Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher

I'm amazed Clanchy is getting as much negativity on here as she is, rather than more support, frankly. That's not to say I favour every wording she used, but - it seems that the onus is exclusively on women to avoid any and all offence. Men are not held to this standard. Being completely dropped by her publisher is totally disproportionate and punitive.

And the characterisations (upthread) of her social media behaviour around the issue are distorted and inaccurate. She was the victim of bullying, not the other way round. (I'm not denying that there were trolls who also targeted people criticising her, though - no doubt in my mind that that happened.)

And one more question, an easier one: can you give an example of a indisputably non-offensive synonym for "chocolate-coloured"?

@KimikosNightmare Why do you think looking butch is a bad thing? You need to do some unpacking yourself, in making that assumption, because as a lesbian I find it pretty damn offensive.

and hasn't answered the questions about how Clanchy could have done it differently

I did actually. I suggested " tell me your story". I explained why- that is an open question allowing them to tell her what they want to or indeed know. They are not being put in a position of responding to and in some cases , denying her assumptions about them.

Peony has explained the racist elements. Did the frequent references to skull types not bother you?

"Ashkenazi nose" has been written off as nothing to worry about. What about "Cypriot bosom"? That's just poetic too?

Do you have any comments on her disparaging remarks about girls' appearance?

But I’m wearing out my typing finger because I think what’s actually being debated is an important discussion.

This. And I love being able to speak honestly about it, because without honesty we don't advance our ideas at all, and FWR is the only place some of us can do that.

Also, truth is a feminist issue.

Firstly, I want to say that I didn't mean you, Peony - there was a stray 'all' in my post that was a typo. My sense is that actually my stance and yours are pretty close, except that our reaction to Clanchy specifically varies according to our perception of how successful she is in accomplishing her aims. I have never said that her being a poet makes her incapable of dodgy language or indeed racism - that is certainly a straw man. We agree that discussion is right and necessary - I haven't noticed a single poster who is supportive of Clanchy suggesting that her accusers should refrain from pointing out what they find problematic. Indeed, we are specifically asking for more detail on that, and our questions are being framed as apologist (not by you personally).

Kimiko, on the other hand, has been quite categorical in saying that e.g. it is offensive to invite people to talk about their heritage, and hasn't answered the questions about how Clanchy could have done it differently. I would really, really like someone who thinks Clanchy is beyond the pale to answer in reasonable detail the questions I posed upthread, which were basically a) why is it racist to notice ethnicity? And b) if you are writing about your own racism, how do you do that without invoking racist tropes? (Although they had more nuance the first time round, so if you can be bothered the first version is the one that best expresses what I meant.)

I wonder how many times a day there are complaints on this board about how women and girls are expected to conform to patriarchical standards of beauty or are subjected to that famous "male gaze"

twitter.com/plathfanclub/status/1487171045580840963?s=20

Any of Clanchy's defenders willing to step up here?

Or what about her description of

A Muslim girl who is “very butch-looking … with a distinct moustache”, ?

But I’m wearing out my typing finger because I think what’s actually being debated is an important discussion. But better get to work so I’m off now.

I guess it’s in FWR because it is about cancellation of a woman and that being issue generally, more so than with men.

Hmm. I read the whole thread but not the book. I won't read the book because I'm not persuaded to by all the critiquing here. It sounds well written so it's probably not 50 Shades of Grey. It won the Orwell prize so it's probably quite worthy. It sounds quite poetic so it's probably wordy and not a lot of people's cup of tea. Apparently it's written by a pretty harmless middle class white woman author. And her pronouns? Check!

What it seems to be (note: to me, just from anything I've read on this thread, not read the book, not read twitter) is a book with some poetic, adjective-y type words that may offend some people if they choose to read them in a certain way and who have a right to be offended if they want. It's a free country.

What I'm really stumped about is why we're all wearing out our typing finger (and thumbs if you're clever) getting in a right froth about this on FWR?

You can find this type of prose everywhere in the name of "art". You can be beaten over the head with it if you listen to any hairy comedian for 30 seconds. You can probably find it on cbeebies if you look hard enough (I've seen some of those puppets).

Is it because she's a white middle class women and she should be kiiiiiind, and police her language to not offend the fragile, and be a Saint because she works with children, and her book should be worthy because it's arty and prize winning and the chattering classes want to chatter happily?

FFS! What's happened to the sweary women of FWR who stand up for the right of women to be sweary and brave and have unpopular views and write about them and be clever and push the envelope of what a woman can say and do even when they don't agree with everything they say?

If we want to have a rant about really objectionable views that deserved to dissected and then crushed on FWR then surely there are hundreds of more worthy candidates.

ps by the way I quite like poems that have five lines and some rhyming words and start off eg..."there was an old man in Kirkcaldy...".

And I say all that as a GC feminist and totally not a woke SJW or anything of the kind. I would rather listen, debate and hear everyone’s view than leap to Clanchy’s defence in all things just because she’s being cancelled. Being cancelled doesn’t make her automatically in the right.

Bit fed up with this straw-manning and hyperbole.

I don’t think nothing KC has ever done has any value. I don’t think she’s an evil racist abuser. I don’t think no one should ever mention or see race. I don’t think cancellation/no-platforming or any kind of abuse of KC is justified. And don’t think anything kimoko has said suggests these things either.

And I think it’s telling that people are reacting like this to criticism of a way of writing about people’s ethnicity and appearance that does cause upset and discomfort - maybe not to everyone, but so what. If someone finds homing in on “Ashkenazi noses” or “chocolate” coloured skin objectionable, they have a right to say so and to discuss it. These kinds of objections are not objections to race being mentioned at all, they are objections to using terms that have a history of being associated with racist abuse, and a kind of obsession with physicality that is strongly reminiscent, as kimiko said, of Victorian anthropologists describing “natives” as some kind of odd curiosity.

