'I believe in multiplicity': Why Massey lecturer Ian Williams stays open to all perspectives
The celebrated novelist says listening is integral in understanding others with different points of view
Listen to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures starting November 18th on IDEAS — as a broadcast and a podcast.
Ever since writer and CBC Massey lecturer Ian Williams immigrated to Canada from Trinidad, he's been fascinated with the multiple selves that live inside all of us.
"It's like you will always, going forward, have at least two selves. And to have that transformation happen, there is a fact of what it means to be alive. Like there are multiple ways of being," said Williams.
Williams is an acclaimed novelist and poet, landing the Giller Prize for his first novel, Reproduction. His work reflects his obsession with representing multiple voices and multiple points of view on the page. And his 2024 CBC Massey Lectures exploring the (nearly) lost art of conversation are no different.
In What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation In Our Time, Williams introduces several voices having both real and imagined conversations. On the page, voices interject from the margins. On stage, Williams argues with himself and with others — dancing with ideas without always landing on definitive answers.
A day before Ian Williams delivered his fourth talk, he joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed on stage at the Victoria Festival of Authors to talk about the 'multiple lives' of the poet and writer.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
All your writing, from what I've observed, whether it's poetry or fiction or nonfiction, there are multiple voices overlapping. There's interaction, there's interjection, there are footnotes, there are lines of poetry running in the margins and fingerprints on the page. I wonder how much of that is a way of resisting having a single voice for a single narrative?
I believe in multiplicity. I believe in a variety of perspectives and in a way that it's not prescriptive. Like, I don't have a sleight of hand in saying 'this is the right way' in a novel. I think, say, Edgar, who most women despise in Reproduction, has something redeeming about him. You could tell a whole story from that point of view — to get out of the way and leave the voices intact. And sometimes to even strip away everything else that distracts you from the voices so that you just have a real balance of two people talking.
But what it exposes is that… although I try to do this thing, to keep many balls in the air at the same time, many perspectives and positions alive simultaneously, I think most readers want to choose, right? They want a hero. We've been trained to read for a hero and to follow, and identify with a single person as a protagonist going forward. But I hope to disrupt that at times.
Maybe people get frustrated in nonfiction and say, 'You need to be more militant about, let's say, what it means to be Black in 2022.' And I'm like, 'Well, there isn't a single way.' Right? And I'm not going to put forward one way as if this is a pattern to go forward with. So the multiplicity really is to allow other people to do the same kind of thing rather than to narrow their options to just one. Instead, to open up all of the possibilities for a life.
Why resist this single narrative from a personal perspective? You explained why from the reader's perspective, but for you, Ian Williams, why is it important to resist the one voice?
I don't think I'm the centre of even my own story. I don't believe that I'm a solid being, even in the middle of my own life. I really do think about myself as an absent figure in my own life. That is formed in silhouette, like cast in relief to other things. And so for me, it's like a search, a really strong identity when that's always been slippery for me.
I really do think about myself as an absent figure in my own life.- Ian Williams, poet and novelist
I actually think I am a big believer in absence and negative space as being really critical. I mean, to come to Canada and your identity gets kind of over-run with the very powerful and solid sense that you must assimilate. That whatever you were before is somehow wrong or mis-fitting in this new context. So the first mode of recourse is to be invisible and observe, and then reform and reshape yourself.
But there's no one single thing to reshape yourself into. My brother did it one way. He followed a pattern that's worked for him. He's happy. But I wasn't. I felt like I kept morphing and kept shifting. And even now, I'm never quite 100 per cent sure of my convictions.
In your poetry and fiction, people are often battling it out. They're arguing. In fact, you're often arguing with yourself in this book, in the Massey Lectures. How does that help you find answers?
I think you have to know the person that you think you don't like. To inhabit their position completely and look out not at anyone in particular right off. But yeah, it's important to keep their point of view alive. We give a lot of lip service to this idea of empathy. But really the empathy is either to gain points, like, 'Look at me, I'm such a sympathetic person, I'm so wonderful.' Or it is to understand the other person so that you can then later dismantle them. What if we had a mode of being, which was 'I will not even alter your words. I'm going to engage with you, but I'm going to represent you so accurately that it might do damage to the consistency of my position? But at least I'm trying to get you right.'
So that requires silence.
Absolutely. It requires silence. And it requires creating a fictional space or non-fictional space where the reader has to agree to those terms, to write, to say, 'No, we're not in this to get people.' We are in this to understand people, to 'get' people differently.
In your book, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, you write, 'I accept that people will misinterpret or disagree with my positions. These disagreements are to test and tune my own thinking rather than making me defensive and inhospitable.' What does it mean to be hospitable to disagreement and to new ideas? How do you practice it?
Well, definitely, to be inhospitable, you stop listening. You no longer allow the person to speak, nothing is coming through. It's just this armour that you're wearing. But to be hospitable is quite the opposite, where you are not just listening and processing them, but you are actually welcoming that difference into your worldview. You're actually seeking out the person who disagrees with you — and paying attention to it.
I watched Fox News yesterday for like 20 minutes. It's just fascinating. I sat there with my sock in my hand saying, 'wow, wow, wow,' trying to quiet that thing in me that wants to judge and say 'no, no, no.' And instead saying, 'Do they really believe this? Why do they believe this? Do other people who watch this believe this? Do I know someone who might believe this?'
And then I thought: would my brother be prey to this kind of thing? Because there's something about it that's really like a football team and so there are many reasons why people join these kinds of movements.
So that's what I mean about being hospitable.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to Ian Williams's full conversation with Nahlah Ayed.
*Q&A edited for length and clarity. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter.
