⁷ Available at http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?Catalog=px145.

within the frame however, are rendered helpless, incapable of responding meaningfully to their own environment. Hugo's portraits can arguably be said to convey a kind of dignity on their subjects. Many seem defiant, almost noble, surrounded by garbage. But nothing in the images suggests that they have the resources or the wherewithal to interpret their own surroundings, let alone change their circumstances. Nothing in this situation can be altered from within. So, the questions raised here are all aimed directly at the viewer of the image, the presumed Global North consumer of both e-waste and art photography. If human beings have been reduced to the status of trash by the mass import of toxic waste, the response that these images seem to call for is an external intervention to eliminate these landscapes of garbage. We as viewers know all we need to know about what is happening at Agbogbloshie; all that is left is to figure out what we will do about it.

But Sontag's argument that the image itself contains little information on *how* to intervene is well taken. And indeed, the questions that Hugo's work provokes tend to be large and abstract, questions many steps removed from the realities of how waste in West Africa fits into the global political economy. 'Is technology good? Is the rush to update to the latest and greatest computer the problem? … Can this phone last me a little longer? Maybe I do not need a new laptop', are the questions Leininger is left with in the face of Hugo's work. These are not, of course, meaningless questions and they are not unconnected from West African realities. But they seem inadequate in the face of the extreme dystopia of *Permanent Error.* Certainly, I have found that for students moved and motivated by Hugo's work, incremental changes in the way they consume technology do not feel sufficient to the task at hand. What they ask for are more immediate and more dramatic steps they can take to alleviate the suffering they read within the frame. And since the image itself contains no mystery, no invitation to further reflection on the scenes it depicts, what students (as any viewer) are left with is a standard rescue narrative, a well-meaning but poorly informed desire to save Africa and Africans.

As Edgar Pieterse (2011: 9) has argued in response to urban poverty more generally, in the absence of additional information about how people live and how cities function, the desire to 'fix' a city's problems alone generally reproduce simplistic, normative responses that have already been proven ineffective at best, counterproductive at worst. *Permanent Error* is not poverty porn, but it does not invite its viewers to ask how its subjects actually inhabit the world of trash. By offering moral certainty and outrage that what one sees in the images is *wrong*, that it requires an immediate and dramatic intervention from outside the frame, *Permanent Error* asks for action rather than further inquiry.

In short, what my students have tended to see in *Permanent Error* is a future that demands their intervention. Most see this as the unproblematic consequence of what Hugo's camera has done—rendered visible otherwise hard to access truths about the way the world dumps its refuse on helpless African subjects. They see truth in Hugo's work, not a set of modernist aesthetic conventions. Not, at least, until confronted with a very different representational style.

#### **Fabrice Monteiro,** *The Prophecy*

If Pieter Hugo's *Permanent Error* is heir to a high modernist tradition of activist photography, Fabrice Monteiro's *The Prophecy* is decidedly postmodern.⁸ The origins of the project are instructive. Monteiro, a Dakar-based artist, conceived of the images as a series of fairy tales. Having asked Senegal's Minster of Ecology for a list of the top environmental threats to the West African nation, Monteiro selected nine scenarios around which to construct his images. Working with the fashion designer Doulsy, Monteiro outfitted models in fantastic costumes constructed of tar, plastic bags, cables, fishing nets, Saran wrap, and wood. Each untitled image features one of these mythical creatures rising out of some dystopian environmental context: a burning forest, a beach covered with animal parts, smog-belching vehicles, oil slicked waves, a trash-strewn landfill. Monteiro has described these figures as 'spirits' or 'genies' (*djinn*), sent by the Earth itself to 'to talk to the humans and tell them that they have to be aware of what is going on'.⁹

The lead image in the series, and the most widely circulated, was shot in Dakar's Mbeubeuss landfill, the largest in Senegal. A female figure with a towering skirt of plastic bags appears to be mid-stride, making her way through a smoking landscape of trash that is itself creeping outwards to replace the green mangrove swamps in the far background. Though her form is unmistakably human, with her face masked and her jewellery and clothing blending into the trash strewn foreground, Monteiro's model appears post-human, a kind of trash cyborg somehow birthed by the landfill itself.

While it is fair to argue that the de facto audience of Monteiro's work is, like Hugo's, an elite audience of transnational art consumers, Monteiro himself argues that his work is addressed to African viewers. In Marcia Juzga's documentary film about *The Prophecy*, Monteiro argues that 'as a photographer confronted by [a] lack of environmental public spiritedness, I wanted to create images that question us about our ways of consuming. The idea is to motivate an ecological consciousness in the upcoming generation by mixing art, culture, and tradition'. According to Monteiro, the fantastic forms into which he and Doulsy have transformed their models stemmed from a desire to reach Senegalese school children, young Africans who might still be open to his environmental message: '[F]rom living in Africa', he

⁸ The images in *The Prophecy* series can be viewed on the artist's website, available at https:// fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/.

⁹ Available at https://theglobalobservatory.org/2015/10/environmental-problems-africa-fabricemonteiro/.

told one interviewer, 'I know that the solution is not going to come from the governments. It's going to come from the people. So I decided to write fairy tales for kids'.¹⁰

Unmistakably activist, Monteiro's approach nevertheless eschews the realist aesthetic that underpins Hugo's *Permanent Error*—and along with it much of the documentary photographic tradition. It isn't obvious how one should read the photographs in *The Prophecy* series. Where *Permanent Error* is jarring because it conflates familiar elements in an unfamiliar way (the bodies of its living subjects with the inanimate bodies of trash), *The Prophecy* is unsettling because its living subjects are so strikingly unfamiliar. As a result, *The Prophecy* isn't a call to action in the same way. It doesn't invite its viewers to intervene according to normative formulas, to fix an easily identifiable problem. What it demands of its viewers is that they look differently at the scene before them.

The figure emerging from the Mbeubeuss landfill may be an indictment of trash dumping, but it also conveys creation and genesis. Monteiro's camera captures a moment of creative adaptation. Whether one reads the emerging figures here as occult spirits or as science-fiction cyborgs, they are not simply victims of their debased environments. They are the products of it. They have found a way to inhabit their dystopic world. They are not abject, not reduced (in Giorgio Agamben's [1998] memorable phrase) to 'bare life'. Instead they invent new bodies and new relationships on the earth, apparently having succeeded in learning to live with the postmodern present's 'imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions' (Jameson, 1991: 39).

If Pieter Hugo's images ask how an external viewer will intervene to change the situation she or he sees in the image, Fabrice Monteiro's challenge is more complicated. Despite his claim to be making pictures primarily for Senegalese schoolchildren, *The Prophecy*'s primary audience has been the art, culture, and environmental activist markets of the Global North. (In addition to exhibitions and gallery shows on the blue-chip art circuit, Monteiro is a widely recognized fashion model and was named by *Foreign Policy* magazine as one of its 100 most influential global thinkers of 2015 for his environmental advocacy.) For that viewership, the challenge is to interpret what the subjects in the frame are themselves doing in response to their conditions of existence. Its invitation is to comprehension, or at least to further research, rather than action. Their imperative is to recognize what those who dwell within or on the landfill, literally or metaphorically, are doing themselves. These are deconstructive images, challenging their spectators to ask what they *don't* know or can't recognize in the scenes that unfold before them.

¹⁰ Available at https://theglobalobservatory.org/2015/10/environmental-problems-africa-fabricemonteiro/.*.*

It is a deliberate strategy on Monteiro's part, as he has made clear in interviews about the project:

I grew up in Benin. When I got back to Senegal four years ago, I couldn't believe how dirty it was. I realized that Africa had a serious, serious issue with environmental problems. So I thought I could do something, being a photographer, and I came up with the idea of mixing art and culture. Because to me, the mistake of a lot of NGOs that try to make Africans aware, they don't consider the culture. They come with ideas that are already all made, and the people there don't get it, because it doesn't talk to them.¹¹

Indeed, confronted by Monteiro's very different rendering of the landscapes of trash and waste in West Africa, my students very often do respond positively to the provocation to ask what is going on in the image. They recognize the argument that they may not, in fact, know exactly what is going on in the story of trash in Africa. That there may be ways of inhabiting an urban landscape that are adaptive and emergent, that draw on histories they do not know, or that employ aesthetics with which they are unfamiliar.

Powerful and positive as that reading of Monteiro's work can be, however, it too comes with certain normative assumptions. In fact, Monteiro's own words can sometimes pose a challenge to using *The Prophecy* as a teaching tool for audiences uncritical of simplistic images of Africa and Africans. In describing his mythical figures as emissaries from the Earth itself, Monteiro repeatedly deploys a rather simplistic and totalizing vision of West African spiritualism:

But using animism, the whole of West Africa believes in the spirits, and the idea was to use those spirits to deliver a message, instead of just saying, 'Oh, you shouldn't do this' or 'You shouldn't do that'. So my idea was to write beside the pictures—write a little tale for kids. The original idea was to have a little book published and distributed in schools in Senegal, because I believe the young generation is the one that we need to make aware of what is going on. They could bring it back home and say, 'Oh Daddy, you shouldn't throw the plastics there. We have to be careful about that, because the spirit of the plastic said now we have to be careful about that'. That was the whole idea of the concept.¹²

The risk here, of course, is that students already surrounded by images of West Africa as a space of primitivism, outside the modern world, cannot see past the idea of 'animism'. They risk understanding waste, its accumulation and its disposal

¹¹ Available at http://www.mantlethought.org/arts-and-culture/photographic-confrontationsfabrice-monteiro-interview.

¹² Available at http://www.mantlethought.org/arts-and-culture/photographic-confrontationsfabrice-monteiro-interview.

not as a complex question of global political economy, but as a problem of the spiritual fall from grace for Africa's noble savages. There are therefore two challenges in using Monteiro's *The Prophecy* as a starting point for engaging students. First, where employing Hugo's *Permanent Error* in the classroom requires deconstructing what students think they already understand, the challenge in using Monteiro's images to teach African environmentalism lies in reconciling *The Prophecy* with Monteiro's own interpretation of what his images mean. As Barrett (2000: 50–1) points out in his primer on photographic criticism, the intention of the photographer is not determinative of an image's meaning. I have therefore encouraged students to see in the series not djinn figures or animist spirits, *contra* Monteiro himself. Rather I have pushed students to see these figures as non-representative forces, creative but ambiguous. They are not subjects as much as they are visual, anthropomorphic signifiers of the potential to invent new possibilities. They express the latent possibility in any ruin space that the world might be imagined differently, that ameliorating a world of waste means not simply condemning it but employing it as part of the process of crafting new, locally meaningful visions of the future.

This is, of course, a less literal approach to the image than the modernist genre of documentary realism. And therein lies the second challenge for many of my students. Unlike the modernist tradition with its direct appeal to the viewer, many of my students see no point of entry for themselves through Monteiro's work. Some, in fact, read Monteiro's images as a foreclosure, a warning that they have no role to play vis-à-vis the scene before them. But once challenged to do so, most are willing to explore further the possibility that *The Prophecy* might simultaneously be a productive critique of both the politics of waste and the 'rescue' narratives that have so long plagued global development policy towards Africa.

#### Conclusion: Outside the Frame

Photographers who use the camera as a tool of activism make a range of choices in style, in dissemination, in equipment, and in message. Each of these decisions opens some communicative possibilities and forecloses others. There are messages the camera can convey and those it cannot, meanings that some types of photography make legible and others that they obscure. The same goes for those who use photography as a teaching tool. This is no less true of issues in development than it would be in any other sphere. The camera and the images it produces open certain avenues for exploration, and they risk shutting down others.

Teaching Fabrice Monteiro's *The Prophecy* and Pieter Hugo's *Permanent Error* together has allowed me to work with students to see the very different engagements that can be fostered with a modernist and postmodern approach to the communicative potential in photography. Both artists set out to intervene in the growing problem of solid waste in Africa, working to raise awareness of the human and environmental costs of indiscriminate dumping and the accumulation of trash. The two bodies of work speak effectively to one another, each addressing the elements weakest in the other. Hugo's work represents the urgent call to arms that has long been the hallmark of modernist photographic activism. But while it challenges a viewer to act, it does not necessarily challenge that viewer to act or think differently about what she or he sees. Monteiro's images, by contrast, force the viewer to confront what might be emergent from the environmental crisis. No less urgent than Hugo's work, it nevertheless suggests that any solutions to the continent's environmental challenges will require understanding what possibilities and potential there is to be found *in situ*. Existing narratives won't be enough. But that is a taller order than Hugo's, and one that risks becoming paralysingly obscure or complex. Inviting students to think these two works together makes it clear that development issues are representational issues, that understanding how to engage the politics and practices of development also requires the ability to effectively read an image.

