The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Staff choice and bargain of the month : an apology to

indigenous people, carefully worded to avoid any real expression of

regret.

If we haven’t got the right style for you in stock, all we can do is say

how terribly sorry we are, and advise you next time to place your

order several altercations in advance.

And please do business with us again.

From ‘ProseThetic Memories’ (Brewster & Smith 2002, pp. 200–1)

Note here how the text mimics the language and posturing of advertising:
the idea of staff choice, items being individually ‘made-to-mood’, ‘cut-
price’ options and so on. I have also adopted a stance, familiar from
consumer culture, which suggests that the goods under question can do
anything under the sun.
The piece ‘Untitled’ (see Example 3.13 on page 63) is by Japanese poet
Yuriya Kumagai, formerly a student in one of my postgraduate classes. The
advertisement for the lost voice satirises the notion, deeply embedded in
capitalist society, that we can gain or regain anything if we pay a price for
it. But it also plays on the relationship between voice and body. Particularly
ironic is the way it suggests that it might be possible to find the voice
without also locating the embodied owner.
All these texts have a satirical edge, and are commenting on contempo-
rary culture, but exploiting its forms. Sometimes these forms are taken
from advertising, where the purpose is to coerce us into buying something,
whether we really want it or not. At other times they may be media based,
and their objective may be to persuade us of a particular view of the world
which is politically biased.
Non-literary textual elements can also be integrated into literary texts.
Iranian poet Mohammad Tavallaei’s ‘School of English’, written when he
was a postgraduate student, begins with an extended version of the infor-
mation that we have to give on a passport or visa form. However, the
cultural discrimination, of which the poet feels he is an object, rebounds
on him in the form of self-denigration. The passport details reinforce the
feelings of alienation the poet suffers as a consequence of the western,
non-western divide (on which he subsequently expands):

Example 3.14

Age: 49

Sex: Male

Height: 165 cm

Working out with structures 61