Fiction as a safe place

 Fiction as a safe place

When it comes to citizenship education, a great many approaches can be taken, depending on which aspect of it you want to emphasise, or work on: you may be interested in the ‘Norms and values’ aspects, and want to come to grips with the workings of the democratic system, say. Or you may want to concentrate on the skills needed, for example communication skills; or you may focus on global citizenship, aspects of culture and inter-cultural communication and multi-cultural societies. Or you may be more interested in attending to critical thinking and its development in your learners.

One issue any such approach will have, however, is that of loyalty. Loyalty to a family, loyalty to traditions, loyalty to a belief (system), loyalty to a culture. The bond that loyalty creates is strong, and will often override such notions as objectivity, multi-perspectival approach and willingness to consider different viewpoints. Thus when discussing, say, Dutch democracy, its norms and values, its expectations, its positioning vis-à-vis collective living, any anchoring in reality will inevitably run counter to some loyalty, on some level. That might be loyalty to a family member or tradition, loyalty to some idea passed down through generations, loyalty to a friend and their beliefs, loyalty to one’s generation, or even loyalty to one’s own sense of oneself: it’s difficult to admit being wrong, it’s even more difficult to cross-examine one’s motives and thinking.

Unfortunately, trying to discuss difficult, real-life themes that always touch upon politics, personal beliefs and ideas of how to get on with one another, is bound to run into this problem of loyalty. No amount of artificial distance put between learners and themes will work, like: ‘It’s not about you, it’s in general!’. But it’s always personal, that’s the point of loyalty.

So discussing, again say, immigration and how to live together, a child of migration is bound to both feel more directly involved and discussed in terms of loyalty: where do those lay? Discussing the heritage of colonisation once, a Muslim Dutch-Moroccan student told us that ‘What the Netherlands did in the past has got nothing to do with me because I’m not Dutch’. Upon enquiry, she confirmed she had been born and raised in the Netherlands, had done her entire schooling in Dutch, and had never lived abroad. Yet for her, The Netherlands were ‘the country of others, not mine’. Loyalty stood in the way of even considering alternatives.

One obvious way to get round this problem is to bring in a disjunction: what Suvin calls a ‘cognitive estrangement’ – a slight dislocation of the real, so that it’s both recognisable (in very general terms) and unrecognisable, even alien. It is in that space, that dislocated space, that the reader can then compare and contrast what is (in real life) with what could be (in the text): it’s a space that invites questioning.

With that concept, Suvin was explaining why science fiction is such a great instrument for thinking, for speculating, and, in a very Brechtian move I guess, ‘to interrogate our reality’ – the equivalent of the Verfremdungseffekt, but this time from the teaching perspective.

Indeed, one advantage science fiction has over most other genres is this ability to create this distorting filter between reader and reality, thereby removing the need (or the desire) for loyalties. When your main character is an alien doing alien things, there’s a disjunction that enables the taking of a distance with that character – and distance is good because it leads to observing, noticing, thinking (see here). But when that alien appears to have recognisable motives to do what it does, that’s where the link with us, our world, comes into it. But that link is still firmly in Alien Land, what we discuss applied to them, on their planet, they don’t exist, it’s all speculation!

But it’s speculation around themes we know apply to us as well: that disjunction provides us with the means to, should we want to (and we do want to😊) make parallels with our world, our societies, our humanity.

Literature as a whole – Fiction in general – can do the same thing, although clearly many writers choose not to. Hence the abundance of novels dedicated to real-life problems, identifying social groups and discussing them openly, which can quickly touch upon loyalty again, and negate the very intention to openly discuss themes and topics in class. Yet there is Fiction that can provide a safe place for a teacher, by creating a in-between space where nothing is real yet everything is. It’s a safe space because should loyalties rear their ugly heads, the teacher can always bring it all back to the fictional elements, to that disjunction: by choosing a different character to discuss, a different situation to describe, for example. That fiction doesn’t have to be science fiction of course, but it does mean that your fiction will have to be complex enough, open enough, so that you have something to go back to when needing that safety again.

That is another short-coming of those thematic books I fear, but that’s for another day. What matters now is to think about the use of literature as an instrument to address social, citizenship-related issues, in the context of those loyalties and how they often will stand in the way of having meaningful exchanges in class. Controversial subjects are very hard to handle, but there is sometimes an insistence on grounding everything in a reality which is often so pregnant, so deeply felt, that it ends up stifling thinking, reflection and openness.

Choose your texts wisely then, and of course, always in strict relation to your aims, since a historical literature class will obviously require something different. It’s always the same: what are your aims? What is the best text to reach them?

And of course: is there anywhere safe for us to (re)turn to if things heat up?

Darko Suvin: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale: Yale University Press, 1979.