https://www.graffitiboeke.co.za/af/389813/Boeke
..........
This book is a critique not only of the publishing world, but of our Western culture and late-capitalism-induced way of life.
.............
Yellowface
RF Kuang
HarperCollins
It is always a pleasant thing to discover a new literary voice, especially one that’s fresh and dazzling as a morning daisy. I first encountered Rebecca F Kuang’s writing on the fictionalised book of Oxford history, Babel, a well-researched historical fiction novel peppered with phantasmagoric elements.
Yellowface is a book of delicate subversions (an Asian woman writing about a plagiarising white woman pretending to be an Asian woman), a deceptively easy read of great psychological insights, and an exquisitely researched tale of greed for literary stardom. The narrative voice is sharp, brilliant, socially incisive and manipulative, with a subtle, dark humour. It has a clear-eyed, almost perfect pitch, pace, rhythm, balance and writing energy with very few hiccups. Its arcane social media lingo stimulates the pleasures of familiarity without caving into platitudes. In patient, properly paced layering, this book exposes the modern vice of making an idol of success. It takes a closer look into the writing and publishing world with an insider’s view of things.
Juniper Song Hayward met Athena Liu when they were both undergraduates. Postgrad Athena immediately achieves literary stardom of meteoric rise. Juniper, aka June, feels jealousy and eventually resentment when her acquaintance/friend gains much fame while her own first novel plunges on the market. One day, they go out to celebrate Athena’s achievements, including finishing a follow-up manuscript. Still on the night of heavy drinking, they end up in Athena’s luxurious apartment, where they continue binge-drinking expensive whisky. Feeling hungry, they make pancakes that are embellished with pandan extract, whose grassy vanilla with a hint of coconut June discovers for the first time: “I can’t believe white people haven’t learned about pandan yet,” quips Athena as she flips the pancakes, calling their smell “a big breath of the forest”. Indulging their competitive natures, they compete on who can waffle down most the fastest. They use milk to chase them down. To June’s hapless horror, Athena chokes and dies before the emergency paramedics get to the flat: “‘The pancakes were like a lump of cement in her throat,’ said the EMT.”
Athena had earlier shown June her Remington-typed finished manuscript in her writing room, which June found exceptionally good. We later learn that she shoved the manuscript in her own bag before the arrival of the EMT personnel. She made the cardinal error of forgetting to steal the Moleskine notebooks Athena had used to write her notes on. This would prove a grave mistake later on, as the notebooks would be sent to Athena’s mother as part of the estate. By passing herself as a grief-stricken friend of Athena, June manages to have a domineering hold on Athena’s mom, thus preventing public access to the notebooks. That’s how she dodges the first bullet. From there, the story takes off. June tries to maintain a fragile sanity after doctoring and heavily rewriting Athena’s historical novel manuscript. She submits it to a famous agent as her own work. She gets a handsome advance after the manuscript is auctioned among the publishers, and begins her own route to literary stardom. The book, published as The last front, becomes a literary phenomenon, a bestseller even from pre-orders. June then lives amidst pressures of the social media age, with growing fearful anticipation of being discovered not just as a fraud, but as a passing (race/ethnicity hopping), plagiarising and culture-appropriating cishet white woman writing about the experiences of the Chinese’s Labour Corps during WWI.
The Labour Corps should be familiar to South Africans because many of our black folks also volunteered – on promises of being allocated land – to join the Allied side. More than 646 of them died in the English Channel when the ship they were sailing on, SS Mendi, collided with a large cargo steamship, Darro, on 21 February 1917. One of Africa’s promising literary voices, Isaac Dyoba Wauchope, who was their parson, drowned there, giving a heroic sermon to those who were scared. The Xhosa poet SEK Mqhayi immortalised his words in a popular poem, “Ukutshona kuka Mendi” (The sinking of the Mendi). Later on, many more died unaccounted for, when they returned from WWI, carrying death seeds of the Spanish flu, which they sowed in the black townships and rural areas of our country. Of course, the land promises were never honoured; the lucky ones were gifted bicycles for their contributions in the European tribal war.
