What Is the Purpose of Art and Literature in Times of Crisis?

Art is not luxury. It is necessity. In times of crisis especially, art becomes the place where we can think differently, imagine otherwise, resist the narratives that those in power would have us accept. Literature is a way of bearing witness. It's a way of saying: these lives mattered, these experiences were real, this history is true.

When I wrote about slavery and its aftermath, I wasn't writing for aesthetic pleasure or to produce beautiful sentences for their own sake. I was writing because historical narratives had rendered Black interior lives invisible. White literature, white historical accounts—they could tell you about the economics of slavery, the politics, the great white men involved, but they could not and would not tell you what it felt like to have your child sold away, to be violated, to maintain love and dignity in circumstances designed to destroy both. Literature could go there. Language could do what no other form could.

In times of genuine crisis—which is what we're living through now, though many people refuse to acknowledge it—art becomes a form of resistance and survival. It helps us recognize ourselves in stories we thought we were alone in. It expands our moral imagination. It shows us possibilities for being human that the dominant culture hasn't recognized. It keeps alive ways of knowing and being that those in power would prefer we forget.

What's dangerous about contemporary crises is the noise, the information overload, the way crisis becomes spectacle. Art offers something different. It offers space. Depth. The kind of attention that can only happen when you sit down with a book and let language change how you think. When you engage with an image or a performance and feel something shift in your understanding of what's possible.

This is why I've always believed that the work of artists is political work, whether we consciously claim it or not. We're either reinforcing the world as it is or imagining it as it could be. In times of crisis, that imaginative work becomes essential. It's how we survive. It's how we transform.