400 Words on Contemporary Literacy.

Perhaps an unpopular take, but oh well.

There needs to be room for uncomfortable, traumatic, and triggering stories in our canon. And we need to be trained to wrestle with them rather than demand they be stuffed in a safe and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Some years back I was an actor in a play set during the Bush War on Terror years, involving an interrogation of an Egyptian-American immigrant taking place in a CIA black site. During the run, I became aware of a vocal online contingent that asked why we should be subjected yet again to a story of pain inflicted on a minority, POC population, that declared it irresponsible to produce such a show at all. I was old enough at this point to understand the futility of jumping in to such a conversation, and preferred to focus instead on my work within said production.

But what I might have said, and I’m saying now, is twofold.

First: The play itself was about the way the War on Terror dehumanized both suspects and their captors in pursuit of a fleeting sense of security. It’s not directed at the audience who understood this, but at the audience who didn’t. Secondly: When you decide to stop telling these stories — of genocide, of injustice, of oppression and degradation — because you feel they’ve been told too often, you leave a space for the counter-narrative to take hold.

When you encounter people who say that slavery couldn’t have been that bad or that the Holocaust was a hoax, it’s because these narratives were given room to breathe in their consciousness.

Am I saying that one must seek out disturbing stories on a regular basis? Of course not, no more than I would say everyone should attempt skydiving. You are often the best judge of your own limits. What I am saying is that we cannot bury such stories or strangle them in the cradle for our own peace of mind. I am saying these stories are necessary not despite their content but because of their content.

The world we live in now is shaped in part on the stories we tell each other and in part on how we listen and interpret the stories we are told. This is not an inconsequential skill set. In certain contexts, such as a rising tide of fascism, it is of dire importance.