Writing in the Time of Global Trauma
By Rheea Mukherjee | February 10, 2020 |
Flickr Creative Commons: Ralf Steinberger
A universal agreement seems to be that art often comes from conflict and emotional burdens. At the very least, the process of writing holds our imagination, and part of our imagination comes from the conflicts we’ve overcome and the sense we’ve made out of our world view.
At this time, it’s hard for us writers to not be bombarded by information that is repeatedly illustrating themes of world devastation, climate change, political polarities, violence and xenophobia. The truth is that the world has always had a million things wrong with it, but our access to the news is far easier, and its immediate repercussions have never been so present.
As I write this, I have become more and more drawn towards the protests against a very bigoted law in India that threatens to tear the foundation of this country apart. As India becomes a place I don’t recognize, I find my voice through my words. I find purpose in my life as an Indian writer.
Today, I find whatever I write, whether related to the political reality, or something completely creative, is coming from a place of more defined purpose. As an intense couple of months threaten to become a new reality in the country in which I live, I’ve found a few writing truths I’ve been confronting.
What Does Your Immediate Attention Go To? Embrace It
The beauty of the world is that we are all affected differently by the same things. There are many issues that can make other people charged up, emotional, or invested but might make you yawn or disengage with completely. Generally, our culture tends to focus on why other people are so invested in things, but we rarely look at what we are invested in and why that might be. The difference in worldview is what stitches together a grand universal puzzle that all of us witness. Unless we look at the things in life that tend to make us take note and bring our emotions in, we’ll risk the potential of our writers’ voices. The human condition, especially at the intersections of identity, gender, mental health, and spirituality, are things that have always been important to me; this is why most of my work embraces these notions. It wasn’t until recently, though, that I felt the power of my voice and felt comfort in the anchoring it gave me as a writer. It doesn’t matter what you write, you could be writing non-fiction, history, science-fiction or romance, as long as you know that these are the areas you are naturally drawn to. Own the spaces and imagination that you have; the rest will evolve on its own.
Don’t Carry The Burden of Caring About Things People Tell You That You Need To Care About
Since I am a person very passionate about social justice, animal rights, and mental health, it took me many years to accept this statement. When you are taken in by topics like this, you are subconsciously taught to judge others for not caring enough about the same issues you do. In fact, a good part of your mental bandwidth then goes to fretting about others who do not seem to care. The bigger picture is that, as writers. we all have our own unique roles in this world. Think about how we look forward to watching or reading something funny when we are recovering from heartbreak. Think about the times we find solace in a poem when we are worried about something happening in our family, our community, or even in our country? All art, no matter what form, plays a role and intersects with ‘all the bad stuff’ that happens in our world. Your role is just to find your honest writing voice. Keep at it and remember it may evolve and become something completely different if you keep your mind and heart open.
Take Time To Engage With Your Community
It takes many minds to further our own art. If we’re not taking time to process the parts of the world we access on the news, social media, and in our lives, then we are only stunting our own personal growth as writers. Checking in with your writer friends, offering help without any other expectation, and opening your mind to a new perspective will always be a fruitful exercise. In the end, we must accept and pull more diversity into our communities. We will then be able to be our best selves as human beings and as writers.
How do you process the world and its many wounds we are a part of? Do you think your work has a role to play in it, even if your work is not directly involved in these topics? Do you think we evolve by adding more diversity to our thoughts and connections with other writers?
Rheea Mukherjee is the author of The Body Myth, (February 2019/ Unnamed Press). Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in several publications including Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Out of Print, QLRS, and Anti Serious among others.
She is the co-founder of Write Leela Write, a design and content laboratory in Bangalore, India.
She spends most of her spare time eating and making vegan hipster things.
Learn more at www.rheeamukherjee.com, and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I nod in agreement with your whole post. It’s easy to become burned out with the speed of the internet bringing every bad thing to your computer. I find I tend to obsess over things and/or feel powerless to change things on the large scale, because I am just one small voice. However, I am able to change MY world, and that is where, I think, my penchant for writing social justice issues into my stories comes from. Through sub-plots my first book addresses child protection, my second book touches on social responsibility and my current wip deals with elderly issues. The first two are contemporary fantasy and the current is a cozy mystery. I don’t try to lecture, but I feel like if one person reads the story and gains a new perspective, or maybe learns something they previously didn’t know, than I’ve done something to change my world, and that’s the best I can do (besides vote.)
Thanks for such a thought-filled post!
Love what you’re saying about the role of art, Rheea. The virtue of staying true to our voice and passion is a message I can’t hear often enough. Sometimes I feel like I have to take it all in, and hold it, and then find a way to force it through my pen and onto the page. Clearly that’s a toxic mindset.
When I manage to find my way back to what brought me to the page–to my original set of passions–it’s not just that I feel unencumbered. I’m also made to see that what really matters to me has been with me all along. No need to store and funnel the ephemeral wrongs and woes that so naturally ebb and flow.
Wonderful post. Thanks for helping to keep me on course.
This is an excellent source of encouragement. Thank you for writing and sharing your thoughts, especially when I, as an American, keep thinking that changes are only unique to my country.
The two writing-pluses I’ve noticed about my own writing is 1) that I seem to be ramping up the emotions of my characters and 2) that this is having–I believe–an impact on my author’s voice by strengthening it.
Times of change and trouble definitely shape us all. As much as possible, I’m trying to cling to hope of a better tomorrow. And actually, so are my characters. Interesting thought: What would my stories be like if this type of change was not occurring?
Lovely post, Rheea. I fight the wrongs with prayer and words, of which I believe prayer the stronger weapon.
I deeply appreciate your call to allow ourselves to care about what we care about and not “perform” caring about the cause du’jour because we feel pressured from without to both have a stance on it and put our energy into pushing our viewpoint.
I am tired of explaining my views on everything. And yes, there are things I don’t have a clear opinion on and I’m to going to expend the energy or time required to even have an informed opinion on them. I’m just not going to engage in that discussion. Sometimes I feel a little guilty about this. But in reality, we all have a finite amount of time, attention, and energy to expend. I want to use what I have to write about the things I do care about.
And thank you as well for your admonition to own the space you inhabit and own your imagination. There’s a tendency to feel like, oh, everyone’s talking about this, so that’s what I should write about. But most of the things I think I’d like to write about are not top-of-the-news-cycle things. They are often much more personal and much more focused on examining the self than our social systems. They touch on those social things, because we are not selves in isolation, but they will tend to be smaller, more personal stories I think.
It’s a struggle knowing what to spend our limited time on. But any time I have done what I thought I should be doing (because I want others to think well of me) I feel exhausted and ineffectual, whereas when I spend time on what I have a passion for, what I feel a calling toward, then I am at peace with myself.
Thank you for this: “The beauty of the world is that we are all affected differently by the same things.” That is exquisite wisdom, and offers an individual path through the chaos of the world. I’ve been writing fiction about ecological stewardship and human relationship to the balance of nature. It’s terrifying and deeply satisfying to ponder the ethics of that relationship.
Great post!
That’s such a good point, that not everyone is touched, fired up, by the same things. I may care passionately about one issue, when others around me are attuned to just as many other issues. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
There are too many things in this world that need fixing for anyone to focus on them all. The best we can do is to keep our focus on what touches us deeply, and cheer on those who address the issues that we see are important but which don’t fire us up in the same way.
So interesting. I have been thinking a lot about this. There’s much that concerns us as people, but is storytelling in all cases the way to address it?
I pose that question because tackling a topic is not necessarily the same as writing from a personal place. To flip the thought, when stories are best based in characters and in an author’s passionate observation of the human journey, is it possible for an issue to generate the same story drive?
Honestly, Rheea, I am only wondering. I would love for you to expand your post! Can topical fiction have power on its own terms or is is necessary for a heart to be opened first by personal history?
Dickens seemed to have been driven in both ways. He saw poverty and experienced it too. What about you? This is a fascinating, uh, topic, thanks for raising it today.
What a very thoughtful and timely post, and the comments carry on the discussion so constructively, in several directions. I think we can write of people showing admirable qualities like resilience and compassion in a time of trauma, who are still being fully human and feeling pain and even confusion, and that encourages readers and society. I also like the point of not rushing in to support the ’cause du jour’, but finding the issue that grabs your attention and writing about that. For example, while many millions of dollars are being raised for victims of the bush fires in my country Australia, I was moved by the plight of earthquake victims in Durres, Albania, who have been forgotten.