On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

  Let me say that the song Avraham sang is now a part of me and that I carry it with me and promise you that it has made me different, stayed with me for over twenty years. I believe our creations, our fictions, our arts can give dignity and understanding and cry for help. Why? Because they offer the articulated potential, the spoken dreams, the unmistakeable beauty and the possibilities of the immense, human interior reality inside that Other, inside all those human beings who are not myself, yourselves. Art lets its creators become powerful because they build something out of nothing – they overturn the basic laws of physics and they remind us of the truth that we are all more than what we seem, and that what each of us holds is irreplaceable.

  And now I can tell you the anecdotes – you’ll have yours, I have mine – about the lady who came to a writing group who seemed to be listless and in some way mentally impaired – she’d been in a residential institution for many years – and after a couple of weeks it turned out that she was mostly bored and had hidden inside her deafness to observe and let the world that patronised and bullied her pass by. She had a great interest in current events. Her family finally found out who she was – when she was in her sixties. Or the schoolboy who suddenly found he could write about the death of his mother, write beautifully about the terrible day when she was taken away, when policemen called him ‘Mr’ for the first time, when her head was angled up to the sky as they carried her out. I’ve remembered his story for more than eighteen years and how his hands shook when he read it and how he hadn’t just written it, he’d crafted it, he’d gone beyond the statement of facts. Or I could tell you about all the people who rehearsed who they wanted to be in art and then were bigger, more alive, more themselves. Or I could tell you about the group from a day centre – people who were all non-literate, had difficulties walking and even talking, quite a vulnerable small group, but we worked out how to write as a group and how to rewrite and they ended up producing a lot of poems – one of them, ‘Troon, Troon, Troon’, about the Glasgow taxi drivers’ outing once a year in decorated cabs to Troon – where the cab drivers would play football – and this trip was a nice gesture, a day out, for sick kids and adults with special needs, which might seem to be the same kind of people, but isn’t really, and they were grateful for the attention and it was a day out, but some of them had been going to Troon for decades . . . to watch cab drivers play football on the beach. Troon, Troon, Troon. And I got a male and a female professional author to read out the poems at an event in the Strathclyde Regional Council Buildings. The writer’s group had T-shirts made and they sat and listened while their work was read and they were happy about it. And the audience of council officials and social workers and community education workers sat and they smiled at the beginning of the event in the way that people do when there’s going to be a kids’ concert, or someone’s dog is going to do a trick. And I watched the audience as the reading went on and many of the smiles faded, not all of them, some people were moved and pleased, but a lot of those smiles faded, disappeared. There was one poem, for instance, from Murray about how he’d like to be allowed to get on and off buses without help – it might take him a while, but he was a man now and it was only right. And there was one poem about how at night owls hide in the sky . . . and slowly those smiles went away. The poems were not necessarily good news for the people who were supposed to provide services for the vulnerable and those with special needs, because the work was human and articulate and it came from real human beings who deserved the best. But they couldn’t have the best. The poets in my group were meant to be grateful for not much and to shut up. They weren’t meant to make anyone feel guilty, or uncomfortable, or as if not enough was being done. Troon, Troon, Troon. It was an interesting afternoon.

  And here is where I tell you that eventually I worked out two contracts to use as an arts worker. Neither was legally binding, but I wanted to use them to make things clear before I started work. The first contract, manifesto, mission statement, if you insist, I gave to the people who were in charge of the venue, or the centre, or the school, or wherever. Those in authority. That contract – to sum up – said I know you will tell me that you’ve asked for arts activity and that you’ll be happy when it happens, but this is to warn you that after a while that activity may mean your clients say more and want more. They will get into the habit of expressing themselves and having opinions about what you do. They will probably get more focused and happier and livelier and probably there will be an end product that could make you look good, but docility and silence will be in shorter supply. If you don’t want this, do not let me in. If the end product that you get is controversial, or weird, or involves a bit of commitment when you can’t make one, or just leads to boisterousness which you deplore and then you come in and call a halt, you will have made me hurt people. You will have let me open people up and get them to trust me and to trust they will be heard. If you then demand silence, you will hurt them. And I can’t have that.

  Obviously, the contract didn’t always help and wasn’t even always read. And, among other things, I learned that bullies are really self-obsessed. Care staff who’ve abused patients believe that’s the first and main and only thing that clients will want to write about, or talk about. Very often people just want to be free to say what they like – the further away from themselves and reality, the better. Often people just want to produce art, joy, expressions of themselves and their humanity – it’s only a coincidence that their work makes you feel really shitty about having hit them that time, or held their head under water just for that moment, or yelled at them to say their address when the group was actually dealing with questions they could answer and couldn’t get wrong, and could learn from, like What makes you happy?

  And how much you learn about the human condition when you ask someone what makes them happy and they don’t know. Or when you take a party to a museum for some general inspiration and you can’t get them beyond the foyer because the foyer is the most wonderful thing that anyone has ever seen – just the foyer. Prisons come in all shapes and sizes and many are invisible.

