For the holiday season every year, I hold a book exchange with one of my closest friends. We buy each other a book we guess the other would like and report back our thoughts. This year, I received Nesrine Malik’s book We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent.
Here are my thoughts.
Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born journalist and author who has written for the BBC and The Guardian and continues to expand her repertoire into non-fiction writing and commentary surrounding international relations. For her first non-fiction novel, Malik chose to interrogate six political myths in contemporary dialogue that expose how race, history, gender and classical liberal values are being weaponised to stop the dismantlement of the historical hierarchy in our media. Malik’s piece is primarily framed through her experience as a journalist and how the systemic discriminatory structures impact today’s semantics.
The six political myths Malik spotlights include: the “myth” of gender equality; the political correctness “crisis”; the concept of a reliable narrator; identity politics; free speech and the evasive qualities of constructing national pride.
To frame her political analysis, Malik unpacks the almost decade of Western cultural happenings prior to writing her novel in 2016, including the election of Barack Obama, the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, the Black Lives Matter protests, the prevailing legacy of empiricism, the Queen’s Jubilee and so on. But most urgently, Malik emphasises the need to transform how we read, interpret and write our stories.
Initially, I rolled my eyes. A book about journalism for an aspiring journalist. Creative. But this unknowing friend’s selection has now become my weapon of choice when I find myself staring at a blank Google Doc.
Now I think about the centuries-old ingrained biases in our media like seeking ‘Western’ platforms — The Guardian, CNN, BBC and so on — as the créme de la créme of the media hierarchy and therefore, the most “accurate”. I think of the gender disparity that still exists in many industries. I think of our leading voices of cultural analysis and political commentary. I think of the racial and ethnocultural mistruths that have always orbited media coverage of international events including the ‘othering’ and vilification of Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) narratives. I think of the moral panic that emerges from any mention of “political correctness”.
I also think of what would come of me as a Middle Eastern and Australian woman daring to oppose the presence of these myths in the complex ecosystem of Western media.
Generally when I am tasked with developing a thesis to a university essay question, a pitch to a writing prompt or any form of ideation, the standard of “breaking new ground” becomes foregrounded in my mind. Well, Malik poses the question, what happens when this ‘new ground’ is protected by the expanse of western myth and “political correctness”?
Malik argues that our selection of media and the platforms are a product of a self-indulgent desire to witness sensationalisation and the most gasp-inducing story.
She points this torch at everyone and sums it up well with, “the reason these consumers return to media outlets, such as Fox News in the US or the Daily Mail in the UK, is to have their world view validated. Or to feel some frisson of something — jealousy, schadenfreude, anger. It is a business model.”
More personal thoughts arose from Malik’s reflections on her own childhood relationship with storytelling — centred around her Sudanese heritage and intergenerational family myths. Reading this, I began to reflect on what narratives I was told as a child that framed my perception of social and political happenings. What lies we were fed about colonisation in schooling and the true dynamic of the oppressor versus the oppressed in contemporary ideation. Specifically, the idea that the ramifications of colonisation are no longer felt today.
However, it is no new truth that the world is made up of a strategic spinning of stories to hide the harder pills to swallow. Less potent is the idea that we seek out and spin our own lies to protect ourselves from confronting the enormity of systemic cover-ups. It makes sense. I do it all the time. We act on our privilege of being removed from the misinformation of platforms or the gender wage gap in different industries or the US political clusterfuck or the fallacies of political dogma to ensure we are not impacted by their own toxic runoff.
And so, when I open Google Docs to write my next Honi Soit article, or respond to my next university prompt, it is my responsibility to consider whose story I am telling and whose eyes need to read it most. Is the way I perceive and share my story a projection of my own privilege? Or informed by the latest Daily Mail article I glanced over or the BBC Instagram tile that I double-tapped?
This is not to say that existing or emerging social media is the only downfall of narratives. Not at all. This is to reaffirm Malik’s calls for us to find new narrators, and new outlets. This is to tell the stories that preserve the fallibility of Western history, in addition to its degradation of trusted storytelling in the contemporary world.
As Malik deduces, “the strength of myths is not in facts but in the narrative”,and we are all living in the story of our minds where we absorb from the information channels around us, and confirm our unconscious bias.
I hope my friend is ready to hear these thoughts…