The revelations of what June fears most comes in circles of tightening grips and perfect layering, one of the literary strengths of the book. First, after some sleuthing by Athena’s sister’s husband through a search engine, they discover that the anonymous Twitter account threatening to spill the beans, belongs to Geoff, Athena’s former “manipulative, abusive, gaslighting, insecure leech … cishet white guy” bf, who has an axe to grind. He was posting long screeds meant to expose June as a literary thief. She weathers that storm easily and ends up being the one blackmailing Geoff. Then she starts seeing the face (ghost) of Athena in the audience during the book launches and at the public cafeteria, like Macbeth seeing Banquo during his royal crowning feast. This culminates with a rather embarrassingly wrong confrontation of a former associate, Candice. The final stage is set when a junior editor (Diana) from June’s publishing house, feels June has wronged her, getting her fired, because she wished to take the precaution – after Geoff’s accusations – of hiring a sensitivity reader (they’re called authenticity/diversity readers now). June had been angrily against this, as it would delay the publication date further and paint her as someone with something to hide.
In Yellowface, Kuang sidles along immanent topics of our age from lateral angles to interrogate various topics, including the racist manner in which non-Europeans, Chinese in particular, were treated worse than enemies by the Allies they came to assist during WWI. The topics are skilfully wedged into June’s negotiations of her guilt in existential angst and dread of being discovered. She manipulates her internal voice until it finds pleasing justification to tell her she didn’t do anything wrong – that, at worst, she just stole themes from Athena, which she developed into an amazing book on her own. Regardless, her conscience barks at her as weed dogs sticking to her psyche, Lady Macbeth style: “Out, damned spot, out, I say!” But the bristly blackjacks and beggar’s lice of conscience stick on the clothes of her conscience, setting the stage for her phantasmagoric final fall.
When the whole thing comes out in the public, June victimises herself. The right, white conservatives come to her defence, making the whole thing into a culture and race war, which, though not politically aligned to, June and her publisher don’t mind because they milk exorbitant profits from it. This is June’s self-justification war cry:
Ever since The last front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized”, they can do or say whatever they want. That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as a punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable target. Racism is bad, but you can still send death threats to Karens. (309)
The themes of this book are various, capacious and dealt with comprehensively in a satisfying manner. From identity politics, tokenism and performative outrage, to the perils of overnight stardom, it touches on our age’s obsession with what in South Africa we call “soft life” – dangerous short cuts, as depicted currently in the story of Dr Nandipha Magudumana and Thabo Bester. The book deals also with the nescient penchant for contrived victimhood and indignance pornography, and opportunistic passing (race/ethnicity hopping) and cultural exploitation. But at the centre of the themes, like a thread sewing everything together, is a deeper look at the cancel culture phenomenon, and how fickle – though fearfully real – social media dog-piling tendencies are. This part reminded me of Etienne van Heerden’s book, A library to flee, which also competently handles the topic from a South African point of view.
Most dear to me is how Yellowface makes us rethink the meaning of the historical novel genre – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s dangers of a single story and the loss of critical thinking, and the gatekeeping of topics/themes by obsessing too much about whose story it is to tell in the first place. Does Athena, born and growing up in the US, have more right to write the story about the Chinese’s Labour Corps because she is a “yellowface”, than someone who spent their whole lives studying that history because they’re white? Are non-BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of colour) being exploitative or culturally appropriative when they write on BIPOC topics? Similar questions have been asked in South Africa, where, for instance, the native history is told mostly by white historians. Is this wrong because they haven’t got the living connection to the native Weltanschauung (worldview)? To what effect do biographical facts affect our literary and political judgements? Do you need the natural and organic umbilical cord to the culture, traditions and language before you can tell the story of its people, or can such things be sufficiently acquired through study, empathy and personal association? These urgent questions are delicately staged in Yellowface through the story of June and her dead friend, Athena.
Of course, there’s really nothing new under the sun; such debates were going on probably even before Aeschylus in 472 BC surprised the Hellenistic theatre by adopting an unusual, empathetic point of view of the vanquished in the writing of his play The Persians. The play, which probably invented the genre of the historical novel, and in so doing carved a path for the likes of Shakespeare and Mqhayi, takes place in Susa, the Persian capital. Though Aeschylus was Greek and writing for that audience, there’s not a single Greek character in The Persians, and rightfully so. Interesting, still, is how the supposedly enemy camp characters are delineated with uncharacteristic empathy for that era. Aeschylus, who was a soldier also, had personally fought in the Battle of Marathon, and most probably that of Salamis, against the real Persians. He had an uncanny familiarity with Iranian culture and genealogies, all of which, as a Greek, he must have painstakingly researched somehow. How poor would not just Western, but world literature be, had the audience boycotted the play on the flimsy ground that it was not his story to tell.
