The Universality of Human Experience

               Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle sets up a direct confrontation of east and west in the form of Hoja, a Turkish scholar, and his newly acquired slave from Venice. But just as the two men are set up for a juxtaposition--an examination of eastern culture and learning versus western culture and learning--their differences are erased. The sovereign could have predicted this; he asks: “[M]ust one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another?” (151). But Hoja discovers this truth over time and after much testing. On the military campaign in the Christian territories of Poland, he embarks on an inquisition of Christian villagers, asking for their “greatest transgression” (132). He would like to find the difference between “us” and “them” (119). Instead, he finds that Muslims “[make] more or less the same confessions and [tell] the same stories as their Christian neighbors” (135). He wondered if anything would change if Istanbul was taken over by his slave’s western empire: “[D]id defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it?” (109). And Hoja’s slave doubts that it “would make [any] difference whether I became a Muslim or not” (41). Even the elevated matter of religion cannot serve to distinguish and separate people. The characteristics that define an eastern person from a western person--dress, education, language, religion--are dismissed as subject to chance. These coincidental attributes shrink in comparison to uniting forces of shared human experience.

                I have found that this is mostly true--at least at the elemental level. I have had the privilege of sharing feelings of sadness, apprehension, and joy with people from countries far from this one. Even while I may be differentiated from a Maasai woman of Tanzania by continent, economic system, class, race, and religion, we hold hands and laugh at the dancing men. 

Power in the Spoken Truth

The abstraction called “truth” is identified as a priority for humans. However, though truth has “not deprived anyone of the hope of attaining it,” it has at the same time “not made for anyone a path to it” (Mahfouz 228). And rightly so: truth holds immense power. In several works of contemporary world literature, the idea of truth has the power to drive apart or reassemble families, legitimize people and their voices, and even overcome supernatural trickery.

                While an acceptance and understanding of truth and reality holds the potential for human rising above adversity, a rejection of the same truths can be equally influential, though destructive. In Amos Oz’s novel My Michael, young wife and mother Hannah does not accept in full the reality of her life. As the narrator, she helps the reader understand why, quoting her late father: “[P]ure truth . . . is thoroughly destructive and leads nowhere. What can ordinary people do? All we can do is silently stand and stare” (Oz 37). Instead of embracing this “pure truth,” Hannah clings to an unrealistic vision of her future, hoping to “marry a young scholar who was destined to become world-famous” (Oz 37, 48). But her visions are not limited to scenes of idealized happiness; Hannah’s escape into unreality includes the terrific and the dark. As “Yvonne Azulai,” her dream alias, Hannah is the “Princess” (Oz 174). She rules the city of Danzig as it is seized by “the heavy breathing of a brooding evil” (Oz 175). She, the Princess, also succumbs to this evil as “the assassins’ hands” grab her (Oz 177). In these dark daydreams, she can feel--unlike during the numbing “sameness” of her days at home (Oz 89). She explains the draw of this type of masochism: “I had a body and it was mine and it throbbed and thrilled and was alive” (Oz 173). Still, though her techniques of escape reconnect Hannah with her body and life, her preference for the world of her dreams may serve as the primary obstacle in Hannah and Michael’s marriage. Michael “can’t understand what’s got into” her, and the two suffer through this disconnect (Oz 164).

                On the other hand, the uncovering of truth has empowering and constructive capabilities. In Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, the forgotten past of the island of St. Lucia is brought to the forefront and the voice of a diverse people is reconstructed. Walcott’s documentation serves to rewrite history; the colonial British rulers of the island no longer serve as the only historians. While “Major” Sergeant Plunkett and the British remember the “Battle of the Saints” in which St. Lucia was acquired as a colony, they may not remember the island’s first name, “Iounalao,” or the island’s first inhabitants, the “Aruacs” (Walcott 28, 4, 5). And the story of the St. Lucians with African ancestry is different from that of the British, too: “Herdsmen haieing cattle / who set out to found no cities; they were found, / who were bound for no victories; they were the bound, / who leveled nothing before them; they were the ground” (Walcott 22). “History saw [the African villages]” of St. Lucia merely as “shacks [that] would creep down the ridges to become towns” (Walcott 57). But this can change. Plunkett admits, “Helen needed a history, / . . . / Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war” (Walcott 30). It is prophesied: “History will be revised” (Walcott 92). The call for a retelling of the island’s history is answered by Derek Walcott. As a sort of mission statement, Walcott writes:

                               

Look, they climb, and no one knows them;

they take their copper pittances, and your duty

from the time you watched them from your grandmother’s house

as a child wounded by their power and beauty

is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice. (75-6)

Walcott, by offering a more complete picture of the truth, redeems the voice and heritage of entire people groups of St. Lucia. The truth communicated validates the stories and existence of the people themselves. The centuries-long silence is broken.

