On Writing

Reading a good book triggers a religious experience for me. Between the pages, the sentences, the words I glimpse eternity as time stands still. Hours become minutes and I am suspended in the hereafter.

I love reading fiction. I love the idea of limitless interpretations when reading a good novel. I love the confusion and the tension created by the author, intentionally or unintentionally. I think of fiction as this space where the author becomes the character, the character becomes the reader, and the reader becomes both the author and the character. This idea fascinates me. But it’s also tiring.

I’ve always been intrigued by the realm of real experience, be it external or internal. I love reading real, raw stories of people that’s why I find solace in personal essays. I like reading personal essays where the author unfurls the personal, the intimate, the unspeakable. Essays in which the author, speaking in the first-person voice, challenges the unnarratability, dares to break the internal silence and. What I love most about personal essays is that they tap into, in one way or another, the act of writing.

I have been preoccupied with this act a lot lately. Now that I am thinking about it, I have been preoccupied with it for the last four years. My whole dissertation was about women writing their wounds. There are those who write to find out what they are thinking, like Joan Didion. There are those who write to understand the interconnection between language, the world, and the self like Zadie Smith. But both Zadie and Joan agreed that the most important part of writing is how sentences and words are arranged and the effect they create on the reader.

I have never thought about it that way actually. The arrangement of sentences and words. Their effects on the reader. Yet whenever I write this letter, that’s exactly what I do. Arrange words and sentences. Edit and delete and add some more. Trying to tell you, my reader, what I feel, what I think, what I see. This is exactly what Didion meant by saying:

“writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind … It’s an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

Zadie wrote something similar:

“[writing in] the first person opens up a possibility of telling someone a true lie: let me tell you what happened to me.”

After reading Joan Didion and Zadie Smith’s essays on writing, or the act of writing, and as someone whose English is not her first language (nor second by the way) I felt the urge to not only explore with you why I write but also why I write in English.

When I told my family that I am starting a newsletter, they asked whether it was going to be written in Arabic or French, or English. I answered it was going to be in English and then it hit me: I had to wait for a third language to fully express myself. To voice my thoughts.

Algeria is a francophone country. Arabic and French are the mediums of communication. Why then do I write in English? The urge to justify myself to others feels like a validation of my own insecurity. I still struggle with words because Buthaina who is writing here and Buthaina who talks to her partner and parents are two different people. Two languages, two attitudes, two sets of minds and emotions. I appreciate Edgar Allan Poe’s poems the same way I treasure Algerian buqalah poetry. But the majority of my education and experience as an adult has been in English. So when I want to contemplate, question, and write about anything really, English is the language that enables me to do so.

I wish there were more Algerian essayists who write about similar experiences. Someone to whom I can relate. Someone who is struggling the same way I am struggling. Maybe that’s why I am writing these letters. Writing in the first-person isn’t meant to entertain or create a sort of escapism from reality, I think. I am writing these letters not only for you but for myself as well, for the confused, the lost, the alien parts of myself. Zadie Smith described it better when she said:

“that part of me (autobiographical part) is always writing backward to the confused brown girl I once was, providing the books I wished back then that I could read.”

What is my purpose in writing all of this? If writing allows readers to see what the writer is seeing, to feel what the writer is feeling, connect with what the writer experiences, then my writings are the images and sounds of everything I encounter and experience. Some of those writings are rooted in the personal, and some of them are whims and complaints and whatnot.

Writing in English feels sometimes like a personal failure because I can’t fully express myself in my native language. But also writing in English feels like a political statement about this failure. Every word, every sentence that I have arranged here feels like an attempt to say, to articulate, to explain to understand the me who is here, the me who is in between.