IFOA - Night The First

Ragdoll got us tickets this year to the International Festival of Authors. I'd never been to this event at all, so when she asked me if I wanted to go, and for free at that, who was I to say no?

The first night I attended was on Friday and it was a series of readings by U.K. writers, which were: Diana Evans (26a), Nick Laird (Utterly Monkey), Helen Oyeyemi (The Icarus Girl) and Zadie Smith (On Beauty). The nice thing about this night was that Nick Laird was the only male author and the only white one. It was wonderful to hear other voices (Zadie's Smith's "buzz" aside for a moment.) The interesting thing about all the female authors works is that they are all English, yet have an ancestry from somewhere else that also informs their experience. In the case of Ms. Evans and Ms. Oyeyemi, both novels highlight a family trip to Nigeria as a key lynchpin of their books' respective plots. Ms. Smith's book details the travails of bi-racial American families and their dealings with the at times shark infested waters of academia. A sense of "being someone, somewhere else" was a theme all the authors engaged in.

All the female writers touched on something I can completely relate to: the feeling of having a split identity. I can completely understand their sense of being "English" and at the same time, the pull they feel elsewhere, their sense of being different. Obviously I cannot speak to my understanding of their experience as a racial phenomenon, because I am not a racial minority. But I do understand their feelings as an immigrant, of what it is to feel remarkably proud to live in the country I do and to identify myself as one of its citizens, but at the same time feel a kinship with something and somewhere else that I would defend just as heartily. Home is "here", but is also "there."

Nick Laird's work also touched on this theme, the well trod "Irish in London" path. The excerpt he read was at times poignant, at others uproariously funny, brilliantly capturing the epic feelings that people experience during the most mundane activities, the "there, there, have a cup of tea" sensibility that all Brits have, but is particularly the domain of the Irish and the Scots. It's one of our great strengths. It is the great strength of any stratum of society I suppose. We all have our own ways of "putting the kettle on fae a brew" when the going gets tough.

Friday night, some amount of tension in my brain disappated, some small part of me whispered "I'm here. I'm waiting. Don't forget about me.". It was so wonderful to hear these authors declaring their own experience and their own humanity through their work. It made me think that one day, I could be doing a reading at the IFOA.

As my maternal granny used to say "Ah well hen, stranger things have happened."