How to celebrate in times of horror
I met a young writer I’ve been mentoring for on Stapelton Road recently. We went for biryani. As you know, I’ve been hankering. Busyness on a couple of projects does mean that the final results of the quest for biryani aren’t in yet, but this particular meal was less memorable for the food and more for what unfolded as me and the writer chatted.
We were meeting for a catch up. We had our final mentoring session earlier this year and I wanted to check in and see how her novel was going. She said that progress had been slow recently. Paid work was getting in the way. Also, she was finding the news hard to look away from. We discussed all the hacks — screen blockers, deleting certain apps from your phone, not having devices next to you while you sleep. And we also admitted we did none of those things despite knowing they were for the best.
She asked what I was up to and I said I’d been struggling to write the new introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of The Good Immigrant that’s coming out later this year. I said I was having the same problem — the news was hard to look away from. It kept getting in the way of the brief. The brief was simple: celebrate ten years of the book that transformed my career and brought so many emotions to so many readers. And yet, it was hard to write that introduction in a vacuum.
When I quantify the last ten years, when I think about where we were and where we are now, I distinctly remember the optimism I felt towards the book. We hadn’t had Brexit yet. We hadn’t had Trump yet. All we had was an opportunity to pass the mic.
She reminded me that Bristol was so tied up in the making of that book. She and I had met when I used to run a youth magazine out of Watershed called Rife. Its remit was to train young journalists to write articles and make videos about the stuff that mattered to them. We had a rotating cast of journalists over the years, cohorts working for us in six month paid internships. My job was to be their editor, mentor and cheerleader, to help them find their voice, hone it and put it out into the world.
It’s all about having faith in the words. Because the words are all we have.
Something strange was happening in this catchup. The mentee was becoming the mentor. The food arrived, we ate. We talked about what I could write. How I could acknowledge the current moment and its ever-shifting sands, how I could celebrate all the book had achieved. Now, reflecting on that moment, this was the difficulty I was having: why celebrate in times of horror? Why am I giving thanks and gratitude while others are suffering?
I was reminded about a moment in Musa Okwonga’s incredible memoir, One Of Them. The line “In my culture, we celebrate everything…” has haunted me ever since I first read it. It’s an indelible line, the antithesis to everything that makes Britain Britain, where to celebrate is to be seen as arrogant. Anything built up must be torn down. Sarcasm is affection. And so on.
My mentee, now my mentor, offered me the last of the biryani, spooning it onto my plate. “Write both, because that’s the truth,” she said. “You celebrate what needs to be celebrated and you critique what needs to be critiqued. Both can exist. You taught me that.”
“Damn,” I replied. “You can’t just fling my advice back at me. That’s not fair.”
“Ultimately,” my mentee said, “It’s all about having faith in the words. Because the words are all we have. How we make sense of the world. Neither of us could be politicians. We can’t start a campaign. We can barely project-manage our own lives. How could we be trusted with anything else? But we will always have words. And the words will be complicated. Feelings aren’t straight forward or linear. We don’t like writers who tell us everything they know. We like curious writers…”
“Writers who yearn,” I offered.
“Exactly,” she said. “Writers who are searching for something. And it’s the search, as we all know, that’s more important than the destination.”
“Words are the friends we made along the way?” I quipped.
“Exactly,” she replied. “You’ve just got to trust the fact that when the thing you’re trying to write is knotty, if you try to untangle it before you get to the page, it’ll be shit. Untangle on the page. Trust in the words.”
I thanked her. She had schooled me. I was proud, a little, to be humbled so profoundly in this way. Because when we’d agreed to meet, it was to help her reenergise her novel. But what she did was get me to remember what it was I needed to write, and find my faith in myself on the page. I’ve since filed that piece. And to my dear mentee, if you’re reading this: I hope you found your way back to the novel. Because it’s going to be excellent. I have every faith in that. And you. Thank you.
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