebrating Dance in Malaysia, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor and Stephanie Burridge, Routledge, 2011, pp. 262–​65. Stock, Cheryl. “Awakening the Spirit: Telling the Stories.” Shaping the Landscape: Celebrating Dance in Australia, edited by Stephanie Burridge and Julie Dyson, Routledge, 2011, pp. 52–​67.

13  Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies First-​person plural and writing/​ teaching against offence Sreedhevi Iyer

This chapter refocuses the philosophy of cosmopolitanism within two aspects of Creative Writing (CW) pedagogy. Firstly, as a deliberate emphasis on a specific craft choice. This chapter argues that using the first-​person plural (FPP) point of view in narrative—​the collective “we”—​is emblematic of cosmopolitanism in the teaching of CW in Hong Kong. I give a brief history of FPP in terms of its utilisation in the Western canon and include examples of exercises I have used with my Hong Kong students that extends its use in a way that is more accurately reflective of Hong Kong’s linguistic and sociocultural realities. Secondly, this chapter focuses on the philosophy of cosmopolitanism as a possible point of resolution, or at least engagement, in terms of reconciling or reducing extreme reactions to offence prevalent in contemporary literary discourse, one which can be utilised within pedagogy. This chapter also acknowledges the contradiction prevalent in applying cosmopolitanism in terms of craft: the “we” collective is a pluralistic approach, while negating the same pluralistic philosophy within literary discourse, as leading to self-​censorship. The inherent tension in this contradiction is verily the challenge of the cosmopolitan philosophy as well—​that the application of cosmopolitanism is the actual negotiation of these tensions.

Background Kwame Appiah propagates cosmopolitanism as a philosophy that describes the universal global village that forms our contemporary sense of reality. He defines this philosophy in two ways: (a) that we have obligations to others, stretching beyond family relations and citizenship; (b) that the particularities of human life have to be taken seriously and given significance. Of course, these are key values for a writer at any stage in her career or location on the planet. As will be demonstrated, they are acutely relevant here in not just Asia but an Asia that is also opening up to creative university degrees. According to Appiah (xix), a writer who is a “citizen of the cosmos” negotiates the clash between the two strands of universal concern and legitimate differences in their creative work and also in the way they practise DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003133018-14

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  189 this ethos in the contemporary world. For example, a writer of Indian origin born in Singapore and writing for an American audience would attempt to communicate in ways that are universally relevant in any part of the world but might be doing so with an expectation that his or her legitimate difference—​of knowing and understanding particular things about their culture and environment and language—​is acknowledged, if not completely understood. The concepts of “universal concerns” and “legitimate differences,” though, as Appiah mentions above, clash. Appiah explains that cosmopolitanism “begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of co-​existence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (xix). Notice how much that resembles the Creative Writing workshop. However, he elaborates on this “older meaning” of conversation as something still problematic, by adding that “Conversations across boundaries can be fraught, all the more so as the world grows smaller and the stakes grow larger … what academics sometimes dub ‘cultural otherness’ should prompt neither piety nor consternation” (Appiah xx). This chapter examines this “fraughtness” within the myriad conversations that surround and indeed comprise tertiary CW education. It studies the possibility of an out-​of-​the-​box convention in crafting creative work as a part of the legitimate difference that clashes with the universal. It also reflects on how writers can be, in the contemporary world of political correctness and easy offence, especially on social media, and how cosmopolitan writers negotiate the clash of universal concerns and legitimate differences in such an environment. In examining this possibility, I apply my own experience in teaching CW to students in Hong Kong, during my time as Writer-​In-​Residence at Lingnan University of Liberal Arts, Hong Kong (2017). I also bring in current reflections on a collaborative creative writing studio conducted between Singaporean writers and Australian writers at RMIT.

Part A One of the representations of Appiah’s “legitimate difference” is the collective nature of Hong Kong society, where the individual is subsumed and is considered less important than the larger whole. In terms of CW, this element has not been accurately demonstrated/​ represented within pedagogical philosophies. For example, the use of point of view in the Western canon primarily supposes, and derives from, philosophies of existentialism and the notion of individual rights prevailing over collective rights (Bloom 519). There is very obviously the first person “I,” the second person “you,” and the third person “he” or “she.” There is also the contemporary aesthetic preference for third person limited, where the “he” or “she” point of view is relayed as close to the character as possible, almost as if it were a first-​ person narrative (Gardner 157; Burroway and Stuckey-​French 300). The

190  Sreedhevi Iyer central element in this Western literary work is the singular individual character, who also sometimes functions as narrator. However, in the Asian context, and the Hong Kong context in particular, such an emphasis on the singular point of view might read as false, and lacking accuracy in reflecting the sociocultural realities of a place with, to name just a few factors, high population density, a co-​operative community ethos, and filial piety and familial piety revered in culture and/​or religion (as it happens). The individualism of the Western literary hero (often her/​ his own narrator) is not in keeping with Appiah’s sense of a legitimate difference, but rather entrapping Hong Kong in an unrealistic aesthetic. A more accurate aesthetic might be the use of the first-​personal plural—​ “we” instead of “I.” The “we” encompasses more than the person within the story. It functions as character, and also as narrator, if necessary. The narrating “we” also recognises a “legitimate difference” within CW pedagogy, in that it resists the universal norm of individuated aesthetics. Interestingly, the use of FPP has been around (if under-​used and under-​ appreciated) since Western antiquity. It only further goes to demonstrate the negotiated tension between the universal and the particular, to now see that point of view as something experimental within the English language.

“I Was There”: first-​person plural, a quick history I undertake here a brief historical overview of the literary FPP, starting from its origins in a Greek chorus, down to its more contemporary uses in literature. I also mention some of the writing exercises I have used in my CW classrooms that foreground this point of view. The collective perspective was a common feature in Ancient Greek theatre, where a chorus was always present. Consisting of around 12 to 50 members, the chorus was intentionally homogeneous. They were meant to be non-​individualised, functioning instead as a collective voice, a larger whole. Their job was to comment on the action of the play as it happened. They articulated the feelings of the characters and the themes of the story. Historically, the chorus were considered actors in themselves, bonded within the narrative, as opposed to possessing a separate identity external to the narrative (Foley 4). They possessed the space of “the ideal spectator” (Schlegel 70), conveying an added dimension of the narrative to actual spectators. In that sense, they functioned to tell the audience what they ought to think, and feel, and “get” from the story. By the time Joseph Conrad wrote The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in 1897, the notion of the chorus in text had shifted to fuse the narrator and character, exemplified in a plural perspective, the “we.” A story of a sea voyage from Bombay to London, with a sickly West Indian protagonist who dies within sight of his destination, the narrative incorporates both FPP and third-​person narration simultaneously, with seamless exchanges between the two that would have a contemporary editor baulk and would certainly

