Elif Shafak on the Power of Literature and Being a Writer in the “Age of Angst”

It is a strange time to be alive. A strange time to be a writer.

In a world that remains deeply polarized and bitterly politicized, and torn apart by inequality and wars, and the cruelty we are capable of inflicting on each other and on earth, our only home, in such a troubled world, what can writers and poets even hope to achieve? What place is there for stories and imagination when tribalism, destruction and othering speak more loudly and boldly?

If I may take you back in time, those of us who are old enough will remember a different moment in history, not that long ago, there was a palpable sense of optimism in the air. The Berlin Wall had come down. The Soviet Union had dissolved. People talked about “the triumph of liberal democracy.” There was  an assumption that from now on history could only move in a linear way and always forward. (Whereas for us, storytellers, time does not move in a linear way. When you write stories, you sense that time can go backwards as well as forwards, and sometimes it can draw circles.) In the late 1990s and early 2000s the biggest optimists came from the field of technology. They told us that thanks to the proliferation of digital technologies, information would easily spread everywhere and people would become informed citizens and make informed decisions, and thus democracy would prevail everywhere.

But information is not the same thing as knowledge and knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom.

Fast forward, today, we are living in a world in which there is way too much information, but little knowledge and even less wisdom.

Snippets of information rain on us every single day. As we scroll up and down, more out of habit than out of anything else, we have no time to process what we see. No time to absorb or reflect or feel. Hyper-information gives us the illusion of knowledge. The truth is we have long forgotten how to say, “I don’t know.” We don’t utter these words anymore. If we don’t know the answer to something, anything, we can just google it and we’ll be able to say a few bits about it, but that is not knowledge.

For true knowledge we need to slow down. We need cultural spaces, literary festivals, an open and honest intellectual exchange. We need slow journalism. We need books.

And then there is wisdom. For wisdom we need to bring the heart into our work and into our conversations. We need to build emotional intelligence. We need empathy. We need literature.

Now I’m not claiming that we writers are wise people. Surely, we are not. What I am claiming is, when we write fiction we connect with something bigger than us, older than us, and definitely, wiser than us. And that something is the ancient art and craft of storytelling. It is universal. It does not belong to any tribe, region or religion. It cannot be confined into any borders.

As a novelist, I am deeply interested in ecofeminism, which aims to connect the dots between seemingly separate issues. For instance, today, of the most ten water-stressed nations in the world, seven are in the Middle East and North Africa. Our rivers are dying. Women, all around the world, are water carriers. When there is no source of water nearby, the distance that a young woman has to walk increases, unfortunately also increasing the potential for gender violence. So if we care about water scarcity we must care about gender inequality, if we care about gender inequality we must care about racial inequality, and so on.

The literary mind cannot be isolationist. The art of storytelling is all about building connections.

As writers we adore stories, of course, but we are, and must be, equally interested in silences. Anyone whose story has been erased, pushed to the margins and forgotten, anyone who has been made to feel like “the Other,” ours hearts and our pens organically move in that direction.

Literature brings the periphery to the centre and rehumanizes those who have been dehumanized. This is why, storytellers are memory-keepers.

For the novelist Toni Morrison, the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting was something that motivated her narrative. She wrote about “history versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness.”

Most of the history that is taught to us in Turkey is his-story, meaning the stories of a few men in positions of power and authority—like Sultans. How was life in the Ottoman Empire like for women? Where are the stories of women? Silence. How was it like for minorities—a Kurdish peasant, an Armenian silversmith, a Jewish miller, an Arab farmer, a Greek sailor…. Silence. So as writers we have to dig deep through layers of history and amnesia to unearth untold stories.

We must also bridge written and oral cultures.

In the age of hyper information, instant gratification, fast consumption and climate destruction, literature is, and has to be, an act of hope. And resistance. Resistance not through force, but through its capacity to remind us of our shared humanity.

The author Doris Lessing once eloquently described literature as “analysis after the event.” I understand that. Things happen and writers need time to process and then we write retrospectively, belatedly.

However, today we have entered a new world. In this moment in time as we witness environmental collapse and wars, increasing polarization and widening inequalities and book bans, as we witness our inability to learn nothing from history, at this  important crossroads, literature has to be not only analysis after the event but also analysis during the event.

But how can we find the will to keep writing stories in this Age of Angst. How can we have trust in books and their ability to change the world? Because it is easy to lose the will. East West, North and South, wherever you look, you will see that people are anxious. The young & old. Everyone is affected by existential angst, the only difference is some people are better at hiding it.

So there is Anxiety. Anger. Frustration. Resentment… It is an age in which emotions guide and misguide politics. All of this is challenging but if there is one emotion that frightens me it is the absence of all emotions. It is numbness.

I believe this world will be a more dangerous and broken place to live in if it were to become the Age of Apathy. The moment we stop caring and writing and talking about what is happening today in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan… The moment we become desensitized, atomized, indifferent and numb. This is what the philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about.

Literature is the antidote to numbness. Writers cannot stop wars. We cannot make hatred disappear. But we can keep the flame of peace and coexistence  and empathy alive. Literature’s power is that it reminds us of what we are capable of, not only destruction and division, but also of beauty, solidarity, sisterhood and love.