Fiction telling real tales

Last week with the 9th grade we looked at how what happens in dystopian fiction can also happen in our own world.

Of Windows and Doors illustration

This weekend's reading and viewing has reiterated the power of fiction/art to hold up a mirror to contemporary society.

First, the short story "Of Windows and Doors" provides a gently horrible episode in a (Syrian?) city under Islamist rule, and the efforts of a young couple to escape the city with the help of plentifully remunerated "agents". I learned more, through feeling and through imagery, of the experience of being under siege, from reading this story than I have through dozens of BBC news segments on contested cities in the Middle East.

There is a moment in the story when you think the plot line will delve decidedly into fiction (when the rumors of doors that lead to foreign places start to become real to the city's residents). As you read on, you realize that the story of the magical doors is true, but you also realize that the improbability of such doors is quite possible, and doesn't, in the end, strain credulity. It seems to me a masterful playing with the edge between make believe and real life, as if the story asks, "Doesn't make believe and the fantastical have a real role in our lives? Don't we live and die based on unreal narratives?"

The second tale was of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist in Mississippi, born in 1917, the 20th child of a sharecropping family who was fired for registering to vote, and dedicated her public life to helping blacks register, despite fierce Jim Crow laws and discrimination that left so many dead.

This image, part of the Fannie Lou Hamer show, reminded me of the New
Yorker illustration of the blown-out door. This is the Freedom Rider Bus
that was bombed in 1961.

The retelling, a one-woman show and a fundraiser for Richmond's Townsend Community Center, was terrific, and introduced me, through a fictionalized account, to a remarkable woman, who confirms my theory that there are Jesuses in every era - those who lovingly and unquestioningly challenge injustice and face insult, injury and death with faith and courage.