Dear Hanif, I write but as a social scientist. I submitted my PhD and had a psychotic break which nearly killed me because it devolved into severe involuntary self-punishment. My PhD was passed with no corrections whilst I was devolving into madness. I had childhood trauma but had thrived in life until over the course of a week weeks it was all taken away. Doctors admit they can’t understand my case. What you have written here today is probably the truest explanation of what happened to me. It was all exacerbated for me by being at the time in avery conservative form of Christianity. I persecuted myself. The saddest part is that the psychosis has taken so much of the creative, alive and driven soul I was away. It’s hideous and I need to recover. A person cannot vanish from the world like this.
This has moved me deeply ( please ignore half sent previous message ). It makes me feel all at once desperate and exquisitely alive and tender. Your crystal clear sharing laser’s into the impossible, crying need to understand and not understand each other, so differently fragile in our dark and wild places. Nina Simone is singing Lilac wine in the shadows. There has rarely been a singer that takes us to these depths. Your words feel a match in this place; don’t disappear.
Thank you for your kind, kind words. My comment seems very mundane to me but I have written some poetry from the midst of the pain that articulates it better. I’m surprised but also moved, that it moved you so. My life before was a life of art, literature, poetry and music, including Nina Simone as my research aimed to speak up for the voices of the oppressed until I became confused by fears of judgment from those who read my work, including both the religious community I critiqued and also the world of social science which often leaves me room for the spiritual at all. A rock and a hard place. I was at an Ivy League level school and won fellowships and prizes. So why the intense self-doubt and sell-hatred? I was loved and happy and thrived, my life had love and happiness and purpose. Over six years of mental torment I have had to try to put the pieces together. The only answer I can find is that perhaps the childhood trauma I had survived and thought had caused me to be a beautiful soul had in fact caused me to fear everything, even God. I don’t know. I know I need to be me again but that seems impossible at the moment. Even my dearly beloved husband feels a million miles away from me. I never knew this was possible to happen to a person. I am moved my your comments.
Yes isn’t the boy a dish? Great piece O Handsome Hanif. And hugely amusing to read dear Virginia slagging off Joyce. Well it was probably only in private that she said it was like a boot boy in Claridges squeezing his pimples. Or something like that. And Eliot! Wanted to make the Soviets a less offensive animal than pigs. Speaking personally I would have told the old pseudo to burn the Four Quartets. Keep it coming Hanif. I really look forward to each instalment love Nige
“I'm a perfectionist, and perfect is a skinned knee,” sings Mike Patton in Faith No More's best-known song 'Midlife Crisis'. I may be about to read too much into lyrics that are predominantly concerned with masturbation (and inspired by Madonna, as she was in her thirties): I have always taken this line to be about a peculiar contradiction, where something that is flawed is of more lasting interest and, in a way more ideal, than something that aims towards being conventionally perfect.
Certainly this is true of my own experience of engaging with the arts. I may see, hear, read, or otherwise absorb a piece of culture and be astounded by the mastery of technique, and the apparent ease at which the creator expresses themselves, and captures lightning in a bottle to an extent that has hitherto been achieved by no other artist. However, once the initial shock and awe wears off, there is nowhere to go. You can only exist alongside the artwork, and continue to be impressed by it, even as its near-perfection continues to exclude you.
Every few years, I will put on 'Nevermind' – Nirvana's Zeitgeist-defining second studio album. I will be floored by the song-writing and the production, and how it manages to distil the music made by a generation of bands who played at eye-level with their audience, in sticky-floored rooms, before clocking-into their shifts at the 7-11. I will enjoy the record immensely, then I will mothball it for a few years, because it leaves no space for me.
Deferring to the autocratic demands of the superego, as it affects the divine provenance of a rumbling thunderhead, that might conceivably hurl down a bolt of lightning if you don't jolly well pull your socks up and do you best impersonation of Bach, is undeniably an act of self harm, teetering on the gossamer supports of unrealistic expectations. One must allow some degree of realism to permeate the creative process, knowing that, in doing so, you are renouncing perfection. I know very well that my photograph will never garnish the front page of one of those supplements that fall out of the weekend broadsheets, underscored by the headline 'The Mozart of Decoupage'. For one thing, I am not entirely sure what decoupage is.
