Prizing Asian Literature by David Parker / Features / Untitled Books

"Historical traumas of war, political oppression, revolution or colonialism have a left a store of powerful stories clamouring to be told."

Prizing Asian Literature by David Parker

"If we are looking for books of the epic scale and stature of the great European 19th-century novels, we must turn to Asia." David Parker is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Man Asian Literary Prize.

When it was announced at the award dinner in Hong Kong last year that the Chinese writer Bi Feiyu had the won the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, the writer, suddenly in the spotlight, was momentarily struck speechless with disbelief. He later explained that his friends had told him not to bother to come to the award ceremony. "They'll never give it to you," they said, "Chinese writers have won two out of the previous three years. This year is not China's turn." That a prize could be above politics was apparently quite outside their experience.

It tells us a lot about a certain time-slice of Asian experience that a nationally celebrated writer in his forties could be amazed by such a thing. And yet it goes without saying that our Board of Directors selects judges we know will look beyond regional politics. The only thing we ever say to them is that we have but one judging criterion, literary quality, however they collectively conceive it. In our eyes the Man Asian Literary Prize can only fully achieve its mission to Asian literature when the word "prestigious" becomes permanently riveted to the beginning of our name. And this can only follow from an unambiguous dedication to identifying the best no matter where it comes from.

Nonetheless it is worth asking why it might be that three Chinese novels have won the Prize in its first four years. The books are Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem (2007), Su Tong, The Boat To Redemption (2009) and Bi Feiyu, Three Sisters (2010). It may be no coincidence that all had the same translator, Howard Goldblatt! But the more significant connection is surely that all are narratives drawn from the experience and the aftermath of one of the most traumatic mass events of the twentieth century, the Cultural Revolution. That astounding attempt to remake thousands of years of history and culture virtually overnight gave rise to millions of untold stories that have haunted the Chinese imagination and memory ever since. Like the great Russian historical novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the Napoleonic wars, Stalingrad and the gulag, these stories cannot but go deep into the darker, tragic recesses of human experience. We who read them cannot but recognize the imaginative power and strangeness generated by coming to terms artistically with such experiences.

The contemporary Western writer does not ordinarily have such experiences or memories close at hand and must therefore travel imaginatively elsewhere, into the past or to exotic places, for example, to seek the power and the strangeness that is the lifeblood of the novel. It may seem to be drawing a long bow to say that non-Western novelists, tapping into more traumatic life experiences, as well as their own rich narrative traditions, often have a natural advantage. Historical traumas of war, political oppression, revolution or colonialism have a left a store of powerful stories clamouring to be told.

For reasons such as these, when I look for something first-rate to read these days, I find myself turning more and more to non-Western novels. Over the last summer I read the monumental Cairo Trilogy by Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz, which refracts the historical shifts in Egyptian society during the British occupation from the First World War to the 1950s through the lens of a single family. I then read The Surrendered, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, by Korean born novelist Chang-rae Lee, who is one of the judges for this year's Man Asian Literary Prize. This book moves from the Korean War to the Japanese invasion of Mongolia to contemporary USA and Italy. Then I devoured with great delight the first two volumes of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, the second of which, River of Smoke, is itself longlisted for this year's Prize. The trilogy explores events leading up to the Opium Wars. Critics praise Ghosh's work as a "spacious", "panoramic" "broad canvas", an "ambitious medley" with a "profusion of traditions, religions, languages, philosophies and geographies".

These three engrossing books are of epic dimensions, collectively spread across the best part of 3,000 pages. By contrast, the six shortlisted Man Booker novels, which I read before enjoying the incredible privilege of attending the Prize dinner in October this year, together occupy around 1,700 pages. Many have expressed disappointment with the 2011 shortlisted books. I can only say that I found more of what I was searching for in my summer reading. However, the Man Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending, is a miniature of consummate artistry and moral vision - though little more than a novella in scale.

With this recent reading experience in the background, I was struck by the fact that the two books that naturally draw our attention in this year's recently released Man Asian Literary Prize longlist are together not much shorter than the whole Man Booker shortlist. When I commented on the longlist in our press release I was tempted into a perhaps daring speculation that was taken up by the Guardian:

The Tolstoys, Hugos and Eliots of today are to be found not in Europe but in Asia, according to the chair of directors of the Man Asian Literary Prize. Announcing the longlist for this year's $30,000 (£19,000) award for the best novel by an Asian writer, which ranges from Japan to India and Iran to South Korea, Professor David Parker from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said that "if we are looking for books of the epic scale and stature of the great European 19th-century novels, we must turn to Asia".

