Having a good place to work

Writer Digest asked me to write down seven things I've learned as an author, for their "Guide to Literary Agents Blog." The piece should be published soon after The Jack Bank hits stores early next week. But I'll give you a sneak preview here of one of the points I made: I talked about the importance of having the most pleasant possible space to work in.

For many years I just wrote wherever there was a spare corner: my university office or high school classroom, or a desk in the corner of the bedroom. I wrote on the dining room table, next to the dirty breakfast dishes. I wrote in Starbucks.

When Peterson and I bought a house together, for the first time I had a study (pictured above). I love working in here. I enjoy the sunlight and the view of the historic town of Sunbury, where we live, and of the green wooded hills. I like being able to turn off the Internet. I love hearing birdsong in the warm months, and the music of the wind chime below. The room is full of my favorite books, artwork, and African cloths. I can't imagine myself ever going back to my old way of doing things.

Some writers do well in artists' colonies or varying their working environs. I think I do well with an ironclad routine: I like to program my own brain so that if it's the morning, I should be sitting down at my desk. And if I'm in my office, I should be working--even the wallpaper and floor rug should be subtle reminders of that fact.

Here's the point I make in my forthcoming article, though: writing takes more concentration than any other activity I can think of. There is no one to cheer the writer on. It's a task that's so easy to avoid. If you're like me and work best in stable, predictable, constant surroundings, then I think it's a good idea to make those surroundings as enjoyable, in themselves, as possible. This may not lead to inspiration in itself (an overrated thing, in my view, but that's another blog post). But if writing is going to be so difficult to do, why not do every little thing we can to make it just a little easier to get started? In my case a comfortable chair. A nice desk. Bamboo blinds, rather than the dusty-stained white plastic ones I had for years. Even though I failed to completely register the fact, I think they imprinted on my brain a mood of gloomy, discouraging dullness.

Foolishness and bravery in Japan

I get lots of my ideas for blog posts from messages shared at the Quaker meeting Peterson and I attend. This Sunday, one Friend shared her despair about human foolishness as evidenced by our building nuclear power plants on geological fault lines.

But my own response has been different. Yes, I will agree she had a point, and media coverage has dealt at length with the corruption of the Japanese nuclear industry. But two counter-arguments: one, this earthquake was the fourth largest in recorded history. A natural catastrophe so freakishly rare, in other words, it boggles the mind. Is it reasonable to conclude that these power plants were a mistake based on such a stunning statistical anomaly? As human beings, what we do expect ourselves to be able to foresee? If we were responsible for preventing every possible catastrophe, however unlikely, we wouldn't be able to do anything in the world at all!

Second, I have to say that his week I've been overwhelmed by the sheer, astounding heroism of the nuclear plant workers. As I write this blog, the effort to control the overheating reactors has had its ups and downs. But I remain optimistic a cataclysmic meltdown will be averted, and if this happens, it will be due to the incredible efforts of the people who've been working on restoring power and dousing these reactors with sea water. They've been putting their own health and bodies on the line for their country's safety.

As a writer and human being, I'm always up for criticizing human stupidity: much of The Jack Bank deals with the innate human capacity for evil. But let's not forget the other side of our natures. My book ends with the recollection of a straight black man who risked his life to keep me safe during an Inkatha attack in Soweto (and he got kidnapped as a result). South African political violence was certainly horrible, but it also led to extraordinary love and heroism.

OK, let's love the dead, but more the living

Today I cross-blog, here as well as at Zack Ford Blogs. Thanks, Zack, for having me as a guest!

We teach our children: speak no ill of the dead. At a funeral, say nice things about the corpse in the coffin. She can’t answer accusations anymore.

If this is true of dead people in general, even more so when the dead person in question is a mere kid, a “laaitie” as we say in my native South Africa. (I immigrated to the United States about sixteen years ago—more about that in a minute). When that child has been bullied and brutalized, we’re tempted to raise them to sainthood. So St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking out of his body, looking to heaven in wounded ecstasy. Also, college boy Tyler Clementi, who got taped making out with a man in his Rutgers dorm room, and then jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Or, closer to my central Pennsylvania home, Brandon Bitner, who got fed up with being gay-bashed at Middleburg High School, and stepped in front of a speeding truck.