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  191 be novel in one of today’s thousands of CW workshops. While the narrative opens with “Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter deck” (3), at a later part of the narrative, the FPP assumes the mantle of narration: They were forgetting their toil, they were forgetting themselves. (32) We hesitated between pity and mistrust. (36) The point at which the FPP comes into play is significant—​it denotes a collective kinship, a significant bond between the seamen. Instead of telling the reader the action, the plural perspective here functions to coalesce multiple minor characters into a singular whole. Subsequent works of fiction have utilised the FPP as a signifier for a larger collective mindset, with varying tones and effects appropriate to the narrative. For example, in Middlemarch George Eliot utilises a narrator who occasionally rises up in the text in the form of FPP, as a collective conscience of the town (72). There is a direct echo of the Greek chorus here, where the “we” narrator functions to explicate the action instead of being a narrative device: “Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand” (72). However, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a 1919 forerunner to George Orwell’s 1984, utilises the FPP not as any kind of pastoral bond of community, but as a mandatory obligation ordered by government. Zamyatin’s darker tone is in keeping with the satirical nature of a narrative set in a futuristic dystopia. Deindividuation here is a form of control. Tadeusz Borowski achieves the same effect in 1959’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, where the plural perspective is the stronger, more confident one between a mix of singular and plural first-​person perspective. In a narrative about a group of deportees at a concentration camp, Borowski’s “we” becomes a desperate, hapless, miserable entity: We march fast, almost at a run. There are guards all around, young men with automatics. We pass camp II B, then some deserted barracks and a clump of unfamiliar green—​apple and pear trees. We cross the circle of watchtowers and, running, burst on to the highway. We have arrived. Just a few more yards. There, surrounded by trees, is the ramp. (67) Borowski’s action-​ packed paragraph employs the “we” exclusively, giving the impression of a multitude functioning in a singular fashion. Deindividuation here, instead of being a political statement, is a consistent narrative perspective in line with the number of characters participating in the action.

192  Sreedhevi Iyer Similarly, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) employs a consistent “we” throughout the narrative, for a collection of boys, all of whom function as a set of protagonists, in a way (and interestingly, the girls in the book are referred to as “them”—​third-​person plural): We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. (43–​44) Here, the sense of the collective is solid and monolithic. There is no differentiation between the boys, giving the impression that they are all narrating the same story the same way throughout. In contradiction to this, Kate Walbert’s Our Kind (2004) contains a “we” point of view that is very different to Eugenides’s monolith. While the plot contains similarities, of young women of suburbia participating in different events, including suicide in some instances, the “we” point of view functions in a way that reflects the fragmented nature of its setting and characters. There are individuations and differentials—​ some characters foreground themselves in some parts of the stories, and other characters recede in the background in other parts. For example, in a section of the novel where there is to be an intervention, the character Canoe is foregrounded: It was one of those utterances that sparkled—​the very daring! Could you see us? Canoe shrugged, to be expected. After all, Canoe was our local recovering; it was she who left those pamphlets in the clubhouse next to the men’s Nineteenth Hole. Still, the very daring! (3) Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic (2001) holds a middle ground in its use of “we,” standing between Eugenides and Walbert. In relaying the tale of mail-​ order brides emigrating to the US in the early 1900s, Otsuka writes some experiences that read monolithic, and some that differentiate: Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on. (3) Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  193 day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers’ daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. (7) The first passage gives a sense of different women’s experience meshed together, while the second details some differentiation occurring between the women—​especially with the repetition of “some of us.” More recently, Chang Rae-​Lee’s On Such a Full Sea openly embraces FPP and plays with it as a legitimate storytelling feature. In a dystopian narrative set in futuristic Baltimore consisting of a professional class propped up by a serving class, the novel utilises the classic Aristotelian plot structure, with a clear hero’s journey. However, the narrator is a combination of a universal omniscient voice present as “we,” as well as narrating the protagonist Fan’s journey as a point of differentiation. More significantly, the collective “we” narrator is foregrounded as participating and commenting on the action of the narrative, very much reminiscent of early modern works: It is “where we are” that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not. (381) We feel ever obliged by everyday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up. (193) While the traditional use of such a device would be what purists call the omniscient point of view, or, as an unreliable narrator, the use of FPP in this shifts the affect closer to the reader. The aesthetics of an unreliable narrator stays, but it is not in the sense of information being withheld from the reader—​instead, it is rather that the omniscient narrator(s) are being collectively vulnerable in expressing and reflecting on a larger profound experience. The reader as such becomes one of the “we,” brought along the epic journey with them. The above provides a brief outline and chronology of the use of FPP within fiction in the English language. Below I contextualise the use of FPP in Hong Kong society.

FPP in Hong Kong In teaching CW students in Hong Kong, I have found that using FPP is a far more accurate reflection of Hong Kong’s socio-​cultural realities. The city-​state functions as a collectivist society (Gudykunst et al., 205) where

194  Sreedhevi Iyer the larger group consciousness takes precedence over individual interests. In Individualism and Collectivism, Harry Triandis lays out four criteria that shape collectivist ways of being (52–​59). Hong Kong fulfils all four of these, namely that (1) group goals take precedence over individual goals; (2) interdependence is of higher value than independence; (3) social behaviour is rooted in norms, obligations, and duties; and (4) the communality of a relationship is emphasised even when it represents a disadvantage (Triandis 54; Wagner 154–​55). Hong Kong society of course possesses individuals that exhibit the full range of human behaviour, but Hong Kong society, especially in comparison to island counterparts like Singapore and New York, operates as collectivists significantly on a daily basis (Hwang et al. 79). Additionally, the FPP, “we,” is also a common pronoun in Cantonese (ngo5dei6), functioning as both “we” and “us” (Wakefield 2019) It can function to include the speaker and the addressee within a specific group, such as in media speech that includes an audience at home. A contemporary example is the current saying “we are in this together,” to denote the global effect of the coronavirus pandemic. Such inclusive use can enhance solidarity with the listening audience (Wai and Yap 696), even as the subject matter is a negative one, i.e., about an untreatable illness. The “we” in Cantonese can also be used to exclude the addressee but refer to the action of the speaker as a member or spokesperson of a larger group—​which can also be used in political discourses to evade blame (Wai and Yap 694). An example Brian Wai and Foong Ha Yap give is how politicians use “we” in media interviews, especially when attempting to evade a controversial question. Using “we” in a way that excludes the addressee and audience shifts their interactional footing (Goffman 1981 in Wai and Yap 2018) that suggests they are speaking on behalf of the party they belong to, and that therefore they are not solely responsible for the issue at hand. Finally, the “we” can also travel in the language to denote the shift from a personal standpoint to a collectivist standpoint (Wai and Yap 706). So, in actuality, the FPP “we” is quite common and is prevalent in everyday language use in Hong Kong Cantonese-​speaking society. The challenge, really, then, is using the “we” in the English language and its creative writing in university courses, as representative of how Hong Kong tells its stories.

FPP CW exercises One of the exercises I’ve employed in class begins with querying students on how they’d use FPP to construct a collective voice. We discuss if they have a plural set of characters who can benefit from the “we” point of view. If so, would it contain differentiations, with individual voices within the collective narrative, who have their own journeys? I then also ask my students to consider their intention in using FPP, in terms of the effect they aim to achieve. This can be done either as group work or as individual work,

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  195 depending on the size of the class. We then gather back for a full class discussion. Usually, what we agree on is that a collective viewpoint can be more personal, familial, and tribal. The student would need to decide if this will be portrayed as something valuable and a sign of everyone getting along. This might lend itself to a consistently monolithic point of view as per The Virgin Suicides. Alternatively, the students might want to demonstrate a false sense of security that eventually shocks the reader, in which case differentiation and unreliability might fare better, as in the dystopian narrative of Zamyatin and Chang Rae-​Lee. Given the political climate of Hong Kong, one of the more popular FPP exercises has been the use of personification. Students are asked to write a monologue in the voice of Hong Kong, as if the city itself was the protagonist (as it is in fellow contributor Xu Xi’s book of creative non-​fiction Dear Hong Kong). If Hong Kong were “talking” to the world about itself, what would it say? What would it say if it were talking to Beijing? This short exercise always drew very detailed and impassioned entries. One might extend to say the exercise allowed for political expression in the English language—​ an activity which usually remains in the Cantonese realm. Another way in which FPP becomes an effective narrative tool is in narratives that incorporate the digital world. The use of FPP on social media is not new—​users who function as corporate entities are more prone to employing the collective “we” to delineate their position and separate themselves from individual users (Meiselwitz 22–​33). However, using the perspective in CW and keeping the digital space in mind can prompt intriguing narratives. In a simple exercise of writing a short story on something going viral online, the students decide on a multitude of entities to which they can ascribe the “we”—​for example, a Facebook group, or a WhatsApp group, that witnesses the phenomenon. Use of differentiation is encouraged, to build individual voices with opinions on the subject matter, although the overall perspective remains collective. Student responses have ranged from a family quarrel in a WhatsApp group chat, to a surrealist fantasy narrative of a Facebook group planning and executing a trip to the moon, with ongoing commentary in the group. The ways in which FPP was utilised differed as well. The family quarrel interestingly possessed more differentiations of perspectives, with individual characters foregrounding themselves to establish conflict. Conversely, the surrealist space mission on Facebook utilised FPP in a very monolithic sense—​in such a risky endeavour, plot-​wise, there was no room for disagreement or conflict—​everyone had to pull together and work together towards the common goal. In this sense, the Cantonese way of using “us”—​to exclude the addressee but including the speaker with a certain group of people—​came into play. The perspective came from that singular “we” or “us”—​“we made a decision” or “we could not arrive in time.” The narrative was about “all of us” in the story but not the reader outside the story.

196  Sreedhevi Iyer Overall, the use of FPP is an effective craft tool in CW in the Hong Kong context (and indeed perhaps in many Asian contexts) as it functions to include rather than exclude and reprioritises the centre of the narrative experiences. Agency is not lost in the collective experience—​differentiation allows for multiple characters within the collective to behave erratically and in contradiction to the larger whole. The hero’s journey is not diminished here, although a traditional Cantonese narrative lacks a concrete, significant transformative element in its climax (Vittachi 5), as plot developments do impact the collective whole. Character names are optional, as is co-​operation within the collective. As a result, the scale of the narrative might appear larger than it actually is—​something happening to a town, or to a Facebook group of significant numbers, might appear more impactful than to a townsperson, or a single Facebook user. Proportions shift. There is even the temptation to make the action itself more epic, in line with the collectivist perspective. However, to these epic tendencies I say that a narrative with FFP is probably going to be more effective if some other element—​either plot or setting or dialogue—​were deliberately ordinary and mundane. The Virgin Suicides has death in the title but is set in sleepy suburbia. Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, with its use of differentiation, employs mundane dialogue that sets off the differentiation. Conversely, Chang-​Rae Lee’s dystopian setting gives rise to philosophical musings—​the effect is immediately epic and otherworldly, and the focus is no longer on the point of view but on other story elements. Student work in Hong Kong in response to FPP prompts display similar multitudinous outcomes. The purpose of FPP really, then, is demonstrating the effect of joint consciousness, with the author determining its value judgement. In taking FPP in the Hong Kong context further, it would be helpful to determine other craft elements that complement or set off the FPP, so that it becomes a legitimate narrative mode, as opposed to something gimmicky and experimental. Teaching FPP in the Hong Kong context is in a sense an odd phenomenon—​ it is introducing the experimental in the English language to learners who are already familiar with the concept in Cantonese. In a sense, it is akin to driving right around a roundabout only to turn into the opposite lane from where you are travelling from. Extending FPP as something out of the existing Western canon might seem like an exercise in universality. And yet, in practice, the learners are not modelling their narratives or relying on these English-​writing predecessors—​they are harkening back to FPP use in Cantonese and transliterating it to English. In a sense, the students respond with their own legitimate difference. The clash here is that the pedagogical philosophy does not align with actual learner process. The outcome, however, remains the same—​the production of FPP point of view in English-​ language CW.

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  197

Part B Cosmopolitanism in the age of offence This section focuses on cosmopolitanism as a possible point of dissolution of instant offence and outrage that has currently become a weapon of identity politics, including in university CW workshops and programmes. I focus on this in light of CW pedagogy being placed within university departments dealing with the English language, literary and cultural studies, creative arts, media studies, and other disciplines within the Humanities that have staunchly valorised identity politics within neoliberal frameworks. In a socio-​literary environment where the authenticity of individual lived experience is considered to be of paramount value, what you identify as authentic about yourself becomes the thing with which you wield your offence—​in terms of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and more. This phenomenon becomes especially relevant in CW pedagogy. As elaborated below, the quality or merit of a literary work is very much attributed to the individual author’s skill and expertise. As such, authors in social situations are required to exhibit a self in line with this social expectation. The public impression of the author-​lecturer is as relevant as their teaching skills, and this section focuses on these developments. Interestingly, such a climate, I believe, dilutes Appiah’s notion of legitimate differences. The term presupposes both a healthy respect for the idea of difference and a recognition of legitimacy. As Appiah mentions: “The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals—​not nations, tribes or ‘peoples’—​as the proper object of moral concern” (40). However, the current environment in literary discourse, I argue, makes the error of evaluating what is appropriate or not—​what can be written about or not, and by whom—​on structural terms and, in tribal, group terms. This section explores this environment.

Background There is a tendency in contemporary literary discourse to equate the author to the literary work produced—​that the author is the work and vice versa. This attribution places the author in a problematic position. This section attempts to explore the fraught expectations placed on authors to perform an “authentic” version of themselves in public. In literary studies, the author’s self is manifest in an indirect manner within the literary work. As Laura Mandell argues, whenever we talk about “great literature” using an author’s name, we confuse people and texts, subtly reinforcing the unconscious idea that authors are literature rather than that they wrote it. The ideology of

198  Sreedhevi Iyer authorship fosters such a confusion, and it simultaneously imposes expectations on people as to how to behave. (208) The personality of the “great author” is created out of words drawn together from innumerable sources (Mandell 209). Unlike the idea of truth in scientific research, research on literature focuses on the author to reveal an otherwise impenetrable “truth.” “The scientist’s name is irrelevant,” argues Mandell. “Truth in science depend[s]‌upon the reproducibility of scientific data while a literary author’s name absolutely determines the value of a text” (209). The intrinsic linking of the literary author’s name to the text produced comes from several arguments within literary and cultural studies that examine the relationships between the identity of author as person as opposed to the identity of author as text. For example, Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author locates the author as an amorphous entity within the study of literature, unrelated and unconnected with actual identity or human self. Literature is a space “where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes” (Barthes 1). In place of the author, literature stands as “the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin” (Barthes 1). In this view, the author’s identity is solely of the work, and the personhood of the author is to be sacrificed in its stead. The idea of there being no person behind a text has been critiqued as being pernicious and provincial (Paglia 653) but remains a popular assumption in the social discourse surrounding literature and authors. In addition, Michel Foucault’s notion of the author-​function further explores the author’s identity as a more central, necessary aspect of literary discourse (Foucault, “Author” 124). Speaking of the usage of an author’s name when discussing a text, Foucault says: It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it. (“What Is” 109; emphasis added) This further embeds the author’s identity as emblematic of their work. Given this association, the community expectation is for the authors to “be themselves” and embody the work they have produced, which assumes a consistency with audience perceptions about the author. The public pressure for an “authentic” author self is a self that is in alignment with the expected self, the self embedded within the text, rather than the self that is the social person participating in the social occasion. Such discursive expectation conflates the artist’s individuality with the literature they write. This

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  199 conflation in turn produces the conditions that inform the behaviour of the artist as a “person,” performing a role within the social order. The author, as person, has to therefore enact, and embody, issues related to the text within the discourse, in order to seem “authentic.” The conflation between author and person has created an expectation that the author’s discursively recognisable self will be in line with their literary product. As such, instances where the author “person” is inconsistent in behaviour with this expectation will bring censure and criticism. The literary environment mentioned above is further compounded by the social expectation of political correctness and adherence to identity politics. So much literary controversy has raged around who gets to write what and, more pressingly, who gets to write whom. A particularly memorable one is the keynote speech given by author Lionel Shriver in 2016 at the Brisbane Writers Festival. In the speech, Shriver takes a stand against the idea of cultural appropriation in literature, specifically fiction writing, as being censorious and limiting of free speech. According to her, the taboo of cultural appropriation comes from a high prevalence of identity politics and overt political correctness apparent within university campuses in the US. She contends: I worry that the clamorous world of identity politics is also undermining the very causes its activists claim to back. As a fiction writer, yeah, I do sometimes deem my narrator an Armenian. But that’s only by way of a start. Merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word … Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-​ bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-​down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough. … If we embrace narrow group-​based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen. (Shriver) In response to this keynote address, non-​fiction author Yassmin Abdel-​ Magied, a Sudanese-​born Brisbane writer, self-​confessedly walked out of the festival event. She proceeded to write a think piece detailing her offence at Shriver’s keynote (which, one should point out, she did not actually hear

200  Sreedhevi Iyer until completion), which included her sense of tone, as well as coming from a background of privilege and racial supremacy. The Guardian republished her piece, which then made the controversy receive global attention. The controversy still ripples today, not the least due to the nature of social media that amplified and sustained the argument for far longer than previously possible. Outraged responses from many quarters, from Australia to the US, begged the question—​who was Lionel Shriver speaking to, versus who is actually rightfully umbraged about it? Ultimately, Shriver was a white woman who was deliberately being provocative. She refused to toe the expected line of behaviour discursively determined for her by identity politics. She especially openly questions the existence of ethnic characters. In the end, much of the accusations levelled against her became that she had highlighted reviews of her work that she had not agreed with, and that therefore it seemed that she wrote the keynote as a reaction to criticism. In this instance, it would seem that the discursive norm that Shriver had transgressed was a misalignment between author as “person” versus author as text. Shriver was most known for writing We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel about the mother of a youth murderer. She had been invited to speak to an audience in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, about “Community and Belonging.” Her keynote address, touching very pertinent issues that had perhaps become taboo among the identity policing left, was unexpected, inconsistent behaviour that did not adhere nor align with the expected author self in public. Instead of speaking to the theme, or speaking as an author on themes related to her book, such as teen violence and maternal guilt, Shriver, as recounted by Brisbane Writers Festival director Julie Beveridge, “did not speak to her brief” (Nordland). By actually being herself, Shriver was censured as being the worst of herself. Notably, during the festival, the organisers removed the text of Shriver’s opening keynote address from their website but kept up the replies of (some of) those she offended (Nordland). A similar issue of community and appropriation broke out in The New Yorker. Calvin Trillin, a legendary food critic, penned a doggerel, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” about hipster anxiety surrounding the “coolest,” “trendiest” regional Chinese cuisine. The poem included mentions of regions in China, including Szechuan, Hunan, Fukien, and Shaanxi (Trillin 2016). A few days after the magazine issue was published, social media raged with accusations of racism against Trilling. The offence and outrage ranged from articles in Asian-​American magazines to Twitter posts calling for his resignation (Ramzy 2016). In that atmosphere of outrage, it did not matter that Trillin was a legendary food critic, a highly respected connoisseur credited with giving exposure to a lot of Asian cuisine in the West. It did not matter that the poem was a doggerel and written in the voice of New York hipsters. The conflation of author and text had occurred, and tone and meaning were afterthoughts in the deluge of offence. Trillin’s explanation only made things worse (Wong). Identity policing won the day.

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  201

Intercultural studio: Singapore and RMIT 2019 In an example from the contemporary Asian CW workshop, I witnessed a smaller but similar conflation occur within my own CW workshop group that gave rise to similar queries. In 2019, I conducted an intercultural writing workshop studio between CW students of RMIT Melbourne, and emerging Singaporean writers attached to SingLit Station, a community writing group in Singapore. A select group of Singaporean writers had flown over for our fortnight-​long studio, culminating in a joint intercultural reading at the Melbourne Writers Festival 2019. In preparation for their arrival, I had set certain writing assignments for my RMIT students, which required them to research Singaporean stories and authors. James Ferris, one of my students, decided to research and write a ghost story based on the Pontianak, a well-​ known South-​ East Asian mythical creature. During workshops, two Singaporean writers, Naomi and Tan (not their real names), among others, aired their discomfort with certain aspects of James’s story. According to them, there were many aspects to the ghost that did not feel genuine. This included the use of joss sticks, the hanging of clothes outside a balcony by expats, and the crying of wild dogs—​none of which, they felt, would occur in contemporary Singapore. In response, James doubled down on the use of the Pontianak and decided to write a different story for workshopping and for the eventual reading at the Melbourne Writers Festival. In the discussion that preceded James’s decision, James clarified that his choices came from the research conducted around the Pontianak myth. Both Naomi and Tan continued to express what they felt was inaccurate about the story, with the underlying implication that their views were more accurate. The further implication in the exchange seemed to be that their lived experience as Singaporeans overrode James’s research. As the workshop leader, I acknowledged Naomi and Tan’s on-​ground expertise and therefore the assumed legitimacy of their opinion. I also requested that they provide their own sources, to further support their argument. I especially felt that if James had been conscientious enough to do his research, with the necessary secondary and primary sources, countering it would also require similar research, with secondary and primary sources. At the time, neither Singaporean writer could recommend one, although Naomi later posted a journal article on supernatural stories in Singapore to the common Facebook group. The secondary source, while welcome, did not match the argument in the studio. The article was on types of ghost stories, and their inherent themes, and did not specifically lay out the “rules” of Pontianak behaviour. What remained of this incident was an interesting demonstration of the conflation of author and identity. The underlying assumption in Naomi and Tan’s argument seemed to be that no matter how much research James did, it did not exempt him from some form of disqualification in writing

202  Sreedhevi Iyer a Pontianak story that was inaccurate in their eyes. Conversely, it also seemed to imply that Naomi and Tan’s lived experience and knowledge of Pontianaks took precedence over James’s research—​and that lived experience was a more accurate resource, over peer-​reviewed sources. The further implication, I posit, is that there were moral and ethical rules around who gets to write which stories. In this instance, the implication is that only those who have had the lived experience, and who belong to the cultural and racial group that is aware of Pontianak in their lives, can write about them, and those outside the group will never be able to do the story justice, presumably due to structural inequalities of race and culture within that discourse.1 The most significantly worrying part of this incident is James’s eventual decision to sacrifice the story for a less controversial one for his eventual course submission—​in effect, killing a piece of fiction before it can develop further than a draft.

Discussion In each of these instances, the identity of the author is conflated with the narrator in the work, resulting in an expectation of behaviour and expression within the discourse. Failure to adhere to such behaviour can generate conflict; misunderstandings; and, in the worst case scenarios, censorship. By many such accounts, outrage itself seems enough a justification to claim the end, and even the error, of a debate. The most worrying aspect of all this is how normalised this censure has become—​a literary controversy (and an unnecessary one at that) is now an expectation, not an exception. In such a censorious environment, Appiah’s arguments become increasingly relevant. “Cosmopolitans take cultural differences seriously,” he says, “but many of globalisation’s cultural critics are aiming at the wrong targets” (40). Much of the arguments around offence in the examples above circle on the idea of cultural preservation. Culture cannot, should not, be appropriated by those who do not belong to it, and especially by those considered to have privilege over the “oppressed” cultures, as it then causes erasure, or at best a dilution of the culture, and thereby propagates homogeneity and lack of diversity. The assumption in this argument, though, is that culture, by itself, is some monolithic entity, existing somewhat solitarily, like a statue, heavy and still, withstanding external forces, and is now at danger of extinction due to appropriation, rather like an animal endangered through excessive poaching. Nothing can be further from the truth. Culture can be viewed as “a set of ideas, beliefs, norms, and behaviors shared by or common to a group inhabiting a geographic location” (Varnum and Grossman 957). Any of these elements are subject to alteration if accepted as common by the group in question. For example, divorce in the US in the 1950s was considered exceptional and extreme. As Michael Varnum and Igor Grossman point out, changes in culture are inevitable and

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  203 are subject to evolution. They are classified as “changes in ideas, norms, and behaviors of a group of people (or changes in the contents or themes of their products reflecting such changes), over time, typically on the scale of decades or centuries” (957). This very idea of an evolution of norms and beliefs over a specific scale of time renders culture a dynamic, contextual concept, contingent on the future as much as on the past. This idea of cultural evolution then gets entangled with authorship—​the notion of “authenticity” becomes fixated on only the author of a specific cultural background being allowed to actually write anything of that background, because they possess an “authentic” lived experience of that subject matter. In the conflation of author and subject, this once again translates to something along the lines of, “Only Chinese people (those from China and the diaspora) can write about other Chinese people, and ideas and events related to Chinese culture.” The further presumption here is that culture is monolithic, endangered, and requires preservation (somewhat like an animal or a forest). Once again, according to Appiah, “Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic, they’re just dead” (44). An attempt to preserve a culture in some ways while resisting cultural imperialism is thus patronising and condescending. The objective of preservation seems to be a maintenance of authentic ways or authentic narratives. The New Yorker poem might have been more acceptable if the author had been Chinese. The Pontianak story would have been acceptable if the Singaporean writers (or, even more authentically, Malay writers) had written it—​that way, authenticity would have been maintained and culture (or its ideal) preserved. However, this debate is is no longer even about authenticity. The presumption here is that Chinese and Singaporean writers are somehow being thwarted, obstructed, from writing such narratives—​and that if given a chance, that is what they would do. Mainly, that they are not given enough of a voice or platform to tell their stories. However, if they are given such platforms and opportunities, and end up writing something else entirely, that is their right and choice. In that sense, arguments of authenticity become, as Appiah finds, “just amount[ing] to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions” (44). Conversely, if we reversed this—​do we then tell Anglo-​ Saxons they should exclusively value their Greek and Roman cultural elements in their contemporary narratives? Should Jennifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, Cormac MacCarthy, and Johnathan Franzen be writing exclusively about Venus and Athena and Apollo, and exclusively about steak and potatoes and burgers? As CW workshops could but do not always show, cosmopolitanism functions to neutralise offence, and deweaponise identity policing, in so far that it advocates not an idealistic, universal harmony with no conflict, but merely in adjusting and adapting the familiar with the unfamiliar—​something human beings have been doing for generations. Appiah contends, “We should

204  Sreedhevi Iyer learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilisations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another” (8). A CW pedagogy that applies these open-​minded principles would be one that understands and allows for student writers in classrooms, including those proliferating in Asia, to explore and seek and play with ideas, concepts, characters, mythologies outside their immediate experience—​and to do so in an unpoliced environment. Where they can make mistakes, small or large, where they can then decide if they want to change their minds about those mistakes or continue on with more research and nuance. Fully informed students could potentially eventually publish the work with enough critical knowledge in the area to know when a reaction of outrage is extreme and unwarranted but also with humility when encountering real, well-​intended criticism that comes with experience and expertise, to understand the nature of discourse and dialogue, as opposed to self-​censorship.

Conclusion This chapter examines the philosophical concept of “cosmopolitanism” as per Appiah in terms of the cosmopolitan’s negotiation of a clash: evident between “universal concern and legitimate difference” and also in terms of how Appiah views ideas surrounding the concept of culture and its development (xv). I apply these mediating concepts in two ways—​firstly, in using FPP, “we,” as a pedagogical tool in teaching CW to Hong Kong liberal arts students. I viewed the collectivist nature of Hong Kong society as a representation of “legitimate difference” that clashes with the shopworn universal aesthetics in English-​language CW. I did this by first briefly contextualising FPP within Cantonese, before finishing with examples of class exercises used as my pedagogical tools that enable Hong Kong students to apply FPP to diverse but relevant subject matters. The second part of this chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan view of culture as something fluid and ever-​shifting, as a possible point of dissolution of the instant offence and outrage prevalent within global literary discourse. This chapter extrapolates on the conflation of author and narrator and the imposed expectations on authors to behave in adherence to the work produced. This chapter then uses examples from the contemporary Anglophone literary world, including a similar example within my own international classroom, to demonstrate the prevalence of identity politics as a way of wielding and imposing these expectations. I then examine the pointlessness of viewing culture in monolithic terms and thereby the futility of extreme outrage and offence in the face of literary authors writing outside their experience. In all, in terms of teaching CW in Asia, I posit the inevitability of applying “cosmopolitanism” philosophies. Whether teaching within Asia, or to Asians in Australia, there are layers of complexity and contradiction that need

Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies  205 navigation and negotiation. An individual’s discursive interactional positioning is never fixed (Davies and Harré 43) and needs to shift in accordance with the context of any pedagogical situation. To act cosmopolitan, then, is to be open to these shiftings and to accept the contradictions without qualm.

Note 1 The irony in this argument is that the Pontianak is a Malay ghost, while the two protesting Singaporean writers are of Chinese descent. In further consultation with Naomi, she responded that as a Chinese-​Singaporean she questions herself if it needs to be a Pontianak when writing a ghost story. She asks herself if a Chinese ghost should be used instead. Once again, the issue of who is qualified to write which subject begins to surface.

