In late March, a book that had been sentenced to death came back to life. There was no star-studded release, no big fanfare, though this book is now a bit famous. The new editor of the memoirs of the poet Kate Clanchy Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me felt bad about taking advantage of the controversy surrounding her. So the new editions, with some intriguing changes to the original text, were quietly replenished in bookstores ready to store them.
What follows is a story that goes far beyond publication. It’s about the voice of who is being heard, what stories are being told, and by whom. But it also has wider implications for working life, especially in industries where the so-called cultural wars that trigger the outside world can no longer be left at the doorstep of the office.
When Some Kids first appeared in 2019, Clanchy was much admired for her work at a comprehensive Oxford center, teaching children from diverse backgrounds to write poetry, with sometimes bright results. A celebration of multicultural school life, along with sincere reflections on its own flaws, Some Kids was praised by critics and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, with judges praising a “brilliantly honest writer” reflections of which they were “touching, funny, and full of love.” But then things began to fall apart.
In November 2020, a professor posted on the Goodreads Amateur Review website that the book “focused on the harmful, critical, and fanatical views of this middle-class white woman about race, class, and body image.” using “racist stereotypes” to describe students. . The author, he said, wrote about his “chocolate skin” and “almond eyes.”
Clanchy responded, initially to Goodreads and then in July 2021 on Twitter, that “someone invented a racist quote and said it was in my book” and urged his followers to defy the criticism he said he had caused. threats against her. The literary giants, including 75-year-old children’s author (and author of the Society of Authors) Philip Pullman, rose in his defense. However, he quickly realized that those sentences (though not, as we’ll hear from Clanchy later, all that is attributed to him) were in the book. Her thorny response not only sat uncomfortable with the subject of Some Kids of a narrator open to learning about herself, one who believed, she wrote, that deep down “most people have prejudices; that I am, that prejudice happens both in the reading of poetry and in everything else ”, but it also had unintended consequences for its critics.
Clanchy’s book, parts of which have since been rewritten
Three color writers, Monisha Rajesh, Professor Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, who had challenged Clanchy on Twitter, suffered months of racist abuse and sometimes violent threats, although Clanchy’s editor, Picador, described his criticism as “instructive and clear-sighted.” . An 18-year-old autistic writer named Dara McAnulty, who had questioned Clanchy’s description of two autistic students as a “nasty company,” was forced to leave social media for abusive messages. Picador, after initially apologizing, saying Clanchy would rewrite the book, later announced this January that he had separated from her by mutual consent. (She has suggested that Some Kids would have been removed if Mark Richards, co-founder of the new Swift publishing house, had not bought the rights.) Clanchy, who lost her parents and divorced the same year her career went implode, he revealed meanwhile. in December that she had sometimes felt suicidal.
The dispute erupted at an anxious time for publication, following a rejection similar to novels from Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 book American Dirt, whose portrait of a Mexican emigrant family was hailed by criticism, until Latin American writers accused its author (who is Irish and Puerto Rican). inheritance) of commercial stereotypes and inaccuracies: in A Place for Wolves by black author Kosoko Jackson, a gay love story set during the Kosovo war that was withdrawn in 2019 at the request of the writer after critics of Goodreads would attack their portrayal of Muslim characters.
Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro recently suggested that the authors fear a “fine of anonymous lynching” online, while novelist Sebastian Faulks vowed to stop describing the appearance of female characters after being criticized. to do so in the past. The debate is raging over whether these are long-standing corrections that should have been expected or represent the drowning of the imagination; if art has a right to offend and if publishing would navigate all of this with less clumsiness if it weren’t for a predominantly white middle-class industry.
That Some Kids has gone so far without sounding the alarm only confirms some of the suspicions of its critics about a business that employs many people like Clanchy, but few who resemble its students. However, other people in the industry are concerned that a writer has apparently been left to face the consequences alone, as a scapegoat for broader collective sins.
“It was a failure of the group,” says a veteran agent, who asks to remain anonymous. “I think the editor failed in his duty of care with the writer. I think the author failed in his duty of care with his students, and in saying that he did not write what he did. No one comes out “It’s a bad story. It’s hurt, and now everyone is scared.”
Monisha Rajesh is in Sweden, on a train going to the Arctic Circle, when we talk. Travel writer, she likes to return to the work she loves after a few stressful months. Many people criticized Some Kids, he notes, including hundreds of teachers who signed an open letter asking if Clanchy (who carefully anonymized his students to publish them) had adequately protected them. But it was Rajesh, in addition to her fellow writers Singh and Suleyman, who were identified as leaders in the Twitter indictment, so she believes they were “pretty obvious reasons: the trope of angry brown people.” There were avalanches of racist hate mail. Every time the story reached the headlines, she would log out of social media or have someone else sift through her emails, but still, she says, it was inevitable. “I would start receiving WhatsApps from friends who would say, ‘Are you okay?’, And I thought, ‘Oh God, someone else.’ May “.
As a mother of two young daughters, Rajesh was upset by the “general lack of kindness” in Clanchy’s often very physical descriptions of children; the “puppy-looking” Pakistani girl with her “different mustache”; the boy from Essex with the “Ashkenazi nose” that surprises her by denying that she has Jewish roots; the white girls on the municipal estates she considers unattractive, or destined to end up fat like her mothers. The text is dotted with references to the “Somali height”, “Cypriots” or “Mongolian railway” of a star student. But something about it also evoked painful memories of Rajesh’s own school days.
There are certain authors or topics that people will not touch: they know what the reaction will be on social media
“I had teachers like her,” she says quietly. “I had teachers who absolutely put me aside because I was the little boy with the furry eyebrows or the ‘stain’ and they made you feel like strangers, without necessarily wanting to do it, but they did. And it didn’t matter the well-intentioned that they had, it did make you feel small and worried you later in life.
She rejects accusations of trying to “cancel” Clanchy as a writer. “They haven’t canceled you, they’ve challenged you. You’re not used to being challenged, and now you’re not, you don’t know what to do about it. the downside is, please stop writing about us like this. “
In the book, Clanchy writes indignantly about how her students lost to white children at the literary awards trial, or were rarely portrayed in books; his supporters point out his years of defense of marginalized youth whose poetry he published in anthologies. But for Rajesh, the implication that a “good liberal” could not have been wrong feels short-sighted. “The narrative began to turn to, ‘But this wonderful woman who has done these wonderful things with children’s poetry: how the hell can you blame someone like that?’ The dispute was not even about Clanchy personally, he says, as much as what the publication allowed.
For many of its critics, Some Kids crystallized deeper frustrations with an industry eager to change, but seemingly slow to do so. The publisher has been moving forward since the days when, in the words of one agent, “everyone’s name was Sebastian.” In March, the Publishers’ Association announced that it had finally achieved its goal of 15% of staff coming from minority ethnic groups. And while a 2016 survey by The Bookseller found that less than 100 of the thousands of books published that year were written by people of color, research by the Publishers’ Association suggests that the number may have now increased. .
However, suspicions persist that, as one Asian-born novelist puts it, it is even easier for whites to publish by writing about minority communities than for people in those communities to escape: “People he wants different voices, but he wants white people to write these different voices. The staff is not diverse, so he will read the manuscript and the comment he will receive is: “And that’s how, well, no, you wouldn’t.”
Amy Mae Baxter: “I’m a white Asian and I’m often the darkest person in the room.” Photography: Maria Epishkina
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