Because We Live in this World and No Other

WHEN was the last time you read a story that well and truly blew your mind?

- Annie Zaidi

I suppose, in order to answer that question, you'd have to first consider what it means to have your mind blown? To me, it means coming upon a story that makes me reconsider the very foundations of society, and which challenges my assumptions about what it means to be human.

Because we live in a human body, and because we can see it, smell it, inhabit it and drink of it, we imagine that we know it. We certainly fall into the trap of thinking that we know what human culture is (or what it ought to be) because that’s how we already live, and we'd like to keep it this way. At most, we might need to stretch the frontiers of what we can achieve, how far we can travel, and the limitations of our bodies. That’s the kind of science, and also the kind of fantasy, we like to conjure up. But every once in a while, along comes a story that shakes our self-assurance, and forces us to reconsider humanity.

One of the first books that blew my mind was Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. I had read plenty of literary fiction before, hundreds of books that routinely feature on 'classics' and 'must-read' lists. But with this book, Le Guin took me beyond empathy, beyond descriptive prose and into the realm of visionary possibility. It was this novel that truly expanded my thinking about gender and the performance of it—what is ‘normal’ about gender norms, how is normalcy enacted and enforced, and why there is such an overwhelming emphasis on the fixity of sexual behaviour?