Who Benefits?
Photo by Latrach Med Jamil on Unsplash
I like to think of stories as questions, and therefore storytellers as question raisers. The creation of the work and created work itself, both steeped in the habit of asking questions. A habit then passed onto the audience, the nature of the work prompting recievers to become question raisers themselves. And all—teller and receiver both—when faced with unpalatable, uncomfortable, insoluble responses to these questions, being required to sit with that discomfort and ruminate on it. I like to think that it is in this fertile soil of unanswers and non-answers that all the good things we attribute to reading—improved knowledge, wisdom, empathy, experience, etc—sprout.
One of those questions I like to raise in the crafting of my stories is: Who does this benefit? It's a question that usually appears with character and plot, when I get stuck on why a character makes a choice or a decision that progresses the narrative in a specific direction. It's also a question I raise in matters of place, particularly when considering the sociological locus of a story's milieu. Who benefits from this? is another way of asking, Why are these people like this? or How did this place come to be this way? or What historical and contemporary social orders ensure that things remain the way they are?
Readers of my stories and novels would recognize how often this question surfaces in my work, asked a new way each time. Some might even say more often than is warranted, which I wouldn't even deny. I believe that asking Who benefits? is the cornerstone of querying the human condition, whether in our primary world or in imagined ones. The very way we live now has been shaped and reshaped by the answer to this question. And for those for whom this shaping and reshaping is still recent, still fresh, still ongoing, this is not a simple craft question, a simple worldbuilding query. It is a real and everpresent question that exists beyond fictional tales, central to their very existence and survival; a question they continue to seek new ways of asking. In a way, raising this question via my stories—even in imagined worlds—is more mimetic than innovative. The best our stories may hope to offer, therefore, is simply more ways to ask: Who benefits from the shape of our world?
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People much smarter and more informed than I am have documented the historical actions and events that have shaped and defined the attacks of October 7th, 2023 by Hamas militants on Israeli citizens (murdering and capturing collectively over a thousand innocent people), and the state of Israel's overwhelmingly disproportionate response since then (murdering and capturing tens of thousands, displacing and starving millions of innocent people). I am not here to discuss these specific events because doing so is typically reductive—discussing them in isolation, sans their historical precedents, would be disingenous. Very few complex, nuanaced and productive discussions can be had on the internet, and a single essay will be insufficient to capture everything I have to say. I'm not a public official or in any position of auhority, so I'm not here to “make a statement” either. But for clarity, I will state this: I have always and will always continue to be unequivocally anti-war, pro-ceasefire and pro Palestinian freedom. In the year of our Lord 2024, no nation-state on earth can continue to make a moral argument that the conditions of its existence require the murder, kidnapping, torture, disappearing, demonization and displacement of innocent, non-militant civilians.
One thing I do say to all who have approached me with questions such as “Whose side are you on?” and “Whose fault is it?” and “Who deserves compassion?” is this: “Perhaps, before these questions, you are yet to ask one just as important: Who benefits?”
When this question is approached in good faith, one may pick any time and place to begin, and the answers will not arrive with as much complication as today's discourse suggests. It's complicated—but only if one hasn't asked who the benficiaries are. One may begin, say, with the complicity of Western powers—the UK, US, Canada, Germany, etc—in hisotrical and contemporary Israeli leadership’s racist, bigoted, derogatory and dishonest laws and policies, including flagrant disregard for all kinds of human rights—within and without the boundaries of war—all the while insisting on their own moral uprightness and investing in strong-arming the world into accepting it as so. One may opt to query Palestinian leadership (Fatah, PLO, PA, Hamas, etc, including others before them) for taking certain actions oriented toward liberation, yet making choices that lead the everyday Palestinian—who did not contribute to this decision-making—into more peril. One may query the industries that rely on war for growth, the institutional capital that funds militaristic endeavours, the nation-states whose cured-concrete policies prevent their own leaders from even considering a slight change in the status quo. One may exit the present and venture further back, making historical pit-stops at all the times everyday Palestinians have suffered militaristic aggression under Israeli command, all the way back to the start of the Nakba. Or even further back, before the creation of the nation-state of Israel, to the British-helmed colony of Mandate Palestine, or the Ottoman Empire before that. Each time, if one asks, with enough good faith and honesty, Who benefits?, the answer is obvious: Not us. Never us. Not even those who think they're winning.
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One of the things that asking this as a craft question does for me is help me realize on the page what I call a character misbelief. It goes like this: for whatever reason in their history/past, a character comes to believe something about the world that is fundamentally incorrect or morally wrong or both. So far, little has worked to disabuse them of this notion or dissuade them from acting upon this misbelief. So they proceed onward as such, until specific events in the story—if it is a good story—hit them with a major reality check. Sometimes this arrives too late, huge damage already done. Sometimes, things are salvaged, and they emerge on the other side only slightly scathed and better learned.
Stories are neat and tidy like that. Real life, not so much.
A small number of us, upon raising the question of Who Benefits?, may allow the answers shepherd us into staring our misbeliefs in the face, and may begin personal and communal work toward correcting them. Many of us, however, will almost never ask this question—or at least not with the unadulterated good faith that is required to approach it honestly. This is because there are manifold persons, institutions and systems all invested in ensuring we never raise this question in good faith. Or, worse, offer us the illusion that we may do so, but only within fiercely guarded lanes, or in sterile ways that offer no real threat to the social status quo. Siloed and individualized, systematically prevented from coalescing into anything resembling momentum. The likes of policies, laws and bureacratic nightmares built specifically to railroad and overwhelm the individual into shrugging and saying, “Well, what can I do? I can't change anything.”
I’m not here to tell you that you can change things. God knows that as a Nigerian, I've seen more than my fair share of raging against the machine, of changemakers cut down the moment they attempt to advocate for anything resembling progress. We are not Chosen Ones, individually or even collectively. We are vulnerable people, and these vulnerabilities will always be weaponized against us, as exploitative human systems have done since time immemorial.
But perhaps if we are too vulnerable, too overwhelmed to take our character misbeliefs to task and stare the answers to Who Benefits? in the face, perhaps we can mine said vulnerability and raise the question on the opposite side of that coin: Who Suffers?
This is the question that has kept me grounded amidst the eruptions following October 7th, and will continue to keep me grounded. Each time someone quotes new numbers, points at another historical event, makes new accusations, reveals new allegations, I have only one thought: Who suffers? Whose character misbelief is fueling these harmful actions, and who ends up the victim of these choices? Who has invested so much in their misbeliefs that their very existence revolves around manifesting it into fruition? Who would rather kill, maim, murder—or support killing, maiming and murder, actively or passively—than admit that their misbelief is misplaced? We ask these questions of fictional characters all the time to help us ground their motivations. Learning to ask these questions of real-world actors helps me keep my head on straight, helps me stay assured that as long as I keep pointing my energy, my compassion, my resources toward the answer to the question Who Suffers?, I can never go wrong.
