The reader’s gift is to bring to this alchemy their own imagination and their own experiences.

From Don’t judge a book by its author by Aminatta Forna.

Wow! This is so good from an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. Hers is the most powerful rejection of labelling by race and gender and class which is such the popular activity in the academy and among the denizens of the chattering class.

Reading her essay evokes a certain response which is rare but lovely. She raises a point here or there and I really want to discuss it. What's the nuance? Does she really mean this or is she getting at that. I don't think I agree with you on this point, why do you say that? The kind of clarification that can only most easily come from a conversation in a comfortable chair, by a fire, with a drink in hand. I like that evoked response from a writer.

I want to include a representative quote from her essay but it is hard to find just the right one. She makes so many good points, each building from the last. Each time I highlight a selection, I keep extending the cursor further and further back up until I have nearly the whole article highlighted. Perhaps this will do.

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either. Achebe did not “write about” Africa, he wrote about people who happen to live in Igboland. Likewise, I do not “write about” Sierra Leone or Croatia, those places are the settings for my characters.

“I think it’s about authenticity,” said the British writer Linda Grant, responding to the Facebook post. “And probably came in with post-colonial studies. If white people can’t appropriate the experiences of the oppressed for fiction then it no longer becomes possible for anyone to write outside their own experience.” The Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie, whose novel Burnt Shadows featured a Japanese character, agreed: “It’s about authenticity. When I was at uni in America in the 90s there was a lot of criticism around the idea of ‘appropriating’ other people’s stories. What started as a thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.”

And there's this.

A novel is a work of imagination, it is not a dissertation. When a writer writes a book, he or she makes a pact with the reader. For a writer of non-fiction the contract is clear. The author pertains to objectivity. The reader may rely on the facts contained therein, the writer promises (to the best of their ability) to provide a factual truth. A writer of fiction makes no such promises. Fiction is subjective: it comes from within the writer, and, not only that, the story itself is composed of a sequence of lies. The writer of fiction says to the reader only this: come with me on a journey of the imagination and I will try to show you something you have not seen before. This is the gift of the writer to the reader. The reader’s gift is to bring to this alchemy their own imagination and their own experiences.

But please, please read the whole thing. It is that good and that refreshing.