.: The Red Brick – Dubai College's Student Newspaper :.

“It says NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

but it don’t say why…”

In 1999, Simon Armitage was commissioned to write a 1,000-line poem to celebrate the passing of the millennium. Killing Time is the manic countdown to the new millennium as the past twelve months spool past like a newsreel. Armitage’s informal and conversational approach takes a detached stance on events as he refrains from imposing his own opinions on the reader. The understatement of pivotal events undermines expectations of the reader as Armitage emphasises the impact through the nuances and subtleties of their presentation.

Through the use of extended metaphors, Killing Time becomes allegorical as often what is being described means something completely different but could be used as a way of describing the events; for example, the use of floral imagery when describing the Columbus High School massacre could be interpreted as a symbol of the flowers laid outside of the school in grief, or of the innocence of those who committed such an atrocity. The poem is a vision full of humorous and bleaker possibilities, which ranges forwards and backwards through time and space.

By creating a kind of linguistic tension, Armitage comments as much on the reportage of the events in the media as the events themselves as he makes an enquiry into the role of poetry in speaking about public events. In the Age of Communication, Killing Time portrays a world picked clean by a microphone and a camera, where nothing is sacred, secret or even true. By distorting the literal reality, Armitage seems to be questioning whether poetry can reveal unexpected and greater truths than those contained in eye-witness description and conventional comment; it is the function of poetry, in particular, to see the world afresh and to ask different questions. Public poetry should not merely be written to reflect current events or memorialise prominent people but it should in fact, be no different to poetry written from the poet’s own impulses – it should still promote, stimulate and enquire.

Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero

In many ways, Jack is a typical five-year-old: he likes to read books, play games with his Ma and watch TV but not too much as it ‘rots our brains’. Yet Jack is different in a big way… he has lived his entire life in a single room sharing the entire space – just 11 by 11 feet – with his single mother and an unnerving night-time visitor known as Old Nick. The reader knows only what Jack knows, since the novel is strongly planted in the narrative restrictions; thus, the drama is immediate as is the reader’s sense of disorientation over why these characters are confined in this place. The main objects in Room are capitalised – Rug, Bed, Wall – which not only serves to highlight their importance to the narrator but also indicates the way that to Jack, they are named beings. In a world where the only other companion is Ma, Bed is his friend as much as anything else. Through this personification, Jack is able to relate to his world, defining the only world that he knows.

Jack’s days were ‘filled with thousands of things to do’ as for him, life was good purely because he knows nothing else; empty egg shells become a snake when threaded together, toilet rolls become a maze and Physical Education is sometimes Track which goes around Bed from Wardrobe to Lamp. However, for Ma, life is filled with the knowledge of what she is missing outside the room before her captivity. Room presents two different perspectives, two different ways of looking at life. Room is the only world that Jack knows; but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. Room focuses on the relationship between mother and child; the way in which she manages to create a magical childhood for him engenders sympathy in the reader and makes the novel a compelling read.

‘You must feel an almost pathological need-understandably- to stand guard between your son and the world’ says the puffy-hair woman. ‘Yeah, it’s called being a mother’ says Ma 

Emma Donoghue has not been so crass as to make light of their plight; in fact, at times, it is almost impossible not to turn away in horror. When Old Nick comes into the room at night, Ma makes Jack hide in the wardrobe where he hides ‘till he makes that gaspy sound and stops’. Ma even has days where she is ‘gone’ to blank-eyed depression. However, Donoghue explores the indomitability of the human spirit, balancing the grotesque with the uplifting making even the most vile of circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful.

Room is a book about the smallest of worlds, and the biggest. Small ones (such as couples, families, workplaces) have their pleasures as well as their irritations; big ones (cities, nations, the Internet) both attract and alienate. Some days we all feel trapped in our particular life circumstances, and other days we find there is more freedom inside their limits, and room inside our heads, than we ever knew.

(Emma Donoghue)

 Inspired by the likes of Elizabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard – both of whom were held for many years by captors by whom they bore children – Donoghue has explained that to frame the story through a mother’s eyes ‘would be too obviously sad’. Therefore, told entirely in the language of a child, Room is the celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between a parent and a child. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty combined with the determination to live even in the most desolate of circumstances.

