Artistic
expression holds such power to evoke empathy – empathy, one of the greatest
emotions mankind is blessed with being capable of.
When prior to coming across these
forms of expression I had little or close to no opinion on certain such
matters, Alicia Elliot’s ‘A Mind Spread
out on the Ground’ enlightened me on the suffering of exploited indigenous
people, Tom Hooper’s ‘The Danish Girl’
and Ivan Coyote sat me smack in the shoes of the derogated transsexual, and
Maya Angelou and Claudia Rankine gave me a taste of the ordeals colored people
have had and still experience today. While in the earlier stages of my life and
ignorance I felt complete neutrality regarding these minority groups prone to
discrimination, thanks to such works of film and writing I would at any time now
readily stand in defense and support of them. Why I stood neutral before, I
believe was because of the lack of relatability I felt with these groups. With
feminism for example, I had no trouble embodying it from a young age, in the
most natural way, as I am female myself, and my home country where I grew up
was largely colored like me so there was little mistreatment among us anyhow,
little to think about. But art – art makes us feel the experiences we never had,
experiences that belong to others. It puts us in the skin of the transsexual who
feels every pair of eyes of those around them boring critically into their own
uncommon body, it shares with us the self-consciousness of the colored who endures micro aggression, it tells us of the endogenous depression that
ails the indigenous Canadian whose ancestors were forcefully and
violently ripped of their land ownership by foreigners. Why are some people
shunned, considered of less value and importance, purely for the circumstances
under which they are born or for their own beings which they cannot help? Thus
in the most humane way we empathize, we feel these sorrows, notice the
wrongness of their sufferings, wish for justice for them. Without empathy, how
is it possible to make true human connections? It ties humans together. To
empathize is to feel for someone or something else that is not yourself. It is selfless.
It is to judge less. This is what art does: it feeds us tastes of experiences –
I do not mean the experiences themselves, for that would be belittling the
hardships of these minorities – that our own lives probably cannot. The more I
learn about these hardships, the more off the fence I sit, and I know without a
doubt which side I am on.
Edit: This
subject of judgement also stretches out to habits and preferences. Certain
habits, joys, ways of life are unfamiliar to or different from ours or
unconventional, but many people with these things are no doubt good, wonderful
people, and not very different from you and me. We connect with one another by
looking beyond the differences that stand between us. And we have no reason to think
one of us is better than the other as a person.
