Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you'd know there's been so much horror and tragedy in the news lately. It seems every day there's a new story about hundreds or thousands of people dying in some faraway land. Maybe it's a drone strike in Gaza that's levelled an entire neighbourhood, a bombing in Lebanon that's killed and injured hundreds, or the war which rages on in Ukraine, with casualties rising quicker than we can keep track, and these are the ones the Western media care enough to cover. There's so much untold tragedy that's gone seemingly unnoticed in places like China, Sudan, Nigeria, to name a few. If you’re curious, there’s an entire Wikipedia page devoted to this, but this isn't a post about all the bad things going on in the world.
Rather, I bring this all up to encourage you to engage in a mental exercise. Ask yourself the following question: how much time do you spend thinking about all the people in war-torn regions or other unfortunate circumstances? If you're anything like me, the answer is “not enough”, and it's not because I don't care about all the people who've lost loved ones, or their homes, or their lives. It's simply a matter of human cognition. It is rather unfortunate, but beyond a certain point, all those faceless individuals in faraway lands become little more than numbers and statistics.
This sounds horrible, and it is. Still, all is not lost, because I bring you an evidence-backed, if a bit unlikely antidote to this problem, and that is storytelling. The thing about our species is we're wired for stories. We are who we are and we occupy the position we do at the apex of the species hierarchy largely thanks to our massive brains and our abilities to spin a yarn. However, as big as our brains may be, they're just not built to compute numbers on a large scale and comprehend the implications in the sorts of situations we're seeing in today's geopolitical landscape.
Is it any surprise that there are numerous quotes (or variations of the same quote) about how one death is a tragedy, but one million (or one hundred thousand, or one thousand, or your massive number of choice) is a statistic? And what better way to make other people care about that one person than to tell their story? What's more, the story doesn’t have to be just about that one person. It need not be a true-to-life account of a single individual’s life, but it could be an amalgamation of the experiences and lives of multiple individuals, merged into one relatable character. In this sense, a story about one person becomes a story about many.
Is it any wonder that the things that stick with us tend to be about individuals? By some estimates, over a million people starved to death during Nigeria's civil war. This is a horrible statistic that undoubtedly tells of unimaginable suffering and strife, and yet, some five decades later, what lives on in the collective memory of the West is a handful of shocking photographs of emaciated children, images which have come to represent the archetypal starving African child.
This, to me, illustrates the power of stories and fiction, and not just in written form. Music, dance, and other artistic expressions can be just as potent. So, please consider this a long-winded call to action to make more art and tell more stories because in a world where empathy may be on the decline and numbness to horror is becoming increasingly commonplace, we need art now more than ever, and you know who is best placed to make this art? You. So tell your stories, express yourself, and please, for the love of all things good, make more art.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.