What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?

Last month, in a post called The Source of War, I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: What would literature be missing without you, and what would you be missing without literature?

This was my answer:

The second part of your question is much easier to answer than the first because it is not an exaggeration to say that literature saved my life, though whether I mean that literally or metaphorically is not always clear to me. I was both victim of and witness to an awful lot of violence during my childhood. I don’t remember ever being truly suicidal, but I know that my experience, especially the sexual violence that I survived, left me feeling empty and ashamed, filled with self-loathing and not sure that there was a worthwhile purpose to my living. Religion filled that void for a while. When I was a teenager, I even thought I might one day study for the rabbinate, but it was ultimately reading—and I read everything I could get my hands on: poetry, science fiction, horror, literary novels, fantasy, Victorian pornography, you name it—that helped me imagine what a meaningful life might be like and gave me hope that I could exist in the world with purpose and have a life that mattered.

Writing, and at first I wrote only poetry, was how I claimed the voice in which I could begin to articulate that purpose—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that writing was how I reclaimed for myself the voice that those who did violence to me tried to silence. At first, the poems I wrote served as proof to myself that my voice was real, and that was enough. Over time, though, I came to understand that what I had to say in that voice was not just about myself and for myself, and through that understanding I discovered the audacity to believe that what I had to say was something to which other people ought to pay attention.

This is what makes the first part of your question more difficult for me to answer. On the one hand, if I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing. It would be whatever its collective of voices had made it. On the other hand, though, if I didn’t believe that my voice, solitary as it is, mattered in some small way to literature, there would be no reason to go through the frustrating and all-too-often discouraging process of publishing, of daring to add my voice and my work to the literary tradition of which it is inescapably a part. Even though, in other words, I am very well aware that I have absolutely no control over my work’s impact on that tradition, it would nonetheless be a lie to say that I don’t want my work to be thought significant enough that people who imagined the possibility of my never having written would call it a loss.

What I do know is that there are people to whom my work has mattered a great deal, on whom its impact has been substantial, and I know this because they have told me so. More to the point, I am also aware that each person who tells me represents a small handful of others, even if it’s only one or two, who, for whatever reason, don’t. Knowing my poems matter in this way to other human beings means more to me than any measure of literary importance or fame that my ego might desire. So, if you were to push me to give a clear answer to the first part of your question—What would literature be missing without you?—I would say, as a simple matter of fact, that it would be missing my voice. Whether or not that silence would be of any real consequence, and for whom, and why, is a question I would not dare presume to answer.