I’m completely in agreement with Zawe. It’s frustrating that we’re still in a place where the race of an artist affects our experience of the art, and that audiences will gravitate to or away from work they don’t consider relevant to them. As Zawe says, we are living in transitional times (I’d suggest that a progressive society will always be in a state of transition), so for the time being it is appropriate that artists may wish to stand up and be counted, though this is absolutely their prerogative. This is something that has been a crucial component of every civil rights movement, whether race, gender, sexuality, disability or whatever, the first step is VISIBILITY. If the stories making it to our stages and screens are not representative of our culture, it means our culture is unhealthy and it’s perhaps necessary to conduct a cultural headcount to work out why this is so. An unhealthy culture leads to ghettoisation, apathy, ignorance, frustration and violence. It makes people think they are not included in the decisions being made or taken seriously. If certain communities are not being provided for by our government, it is up to the theatres, musicians, novelists and artists to make a loud noise and to not shut up until that changes.
Artists have a responsibility to represent the disenfranchised, to give voice to those who would otherwise go unheard. The theatre has been described as a place where culture debates itself, and the cultural health of a nation depends on its engagement with its citizens, with the full diversity of their experiences, frustrations and desires. For a long while the voice of our culture has been (and remains) almost exclusively ‘white’ (also add ‘middle-class’, ‘educated’, ‘heterosexual’, ‘able-bodied’, ‘male’…). Though there is legitimate cynicism about legislation regarding race, class, age, gender, religion, disability and sexuality, it is absolutely right for arts organisations to seek out and encourage cultural contribution from minority groups. Crucially, I feel it’s important to say that their stories are relevant not only to members of those groups but to everyone else as well. Chinese immigrants dying in vans, homelessness, cancer, the provision for children and the elderly and inner city knife crime are issues for every citizen of this country, not just those who are directly effected by them. We should care for, provide and look after one another. That is what a civilised, progressive culture does.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not sure what people mean when they describing something as a ‘black issue’. Certainly there are, unfortunately, countless issues which directly impact on black people and which don’t effect people who are not black (a good example would be stop and search tactics which threaten to become more regular and invasive under Boris Johnson). But these injustices are an issue for all of us, whether we are directly affected or not. When, for instance, women won the right to vote, that was not just a victory for women. It was a progressive step forward for our entire society. (This battle is far from won by the way, with equal pay still yet to be achieved. There’s also never been a new play by a female writer on the main stage of our National Theatre). I worry when people talk about ‘black issues’ because it allows white people to think it doesn’t concern them, as if the ‘black community’ is a separate entity within the UK. I worry about our lack of intervention in Rwanda and Darfur, about our failure to end world poverty, to combat world hunger or to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS. I wonder if politicians secretly have in their minds that these are ‘black issues’. They are not. They are humanitarian issues. The German playwright Heiner Muller once stated, controversially, that Hitler did one thing wrong - he conducted a genocide too far north - the implication being that had he executed six million Africans, he would have got away with it.
It disturbed me greatly that many critics of my last play couldn’t get over the fact my central character was black, as if our default starting position for characters is white (add to that male, heterosexual, middle-class, 25-40…), and anything else is a ‘choice’. It is clearly still a sad rarity to see a black character in a central role. Whilst race was a significant aspect of the play, the pressures on the central character were not purely ‘black’ issues. He struggled with issues of fatherhood, masculinity, mental health, responsibility, love and middle-class guilt. I wonder whether it surprised so many people because I wasn’t black, as if I couldn’t possibly relate to or have empathy for someone who was.
There will be many people who will feel that, as a white man, I have no right to write a black character. You could also say I shouldn’t be able to write women, old people, firemen, people who have different names, ages, opinions or experiences etc to my own. This particular line of argument ends up at a dead end where we are only able to write one-person shows about ourselves, performed by ourselves - but then why even bother, if our capacity for empathy doesn’t stretch to engaging with and being moved by the experiences of others…
One of the reasons I wrote the play was that I kept hearing politicians saying ‘black boys are failing’ - the implication being that they were failing because they were black and because they were boys. This is an example of widely accepted institutional racism. What the politicians won’t say is that, in a study from last year, 80% of black families in Britain live in deprived areas and in poverty. 80%! That is unacceptable. There is a huge social/class divide along racial lines. If they’re living in deprived areas, they’re most likely going to under-performing schools. No wonder they’re failing. But the statement ‘black boys are failing’ doesn’t take any of this into account. What they should say is ‘we are failing our black boys.’ And not just black boys. 80% of black families. A recent report says that the demographic that are performing least well in school is working-class white boys. Under the Tories and then New Labour the gap between rich and poor has been exacerbated. Because it is the middle-class, educated, theatre going people who are in a position to change things, through lobbying, voting, writing, discussing, debating and by modifying their behaviour, I felt it was worth trying to introduce some of these issues to them. I think it is absolutely my right as a writer, indeed, it is my responsibility, to try to bring these issues to attention and to raise peoples consciousness, regardless of the colour of my skin.
There’s a difference between accuracy and authenticity. Critics, producers and audiences are often guilty of ‘fetishising’ perceived authenticity. The important thing is that a play is accurate in its depiction of its characters and their stories, not whether or not its writer has personally lived through the same experiences they depict. Though there is a certain anecdotal interest in knowing that the writer of a play about, say, drug abuse was a former addict, that doesn’t necessarily make the play more ‘accurate’. We have frequently witnessed the vampiric fascination with youth (Bola and I have both benefited from it to some extent at the Court) or addiction (look at Pete Dougherty or Amy Winehouse). Often this can be exploitative - one of your correspondents referred to the dissipation or watering down of ‘black’ music, something that has happened to a large extent because of money and marketing, creating insipid, vague, commercial crap, or misogynist, regressive stereotypes.
Okay, so I’ve contradicted myself. I said that the important thing is that stories are making it to the stage, and that they are truthful, that our diverse culture is being represented accurately and that theatre is available and accessible to all, that writers should write what they feel passionate about with no limitation and that it is the work that matters, not how it was made and by whom. I agree with all of that, and yet I also think it’s shameful that a female writer hasn’t debuted a play on the main stage at the National. I think it’s shameful that the British public prefer their soul music to be performed by white people. Ah well. I stand by my contradictions. I suppose what I’m saying is that I would resent being described as a ‘white writer’, and I would never seek to write about ‘white issues’ for ‘white people’. I don’t know what any of that means. As a writer, my responsibility is to keep my eyes open and respond truthfully to what I see, and to ask questions I don’t see being asked. Thanks for asking this question Bola. Sorry for the epic length of my response, and thanks to anyone who made it this far!
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