The Impossible Assignment
Truth is a fragmented mirror. What are writers to do?
MARCH 4, 2025
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. It was nothing to worry about, my 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, several days later, 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.
As I drove the long road back to my hometown, against the backdrop of a sky set afire by the setting sun, I pondered how to get my father back to Abuja, where I lived and where he could access better health care. 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 out 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, by that point, was that there was nothing I nor anyone else could do to save him.
In the hours and days that followed, I contemplated what had led to that moment, my father’s decision to keep the truth from us, and the untruths told by my cousins, with whom he lived, in keeping with my father’s wishes. And the truth I now possessed and had to manage. How much of it should I tell to others — to my aunts, whose only brother lay dying, who expected that his 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.
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?
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 reality, with what we learn about the deceased (and I learned a lot 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 — with what we think it means and what we do with it.
Everyone agrees on what “truth” is, or ought to be, as a concept yet no one agrees on what the truth is. That is a paradox in itself. This quote, attributed to the Persian mystic Rumi, captures this idea: “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 nonfiction, as a journalist, and now as a journalism scholar, I am constantly grappling with this paradox.
The Fiction of Truth
Last summer, I taught a fiction writing workshop in Abuja. Quite early in my first session, I looked at the faces of the young, eager 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, laid bare on the screen. 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, “lies.” My morality fought against it. I struggled to reconcile my love of fiction writing 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? George Orwell’s novel 1984 is thought to speak the truth about repression and the surveillance state, while Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale tells us about the future dystopia that awaits us, so we may recognize the signs on our journey there.
Truth is a paradox that writers contend with every day. The struggle is often more obvious in the expectations imposed on an African writer who must not only be a creative who crafts stories and an archivist who documents histories and interrogates the present, but also an activist who shoves truth in the face of power. 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 the work needs to have something to say about the political and social power structures of our time. Even a story that is fantastical, or far removed from reality — set in the future, perhaps, on a planet that may or may not be Earth, with creatures that may or may not be real — is expected to uncover some truth about our reality. Often these truths are read into the text by the reader, regardless of the writer’s intentions.
Writers who have taken political stands and spoken truth to power, like the Nigerian writer 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 chose not to speak about political issues, like Mo Yan, the Chinese novelist and short story writer, are dismissed as a “patsy of the regime” (that phrase is courtesy of Salman Rushdie).
Here is the irony, though: The fiction writer’s craft, the instrument of his trade, 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, gently ushers them into the imaginary and holds them there. The fiction writer must craft lies to probe and interrogate the essence of truth and reality.
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 a deeper appreciation of reality.
The Truth of Nonfiction
As a teenager, I decided to study journalism at university. I wanted to tell meaningful stories, to explore the real in more depth, to hold the powerful to account — and to hold 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. My idealism suffered a mortal blow when I learned that sometimes the truth is harmful to those it is meant to help.
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 they hold in their hands.
On a reporting trip to Nigeria’s northeastern region, to pursue stories of resilience and courage in the wake of the destruction left behind by the terror group Boko Haram, I instead found that trucks laden with much-needed relief materials for victims of terror were being driven through the front gates of displaced persons’ camps and then later driven out the back gates still unloaded. How anyone has the heart to loot relief materials desperately needed by displaced persons was beyond me. Yet those siphoning off the supplies were rich and well placed in the corridors of power. Exposing that truth would be of no consequence to them, especially in an existing climate of corruption, but it would be of consequence to the nonprofits providing essential services to the displaced persons. And without their help, there would be nothing standing between the victims and hunger and lack of medications. For days I grappled with that truth and what to do with it.
The blow of it felt familiar. The intensity of how it burned, and the weight of deciding what to do with it. I felt similarly when I stood before my aunts and had to decide if I should tell them that we couldn’t save their brother who 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, I have learned 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 they hold 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.
Now, in my pursuit of a doctorate in journalism, I have made the tortuous decision to sift through the murkiness — to probe this uneasy marriage of truth and untruth by studying disinformation.
The manipulation of information has always existed, 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, but the tools at our disposal today are more sophisticated than ever, the lines between truth and lies blurred to near perfection.
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, therefore, 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 so a rather trite statement gains 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 traveler 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. After months of travel from Sokoto , 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.”
The story of Ikilimu Bilbis and the Book of Absolute Truth, I should admit, is something I made up to make a point: We must navigate 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. I later discovered fragments of truths about him that could have changed how I related to him in his final days, the way I spoke to him or understood the choices he made in life. Years later, I am still processing these truths. Yet, I am also conscious that I have kept these fragments of the mirror tucked away in my heart, away from others who loved him and may never know what I do.
This is ironic considering that I have spent most of my life trying to glimpse the various fragments of Rumi’s mirror held in a thousand different hands — through journalism, fiction, academic inquiry, and the process of grappling with my father’s death. The truth about truth, perhaps, is that truth is an endless paradox. And today, it is more nebulous than it has ever been.
This article first appeared in Norwegian in Vinduet.
✺ Published in “Issue 26: Gospel” of The Dial
