Does literature imitate reality or does it affect and influence our vision of the world? Let’s just borrow the old joke on how no one used to go to see the sun rising before the time of William Turner's paintings. It’s not simply stating the overused "life imitates art" but rather reflecting on how consciousness operates, based on the codes and registers interiorised throughout our lifetimes. Simply, when people think and reflect, there isn’t a universal set of feelings and sensations that exist as part of human essence, but an internal monologue emerging in the language each of us speaks. This is the classic question asked to bilingual people stating something like “in which language do you think?” Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf already noticed it when they crafted their famous hypothesis, and while it has been criticised for being over-generalising, there is something to be learnt from their belief that each language determines the thoughts of its speakers. But this is not limited to purely linguistic terms, but also the ideology lying behind metaphors and other semantic and pragmatic elements.
The importance of decolonising your bookshelf
In our Western cultures, we have learnt—and reflected in our language—that time is linear and genealogy is vertical. That to reflect about the past is “to look back” and that our family are our “roots”. And when we hear that in some cultures time is circular and cyclical, we reconsider how ingrained certain beliefs are: they seemed universals and not metaphors. When thinking about metaphors and ways of using language, where better than in books to find lots of them. If we think that language, or more accurately, cultural contexts, grant a worldview that far from being universal is only one out of endless possibilities, we must deem ourselves lucky to have at our disposal an immense archive of worlds just at the reach of the hand—just by going to the local library. However, while this statement seems celebratory in tone, it is a shame that in the canon of world literature, filling the shelves of libraries and the syllabi of uni courses, there are certain cultures and languages that are overrepresented. To not have a diverse, decolonised library, we are not only missing the possibility to access alternative worldviews, but unconsciously reproducing the violence that certain ones are hegemonic. That certain ideologies are not ideologies but the truth. Literature imitates reality, some say. Which reality?