Visiting Bombay
in 1997, Michael Keren met a beggar on the street. Carrying a crippled infant,
she asked him for money. He watched her shuffle away and wondered: Where did
she come from? Where is she going? Who does she work for? Has the baby been
crippled intentionally? Where does she sleep and what is she dreaming about at
night?
Mortality rates, population densities, crime rates, spread of disease, income disparities, political corruption, figures of victims of genocide, counts of homeless people-none of the reports or data answered his questions and so he looked to the world of imagination: Fiction.
According to Keren, professor and Canada Research Chair in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, the complexity of information presented in statistics, newspapers and United Nations reports is overwhelming to most people. After studying novels depicting urban slums in Asia, he says fiction contributes to our ability to cope with the complexity of the issues and helps us to grasp the meaning of data presented in other forms.
"Poverty is a phenomenon we are constantly facing, but feel we never grasp. It is on a scale we have no idea how to cope with, but we still must try," says Keren. "United Nations reports, scholarly studies and media accounts are extremely important and we can not do without them. The part that is missing, however, is the voice of the poor."
Anosh Irani, in The Cripple and His Talismans, shows us daily life and the hopes and fears of Bombay slum dwellers. He describes his character's morning rituals, how children come to reason it is unwise to barter for a meal by selling their teeth, and what it feels like to escape the slum at night in favour of sleep and dreams. For Keren, Irani's fictional description of a beggar's dream allows us to identify with her and her misery on some higher level of humanity.
"Today we find ourselves as bystanders to the falling of whole regions into poverty in the South Sahara, genocide in Africa, rapes in the Congo," says Keren. "Whether or not we have the power to do something about it, as individuals we have an obligation to at least understand those situations. Fiction is an anchor to help us penetrate them a little deeper."