Why I Write (also 

Draw)

I - not being mainstream and centre stage, lacking the privileges of maleness and
Whiteness, find that a lacuna of meaning exists in societal discourse

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

There always was a deluge of messages that I was wrong for speaking out about what I saw
and experienced. From age 11 or so, I was told to be quiet. White liberalism seemed to offer
refuge from the Muslim patriarchy, but I inadvertently caused outrage by writing my
philosophy dissertation as a conversation centring Sojourner Truth, who interrogates the big
wigs of Western philosophy and academia. The external examiners threatened me with
failure for this audacity and thus I learnt how short is the leash for women of colour to speak
our truths. 

Things were even worse when I began teaching in colleges of further education in the Uk.
Eventually, the barrage of pressures, the onslaught of attacks, created the desired effect. 

 I became ill. 

I literally couldn’t speak, instead of speaking I am wheezing, barely above a whisper. I have
developed asthma. 

There were no ears to hear me anyway. But I needed to keep a record of what was going on.
The solicitor and the union rep told me to write daily. 

“We need a chronology of events,” they both said. 

Imagine my shock, dear Reader  — after four disciplinaries (that were each withdrawn after
my students and their communities defended me) I had then raised a grievance at the college
where I taught. Both of the union reps called me the evening before the grievance hearing, to
say they were unable to attend. I was so shocked, I couldn’t reply. 

Betrayal leads to shock. And then we are left with the job of making sense of it all. 

That’s how my writing began. That, and writing short plays for my students, learning
English. I wrote poems too, and illustrated them, simply because the stuff written by white
middle class people was boring and too often, quite irrelevant to their life experiences. 

I write also to make sense of my family of origin, in which I refused to comply with the roles
expected of me. Though devalued as a daughter, I worked harder than the Golden Child son,
in the family business, but all my life I have been treated like a naughty child; the daughter
who refused marriage and motherhood both.

Thus my writing is in the long-standing tradition of testimony, akin to ‘Azalea’, or ‘Incidents

in the Life of a Slave Girl’. 

It was my elderly father, just before he passed away who murmured in some distress, ‘They
have buried her alive’. 

I write to resurrect the truth of mySelf, my actions and intentions from the grave of slanders
and the silent treatment which was indeed designed to leave me feeling buried alive, snuffed
out in a demeaning irrelevance and suffocated.

Completing the articulation, in descriptive and analytical form, of various key events in my
life, would be my criterion of success, for that will expose societal-wide lies, of the nature
that George Orwell describes.