  Of course, apart from anything else, all of this makes a nonsense of the generally held opinion that if you really want to do art, really enter in, then you have to be mad or ill, or get mad or ill. And suffering is elevating – unless it’s happening to someone powerful in which case it’s a tragedy – and art without suffering is impossible, and watch out because there’s a price to be paid for every joy and a penalty for every step towards freedom.

  Well, in my opinion, suffering makes you suffer. That’s why they call it suffering. You may be able to turn it into a gift, and art can help you do that, but it’s still suffering. You wouldn’t wish it on a friend, why wish it on an artist?

  And if that kind of thinking isn’t a prison, then I don’t know what is. Working in the arts is insecure, low-income and therefore stressful. It’s like many kinds of self-employment. That takes a toll. But doing what we do is also such a wonder, such a privilege – the chance to be paid at all at any point for doing something which is a vocation, which sings in us, that’s not a recipe for madness and ill health. People like me, we may go over the score a bit and get ill from overwork. I’m an overwork kind of person. Give me a box of tamarinds – you can buy them in Chinatown by the shoeboxful – and I’ll eat the box because they’re lovely. A box full of tamarinds has a horrible effect on the digestive system – but I never learn. I just like them. My work is lovely, too. So I do it too much and sometimes get ill. This doesn’t alter the fact that jobs in the arts are real jobs: safe, clean and satisfying jobs. They’re a significant part of the economy, they’re not all fantasy and fairy dust, they’re flexible, they’re open to people with all kinds of levels of ability and disability and in all kinds of circumstances, and they provide proof of dignity and humanity and daily pleasure – if we keep our wits about us – for those who produce the art and those who receive it. There is nothing wrong with that. But, of course, all that di
gnity and humanity, demanding that everyone should be allowed to fulfil their potential, that we should pay attention, that goods and services should probably be more equally divided, that we should help . . . well, for some people that can be worrying. And some of those people are influential. So we are taught that artists are mad and bad and dangerous to know.

  And sometimes we do like to act as if that’s true. Why not, if you can get away with it. Doubly why not if you’ve been ignored most of your life. But it isn’t true. What is true is that art is about other people. If I refer to my own particular profession, fiction is always about people other than the reader. By agreeing to read it, we agree to collaborate with the minds and the voices of the authors and their characters, to let them put their words into our mouths, our minds – one of the most intimate intrusions possible. In the case of the novel, we may sustain this intrusion for days, if not weeks. We do this because we tacitly acknowledge that others’ thoughts can be as important as our own and because they address us, uniquely, with the ‘uncritical respect that you give to friends and relatives’, if not lovers. We believe in the people authors make. Whoever they are, we care about them, understand they are important, help to make them important, suspend our disbelief and take them into our imaginations and this is enjoyable and feels very natural and is, I believe, an exercise which can begin to make it harder to murder, or torture, or harm other people, even other people that we don’t know. I think it also makes it more difficult for us to stand by while such murders and tortures and harms are committed.

  Why do so many campaigns suggest we send postcards to prisoners, why on earth would this be effective? Because postcards make the prisoners feel not alone, but also because they help the warders to imagine them as human and to know they are not alone – they are, in fact, observed. The arts send all kinds of postcards into all kinds of prisons.

  Particularly now – and I’ve written about this elsewhere – we, as people who advocate using the arts to work with people, get asked variations on the question that goes ‘Baby who needs an incubator, or a creative writing class – you only have the money for one – are you seriously saying that you’d pick the creative writing class?’ And I would answer and have answered and always will answer – No. The baby gets the money every time and the writer who’d have led the workshops will make do for now.

  But.

  If the baby isn’t here, if it isn’t my baby, if it’s a foreign baby, or a baby from another religion, if it’s a baby I know nothing about and with which I have nothing in common? Then an individual piece of art – a poem, a painting, a story, a sculpture, a film, a photo, a song, a whatever – might be what helps me understand I have to find the money for the incubator. It can make it more important. The practice of entering imaginatively into someone else’s way of seeing and being, the practice of entering into others’ dreams, of seeing the world differently, that can mean I then change the world. Maybe we all chip in a fiver and we buy an incubator, maybe the minister doesn’t get the new gazebo and there’s suddenly more in the budget – who knows? Why should we care about work that exercises our imagination? Because without imagination we cannot believe in a time when a seemingly permanent injustice will have been removed, we cannot plan its removal. We cannot imagine health, solutions, recoveries, reliefs, or the pains of others. We cannot call up those elements of the past which nourish us and make us ourselves, we cannot have a future, because nothing, in reality, exists other than the endless, inescapable now – tyranny demands an eternal, unrelieved present tense, a forgetting of our own interior lives and those of all others, our cooperation in the process of our own removal, thought by thought.

  Why else would an oppressive regime and really, I would have to say, any government with an eye to its own survival become at least unsettled by the widespread use and demonstration of imagination amongst a population it seeks to control?

