We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff

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Expat identities: a queer migrant's reinvention abroad". propertylistings.ft.com . Retrieved 2021-11-24. What else can you expect to come across in We Are Made of Diamond Stuff. Well, as just a few examples, consider The reference to the Life in the UK test is important as the book has a continuous undercurrent that often bubbles to the surface which reflects on Brexit and British citizenship as well as on the place of “experimental fiction” in UK publishing. Perhaps the best way to summarise is to let Waidner speak for themself about their book:

The German translation of Gaudy Bauble, translated by Ann Cotten, won the Internationaler Literaturpreis. [12] Their first, second and third novels were shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, in 2018, 2020 and 2022 respectively. Spurred by the Brexit referendum, they applied for British citizenship and became eligible for the Goldsmiths Prize. Waidner has written extensively about working-class queer and transgender people, nationalism, and how "the British novel tends to reproduce white, middle-class values and aesthetics", with their work standing in opposition to these motifs. [13] Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh in 1967 to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother. When she was three, her family moved to Bolton, England. She went to Bolton School and then studied PPE at Wadham College, Oxford.What even is this? It’s a daring, uncompromising, bonkers serious-scape of the kind that rarely gets the limelight in the UK’s contemporary literary field. Why? Because it’s subversive, off the wall and, frankly, challenging to the status quo of what literature is and does. For all these reasons, I’m glad of it. A key element of their writing I believe (again in my words) is the rejection of the traditional novelistic structure featuring a main character, other key characters, minor characters and then passive objects with which they interact. I think part of that may be due to my familiarity with Waidner’s very distinctive techniques and style. Politics- David Gauke was educated at Northgate High School in Ipswich, Suffolk before attending St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Resigned as Secretary of State July 2019, citing that he could not serve Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Gauke became known in the media as the "Gaukeward Squad .

However, unfortunately, I did not enjoy th In Isabel Waidner’ssecond novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test.At a later point, House Mother Normal walks in on the polar bear FEEDING, the reeboks in a FRENZY. Who fed them? House Mother Normal works herself up over the polar bears and the reeboks freeloading. She is exploring the possibility of them fixing the boiler in exchange for their squid-. No! I say. The polar bears are novelists, the reeboks are poets, it is not within their remit nor skill set to fix and English boiler!” That reflects my life until a few years ago. Many people who come to London as migrants, especially queer and trans migrants, work these jobs while trying to do something more ambitious and at the same time juggling the oppressive structures impacting on our lives. I worked minimum-wage jobs until my mid-30s, when Roehampton gave me a scholarship to do a PhD. I’m staging a complexity we don’t always see in novels: working-class characters often do one thing – work – and then maybe they’re a little bit criminal, and that’s it.

In a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly from 2018, Halberstam and Nyong’o collected a variety of texts on wildness that attempted to “think beyond the colonial epistemes in which wildness indicates uninhabitable space and unknowable peoples all at once” and instead ask “what is wildness for those who have been forcibly gathered under its sign?” It’s clear that wildness is a historically charged term. But can it help us reach for alternative futures? Though what’s considered wild might differ depending on cultural contexts, the wild that Halberstam and Nyong’o theorize seems to be situated in the tension between a (post)modern, western subject of “civilization” and its “wild” Others. Julietta Singh reminds us, via Edward Said’s classical analysis, that the wild/civilized binary was/is situated at the very center of colonial missions. Still, Singh points out “how one colonial errand gives rise to the advent of another and … how this relay might be perverted and redirected toward the decolonial wild.” If, as Sylvia Wynter also argues, the modern subject, or “Man,” is dependent on a binary of rational/subrational, to turn wild might mean to reject the supremacy of the western rationale. The wild move is then a kind of anarchistic impulse, a reaching for other worlds beyond white, neoliberal patriarchy. Halberstam and Nyong’o argue that “If we refuse to access all that wildness names and has named, we will be acceding to a monologue of civilization with its narrative alibis of humanity.” Embedded within wildness’ possibility to challenge a certain world project, then, are the histories of violence of that very project. Some of what is at stake can be considered through the figure of Waidner’s lypard. There is not a single ordinary sentence in Isabel Waidner’s We Are Made of Diamond Stuff. A novel that reads like an act of sabotage, of resistance, written as a song-scream against our nullifying need to belong. It is charged with undeniable life, like some explosive projectile aimed at all our insidious narratives (nationalism, exclusionary culture, corporatism, conservatism and so much more). You hope it goes off, that it blows open everything in its sights – just so that you may ride out on its wake. It leaves you laughing, breathless but also heartbroken and hopeful, like the spirited survivors in the book itself. Like lightning, this novel. It is a furious work, stuffed with necessary power, purpose and also affection. And to borrow one of its lines to re-articulate it – like the lypard, it navigates dimensions.’ – Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City What if fear, rage, joy and a sense of humour were actually Milky Ways. What if political urgency, transgression and difference where Kinder Surprises! What of WE THINK YOU ARE BORING were fun size Mars bar. What if life (a lot of it) and love (above all) were mini Galaxies, then there’d be Celebrations for Shae and I after all!”But the Tonya Harding story doesn’t possess a single, defeatist meaning. She may have been ostracised and undervalued by the skating community. She may have turned to violence in retaliation or revenge. She also kept going. Class trappings operated as a brake on respectability but not self-realisation. And so it goes for the narrator of this resourceful, fist-raising novel – trapped in Brexit Britain, perennially precarious, but finding a way through, as reflected in their statement of defiance, the lovely, comma’d motto, “I have talents, I’ll use them.” In my review of that book I referenced the author’s thesis ( https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/...) which helped considerably with my understanding of what they had achieved with the novel. Isabel Waidner: "The British novel reproduces white middle-class values and aesthetics" ". New Statesman. 2021-11-03 . Retrieved 2021-11-24.

Now re-read with its inclusion on the Goldsmiths shortlist providing the perfect reason for the re-read I promised myself at the end of my initial review.

The judges on the shortlist

From the world of small, successful, innovative, independent presses in the publishing world Toby Litt Sam Jordison Eloise Millar Naomi Alderman Born in London Alderman educated at Lincoln College, Oxford , where she read PPE. In the United States she began to explore the world of fan fiction, focusing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (note: 'Fan Fiction', and Science fiction is a particular area identified by Waidner as excluded by the mainstream publishing industry) However, unfortunately, I did not enjoy that much the aesthetic choice of the novel. Isabel Wainder is PhD in Creative Writing. In their own words, “it (the novel) collides literary aesthetics with contemporary working class cultures and attitudes.” So i am sure it is a deliberate choice. I felt the style and the language used was deliberately made radically accessible. And I found it problematic. The anthropomorphism and the sentence structures, amount of question marks and capitalisation reminded me of the language one tends to find in a children book. And a hunt for the “lypard” specifically reminded me of a famous children book “We are going on a bear hunt”. I am not quite sure about the reason for such a choice of style. It might be to follow a marxist view that there is no difference between the high and a popular culture. Or, it might be to increase the audience of the readers who would identify with the text and help them to pay attention to the serious issues incorporated and mentions above. The typical example of the style: Which reminded me of this Daily Mail story from several years ago (not referenced as such in the novel): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti... The most popular choice of trainers among burglars are Reebok Classics, according to a study which examined footprints left at crime scenes. I read Gaudy Bauble last year, and this offering from Isabel Waidner is a second extract from their thesis (available online) explaining their positioning as part of a “new generation of interdisciplinary queer British writers” .