Literature as A Source of Bonding, Community

It has become something of a truism to say that the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is a play in which nothing happens, one which took the Theatre of the Absurd to new heights by presenting a plot in which nothing changes in either space or time. The two characters, Vladimir and Estragon indeed seem trapped in the particular part of space and time where they find themselves, with no easy way out. Its nihilism and seeming incomprehensibility were greeted with scorn, both in the original French version when it was first shown in 1953 at the Babylon Theatre in Paris, and later on in the English translation, in London in 1955.

In fact, the censor responsible for approving the play in London wrote in his report to the Lord Chamberlain that he had “endured two hours of angry boredom” for “a piece quite without drama and with very little meaning,” which seemed to him more like an “ugly little jet of marsh-gas” than a serious work of stagecraft. However, a sign that the play may have first reached the wrong audience came eight months later, when it was translated and enacted at the Lüttringhausen Prison in Germany, from where a prisoner wrote to Beckett, “Your Godot was a triumph, a delirium – Your Godot was ‘Our’ Godot, ours! ours!"

The prisoners could understand Beckett’s themes of isolation and nihilism more easily than theater-going audiences and critics. A later production of Godot in the San Quentin Prison in California, recreated by the inmates in a series of workshops, was also a success, and the author Martin Esslin wrote that “what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of Paris, London, and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts.” Beckett’s characters, Vladimir and Estragon, were themselves tramps and on the margins of society, and the prisoners could perhaps relate to them better.

These poignant incidents, in which those imprisoned could relate the best to the isolated and repetitious lives of the characters in the play, speak to the many ways in which literature can be a source of collective hope in difficult times. As the author James Baldwin wrote, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." Literature helps us contextualise our emotions and anger by helping us relate to others, in other times and places, who felt the same way. 

Sometimes, this may be because of the circumstances of the author who first created the literary work. For example, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote the poetry cycle Requiem, a critique of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, during a time when he was imprisoning or even executing those who were critical of his regime. Akhmatova and a few trusted friends were compelled to rely on “pre-Gutenberg” methods, as they memorised the entire poem and retained it in their memories for years, because writing it down would be evidence of her dissent. When Requiem was eventually published abroad, in a process known as tamizdat, a generation of Russian defectors found hope and solace in it because of the resistance to totalitarianism that it symbolised.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of literature is how its meaning can transcend time and space to be related to in new and unprecedented circumstances. For example, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski wrote the poem 'Try To Praise The Mutilated World' in memory of a trip he and his father had taken to Ukrainian villages in Poland that were cleared out during forced population transfers, where the houses were empty but the apple trees were laden with blossoms, indicating the way that life moves on after a tragedy. Zagajewski's themes and ideas are by and large typically European, dealing with the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, and the years of Communism and repression in Poland and the Soviet Union.

However, the poem itself, with its message of hope in the darkest times and holding onto memories when the present is difficult, found new life in quite a different context after the 9/11 terror attacks. While Zagajewski himself said that 9/11 did not fundamentally change his outlook in the way that other major world events had, his poem became famous when a translation of it by Clare Cavanaugh was published in the New Yorker after the attacks. It was quickly hailed as a literary touchstone, and the idea of holding on to beauty in troubled times was an important part of New York's recovery after the attacks.

Apart from the written tradition in literature, oral storytelling also plays an important role in bringing a community together through shared experiences and lore that is transmitted through generations. Oral forms of literature have always been the repository of societies' knowledge about themselves and the world. For example, the griots of West Africa played the double role of troubadours and historians, entertaining people through community storytelling, while also reminding them of their roots, while the seanchaí of Ireland were at first historians who knew the ancestry and genealogy of the nobility, and later, storytellers who entertained the people with stories and songs about traditional Irish beliefs. 

These storytellers were often, as depicted by Gabriela Mistral in her poem 'La Contadora,' the centre of people's attention and expected to know everything about the lore and culture of their society. While their importance has slowly declined, and indeed many of their stories have been forgotten, the role they play in a community's formation of its identity cannot be underestimated. The author Mario Vargas Llosa illustrates this in his novel The Storyteller, in which the young anthropology student Saúl Zuratas is accepted by the native Amazonian Machiguenga tribe as a storyteller, and reminds them of their ancestral history, myths and of how they survived various dangers in the past; this history and identity, in turn, is a powerful force for the Machiguenga to resist Westernisation and encroachment upon their land.

There are countless other examples of novels, poems, plays and stories that have been sources of hope and identity at the community level. In fact, it has been seen that books are powerful ways of drawing communities together in times of crisis; for example, during a period of unrest in Chile after Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973, there were several instances of college students reading aloud Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America on public transport, slowly making the public more aware of how their country's resources had been exploited in the past, and how the ongoing political developments could lead to this happening again. However, apart from political galvanisation, literature can simply comfort people during hard times through a recognition of shared ideas and experiences, or acknowledgement of a common history.

Image Credits: Photo by Joan de la Malla, taken from Mongabay at https://news.mongabay.com/2017/11/storytelling-empowers-indigenous-people-to-conserve-their-environments/