The Dalit Caste Writer.

Recently I was thrown out of a bookshop. Bookshops aren’t known for confrontation and prejudice, but the world of publishing is a class system, like any other class.

I know a few things about prejudice. I suffer from Schizophrenia. I have been excluded in several different situations in my life. Everything from friendships, to work, at church and even a dentist. Discrimination is usually about fear, but more so in mental health. In publishing there are a great many difficulties and obstacles in the way of anyone who wants a career in writing. Class can be one of them.

A degree from Oxford or Cambridge or any good English degree will get you past a few hurdles, least of all how to write. But the largest one is money. If you can prove you can make money for your agent, your publisher or television and film company then you’re in the door. And that’s fine. But what if you have a background like mine?

Welcome to the world of the Dalit Caste Writer. We are the untouchables of the publishing industry. Do be an untouchable, you need the following attributes: no English degree, no agent, no publisher and most importantly you need to be vain and stupid enough to publish your own work. If you have all four of these things, then you are a Dalit; an untouchable.

The fact is there are thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, writing terrible books and sending manuscripts to a limited number of agents and publishers and there are thousands of self publishers, pushing their books onto the booksellers; of which there are only handful. This is why the Dalit Caste Writer exists. We self create our own exclusion, due to our huge numbers.

In my time, I have written to vast numbers of people asking to help me with my career. When I became unwell at the age of 20, I knew my life was all but over. The diagnosis of Schizophrenia doesn’t come along straight away. First you’re put into a pre-Schizophrenia bracket called Schizophreniform, when you have had all the symptoms for at least six months then you get the dreaded and most life changing diagnosis in the medical literature. Once there you will be feared, dreaded even, wherever you go. Friends and family alike will freak out badly if you say or do anything weird. I have been cast out of a dentist’s chair mid exam, asked to leave a church, a super-market and recently a bookshop, because staff felt threatened.

You may be wondering at this stage why I’ve combined writing and mental illness in the same story. The manager who threw me out of the bookshop, was engaged in conversation with me, as if I was a customer, right up until the point she realised I was a self-published author. And that’s when she changed from listening and engaging, to calling security. It seemed to me that once an industry insider like her realises she’s talking to a self-publisher, it triggers an instant aggressive response. This is because she realised that she could treat me in any way she wanted. She was not dealing with a human being any more. The mentally ill are equally as repugnant to many people. We are a threat. We don’t understand the difference between right and wrong, which makes us unable to cope with moral dilemmas and questions. Therefore we can’t be trusted.

The second reason I have bundled the two together, was because of the role writing was supposed to take in my life, after I became ill. I wanted to be a writer from a young age. I started two novels when I was around 18 years old and they were terrible. I had no inspiration, no ideas. After I had a religious psychotic breakdown, I had masses of stuff to write about. Doesn’t make me a good writer, I just had stuff to write about. By the time I was twenty-five I decided to try a career in writing. I got work as a journalist, I published my first book to test out my ideas. All good. Got some excellent feedback, which was unexpected. Writing was supposed to be my niche, my way out of my terrible circumstances, having been very unwell, homeless, friendless, penniless and unable to work with others because of my paranoid delusions and thought broadcasts and delusions of telepathy etc. At that time I suffered from every symptom in a long list of symptoms. Writing could be done in solitude. I barely had to leave my desk and I could (maybe) earn a living. But since then writing has become a source of extreme disappointment and depression and feelings of utter hopelessness. The reason? No-one and I mean no-one will read my work, answer my letters, emails and calls and those I have cornered at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, just simply refused to help. This feeling of being besieged by writers like me, is something I can understand. But at the same time, it doesn’t help me at all. I just wanted one chance, to escape a life which is killing me. Like some pathetic X-Factor contestant I find myself having invested far too much emotional energy in hoping that writing will help me escape the illness, the economic trap I’m stuck in and give me a little self-respect for a change. Do I blame the culture of wanting to become a writer, do I blame the rudeness and ignorance of the publishing industry, or do I blame myself, for wanting a future that just wasn’t and never has been available to me? Should I give up and lead a solitary and excluded way of life? According to recent life expectancy figures, I’ve got fifteen years of my life left (I’m 38). I lost my whole adult life, on this cruel and relentless illness. And when it kills me (and it will), my family will mourn my passing and then the other 7 billion people on Earth will experience one more unremarkable day.

What gets to me, and really I shouldn’t let it, is that one of the most prestigious Literature Festivals in the world sits a hundred yards away from my house each year. I look at it as if it’s a mirage. I walk past it with my head down and a pang of anxiety and anger in the pit of my stomach. I can’t possibly be this close to world’s finest writers, publishers and agents and yet so far away it may as well be in Timbuktu. It is all of those things. Close but far away. The white tents and The Times stands and the occasional glimpse of Mariella Fostrop, or Lord Winston; the Cheltenham Literature Festival attendants whizzing around moving stock and directing customers to right tent for the right event. All the bustle, the big television broadcasting trucks. All of it a mirage. I am an untouchable and I cannot reach out and touch them, because they are not there. Not for me anyway.