"It had white-skinned characters sticking their long noses into everyone else’s business": a story that reports on Woke Lit
The sensitivity reader took a break and went for a walk, and as she went along, head buzzing with all she had read that morning, she had the image of a native bumblebee carrying pockets of pollen on either of its hind legs. It was a happy image, golden, fertile and kinetic; sweet round bumble bum and pure flash of gossamer wings.
Gossamer wings. Now, that would be a cliché. Cliché did arise in her reading, frequently, because so few of the writers read other writers, ever, so didn’t recognise it. The sensitivity reader longed to be allowed to strike it through or delete entirely but that was not part of her brief. Nor was correcting grammar. That all came later, done by less sensitive professionals.
Not everyone can be a sensitivity reader. Who they are and where they live is a closely guarded secret. The old idea of a writer – pale, generally male, thin, anxious and poor - didn’t hold water these days. Ah. Hold water. Another cliché. But thinking in them wasn’t as bad as writing in them, surely? This sensitivity reader, who may only be known here as Reader 4, lived on an anonymous street in an anonymous town with a small, anonymous park nearby, which was her destination.
Yes – the secrecy is necessary. Far from being addicted to cigarettes, alcohol and mind-altering substances, as of yore, writers these days can be mindfully fit, all gristle and muscle and as violently convinced of their genius as they are quick to rage and self-defense.
Or so R4 feared. To date, she had received only thank you notes forwarded by publishers and some of these notes could best be described as cowering and self-abasing.
At the park R4 made for her favourite bench, and not a moment too soon. Her legs were about to give way from under her. People would ask, what is wrong with your legs? And she would say clubfeet, even though that wasn’t strictly true. It was much worse than that, far more serious, and required many operations all through her childhood and teens. For most of her life, the condition had been only a source of pain and isolation.
Someone else was sitting on the bench, an old Indian lady in a purely synthetic sari. Her grey hair was smoothed back under a bright pink shawl with gold edging that matched the rest of her outfit. R4 was sure that she must be very hot. But the woman had taken the shady end of the bend, which meant R4 had to sit in full sun but that was all right because her richly diverse heritage had bequeathed her with the necessary protective melanin. "From all corners of the earth!" her grandmother used to say, with glee, counting 200 living relatives in 41 countries.
Even so, on this November day, as R4 rummaged in her kete and took out her phone with her left hand, clicked on Instagram and started scrolling, she wished she’d worn a hat and put on long-sleeved shirt and long pants. The tops of her thighs were pinkening.
The Indian lady was looking at R4’s legs, as in really looking, at the orthopaedic boots and long scars up R4’s shins. Before R4 became a sensitivity reader that never would have happened because she covered herself up. She had taken heed of her mother’s caution – if people ask you, tell them you’ve got clubfeet and change the subject – but that was so old school.
Now, R4 identified as disabled. She identified as a disabled cis-person, bisexual and trans-friendly. Not that she was really bisexual, not at all. She only liked cis-persons with penises, and that minimally. But who was checking?
R4 put her phone away in order to inhabit the moment. It was a tiny park, and just now full of workers from the site next door. They were building retail outlets with apartments above, and it was lunch time. Men and women in high-viz jackets ate sandwiches and pies and salads. Close by, on the low wall by the swings, a young man kept looking in her direction. He was eating quickly from a series of small round metal containers.
Tiffin boxes, that’s what they called them. She had never seen them except in movies and was pleased to remember the name. Sensitivity readers needed good general knowledge.
Was he a writer she had sorted out? Unlikely – he was so young – but you never knew. He met her eye and licked his lips. Had he found out where she lived? Was he carrying a knife? There were some ethnically subcontinent writers who made dispiriting assumptions about tangata whenua, Christians, feminists and Western decadence.
He was getting up, he was walking towards her, he was holding out his tiffin boxes all neatly clipped together and his mother – grandmother? – was taking them without a word and slipping them into a basket at her feet. When she stood up, he took her arm and they walked away.
You could never have that scene in a novel. Everything was wrong with it – his licentious stare, the woman’s brazen investigation of R4’s disability, her meek acceptance of his dirty dishes, her anti-feminist existence. Some writers had come back to R4 and said – but I based this on real life! This is a true story!
A sensitivity reader had to be firm. It was easy to be firm if you imagined the tears and despair of those forced to bear witness to hurtful prejudice. R4 had been well trained and knew to be on the alert for the 3 P’s: portrayal, preservation and promotion of negative archetypes.
Anyway, the happy grandson/grandmother relationship, if that’s what it was, didn’t warrant any further thought. She had come up here to take a break from the current manuscript, which had been sending tiny electrical impulses along her arms and legs and setting up painful crosscurrents in the amalgam of her teeth. R4 wanted, suddenly, to stand on this very bench and scream out at the slowly emptying park, bellow against the whine and saw of power tools resuming over the fence, yell at the top of her lungs, "It’s just not okay, OKAY!"
Because it wasn’t. It had white-skinned characters sticking their long noses into everyone else’s business and trying to take control, wanting to know how it all worked and why and when and rushing to get it down in writing. They were slow to laugh and quick to criticise and valued one another mostly by how much they earned and the worth of property owned. They showered too often and wasted water, they ate too many nearly extinct marine species, used too much plastic and burned too much fossil fuel. They sucked dry the life around them, funneling it into the dead zones of their colonisers’ hearts. The narrative put these people centre-stage, while the disabled of every hue sat about with the footlights refracting off the chrome of their wheelchairs. The indigenous formed only a backdrop or flew in on rigged harnesses with angel wings, all except for one earthy woman who was brave enough to remonstrate with the protagonist about his profligate and exploitative ways. Some chapters were written entirely in Mandarin and the translator was lagging behind.
Satire, the note from the publisher had said. Satire! Who would laugh at that? It made R4 cry. She was crying now, a little, at the thought of having to go back to it. It was a hell of a way to make a living, quite honestly. It used to be easier. Her first assignment, for example, had been an historical novel written by a New Plymouth Pakeha with a central Māori character, and told in the first person! Outrageous. The writer had no provenance, except for the fact this was his 39th novel after a luminary career of four decades. That alone was enough to make R4 want to shut him up. Haven’t we heard enough from you already? Shut the fuck up! And he did, by his own hand a few days after receiving the rejection letter.
The walk home took longer than the walk there, and her feet hurt more. It was if they bore not only the weight of her frame but of all the worries of the world. How do we even know, she worried, what they are anymore, the worries? The worst are insurmountable, the least fragmentary and nicene. The worst are silent, the least drown all other sound.
Up the steps to the porch of her unit, and as she fitted her key in the lock movement in a potted hibiscus caught her eye. The soil was heaving a little, just in one spot, as if a worm was breaking free, or a tiny volcano was forming in the potting mix. Closer inspection required courage – insects were not her favourite thing; they frightened her, usually. A pair of feelers emerged, then a small dark head dusted with earth. The body followed, striped, and a pair of grubby wings. There was a pause, just a few seconds, while it recovered from hatching, shivering from the effort. Was it actually panting? Just as R4 wondered if she should try to help, it shook itself clean – gold, black and gossamer! - lifted up and bumbled off into the hot blue of the afternoon. There was no way to describe it without cliché.
Next week's short story at Easter weekend is by Owen Marshall.