And I really object to the suggestion that thinking this is simply down to a failure to appreciate KC’s amazing highbrow literariness, and that if anyone doesn’t see that, it’s because it’s gone over their silly little head. Yes she’s a poet - that doesn’t make her incapable of using dodgy language or having a weird patrician attitude.

Re should she have told that story. Of course, if she wants to write about how a racist assumption of hers was challenged by kids she was working with, nothing wrong with that. However if I was her editor I’d have advised her to try telling it without raking over people’s physical details in a prurient-sounding way, without the use of the word chocolate, which has some triggering potential, and with maybe more explicit explanation of how she learned from it.

And finally, to avoid misrepresentation of Britain and British white people too. All people in government are actually not like KC, white and middle class and privately educated. All white British people do not think all brown-skinned people look the same. What bollocks.

Again I don’t like the circus, the hounding, the abuse -it’s not on. At the same time I do think this should be discussed and not shut down. I remain shocked that people are still defending her on the basis that it’s all fine because she’s discussing race and that’s what she should do, she’s a poet so we just don’t understand, blah blah. No. There’s such a thing as getting it wrong, even well-meaningly, and that can be discussed.

What I see is a private school educated, white middle class woman who is trying to fight racial injustice in a patronising, cultural cringe kind of way. I know plenty of people like this, she really reminds me of some of my older relatives, some also teachers. It doesn’t mean they can’t help people or do any good, but it’s also OK to question and critique their assumptions and white saviour POV.

Fair enough. I am thoroughly persuaded that you don’t see the merit in anything KC has written, said or done,Kimiko. Yep, me too. And for what it's worth, I think there's also general agreement that her reaction to the bad reviews was at best injudicious.

I notice, though, that no one has addressed our questions about how she could have talked about racism, in the context of her personal experience and with full acknowledgment of her own prejudices. That goes conspicuously unanswered - as Squirrels said, the conclusion seems to be that she should never have told that story, or any of the stories in the book.

I am a little shocked that you think that talking to kids about their sense of identity and who they are is somehow racist.

Yes. Me too. And I am tending towards a rather inflammatory speculation on all this, which is not only that all Clanchy's detractors do, whatever they say, resent anyone seeing race at all - but that it comes from the same internalisation of trauma that can lead to a teenage girl's declaration that she is non-binary. The abuse becomes located, in the victim's mind, in the fact itself, rather than in the abuser's attitude to it - so anyone who sees that physical reality, even if they do not judge it for anything more than a fact, even if for them being Jewish or Irish is just a background like any other, is collaborating in the abuse. I don't think this is healthy, or fair, because we must surely work on detaching the prejudice from the reality, not determinedly ignoring the reality.

I think your reading of her passage here is incredibly literal. Not everything is meant to be read in that way, most literature isn't and she's a literary writer.

The parts of her book which have been expurgated were horrible and indefensible. Denying she had written them and going on a counter- attack was irredeemably stupid.

The recent articles have fanned the flames again. Sunny Singh, Chimene Suleyman and Monisha Rajesh are tweeting at lenght about this; Singh has been tweeting some truly hyperbolic stuff. Rosie Kinchin, author of one of The Times articles, accused Suleyman of being in a froth.

Clancy had a new publisher from 28th January.

I watched a documentary film recently with my husband of footage from a major city which I'm quite familiar with - it's a very multicultural place. But the footage was from the 50s, and one of his first comments was "it's soooo white!"

It was really noticeable, the difference, and it impressed itself on both of us - we weren't looking for it

And ? So what? That means you can't tell one white child from another? Clanchy wasn't commenting on the fact her class was white (outside Glasgow and possibly the other 3 cities that would hardly be surprising or worth mentioning)

She said she had difficulty telling the children apart.

As for the fact that the kids in the one school didn't respond to it - how is that not interesting? Why this idea that it doesn't say anything about how those kids think about themselves? That's not to make a value judgement on it - not all observations that are worthwhile are value judgements.

There are all kinds of places in the world you or I could go to where we would be unable to pick up on ethnic variations that are perfectly obvious to the people who live there - we would tend to think they just reflected normal variation, we wouldn't have the background to create those categories.

The same is true of people from other places who come to Europe.

It's no different than the fact that many of us can pick up on slight variations in accents that are regional to us that indicate slight geographical or class variations that would be completely unnoticed by someone from elsewhere.

It's not a good thing to class this kind on normal limits around classification in terms of racism.

It's not enough to simply tell a story and allow people to think about it, draw their own conclusions. Careful and honest observation of internal processes or situations is not enough.

People have to be told clearly what is right and wrong and how we are supposed to think and feel about that, and if the message we get might be wrong, then it's not acceptable art.

It's toxic to any real art, even popular art, and toxic to real exploration of reality - propaganda becomes the only acceptable output.

Fair enough. I am thoroughly persuaded that you don’t see the merit in anything KC has written, said or done, Kimiko.

For me, I’m still perturbed by this whole circus surrounding the book.

I watched a documentary film recently with my husband of footage from a major city which I'm quite familiar with - it's a very multicultural place. But the footage was from the 50s, and one of his first comments was "it's soooo white!"

It was really noticeable, the difference, and it impressed itself on both of us - we weren't looking for it.

where their name came from

Which she goes on to expand that in North London you found out things like the meanings of their names in their culture, or in Scotland the family history of who they were named for in their family, often their mother’s maiden names.

She’s not asking them where they come from.