On Writing (as feminist praxis)

Hello hello everyone, happy Pisces season! 

I've spent the past month dreading something that is going to happen at the end of this week which is that I'm going to be turning a year older. I used to be the kind of kid, and till very recently the kind of adult, who would get really excited before their birthday because I was always the youngest in class and felt the need to overcompensate. This is the first birthday I have not been looking forward to. I think about my life thus far and am filled with gratitude, but there is something that gnaws at me a lot of the time. I feel I'm not on the path to achieving the kind of professional success I always thought I would have if I stayed focused and did the work of writing. I cannot even say I came to writing late, that I stumbled into this work by accident. I always wanted to be a writer, as far as I can remember I have wanted to write, and had both the means and privilege in order to do so. When people ask me what I do, I am a little embarrassed to say I am a writer, I am (ostensibly) writing a novel, I also do some reporting. And, although I swore up and down this would never affect me, I sometimes wish I had chosen to do something a little more...structured, something that made me some money, even. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, a lot of the time it is you just staring at a Word document willing something into existence, and you have nothing much to show for it at the end of the day.

Needless to say I have spent the better part of last month moping and worrying about my writing career. Fortunately, in the midst of all this self pity, my friend and colleague Aneeqa asked me to come to her excellent class, Spaces, Cities & the Self, and for this class the assigned reading was an essay by Taymiya Zaman which I am linking here, because everyone should read it. In the essay, the writer battles between two selves; the Historian who has returned to her country in order to study it and the self that struggles to break free of this historian and her trained eye. A passage that struck me especially:

"I exist so she can write about me and capture me as she does everything else, and in giving me over to language, she will erase me. There are fewer and fewer moments in which I can free myself of her."

This echoes so perfectly how I have come to feel about writing. My anxieties around writing; when to write, where to write, where to pitch, how to pitch, being unable to go a day without having an idea and wondering if I should write about it, going somewhere and thinking oh I could write about this place, these people, have slowly been erasing me. And, this erasure does not start with me, but with what I have chosen to capture as Taymiya says. It starts with those of us who are writing and what we choose to write about, the simultaneous recognition and erasure that we partake in, which is what our work also hinges upon.  

In Aneeqa's class, we spoke about writing and her students asked the kind of questions I have recently found myself contending with as well. The subject in question was the personal essay and the importance of being vulnerable in this kind of writing. A student said they felt conflicted over writing about their family. A lot of the time they wrote about family to build solidarity because others read their work and felt understood, they thought of writing as a kind of feminist praxis, but not one that comes without its own anxieties. What happens when the people around us, the ones we are writing about, ever read what we write?  Within this anxiety lies a question; should we write about our mothers? If the personal is political, then how can we not write about what is personal to us? The heart of the question; when does writing become extractive? When does our writing start to run into our actual lives, knock people over unexpectedly and abandon us on the pavement, trying to help those we have hurt get back on their feet? How do we decide what to write about and what not to write about?

I think a lot of these questions about what to write, what not to write, how to write, how not to write, are so deeply felt because they are tied to an anxiety we all have about writing, by virtue of our 'modern' education and the prestige tied to writing and scholarship, which is that we have been taught to hold writing up as a harbinger of some kind of Truth and writers as truth-tellers. I should bookend this by saying this does not mean that writing cannot also be feminist praxis, but I'll come to that towards the end of this essay.  It cannot be denied that so much of public writing has historically been exploitative. The quest for Knowledge is closely tied to categorising and creating typologies, being the one in the position to make 'sense' of it all. The industry of writing today is a continuation of this same thing in many ways. Writing fiction, conducting research, becoming a scholar are all so competitive, possibly because the culture of it is still grounded in telling objective truths. Scholars and writers and researchers are told they must separate their work from their lives as a result. Having to let go of belief and belonging, as Taymiya says she was compelled to do during her degree. 

Whenever I think of whether or not to write about my own mother, I always remember a story she told me years ago. When she first got married and moved to the UK, my nani would send her letters. At the end of each letter, she would caution her to tear it up once she'd read it and throw it away. We don't talk enough about what else writing can be because writing is so often thought of as truth, the writer's word as final. Even now, sometimes I mourn the loss of that 'archive', the letters sent between my grandmother and my mother in her youth, I want to read them to find something true within their pages.  My nani however understood there was no such thing. She wasn't about to take any risks. She harboured a suspicion of the written word, how people too often read the written word as final. The written word is evidence and evidence rarely ever swerves in the favour of women. This is why her letters to her daughter were meant for her eyes only. 

Having said all of this, sometimes I do choose to write about my mother. These are always the pieces that evoke the most anxiety within me and I always wonder if she has read them, what she thinks of them. If she brings them up, I rush to justify this or mitigate that. Often I find myself feeling annoyed about all the stress, however lately I am beginning to understand that this anxiety is important in order to remember that my story is not just mine, my life is intertwined with the lives of many others. I will never be able to draw a clear line to demarcate; My Work ends here, Our Lives begin there. 