By ceding ground to the superego you also act against the interests of your audience, chasing perfection that exists as an unassailable expression of an idea; one that leaves no room for alternative interpretations or personalisation. It crowds out the people with whom you had hoped to communicate, reducing them to the role of spectators, who can only stand mutely in the blinding light of your artistic glory as it projects from between your exemplary buttocks.
'Nevermind,' as it came together in the studio, was conceived as a paragon of a particular genre of music, with all the burrs and rough edges smoothed out, and with several layers of spot-gloss carefully painted on top. The end result is marvellous in the moment, but with an alienating aftertaste. I more often listen to the Nirvana's ragged debut album, 'Bleach', which is the sound of a band who are focused on expressing something inside of themselves to the best of their abilities, over and above the pursuit of perfection. I would happily dispense with both these records in favour of Sub Pop 200 – a compilation of songs by Nirvana and their peers when they were nothing more than a cultural curiosity, screaming into the void to general indifference. I will take the live-wire energy of 'Is It Day I'm Seeing' by the Fluid, over the curated catharsis of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
Somebody who had good intentions recently described me in company as a writer. I felt the edges of my soul curl up and die, mostly because it isn't true. I have made a very modest sum of money from writing, enough to keep an anthropomorphic church mouse in velvet waistcoats, but it's not really about the output any more, so much as it is about the process. I have never sat down in front of my disgusting computer keyboard with a head crowded with Platonic Forms, and envisioned a blank OpenOffice document as a block of marble that must be chiselled into a word cloud variant of Michelangelo's David.
It is more like swimming in the sea. You aim for smooth, effective strokes that will propel you gracefully through the water, while accepting that, every so often, you will mistime the descent of a hand and paw at the surf, while the trunk of the breaking wave slaps you in the face, and leaves you choking and gasping for breath. That is the important part- reaching for something and not quite getting there. Perfection is something that you can't see, perpetually somewhere over the horizon. You are down there in the moment, trying to make sense of its ripples as they wash against you, and all around you.
That last part- "That is the important part- reaching for something and not quite getting there. Perfection is something that you can't see, perpetually somewhere over the horizon. You are down there in the moment, trying to make sense of its ripples as they wash against you, and all around you."- that speaks to me beyond all perfection and non-perfection issues. Question: how is a work of art perfect if it doesn't communicate something perfectly? And if it does, what is there to complain about?
“ It is important not to forget the sheer amount of fear all children endure.” This is so tender of you to remember. And we all have that child still within us…but must help her or him to be bold and trust themselves. Thank you for sharing and wishing you all the very best. 🙏❤️
I found T.S. Eliot’s rejection letter to Orwell to be fascinating. It seemed to me that Eliot himself made the argument why Animal Farm *should* be published. It stimulated debate even from the person rejecting it. How could he be so obtuse?
Such a thought-provoking piece. Not familiar with the concept of super-ego, it sounds like it represents a sort of Judeo-Christian guilt. And why is not conscience a more useful association? When we meet someone who seems not to have a conscience, we notice it- an undeveloped part of a person, a lack of perception of their own potential for benevolent behavior. Just mulling this over- thanks so much for posting this piece.
Hah! You got me. And I love the rejection letters too. We are all like sharks asking other sharks “but, do you really love me? Me? The real me?” Chomp.
Thank you Heidi for your comment, It is a very good essay but I was surprised that Hanif did not tell us he was apparently revisiting this text of 2016
One of your many brilliances Hanif is that as a writer you are able to make the reader feel that you are addressing them as an individual. Your writing is like a light shining through the dark.
