Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

Whom does a writer write for, was one of the questions that did the rounds at the Adelaide’s writers week that concluded on the Friday past. The writer’s week is a pioneer kind of a thing in the country, you have far flung talent coming to Adelaide for a week and on the banks of the Torrens with gentle sunlight abounding, you see the who’s who of the literary world hobnobbing with people like you and me, people that are enamoured by the written word, by the smell of wet ink on crisp white paper and by the voices that reach out to you from the confines of a dusty book jacket.

I attended the session that dealt with internationalism in writing and we had an impressive line up of Shashi Deshpande, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Peter Goldsworthy and Catherine Rey. I missed Vikram Seth’s session but this one was a real treat too. The general trend seemed to be that there is nothing international about writing, you write about the things that stir in the deep recesses of your heart, you share a slice of yourself and for something that personal, there are no global analogies. Shashi Deshpande was succinct when she said that if you think about it, a novel is really five to six families on a country road…this is what your entire magnum opus boils down to. When asked whom she wrote for, she said she wrote for herself, and then she confided that every writer knows or atleast feels that somewhere out there in the milling throngs of humanity is one person who will read your words and cry or laugh or sigh and think those words are for him and him alone. That is when a book comes home she said, that is the only audience the writer thinks of. As a side note, I remember reading Ruskin Bond a few years ago and he said something similar “There is a lone soul somewhere out there in the world who cares about what happens to my characters and this person makes me turn on the light as dusk falls and this person makes me reach for my pen and paper…”

Peter Goldsworthy with his typical Aussie wry humor was even more lucid when he said “I write the kind of literature that I like to read”. Abdul Razak Gurnah while explaining of why his novels were to do with apartheid and freedom struggles (he is from Zanjibar) said that he wrote about struggles because humanity fights the same battles over and over again and some things transcend time and places and history…we share some struggles even when we have nothing to do with them. There was also the eternal question of “When do you write and when do you over-write?” and like Shashi said, “You overwrite when you start assuming that your reader needs explanations, all a writer has to do is to create a connection, a vibe, a feel…the reader has to complete this journey on their own, you cannot make this journey for them”.

All in all, it was a pretty good session and I reckon the next time this happens, I am going to make sure I camp there with bag and baggage. And while the written word was analyzed and re-analyzed and some one read poetry on a placid evening with the westerly breezes all around, on the other side of the road, L Subramanium played the violin and Amjad Ali Khan played the sarod in a scintillating setting with the moon high in the sky and ‘Mama Africa’ Miriam Makeba enthralled audiences around a bonfire with her songs about the oneness of it all, about how we cant be different because we are not supposed to be.

At times like these, I guess you keep your pen and paper away and don’t worry about doing a review…you lean back and soak in the dizzying beauty of the harps and the cymbals and of the poetry that sounds like it was written for you alone and you take in huge gulps of the moon, the milky white river and catch a fragment of time to reclaim your own slice of eternity…