Reading literature can help enhance the engagement that each of us has with a stranger who may come from another country. It can aid our understanding of many cultures, as literature is able to provide a genuine and personal perception and historical recollection of a certain culture. It can also reveal how other people may be going through the same problems as what oneself is, too.
Conflicts are prevalent all around the world, told in the stories “Run, George!” (Libya) and “Before Sunrise” (Armenia). You hear that Libya is a country where ‘the God these Muslims monopolized for themselves had actually revealed Himself to [George’s Christian] community first’, showing a great disagreement over the origins to the two religions, therefore leading to a tension between the two groups, therefore leading to the violent and life-threatening scenes near the end, where George so closely evades the bullet chasing him, but ultimately ends up dead. Hearing the words that the residents of the Muslim graveyard, whom it is assumed are Muslims, screamed at and insulted against George is not something that I have experienced in my life. Then, in “Before Sunrise”, you have the Christians in Armenia, where one character is described as ‘a foreign element’. Besides religious tensions, however, there is also a myriad of other conflicts, such as ‘civil war, car accidents, stray bullets, electric shocks, [and] mines” in Libya, then how ‘your name is next to those of dead people [in reference to taking a vote]’, of the killings, of how crowds riot over how they were ‘cheated out of promises for a good life’ in Armenia. These descriptions of these two countries paint the clearest picture of what scenes could possibly unfold. It’s interesting for me to learn of these things, how some people from these countries view their homeland and so honestly speak these words.
Some other stories recount the history of a country, such as in “There Was a Bridge in Tekka” (Singapore), “Old Proud Mountain” (Bulgaria) and “The Testament of Gjon Muzaka” (Albania). The way in which I walked through the era of 1940s Singapore in “There Was a Bridge in Tekka” was not only a straightforward recount of the period of colonization, but expressed emotions and voiced thoughts of those during the time, who fought for the larger causes and endured personal strife; the rich and empowering revolutions that occurred in 19th century Bulgaria, of the dead, legendary figures all compiled into one train on the top of a mountain in “Old Proud Mountain”; and the mind of Gjon Muzaka, writer of Albania’s very first text, that imagined what Muzaka would have thought of his land, of the future of his kind, questioning himself and the meaning of it all. Thinking about the latter two stories and the countries they were from, I would never imagine how else I would have found such content anywhere, to relive the moments of history so vividly and from such personal perspectives. The emotions infused into these stories, thanks to the help of literature and its writers, thus enables it to capture our minds and to give us what an encyclopedia may not fully provide.
Something which may not necessarily have related to culture, but more to do with certain messages and the everyday struggles that any person, from any continent or country, undergoes, is most notably displayed in “Flamingo #13 of the Caspian Sea” (Iran), “Vienna” (Lebanon), “The Crow” (Indonesia), “Home Front” (New Zealand) and “Enemy” (Pakistan). In “Flamingo #13 of the Caspian Sea” is the succumbing of a man to his addictions, of the changes to his body that these habits cause, and of his inevitably and forever cursed life he now lives; a display of a woman’s deviation from expectations, from the norms of her culture and society, with some considerably radical decisions on her part (drug use, adultery) and the indulgences into love in “Vienna”; a quite lonesome, repentant and self-doubting life, in “The Crow”, of a man who loses a battle within himself over his mistakes; and the shift in generations, from millennials to baby boomers, differences in the way one types with their thumbs or index fingers, the complicated electric cars, the politics, the inexorability of death for the elderly, explored, in such a way what one may do in their own mind, in “Home Front”.
However, “Enemy” (Pakistan), in particular, struck one chord within me that made me realize of the dark emotions that pervade people’s minds. A woman who attempts to hunt herself down, to suppress and extinguish the part of her who seeks to escape the turmoil of life. She doesn’t know whether it is right or not, but in the end, the deed is done, and she is struck with horror at her actions. The message is so powerful, and I am so glad to have had a translated version from its original Urdu, to have been able to read it and let it sit with my mind.
Covering the topics of addiction, non-conformism, suicide, existentialism and death, these different stories are very relatable to any one reader. The beauty of translation is the overcoming of the barriers of language, the ability to communicate with each other and realize that we are all quite the same happy/sad, optimistic/discouraged and sane/crazy people.
Finally, a poem by Pakistani poet Shakir Shujaabadi titled “Hope Against Hope”:
Hope against hope should never end
The beloved should never be defamed
Tonight she made this final vow:
May this evening never end
A simple message of sticking to those closest to you, appreciating and cherishing the smallest moments in time, and that, with love, everything will be well in the end.
In submerging ourselves in others’ cultures, stereotypes and shallow judgements can then broken down and cast away. We learn from each other’s stories that we are all different, that this person’s family has had a brutal history of suffering, and that other person was once quite rich and wealthy, but we all face quite the same problems today, despite coming from entirely different parts of the globe. So we shouldn’t critique or ridicule or ignore what others may appear to look or sound like, but instead to embrace many of these differences and enrich each other’s lives.