As Zack Ford said in his blog three months ago: “We owe [Brandon] that love now, more than ever.” In my home town, people compete for stories of how they are connected to him. My cousin’s husband was the driver of the truck—those kinds of tales. Brandon’s memorial page is understandably full of longing and regret. An acrostic poem states: “An angel you are to us now.”

I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I just can’t do go along with all this anymore. I’ve had enough. It’s certainly not that I hate Brandon, Tyler, Justin Aeburg, Asher Brown, and all of the other depressed queer teenagers who’ve taken their lives over the past year or so. A gay man myself, I value their difference. Is it even necessary to say I strongly condemn their harassment and abuse?

Nor am I blaming these kids for their own deaths in that sadistic US marine sergeant kind of way: “Friggin’ sissy! Toughen up!” They had enough of that crap while alive.

What I am tired of is feeling I’m supposed to fetishize these boys’ victimhood, kiss their broken bones like George of Diocletian’s, adore them ten times the more now they are dead than I would have done if they’d carried on to live happy, fulfilled, grown-up gay lives. More than if they’d survived.

I experienced my own homophobic hell growing up white and gay in apartheid South Africa, an experience I describe in my forthcoming memoir, The Jack Bank. I spent my early years in the Kruger National Park, where a lioness charged my mother and a buffalo killed a housekeeper who crossed a dry river bed in the wrong spot. But what I experienced at age 12, when I was sent away to a whites-only, government boarding school, made these early brushes with danger seem simple.

A seventeen-year-old prefect figured out I was gay when he caught me “looking at him funny” in the shower room. He beat me, sometimes several times a week, on my buttocks with a cricket bat. We called them “jacks,” in South Africa—thrashings—and senior boys were unofficially allowed to administer them to juniors.

He built an electric shock machine with a hand telephone crank and shocked boys’ genitalia. When he suspected another kid of informing on him to his parents, he staged a mock nude hanging in the senior boys’ bathroom. All the time he told us—me in particular—he wanted to beat the “queer” and “sissy” out of us. He said we needed to fight a race war, and this meant we should get some backbone.

One night, just before he got transferred out of the junior dormitory for being too brutal even for apartheid norms, he invented something called the “jack bank,” where we could deposit beatings and they could earn interest. We volunteered for these beatings. We begged him, “Please, sir! More!” When he got transferred out of our passage, the thing that most infuriated us was that we lost our deposits.

We sweltered, for years, in fear and dehumanization, a program designed specifically to prepare us for the role of racist oppressors. At times I felt like Brandon—suicidal. At other times we took out our hurt and anger by beating those younger than us. Some of my most nauseating memories of high school are of pushing younger boys’ heads in a wooden mailbox, beating them as hard as I could with a cricket bat, and then feeling a great deal of power and self-satisfaction when I got them to fear and obey me. Until the self-disgust later drove me to vomit over the toilet.

But I got through these trials, as did hundreds of thousands of other gay white boys under apartheid, not to mention the millions of young black South Africans whose suffering greatly exceeded ours.

The world knows the end of this story. Nelson Mandela, walking free in front of the television cameras. Corporal punishment being banned in South African schools. The adoption of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, which also bans discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation—a clause I helped lobby for, and celebrated ecstatically when it was passed into law.

I’m trying not to be self-righteous here. Lord knows (metaphorically speaking, on this atheist blog!), I have no reason to be. See a couple of paragraphs above.

But still, part of me is angry at Brandon, Tyler and co. for caving in. For giving the haters what they wanted—a few less gay people in the people. For not keeping going long enough to show the world they could leave adolescence behind and be peaceful and happy queers.

Any depressed gay teenager out there today could look at the reaction to these kids’ deaths and think, “If I want everyone to love me, I should just kill myself!”

But this is wrong. We can survive, hard as it is. We can find joy and peace; can learn to be kind to each other. We can mourn people like Brandon and Tyler, without romanticizing their martyrdom. We can protest bullying. And that way we can, at least at moments, be real angels for our fellow human beings, as opposed to vanished saints.

THAT’s love worth giving, day after day, for as long as it’s needed.

Glen Retief teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University. His memoir, The Jack Bank, appears in April from St. Martin's Press. www.glenretief.com

On learning to love my niche audiences

The last thing any creative writer wants is to be put into a narrow box. We all want to believe we are writing for all people, for all time: as universal and essential as well, Shakespeare or the Book of Genesis. So imagine my frustration! A librarian in Victoria, British Colombia reviews my book. I've never met the guy, but I picture a thin, stuffy 45-year-old in a three-piece suit, heterosexual, married, smoking a pipe in an office cubicle with a view of the Puget Sound. He said:

"[Glen Retief's] memoir should appeal to LGTB readers looking for something beyond the standard gay coming-of-age story and, incidentally, to anyone interested in the social history of South Africa as apartheid was ending."

There I had it--BAM! My memoir should appeal to eccentric queers and idiosyncratic historians. The latter only incidentally. For presumably a week or two. Then, thank God for recycling--at least I wouldn't bear sole responsibility for the loss of a row of trees in rural Maine!

I was furious. I Googled Richard J. Violette, the reviewer, but didn't learn much. I Googled Victoria, BC: beautiful spot, indeed, I decided. But who would want to live there if it's the kind of place where "ordinary" people (read: Western, middle-class, straight) don't want to read books by "different" people (African, gay etc.)? I'll stick around in Amish country. And drop off a couple of promo copies of The Jack Bank in the Mennonite store with the "buggy romance" rack. Who needs Canada?

But then, this weekend, I had a different insight. Mostly out of guilt, I've been reading Jacqueline Deval's How to Publicize Your Book. She's a former book publicist for a major New York house. The one thing she talks about over and over again is, figure out your audience! Get a picture in your head of who might want to buy your book. (The myth of universality, she says, is just that, a fairy tale. Every book appeals to specific kinds of people). Then, if you're an author with even a grain of desire to actually be read, figure out a way to connect with these folks.

So that's what I'm planning to do this summer. I am planning to visit, as much as I can, some of my favorite people in the world: progressive expat South Africans, like the fun crowd I hung out with DC for the World Cup--see my earlier post on this blog. Queers of all stripes, especially activist ones. I don't know that many idiosyncratic historians, but I am, after all, a Quaker, and Quakers are endlessly interested both in progressive social history and in global cross-culturalism. So I'm going to be doing a reading at Friends General Conference in Iowa.

I feel strangely at peace having accepted this box--and grateful to my unknown Canadian "Violette" for having pointed out its contours. As I tell my students, it's in the particular that we find the universal. And in having claimed my cultural particularity as a writer--gay, South African, etc.--I somehow also feel more in touch with the human race as a whole. There's a lesson in this.

Worlds Apart: Family Life Across the North-South Divide

My little brother David just came to stay for the weekend. He is working for his multinational computer company for six weeks, in North Carolina, and popped up for the weekend to bleak, wintry central Pennsylvania, where Peterson and I live. It was lovely to have him, but talking to him about all the family developments back home--my nephew going to school, all of the different family members' reactions to my book coming out--was a reminder of how radical a choice it is to be an expat. Edward Said talked about how it severs an individual from the consolations of "family, history, and geography."

I see my parents, siblings, and nephews once every two years or so, when I make my bi-annual pilgrimage back home, usually for Christmas and New Year. In the 17 years I've lived in the USA, only three times have any of my biological family members set foot in a place where I live: my parents, once, when I lived in Miami; David, twice.

My friends Silas and Catherine, both American, went on a family cruise recently. Catherine's family lives a couple of hours away, in Maryland, so they see them every month or so. On this cruise, both Silas and Catherine were struck by the number of developing-world workers--Filipinos, Thais, Brazilians etc.--who made a fuss of Silas and Catherine's kids and talked about missing their own children, left behind with grandparents or aunts and uncles. I'm certainly not comparing my own experiences to these workers': I'm a middle class South African who left my home country at least partly to study and teach creative writing. I don't have children the other side of the world, just aging parents and lots of siblings, cousins, and nephews. Still, it does seem to me South African families, across race and class differences, are fragmented in a way that American middle class families aren't. Among my parents' friends, almost every family has at least one kid somewhere in the West, in England, Canada, America, or Australia. And the Xhosa families my students and I met in Tshani, Transkei, this last December, talked of children leaving the village for the distant large cities, and almost never being seen again--from the way they spoke, their children might as well have been in Brisbane.

What do you think? Is it easier to maintain family closeness in richer countries? Is this a good thing? Bad? Are America and places like it the last bastions against the globalization of blood ties?

Valentine's Day randomness

Just a few random, rambling thoughts this sunny, mild Valentine's morning...

Had a busy weekend, which began with my looking at my friend Susi Wyss's web page, www.susiwyss.com. I met Susi at the AWP conference in DC last weekend and I instantly liked her: she just seems so smart, wise, and interesting. Susi has what seems to be--I haven't read it yet--an excellent novel coming out just a few days before The Jack Bank does, and from the same publisher (St. Martin's). Her novel is ALL about Africa--weird and wonderful coincidence, no? We're going to try to do some joint Africa-themed events in the Baltimore area.

Anyway, I was reading some of Susi's stellar reviews, and that got me hunting down reviews of my own. I was pretty pleased with this one from Library Journal: “Retief has a skillful, subtle style that conveys a sense of atmosphere and his own otherness that grips even when he describes in detail the sordid brutality of boarding school life.” Gripping my readers with sordidness--yes! That'll pull out the book-buying hordes. But then I got thinking: as a writer, should I even be reading my own reviews? My own Valentine, Peterson Toscano, asked a similar question at just about every panel he went to at AWP: should we writers listen to our critics? I told him no, I am just going to ignore my reviews, all they can possibly do is muddy the creative waters. But then I realized: if I put my head in the sand, who will collect the good reviews for my web page? Tenure file? Writers conference applications? So I guess I'm going to be reading my book's reviews after all, God help me...

Yesterday, at the Quaker meeting Peterson and I attend, folks had a lot to say about Egypt: how inspiring the nonviolent change there has been; how destructive the military and financial support for the Mubarak regime. I think I was the only one in the group to have traveled to Egypt, all of the way back in 1993. I remember the beauty of the Nile, the endless hustling of the tourist totes, and the breathtaking pyramids at Saqqara. But I did think: if we North American liberals are going to get THAT inspired by a country we've barely thought about for the last several decades, how about we teach ourselves a little about it? So here are some beginners' links and suggestions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt
The novels of Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz. I especially enjoyed Palace Walk.
If you haven't already, read the Koran, a brilliant, sometimes disturbing, poetic sermon on how to be righteous. It also contains alternative versions of the major Bible stories.
Watch some Egyptian movies!

Finally, a sad Valentine's moment--a segment on BBC World Today, about the BBC reporter who had to flee Uganda after telling an MP he was gay. I'm not denying the awfulness of what's happening there in that country, by any means. When I visited in 2000 I was very struck by the climate of terror and homophobic hatred. But really, what does Scott Mills expect if he asks random people in the streets of Kampala what should be done with homosexuals? If I asked this question in rural Transkei, many of the respondents would think I was talking about intersexed people ("hermaphrodites," as they say in rural Africa). Without asking Ugandans about their understanding of the word "homosexual," interviews like this simply become a display of mutual cultural ignorance.

On risky ambiguity in autobiographical writing

A month ago, I published a short personal essay in the St. Petersburg Times about race and hazing (http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/on-being-a-minority-hazed/1125348 ). In it, I explored some very loaded questions, most notably: is there a link between hazing and race? I made some bold comparisons between my own experience of homophobic violent hazing under apartheid, in a whites-only school, and the experiences of Courtney Howard, who joined an all-black sorority at San Jose State and got badly roughed up. Implicitly, I posed what I thought was possibly the most outrageous question I could pose, as a white South African living in the United States—are there any similarities between my own racial minority’s experience and that of the most famous racial minority in my adopted country, African-Americans?

