As someone who loved To Kill a Mocking Bird, I was quite taken with the
quote "You never really understand a person until you
consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and
walk around in it.". However, forty odd years later, T.I raises a slightly different aspect, in his song Ready for
Whatever, when he says he can't be judged (by the listener) for what he's done because
he thought he didn't have a choice, given what had happened in his life, and
how it framed his decision making, and he ends with:
'You'll have to put yo self in my
position
You can't expect me to think like you
'Cause my life ain't like yours’
'Cause my life ain't like yours’
As someone who strives for empathy, I had a startling realisation to the truth of this statement while in
Vietnam. I was reading a lot about the country, and I had started reading The
Trader from Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks.
Over the years, I've read a lot about the fall of Singapore and a lot of books set in Malaysia both during the war and after, however the Vietnam war was quite new to me, so I read a few books on the journalists and the fall of Saigon and then picked the Cruickshanks book because it wasn't focused on the war, and the rich Vietnamese history is so much more than that period.
Part of the story focuses on the rationing, and a stolen
ration book. So it was that poverty post war, and familiar territory. I'd
read about 150 pages into the book when I suddenly noticed this on the back cover:
I was stunned for a minute while I recalibrated the setting. In my head, the book was set in the late 40's, not the mid 1980's! It completely threw me. Logically, I could see I'd just moved history around in a nonsensical
fashion, but if you talk ration books, my brain immediately jumps to WWII, not
late ‘70’s. All the other books I'd read set in Asia are referring to WWII
if they are post war.
Without the actual date mentioned, or defining situation, my brain just
furnished the fictional world in dress and setting of the late '40's. It took
what it knew, what it had learned over the course of my life, all my knowledge
and put it into the world I was reading about. And it was wrong. Very, very
wrong.
We are the sum total of every life experience we have, every lesson we
are taught in school, everything we read and see, and it frames our world view, often without us even knowing. It's so ingrained, it taints every we see and think, and we're often completely unaware it's filtering our thoughts. Maybe we can't really ever walk a mile in someone else's shoes. However, we can and should, try.
If someone chooses to leave everything they know, there
must be a very good reason. If they choose to risk their life fleeing, there
must be little or no safer option. Maybe we need to understand more of their
actual life, rather than sitting making judgments from our cosy living rooms. We
can’t have a proper understanding if we are furnishing their world like ours,
and giving them options and choices they really don’t have the luxury to make.
As T.I says, we can’t really think like them if our life isn’t like theirs. And
thankfully, for so many of us, it isn’t.
Linking with #BooknificentThursdays
Linking with #BooknificentThursdays
