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| The following essay discusses the work of Anthony Marra and other contemporary war novelists. More on his novel at the end of this blog. |
Editor’s Note: New America, formerly
New America Foundation, is a non-partisan think tank in the United States. It focuses
on a range of public policy issues, including national security studies,
technology, asset building, health, gender, energy, education, and the economy.
Based in Washington, D.C., the organization kindly shares its editorial content
found in its various publications and papers with other not-for-profit media,
such as this advertising free blog. The
following essay was published December 3, 2015.
For more articles by New America go to www.newamerica.org
GUEST BLOG—By Emily Tamkin, Assistant Editor, New America
Weekly--Both
scientific studies and literary luminaries tell us that reading literary
fiction can make us more empathetic.
Inhabiting the worlds of novels and short stories can help us step out
of our own personal lives and into another’s and back again—leaving us more
understanding than we were before of experiences beyond our own.
But can it
make us more understanding of issues beyond our own, too? Can we, as we come to
the end of 2015 surrounded at once by near-constant images of calamity and
best-of books lists, become more empathetic or politically aware by
supplementing the news articles and white papers with a piece of fiction?
The answer,
according to some of the authors who are writing about real-world issues in
fictional stories, is that we can try.
The authors,
for their part, have dealt with a wide variety of subjects with which we
readers can use fiction as a vehicle for examining geopolitical conflict—and,
perhaps, learn what it might mean to be geopolitically empathetic in the
process.
New America
Middle East fellow Zaha Hassan is addressing the plight of Palestinians in her
upcoming novel Die Standing Like Trees.
An international lawyer by training, Hassan recently wrote that she chose to
use literature to explore this topic so that “those observing events unfolding
in Palestine/Israel can imagine the humanity in the very real stories of
Palestinians and the context of their struggle for freedom and
self-determination.”
Similarly,
Anthony Marra brought the wars in Chechnya to an American audience in his
novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,
and short story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno (disclaimer: both made
the author of this article cry).
In Ghost Fleet, August Cole and New America
Strategist Peter Singer use the novel form to imagine World War III.
And writer
Xiaolu Guo uses her books to explore “the issue of exile, the issue of complex
relation between art and politics, and how artists try to survive in a political
environment” (this, according to Guo in an email). The list goes on. But,
between the titles, the question remains: How do writers bring the geopolitical
to fictional life?
Can we become more empathetic
or politically aware by supplementing the news articles and white papers with a
piece of fiction?
Some draw
upon personal or professional experiences of their own. Hassan wrote of her
mother’s Palestinian generation, while Singer spent years as a consultant for
the U.S. military and intelligence community. But both had written far more
non-fiction about their subjects before beginning their novelistic ventures.
Singer wrote a novel (as opposed to an article, or an essay, or any other kind
of book) because he was interested in exploring not only what a World War III
would look like, but also what it would actually be and feel like.
He said in
an interview for this article that, though he had done Hollywood consulting,
fiction writing was different from his other endeavors. He noted that the
fiction writer must focus not just on what’s important, but also on what’s
interesting—and that the introduction of characters of his own imagination made
editing infinitely more difficult, not only because, in his war thriller, “you
could cut one sentence and throw off everything four scenes later,” but also
because the characters “are your creations,” and therefore painful to destroy.
While Singer
had expert knowledge prior to writing his book (including its 374 endnotes),
other authors had to be students of their subjects before they could be
scribes. Marra, an American, recalled in a Skype interview for this piece that
he “arrived in Russia in 2007. I was 22. I lived down the street from a
military cadet academy and I would see these military cadets marching … seeing
these teenagers march past this conflict they might one day join … What
separated them? It was, of course, Chechnya.” Four or five years later, he
said, he set about trying to find a novel in English set in wartime Chechnya.
When he couldn’t find one, he wrote the book that he wanted to read.
As an
American, Marra had to educate himself on the subject of Chechnya specifically
and Russia more broadly—and know that he was doing the same for his audience.
“I had to write it knowing that 99 percent of [the novel’s] readers would have
no familiarity with the history of Chechnya … I suppose I know that at no point
have I ever claimed that I'm an expert. There are people who have devoted their
lives to studying this. They're the ones I list in my bibliography. I was in no
way giving voice to a people. I was concerned with about a dozen characters.”
To inform
while entertaining: That’s the balance that Singer described as “useful
fiction.” A good novel that deals with geopolitical issues well, Singer
stressed, must meet both terms. This informational element is a distinguishing
feature of geopolitical literature.
If writers are able to render fiction useful
in exploring geopolitics, it is because geopolitics is ultimately made up of
humans, and fiction is a uniquely effective platform for exploring
humanity.
None of this
is to say that novels can—or should—replace white papers or news articles.
According to Marra, “Nothing kills fiction more quickly than realizing you're
getting a history lesson. I was much less interested in politics at the level
of the Kremlin, the decisions made by rebel commanders. I was much more
interested in how those decisions play many, many miles away.”
And, as
Singer pointed, out, the risk of crossing the line between art and advocacy and
losing an audience in the process is not unique to literature—he noted that the
lukewarm response to war movies that politicized opposition to the conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Green Zone, was likely linked to the reality that
people don’t turn to art for advocacy. “It can’t just be whatever nonfiction
point you’re trying to make,” he said.
Or, as Guo
put it in an email interview, “I think fiction is one of the best ways to
explore politics and our problematic reality … But for me, emotion and
characters are the first things in a story, without genuine characters and
artistic narrative the rest [doesn’t] work.”
So, how do
writers examine geopolitics through fiction and help readers do the same? Some
write about what they know. Some educate themselves about what they don’t. They
place their prose in a well-researched time and place. They create a
painstakingly studied context for their creations. And then they hold
themselves to the same standards as any other literary author: They create
stories and fill them with characters with whom readers can live and feel, if
only for a little while.
Because, in
the end, if writers are able to render fiction useful in exploring geopolitics,
it is because geopolitics is ultimately made up of humans, and fiction is a
uniquely effective platform for exploring humanity. It doesn’t turn the
personal into the geopolitical, but it can move the political back into the
pathos of the personal.
And while
Guo said that “any art form” can be used to explore political issues, as long
as “an artist really has something genuine to say,” Marra seemed to think
fiction uniquely up to the empathetic task.
“The real
beauty and miracle of fiction,” he said, “is that it lets us walk in someone
else's shoes. It drops us through the Earth and next to people I would never
otherwise meet. I read the newspaper and [I] read about numbers. How many
people were killed here, how many people were displaced there? It's hard to
feel much for a number. But you can feel an enormous amount for people, for
individuals, when you hear their stories. There's no form of creating,
nurturing, fostering that sort of care for strangers quite like a novel as a
vehicle for empathy.” He paused, then concluded, as though finishing a
particularly powerful chapter on Chechnya, “It's unparalleled.”
New America’s weekly digital magazine
champions innovative thinking confronting today’s world of pressing challenges.
A CONSTELLATION OF
VITAL PHENOMENON By Anthony Marra
New York Times Notable
Book of the Year * Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year
Amazon Notes: In a
small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as
Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire
to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest
with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change
their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole
remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For Sonja, the arrival
of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has
no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of
five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the
intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three
unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the
transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a
work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.
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