                Human apprehension and speaking of truth similarly holds the power to alter history in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Arabian Nights and Days, even when the supernatural in the form of a genie interferes. At first, Sanaan al-Gamali’s interaction with the genie Qumqam leaves him lost; his “confused mind . . . chewed over memories as though they were delusions” (Mahfouz 21). But Gamasa al-Bulti, charged to kill the governor by the genie Singam, claims to see the truth clearer than before. As Gamasa draws his sword for the murder, he claims that “the truth is being spoken for the first time” (Mahfouz 46). Ma’rouf the cobbler, though he lies about his possession of Solomon’s ring, is truly a fair and pleasing ruler to the people of his quarter. The truth--that he does not own the ring--does not lead to his execution but rather to his promotion to governor (Mahfouz 206). The genie Zarmabaha disguises herself as the beautiful Anees al-Galees to trick powerful men into humiliation (Mahfouz 137). But the wisdom of the “madman,” who was formerly called Gamasa, sheds light on the genie’s trickery, saying, “I see nothing but walls between which the breaths of the ancient plague rebound” (Mahfouz 143). This truth dissolves the plot: “With extraordinary speed there was nothing left of her but disparate parts, which themselves were transformed into smoke that simply disappeared and left no trace” (Mahfouz 143). The verbalization of what is honest trumps the deceptive plots of the genies and instills in humans an almost supernatural power.

                For those in the modern West, perhaps a more understandable portrayal of truth’s power may be found in the universal context of the family in Please Look After Mom, a story set in South Korea. Before the disappearance of the family’s mother, the children and father do not know the truth about her. Chi-hon, the mother Park So-nyo’s eldest daughter, suggests that “either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers” (Shin 18). Chi-hon and her mother belong to the latter group. Chi-hon and her mother had superficial conversations: “Your words had to with whether she ate, whether she was healthy, how Father was, that she should be careful not to catch cold, that you were sending money” (Shin 35). While Chi-hon had “never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen,” Park So-nyo herself sometimes felt as if the kitchen was a “prison” (Shin 55, 61). After learning that her mother had long-lasting and paralyzing headaches, Chi-hon admits to herself: “You could no longer say you knew Mom” (Shin 25). In fact, Chi-hon, like her siblings, realizes the misconceptions she has passively accepted her whole life: “To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom” (Shin 27). But Park So-nyo’s physical disappearance prompts her family to discover the truth about her life--her condition, birth year, relationships, pastimes, and feelings. Uncovering this truth proves to hold restorative power for the family’s relationship: “Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. . . . Her everyday words, which you didn’t think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves” (Shin 246). Hearing the truth about Park So-nyo, rather than accepting the silence surrounding her personal life and thought, energizes her family to overcome isolation and recognize that they have “needed her [their] entire [lives]” (Shin 228).

                Though the quest for truth is not a new idea in literature, the modern era presents endless challenges to ideas of reality. In the characters’ searches, truth is obfuscated by ideas absorbed in earlier years, histories written by the powerful, interferences of the supernatural, and silence. However, when this silence is broken, when the truth about family and history is discovered and spoken, characters find the strength to overcome--to be legitimized in their voices, to live with dignity, and to restore relationships.

The Disappointment of (Too) High Hopes

                Amos Oz’s novel My Michael traces the psychological meanderings of young wife and mother, Hannah. As the speaker in the book, thirty-year-old Hannah looks back at her ten-year-long marriage to Michael. Because her point of view is retrospective, she is able to subtly foreshadow the “disappointment” that is her marriage (48). The heroine of the movie at Edison Cinema “dies of unrequited love after sacrificing her body and her soul for a worthless man” (21). The “strange language” of her geologist husband tells of the “forces [that] are perpetually at work” under “the surface of the earth”: “the thin sedimentary rocks are in a continuous process of disintegration under the force of pressure” (12). And on a New Year’s Day, Hannah watches a rusted bowl, which had been hung in a tree in the backyard since the couple had moved into the apartment, fall to the ground. She explains the collapse: “strong forces came to fruition at that moment” (101). Drawing a parallel to her collapsing relationship with Michael, Hannah adds, “All those years I had observed complete repose in an object in which a hidden process was taking place, all those years” (101).

But while all of these images suggest a deep violence between both people--that is, Hannah and Michael--perhaps this is a misconstruing on Hannah’s part. She underestimates her own role in the disappointment. Along with continual depression, Hannah clings to an idealized image of her perfect marriage relationship, in which she “creep[s] into [her husband’s] severely furnished study, put[s] a glass of tea down” without him noticing (48). Michael, on the other hand, is more of a realist: he mocks the “prince-poet-boxer-pilot husband” for whom Hannah longs (222). As a result, he does not feel the same disappointment as Hannah. Her feeling of loss is based in the difference between her idealized and ultimately unrealistic and unfulfilling vision of marriage and the mundane reality of marriage. And she attributes her disappointment to an underlying battle between her and Michael, but perhaps does not give enough credit to real problems of her own--depression and unrealistic expectations. Though I may not find myself in as complicated a situation as Hannah--deeply disappointed, in a marriage, and with a young child--her story has served as a sort of haunting warning. The more stubbornly I cling to idealized visions for my future, the more likely disappointment is to come and the less likely I am to enter into honest and mutual relationships. Perhaps I should heed Michael’s advice: “[I]t [is] a mistake to demand too much from life” (56).