Cancel Culture, Cancel Creativity?

Hilary Mantel's comments are a warning to us all...

This weekend I read an interview that Hilary Mantel gave to Italian publication la Repubblica in which she gave honest answers to some really quite direct questions. She answered a question posed to her about where she stood on the hounding JK Rowling has received on Twitter. What she said was this: “I don’t think you will find many writers who favour the self-righteous stifling, fear-ridden climate of cancel culture.” 

Not a writer with a heart, I would agree. 

I was on holiday a few weeks ago when the Kate Clanchy debate hit Twitter, and it was a very ugly thing to witness. Clanchy is the author of several books and one among them is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Clanchy had described her students in terms of their physicality: ‘chocolate brown skin’ ’almond eyes’ ‘small and square and Afghan with his big nose’. I think we can agree, without doubt, that these descriptions are reductive, unnecessary, lazy and, yes I can see, also racist. 

Here, I must confess to a vested interest too, I remember Clanchy winning the Orwell Prize for this book (although I haven’t read it myself), and I have to admit I was a little envious. Back in 2017, I had been longlisted for this award for my ghosting work with Hibo Wardere on CUT: One Woman’s Fight Against FGM in Britain Today, so I’ve always had my eye on that particular prize. At the time of Clanchy's win, I was ghosting Andria Zafirakou’s book Those Who Can, Teach and I knew if a book about a school teacher had won in 2021, it was unlikely to happen again in 2022. 

Clanchy’s book had a lot in common with Zafirakou’s which was also set in an inner city multicultural school. Zafirakou herself is from an immigrant background – her grandparents settled in the UK in the late fifties from Cyprus – and I felt that was an important way into her story and a big reason why she was able to click with the children she was teaching, who often arrived in Britain from all corners of the globe. She learnt their languages, respected their cultures, understood their customs, all of this helped her to connect with them better, to earn their respect in return, and most importantly, to teach them. 

This was perhaps the slowest publication process I had experienced to date and that was because the publisher brought in sensitivity readers to check what we had written. I’m pleased to say there was nothing as controversial as the descriptions that Clanchy had written, but I’ll admit, some of the points raised by the sensitivity reader gave me pause for thought. For example, if one of the kids was Black Caribbean, I’d written that, but the sensitivity reader asked if that was necessary. I argued that the reader might then assume that the child was white and that if we were writing a book about a multicultural school, then we really needed to talk about the backgrounds of the children. But, as my sister pointed out to me, for me to assume the reader would assume a child was white, was for me to assume a reader was white. Ah yes, I see her point. So what’s the answer? I asked her, knowing she does a lot of good work in the sphere of inclusivity. She suggested that if we’re going to mention the skin colour of one child, we should mention it of all the others. True. Good point. And in fact, in Zafirakou’s school, where white children are the minority, it was necessary to do so when discussing those children too. 

There is admittedly a lot to be learnt on this subject, there are difficult conversations to be had, but witnessing the aggression directed towards Clanchy on Twitter even after she had apologised and volunteered to rewrite the book was uncomfortable. In fact, one of the people who was central to exposing Clanchy and oft-quoted on the subject in the newspapers, had herself used an offensive expression to make her points on Twitter, unaware of its racist origins. She apologised and the matter was swiftly forgotten about and everyone went back to piling onto Clanchy, but you see how easily it can be done, even by those who are policing others? 

In the aftermath, writer and behavioural and data scientist, Pragya Agarwal, wrote a piece in The Bookseller saying that as writers it is ‘impact not intent’ that matters. And again, this gave me pause for thought, I could see where perhaps I’ve made mistakes in the past, trying to convey in 140 characters my intent and instead making a clumsy impact. There is definitely a sweet spot to be reached and I do think that writers should create with impact somewhere in mind, but the very next day I received an anxious text from a super talented friend of mine who has been working on a brilliant idea for her debut novel for months – years – and had decided to abandon it after the Clanchy affair. She was just so worried that she could face a similar fate if her work was published and then misinterpreted on Twitter. Did she have agency to write on this subject, she asked. That made me sad. It was impossible for me to encourage her to continue – she was too nervous to be able to relax and enjoy the process – all I could say was that I understood why she might feel like that, and that I was sorry. I’m sure hers wasn’t the only work in progress that slid into the back of a drawer after that week on Twitter. 

When I read Mantel’s answer to the question posed to her this week about JK Rowling, I thought of my friend, of all the writers who are now neurotically sifting through their work, or worse, abandoning it. ‘Stifling’ is the right word. The cancel culture is not conducive to creativity.

How many times have writers been encouraged to ‘just write’, to put all thought of the reader out of their mind, to just get what they want to say onto the page with honesty, with integrity, with heart. After all, you cannot be responsible for how your work is received, art is so subjective, that is the beauty of it. What I see, or take away from a book, a film, a painting, is different to what you see. We all come to the page – as writers or readers – with our own backstories and unique lens. 

Words are powerful and it is absolutely right that we need to keep in mind the impact of the ones we choose to commit to the page. Clanchy’s work shouldn’t have ended up on the presses in that state, it is a concern that it wasn’t picked up before, something went unchecked in the editing process, and it is right that she should have been challenged, but publicly vilified? I don’t think so. 

Cancelling people only makes the conversation smaller, making an example of someone will only make others fearful of putting their head above the parapet, it will reduce the number of seats at the table, not make room for more. Writers are inherently sensitive and neurotic souls, they are curious and interested in the world, they want to learn, that’s why they write in the first place  – so don’t cancel them, teach.