Why on earth should we create art?

An engineer's dilemma

A scream of joy, or confusion? Nobody will ever know.

I’ve been a full time working writer since about 2018. My first book came out in March 2016, while I was still employed as an engineer. A few months later, I transitioned to freelance, and I haven’t taken a salary since.

It dawned on me recently that I’ve been a writer/broadcaster/speaker/cultural worker for double the amount of time I worked as an engineer. Double! But I only began to introduce myself as a writer two years ago. I’ve been doing this work longer than I’ve been doing anything else, yet a part of me still feels like this path is completely foolish.

Why do it if you think it’s foolish? you might be asking. Gurl, I wonder the same damn thing, every day of the week.

There is nothing about the path of being a writer, artist or freelancer that is stable, secure or certain. If you’ve read my substack before, you know this is well worn territory. Even today, when young women ask what I recommend they study, despite the male dominance, despite the difficulty, despite the likelihood they will leave the industry, I still recommend engineering. A mechanical engineering degree was one of most rewarding things I have ever done. Sure, I graduated one of seven women in a class of 300. Sure, I was never taught by a woman. Sure, those four years were a form of educational punishment - no (halal) party time for little me! But the problem solving it taught me, the rigour I learnt and frameworks I absorbed during those formative years, shaped me in a way I’m grateful for. As my father often says: Once an engineer, always an engineer.

Right?

I romanticise the socks off my previous career. I will argue the sciences over the humanities, any day of the week. Ask me anything even vaguely engineering related and I will wax lyrical about the fun I had, fixing problems and chatting shit and getting grime under my fingernails in the workshop. It’s true, of course. I had a hell of a time, and so many adventures. But why then, do I not go back? Why then, do I continue on the path of this foolishness, writing books and TV shows and plays, traipsing around the world with nothing but my breath and a dream?

(Okay fine, my baggage is often always full to the brim incredibly overweight, but let’s roll with it, yeh?).

I was thinking about this as I watched a screening of the recent Sudanese film, Goodbye Julia. If you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, I highly recommend.

Set in the years between the formal end of Sudan’s civil war, and the vote by South Sudanese to separate from the North, the film excavates the dynamics between two women, one from either world. I won’t taint the watching experience by sharing much more, but suffice to say: I was profoundly moved, confronted by the reality of a world I know well, and am implicated in, mirrored so sharply on the big screen. I thought about how I, as Arab Sudanese, am complicit in the violence against non-Arab Sudanese, about how I, as an African born Muslim woman can be one who is both oppressed and oppressor, depending on the context, the landscape, the positionality. It brought home the relationality of injustice, of how no identity with respect to power is fixed, of how we must stay vigilant, lest we do to others what has been done to us.

I guess that’s why they call it Art, huh?

The director, Mohamed Kordofani, also used to be an engineer. An aviation one at that, so we hail from similar academic and professional worlds. I have yet to ask him what prompted his shift to the precarious world of art, but I wonder. Will his answer echo my own? Will it be this unknowable pull, this God-given sense that this is the work one is meant to be doing?

When folks ask me why I write, I tell them I tried my hardest not to. I studied mechanical engineering for crying out loud, I did the most to run as far away from words as I could. But words wouldn’t leave me alone.

I wish it were different. I wish I could walk away from it all, it would certainly make life a lot easier. I wish I could accept that engineering role, in whatever company would have me, and sink back into the ordered world of spreadsheets and equations, swim in a sea where everything adds up, everything makes sense. Gosh, wouldn’t that be nice?

But I don’t, and I cannot tell you why. That in itself, for a creature trained in rationality like me, is mind-blowing. How can I not really have an answer for why I do what I do? I could tell you it’s because of the impact art has on the world, for the flexibility, for the love of it all. I can point to Goodbye Julia, how it rendered a complex, nuanced landscape into a work of beauty, forcing us to praise the very text we are challenged by. I can talk about arts role in sparking revolutions, inspiring, and captivating.

None of those explanations quite fit the bill.

I write despite all evidence that would encourage me to do otherwise. I write because it feels like I must. I write because words, like bridges and other physical things I can also design, live beyond us, can travel the world, cross borders, eschew man-made divisions, plant themselves as seeds, and grow into forests far beyond anything I could have imagined. I write in spite of it not making any sense. Subhanallah.

I’m not sure I always felt this way. I began to write as a practice in 2012, blogging about the protests in Sudan. I continued while I was working on the rigs, and the rest is sort of history. If you’d asked me how I felt about writing then, I would have answered differently. It was a hobby, a nice to have, not the entire shape of my world.

So, I wonder. Will I wake up one day, fallen out of love with writing? Is this a love affair, heady and passionate, that will one day end, leaving me distraught and broken in its wake?

I have no idea. But I guess it means I have to make the most of it while I can, because who knows what the future holds…

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This week’s recommendations are all works of culture or art related to Palestine and Gaza. The genocide continues, unabated. Ya rab!

1. After October 7th

A transcript of a conversation between Israeli and Palestinian activists, recorded on YouTube on October 24th. The dialogue offers a nuanced perspective from the ground, as folks grapple with the impossibility of their situations.

The speakers are Sally Abed, a Palestinian peace activist and leader of Standing Together, the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel, based in Haifa; Uri Weltmann, a founding member of and national field organizer for Standing Together, based in Tel Aviv; Kefah Abukhdeir, a Palestinian American educator and activist, based in East Jerusalem and Atlanta; and Yael Berda, a sociologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former human rights lawyer involved with A Land for All.

2. Bayyaritna by Suha Shoman

A short film about an orchard, telling the story of the 151 acres Suha’s grandfather planted with orange, clementine, lemon and palm trees from 1929 in the Gaza area, before the existence of an isolated Gaza Strip. A slow moving, beautiful piece.

3. Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Hammad’s newest book looks at life in present day Palestine. I’m reading it ahead of the Amaliah Book Club I’m hosting, to be held in a couple of weeks! If you like this book, want to discuss with fellow Muslim women, and live in London, come join us on the 29th of November, inshallah.

Bonus piece of news: I have recorded my first ‘Good Chat’ podcast! An important conversation on the history of Tamil people and the Tamil genocide with my dear friend, Dhaksh Sooriya. I will upload that as soon as I’ve edited it, inshallah. The podcast will be another Substack experiment, I hope you enjoy!

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Thank you, as always for reading and supporting my work. Big shout out to this week’s newest paid subscriber: Baha! 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.

In Case You Missed It:

I joined Pappy Orion and Gedeon Baleke, two Congolese community and political organisers, on an Instagram Live this week, to talk about what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and how people can help. We speak for about 40 minutes, so if you have the time, please check out the recording below.

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Until next time inshallah,

Yassmin