In these days of instant feedback, kudos, comments etc to something published online, it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of published writing never gave the opportunity for two-way communication to the reader.
When I was quite young, I wrote a fan letter to Tom Wolfe about his novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
AND HE WROTE BACK TO ME!!!
It was such a COOL letter, by an author I have since come to adore even more. I loved the fact that in his letter to me he was sharing his work in progress. The novel to which he refers came out two years later as Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing The Flack Catchers. It was a massive bit of irony about both bureaucracy and activists, lampooning both in equal measure.
Here’s an excerpt from an article in the New York Magazine about the novel:
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well … they used the Ethnic Catering Service … right … They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak–then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.
Did I love this novel even more because my family’s nick-name for me was Mau-Mau?
If the reference to mau-mau is meaningless to you, blame your youth. A Mau Mau was a member of a revolutionary society in Kenya, established in the early 1950s, that engaged in terrorist activities in an attempt to drive out the European settlers and to give government control to the native Kenyans.
It gained another meaning entirely thanks to Tom Wolfe.
In current English, mau-mau is used to suggest that a person's efforts and actions stem only from a desire to commit violent acts, or in milder use, to cause disruption or achieve some petty aim.
As a writer now, I remind myself occasionally of how important it is to give a reader a response to their comments; without Tom Wolfe’s letter, I wonder if I would have become the reader and writer I am today.
