Andrew Blackman

It’s past four in the morning and I can’t sleep. Haven’t slept all night. I tried reading for a while, but that didn’t work – I couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds at a time. All that I have been able to do is lie in bed for five hours with my eyes wide open, staring into the darkness while Genie sleeps beside me, only waking up every hour or so to mumble “You OK, sweetheart?”

Am I OK?? I’m fantastic! I just won the Luke Bitmead Writers Bursary. The prize: £2,500 and a publishing contract with Legend Press!!! After years of writing with no prospect of success, I have a publishing contract for my first novel. I can call myself a writer without having to qualify or justify it.

I think that’s why I can’t sleep. It’s mostly pure, uncut, grade A adrenalin of course, but I think my brain is also buzzing so much because it’s trying to process the enormous change that has occurred in a single evening. In the past, when I heard people say “It hasn’t really sunk in yet” I never really understood. Sink in? Smelled like bullshit to me, just the sort of thing people say because they’ve heard other people say it in similar situations and they think it’ll make them seem gracious or something, when all they really want to do is dance around the room shouting “I’m the winner, I’m the winner!”

But now I think I understand what the sinking in thing is all about. For years I have been a struggling unpublished author. I have created stories to explain my situation to myself and others. I have grown somewhat comfortable in this role and reveled a little in the self-sacrificial nature of it. I have derived a certain satisfaction from sniping at published authors, jealously wondering how they got published when I couldn’t. Now suddenly, with the presentation of an envelope, a book and one of those large plastic cheques, I have been catapulted over to the other side of the fence. Suddenly I am one of those smug people with book deals who like to talk about their next Waterstones signing.

I have not yet made the adjustment, though. In my head I still feel part of the unpublished crowd. Someone at the event was offering around flyers for a fledgling-writers website and said to me “Oh, you won’t want this, though, you’re a published author now.” I didn’t really know what he meant for a while. So I suppose all these hours of staring into the darkness have been about adjusting slowly to the fact that I have a book deal. I still don’t think I’m there yet, but perhaps at least my brain is starting to catch up with events. I feel somewhere in midair now. In no way am I anything other than delighted, over the moon, ecstatic, psyched, etc. etc., but I suppose that being in midair and not knowing exactly where you’re going to land is also a little anxiety-inducing. I am entering the unknown. I’m having to create new stories to explain myself to myself.

Well, a little incoherent but I wanted to record how I feel. Now I have to go back to bed and stare at the ceiling for another few hours. Will try to write something more considered when I’ve had some sleep, so probably some time next week.

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road award, cognitive dissonance, legend press, luke bitmead, publishing deal

The style of writing is very conversational. No beauty, not even many full sentences. The sort of writing with not many verbs. Just reportage,and not always very grammatical, like you were hearing someone tell you it on the phone.

That part didn’t work for me, but the advantage of it was that it focused my attention entirely on the characters, all of which were strong and fascinating. What made them successful, too, was that while much was revealed about them, important things were also withheld, so that they felt elusive in a way. This particularly applies to Joseph, not surprisingly, as he was traumatised by his time in the army in Northern Ireland and his killing of a man at a checkpoint. His girlfriend Alice we know best, but even she is far from simple. And then there’s her grandfather David, hard to understand until we hear him talking about his time in Kenya, the bombs he dropped on Mau Mau fighters, just seeing the explosions in the forest below and never really knowing how many he was killing.

The novel resists easy answers or judgements – well, any answers or judgements really. It is political without seeming polemic, and none of the characters feel like caricatures or representatives of a position (except perhaps Alice’s stepfather, who doesn’t play much of a role except as a representative of the unthinking antimilitary position, criticising David without attempting to understand his position.

I have got behind with my reviewing so it’s been a while since I read this, but those are the main things I remember. What I took from it for my own writing was that much could be communicated without making explicit points, that very functional writing helps to focus attention on the character development, and that characters can feel “real” and rounded while at the same time remaining somewhat elusive and unknowable even to themselves.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews afterwards, kenya, northern ireland, novel, review, seiffert, war

On my way to work on Friday, passing Southwark Crown Court, I saw a group of people protesting outside. I always love people protesting about something instead of just complaining or watching TV, so stopped to ask what it was about. They said that a friend of theirs had been convicted of graffiti and sentenced to two years in jail. I couldn’t believe it: two years, for some graffiti?

Now, as this disgustingly biased article makes clear, the graffiti was widespread, and carried out over a period of years, by a group of about 10 people called the DPM crew. But still, two years in jail? How absolutely ridiculous. Personally, I like graffiti, and as someone who has travelled quite frequently on the trains in southeast London allegedly “attacked” by the DPM crew, I would like to thank them wholeheartedly for making my commute just a little bit less soul-destroying. I think the people to blame for all these thousands of pounds of “damage” are the small-minded bureaucrats who spent all that money washing off or painting over artwork so that we respectable commuters could instead stare at blank concrete as our trains and our lives went nowhere. But even if you accept that graffiti is a crime and they should pay for it, fine. Two years in jail? That’s not paying. That’s ruining a young man’s life.

