A work in progress on Work in Progress

Geoffrey Blainey in crumpled suit and Gideon Haigh in torn jeans, 59 books between them—

On the elevators and steel skeleton constructions
coinciding with the growth of a city.
White collars.

Fogged windows and chocolate biscuits: a comfortable routine.

Both Chicago and Melbourne had height limits, for a time, on office buildings. ‘Some of the earlier skyscrapers [in Chicago] sat like a petrified forest’, said Haigh, until the ’20s and ’30s when more skyscrapers were built.

In Melbourne, the six story limit related to the length of fire ladders. ‘People wouldn’t go into the lifts’, said Blainey. They were afraid.

The Manchester Unity building on Swanston Street is the ‘little brother’ (as Haigh put it) of the Chicago Tribune building, which was built from Raymond Hood’s competition-winning design for the most beautiful office building in the world. (Aside: glorious art deco.)

You used to be able to tell, said Blainey, what line of work people were in, by the way they dressed. Office workers were clean. Positions in some professions were determined by uniform, now we have titles. And many titles don’t tell us anything.

How do we judge the output of office workers?

‘We come up with means to judge an office worker’s productivity.
9-5 or 8-6
there’s an expectation of
minimal diligence by presence,’
said Haigh.
It’s hard to judge productivity, in an office, any other way.

In the early mixed-gender office men were worried they’d be distracted by ‘female frivolity’, or perhaps the women would become coarse. They were still segregated: telephone operators, secretaries; in the basement. Typing was ‘feminine’ but relied upon. Lorena Weeks fought for the shiftman’s job and, eventually, she won.

Blainey remembered a boy writing his school essays on a typewriter. At the time, they didn’t know what to think of him.

Haigh was ahead of the technology in the early ’90s, taking a giant computer home from the office each night to do his writing.
Now we can easily work from our homes/on the move. ‘Perpetual contactibility,’ Haigh called it.
The office is inescapable (she types, working from home).

At least as long as the physical office exists, we can leave it behind—Haigh (paraphrased).

One can be seduced by corporate culture. One can belong.

Or there are those subtle acts of subversion: stealing stationery, satirical emails.

But, as an audience member pointed out, we’re not so assured of ‘careers’ now. Contract work, downsizing, takeovers, discrepancies between the salaries at the lowest and highest levels. Decisions are made a long way from where they’re implemented (but maybe, the panel says, that’s not new).

But work itself. Blainey and Haigh embody it, because they enjoy what they do:
‘It gives me enormous pleasure,’ said Blainey, who remembers the joy of working with the fruiterer as a boy.
For Haigh there is the satisfaction of self-sufficiency, there’s a desire to improve and to be productive. Blainey is an inspiration to him.

Gideon Haigh’s latest book is The Office: A Hardworking History and Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is A Short History of Christianity.

A brief intro to a vast subject: The Other Africa

It was impossible for the four writers on The Other Africa panel today to give us anything more than a glimpse of such a complex and diverse continent. And that was partly what Kwame Antony Appiah, Majok Tulba, Uzodinma Iweala and Sefi Atta talked about, in their conversation with Arnold Zable. I’ve been reading Iweala’s wonderful book Our Kind of People about people and communities in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The book takes an intimate view through Iweala’s conversations with HIV-positive individuals, community leaders, and government representatives; and through personal questions and reflections. As Iweala said on the panel, he was trying to find a ‘different way to talk about HIV/AIDS in Africa, which doesn’t descend into hyperbole’. He wants to get away from the idea of Africa as a monolith, and the way to do that is through individual stories, individual voices. Iweala spend four or five years on the book, letting himself be guided by the stories people told him.

Esteemed philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah spoke about the fact that, yes, Africa is an enormously diverse and complicated continent (and not just countries but the diverse cultures, languages and religions within them) but when travelling about the world he said that someone from Nigeria, South Sudan, Ghana (to name a few) is often simply perceived is as ‘African’. He said while that is never going to be enough (would ‘Australian’ be enough to describe you?) that perception still informs a part of one’s identity. It is not so much that people intentionally stereotype, though certainly reading nuanced stories about people from cultures other than our own goes some way to helping us break down stereotypes.

