Fiction as Empowerment
One of my favorite aspects of designing my own Rebel MFA degree has been the deep dives and rabbit holes I go down. I love learning (I think you know this about me) so of course, this would be one of my favorite aspects, but it’s deeper than that. I think one benefit of college and/or graduate school is the encouragement to go deep on subjects. To learn, explore, expand and grow our understanding of subjects that are of interest to us. And one way to see that in action is by reading thesis or dissertation papers. Some of you may be rolling your eyes right now thinking, “who in the world thinks this is fun?”
Me, friends. I think it’s incredibly fun.
And one of my latest deep dives shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s the assertion that fiction is a huge source of empowerment in our culture. I knew that intuitively, especially given my work around writing fiction to heal. But I had no idea that it’s an entire field of study. Cultural anthropology. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t yet have a great grasp on the world of cultural anthropology (it’s on my list of things to research and deep-dive into) but I understand enough of it to make some assertions in this article.
What I found in my research, deep-dives, and rabbit holes is a population of cultural anthropologists who study fiction (including but not limited to literature, plays, screenplays/film, etc). In many of the academic papers, they talk about certain pieces of fiction that have influenced our culture and/or are representations of our culture at the time of creation. This is endlessly fascinating to me.
What I learned is that time and time again, when these cultural anthropologists look to fiction as an indication of culture — we see an increase in empowerment among minorities and marginalized peoples. We see the cultural concerns of the time being reflected and, in most cases, solutions or desires for solutions within the context of the creation.
Take for example this quote from Carmen Maria Machado during an interview with The Paris Review¹
Horror can be a very transgressive space. It reflects so many of our anxieties and fears. When you enter into horror, you’re entering into your own mind, your own anxiety, your own fear, your own darkest spaces. Horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you, the viewer, the reader. That tells us a lot about who we are, what we are, and what we, individually and culturally, are afraid of.
Because I have a special interest in female empowerment, I pay particular attention when creators of fiction or scholars of literature and film recognize genres and categories where the feminine aspect is empowered. One of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read, Audre Lorde asserts that the Erotic can be hugely empowering, especially for women in her The Erotic as Power paper, published in 1978. One of my favorite excerpts from that paper is:
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.
She summarizes the whole aspect of what this empowerment can do in just a few lines:
...Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world...
These are only two of the many writers and scholars who understand this deep connection between fiction and empowerment. (Hence why there are entire studies around it).
But I am not a scholar, not really. I am just me. Curious, introspective, me. Being truthful — I set out to write this article in a particular way, with particular examples but then I realized that a 1-2k word article is not going to do justice to the topic. I can’t possibly explain in this short of a piece just how empowering fiction is. That made me think that I may have my new Rebel MFA Thesis topic to ponder on. Regardless, I debated on the best way to “show” you what I’m talking about, and then it hit me. Use examples from creators themselves. I’ve compiled a few of my favorite creators who talk about using fiction for empowerment and healing.
Case Studies
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is notorious for writing reality-turned-fiction stories and has endeared readers with his ability to explore themes and topics that many are hesitant to talk about.
In The Nickel Boys, an archaeologist investigates unearthed graves at the fictional Nickel Academy. But what’s not fictional is the reality the book was born from. The Dozier School for Boys in Florida was a real place with real horrors.
The real-life archaeologist, Erin Kemmerle’s investigation into the Dozier School for Boys revealed more than fifty unmarked graves revealing sexual assault, abuse, and torture. Survivors have said that the school (which was supposed to be a reform school for boys) became a slave labor camp for the boys attending.
In an article about Whitehead in the New York Times, writer Frank Rich says²,
He applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavate a grievous past but to examine the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or “neatly erase” the stories he is driven to tell.
To me, this is an exemplary way of writing for empowerment — uncovering insidious and horrific stories that seem to lose staying power in the minds of those who don’t want to remember the reality. But with his fiction, Whitehead forces readers to contend with the past and empowers survivors alike to know: someone is listening. Someone cares. Someone doesn’t want the rest of the world to forget your tragedies.
