How to inhabit a space, or a sentence

The Authors Club of London, where I held the launch party for Her Golden Coast, did not admit women until 1971. Professor Sunny Singh, someone I’m proud to call a friend, was the first woman of color and the first writer from a former colony to hold the office of the club’s Chair. I was new to London; despite the stuffiness and reserve of the city and the isolation forced upon us by the global pandemic, she invited me in.

I left the U.S in 2017, but made the decision to leave in 2016, when the outcome of that election seemed both incomprehensible and inevitable. I was among those who always figured Trump would win, because I could not believe that the America I’d known for 17 years would elect a woman to the presidency. Now, 8 years later, we face the same question. If any country can change fast enough, it’s America. We’ll see.

Here in the U.K. the recent xenophobic riots of the far-right are not a surprise to me, not when we’ve had names like Rishi Sunak and Sadiq Khan and Priti Patel in positions of power in a country that is falling apart but still believes it’s an empire. There’s definitely an air of “But we’re supposed to be doing the colonizing!”

(Tangent: WTF does it mean to call other completely independent nations your commonwealth? It’s like that executive who uses the royal-we to talk about work other people did). 

At Oxford University, author Kia Abdullah talked about racism and xenophobia in a famous Morrissey song (great, short video) and about the painful experience of watching her father put on a pleasing smile to impress others. If you are marginalized in any way (e.g. gender, sexuality, race, disability, immigration status, etc.), you may find it impossible to walk into a room and own it, to put forward your thoughts without preface or apology. However, it is only when you do that that things start to change. Our awareness of what’s “normal” shifts, and new futures become possible for everyone. 

But how do we get there? How do we get comfortable in our own skin, confident in our voice, certain of our place in the world? 

1. The skin

This has been the hardest part of my journey, and I know I’m lucky. I did not grow up a racial minority, and my body matched my gender. But when I was sixteen, I was convinced my arms were ugly, because the hair on them was dark and visible. I still have acne. All the things I saw as defects I was certain were the first things others saw of me. It took me a long time to realize most people are too self-conscious to bother really looking at you. In many of the photos from my book launch, I have a red smudge on my nose from stray lipstick. No idea how it got there, but apparently nobody’s noticed it yet. (Now it’ll be all you see). 

As part of my day job, I’m in front of the camera a lot. Once I realized it was inevitable, I decided to go at it like a project, especially when I was told that as a leader, people took their cues from me. I learned better posture, better breathing, how to stand without fidgeting or shifting on my feet, how to be just that little bit more aware of what my limbs were doing at any moment. I trusted a stylist to tell me what to wear and stopped worrying about my clothes. And then I realized that the more comfortable I was, the more comfortable others were around me. The less I worried about a zit or a scar or the fit of my dress, the more attuned I was to what others felt. By getting out of the mindset that loves to critique and find fault in myself, I actually increased how much empathy and compassion I had for others. 

2. The voice

It starts with a sentence. There’s a reason so many therapies recommend journaling as a healing practice. The act of writing allows you to listen to yourself. Doing it long enough allows you to grow familiar with your own voice, to tire of your lies and pretensions, and to stop trying so hard and just say what you mean. 

At the book launch, I mentioned that writing is fundamentally an act of empathy, a way of reaching out to other people for connection and understanding. I believe this is true of all art. Empathy requires doing what is necessary for the reader / listener to understand you, even if it means swallowing your pride and simplifying your thoughts. 

This simplicity does not always mean short sentences or “dumbed-down” language, but it does mean prioritizing the reader’s needs over your own vanity. It means asking yourself and answering honestly: “Am I writing it this way so my meaning is clearer, or am I writing it this way to showcase my own cleverness?” At work, a different version of this plays out: “Are you building the product this way so it’s easier for the customer to use, or because it showcases your engineering skill?” 

If being comfortable in your own skin allows you to see and be seen, being willing to simplify and clarify allows you to be understood.  