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206  Sreedhevi Iyer Hwang, Alvin, et al. “The Relationship between Individualism-​Collectivism, Face, and Feedback and Learning Processes in Hong Kong, Singapore, and The United States.” Journal of Cross-​Cultural Psychology, vol. 34, no. 1, 2003, pp. 72–​91. Lee, Chang-​Rae. On Such a Full Sea: A Novel. Riverhead Books, 2014. Mandell, Laura. “The Original Author: How Digital Technology Reconceptualizes the Author (and the Self).” International Journal of the Book, vol. 1, 2003, n.p. Meiselwitz, Gabriele. Social Computing and Social Media. Design, Human Behavior and Analytics 11th International Conference, SCSM 2019, Held as Part of the 21st HCI International Conference, HCII 2019, Orlando, FL, USA, July 26–​31, 2019, Proceedings, Part I. 1st ed., Springer International, 2019. Nordland, Rod. “Lionel Shriver’s Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Sept. 2016, www.smh.com. au/​entertainment/​books/​lionel-​shrivers-​address-​on-​cultural-​appropriation-​roils-​ a-​writers-​festival-​20160914-​grg1gx.html. Orwell, George. 1984. Harper Perennial, 2014. Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. Anchor, 2012. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Yale U P, 1990. Ramzy, Austin. “Calvin Trillin’s Poem on Chinese Food Proves Unpalatable for Some.” The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2016, www.nytimes.com/​2016/​04/​08/​world/​ asia/​calvin-​trillin-​chinese-​food-​poem.html. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Free eBook. AMS, 2004. Shriver, Lionel. “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech: I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad.” The Guardian, 13 Sept. 2016, www.theguardian. com/​commentisfree/​2016/​sep/​13/​lionel-​shrivers-​full-​speech-​i-​hope-​the-​concept-​ of-​cultural-​appropriation-​is-​a-​passing-​fad. Triandis, Harry. Individualism and Collectivism. Westview, 1995. Trillin, Calvin. “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” New Yorker, 28 Mar. 2016, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2016/​04/​04/​have-​they-​run-​out-​of-provincesyet-​by-​calvin-​trillin. Varnum, Michael E. W., and Igor Grossmann. “Cultural Change: The How and the Why.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 12, no. 6, 2017, pp. 956–​72. Vittachi, Nury. “A Brief Plea for East-​West Literary Bridge-​Building.” Special issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, no. 47, 2017, pp. 1–​17. Wai, Brian Lap-​ming, and Foong Ha Yap. “Inclusivity and Exclusivity in the Use of Cantonese Ngo5dei6 (‘we’) in Evasive Replies in Hong Kong Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society, vol. 29, no. 6, 2018, pp. 691–​715. Walbert, Kate. Our Kind: A Novel in Stories. Scribner, 2004. Wagner, J. A., III. “Studies of Individualism-​Collectivism: Effects on Cooperation in Groups.” Academy of Management Journal, vol. 38, no. 1, 1995, pp. 152–​72. Wong, Julia. “Calvin Trillin Defends His Chinese Food Poem in the New Yorker.” The Guardian, 7 Apr. 2016, www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2016/​apr/​06/​ calvin-​trillin-​new-​yorker-​chinese-​food-​poem. Wakefield, John. Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning. Routledge, 2019. Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics. Xi, Xu. Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City. Penguin Random House Australia, 2017. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. 1924. Translated by Hugh Aplin. Hesperus, 2009.

Index

Abad, G. 132–​33 Abdel-​Magied, Y. 199–​200 Acadian French 10, 26 accreditation 88 Adichie, C.N. 172 Ailey, A. 177–​78 Allan, M. 180 Ambedkar University Delhi 64, 82n1 Amis, M. 8 Ang, A. 29–​30, 31, 33, 35–​36: and Bang My Car 29–​30, 33 Ang, V. 30 Arnhem Land, Australia 175, 180 Apostol, G. 135 Appiah, K. 188–​89, 197, 203–​04 apprenticeship 87–​89, 90, 132 Arguilla, M. 132 Aristotelian plot 92, 94, 193 Ashoka University 57–​63, 74 Ashoka-​UEA Creative Writing Workshops 57 Asia 1, 3, 5, 188, 190, 204 Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2, 7, 53, 85 Ateneo de Manila University 137–​38 authorship 87 autofiction 146, 153–​54, 163 Austen, J. 162 Australia 2, 3, 19, 84; see also Arnhem Land; see also Canberra Aw, T. 11, 48 Baker, J. 179 Ballet Russes 179 Bangarra Dance Theatre 175, 181 Bangalore 65–​66 Barthes, R. 198 Bassnett, S. 119 Beckett, S. 119

Benitez, P.M. 132 Bhaba, H. 181 bilingual creativity 49, 103–​04, 116, 121, 124–​25, 136–​38, 143–​44, 162, 196 bilingualism 7, 46 blood memory 176–​78 Boey K.C. 19: ‘Passport, Please?’ 19 British Council 74 Brodsky, J. 119 Budd, K. 146–​47 Bulosan, C. 134 Burns, G. 134 Burroway, J. 92, 189 Burt, R. 179 Canada 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 164 Canberra, Australia 175 Cantonese 20–​21, 47, 93, 116–​17, 194–​96, 204 Carter, A. 165, 166 Carter-​Morley, J. 172 caste 72–​74, 76, 78–​81 Carver, R. 53, 59 Casocot, I.R. 140, 142 Chang, E. 119 Chandralekha 176 character 36, 91–​93, 96–​97, 161–​62, 164, 166: and dialogue 18, 26, 28, 30, 35: and E.K. Brown’s character gradation 30 Chaudhuri, A. 56, 57, 60, 73 Chen, K. 27, 30, 31, 33: and Soy Sauce for Beginners 27, 30, 33, 37 Cher, M. 31, 46–​47: see also Spider Boys childhood 38, 164, 165 China 102–​14, 131 China University of Petroleum 102 Chinglish 103, 112, 127

208 Index Chng H.H. 21, 23, 36, 38–​39 choreography 176–​78, 182–​83, 185 chorus 190–​91 CIA 6 City University of Hong Kong 52, 148–​49 Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Taiwan) 183 Coetzee, J.M. 56 code-​switching 3, 17, 20–​21, 24, 27–​29, 31, 49, 53 colonisation 9 commodification of CW degrees 45, 75, 87–​88 92, 164 communality 166, 175, 177, 189, 190–​91, 194, 200, 204 community writing groups 64–​66, 70, 75, 138, 201 competition 86, 164 conflict see narrative conflict Conrad, J. 190 Cordingley, A. 119 cosmopolitanism 188–​89, 197, 203–​05 Coxford Singlish Dictionary 23, 25, 32 Cowan, A. 168 Crazy Rich Asians 33–​34 creative non-​fiction 107, 135, 139, 160, 163–​65, 170–​71: as assignments 71, 104: on craft 60: and multilingual students 49: and public intellection 59: see also memoir creative problem-​solving 37–​38 creative research 86 creativity 97, 157–​60, 162, 164, 167, 188–​89: in student assignments 111–​14, 117–​18 cultural appropriation 199, 201–​02 see also cultural ownership cultural ownership 77, 174–​75, 179, 181 see also cultural appropriation Cruz, J.L. 141 Cruz, R. 73 Cusset, C. 146, 153 dance 174–​85 Dai, F. 102, 120 Dai, F. and Li, L. 102, 103 Dai, F. and Zheng, W. 104 Davis, A. 85 Dean, B. and Carell, V. 174–​75 defamiliarisation 79, 82, 122, 125, 163 De La Salle University 137 Delhi 62, 71 Denmark 5