Get Out by Jordan Peele
A blockbuster hit from the beginning, Jordan Peele’s horror movie, “Get Out” is seared into the minds of many (mine included). What I love (and what scholars also love) about the movie is that it’s a testament to a topic that burns red hot. Racism.
In an interview with The New York Times³, he says,
“This movie is also about how we deal with race. As a black man, sometimes you can’t tell if what you’re seeing has underlying bigotry, or it’s a normal conversation and you’re being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling.”
What Jordan Peele does in the movie, however fictional it may seem, is showcase real-life anxieties and situations. I think the fact that he chose to set the scene (pun intended) with a biracial relationship ascending to the next level (meeting the parents) is a reality so many biracial couples face. While I don’t personally have experience with it, I’ve talked with many of my black male friends who say that the movie perfectly captured their fears and anxieties around the situation of meeting the parents.
Peele takes it one step further though as he explains in the same interview,
“I was making the movie in that period when Trayvon [Martin] was [killed]. What originally started as a movie to combat the lie that America had become post-racial became a movie where the cat is out of bag, and now we’re having this conversation. I realized I had to shift it a little bit. It became less about trying to create wokeness and more about trying to offer us a hero out of this turmoil, to offer escape and joy.”
Peele’s “Get Out” is proof that fiction has a place in social commentary and empowerment.
Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
I might be biased because I have loved both of Alix Harrow’s bestselling books — but when I read Once and Future Witches, I felt empowered down to my bones. Maybe it’s because the topics are something near and dear to me (witches and suffragettes) but more likely it’s because Harrow does such a magnificent job of bringing to life the characters and the time period which were undoubtedly about empowering women to stand up for themselves.
One of the things I love most about Once and Future Witches is that the empowerment is two-pronged (as so many things are). First, we have the idea of witches and the way they’ve been superimposed with “wrongness,” and have had their gifts and identities reduced to nothing more than evil. Even though the book is fiction — the reality is not. We all know that there was a time (and there still is — see my Witch Wound article!) that women who were considered to be witches were not only disempowered but brutally and severally hunted. Then we have the plight of being a woman stripped of any power at all. I think setting the book in the era of suffragettes was brilliant because it’s such a viscerally painful reminder of how women were treated.
In Once and Future Witches, we follow three sisters who each play a very different role in their attempts to reclaim their power as women and as witches. Juniper is one of the most empowering characters I’ve ever met in a book and she alone could carry the torch of empowering women. But it’s the whole ensemble of characters that bring to light the empowering aspects of the book.
In an interview for The Nerd Daily⁴ Harrow talks about the impetus of anger behind writing the novel. She said,
“Quite a few people have commented on the anger of this book, and I’m always a little surprised! I guess I’ve been swimming in fury for so long I don’t notice it anymore; I guess I thought everybody was in here with me. Although actually, in the case of this book, a lot of my anger came from research rather than reality. It’s very hard to read about the history of women’s rights or of witchcraft without ending up without wanting to set at least one mid-sized city on fire.”
In an interview with Tor.com,⁵ Harrow elaborates:
“I dreamed a world where women had more than just their voices—they had just a little bit of witching, and the memory of a time when they had more. One of the ideas in this book is that magic is the distance between what you have and what you need; this book is absolutely the reality I needed, but didn’t have.”
Through the fictional lenses of the Eastwood sisters and their magic-making, stand-up-and-fight comrades — we, the readers, are left feeling raw, hurt, angry but most importantly — empowered.
Conclusion
I could have written another 5-10k word about this subject because I find it incredibly fascinating. It makes me wonder how I would have done as a cultural anthropologist myself. But alas, I will have to settle for what I can do as a Rebel MFA student working in a Rebel MFA way. I hope, though, that sharing this information has given you a new outlook on the ways in which we can see empowerment radiating from film, literature, and beyond. I hope I’ve given you a new and potentially rabbit-hole-filled way to learn more about film studies and cultural anthropology. Mostly, though, I hope you see — yet again — just how powerful fiction really is.
¹ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/10/03/pleasure-principles-interview-carmen-maria-machado/
² https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/books/review/nickel-boys-colson-whitehead.html
³ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/movies/jordan-peele-interview-get-out.html
⁴ https://thenerddaily.com/alix-e-harrow-once-and-future-witches-interview/