After the essay appeared in print and online, I held my breath. Typically, my op-eds get a flurry of livid responses. When I published an essay in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette arguing that recent anti-illegal immigrant legislation in Arizona had echoes of apartheid in it (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10213/1076466-109.stm) my email address was all afire with readers’ fury. I was dumb; anti-American; just didn’t understand about the rule of law. So this time, I was sure I was going to provoke a firestorm. Come on—white South Africans, probably one of the most privileged and oppressive racial minorities on the planet? Think the settler family on the farm, enjoying leisurely days supervising the cook, gardener, and maid who have had everything stolen from them. Against this, African-Americans, survivors and descendants of slaves. The man in Morrison’s Beloved whose mouth gets ruined by the metal bit. The flogging and back-breaking work and dehumanization that extends into the present day, where African-American men in particular are pulled into a mind-bogglingly enormous prison system—something like ten times the per capita size of the next most imprisoning industrial nation—that, to me at least, seems very reminiscent of slavery, down to chain gangs and the tradition of depriving felons of their voting rights.

Talk about chutzpah on my part, for even referring to these two minority experiences in the same sentence! At least that’s what I thought when I published the essay—even though I had my reasons for doing what I did, which I’ll get to in a minute.

But here’s what fascinated me: nobody confronted me. At least not in print. One reader commented that s/he couldn’t understand why I was so hung up on race—even though I explain in the article that I got the shit beaten out me so I wouldn’t be too sissy-ish to defend white power. Another rolled out the by now exhaustingly familiar “ranking of oppressions,” saying that apartheid homophobia couldn’t possibly compare in its intensity to apartheid racism. (For the most part, I agree with this argument, although I’m not sure how useful it is go down this road. There were white South African defense force conscripts tortured and drugged to suicide by apartheid homophobia. Are our brains too small to take in the gravity of this fact without having to ignore apartheid’s other enormous crimes?)

It was left to one of my colleagues here at the Susquehanna University Writers Institute to say the obvious. “Your essay was very risky indeed,” she commented. “I can imagine a black person reading it and being highly offended.”

She was, of course, right--although I was glad no African-American readers apparently got angry at me for writing it, suggesting the piece perhaps did manage to work well, overall.

So why did I do it?

Part of the reason, I’ll admit, has to do with literary form. The personal essay/op-ed for newspapers is an unforgiving genre, reminiscent in some ways of the TV soundbite. The writer must say one thing clearly, strongly, emphatically. The idea is to provoke controversy rather than explore all the nuance. In my essay, I had to educate readers about the Courtney Howard lawsuit; explain the Ricky Lee thesis about race and hazing, namely that hazing traditions, while harmful and destructive across the board, are influenced by cultural traditions; share my own hazing experiences; and—the final point--talk about why I emotionally identified with Howard. In a 5,000 word academic essay, would I have offered a disclaimer about what I think the limits are of this emotional identification? You bet! Would I have carefully listed what seemed similar to me between my experience and Courtney Howard’s as well as different? Yes! Similar: the style of beating; the racially segregated context; and the reason given for the violence, namely to strengthen the race against a hostile numerical-majority culture. Dissimilar: the fundamental power dynamic, in one case, the hazing being meant to preserve racial privilege, in the other case undermine it.

I would also probably have gone very deeply into the pros and cons of this instinctive emotional identification of mine, the way on the one hand it shows in me a sensitivity to my shared humanity with Courtney Howard; on the other hand perhaps a tendency to forget about white privilege.

But fact is, formal limits are not the only reason I need to or like doing this kind of “risky” writing. I was kind of happy to publish this piece of autobiographical testimony as it was, without the cautious clarifications. Here's the reason: I’m a literary artist, not a critical race studies analyst. In my personal essays—for newspapers or elsewhere—I’m not always trying to get it all right, nail the argument with perfect intellectual clarity. Sometimes I’m wanting to just show a suggestive fragment of myself and let the reader reach her own conclusions. Hemingway thought a short story should be like an iceberg, with most of the movement sensed beneath the surface. Sometimes that’s what I’m trying to do, too, with my autobiographical writing: showing what feels to me like a poignant and true part of myself, and trusting the reader to feel what I mean, without it being explained. This was my hope for a personal essay like “On being a minority, hazed.”

I have no idea what to make of the absence of commentary on my piece. Maybe they understood everything that I meant--sensed my good faith and didn't get offended. Maybe people just thought, "Oh, this guy is too screwed up about his painful experiences, I can't talk to him about this." I like to believe it wasn't callous indifference to the problem of violent hazing in our society and the trauma it causes.