Empathy
Dear Karen,
It is two days past Thanksgiving, 2014. At the start of the week we learned of a grand jury’s refusal to indict a policeman for the shooting of an unarmed black man. There were riots. Cars were burned. Businesses broken into. People were angry. Facebook lit up with anger, from both sides. The close of the week was Black Friday, the super-shopping day in which crowds storm into stores, and trample workers and each other, and fist fights break out over microwaves and televisions and video games. In the center of the week was Thanksgiving. It is a week that has left me feeling emotionally wrought, hammered into some sort of unwanted shape and sizzled in cold water, then heated and hammered again. I am fortunate to feel this, and not feel a gun in my back, or a club on my head.
You wrote this in your last letter: “I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.”
It seems to me that you do this, for empathy is the work of a writer, but the events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.
I have written two novels dealing with race relations. Both are historical. The shame I feel over slavery is muted by time, and it is this distance that allows me to enter into that era. I don’t believe I could write a novel about race relations in present times. I don’t believe it is within my capability. It’s not that I am not empathetic. It’s that I am paralyzed. The shame I feel over our current system of racism is not muted by time. It is only muted by my white skin, the skin I travel in that allows me to go about my day without being suspected of a crime based on a stereotype, on racism, on blindness, on a system that hacks and hacks and hacks at people of color and poor people, to keep them down economically, spiritually, and emotionally. I live in this system. I benefit, my family has benefited, from this system.
All this makes me think of my role as a writer of fiction. I am a story teller. I live in story. I believe in story. When a story comes my way I have two choices. One is to say yes, the other is to say no. I have this freedom. I might even get the story I write published, although there are plenty of stories I’ll write that won’t get published. But even with the struggles of publishing, and making a living, I do not feel like my stories (fiction or nonfiction) won’t be heard. I feel like they’ll be heard somewhere, by someone.
But what of people who haven’t been heard, who have said again and again, politely, nonviolently, violently, pleadingly, “Please, may I have some rights? May I have some equal opportunity? May I feed my kids? May I work a decent job? May I live in safety? And if none of these things, may I at least tell you what my life is like without these things, and have you listen? May I tell you my story without having you turn away?”
Story is the most stable place I have found to stand on as an artist. I stand on the importance of stories. I stand on the stories I can tell and the ones I can’t tell. I stand on the ones other people must tell. I stand on the ones I’ll hear and the ones I’ll never hear. I stand on the fact that each of us has an important life, and an important story, or a hundred, or a thousand important stories. This is what matters. Empathy. The ability to feel other people’s stories.
Isn’t it our work as human beings to listen deeply to other human beings?
Love, Nancy
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