In a Slate magazine essay over a decade ago, Katy Waldman described non-fiction as “the patriarch of literary genres”. While the literary landscape has shifted since then, much non-fiction still carries a whiff of authoritative objectivity and dominance, whether earned or not.
In this scenario, the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is a welcome development. The six titles on the shortlist are distinguished by an intimate, introspective approach that in no way minimises the treatment of their subjects. They offer original perspectives on subjects like online polarisation, Artificial Intelligence, enslavement, and the lingering shadows of family ties.
Many of the books are memoiristic, some more than others. For instance, Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place is woven around walks through Britain’s flatlands, during which she recounts childhood experiences in Lahore and her experience of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. “Flat landscapes,” she writes, “had always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me”.
Masud’s prose unpacks a conflicted relationship with an overbearing father and comes to terms with landscapes within and without. The combination of “complete exposure and complete withholding,” she feels, “asks us to accept that there are things we’ll never understand”.
‘River of memories’
A tumultuous childhood and domineering father are also at the heart of Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, an account of her Rastafarian upbringing in Jamaica. Sinclair plunges into a river of memories, following the people, places, and events that shaped her life. Context is crucial: she examines Jamaica’s colonial relationship to Britain, and Rastafarianism’s form of political resistance. These currents shaped her circumstances until one night when, “under a borrowed moon, I discovered that a poem was order. It was certainty. And, for the first time, it seemed possible for me to write my way out.”
Memories of a father also play a role in Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap, a singular perspective on art and how we react to it. The title refers to a gunpowder explosion in October 1654 that devastated the Dutch city of Delft and killed, among others, the 32-year-old painter Carel Fabritius.
Cumming uses this incident as a launchpad to explore the lives and works of artists of the Dutch Golden Age as well as her Scottish father, a painter who also died young. The chapters are akin to a series of postcards “about what these painters made of the mysteries of life and art, how and what they taught me to see”.
Survival tales
Looking closely at human artefacts and examining their impact over decades also informs Tiya Miles’s All that She Carried. The primary object here is Ashley’s Sack, a cotton bag made in 19th century America by a Black woman as a parting gift for her nine-year-old daughter about to be sold into slavery. Years later, Ashley’s granddaughter embroidered a message onto the sack about the story of their separation.
In Miles’s hands, the sack symbolises the strength of Black women and the power of everyday objects to tell the stories of those who have been ignored. Her book is a survival tale that uses fabric as a metaphor for “tying, weaving, knotting and binding people together”.
Moving from the 19th and 20th centuries to the 21st, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger deals with the predicament that arose when she began to be mistaken for Naomi Wolf. Klein becomes obsessed with reading about Wolf and her deluded theories, which develops into a consideration of alter egos in film, TV and books, and then to the current climate of competing worldviews and shadow selves online.
“It began to feel as if the forces that have destabilised my world are part of an expansive web of forces that are destabilising our larger world,” Klein writes. “Understanding these forces could hold a key to getting to firmer ground”.
Finally, Madhumita Murgia’s cleverly-titled Code Dependent examines another force shaping our lives, that of Artificial Intelligence. Murgia ventures beyond Silicon Valley to show how scalable systems like machine learning benefit large groups, but tend to work at the expense of individuals and communities “floating in society’s blurry edges, fighting to be seen and heard”.
Her subjects include a doctor in a Maharashtrian village, a food delivery worker in Pittsburgh, an African American engineer, an Iraqi refugee in Sofia, a single mother in Amsterdam, a Chinese activist, and a priest in Rome. Through these real-world encounters, she realises that it is impossible to avoid the elephant in the room: “power is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, who hold all the cards”.
In All that She Carried, Miles writes that we need to escape from frames of mind “that elevate mastery over compassion, division over connection, and greed over care, separating us one from another and locking us in”. In their own ways, that is what all these shortlisted books urge us to do.
The reviewer is a Mumbai-based writer.