The mourning pain that drove Aeschylus, who had lost his brother in that war, is universal. It is probably what made him understand better, beyond the superficiality of politics, the so-called clash of civilisations between East and West, because it coruscated through his own blood also. Only someone who understood such pain in a personal manner would have such deep empathy for the enemy. He felt how deep their scars of grief ran also, for having lost not just their young to the megalomania of greed and tragic ambitions of foolish kings and political leaders who were criminally careless with young people’s lives, but their empire also. This is probably why he didn’t write in a tone of mockery and hatred against the Persians. He stood above the sneering blame of politics, at the heart of his own humanity, to see in Persians not just strangers who deserved his animosity, but other humans caught up in the axis of human evil. Look at your screen and tell me if someone somewhere in Ukraine and Russia doesn’t feel the same universal pain at the moment. Or if a mother in the US had no similar feelings as her son or daughter was returned from Iraq in a body bag. For what? Lies, greed and misdirected ambitions for rotten, collapsing empires? In the universal, our souls speak a primitive tongue from divine consciousness. Participating in divine consciousness, according to Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the whole point of our nature, which we lost at the Tower of Babel (the Gate of God), the analogy for noise and confusion coming from our miscommunications and misdirected ambitions of clay-footed leaders.
............
Look at your screen and tell me if someone somewhere in Ukraine and Russia doesn’t feel the same universal pain at the moment. Or if a mother in the US had no similar feelings as her son or daughter was returned from Iraq in a body bag. For what? Lies, greed and misdirected ambitions for rotten, collapsing empires? In the universal, our souls speak a primitive tongue from divine consciousness. Participating in divine consciousness, according to Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the whole point of our nature, which we lost at the Tower of Babel (the Gate of God), the analogy for noise and confusion coming from our miscommunications and misdirected ambitions of clay-footed leaders.
.................
And, like the proverbial Daniel, we also look to the feast walls of the modern Belshazzars and think: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! (You have been weighed and found wanting!).
Lastly, Yellowface is a blend of memory, learning, imagination (of the future) and invention (of the present). The writing energy dips a little in the middle section of the book, as the content becomes monotonous, a derivative pastiche of writing commenting on its own content and style. But it soon recovers in the last third of the book, which I call the Lady Macbeth syndrome section. But in the end, you even appreciate this trick of the writing commenting on itself, as a necessary literary device that gently leads us to the closing – June’s outburst from what she calls years of suppressed rage. In the denouement, you soon discover that the revenge of the Karens is not only in the planning, but in what you’ve been reading all along as Yellowface. The insinuated message of Yellowface is that no matter how down the Karens may be, they can never really be out, because the (publishing) system is rigged on their behalf. As long as they know how to package themselves well, they’ll have the last laugh. Beyond small cosmetic changes done to elevate a few BIPOC cheerleaders who fit the white gaze expectations, the system is still hostile to authentic BIPOC stories. And when things come to the crunch, the white voice is more believable and holds the reins.
..............
The insinuated message of Yellowface is that no matter how down the Karens may be, they can never really be out, because the (publishing) system is rigged on their behalf. As long as they know how to package themselves well, they’ll have the last laugh. Beyond small cosmetic changes done to elevate a few BIPOC cheerleaders who fit the white gaze expectations, the system is still hostile to authentic BIPOC stories. And when things come to the crunch, the white voice is more believable and holds the reins.
................
The book depicts how in this age and (publishing) field, even scandals are mere opportunities for further exploitation and consumerism for feathering the pillows of capitalist greed. And, as Karl Marx saw it, the perennial strength of capitalism is in its adaptability. Under the neoliberal engine, late capitalism co-opts everything to its own advantage, including intellectual weaponry designed for its demise. And, most scarily, it makes everything fluid, relative, by disengaging from its intended roots and purposes, so that it may serve the gospel of Mammon:
I’ll spend the next eight weeks scribbling down all my thoughts and recollections. I can’t recycle material from my pseudo-autobiography. No – in that project, I was willing to make myself the villain for the sake of entertainment. In this version, I need redemption. I must make them see my side of the story. Athena was the leech, the vampire, the ghost who wouldn’t let me go; Candice her deranged wannabe proxy. I am innocent. My only sin is loving literature too much, and refusing to let Athena’s very prenatal work go to waste. (318)
This book is a critique not only of the publishing world, but of our Western culture and late-capitalism-induced way of life.
