Narrative, Imagination and Migration in the Southern Hemisphere: An Interview with Professor Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford. She is also an acclaimed author of fiction and has published numerous novels and short story collections in the English language. In this interview with Dr. Flair Donglai Shi (School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Professor Boehmer discusses her latest work on literatures of the South and how writing can be a way of navigating worlds. This published version is edited from the online interview conducted as part of Dr. Shi’s “Transnational and Situated” public seminar series that took place on the 24th of May 2023.

Shi: As one of the most prominent voices in Postcolonial Studies, you have continued to work on different literatures from and literary histories of countries formerly colonized by European empires, especially the British Empire. Your research concerns also span different historical periods, from the Victorian era to the contemporary age. In 2015b, you published Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire, and in 2018, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century Critical Readings. I am aware that you are now working on a new project called Southern Imagining, can you please share with us the major concerns of this project?

Boehmer: Thank you for mentioning those works. The idea of cross-border dialogues and writing across barriers has been central to my thinking, and the Southern Imagining project continues to explore lateral exchanges between different global regions, particularly in the southern hemisphere. When I look across my work, both as a scholar and as a creative writer, I can see that this has been a vital theme, namely this central concern of how we address each other across borders – linguistic borders, political borders, cultural borders – through different forms of translation.

Shi: Indeed. Can you give us a brief outline of this new project and explain a bit about the rationale behind its organization?

Boehmer: Sure. The book is currently divided into 8 chapters plus a preface. In the preface, “Southern Lights”, and the first two chapters respectively entitled “Cartographies” and “Shared Skies”, I lay out the research area by delineating what I mean by “the South”, as it pertains to the far south of the world rather than the “Global South”. Geographies and cartographies are thus very important to this project. From the mapping activities of European colonialists to contemporary indigenous writings about the lands they inhabit, “the South” has been sustained by different mythologies. This project not only charts the histories of these mythologies but also looks at the dialogic patterns that can be traced between them.

In Chapter 3, I turn to the Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões, whose epic poem, Os Lusíadas, narrates the 15th-century Portuguese experience of rounding Africa to travel to India, in order to set up trade with Asia. Of course, it is a colonial poem, but it is also very interesting in the sense that it is a cartographic poem. It tries to imagine what that process of rounding the Cape of Good Hope through the Southern Ocean involves. In Chapter 4, “Writing Southern Seas”, I continue to read classic Western writers and analyze how they imagine the Southern Ocean in relation to danger and extreme conditions. Writers that appear in this chapter include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, and Mary Shelley. Chapter 5, “Silent Vastness”, then focuses on the farthest south and examines writings about Antarctica, especially writings about traveling into the continent to reach the South Pole.

Chapter 6 focuses on the so-called settler writers, including Olive Schreiner from South Africa, and Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame from New Zealand. In this chapter I also look at Australian poets like Judith Wright, who tried to imagine and find words for the great deserts, the red interior of Australia. Chapter 7, “Keeping South”, then forms a hemispheric arc and brings critical attention back to Indigenous writings and mythologies from southern Africa and southern Australia in the contemporary age. And then finally, Chapter 8, “Southern Tilt”, is an autobiographical section in which I talk about my own travels to these far southern places, where travel becomes a kind of lens for reading different Southern literatures across the past 10 years.

Basically, the project tries to rethink the world through southern or south-centered conceptual frames, through different geophysical perceptions of light, distance, and spin directed from the southern hemisphere. This kind of southern imagining is not so much reactive to the modern, as in dialogue with it, and aims to move towards a more interactive world map of literary relationship.

Shi: The range of writers and writings you engage with in this project is truly expansive. How do you situate it in relation to existent scholarship?

Boehmer: There are basically four humanistic fields or strands of theoretical thinking I engage with in this project. The first is the theory from the south, such as in the work of Paul Carter, Peter Beilharz, or Raewyn Connell. The second is recent works in Environmental Humanities, especially concerning the oceanic, such as the works of Epeli Hau’ofa, Timothy Clark, and Isabel Hofmeyr. Thirdly, I would point to the indigenous cosmologies highlighted by Jeanine Leane, Linda Tuwihai Smith, and Alexis Wright that inform my understanding of contemporary indigenous literature. Lastly, I also engage with linguists like Edward Sapir, Deirdre Wilson, and Dan Sperber to discuss ideas about linguistic relativity and inferential reading.

