Faith

Essays, Prose and a Play on Seeing

I first came across the writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan in 2021, she wrote the opening essay ‘I Am Not An Answer, I Am The Question’ in Cut From The Same Cloth? – Muslim Women on Life in Britain edited by Sabeena Akhtar. Her essay was about the understanding she came to while a student at the University of Cambridge where she encountered a tool for attempting to ‘unlearn’: questioning.

I realised that most feminist and anti-racist politics I had engaged with up until that point were shallowly asking the wrong questions. Most of the questions being asked were not my questions at all. So much of my educational and consciousness-raising work had been the work of answering questions posed by others.

Her book Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities is an extension to the understanding she shared in that initial essay.

It is interesting to read the opening pages where she is grappling with her purpose for writing and how to begin this book, having just finished reading Annie Ernaux’s nobel lecture, where she reaches back sixty years to a diary entry and finds her opening line (her purpose for writing), in the words ‘j’écrirai pour venger ma race’ (I will write to avenge my people).

Manzoor-Khan writes about ‘the gaze of the other’ and questions whether she has anything to add to a complex and much discussed subject and finds out she does when she turns the topic on its head.

Ernaux was writing from the perspective of a higher educated French working class woman in the closing years of a writing career, while Manzoor-Khan writes from the perspective of a higher educated British Muslim woman at the beginning of hers.

Troubled by such doubts, I started to consider why being a subject rather than an object was the furthest horizon I could dream of. What lay beyond ‘seeing with my own eyes’? What if ‘seeing for ourselves’ wasn’t actually the best way to see? What could transcend the desire to be see-er instead of seen? What if I closed my eyes and did not prioritise seeing at all?

Looking into these stranger possibilities, she contemplates the how to, and finds no easy route than to go forth and try. What results is a combination of prose, poetry and a short play interspersed throughout the text; looking at the question from different angles and so too, using different genres.

Need, Want, Seeing, Overcoming

The book is structured into seven parts:

the need - how I am found
the want - how I find myself
becoming a sight - the portal of objecthood
striving to see - seeking subjecthood is a circle
escaping the cycle - even stranger possibilities
grief is a type of ghaib - love is a type of sight
a note on endings - the impossibility of concluding

The need is about clarifying intention and the want is to bear witness to an existence. This latter section opens with a poignant vignette on hoarding nineteen white IKEA boxes in the author’s room that cause her shame. On further reflection, she discovers their ‘why’, they are evidence of a life.

I am afraid to let on about this in case it becomes obvious how afraid I am to go unseen. In case it becomes obvious how powerful it is to destroy a people’s history. How catastrophic it is to leave them believing they are suspended. To eliminate their past, present and knowledge.

The Writer and The Book in Conversation

Throughout the text are acts, scenes from a short play. It is how the book opens, Act 1, a conversation between the writer and the book.

the writer: You’re not what I expected you to be.

the book: What did you expect?

the writer: You were supposed to be about seeing and being seen
About the different gazes upon us
And how to see ourselves without them

the book looks smirkingly at the writer, knowing more than her (as always).

The way these brief interludes are positioned lightens the tone of the book, giving it a different vibe, featuring characters such as the writer, the book, her head, her heart, her fear, her eyes, her soul.

Because of their brevity, the voices of those characters speak more loudly and succinctly than the more existential meanderings of the author on changing her perspective of the gaze, from ‘others’ on her to (even stranger possibilities) just the ‘one’. The many different forms that address her subject, allow the reader to consider, reflect and attempt to understand the perspective being shared.

It is a philosophical read, of short easy-reading vignettes,some that challenge more than others, of poetry and the interspersed acts and scenes of the play featuring the writer, the book, her eyes, her fear, her head, her soul. In another scene, a group of onlookers struggle with the question of being seen, of invisibility, of too much visibility, of how we are perceived by others, by ourselves, by the Divine Presence…

It is a companionable read, though not easy to review, as the author reminds us, this is a book of questions, and it is also a journey, it is not a conclusion or a set of answers, it is observations, reflections, it invites participation, it does not exist in isolation.