Fiction, of course, takes us into the world and experiences of another person, a character, and can be incredibly effective at building empathy and complexifying one’s relationship to other people and places. Nigerian-born Sefi Atta began writing when she was 30, living in the US. She realised she’d never read a novel about a Nigerian woman like herself. She builds up her stories with detail from the characters’ lives so as not to fall on/enforce any particular ideology, though she says ‘there’s something about integrity which matters’ to her as a theme in her writing. She says this is possibly a response to misconceptions about Africa. Her latest novel, being launched at the festival, is A Bit of Difference.

Majok Tulba’s debut novel Beneath the Darkening Sky I have written about in detail previously on the blog. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about his work. Tulba said that writing the book wasn’t easy, because of the topic. As a child he thought that starvation and war were ‘all the world was supposed to be’. In Australia he saw a different world. He returned to his village (which he talks about so movingly) in 2007 and was heartbroken to see the aftermath of war. He remembered some of his friends he used to play with, eat with. He believes in the power of writing, as a way to make people realise the horror of what some children go through (and he did choose not to specify the country in the novel, because he said it could have been a few countries besides South Sudan) but also to show them the beauty of the Africa ‘where we can tell the time by a rooster crowing’. ‘This is the Africa I love’, he said. He wrote the book also to ask the question: ‘why is this happening?’ And he hopes the reader will ask this too.

Appiah spoke about how problematic it can be when there is a perception that an ‘African writer’ is approached only to write about ‘African topics’. His latest book, The Honour Code, is about the role of honour in shaping some specific moral movements. He says that, of course, we also cannot deny the influence of our backgrounds, our cultures, and he recounted a story of his father lying in bed smoking and reading the Ghanaian newspapers, before (I believe) Appiah went off to England, and he said: ‘don’t forget you’re taking the family name with you’. Despite the fact Ghana, and Africa, are not present in the book, the idea of exploring honour may have come from his own personal (and cultural) background.

I don’t want to make this too long. As I said, the session barely scratched the surface (and my notes probably don’t even do it justice) so I would encourage you to check out the work of these writers, the fiction and the nonfiction, and try to catch them at their other sessions during the festival. Click their names in the first paragraph for more info on those.

I hope to see you at the first Morning Read session at 10am tomorrow (featuring Majok Tulba) or at the one on Sunday (featuring Sefi Atta and Uzodinma Iweala).

Five facts: Uzodinma Iweala

Uzodinma Iweala is the author of the novel Beasts of No Nation, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His latest book is Our Kind of People, a nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis in Africa. Iweala is an American-born Nigerian.

Five facts:

My favourite writers’ festival experience was the FLIP Festival in Paraty, Brazil because a.) it’s Brazil b.) my little brother came with me and ended up getting profiled as the author’s ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ brother who ‘walks down the street followed by ladies’ in a national newspaper and c.) it’s Brazil.

The best thing about being a writer is not working in a hospital/ listening to all my friends talk about how horrible their real jobs are and realising that I would do what I do for free (don’t get any ideas now…)

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I go for a walk, run or bike ride. I often find that vigorous physical activity can help eliminate some of the anxiety that blocks those creative inclinations.

My parents had a great influence on me, because they have been very encouraging of my work but also extremely honest with me about how difficult this world can be. It has really helped form a sense of commitment to my work and a strategic way of thinking about how best to create the right environments to do good work.

My greatest ambition is to sleep, oh please sweet sleep!

—

Uzodinma Iweala will be appearing on the panel The Other Africa on Friday 24 August at 2:30pm, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sefi Atta, Majok Tulba and Arnold Zable. He’ll be interviewed by Peter Mares on Saturday 25 August at 11:30am in a session called Humanising the Virus. And he’ll be reading from his work in The Morning Read session (free) on Sunday 26 August at 10am.