Shi: These are all very exciting dialogues, but to bring the conversation back to the central keyword of the project, “the South” or “Southern” (and you also keep mentioning this cartographical notion of “the Far South”), I wonder what motivated you to shift from “the postcolonial” to “the South”? In addition, the term “the Far South” certainly reminds me of “the Far East”, which used to refer to East Asia but is now more or less obsolete due to its Orientalist baggage. So, in what ways do you conceptualize this “Far South” in relation to colonial histories and postcolonial politics?

Boehmer: Let me address your questions in order. First, about the shift you mention. A governing motif that has run through my postcolonial work is the critical attempt to think about literary and cultural interrelationships without, alongside, or even against, the mediating force of the European metropoles. For example, my 2002 book, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction, examines dialogues between the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. It also presents many other examples of cultural exchanges which do not necessarily go through, or are not radioed via, the literary elites and elite institutions of London, Paris, and New York. Since that book, I have continued to meditate on such possibilities. I then started to notice how the different literary groupings of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America were sometimes subtly referring to each other’s experiences of being southern, rather than citing influences from the European metropoles, to read their own environments. This new project attempts to find and analyze the lateral patterns of influence that connect these writers, not least, for example, Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield.

Second, about Orientalism. At first glance, Southern Imagining may bear some resemblances to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), in the sense that I also begin with how Western writers and discourses imagine the Other as the projection of or cover for their own colonial desires. However, in this project, I’m interested in the reverse and the transverse gaze. I delve into how southern writers like Alexis Wright and Zoe Wicomb tap into their own cultural wellsprings to write back to Europe or the Global North.

Shi: Let us now focus on the specific case of South African literature. You are not only an influential scholar in the studies of South African literature but also a creative practitioner who actively participates in its ongoing development. How do you position South African literature in relation to “the South”, the Far South, or the southern hemisphere? What are some of the general features and cultural trends of South African literature you have observed in the past decade?

Boehmer: South African literature is one of the national or regional literatures vital to the project. To illustrate, the 2003 Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee embodies some of the lateral exchanges emphasized in the project. He was born in South Africa in 1940 and moved to Australia in 2002 and is now recognized as something of a hybrid, a partly Australian, partly South African writer. His 1999 novel, Disgrace, depicts the post-apartheid condition of social breakdown and inter-racial violence in South Africa. But, since moving to Australia, he has broadened his southern focus, by carving out cultural routes through which spaces in the Far South can be imagined comparatively and collectively. For example, from 2015 to 2018, he worked on a major translation project with writers and academic colleagues at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, called Cátedra Coetzee: Literaturas del Sur. In his increasing resistance to the world domination of the English language, he has mapped some of the lateral pathways of writing and exchange that I seek to highlight. But this is even as he remains a key influence for the development of South African literature.

As to how South African writing has changed in recent years, this is a difficult question. Nearly 30 years since the end of apartheid, the country is still very divided along racial and cultural lines, and the literature continues to diagnose those divided conditions and still struggles to imagine differently. For instance, the 2021 Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, could be criticized for continuing to run along the generic, imaginative and metaphorical grooves of how to represent the land that Olive Schreiner’s writings were exploring 150 years ago. It seems to me that South African literature persists in its urge to map and remap a racially and culturally divided country.

Shi: Indeed. Galgut’s The Promise may be seen as the latest South African novel that has entered the world literary space after being consecrated by the Booker. In 2021, Damon Galgut became the third South African author to be awarded the Booker, after Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, both of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature after getting the Booker Prize. All three authors were categorized as white during apartheid and are still generally perceived as such in the post-apartheid era. Before his award, Galgut had previously been shortlisted by the Booker twice, first in 2003 for The Good Doctor and again in 2010 for In a Strange Room.

To contextualize my questions, please allow me to first give a plot summary of The Promise. The story begins in 1986 with the death of Rachel, a forty-year-old Jewish mother of three on a small holding outside Pretoria. The drama of the novel turns on a promise that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, made to her before she died, overheard by their youngest daughter, Amor. The promise was that Manie would give the black maid of the family, Salome, the deeds to the annex she occupied, namely the little house she was living in. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten the promise and does not wish to be reminded of it. Amor’s siblings also dismiss the promise and regard her stubborn insistence that Salome should own the little house as the kind of talk that “now appears to have infected the whole country”.

