Why Literature?

Why do we read literature?

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran and a question Azar Nafisi addresses in the book is the question: what does literature offer us? Throughout the book she extols the power of literature mainly as the ability to offer empathy, both to train you to empathize and to understand the world and issues through different lenses. She writes,

A novel...is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience.

So, is that why we read literature, and should it be the only vessel we have to understand the experiences of someone else; not only the writer but the oppressed when reading Invitation to a Beheading or the American Dream when reading The Great Gatsby? And what should we do when confronted with conflicting ideas of what is reality as perceived by two different sources?

An article written by the Washington Post called Sorry, Wrong Chador examines Iranian views of Reading Lolita in Tehran (the few that have had the ability to read it). Many do not agree with Nafisi's take, or think that it deserves updating. It is a powerful book, no one argues that, but if the basic facts are not universal, or even widespread, what do we take from it? There is a endless call for the 'right' story, so how do we choose?

It seems to me though, that more than one story can be correct. Throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran, and many of the books they read, there is a sense that somehow fiction and reality have combined to make something that is true in meaning but perhaps not exactly true in happening. An event, seen from four different sides does not have a right story, it has many different perceived stories. So, the power of literature comes from the ability to communicate those stories, together or separately, and the power for us to understand them. But in order to avoid a story that is one sided, we must take other stories into account, and remember that the true power of literature comes from the words and meanings embedded in them, so that perhaps a spoken version is just as powerful.

We must remind ourselves that a word once spoken, or written, it cannot be taken back, only built upon.

Equality v. Inequality

Yesterday I was reading Muslimah Media Watch (a blog dedicated to keeping track of how Muslim women are portrayed in the media with more than 20 contributors) and in this blog post Krista made a distinction that I think deserves a lot more attention. She wrote in reference to Bill 94 (a bill currently proposed in the province of Quebec, Canada to ban the niqab in any place of public service):

One issue that came up...was the difference between formal equality (everyone being treated in exactly the same way) and substantive equality (a more equity-focused concept, in which it is recognized that identical treatment doesn’t necessarily have egalitarian results). The argument here is that, while Bill 94 claims to treat everyone equally by requiring all people to show their faces, the result will have disproportionately negative effects on women for whom showing their faces in certain situations is just not an option; Bill 94, in other words, represents formal equality but will result in substantive inequality.

So, what is equality? If Bill 94 is passed, and it will not be the first of it it's kind if it is. It will not have an effect on everyone. When it comes down to it, it will only have an effect, a negative effect, on the small sect of the population that wears the niqab. That is, both mathematically and morally, the bill is unequal. If every single person wore the niqab, and it was banned, only then would this bill be substantively equal. However, only then would there be more of an outcry, if only because there would be numbers behind the plea.

This episode begs the question, can the government make every law they pass equal in its effects? Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. teaches us that it cannot. If everyone is brought down to the same level, we could be all equal (and affected equally by every law), but then the beauty of the human race would be lost. People are born unequal. That is how the world works.

However, coming back to Bill 94, how close can we get to equality before we cross over the line and make the world more unequal, even if it is only for a select few? Considering the differences between ' formal equally' (in its most extreme version in Harrison Bergeron) and 'substantive equality' must be a requirement. Equality is a word that is thrown around a lot, but true equality would be the kind where everyone was affected the same way. Those who proposed Bill 94 do not (I hope) have any hatred for people who wear that niqab, but I think policy makers have to be aware that they can easily be pulled into the recent wave of Islamaphobia and to remember that fear does not give grounds to effectively deny any human being their rights. I do not wear a niqab, and I do not know anyone personally who does, but still I am offended by this regression to inequality among people who live in the same neighborhood. I hope that the supporters of Bill 94, and other bills like it, stop to think about how to balance safety concern with equality.

