Telling Tales Out of School, A Research in Society Lecture Delivered at the 2007 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences

My title, "Telling Tales Out of School," is hard won. In coming up with it, what I had to resist was the tyranny of the colon—its insistence, as soon as you are within the academic orbit, upon inserting itself, demanding qualification of titles, of terms. As a novelist, there are other linguistic devices that impress themselves upon one in much the same way. In this title, for instance, it is the cliché.

But my job, as a novelist, is actually to work against cliché, so perhaps my title really should have been: "Telling Tales Out of School: Caught between a Colon and a Cliché."

The fact that I chose the title without the colon would suggest that in my case, at least, the cliché won out. And in some senses, that's my story. The story of how I became a writer, which is very much tangled up in the story of how I became, albeit briefly, an anthropologist.

I've been trying to figure out this relationship between my academic past and my present as a writer of fiction for years, particularly the last couple of years, because my most recent novel, Sweetness in the Belly, is a very ethnographic novel in many ways. The novel is concerned with human social phenomena, and the book's themes—identity, ethnicity, family, displacement, belongingness—are all key concerns in contemporary ethnography. The ethnography that informs the cultural, religious, social, economic, and political details of the book are also based, in part, upon doctoral fieldwork I conducted in a Muslim community in Ethiopia in the mid-1990s and postdoctoral research in Toronto in the late 1990s amongst Ethiopian refugees and later immigrants.

The story itself, though, is set twenty years before I conducted research in Ethiopia, against the backdrop of the revolution where Haile Sellasie's empire was brought to an end in 1974. During the subsequent era—nearly two decades of control by a brutal socialist dictatorship—we saw the creation of a worldwide diaspora of Ethiopians for the first time in history, and we were exposed, through the media, to a portrait of an Ethiopia dominated by images of famine.

The novel moves between the walled Muslim city of Harar in the last years of Haile Selassie's empire and Margaret Thatcher's Britain ten years later, where a community of Muslims from this part of Africa are struggling to create new lives for themselves in exile.

Sweetness in the Belly is not, however, an ethnography; it is very much a novel. The characters are invented, and the plot is invented. I've messed with a lot of the facts—historical, cultural, and otherwise—for narrative purposes, because as much as this is a novel engaged with information, a big part of a novel's job is to tell a good story, to please us aesthetically, to entertain.

Some would actually argue that this is the only job of the novel. And this is one side in an endless debate about the novel's purpose.

Hermione Lee, who was one of the Booker Prize judges in 2006, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books that among the judges "discussions kept returning to those centuries-old debates, where praise for seriousness, social responsibility, and moral meaning jostled against praise for aesthetic pleasure … But," she writes, "still—in all our arguments we had no doubts that we were dealing with objects of value."

The importance of this statement lies in the fact that, as she points out, "prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger, for instance, said that novelists 'squander ignobly the reader's precious time.' And that 'only when entertainment is combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance and depravity.'"

And we battle the likes of more contemporary critics. V.S. Naipaul, for instance, who, despite writing fiction himself, fiction he no doubt believes should be read, has no problem saying that...