Now Hanif I am confounded by your easy talk of the superego and this is because (as you don't know) I am not a fan of Freud. There is no use me pretending to understand this concept because straight away I don't want to. And that is probably all bound up with what it is - rest my case there. In other news someone below has commented very wisely on how well you look - agreed. I did enjoy as always learning how writers of note, were rejected but were rejected so well!! and then it didn't stop them in the end either. I think the email has a lot to answer for - letters are important whatever they say. The conversations the conversations - with ourselves with others. There is no mention of your current state so think you must be still in Rome with your family - I have started the two books from your list and when I say started I mean about 5 or 6 pages in. My small dwelling is littered with books at this stage, books to be read. Books I have read and am rereading (the one I read before sleep overtakes so this is a terribly slow read). Then there's the Saturday Guardian then the addiction to Twitter then you. and you are not last by any means. Your importance for me, is the digging away at what it means to write, how to write, what to discard and just how to let that drive through. I do use my dreams and sleep to give me the ideas and answers by the way. I hope you are equal to your situation that's what I hope - thank you as always for your writing and sharing on here and that I can see it and respond. With love from deepest North Yorkshire, Maddi.x
The letter from Woolf to Joyce was not a rejection as it is usually thought of. She describes the physical impossibility of publishing his book on their press. For any one who has handset type the issue of 300 pages is a huge obstacle.
This is an amazing piece, Hanif. The rejection letters are fascinating and your thought on how we may begin to fear our own imagination is one that will stay with me. Thank you!
hi sam, there's no quick easy answer. there are many african literatures: pre-colonoial ones in oral form. the written literatures begin in the 20th century. first major movement is called Negritude and goes back to the 1930s; then colonial and anti-colonial literatures beginning mostly in the 1950s. the literary scene is enormous, and usually approached as national literatures. large countries like nigeria would have hundreds, if not thousands of authors; nobel prize winners like Soyinka, world famous ones like Achebe. other countries equally endowed, some much smaller. the genres you mention like sci-fi or fantasy crime are more recent, but still there. realism has dominated up to the present. stories can be told different, especially from the oral literature. but then it makes sense in the past 30 or so years to consider its literatures as encompassing people who live and write from abroad, or both abroad and at home. a famous example is adichie, or in french ben telloun. others like coetzee up and left. lots and lots there. (no one can know everything; i know nothing of native canadian literatures, and barely anything of mexican, though canada and mexico border on the u.s. and i know not tons of contemporary u.s. a good author i like is teju cole, nigerian, lives in u.s.
There’s lots of different kinds of art, i should think. So, in my field of african literature, we have a classic, Things Fall Apart, which is far less apollonian than dionysian; less that wild rebellious work you embrace, more a work that seeks to validate igbo people and culture, to humanize them, albeit through a domineering patriarchal masculinist type. I don’t know how to think about art as the world of control or out of control cries. Maybe the most crazy cry is ultimately disrupting an unstable order. In african tales the trickster turns the world and people upside down, and usually it is so that that the unstable, unbalanaced world they have created can be readjusted to its proper order. A favorite term from derrida, “propre,” in french that travels all the way from clean to ordered to one’s own. But disturbing order often means restoring a proper order. In judaism we atone on yom kippur, and tell those we’ve offended we are sorry, so as to start off the new year with a turning, a re-turning, that will readjust the order of our relations. I never have the courage to do this: it seems so childish and programmatic, but i can imagine someone else writing a novel or story about doing this; apologizing so as to set things right between them. One day abraham took his son out to a mountain to kill him, to sacrifice him. The story ends when god provides a ram in substitution of the child, and god pronounces his satisfaction with abraham who was willing to give his most precious possession, ce qui etait propre a lui, when asked by god. Yet when abraham goes back down the mountain, we don’t hear of him setting things right with isaac. His son was, after all, his own, son propre fils, his own son. His proper son. And not a word of how they got on after that. A last word: if your father is a nice guy, like the father in Laundrette, how hard is it to become your own self? Ton propre soi-meme?
While reading your reply, it occurred to me that I know nothing about contemporary African literature. If I was chloroformed and awoke in the Mastermind chair, and that was my subject, then I would score zero.
Obviously Africa isn't an homogeneous continent - it's a patchwork of nations and languages, but I wonder, is there something akin to an African literary scene? What are people writing about? Is there African sci-fi, fantasy, crime fiction, etc, and what does it look like? Are stories told differently?
Just a note- it gives a link to upgrade to founding member - which I tried to do some weeks ago but it didn't work. Hope you get the paid subscriber base that you need to keep doing this. It's very valuable writing.
