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Tag: identity

  • I Want to Be Commissioned to Review Love Island

    I Want to Be Commissioned to Review Love Island

    June Bellebono on the pigeonholing of identities, being commissioned on topics other than that which you embody, and Love Island.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    On 8 August 2018 – the day after the reunion episode of the fourth season of Love Island ­– I found myself spending my incredibly quiet shift as a museum library assistant writing a 4418-word Google Doc ranking every contestant from worst to best. I shared it on my socials, as well as on the Love Island subreddit, and received reactions ranging from profound appreciation to serious concern for my wellbeing.

    Over the years, my writing has shifted and evolved: I have written about the impact of learning about Burmese trans identities for East Side Voices, about the violence of the LGB Alliance for gal-dem, and about the relationship between my bereavement and queerness for Letters from the Grief Club. I also founded an online platform – oestrogeneration – to highlight transfeminine voices in the UK. I feel pride in knowing I’m producing all this work, and yet that Love Island Google Doc remains one of the pieces I feel proudest of and most passionate about.

    Throughout my writing career, I have found that, whether I’m pitching or being commissioned, the focus of my writing always goes back to the identities I hold. They have ended up being my selling point, my USP. As someone who ticks a few of the diversity boxes that allow organisations to feel better about themselves whilst doing little to no uncomfortable work, this is a game I’ve got used to playing. But I feel resentful playing it.

    This resentment feels complicated: all the identities I hold do inherently affect the way I navigate the world, the way I think, and, as a consequence, the way I write. I want to discuss my identities because I think they hold power and because they feel inherently political. An existence that challenges the status quo – whether that’s because of a queer, ethnic, class or other identity – has the potential also to disrupt it; that’s why it feels important to promote writing, and art at large, that’s embedded in this existence. What feels frustrating is that, just like white/straight/middle-class/able-bodied/cisgender/etc. people, those of us who hold marginalised identities also go through “mundane” experiences and feelings: we fall in love, we have beautiful friendships and friendship break-ups, we lose people, we hate our jobs, we cry at films, and we get obsessed over Love Island. These aspects of our life affect us emotionally and socially, just like the systemic identities we hold, but our art and creative expression rarely get the chance to delve into them.

    When I watch Love Island, the fact that I’m x, y and z inevitably affects the way I watch and perceive the show. On the surface, there’s no reason for me to relate to Megan, Faye or Liam, but I find myself doing so. I find myself relating to the way Megan feels like giving everyone who’s into her a chance, after growing up feeling undesirable. I find myself relating to the way Faye feels paranoid and insecure in her relationship, despite receiving regular validation and affirmation. I find myself, begrudgingly, relating to the way Liam acted like a fuckboy only to then sit in his guilt for days.

    My obsession with the show does not feel arbitrary: whilst Love Island presents itself as an apolitical show, politics are central to it. Class, race, sexuality, disability and other socioeconomic characteristics are rarely explicitly discussed, but, deep down, they shape every single interaction. From a working-class contestant feeling anxious about how they’ll be received by a partner’s middle-class mum, to the racialised politics of desirability that ultimately sit at the foundation of the show, Love Island reflects many of the current issues in British society.

    Across creative industries, we’re witnessing a heightened demand for “diverse” voices. But what these voices are allowed to discuss feels limited. We might see a Black journalist interview a Top Boy actor, a queer writer publish a think-piece about queer raves, or a disabled activist discuss the latest abhorrent Tory policy, but we will rarely see any of them cover something not directly tied to their identities. The way people with socially dominant characteristics consume marginalised voices is still rooted in voyeurism, rather than relatability. They will appreciate our talent whilst seeing it as less legitimate than theirs, because they don’t think they can empathise with what we’re saying or going through.

    The starting point for a true commitment to coalition needs to be one where our humanity is seen in a holistic way, and our voices are seen as worthy in all their facets – not just when discussing topics that we embody.

    I recently wrote an article for i about the ways I make sure to celebrate and honour my dead brother on his birthday. One of my trans sisters messaged me, congratulating me on the article, saying how nice it was to ‘see a sis being allowed to put out non-trans-related articles, to remind people that we also experience everyday human problems’. I’m hoping that the next step in the creative industries will allow us to do that more and more: I hope we’ll shift from a movement that pigeonholes “diverse” voices, into one where, instead, we get to speak about all the experiences we go through – including friendships, loss and Love Island.

    June Bellebono is a London-based cultural producer, writer, educator – but also a party girl, fashion enthusiast, and lover of friendships. June founded and runs oestrogeneration, an online magazine platform highlighting transfeminine voices in the UK, and founded and hosts Queer Good Grief, a peer support by and for bereaved lgbtq+ people. They have been featured in gal-dem, i, and daikon* and are one of the contributors in anthologies East Side Voices and Letters from the Grief Club. 

  • Identity and durability

    Paulo Scott writes for PEN Atlas about the need for Brazilian authors to move away from stories about ‘white guys, living in the big urban centres’, and how a vain desire for durability has stunted the literature of his country

    Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

    Anybody would advise caution to a critic of narrative fiction who claims that a work has successfully used recent historical events as a vital component (and also as a backdrop) of its unfolding plot, in particular those events that relate to political positions. Books of this kind run the risk of becoming quickly dated – and there are few things considered worse for a work of literature.

    It is undoubtedly the case that historical events, particularly recent political events, are inevitably susceptible to re-readings and mutations. It does not, however, follow that a novelist ought to worry that his own personal – and therefore decisive – reading of a certain socio-political landscape (even if it is a barely examined one, and whether or not he is writing a predominantly realist narrative), might perhaps be capable of jeopardizing the durability of his story.

    A concern about the durability of a piece of literary production even before it has come into existence – as though such things could be reduced to an engineer’s calculations – is not something that can be taken seriously. Durability is a condition that is disconnected from a writer’s efforts and from his control, though I admit that a misreading of a given political landscape can substantially shorten the life of a novel with settings of a socio-political nature. Readers tend not to waste their time on narrative premises that are flagrantly incorrect (or, even worse, which are exposed by an about-turn in recent events). What I do not see as credible is that the writer should become fearful and run away from any kind of risk, which sometimes is an inescapable dimension of the creative process.

    The period of recent Brazilian democratisation (following the dictatorship that started in 1964), a period already within the gaze of Brazilian history, a period whose conclusion, depending on the criteria you use, ended in the second half of the 1980s, has so far failed to produce an even moderately impressive number of novels that manage to get away from the reality of white guys, living in the big urban centres, belonging to a middle class that is modernised and advantaged. Nor has it produced novels that risk a more substantial (and also more vertically-oriented) and challenging weighing-up of the social impact of recent political choices. There are, of course, people who claim that the country is still in a transitional phase towards true democracy, especially taking into account the demonstrations in June 2013, which triggered political repression that various levels of government considered perfectly acceptable in view of the greater freedom existing today as compared to the exorbitant restrictions in place during the years of the military dictatorship.

    These contemporary novels describe the reality of a social class with access to education and culture in general, which the overwhelming majority of Brazilians do not possess. There is a certain modesty in the choice of narrators, of characters, of plots, of settings and spaces. There is a need to correspond to a contemporaneity dictated by literary production in Europe and North America, as though by reflecting them we might attain some of our own authority or greater visibility or even durability. There is a short-sightedness that is entirely unproductive and anti-literary, if we accept that literature is an important means of getting closer to the other. There is a fear of taking a frank look at Brazilian reality.

    Of course, there are some contemporary writers (I shall not risk naming them) who do not deny the full breadth of Brazil’s culture, and who do not refuse a hard look at Brazilian identity – something that is undeniably interlinked with current events as well as with recent conflicts, with the period of democratisation (which for some people is still incomplete and is not being completed), with a tremendous difficulty in learning from our own mistakes – but they are names not present in any quantity that is reasonable and desirable; they are, in other words, few and far between.

    From this perspective, contemporary Brazilian literature – even keeping in mind those writers producing literature that is original and facing outwards to a Brazilian social reality of relevance, though one as yet little explored – is still quite timid compared to what is being produced in the rest of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Brazil is vast (so vast that whenever it responds as a State, as a Nation, it’s frightening), it has a plurality that is almost impossible to bind together, but this is no excuse. To my mind, taking on a bit more risk and being unafraid to write about what are actually the most pressing concerns within the seriousness that is today’s Brazil would not be a mistake.

    Cultural expression, literary expression, can become dated for countless different reasons, so arranging things in such a way as to avoid the label of becoming dated, whether in theme, in the profile of the characters, in the events that propel the narrative, in whatever it may be, might be an unforgiveable error. Someone once said, and it is worth remembering, that if you are going to write governed by fear, even just with an eye to the little aspirations and vanities related to the illusion of durability, then you would do better not to write at all.

    Paulo Scott is appearing in the UK at the following events.

    He will also be appearing in the US.

    Nowhere People is Paulo Scott’s first novel to be translated into English.