The power of community
Waithera Sebatindira, co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism, eloquently discusses the challenges of navigating elite institutions as a black or woman of colour. Sebatindira talks about how finding community helped her, and others, navigate the daily racism, classism and sexism she encountered as a minority in Cambridge University.
Freedom, Love, You (FLY), a Cambridge University Society founded in 2012, by black women, and later opened up to all women, gave Sebatindira and other students “a space to vent about racism and sexism, without being dismissed or called overly sensitive. Because other people in the group had had similar experiences, I knew that when I’d share my own, I’d be met with empathy, and ideas for how to cope with daily instances of bigotry.”
“In this way,” Sebatindira says, “FLY gave me resilience. Not a stiff upper lip, but a place to come home to, where I could lay down the microaggressions I’d collected outside the meeting. Lay down the pain that they caused and help other people do the same with theirs.”
Through community, the group were able to discover the commonality of their experiences, and collectively start to make sense of them using intersectionality, a theoretical paradigm proffered by the legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989. Crenshaw, highlighted how the confluence of different axes of oppression or disadvantage such as racism and, sexism,compound each other, situating black women and women of colour differently to other cohorts, within anti-discrimination and feminist discourse. 1
Sebatindira is also the author of Through an Addict’s Looking Glass.
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 139 - 67, (1989). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3007, p. 149↩︎
It’s in the telling
The ever delightful Anne Carson on why you must authentically voice the unsaid thing:
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.
- Anne Carson, Candor, A poem made for Roni Horn out of the titles of five of her sculptures, Could 1, 1 July 2011, in Bomb Magazine
Keep at it
Interesting work only begins after you’ve gone through the process of being exactly like everyone else. So says Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman tells the story of Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen describing the Helsinki bus station to students of photography:
There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.
Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours.
Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station.
But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.
What’s the solution?
“It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”
A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.”
The challenge of decolonising the mind
Mercilessly rippled out of the context of his memoir, here is Binyavanga Wainaina’s hilarious take on the difficulties of decolonising the mind:
I read Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o a few week (sic) ago. It is illegal and it was thrilling, and I had vowed to go back to my own language. English is the language of the colonizer.
I will take Gikuyu classes, when I am done with diversiddy and advertising, when I am driving a good car. I will go to the village and make plays in Gikuyu, in my good new car. I will make very good decolonized advertisements for Coca-Cola.
I will be cool and decolonized. An international guy. Like, like Youssou N’Dour.
- Binyavanga Wainaina in One Day I Will Write About This Place P. 92, Granta
His “own language” here is supposedly Gikuyu, which alas, he does not speak, even though Wainaina was a polyglot.
In a few short words, Wainaina manages to bring levity to a number of issues including book censorship, decolonising the mind and colonisation, identity, and the futility of striving for cultural purity in the Babel that is our globalised, cosmopolitan world.
Why think in public
I have previously mentioned my intention to build a daily writing practice. Writing every day is one thing, but why bother making the information public, especially as this means publishing half-baked ideas and showing your learning pains? This in my view is exactly what makes sharing your work worthwhile. Here’s why:
The illusion of understanding
If you have ever tried to explain something, only to discover that regardless of your familiarity with it, you don’t actually understand it well, you’re acquainted with the illusion of explanatory depth. Easy access to the internet via smartphones, has made it much easier to look up information, which has been shown to create the illusion of “greater than actual knowledge”.
As research on the illusion of explanatory depth has shown, until you have to explain something, you don’t really know how well you understand it. Thinking in public enables you to see where your gaps are and thereby disabuse yourself of misguided notions. It forces you to research, deepen understanding and to reflect on what you’ve learnt.
To paraphrase Schopenhauer, acquiring books is not the same as reading them, and reading is not the same as understanding. Schopenhauer thought that it is not enough to read a lot, one must also engage with the subject matter by taking the time to reflect on it. “It is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.”
Writing is one of the best ways I know of thinking things through.
Rigour
Thinking in public forces me to finish writing articles, which left to my own devices, I might not otherwise complete. Knowing that I’m going to publish something, forces me to take notes, tidy them up, do the requisite research and examine my work for truth.
Encouraging creativity
Capturing and polishing an idea creates a foundation on which I can build. The idea continues to incubate and grow, which leads to the next connecting leap, and the next, until any gaps are plugged. It’s like building a wall, one brick on top of another, until your wall is complete.
All of this is beneficial not only to me, but also to others who read the work.
Benefit to others
None of us are born knowing anything and we look to others to teach us what we want to know. Making your work public helps your readers learn from your struggles, experience and knowledge or lack thereof.
Perhaps you’re trying to make sense of a topic that interests you. Feeling your way around it might help anyone interested gain a beginner’s understanding of it. I learn a lot from watching other people’s thinking evolving. It’s sometimes messy, but this is what makes it relatable and human.
There are people who are struggling with whatever you’re wrestling with, and it can be a comfort for others to know that someone understands what’s like to be in their shoes.
Finding community
Henrik Karlsson put it aptly when he said, “You write to find your tribe. It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it.”
It’s true that the majority of people will be indifferent to your work. But the effort is worth it for the few who will find it resonant. I’m inclined to agree with Karlsson when he observes that, “a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”
Creative gifts are for sharing
If you bury your creative gifts, you lose them. As Lewis Hyde pointed out, gifts must be kept in motion, else they cannot nourish us or bear fruit. If you think of your creative gifts like a constantly flowing river, to treat the gift correctly, one must allow oneself to become a channel for its current. “When someone tries to dam up the river, one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate or it will fill the person up until he bursts.”1
Conclusion
It’s natural to be fearful of, or have reservations about, sharing your work. It can bring up uncomfortable feelings, like embarrassment, fear of ridicule, not being good enough (imposter syndrome) and so on. There’s no limit to the number of scary demons our imaginations can conjure up. However, I think it’s worth getting past any misgivings, as the benefits of thinking in public multiply the more you do it.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (p. 25). Canongate Books. Kindle Edition.↩︎
Speaking for Earth
Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize for her book Orbital. It’s a love letter to our bright, blue, watery orb of a planet, and an anguished plea to stop our heedless destruction of it.
Here is an excerpt of her acceptance speech, in which Harvey references climate change:
I suppose, it’s fair to say that no Booker speech has ever been made in a perfect world. But it’s hard to not acknowledge the imperfections of the world that we live in today.
We are, as Carl Sagan says in his book Cosmos, “the local embodiment of a consciousness grown to self awareness. We are star stuff, pondering stars.” And I would add that we are also earth stuff, pondering the Earth. And I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering.
To look at the earth from space, is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising, for the first time, that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves. “Our loyalties” Sagan says, “are to the species and to the planet. We need to speak for earth,” he says.
I would like to dedicate this prize therefore, to everybody who does speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace. This is for you. Thank you.
I read an interesting comment in which Harvey says she nearly didn’t write the book thinking, “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.”
Alas, Booker prize winners have doubts too. Aren’t you glad that she carried on?
It’s a beautiful and succinct piece of work that left me with full blown overview effect - awe, transcendent love for, and a ferocious desire to protect, the earth. Long may it continue.