That joke isn't funny anymore

By THEA LENARDUZZI

Last night, in the opulent surroundings of the Commonwealth Foundation’s headquarters, just off Pall Mall, a panel of Commonwealth writers came together, chaired by the Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera, to discuss the place, if indeed there is one, of humour in conflict. The event coincided with the launch of the Foundation’s 10-by-10 Podcasts, a series of ten-minute contributions from writers across the Commonwealth, including Margaret Atwood (Canada), Binyavanga Wainana (Kenya) and Gunesekera himself.

Back in Malborough House, however, Gunesekera was joined by Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese playwright and novelist, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a Ugandan novelist and poet (and the winner of last year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize), and Kei Miller, a Jamaican writer for whom, apparently, “a novelist” is “the worst thing in the world you could be called” – a contentious point to make in a room full of (amateur) novelists. (Miller writes in multiple forms at the same time – “It’s a form of ADD”, he says – poem, essay and novel are in constant rotation on his computer screen.)  His point is rooted in the idea that looking at the world through the lens of any one genre (be it romantic, scientific or otherwise) risks minimizing the complexity of the situation. We also need to dispel the myth that humour cannot carry heft – “there is great terror and profundity to be found in humorous writing”.

For Miller, reality is an endless and contentious discussion which, in his most recent collection of poems The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, takes place between a Rastafarian and a cartographer.  He shows how the early maps of Jamaica are pock-marked with blind spots and “colonial purposes”, creating a landscape in which humour and contention alternate and co-exist. In Poem 10, “in which the cartographer asks for directions”, we hear a virtuoso performance of Jamaican patios which leaves us as bewildered (though laughing) as the poem’s supplicant, while Poem 11, “on the thoughtless ungridded shape of our city”, takes a more accusatory approach. Miller uses mapping as a metonym to shame the cartographer – who here stands for all the supposedly objective “men of science” who colluded in the betrayal of Jamaica. The cartographer's bowing to the colonizers’ desires to avoid the black neighbourhoods on their travels through the city resulted in the long, contorted streets which continue to add hours to the daily grind of modern Jamaicans.  

 

Leila Aboulela is guided more by character, and humour for her is impossible unless there is distance. “If I’m very close to my characters,” she said, “humour is not possible.” By way of example, she talked about The Translator (1999), her semi-autobiographical novel about a young Sudanese woman who moves to Aberdeen (where Aboulela now lives) and finds herself utterly baffled. “I had not meant it to be funny” – and she was surprised when, at a reading attended by Doris Lessing, the British novelist laughed aloud at the character’s struggles. Context and culture is, of course, everything, and some jokes remain untranslatable or invisible to others. (As a general formula, Miller offered “A B C X” – “‘A B C D’ isn’t funny – you need to break the sequence . . . to create tension.”)  

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi related a similar experience of reading to an audience in Kampala. They found her story of a widow who discovers that her husband had another wife hilarious; her listeners in Britain had apparently not. “In Uganda, you need humour; stories need humour – it’s the best way to talk about pain”, she explained. (Later, Makumbi cited A Modest Proposal as an early influence on her writing; “There is normally a grim humour in my writing” – which, to me at least, would suggest it is a perfect fit for British readers.)

As ever with these things, however, there were no answers, nor even a consensus, but rather a proliferation of questions: can humour in writing bring social and political change, or does humorous writing in fact dispel tension, thus preventing further action?  (This, of course, begs the bigger question, “What is the point of writing?”, which Miller, in turn, reformulated as “How can I get you to hear what I am saying?”); how can we control humour – indeed, can it be controlled at all? – in an increasingly globalized (literary) world? Both Makumbi and Aboulela confessed that they could never send up a culture other than their own – “And never the Queen!”, our host tonight, after all; Miller, meanwhile, acknowledged no such limits.