The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Weight: 63 kg

Hair: Black and White

Face:Wrinkled and Ugly

Nose: Fleshy

Eyes: Myopic, with Double Vision

Is it not strange that these features

Of an imported material

From far and exotic places

For acculturation—

Monkey-like mimicry of alien sounds and signs,

Academic ass-licking and smiling in awkward situations—

Transform into sites of antagonism

Between the circumcised and the uncircumcised?

Why does lack of foreskin

Prefigure so predominantly in their minds?

Their language:

the zone of my silence,

A Post-Babylonian Babble

hurting more than colonial history and geography.

‘School of English’ (Tavallaei 1996, pp. 57–8)

CONCLUSION

Working out with structure means juggling and rearranging our material
to have maximum formal and cultural impact. Structures are sometimes
clearly visible on the page (a repeating structure may be apparent at a
glance) and the visual layout on the page may reinforce the effect.
However, sometimes structures are so complex that we may only begin to
grasp them after several readings. This chapter deals with relatively simple
structures, but as your writing develops you will become more and more
aware of different kinds of structuring principles, and how to combine
several at once. Structure is also very important in many of the chapters
ahead, and most often consists of the disruption of a linear sequence: this
is a feature of most kinds of writing, but is most extreme in experimental
texts. In Chapter 5, for example, we see how narrative linearity may be
broken up to give maximum effect to the narrative content. Likewise,
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 all deal with various types of disruption to the linear

62 The Writing Experiment