Leaving Babel At The Gates: Writers, Personas And Cyberspace

1. ‘A collaboration over too much coffee’

Caferati began as an online network for writers called Bombay Writers’ Cafe (on the networking site, www.ryze.com), in July, 2004. A few weeks later, when some writers met for the first time, there were all of ten people, with only one person reading original work. That day, the possibility of future offline meets, and the ground rules for interaction were discussed.

            There’s nothing unusual in this. Writers everywhere have always looked for a community or a peer group with whom they have things in common, and with whom they can share their ideas and work and offer critiques. The Poetry Circle, the PEN, Loquations, Chauraha, Riyaz – all these are examples of writers’ groups that meet to discuss and share their writing.

            When the Bombay Writer’s Café morphed into Caferati, it became something of a first in the Indian writing environment: a writer’s group that had an equal presence in different cities and also in cyberspace. People in cities as far away as Jaipur, Kanpur and Calcutta could join the online forum and feel a part of the same community. Writers would meet in their cities and share the experience with those who weren’t present through the online forum. People from small towns could finally feel a part of the world they had looked at enviously from the outside because it was too far away and out of reach; people who were writing for the first time, could have their work reviewed by their peers at the very least, and if they were lucky, then by someone from whom they could learn; Caferati became a place where your work would receive the same attention whether you were a poet, a banker or a roboticist.

            An online forum works more or less in the following fashion: someone posts their work and the act of posting it publicly is an invitation for feedback. Other members read; some critique the work and offer suggestions; every once in a while, a piece that has been posted will cause someone else to write a new piece based on the first one. Occasionally, someone will initiate a writing exercise, such as flash fiction, or writing to a theme, or writing in forms – sonnets, villanelles, pantoums – and the board sees a spurt of activity and interest. A spurt of activity for a very good reason: the exercise is ‘judged’ and anyone participating can be sure of feedback. Regular posting may or may not elicit responses and the writer has to deal with that.

            Some of what a writer experiences on a online forum such as Caferati, or others like Shakespeare and Company should be obvious, but I’ll start with these experiences all the same.

            The internet has acquired a reputation for being several things: it is supposed to bring together people from all over the world into a shared space; it is supposed to be available, in the current jargon, 24x7; and above all, it is supposed to be democratic.

            When we’re told the internet helps to connect people, we have to assume several caveats. Language, connectivity and interest are the gates through which a writer must pass to access these shared spaces where work can be offered and critiqued by nothing less than a supposedly global audience. The main page of the Caferati board says: ‘Caferati is a forum for writers. Most of our membership is in India, but that is not a pre-condition for joining. Our focus, however, is Indians writing in English.’

            Those writers whose first language, in a sense, is not English, have to wait outside this first gate. But even those who do write in English are separated by other allegiances: regional, cultural, political and gender-related; by the depth and width of their reading and the breaks this causes in communication across this already difficult terrain; and finally, by interest and ability.

            Even at the point of becoming one node in cyberspace, a writer has already made several choices that will narrow the areas of her interaction considerably. Caferati, for instance, has some members from other countries; but when they are not expatriate Indians, they tend to be people with a deep interest in India or South Asia. The chunk of its membership is from India; and within this community, most users are from the business networking site called Ryze. A few members become a part of Ryze and thereafter, of Caferati, once they have attended what Caferati calls ‘read-meets’ or offline meetings in different cities.

            When you, as a writer in English, join an online forum such as Caferati, you are faceless. The only things that speak for you are your words. A name might be an indicator of regionality, but only if it is your real name and not an assumed one, as often happens on such forums. You could be, to take a real example from one forum, Xacarob Pernicious and no one would know which city you live in, what you gender is, how old you are, or what you have written so far.

Whatever you alias, let’s assume that you are a writer of some ability, who has only just heard of Caferati and has joined to see what it is all about. You post something – a short story or a poem – and wait for a response. This is exciting, because except for the one or two people you have been in the habit of sharing your work with, this is an audience, and at least nominally, a global one.

            Since there is such a provision, you notice the number of people who have read your work. Of course, you can’t be sure if the 215 on the page is an indication that 215 different people have read it, or whether some people have read it twice or even three times, or whether your own visits to the page are pushing the numbers up to an unrealistically happy total.

            Finally you get a few comments. As a writer you have learnt to expect the worst while hoping for the best – as the folder with rejection slips will testify – but these responses are not just the worst, they are a waste of time. It is clear from the general tone of the critique, and indeed the language used to express the reader’s views, that she knows nothing about writing. This critique, such as it is, can be ignored.

