‘The Messiness of Our Aliveness’: A Conversation with Sanah Ahsan and Gargi Bhattacharyya

In this interview, poet, psychologist, and educator Sanah Ahsan, and sociologist, writer, and Professor of Anti/Post/Decolonial Theory and Praxis Gargi Bhattacharyya address the violence, inequality, and waste produced by racial capitalism, while also imagining modes of living otherwise. In recent work, both writers seek to embrace, in different ways, the ‘messiness of our aliveness’ (Ahsan), refusing the idea that there can be a non-implicated ‘clean subject’ (Bhattacharrya) under capitalism. They interrogate individualised notions of grief and heartbreak, considering how these affects emerge from uneven social conditions, but may also form sites of political community, action, and transformation. Maya Caspari, Wasafiri's Associate Editor, spoke with them in early July 2024.

Maya Caspari for Wasafiri: What brought you to your work?

Sanah Ahsan: In many ways, it's my own living that has brought me to the different threads of my work, particularly my work on grief, heartbreak, and madness: trying to make sense of madness as a young person in a constraining and oppressive mental health system; understanding madness as a conversation with the world; surviving the edges of structural violence in this particular body. I’ve turned to the page, and also to theory, as methods of tending to the entangled, communal wounds that take shape within me. It was this hurt that initially brought me to the psy disciplines. But there was further wounding to be encountered, in the White, Eurocentric, hyper-individualised, pathologising framework of pain. I often write into those spaces of disappointment, that space where there is something missing – where the pain, my own, and that of the ancestral histories we carry, is not being attended to – and I seek the writings that are already doing that, that are reclaiming life beyond the narrow confines of white psychology. It’s really an invitation to be a bit of a mess – for the messiness of our aliveness – an attempt to commune there.

Gargi Bhattacharyya: All the writing I do is to calm the noise in my head. I have a very noisy head. We’re often taught through formal education to order the noise in our head so that it looks like mastery when you spit it out. I identify with what you said about messiness. I’ve been writing about being willfully ridiculous as a political stance, acting and speaking in ways that are not about mastery, but rather about audacity or incompleteness, because I don’t think any of us can be complete in our understanding or in our pursuit of freedom on our own.

I love what you have said about messiness — how this might be part of a refusal to perform mastery. How do these concerns inform the choices you make when researching and writing?

SA: I think poetry lends itself to that messiness. It refuses the rules and regulations of prose; the idea that the sentence needs to end here, to make complete sense. It's much more akin to our living in its abstractness and the refusal of social order. And I've leant into that on the page. Poems can, in their form, manifest the complications we experience. Where I have felt hurt and grief is in attempts at neatness, the reduction into binaries: bad/good, boy/girl or villainy/victimhood. Making these kinds of categorisations of each other misses how all these things live within us. What I was really asking in I cannot be good until you say it was: how can we delight in that messy place? In the complication that encompasses all of us? Etymologically, the word ‘queer’ comes from ‘to twist’ — and twisting is something I was thinking about. What does that look like on the page? How can we twist in ways that creates spaciousness and agency? For me, as a Muslim, the twisting of the prayer mat to fit two queer bodies side by side in prayer, is a making of greater space; of a new world — and that is something I was leaning into poetically. How are we making more space for the fullness of our humanity?

GB: I don't make a big distinction between the kinds of writing I do. Alongside getting rid of noise, writing is also about the sensual pleasure of the rhythm in your head and in your mouth. Playing with language is a childish delight. Lots of my writing feels like self-soothing in this way. Now, looking back, I realise that I’ve always found it hard to stay in an academic line at all. Although I can say in the abstract, yes, there are these rules of academic writing, that has not ever been how I have written. Most of my writing is how I speak; not altogether jumbled, but not a fully formed argument. But I do try to write in a way which says: I can understand this. You can understand this. And if we understand these things, where might that take us to? People don’t often talk about musicality and academic writing, but I do think the pleasure of writing is in its musicality. I’ve hated it when people try to change the words to be tidier. It makes me think, you didn’t hear the tune.

SA: I've regularly heard references to the musicality of language in poetry spaces, but it's refreshing to hear you talk about it in the context of academic writing, which can often feel quite disembodied. It's a reminder of embodiment as a life-affirming practice, and how writing can enact a return to our collective body.

In the editorial to Wasafiri 118: Abolitions that this conversation accompanies, Farhaana Arefin and Dr. Abeera Khan discuss whether writing can offer a ‘tool in the orientation against abandonment’, with reference to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s ‘organised abandonment’. I wonder if that idea of ‘writing against abandonment’ resonates with how you understand your own work?

