Like many others in the literary world, I, too, have been disheartened, saddened, shocked by the news surrounding Alice Munro’s family affairs. In Iran, I grew up reading Munro’s stories translated into Farsi. Even though her Canadian landscapes bore no resemblance to the desert climate I was used to, I saw a familiar feminine world depicted, with familiar questions. At the time as a teenager, I didn’t know words like oppression, agency, empowerment, feminism to assign to what I was reading in her stories but took comfort in a story that felt familiar, in the lives of those characters that seemed to be as complicated as the lived of the Iranian women I knew- mothers, aunties, grandmothers, daughters.
Years later, when I had become fluent in English, I turned to her stories again and this time too, her stories gave me permission as a female writer. On the page, she took space, used as many words as necessary. Her stories spiraled, twirling around themselves. They were never adorned with a shiny bow at the end. She seemed to be, on the page, a female writer unapologetic for her style, tone, or her word count. I was encouraged by that, too to the page, laid down my burdens and questions on its forgiving blankness.
When Alice Munro died, I felt the loss of her as a literary guide. Looking back now, I realize that I had made several assumptions and the news with her family has shone an uncomfortable light on how tenuous my assumptions were: A sensitive writer makes for a sensitive person. If one can create transcendent art, one must necessarily be a transcendent human being. This is what Michelle Cyca’s comments on X remind me of, “Harder to accept that the truth that people who made transcendent are capable of monstrous acts.”
I’ve also been uncomfortable with all the comments “to separate the art from the artist.” While we all can, and should, strive for greater grace and compassions, in that statement lies a permission to lead a double life, a permission that one’s life can be exempted from scrutiny if one can manage to create great art. It absolves the artists from the moral obligation to lead a life of meaning, a life worthy of emulation that comes with fame, a life lived with honesty and integrity.
Fame. This one is another issue that I have not seen as much discussion around this devastating news (except for Brandon Taylor’s newsletter in which he also asks these difficult questions). If we demand courage from Munro to have stood by her daughter, to have extended the same compassion she showed for fictional characters to her own offspring, then we, too, must be willing to ask the painful question: What was my role in all of this?
Obviously, many of us were not personally involved in Munro’s family life. What I am referring to is a plea to turn our eyes towards the very notions we have around fame. Where does this obsession with worshipping celebrities come from? What are my unconscious biases when someone becomes great at their craft? I ,too, lavished praises on Munro’s stories, and by extension, on her as a human being. But I must be honest. On what did I base my judgement of her as a person? Was it not her fame? Was it not that she won the Nobel prize? That’s only given to “peaceful” individuals, right?
Awards. Fame. Exaggerated praise. These all leave an influence on the psyche of individuals. I am not in a position to judge the character of Munro, nor would I want to be, but I do know that I was part of the collective entity that permitted her fame, fanned it, and even relished in her goodness. But now I must sit with the uncomfortable knowledge that I might have been wrong. That I might have been blind, jumped to quick, unfounded conclusions.
This brings me to a last question. What in our world allows for such a thing to even happen? For someone to create art, be praised for it, receive a peace award, and yet fail to be a practitioner of peace in one’s daily life? There are many factors. But here is one not often talked about: Art that is created, and promoted, a-contextually.
As a child growing up in the Middle East, like Orhan Pamuk, I , too, was painfully aware that the world had a center and that I was not at that center. The books on my parents’ bookshelves reflected an admiration for the western world, their works labeled as “classic literature” while Iranian stories was “garbage”. I overheard these comments about Iranian literature on more than one occasions among our guests. “Iran has become a dumpster of trash stories,” people were quick to say.
Recently, during a trip to Saudi Arabia, a young girl, around nine or ten years old, came up to me at a park and asked if I was American. I never know how to answer that question, so I said that I lived in America. She started a monologue about how she really was an American at heart, New York, her dream home, and that she even had a TV in her bedroom, where she watched Netflix all the time. She lived in an American compound, her father working for an oil company. “I’m not Saudi, but American, one day.”
As I listened to this child being formed under Western media influences, I recognized an uncomfortably familiar phenomenon. The aggressive promotion of western media creates a rift in the psyche of children growing up outside of those Western countries where the media is created. The western world is portrayed as exotic, free but then when the child turns off the TV, or shuts the cover of a book and returns to their daily life in a traditional society, all she sees is the lackluster, the boring sameness. Suddenly, an aunt asking a child to wear an additional layer because of the cold chill seems suffocating in her ways. If I decide to leave my family’s farm in order to study acting in America and the elders of my family intervene and ask me to reconsider, I see them as limiting my personal progress, becoming barriers to my fulfillment, oppressors. Is the equation ever this simple? Is it ever this black and white? Well, the impoverished conversation around propagation of western media in historic societies makes it seem so. It shows this shiny world. I know that living in this shiny world comes at great costs- loneliness, alienation, erasure of traditional values like community and family life, but does that little girl in Saudi know this?
How does this relate to Alice Munroe? Artists are people. There is a degree of scrutiny that comes with creating art and promoting it to people who know you not only as an artist but as a person. Having the eyes of people, who know how you show up every day, on your art, forces an artist to reconsider their work. If I knew Alice personally, if I lived down the street from her, would I have been as willing to admire her stories? I don’t know but it is a question heavy on my heart as I continue to witness aggressive promotion of art outside of the culture in which it was created without any accompanying broader discourse that helps the consumers of such art to consider the values being portrayed.
Here is what I am not saying: that all art should be created and only promoted in a local community. There is beauty in discovering a work of art set in a world vastly different from your own. It can broaden horizons. Rather, I am merely suggesting that there are consequences to the patterns of promotion of Western literature and that it might be timely to pause and ask, do these patterns breed unhealthy individual tendencies? Do they allow for individuals to get away from having to lead a meaningful life? While as individuals we must strive to lead a life that reflects our ideals, we also have a responsibility to examine dispassionately the collective influence that we all create together, and we are in turn influenced by. I want to be willing to do the hard work of changing deep-seated patterns of thought and behavior that continue to allow for such atrocities to occur, for people like Andrea Skinner to be silenced, for normalization of pain and abuse.
Unlike some, I cannot separate the art from the artist. Now, I know that I know, and I cannot ever turn to her stories with the same blind trust as before. The story of Andrea Skinner cannot not be separated from a discussion of Munro’s work or we would also be perpetuating patterns that allow abuse to continue.
Perhaps, I should have been more thoughtful from the beginning. Here is what I firmly believe: as artists we have a responsibility to society, we hold up mirrors that show fractures, we imagine alterative worlds, we birth beauty, but nothing exempts us from the responsibility to turn our critical eyes towards our own ways of being. Nothing exempts us from trying to become better, one day at a time. One of my favorite quotes about art is this one from Akira Kurosawa: “The role of the artist is to not look away.”
Now this is what I hope for: to never look away even if it hurts, even if it is turning a light towards my own deepest, darkest corners of being. I hope that we will all have the courage to look at ourselves with the same critical eye that we are so quick to turn on characters in our works of art.
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