The Writer and the Paradox of Truth

I knew my father was dying a week before it happened. I had only found out he had been ill a few days before, hospitalized for a common stomach bug, because my cousin had insisted. It was nothing to worry about, this cousin had assured me, and there was absolutely no need for me or my siblings to leave our jobs and travel to our hometown, as the rest of the family could handle everything.

But that day, my cousin called, hours after he had issued yet another assurance, and said in a grave tone, “I think you guys need to come see your dad now.” I knew there was something seriously wrong and that my siblings and I had been lied to.

In the hours between that phone call and arriving at my hometown, on the long road, driving against a sky set afire by the setting sun, I pondered how to get my father back to Abuja, where I lived, to access better healthcare. His heart condition and high blood pressure had always been something he managed with medication and regular doctor’s visits. So what could have gone wrong?

When I saw my father that evening, stretched on the bed, unable to even speak, my heart sank. He was basically on hospice care, brought home to wheeze out the rest of his days among his loved ones. The truth, at that point, was that there was nothing I nor anyone else could do to save him. It was a truth that was so present and so devastating.

In the hours and days that followed, I had reasons to contemplate the handling of that truth and the many truths and untruths that had led to that one definitive moment. Like my father’s decision to keep the truth from us, and the untruths that my cousins, with whom he lived, told us before that day in keeping with my father’s wishes. And the truth I now possessed and had to manage. How much of it do I tell to each person—to my aunts, whose only brother lay dying, who expected that their brother’s children living in distant cities would swoop in, commando-style, whisk him away to Abuja, and bring him back hale and hearty?

I found myself having to decide how much truth each person needed to know, just as my cousins and my father had done.

When he eventually passed, a week later, on a Friday evening, I soon learned that grief is the process of accepting the truths about a loss. Mourning is grappling with the reality, the truths we learn about the deceased (and I learned a lot of truths about my dad only then), and how many of those truths we are willing to share.

This, however, is not about my father but about our consistent engagement with the truth, what the truth is, what it means, what we do with it, and how we do those things.

Everyone agrees on what truth is, or ought to be, yet no one agrees on what the truth is. That is a paradox in itself. This is because perhaps everyone believes, on their own merits and values, that they know what it is. This quote, attributed to the Persian mystic Rumi, captures it better: “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.”

As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, as a journalist, and now as a journalism scholar, I have consistently grappled with what truth is every single day and in varying ways and times.

The Fiction of Truth

This last summer, I taught a writing workshop in Abuja. Quite early on in my first session, I looked at the faces of the young, eager emerging writers as they contemplated the words I had projected on the screen.

“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” – Steve Almond.

I watched them tilt their heads to one side and then the other, squinting and frowning at the words of the American writer and essayist.

Over the years I have facilitated and taught writing workshops, I have seen the same reactions, over and over again: the realization that the basic instrument in the repertoire of the fiction writer is the lie. We have, of course, called it by different euphemisms—craft, imagination, creativity, inspiration even. But there it was on the screen laid bare. Lies!

The first time I read those words, several years ago, I sat down to ponder their implications. My religious upbringing as a Muslim disapproved of that word. My morality fought against it. For days I struggled to reconcile the reality of what I loved doing and the means I had to employ—the manipulation of lies—to do it. Until I asked myself one question: if fiction is the crafting of lies, why are writers always being asked about the truth? Why are conjurers of the imaginary being quizzed about the essence of the real, or even the meaning of life?

Truth is a paradox that writers have had to contend with every day. This contention is often more obvious in the expectations imposed on an African writer who must not only be a creative, crafting the stories that matter; an archivist who documents histories and interrogates the present, but also an activist who swaggers into spaces and shoves the truth in the face of power.

Here is the irony, though: the writer's craft, the instrument of his trade—except when he or she trades in nonfiction—revolves around the conjuring of untruths. The writer's task is the sculpting of these untruths into a work of art, into a cohesive story that suspends the readers’ belief and gently ushers them into the imaginary and holds them there.

Beyond this expectation of a convincing lie being told, often in imaginative or colourful language, in entertaining, intriguing, or engaging stories, lurks the expectation of accosting the readers with truths. What this truth is, however, is what is being negotiated. In a way, the writer must craft lies—or the imaginary—to probe and interrogate the essence of truth and reality. A story that is the most fantastical or most imaginative, one that is so far removed from reality—like magical realism or science fiction, for instance, set in the future, on a planet that may or may not be Earth, or on a planet that humans cannot possibly reach, with creatures that may not be real, like dragons or some alien civilization—there is often a subtle expectation for that story to speak some truth to our reality. Often these meanings and truths are read into the text by the reader, expunged from it sometimes even where the writer did not intend it.

Writers who have taken political stands and spoken truth to power, like Wole Soyinka, are often lauded and held up as examples. Even if he is not a politician, his opinions on politics are often sought out. In the same vein, writers who do not speak truth to power in similar ways, like Mo Yan, whose trade is devoted to fiction, are dismissed as a “patsy of the regime” (that phrase is courtesy of Salman Rushdie).

By this logic, the writer becomes a navigator exploring truth through lies, the real through the imaginary and vice versa, to reach the truth through lies, and this truth, if attained, must again be subjected to the test of lies or the imaginary to authenticate its truth or reality. In this quest, the reader often finds that through the understanding of the fictional, the real becomes more comprehensible. By journeying with fictional characters, a reader, and sometimes the writer himself, may come to an appreciation of the reality of the people around them.

So when an African writer who writes a love story is asked by an African intellectual, “So what does this story say about the reality of our people?” the expectation is that it needs to speak truth to power (in more obvious ways) or the social contentions in that geography at the time. George Orwell’s novel 1984 speaks the truth about repression and the surveillance state, while Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale speaks the truth of the future dystopia that awaits us, so we may recognise the landmarks on our temporal journey there.

The Truth of Nonfiction

When, as a teenager, I decided to study journalism at university, that interest was tied to a will to explore my creativity and my desire to tell meaningful stories. Through journalism, I desired to explore the real, beyond the surface, and to help hold not just the powerful to account, but the rest of us accountable to each other. After all, the not-so-powerful often exert greater power in the lives of each other than the powerful in distant corridors of power.

My naivety was expunged in my first few weeks on the job post-graduation. The idealism suffered a mortal blow when I learned that sometimes even the truth is harmful to those it is meant to help.

On a reporting trip to pursue uplifting stories in the dust left behind by the terror group Boko Haram—stories of resilience and courage—I instead found facts about how trucks laden with much-needed relief materials for the victims of terror are driven in through the front gate of displaced persons camps and then later driven out through the back gates still unloaded. Those siphoning off the supplies are rich and powerful, with tentacles deeply entrenched in the system. Exposing that truth would be of no consequence to them, especially in a climate of corruption, but it would be of consequence to essential service providers for the displaced persons.

For days I grappled with that truth and what to do with it. The blows of it felt familiar. The intensity of how it burned, too, and the weight of deciding what to do with it as well.

It felt like the time I stood before my aunts and had to decide if I should tell them that we couldn’t save the brother my siblings and I had travelled to rescue.

In writing nonfiction, as I have done in my journalism and in my weekly columns for one of Nigeria’s leading newspapers, and often as I have been called upon to do in my capacity as a writer, one learns that the truth is indeed a fragmented mirror. When people ask for the truth, they are often not prepared for it, especially if that truth does not correspond with the image they see in the fragment of the mirror in their hands.

The not-so-powerful who demand the truth about the powerful are often averse to the truth about their own complicity in the failings of the nation. Those who revel in the social critique of one group or region take up arms when the truth about them is told with the same objectivity and lens.

Now, in my pursuit of a doctorate in journalism, I have made the tortuous decision to sift through the murkiness—to probe this marriage of truth and untruth through disinformation studies. As a result, I have gathered that at no time in human history has the manipulation of truth and lies become as pervasive as it is today. The instruments of doctoring information are so ubiquitous today, and the lines between truth and lies are often blurred almost to perfection. This manipulation has existed from antiquity—from word of mouth to the inscriptions on the Egyptian pyramids or the propaganda on Roman coins proclaiming the divinity of Julius Caesar or the villainy of Mark Antony. In this age, it seems even more pertinent because the instruments for the manipulation of the truth—and by extension, reality or the semblance of it—have become even more sophisticated. So, the truth has become more elusive.

The Paradox

“All Cretans are liars,” Epimenides once proclaimed.

It is perhaps a banal statement, one to be dismissed as the drunken proclamation of a long-dead, curly-bearded Greek in a street corner bar, not to be given any serious consideration. Except perhaps if you are Cretan and choose to take offense at it. Or, if you know that the speaker was not just a drunken slob being thrown out of a bar, tunic flying behind him, but that he was, in fact, a Greek philosopher of some repute. His statement has since become one of the most scrutinized in the history of human thinking and the perfect example of the paradox of truth.

Since Epimenides was himself Cretan, if his statement is true, then he is lying and, as a consequence, his statement would be false. But if his statement is false, then not all Cretans are liars, which therefore means that his statement could be true. The paradox implies that the statement cannot be consistently true. And this, dear reader, is how a rather trite statement gained immortality in the realm of logic as the Epimenides Paradox.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the illusory pursuit of the truth like the story of Ikilimu Bilbis, the traveller who arrived in the ancient city of Timbuktu to glimpse the Book of Absolute Truth, a tome that contained the answer to every question in the universe. Many scholars, philosophers, and adventurers from all corners of the world had travelled to Timbuktu hoping to see the book.

After months of travel and searching, he found himself standing before the grand librarian of Timbuktu, an old man with eyes as old as the stars.

"I seek the Book of Absolute Truth," Bilbis said.

The librarian nodded and led him to a hidden chamber deep within the library. There, on a pedestal, lay the Book. Bilbis approached, took a deep breath, and opened it. His eyes widened as he flipped the pages.

Confused, he turned to the librarian. "It’s empty. Why is the Book empty?"

The librarian smiled. "The truth is a paradox. The moment you believe you have found it, it eludes you. The Book of Absolute Truth reflects this. It is both full of answers and devoid of them."

Bilbis pondered this for a moment. "So, the truth is that there is no absolute truth?"

"Precisely," the librarian replied, clasping his hands together. "The pursuit of truth is a journey, not a destination. It is in the questioning and the seeking that we find meaning."

How does one chase a paradox or all the broken fragments of Rumi’s mirror? How do we recognize that we might have an equal craving and aversion to the truth? How do you know what is true? For example, there never was any Ikilimu Bilbis, nor the Book of Absolute Truth. That is just fiction I made up to drive home a point because we are often navigating an ocean of untruths to arrive at one truth. And like all voyages, we are not always certain of arriving.

My father’s passing was one such voyage for me. Through it, I discovered fragments of this mirror containing truths about him that could have changed how I related with him in those last days, perhaps altered the things that I might have said or done and my understanding of some of the choices he made in his life. Years later, I am still processing these truths. Yet, I am also conscious that I have kept these fragments tucked away in my heart, away from others who loved him, yet may never know these things. 

This is ironic considering that I have spent most of my life trying to glimpse various fragments of a broken mirror in a thousand hands: through journalism, through fiction, through studious academic inquiry, and through navigating and handling the truth about my father’s death.  The truth about truth is that truth is an endless paradox. And today, it is more nebulous than it has ever been.