Identity politics collars fiction

Things don't go well for the poachers and things have not gone well for me, in my attempts to publish the story.

A literary judge in the UK said she liked the story but as I'm white and Anglo-Celtic, I had no right to create a black man's reality, because I had no direct experience of it. I was guilty of cultural appropriation.

The novelist Lionel Shriver said if writers only portray white, straight characters, their work will be attacked for a lack of diversity. Yet if they include characters from 'protected' minority groups, they may be labelled disrespectful. You can't win.

A part of the problem is 'I feel' and 'I know' are now synonymous. Our education system places so much emphasis on the right to ventilate one's feelings, that umbrage and denouncement now rule.

Some years ago, I was the head of the largest writing program in Australia (RMIT). It was a good program but there were problems.

Students would often critique their fellow writers' work based on PC values, rather than improving the quality of the writing.

It wasn't only the students either. One screenwriting lecturer complained when a Bosnian student submitted a screenplay with a graphic rape scene by Serbian soldiers. The student told me the scene wasn't fiction.

The other problem was that many students didn't read. They were impatient to get their works published, so they created a 'Year Zero', ignoring the works of the most innovative writers of the last 100 years, or lambasting them as Dead White Males or politically naïve females.

How were they ever going to be writers if they didn't read?

The clarion call for more ethnic and cultural diversity in publication would gain more traction if those writers could also produce works of a saleable quality, such as Alexis Wright's novel, 'Carpentaria'.

Universities encourage students to view literature through the prism of unequal power dynamics (such as 'white saviour narratives') and to scrounge for evidence of racism, colonialism and sexism, etc.

In doing so, the multicultural left has forsaken the plight of the working poor and unemployed, while allowing people to work for $15.00 an hour, across split shifts in insecure jobs.

Fiction overturns assumptions, mocks narrow-minded ideologues and disrespects sacred cows.

It is under no obligation to reflect reality, pursue social justice or push laudable political agendas.

The geography of the imagination is inviolate, unbounded and available to all.