Magazine
You, too, will write big books
Vikram Seth at the festival. The audience, below, was spellbound by quotations from his novel. And there, too, were other rich voices — young, old, brown, black and white. Pictures: Betty Caplan
Posted Monday, August 17 2009 at 00:00
"AND YOU, TOO, WILL MARRY a woman I have chosen,” said Vikram Seth, quoting the opening of his 1,300-page book, A Suitable Boy.
He wrote it while supposedly completing his PhD in Economics at Stanford University but in fact lolling about at the age of 37 at his parents’ home in Delhi.
The audience at the Storymoja Hay Festival was spellbound. Here was a writer who could talk as well as write! Wit and words flowed from his mouth like ripples over the surface of River Ganges.
Who would ever publish a volume that was over 1,300 pages long and took up more than three inches of space on the shelf?
As we know, the book has proved popular all over the world, though, like any writer worth his salt, Seth had to suffer the usual ignoble rejections. These are part of the initiation process. They harden your skin and test your resolve.
Will you continue regardless?
The answer in Seth’s case is a resounding yes. A man of the world, he feels at home everywhere, though his initial inspiration was a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. A true intellectual traverses the universe, and isn’t put off by anything.
People always pester writers with the same old things — why do you do it, what about writers’ block and give me the magic formula. Seth overrode them all with ingenuity and passion. Obsession is what drives him. He has to know how the story is going to end.
And there are the pompous questions like, “What is the writer’s responsibility in society?” To write, silly! What else? Not to provide solutions. Just to tell stories and to give pleasure. That is not to say there aren’t writers who lead revolutions or become politically engaged — just that Seth isn’t one of them.
THE FESTIVAL WAS THE brainchild of writer Muthoni Garland, whose Storymoja imprint, together with Kwani?, has circumvented the reluctance of Kenyan publishers to promote local writers in favour of that sure-fire bestseller called The School Textbook, which is enough to put you off reading for life.
Storymoja and Kwani? produce mainly slim, attractive volumes (no Vikram Seths please; though he does produce slim vols, too, when he isn’t being A Suitable Boy) that fit easily into the pocket and don’t break the purse.
The latest additions are Al Kags’ Living Memories and Richard Onyango’s story of his life with Drosie, that woman of ample proportions whom he immortalised in his paintings before she died prematurely of heart failure. And of course Billy Kahora’s True Story of David Munyakei, of which an extract was published in The EastAfrican of August 2-9.
Al Kags had recorded the stories of elderly people — living memories that have too often been ignored but which are very much part of our current collective psyche.
The organisers had deliberately asked Luo academic Garnette Oluoch to chair the session to underline the point that these stories, mostly about those who suffered from the Emergency period, were not just about Kikuyu homeguards or members of the Mau Mau.
IF THERE IS SUCH A THING AS Kenya, these stories belong to us all, just as the pictures in Kenya Burning document the trauma of a nation during the post-election violence. The age of history written by white males is well and truly over.
If there is one useful thing about the events of 2008, it is that a space has been created where the unspeakable can at last be spoken, and the invisible brought to light.
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