It also requires an engagement with what is left entirely out of the frame. There are, for example, some parts of the story of African trash that simply cannot be told with the still camera in any style or genre. Recognizing these absences has been as important a part of the pedagogy of trash as challenging students to understand what they see within the frame.

Most obvious here is the incredible scale and diversity of activities that fall under the broad category of managing solid waste. As Nas and Jaffe (2004) argued over a decade ago, millions of people around the world exist on activities that are recognizable as forms of scavenging trash, and yet time, location, social, and economic context all give these activities very different local valences. Not surprisingly, still photography has gravitated towards the extreme end of what is, in fact, an enormously varied relationship between humans and their refuse.

Also largely absent from these frames is the deep history of trash as a site of contestation. It may be true that the environmental consequences of large-scale trash dumping are a rather recent development, but the politics of trash itself is not. Scholars working in various African cities have traced the ways in which the vocabularies of urban cleansing campaigns have blended the physical clean-up of city infrastructure with efforts to 'clean-up' city and state government (see, for just two examples, Diouf [1996] on Dakar, and Oppala [1994] on Freetown).

Finally, when told visually, the story of trash and its circulation tends to prioritize the dramatic landscape of the dumpsite and landfill. This obscures not just the transnational and national networks that carry waste to that point, but also the often-gendered labour that makes up these flows. As Rosalind Fredericks (2008: 2) points out, in Dakar as in many other places the collection of household trash is labelled as women's work, which in the neoliberal present has meant an expansion of such 'private' labour into more and more sectors of the city. The photographic focus on the predominantly male activity of gleaning a city's landfills risks obscuring these more complexly gendered 'geographies of trash labour'.

These are absences that, as an instructor, I labour to fill. They are the necessary second steps, though as someone invested in the complexities and nuances of contemporary African political economy, I find these details to be of the utmost importance. If they cannot be conveyed simply from looking at Fabrice Monteiro's *The Prophecy* or Pieter Hugo's *Permanent Error*, this is the fault of neither photographer. Photography as a medium simply does not operate at that order of meaning. But inevitably I find myself starting with the image of waste as a teaching tool. Because what both of these bodies of work do, and do far more effectively than any other medium, is to convey the sense that as a development issue, trash matters.

#### **References**

### **Writing a Development Play**

'The soft bulldozer', or the Subtle Smashing of Self-Empowerment

*Mark Ralph-Bowman*

#### **Introduction**

It is 2011. I find myself copy-editing the contributions to a book. Initially, this book has no title but it becomes *Aid, NGOs and the Realities of Women's Lives: A Perfect Storm* (Wallace et al*.* 2013)*.* The papers in it explore the complex and troubled intersection of two significant sets of stories. One set concerns the reality for those women in the Global South experiencing 'aid' for 'development' as its recipients and/or distributors. The other drills down into that reality as perceived by and explained to the North. One might expect those two sets to carry broadly the same payload. The bothersome fact is, they are radically at odds.

Besides the uncomfortable disconnect between the two sets, the book has another extremely disturbing dimension. I had lived and worked in Uganda and Nigeria for much of the 1970s. Reading the chapters, I am dismayed that the relationship between the North and South that I had witnessed over thirty years ago seems to have experienced little substantive change in the interim; it could even be argued that the relationship has become worse and more destructive.

Broadly, in the Global North, there are two well-rehearsed narratives about 'Aid'. One tells of the wasteful process of throwing good money after bad. The other tells of good folk in the North chuntering down to the South with buckets of goodwill and healthy bank balances to help those poor benighted citizens into the twenty-first century; this latter story is often given video validation in NGO promotional materials and fund-raising telethons. Unsurprisingly, neither narrative comes even close to reality. But they are much easier to tell than the real story of a complex, messy, often contradictory meeting of race, class, power, financial clout, and, fundamentally, gender, neatly summarized by David Lewis and David Mosse (2006: 5): 'Out of the messiness of practice, actor-networks constantly establish domains for the rule *of* expertise and universal principle that stand apart from the local, the arbitrary and continent world'.

#### **The Decision to Write a Play**

I have been involved in teaching, creating, and writing for theatre for much of my life including the years in Uganda and Nigeria. This theatre work in Africa was driven by both broadly 'artistic' motivations and an interest in theatre as an individual and societal development tool.

The papers in *Aid, NGOs …* inspire me to write a play. This decision to explore the issues raised in the book proves to be the easy part. When the writing begins, I am confronted by the several common but complex and individual threads running through all the narratives in the book. The danger is that the complexity will be diluted by focusing on the commonality; the danger of falling into the trap of the single story persuasively argued by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's (2009) TED talk.¹ But there has to be some unifying image about which to construct the plot of the play.

As I begin the play that became *With You Always*, the issues raised in *Aid, NGOs …* jostle with my own far-off experiences that seem still to be very much alive. People sometimes enquire as to what the play is about; I struggle to generate a coherent answer. When quizzed by a female director I reply, 'Oh, it's about women and overseas aid'. 'Good luck with that!' she observes, not unsympathetically.

The rule of unintended consequences applies to both playwright and development funder. And where one person might find an inspiring development project, another might see a piece of oppressive and costly neocolonialism. Since I am attempting an exploration of a dilemma it is important to avoid setting up simplistic polarizations between 'goodies' and 'baddies'; dilemmas, almost by definition, afford no easy moral solution. Thus it was that the tag line for *With You Always* became 'Doing no harm with "overseas aid" must be the easiest thing in the world, right?'.

#### **Beginnings**

An Old Testament image is provided by Meenu Vadera's (2013: 143–53) contribution to the book, *Aid, NGOs ….*—it's entitled 'Women on Wheels'. She describes her struggles in setting up an NGO to train women as taxi drivers in Delhi, a profession dominated by men. Hers is a compelling exploration of the David and Goliath narrative and contains many of the main themes in the book. The obstacle for me writing a play, however, is that I have never been to India and my sense of the place would be second, third, and fourth hand. In terms of the plot of the play I am writing, besides the David and Goliath image, there is a further debt to 'Women on

¹ Available at https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda\_adichie\_the\_danger\_of\_a\_single\_ story?language=en.

Wheels'. The current ending of my play is the beginning of Vadera's story; having been battered by the complex demands of meeting agendas set by the North, a woman sets out to build something independent.

Because I have lived and worked in two African countries and have some knowledge of the context, I decided to retain the David and Goliath image but set the play in contemporary Africa with an African woman as the central character.

I am cautious, however, partly because Peter Brook's 1970s London Roundhouse production of *The Ik* still sticks in my throat like cold, half-cooked porridge. Brook, as I do, drew on a book, *The Mountain People*, by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1972), which records his inability to understand the community he was studying in Uganda. Despite this inability, Turnbull seemed to assume an almost omniscient presentation of the people under investigation without benefit of knowledge of either their language or culture. As part of my thinking for this chapter, I decide to revisit *The Ik* in an attempt to understand my reaction to it, a visit that helps explain my visceral antipathy to the production at the time.

In the years since Brook's production, serious questions about Turnbull's representation of the Ik have been raised. In 1985, following his work with the Ik, Bernd Heine (1985: 1) wrote, 'Turnbull's account of Ik culture turned out to be at variance with most observations we made—to the extent that at times I was under the impression that I was dealing with an entirely different people'. Curtis Abraham concludes his 2002 assessment of *The Mountain People* by saying that 'ultimately the Ik saga says more about the internal hopes, dreams and aspirations of individuals like Turnbull rather than the external realities of the people they study'.

Certainly, what Turnbull writes in the Introduction to the published script of *The Ik* is astonishing (Higgins and Cannan, 1984: 9):

Whether or not this [the story told in the play] was an Ik truth, we could not say. But it was truth for *us*, even though more than likely each of us in the company saw it differently; and it was a truth for the audience in terms of *their* individual experience. After all, it is for ourselves, including the audience, that we play, not for the Ik. The Ik we can only thank for having driven us to discover such a moment of beauty in our own lives and, no matter how discouraging the world around us may seem to be, perhaps to discover the hope, the faith, or whatever the truth is that for them also makes life worth living.

It is also revealing to set this conclusion in the larger context of Brook's 1972 African theatrical pilgrimage recorded in Heilpern's (1977) *The Conference of the Birds.* Having conquered the theatrical world in the Metropolitan North, Brook went to Paris, in Heilpern's (1977: 26) words, 'to discover the miraculous: a universal theatre'. There Brook created an acting troupe (including Helen Mirren) to travel through Africa to find that 'universal theatre' and its language. Heilpern's book follows that troupe through the highs and lows, the successes and failures in villages and towns in Algeria, Niger, and Nigeria. Pondering one disastrous performance Brook realizes that 'the audience couldn't understand what was happening because it couldn't share the convention' (Heilpern, 1977: 203).

In the context of *The Ik,* the point is that when it comes to 'understanding' them and creating a piece of theatre about their experience, unless you are Ik and are able to 'read' their history and social conventions, the likelihood is that you will impose interpretations and responses that are more about you than about them. In other words, you risk using the Ik as exemplars of some personal fixation. This danger is further intensified when, as later researchers such as Abraham have discovered, many of Turnbull's informants were not actually Ik but members of other, rival, ethnic groups who had their own agendas *vis-à-vis* the Ik. Turnbull's Introduction to the 1984 script quoted above demonstrates that he, at least, is aware of this dimension, though he presents it as an artistic merit.

In this respect, there is a wonderful, illustrative anecdote recorded by the anthropologist Laura Bohannan in relation to her work on Nigeria. In her 1966 article 'Shakespeare in the Bush', she describes how in the evenings during her fieldwork her hosts entertained her with stories. One evening they tell her that the next night it will be her turn to recount a story. She decides to recount the story of Shakespeare's *Hamlet*, which she thinks is universally understandable. She hardly starts with her narrative when her hosts interrupt, incredulous. They find the behaviour of the characters totally unbelievable and tell her she must have got it wrong and begin to reconstruct the story for her. Thus she learnt a simple but basic lesson: the sense and impact of a play is dependent on existing theatrical and social conventions.

So the challenge is to find a context in which the seemingly invincible Goliath of 'the North' might meet his (I use the pronoun deliberately) match in the seemingly powerless David, 'the South'. Also, I want to create real characters who are morally and psychologically complex, neither one-dimensional mouthpieces in an academic debate nor vehicles for polemical speechifying. With all these many and various caveats in mind, I begin to write my play. Since it is directed at a British audience, I feel it necessary to give them a way in via British sensibilities. So, the first draft of the (untitled) play begins thus:

#### NGO Play—2013

appears addressing the audience.] And there it was. Complete. Months of work and uncertainty. The rains that washed so much of it away. The outbreak of measles. After so long and such difficult conditions, Kasangila, finally, had its new Lower Secondary School building—thanks to all of us and the money we raised here at 'Bringing Joy'. Never was a name more apt than ours. Truly we in 'Bringing Joy' can risk the sin of pride.

CLAIRE applauds the audience which breaks into 'For she's a jolly good fellow' the singing of which continues as CLAIRE is joined by OLAVE burdened with two wheelie suitcases and hand luggage which she shares with CLAIRE. The singing ends to be replaced by the tinnitus of airport muzak. They look about them flustered and anxious.

CLAIRE Do stop that, Olave.

OLAVE What?

CLAIRE Looking at your watch. This is Africa, dear. A completely different approach. No such thing as 'late' in African time. You'll find it most refreshing, liberating. If you can't be late, you see, there's no need to hurry. You'll just have to adapt.

OLAVE But we have been waiting rather a -

CLAIRE Thirty-seven minutes.

CHRISTOPHER approaches them.

CHRISTOPHER Excuse me, madame. You need taxi?

CLAIRE No, thank you. We are being met. A driver will meet us. I have it here. She pulls a sheet of paper from her handbag and holds it towards him.

You see. An email. Confirmation.

CHRISTOPHER bends to read the proffered email.

