Girls' Own Adventure

Mary Kingsley and crew

My current hyperfocus - Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. OMG.

It reads like a Boys' Own Adventure – only she’s a thirty-year-old woman, striding off, in her long skirts and her corsets, to West Africa in the late years of the nineteenth century. Once there she undertakes multi-day expeditions through trackless jungle, single-handedly fights off crocodiles with the paddle of her canoe, survives falling into pits full of sharpened stakes by merit of her thick wool skirt, and wades chin deep through swamps with leeches attaching themselves around her neck like a ruff.

Maybe you have to take it with a grain of salt. Is it really possible to wade neck deep through swamp in full Victorian women’s garb, I wonder? Wouldn’t your waterlogged skirts slow you down and make the whole thing impossibly exhausting? Or did she, like her native guides, strip off and wade through with her clothes carried above her head? Perhaps she did – you could see why she might not have shared that detail with her readership.

More scepticism-inducing even than the tales of derring-do, though, is her tendency to take credit for every lifesaving decision. It is she who notices that the bush is on fire and rouses her companions from sleep just in time to prevent a fiery death. It is she who realizes that the mangrove swamp through which they are hiking is tidal, and gives the order to retrace their steps before they are drowned by the rising waters. And it is she who takes the tiller of the boat when the crew falls asleep, guiding them safely through the spectacularly starlit African night.

And yet – and yet – the whole book is a lyrical delight. A keen observer with the talent to capture the detail on paper, she brings her adventures to life in a quite addictive fashion, and you want to believe.

She’s a creature of her time, of course. As an Englishwoman and a Victorian she simply assumes that the right to judge is hers. Even the fact that many – if not most – of her judgements are positive (“he is a splendidly built, square-shouldered man, a pure Benga, of the finest type”) does not cancel out the hubris. What does help – somewhat – is that she judges herself with the same wry eye she applies to the rest of the world.

The tension between prejudice and open-mindedness is most noticeable when she is talking about the habits of thought needed to understand the people amongst whom she is living. You need to let go of your preconceptions, she says. She tells the story of the game hunter who cannot understand why, every time he comes within shot, the antelope take fright and run away. He knows he and his party are upwind and have made no sound. Eventually he discovers that his servant is triumphantly flourishing the consular flag behind him every time he has an animal in his sights. This is the key, says Kingsley – “if you go hunting the African idea with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you, you will similarly get very poor bag.”

Her choice of metaphor (“hunting the African idea”) is as damning as it is redeeming. She’s still the Victorian hunter-collector, trying to capture what she seeks in order to display it, back at home, fangs and teeth rendered safely impotent. But she does at least try to come at things with an open mind. And that’s the best any of us can hope for, I guess.

How do you research a character's background if that background never existed?

(1920s jazz singer Esther Jones)

Maybe there’s some wisdom in the often-repeated idea that you should write what you know. At the very least, you minimize the chances of making the kind of ridiculous blooper that comes from inadequate knowledge of your subject, and at best, your writing will hopefully take on the ring of authenticity that is one of the marks of the competent writer.

Unfortunately, I am not a writer ever likely to take this advice because, frankly, it sounds so deathly boring. Why would I want to write what I know, when there is a world out there full of people who differ from me in terms of culture, sexuality, gender, gender identity, nationality, eye color, musical preferences, toenail-cutting habits and a million, million other things that I want to explore (excepting, possibly, the toenail habits) and understand and ultimately capture?

And I think I do mean capture. You can make beautiful speeches about the artistic process all you want, but in the end there’s something unpleasantly rapacious about the writer’s compulsive need to plunder the contents of other people’s brains and display them out in full view for the rest of the world to gawp at. It seems important then, to pay your victims the basic respect of getting it right.

This is fine and dandy if a little research can take you to the point where you know as much as or more about a subject than most of your readers. I can, for example, try to write from the point of view of someone in the Regency period. I’ve been compulsively reading Jane Austen for decades; I’ve gone on to read any number of books about Regency life, costume, manners, etc. The result is that I seem to be able to make a fair-to-middling stab at a background of that era , and getting it onto paper in a form that other people are prepared to deem acceptably authentic.

Slightly harder is getting inside the head of someone about whom some of your readers have far greater personal experience than you. That’s why the fact that Blades of Justice got an honorable mention in this year’s Rainbow Awards is so important to me. Get this: I, as a straight woman, wrote from the point of view of a lesbian woman convincingly enough that the anthology as a whole was described as having “complex characters, wonderfully crafted.” I’m proud of that.

But where it gets really tricky, I’m finding, is where you are trying to get into the head of a character who has never existed, even though you are placing that character in a background that does (or rather did) exist. So, for reasons only known to my muse (who, it’s fair to say, has a… quirky sense of humor) I chose to invent an African-born, mixed-race woman in British aristocratic society in the 1920s.

I’ve done my research – this never happened. There were certainly many people living in 1920s Britain who would have been considered black, and a not insignificant number managed, against the odds, to reach the ranks of the professional middle classes as doctors and lawyers. Black musicians and actors would certainly have mixed with the upper classes. Queen Victoria had an African goddaughter. And there was even a case of a mixed-race African man who only missed inheriting an Earldom by the fact that his parents married after his birth rather than before. But, as far as I can tell, there were no card-carrying British aristocrats in the UK at that time who would have been made, for example, to sit at the back of the bus in Alabama by merit of the color of their skin.

Now, I can research what it was like to be a British aristocrat the 1920s. I can research the experience of black people living in Britain in the 1920s. I can research what it was like to be a British girl growing up in Africa in the early 1900s and then moving to Britain. I can research the contemporary experience of people who experience racism – and I have tried hard to do all these things. But to put them altogether to create an account of a mixed-race woman who is the granddaughter of an earl in 1920s London that feels authentic – that’s a challenge, and one I’m far from certain I’ve risen to.

Enter racial politics. Is it even acceptable for a white woman to appropriate this woman’s story (imaginary as it is) given the long history of exploitation of black people by white people? As I said above, there is always something a little exploitative about the writer’s need to plunder other people’s brains. Does the power balance in this instance make it a little bit worse? Is it worse, for example, than a man writing from a woman’s point of view, given the traditional power imbalance between the sexes?

Certainly, it makes the need to get it right - to make the account feel authentic – more pressing than ever. In the end, rightly or wrongly, I went for it, and the novel I wrote is now being considered by agents. It is, if that’s worth anything, an honest attempt.