The mirror of literature

A couple of years ago, as the country went through another episode of rapid political change; frustration, anger and conspiracy theories found an enabling environment. But something else also happened. A novel, first published in 1949, started getting attention in some circles. Written by India-born George Orwell, the novel titled 1984 is a dystopian tale about surveillance, authoritarianism, cults of personality and controlling ideas and thoughts. It talks about big brother, unperson and thought police. I had never seen the novel in bookstores before even though it is considered a classic. I spotted a couple of copies in the homes of relatives and friends when I visited the country. Someone mentioned that an Urdu translation was also available. I do not know how many copies were sold, but a few weeks ago when I was in Pakistan, there were copies still available in all the bookstores that I went. Now, I am not sure whether this was a cool thing to do, a fad of some kind among a certain class, or an actual attempt to make sense of the world. I hope it was the latter. When little else makes sense, literature can offer a window into our souls, the world as it is, or the world as we would like it to be.

1984, while a common go-to book in times of institutional overreach, is not the only classic that people turn to in such times. Non-fiction writing of German philosopher Hannah Arendt, in particular Origin of Totalitarianism, continues to find new readers in countries all the around the world, including in the US. Every few years, the demand for the book surges as parallels between the time when Arendt lived and the current moment seem too hard to dismiss. At home and in our eastern neighbour, Faiz's poetry rooted in the idea of resistance, gives both a reality check and a hope for a future that is different from the present. During the pandemic, The Plague by Albert Camus (published in 1947) found its way to bookstores that had not carried any book by him before. Given the state of the world right now, Camus can still offer a lot to us.

But literature that speaks to us in uncertain times does not have to talk about what governments or institutions do – sometimes it shows us the mirror on how we think and act as individuals and communities. I recently came across a short story written by Derrick Bell, a prominent legal scholar and the first tenured African American law professor at Harvard. The science fiction story, titled The Space Traders, published in 1992 is a provocative tale, and one that has resonance today. The story focuses on an alien ship that arrives on January 1, 2000 and offers the US the opportunity to have gold, limitless safe nuclear power, and technology that will cleanse the air and the water. In return, the aliens ask the US government to hand in all Black people in the country. This leads to debates and proposals, in the cabinet and the public sphere. A public referendum on the deal with the aliens is planned, the question of legality of the trade reaches the supreme court on whether such a referendum is legal or not. The supreme court, citing precedence from a century ago, rules that the referendum is in fact legal. Televangelists say that this is God's will, and hence the trade should go ahead. Business leaders argue against it worried about rising labour costs as a result of losing cheap Black labour.

Eventually, the referendum goes ahead. The people vote in favour of the deal by a 70-30 margin. On Martin Luther King Day, twenty million Blacks board the space ship in nothing but their undergarments. The last line of Bell's short story reads "heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived."

At a time when it is all about making deals, Derrick Bell asks us to wonder, at what cost?