The cultural and historical incompetance of the corporate arts sector is of Atlantean proportions. You will not really hear this spoken, or written, about much in the media (though columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown deserves credit for having had the courage to write openly about it), but it seems that in general, there are different sets of rules for white, brown and black writers - and the same applies for theatre.
There are multiple, overlapping, mutually reinforcing loops of exclusion - but class, geography and race are the three primary ones. 'London', and the power concentrated and jealously protected within that entity, is a suffocating noose around one's neck. There is no 'post-imperial' - what we are living through is just imperialism with its liberal mask (the conservatives won't give one the time of day, so forget about them). Episodes like the rabid racist radio presenter, Samantha Mason, who didn't want a South Asian taxi-driver to transport her teenage daughter are like gifts to these conservative and liberal hypocrites. It allows them to project themselves as anti-racist, while in fact, they are the ones maintaining the edifice of racism and economic hegemony that defines the relationship of the West with the rest. They help construct monsters like Samantha Mason. Women like Samantha Mason do not surprise me - I have lived every day having to breathe the same air as the millions of her sisters (and brothers) who feel exactly the same as she, but often do not vocalise their feelings. You only have to have been a brown or black man on public transport for a single day to understand this. It's Anglo-Saxon Dixie, my friends, and the preservation of white virginity. But the real enemy is not this lumpen mass of idiots. No, the real enemy, the ones holding the keys of the cell, are the clever liberals in corporate commissioning positions dispersed throughout the media and arts. The private sector is far, far worse than the (soft) state in this regard. I am very left-wing in this regard - and this is because of experience, not ideology.
Of course, just as in other situations, women also help to maintain patriarchy, so too do some successful black and brown people help to maintain their positions within the architecture of white supremacy by helping to maintain the normative absolutes of the supremacy itself. If one lives in that most despised of places, 'the provinces', is non-white, did not go to private school and/ or Oxbridge and is not serving up modern variations on the theme of Orientalism, like the character, Jamil Ayaan in my novel, 'Psychoraag', one may as well be working down the sewers.
I remember that a colleague - a white writer, in fact - told me some ten years ago that, "Publishing is racist. There are some types of books that will get published, and others that won't". He was correct. And journalist, Sarfraz Manzoor critiqued the disparity exemplified by the fact that while white artists can be artists, black artists can only be 'authentic'. If one's name is, say, David Mitchell, one can reach for the stars, one can explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, new civilisations... but if one is black or brown in the UK and not part of the social elite, one is permitted to serve up only gumbo or curry. If one does this well, one will be handsomely rewarded, but remember this, my friends, it may be lined with gold and jewels, but it will still be the gutter.
The fact that almost no-one will get to read this, as almost no-one will get to read my books which often are about characters trapped in a kind of existential silence, is (as once was elegantly pointed out by novelist, Ali Smith in relation to 'Psychoraag') a bitterly ironic validation of this argument.
You will need to enable javascript to generate a trackback link
