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Authors: Geraldine Brooks
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complained that my narratorsâ voices are too modern, too feminist. I urge them to go and read some seventeenth-century court transcripts.
If one definition of home is a destination, then I have reached it at last, as a fiction writer who draws inspiration from the past and nourishes it with experience garnered as a foreign correspondent. I do not think I would be able to write the books if I had not had, as prelude, those years of covering catastrophe. A foreign correspondent enters peopleâs lives at the worst of times and mines them for the most terrible details. You write the story, hoping someone who matters will read it and give a damn. And then you try to forget about it so that you can go and do it all again; some other war, some other personâs desperate sadness. You try to clear the cache. But you canât. You canât drag and drop your memories into the void.
What is the price of experience,
asks the poet William Blake.
Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the witherâd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
So, I try to use the experiences that I have had, in the withered fields of famine-racked Ethiopia or the desolate, shell-shattered market places of Bosnia. I try to make the suffering I witnessed count for something. I believe fiction matters. I know it has power. I know this because the jailers and the despots are always so afraid of it.
In Israel, I interviewed, and later befriended, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian after he stoned my car on the road to Hebron. Not long after, his militancy landed him a five-year sentence in an Israeli jail. Because he had told me he loved English books, I tried to bring him a copy of Hemingwayâs The Old Man and the Sea , thinking the story and the spare language would be accessible to him. The jailers would not allow it. I thought of that boy when Major Michael Mori, the US marine attorney for David Hicks, recountedhow he had been barred from giving Hicks a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird . He also noted that in the few letters Hicks was allowed to receive, the word âloveâ had been redacted. These stories enrage me, but they also get me up in the morning.
I am glad the jailers fear the power of fiction, the power of words. It encourages me to try harder, to give them something new to worry about.
The contours of my work life are very different these days from that of the young woman whose bag was always open in the cupboard, ready to receive items from a packing list that included both a chador and a bulletproof vest. These days, my workday begins with a short walk up a dirt track from my house to the main road, where I wait with my younger son for a yellow school bus to come to a halt in a strobe of flashing lights. It is odd that in the United States, a country that so deplores any hint of the nanny state, this most nannyish and levelling institution is ubiquitous and embraced. My son climbs aboard, the stop sign folds back, and I wave. By the time I reach the house, I am already at work. I pause in the kitchento brew a fresh cup of coffee. As I wait, I pull a poetry anthology off the shelf and let the book fall open. I read whatever poem my eye falls on and, pump primed, climb the stairs to my study and step back into the past.
In his 1936 classic for children, A Little History of the World , the Austrian author Ernst Hans Gombrich describes the business of writing about the past. It is, he says, like lighting a scrap of paper and dropping it into a bottomless well. As it falls and burns, it lights up the sides of the well in the same way that our memories light up the past. The deeper it falls, the less is illuminated. Living memory gives way to archives, archives to cave paintings, cave paintings to fossils, until the light goes out
If one definition of home is a destination, then I have reached it at last, as a fiction writer who draws inspiration from the past and nourishes it with experience garnered as a foreign correspondent. I do not think I would be able to write the books if I had not had, as prelude, those years of covering catastrophe. A foreign correspondent enters peopleâs lives at the worst of times and mines them for the most terrible details. You write the story, hoping someone who matters will read it and give a damn. And then you try to forget about it so that you can go and do it all again; some other war, some other personâs desperate sadness. You try to clear the cache. But you canât. You canât drag and drop your memories into the void.
What is the price of experience,
asks the poet William Blake.
Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the witherâd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
So, I try to use the experiences that I have had, in the withered fields of famine-racked Ethiopia or the desolate, shell-shattered market places of Bosnia. I try to make the suffering I witnessed count for something. I believe fiction matters. I know it has power. I know this because the jailers and the despots are always so afraid of it.
In Israel, I interviewed, and later befriended, a fifteen-year-old Palestinian after he stoned my car on the road to Hebron. Not long after, his militancy landed him a five-year sentence in an Israeli jail. Because he had told me he loved English books, I tried to bring him a copy of Hemingwayâs The Old Man and the Sea , thinking the story and the spare language would be accessible to him. The jailers would not allow it. I thought of that boy when Major Michael Mori, the US marine attorney for David Hicks, recountedhow he had been barred from giving Hicks a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird . He also noted that in the few letters Hicks was allowed to receive, the word âloveâ had been redacted. These stories enrage me, but they also get me up in the morning.
I am glad the jailers fear the power of fiction, the power of words. It encourages me to try harder, to give them something new to worry about.
The contours of my work life are very different these days from that of the young woman whose bag was always open in the cupboard, ready to receive items from a packing list that included both a chador and a bulletproof vest. These days, my workday begins with a short walk up a dirt track from my house to the main road, where I wait with my younger son for a yellow school bus to come to a halt in a strobe of flashing lights. It is odd that in the United States, a country that so deplores any hint of the nanny state, this most nannyish and levelling institution is ubiquitous and embraced. My son climbs aboard, the stop sign folds back, and I wave. By the time I reach the house, I am already at work. I pause in the kitchento brew a fresh cup of coffee. As I wait, I pull a poetry anthology off the shelf and let the book fall open. I read whatever poem my eye falls on and, pump primed, climb the stairs to my study and step back into the past.
In his 1936 classic for children, A Little History of the World , the Austrian author Ernst Hans Gombrich describes the business of writing about the past. It is, he says, like lighting a scrap of paper and dropping it into a bottomless well. As it falls and burns, it lights up the sides of the well in the same way that our memories light up the past. The deeper it falls, the less is illuminated. Living memory gives way to archives, archives to cave paintings, cave paintings to fossils, until the light goes out
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