Through this short summary, we can already see reflected many of the common tropes of South African literature, including those of the racial divide, land ownership, family dramas and intergenerational conflicts and reconciliations. Moreover, like Coetzee’s (1986) novel, Foe, there is also the voiceless black character central to the story. In The Promise, Salome is not granted a first-person narrative, and she is always talked about. With all these observations, the obvious question for us to ask is, why does South African literature always appear to be white in the space of world literature? How then can black South African literature become world literature? Why are black South African authors made invisible in this particular space regulated by the prominent prizes operating in the Global North?

Boehmer: Thank you for a masterful summary of the novel. I shall preface my response by saying that it is one of the objectives Southern Imagining to try to read outside those recurring and repetitive frames through which world literature from southern lands like South Africa is read and constructed. This is also why Zoë Wicomb is such a valuable presence and force in the community of South African writers who are internationally known. Some of her works explore what it means to try to pass racially, to claim whiteness when one is from a “Coloured” community or a black community.

As for The Promise, it is indeed a farm novel about white possession, black dispossession, and the silent black servant. There is no doubt that all these are tried and tested tropes in South African writing. However, Galgut deals with this genre and these tropes with a certain amount of humor and self-awareness. His tropes that send up the realism of the novel itself, and, in an almost postmodern fashion, he pokes fun at his own replication of the tropes. For example, one of the key characters is himself writing a manuscript, a farm novel, in which he sets himself up as a character. My firm sense is that Galgut has moved the South African novel on a stage with this biting use of comedy including satire and slapstick.

There are many reasons as to why black South African authors tend to remain invisible in the current operation of world literature consecration. It has to do with the legacies of apartheid, and it has to do with what international literary elites recognize as legible themes or codes for understanding South Africa in the world literary marketplace. Again, one of these codes is the farm novel, and another is the white-black racial divide that black writers may not always be that interested in writing about. They may be more interested in writing about more varied, broader topics. For example, Mda’s (2005) novel The Whale Caller is about a love affair between a whale, a creature of the ocean, and a human being. It forms a key text in Southern Imagining.

Shi: It is indeed very important to see the diversity of voices and topics in South African literature. To dwell on the limits of the persistent tropes a bit longer, do you think the recurrent figure of the voiceless black character in white South African writing has anything to do the politics of authenticity or representation? Despite the polyphonic structure of many of these postcolonial works, white authors seem to be anxious about ventriloquizing for the black Other. In the US, a white author who writes in the voice of a black protagonist will likely be accused of the politically incorrect act of cultural appropriation, and as postcolonial literary critics we can understand such concerns. However, the consequent resistance to narrating or presenting the perspectives of the Other also appears unsatisfactory as it can easily lead to an overly sensitive refusal to see things differently.

In your case, no matter whether we are looking at your scholarship or your creative writing, you always attempt to offer a different array of characters, and many of them have very different backgrounds and life stories, which you guide your readers through with different narrative tools. For example, the first story in your 2019 short story collection, To the Volcano, is entitled “The Child in the Photograph”, and it tells the story of a female student from Botswana and her experiences in the UK, and in many ways all of us who have been international students ourselves would be able to identify with her (Boehmer 2019). It shows that one does not have to always write about one’s own personal stories to create possibilities of identification through co-experiencing. So, I just wonder in the great scheme of world literature, how should we approach this question of race and representation, or the tension between authenticity and the narrative voice?

Boehmer: I completely agree that the anxiety about voice appropriation is a real issue in Anglophone literary circles, and in the US certain writers like Lionel Shriver have really ignited the debate. It is a very polarized discussion and can get very heated. It is informed by racial politics in the United States, which in some ways do bear analogies with the situation in South Africa. As for The Promise, Galgut’s defense for the voicelessness of Salome is precisely based on this anxiety about giving a voice to somebody from another community. However, as you suggest, such refusal to ventriloquize simply replicates the silence of the other, which seems thereby to become an ever more inescapable colonial trope.

In my fiction, I have tried to approach this problem through the deep study of the particular situations I am writing about. I always try to talk to different people around me who are involved in similar situations and attempt to offer a diverse array of perspectives. For example, my novel, Bloodlines (Boehmer 2000), is set around 120 years ago at the time of the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. To write it, I read widely and engaged in many in-depth discussions with historians. I visited the sites and felt the atmosphere of the places that I was writing about.

Essentially, to create drama in your fiction, you need to create difference, and to create difference, you need to try to see a situation from different angles. So rather than projecting my own voices upon characters, I try to enter characters and situations from within to the best of my ability. Indeed, in my 2015 novel, The Shouting in the Dark, I went so far as to explore ventriloquism as a trope and even as an act in the narrative, in order to explore in depth what it takes to give voice to a historical figure. There is no absolute measure for how to get it right. But I do try sympathetically, rather than empathetically, to enter the world of the characters that I am writing about.