I’ve been reading an amazing book on craft: First you write a sentence. The author talks about how, when asked about his role in the Holocaust, Eichmann “would go off on a long detour about police regulations for official letters, the protocol for getting the department chief’s signature and the meaning of all the different colours of ink…. He described his role as ‘emigration specialist’. The Auschwitz death trains were ‘evacuation transport’. Things either fell, or more likely did not fall, within his ‘area of competence’. Where he could, he hid behind the passive voice. ‘Everything was geared to the idea of emigration,’ he said. ‘But constant difficulties were caused by various offices in a bureaucratic manner.’”

Complex sentences can conceal rot and cowardice, and can reflect our neuroses and anxieties. That doesn’t mean they should be avoided altogether. One of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read is also the longest. But the words are simple, the pattern repetitive; it retains its readability and musicality. When read aloud, the sentence’s form matches its function, which is to make you feel the agony of holding your breath waiting for equality and belonging: 

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million N**** brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "n*****," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a N****, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"— then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. 

– Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Letter from a Birmingham Jail (Content warning for unredacted slurs)

The variation, between the short, clipped first sentence that describes what others are demanding, and the longer sentence that is the lived experience of being Black in America, creates the music, as does the pattern of “phrase; when you” which repeats itself like the endless stream of microaggressions it describes.

3. The place in the world

Connection. It can be instant, a twang of resonance as, suddenly, it seems you and I are not actually that different. That we might not even be separate entities, but rather part of something greater, something whole. What does it take to feel that? To maintain it, over time and distance? 

At my book launch, I mentioned that our novels are in conversation with each other and with reality. Osman Haneef’s The Verdict is in harmony with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. And Kia Abdullah’s Those People Next Door is prescient, predicting the riots here in the U.K. while making “John Grisham seem like a maiden aunt.” (All the marketing bonus to whoever wrote that for the Sunday Times Crime Club). And here those two people are, flanking me at the Authors Club. 

We write to connect our stories and histories across cultures and borders. Our words are needed more than ever to unify and move us out of the mess we’re in, and it is this urgency that must pull us out of more self-conscious concerns. Basically, ask not what it will take for you to feel you belong in this world, but what you can do to make others feel they do. (That’s another example of a sentence being in conversation with history). 

I mentioned at the launch that as an introvert, writing was my way of being in the world. In The Temptation of St. Anthony, Gustave Flaubert describes the state of derangement of the senses attained through art: 

O happiness! Happiness! I have seen the birth of life, I have seen the beginning of movement. The blood in my veins is beating so hard that it will burst them. I feel like flying, swimming, yelping, bellowing, howling. I’d like to have wings, a carapace, a rind, to breathe out smoke, wave my trunk, twist my body, divide myself up, to be inside everything, to drift away with odours, develop as plants do, flow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter—to be matter!

Throughout Her Golden Coast are themes of being in the world (decadent, hostile and corrupt as it is) or being removed from it when it does not accept us as we are. The sentence below is Malini’s desire to be in the world, which is directly in resonance with Flaubert above. 

I want to live my life in baroque—moving, always moving, driving miles in an almost ravenous conquest of expanse, discovering indescribable ecstasies that exhaust every sense and thought. Such perfect moments are accompanied by a shattering so complete I’m left only with a burning, consuming faith in my capacity for happiness.

The link at the very beginning of this post leads to a brief history of the Authors Club: essentially, people who wrote and talked to each other and read each other's work. That’s it. There’s no magical invite to the adults’ table; you just have to decide you want to be there. In her afterword to Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies: A History of the Authors Club of London, Sunny Singh writes: 

“This club history has brought home once again that each generation must make its choice between right and wrong, exclusion and inclusion, looking towards our past or our futures…. It is heartening that the club remains as passionately involved with the larger world as at any time in our past. It is also sobering, however, to realise that our safe haven remains so because we must work tirelessly to maintain it while also remaining firmly engaged with the troubles outside our doors.”

Thank you to those of you who could come join me at the Authors Club and engage in the difficult but important work of creating belonging. Look at this incredible room:

BTW folks have told me that they think the subscribe buttons down here are boilerplate from Substack, not me. They really are a request from me! Please do like, comment or share these posts, as I’m trying to grow my audience, which is really hard to do as a new author. I’ll explain a bit more in my next post about why your engagement (every click, like, comment, book purchase, book review, etc.) is absolutely make-or-break in the attention economy.