How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

As a novelist, I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom. In the swirl of news that surrounds us – the inequalities, the injustices, the seemingly unstoppable turning away from the path of co-existence and diversity and inclusion – it is easy to feel like the story we are living in is not the one we would have chosen.

No doubt we are living in challenging times and there is a lot we need to deal with – individually and collectively. Yet just imagine, for a moment: a world without books, without storytelling, a world without empathy, would be a much more divided and a lonelier place to exist.

When we become more engaged, more informed about all that is happening, however, we feel more disappointed, anxious, angry, surrounded with negative feelings in the face of current news and fast-moving events. It is too much to deal with. We crave simplicity; we retreat into ourselves, into the familiar. This is a dangerous moment because it is when the populist demagogue enters into the picture, promising to simplify things for us.

Trusting in progress was at the centre of their worldview. If every generation did their best and spared no effort to improve the conditions they had inherited from their parents, gradually, incrementally, the world would become a fairer place.
Today the faith that tomorrow will be better than yesterday is simply no more.

Sometimes, where you genetically or ethnically seem to fit in most is where you least belong. Sometimes you are at your loneliest among people who physically resemble you and seem to speak the same language. There are many citizens across the world today – and their number is growing – who have a hard time recognising their countries, walking like strangers in their own homelands.

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath there is a moment when a character describes her suffering with the following words: ‘I am just pain covered with skin.’ It seems to me, more and more, we are pain, and hurt, and loneliness covered with skin.

Just as the colour white is a combination of all colours, apathy is a combination of many emotions: anxiety, disillusionment, bewilderment, fatigue, resentment … mix them fast, mix them hard and you end up with pervasive paralysis, lack of feeling, numbness.

‘I am from multiple places,’ I wanted to be able to say in return. ‘I come from many cities and cultures, plural and diverse, but I am also from the ruins and remnants of these, from the memories and forgettings, from the stories and silences.’

Trust is eroding. Never were so many big promises made to so many for so long, only to have delivered so little in the end.

I was an early reader. As an only child, a lonely child, I was immensely curious about books and the mysteries they held, and at home, with a bit of help from my Grandma, I had been quietly picking up the patterns of language, deciphering their codes.