Shi: Very interesting. What is the difference between empathetic and sympathetic for you?

Boehmer: Empathy means absolutely “feeling with”, so to some extent it means appropriating the perspective or the world view of a character. Whereas sympathy is more of “feeling alongside”, and it recognizes that we occupy different vantage-points but that it’s nevertheless not impossible to at least attempt to see the world from where the other person stands.

Shi: I have another question with regards to the relation between literatures of the South and world literature. In his famous 1986 essay, “Third Word Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, Frederic Jameson asserts that for most non-Western literatures, the story of the private individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public “Third World” culture and society. Almost 40 years on, this allegorical mode of writing and reading still seems to affect how non-Western literature is recognized in the West. Do you still observe this kind of allegorical domination in South African literature or African literature as a whole?

Boehmer: Jameson’s article was quite controversial when it first came out, and continues to be so, because it appeared to homogenize entire fields of literary and scholarly work from around the world. However, we find ourselves going back to it because he was pointing to something that is still endemic in the field of world literature criticism, where “world literature” is sometimes still an alias for “Third World” literature, or literature from “the South”. We already touched on this when we talked about what becomes legible to international prize committees like those of the Booker and the Nobel.

This tendency remains a source of great frustration to me. Essentially, as a writer, you can try out all kinds of different plots, but the ones that resonate internationally tend to be those associated with your particular national background, read as a national allegory. For example, if we take the case of a southern land like Australia, except for Coetzee, who migrated to the country when he was already in his 60s, the only other Australian author who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature is Patrick White, and his works certainly invite reading as national allegories of travel into Australia’s outback. We find in his work the trope of the white explorer going into the desert, confronting archetypal strangeness, and eventually losing his life. This is the national allegory that pertains to white Australia – a “developed” country, but a southern one, too.

Ultimately, national allegory works like a framework that non-metropolitan writers are required to conform to in order to enter world literary space and submit to consecrating mechanisms like prizes. And yet, it is perfectly possible to flip the set-up and try to apply such modes of reading to literatures from the Global North. Ian McEwan’s and Martin Amis’s works, for instance, could be read as allegories of urban Britain in the late 20th century. Though such approaches are rarely applied, for obvious but interesting reasons, they produce fruitful results.

Shi: Speaking of the Nobel Prize in Literature, what do you make of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s award in 2021? He was hardly known in China as none of his novels were translated in full length before the award, but after the consecration of the Nobel, the translations have been quickly arranged and are gradually being published. He is now one of the most read African authors here and many Chinese scholars have acquired significant national funding to study his works. Before his award, I remember even in the UK, where he had been living and working for decades, we rarely saw his works featured in the postcolonial or world literature curricula. Were you surprised when he won the award? How do you view his career as an African writer based in the UK?

Boehmer: Well, I have a lot to say on this topic! And I have certainly taught and supervised on Abdulrazak Gurnah over the years. At Oxford I co-convene the long-established Postcolonial and World Literature Seminar, and, in the early 2010s, Abdulrazak Gurnah was twice a guest of the seminar – long before he won the award. And we have featured his work on our website https://writersmakeworlds.com/ and did so from the beginning of the project. The site had a surge of visitors after his award was announced, because at the time not many outside the small select circle of postcolonial writers and scholars knew about his work, as you rightly point out. Our site was one of the few places that provided a comprehensive introduction to his works.

Personally, in postcolonial circles, I had known Gurnah for many years before we invited him to participate in the seminar series. Prior to his retirement, he worked as a teacher of literature at the University of Kent, as both an academic critic and a creative writer. He and I have held a longstanding dialogue precisely about how to manage that interesting relationship between those different writerly identities. One fun fact to share is that, for those of you who know his work, there is a character who bears my first name in one of his best-known novels, Paradise (1994).

Concerning his universal resonance, his work highlights the humanity of the refugee. And the refugee condition so defines this moment that we are in now, certainly from the vantage point of Europe. Gurnah speaks about being a refugee himself, from the civil war in Zanzibar, Tanzania in the 1960s. He speaks about the predicaments of being a migrant. It is no surprise to me that he drew the attention of the 2021 Nobel committee. In fact, this winter there is an installation in Stockholm, Sweden, honoring his work on “the journey between cultures and continents”.

