A conversation surrounding Yann Martel
Content warning: allusions to self-harm and suicide
The family I was born into are fixtures among the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, colloquially known as the Jehovah’s Witness. Their peculiar faith which they call “the truth,” includes anti-2SLGBTQ+ views, the primacy of church doctrine, and the illusion of political neutrality. At thirteen, I found myself in contention with the church on the basis of my burgeoning sexuality as a young gay man with newfound leftist politics. The hypocrisy of the church, which bore the same accusations of corruption as the Catholic Church they railed against, fueled my rebellion.
When I was thirteen years of age, I tried to run away from home. I wrote my mother and father a note and left it on my desk, I packed a bag, and I climbed out my bedroom window onto the roof of the garage. My mother would find me sobbing there and thus began my tumultuous journey with my faith. After my failed escape, I tried to run by means of knives against my forearms and ropes against my neck. All the while, acts of violence began taking place against Jehovah’s Witnesses at an unprecedented rate across the world. It was during this hectic climate that I first read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
Life of Pi tells the story of Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel, a young man who simultaneously practices Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity while his parents run a zoo in Puducherry, India. When the now-infamous Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brings down the communist state government of nearby Kerala, the family decides it’s time to move to Canada and sell the zoo. The story is one of Martel’s signature parables on faith.
At the time, the story fascinated me, but it didn’t quite touch me. I grew older, moved 3000 kilometres to the West Coast, leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses behind. It was then that I read Martel’s other work, The High Mountains of Portugal. A weaving-together of three interconnected stories involving chimpanzees, Iberian Rhinos, love, and loss. As always with Martel, we cannot take the animals for granted.
God is symbolised by the extinct Iberian Rhinoceros. The chimpanzee, as I came to understand, was a representation of the primal need for love held deep within each of us. Love may be patient and kind, it may not boast or look out for its own interest, and yet in all its hallowed perfection, love can kill. Love is like a chimpanzee because it is a wonder of creation, and it can also destroy you. To borrow from Erin Shields’ theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost, it is precisely God’s suffocating love that was his favourite tool in my personal oppression. If God gave his son for me, he was right to want me dead for rejecting him. How do you even forgive someone for loving you too much?
It was a year later that I read Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil. The story of a novelist who retires in a new city upon having his unconventional manuscript take on Holocaust remembrance. Beatrice & Virgil is about humanising both the perpetrator and the victim of unspeakable evil and understanding what it means to seek forgiveness. It asks the reader, through a series of “games” at the end of the narrative, to put themselves in the shoes of various people living through the Holocaust and ponder whether this wound can ever heal. My experiences were nothing compared to genocide. If one can ponder the possibility of repairing such grievous injury, surely, I could stand to think about forgiving those that wronged me. It was then that the three stories suddenly made sense to me. The task before me was to forgive. By forgiving and coming to love people that I still feel unsafe around, I would find peace. If Life of Pi helped me understand why my parents still loved God despite everything he put them through, and The High Mountains of Portugal helped me understand why it was that they could not see that very Christian love was dangerous to me, then Beatrice & Virgil helped me to see that I would need to embrace forgiveness. I am still on this journey and am now asking myself what it means and looks like to forgive a concept. Yann Martel released a new book in 2024. Maybe I should read it.
