Mick Hartley

It would be almost impossible to parody this Guardian piece by Yassmin Abdel-Magied. It parodies itself:

I have never walked out of a speech.

Or I hadn’t, until last night’s opening keynote for the Brisbane writers festival, delivered by the American author Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel, We need to talk about Kevin.

We were 20 minutes into the speech when I turned to my mother, sitting next to me in the front row.

“Mama, I can’t sit here,” I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. “I cannot legitimise this …”

My mother’s eyes bore into me, urging me to remain calm, to follow social convention. I shook my head, as if to shake off my lingering doubts.

As I stood up, my heart began to race. I could feel the eyes of the hundreds of audience members on my back: questioning, querying, judging.

I turned to face the crowd, lifted up my chin and walked down the main aisle, my pace deliberate. “Look back into the audience,” a friend had texted me moments earlier, “and let them see your face.”

The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against they grey plastic of the flooring, harmonising with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question.

“How is this happening?”

Read on, breathlessly….

In sum, Shriver believes in the novelist's right to use their imagination: Abdel-Magied is horrified at the cultural appropriation involved. She doesn't – it becomes clear – understand fiction, or the idea of fiction. Or the use of the imagination. 

It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with. It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story?

She doesn't seem to appreciate that the Nigerian woman in the story is not an actual Nigerian woman, but – you know – a product of the imagination.

Peak Guardian.

I could go on, but the CiF commenters tear her to shreds - though it's noteworthy that the Guardian Pick comments at the top are about the only positive ones.