So, I see Gurnah as both a black British writer who has written about the condition of being from East Africa and living in racially divided Britain, and as an East African writer who sees the world from that point of view, an Indian Ocean point of view, from a part of the world that has always interestingly been interconnected with China. Did you know that giraffes were exported from the East African coast to the court of China at the start of the first millennium, the year 1000? Isn’t that wonderful? Ships plied back and forth across the Indian Ocean with the monsoon or trade winds. These transverse movements are something that Gurnah has made his own in his work as well as writing about modern Britain. In short, what a great writer.

Shi: It is so interesting to learn about all these connections that were already there for a long time before the award. To return then to this idea of “lateral exchanges”, in his two “Conjectures on World Literature” articles published in the early 2000s, Franco Moretti conceptualizes world literature based on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory and comments that “movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the center) is almost unheard of” (2003, 75). Is it really the case that countries in the South cannot dialogue with one another without the mediating force of institutions or cultural trends in the Global North? In the realm of global book prizes, it is true that prominent prizes operating in the Global North serve as the major consecrating mechanism to recognize writings from the South, whereas prizes operating in the South tend to be national in scope and rarely have the same level of consecrating power for writings of other nations. In your career, have you observed any attempts to break away from such mediating forces of the North in the Southern countries you have traveled to? Is it really an impossible task?

Boehmer: To give a necessarily provisional answer to this interesting question. I should say first that I completely disagree with Moretti on these matters. I also disagree with Pascale Casanova, who in her important book, The World Republic of Letters (2004), uses influential metaphors of horizons and emergences, to talk about how writers become visible in the metropolis, but she clearly sees the world almost exclusively from the vantage point of Paris. Her world literature is firmly located in the Paris-sanctioned literary world. To be blunt, such designations are problematic: it approximates a kind of colonial gesture for critics like Moretti and Casanova to suggest that unless a work is legible to Europe or America, it does not count.

While I recognize the dominance of European and American literary infrastructures of valuation and validation, it has been my life’s work to try to find lateral pathways of exchange and influence that do not always run via the metropoles of the Global North.

To locate these pathways, we need to do proper archival work. We need to be able to cite historical examples to counter Moretti’s statement. Consider the clustered and networked world of the late 19th century, for instance, that I have discussed in my book Indian Arrivals. Or notice how Mexican artists like Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo were referencing Russian formalism and modernist art from India in the 1930s. Or again, how 1960s South African writers like Alex La Guma consulted with Caribbean or Nigerian writers to make their art. There are many interesting examples of influence that did not and still do not run through the world capitals, but we need to carry out proper archival work to retrieve it. This mapping of crosswise pathways is the task of the postcolonial critic though, as we are saying, it is not easy. As Wallerstein noted, the world may be one, but it is uneven. The power differentials between cultures are steep but I would urge postcolonial scholars to try to work against them and question them rather than simply replicating them in our criticism.

Shi: I totally agree with you. Indeed, we should not forget the numerous historical precedents for lateral exchanges that took place in the second half of the 20th century. During the heightened years of the Cold War, there occurred, in chronological order: the Bandung Conference of 1955; the establishment of the Non-aligned Movement in 1961; the Tricontinental Conference of 1966; and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences that ran from 1958 to 1979. Although they tend to be ignored in contemporary re-conceptualizations of world literature circulating via the material and cultural networks of globalized neoliberal capitalism, these historical efforts and their legacies may still offer important inspirations to us when we try to build new networks of lateral exchanges in the South. Among such networks, translation is one of the primary mechanisms. I know that two of your novels, Bloodlines (Boehmer 2000) and Nile Baby (2008), are being translated into Chinese and will be published in China in 2024. Do you know why, among all your novels and short story collections, these two works got picked up for translation into Chinese? What are your thoughts on how they may be received? We remember, too, of course, how your first monograph, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995), was translated into Chinese in the late 1990s. But now, in the 2020s, how might these particular fictions interest the Chinese reader? I for one am really looking forward to reading them.

Boehmer: Thank you for mentioning the new translations. Since I do not read Chinese, it is hard for me to imagine the reception. I am also curious about why these two works got picked up.

The two novels are very different. Bloodlines is a historical novel about the South African or Anglo-Boer War that lasted from 1899 to 1902. It operates using two historical frames, shuttling between the post-apartheid period, a time of great violence and rupture, and a similar moment of division, rupture, and violence in 1899, on the eve of that war.

As this suggests, the novel unfolds on a very large international canvas. I was inspired to write it after I found out about certain interesting connections between Republican Ireland and South Africa back in the early 20th century. I learned that Robert McBride, a famous African National Congress freedom fighter figure in South Africa, was probably the grandson of John MacBride, the husband of W. B. Yeats’ muse, Maud Gonne. John MacBride participated in the Anglo-Boer War as part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was in allegiance with the South African Republic, or “the Boers”, and he and other Irish republicans fought against the British with them. During his time in South Africa, he had an affair with a black woman, and they had a child who later became the parent of Robert McBride. I have fictionalized this interesting history in Bloodlines where a similar “grandson” figure appears. It was an interesting dynamic to work with. I suspect that it is that intimate drama, set against a broad historical canvas, and the contrast between them, that may be intriguing to the prospective Chinese readers.

Nile Baby is completely different. It is in many ways a young adult novel, a story about the close friendship between two 12-year-old British kids who discover a strange haunting in their science lab at school, something that is awakened by the titular ‘Nile Baby’. Alternating from one chapter to another between the first-person perspectives of the two young protagonists, Nile Baby engages in universal themes of friendship, historical reappearance, and race relations. One of the children has a Sudanese father and motifs from Egyptian mythology circulate through the story. It is interesting to me to notice that both of the novels being translated into Chinese have to do with friendship and reconciliation.

Shi: These stories really demonstrate the wide scope of your imagination, and they present contrasting characters very vividly. Speaking of writing fiction, you are certainly one of the most prolific academics based in the English Faculty at Oxford University, in terms of both your research publications and your creative output. I wonder how do you juggle these two roles? In some of your criticism, like Postcolonial Poetics, you talk about this reciprocal relationship you wish to promote between writers and readers, even though traditionally we understand the reader as a kind of passive recipient of ideas. Certainly, as academics, we have the tendency to get stuck in certain ways of thinking. We are perhaps overly influenced by the theories we project onto the texts we read. How do we free ourselves from that tendency? Or is it actually necessary to do the freeing? In summary, how do you view this reconciliation or reciprocal relationship between the different genres you write, the different roles you occupy?

Boehmer: For me, it has always been extremely important that the ideas I am trying to communicate come across clearly to readers. To write vividly, accurately, with a sense of where the reader may be coming from, is vital to my work. This principle informs my commitment to continuing to write fiction alongside criticism and history.

Similarly, to understand cultural situations, be them my own or those of others, to see them in depth and in detail, is really important. I already mentioned the importance for me of doing the research and going into historical situations in detail. And when you are telling a tale from the imagination, you have to be particularly aware of the reader. You need to make sure that you are drawing the reader into the world that you are re-creating or, in many cases, creating from scratch. The reciprocity between the writer and his or her readers is something very important to me, and I am interested in understanding what readers see or sense in my writings as much as I am interested in the writing process itself.

In terms of juggling my creative and academic roles, it is indeed a difficult balance to maintain, and requires quite a bit of self-reflection and self-discipline. On the one hand, I do think that academic study can play a helpful part in this self-reflective process. In recent years, I have been interested to work with reception aesthetics, a theoretical school pioneered by the German theorist, Wolfgang Iser. Reception studies helps me to bear the audience in mind, to think about accommodating the reader.

On the other hand, creative practices may in turn help us to reflect on how we conduct our academic discourses as well. To illustrate, I have been interested to reflect on the avoidance of the “I”, the first-person voice in academic writings, whereas in fiction it is more prevalent, certainly in dialogue. We avoid it because it is perceived as working in contrary ways to the authoritative critical persona we wish to project. We prefer to hide ourselves behind the screen of the third-person narration and tell our students to avoid it as well. However, the further I go in both my research work and my creative endeavors, I find that masking of the writerly self more and more unsatisfactory. In The Shouting in the Dark (2015a), a work of auto-fiction, I do still use the screen of the third-person, but there is also a negotiation between first- and third-person throughout the narrative. It has become increasingly important to bring out this “I” in my non-fiction. It also ties in with the issue of appropriation and authenticity we have discussed. Writing itself is a process of negotiation between different positions and having the “I” out there is like saying, “I am trying to draw you into that process of negotiation, but this is my position, and I wish for us (both the writer and the reader) to understand other positions.” It is a fine balancing act, a difficult dance of appropriation and approximation between writer and reader that I have been exploring.