EMBRACING THE OTHER
I avoided this space for quite along time now. I simply didn’t know what to do with it. Self-promotion, self-absorption – ultimately, self-obsession – all come with the package of writing one’s way into the literary jungle these days, and I didn’t feel like playing along – what for? To keep the endless blabbering going, with everybody talking simultaneously and nobody listening?
More than that, I felt paralysed, as in most parts of my existence, including what I’ve come to define as a “suspension of belief” while facing the news on both national and international politics. Is it really happening, I’ve often wondered (and still do), or is it just some AI blunder? Most days, I tend not to believe anything I’m told; other days, I just find it hard to focus on writing or even finding the time and energy for analysing what I would like to say on some specific matter. I don’t mean prose or poetry writing – that goes on undeterred despite the world constantly being on the verge of collapse, because it is as I primarily function as a human being: as a creator of stories and an explorer of words. What I mean is pinning down thoughts in a coherent, meaningful way for myself and potentially for others in reviews or coagulated thoughts of some sort, like these fragments shored upon WordPress. It takes a lot of extra stamina, effort and time, to devote oneself to this activity which, for a novelist, may represent an addition to the main work they are dealing with – the story unfolding through some characters interacting with one another. Like many, I suspect, sometimes I don’t feel like doing it or simply give up trying because, unlike writing a full novel, it requires both a sense of contingency and a sharp awareness about the past and the present, as well as an exceptional ability to connect the dots fast in a few pages.
Writing shorter pieces which may have nothing to do with your own creating an alternative fictional world, but is rather centred on the interpretation of reality or of what other people have written, is all about connecting to others and offering them some truth you think might be worth exploring. It is a gift, not a request, a seeing rather than a wish to be seen. I don’t believe, like Barthes said, that “on écrit pour être aimés” (we write in order to be loved). I refuse to believe it, for I think it is my ethical imperative not to believe it. In the age of narcissistic self-aggrandisement fuelled by social media, writing cannot and should not be a futile question of “being loved”; it may have worked in 1964, when Barthes wrote Essays Critiques, but it can’t work for our hypertrophic times. A twenty-first century writer can’t get away with simply saying: I write because I want others to love me. She/they/he has to commit into illuminating words with meanings, finding signs, tropes and possible forms of resistance to apathy, hate or despair in what hides inside the world, including other people’s words, not just her/their/his own. It’s not a question of self-absorption at all; quite the opposite, it’s – and should be – an embracing the other and what the other took time and effort to say.
