At most lit-fests, the audience engagement at the end of each session is sometimes the most dynamic and invigorating part of the session. At the Kerala Lit Fest that concluded recently in Kozhikode, a young man observed that be it the female point of view or the Dalit point of view, only someone who understood the politics of what it is to be that marginalised voice would be able to bring authenticity into the telling.
I thought of the book I was reading. The Girl with Seven Names (A North Korean Defector’s Story) by Hyeonseo Lee. The author lived in North Korea till 1997 until her escape. More than the arduous and dangerous journey, the book is truly memorable for its account of ordinary life in North Korea. ‘Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a lifetime in the Gulag.’ Or ‘ It is mandatory from Elementary School to attend public executions.’ Or ‘The State Beauty Parlour was always fully booked, with women having their hair permed (not dyed which was prohibited)...’. There have been two other such books that caught the world’s imagination. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and Xinran’s The Good Women of China. Stories of extraordinary courage by ordinary women.
The young man in the audience would perhaps see these accounts as true voices of courage about surviving an oppressive political regime. But according to his argument, a writer who has not experienced any of this will be unable to bring a true ring of honesty into the telling.
As a 10-year-old, my older brother read out a poem to me from his Hindi text book. Siyaramsharan Gupt’s Ek Phool Ki Chaah. The story of a Dalit child who asks her father for a flower from the temple. Despite knowing that this may have dire consequences, the father goes to the temple and what follows is inevitable.
As my brother read aloud, I remember the lump in my throat growing. Many years later as I read Ann Micheals’ Fugitive Pieces and Tom Kenneally’s Schindler’s Ark, the grief that grew within me was the same.
The Fugitive Pieces in almost poetic prose tells the story of Jakob Beer who is seven when his parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers who invade their Polish village, and his beloved, musically talented 15-year-old sister, Bella, is abducted. Fleeing from the blood-drenched scene, he is saved by a Greek geologist who secretly transports the traumatised boy to his home on the island of Zakynthos, where they live through the Nazi occupation, suffering privations but escaping the atrocities that decimate Greece’s Jewish community.
Schindler’s Ark went on to become the movie Schindler’s List that churned up everyone who saw it. The book does that a hundred fold more.
None of these writers had actually ever experienced the gristle and bone of the worlds they were describing. And yet the power of the writing surmounts all of that.
It would be impossible for a writer to experience everything he or she writes about. What a writer seeks to do is draw on that inbuilt ability called empathy to make an alien world his or hers by drawing on a similar experience to seek actuality from. But demanding that only those who know what it is to be a member of a marginalised group should write about it is both limiting and short-sighted.
Worse, it will see a proliferation of polemics masquerading as literature and misery memoirs that fulfils the voyeuristic reader’s need for satiation and little else.
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