Even giving myself a little more book space than usual in Friday\u2019s column<\/a>, there\u2019s something I want to scratch at deeper. Absorbing these two different pieces of media\u2014each with their own different goals\u2014has really underscored something about novels and poetry and the argument for their continued existence, as if such arguments are ever productive. <\/p> So I\u2019m going to put the onus on the drier media: history podcasts are lousy are conveying how it feels to be alive during history. <\/p> Won\u2019t be able to find it, but I remember reading some Mad Men <\/em>recap way back in the day\u2014maybe on Slate<\/em>? Can\u2019t remember the writer or the season, tbh\u2014where something along the lines of \u201cit\u2019s unclear if Mad Men <\/em>is trying to say anything or if it\u2019s just a snapshot of how it felt<\/em> to live in the 60s.\u201d As if that\u2019s such a bad thing! That\u2019s the power of literature. I can read about how everyone was freaked out by Medgar Evers\u2019 assassination<\/a> or how the Moon landing captivated the viewing public\u2019s imagination<\/a>, but seeing characters I\u2019ve gotten to know experience those things is entirely different. <\/p> One simplistic way to put this is: the entirety of The Book of Lamentations <\/em>(if it were a nonfictional event) would cover about 10 minutes of something like the Revolutions<\/em> podcast. I\u2019m talking a broad history podcast, not one of those shows that zooms in on a single murder case in West Virginia and gets five seasons out of it. The type of uprising depicted in the book, when described by historians, does not often focus on characters like Marcela G\u00f3mez Oso or C\u00e9sar Santiago. What I\u2019m saying is, I can and have read dry facts like \u201cMexico has had its own racial caste system\u201d or \u201cmany Indigenous tribes and nations still live within the borders of Mexico\u201d and not really <\/em>understand what that means. Not on a visceral level. <\/p> Before this gets too high-in-the-sky, \u201cbooks-can-save-the-world<\/em>-man,\u201d I want to give the \u201cit\u2019s not literature\u2019s responsibility to do anything\u201d caveat. Salmeen Sinai might be a self-conscious stand-in for India in Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>, but metanymy only goes so far, you know? Just as living people are not statistics you see in a newspaper, just as demographics are not monoliths, a novel or poem is never going to be the definitive<\/em> take on an event. There are other stories to be told about World War II than just The Tin Drum<\/em>. <\/p> The notion of fractals kept hitting me over and over while reading The Book of Lamentations<\/em>. There\u2019d be a scene of conflict with Indigenous characters, but their issues were meaningless to the Ladino characters, whose issues were meaningless to the government workers trying to implement land reform, whose issues were not meaningless but also not the first priority of Church higher-ups whose motivation was mostly to secure the Catholics\u2019 power in Central America. Ghosting over all this was a sort of meta-notion that to the average U.S. citizen, all of these characters would be categorized in an undifferentiated mass misnomered as \u201cMexicans.\u201d Which is to say: the ability of empire to flatten out peoples\u2019 stories is unparalleled, and something society needs to actively guard against. <\/p> Empires, unfortunately, do <\/em>reverberate throughout history. We still talk about Alexander as a \u201cThe Great\u201d without talking much about the people he crushed underfoot. We rattle off the names of dictators with little recall of their victims. Empires crush stories\u2014especially ones that make them look bad\u2014until the red pepper becomes known as \u201cpaprika.\u201d Why do you think Beloved<\/a><\/em> gets banned<\/a> but Gone With The Wind<\/em> is the definitive portrait of an era for some people? <\/p>![\"File:Earth,](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/249d9278-7332-4d90-a2c4-578c5beb9424_624x600.jpeg\")
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