            On the other hand, once in a while, you will get a comment that makes sense. You look out for the work of the person making the sensible comments. And when the opportunity arises, you reciprocate with comments of your own on their post. You learn who writes well and who doesn’t and you learn which posts you can entirely skip. With time, this large, undifferentiated space called the internet becomes narrow and more focused.

            So this notion that the internet, or a writer’s forum on the internet, provides a shared space for everyone is only partially true. Yes, it is a shared space, but one that is uneasily occupied by people who might have some things in common but who find more things that separate them. People who are interested in translations talk to each other; people who can’t be bothered reading long essays or stories stay with the poetry; and for every writer who posts, there are fifty who lurk – just watch conversations but contribute nothing, either positive or negative.

            Which brings me to the issue of democracy and online forums. Where many people talk at the same time, there is debate and discussion. Sometimes these discussions can become heated and acrimonious; which is why most forums are, and often need to be moderated.

Online forums are curious places. The space belongs to whoever takes it and uses it. If you do not speak up or engage with other writers, no one is going to coax you out of your silence. On the other hand, if yours is the lone voice that goes against the grain, chances are that whole crowds of people who generally remain silent will emerge only to shout you down. In this respect, as far as the democratic nature of the online community goes, the virtual world is no different from the real one. We can assume new faces, but we don’t really know how to behave differently. Cyberspace is not more democratic, and might very well be less so, especially when you consider that only those who have access to a computer and the internet can participate in the amorphous democracy of the world-wide web.  

2.      The Strange Case of Akira Yamashita

How is a writer who is a part of a web of connections and responses, different from a writer who sits in her study and works in isolation?

            For a start, once a writer has posted a piece of writing he or she might get a response almost immediately and get many more responses from a variety of people than she might get sitting at home and writing alone. Outside of a creative writing class, nowhere else is feedback more quick or more unsparing.

            How does a writer make sense of all this response being thrown at her? How does she pick and choose what to accept, what to argue with and what to ignore unless she already has a highly developed sense of what is needed from her work or what she expects of herself?

            Gary Kamiya, writing in Salon, in an article titled ‘The Reader Strikes Back’, says:

The larger issue, however, is the effect of massive feedback …on writers. Here we approach the ambiguous heart of the issue. It's ambiguous because a writer's relationship with the imagined readership is itself inherently unstable. Writing is an unstable, hybrid form of communication, at once a soliloquy and a conversation. And the sudden onslaught of responding readers has profoundly changed that relationship, in ways that may improve the communal, two-way aspects of writing but may damage its intimate, meditative and one-way nature.

A second, related question is, who does the critiquing and what are their credentials? I have touched upon this earlier. Feedback is acceptable from everyone when a writer’s work receives unqualified praise; from some people, when the writer believes that the quality of the writing matches the writer’s own; and completely unacceptable when a critique is harsh and doesn’t meet with the writer’s opinion of her own work.

            This is only natural; writers, like almost anybody else, have strong egos. They want their work to be liked and they want attention. A post that goes without comment is almost as hurtful as one that elicits only brickbats. But writing online does produces a strange schizophrenia without diminishing the ego one whit: online, a writer can be whoever she wants; can, in fact, be several people at once, assume any name, persona and face, because she is already faceless.

            When a writer assumes a new name, she assumes a new personality and constructs a new self that allows her to respond in ways that might have been impossible for her ‘real’ self. If she likes, she can be more intemperate in her language; she can hide behind her anonymity and raise contentious issues without fear of losing the friends she has made.  

            Perhaps this is a kind of liberation, an ‘escape from personality’ in a way that Eliot could not have conceived of when he wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent’.

            Almost a year ago, on another network called Shakespeare and Company, a strange person made his debut: Akira Yamashita. Akira-san claimed to be a Japanese Koto player, with an interest in writing poetry. He was received warmly by the network. A few weeks later, however, he put up this startling post:

Some of you may recall that several weeks ago, I fell a victim to Fugo fish poisoning. I was hospitalized in a Sapporo hospital and fed activated charcoal as part of the treatment. Time stood still.

It was a period of intense soul searching. I had visions. I spoke to God and several doctors and nurses. As a side effect of the poisoning, I lost the ability to converse in Japanese and now speak English with a pronounced Angolan accent. Not being able to speak Japanese in Japan despite being Japanese has certain disadvantages and I am now looking to emigrate. In any case, I discarded Koto playing and now play the Sitar, which affords a deep sense of meditative pleasure. I find I cannot tolerate Japanese food either and prefer the more charming Idli and Dosa from South India, despite having never visited India. And I never want to write a haiku again. Never. Ever.

The strange case of Akira Yamashita – a persona that continues to grow, change and became an independent narrative – is one way of dealing with the problem of personality in an impersonal space. With self-deprecation and humour, Akira-san constantly subverts and at the same time, draws attention to some aspects of our behaviour online. In this post, he has raised the issue of identity: What kind of a Japanese man wakes up to find he speaks English with an Angolan accent and wants to emigrate to south India? Which part of this narrative is real and what does that word mean anyway?

            Another member of the same network, David Israel, had this to say when it became apparent that Akira-san was a fiction:

Is this, rather, a question of fictional persona-construction as lying close to the imagination-generating heart of his poetical creativity? Or if one is to essay the writing of haiku per se, does this fairly necessitate constructing a Japanese persona who may then do the writing? -- if one is to write from the vantage of a Black American, does this call for the formulation of a personality who can justify such a literary exertion?

Is [this person] radically different from any significant poet who, perforce, constructs a "self who can speak" in the very process of speaking?

Akira Yamashita is a story that magically transforms our ideas of ourselves in an online space. We are forced to question the stories we tell about ourselves, our identities as writers and our identities as speakers in the stories we tell. He is a mirror held up to us; if we are conscious of absurdity in his posturing, it is a timely reminder to us to examine our motivations and our stances online.

3. “The dreams of a few had turned to the curses of many”

The title for this section, comes from Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis. One scene in Metropolis has the charismatic Maria, the leader of the workers, recount the story of the Tower of Babel. She tells the workers how the Tower was built by the slaves, while the masters merely watched; and how it was destroyed because though they spoke the same language, Master and Slave could not communicate with each other, leading to a revolt and the eventual collapse of the Tower.

            I don’t want to sound a bleak note about the state of writing communities in cyberspace, but it’s easy to see how the Babel metaphor would apply here. The number of people talking to each other is frightening. On Caferati, at last count, there were nearly 2,500 members. On any given day, there are at least fifty posts to read, absorb and respond to. A writer might belong to more than one network, in which case these figures – and noises – multiply.

            Cyberspace is addictive. It is easy, in the age of broadband, to be connected at all times. The urge to check how your piece of writing is faring on the board is a natural one, but in time, it changes into an obsessive need to know what people are saying about your work.

            At what point do writers cross from being serious about the way they imagine, construct and finish their work, to becoming feedback junkies posting half-finished work because it is the feedback and not the quality of the work itself that matters? At what point does a writer start writing for the audience she imagines she has?

            The image the writer has of herself is no longer constructed from what she puts into her work, but what image she has created in her mind of her putative reader. She becomes what the responses to her work indicate. The more responses her work gets, the clearer her idea of herself becomes. She participates in the life of the community until all her work becomes a response to a stimulus that only the online community can provide. By turns, she is a comic writer who has her audience in stitches; a poet; a gentle judge; and a warm presence welcoming new writers who are unsure of themselves.

            The dream the writer originally had, of finding a community of other writers, is always teetering on the edge of a nightmare. There are too many voices here, too many responses and demands, and too little time. Sometimes the voices are not just of the virtual others, but the imperatives of become subtly different persons for each kind of interaction. Each well-defined and unique voice the writer has created on each forum requires an effort that goes beyond the writing. For the people who are two and three different personas, under aliases, the Babel is not just outside, but in their own heads. If this is a web, it is a sticky one that does not let go easily.

Any online forum that takes itself seriously has to take into consideration the difficult question of how it is going to strike a balance between being a place where people can, to use Ursula K Le Guin’s term, learn to ‘steer the craft’ and a place where anyone can post the most mediocre writing and be sure that there will always be someone who will offer fulsome praise.

            Every writer has to decide for herself whether reaching an audience is as important as writing well. The two are not necessarily opposites; sometimes a good audience will insist on good writing and online forums are often good places to hone one’s writing skills.

            But writing well requires some silence and some amount of isolation. There has to be a point when the writer walks through some door and leaves on the other side the chatter and the bonhomie. It doesn’t go away, this community, but its noise is muted and perhaps even comforting. Until finally the writer is where she has always been: in front of a page that is both mirror and canvas.