Dear Hanif, I write but as a social scientist. I submitted my PhD and had a psychotic break which nearly killed me because it devolved into severe involuntary self-punishment. My PhD was passed with no corrections whilst I was devolving into madness. I had childhood trauma but had thrived in life until over the course of a week weeks it was all taken away. Doctors admit they can’t understand my case. What you have written here today is probably the truest explanation of what happened to me. It was all exacerbated for me by being at the time in avery conservative form of Christianity. I persecuted myself. The saddest part is that the psychosis has taken so much of the creative, alive and driven soul I was away. It’s hideous and I need to recover. A person cannot vanish from the world like this.
This has moved me deeply ( please ignore half sent previous message ). It makes me feel all at once desperate and exquisitely alive and tender. Your crystal clear sharing laser’s into the impossible, crying need to understand and not understand each other, so differently fragile in our dark and wild places. Nina Simone is singing Lilac wine in the shadows. There has rarely been a singer that takes us to these depths. Your words feel a match in this place; don’t disappear.
Thank you for your kind, kind words. My comment seems very mundane to me but I have written some poetry from the midst of the pain that articulates it better. I’m surprised but also moved, that it moved you so. My life before was a life of art, literature, poetry and music, including Nina Simone as my research aimed to speak up for the voices of the oppressed until I became confused by fears of judgment from those who read my work, including both the religious community I critiqued and also the world of social science which often leaves me room for the spiritual at all. A rock and a hard place. I was at an Ivy League level school and won fellowships and prizes. So why the intense self-doubt and sell-hatred? I was loved and happy and thrived, my life had love and happiness and purpose. Over six years of mental torment I have had to try to put the pieces together. The only answer I can find is that perhaps the childhood trauma I had survived and thought had caused me to be a beautiful soul had in fact caused me to fear everything, even God. I don’t know. I know I need to be me again but that seems impossible at the moment. Even my dearly beloved husband feels a million miles away from me. I never knew this was possible to happen to a person. I am moved my your comments.
This has dropped me into a very deep and
Yes isn’t the boy a dish? Great piece O Handsome Hanif. And hugely amusing to read dear Virginia slagging off Joyce. Well it was probably only in private that she said it was like a boot boy in Claridges squeezing his pimples. Or something like that. And Eliot! Wanted to make the Soviets a less offensive animal than pigs. Speaking personally I would have told the old pseudo to burn the Four Quartets. Keep it coming Hanif. I really look forward to each instalment love Nige
“I'm a perfectionist, and perfect is a skinned knee,” sings Mike Patton in Faith No More's best-known song 'Midlife Crisis'. I may be about to read too much into lyrics that are predominantly concerned with masturbation (and inspired by Madonna, as she was in her thirties): I have always taken this line to be about a peculiar contradiction, where something that is flawed is of more lasting interest and, in a way more ideal, than something that aims towards being conventionally perfect.
Certainly this is true of my own experience of engaging with the arts. I may see, hear, read, or otherwise absorb a piece of culture and be astounded by the mastery of technique, and the apparent ease at which the creator expresses themselves, and captures lightning in a bottle to an extent that has hitherto been achieved by no other artist. However, once the initial shock and awe wears off, there is nowhere to go. You can only exist alongside the artwork, and continue to be impressed by it, even as its near-perfection continues to exclude you.
Every few years, I will put on 'Nevermind' – Nirvana's Zeitgeist-defining second studio album. I will be floored by the song-writing and the production, and how it manages to distil the music made by a generation of bands who played at eye-level with their audience, in sticky-floored rooms, before clocking-into their shifts at the 7-11. I will enjoy the record immensely, then I will mothball it for a few years, because it leaves no space for me.
Deferring to the autocratic demands of the superego, as it affects the divine provenance of a rumbling thunderhead, that might conceivably hurl down a bolt of lightning if you don't jolly well pull your socks up and do you best impersonation of Bach, is undeniably an act of self harm, teetering on the gossamer supports of unrealistic expectations. One must allow some degree of realism to permeate the creative process, knowing that, in doing so, you are renouncing perfection. I know very well that my photograph will never garnish the front page of one of those supplements that fall out of the weekend broadsheets, underscored by the headline 'The Mozart of Decoupage'. For one thing, I am not entirely sure what decoupage is.
By ceding ground to the superego you also act against the interests of your audience, chasing perfection that exists as an unassailable expression of an idea; one that leaves no room for alternative interpretations or personalisation. It crowds out the people with whom you had hoped to communicate, reducing them to the role of spectators, who can only stand mutely in the blinding light of your artistic glory as it projects from between your exemplary buttocks.
'Nevermind,' as it came together in the studio, was conceived as a paragon of a particular genre of music, with all the burrs and rough edges smoothed out, and with several layers of spot-gloss carefully painted on top. The end result is marvellous in the moment, but with an alienating aftertaste. I more often listen to the Nirvana's ragged debut album, 'Bleach', which is the sound of a band who are focused on expressing something inside of themselves to the best of their abilities, over and above the pursuit of perfection. I would happily dispense with both these records in favour of Sub Pop 200 – a compilation of songs by Nirvana and their peers when they were nothing more than a cultural curiosity, screaming into the void to general indifference. I will take the live-wire energy of 'Is It Day I'm Seeing' by the Fluid, over the curated catharsis of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
Somebody who had good intentions recently described me in company as a writer. I felt the edges of my soul curl up and die, mostly because it isn't true. I have made a very modest sum of money from writing, enough to keep an anthropomorphic church mouse in velvet waistcoats, but it's not really about the output any more, so much as it is about the process. I have never sat down in front of my disgusting computer keyboard with a head crowded with Platonic Forms, and envisioned a blank OpenOffice document as a block of marble that must be chiselled into a word cloud variant of Michelangelo's David.
It is more like swimming in the sea. You aim for smooth, effective strokes that will propel you gracefully through the water, while accepting that, every so often, you will mistime the descent of a hand and paw at the surf, while the trunk of the breaking wave slaps you in the face, and leaves you choking and gasping for breath. That is the important part- reaching for something and not quite getting there. Perfection is something that you can't see, perpetually somewhere over the horizon. You are down there in the moment, trying to make sense of its ripples as they wash against you, and all around you.
That last part- "That is the important part- reaching for something and not quite getting there. Perfection is something that you can't see, perpetually somewhere over the horizon. You are down there in the moment, trying to make sense of its ripples as they wash against you, and all around you."- that speaks to me beyond all perfection and non-perfection issues. Question: how is a work of art perfect if it doesn't communicate something perfectly? And if it does, what is there to complain about?
“ It is important not to forget the sheer amount of fear all children endure.” This is so tender of you to remember. And we all have that child still within us…but must help her or him to be bold and trust themselves. Thank you for sharing and wishing you all the very best. 🙏❤️
I found T.S. Eliot’s rejection letter to Orwell to be fascinating. It seemed to me that Eliot himself made the argument why Animal Farm *should* be published. It stimulated debate even from the person rejecting it. How could he be so obtuse?
Hanif is the photograph above taken recently? You are looking handsome.
Such a thought-provoking piece. Not familiar with the concept of super-ego, it sounds like it represents a sort of Judeo-Christian guilt. And why is not conscience a more useful association? When we meet someone who seems not to have a conscience, we notice it- an undeveloped part of a person, a lack of perception of their own potential for benevolent behavior. Just mulling this over- thanks so much for posting this piece.
Hah! You got me. And I love the rejection letters too. We are all like sharks asking other sharks “but, do you really love me? Me? The real me?” Chomp.
Thank you Heidi for your comment, It is a very good essay but I was surprised that Hanif did not tell us he was apparently revisiting this text of 2016
One of your many brilliances Hanif is that as a writer you are able to make the reader feel that you are addressing them as an individual. Your writing is like a light shining through the dark.
Now Hanif I am confounded by your easy talk of the superego and this is because (as you don't know) I am not a fan of Freud. There is no use me pretending to understand this concept because straight away I don't want to. And that is probably all bound up with what it is - rest my case there. In other news someone below has commented very wisely on how well you look - agreed. I did enjoy as always learning how writers of note, were rejected but were rejected so well!! and then it didn't stop them in the end either. I think the email has a lot to answer for - letters are important whatever they say. The conversations the conversations - with ourselves with others. There is no mention of your current state so think you must be still in Rome with your family - I have started the two books from your list and when I say started I mean about 5 or 6 pages in. My small dwelling is littered with books at this stage, books to be read. Books I have read and am rereading (the one I read before sleep overtakes so this is a terribly slow read). Then there's the Saturday Guardian then the addiction to Twitter then you. and you are not last by any means. Your importance for me, is the digging away at what it means to write, how to write, what to discard and just how to let that drive through. I do use my dreams and sleep to give me the ideas and answers by the way. I hope you are equal to your situation that's what I hope - thank you as always for your writing and sharing on here and that I can see it and respond. With love from deepest North Yorkshire, Maddi.x
The letter from Woolf to Joyce was not a rejection as it is usually thought of. She describes the physical impossibility of publishing his book on their press. For any one who has handset type the issue of 300 pages is a huge obstacle.
This is an amazing piece, Hanif. The rejection letters are fascinating and your thought on how we may begin to fear our own imagination is one that will stay with me. Thank you!
hi sam, there's no quick easy answer. there are many african literatures: pre-colonoial ones in oral form. the written literatures begin in the 20th century. first major movement is called Negritude and goes back to the 1930s; then colonial and anti-colonial literatures beginning mostly in the 1950s. the literary scene is enormous, and usually approached as national literatures. large countries like nigeria would have hundreds, if not thousands of authors; nobel prize winners like Soyinka, world famous ones like Achebe. other countries equally endowed, some much smaller. the genres you mention like sci-fi or fantasy crime are more recent, but still there. realism has dominated up to the present. stories can be told different, especially from the oral literature. but then it makes sense in the past 30 or so years to consider its literatures as encompassing people who live and write from abroad, or both abroad and at home. a famous example is adichie, or in french ben telloun. others like coetzee up and left. lots and lots there. (no one can know everything; i know nothing of native canadian literatures, and barely anything of mexican, though canada and mexico border on the u.s. and i know not tons of contemporary u.s. a good author i like is teju cole, nigerian, lives in u.s.
There’s lots of different kinds of art, i should think. So, in my field of african literature, we have a classic, Things Fall Apart, which is far less apollonian than dionysian; less that wild rebellious work you embrace, more a work that seeks to validate igbo people and culture, to humanize them, albeit through a domineering patriarchal masculinist type. I don’t know how to think about art as the world of control or out of control cries. Maybe the most crazy cry is ultimately disrupting an unstable order. In african tales the trickster turns the world and people upside down, and usually it is so that that the unstable, unbalanaced world they have created can be readjusted to its proper order. A favorite term from derrida, “propre,” in french that travels all the way from clean to ordered to one’s own. But disturbing order often means restoring a proper order. In judaism we atone on yom kippur, and tell those we’ve offended we are sorry, so as to start off the new year with a turning, a re-turning, that will readjust the order of our relations. I never have the courage to do this: it seems so childish and programmatic, but i can imagine someone else writing a novel or story about doing this; apologizing so as to set things right between them. One day abraham took his son out to a mountain to kill him, to sacrifice him. The story ends when god provides a ram in substitution of the child, and god pronounces his satisfaction with abraham who was willing to give his most precious possession, ce qui etait propre a lui, when asked by god. Yet when abraham goes back down the mountain, we don’t hear of him setting things right with isaac. His son was, after all, his own, son propre fils, his own son. His proper son. And not a word of how they got on after that. A last word: if your father is a nice guy, like the father in Laundrette, how hard is it to become your own self? Ton propre soi-meme?
While reading your reply, it occurred to me that I know nothing about contemporary African literature. If I was chloroformed and awoke in the Mastermind chair, and that was my subject, then I would score zero.
Obviously Africa isn't an homogeneous continent - it's a patchwork of nations and languages, but I wonder, is there something akin to an African literary scene? What are people writing about? Is there African sci-fi, fantasy, crime fiction, etc, and what does it look like? Are stories told differently?
Sorry, meant to write it was More apollonian than dionysian….
Just a note- it gives a link to upgrade to founding member - which I tried to do some weeks ago but it didn't work. Hope you get the paid subscriber base that you need to keep doing this. It's very valuable writing.