CHRISTOPHER Ah! Tuko Pamoja.

CLAIRE Correct. Tuko Pamoja.

CHRISTOPHER [He reads] 'A driver will meet you in Arrivals.' This is Arrivals.

CLAIRE Indeed it is.

CHRISTOPHER No driver. I think, Madame, you are needing a taxi. My own is outside. Ready to go. Very safe. Comfortable.

CLAIRE Excuse me, young man. I do not need your taxi. I do not need any taxi. I am waiting for my driver. Good day to you.

CHRISTOPHER And a very good day to you, madame.

At this early stage of its development, the plot eases the audience into the unnamed African country through the journey of the redoubtable Claire and her friend Olave. Olave, however, does not make it through the first major re-write, though it took the observation of a fellow playwright to show that Claire's voice is enough to represent the good-hearted, charitable motivation of the liberal North's desire to 'help'.

One of the key issues the play needs to address is the confrontation between the altruism represented by Claire and the appropriation of that altruism by commercial interests, sometimes described as 'market forces'. So, I decide that, by chance, Claire's trip should coincide with that of accountants doing an audit of the local NGO she is visiting. [The NGO ends up being called *Tare Muke,* Hausa words which translate broadly as 'We are together.']

Caught in the spotlight of these two visitations is Dambisa, the young woman who runs the NGO. She is the central character in the play but in early versions she does not appear until Scene 5—like having Hamlet turn up in Act Two. It takes some time to find the courage to avoid pandering to the British sensibilities but the full theatre production of *With You Always* in 2016 at The Old Fire Station in Oxford puts her up front.

#### *CAR HORNS BLARE. PLANES AND LORRIES ROAR.  MORPHS INTO …*

 So, where are you? Sorry—you're breaking up. What? An hour ago? An hour? No, no, no. That's fine. Fine. No problem. Everything's set. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

#### *SHE STANDS STILL. OUT OF NOWHERE SHE RELEASES A HUGE EX-PLOSION OF FRUSTRATION.*

#### *AS CLAIRE AND CHRISTOPHER ARRIVE.*

DAMBISA Oh my god! Er, welcome. Welcome to *Tare Muke*. Christopher? Oh. You must be *…* Mrs Boyden?

CLAIRE Please. Call me Claire.

DAMBISA How *…* how was the journey?

CLAIRE Marvellous. I didn't expect such a bustling, modern city.

DAMBISA -

CLAIRE It's lovely to be here.

DAMBISA I am sorry for not sending the car. It slipped from my mind—some very important people are coming from the UK today. Not *…* I mean, you are important also—I did not *…* so *…* ah *…* yes, you see the car is with them. Claire Boyden—*Bringing Joy*, from Belper, isn't it? Our wonderful Derbyshire Support Group. Dambisa Jakande.

#### *They shake hands*

CLAIRE Christopher whizzed me here through the back streets. I say, these VIPs of yours, anyone famous?

DAMBISA Accountants. From your *Hilarious Help* organization.

CLAIRE Really? I'm rather fond of that young fellow. Does lots during those *Hilarious Help* telethon fandangos. You know him? Motorbike trips on the telly? Something on train spotting/one of our gang tells -

SAM *[off ]* It's a Flame Tree, Alex.

CLAIRE Ewan McGregor!

SAM *[off ]* Take a picture of every single flower in the city, why not.

#### *SAM AND ALEX ENTER*

#### Hi, hi. *[SAM holds out her hand to CHRISTOPHER]* I'm Sam. That's Alex. *ALEX TAKES A PHOTO OF SAM AND CHRISTOPHER SHAKING HANDS*

SAM Hi. Good to meet you.

CLAIRE My pleasure, er, Sam?

SAM Cool. Right, cool.

#### *SAM TAKES DAMBISA'S HAND. ALEX CAPTURES THE MOMENT*

Great location. Loving the Flame Tree. Alignment—spot on, yeah? Feng Shui? No? Oh-kaaay. So—you're a volunteer?

SAM Water for me. Alex? Water? Alex? Life support machine?

ALEX Oh, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Nice place, Dambisa. Cool.

SAM So—we're not DfID. INKE? Private sector?

CLAIRE !

DAMBISA I've made my office available as your base.

SAM Let's get on it. *THEY GO*

Locating the play in Africa and making an African female the protagonist, however, creates a further challenge pointed out by Dr Eric Northey, one-time Professor of Mass Communications at Bayero University, Kano and later Senior Lecturer in Media at Manchester Metropolitan University. He observes that most people in the North are functionally ignorant about Africa past and present. For them it's represented by game parks, safaris, the 'Big Five', bloody conflict as represented in films like *Blood Diamond* and *Hotel Rwanda*, corruption ['The Interpreter'], the cynical clichés of Richard Bean's *The God Botherers* or the flyblown, malnourished children paraded by INGOs seeking funding. Even the geography seems to defeat them. When Ebola struck West Africa, tourism to countries thousands of miles away took a big hit. Northey predicts that the audience of a play set in Africa will go away disappointed if there is not a plentiful supply of 'native costumes', bare chests—preferably both male and female—and lots of drumming and dancing. Some responses to the production seem to indicate his prediction to be correct but more of that later.

#### **The Past Invades the Present**

When editing *Aid, NGOs and the Realities of Women's Lives: A Perfect Storm*, and before starting to write *With You Always*, I frequently found my mind going back to late 1970s Nigeria with a strong sense of *déjà vu* and the disturbing realization of little substantial change in over thirty years. I was reminded of *The Project,* a theatre production created through workshops with Nigerian students.

Back then, the World Bank put up 50 per cent of the funding for a number of enormous projects that would, it was claimed, increase productivity of huge swathes of Nigerian agricultural land. Three of these projects focused on transforming relatively arid, sub-Saharan savannah land in the Kano, Sokoto, and Chad River Basins from their traditional agricultural use into industrial-scale cotton production. Cotton is a thirsty beast so rivers were to be damned, irrigation lakes established, and miles and miles of irrigation canals built and the indigenous population to be relocated from thousands of hectares of their traditional land.

It was a World Bank condition that 40 per cent of the loan [i.e. 20 per cent of the total cost of the project] had to be spent in the Global North. So 20 per cent of the multi-million dollar loan was used to import the gargantuan machinery required, pay the salaries and emoluments of the senior staff (recruited primarily from the North), to say nothing of the regular flights from Italy bringing fresh produce to the air-conditioned supermarket servicing those expatriate staff and their families. Ordinary Nigerians mainly profited from employment as unskilled and semi-skilled labour force.

But they also lost their land. Thousands were relocated, 'benefitting' in the process from visits of advisors ['Agricultural Extension Workers'] from various government ministries who would tell them how to make the best of the fantastic opportunities being made available to them thanks to their sagacious government and the World Bank. At the time, the Nigerian exchequer was relatively flush with oil money so projects such as these were not only a highly attractive investment for the World Bank but were also being replicated in five other states in Nigeria. And the loans for these projects had to be repaid in at an interest rate of 7–8 per cent. And here's the killer: repayment is in foreign exchange.

In a paper written in 1979, Tina Wallace (1979: 6) noted that 'it is essentially a technocratic approach to the causes of rural stagnation, which sees the solution in bringing new knowledge, inputs, technology efficiently to the recipient, the small farmer. Reliance is placed on "the expert" carrying change to the poor; the key actors in rural transformation include road engineers, dam builders, extension workers, seed multipliers, Project management'. She also noted that the World Bank project had no sense of the whole: 'they do not tackle such issues as rural health, nomadic groups, non-farming activities, rural industries, the role of women' (Wallace, 1979: 5).

Scroll forward to 2011. In *Aid, NGOs and the Realities of Womens' Lives*, I read Stan Thekaekara's essay 'Development from the ground: A worm's eye view', where he writes that since 1974, 'we have seen governments, civil society, philanthropists, and even corporations investing huge amounts of money. But has anything changed for the people living in poverty?' (Thekaekara 2013: 33).

#### **The Project**

Back in 1979, I was already engaged in creating theatre with students at Bayero University, Kano. I wanted to both explore with them the issues around the World Bank involvement in Africa and create a piece of theatre that would be accessible to a wider audience than the educated elite; motivation very similar to that behind the writing of *With You Always.*

Using the research being conducted by Tina Wallace at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, I began a series of theatre workshops exploring this subject of vast sums being spent with little discernible benefit for the poor. Week by week we would take a starting point suggested by the research and literally play with it. The outcomes of each workshop were recorded in written notes. Eventually, after several months of development, a story, or more accurately several narratives, began to emerge. And out of these a theatre production was formed. By the time it came to public performance the show had developed a fixed and loosely scripted format. The only thing it did not have was a title. We spent an inordinate amount of time tossing ideas around until one of our number, Emman Usman Shehu, calmly announced 'It must be called *The Project.*' As we thought about it, we realized it was wholly apposite. Our work was indeed a Russian doll of projects. There was the context of the general North/South project, the specific World Bank project, the research project, our theatrical development project of workshops, and then the performance project of placing the results in front of audiences.

*The Project* was initially performed at Bayero and Ahmadu Bello Universities before being funded, without irony, by the Ministry of Agriculture to be shown in Kaduna, Jos, and Maiduguri. In many respects the latter show was the most inspiring. It took place in broad daylight on the racecourse before an audience seated in the stands by the finishing post. But the great thing was that much of the audience comprised 'ordinary' people from local communities, many of them speaking little English. *The Project* used a combination of RP, Pidgin, and occasional smatterings of indigenous languages. It was immensely rewarding for the participants in the show that the narratives portrayed spoke directly to this Maiduguri audience which responded enthusiastically.

A scene in the *The Project* that always received a spirited audience response was the visit of the 'Agricultural Extension Workers' to the farmers following their relocation from their ancestral lands. These characters arrive dressed in the height of late 1970s fashion—perilously high platform shoes, swirling flared trousers, extravagantly patterned tailored shirts with collars big enough to take flight on, and the ubiquitous shades. They proceed to lecture the farmers on how to do their jobs. The farmers are sceptical. At one point in the conversation, the Extension Workers explain:

BASIL The problem is fertilisers. I have studied fertilisers in Britain.

OGUNLEYE So in Britain they go teach you?

BASIL Yes. I studied fertilisers, soil conservation and soil analysis. I studied phos-

phates. I studied nitrates. I studied all the things in a laboratory in Birmingham. OGUNLEYE Tell me. This soil wettin you go study. Which kind soil be that? BASIL Why?

BASIL Well, yes. I was in England you see.

OGUNLEYE This soil, now. The one we dey sit on. Which soil be that?

BASIL Six months—six whole months.²

² From my working notes on *The Project.* The 'script' recorded here was the outline script, and actors improvised around it.

In the final scene of *The Project,* a small group of rich young Nigerians brag to each other of their experiences in the yuppie high spots of Europe and the USA. As these young swells talk, the audience becomes aware of murmurings that slowly coalesce into the chants of street beggars. Ragged mendicants, some with ugly deformities, inexorably appear quite literally from among the audience and forcefully importune the audience for alms. Initially, the audience tends to laugh but as the chants continue, the demands strengthen to be made directly to individuals in the audience; they begin to feel uncomfortable. After what feels like an age, the chanting abruptly cuts—an awkward silence falls.

One of the challenges currently facing the world is the tens of thousands of people from many African countries risking untold hardship in search of a better life in the Global North. As I read the reports of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and hear Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) condemnation of the horrors of Libyan detention camps, in my ears I hear those chants and recall the deprivation and depredations ongoing since the 1970s and before.

#### *Aid, NGOs* **…** *and* **With You Always**

Looking back on *The Project,*I realize that its point of view was unremittingly male. One reason for this is the fact I, a man, was initiating, facilitating, and probably though not deliberately—manipulating it; there's something of Peter Brook in all theatre directors. Another reason is that the majority of student participants were male. Bayero University students were primarily, though by no means exclusively, Muslim. For most female Muslim students, appearing in mixed theatrical performances was problematic.

On this issue of the dominance of the male perspective, *Aid, NGOs and the Realities of Women's Lives* unsurprisingly has many telling comments that give me pause.  Somehow this comment encapsulates the related and intensely complex issues of gender and power that I also want to explore in *With You Always*.

