What Do You Write to Resist?

From Writer Unboxed:

I’m reading an essay by Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet and professor, called “Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?” In his essay, Refaat recounts the times he told stories to his young children during the war of 2008-09 while sheltering them in the part of his house least likely to be hit by a stray missile.

“My stories were both an end and a means,” he writes. “As I told stories to my children to distract, soothe, and educate them, I felt very close to my mother and to my grandparents.” The stories he told his children were the same stories his own mother told him, or variations on them; he sometimes starred his children as the “heroes or saviors.”

For a while, when I was a young child plagued by insomnia and anxiety, my own mother invented stories for me before bed. I was usually the hero or savior of these tales, often saving my classmates or talking animal friends from danger. As I grew into a young person still plagued by insomnia and anxiety, I began to tell myself stories to get to sleep. These stories kept me from ruminating on distressing thoughts and turning every creak or gust of wind into an intruder coming to hurt me. They kept me safe.

Storytelling is an act of resistance. For child-me, far removed from the threat of stray missiles striking my bedroom, the stories helped me resist a different sort of fear.

I chose to say “storytelling” over “writing”—even though we are Writer Unboxed—because oral storytelling is equally a form of resistance. I’m thinking of the drifters of Fahrenheit 451 memorizing books to thwart the book-burning firemen, of course, but also oral storytelling evolving in tandem with human language, long before the written word; I’m thinking of the preservation of oral storytelling traditions among Indigenous cultures despite outside pressure to commit them to paper. Oral and written stories each have unique positive qualities. They are also complementary, and both are valid modalities.

We often think of resistance in its bodily form: taking up arms, throwing stones at oncoming tanks, sitting at lunch counters, chaining ourselves to trees marked for destruction. We might also consider famous works of resistance literature, such as The Grapes of Wrath, Maus, or Beloved.

Sometimes the act of speaking alone is resistance: a parent telling stories to comfort their children, or an Indigenous person speaking their own language.

While she is not always presented as a resistance fighter, Anne Frank’s diary is probably one of the greatest examples of writing as an act of resistance. Through its fame, The Diary of a Young Girl by itself preserved the memory of one of the many families partially or completely annihilated during the Holocaust.

And I don’t want to erase Anne’s own conscious resistance: in 1944, she started rewriting her diary, preparing it for publication in response to the Dutch government-in-exile’s request that individuals document the occupation. Fifteen-year-old Anne knew exactly what she was doing: standing up to attempted elimination by asserting unequivocally that she had lived.

At its most basic, we could look at writing and storytelling as resistance against death itself (rage against the dying of the light, and all that). But I don’t mean to say that every story we tell has to have some huge, noble meaning or brave moralistic stance—I’d even argue that the silly, light stories told for fun and entertainment are just as important as documenting the attempted elimination of one’s race or religion, but that’s probably a different post.

All of us, by writing, even if our work only reaches a small circle of readers, are asserting that we are here, leaving something of ourselves that has the potential to survive even after we’re gone.

“Writing is a testimony,” Refaat Alareer writes, “a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world.”

Those stories my mother told me and the ones I later told myself will never reach a global audience. But they helped me communicate with myself, to resist the anxiety and frustration of insomnia, to live without constant fear. Writing does not have to be for an audience to be resistance. As a child, I often had to keep quiet during the daytime, to minimize the noise of my play, to accommodate my disabled father’s disrupted sleep schedule. Writing became a way for me to use my voice. I write to resist my own silencing.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed