Making Hay

I have just come to realise that there is such a thing as a British "Literary Season", which starts by whispering sometime in the spring, and then audaciously blows its trumpet at the beginning of summer.

For March and April 2009, the British Council website lists more than ten literary festivals taking place each month across the country. By May, the number doubles, and then the entire summer seems to transform into an unbroken stretch of shameless book-worshipping. Arguably the best known of these festivals (at which the trumpet-playing is loudest) is the Guardian Hay Festival, which debuted in 1988 with a little over a thousand people, but now attracts around eighty thousand annually.

As the bus I was on made its way into the tiny Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, which plays host to the Festival, it started to rain. And I remember thinking to myself, "this is one of those British towns in which the most interesting thing that ever happens is the rain!" I was wrong of course.

Apart from being the Festival's home town, Hay-on-Wye is also home to an intimidating assortment of second-hand and antiquarian bookshops (39 according to current statistics). For a town of less than 1,500 inhabitants, this is a record feat, and the major attraction for the tens of thousands of tourists who visit, even outside the Festival period.

This year's was the 22nd edition, featuring three hundred and fifty eight ‘events' celebrating (according to the brochure) "everything from outer space to the mysteries of the human heart, from God to Darwin, from macro-economics to the burlesque."

Hay-in-Nairobi

I arrived roughly midway into this year's festival, a first-timer. I had missed a number of the events I planned to attend - featuring Dambisa Moyo (Zimbabwean-born author of the controversial anti-Aid polemic, Dead Aid), Brian Chikwava (whose debut novel, Harare North has just been published by Jonathan Cape), and South African musician Hugh Masekela.

I made it to a stage performance ("Cut Off My Tongue") by Storymoja Africa, from Kenya. Storymoja belongs to the emerging generation of innovative African publishing collectives, and is "committed to publishing contemporary East African writing of world-class standard." Later this year, a spin-off of the Hay Festival will be launching in Nairobi, to be hosted by Storymoja.

There were a series of special sessions (three in all) billed as the "Creative and Cultural Skills Conference at Hay" which, according to the programme were "specifically designed to explore professional development for writers." The shadows of the internet and of new publishing technologies loomed large over the debates.

In an age in which the most powerful Gatekeepers of publishing success seem to be gimmicky, overambitious marketing tactics by publishers, it was heartwarming to hear agent Caroline Michel argue that "the thing that really sells a book is word of mouth."

And for those who might be concerned about how the internet destroys all incentive for paying for textual content, Canongate's Jamie Byng had a different view. "I know that giving stuff - if the book is good - leads to more sales," he said.

Overwhelmingly white

Having (hopefully) given you an idea of the kind of ground breaking discussions carried on at Hay, perhaps I could then let you in on something somewhat different - and which, come to think of it, may not mean much: The Guardian Hay Festival is an overwhelmingly white festival. This is in no way an indictment; it is what confronts the visitor, or at least what confronted one visitor -me. (It's hard to tell though who would be the first to notice the ‘whiteness', a black visitor or a white one).

In most of the sessions I attended I was the only black person in the typically sizeable audience. If you had stepped in you would have spotted me, basking in that otherworldly ‘Obamic' significance that issues from standing as a representative of an entire race. Because of ‘budgetary considerations,' I camped out during my Hay sojourn, on a site owned by a company called Tangerine Fields.

I took a one-man tent (with air-bed) that cost £20 per night in rent. I was the only black person in the camp. For someone whose pre-Hay queuing experiences with white people were restricted to buses and maybe banks, there was a somewhat perverse pleasure to be had in the mornings, standing patiently in line outside the row of camp showers; all of us - irrespective of skin colour - united in common purpose - the Yes We Can of Personal Hygiene.

My first one or two nights at the Globe Theatre, the unofficial Festival nightclub (by day a Philosophy Lab, by night a crowded ex-Church-turned-bar / night club / dance hall) - same scenario. Humble me.

In the literary republic

I did my best to participate in the Festival sessions, by asking questions, which I hoped came out intelligently, the way Obama would have put it, even if not in the same accent. (Speaking of which - it always sounded strange, my Nigerian accent, crowding around my ears as it left my mouth into the mic, jostled left and right by the ghosts and after-effects of so many English accents).

It's hard to tell now if there was a link between the paucity of visitors of colour at Hay and the intimidating frequency with which people smiled at me all over the town. From the moment I got into Hay, the smiles and smiling looks kept beating frenzied paths towards me. Not that anyone stopped to ask if this was my first time at Hay, or to congratulate me for coming (the way we do to first time visitors in Nigerian churches) - in any case I wouldn't actually have been surprised if that had happened.

Come to think of it, one woman did sort of congratulate me, one day as I wandered around the festival site. She smiled and observed that I seemed to be enjoying myself, and making the most of my time in Hay. I didn't recognise her; turned out she'd been in at least two sessions at which I'd asked questions. It must have been at that moment that I realised that felt anonymity and actual anonymity are two utterly different concepts. God knows what else she saw me doing! I am certain that going to Hay will turn out to be one of the best things I did in 2009.

It was inspiring to be in an environment in which the printed word was being celebrated, instead of mourned, as is the norm these days especially in the face of the global recession.

However, watching the long queues of people gathered for the book signing sessions at the Festival Bookshop, I couldn't help trying to imagine what the near Digital Future might look like, when Google and Amazon and Sony are done with us: long lines of adoring fans, nervously clutching Kindles and Readers, eager to have their e-books (yes, e-books!) signed... Intriguing idea - but I think it can wait.

Until after my name has found its way into the Hay Festival brochure, as a novelist who will be reading from a HARDBACK copy of his debut novel... Teju Cole will return next week.

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