Luminous Voices

Left to right: Yiyun Li, Aravind Adiga, moderator Susan Cole, Tash Aw, Chimamanda Adichie.

Finally! We've been to a few disappointing Luminato displays of late, and a few disappointing "marquee" literary events, and so it is with great pleasure and relief that we can report that last week, both fiction lovers and Luminato-goers got exactly what they've been craving: well-executed programming that was as warm and inviting as it was ambitious. World Voices in Fiction brought four of the brightest new luminaries in contemporary fiction to the Al Green theatre Thursday night, to read from and discuss their recent works, and did so in a most satisfying fashion. The authors were brilliant and also, happily, comfortable in front of an audience. The space was welcoming and the pace relaxed, just right for a reading on a lazy summer night. (Organizers of all literary events take note: acoustics matter. So do lighting and sightlines. Please book your venues accordingly.) In short, it was just what a book-ish night should be.

Well, with one caveat.

Tash Aw and Chimamanda Adichie signing books after the reading.

Chimamanda Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Tash Aw, and Yiyun Li are authors of the highest order, and putting them on a stage together requires no more justification or explanation than that they are all extraordinarily good. Inevitably though, matters of identity politics and "authenticity" were raised immediately and, like an annoying game of Whac-A-Mole, persistently popped up throughout the night. Moderator Susan G. Cole spent a good bit of time wondering whether the authors were vexed by the fact that they might be expected to speak for their respective peoples, and whether their legitimacy was undermined by the fact that they had all, at least for long stretches of time, chosen to live outside their homeland.

The questions were not surprising: put four non-white, non-Canadian authors on a stage, slap a title like "World Voices" on the event, and identity politics will become the discussion topic of first resort. This was lamentably reductive—there's little sense to the notion that, simply in virtue of telling stories that are set in particular places, authors are trying to serve as representatives of those countries, or ought to be. Much to our relief the writers themselves resisted this simplistic line of inquiry. With good humour but underlying resolve, Aw replied that "it's only non-white writers that are subject to this question of authenticity" and that he frankly didn't care whether his readers (compatriots or otherwise) counted him as a "true" Malaysian. Adichie made a similar point, saying that "the very idea of authenticity in fiction is very troubling…it's not the job of fiction to do that." The authors agreed that the primary goal of a storyteller is to paint psychologically compelling portraits, not render a political landscape with journalistic accuracy, and were more interested in discussing how geographic dislocation affected their writing processes and their use of language than their purported credibility.

Fortunately for all involved, the quality of the writing more than compensated for such annoyances: in the end, the fiction was the thing that mattered, and the fiction was very good indeed. One measure of a reading's success is the number of new books it prompts you to add to your "must read" list. Ours has grown considerably, and for that we give Luminato full marks.

Photos courtesy of Luminato.