How Can Literature Save a Nation?

To fully understand this question, we need to define first two things. One is, of course, what literature is; second, what it is that endangers a nation that can be negated by literature. Literature, per definition, is the art of written works. In Latin, it literally means “to be acquainted with letters”. So, in that context, every book, every journal, every thing written, loosely defined, is literature. Now, what can books, journals and papers possibly do to save a nation from, say, war? Or economic crisis?

Or anything that can harm what we define as “ community sharing a common language, a common culture”; simply, a nation? Take for example something written by a middle-aged American way back in the 1850’s.

And she was a woman, nonetheless, by the name of Harriett Beecher-Stowe. It revolves around an African-American man who, today, would be a houseboy or a worker. Those times, he was called a negro slave. The book is, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the story touching sensitive topics of slavery, racism, and religious faith.

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This simple book by a simple schoolteacher awakened the minds of the American people into realizing that, to quote Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”, “If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? ” This aroused a sense of disgust that what White Americans were doing to another actual human being, albeit of a different color, yet still another living person, what they themselves would not want to be put up with.

In short, this book helped shape America’s future as a slave-free country by igniting the first sparks of the American Civil War.

Coincidentally, some decades later, it was to be the same book that would ignite another revolutionary spark somewhere in the Pacific; in the Southeast Asian region to be exact. While in Madrid, our very own Dr. Jose P. Rizal was moved by Uncle Tom’s Cabin that he proposed writing a novel that would do the same for the Philippines (at that time under Spanish oppression) what that book did for America. The result was “Noli Me Tangere” (Touch Me Not). Now, to illustrate how those works saved a nation concretely would be illogical.

For it is not paper and pencil that saves a nation, it is us, its people. We are the nations conscience and we act on our own consciences. Literature, whether it be the Bible, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Da Vinci Code, ignites in us thoughts and emotions.. Of course it cannot save us physically, but it is a catalyst. Literature is concentrated on saving the civilised human race. It keeps us who we are, points out what makes us different from animals: our thinking and our ability to not only change and adapt, but to change the situation we are in.

It informs us, thus, giving us new points of view and a broader opinion on a subject leading to a better understanding of it. It generates ideas that move us into action, that influence us, that change us. This is what creates a force or a chain reaction of sudden awareness that causes the people of a nation to rise up and save that nation; either from slavery, from oppression, from economic downfall, or form anything a nation is to be saved from by its people.