books and freedom: 2 or, elegantly dressed banned in Hackney

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The writer Iain Sinclair, with whom I am proud to share Hackney, is a “non-person.” The worst thing about that epithet is that he may have thought of it himself, but it describes a situation he certainly didn’t choose. He has been banned in Hackney.

Yes! Our rose-red empire. Home to the Dissenters themselves, the borough that gave us Diane Abbott.

A year ago Sinclair was invited to launch his new novel, coincidentally entitled Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, at Stoke Newington Library. (Mind you, I have known just how useless they are there ever since my then-2-year-old was allowed tp push his pushchair out of the building and into the street, straight past the front desk, which sits by the door – from a children’s story hour! I had turned my back, knowing what the child was like, for precisely one minute, and was eight months pregnant at the time. I discovered him, with no help from the librarians, way up Church St heading confidently for the park. We never went back. Basically, I banned the story hour.)

Even though he was horrified that the library’s local history section had shrunk to a carrier bag of pamphlets under the counter, Sinclair accepted the invitation and has been planning ever since to launch his book in this historic and highly local venue.

“Hackney Libraries invited me to come back in February 2009,” Sinclair writes, “to launch a book I had been working on for more years than I care to remember: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. I was happy to accept, believing that a work researched, contrived and constructed in this place should have its first reading right here. A small return on my part for 40 years of madness and inspiration, painting the white lines of football pitches on Hackney Marshes or trawling for used books in Kingsland Waste Market…”

But how things can turn. Yesterday he related on the Today programme, and this morning recaps in the Guardian, the news that this invitation has been withdrawn. He has been told that he would be an “inappropriate” choice for a book launch in a Hackney library. He’s too “controversial.” Too controversial for a library! And why? Because in June he criticised the Olympics in the Times Literary Supplement. (As someone said, the council seems to be a bit behind in its reading.)

The Olympics: car parks and shopping malls and the loss of our open spaces, historic Hackney Marshes, and the way it’s selling local people down the river (Lea). Apparently, if you talk about the 2012 Olympics at all in this part of town, you have to praise it.

According to the council, if you criticise the Olympics, you are relinquish the privilege of undertaking any public use of their buildings, resources, or indeed goodwill, even if it is in a completely different capacity from your criticism of the Olympics. No citizen who publicly dislikes the Olympics, in short, may enjoy the public support of the council for any other reason at all.

When I first lived in Stoke Newington and used the library all the time, its foyer proudly displayed the gravestone of Daniel Defoe himself. I used to show it to my infants every week (sadly, this is true), telling them what an honour it was to grow up in the home of this man, father of the English novel and champion of free speech. (Indefatigable pamphleteer, in fact; I hope it wasn’t his pamphlets in that carrier bag.)

So here it is, Elegantly Dressed Wednesday – which, for people who missed the first chapter, was started by the prolific, and politically engaged, Hackney blogger Ben Locker. An excellent opportunity to admire Iain Sinclair’s black-on-black arrangement above – the honest, intelligent simplicity of his T shirt, the jauntiness of his button-down shirt-collar, and the clarity of his spectacles. He can see things council officers can’t; he can say things council officers can’t; and that is only elegant.

Repeat after me: Sha bi!

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Filed under Poetry international 2008, Stoke Newington, books, important things, politics, useless