Desai, A. 73 dialect 5, 10–​11, 18, 21–​24, 26–​27, 30, 32, 34, 46–​47 dialogue 18, 65 diasporism 10, 134, 140 Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English 29 Díaz, J. 17, 31, 73–​74 Dillard, A. 6 Dix, H. 154 diversity 63 Doubrovsky, S. 153–​54 Dust for Dancers 174–​75 Eagleton, T. 170 Egan, J. 203 Eisner, E. 182 Eliot, G. 191 embodiment 176, 178, 182–​84 emotion 91–​97, 103–​06, 109, 124, 154, 159, 176: in different languages 20, 24; see also social-​emotional intelligence; see also therapy empathy 35–​36, 105, 178 English departments 54, 59–​60, 62–​63, 70, 86, 90: animosity towards Creative Writing 7–​8 Enguehard, F. 10 enrolment 84, 88, 136–​37, 143: rising 2–​4, 38 epic 61, 64, 196 ESL/​EFL 5, 48, 73: creative writing and learning 9, 48–​49, 102–​04, 110, 112–​13, 132, 137, 162 Eugenides, J. 192 see also Virgin Suicides, The Europe 4 European Association of Creative Writing Programmes 4 family 11, 63–​64, 147–​51, 155, 160, 165, 190 Faulkner, W. 17 feedback 62, 65, 71, 76 feminism 146, 176 fiction 35, 51–​52, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63: recurrent student challenges with 163–​66, 170: transitioning formerly non-​creative Asian students to 155, 157–​62 Filipino (language) 131, 135 first-​person plural 188–​96, 204 Fishelov, D. 91–​92

Index  209 Flaubert, G. 172 Foden, G. 166 food writing 50, 76–​80, 124, 160 Forster, E.M. 164 France 4, 25: l’Académie française Franzen, J. 203 free indirect style 35, 189 Foucault, M. 198 Fowles, J. 163, 164 Freed, L. 3, 74 Freytag’s Pyramid 92–​93 Fudan University 102 Fulbright Scholarships 7, 157 Galang, Z. 132 Galdon, J. 134 Gardner, J. 91, 164, 165, 189 gender 50–​51, 63, 76, 78–​79, 81 gender studies 70–​71 Gessen, K. 1 Gizzi, P. 121 globalisation 4, 174 Goh, C. 23, 25, 27, 31–​32, 35 Goldoni, C. 118–​19 Goldsmiths: University of London 4 Gonzalez, N.V.M. 134 Guangdong University of Foreign Studies 102 Guerrero, L.M. 134 Gupta, A. 32 Hagedorn, G.A. 135 Hallman, J.C. 168 Hamada, S. 132 Harbach, C. 1, 2, 88 see also MFA vs. NYC Hall, M. 85 Harper, G. 71 Hemley, R. 10, 139: Nola 147–​48 Hemingway, E. 53, 59, 159, 161, 166 hero’s journey 190, 193, 196 Heureux, J.L. 92 Hidalgo, C.P. 146–​47, 151–​52 Hills, R. 91–​92 Hindus 72–​73, 78–​79 hiya (‘shame’) 146, 148–​50 Hoban, R. 93 Hokenson, J.W. and Munson, M. 118 Hokkien 21, 22 Hong Kong 96, 116, 118–​120, 125, 127: teaching there 49–52, 94, 189, 190, 193–​96, 204 Humanities 2, 29, 57, 63, 197, 204

humour 18, 20, 22, 24, 32, 34 Hsia Yü 119 Hwa, R. 112 identity politics 197, 199–​200, 204 India 7, 9, 17, 22, 56–​82 individualism 87, 89–​93, 95–​97, 190, 194–​95, 197, 198, 205: and CIA promotion of 6 Internet 46, 54 Iowa Writers’ Workshop 1, 6, 10, 59, 84–​90, 133, 135, 136, 162 Ip, J. 124 irony 28, 47, 58, 71, 77, 108–​10: relevant examples of 19, 23–​24: and multilingualism 33–​34 Jaipur Literature Festival 72–​73 Japan 131, 161 Jaswal, B.K. 19, 38 Jacobsen, R. 117 Jesus, G.d. 147 Jobs, S. 2 Johnson, D. 161 Jose, F.S. 135 Jowitt, D. 180 Kachru, B. 7, 20, 36, 37, 50, 103–​04 Kai-​cheung, D. 49 Kang, H. 50 Kashyap, A. 58 Kirsch, A. 47 Koe, A.L. 38, 165 Koritz, A. 180 Kroll, J. 71, 103 Kwan K. 33–​34: see also Crazy Rich Asians Laban, R. 177 Labanotation 174 Lanchester, J. 49 LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore 4, 19, 34, 38 Latinx students 3, 31 Lee, K. Y. 5, 6, 22, 24 Leong, R. 179 Levenson, M. 87 Li, B. 126 life writing 146, 154 see also creative non-​fiction; see also memoir Lin, Y. 119 Lingan University of Liberal Arts (Hong Kong), 189

210 Index literary criticism 7, 8, 59–​60, 133, 136, 139, 165 lived experience 197, 201–​03 London, J. 159, 161 Lopate, P. 172 Lua, S. 137, 142 machine translation 120, 123 Majumdar, S. 71, 73–​74 Malay 17, 18, 21, 22 Malaysia 18, 203 Mandarin 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 109, 116, 117, 157, 162 Mandell, L. 197–​98 Mansfield, K. 166 Mapa, T. 149–​50, 152–​53 Mazo, J.H. 179 McCarthy, C. 203 McGurl, M. 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 56, 64, 66–​7, 82: see also The Program Era Meekings, S. 1 see also The Place and the Writer Melbourne Writers Festival 201 Menand, L. 86–​89 memoir 94, 139, 146–​55: generation gaps for writers of 152: see also life writing memorisation 7, 72, 158 metafiction 154–​55 metaphor 28, 49, 112, 177, 178, 183 MFA vs. NYC 1, 6, 88 Mindanao State University 138 Mishra, P. 48 Mizumura, M. 47 Moore, M. 20 Moore, M. 1 see also The Place and the Writer Mufwene, S. 31–​22 multilingual CW students 157 multilingualism 2, 3, 5, 17, 33, 53–​54, 116, 118: and bilingual creativity 49, 121, 124–​25: in CW faculty 59–​60: and homophonic translation 127: and international readers 109: and student composition: 94–​97: in the Philippines 139–​41: and postcolonialism 144: and privilege 46, 73, 147 Munro, A. 10, 165 Murakami, H. 134–​35, 165 Murray, J. 85, 88 National Gallery of Australia 175, 179

