10/31/2023 0 Comments Opinions on undercover police carsHow many of us would know much at all about the Biafran war, without Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun? What would we care about Thomas Cromwell, were it not for Hilary Mantel? From 12 Years a Slave to Schindler’s List, Dunkirk to The Hurt Locker, it is often through fictional narratives that we collectively process our past and start to heal our trauma.īy telling stories about undercover policing, dramatists and novelists perform an important public service. Fictional narratives can reveal those invisible bonds between past and present, and show us the ways in which our history is always with us. We still think this is the kind of thing that happened in East Germany and the Soviet Union, not here at home.ĭrama and fiction – acts of empathy and imagination – have a unique capacity to communicate the truth in a way that engages our emotions and makes us care. Many people will be aware of the facts, but somehow won’t identify with them. I wrote the book because I felt that as a culture, we hadn’t begun to absorb the extent to which our lives and our society have been shaped by political policing. This was also my motivation for writing Skylark, a novel that looks at the impact of undercover policing on anti-capitalism and environmental groups during the 1990s, through the lens of a relationship between an activist and an undercover cop. ![]() The BBC’s Sherwood has served as a timely reminder that drama and fiction have an essential role to play in keeping this issue alive in the public consciousness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |