Tributes, tribes

Tribute: ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin tributum, neuter past participle (used as a noun) of tribuere ‘assign’ (originally ‘divide between tribes’ ), from tribus ‘tribe.’

I've been reading two very different authors. What they have in common, apart from their compulsion to write, is their concentration on one particular group of people whose roots are in one particular place. In Alistair MacLeod's case it is the rough, tough, Gaelic speaking miners and fishermen of Cape Breton whose ancestors came from the Scottish Highlands. Isaac Bashevis Singer's life long tribute was to the Yiddish speaking Jews of pre-war Poland whose ancestors came from all over Europe.

Both authors have a burning passion to get their compatriots' stories on record in a way that won't be forgotten. The people they write about are flawed and vulnerable and from time to time they're described as doing horrendous things, but the love behind the writing is such a driving force that it transfers itself to me, making me care about these alien tribes and start to identify with them.

That's the power of high quality writing (and the more understated the more powerful).

Here's a paradox I keep coming back to. The author of fiction by definition must be inventing his characters and telling lies, circumnavigating historical or geographical exactness, but it seems to me I can get a deeper, more lasting idea of the truth of things by immersing myself in a novel than by picking up a random selection of facts from history books or an encyclopaedia. I remember what I've learned when I've been encouraged to imagine a world created or recreated by a novelist or a poet. With the greatest writing that includes what I've learned about myself, because however specific the setting, what it means to be human is a puzzle everybody shares.