The Grenfell survivors can’t copyright their tragedy

Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster.

A petition urging the BBC to drop its projected series Grenfell has had more than 50,000 signatures, and there’s anger too at a play being prepared for the National Theatre by the writer Gillian Slovo. ‘Before you do this sort of thing, you should get our permission, because this is our pain, our story,’ said Maryam Adam, who escaped from the burning tower and later gave evidence to the public inquiry. David O’Connell, a leaseholder on the estate, is quoted as saying: ‘There’s no way people want to be part of this BBC series. It’s a fictionalised version of my lived experience. For us it’s repetitive and triggering.’

I risk sounding a bit of a heel in taking the opposite view here. There’s a dignity and an aura of moral authority, especially in the culture as it stands now, that comes from suffering and from strength of personal feeling. Who am I, writing from the trauma-free comfort of my own home on the other side of London, to argue to the survivors of so terrible a disaster that they do not own their own stories?

But apologetically, and with all due respect, I do. 

It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about. To have been involved in a historical event, and even to have been traumatised by it, earns you the right to a decent hearing and the right to sympathy and hopefully the right to some form of public redress. But it doesn’t give you copyright on the story. Should the survivors of the Lisbon earthquake have felt entitled to a veto on Voltaire’s writing of Candide? Should Napoleon have had first dibs on War and Peace? Was Don DeLillo’s Falling Man arrogating a narrative right that belonged solely to those who survived the attacks on the Twin Towers, or even to those who did not survive them? 

What we’re seeing in this story, I think, is a muddled collision between the never very well-defined prohibition on cultural appropriation, and the concept that certain forms of language or art can (in re-traumatising their audience) be almost a form of violence themselves. In the language in which it is discussed, we find a jumble of pop-therapeutic and identity-politics phrases: ‘triggering’; ‘lived experience’; ‘ownership of the truth’; ‘our identities are being stolen’. I just don’t think this is the right way to think about art. How can you decide with any degree of rigour who owns a story? And how can you police with any degree of authority the way in which those stories are told?

God knows art, especially art that fancies itself as high art and aims to be edgy or controversial, can get things wrong. It’s much easier for film makers or dramatists to be ghoulish, insensitive, exploitative, dishonest and tasteless than it is for them to avoid being so. In writing about living people and recent events, the risks are especially high. The liberties that The Crown took with the historical record might be a good analogy. But the proof of all that is in the pudding.  

You can pelt the finished product with any number of rotten tomatoes if it turns out to deserve them. But you don’t head those risks off by deciding on principle that there are certain stories that cannot be told, or that can only be told by certain people, or that artists need to ask permission before they get on with doing their thing. Art itself – in which category I include film-making, drama, fiction and almost any other creative response to the world – is unruly and greedily appropriative. It has to be able to be in order to do its work. It has never come with good taste baked in.   

My friend and colleague Lionel Shriver, who has never been one to kowtow to the taste police, put it very well I think when mocking an undergraduate moral panic over white people wearing sombreros. The point of being a novelist, she said, is exactly to try on other people’s hats. She was right. But I think she’d be the first to acknowledge that you try on those hats at your own risk. Is it safer to stick closely to what you know? Sure. You’re more likely to come a cropper the further you stray from home. You’re more likely to tell on yourself by creating characters bolted together from cliches and preconceptions. Will you attract scorn and mockery if, as a straight middle-aged man from Hampstead, you write a queer teenage Tiktok influencer from a housing project in Detroit and give her a vocabulary of Ali G ghetto-speak and early-noughties online buzzwords? You betcha. And you will deserve it. Does that mean you have no right to try to tell her tale in the first place? It does not. Knock yourself out. Try on that hat. And as for triggerings and retraumatisings, the front pages of newspapers will do that far more effectively than any number of TV dramas or plays on the South Bank—and no news editor worth his salt ever refused to report a disaster because it might upset the people involved.  

As it happens, from the sound of it, both Slovo’s and the BBC’s dramatisations are going out of their way to be tasteful, to be respectful, to cleave to the facts as far as they are known and to foreground the voices of those who lived through those horrible days in 2017. Slovo’s play, Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, seems to be a sort of collage-piece – a collection of verbatim survivors’ accounts collected over five years of interviews and engagement. Peter Kosminsky, screenwriter on the BBC drama, says the team started working on the piece within days of the fire and attended every day of the public inquiry. They have evidently been putting in the work. So much the better.  

But even if they weren’t, that doesn’t mean that any number of signatures on a petition should be considered a mandate for those writers to be forced to park their pens.