Everything we live through shapes how we understand and engage with institutions and social connections.
There are so many examples in history and in books of young people reckoning with institutions and dominant cultures, forcing—catalyzing—change through their actions. The beauty of so much literature is that it continues to find ways to remind us how this work has been done before —how we have suffered, yes, but also how we have made it through. That is the power of the personal.
There is no such thing as political fiction to me, because such a term feels redundant: All fiction is political. The worlds we choose to build, the histories we choose to write about—the way we tell those stories, who we focus on, how we determine who is in the room—these are all choices, made by a writer, affected by histories and institutions and the way they walk through the world. Political.
When I was writing my novel, A Thousand Times Before, I knew I was writing against histories that had been framed and reframed by people in power who could benefit from a specific style of storytelling. I wanted to write about the partition of India and Pakistan without celebration, without love for any resulting national identity. Similarly, in writing about the Nav Nirman Andolan in 1974, I wanted to balance bringing this important slice of history forward with its ultimate consequence: the devastating and shameful Emergency of 1975 and the resulting power vacuum that led to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s foothold in Gujarat and the country.
In my novel, these moments shape how characters understand and engage their countries, governments, and communities. These moments, major in political history, are prioritized in the way that they are foundationally personal for the characters. What you can afford to eat—the commodities that are available—are personal just as much as they are the result of political economics. When and how you are displaced, the violence that results from this, and the loves you lose in the process—these too are personal and still political.
Each of these books demonstrates the consequences of the world we live in, the ways that our political histories are inseparable from how we walk through the world. That the political and the personal are always, always, intertwined.
Human Acts by Han Kang
Reading this book is like moving through concentric circles, out from the middle. At its center is the Gwangju Uprising. The novel opens with the student Dong-ho’s experiences prior to the May uprising, as he volunteers at a school to help individuals identify civilians killed by soldiers. As he builds friendships with other volunteers and ponders what happens to a soul when it has left the body, the inevitable moves closer: his own death at the hands of soldiers.
For the rest of the novel, the reader moves to new narrators, some known from prior chapters, some not, as the years become further and further from the 1980 uprising. These refractions of experience demonstrate the consequences of one moment throughout the lives of Dong-ho’s loved ones, of his friends, of witnesses and journalists. The novel asks how one event might permeate through our lives—how we are all affected.
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
From the prologue of Brotherless Night and then all the way through, this novel puts forth an experience of conflict and history with the type of voice that makes you feel like the narrator is looking directly at you as she speaks. For Sashi, nearly 18 years old at the novel’s beginning, her four brothers and the neighbor boy, her parents and her grandmother—all fill her world with so much care, love, and joy. Their lane in Jaffna is a place of safety for so much of Sashi’s life, until the growing violence against Tamil people leads to the murder of her oldest brother, spurring both Sashi’s loved ones—and Sashi—to action.
Ganeshananthan writes in a way I can only dream of doing. Sashi’s voice engages the reader directly—indicts them. From the beginning, the novel asks, Who created the labels we use, and what happens when those labels serve to distance the observer so that empathy, humanity, and understanding are erased? And if it were you, what would you do, in order to protect the people you call home?
A History of Burning by Janika Oza
When Pirbhai takes a boat from Gujarat to Mombasa at the end of the nineteenth century, serving in indentured servitude to the British as they lay down railroads, A History of Burning begins its nearly century-long family history. Pirbhai’s story in this new place begins with a stain—a burning—and it will not be the only burning witnessed on the family’s path to stability. And soon, under Idi Amin’s rule, when Asians are ousted from Uganda, this family splinters.
How do you become part of a place? What does that mean you carry with you? From Mombasa to Uganda, to London and Canada, Oza writes the story of a family whose paths fork. A History of Burning is about the ways we remember, the ways we love, and how we hold ourselves together.
The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer
A hefty novel with a love for linguistic digression—the protagonist and his father are both scholars of Sanskrit—the novel opens with Skanda traveling to be with his ill father, and then later transporting his father’s ashes to India. Meanwhile, the circumstances of Skanda’s parents’ lives are revealed, as well as the changing relationships to a ton-like social structure, against the historical backdrops of the 1975 Emergency, the 1984 pogroms of Sikhs, and the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid.
Through their romanticization and academic study of Sanskrit, both father and son are united across time in wondering how their beloved language became co-opted by Hindu nationalism. But what happens when one chooses to study rather than make any change in their society? The novel is as much a study of a particular family’s passivity as it is begging its readers to do more.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Few intergenerational novels do it like Pachinko. Immediately, the reader is invested in Sunja’s life: from the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, her adolescence and later exploitation by the wealthy Hansu, and the marriage to minister Isak which whisks her away to Osaka. Lee lingers in early descriptions of Sunja’s fishing village, and these early moments throw her experiences during the Japanese occupation of Korea into stark contrast.
Pachinko is in many ways about the power and consequences of a secret, the way it can trickle through children and children’s children, and, all the while, the ways in which a woman might protect herself and her family.
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Burnt Shadows spans nearly 70 years in the lives of Hiroko and Ilse’s respective families. Its driving premise—how did we get here?—reflects the feelings of displacement, of confusion and consequence, and a yearning for stability against the backdrop of imperialism. Hiroko and Ilse’s sons, Raza and Harry, carry forward some of the same questions that their mothers grappled with: Is it possible to escape our pasts? And how are our stories intertwined with narratives of power?
In many ways, the sheer proximity of this novel’s history is damning on its own. The family story feels inseparable from its chronology, which begins with the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb in Nagasaki, and moves later to the partitioning of India and Pakistan, the American proxy wars in Afghanistan, and 9/11.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
In Exit West, the central family is a couple—Saeed and Nadia—who live in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that is suffering conflict. Violence grows as they maneuver a relationship that prompts them to live together sooner than Nadia had expected, and soon they flee together through the fantastic element of this novel: doors that are like portals to other places around the world. The two, like many displaced people, try to find a safe place to build a stable home.
Though it is governed by this speculative element, Exit West is a world that the reader immediately recognizes. The novel is about labor and class, displacement, and power—and it is also about what it means to love a person, to see them to safety, and to build something new. This book reads like poetry; it’s impossible to put down.
