Browned Off

The Write Stuff

Much as Moni and Faiza enjoy cliché-spotting, this episode is about books by diverse authors that show possibilities outside of tired old tropes.

Arifa Ahmed’s extraordinary memoir, Consumed, about her relationship with her late sister has Faiza Khan in raptures while Moni Mohsin adores and admires Natasha Brown’s grenade of a novel, Assembly, and Mira Sethi’s beguiling collection of short stories, Are You Enjoying? Tune in for a celebration of a fresh crop of non-white voices shaking things up.

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Food is freighted with so much meaning. What we eat, how, when and with whom speaks volumes for our culture, our history, our politics, our religion, our class. Little wonder then that novelists use it so often to convey meaning in their work. But perhaps no one uses it quite as often as South Asian novelists, whose rapturous descriptions of their own daily bread and all the nostalgic memories it triggers, would put Proust to shame. Faiza Khan and Moni Mohsin wade through vats of fragrant curry to discover what’s actually cooking.

Film

If Charlton Heston could play Moses, Jodie Turner-Smith can play a black Anne Boleyn. The issue is not one of historical inaccuracy, we say, but of a failure of the imagination. A commitment to promoting diversity in film doesn’t just mean using actors of colour to tell white people’s stories. It means employing non white actors to tell their own stories. And goodness knows there’s plenty of material to choose from. White producers could start, for instance, with a film or web series about one of the millions of black and brown soldiers who fought in World War II. But, if truth be told, white movie makers have never been interested in non white stories and when they have portrayed people of colour it’s almost always been problematic. 

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Twitter: @BhopalHouse   @moni_butterfly

Instagram: @faizasultankhan  @monimohsinofficial

Website: www.monimohsin.com

Not long ago British novels were full of domestic staff – compelling, vivid characters like Mrs Danvers, Miss Folley, Peggotty and Jeeves. But over the last fifty years domestic help has all but vanished from the pages of British fiction. Contemporary novels, films and TV serials feature maids, nannies, cooks and chauffeurs only if they are set safely in the distant past. Is this because Britain is a truly democratic place now where salaried domestic workers are extinct? Or is because modern white British readers are made so uncomfortable by the mere mention of the people of colour and immigrants who now toil in their homes that writers and editors deliberately erase them from literary accounts of the present?  Moni Mohsin and Faiza Khan investigate.

Note: Due to unavoidable Covid related delays, the recording of this episode was begun in November and completed last week.

Writer Moni Mohsin and editor Faiza Khan are amused and annoyed by all things diversity.

White novelists can write about whatever they please because their experiences are considered universal. But those of non-white authors are not. Our primary purpose has always been to educate white audiences with weighty tomes on race, culture and religion. However, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, even the bastion of white privilege that is British publishing wants to be seen as diverse. But, we ask, has anything actually changed? Are non white writers now allowed the same creative latitude and opportunities as their white counterparts?

Social media:

Twitter: @BhopalHouse

Website:www.monimohsin.com

Instagram: @faizasultankhan

@monimohsinofficial.