 SA: When I think of the word abandonment, the image that comes to mind immediately is the left-behind child. When they talk about organised abandonment it implies an abdication of responsibility — there is intent in that, which is difficult to assign to parenting. But the reason I start with that image is because it’s often the earliest conscious experience we have of a power-over relationship. And this is what happens on a large scale with organised unlove — the state is neglectful and violent in its rearing, which of course gets obscured by the cultural over-emphasis on motherhood and the nuclear family. Writing has been one mode of reparenting for me, a turning to the page for nurturing, stewardship, and for re-mothering. In Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ work, she remakes the word mothering as (m)othering – taking the other into one’s mouth – and writes of a mothering that transcends biology, home, or bloodlines, but is about raising new worlds, and is a practice of collective nurture and creating the conditions we need to move towards freedom.

This may be an overreach, but this is what writing has been to me in many ways — both the practice of it, but also the nurturing I have received from reading theorists like bell hooks, who taught me definitions of love that I wasn’t able to access in certain relationships, or immediate places in my life. Writing offers a different kind of raising and allows us to access the richness offered in these teachings — to consider what a different kind of loving praxis could be. So, when I think about writing against abandonment, I think of writing as a teaching of what it means to enact love in the face of so much lovelessness and domination. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the ineptitude of it in the face of great devastation and cruelty. We can turn to the page, but we also need to ask: What are we living? What is our practice? How are we bringing these words to life, in relationship and in commitment to each other?

I’m curious to hear Gargi’s thoughts on this, especially on the concept of ‘everyday geographies’ of parenting. How do you, as a parent, see that praxis as a mode of resistance to organised abandonment, if at all?

GB: My broader intellectual project is mapping how structures of violence emerge so that when people experience the affect of organised abandonment, they have some resources to see beyond their own life. I’m not entirely comfortable with ways of thinking that sit too much within ourselves because that is also part of the structure of violence, of organised abandonment. And that goes back to the institutional violence of psychiatry and psychology as well. The brokenness of the world is experienced as a violence to ourselves, which we then internalise as our own private experience. Part of the point of trying to become free together is to find ways to speak to each other, so that even when people feel violence of different kinds, they have ways to process it as a collective and structural experience. That is not an academic register, nor is it an affective register. It’s an analytic register.

One of the things I hope people take away from my work is resources to think about: how did that happen to me? Who did it? Who else is it happening to? How can I process that and do things which are not solipsistic, because the machine encourages solipsism? I just don’t think writing is the thing. Writing is a vehicle to do some other things together. Just like cooking is not a vehicle to be free, but we need to eat to get somewhere. We won’t unmake organised abandonment however well we write. We will remake it together through a set of practices. Writing might be one of the things that helps us find each other to get to those practices, but there isn't any way I, alone with my screen or page, can do that.

SA: Writing can’t refuse organised abandonment on a structural scale, but it might attend to abandonment in other ways — someone might find their way into liberatory work through that doorway …

GB: It’s a gateway drug. But liberation is the goal. Of course we have to survive on the way. I do understand that people take solace from writing, and that we need the whole range of ways of taking solace. But we also need a way of checking ourselves because solace can be its own kind of self-medication. Solace can become its own kind of violence. Like when people say: don’t talk to me about that any more. Solace is also sold to us by the machineries of violence. There has to be a balance between sharing resources of solace, because we must survive and make connections to each other, but at the same time having scepticism about the limits of solace in a broken world. Perhaps writing is one of the vehicles to see and help people hold those two simultaneously.

SA: Yes, writing can uphold a violent solace, deny the fullness of what needs to be felt and done, and what needs to be acted upon. But also – maybe I'm just trying to make the case for writing – it can be a kind of instruction. Not instruction as a violent impositional tool, but – speaking from my own experience of reading through theory, through the page – as a way of even coming to know what we mean by liberation. These are gateways, portals, cracks that invite us in – but also quite essential ones.

It’s interesting how you’re evoking different possibilities for writing. Perhaps the idea of ‘solace’ implies writing can be a retreat from the world and its material realities — a retreat that is sometimes necessary, sometimes dangerous. But then there’s also another sense of writing as material: something that potentially moves, that acts in the world?

SA: The word solace is interesting. Personally, I see writing more like disturbance, something which can stir trouble. It can be a discomforting illumination of what has been concealed or obfuscated, as well as a pathway to return to the body.

Some of the key writers we turn to for stewardship towards liberation, they make us feel. Audre Lorde is a writer who is explicitly instructive on how we must live towards freedom, but she also turns the heart and belly with her poeticism. She invites us to reinhabit the embodied place of full feeling and return to our aliveness. One of the projects of whiteness is dehumanisation, a devaluing of the body’s wisdom, and a kind of cartesian desensitisation. The less we feel our embodied emotional worlds, the less we are connected to our agency. The idea that freedom or liberation is any one thing – a fixed destination over there – is something I sometimes struggle with. It’s a messier practice and these different elements that Lorde and others write about help inform this practice of what it is to be free. Any human being within this world is trying to make a definition of freedom while being a breathing embodiment of violence. We can’t ever disentangle it entirely, so it’s hard to find an entirely pure sense of what liberation is.