A Conflict of Identity

I have recently been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and a large theme in the book is the ability of someone to have an identity, and to what extent that identity is influenced by those around us. In the book, Nafisi explains that the totalitarian regime of Iran controls so much of the lives of her students and the people she knows that they struggle to form their own identity separate from how they are defined by the government and the world they have created. On page 76, Nafisi writes:

Implicit in almost all their descriptions was the way they saw themselves in the context of an outside reality that prevented them from defining themselves clearly and separately… my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had.

To what extent is our identity based on others in the first place? Psychology has many different answers to this question in the form of different theories, like Erik Erickson’s theory of development and James Marcia’s Identity Statuses (and of course many others). However, the many different parts of a person’s identity (social, political, sexual, religious, vocation identities) each depend on different factors, and some do depend on different people. I think, at least in some ways, other people do help define almost all areas of your identity. However, I think the difference in developing your identity with other people around you, and developing your identity in a country where your actions are controlled by someone else, is the freedom to choose. I have the ability to choose who I know and speak with, what I learn, read, and how I act (up to a certain extreme), but the girls in Nafisi’s Iran do not have that choice. Their every public action is controlled by what other people think they should be, so they cannot act out things the way they want to, and they cannot discover themselves through their decisions. So they are caught in this in-between place where they know what they are not, but do not know what they are. They are caught in this prison, this conflict of identity, and I really do not know how they will escape it. It is a tragedy that people are caught in this kind of situation, and that once they are caught it is very hard to escape.
What do you think?

Smear Your Competition?

I follow Culture Clash (a blog written by a multicultural Canadian-American), and the other day I was reading her post about the recent election and specifically the ad campaigns that occurred before election day. I started to write a comment, but I liked the topic so much I wanted to dedicate more time to it.

I too have gotten sick of the attack ads during this campaign season. As Stephanie mentioned, Wesleyan University recently published a study showing that ads based on personal characteristics of political components have increased by 6 percent since the 2008 election. I am not surprised, it seems to get worse with every election. In comparison, other countries have a distinct abhorrence to smear ads and the inevitable lies and slander that go along with them. In the recent England elections, two judges ordered a re-election for a seat of Parliament in northern England because the winning representative was found to have publicized false statements about his opponent. The statements that the liberal democrat courted Muslim militants who had advocated violence against the Labour Party candidate seem all too familiar. I would say that there have been even worse campaigns in the United States, and they will inevitably grow worse next election. Politifact (a non-partisan group that checks facts during elections) found in a recent study that most of the ads during this campaign season where barley true. They twisted facts wherever possible, and outright lied on occasion, but the damage has been done.

These ads do only sully the run-up to the election though, a lot more is at stake. This competitive and utterly poisonous atmosphere can continue after the elections, making bi-partisanship near impossible. I think the question here is what do we do to stop the vicious cycle? I think publicizing things like Frank Luntz's recent study about campaign ads would be a good start. He found that talking straight and not trivializing the issues makes the best campaign ad, not smearing your competition. Perhaps these negative campaign ads do help the party publishing them by a few percentage points, but I think the trade-off for American democracy is much worse. It worries me that here, in what we hope is the most democratic nation in the world, people are continuing to fall back on dirty campaigns rather than speaking about the issues that matter. They should be talking about the real things that people should election them for, not the trivial false statements that are taking up more and more of our time and money each year. We need to consider our combative ideas when it is election time for not only the benefit of the next two years but for the future of American democracy.

What do you think?

Modernization

Modernization is a word that people throw around a lot but what exactly are they trying to convey? A lot of the time modern and western are words that are used interchangeably, however, that juxtaposition says a lot about the idea of 'modern' today, not what modern really is. Modern generally means having the characteristics of the present or the immediate past involving techniques, methods, or ideas. So technically the word modern simply means what ideas and methods are common presently, and modernization means moving towards that. However, there are a lot of words that modernization alludes to, like westernization, urbanization, industrialization, and civilized. The connections between modernization and westernization are tied tightly together by many ideas in our society. The 'west' views itself as the most advanced and therefore the most 'modern' of today's societies. So what does modern society mean? Does it mean that every societies’ modern is the same? In the natural world every organism is different but they are all advanced and well suited to survive in their environment, can we think of societies the same way? As the world becomes more interconnected must societies become more similar in order to live together in a smaller environment. I think that there could be a move towards a more ‘modern society’ in order to become more powerful in the world without loosing the unique culture of each society.