The people with the banner were hopeful of getting some good press coverage. I smiled and wished them well, but hated to tell them the truth: there are no real journalists any more. Twenty years ago a gnarled old court reporter might still have been hanging around and would have spoken to them. Today there are no court reporters (as Nick Davies valuably detailed in his recent book “Flat Earth News”). All of the crime stories are produced by wire services and rely heavily on the police to tell them what the news is. So all of the outlets that carried the story (most of the major newspapers had at least a small item on it) followed the same line: referring to the defendants not as people but only as “the vandals”, playing up the damage and its effects, and using utterly irresponsible quotes like the one from  Detective Superintendent Michael Field calling it an “almost military style operation”. What is military about it? Were they carrying guns? Grenade launchers perhaps? Clearly Det Sup Field is not a military man, because if he was, he’d know that our brave boys in Iraq and Afghanistan are not spending their time spray-painting railway carriages. They’re killing people. That’s what the military does. To call a few graffiti artists military is irresponsible, as is calling it a conspiracy, etc. etc. It’s not Det Sup Field’s fault though – his job is to put out such nonsense. The fault lies with the journalist who faithfully wrote it down and printed the police line word for word. Stuff like this almost makes me want to go back to being a journalist again myself. Almost.

One question I’d like to ask: how much money did Det Sup Field waste mounting a seven month operation (Operation Shuttle) to catch a few harmless spray painters? How much money was then wasted putting them through the court process, and how much more will be wasted keeping these people in jail? And what happens when they come out? What will prison have done to them? What will the costs be? Sadly, the police and the smug establishment journalists don’t care. Vandals swept off the streets. Conspiracy ended. Railway carriages can now sleep safe in the knowledge that they will not have any creative works daubed on their crap paintwork. Job done.

Andrew Blackman Political comment crime, graffiti, outrage, punishment

I’ve been attending quite a few readings at the Southbank Centre lately, and always find that, while I spend some time wondering why I am there, I get something from the experience in the end.

Last Sunday it was the shortlisted writers for the Caine Prize for African Writing. My first observation was that, whereas the Orange Prize readings last month were a sell-out even in the larger Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Caine Prize readings attracted only a few dozen people scattered around the Purcell Room. It’s true that the Orange Prize is more well-known, but it also showed me who the main audience is for literature.

Another observation: the two white South African authors on the shortlist, Gill Schierhout and the eventual winner, Henrietta Rose-Innes, seemed intensely uncomfortable when they were being questioned. Gary Younge, the moderator, was by far the best I have seen at this kind of event. His training as a journalist seemed to prevent him from just lobbing the easy ’so tell us how great your book is’ kind of questions that most moderators opt for. He wasn’t exactly interrogating them, either, but he did try to ask some questions about the social and political context of the work.

The response, particularly from Gill Schierhout, was astonishing. She had written about a miner who’d lost his hand in a mining accident, had it sown back on, and was then paraded around by doctors as an example of a medical miracle. Gary Younge, quite naturally, was reminded of Sarah Baartman and the objectification of the black body, but when he asked about this, the author began by saying “Well, I don’t think the objectification of the body applies to one particular race or ethnic group – it’s a universal thing, I mean, we’re all objectified, aren’t we?” I was stunned by that response – that kind of ignorance, to me, is not acceptable in a writer. When Gary Younge pressed her, she said she didn’t feel qualified to answer. Well, I’m sorry, but you felt qualified to write about it, and you had no problem accepting the money and being shortlisted for a prize, so you should be qualified to talk about it too.

Henrietta Rose-Innes wasn’t quite as bad, but she did circle around and around the topic, not answering questions directly or (heaven forbid) mentioning the “race” word. When Gary Younge tried to pin her down by asking her what different reactions she gets when she reads her work to Afrikaaner vs. coloured vs. black audiences, she gave an evasive non-answer that a politician would have been proud of.

I enjoyed Ghanaian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s story, and also his explanation of his character Mallam Sile as something of a sage. He said he wanted to place a high value on naivete. Gary Younge didn’t seem to understand and made a joke out of it, but I thought it was a very perceptive point. We place such high value on knowledge, i.e. accumulation of memorised facts, but rarely does such knowledge lead to understanding. People with a lot of knowledge created nuclear warheads, prescribed disastrous economic policies for poor countries, invented highly toxic technologies that are destroying the world. Perhaps a little more naivete would not be such a bad thing.

Andrew Blackman Literary events african writing, caine prize, Literary events, Literary news, short stories, south bank