When the Words Stop

Our worst algorithms have come home to haunt us. The nightmare is no longer something we dream up. It is dreamt on our behalf

- Naveen Kishore

NOTE to self. I was reading a conversation between a writer I admire, Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American born in the mid 60's, and Teju Cole the Nigerian-American writer, who is currently getting much attention in the US. Some of what they talked about made me think:

Fiction and non-fiction. Truth? And its opposite? As if the 'non' turns the writer's truth into 'un truth'? Also, the question of the static-truth as the only fixed reality—versus the more elastic evolving and dynamic constantly changing 'truth' that does so in one way for the writer and perhaps in another for the reader.

Hemon says something I liked: In Bosnian, there are no words that are equivalent to “fiction’ and “non-fiction”, or that convey the distinction between them. That is not to say that there is no truth or falsehood. Rather, the stress is on storytelling. The closest translation of “non-fiction” would really be “true stories”.

And this from Cole: Painters [for example] know that everything is a combination of what's observed, what's imagined, what's overheard, and what's been done before. Is Monet a non-fiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter?

The interesting thing is that both of these writers are a part of a ‘marketplace of labels’. And the market we all know ‘categorises’ for the sake of its own convenience. Writers know this. All one wishes for is to be allowed the pleasure of being 'dragged' into a space where one has not been to before. A place where this 'truth' is created. The labels do not matter and need to be ignored. As long as story-telling is at the heart of that which is being narrated.