It's all in the stories we tell

I have just finished reading The Uncertainty of Hope, by Valerie Tagwira. It is a novel set in the Harare area of Mbare, during the time of Operation Murambatsvina
(which began, incidentally, almost exactly 3 years ago, on 25 May 2005 - see
http://www.sokwanele.com/articles/sokwanele/opmuramb_overview_18june2005...). The novel tells the story of two families, and their lives and losses as they try to survive the turmoil caused by the 'cleanup' operation, high prices, and food shortages -- not to mention the ravages of HIV/Aids. Tugwira focuses particularly on the women, who are the ones trying to keep their families together against formidable odds -- often having to deal with abusive men on top of all the other difficulties.

It's a good novel. Not brilliant, but good (in places it's a little too preachy for my liking, but Tagwira definitely knows how to tell a story and her characterisation is strong). I don't want to give away the plot, but let me just say I found the rather upbeat ending depressing rather than uplifting -- because in the light of recent events, it just doesn't seem plausible. In the novel, in the midst of the worst of Operation Murambatsvina, when people's houses and market stalls are being bulldozed, the characters take consolation in the fact that 'things surely can't get much worse'. Well, we now know they can, and have.

But The Uncertainty of Hope reminded me why fiction is so important. It's important for lots of reasons, but one of them is that it teaches us, by helping us imagine -- other people, other lives, other circumstances. I have read loads of news articles and features about Zimbabwe. They have given me a sense of what's happening or happened, a sense of the facts of the situation, and the range of opinions being expressed. But Tagwira's novel has given me more of a felt understanding of what people have gone through and are going through, than any news item or academic article could hope to do.

Thinking about the awful wave of xenophobic violence that's hit South Africa over the past two weeks, I wish more people would read fiction. Yes, I know how naive and pie-in-the-sky and even callous that sounds. When people are dying, being beaten up, and having their homes destroyed, I'm wishing people would read more novels. What we need are houses, jobs, more effective police, better education in tolerance - not fairy stories!

But it's all about stories! It's the stories people tell one another about what it means to be South African, the stories we tell one another about what a foreigner is, what foreignness is, who is in, who is out, who's to blame. Not one of these things has anything to do with fact -- it has to do with our stories and the collective imagination.

The political scientist, Benedict Anderson, understood this well. In his book Imagined Communities, he defines a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." It is imagined, because it is simply impossible for all the members of a nation to know or even see one another. So they live in the mind, as members of a nation.

In South Africa, we've liked to imagine ourselves as the rainbow nation, a miracle-nation, a country where we've overcome intolerance and hatred and moved on to a democratic, tolerant society. Much of the shock and distress people are expressing has to do with the fact that that image, that 'story', has been shattered in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary. And the people who are attacking foreigners have their own imagined South Africa, in which foreigners are all criminals and job-stealers, and just do not belong.

The power of fiction is that it has the ability to influence and change the stories we tell ourselves and one another. It can stretch our imagination, to help us understand 'the other'. And I also believe that reading stretches the imagination in a way that TV can't. As we read, we re-create the characters in our heads, they live with us, live within us, they are our co-creations.

And as much as the news is necessary - we need to know, to be made aware of what's going on - we also know that the news can de-sensitise. Endless images of hurricane victims and earthquake survivors and fleeing migrants are not pleasant to see, but eventually they just wash over us, leaving us numb and uncaring. Good fiction, on the other hand, has the power and potential to re-sensitise us all.