Latte Leftie joins the baying ranks of young progressives in calling for a cleansing round of book burnings.
Dear LL – I was cringing even worse than usual to be a citizen of this backward country when the Brisbane Writers Festival recently made world headlines. As you’ll be painfully aware, a Gen Y Muslim woman had a psychotic episode after being triggered by a middle-aged, Caucasian cisgender novelist arguing she should be able to write about things she hadn’t personally experienced. Isn’t this all the evidence that’s required to prove 18C breaches should attract the death penalty in order to guarantee non-minority storytellers don’t engage in anything other than ethnomasochist memoir?Lionel, Balmain
LL replies: As Ms Abdel-Magied argued so persuasively in her Grauniad cri de coeur, is it not the case that creating literary characters makes one complicit in the “normalisation of imperialist, colonialist rule”? Who can argue with her assertion, “It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story?” Granted, the answer to that last question may well be, ‘Every time I listen to ABC radio, read Sydney Morning Herald or watch SBS TV!’ but that just proves the point. In this day and age, why are people still allowed to consume non-queer-Indigene-featuring lamestream media which, to quote the Philosopher Queen Abdel-Magied once more, presents a norm that is “profoundly white, straight and, often, patriarchal”. Was it not Voltaire who observed, “I do not agree with what you have to say, therefore you should be put to death for saying it.” No more genuflecting before the bourgeois false god of free speech, I say. If our reactionary federal government won’t ban foul cesspits of cultural appropriation such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, let the idealistic youth of this nation build a mighty bonfire and rid the world of unorthodox and hurtful words!
