Okay, so I cheated. I started writing this on Wednesday, as I’m on holiday and insanely relaxed. Depression feels very far away, the only reminder being the pill I take every morning, and this blog. So desperate was I for a work/stress/depression/anxiety free holiday that before I left, I even managed to submit redrafts of not one, but two (!) TV treatments. I then stuck a ridiculously ambitious out of office on my email, basically saying I probably won’t reply to you until the end of the summer.
I wanted to buy myself some time to finish the first draft of a play I’ve been working on. So far, I haven’t managed to get the focused stretch of time I need to inhabit the world of the play in order to write it properly, and I’m desperately looking forward to some uninterrupted writing.
So my holiday is 5 days of bliss by a pool, after which I’m back to writing, but ideally without internet (hello Freedom) and with my phone in a K safe – I have Johann Hari to thank for the tips, and I highly recommend his book Stolen Focus. I’ll let you know how it works out for me.
Another holiday read has been Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyaasi – an astonishing exploration of being. If that makes the book sound vague, I promise it isn’t. A story about a brother’s addiction and a mother’s depression is a profound and complex investigation of what it means to be human.
I was so enthralled by its careful musings on faith and science, and how Gyaasi negotiates them in relation to mental health, I googled to find out more about her interest in addiction and depression. But in all the interviews I found and skimmed, all interviewers were primarily interested in talking about with her was racism and blackness.
Don’t get me wrong its certainly part of the book, but it isn’t all the book is about, and surely not the only talking point. It’s possible that race was the talking point she wanted to stick to. It’s also possible that my reading of the novel was atypically less focused on the elements of racism within it, or that the interviews I found were just skewed that way whereas other broader ones I didn’t stumble across in my cursory google.
But to me, it seems more likely that this is a case of – anything written by a black writer with black characters cannot be a universal story about addiction or depression, but a black story about blackness.
There’s an inclination to always ask of a piece of art – “what’s it about?” And when it’s written by a writer of colour, the answer from a white lens inevitably is that it is about race. But work by white writers can be about homelessness, addiction, community, grief, climate change, body image, male violence… but never about whiteness.
I was talking to S this holiday about what it was like to grow up consuming only white stories. The entire world of ambition, of imagination, of promise, of life itself that was presented to me in TV, in books, in films was all white. So if life appeared to only happen to white people, and I was brown, it felt growing up like I was a spectator to other people’s lives, not a participant. I still often feel like a spectator, not a participant a lot of the time.
For so long, whiteness has been invisible, ubiquitous. While colour screams loudly about its otherness.
I wonder what stories I’d write if I were a white writer, without both the label and the lens of my brownness. Perhaps critics wouldn’t grumble about my work being too issue packed, because I wouldn’t feel compelled to include people of colour and the complexity of their lives. Perhaps it would be easier to write the play I’ve been working on for years about body image, because I wouldn’t have to consider white gaze and skin colour, as well as the male gaze when it comes to women’s bodies. Is this another play that will be too issue packed for critics? I get the need for a salient issue in any piece of work, but it just pisses me off that writers of colour are always lumped with this additional “issue” whether they ask for it or not, whether the work warrants it or not. It makes everything doubly hard, and the juggle of that is frankly exhausting. And in truth, it is impossible to separate a writer’s lens from the issues they write about. Yaa Gyaasi’s novel is an intricate knitting together of all of what it means to be that specific character, and in being so it is also deeply relatable, universal even – if you choose to connect to it in that way.
It’s time whiteness was seen as a lens in its own right, and black and brown stories as universal. If you can’t see blackness and brownness as universal experiences, the problem lies with you – a shortcoming, a failure of your empathy.
An update from Thursday / blog day –
So after I wrote the above, S and I got dressed for dinner and went to sit on our balcony, overlooking our hotel and the bay beyond for a drink in the late afternoon sun. She made a toast and started in with a very moving spiel, which is now all a blur, because the next thing I know, S was on her knee and holding out a ring and asking me to marry her. My head was spinning and time pretty much stopped – I was totally taken by surprise.
I had proposed to her myself a while ago, and she’d said yes, so we were already engaged, and a reciprocal proposal was something I’d just never considered. I cried, a lot. Several times. With all the gay brown shame I’ve been carting around all my life, I don’t think I ever expected this, and certainly didn’t feel deserving of it. But it was pretty special to take a moment to realise how loved I am. I obviously said yes!
I add this here not to gloat or over-share, but because it’s important to me to mark how profoundly happy it is possible to be, most certainly all the richer for the moments of lowness and despair this year has seen. I’m reminded of the postcard quote I’ve always loved from a poem by Kahlil Gibran: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Well, I’m overflowing with it today.