This afternoon I went to the park and sat on a bench, as I often do. This particular bench is dedicated to Brian West who was born in 1929, died in 2011, and according to the inscription, “loved this park.”
I thought, as I sat on that bench, that there will never be a bench with my name on it. I move too much, I leave entire countries with no more planning than “let’s do it if I can get a visa, sounds fun,” and my husband and I don’t stick around in any one place long enough to become of it, to belong to it. We won’t buy a home, perhaps ever. That is just who I am as a person and who I have chosen to marry. Therefore, most likely, there won’t be a park with a bench that has my name on it.
What I do hope, however, is that there will be a library somewhere, a bookstore maybe, with a shelf full of titles that have my name on their spines. I hope there will be a young woman who randomly picks up one of those books and I hope she is never the same person again as she was when she opened that book. I hope she reads my work, as I once read someone else’s, and realizes that she is not alone, that there is someone like her out there fighting, even winning. That there is a whole world that doesn’t live by the constraints of her culture and that if she finds within her the courage to take one small step out of the world she knows, her life will change in ways she can’t even imagine.
I know because I was that young girl once.
I grew up in a traditional Indian household. There was a lot of love and tenderness, but there were also rules and restrictions. You could be who you wanted to be as long as who you wanted to be fit within certain molds of what an Indian woman’s life needs to look like.
I was not made to fit into anyone’s mold.
And so I read books. It is possible to not have to live this life, I realized. The world is open to me, I understood, and I can go be a part of it. I will have to fight for it, but look, here is someone else who did.
Our world today is at a troubling point in history. It is reasonable to think that our work does not matter, that the novels we write and the art we create is meaningless in the face of the big sweeping changes that are taking over the planet.
I’m here to remind you that it is exactly now when you must finish that book, when you must contribute to the art that is to be put out there in the world.
This week, I have spent countless hours talking with and messaging friends who are concerned about the politics taking shape in the US, the “demonetization” that has created a volatile situation in India, and the elections that are coming up in Europe. Not to mention the other global horrors we watch unfold everyday. But after the first few days of ranting and raving, I noticed that it wasn’t links to articles that we’re frantically messaging to each other, it was poetry. It was quotes from authors. It was book recommendations. We were following the breadcrumbs artists who came before us have laid out for us.
No matter whether your goal is to change the world or the life of one young woman trying to break free of her culture, it is important for you to remember that your words matter. And in the times we live in, they matter more.
Us, the writers of today, have the responsibility to document what is happening in our world. It is your book that will change lives, your book that will provide comfort and entertainment, your book that will provide education. It is your book that young men and women will pick up years from now to understand what 2016 looked like. It is your book that will make them realize that they are not alone in this fight, that someone has fought it before and someone is fighting it still.
We get into trouble, as artists and as citizens of the planet, when we think that we are powerless. We are not powerless. We have never been powerless.
Toni Morrison sums it up perfectly and it is in her words that I have been finding my own comfort this last week: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Given that you, my readers, come from all corners of the earth, that you are diverse and represent the world in all its many shades, it is important that you take note of what’s happening around you.
Observe, learn, and then for your sake and ours, get the hell back to work.