YOU CAN’T SAY THAT

Are there topics that shouldn’t be discussed or used in fiction?

If you think something is off limits, is it really or do you just think it is?

It’s one of those ‘stock’ complaints that seems to appear very quickly in opinions, ‘You can’t say anything nowadays without being called politically incorrect.’ What tends to follow is tenuous complaint about not being able to be somehow derogatory in any given way so it would be far too easy to have your eyes rolling even before the sentence is finished, but could there be stuff that you can’t go near?

If you wanted to write a book on any possible topic or situation, absolutely being given utter freedom to write in or around anything that your heart desired, what would you choose?

I wrote my fist book with that in mind because that story was the one that I wanted to see the most. It was a story that spoke to me so I wrote it myself. Set in the real world but with some monsters and magic to boot.

Now pick something that’s wildly controversial as a theme, or event, and now create a story inside that.

Now pick something that’s wildly taboo, could you create a story in there?

The Holocaust is a festering stain on all of humanity but Schindler’s List is a huge piece of work inside it. Roberto Benigni stars in another film set within that awful time but it’s a film with warmth and humour sparkling like jewels in the rivers of shit which was concentration camp life. JoJo Rabbit and The Producers too.

Mel Brooks also gave the world Blazing Saddles, a film if edited for TV release before the watershed would likely be about eight minutes long. Four Lions was hysterically funny, as was The Life of Brian.

All of these stories carry with them something potentially poisonous, but they’re able to make the messages they carry get through because they’re not holding the horror up as the thing to be celebrated. Schindler’s List is a story about the struggle to survive and Blazing Saddles is perfect at holding up a very large mirror regarding racism. Neither effort suggests that Nazism or White Supremacy is the correct standpoint but they use them, those nuggets of evil, to build a story to make their point. Bigoted and unpleasant characters are then held up as clowns to be laughed at or ridiculed rather than being paragons of virtue but that makes them even more useful as a storytelling tool because they can go on a journey of understanding.

Heading back to the first idea of not being able to say anything these days, what that seems to convey when it gets used is that ‘you can’t say today that which was acceptable yesterday’. Societies move ahead in any and all directions and what was acceptable before may not be now, in the same way that we may all find something to be ‘wrong’ now, but in a century it could become common place.

Every topic is fair game, but it’s still something we have to be responsible with. We can’t just dive into a taboo topic because we just want to be as insulting as possible, that’s just lazy. We all need to understand that for each and every topic out there, there can be a story to tell and recognise that that can help us understand ourselves as a people, even if it comes about from potentially offensive locations.

Happy thinking all, and stay safe.