Why leaders need to read novels - #NL3

Novels have always been a tool in which the unspeakable is spoken, where words are created without borders and emotions spillover like stubborn ink. The very idea and aim of a literary piece is to make us think about what we normally do not think about. Through stories and imaginations, beauties and tragedies, love and hate, it opens us up to understand a dimension of the world which we normally never approach or which we consciously neglect.

In Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses, we learn how Odysseus completes the ten year journey home to Ithaca from Troy (which defined his experience), and how that journey makes him consider his future very deeply as an older man. As an older man, he finds out that he is now fighting a new fight, not of enemies or external forces but the inevitable fight against his age. In his moment of distress he says:

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

Literature is the anti-aging process, it strengthens time and fate. Literature cannot get old because stories cannot age - in this sense they are extremely strong in will. In novels, there is time for our leaders to listen and see the point of views from a lot of angles. On a normal day, that listening time would have been limited. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018 stated that “for me fiction, much more than non-fiction does, allows situations that I have no direct experience of to be really conjured up and for me to develop an understanding in a way that is different to reading non-fiction.” Novels should be given a higher cultural importance than it currently has because it might be the way to create empathy for people who we think can never change. Maybe, just maybe, Hillary Clinton understood this and decided to write a novel herself (I have not yet read the novel but her novel received a lot of attention due to its subtle shades of her political experiences).?Her husband, Bill Clinton has also written a series with James Patterson. If politics, for example, is a field of different perspectives and points of views, maybe novels are the best class rooms!

When I read ‘Half of the yellow sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I remember how I was made Igbo too. She had made me Igbo in heart and mind. She had allowed me to see what the Nigerian civil war was like, and maybe that made the difference from a biased and single rhetoric which I could easily have constructed. Maybe leaders will be able to understand the other party better once they realize that understanding is just a novel away. There is something about a plot that can do more than a debate. Frantz Fanon famously stated that “everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” In novels, things are explained to the people, to us, to them. Maybe next time, instead of us trying to make leaders see a perspective with our words in a limited time in a public square, we should tell them a book to read which explains what we want to say (this is of course a limited suggestion, issues need to be discussed still). From there, we can have proper references which both us and the leaders now know. Maybe, instead of saying “that policy is bad”, we should say “do you remember how Jon was killed in the story? That is what your policy can do too”, and then make our point. Stories allow for emotions to be passed, emotions that can bring the empathy we want our leaders to have. Also maybe, the next thing we should demand our leaders to do before campaigning or trying to sway us, is to host book clubs.?If anything, at least we would know which of them actually reads.

The future of the world is not really only about the ideas or the systems we will build. A lot of it relies on the leaders that will drive those ideas and influence those systems. More than anything, we need leaders that are in touch with people. We need leaders who can feel and see what we are feeling and seeing. Leaders who will today understand that in their societies, there are parallel Winston Smiths, there are V’s waiting for vendetta’s, there are still Okonkwo’s who believe the outsider should not be trusted. As people hoping that tomorrow is more firm, maybe our priority should be to ensure that those going to lead us have a heart and mind that looks like the societies we want. There is something about a plot that can do more than a debate sometimes.?

Here again, I am careful not to say that people who read make better leaders. No. The world has seen a lot of smart leaders who make very terrible decisions, and lose touch with those not like them. The point of this week's newsletter is just to say that we need to have leaders who understand the actual human experiences and not only the quantitative details of a "policy brief", amongst other things, because ultimately that is what a novel does. There are a lot of things which quantitative measurements cannot really measure, this is why we need leaders who should read novels.