GB: None of us is the clean subject. The urgency of doing liberation work can tip over in an instant into its own authoritarianism. An anti-fascism, which says: Evil people are out there. I'm gonna fight them is, although necessary, not sufficient, because fascism works by calling to all of us, and saying, we can give you solace in the face of your abandonment. We have to learn together, and writing is part of learning together, although we always need to remind ourselves that we don't only learn through writing — writing takes up so much institutional space, though it is still the very important portable tool humans have. There’s something important about how capitalism loves us to feel our feels, and even the most beautiful writing is recuperable into that. Feel your feels for capital. And we do need to feel our feels, but we also need not be subsumed into the emotional subject of capitalism, which is clearly also the emotional subject for genocide and what looks like a renewed wave of global militarism.

But I hear what you’re saying: writing can bridge the emotional and the analytic and give you tools in your own life to navigate it, which is I think the collective project. No single piece of writing does that. It’s also about how writing speaks to other writing. It introduces you to a room of resources, some of which might work for you, some of which might not. I hear what you say about the danger of being didactic: we're not saying, 'read this one manifesto and then you're done', but we do have a kind of hive mind of ways people have tried to survive, give solace to each other, find routes forward, challenge organised abandonment, build something else, fight, and many things between. And writing can be a way of recognising why you might want to know some of those things, what those things even are to know.

SA: The idea of feeling your feels for capital is interesting. I’m curious about whether we can ever feel ‘too much’. Does that truly serve the capitalist agenda? Capitalism deifies productivity, it demands a repeated denial of one’s emotional world, as well as the rich information it contains about our political world. Is it ever entirely escapable? How do we tend to the ways these things live in us?

GB: I don't think there's a space outside capitalism. I don't think there's some clean way of being, which is the non-capitalist subject. But there’s a struggle between moving towards liberation and being recaptured. Capital is a tricky, seductive beast that will move to say, ‘oh I’ve made you unwell. Here’s the wellness industry to fix you’. It preys on the wounds it has made itself and always has done. And knowing that doesn't mean that we are not wounded. Of course we are wounded. And that doesn’t mean we should give up on solace for our wounds. But it means also understanding that there are forms of solace that are moving towards liberation and forms of solace that are not, and we might not always know which is which. We might get tricked and then wrong footed and start again, and it’s alright to do that because if we wait for the right answer then there’s nothing. We have moving towards liberation with others, and communion with others. Oh, how does this feel? Or maybe, can I check with my comrades? What do we think? It's iterative. And writing can be iterative like that. In The Futures of Racial Capitalism, I was trying to present an unfinished argument in the hope that it would call out to others who would bring other pieces. Writing is partly a call to the others who you might not yet be in communion with. It’s only in communion we might make it.

You both sometimes invoke a collective ‘we’, while also attending to specific histories of colonial and racist violence. Could you say more about imagining a collective ‘we’ and building forms of solidarity under racial capitalism? Do you feel hopeful?

SA: Heartbreak is difficult when we hold it in isolation, but when we use it as a medium of return to communion – this hurt isn't just my own but is rich with data and information about the world's hurting – it points us to the systems of violence hurting us. That shifts something, because we go from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’ of heartbreak. That's not to say that the ‘we’ isn't also incredibly fractured, or that the communing isn't messy. Christina Sharpe describes 'we' as a fragmented thing. But we write we anyway, worshipping its complication. This work is deeply relational.

I'm thinking about Mariame Kaba’s work on hope as a discipline, as a practice. And I’m thinking, though this is slightly contradictory, about Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist writer and teacher, who talks about abandoning hope because it risks being a means of denying what is; not staying present in the difficulty, in the fullness of this moment.

So, how can we hold the contradiction in all of it, and stay here? Inhabit the sticky, heartbreak of this moment and the clarity that it's bringing, and at the same time practice trusting that other worlds are coming, have been made, and trust our making of them in this moment … I do feel hopeful, and I’m sometimes sceptical of performative hope.

GB: Progressive politics in this country has become much more forgiving: there is at least a language to talk about tripping up, about messiness, and the need for people to step out and care for themselves. I do feel hopeful.

There isn't really any ambiguity about the battle lines now. And our side has been more … is more clear-headed and explicit with each other about where we are and what we must be to each other than I have probably ever known. So, this is the beginning of the next phase. This isn't the end, but it's the beginning of the end. I'm pleased to live long enough to see it.

Photo by Haley Carman on Unsplash