Ashish Shah's (2013: 206) essay in *Aid, NGOs…* reminds us that many of the issues around gender, power, and class are universal:

I realize the difference between attending a gender training and actually understanding and trying to empathize with the different world that women live in. As men, as people with different positions of power (whether we are men or women), as people from biased professions, as outsiders, even when we make significant efforts to try to understand a problem or context, we are always getting only a partial picture. While we will never fully grasp the realities experienced by women, as men, and as people who want to do good development work, we owe it to ourselves to break out of our comfort zones and try to experience reality from the perspectives of those we say we work for.

The universal nature of the challenge is neatly put by Chris Mowles (2013: 58) in his contribution: 'Citizens in the developing world are not distant abstractions, or objects of our "treatment", but are self-organizing, meaning-making animals, and our moral equals. They interact with each other and with us, enabling and constraining in relationships of power, as the future emerges in highly unpredictable ways and in response to our plans and actions as we differently construe them.'

And then there is the significant challenge that, in the thinking of funders of development, reality is a nice, neat, concrete entity. Wallace and Porter (2013: 9) disagree, arguing that 'reality is unpredictable, and often messy. Local knowledge is frequently strikingly at odds with well-crafted projects; what actually happens often falls far outside "the scope" of planning documents. And yet what happens in "real life" is what INGOs and their partners can build on to create better interventions, based on people's lives and priorities'.

This complex reality is one that I struggle to explore in *With You Always.* At the time of the 2016 production of the play, the final scene turns out to be one of its more problematic features and the most difficult to get right. In it, through a confrontation between two central characters, the issues of male assumptions around relationships with women are addressed head on. This confrontation draws on discomforting realities for both characters. Many audience members also find it challenging and uncomfortable, especially since it provides no reassuring solutions to the dilemmas raised. The reason for not providing them is that there are no solutions 'out there'. These are dilemmas, the solutions to which each and every one of us has to find for ourselves in and through our own relationships.

#### **Whose Soil Is it?**

Ashish Shah's (2013: 203) record of his encounter with a farmer in Kenya to whom he, a confident young development worker, had offered help, is particularly revealing. The farmer said to him:

I don't think you have ever farmed before in your life. You don't know what it's like to grow sugarcane or any other crop.  I don't have time for people like you.

To his credit, in order to fill this knowledge gap, the young Shah then set to and farmed a small patch of land.

But then came another shock when he met a woman sugarcane farmer, who said to him 'Everything you talk about is from a man's viewpoint … I don't think you understand what it means to be a woman sugarcane farmer' (Shah, 2013: 205). She challenged him to live and work alongside the women farmers. He did so and discovered that:

I did not understand how difficult, if not impossible, it was for women sugarcane farmers to claim payments compared to their male counterparts, for a multitude of reasons. I did not understand the actual workload involved for women engaged in the multiple roles forced on them by society; coupled with the expectation to be a good sugarcane farmer. I did not understand the level of abuse and exploitation that women faced at all levels of the farming process, or the impact of cultural practices and women's vulnerability in areas of their life that they could not control—be it their bodies or their land. I did not understand the levels of violence against women and its psychological, social, economic and political impact on them. I did not know about the internal organising structures of women cane farmers, how different these were to the formal organising structures for most of the male farmers, or that women were trying to introduce complexity into mono-crop sugarcane farming systems to counter the growing hunger periods. (Shah, 2013: 206)

Our jokes in *The Project* about whose soil it is seem pretty mild in comparison to this dark and complex reality for farmers in general and women farmers in particular. In 1970s Nigeria, initiatives like the Kano River Project were asking some disturbing questions regarding ownership of the land and who had the right to work it. This was not the first time that the World Bank had been involved in the displacement of large numbers of people. In 1962, for example, it put up US\$47million for the Volta River Project in Ghana that displaced over 80,000 people (Wallace, 1979).

By 2014, however, the plundering of land had become common in Africa and beyond. Across swathes of the South, international businesses, including though not exclusively agribusinesses, are hoovering up vast tracts of land with the complicity of national governments in both the North and the South. Much of this process is justified by appeals to efficiency and progress. David Lewis (2013: 115) expresses the underlying principle at work thus:

[A]s Western development policy has recently become more and more concerned with the management of aid resources, relationships and impacts, so the lives of ordinary people in developing countries have, perhaps paradoxically, become even more remote from policymakers and development professionals.

In 2017 this process of effectively recolonizing land in Africa was set in stark relief when the UK government, without irony, decided to call its strategy for developing bilateral deals with African countries 'Empire 2.0'. The beauty of this moniker is that it declares precisely and exactly the way that the North regards its relationship with the South. While the British demonstrated an extraordinary lack of intelligence in naming their strategy thus, we need to be clear that their approach to their dealings with the South are not only common in the North but also in the emerging economies of Asia.

These are the kinds of issues that I am attempting to dramatize in *With You Always*. As I have suggested above, I am trying to use the point at which these issues intersect in the lives of half a dozen people as a sort of peephole through which an audience can sense that what they are seeing is but a small example of the whole.

#### Journey to Performance

This journey is exhaustive and exhausting. When I have finally produced something I am reasonably happy with, we give a public rehearsed reading using professional actors. This took place at the Ark T Centre in Oxford in April 2014. As so often with such readings, the rehearsal period is short. The actors and director, despite being talented and committed, are largely unfamiliar with many of the issues being explored in the play. Because they are embodied in character and situation rather than expressed through debating points, the actors have to drill down into the social and political context to find not only their character's motivations but also the issues being addressed.

These challenges for the actors are almost a microcosm of the whole. There is a complex reality that we are trying to capture in the play so as to avoid the simplistic caricatures exploited by fund raisers. But not only do we need to avoid an audience throwing up its hands saying 'I don't get this' and walking away but I also need to avoid alienating the actors with material way beyond their lived experience. So we spend a lot of time unpicking and clarifying character and issues.

Some seventy or so people came to the 2014 Rehearsed Reading. The key points from the feedback—besides a lot of encouragement—are that it is too long and too wordy. An interesting reaction, however, came from a manager in the UK's public sector: 'It's just like that where I work.'

In 2015, supported by an Arts Council Grant, a series of workshops culminated in the performance of a truncated version of the play at the Simpkins Lee Theatre in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in front of an audience again of about seventy (though a largely different seventy!). By this time the actors—most of whom were also involved in the Rehearsed Reading—are getting to grips with the challenge. Jo Noble, who plays Claire, the Englishwoman visiting *Tare Muke,* talks of it as an ongoing process (Promotional video for *With You Always,* 25 August 2015):

It made me think, I want to investigate (Aid) further and I want to investigate what strings are attached for the recipients. Who made the decisions? Are the decisions really in the best interests of the people they are supposedly trying to help?

In the same video, Amantha Edmead who plays the character of Edriam, an African woman running a small cooperative enterprise, says:

Even though this play is full of lots of issues, it's still very character driven so it's about bringing individual characters—who are real people—to life. And the subject matter, cos you can't get away from the issues particularly now when you're seeing lots of refugees showing up and when you're looking at Africa whether it's the Chinese coming in or the fact of what we do with the world's resources, whose benefit that is for.

In the Q & A that follows the Showcase—unusually, most of the audience stay on—three comments broadly summarize the reactions:

'A strong piece of theatre. There's so much in it I feel I want to take it away and think about it.'

'What I enjoyed most about it was the differences on both sides as well as between the sides so there's a lot going on.'

'You were really good on the individual relationships and the characterisation.'

Which brings the story to the first full production at the Old Fire Station in Oxford on 4 and 5 November 2016. The showcase at Lady Margaret Hall had incorporated some elements of singing. A number of those who saw that Showcase are clearly expecting further development of the musical elements in the production at the Old Fire Station (one of the audience in the Simkins Lee who had not been to Africa said the singing and dancing made him feel he 'could manage going there'!). Some are surprised, therefore, and some are disappointed, that the production has moved into a more conventional, naturalistic performance style.

It is not entirely naturalistic, but predominantly so. The reason for this decision is worth noting. Emma Webb has taken over as director due to the previous director, John Sailsman, not being available. She is very much a physical theatre practitioner. But she feels that the central strength of *With You Always* lies in the characters, their relationships, and the issues; she wants to focus on those aspects. Since the play runs around two hours with a fifteen-minute interval, she is throwing down a huge gauntlet to the stamina of the actors and the powers of concentration of the audience.

Feedback on the show broadly divides into two. There are those who come to see the production primarily because they are attracted by the subject matter exemplified in the tag line 'Doing no harm with overseas aid must be the easiest thing in the world, right?' Their interests are in arts and theatre that engage with important issues. They are not there to see the latest innovations in theatricality, though probably would not be averse to them if used to explore challenging ideas. The second group are people of the theatre. For the most part they are less interested in the issues than in the ways in which theatricality is being employed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the latter group, while recognizing the importance of the subject matter, tend to find the play 'worthy' but unexciting.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Eric Northey's comments that people would be expecting lots of drumming, naked torsos, and exotic costumes from a play set in Africa. I recall going to buy postcards in Kano in 1975 and expressing disappointment at the shortage of cards with animals or picturesque landscapes. The woman in the shop smiled. 'Ah,' she said. 'Europeans always want to keep us back in the past. They don't want pictures of the way we are now'—one of those chance comments that still resonates. I had not anticipated that it would be the theatrical people who would be making a demand of me similar to mine of that woman in that shop all those years ago.

Many of those principally committed to and interested in development issues tend to be both engaged and excited by the production. Not uncommon the following comments from development practitioners and academics made to the author at the Simpkins Lee Q & A in May 2015 and emails in November 2016:

'I thoroughly enjoyed it, and many people who I knew there have said how much they appreciated both the drama itself, and the introduction it gave them to the issues.'

'The play was insightful, moving and pertinent, strategically directed. The casting was excellent; the acting attuned to the text.'

'In my experience that happens a lot (manipulating the data). It's the only way to get things done. That too is an ethical challenge.'

But there were also development practitioners and academics who felt that the play fell short on some of issues. Such viewpoints are exemplified by the following comments also from the 2015 Q & A and emails in November 2016:

'I wanted more on the structural power relationship between people both on the ground and in the development sector.'

'(More projects are mentioned but we) didn't get enough of a sense of the other work. Too limited a lens on the work of *Tare Muke.*'

'I want to know how to change that world – a plan offering the solution to that problem.'

Initially I was dismayed by such comments from development practitioners. Naively I had assumed that they at least would be fully appreciative of what I was attempting to achieve. But then I recalled the response of some colleagues in the Theatre Department in Ahmadu Bello to *The Project*, back in 1979. They complained that it was merely bourgeois *agit prop*; somewhat like complaining that an African elephant is merely a *Loxodonta Africana*. In many areas of human endeavour, the most critical responses sometimes come from those in the same discipline*.* Certainly, as Lewis and Mosse (2006: 11) have highlighted,

the development encounter between developers and people is far more complex and nuanced than is allowed for either (at the level of practice) by the crude approaches of interventionist developmentalism that still exist in many parts of the development industry, or (at the level of theory) by the poststructuralist critiques of anthropologists in the 1990s. Meanings are contested and organizing space is negotiated at multiple levels, blurring the range of insider/outsider, indigenous/scientific or formal/informal dualisms that are common in both development theory and practice.

#### **Conclusion**

A review of the play appears in the January 2017 edition of *Dub* magazine in Oxford. Though the magazine is dedicated to 'Celebrating *Roots Reggae* music in the Thames Valley region' it is the only publication that reviewed the production. The review by Natty Mark (2017) began thus:

What do you do with the good heart that is misguided? Especially when that misguidance might result in the appearance of the soft bulldozer; the subtle smashing of self-empowerment. The play I went to see tonight addressed this question.

I suspect there can few experiences more satisfying for a playwright than reading a review of your play that simply gets it.

#### **References**

Abraham, C. (2002) 'The Mountain People revisited', available at https://www. thefreelibrary.com/The+Mountain+People+revisited%3A+Curtis+Abraham+went +to+Ik-land+in…-a082802101.

## **Entering the Fictional World of Development**

Writers, Readers, and Representations

*Hilary Standing*

#### **Introduction**

Over a decade ago, I decided to write a novel about 'development.' The decision came about partly because I have always been a secret scribbler of odd bits and pieces—short stories and narratives of events that have engaged me in ways for which social science doesn't quite work. But it was also because the story behind the novel presented itself to me unbidden in a country where I have worked and lived and that is very close to my heart. That country is Bangladesh and the story which came to haunt me is one of good development intentions gone disastrously wrong.