It puts into word the frustrations and injustice of invisibility and challenges that which is seen (the blind scrutiny) in its place.

Perhaps rather than the head, the intellect, the eyes, the judgments, we ought to perceive with the soul, if so, what might that look like?

Rather than striving to be seen, approved or understood by gazes that shrink me, all I have to do is that which brings me closer to my Maker, who sees the full context of me. Everything else is either a means to this or a diversion from it.

The book is available from its UK publisher Hajar Press, and as an ebook here.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Author

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge.

She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn.

Her writing has also featured in The Guardian and Al Jazeera, and her poetry has been viewed millions of times online. She is a co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in prison. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing was my One Outstanding read of 2017, and it was a book I initially avoided as it was the subject of much hype and expectation, which can cloud our ability to discern. However it was exactly the kind of book I love, thought provoking, taking the reader outside of their own culture but showing how the threads of an earlier culture have influenced where they are today.

In a sense that too is at the heart of Transcendent Kingdom, a family from Ghana immigrate to the US, the mother, the father (who the narrator, the daughter Gifty, the only one of the family born in the US, refers to as Chin Chin man), and their son Nana. Though they leave their country behind, something of remains in them, and though they are determined to ascend in their new country, it comes at a price.

I wanted her stories to about her life in Ghana with my father to be filled with all the kings and queens and curses that might explain why my father wasn’t around in terms far grander and more elegant than the simple story I knew. And if our story couldn’t be a fairy tale, then I was willing to accept a tale like the kind I saw on television, back when the only images I saw of Africa were those of people stricken by warfare and famine. But there was no war in my mother’s stories, and if there was hunger it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy.

Gifty is a sixth year PhD student studying neuroscience, observing mice in order to better understand the role of the brain and neural circuitry in relation to the desire for and restraint of reward-seeking behaviour. In other words, the tendency towards addiction or depression.

To know that if only I could understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn’t speak to the intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try and understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom…

The narrative moves back and forth in time, in the present she works in a lab, while at home her mother stays in bed all day. This is not the first time her mother has succumbed, so memories of the first time return and the events that lead up to the disappointment(s) that became too much. Only now their roles have reversed.

The question I was trying to answer…was: Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?

Photo Anna ShvetsPexels.com

The novel also explores the controversial American opioid issue, how what begins in innocence can lead to devastating consequences. The inspiration behind the science of the novel comes from the work of Yaa Gyasi’s best friend as she shares in the acknowledgments and in the interview below.

‘At the time of writing, the opioid crisis was being reported on near-daily. I found the reporting to be very moving and willing to look at the effects, not only on the people with addiction but the families, too. It was the first time we were seeing an interrogation of the role of pharmaceutical companies in creating this crisis. I wanted to add my voice to the chorus but from the perspective of a black family.’

Though Gifty is focused on the science on what has afflicted her family, she is reluctant to observe or consider her own behaviour, her difficulty in forming relationships or allowing people to get close to her, the consequence of having lived through trauma.

While she pursues the science and looks for a logical answer to her question, she considers the role of faith. Because science doesn’t explain the feelings of shame, of anger, of hatred, self-loathing.

“What is prayer?” my mother asked?
This question stumped me then, stumps me still. I stood there, staring at my mother, waiting for her to give me the answers. Back then, I approached my piety like I did my studies: fastidiously.

It’s a thought provoking novel of seeking to understand human behaviour, of the propensity “to try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all” and to find a way to seek solace and refuge from it all.

Though it took me a little while to get into it, there was a turning point where it began to click and become more than just a story, where the interconnecting threads became apparent. An enjoyable read and follow up to her impressive debut.

Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her first novel, Homegoing, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

In 2017 Yaa Gyasi was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists and in 2019 the BBC selected her debut as one of the 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. Transcendent Kingdom was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. She lives in Berkley, California.

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Word by Word

Thoughts on Literature, Expressing Creativity, Being Authentic

Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan