by ZADIE SMITH
Author Zadie Smith PHOTO/David Shankbone/Wikipedia
In 2006, I went to Liberia for the first time. As with any trip by a westerner to the “developing” world, my attention was drawn to the gap: between these roads and the ones I had walked down, these houses and those in which I had lived, these schools and the schools that had educated me. Into this gap, well-meaning people tend to pour in two large groups (though there is a good deal of overlap): the Church Workers and the Aid Workers. The pious are everywhere in Liberia, motivated by the Christian ethics of pity and charity. They build churches and schools, and try to improve people’s lives at the point of contact. Working alongside them the aid people take, generally, a more secular and macro approach to development: working on infrastructure, project managing, liaising with government. On that first Liberian visit, I was a guest of Oxfam, and being around them and their work illuminated another significant gap: the one between the language of development and the language of the rest of us. This is no special flaw in the world of development—every large organization has its technocratic lingo and unreadable reports. But it seemed to me a shame that between the highly technical, acronym-heavy documents written within the world of development and the often saccharine self-descriptions of the church workers, there were so few people writing development stories from a human perspective. Stories that were not especially concerned with a man’s eternal soul or his statistical representation, but with his life.
Journalists do this, but as everyone who has worked in development knows, the best time to get a journalist’s attention is when the bomb goes off or the tsunami hits or the famine brings the walking dead to the border. In the downtime, interest fades.
The idea for Writers Bloc came from this perceived gap. My article on Liberia was read by people at the Open Society Institute, who were interested in the way it was written, not as a development report but as an account of an experience. They approached me with the idea of co-operating in a project that would create more such pieces of non-professional reportage. It was a simple concept. A small group of fiction and nonfiction writers (myself, Hari Kunzru, Kamila Shamsie, Rachel Holmes, and Nick Laird) got together with the hope of enlisting the skills of an international team of writers. People who have a knack for compelling narratives, who like to try to represent people’s lives in all their curious detail—in short, people with a patience for the third dimension. We wanted to read accounts that were not only pious, charitable or analytical but also readable, engaging, exciting. Our focus was universal education: it is one of the eight aspirations of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) project, launched in 2000, and we thought it a subject naturally of interest to writers, who owe their lives to the skills they developed in classrooms.
Funded and supported by the Soros Foundation, we set out to send novelists to the four corners of the world. We had no editorial policy, and gave our writers free rein, both in their subject matter and their approach. They returned with detailed, well-written, hopefully compelling windows into the progress (or otherwise) of the MDG’s vision. But there I sound like a policy wonk. What they came back with is far more precious.
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