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

[ArabellaScott]

Picador are unpublishing - ceasing to distribute - all of Clanchy's books. The article says 'by mutual consent', but it's not a good thing to hear a poet/author being 'cancelled'.

Literature/poetry is not in a healthy state right now.

unherd.com/thepost/picador-cancels-poet-kate-clanchys-books/

In case you missed the brouhaha - Article from last year:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-58151144

@QueenPeony

I think there is a big middle ground between pretending not to notice racial features/differences, and interrogating people and making assumptions about them. Not doing one doesn’t mean you have to do the other.

Asking a class of many different nationalities where they come from is not really The Spanish Inquisition, Queen.

Well, yes, that is racist. But there's no evidence at all that it's what happened in this case.

How should she have described the two kids - Somali and Kenyan - in that story?

All I can see is that the conclusion is she shouldn’t have told that story at all.

A story about her own prejudice and race-blindness that made her the problem, because she didn’t understand until it was pointed out to her. She’s saying ‘This was my prejudice’.

@NoSquirrels

How should she have described the two kids - Somali and Kenyan - in that story?

All I can see is that the conclusion is she shouldn’t have told that story at all.

A story about her own prejudice and race-blindness that made her the problem, because she didn’t understand until it was pointed out to her. She’s saying ‘This was my prejudice’.

That whole story came about because she was "baffled" why one boy had punched the other because she "thought you guys came from the same country"

I mean , fgs, what the hell has that got to do with anything?

So yes, clear evidence of her own prejudices and blinkered thinking. Whether she learned anything , I don't know.

So she shouldn’t have told the story at all, Kimiko?

@NoSquirrels

I don’t think you should read the book, Kimiko. It’s basically predicated on her poetry practice with children from diverse backgrounds where the ‘where do you come from’ question is integral to her method of teaching poetry.

So if you don’t like that, you won’t see any value in any of the book at all.

I am reading the bowlerised version- most of the egregious bits have been removed.

where do you come from’ question is integral to her method of teaching poetry

"Where do you come from" is actually a pretty crap question. She found that out from the Somali boy- being near the Kenyan border wasn't something he wanted known. I don't think it's improbable that other children might not want to disclose where they had come from.

"Tell me your story" is a better question.

Incidentally Chimeme Suleymann tweeted today about one of KC's pupils who had asked KC to stop referring to her as a refugee. KC then tweeted something like "guess I called her a refugee once too much"

twitter.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1488142107302899712?s=20

This is the thread referring to KC being asking by a former pupil to stop calling her a refugee and then apparently calling her a refugee.

I’ve looked up the ‘where did you come from?’ teaching game. I misrepresented it.

She says (my bold)

“At first, when I started out with classes here, I tried my favourite introductory game: asking the students *where their name came from.”

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.

@NoSquirrels

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.

I think that's a crap question too. It also has the potential of putting children on the spot of being asked to disclose information they don't want to disclose or may not even know.

@KimikosNightmare

The point of whether or not one is allowed to have an opinion without having read the book has been discussed.

Clanchy offered to re-write it removing the problematic material - although as one commentator said it's a short book with large space settings and there's a lot to deal with.

I didn't say I was offended. My reaction to her comment about the homogenity of Scottish working class children was perplexment and puzzlement. It's a very odd thing to say.

I don't think the explanation makes it much better - that after the exoticism of her multi- cultural, inner city class the Scottish pupils were drab and indistinguishable

I'm not sure that it is odd, unless you mean it in a different way than I am thinking?

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.

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.

@SelfPortraitWithPterodactyl

I've got to say I find this a very clumsy and insensitive attempt at comfort which may well have left the boy feeling worse than before he spoke to her - imagine being told by your teacher that all you lot look the same to her, and that you'd better pin your family's hopes on the racism of the immigration officials, and that's supposed to make you feel better. And there's no further self-reflection from Clanchy at all, she closes the story there, apparently under the impression she has been successful in this interaction.

Ha, this shows the limits of "objective" textual analysis. I read this as archly referencing the ubiquitous "black people look the same" trope, on the assumption that her readers would be culturally literate enough to know that it's a joke at her own expense - she is tacitly acknowledging her own powerlessness to help, and the racism which faces him. Of course it's not comforting in any practical sense, it's the meagre comfort of her trying to acknowledge some of what faces him. And she let's it hang because she doesn't think she needs to spell it out.

That's how I read it, anyway - and since I see that it can be argued your way too, I am inclined to think that some of her problems come from assuming that people would read her gaps and implications. She's a poet, isn't she? I wonder if it's because she's using a kind of open-ended, draw-your-own-conclusions form that people think she genuinely hasn't engaged with the implications of what she's said. She's being honest, and nuanced, and open about the imperfections of her own responses - without saying at every turn And This Is Bad, because she trusts the context and form to make that abundantly clear. And so if you take it out of context, or you're so alienated by her that you can't see what she's trying to do, it does read as much worse than it is. Given what she does explicitly say about what she's trying to do and write about, I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.

This is the case with an awful lot of artistic output now - be it television or biography or novels children's stories or whatever.

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.

@NoSquirrels

She said "To most of us, you look the same to us". Most of us meaning white people.

And that was in response to the kid in question hauling her up on her previous assumption that he was from the same background as the other boy they’re discussing. That kid tells her ‘Miss, haven’t you noticed we’re not the same’ (or something like that). So he’s already addressed her racism in person. Then they have a conversation about his asylum case and background to that and - because she can’t fix anything for him, she’s powerless to offer any real comfort or help - she offers him a joke based on the thing they’ve just discussed. The thing he’s been comfortable picking her up on her inherent prejudice.

It’s not intended to be of real comfort. Because she can’t give that.
It’s intended to be an acknowledgment between two people of the unfairness of it all.

That’s what I took from that piece.

Is it really correct to call that racism?

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.

@KimikosNightmare

An exercise in ‘where do you come from’ is how she describes it, and that it had had different outcomes both in the Scottish school and her inner London school. This Essex school was remarkable in that the exercise didn’t yield anything- that’s why she’s pondering it

Fgs - I can't believe anyone is trying to justify this on the basis of "where do you come from? "

I am a little shocked that you think that talking to kids about their sense of identity and who they are is somehow racist, especially in a class about poetry or art. To me that basically reads as people don't draw from their origins and family background and it's irrelevant in artistic output, which to me is obviously false - I don't think I've ever met an artist who doesn't have an awareness of where they come from as being significant in terms of what they create, and learning to draw on that is very standard in all kinds of artistic training. "Where do you come from" which is actually pretty open ended is a simple way to start to start to explore that with kids and poetry.

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.

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.

@NoSquirrels

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.

Oh I'm perturbed by the circus- but Clanchy played a big part in setting it in motion and keeping it going.

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.

@KimikosNightmare

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.

I was commenting on the post actually.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...".

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

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 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”, ?