There are other interesting blogs about this subject, like this one and this one. Both of them are from a different parts of the world, but both give interesting points of view.

Death in The Poisionwood Bible

I just finished reading The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and a quote stuck out to me near the end. On page 528 she writes:

They worshiped everything living and every dead, for voodoo embraces death as its company, not its enemy. It honors the balance between loss and salvation. This is what nelson tried to explain to me once, while we scarped manure from the chicken coop. I could not understand how muntu could refer to a living person or a dead one with equal precision, but Nelson just shrugged. ‘All that is being here.’

This idea of death being a necessary part of life is critical throughout Kingsolver’s novel. The equality of life and death is not something we really talk about in America and in the west. I was raised by a thoughtful family and I cannot recall having ever talked about death. There are so many ideas about death, but many in western culture are still fearful of it, and view ‘death’ as a bad thing, and perhaps it is (interesting blog). It takes people away. It literally kills people.

Death in The Poisionwood Bible is more fluid, more mathematical. A person who is living or dead is muntu. They are still alive when they are dead, and in some ways dead when they are alive. Death is still sad, the Congolese women scream and screech when their children die, but they understand that without death there is no life. Throughout the book, one thing dies so that another may live, and that is the price you have to pay to stay You must hunt and kill animals to keep your children alive. You must choose a child to save when the driver ants come. Adah considers herself to be alive because her younger sister Ruth May is dead. Adah did not kill her, she tried to save her, but she survives later because Ruth May is not there. Death is a necessary part of life, at least the Congolese life as portrayed in The Poisionwood Bible. There is a cycle of life and death that is forever upheld in the Congo.

Cyclical v. Linear Time

The other day I was reading about India and my English teacher recommended a talk by Devdutt Pattanaik about the myths of India compared to traditional western myths and how those myths affect how we think today. The natural world shows each human the same thing, but the myths each person holds allows them to make sense of the world that they see. So, the concept of time in India and in the United States is what I will examine in this blog.

The American concept of time is traditionally linear. That everything has a set order, a time line, and once something happens it does not happen again. Similar things may occur but each has its own notch on the linear time record and is separate from one another. Augustine was the first to praise a linear time line because he said time was going somewhere and nothing was ever repeated. On the other hand, Indian time is traditionally cyclical. Cyclical time is first recorded in the Upanishads, when the Rishis believe that time is circular because of the seasons and nature and they saw a center around which everything revolved around (more detail here). Nothing lasts forever, and everything is repeated. Devutt Pattanaik says in his talk, “Not only do [the people of Indian myth] live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all.”

How do these two competing ideas affect the way people think and live? If your view of the world is cyclical, I think you would care more about what happened in the past, so that you could know what would happen in the future. Also, I think your sense of justice and fairness would be more firmly set without any other influences (religious commandments ect.) because ‘what goes around comes around’. On the other hand, linear time is more focused on goals and steps, and the westernized world of business is set up very linearly. So perhaps to succeed in western business you have to give a little to the linear perspective. In Indian myths there is a lot more left unknown, as Pattanaik mentions. He says, “You're not really sure how you stand in front of God. So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God.” It leaves justice as a more fluid space (at least in the moral sense of the word, not in actual policing), and I think more questioning would go into morality if someone thought it would affect them in the future. Perhaps thinking more about our actions would be a good thing.

When does aid become harmful?

According to S. K. B. Asante in International Assistance and International Capitalism: Supportive or Counterproductive?, “Summing up the experience of African countries both at the national and at the regional levels it is no exaggeration to suggest that, on balance, foreign assistance, especially foreign capitalism, has been somewhat deleterious to African development.” Is this true? At what point does aid become harmful to the people receiving it?

