Inconvenient Facts

The problem is that politicians do not know how to handle inconvenient facts; facts within history that are contrary to their own opinions or values. [1]

Boomed a historian during the first public forum at the Adelaide Writers’ Week 2006; a panel discussion on history’s public role. I was piqued, being a second year creative writing student, I have to handle inconvenient facts regularly – they are the ones that do not support the premise of a truth established in the pseudo-academic dissertations required of me now and then. In handling them, methodology is everything. I start by ignoring them and hoping to get away with it, and failing that (like when my tutor brings it up), I just have to shift my premise to accommodate them. After all, good grades do not come without a certain amount of mental dexterity.

… and, quoting our Prime Minister: Historians should stick to the facts and not indulge in mushy relativism.

The same historian continued, and this stoked the ire of the other historians on the same panel that first day. What followed was a vociferous defence of the quagmire that is history. The truth that is in history can only be found through a process of discovery, not rote learning, they echoed. There are invariably other perspectives, left untold, that are equally valid but that run contrary to prevailing (read: politicians’) perceptions or expectations. History is not for moralising, and interpretation of the past is only possible if an open, inclusive interrogation of it can be made; where alternate perspectives are also respected and investigated, not packaged and commoditised.

The historians view the present problem as one where politicians see themselves as the guardians of the nation’s future and past – or having to ‘win’ the past to secure the future, and are uncomfortable with a past that is contingent, provisional and ambiguous. This runs contrary to that sense they have of their own rectitude, and are comfortable only with polemical discussions, which force arguments to inevitably centre on the ‘or’ – as is the case presently with global terror, with no consideration of the ‘and’ – which would encourage a healthy civic pluralism. [2]

At this point, I was really intrigued and, unknowingly, my mental antenna had tuned to inconvenient facts for the week. I was inundated.

Inconvenient fact one: the indigenous experience. During a forum on interrogating the past on day three, narratives abound about attempts to wipe out aboriginal history and culture in the last century, and replacing it with a ‘white’ one. But a lawyer cum Indigenous historian’s attempts to bring the history of her people as a counterpoint to ‘white’ history is met with political doublespeak – how many deaths does it take before an event in ‘white’ history is considered genocide? But semantic debate does not change the aboriginal understanding of the same history. [3]

Inconvenient fact two: inhumanity. The forum on feature journalism fired the indignation of the audience when the war in Iraq and the reasons behind it became its central theme. The inconvenient facts, that tells the war from the perspective of civilian casualties and suffering, are now beginning to surface; an alternative history that the journalists’ are trying to write.

But inconvenient facts can also be liberating. Literally biting the hand that feeds them, the panel of journalists did not mince words when they told the audience that they were being lied to by the media. Circumstances in Iraq had forced most foreign journalist to rely on ‘facts’ fed to them by the military; a military spin on the truth with the inconvenient facts left out. But, strangely, that revelation came as no surprise to the audience at the forum, they expected deception to be a part and parcel of the Government’s report on the war, the revelations only validated their long held beliefs. But the loss of faith in the honesty of their leaders had also caused a great sense of disconnection and alienation from their leaders. The panel was aware of this sentiment, as well as the apathy that has descended upon the polity as a result, but could only manage a shrug as they had no idea how to deal with it. [4]

My head was swimming after all this, but I came to realise that I am a mere neophyte in the realm of inconvenient facts. So, as long as I am not considering a career in politics, my academic chicanery can be brushed off as artistic licence, I convinced myself. Even then, a question surfaced: are there ultimately truths in the narratives of inconvenient facts? And the answer came from above (I was sitting just under the speaker), we will never know the ‘real’ truth until we have all the facts; all the different stories [5]. Strangely, my hopefully-not-too-sullied-by-academic-chicanery conscience still yearns for truth. For only then will the true state of the human condition be known.

It is in trying to reflect this human condition that makes inconvenient facts the doors through which countless writers, fiction and non-fiction, have entered into narratives. These catalysts for a writer’s creative explorations gestate till a fictional truth is born – a fictional truth because any narrative is neither pure fact nor pure fiction, but one that will, hopefully, reflect another facet of the human condition, bringing us closer to whatever truth is sought after.

The desire to write and read harbours a desire for truth; a truth of the human condition. It is a post-colonial world within which long buried histories are emerging and exerting themselves. It is also a more cynical world, where the past is ceaselessly questioned and rejected. Modernity and its multi-faceted approach to truth has also moulded the modern writer’s, and reader’s, perception of truth - that the truth will be found when we are willing to open our minds, and hearts, to inconvenient facts. Not doing so leads to one incontrovertible fact, so succinctly forth put by David Malouf during that week when my writer’s soul was in turmoil:

Opinion is the death of writing. What a firmly held opinion indicates is that the holder of it has come to a conclusion; that he has stopped thinking. [6]

Ah, that fine balance between having an opinion, and not being opinionated…

NOTES

[1] Panel discussion on ‘The Public Role of Historians: History as a Public Function’, 5 March 2006, 2.00pm, Writers’ Week 2006, Adelaide.

[2] Panel discussion on ‘The Public Role of Historians: History as a Public Function’, 5 March 2006, 2.00pm, Writers’ Week 2006, Adelaide.

[3] Panel discussion on ‘Interrogation Past’, 7 March 2006, 11.00am, Writers’ Week 2006, Adelaide.

[4] Panel discussion on ‘Feature Journalism’, 8 March 2006, 11.00am, Writers’ Week 2006, Adelaide.

[5] Panel discussion on ‘Feature Journalism’, 8 March 2006, 11.00am, Writers’ Week 2006, Adelaide.

[6] David Malouf, ‘The league of writes’, The Advertiser Review, 4 March 2006, 5.