Elif Shafak's Power of Literature and Me In The Land of Trump

 I have not read any of Elif Shafak's fiction. I have read her non-fiction, and Elif Shafak on the Power of Literature and Being a Writer in the “Age of Angst” (LitHub) leaves me wanting to read her novels. With Trump's Chief of Staff, Mark Kelly, finally letting us know that Trump is a fascist, I would like to be as optimistic as Ms. Shafak. That 47% of the United States wants a fascist for President leaves me pessimistic - about Americans, about the American educational system, about America itself. 

For many, many decades I have distinguished knowledge/education and wisdom.  Ms. Shafak does the same, only more eloquently: 

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. 

I like how she also gives us a cause.

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.

But my nagging cynical mind wonders this about Americans: have we given up on stories of real people for fantasies? 

For does Trump sell but fantasies? I grew up around people who survived The Great Depression, they had no time for fantasies - dreams, yes. There is, I think, this difference between dreams and fantasies. You work to achieve your dreams; you expect someone to fulfill your fantasies. No longer do we work.

sch 10/23/24