In American society we are brought up with the idea that as Americans we are ‘the best’ and must spread our ‘best-ness’ around to everyone else. Although these ideas are vague and near immeasurable, we hold them up as if they are indisputable. From John Winthrop’s ‘City upon a Hill’ to Fareed Zakaria noting in The Post-American World that America is the only nation that issues report cards to every other country in the world every year, this idea is ingrained in our society. However, I am not here to write about American exceptionalism, I am here to talk about one of the things that it causes… humanitarian and developmental aid, specifically in Africa, and whether it helps or hurts the people receiving aid.

First, the good side of foreign development and aid. Aid can be given for many different reasons including natural disaster, to strengthen allies, to provide infrastructure needed to evacuate natural recourses, and commercial access. Of course, humanitarian ideals are also held and aid is given for that reason as well. Direct humanitarian aid, like sending doctors, food, and shelter to areas which are affected by war or natural disasters saves lives. There are many organizations that help with medical assistance, food, shelter, education, and a whole host of other problems in other countries. I probably don’t need to preach to you too much about how good humanitarian aid is. It saves lives! Over 44 billion dollars in 2008 was donated to Africa from other countries to help in developmental and humanitarian aid. That’s a lot of medical supplies, food, and tents, all of which are essential to people who have been affected by natural disaster or war.

Direct humanitarian aid does save lives, but developmental aid is harder to pin down. Developmental aid can become a political tool for developed countries to influence other countries. In the Cold War, for example, both sides used aid to garner allies and support them with no view of where the aid was going. James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, says that developmental aid in Africa is harmful because many times it is distributed by politicians and can help prop-up corrupt governments that use the aid to manipulate the people they govern. Shikwati uses the example of food aid in Kenya, portions of which are sold on the black market at prices that undercut local farmers. Furthermore, Mark Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Program, said that food aid cost developing countries about $50 billion dollars a year in agricultural exports not exported. In places that corruption is high, aid money goes a long way to finance things it is not meant to finance. Monetary aid in Iraq for example is considered to be about 15 cents on each dollar donated. Also, foreign aid can make an impact in ways that they are not meant to. For instance, sending educational aid may help a government reallocate funds from their educational spending to their military spending, so the actual increase in spending goes to the military rather than education. So, developmental aid can be harmful to the people it attempts to aid.

Now we come back to our American exceptionalism and wonder, are we doing the right thing? At what point does our want to help people actually end up harming them. It should be noted that although the United States does come up as the highest donor on many lists, it does not come in even the top fifteen (out of the 22 measured) in the Commitment to Development Index, which measures factors other than money. So I would like to ask, what do you think?

Into to Conflict

Is there a right answer? When people argue, and when conflict breaks out, who has the right answer? The answer that makes everyone happy? The answer that stops the conflict? The answer that prevents conflict in the future? When both sides argue passionately for what they believe in, is there still a definite right and wrong? And then, if there is a right answer, who decides that it is right? Is this decision democratic, or a more dictatorial? Where does everyone fit into the whole picture of the conflict?
Maybe these questions do not have a right answer, however, through this blog I hope to explore them. I am not a journalist, I do not have any fancy degree, and I do not have years of experience in conflict. I do however have a curiosity for the subject, and a determination to find out more about it. To find out how conflict is both solved and how situations deteriorate and people get more entrenched within their conflict. To examine both sides of an ideological split, to see what both sides have to say about it. In each post I will pick a conflict that I think it worth talking about, whether it be political, ethical, or ideological. With each conflict I will see what people have said on either side, and what is being done.
Through this blog I hope to learn more about the world, and the people that inhabit it through what they have to say and what they believe. I hope that I can learn more about specific conflicts, and I hope I help other people to as well. If more people know what conflicts there are in the world, then there are more informed people trying to think of a solution. So here goes, more posts to follow soon!