It’s a funny thing, but you mention “creative writing” and you can almost see people’s faces fall. I’m not sure what it is- I mean, proper grown-up writers with their names under columns and on the dust-jackets of shiny hard novels don’t get this kind of stigma- but it’s definitely there. You dance? Amazing! You can paint? Paint me something! You can play the flute? How pretty! You write? … and the faces fall and in the awkward silence you can hear their brains whirring as they try and think of something to say.
Maybe it’s because people are scared of bad writing. But when there’s so much of it about (most of the best seller lists seem to be full of badly-written, fast-paced, well-plotted dross) you’d think people might have become immune to dangling clichés, both in construction and plot. You’d also think people would be more willing to read badly-written, fast-paced, well-plotted dross written by somebody they know rather than a stranger. Not at all- though the theory seems to be that if somebody at an editing house/ press office thought it was good enough to stick into print and sling a hard cover at, it’s good enough for me. And like I’ve said- it isn’t. It really isn’t. You can do better than that yourself. But you try, and people will give you that funny look again. (Try it. It’s got a lot in common with other looks- the look that JC people give you when you say you go to DC. The look someone might give you if you owned up to a keen and pressing interest in collecting odd and esoteric objects.)
Maybe it’s because writing is such a solitary thing. You can’t write together- well, you can, but it’s hard to get anything good out of it. Most collaborative writing smacks nastily of School Project- and most of those that require me, at least, to sit down with somebody else and WRITE end up with me and the somebody-else having a stand up row or a sit down gossip, and neither way do we get much done and down. But writing’s boring to watch. A great deal of writers haven’t got a lot to say off the printed page and written word; and a great deal of writers would rather write than talk (that’s why they’re not actors). And people tend to avoid people who are into solitary pursuits. Saying that you, by choice, sit on your own with a pen-and-paper/computer/typewriter /whatever floats your writerly boat is like announcing to the world you’d really rather sit on your own with a pen-and-paper/computer/typewriter /whatever floats your writerly boat THAN TALK TO THEM. Yes, we know that’s not true- but I’m writing an article about creative writing and you’re reading it. Probably on your own. Probably on a computer screen. You can kind of see where they’re coming from. So we’re going to have to do something about that, too.
Maybe it’s because people are scared of the horribly emotional cliché of the Teenage Writer; laboured rhyming couplets that don’t scan and don’t work as a poem. Yes, there’s a fair few bad teenage writers- one quick drag of the internet finds more bad teenage writing than you could ever hope to need- but there’s a fair few amazing teenage writers at all. Though to classify these writers as teenage is demeaning and ridiculous- nobody ever calls Keats a teenage writer (though some of his work definitely fits the stereotype- laboured rhyming couplets that don’t scan- and I may be risking near death from the English department for typing that) and he died at 25. Vast chunks of his poetry were written in that teenage bracket, and he isn’t alone. It’s the job of this little quarter of the magazine (eighth, sixteenth, maybe even 32th now, in these busy busy technological days) to weed out the bad, and fill it with writing above and Keats. Writing that will defy the stereotype. Writing that will change the minds behind all those looks.
So let’s start now. If you’re in the creative writing section, chances are you’ve got a passing interest in creative writing. So we’re going to do this together. What are we going to do? We’re going to, in Dubai College at least, attempt to change the way people look at creative writing. So that means: writing something people want to read, making it less solitary and getting rid of the cliché of the Teenage Writer. Is this even possible? Can we do that? In the words of Barack Obama and Bob the Builder, YES WE CAN.
And here’s how. I’ve never run something like this before, but here’s how I imagine it should go. Write the next line to this story. Or two lines, if you prefer. As much as you like, up to 100 words. Send it to me. I’ll pick the ones I like best, adhering strictly to the No Teenage Writing and No Bad Writing theories. The techie people will put it on the website. We should in theory end up with a work of artistic and sociable genius. So heigh ho, let’s go…
The day I fell down the cellar steps was the first day of the rest of my life. If I hadn’t fallen down the cellar steps, my head going bump bump bumpity bump on every single stair, my whole life would have been completely different-

…and off you all go. There may even be prizes for anybody who gets something up here (I say prizes. We have no budget as such, so it will just have to be the everlasting love and respect of the editorial board and maybe some chocolate if you’re lucky).

Ella Risbridger