In the 1970s, following a very successful programme to construct deep tubewells for irrigation to increase agricultural production, international agencies turned their attention to using this technology to provide clean drinking water for the rural population. The tubewell pumps were adapted for domestic use and from the 1970s onwards, millions of wells were dug. Rural people soon adapted to this new technology and stopped drinking bacteriologically contaminated surface water from ponds and other shallow water sources. The availability of groundwater from tubewells was a major contributor to the rapid decline in morbidity and mortality due to diarrhoea and other waterborne diseases, especially among children. It looked like a textbook example of well spent international aid money.

But over the decades it became clear that there was something deadly in this water. The first reports had come from over the border in India in the 1980s, where tubewells were also common. That something turned out to be arsenic—naturally occurring in many deltaic regions and liberated from under the layers of sediment by the action of constructing a deep bore well. As infant mortality rates were tumbling, millions of people were being slowly poisoned by some of the highest arsenic levels ever recorded in drinking water. While various mitigation measures exist, the scale of the problem has so far defeated a comprehensive solution. Estimates are that 50–80 million people remain affected by what has been described as the world's worst mass chemical poisoning.

It is a terrible story which raises many questions about the project that we call 'development'. Where does accountability for this disaster lie? Could it have been foreseen? Which actors and agencies should take responsibility for resolving it? There are many sober, well-researched accounts of the arsenic situation in Bangladesh. I wanted to tell it differently, to explore these troubling questions through the prism of individual lives, to imagine how characters caught up in this situation in different ways might respond, and to reach audiences beyond academia.

It is these individual and interconnected stories that I tell in my novel *The Inheritance Powder* (2015, 2016)*.* The novel is told from the alternating viewpoints of a visiting British consultant working for a European development agency that wants a grand plan for dealing with the arsenic situation, and a Bangladeshi woman leader of a grass-roots organization that is working to develop local solutions. Their subsequent emotional entanglement throws into painful relief the dilemmas and compromises inherent in their relationship as a consequence of their very different positions in the world of development.

In this chapter, I begin with a general discussion of the role and value of fiction in writing about the world of development and the ways in which its forms of representation both converge and diverge with other modes of development writing. I then move on to discuss some key questions about power, authority, representation, and the positionality of the author, which confronted me in writing my novel. In the final section, I draw on my experience with writing a novel about development to consider relationships between writers, the publishing world, and readers.

#### **Fiction and Non-Fiction in the Writing of Development**

In one of the first scholarly articles on the value of fiction as an important form of development knowledge Lewis et al. (2008, 2014) argue that fiction can sometimes give us a 'better' representation of development realities than academic accounts. They suggest that fiction accomplishes this in two main ways. The first is through exploring the private and informal worlds of people and institutions and giving voice to the experiences and emotions of those who often go unheard. Fiction, they argue, can reveal the complexities that are so often glossed over or selected out of academic accounts.

One example cited is Helen Fielding's debut novel *Cause Celeb*, a satirical comedy about a young Englishwoman who goes to Africa to work in a humanitarian organization involved in famine relief efforts.¹ In a study of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Philippines, Hilhorst argues that Fielding's novel provides the kind of nuanced, behind-the-scenes account of how bureaucracies work and how their clients react to them, which is often missing from development writing about NGOs (cited and discussed in Lewis et al., 2014: 25–6).² Humour, idiosyncrasy, individual characters and their emotions and motivations are of course the very stuff of novels and the material that academic writing is generally obliged to leave out. There are sound research and ethical reasons for much of this. It is unclear, though, why humour—whether as rhetorical device or as subject—is so strikingly absent from works of social science, except perhaps from fear that other social scientists will not take the writer seriously.

The second way in which fiction may provide a more effective representation of development is through its quality of 'being there'. This grounds the reader in rich, multilayered contexts and realities. One might add that it also engages directly with the reader's emotions and empathy. In focusing on the tragedy of one man's rise and downfall against the context of enforced transformation of a society by colonial rule, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's depiction of Igbo society in *Things Fall Apart* (1958 [2006]) carries unique emotional and dramatic, as well as empirical truth.

But the boundary between fiction and non-fiction in writing about development is not a fixed one. As Lewis et al. note, this 'being there' quality has much in common with ethnographic modes of representation which offer 'thick description' of a society and its social relations (2008: 14). Within this methodology, there is room for detail and nuance and multiple stories. Indeed, the anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus go further in arguing that '(ethnography) … is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures …' (1986: 2). This problematizes the boundary still further. Are all accounts of the social in some sense fictions—not in the 'made up' sense—but as constantly contested imaginaries? I will explore this problematic further below in the context of wider questions about power, authority and representation in all forms of 'development' writing.

Writing about development in ways that blur the boundaries between forms and styles of writing is not new. The epistemologies of feminism and participatory approaches, grounded as they are in debates about subjectivity and positionality, have encouraged some social scientists towards greater self-reflection and reflexivity in their writing practice—the 'who am I in this narrative and what is my relation to the subjects of my research?' (Harding, 1988; and for a literary account, see

¹ Fielding is best known as the author of the *Bridget Jones* novels.

² While Hilhorst may be right about the tendency to focus on the normative and the formal rules of organizations in a lot of this writing, this critique does ignore a substantial body of work outside development studies that has centred attention on the informal rules and worlds of organizations. See, for example, Cooperrider et al. (1995).

Lenz, 2004). Equally, they have encouraged the use of personal narratives and testimonies, the giving of voice particularly to the marginalized (e.g. Narayan and colleagues, 2000). More recently, Rosalind Eyben's reflective writing on the experience and dilemmas of being an 'aid professional' (Eyben, 2014) and on what it means to be a feminist in an aid organization (Eyben and Turquet, 2013) draws on some of the techniques of fiction. It uses conversation and personal reflection to open up fresh perspectives on insider–outsider positionality and complex power relationships in the world of development aid.

In their vividness, some ethnographic accounts have much in common with the narratives of fiction. One example is Thomas Belmonte's classic account of an impoverished Neapolitan neighbourhood, which plunges the reader right into its streets and homes (2005 [1979]). Within the increasingly porous borders of fiction, memoirs and 'life writing' genres can provide in-depth understanding of and insights into development processes. One of many great examples of African life writing is the historian Toyin Falola's memoir of his Nigerian childhood (2005).

There are thriving genres of non-fiction writing and reportage that draw on the immediacy of authors' experiences, such as Katherine Boo's account of a Mumbai slum (2012) and the 'literary reportage' of international issues of the acclaimed Polish investigative journalist, Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski (see, for example, *The Shadow of the Sun,* 2001, which reflects on development questions in several countries of sub-Saharan Africa). The ever thriving subgenres of 'travel writing' span a wide range of modalities and styles from the light-hearted holiday account to the 'epic' journey.³ David Lewis has also drawn attention to the 'personalised style and form' of the 'development blockbuster' which relies on simultaneous appeal to the writer's scholarly authority and their individual on-the-spot experience (Lewis, 2014: 11).

So, as Lewis et al. (2014: 21) point out, 'the line between literature and the social sciences becomes a very fine one'. Similarly, when we consider social science research as the predominant form in which development writing appears, the (re)presentation of research is also accomplished through narratives—research is a form of storytelling in the sense that data do not speak for themselves but require selection, interpretation, and crafting into a plausible narrative. This applies particularly but by no means exclusively to qualitative research. These narratives may call on a range of rhetorical devices such as metaphor and the use of the particular to illustrate more general truths. Research also treats subjective experience as an important source of insight. These devices and insights are, of course, at the heart of fiction writing. We are dealing therefore less with a line than with a spectrum of overlapping approaches to style and representation.

³ For a critical appraisal of western travel writing, see Pratt (1992).

It is important also to recognize the links between creative writing and research. Novels often 'contain' considerable research. This is true not only of novels adhering broadly to realist conventions of writing.⁴ Narrative plausibility relies on an implicit pact with the reader that a novel located in a specific place, or time, or event does not violate empirical truth unless for particular creative purposes signalled in the style. There is a difference between importing factual error and engaging in creative licence. The latter is not infinitely elastic. The city of London is not in the south-west of England unless it is an otherwise signalled fictional entity. Errors simply annoy readers who spot them.

In *Mother London* (1988) the novelist Michael Moorcock gives us a London that is simultaneously empirically recognizable as itself and dazzlingly off-kilter. Seen and excavated through three characters who are mental health patients—part of London's floating, marginalized flaneurs—the city becomes mythical, existing more in its network of presumed or real tunnels below the ground and in the congealed history of war-time bombing than in its empirical geography. The 'truthfulness' of London lies in its narratives of dislocation. But a novel like Mother London could only be written by someone with an intimate knowledge of the city and its history and who is self-consciously muddying the common-sense boundaries between fact and fiction.

The novelist J. G Farrell is a writer of particular relevance to the fiction of development. His 'Empire Trilogy' consists of three novels completed in the 1970s. Each focuses on three diverse but critical moments in the decline of the British Empire.⁵ The final one, *The Singapore Grip,* is set in the few months leading up to the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942. On the surface, privileged life in the European enclave continues as usual, despite World War II in Europe and the Sino-Japanese war to the east. The early waves of the dispossessed arriving from China and the Malayan peninsula barely disturb the garden parties of the colony's ruling and business elites. The hierarchy of empire, exemplified in the spatial layout of the colony and in its racial and sexual orders, is intact. But underneath, the old order is being chipped away as global economic and political power shifts.

The novel draws heavily on real events. Farrell further blurs the line between fact and fiction: as well as quotations from contemporary sources such as newspapers, he includes several real historical figures and makes us privy to their (imagined) thoughts. With its long and detailed treatment of the colonial economy of commercial rubber production in Malaya, *The Singapore Grip* can also be read as a shout against political and economic exploitation. Farrell undertook very substantial research and added an afterword on his sources and a long bibliography. Farrell's

⁴ See Head (2002: 2) for an extended discussion of realism in novels: 'the novel, through its ability to fictionalise and reimagine, affords a reinvigorating perspective on the real.'

⁵ *Troubles* (1970), *The Siege of Krishnapur* (1973), *The Singapore Grip* (1978).

Singapore is, however, a gloriously fictional universe. He makes it a city of invented architecture, enabling him to deploy his gifts for the fantastical and the tragi-comic (it is extremely funny) while keeping historical faith with the events that preceded and followed its fall.

This critical distinction between error and invention accompanied me throughout the writing of *The Inheritance Powder.* I was able to draw upon my experience and knowledge of Bangladesh. I have both lived in the country and been involved in research, consultancy, and academic links over several decades. I also researched the arsenic situation extensively. I was clear from the start that I must maintain complete fidelity to the empirical truth of the issue.

This is because it felt to me too serious an issue to tamper with the facts and realities. So every statement that contained a specific fact was checked and rechecked for veracity. The novel is set in 2003, and I was as meticulous as I could be in ensuring that the situation as presented accorded with how it was at that time. This is harder than it first appears. The numbers and the known facts are different now. Other things have changed significantly, such as the means of communication. Then, it was largely faxes and emails. I am still haunted by the thought that there are unwitting anachronisms. I was, I suspect, over-meticulous (or simply being 'true' to my calling as an academic). But if, as a novelist, you decide to take on specialist and technical issues and to anchor your narrative to a specific time, you can expect some of your readers to know more than you do. It feels imperative to respect those readers as well as the reality you are trying to represent.

The novelist Ian MacEwan has perhaps best articulated this challenge for the fiction writer who ventures into specialist areas. In an interview for the New Yorker (Zelewski, 2009), he described how he needs to do field research whenever his characters work in complex areas (he has written novels on topics as diverse as brain surgery, climate change, and law). He further commented that, 'It's worth knowing about ten times as much as you ever use, so you can move freely', a sentiment that many social scientists would identify with. I can testify to this need from the paper and electronic mountains of material I amassed and studied on water engineering, the geology of the Bengal Delta, and the history of arsenic.

I also wanted to convey a real sense of place in my depiction of Bangladesh, to be as faithful as I could to its geographical and social landscapes. I was very conscious that I was writing for different audiences. One is mainly 'western' in that it is written in English and was first published by a UK publisher. This audience is also segmented in that there are readers (particularly in the development studies community) who know Bangladesh and readers who do not. The other audience is Bangladeshis having their country represented back to them by a non-Bangladeshi.

