Resisting and existing on the page

Last week, I attended a virtual gathering with my writers group, Muslim Writers Salon. The theme was “Writing Through Resistance.” My distracted reading of the theme was “Writing As Resistance,” so I went in with different assumptions. I can talk all day about the many ways I resist writing. Oh, and if I did that, I could use that as my excuse for why I didn’t write, right?

But lately, alhamdulillah, resisting writing isn’t my issue. I’m actually craving that open space to fill with writing. It’s all I seem to want to do lately. The injustices of the world are particularly heavy right now. Doing anything other than bearing witness to genocide brings guilt and shame. Writing feels acceptable though. Necessary, really. Less distraction and more presence. Let me build my creative, intellectual muscle. I’m going to need that for this long journey ahead. Sanity feels particularly fragile right now.

One of the prompts in our gathering was: what does it mean to me to resist? Even though I knew better by then, my brain was still latched to my previous assumptions of what we were there to explore. 

First, what am I resisting? That’s a quick answer: silencing. I love to be quiet much more than I love to speak, but being quiet is not the same as being silenced. I mean I call this thing “Something to Say” for a reason. The unwritten part is, “when I want to say it.”

A phenomenal artist friend of mine (and friend of mind), Kristina Kay Robinson, shared some time ago on Facebook about choosing silence as a survival tactic. She was speaking in the context of Black women. Sometimes, we are demanded to speak, as if we owe anyone our words, which is to say our work, which is to say our heart. If we give even a little of our heart, then comes the attack. So we - historically marginalized, systemically oppressed - may choose silence as it suits us, which is to say with agency.

Quiet time is building time. Silence can be retreat to replenish.

I started writing to resist erasure. I was told in no uncertain terms that I, being Black, Muslim, Creole, Southern, didn’t exist. But I did and I do, and I’m stubborn. So I started writing myself on the page.

Now I think about resisting despair and helplessness. I think about joy and love and possibility, what it looks like when we move beyond surviving towards thriving. Writer Zetta Elliott (in an essay I can’t find, sorry!) shared an idea that has stuck with me: what if our art, rather than strictly depicting reality, expressed possibility? 

That idea was with me when I was writing my novel (publishing next year insha’Allah, you can learn more about it here). As it began to take shape into an actual story, I saw these characters I was writing couldn’t move past the traumas and choices of their younger lives and therefore lacked imagination in thinking about what they were going to do with their adult lives. What emerged from the jumbled mess of drafts was a story arc in three parts I called: reveal the present, confront the past, create the future. They had to imagine what was possible and invent a future for themselves.

Funny, that thing we writers sometimes resist – writing – is also that thing we reach for to fight off that suffocating blanket of despair. In another writers group I was a part of, we addressed the question put forth by many of the late, great writers before us: do you write as if your life depended on it?

My answer then is my answer now: yes, what other reason could there be? My life absolutely depends on looking beyond what is in front of me and towards what is possible.

(Cover photo credit: Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash)