To cope with the onslaught of the world, so to speak, I've learned to start compartmentalizing in terms of what I could do with the shocking or devastating information I learn, how I could use it in a book, whether that quote or that statistic could be incorporated into my latest story. Not "how can I take action and make people aware of this?" or "how can I change this?" but "how could this fit into my novels?"
This is a problem.
On Friday I was at a talk on the state of Gaza after the Israeli war last summer, and I was trying so hard not to break down into sobbing the whole time, I was trying to see these pictures and hear these stories with a distant ear, a writer's ear, so that I could channel this devastation and this tragedy at a later moment.
But this voice in my head nagged me, saying, "their tragedies are not yours to use, to take and bend and put in a book set in a universe that will never exist, with characters who live only in your head."
Why was I trying to keep this distance, trying not to cry? It wasn't that I wanted to remain unmoved by the accounts of terror and desperation and misery, but that I feared being broken by them. That it was easier to process if I transplanted their stories into my imaginary world.
But that is not where they are happening. Those collapsed buildings and shattered homes and tortured people, I did not invent them and they will not go away if I tie them neatly into my fantasy stories.
I like to think that I write fantasy because I can make political commentary subliminally, that I can worm subversive thoughts into people's heads without them realizing what I am actually talking about. But maybe I also write about fantasy worlds because I am afraid to write about the real one. Afraid to co-opt stories that aren't mine, afraid to "get it wrong," afraid to face what is going on here for real, instead of piecing together a fantasy world based on Palestine-Vietnam-Iraq-Chile-whatnot.
I went to a writing conference where the keynote speaker was Aminatta Forna, an author from Sierra Leone, who spoke of writing about politics and how in the Western world, so many see this as taboo, a borderline that fiction should not cross. Whereas in the rest of the world, almost every book is inherently political, because "politics"--that icky, gritty sphere we like to keep at arm's length--colors every aspect of people's lives in a way that we over here have likely never experienced. We can live in our snow globes and poke things away as we wish. If politics is too messy and unappealing (or, heaven forbid, won't sell well enough), we can just leave it by the wayside.
I guess in my snow globe, I've been watching the world through the glass--not ignoring, never ignoring, but not interacting. I reach out and snare little pieces of what's swirling around out there, and then spin it into my own story so the snow-globe-bound might start to care about what's out there.
But that is a limited narrative. And even reading the last paragraph, I notice how US-centric it is--"out there," especially. The people who live "out there" are inherently "not here"--it's othering. Do I write, then, from a divisive standpoint? Also, the ones here, the "snow-globe-bound," tend on the whole to be less bound by any outside forces than anyone else--it is their own fear or ignorance or indifference that keeps them stuck inside. They are not the ones who need the world brought to their doorsteps--it is already there, if they would care to see it.
If I am employing this language, if I am focusing on little pieces of the world like I'm casting a selective fishing line through it, I am still seeing with snow-globe lenses. I am not representing anyone's story fully, I am bringing nothing to light. I am giving in to the same narrative that says "politics should stay out there, I don't really need to think about it." It is from a very privileged worldview indeed that I can say, "I don't want to think about that too hard because it makes me so desperately sad, so I'm going to put some of it in a story instead and distill it out so I can handle it."
It makes me sad? I am afraid I will be broken by it? I, who live at such a reserve from all of this "war stuff," as a friend of mine deemed it? I must protect my delicate psyche by averting my metaphorical eyes from it? I can do that--it's been made so easy for me. But how many people can't, don't have that compartmentalizing option, to separate the terrors of the world from the everyday going-ons of their lives, because they are one and the same?
Transferring those feelings and stories to fantasy also inherently brands them made-up, not real. And isn't that the last thing I want to do--dismiss the suffering around the globe (largely wrought by the US)--but is that what I have been unintentionally doing? Not extremely egregiously, I don't think, since of course the real world influences all stories we write, made-up or not, and there's a line between doing what I meant to do--placing real-world events in a fantasy context to generate new thinking about the world--and avoiding it. Armed with avoidance tactics is not how I want to live in and view the world.
Some sorts of these thoughts have been germinating in my head since I heard Aminatta Forna give her talk. If I want to write about politics, if I want to crack the snow globes, why must I stick to a hypothetical situation loosely based on catastrophes happening right here and now? If I want to write a story influenced by the US war on Vietnam, why not set the story in Vietnam? Why not write about the Palestinian children in the presentation I saw, rather than pluck up their stories and replant them elsewhere? Can not a story set in its own habitat be more powerful than any distant, distorted reflection?
Fantasy often need be a vehicle to talk about the real world, but need not be one to avoid that real world. If I am trying to escape it, trying not to feel the intense sorrow and pain and horror of the world by imagining how I could use it in my stories, I am doing no one a good service. Fantasy writing as activism is a powerful thing only so long as it does not keep me from fighting for and with the real people whose lives influenced my writing. And that's what I'm afraid my compartmentalizing of our horror-wracked world has been doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment