In the Event of a Disaster, the Writer...

by Mandira Pattnaik

Daniel/Unsplash

Last week, the managing editor of a prominent publication I had never before submitted to, reached out to me through my author website. They had read "Dark Matter" (published 2022; Selected in Best of 20 Years’ of Contrary Magazine; Pushcart nominated) and liked it enough to invite me to submit. A communication such as this, without doubt, is enormously flattering for any writer, and when the froth settles, one is bound to feel a surreal connection with someone whose age, race, interests or nationality is unknown. I think that is the pinnacle of the creative arts — a positive resonance with a stranger. Such emotions of interrelatedness with another human, I believe, help promote positivity, hope and lasting peace in an atmosphere of hate and violence.

The editor’s note, because it was so unexpected and serendipitous, made me stop and ruminate about many things around the conceiving and writing of "Dark Matter." The story begins with a young boy watching the stars. Until the age of five, when my family lived in a small town with zero light pollution, star gazing was a favorite pastime. Grandfather pointed out constellations and us kids were fascinated by the wonder of beyond. Kids! Wonder!

Rudely though, I was immediately thrown back into the mess of our present times and couldn’t help but think of the children in war-torn areas, who, just at this moment, must watch bursts of firepower instead of stars. The visuals we see daily on TV, and there is no way we can shield those images from our kids in places faraway from those conflict zones, appear uncannily similar to a fireworks display sparked off for the benefit of some overgrown kid’s entertainment. Alas!

Our news channels also beamed videos of Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene and the destruction they had brought. It is exceedingly uncomfortable in the way our children are now accustomed to these images of horrific damage. The catastrophic events register their presence by their shocking regularity and their ordinariness in the greater challenges of the planet.

Should we or should we not talk and write about wars and disasters? As it turns out, artists and writers do want to ‘represent’ disasters. One of the great tools of accurate representation is of course journalistic reportage done on the spot (like the one Herbert Morrison did as he live covered the 1937 airship Hindenburg’s arrival and subsequent bursting into flames: It’s fire, and it’s crashing! It’s crashing, terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It’s burning, bursting into flames… Morrison said in the live recording), but most are only afterimages of the disaster, with the reporter covering the disaster after it has happened, or far from where the conflict is raging (there are, of course, several notable exceptions).

Another famous Morrison, Toni Morrison, wrote in her 1973 essay: Too tired? I’ve never been more exhausted in my life. Not just the numbness of watching hundreds of Mexicans — naturalized and otherwise — being kicked back across the U.S. border. Not just the bone‐marrow fatigue of reading about the latest outrage in outrageous South Africa. Not just the weight of old anger, but an inability to contain the new. Mine is a tiredness of perception, of strafed ganglia. Anchors float. Bread won’t mold. Children’s brains splatter on the walls of “very good” homes. Toni Morrison was scathing about the ‘representation’ of disaster. Yet, I have found that, disasters are routinely ‘watered down’ and sanitised before being served as stories in literature meant for readership of the general public. There is a certain unwritten rule about it. In a 2022 essay, Rachel Heise Bolten writes: By making disaster small we can see it better, or maybe we just like it that way. For example, we have stories about observers in a war, and perhaps families of soldiers, rather than the actual macabre action that happens in a battlefield. Case in point is the story "War" (Original title: Quando si comprende) by Italian playwright and dramatist Luigi Pirandello. The plot revolves around a conversation in a train among sets of parents of soldiers deployed in the First World War, and the final acknowledgement by one parent that his son is indeed dead. In case of floods, earthquakes and natural disasters too, we rarely see the protagonist ‘living the moment’ so to say. For example, After the Quake is a collection of six short stories by Haruki Murakami. The stories (written between 1999 and 2000) were in response to Japan’s 1995 Kobe earthquake, and each story is affected peripherally by the disaster, and not centrally to the disaster.

I advocate taking on a disaster that jolts us to the core, and directly confronting the issue in stories and essays, as realistically as possible.

My understanding is that, maybe, the shock of the narrative will be a treatment to climate-emergency-denying people, votaries of hate and intolerance in today’s world. As you may agree (or not), there’s a manifold increase in climate deniers, haters, and supporters of violence, among common, working-class populace, from, say, a decade ago. I trace the phenomena to underlying causes. I hate job cuts, shrinking salaries and abject poverty. I perceive everyone is looking for an enemy to bash. But whatever may be the cause, one can’t call for violence and let alone execute it, seemingly supported by the same common people who gain nothing.

We need more direct action from writers and artists. We need stories with protagonists caught in climate catastrophes, groups of people standing up and confronting a liar, or narratives where those with appetites for abuse and violence finally realize what a disaster they are.