michiko

So, so, today's class was of the depressing variety - not because of the teaching method or the other students, but rather the content. The book under discussion was Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Its setting of Khaufpur is a thinly veiled fictional allusion to the horrific and horrifying real-world Bhopal. The novel itself is stunning, opening with the line, I used to be human once, and running full tilt from there, told through the unflinching narration of the eponymous Animal. The class discussion moved pretty fast from one topic to another, but seemed to return again and again to authorial intent and the ethics of telling stories that don't belong to you. My personal approach to novels has always been to disregard the author's intention as something unquantifiable, a guessing game; yet in the case of this book, the main presenter argued - and I agreed with - the idea that the book itself was an extension of the author's activism in the case of Bhopal. On one level, it's simply fiction; on another level, it's a meta-narrative, speaking to and with the complex political arena of Bhopal, and of Bhopal's relationship with media and the West.

This has got me wondering - what other books out there function as activist texts? By this I mean, fictional stories that are not written into a vacuum but rather are placed in a complex web of reference and allusion, working to heighten awareness of key socio-political issues?

Thoughts?