Nanyang Technological University 19, 38, 163–​73 Narayan, R.K. 73, 74 narrative conflict 17, 63, 79, 81, 88, 92, 159, 164, 166 National College Entrance Examination (China) 106–​10, 113 Necessary Stage, The (theatre company) 26–​27, 31 New Criticism 56, 59, 133, 136, 139 New Delhi 70, 74 novel 135: Philippine need for more success with 135 Ng, Y-​S. 38 Nguyen, V. 73–​74 Ong, E. 18 Orwell, G. 172 Otsuka, J. 192 Overgaard, M. 95 Oxford English Dictionary 21, 37, 45, 53 Page, S. 175 Pang, A. 32–​34 Pang, H. 125 parents 109, 147–​48, 158, 160, 164: abusive 106 Pariat, J. 58, 60 Parks, T. 48 Patchett, A. 8 Pearsall, D. 87–​88 Peking University 102 peer editing 8, 61, 72 peer review 88, 91 Pen, H. 176 Phua Chu Kang 38–​40 Philippines 17, 22, 52–​53, 131–​44, 146–​55 Phnom Phen 184 Pink, D. 4 The Place and the Writer 1 Poddar, N. 73–​74 poetry 33, 48, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61: cultural residue in 79: musicality of 117, 123, 135, 159 point of view 90, 158–​62, 167, 170, 189–​90, 192–​96 political correctness 189, 199 Pontianak 201, 203 population density 9, 18, 167, 190 postcolonialism 9, 10, 27, 46–​48, 118, 144: and English: 18, 22, 24:

Index  211 hybridity 19, 21, 36–​37, 48, 118, 131–​33, 181 postmemory 166–​67 Pound, E. 1, 119, 123–​25, 127 private universities 8, 70, 72–​75, 82 privilege 9, 17, 46–​47, 63, 72–​74, 76, 80–​82: and English 133, 138–​40: and social class 147, 149–​50 The Program Era 1, 3, 56, 64, 66–​67, 82 Ratman, A. 184 Rae-​Lee, C. 193, 195–​96 Raminginning, Australia 175 Renmin University of China 102 research see creative research revision 8, 9, 121, 164 Richardson, G. 87 ritual 80, 90, 92, 110, 175 Rizal, J. 134 RMIT 4, 5, 9, 189, 201 Robinson, K. 37, 185 Rousseau, J-​J. 154 Roy, S. 60 Rushdie, S. 19 Ruthven, K.K. 153 St. Denis, R. 179 Salih, T. 165 Sangam House 67 Santos, B. 134 Sathyanathan, C. 81 Sarong Party Girls 22, 33–​34 Scroll.in 60, 67 self-​expression 72, 75, 103, 162, 171 self-​translation 104, 110–​12, 114, 116, 118, 121–​23 sex 37, 50–​51 Shanghai University 102 Sharma, H. 26–​27: Off Centre 27 Shathe, S. 81 Sheets-​Johnstone, M. 176 short story 132–​33, 157, 159, 161, 165, 170 Shriver, L. 199–​200 Siaw, L.L. 25 Sichuan University 102 Silliman University 135–​36, 138, 140 Sina K. 184 Singapore 17–​40, 46, 52, 124, 163–​73, 189, 194, 201: design schools in 4: hawker centres 20; and low press freedom ranking 5: MediaCorp 20:

National Registration Identity Card 18: official languages of 17: Singapore Writers Festival 10, 11, 38 Singlish 10, 17–​40, 50, 112, 124: in Oxford English Dictionary 21: and “Speak Good English Movement” 22: student fines for speaking 22; see also Sarong Party Girls: see also Spider Boys SingLit 17, 26, 35, 37, 38 SingLit Station 18, 201 Silverman, S.W. 146, 148 Smith, Z. 11, 28 social-​emotional intelligence 105, 159 social media 152, 163, 189, 195–​96, 200 Spain 4, 131 Spanish 131–​32 Speak Good English Movement of Singapore 22–​23, 26, 36, 38 Spider Boys 31, 46–​47 Stalling, J. 127 Strand, M. 126–​27 subtext 161, 176 Sui, G.L. 20; in New York Times 20, 25, 28; and Spiaking Singlish 25; on Singlish: 20, 35, 37 Sun Yat-​sen University, 102; Creative Writing there 102–​05, 114; Writers’ Residency 103 Suyin, H. 51 Suzhou University 102 Syjuco, M. 135 Sweden 4 Tagalog 146–​47 Taglish 140 Tagore, R. 119 Taichung 157–​59, 162 Taiwan 119, 157–​162, 183: Taiwanese soap operas 162 Tam, L. 121–​23 Tan, A. 26–​27 Tan, C.L-​L. 21, 31, 33–​44, 37: A Tiger in the Kitchen 34: see also Sarong Party Girls Tan, H.H. 27–​28, 30–​33: Foreign Bodies 27–​28, 30–​31, 33 Tawada, Y. 50 Tayu 157 therapy 62, 85, 104–​05 Teo, Sharlene 33: Ponti 33 Theroux, P. 49–​50

212 Index third-​culture 3 Thomas, the 132: Thomasites 132 Tiempo, E. & E. 135 transferrable skills 25, 61, 68, 140, 143, 158, 161–​62, 164 translation 5, 50, 73, 127, 131, 135, 139–​40, 184: homophonic 117–​18: radical translation 123–​24; see also self-​translation; see also machine translation transnationalism 46, 50, 53 Triandis, H. 194 Trillin, C. 200, 203 tsismis (‘gossip’) 146, 150 Tunghai University 157, 162 Udall, B. 159 United Kingdom 72, 84, 164 United States of America: 6, 58, 59, 64, 67, 71–​72, 131; CW curriculum in 76, 84, 162: CW enrolment in 2, 74, 84: female memoirs there 146–​47 University of British Columbia 4, 45 University of East Anglia 1, 57, 164 University of Hong Kong 91, 93–​94 University of Iowa see Iowa Writers’ Workshop University of Nottingham in Malaysia 4 University of the Philippines 136, 138, 140, 143, 148: University of the Philippines National Summer Writers’ Workshop 136, 138 University of Saint La Salle (Bacolod) 138 University of Santo Thomas 136–​37, 143 Varnum, M. and Grossman, I. 202–​03 Vendler, H. 86–​87, 89–​90 Velveteen Rabbit, The 93 Vermont College of the Fine Arts CW MFA 148–​49 vernacular 57–​58, 63, 65, 73, 118, 127, 139 Vietnam 4, 131

Villa, J.G. 132 Virgin Suicides, The 195, 196 Viswanathan G. 9 voice 27–​32 Wai, B.L., and Yap, F-​H., 194 Walbert, K. 192, 196 Walcott, D. 3, 4, 7, 87, 89 Waley, A. 126 Walker, A. 161 Wallace, D.F. 8, 203 Wang, W. 127 Wee, L. 20–​24, 27–​29, 32, 37–​38 Weinberger, E. 127 Western canon 3, 51, 196 Whetter, D. 2, 4, 144 Wigley, J. 143 Williams, R. 75 Wong, C. 36 Woo, Y.Y. 23, 25, 27, 31 Wood, J. 35: see also free indirect style Woolf, V. 166 workshop 61–​62, 104, 148, 162, 163, 166, 189, 203: cultural aspiration for 75, 88: peer critique 70: peer learning in 8 Worthington, M. 154 Wuhan University 102 Xia, Y. 119 see also Hsia Yü Xi, Xi 49, 94, 126 Xi, Xu 31, 195 Xiamen University 102 Xiao, Q. 119 Xue, H. 112 Yabes, L. 133 Yale-​National University of Singapore 19 Yirrkala, Australia 174, 175 Yu, H. 119 Zamyatin, Y. 191, 195 Zhejiang University 102 Zheng, W. 104, 110, 119