Pointing to the Man Asian longlist inclusion of both Haruki Murakami's "massive magnum opus" 1Q84 and Amitav Ghosh's three-volume epic about the opium wars, of which River of Smoke is the second volume, Parker said that Asia is producing novels of "a scale and ambition we don't often see in western writing these days.

"Could it be that as the world's economic centre of gravity is moving eastwards, so too is its artistic energy and ambition?" he asked.

I have talked about a commitment to identifying quality as the sole aim of the Prize. So why write about scale and ambition? Does size really matter? What's the connection? If there is one it is between the sheer scale and the epic dimensions of the kinds of books I read over summer and the stature and significance of the historical events, such as the Opium Wars, they encompass. And as I was saying before, those books have a strangeness and a depth that come from artistically worked-through traumatic historical experiences that have demanded and found expressive shape for the first time. In this they do share something with the great European nineteenth century historical novels - before the novel grew in poetic concentration and turned inwards into the theatre of consciousness early in the twentieth century. Obviously I do not wish to claim that the Asian novel has already found its Tolstoy, Hugo or George Eliot. What I am saying is that if the world wants to watch this space, there are reasons to suppose that the next generation of truly great novelists may well come from the East.

If that happens then the new Asian self-confidence that comes from economic centrality in the world needs to be matched by greater cultural self-confidence. And most of Asia has far to go before it can begin to catch up with the West in that.

It is here that an award such as the Man Asian Literary Prize, drawing in the whole of Asia and working in the global language, can play a significant role. Of all the hundreds of media stories the Prize generates each year, the great majority of them take the following form: "Five Indian novels dominate Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist." Substitute for "Five Indian Novels", a Philippine novel, Korean, Pakistani, or Iranian novel and so on, and you have over 90% of the press stories generated -- in the national media of the relevant countries.

A typical case for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize is the joyous reaction in Korea to the longlisting of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin. This book has sold over a million copies in Korean, so why the outbreak of celebration when the English translation is longlisted in the Man Asian Literary Prize? The answer to this question takes us to the heart of the Prize's mission.

The best way understand that mission is to look in some detail at the astounding press reaction to the publication of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize winning novel, Ilustrado, by the previously unknown Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco.

According to Robert McCrum of the Guardian, writing about the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010, prizes are the "literary powerhouses" of the contemporary world of books. His article focused on Ilustrado, which had just been published globally to great acclaim. "Literary prizes are not only cultural thermometers, reflecting the zeitgeist," he wrote, "but also have the power to propel unknown writers into the limelight."

Why do prizes such as the Man Asian have this power? Syjuco's novel also won a prize in his home country, but as the Manila-based GMANews TV explained, it was the international prize that made all the difference: "After winning locally with the 2008 Palanca Grand Prize for ... Ilustrado, he gained worldwide recognition by bagging the Man Asian Literary Prize in the same year."

The key to the power of the Man Asian Literary Prize, as opposed even to important local Asian prizes, is to confer "worldwide recognition". As the New York Times put it, Syjuco was unheard of before winning the Man Asian Literary Prize, which "recognizes the best Asian novel written or translated into English." Winning the Man Asian means being recognized as "the best" in Asia, an accolade only an international prize can give.

Worldwide recognition points two ways at once. It means for a start that the author is read right across the English-speaking world, and beyond. (Ilustrado has been translated into 16 languages.) This is especially important in Asia because post-colonial societies often suffer from serious forms of misrecognition, or even non-recognition. As Syjuco said in an interview in the Toronto Globe and Mail, "the Philippines is a country people have almost forgotten now," subject to "all these preconceptions and misconceptions about who we are." And local writers have failed to correct them. As Syjuco pointed out very poignantly. "We've been writing in English for 100 years," he said, citing a complaint familiar on the islands. "Why is nobody reading? Why is nobody out there?"

One of the things worldwide recognition means is correcting these "preconceptions and misconceptions about who we are." As Syjuco reminded his countrymen in the Manila Bulletin the false pictures are partly foreign stereotypes of Filipinos as maids, prostitutes, corrupt officials and terrorists. "We are all these things, but much, much more." But to some extent such pictures have been partly created by Filipino writers themselves, "who decided to exoticize themselves." "Carabaos in ricefields, sunlight the color of mangoes. Is that the reality? No it's not. I think publishers and Western readers see through that. It was okay 20 years ago when it first came out, but now it's not."

Like Ilustrado future shortlisted and Prize-winning novels may be able to give important insights into what it actually means to be an Asian "now". Far from the exoticized "East" of Western fantasy or nostalgia, these books will be written out of the globalized experience of 21st century Asia. This is partly what the Guardian article meant by literary prizes as "cultural thermometers" reflecting the spirit of the times. Contemporary young Asian writers like Syjuco or Tabish Khair or Kyung-Sook Shin are likely to have lived, worked or studied in countries such as Canada, the UK or the US, and to be what cultural theorists now refer to as "cosmopolitan" in identity, citizens of the world as much as the country of their birth, and dividing their lives between home and many other places. When they write it is this current, globalized reality that they bring to life, a world in which Asia is rapidly becoming more central.

If the Prize's distinguished novels will increasingly empower us all to view the world anew in the Asian century it will very largely be the contemporary globalized and cosmopolitan reality of countries such as India, South Korea or the Philippines that these books will enable us to recognize more fully.

The other side of worldwide recognition is the stimulus given to the Asian cultures themselves. Within the Philippines, as much as outside it, Syjuco's novel "triggered an excitement about Philippine literature not seen since Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters was published in 1990" (Phillipine Inquirer). If Filipinos are talking about literature as they haven't for twenty years it is because the 2008 Prize winner became something of a media star, someone ordinary kids now write to and ask for autographed pictures or copies of his book (Montreal Mirror). But more than that, Syjuco helped to conjure up new literary possibilities for his fellow Filipino writers. As Syjuco told CNN, in creating his alter ego Crispin Salvador, he was exploring modes of writing he hoped his countrymen would pursue: "I wanted him to write the books I wish I had written. In the Philippines we don't have pulp fiction like his 'Manila Noir'... We don't have seafaring novels. We don't have crime writing. We don't have a lot of the stuff Crispin actually ostensibly wrote. I wanted to put those out there - finally, a writer who did that. Hopefully, that would give Filipino writers the idea, 'Hey, why don't I be that writer.'"

The worldwide recognition coming from success in prizes such as the Man Asian is culturally empowering; it brings a confidence and self-belief vitally necessary to post-colonial cultures, often shamed by centuries of misrecognition. Once again, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the Prize itself has done important work in fostering this growing confidence: "Few Filipino novelists have developed an international following, and the literary scene there is anaemic compared with the country's vibrant film industry. But in the last few years, Filipino authors have started to gain international recognition. Many Filipino novelists write in English - a legacy of the long American presence there. Several have been boosted by the Man Asian prize, which was founded in 2007. Filipino authors accounted for five of the 24 finalists on the 2009 long list, following India as the most represented country, and Manila native Eric Gamalinda was short-listed last year for his novel, The Descartes of the Highlands."

It is clear that a pan-Asian award such as the Man Asian Literary Prize, also misleadingly known as the "Asian Booker" (we share a sponsor with that justly famous prize), provides a stringent scale of recognition on which Asian nations are already beginning to weigh their own cultural achievements against those of other Asian nations. This may suggest a form of national competition, but according to Miguel Syjuco tough competitiveness is precisely what Asian cultures need to hone their cultural achievements. The same market place that sharpens business prowess is needed to make a culture advance. Syjuco outlined the desirability of a more stringent editorial culture in the Philippines: "We're mostly publishing friends. When I went abroad I realized how competitive it is. There was a year when I couldn't even get a short story published. We need to have competition here."

The Man Asian Literary Prize has gained its flattering nickname the "Asian Booker" partly by having judges who, as with the Man Booker, exercise the most rigorous international standards and are blind to everything but literary quality. The most recent chairs of the panel have been Madame Adrienne Clarkson, novelist and former Governor-General of Canada, Colm Toibin, distinguished Irish novelist, Monica Ali, celebrated British author of Brick Lane, and this year BBC arts journalist Razia Iqbal. To be pronounced the winner by one of these is an achievement in some ways beyond even six-figure local sales or winning a top national prize. It is in the hope of such an achievement that the press in South Korea, India or Iran greet the longlisting of one or more of its own writers a little bit like a first-round win in the football World Cup. Such is the blindness of the judges to everything but the literary quality of the books before them that even the biggest names carry no clout. Come 15 March 2012 the announcement of the 2011 winner could well strike a relatively unknown novelist quite speechless.

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The shortlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize will be announced on January 10th.

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Wednesday, 7 December, 2011

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Issue 41 / February 2012

"Historical traumas of war, political oppression, revolution or colonialism have a left a store of powerful stories clamouring to be told."