Agenda Fiction

Ok, so I'm on a bit of a Chimamanda Adichie kick this week. Last week was Chris Abani. Next week will probably be Dave Eggers, a guess based largely upon the reading schedule for my Lit class.

Anyway, one of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, called "Jumping Monkey Hill", is about a writers workshop for African writers. The protagonist of the story writes about her experience being sexually harassed in the workplace and has it dismissed, by the workshop's director, as "Agenda fiction." Adichie often discusses the strange relationships between fact, fiction, biography, memory and truth, so it has been on my mind lately. I think this is why I couldn't help but see a moment I had today as an irony so heavy-handed I could hear my lit professor reading it aloud and then mocking it.

To set the scene a bit: I'm writing a paper for my history class about Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. Actually I'm writing about the way the American media covered her, because that's what you do when you can't read the language of the best primary sources. Anyway, a classmate and I walked from class in Smith Hall to Red Square talking about our respective papers. He's Palestinian. Or maybe Arab-Israeli. Or maybe Palestinian-American. I'm not sure how he would identify himself, but he asked me, as though it would be a personal favor, to tell Wafa's whole story.

"I'm not saying suicide bombers are good. But people think they are irrational, they don't even think there might be a reason behind what they do," he said.

I nodded emphatically, rushing to assure him that we were of the same mind about this issue. (My privileged white girl arrogance sometimes allows me to forget that Palestine is more his than mine, no matter how much it matters to me.) We agreed to exchange papers at the end of the quarter, each excited to read what the other is writing (his is on soccer in Palestine) and said we'd try to write well for the sake of the other. It was one of those moments of connection that left me smiling, because I have had them so rarely while at UW. With very few exceptions my classmates and I have spoken almost exclusively within the classroom. To have such a personal (if short) exchange with a guy who had been a stranger mere moments before was reassuring in a way.

Distracted as I was by this bonding experience, I neglected to notice that on the tower above our heads a banner entreated "FREE TIRP TO ISRAEL".

When I passed back through Red Square and saw this banner, my first thought was the oddly detached realization that this moment would never pass for fiction. Too contrived, my lit prof would call it, too heavy-handed. "Wink wink, nudge nudge" is his catchphrase for moments of too-obvious symbolism, irony or foreshadowing.

Free trip to Israel. The words loom larger-than-life. Larger, it seemed, than our insignificant papers, our shared hope, larger than either of us. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. I won't turn this into a rant against Birthright trips but any system that says American college kids have more right to visit a place than the people (and their families) who owned houses and populated the villages of that place just 60 years ago.. well.. to put it frankly, I shouldn't have to explain how fucked up that is.

Which, I suppose, is a very small part of what led to the death of Wafa Idris. I think that my research about her life, the sheer amount of personal detail I've collected and sifted through in trying to form my own picture of her and her choices, is a darker and more emotional experience than most of my academic endeavors. I worry, at times, that spending too much time reading about her and reading the way the media discusses her will make me too angry, too upset, too consumed by my frustration to be objective.

But I promised my classmate I'd do my best. I will try to tell the whole story, or, at least, as much of it as can ever be understood this far removed from the time and the place.

And, should the story of my life ever be told, (by me or by any one else,) this incident will surely be cut from the final draft by a discerning editor, dismissed as too contrived to ever pass for the kind of truth we expect from memory or from fiction.

Wink wink, nudge nudge.