“Love Thy Monster” and Thoughts on the Power of Fiction

by Monona Wali

The story of how my short story “Love Thy Monster” (fall 2024 Santa Monica Review) came into being starts with an article I read by Parhul Seghal in The New Yorker (January 2023) The piece looked at the partition of India in 1947. When the British finally left India because of India’s independence movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi and many others, they created a border between India and the newly formed Pakistan on the west, and East Bangladesh on the right. Here’s what Sehgal wrote in her essay: “The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as the Partition.” As a result of that slash of his pen, cataclysmic sectarian violence was unleashed. “It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history.” This was a horrific event in South Asia and is still living in the memory of people today but is not really that well known in the West. What was interesting to me in the article was this question she asks of where the story lies in these sweeping and tragic historical events. Is it in the statistics – how many killed – displaced – raped – murdered – or – in the human stories – the small details that historical writing cannot capture? What she suggests is that the fiction that was written by Indian and Pakistani writers was best able to capture the human dimensions of the partition far better than the historical and journalistic accounts.

I sat with that a while and the question she raises about of the role of fiction – what can, and can’t it do?

Somehow out of that article the story came to me almost fully formed, actually when I was at a meditation retreat, apparently not meditating but writing in my head. The character of Iqbal and her revelation that she is a woman was one of the first impulses of the story. It was for me a very experimental story, prompted by this idea of writing a novel in six short chapters. It was not something I pre-thought or strategized a lot of about. It was a very intuitive decision.

Limitations can sometimes be helpful to a writer, and because I wanted to keep each chapter to just a page, or little more than a page, I was forced to compress the story, to keep paring it down to its essence. But by calling it a novel, it allowed me to imagine a bigger scope for the story.

Chapter four, where the narrator undertakes to learn about the partition and she brings in the facts and statistics, was the biggest risk for the story. Yet it allowed me to bring in facts about the partition in an almost documentary way. I didn’t know if it would work but I felt a commitment to doing it. There’s a bit of backstory to this. I had my start as a filmmaker in the 1980’s and was very taken with neo-realism as a movement in cinema. This was the black and white work of Roberto Rossellini in Bicycle Thief, or with the films of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray with The World of Apu. More contemporary might be Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler about the 1968 Democratic convention or Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep – all brilliant films. Even though these films are fictional stories, they feel almost documentary – they are shot with natural light and often with untrained actors. They tell real human stories. When I made my thesis film while a graduate student at UCLA, I incorporated a lot of documentary footage shot on the streets of South LA into a fictional story about a black woman television news reporter. I was very attracted to the idea of combining documentary footage with the dramatic, and felt the documentary footage added a kind of power to the fictional. In writing “Love Thy Monster” I revisited that idea. I wanted to go back to that impulse and inspiration I had many years ago. By using the statistics and journalistic accounts I was able to set the story in a context that was bigger than the two characters but not negate the intimacy between them.

Martin Amis once said the novel was the great humanizing influence of the 20th century because it allowed the reader to step into other people’s shoes. I really believe this – that the power of fiction is in creating characters who transport the reader into all kinds of realities that they would have no other way of experiencing. By stepping into others’ shoes, we gain empathy, and we are challenged to let go judgement and beliefs. 

When Iqbal asks for a story, it is what sets up the possibility of a connection between her and the narrator.

Sharing stories, and the power of stories is something I have been privileged to witness. I have been teaching memoir writing to older adults for eighteen years at Santa Monica College. When I first started teaching in 2007, I had several holocaust survivors who began the often-painful process of writing down what they had experienced for the first time. For most of them, they had never shared these stories before. I remember one student who when she first entered the classroom looked around our group of twenty-five to thirty students and said very skeptically that she didn’t believe we could ever understand what she had experienced as a seven- to eleven-year-old in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. I encouraged her to try and, bit by bit, she started telling her story in very vivid detail. As a class we were all deeply impacted. She had been very hardened by her experiences, and not very trusting of us, her listeners, but she softened over time. Sadly, she battled leukemia for a long time, but she told me before she died – she was in her 80’s by then - that she wished she had told her story much earlier in her life, that she felt she would have lived her life differently if she had unburdened herself of her story. The character of Iqbal is partly a reincarnation of that student. In the classroom, I have seen over and over again how telling stories, often long held, stories of abuse, or trauma, or privation, has had a transformative effect on both the teller and the listener.

It was that backdrop that inspired the story of these two characters. And then bringing in the character of the daughter was a way to explore how stories, how our histories get passed down from one generation to the next. And that the daughter’s story will also be a difficult one, as she, and all young people today, have to confront climate catastrophe and fascism and political upheaval.

So, what can fiction do, and what can’t it do?

Clearly nonfiction, history, and journalism, are critical to our understanding of the past and the present. Fiction can’t replace the deep scholarship of historians, philosophers and scientists. Fiction lives in the realm of the imaginary. But it has this ability to give us its own version of the human condition, and to confront the monsters that are always present in our stories. It opens the door to truths that stem deeply from what the writer knows to be true, and it is individual, specific, and deeply personal. But it is through that lens we hopefully reach the universal. I hope in the story of the partition we see the traumas that are being played out today in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan to name a few.

One of the main challenges in fiction that I’m interested in is how we get or even allow characters to connect. I find that a lot of fiction often takes place in a character’s head, their own singular point of view that never escapes the mind of the character. So much of 20th century fiction was about the isolation and alienation of the individual brought on by the modern world and the horrors of the two world wars. Of course, this theme remains relevant today. But more and more I’d like to take my characters out of that isolation pit and see what happens when people actually connect with each other. Actually say uncomfortable things to each other, and push past all the things that keep people from connecting. That was the impulse to bring Iqbal and the narrator together, to allow two women from vastly different backgrounds touch each other deeply. In sharing her own awkward story, the narrator opens the door for Iqbal to share hers. It was E.M. Forster who said, “only connect.” As a reader, that is something I really enjoy too—seeing characters connect—it gives us the hope that we can move forward together through difficulties and differences. It may be a bit pollyannish particularly given the deep divisions in our culture, but I think the power of fiction is that it allows for that kind of dreaming.