  Because if we have imagination, apart from anything else, we can fit actions together with consequences – even if those consequences are being intentionally obscured. So let’s move on to consequences . . .

  The second contract? I gave that, or read that, to the people I worked with. And in it I promised that whatever they wanted to do – once we’d worked that out – I would try to make that happen to the limit of my abilities and available resources. I promised that what we made would be about them and about what they wanted and who they were. I promised that the material they intended to be private would stay private and what they wanted public would get out there. I promised we’d work in a safe place and said that would be about all of us making it safe and then we’d begin.

  And I don’t think that was a bad contract. I believe – obviously – that I was bringing something good to the people I worked with and that arts activity can be good.

  But. I knew – eventually knew very well – that I couldn’t always rely on management teams, or parents, or care workers or whoever to back up my promises, or not be alarmed by even the smallest demands from clients. I tried to learn how to read bad institutions and avoid them.

  But then again that meant that the worst places where people were the unhappiest wouldn’t get any interventions. So I had to compromise and do what I could. I couldn’t often decide that nothing would be worse than opening a hope that couldn’t be fulfilled, because I had no idea what an individual might find sustaining. I know that for me a single session with a great teacher, a single phrase in a book, a single story told me, has made all the difference at key times – what if no one bothered to tell me the story, or give me the book, or offer me the single session?

  It is truly remarkable what imagination and its practice can help us endure, when enduring or ceasing to be are our only options. Take the case of Talha Ahsan – Talha is a British subject and resident who was arrested on the 19th July 2006 and who has been held without trial ever since, awaiting extradition under the terms of the increasingly notorious Extradition Act 2003. The US requested his arrest and the UK authorities obliged, although he has no case to answer in the UK. The Extradition Act doesn’t require the provision of prima-facie evidence. It seems that evidence gathered during Baber Ahmad’s interrogation – interrogation described in the High Court as ‘grave abuse, tantamount to torture’ – may have helped form the case against Talha. Ahmad was later awarded £60,000 compensation by the Metropolitan Police and also has no case to answer in the UK. He also remains in custody awaiting extradition to the US.

  Talha is a poet. I know him through his poetry and because I write to him and he writes back. We’ve never met. He has allowed me to imagine him. Talha is very close to being extradited now and if he is and he’s found guilty of whatever charges he has to answer, then he’ll be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. I’ll read you two sections from one of his letters to me. ‘The ECHR judgement of 10th April was disappointing, but I am philosophical, I believe nothing occurs in this world except for a great wisdom. I am content and grateful for these experiences in making me a better person. . . .’

  Talha is a very spiritual person – he welcomes the peace of prison for contemplation and follows the tradition of imprisoned religious men and women. He may also be stronger because he can create. He can, in a way, transcend his prison – he can write . . .

  Sometimes I like to imagine I am an Ottoman prince condemned to spend the rest of his days confined in his palace by a rival sibling who has usurped the throne. Having exhausted myself with the odalisques in my seraglio with endless games of battleships and hungry hippos, I shrug off the jeunesse dorée of my entourage and stroll the gardens in my finery with a mournful and dishevelled manner. I no longer mind the impertinence of the peacocks ignoring my presence. When I reach the walls I hear the common folk bemoaning my brother’s rule and praying for my return.

  And that’s it. My situation’s one big art happening. Some may see influences of the surrealists or Kafka. Ultimately it’s a farce and on the way I hope it raises a few laughs.
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  Over more than twenty-five years I have read writers with limited mobility, writers who were confined, who were imprisoned in various ways, and many of them – like Avraham, like Talha – sustain themselves with flights of fancy and by practising the arts of livingness, however constrained. An older lady, sitting in the one room of her care-home, the one room she still lived in, the one room she would very probably die in, learned to focus all her interest in her window. She had trained herself to find her view – the tiniest details of plants, birds, passers-by – a universe of interest. She was not diminished by being diminished and passed that truth on.

  As I’ve said, people like Talha seem to me to be strong people. It seems to me that they are strengthened by art and an access to art. Still, I think, we need to bear in mind how much art can wake us – how it can remind us of feelings, or needs and wants – and of what makes us happy. What if someone wakes and comes to themselves and they’re in a lousy care-home, where the air is full of ammonia and the cries of the distressed, and human beings sit surrounded by their own urine, the remains of inedible food. (I’m not exaggerating. There are many such places and I have seen some of them.) What about the places where our forgotten are warehoused before they die? Do we go in there? If we can’t make things better? Is the fact of our company enough of a benefit when we will eventually leave and perhaps not be replaced? Should we enliven awareness when we may be helping human beings see how dreadful their surroundings are, how bad things have become, how little time they have left?

  These are difficult questions to answer. I think we can only answer each case as it arises and do what we can to help each other. I think our lives should be about doing what we can to help each other. We all will need help eventually – life is hard and ends badly. No one gets out alive. This makes the kindness that arts can bring – and every other kindness – of great importance.