Why i write

When I was in preschool, I wrote a two-page guide about how to make friends. It was the first coherent piece of writing that I had ever produced and therefore, the inception of my biggest passion. After all these years, my mother still keeps it safely tucked away in a file organizer that sits in a massive plastic container overflowing with faded composition books, poetry, songwriting, short stories, and old diaries. It is the repository of the passions, dreams, and ideas of my youth. To this day, writing has always been a way for me to transcend the mundanity of reality and indulge in escapism, a means by which to capture my thoughts on anything and everything, and an oasis in which to cope with the turbulence of life. It is the convergence of my pencil with whatever I dared to illuminate or envision.

If you were to ask my friends what my biggest dream is, perhaps they would suggest working in policy or running for office. In actuality, the ambition that I most yearn for is to publish a novel. Although I may be more known in my social circles for the scathing critical analyses that I write about electoral politics, capitalism, and the carceral state, many do not know that I have engaged heavily with writing fiction. 

Indeed, I wrote voraciously throughout elementary school and middle school, crafting everything from dystopian mysteries to romantic comedies. Unfortunately, high school interposed my passion for fictional writing with its harsh monotony, rigid requirements for conformity, and tedious time commitments. 

Five or six years passed in this suspension of creativity. Though my general enjoyment for writing had not dissipated in my English classes, it seemed as though my creative energy had been exhausted. It pains me to reflect on these wasted years that could have been spent cultivating my fictional repertoire, building faraway worlds, monstrous totalitarian governments, and fiery resistance movements. 

It wasn’t until the summer before my sophomore year of college when two seemingly inconsequential yet profoundly transformational things occurred. One, I had recently finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. And two, I had also finished watching Attack on Titan. At this point, perhaps you are wondering what a children’s show and a Japanese anime have to do with my relationship to writing. I’ll elaborate.

The creators of Avatar conceptualized a world without whiteness. Despite being a woman of color myself, my imagination had never ventured so far as to imagine what that world could look like. I was impressed by the show’s mature confrontation of themes such as genocide, colonialism, war, abuse, spirituality, and redemption. This resonated with my own desire to challenge injustice in my writing. 

With jarring twists and turns, the creator of Attack on Titan designed the most beautifully convoluted plotline I had ever encountered. It may appear to be a gory anime about fighting grotesque creatures, but peel back the layers, and it is an unapologetic portrayal of humanity’s tenacity in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity, the moral ambiguity of violence and political conflict, and the collective thirst for liberation. This resonated with my desire to write about the unflinchingly quotidian nature of violence and to capture the human experience of longing for freedom. 

For the first time in too long, I felt compelled enough to open a document on my computer and start typing. I probably made over ten different outlines for stories I could write. Like Avatar, the worlds were not white. Like Attack on Titan, liberatory aspirations drove my characters. 

In a way, this was uncharted territory. When I was younger, I mainly wrote white characters with generic, easy-to-pronounce names. The very notion of reading a story about a protagonist with a name like Mahnoor, with brown skin and dark eyes seemed laughably unfeasible. Although representation in and of itself can be powerful, I have learned that it is most powerful when its function is to challenge material conditions, uproot oppressive ideas, and fight for liberation. 

As a Pakistani-American woman, it has taken me a considerable amount of time to grow into my identity. For one thing, colonialism has had a tremendous impact on the struggles of my ancestors. Centuries of British hegemony in the subcontinent of India sowed seeds of hate, polarization, and strife that linger in the American diaspora as well as Pakistani society. Moreover, I have endured everything from microaggressions to traumatic encounters with the surveillance state. I have developed strong convictions about the world, and I want them to shape whatever story I decide to write. 

Many more discarded outlines later, I still don’t know what that story is going to be. I don’t know what it will take for my pipe dream to become a reality. And I don’t know if my name will be ever imprinted on a novel. 

 

Only one thing is clear to me. Though I once thought that high school had burned me out of my creativity, there was an ember in the ashes. Perhaps I was always clinging to what I thought had died out. I’m reinvigorated now, and I know that I’ll find my way forward. I’ll figure out how to tell my boldest truths through fiction. After all, “...whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice" (Gluck, lines 18-20). 

 

Works Cited

Gluck, Louise. The Wild Iris Poem. 2004, Poem Hunter, 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-wild-iris/. Accessed 02 February 2021.

Imran, Mahnoor. Letter of Interest. 2020. Sweetland Center for Writing, Michigan.