Terra incognita

Right from an early age, I read fiction.  A lot of fiction.  I loved the Tamil stories, to which I could easily relate.  The ones set in America or England, and the Russian works in translation, required me to imagine lands and peoples and cultures that were completely alien to me.  I read them all, sometimes even if they were beyond my fullest abilities, as was the case with Anna Karenina, which I read when I had yet to gain even a little bit of an understanding of the world.

Fiction that is set in cultures different from one's own requires the reader to learn new names of people and places, the foods and drinks that they consume, the music that the stories refer to, and the history and politics too.  While all these might seem like a lot of work, I have found it to be otherwise.  It was enriching.  It made me want to travel the world and enjoy the remarkably different lives that people lead.

Over the past few years, it has been a world of riches when it comes to reading fiction in the English language.  Even Tamil novels have been wonderfully translated into English; Tamarind History and Perumal Murugan's works offered plenty for me to think about. And, of course, authors from the brown world writing in English about brown people's lives.  The latest is Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim.

Anam's work here is like the few other books that I recently read (and blogged) that is set in the non-Western world, with characters who are non-white, which is what Orhan Pamuk said would happen:

I'm sure we will be reading more Indian literature, because Indian literature in English is slightly more visible, than say, Chinese or Latin American. But I would say, the private lives of non-western nations will be more visible in future. That I can only say. Non-western writers will be more visible and domination of the European-American small world – they were dominating the whole world – that domination will be less. But it's not an animosity, it's not a clash, it's a friendship. We have learned the art of the novel from them – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann. These are my brothers; I am not fighting with them.

Unlike with books by Dostoyevsky and the rest, The Good Muslim covers a relatively familiar terrain--Bangladesh.  When the author drops the name Bangabandhu, I know right away that she refers to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is considered as the father of that country.  Even though I have not visited the country, Dhaka and Chittagong are names of places that have been familiar to me forever.  When the story is set against the backdrop of the 1971 war that birthed Bangladesh by severing it from Pakistan, I do not need to brush up on history in order to understand what happened.

The familiarity with the context makes the fiction more real.  But, the unfamiliarity of, say, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk was also equally enjoyable and thought-provoking.  Ultimately, it is all about viewing the world through somebody else's eyes and values, which we all need to do in plenty if we want to work towards peace.  As I noted in this post five years ago, empathy does not come easily to us.  We need to learn about it, and experience it over and over.  We learn and experience empathy through the profound works of literature.  The quote in that post, which I had excerpted from an essay, is worth repeating:

What could be more important, for ethical and social understanding, than the ability to grasp what it is like to be someone from a different culture, period, social class, gender, religion or personality type? And one learns why even those broad categories won’t do, because one senses what it is like to be a particular other person. And that, too, is an important lesson: no one experiences the world in quite the same way as anyone else. 

If we could more easily put ourselves in the position of others and put on a set of glasses to see the world in their way, we might very well, when those glasses are off, still not share their beliefs. But we will at least understand people better, negotiate with them more effectively, or guess what measures are likely to work. Just as important, we will have enlarged our sense of what it is to be human. No longer imprisoned in our own culture and moment, or mistaking our local and current values for only possible ones, we will recognize our beliefs as one of many possibilities -- not as something inevitable, but as a choice.