On the Stories We Read

and what we tell ourselves about them

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During an anti-oppression workshop I was facilitating this week, we asked participants a series of questions not dissimilar to those on the ‘invisible knapsack of privilege’ essay written by Peggy McIntosh in 1988. These are prompts designed for participants to reflect on the unearned advantages they may have benefited from throughout their lives, such as ‘I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my race,’ or ‘I can go to the theater without considering how I will get into the building or to my seat.’

I’d heard the lines before, but this time one struck me with a particular sensation, like noticing the colour of your neighbour’s front door for the first time.

‘I grew up in a house with over 30 books.’

I found myself raising my hand while considering the statement. Thirty books, I thought, reflecting on the yearly IKEA trips to purchase new modular bookshelves for my childhood home. That’s not even that many.

In the two decades I had lived with my parents, I had never thought to count the books stacked up in the living room; my father’s engineering tomes and my mother’s study materials, treatises on politics and economics and children’s books in Arabic and English combined. Not once had I considered the value might be in their quantity. Even if I had counted them, I wondered, would I include the tens of books borrowed fortnightly from the library? I must have read hundreds of titles from the local council, because buying new books was a luxury we couldn’t afford, save for on the annual trip to the Lifeline Bookfest. I would stock up on Enid Blyton editions and discover new authors as I wandered around the magical hall for hours, grazing my fingertips over tens of thousands of books, old and new, story sold by the box and kilo.

What would my life have been like, if I had no books in my home? What did it mean, to take my literacy for granted?

img via Lifeline Bookfest

When I was a child, I read for escape. I threw myself into the worlds of dragons and knights and far away planets as a way of imagining a different reality. I don’t believe I was consciously looking for inspiration, or felt that the world I inhabited was small, but I was curious. I imagined myself in each one of these characters, placing myself in the shoes of a young magical boy as easily as an adventurous rabbit or a tall, waify elf. I did not expect to be reflected in the books I read so much as entertained, entranced, transported.

It was all fantasy, sci-fi and teenage fiction stuff until I hit university and my mother told me to get my act together. It was time for my reading to be ‘productive’, to ‘add value’, to be non-fiction, serious, worthy. The message took a few years to sink in, but soon I spent my reading time learning rather than indulgence. I read to be informed, challenged, politicised. In hindsight, I’m not sure I did that much reading at all; I fell into the almost half of 16-24 year olds who do not read in their free time¹. This period in my life also coincided with the rise of social media, blogs, eventually streaming, meaning there was far more competing for my attention and for my time. I had become a lapsed reader, one who had a history with books and counted them as an important part of my upbringing, but I wasn’t ‘practicing’, per se. It wasn’t until I began my residency in Paris in 2021 that I began to re-engage with fiction in an intentional manner.

It’s funny, you know. Despite loving books, I never, not once, considered writing them. Why is that? Why did I not think it was possible? Why did I not even think to think it was a possibility?

Authors were unknown unknowns. I could more easily imagine the path to being a nuclear physicist than I could someone who wrote books, or tv. Even training for the Olympics would have been more conceivable; I went to school with at least three Olympians, and my younger brother was a talented enough runner that he was in with a real shot.

But an author?

(I literally laughed as I typed that sentence, how amusing).

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have the anxiety around writing that I once did. I’m five books in, Alhamdulilah, so not referring to myself as a writer would be borderline offensive. No, I’m quite comfortable talking about my relationship to writing now. What I do find interesting is that despite growing up around books, despite being a reader, it did not once occur to me to consider this path, until it came knocking on my door with the insistence of a Hollywood SWAT team. Why is that? How was the ‘story’ about who I was or what I was meant to be so strong that it crowded out so many other possibilities?

Perhaps what I really want to know is, are there stories I am telling myself now that are limiting my possibilities?

How do I go about re-writing them?

Today, I live in a house with far more than 30 books, Alhamdulilah. Hardly any of the books I own would have been on my bookshelf as a child, and I cannot decide if that is a betrayal of my upbringing or a wonderful evolution. These books, most of which I have read, tell their own story - of what I am interested in, what I have explored, what I care about. There are far fewer books on technical matters than I would like to admit, most of my engineering texts are packed up in a box somewhere in the house I grew up in. I wonder why I feel like my books need to tell a story about me at all. Did my parents expect their shelves to reflect their personality?

Dear reader, now, I turn to you: What is your relationship to reading? Has it changed over time? What do you look for in the books that you read? How do they related to the stories you tell yourself?

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1. Listen: Street Rap Sudan 249

Some incredible street rap from Sudanese artists, my favourite section begins at 1:50min.

2. Watch: Supa Team 4

While everyone is talking about Blue Eye Samurai, I’m going for something a little softer. This is Netflix’s first African animation, and it’s fun, wholesome and full of joy.

3. Read: Samad Akrach will not let the dead be forgotten

A feature on Samad Akrach, a former care worker who performs funeral rites for the most vulnerable of the Muslim diaspora in France. This story reminded me of Antigone, the tragedy about a woman going to the ends of the earth to bury her brother. When there is no dignity in life, dignity in death feels all the more important.

But the dignity that comes from fulfilling an obligation that rests collectively on all Muslims — that’s a lot. You wash your dead is the rule. You shroud your brothers and sisters.

Akrach, a regular speaker at interfaith events, views his work in the frame of a universal humanity. We all deserve dignified “after-death care”, he told me, in line with our beliefs — or lack of them. Plus, he had spotted a gap. “There are plenty of charities for the living,” said Virginie, his wife, with whom he has a three-year-old daughter. “But not for the dead.”

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Until next week inshallah,

Yassmin

1. In England, 31% of adults don't read in their free time, rising to 46% of young people (aged 16 to 24). While this a statistic from England, I wouldn’t think it’s too dissimilar to Australia. https://readingagency.org.uk/about/impact/002-reading-facts-1/