Why do you write?
- Terese Jonsson
- Feb 8, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 9, 2024
It’s been a while since my last blog post – longer than I had intended. I have a couple of half-drafted posts in the works and a list of ideas for topics to write about, but it’s been hard to motivate myself to focus on any of them.
Beyond the everyday challenge of finding time to write in between client work, admin, parenting and life, I haven’t been able to find the words to say anything that felt meaningful enough to share in this moment. It has felt impossible to continue posting on this blog without acknowledging what is happening in Gaza.
Of course, atrocities take place around the world all of the time, and it is impossible to pay attention and respond to them all. This violent world requires us to maintain a high level of emotional disconnection in order to function. But the disconnection of different groups of people from each other – enforced through systemic oppression – is what has led us here. And it is only those who are more protected (by race, class, citizenship, religion, location…) that have the privilege to disconnect and live our lives as if the systemic violence against others is inconsequential to us.
I’m not writing this from a moral high ground. I have often felt attached to the numbness of non-engagement – of wanting to live my nice little life untroubled by the suffering of others.
But when I come to the page in that numb state, I struggle to write. My writing self will not allow me to disengage; it goes on strike.
It brings me back to a basic question: why do I write?
Reflecting on this question, I came up with a number of reasons:
I write to open things up and to make sense of things, to work out what I’m thinking/feeling.
I write because I want to change something – to join together with other voices to build towards something different.
I write to connect to myself – my hopes and dreams, plans, secrets, worries, despair.
I write to connect to others – in the hope that I might write something that touches or is useful to someone else; that it might connect us together in a conversation.
I write to get to the truth of something.
I write because I hope; when I feel hopeless it is hard to write.
I write to research and learn.
I write because I can’t not write; to decide not to write again feels like cutting off a part of myself.
I keep returning to connection. As I’ve written before on this blog, for me, writing is about striving for connection, and to not acknowledge what is happening right now – the genocide of Palestinians – feels like a way of disconnecting from it.
Aman Ahluwalia writes compellingly about the importance of being able to see injustice and name genocide, while also being able to hold the full humanity of each and every person harmed, Palestinian and Israeli: to ‘refuse binary thinking and honour the pain of each and every victim of this bloody occupation’.
So, let me add another one to the list: I write to resist dehumanisation.
The question I am sitting with at the moment is: How do we stay connected in these times, in ways that help us work towards a more humane, just and sustainable world, but without becoming hopeless and overwhelmed?
In Hanna Jameson’s dystopian novel Are You Happy Now, set in New York in a world very similar to our own (mass economic precarity, impending climate chaos and social breakdown), people suddenly start to sit down and become unresponsive, completely overwhelmed and ultimately giving up on life. The novel chronicles the lives of its protagonists against this backdrop of a pandemic that comes to be known as psychogenic catatonia. As the book’s blurb asks: ‘how can anyone be happy in a world where the only choice is to feel everything – or nothing at all?’
It is a healthy response to feel heartbroken in this world. It means we have not let ourselves be numbed. Gargi Bhattacharyya suggests that ‘to be heartbroken is the true class consciousness of racial capitalism’.
So how do we stay and remain connected and engaged with the reality of this world without sitting down and giving up – how do we continue to hold out hope and work towards something different? A large part of the answer lies in collective organising and coming together as communities in solidarity, and these things are beyond necessary right now.
For me, and many others, writing has a place, too. It may not change the world on its own, but it can help us connect – to ourselves, to each other, to hope. As Palestinian author Adania Shibli writes,
Literature’s relevance is not to incite change but intimacy and reflection; to bring others back to ourselves, perhaps a field where we can consider how we relate to ourselves and to others, from living to pain; and to guide us towards imagining how to live better.
(There is so much more to say about this article, which Shibli wrote in response to Frankfurt Book Fair cancelling an award ceremony in her honour, but I will leave that for a future post about the possibilities, and limits, of language).
Part of me feels conflicted writing this here, on my business website. While I started this blog to have a space to write publicly again, it also has a marketing purpose – blogging is a way to raise my profile as an editor and hopefully connect with my (in marketing lingo) ‘ideal clients’. I don’t want to be dishonest about this.
So let me instead be explicit: I want to work with other writers who seek connection in a disconnected world. I am interested in writing that opens up our imagination to different possibilities. Writing that refuses to disregard systemic violence and injustice. Writing that teaches us something about solidarity and intimacy across difference. Writing that helps us see the humanity in each of us. Writing that slows down, pays attention, allows nuance and complexity. Writing committed to hope.
This is the kind of writing I seek to do and it’s the kind of writing I want to support to flourish.
Some further resources on Palestine
Organisations
Books- and publishing-related resources
Image: Photo of cuddly toys outside the UK Foreign Office in London, Parents for Palestine demo, 27th October 2023.
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