FictionThatMatters.org

Ask a room full of writers whether they have a responsibility to write about politics, and you will get a negative response. Writing should be unfettered by responsibilities, they will assert, while a few liberal types might mutter a defense before being shouted down. I know this because I have asked this question to a room full of writers several times. It turns out I was merely in the wrong room.

From Words to Nations

The panel Left/Right Literature: The Politics of Taking Up the Pen featured in the chilly Nordic basement of the Scandinavian Society, addressed these questions at length. These writers asserted that the responsibility to engage in political discussion varies from focusing on singular words, to the empowering stories of individual achievement, to addressing the politics of global war. Larry Siems of the PEN Freedom to Write initiative moderated.

Boring Gray Men

Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam initiated the discussion with a reading from his work The Wasted Vigil. I’ll admit that many of the words were lost to me because I was awestruck by the fact that Aslam had memorized several pages of the book, and didn’t seem to be reading at all. But in regular conversation he still spoke in a lyrical manner: “Boring gray decisions on boring gray paper, by boring gray men” in Washington had embroiled his country in war. This in a country in which engaging in politics is not always a choice, for language itself has been politicized. Regime changes have resulted in the Islamicization of chemistry textbooks, in which atoms can only bond with Allah’s will. Choosing to write at all is a political act in his view.

These sentiments were echoed by Italian writer Domenico Starnone. “To find those words,” he said, “is one of the primary responsibilities of the writer and the teacher.” Teaching and writing are mediated through language, and the choice of words bears enormous responsibility from writers.

Warspeak

Even war can be the product of words. Austrian author Norbert Gstrein enjoys the unusual passion of exploring how war may be reflected in literature. His 2003 novel The Craft of Killing depicted journalists covering the war in Kosovo. The characters were ultimately troubled by the inability of the novelistic form to reflect war’s true horror. It is challenging to capture the horror of war, the characters agreed. Putting war into a story often ‘negates’ it.

The suggestion (although Gstrein did not state this) is that once the horror of war is adequately expressed, we will grapple with it in a more direct manner. It seems to me that a further complication to war novels is that they lend a metanarrative to what is normally a scatterbrained, disjointed explosion of violence at the time, rendered into coherence later with the benefit of hindsight.

Disgrace-fulness

To further digress, the novel that most distressed me and made me wonder whether writers had a responsibility was J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a tale about an aging professor in Cape Town who has an affair with his student before retreating to the countryside. I read the work while I was living and working in South Africa. I was so shocked by Coetzee’s disparaging portrayal of blacks, women, and everyone else that I read the entire work in outrage. It made me all the more frustrated that this Nobel Prize winning author was also such a damned good writer. But all he had done, for me, was give voice to the apartheid era fears of the right. Black men will rape your women if they take over the country, etc. This question has burned in my mind for years.

Let them Eat Pancakes

At the same time, it is impossible to craft a moving story when there is an absence of realistic characters. Fiction writing can be shackled by the bonds of political discourse. So what kind of book would Coetzee have written if everyone agreed with each other, and all characters, including animals, could give voice to their pain? Not a very good one, the argument goes.

This topic was best addressed by the Dutch writer Mariken Jongman. Jongman prefers to write stories about individual empowerment, especially by children who can be suppressed by adults for making their own choices. She encountered the challenging situation in which she, a devout vegetarian, could not realistically write a novel in which every character abstained from meat. This became especially troubling when one character began to cook for himself. Her solution: she wrote him making pancakes and other assorted vegetarian delectables.

Melted Tears

I’ll close this post with a line from Burmese author Khet Mar, who I covered in an earlier post ‘Prison Deform’ on this site. Mar is currently writing in exile. Today she read from a passage in which she described learning of the imprisonment of a fellow writer in Burma, who was sentenced to 65 years. If singular words matter, as the panel suggested, then these speak volumes.

In the story, the pleasant green lawns at a cocktail party in Iowa were suddenly tainted by the news of her friend:

“As sun melts ice, the wine melted the sadness into tears.”