Hello,
What is our moral responsibility towards those around us? What do we owe our loved ones? Especially our parents, our children. I was nineteen when I first dared to question my right over my self. Until then I had no doubt that my life belonged to my parents, that the reason for my existence was to be in service of their hopes, dreams and desires. I was acutely aware of where they would like my life go and I did everything in my power to stay on that path. This involved killing every part of me that didn’t want to be on said path. But at what point do the parents’ desires stop and the child’s start? And what’s that severing like for a parent? How do they go from extending their self through their children and then being so unceremoniously cut off from a part of themselves?
These questions have been on my mind ever since I finished reading Leaving by Roxana Robinson. I had read the reviews so I was braced for an explosive ending, but nothing prepared me for the confusion, anger and sadness that burst forth as I read the last couple of pages. The story begins with a chance meetings between Warren and Sarah at the opera. They are both in their sixties and dated briefly in their twenties before a misunderstanding caused their paths to diverge. Sarah is divorced, Warren is unhappy in his marriage. Both have grown children leading their own independent lives. They feel they have performed their moral responsibility towards their children and now they are ready to give their relationship another chance, to fix the wrongs of their past. But Warren’s daughter won’t let her father leave her mother for his college sweetheart. She simply won’t allow it. The book unfurls the repercussions of this forbidding and left me asking what we owe those we call family. At what point does our moral responsibility for our loved ones’ happiness cease? Does it ever?
Over the last decade I’ve been trying to live a life of truth and am getting intimately aware of the highs and lows of this kind of existence. It’s something I’m exploring in my current draft and as part of these interests I’ve been following the work of writers who share a similar urge to reveal their truth, regardless of the repercussions. Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk are high on this list, closely following by Sarah Manguso, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Smith. A recent addition to this list is Emily Gould. I’m still reeling from the piece she wrote on The Lure of Divorce for The New York Magazine. The essay links to another, a review/profile of her husband’s memoir on being a father. This book is a departure from his usual writing, and it encroaches on her genre of writing, namely first person, personal, memoir. Talking about his book
Gould calls her husband “the Christopher Columbus of mommy blogging.”
What a thing to say about your partner’s new book and to say it publicly, to leave it somewhere for him to read, for everyone around him to read. It is honest, but is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it morally responsible? I’m not judging Gould, I’m only using her words to understand my own desire to say things as I see them, and the guilt, shame, self-loathing I feel when I find myself in situations where it doesn’t feel safe, right or kind to share my real thoughts. Coming from my community, to become a writer I had to cross the threshold from being seen as selfless to selfish. This was a difficult shift for me. But everything that my community saw as ‘good’ traits in a woman were exactly those that threatened to kill the writer in me (I think these are connected). To keep her alive I gave up my desire to please my family, to feel worthy of their love. Was this a morally responsible thing to do? Claire Dederer, in her essay for the Paris Review puts it plainly
There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
What does this selfishness mean? Is my moral responsibility towards myself or my community? If they are in conflict, who do I choose? Is it my choice? Also, why are they in conflict in the first place? And does being seen as selfish make one selfish? These questions were on my mind last night while celebrating the most beautiful soul I’ve the pleasure and privilege of knowing — Dr. Sanah Ahsan. We gathered to celebrate their first poetry collection I cannot be good until you say it. It’s a searingly honest, beautiful, profound collection. It made me laugh, it made me cry. It made me understand myself. It made me want to take responsibility for my hopes, dreams and desires. I can’t recommend it enough.
Last night, I listened closely when they were asked about the ethics of writing about others and how they make peace with it. They said that this can be achieved by honouring each person’s complexity. I’ll carry this with me as I go back to my draft, my life. They linked it to something Christina Sharpe said about ‘opacity as a technology of kindness’. I’m reading Ordinary Notes at the moment and the revelations are coming thick and fast. It’s a book that sits on my bedside table and it leaves me reflecting for longer than I spend reading Sharpe’s incisive, honest, courageous notes.
Another moment that’s stayed with me from last night is how the book launch was kickstarted by a guided meditation by Nova Reid focusing on our humanity, our fight for dignity, the extraordinary cruelty being unleashed on innocent people around the world right now and honouring those who came before us by making room for their fight alongside our own. It was such a comforting acknowledgement of the power of community. Sanah’s words have helped me at many times in my life, and one essay in particular was a guiding light for my flailing self when I most needed it. It’s titled Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance and if you are new to Sanah’s work then this is a great place to start. And if this is your first time on Too Little / Too Hard then I recommend you check out other essays on there, it’s a beautiful, healing space and I’ve found a lot of solace from reading their first two issues.
Most of us are carrying a heaviness ever since the awful attacks of October 7th. There is the pain of the loss of innocent life, and then there is the pain of watching how this loss is used to perpetuate a level of violence that is extraordinary in its scale. I’ve been struggling to make peace with how we let certain narratives become our truth, just because it’s easier to believe this narrative than dig deeper and confront our truth. The attack and the retaliation have created fissures in all our lives, and it’s brought us clarity as well as pain. And for some of us, even shame. I don’t have answers, I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said by people more qualified than me so say it. I just wanted to acknowledge the wound that has opened within us and which has been festering for months now. I found solace in the work and words of Jewish people who are being strong and honest in their pursuit of truth without falling for emotional, tribal narratives. I know from experience that this is very hard indeed. This shouldn’t have been their burden to carry, and yet here we are. If you are struggling to make sense of what’s happening, I recommend two episodes of Between the Cover podcast with Naomi Klein. The first episode focuses on her latest book Doppelganger and the second one foregrounds her Jewishness and her thoughts on the rhetoric around her identity. I highly recommend listening to both if you too are grappling with the confusion and unfairness of what’s unfolding. In response to the news, Klein has made two of the chapters from her book free to read on her website.
I also want to name Aaron Bushnell here. I don’t know if his self-immolation will move those who are creating this sense of despair and helpless in us. All I can do is pray for his soul. Rachel Connolly and Masha Gessen were able to give words where my language failed me.
It’s been a year since you received a letter from me. The last 12 months have been some of the most difficult ones I’ve lived through and it felt safer to write in my journal and work on my draft than to come on here. Like Sanah, I too am trying to find the line that crosses through truth and moral responsibility when writing nonfiction. There is so much guilt and shame around my desire to write, to share. Any conclusion I come to feels like a cop out. Sanah mentioned how writing is a gathering of our selves, that writing comes from a sticky, wounding place, that radical courage comes from baring our wounds. The first time I met Sanah (at an Arooj Aftab concert) they mentioned in passing how quick moving the wound is and this one sentence suddenly made my contradictory, confusing life make sense. They made me aware of the shape shifting nature of my wound, something I hadn’t taken into account while trying to pin down a single/‘official’ narrative of my life. There are many truths, and there are many sources to our wound.
I’m thinking of the wound today as a place of creation (as Sanah sees it) rather than something that needs to be erased. Wound as an opening and writing being an act of wrestling in the messiness of the wound and not glossing over it. I write to understand, to connect with others who are carrying a similar wound, to not feel so alone in myself. Anyway, all this to say, if you are still here, then I want to thank you for sticking around despite the long silence. I appreciate your presence, your willingness to see me for me, in all my sticky messiness.
Before I leave you, a few book recommendations:
Daughters of the Nile by Zahra Barri — an original, hilarious and deeply thought out story of three Egyptian women from one family navigating patriarchy, family expectations, sexual identity, secrets, revolutions, censorship and much more across three timelines. An assured, intelligent debut.
Namesake by N. S. Nuseibeh — I got to read an early copy last year and I stand by my cover quote: ‘Such a brave, insightful and important book. A collection of essays exploring the author's Palestinian, Arab, British, Muslim, female, academic and privileged identities through deep thinking and rigorous research while using an ancestor as her touchstone . . . I learned so much from this book’
Reason to be Happy by Kaushik Basu — An excellent book looking at the importance of rational thinking and understanding game theory. It’s the book that gave me a better understanding of moral responsibility and moral intention and how neither is enough to guarantee a morally good outcome.
The Eighth House by Linda Segtnan, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel — another nonfiction, following a mother trying to piece together the life and surroundings of a murdered girl. Haunting.
Here After by Amy Lin — a memoir of young widowhood. You might have read Amy’s beautiful newsletters. I read and loved them so I believed I knew what I was getting into, but the book surpasses all expectations and manages to surprise with every turn of the page. I don’t know how Lin did it. But I’m so grateful that she did.
Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly — one of the best novels I read last year. A great mix of humour and pathos, intelligent prose and wholesome characters.
Art by Yasmina Reza — a play. Beautiful, funny, very insightful on friendships, feelings, hurts and ego.
I’m going to stop here. This newsletter used to be my way of procrastinating from my book writing and I made a rule to not spend more than an hour on each letter and I’ve already run over! For now, wishing you a lovely Ramadan ahead. May you enjoy your spring. May all your prayers be answered, may humanity triumph, may our wounds heal. May you never forget that you aren’t alone in your pain, that you are loved.
Best,
Zeba