What writing and activism have in common

Strangely, more than I thought!

I’ve been involved in change-making movements since I was a child.

from my first day at school, in 1995? 1996? Ya rab, I’ve reached the age where I no longer remember when I began school.

The causes were not always strictly political, in fact, they often weren’t: they were mostly grassroots activities, organising at the most local of levels, attempts at improving the lives of our families, communities, those back home. Volunteering at the Sudanese community organisation, at the local school, at the local mosque. The 40 hour famine (!!). I took my first set of minutes for an organisation at the age of 12, became secretary at 13, did a speech at a protest at 15, started my own organisation at 16. Organising, campaigning, protesting - these threads formed the warp and weft of my adolesence, wove a sturdy foundation for the decades of agitating and advocacy to come.

Interestingly though, I never considered doing said work as a career. I had engineering, then I had writing, and while this work - sometimes called activism, sometimes called advoacy, sometimes called organising - was always part of my life, steady as a heartbeat, I shied away from wanting to make it my ‘job’.

I’m not sure why I decided to eschew the professionalising of my social justice work. It certainly isn’t a standard I expect of others; I encourage friends and comrades to find ways to be compensated for their efforts, to make the work sustainable. A generous interpretation might say choosing to remain a volunteer allows for a sense of freedom, flexibility, and independence. A more critical reading my wonder if I am protecting myself from the brutality of ill-perception. Because in the world of good intentions, things get tricky when money is involved.

I think about my parents: in all their decades of service, they would have never considered payment for their community work. Not only did they consider it gauche (in the Sudanese context, financial compensation for helping each other was strictly refused), but being paid for such work carried a whiff of… insincerity. Ulterior motive, even. In the community, if you were being paid for doing ‘good work’, it would come with the suspicion that perhaps you were only doing it to profit, to benefit, because you were selfish.

Now, of course, you and I both know that is not always the case. If one dedicates their life to a cause, they have to somehow earn money to live! But ironically, although we might be working towards justice, so many of the movements themselves struggle with the concept. It is not fair that compensation for activism and advocacy has the potential to taint one’s integrity. It is far from just. And yet, here we are.

But in the same way I eschewed payment for my ‘change-making’, for many years, I did the same with my writing. I did not consider it a vocation, did not think it could ever pay the bills (it still doesn’t, but that’s by the by).

In recent years though, that changed. I decided to take my writing more seriously, to consider it my vocation as much as I once did engineering (oof - even while typing that sentence, my heart skipped a beat). It is not a straightforward path by any stretch of the imagination; indeed, the desire to have a writing career is no guarantee of one. However, I have come to believe that my years of advocacy and organising and campaigning have taught me skills vital to pursuing a career in the arts. Such as…

1. Focusing on process over outcome

If I only enjoyed writing when I ‘achieved’ the desired outcome - launched a book, sold a show, produced a play - I would be facing a lifetime of misery. The majority of one’s time as a working writer is in the process: the drafting, the redrafting, the thinking, the mulling, the reading, the considering, the self critique, the despair. The process. The process is not something to get through, it is the thing. Similarly with change-making, the process itself is part of the transformation. Of course, the passing of a bill, or the launch of a paper, or the closing of a factory are wins, but the wins themselves do not constitute the majority of what activism is. It’s the meetings, and the minutes and the chasing people up and the fundraising and the conversations and the debates and the frustrations and the organising of it all. Organising is a verb after all, not a noun.

Ensuring you find a way to enjoy the process, in writing or in organising, is vital to a long life on that path.

2. Developing an intimate relationship with rejection

It’s cliché to talk about rejection, but honestly, this is something we can’t talk about enough! Even this week, the creator of Giri/Haji and numerous other TV shows, was lamenting about it in a Guardian interview.

“In those environments, the treatment of writers is very weird. You feel like an antelope walking through a pack of lions – they are just desperate to take you down.”

Folks assume because I’ve published five books (Alhamdulilah), I’ve got it made. Except, the last book I tried to sell died on submission, and I’ve already recieved a couple of rejections for the adult novel I’m currently shopping. Does it suck? Sure! Writing books for no money that never sell is not what I thought I’d be spending my life on, genuinely. But…it’s also fine. It’s part of what I signed up for, really.

The same is true of change-making. Will we win every campaign? Will we change every mind? Will we stop every war? Unfortunately, devastatingly, not. But we do not know which campaign, or book, or ambition will win out. There are an infinite number of possibilities, and for me, also Allah’s will. Only one thing is for sure - we will never win the battles we do not fight, never publish the works we have not written. We cannot let the very real risk of failure stop us from trying.

3. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty

If I wanted certainty in my path, I would have stayed an engineer. It is a career built around certainties, around minimising risks and objective, calculated solutions. Writing is the opposite. It is all risk, all subjective, all uncertain. I have had to rewire my brain to become comfortable with that, as I have with every social justice movement I have been involved in, or allied with. Certainty does not exist, when humans are involved. Even when there is change, the outcome can never be guaranteed. But that’s… okay. It’s okay to not know if my writing is good, it’s okay to not know when Sudan will get a civilian government. We are only human, after all. It’s okay to not know, and continue to step forward. As I said in a previous substack:

Solutions will ‘emerge’, but they can only do so if we continue to take steps forward, if the players continue to play.

Onwards, inshallah.

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Recommendations this week include a song, a short read, and a light show.

1. Scary, by some British Yute.

Why has this song been stuck in my head all week? I duno, but the mandem fighting demons…

2. How the Israel-Palestine war is impacting the Horn of Africa

A short read by Alex De Waal who writes a lot about Sudan, looking at the broader implications of what is happening in Palestine.

The most obvious impact is that the Israel-Palestine war has legitimized and invigorated protest across the wider region. Hamas showed that Israel was not invincible, and Palestine would no longer be invisible. Many in the Arab street — and Muslims more widely — are ready to overlook Hamas’s atrocious record as a public authority and its embrace of terror, because it dared stand up to Israel, America, and Europe.

Hamas’s boldness has given a shot in the arm to Islamists, such as Somalia’s al-Shabaab. As the African Union peacekeeping operation in Somalia draws down, al-Shabaab remains a threat— and will likely be emboldened to intensify its operations both in Somalia and neighboring Kenya.

3. The Buccaneers

If you like Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, The Gilded Age, and other escapist period shows, you might enjoy Apple TV’s newest offering, The Buccaneers. Based on an unpublished Edith Wharton novel (I now feel the ‘unpublished novel’ thing so deeply, lol), it’s about a group of young American women from wealthy families, travelling over to the UK to find aristocratic husbands. Secrets, drama, the usual, ensue. It’s fun, and doesn’t end quite how you expect it… (Apple TV provided me the episodes ahead of release for no payment, just an honest review).

Enjoy!

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Thank you, as always for reading and supporting my work. Big shout out to this week’s newest paid subscribers: Heather, Kerrie and Asifa! As always, I am eternally grateful. As a freelancer of almost a decade, income from this newsletter makes the world of difference, and every little bit counts. If you feel like you have the capacity to support my work, do consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Until next week inshallah.

Yassmin