Hello,
Hope you are having a good week. I’ve been thinking a lot about grieving this year. What we are collectively experiencing has definitely pushed me towards more personal stories of grieving.
The last couple of weeks I sent my newsletter on Sunday on account of busy weeks. My writing head space for these letters was mostly taken up by Amy’s At The Bottom Of Everything substack, which arrives in my inbox at the end of the week. I’ve mentioned Amy’s letter in my first one to you and would like to mention it again because of the attention her writing demands. I surrender myself to it every Sunday and a part of me understands that what I’m reading is rare and to be lauded. I’m struck by Amy’s generosity, her self-awareness and her undoubted skills as a writer. In addition to the letters, she has started posting Mind Marginalia, where you can listen to each letter read in her voice.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is worth mentioning here as well as two brilliant online pieces I read in the last couple of months on loss: one of a beloved and another of a beloved father. Jesmyn Ward’s On Witness and Respair in Vanity Fair is a powerful piece and I think about it whenever I hear differing thoughts about the pandemic from various people as they plan and unplan their December. The other is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief in the New Yorker on losing her father and being unable to attend his funeral because of the pandemic.
Earlier in the year I read Jayson Greene’s Once More We Saw Stars. Greene’s two-year-old daughter was killed in a freak accident in New York on her day out with her maternal grandmother. I paused a while after typing that sentence, not sure how best to proceed in describing this book which I think is really really good. Another one is Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, grieving the death of her mother to domestic violence when Natasha was nineteen years old.
Unrelated to grief, a book I recently read but couldn’t quite figure out how best to talk about is Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. The New York Times named it one of ten best books of 2020. There’s no doubt it’s a great book; precise, striking and magnificently imagined, playing deftly with form. But there were parts in the book that didn’t sit well with me, from a religious point of view. And that too was explored in the book. Previously, I would have stopped reading but something about Akhtar’s writing compelled me to keep going. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. He addresses this in a podcast, excerpted below:
Ayad Akhtar’s new novel, “Homeland Elegies,” invites immediate questions about that word, “novel.” The book draws on deeply autobiographical details, including Akhtar’s relationship with his father, to address issues about what it means these days to be an American, and in particular what it means to be Muslim-American.
Akhtar talks about why he decided to write the book as a novel, and whether making it fiction will mean he gets less criticism for some of the complex things he writes about Islam.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I feel that what I’m saying in the book, while complicated for some to hear — and I had been advised by those close to me in some cases to take out some of those sections, and of course, I can’t, I won’t — I would like to think that I have some idea of what the line is, and that I’m not stepping on that line, yet,” Akhtar says. “I think one of the jobs of an artist is to question the sort of prevailing agreements that the societies that they live in come to, and I’d like to think that the book is at least participating in that process, in some way.”
The last sentence in particular has stayed with me. I think it’s good to know where our lines are and what would constitute as crossing them. I must say, I think for me this book crosses it but I would still fight for its right to exist. I wonder if I was inclined to type that last sentence to clarify that I’m not one of ‘those’ Muslims. I’ve been watching in horror the policies taking shape in France and the general Islamophobia prevalent in this part of the world. I’m thinking about it but I don’t have anything intelligent to share on the subject just yet. Instead, I would like to mention a book I’m looking forward to reading. It’s an anthology published by Manchester University Press titled I Refuse to Condemn by Dr. Asim Qureshi. Publisher’s description below:
In times of heightened national security, scholars and activists from the communities under suspicion often attempt to alert the public to the more complex stories behind the headlines. But when they raise questions about the government, military and police policy, these individuals are routinely shut down and accused of being terrorist sympathisers or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is immense pressure to condemn what society at large fears. This collection explains how the expectation to condemn has emerged, tracking it against the normalisation of racism, and explores how writers manage to subvert expectations as part of their commitment to anti-racism.
I’m still working through Grace Paley’s short story collection. The stories are insightful and really helping me with my own writing. I’m not writing at the moment, but am working around it, filling in my notebook with details, observations, dreams and plot ideas every day. I’ve been told this counts as writing too and I’m holding on to that for now.
I’ve developed a great liking for short stories recently and have had this Sarah Hall short story bookmarked for weeks. I look forward to reading it. Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin are two of my favourite collections.
It’s a difficult time, most of us are grieving someone or something. I wish you solace, peace and respite as we rush towards holiday season.
Zeba
Reading your newsletters makes me slow down at whatever point of day I'm reading it, thanks for sharing! Speaking of short story collections, have you read How to Pronounce Knife? Would recommend if you haven't already <3