The power of words drive change at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

Three leading lights of international literature have used their opening address at the Sydney Writers' Festival to call for new ways of storytelling to celebrate the unheralded lives of ordinary people.

Magazine writer and screenwriter, Alexis Okeowo, challenged the position of the media foreign correspondent as a voice of authority, expertise and objectivity.

The award-winning author of A Moonless, Starless Sky, joined acclaimed novelist André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name and Enigma Variations), and award-winning author Min Jin Lee (Pachinko) on stage at Carriageworks on Tuesday night to look at the influence of power on politics, money, sex and identity, and the ability of literature, storytelling and reportage to redress power imbalances in modern times.

Okeowo has been a foreign correspondent for most of her career having started out of college reporting in Uganda.

While journalism has evolved and become more diverse, Okeowo said its roots were problematic, having begun as a colonial enterprise explaining "the so-called others to the so-called us". "Women of colour were always the subjects, never the storytellers."

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There was an uneasy framing, too, in the unbalanced power dynamic between a journalist and subject, she said. "There are few phrases I cringe at more than 'giving voice' or 'bearing witness' as if journalists are Christopher Columbus on his ship heroically 'discovering' America."

Yet reporters were often regarded as immediate experts, or, worse, saviours. Subjects from marginalised communities were too often seen as passive, people to whom things happen to.

As the last US presidential election proved that frame was often far from the truth, she said.

Korean-American author Min Jin Lee detailed her failures – the "short poppy" among her more successful sisters -along the road to publishing her much acclaimed work Pachinko, of a Korean family living in Japan.

Placed in the "dumb" classes when the family migrated to America, Lee was almost mute as child and took comfort in books, particularly the words of Sinclair Lewis, was discovered to be a carrier of chronic Hepatitis B and was eventually cured.

Taking cheap writing classes, she had wanted to "write about my ordinary neighbourhood in Elmhurst, Queens, filled with bus drivers, plumbers, church organists, house cleaners, and people who worked for others".

"So I wrote my novel FreeFood for Millionaires because I wanted to write about money, class, ambition, and power, and how conventional ideas of such things may not hold up for those who are plain and unimportant."

Lee said her subjects insisted on defining themselves rather than being defined by power – they did not consider themselves victims – and suggested that the greatest superpower of all ordinary people to love unconditionally.

Aciman told the opening night audience at Carriageworks that the power of literature was to think against the grain, against popular opinion.

The enemy of good thinking was factoids, Aciman said, what the dictionary defined as brief or trivial items of news or information, and the popularity of a magazine writing style that had emptied writing of meaning and emotion.

To find the "power to write in a language that is not simple but complex, not brawny but sinewy, bearing, to use an image, the supple grace of a statue by Praxiteles as opposed to the scrawny desiccated lustreless figures one find in Giacometti" was the novelist's quest.

For Okeowa it was time for a reckoning, to consider more deeply how to write about those people less powerful, with less political currency. That might include sourcing material from inside a country or community rather than academics in California.

"What if we thought of our work partly as a way to justify why we have the privilege of appropriating someone elses story in the first place, a way to prove our worthiness as the storyteller?" she asked.

"Which would then lead us to ask how we can respect, dignify, and do justice to a voice, to a life. Which would then probably lead us to wonder sometimes if we are the right person to tell a story, at all, or if someone else could do it better."

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Linda Morris is an arts and books writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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