How to eat at a grand buffet and attend MWF

Writers’ festival programs are like the buffet at the Grand Hyatt: a big ol’ fancy tease. That first glance is near overwhelming: towers of cakes and pastries, silver platters featuring rows of fresh seafood, fruit, nuts, ganache and coconut, sausage rolls the size of your thumbnail and cream puffs like clouds of angel’s breath. You’re eying off that lemon meringue pie like nobody’s business, but there are also those delectable little salmon quiches and dear god, yes, butterfly cakes dusted with chocolate. You have died and gone to culinary heaven, and yet the unfortunate truth is that even if you tried your hardest, even if you wholly devoted yourself to that most divine of tasks, you could not eat it all. It’s unlikely you could even sample everything, and you resign yourself to the fact that you will need to make a judicious and limited selection. But how do you choose? 

My research¹ indicates that Festival Indecision² is a common affliction. Those of us on a shoestring budget in particular know the symptoms of FI all too well, and while we probably won’t ever get to a Grand Hyatt buffet (I did gatecrash it once, though, true story, and there was, like, a wall of champagne) we might be able to make it to a couple of writers’ festival events.

So, in the interests of fellow sufferers, I have come up with a selection of ways to choose which MWF sessions to attend. (Warning: some of these suggestions may have adverse side effects, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.)

Ahem:

 

How to Choose Between MWF Events

1. Send a barrage of emails to the publicists or agents of the authors on your shortlist. Attend the sessions of anyone who replies. If they reply angrily, buy a copy of their book. If you already have it, buy a copy for your mum. If they take out a restraining order, we don’t know each other and you never heard this from me.

2. Play a game of pool with your bestie, assigning an MWF event to each ball. The order of balls pocketed is the order in which you must buy your MWF tickets. Buy tickets accordingly until you hit your budget. If you lose the game, buy your bestie a round. If you win, buy yourself a ticket to Friday Night Live.

3. Borrow a harried friend’s child for the week and take them along to the Schools’ program. Your stressed out friend will be grateful for the break and you’ll remember how awesome kids’ books are and regret ever having to grow up and read totes srs literature.

4a. Stick the pages of the MWF 2012 Program to the dartboard at your local pub. Throw the darts. Attend any session skewered. If the dart knocks over another patron’s beer, invite them along, too. If you accidentally hit another patron, attend every Big Ideas session. If you get into a fight with the big burly regulars because you’ve plastered the dartboard with newspaper, run.

4b. Variation: accost passers-by and get them to throw the darts for you, thereby availing you of all responsibility for the outcome. If the session sucks (Unlikely! But even the food at the Grand Hyatt sucks sometimes³) you can blame that old stringy guy with the weird eye.

5. Make it your festival mission to uncover the identity of @WFQuestions. Pretend you’re playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Use her tweet-stream as a guide to the festival. Wear your running shoes in case she finds you first, waves her dream beads in your face and tries to sell your her erotic e-book 50 Planes of Sexy Flying.

 

Now: what are your suggestions for dealing with the dreaded Festival Indecision? And if MWF 2012 were a buffet, who would be the meringue?

––

¹ listening to my friends complain
² a real disease
³ I guess

On Afghanistan

By now, Malalai Joya should need no introduction. If you haven’t read the interview with her in the current edition of Overland, or the except of it in The Age last Monday; if you didn’t catch her on Q&A on Monday night or speaking to John Faine in the Conversation Hour, or even picked up a copy of her autobiography Raising My Voice, then I hope you were lucky enough to catch one of her sessions at the MWF.

On Saturday night, Joya addressed a packed BMW Edge, speaking frankly about life in Afghanistan today. 10 years of occupation has doubled the misery of the Afghan people, she claimed. The US-led invasion that was instigated as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and justified since with references to the dire situation for women and children (Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, according to UNIFEM) and the serious human rights abuses perpetrated by the Taliban, has not made things better for the Afghan people, Joya claimed. In fact, they have made them worse. If, in the time of Taliban rule, some women in Kabul were mildly better off, certainly nobody listens to their voices now. They are lashed in public, raped by corrupt police, shot. Women sell their babies for loose change because they cannot afford to feed them. Men are hung for being pro-democratic, and then their bodies are harvested for organs.

“Democracy never came from bombing a wedding party.”

Afghanistan has billions of dollars in mineral resources, Joya explained, that could be exploited for the benefit of the people. However, they also have the second most corrupt regime in the world, so the Afghan people don’t see any of the benefits from these resources. The money goes straight into the pockets of the already wealthy, powerful and ruling elite. In attempting to bring about democracy and bring down the Taliban, the NATO forces have, in Joya’s words, ‘propped up’ a regime of ‘criminal war lords’. These war lords only differ from the Taliban in their fiscal approach, not their anti-democratic or anti-humanitarian mentalities.

Joya does not deny that things are bad. After years of underground activism and persecution, she knows better than anyone that they are devastating. But the Afghan people are ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ now because foreign military forces are occupying the country. The people dropping bombs and killing civilians in air strikes are NATO forces. In fact, some of the worst massacres, she claimed, happened in Afghanistan after President Obama came into power. Nobody wants to believe that a superpower like the US would lend its support to these kinds of travesties, and yet 14 countries are allied with them over the war in Afghanistan. The lawlessness that exists because of their presence is their excuse to stay longer. They are currently scheduled to leave mid 2014, but they are now talking about setting up permanent military bases in the country. This is part of the reason why Joya believes they are not in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people but for their own strategic interests. ‘I do not believe it is a war on terror,’ Joya said, ‘simply war crime.’

The most striking thing about Joya’s speech – and the part of her message that I think is most crucial, and perhaps what is lost in the contemporary mainstream coverage about Australia’s presence in Afghanistan – is her focus on what the people of Afghanistan want. Neither the war lords currently in power nor the Taliban act in the interests of the people, she says. To assume that the Afghan people want these corrupt and violent war lords in power – and further, to assume that outside forces negotiating with them at gunpoint could possibly bring about democracy – is naïve, as though a population would choose to be exploited, to be tortured, to be oppressed. And yet by trying to work within the existing power structures, she claims, the NATO forces are actually uniting the enemies of the people against the people.

“Democracy without independence or justice is meaningless.”

Afghanistan needs honest helping hands, Joya said – they need schools and they need hospitals. But through the military occupation, the money and power falls into the pockets and hands of the corrupt. The media never reports the internal resistance, to not only the Taliban and the war lords, but to the NATO forces themselves. The question is always asked: ‘But what will happen if the troops leave?’ Except, Joya said, that nobody asks what is already happening while NATO forces occupy the country. Civil war in Afghanistan is not a possibility; it is an actuality. But if the foreign troops leave, she said, actually leave, the backbone of the corrupt regime will break. And then, finally, perhaps the people of Afghanistan will be able to liberate themselves.

Uncomfortable truths: gender matters

Women continue to be marginalised in our culture. Their words are deemed less interesting, less knowledgeable, less well-formed, less worldly and less worthy.

If you are in any doubt that gender matters, you need only ask a scientist. Yesterday in ACMI Cinema 2, Robert Brooks, Cordelia Fine and Jane McCredie got together to discuss with Monica Dux the science of sex differences. Fine spoke first. ‘We have a tendency to see male and female as fixed and immovable categories,’ she said. Neurology and biology are called upon and expected to explain existing sexual power differentials, achievement biases, social norms and gender stereotypes. But it’s important to critique this ‘sexist science’, Fine said, because – as she writes in Delusions of Gender – ‘from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers.’ Self-help books and the popular media capitalise on these categories and trends, and refer to ‘the science’ as justification for the status quo.

Brooks picked up where Fine left off. ‘Male and female are seldom as different as we would like to think,’ he said, and nature v. nurture is a false dichotomy. Yes, to understand power and the inequalities of existing power structures, we need to look at the social, political and economic contexts that created them. But this is not incompatible with evolutionary biology. In fact, Brooks argued, engaging with evolutionary biology is essential to understanding the implications those very same forces might have for individual people.

