Tag: reading and writing

I walked away from a trade publishing job in 2008, just about 9 years ago. I absolutely loved the work as an assistant editor and I adored my boss to pieces. Even though I wasn’t the best at my admin tasks, he trusted my editorial instinct and I tried to ensure that he was happy with my work. At the time, the subprime mortgage clusterfuck had all of us New Yorkers shaking in our boots and fearing the worst. Many were shaken from the tree. I chose to leave at that time because I too had no idea where the industry would end up (it survived). Editing was exciting but I wanted more from the other side of the desk.

Even though I never pubished my work, and at the time, never cared to, I had always been a writer. And after publishing, I planned to pursue a career as a literary scholar. It sounds perfect, right?  You study it, practice it, teach it, and read books all day long. The AIDS epidemic had dominated my consciousness and my writing and still does in an academic sense. Too many relatives were sick. So many people were dying. In Manhattan, I befriended many gay men who understood how an epidemic can seize your consciousness in a way that my contemporaries could not understand. We had a common understanding of the fears and anxieties of our own and our communities. That feeling of helplessness for others, for your family, neighbours, nation and not knowing if a cure would come and save all of us from this. I wanted to understand how Africans (specifically Malawians) wrote about health (specifically AIDS) and why it mattered in global literature. I had many chats with survivors in New York about many things but it was the discussion of what AIDS did to sexual identity that resonated. Just 11 years post-Stonewall, gay men were held accountable for the disease. And within years, that vitriol was pointed towards Africans, the original pariah’s of European Christian notions of contagion. It was a natural progression and I knew what I wanted to write about as soon as I left New York.

At the peak of my writing in 2010, I had mastered a new technique… a reflective narrative style followed by stream of conscious prose that would interchange after 15 sentence intervals. It was informed by traditional African mysticism and indigenous discourse. It reminded me of the way my parents would weave in and out of their indigenous tongues and English seamlessly when they were passionate about something. I was very proud of  it and felt that it could be a welcome inclusion in the canon of African writing if I got it right and figured out what story to make of it.

Initially during my PhD, I kept at it. I wrote daily, played around with new words, new ideas, new prose, which were informed by whatever I was reading at the time. It  became intertwined with ideas about the body, my body, the sick body, the aching body, the dying body, the mystic body, the sexual body, the healing body, the African body. The research in the medical humanities seemed to compliment my own writing. But halfway through my PhD, in 2012, I stopped reading. And by reading, I don’t mean the actual process of the eyes glazing across Latin alphabets from left to right and absorbing their ideas. I did and still do that constantly. I mean, I stopped engaging with literature. Shortly after, I stopped ‘writing’.

There was so much that contributed to this. First it was the thesis, then it was the thyroid disease, then it became the grants and consultancies and a whole lot of other stuff that was really good for me at the time but detrimental to my writing. Eventually, it just morphed into one prolonged exercise that I couldn’t engage in. I stopped writing. No more notes, no more love letters, poems or stories…

Five years has passed. Because of new thyroid medication that I just started taking this year, my head has been clearer than it ever has been since I got sick. I have a job, a nice flat, live in a beautiful city and get to research storytelling as I dreamed of it. I am overall in a good place. And just two weeks ago, I decided that I am going to start writing again. So I tried. Took a stab at some prose and I was horrified to find that I could no longer do it. My sentences were shorter and impatient. My thoughts were disjointed. I just didn’t know what to say anymore. I was writing about anything. ‘It’s because you stopped reading,‘ I told myself. Whatever I did write, I felt compelled to add footnotes and/or a citation to prove my point after every sentence just like I had been doing for five years. The voices in my head were overshadowed by the voices of authority, a key distinction of academic writing. My creative writing became perfunctory.

It was disappointed but I decided that I would start writing again. But in order for me to find my own voice again. I need to start reading again. My own voices were inspired by other Africans who flirted with free verse that mimics our native tongue. But it was also inspired by other writers who held ideals that are reflective of my personality. I was inspired by Nadine Gordimer’s pragmatism, by J.M. Coetzee’s audacity, by Phaswane Mpe’s bluntness, by Richard Russo’s vision of home and belonging, Salman Rushdie’s magical realism and by Alice Walker’s fearless exploration of the black sexual self. And I lost them when creativity turned to theory. No disrespect to Sontag and Spivak, I just need to add other voices in my head right for a short while if I’m to find my own again.

This is my first stab at writing something that isn’t tied to work in a long time. I anticipate that every piece is going to be shit. But as long as the next piece becomes progressively less shittier than the last piece, then I am doing something right. Wish me luck!