I return below to the larger issues contained in the concepts of representation and audiences, but from the perspective of the kind of story I was telling, this seemed to me to require fidelity to both place and social relations as well as to time and knowledge. Thus, the city of Dhaka appears as itself. It would not have advanced the narrative to make changes to its geographical and social contours. They would simply appear arbitrary. On the other hand, I did invent the district where part of the action takes place, giving it a name ('Shimulganj') which was carefully checked to ensure that it had no actual counterpart. I also located it with deliberate vagueness a few hour's drive from Dhaka city.

This invention was a narrative necessity. Shimulganj is the location of one of my two main characters, Zafirah Rahman, leader of the organization working on local development solutions to the arsenic problem. Her story is very particular and deeply entwined with the history of her activist grandmother who was a prominent figure in the district. I needed an invented space for her story to unfold, unencumbered by concerns that I might be trespassing into the realms of actual places and people. In that sense, the decision was one made specifically with Bangladeshi readers in mind.

The line between fact (in the sense of a generally agreed empirical truth) and invention was thus always at the forefront of the novel's development. I wanted readers to know where the line is drawn, so included a preface making this perhaps pedantically clear. Writers of realist development fiction must also be mindful of the possibility that too close a resemblance to actual people and organizations might incur legal challenge!

But these are choices all fiction writers make. There is nothing intrinsic here to the writing of 'development' fiction. My choice to adhere broadly to realist conventions reflects more my personal disposition and capacities as a writer as well as my reading preference for novels with real world 'stuff ' in them, rather than my training as a social scientist. Development could as well be written as satire or magical realism. Indeed, these modalities—in pointing up absurdities, and using myth and magic to confront political and other forms of denial, would illuminate the project of development in important new ways.⁶

And realism in fiction does not mean a worthy adherence to empirical reality. My novel has a third main character, Arsenic, that stands in a certain way for the limits of human intervention. This imagining of a chemical element as a persona allowed me considerable dramatic licence. In one chapter, the women members of the NGO create a drama for their anniversary day in which they put Arsenic on trial in front of the village court. Their eventual judgement embodies a wisdom that challenges the taken-for-granted technical discourses of the experts.⁷

⁶ In these senses, the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez can be seen as a major commentator on Latin American forms of 'development'.

⁷ For social scientists, there are parallels here with Latour's sociological extension of the concept of 'actants' to things as a way of breaking down what he sees as the artificial distinction between human and technical ways of acting in/on the social universe. Agency can also be invested in objects (Latour, 2005).

I have drawn attention to the ways in which fiction and non-fiction modes of writing about development overlap, particularly in their narrative styles and often common reliance on research. I have also noted the epistemological fluidity of the boundary in terms of the kinds of truths that both forms of writing may be seen to represent. Nonetheless, I would argue that critical differences remain between fictional and non-fictional endeavours. In relation to the role of research, for example, novels are often 'researched' but they are not social science texts, or ethnographies, or attempting to be authoritative accounts of their subject matter. While I have noted the tacit rules and conventions in fiction writing regarding the difference between invention and error, research is always in service to the narrative, not the other way round.

When I was writing the novel, one of the hardest things was having to constantly jettison my own research knowledge, to remove the didacticism that would keep intruding into the narrative and the material that did not advance the story. This may serve as a general warning to social scientists who turn to fiction writing. A novel is not primarily about informing or improving the reader's specialist knowledge. It is about telling stories. I would nevertheless agree with the literary critic John Sutherland on the important role that novels can play in democratizing specialist knowledge and that: 'Fiction can make us better, or at least, better informed citizens' (2007: 257).

What is refreshing about writing a novel is that the novelist is under no obligation to be 'fair' or to render interpretative judgement based on a careful weighing of evidence. Fiction is not required to meet the canon of 'balanced reporting'. On the contrary, fiction allows and frequently foregrounds the outrageous and the controversial and gives voice to societies' rogues and outlaws and bigots. In their conclusion to the earlier volume in this series, Lewis et al. suggest that a critical role for popular representations of development is to articulate otherwise unacceptable views that may equally come from professional 'insiders' (2014: 244). One minor but important character in my novel—an old (and white, male) development hand—consistently punctures the pious tendencies of the main male protagonist with his robust commentary on the failings of the aid industry and the queasy compromises that working in it so often entail. For an applied social scientist in particular, there is relief in escaping from the straightjacket of the normative, to be able to create characters that are wilfully subversive and politically 'incorrect'.

Lewis et al. (2014: 27) refer to 'the freedom of fabrication' that fiction offers. This is not a freedom without limits. As I have argued, fiction also has its rules and conventions. But in letting the imagination off the leash, fiction opens up the everyday world in uniquely different ways. Fictional characters can be cynical, deluded, inadequate, foulmouthed, and have bad consciences or no consciences. These same characters can at the same time be sympathetic and heroic. The best characters are always the flawed ones, the ones whose lives veer off-course in unexpected ways. Fiction thrives on contrariness.

Unlike social science, fiction privileges the irrelevant, the individual, the playful, and the particular. Characters become known by their tics and idiosyncrasies. In a wonderful piece of sustained metaphorical writing in *The Singapore Grip,* Farrell gives much space to an ill-favoured, diseased stray spaniel which resists all attempts at humane 'disposal', cropping up in all kinds of unlikely places and finally getting itself onto the last ship to leave Singapore before the Japanese invasion. Someone nicknames the animal 'The Human Condition'.

Through its concern with emotional truths and truths of the imaginary, fiction amplifies interpretational possibilities. By unfettering us from the literal and empirical, it allows the imagination to roam through places that we may think we know until that familiarity is unsettled or upended by a different narrative. In its exploration of character and motivation, fiction invites us into our own interior worlds, into our dreams and desires, our secret fears and personal failures. We identify with characters even while finding them unlikeable.

I would argue therefore that the differences between fiction and non-fiction lie less in narrative forms and styles and more in what fiction 'does' and how this 'doing' arises from its relationship with audiences of readers. Freedom of fabrication is part of, and dependent on, unspoken pacts with readers. Novels are 'read' differently, not just through the willing suspension of disbelief that they require but also through the different sensibilities that they invoke. Nabokov's *Lolita* is not a manual on paedophilia.⁸

However, this freedom is not insulated from wider questions about power, authority, and positionality in representation. In an essay on exile, the writer Leon Edel argued powerfully that, 'One's citizenship in literary discourse is determined … by the landscape of the imagination' (1982: 50). But neither citizenship nor landscapes are neutral zones. Edel's vision is a contested one at given historical and political moments. I turn now to how these issues played out for me in the writing of *The Inheritance Powder*.

#### **Representing 'Development': Writing Ourselves and Others**

When I first conceived of my novel, it had one central character from whose point of view the story was to be told. This was a British economist called Carl Simonovsky from a London-based research institute, who is visiting Bangladesh for the first time. He is first and most obviously an outsider and 'Bangladesh' is thus filtered through his vision and consciousness. As I wanted the novel to speak

⁸ I am aware that there may well be readers who would make that claim or view it as such, but even if such a view is granted validity, it is arguably incidental.

also to issues of identity in a globalized world, I made his origins deliberately ambiguous. But as the novel progressed, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the restrictions that this format imposed. I felt it lacked any counterweight or challenge to the naive outsider's point of view. Furthermore, I was finding him hard to write and I was particularly troubled by a sense in which I felt the novel risked repeating hackneyed tropes about ignorant foreigners and 'bumbling Brits abroad'.

I realized that I wanted to write a counterpart point of view, and that the obvious contender was the woman with whom he falls in love—Zafirah Rahman, the NGO leader. This would open up a freedom to write from 'within' the context and to make their very different positionalities central to their conflicted relationship. The decision to write this other point of view was itself a conflicted one. Writing Bangladesh through the eyes of a foreigner had enough potential traps and pitfalls. Who was I to presume to write through the consciousness of a Bangladeshi woman? It was a reminder that in terms of the epistemologies of power and representation, the 'development novel' must be considered as part of the broader post-colonial landscape of fiction. It is in this context that I will now discuss both of these point of view challenges in more detail.

The term 'post-colonial' is simultaneously a contested one and one which it is difficult to dispense with, referring as it does both to a particular historical moment in the decolonization of Africa and Asia and to its associated political, economic, and cultural transformations. This corresponds broadly to the second half of the twentieth century. The concept of 'development' takes its current shape in this era, and this is reflected both in the locations that it focuses on and in the epistemologies of change which underlie its visions (see Eckert et al., 2010).

Definitions of post-colonial tend to be either spatial–temporal—focused on specific societies in a particular time period, or representational—based on the intersections of imperial power relations with language, text, or practice in colonial/post-colonial settings (Ashcroft et al., 1989; McLeod, 2000 [2010]). From a literary perspective, this latter understanding is more fruitful. It opens up to scrutiny the multiple forms within which power plays out textually in a whole range of cultural media. 'Othering' is one of the major tropes through which colonial/post-colonial discourses are enacted in fiction. In *Orientalism* (1979) Edward Said argues that the West has inscribed a homogeneous otherness onto its colonized spaces. They are not so much places as repositories of the fantasies and projections of the colonizer. A second, and related trope, is exoticization. Huggan describes this as 'an aestheticising process through which the cultural other is translated, relayed back through the familiar' (2001: ix–x).

A third way in which power relations are inscribed in literary text—and of particular relevance to my own writing practice—is resistance to and reappropriation of the terms of representation (see for example. Spurr, 1993; Cohn, 1996; Ashcroft et al., 1989). Edward Said, in asserting the right of the formerly colonized to represent themselves, notes: 'it is sometimes of paramount importance not so much what is said, but who speaks' (2001: 244). In this assertion, Said brings us up sharply against the reasons why Leon Edel's (1982) vision of an unbounded literary citizenship of the imagination is a contested one at certain historical and political moments. For 'representation' is not a neutral term.

Derek Attridge argues that the capacity to represent an 'other' in relation to oneself is intrinsic to the creative process and is 'something that is brought into being by an act of inventive writing' (2004: 29). But where the representation of self and otherness is tied to contexts of oppression it runs the risk of both exoticization and appropriation. It can misrepresent and disempower the other in claiming to 'speak for' their reality. This broader politics of representation was an ever-present accompaniment to the writing of my novel. It has important analogues with writing about international development and the sensitivity, for instance, around matters of authorship and co-authorship of academic papers—an issue that I was acutely aware of through long engagement in international research programmes with partners from the Global South.

An important exemplar of the politics of representation is the (white) British author Joyce Cary's novel *Mister Johnson* (1939 [2009]). This was written, unusually, from an 'African' point of view though the novel is also peopled by stock expatriate character types. Mr Johnson is a comic figure, a low-level clerk in the colonial apparatus. It is this novel that is said to have provoked Chinua Achebe to write his famous African trilogy, as a riposte to Cary's representation of Africans which he found offensively superficial (Slattery, 2010).

These are traps for the unwary writer, raising thorny questions about what is being represented and by whom. To make progress with my novel, I needed to explore these issues in more depth in order to feel creatively 'comfortable' with both of my point of view characters. I therefore wrote my creative writing Masters dissertation (2012) (*Only clowns, dupes or saviours? Writing 'ourselves' back into the postcolonial world*) around this central dilemma of representation.

In examining twentieth-century novels by white British authors that focused on encounters between expatriates and colonial/post-colonial settings, I found an interesting divide that appeared to open up as the century progressed. Up until the 1960s, it is not difficult to name internationalist writers who used such settings to explore wide-ranging ethical, moral, and political dilemmas. Writers such as E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, and J. G. Farrell all wrote substantially and often critically on the relationships between Europeans and 'others'. While they have not always escaped critique from the standpoint of subsequent post-colonial reassessments,⁹ this does not detract from their literary and thematic boldness.

In contrast, my review of those novels from white British authors that have ventured into 'post-colonial' settings since the 1970s found few that take on significant

⁹ See e.g. Salman Rushdie's harsh verdict (1984) on Paul Scott's *Raj Quartet*.

social and political issues through the phenomenon of the transcultural encounter. Rather, 'Brits abroad' became increasingly the province of genre fiction. Novels took the form either of comedies or of thrillers. In representational terms, expatriates are either clownish or victims of sinister plots. Paradigmatic examples are William Boyd's (1981) *A Good Man in Africa* (comically unsavoury British diplomats make mischief in a comically unsavoury fictionalized African country), and John Le Carré's (2001) *The Constant Gardener* (self-sacrificing expatriates take on evil local and international forces of big business in Kenya). This, I realized, was at the source of some of my early discomfort with my white British male protagonist.

A third type, which can cut across these two, is the 'white saviour' novel, in which the expatriate becomes the fulcrum for improving the lot of the local population. Helen Fielding's comic heroine in *Cause Celeb* (1994 [2002]), undertaking voluntary work in an African refugee camp, calls in her rich and famous London friends to save the refugees from famine. In each of these genres or types, expatriates perform the roles of clowns, dupes, and/or saviours. As the writer Teju Cole (2012), among others, notes—the effect of these tropes is to reinforce a Europe-centred view of the world. There is, I concluded, something of a crisis of representation among 'white' fiction writers engaging with the post-colonial world.

There are many reasons for this. The end of empire brought the loss of a coherent narrative of power within which Europeans had held the authoritative place. For the (white) British writer in the decolonizing century representational options narrow once the British are no longer the orchestrators of action in the colonies. Critiques of the English novel in the post-war period have pointed to a sense of insularity and parochialism in its themes, a turning inwards to local concerns in the context of the post-war social contract (summarized in Head, 2002). Post-colonial voices have increasingly filled the literary space in terms of alternative narratives of empire and post-colonial power relations.

These diminished forms of representation can be seen to reflect a crisis of identity (how do we think about ourselves as Britons/Europeans in the post-colonial world?) which is linked to an awkwardness with colonial legacy. Comedies and thrillers, with their distancing devices of the comic expatriate abroad or the victim of sinister plots and forces, provide convenient modes for circumventing engagement with the complexities of this legacy and its implications for the politics and performance of identity.¹⁰ But the anthropologist Benoit de l'Estoile points to the multiplicity of ways in which the colonial past is inscribed in the present, continuing to shape encounters and relationships across continents, while 'their meaning is actively reinterpreted and renegotiated' (2008: 277).

¹⁰ They are essentially tropes of 'innocence' that bring to mind Graham Greene's (albeit now insensitive) warning in *The Quiet American*: 'Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm' (2004: 29).

This fertile terrain for novelists has largely remained the province of (nonwhite) post-colonial writers. From the 1950s onwards, the empire itself was increasingly 'writing back'¹¹ as novelists of, or with a heritage in, those countries became the accepted literary voices for post-colonial settings. This has almost certainly led to some abdication of the territory by white writers, due particularly to nervousness about charges of neocolonialism through appropriation of the experience of the 'other.' In a *Guardian* interview, the novelist Philip Hensher described how his grant application to write about an Indian painter of miniatures was questioned by 'an academic who wrote an angry letter saying that this person should not write novels about India because he is not Indian' (Wroe, 2012).

Post-colonial critiques of representation have perhaps unwittingly placed the white metropolitan writer in an impossible bind. If writing which explores the experience of the 'other'¹² but is not written by that other risks being culturally embargoed, it severely limits the creative space. Any sense of the other becomes tainted by its authorship.

In the framing of both of my central characters, therefore, the representational dilemmas that I experienced were rooted in the challenges of writing in the historical moment loosely described as 'post-colonial.' The decision to move from a single, external point of view to a structure which interweaves a 'British' and a 'Bangladeshi' viewpoint needed much self-reflection. But so, equally, did writing a 'British' character in a post-colonial setting.

I found three recent developments and ways of thinking important in working through these dilemmas. First, I was influenced by reading post-colonial writers who have written British point of view characters into their novels in nuanced, reflective ways. Examples are Chimamanda Adichie in *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2009) (set in southern Nigeria), where the boyfriend of a key character is a young British historian; and Aminatta Forna in *The Memory of Love* (2011) (set in Sierra Leone), in which a British psychiatrist becomes involved in post-conflict mentalhealth care. This felt like a moving on, a shifting of the representational terrain: a 'permission', almost.

Second, and relatedly, was a sense that, in this (relatively) new century, writers have different realities to explore and negotiate. In a globalized world with ever increasing migrations, individual and collective lives are shaped by the intersections between new forms of connectedness, by the hybridization of identities, and the blurring of cultural boundaries.¹³ As two contemporary scholars of transnational

¹¹ The phrase 'the empire writes back' was coined by Salman Rushdie (1982) to refer to a revisioning of colonial texts and a repositioning of voices in the telling of post-colonial experience (see Ashcroft et al. 1989: 32).

¹² To write from an expatriate viewpoint is necessarily to speak of the 'other' in relation to that viewpoint, even through silence.

¹³ For a non-fiction exploration of expatriation against this changing context, see Fechkter andWalsh (2012).

English fiction argue: 'there is no longer anything *absolutely foreign*. Accordingly, there is no longer anything *exclusively one's own,* either' (Schulze-Engler and Helff, 2009: 7, emphasis in the original). I became increasingly concerned to explore my characters' commonalities, making them boundary crossers whose passports fully define neither their identities nor the space called 'home'.

Third, it helps to keep in mind two simultaneous and seemingly contradictory things—that the positionality and self-reflectiveness of the writer matter to interpretation and that the text has a life of its own and is subject constantly to rereading. In testing the limits and possibilities of literary citizenship, therefore, the context of representation will always matter but will never be all-determining. All readings and literary labels are inherently unstable and subject to multiple forms of appropriation and re-appropriation by different audiences at different times. None of my readers so far has raised an objection of the kind that most concerned me—that I have used a privileged outsider's position to appropriate another reality. But that leads into my final section on the interfaces between writers, publishers, and readers.

#### **The Hard World of Publishing and Finding an Audience for 'Development' Fiction**

The writing of any novel is a complex and often tortuous journey from having an idea and a compulsion to having a completed manuscript. Most ideas never get to final execution, and the vast majority of finished manuscripts does not get published. Of the few that do, sales in most cases are very small (Piersanti, 2020). This is particularly true for first-time authors with no reputation to trade on, and with manuscripts that do not fit any obvious category—or worse—are consigned to the barely read zone of 'literary fiction'.

This reflects the changes that have taken place in publishing over the last few decades. In *Merchants of Culture,*Thompson (2010) points to several factors which have produced a very different industry in the twenty-first century. These include mergers of smaller publishing houses into large conglomerates and a focus on the publishing and marketing of a narrow range of commercial bestsellers in order to make publishing 'pay' while book sales decline. This has come at the expense of diversity and books that have merit but are only ever going to achieve modest sales. At the same time, the digital revolution has opened up self-publishing and other forms of hybrid publishing as a viable route for authors either struggling to break into traditional publishing or actively choosing to take control of their own distribution and marketing. So, over the last decades, the number of books actually published has grown exponentially. According to a newspaper article, 'UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour over the course of 2014, meaning that the country published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world' (Flood, 2014). The irony is that fewer and fewer of these books get noticed, purchased, and read, in either print or electronic form. Without the marketing power of the large conglomerates behind them, authors are lucky if they earn back their modest advances for the publisher.

What does this mean for trying to get a 'development' novel into print? First, there is no such concept or genre in mainstream publishing. A novel about development has to conform in some way to the categories that the market recognizes. One of the first questions an agent asks is 'What is it like?' In order for it to be pitched to a publisher, it has to have a recognizable market. This means finding books that it can be compared with. This gave me a lot of problems as I struggled to think of any. Pitches to agents and publishers also have to be crafted with this highly competitive market in mind. The ten-word pitch is normal, as is the one paragraph summary. For social scientists whose lives are dedicated to the complexity principle, these marketing devices can feel akin to a violation.

*The Inheritance Powder* did attract some interest from literary agents. One agent from quite a prestigious London agency expressed a strong interest. But it became clear he was looking for a thriller, a new version of *The Constant Gardener*. He also wanted me to remove the female point of view character as he was only interested in the 'outsider's' narrative. My description of the novel as an ambivalent postcolonial love story ticked no genre boxes for him. Another commended me on my writing style and said she would be delighted to read a different novel from me. However, she would not want to take on *The Inheritance Powder* as she was looking for books written from an 'authentic' point of view rather than that of an 'outsider'. Both of these ostensibly contrasting responses have strong echoes in my exploration of the challenges of writing such a novel in the long shadow of post-colonial literary criticism and the ways in which this has become refracted in publishing discourse.

'Development', it turned out, was not a saleable concept for commercial publishing. Another agent put it bluntly: 'Who is interested in novels about international development?' The only sensible advice to anyone contemplating writing a development novel is to write anyway but without expectation. Eventually it found a UK home with a small, new, independent publisher whose business model is realistic about the market for unknown authors of niche books. This left me with a further dilemma. Although it meant that the novel was available worldwide via Amazon and other global distribution platforms, this requires purchasers to have access to the means to pay, such as an international credit card. This ruled out many potential readers in Bangladesh. In 2016, following discussions between RedDoor the UK publisher, and UPL, the main publisher of English language books in Dhaka, UPL negotiated the rights to publish and distribute it for the South and South-East Asia region. This edition was launched at the Dhaka Lit Fest in November 2016.

#### **Conclusion**

Who are the readers and how have they responded? For the most part, readers have come from the development community itself—at least judging from most of the reviews on my Amazon author's page and to an extent from Goodreads.¹⁴ Of course, family and friends have kindly bought it and told their friends about it. But amid the deluge of fiction now available, book sales require a huge and continuous marketing effort by authors themselves, and it is surprisingly difficult to get feedback beyond the small circle of known readers. The marketing strategy with my publisher has focused particularly on development studies academics and students. What I had not factored into this is the fact that students no longer buy books and that, despite encouraging emails from course tutors and one request to talk to a development studies department, the teaching of fiction in development studies course programmes remains a minor enthusiasm. I suspect this reflects the sheer volume of topics and material that programme convenors feel they already need to cover.

Much feedback to authors is informal and personal ('just read your novel, loved it'). Those who do not love it probably keep quiet. The main source of formal reader feedback comes from big sites like Amazon and Goodreads author pages. Responses on those pages from 'expert' readers (i.e. those working in international development or familiar with Bangladesh) have been very favourable, to quote from a few:

'If you have lived in Bangladesh and worked in the development sector as I have, then reading (this) novel is like your life flashing in front of you.'

'This book should be required reading for anyone who aspires to work in development, join the Peace Corps, attempt to save the world.'

'Having worked for NGOs, government and the UN, I recognize many of the distortions, disillusionment, delays and dilemmas of development which the author portrays. As a development professional and trained anthropologist, she distils her experience well into the feel of "being there".'

For balance, I should add that my only two-star rating is from someone with a background in development and Bangladesh, who did not otherwise leave a comment. But in personal conversation they were most concerned with trying to work out 'who' my characters were 'really', and unconvinced by my categorical statement that no-one in the book is based on an actual person.

Reviewers also commented favourably on the portrayal of the country:

'It's easy to almost feel the sights and sounds of Bangladesh as you read.'

'I have not visited Bangladesh, but a sense of place shone through.'

¹⁴ These are generally complimentary, with an overall rating of 4.5 stars from 26 reviews on Amazon and 4.1 from 12 reviews on Goodreads.

'Where an author is writing from their own experience the resulting book normally oozes with authenticity and that is certainly the case with *The Inheritance Powder*.'

'It's so rare to get a book set in Bangladesh and she depicted the country with such insight and humour.'

There have also been very favourable reviews from readers who do not have a development or Bangladesh background:

'Great to read a novel which brings another part of the world to my door and tells me about an issue which I had never heard of previously. I really enjoy learning about history and the world when reading fiction.'

'This is a very easy to read novel and for me it is a huge plus that it is also very informative.'

'I found this novel gave a fascinating insight into Bangladesh, a country I have never visited, and the labyrinthine world of international aid.'

Gauging the response of Bangladeshi readers is somewhat harder as not many reviews have appeared, and there is no equivalent to Amazon for readers to post comments. But my author's public Facebook page has over 600 'likes', which are overwhelmingly from Bangladeshi Facebook users, though I have no way of knowing how this translates into actual readers. I have also been contacted by journalists in Bangladesh and Hong Kong, concerned to engage with the subject matter. One interesting reaction from Bangladeshi readers known to me personally has been to express gratitude that the 'story' of arsenic has been told. No-one so far has raised any concerns about representation and appropriation. At the launch of the Bangladesh edition at the Dhaka Lit Fest in 2016, audience questions focused for the most part on the substantive issues that the book raised. I feel that this provides some empirical support to my process of reflection on Edel's (1982) 'citizenship of the imagination', that issues of power and representation are a constantly shifting political terrain. Finally, to my relief, no-one has yet contacted me to point out any embarrassing factual errors.

#### **References**

Achebe, C. (1958 [2006]) *Things Fall Apart*. London: Penguin Classics.

Adichie, C. Ngozi (2009) *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2nd edn). London: Fourth Estate.

Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin (1989) *The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures*. London and New York: Routledge.

Attridge, D. (2004) *The Singularity of Literature*. London: Routledge.

Belmonte, T. (2005 [1979]) *The Broken Fountain* (25th anniversary edn). New York: Columbia University Press.

### PART II ADVOC AC Y

### **From Poverty to Power**

A Blogger's Story

*Duncan Green, with Maria Faciolince*

#### **Introduction**

As Ryan Manning (2014) wrote in the precursor volume to this book, *Popular Representations of Development* (Lewis et al., 2014: 213),

recent years have seen an explosion of Internet-based communication and publishing forums, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to more traditional websites. These have dramatically lowered the barriers to producing and distributing content, and people can now easily share information, experiences, perspectives, artwork, and almost anything else with their fellow Internet users around the world. Some decry this proliferation of online publishing as chaotic, overwhelming, rife with minutiae, and lacking in standards. Others claim it heralds the emergence of a more democratic, inclusive world of free speech, public debate, open exchange of knowledge, and global collaboration.

The *From Poverty to Power* (FP2P) weblog was part of this dynamic explosion of web-based communication. It went live in July 2008, as part of the promotion for my new book, *From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World* (Green, 2008). It rapidly took on a life of its own, becoming one of the most widely read blogs on international development. This chapter explores the evolution of FP2P, how blogging compares with other representations of development, and the challenges of blogging within a large bureaucratic institution. It draws potential lessons for both academic and NGO blogging.

#### **The Weblog (Blog) FP2P**

As an erstwhile journalist and wordsmith, I took to the blogging format immediately, and early posts show that the blog rapidly settled down into a format which more or less continues to this day: comments on events—this being 2008, 'How will the meltdown affect development?';¹reviews of new publications ('Does Grassroots Activism Work? Two new collections of case studies');² curtain raisers for important events ('What Happened at the G20 Summit on Saturday?')³ tips for NGO activists ('Killer Facts: a User's Guide'),⁴ discussions of 'big ideas' ('Will we ever be able to talk about limits to growth?'),⁵ and the introduction of a more personal touch ('I just read four novels in a row').⁶

Over the last 11 years, the blog has evolved into something akin to an international community with shared interests and values, engaging in conversations on a daily basis. Blogging enables a timely discussion of a new or breaking issue or event, with more depth than other social media like Twitter. The exchanges are often intense, and both intellectual and emotional—bumping into regular participants in the flesh at conferences or on field trips is like an encounter with an old friend (or occasionally the opposite). It is both more democratic than many more conventional NGO and academic fora, and yet not democratic enough—a point discussed later in this chapter—but it has become one of the most rewarding parts of my current role at Oxfam.⁷

Over time, FP2P has made greater use of guest posts, with my role often being as much that of editor/curator, as of sole author. The blog has also run some fifty reader polls. In 2012, it added an active Twitter account, which both promotes and feeds off the blog. At the time of writing @fp2p has about 40,000 followers, high by the standards of the aid industry. I have also experimented with vlogging⁸ (short video blogs), audio (summaries and podcast interviews),⁹ and debates between high profile protagonists on controversial issues such as the role of evidence,¹⁰ or private education.¹¹

Rising visibility ensured that what had initially been a short-term promotional exercise was recognized as a useful part of my day job (as Head of Research, and subsequently as Oxfam's Senior Strategic Adviser), accounting for approximately 10 paid hours per week (and doubtless a few unpaid ones too). Most recently, the blog has also attracted funding from two US foundations to enable it to run the

¹ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/how-will-the-meltdown-affect-development/.

² Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/does-grassroots-activism-work-two-new-collections-ofcase-studies/

³ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-happened-at-the-g20-summit-on-saturday/.

⁴ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/killer-facts-a-users-guide/.

⁵ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/will-we-ever-be-able-to-talk-about-limits-to-growth/.

⁶ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/i-just-read-four-novels-in-a-row/

⁷ For more on the motives and experiences of development bloggers, see Denskus and Papan (2013).

⁸ Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUCftgsFVGiAihCJu-HhR4dQ &v=ZiI2Aq2HG7Y.

⁹ Available at https://open.spotify.com/show/5db71I4MLaABZmQBInBhy3.

¹⁰ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/the-evidence-debate-continues-chris-whitty-andstefan-dercon-respond/.

¹¹ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/education-wonkwar-the-final-salvo-kevin-watkinsresponds-to-justin-sandefur-on-public-v-private-and-the-reader-poll-is-still-open/.

#PowerShifts project to raise voices and issues from the Global South, discussed in more detail below.

According to Wordpress, the platform on which FP2P appears, at the time of writing (September 2019), FP2P had hosted over 2,700 posts, and 13,000 reader comments (an average of 5 per post). At a typical word length of 800–1000 words per post, that comes to well over 2 million words, the equivalent of several academic volumes.

#### **Readership and Impact**

Data on readership is available from Google Analytics, which measures the numbers of direct hits on the site (though not reposts, excerpts, etc). After a slow start of fewer than 14,000 'unique visitors' (UVs)¹² in its first six months, traffic increased steadily for the first four years, and since late 2012, has fluctuated around an average of 30,000 UVs per month. Google Analytics provides some information on the location of readers. The most recent summary on FP2P (of data for 2018, Table 5.1)¹³ shows that just over 40 per cent of its 330,000 UVs were based in the UK and US, with no other country exceeding 6 per cent of readership. Only three developing countries appeared in the top ten. Those used to academic download numbers will probably see these figures as high, while anyone from traditional print media outlets such as newspapers and magazines will find them strikingly low. The truth (at least in the case of FP2P) is that the blog has provided a platform for a specialist conversation with a relatively narrow, but global, readership.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most-read post over the 11 years of FP2P is a country specific post about climate change in South Africa¹⁴—I presume it is on a large reading list somewhere, but have been unable to track it down. Other 'greatest hits' include a 'funny': 'What Brits Say v What They Mean'¹⁵ circulated endlessly on social media. The other most-read FP2P posts give a good sense of the breadth and randomness of the internet. They include practical/self-help advice posts ('How to get a PhD in a year without giving up the day job',¹⁶) the controversial ('How

¹² The term 'unique visitors' refers to the number of distinct individuals (or more accurately, IP addresses—individuals using more than one device will register multiple times) visiting a website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit.

¹³ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/2018-fp2p-report-back-stats-most-read-posts-andsome-big-plans-for-2019/.

¹⁴ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/how-is-climate-change-affecting-south-africa/.

¹⁵ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-brits-say-v-what-they-mean-now-with-authorcredit/.

¹⁶ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/how-to-get-a-phd-in-a-year-and-still-do-the-day-job/.

*Source:* Google Analytics

much should charity bosses be paid?'¹⁷), and the campaign polemic (comparing country GDPs to the turnovers of the largest global corporations¹⁸).

Readers arrive at the blog through a number of channels. Around 7,000 people receive daily email notifications of new posts, while some 3,000 have signed up via the popular Feedly RSS feed.¹⁹ The most recent survey of FP2P readers comes from 2017.²⁰ Based on approximately 350 responses to an online survey, roughly 40 per cent of the readers worked for NGOs. A further 18 per cent were academics and students, and 13 per cent came from government or multilateral organizations, suggesting a fairly specialized development sector audience.

Readership is, of course, not the same as impact (on discourse, policy, or practice), and here the evidence is much patchier. It is hard to pick out any one post as having had more influence than others. Instead, the impact appears to be cumulative, based on multiple posts exploring a range of themes that have evolved with my own interests and in response to external events. Threads of posts in the early years concentrated on the developmental impact of the global financial crisis, subsequently moving on to inequality and, most recently, governance and theories of change. It is these extended conversations that appear to have most resonance.

¹⁷ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/ok-so-how-much-should-charity-bosses-be-paid-plusyour-chance-to-vote/.

¹⁸ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/the-worlds-top-100-economies-31-countries-69 corporations/.

¹⁹ Available at https://feedly.com., RSS (rich site summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs, and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS feed to whoever wants it.

²⁰ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/survey-results-who-reads-fp2p-what-jobs-do-you-dohow-would-you-like-to-improve-it/.

As far as I know, the only independent evidence that goes beyond the anecdotal is from a 2012 report on attitudes among 'influentials' in US, UK, China, France, and Germany (Intermedia, 2012). This involved a survey of 3,984 'interested citizens' in the UK, France, Germany, China, and the US, along with in-depth interviews of 88 'Influentials' across China, France, Germany, the UK, and the US, and 40 government decision makers in the UK, France, Germany, and the US.

The study identified FP2P as among the five most influential blogs on international development among 'influentials' in the UK, France, and Germany (though not the US and China), and among government officials in the UK. Interestingly it also drew a distinction between 'institutional' bloggers linked to a recognized organization (such as FP2P/Oxfam) and unaffiliated individual bloggers, finding 'Blogs sponsored by recognized institutions are popular, including those run by recognized development NGOs (e.g. Oxfam) and multilateral funders/agencies (e.g. the World Bank). Among new generation influentials, institutional bloggers appear to have much stronger links to government decision-makers than independent bloggers' (pp. 8, 28). I return to this issue below.

#### Swimming Pool-Gate and Bringing Internal Aid Debates to Life

The 'Nairobi Swimming Pool' post²¹ has become somewhat notorious in the aid sector, illustrating both the reach and risks of blogging. It became a case study in Rosalind Eyben's (2014) book *International Aid and the Making of a Better World*. Its popularity lay in exposing the kind of difficult decisions and dilemmas that are a regular occurrence in aid work, but are seldom discussed in public.

Nairobi is a major NGO hub, currently the epicentre of the drought relief effort, and Oxfam's regional office realized some years ago that we could save a pile of money if we ran our own guesthouse, rather than park the numerous visitors in over-priced hotels. It's nothing fancy, definitely wouldn't get many stars, but it's much more relaxed than a hotel.

But there's a problem. As a large converted house in a nice part of town, and like most such houses in Nairobi, it has a swimming pool. But the swimming pool is covered over and closed, even though it would be cheap to keep it open. Why? Reputational risk—back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam's big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it. It didn't help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website …

²¹ Available at https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/the-great-nairobi-guesthouse-swimming-pooldilemma-cast-your-vote-now/.

On my recent stay at the guesthouse, I asked everyone I met there and whether African or expat, they all said it makes sense to open the pool. Exhausted aid workers arrive hot and dusty from remote areas of East Africa for some R&R, but there's no chance of a refreshing swim. I need my exercise so had to go running instead—the combination of altitude, hills and choking traffic fumes nearly killed me.

On the other hand, there's no denying that most of our supporters back in the UK, let alone the people we are working to help, are not likely to have access to a pool in their back yard, so why should aid workers get special treatment?

So what do you think? Should Oxfam open the pool and take any bad publicity on the chin, or should we stop whining? It would probably cost about \$200-300 a month to keep the pool open—if we could find a way to do it without creating an accounting nightmare, we could probably raise that from contributions from guests, and even have money to spare to plough back into Oxfam programmes.

The post sparked record numbers of comments (89 to date) and votes. Of 800 people who took part in the poll, 75 per cent urged Oxfam to reopen the pool, while only 7 per cent argued for keeping it shut. However, the post itself became part of the problem, when it was picked up by anti-aid journalist Ian Birrell in an article in *The Spectator,*²² which argued that 'Mr Green's blog highlighted the contortions of a thriving industry that would go out of business if it succeeded in its stated aims'. In the middle of a famine response in East Africa, overworked Oxfam press officers were forced to handle enquiries from journalists about the Great Swimming Pool Debate. I had to apologize to them, and the pool remained closed.

#### **Tapping into the Zeitgeist: Sausagefest**