When Jane McCredie spoke, she said she said she found it frustrating how science, in seeking to make everything precise, sought to find clear categories in which to place people. For instance, we could dismiss trans and intersex people as aberrations of type, she said, but to do so would be a failure of nerve. Nobody fits a category unequivocally. Science needs to accomodate all of our differences, not seek to push them back into a pre-existing, restrictive boxes.

It would have been difficult for anyone to come away from this session believing that scientific discourse is divorced from the politics of gender. But if you were in any doubt that there are social and political reasons to argue against this kind of sexism and all others besides, Sophie Cunningham’s A Long, Long Way To Go: Why We Still Need Feminism would have left you with the conviction that sexual inequality is indeed very real, and evident in statistic after sobering statistic. 

In Australia, Cunningham explained, only 58% of women are in the workforce, compared to 78% of men. Only 54% of ASX200 companies have women in management roles, and only 10.7% of executive managers are women. 56% of law graduates are women, but only 25% of practicing lawyers over 40 are women, and those women in law suffer a 62% pay gap. The arts are nowhere near exempt from these kind of telling numbers. When the May issue of Esquire listed 75 books every man should read, only one woman made the cut. The 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin shortlists were all male. Since the award began in 1957, it has been awarded 51 times. Out of those 51 awards, only 13 recipients have been women. In theatre, visual and fine arts, these trends are mirrored, if not worse. And one set of numbers Cunningham didn’t give: in the 16 years since the MWF instituted an opening night keynote address, that headlining festival role has been occupied only twice by a woman – by the same woman: Germaine Greer.

So do these things matter? Cunningham asked. Are women just feeling left out? Earlier in the afternoon, when Fine discussed women’s performances in mathematics, she explained how women who believed that they were ‘naturally’ bad at mathematics performed badly. When they believed that they were bad at mathematics not through any deficiency of their own but because of external factors, their scores went up significantly. Cunningham argued a similar point: ‘Erasure of female talent… has a quantifiable effect on women’s careers and their capacity to earn money.’

Perhaps many of these biases are unconscious, Cunningham said. But if our biases are unconscious, that is no defence against failing to act on their recognition. It is in understanding this that Cunningham and a group of writers, editors and feminists created the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing. But change is not just a matter of recognising what exists, but of creating a culture in which that is valued, and in which women are further able to access the means to pursue their vocations. Unconscious inequality requires conscious action to correct it. And because of this, a new wave of feminism, says Cunningham, ‘a fourth wave, if you will, is both needed and soon to arrive.’

On uprising

Since December 2010, the Arab world has been in uprising. Beginning in Tunisia, one man’s act of self-immolation became the catalyst for a wave of political protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa over the following months.

On January 25, 2011, the population of Egypt took to the streets, protesting police brutality and abuse of power, demanding the resignation of the Ministry of Interior and accountability from President Hosni Mubarak’s government. After 18 days of protests throughout the country, during which the Mubarak regime declared curfews, deployed the military and shut down internet access in attempts to cripple the escalating unrest, Mubarak himself finally resigned.

During the 18-day uprising, a journalist by the name of Mona Eltahawy started appearing on radio and television broadcasts across the United States, giving her perspective on the events unfolding in Cairo. A New York-based commentator, Eltahawy was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States in 2000. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Toronto Star, Israel’s The Jerusalem Report and Denmark’s Politiken among others, and she is a frequent guest on television and radio. Eltahawy speaks and writes frequently on Islam and feminism, and has attracted criticism for some of her politics, particularly her support for the Libyan intervention and the recent burqa ban in France. Her high profile during the Egyptian uprising led to feminist website Jezebel dubbing her ‘the woman explaining Egypt to the West’. Determined and uncompromising, Eltahawy is a compelling figure in the line-up of female political voices staking out their territory at the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival.

Mona Eltahawy will be speaking at the MWF as part of the Big Ideas programme. She will be speaking on The Roots of the Egyptian Revolution: From Tahrir Square to Liberation from Dictatorship on September 2, and discussing the Arab Spring with Joseph Braude, Amin Saikal and Louise Adler on September 3.