Stories, Philosophy, Opinion

Fatima Bhutto was due to be keynote speaker at the 2010 Byron Bay Writers Festival (but pulled out for, as far as I can tell, undisclosed reasons).

While I knew there was a trend of getting individuals who are not, strictly speaking, writers to speak at writing festivals, the addition of Fatima piqued my curiosity. I knew she was the granddaughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and neice of Benazir. I assumed she would be at the festival to talk about Pakistan, its political instability and the plight of its people, but why Byron and why now?

As it turns out, Fatima was not just invited because she is part of an infamous family – she is a writer. She published a book of poetry as a teenager, is a columnist for several newspapers and recently published a memoir, as I discovered in an interview she did with Joel Whitney for Guernica.

Prior to reading the interview, I had only heard good things of Benazir Bhutto. My impression of her death was that it elevated her to the status of martyr and that it was a blow to the prospect of stability in an increasingly volatile land. Reading Fatima’s comments contradicting this impression was then somewhat shocking, heightened by the fact it was coming from Benazir’s niece.

This inevitably opened up in my mind questions of truth, bias and the multifaceted nature of stories. But this is really a secondary concern to me and my interests than the idea of how a story is told.

As I learnt in the interview, Fatima’s father Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated outside the family home. Saying the circumstances were dubious is a huge understatement. Fatima, only 14 at the time, was inside the house and heard the gunshots that executed her father and his entourage. She said that later, when she questioned Benazir (who was then prime minister of Pakistan) about the attack, Benazir told her things weren’t as simple as they seemed.

The above is the briefest of summations of over a decade of, for some people, hurt and the recent history of a nation. Important details are missing – like the fact that Murtaza Bhutto was taken from the scene to a nearby clinic where they were unprepared for treating gunshot wounds – as are all the tiny, incremental details that make up life and the world.

A good story teller knows what to leave out. But what do you leave out when your history is embedded in the history of a nation? What do you leave out when your father was murdered in earshot? What do you leave in when your aunt condoned it by, at the very least, inaction?

Is a distance between story and teller, therefore, important?

In his post I’m Chinese-Australian but…, Tom Cho (who is, incidentally, appearing at the Byron Bay Writers Festival), wrote about critics making backhanded compliments by pointing out his and Nam Le’s ethnic distance from some of their subjects.

This is of interest to me for a number of reasons, the main one being that I have written literature from the perspective of and about non-white Australians, though I myself am white as can be. Apart from the inherent technical problems with the stories themselves, I was uncomfortable with the act of telling a story that was not similar to my own. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. And while they skip around in my thoughts from time to time, I ultimately abandoned those pieces.

Perhaps there are different schools of thought when it comes to fiction and non-fiction. Two books that immediately come to mind are Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In both  books, there is a distance between story and teller. Those who have read the stories will know that that distance shortens in both instances, but neither authors are directly involved in the case or with the individuals involved.

But, again, in both books, the distance shortened. My feeling is that Chloe Hooper did not visit Palm Island simply because she saw a complex court case with the makings of a murder mystery unfolding. Even if she did, she explicitly states she helped the murdered man’s family. Maybe Helen Garner was initially intrigued by the case of Joe Cinque’s death, but the book is titled Joe Cinque’s Consolation for a reason.

These stories are real and must account for real people and real pain. It’s for this reason I question Fatima Bhutto’s ability to objectively tell her story – I couldn’t – and wonder how good the story can be given that she is so close to it.

Does this mean neither side should tell the other’s story? Does it mean that if your father was assassinated in front of the family home you should not tell your story or that of your country?

Without intending to dillute a terribly complex matter, and without intending to critique those mentioned above, it seems to be an argument of intense emotion versus a perceived absence of it. Impassioned or unimpassioned, which makes the better story teller?