Yet, beyond just writing about my mother, I am still anxious about my writing career and this must mean I too have fallen into the trap of seeing writing as truth telling. All my life I have been told I am exceptional, that I have something to Say. This is why I want to make thirty five under thirty five lists, and the reason I am dreading the advent of yet another birthday having not made any lists. In the way the writing world is set up, this is the dream writers are told to chase. Work hard, flex your range, think about writing constantly, enter stories in competitions, do an MFA, maintain a public Instagram, become a kind of icon, a 'voice', as people say. I want to do these things because a writer who successfully manages to do all of this is the writer who is the teller of the highest Truth. 

When we talk about writing, we talk about success and failure as binaries, natural oppositions. This is why writers like me are so obsessed with success, the alternative is not an option in our minds. But on what grounds do we judge the success of the written word? It is urgent that we speak more of failure as inevitable, to write is to inevitably fail at the task of trying to capture the wholeness of life, of ideas and people and other impossible, unpredictable things. Even this newsletter, what is it if not a failure to articulate my own personal crisis, wonder if there is a structural reason for it and grapple with the possibilities of alternative? We should start to admit to these failures, so that perhaps we can slowly begin to undo the work of countless writers who have laid claims to a Truth, whose claims to Truth have facilitated racism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, the way the world is as we stand before it today. 

And yet, none of this can account for why, if we are not laying claim to a Truth, do we embark upon this mission of failure? I believe it is the separation of work from life that has brought us here and it is only when we begin to see writing as something that should be done in the midst of life that we can begin to think of writing differently. Of course this is easy to say and difficult to do. I think about Woolf's A Room of One's Own, how my whole life I have yearned for and fought for a room I can truly call my own, the room in which I will study and write. But I am beginning to suspect that I only need the room because the world has divided Work from Life, even though writing is Work, life is something else, an interruption, your children and other difficulties barging into the room in the middle of the day. We privilege work over life. I think about how I have mapped out my own life; I will Work very hard and publish a novel so as to have achieved some success before turning some attention to life, perhaps I will start a family, or cultivate a garden, or nurture a hobby, travel a little even, before once again turning to the Work I have been 'ordained' to do, which means shutting myself in the room I have fought so hard for and producing something tangible, something that claims a truth, in order to justify my life. 

An important aside, I don't wish to suggest that those who suffer everyday because of their circumstances of their lives (esp women and gender/sexual minorities) should give up their fight for a room of their own. Many people need a room in order to survive, they need a room to just be, because the outside world is cruel and unjust, demanding too much of them. What I'm trying to say is the room cannot be the end goal and, although the point is not that individual people should give up their rooms, we also need to start looking beyond the room and the private space. 

So where do we go from here? How may we begin to salvage writing from The Study, The Archive, The White Man, The One Truth? I believe that Gloria Anzaldua has some of the answers in her glorious essay, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. 

"Forget the room of one's own - write in the kitchen. lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping and waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriters, unless you're wealthy or have a patron - you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you're depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write."

I love this letter so much because Anzaldua speaks not of the success or failure of writing but of abundance, the many possibilities of writing and of life, where writing may take place anywhere and anyone may write and where life and writing nurture each other, and although they are not always harmonious, they make space for each other because there is an understanding that one cannot exist without the other. An even more liberating thought, perhaps we too can have it all but this rigid separation of work and life, in a world where only men can successfully manage this most of the time, is what is truly keeping us from having it all in the first place. 

I am aware that this has become a very long and tangential essay, but I do want to end with a final thought, the thing that has reminded me why I came to writing in the first place and also what compelled me to write this essay and that is something a student said during Aneeqa's class. They said that sometimes they feel the urge to write about something, often something to do with their family, but instead they turn to their sisters, and try to have conversations with them about what is on their mind. I was completely awestruck by this commitment to building community and understanding, always a risk, over the decision to enshrine one's word as the final judgement on anything. This is where we should be locating writing, the writing of our own lives but also the writing of fiction, essays, non fiction, research, not in the quest to become a Voice, but alongside care, love, community and an openness to being vulnerable. Writing as feminist praxis is sometimes choosing to write a newsletter, a tweet, a blog or an essay, in an attempt to build solidarity and understanding, it is sometimes choosing to write for just one person, tearing up the letter once it's read, and sometimes it is choosing not to write at all, but to listen. 



I would like to thank Taymiya, Aneeqa, Aimen and Aaisha for their invaluable labour, labour which is very often not tangible, and for helping me think through this essay through their writing, teaching and comments. We learn everyday from communities of support and from the labour of others, I can never be grateful enough for this constant learning. 

PS: If anyone is curious about the courses Aneeqa, Ilma and I teach then please follow our IG: creativeroom_co. We have an excellent line up of online courses scheduled for this year and I'm very excited to be a part of this space.

PPS: I try to write an essay a month, on feminism, fashion, fiction and ways to build community. If you have been following me and enjoy what you've been reading so far, then please consider sharing!